Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  “You’re offering me dating tips from The Bachelor?” Susannah sneered.

  You can act according to the script for Tamil culture or the script for American culture, her dad would often claim, but you can’t pick and choose what you like from each script.

  “Well, yes. Dating in America is so different from what we had in India, you know, and these reality shows are giving me an idea of how it works.”

  “They edit reality shows, you know, they’re not real.” Susannah stabbed at her tofu. Her parents never talked about it, but they had been brought up in segregated realities, and so they had completely different ideas about what Tamil culture was, what India was, maybe even what happiness was, and she’d grown up not quite sure which parent’s version of reality she should trust. She wished she could honestly tell her father he didn’t understand American social rules at all, and that’s why he didn’t understand her decisions, but she wasn’t sure she would go that far. She was a bit of a freak regardless of what cultural standards were being used.

  A few minutes later, Susannah’s mom volunteered, “We could put up a matrimonial ad for someone here. Or even someone from India. The other day I heard from Anjali’s mom. Remember how I told you she couldn’t find anyone? Her parents put out an ad and found a suitable match with an engineer from Bangalore. Do you want us to do that?” She did not say outright that nobody would want Susannah, with her dark brown skin and flat nose and fuzzy, curly hair, if she waited much longer, but this was what Susannah heard. She was only twenty-six, and none of her friends were married, but to her Tamil mother, she was reaching the end of her shelf life.

  Susannah considered asking what Tamil man would answer an ad that told the truth. After all, her mother had lost her Brahmin status and, for many years, her ties to her family, just for marrying her father. But her mother’s chocolate brown eyes looked bright and wounded, as always, and Susannah couldn’t bear to see them look even more devastated. Instead she said, “Anjali is one of those nasty girls who told me I wasn’t really Indian when we were in school together because you gave me a white name. I can’t believe you still talk to her mother.”

  “You never told me she said that. What ignorance! There’s no such thing as a white name.”

  “Of course I told you! You just blocked it out, the way you always do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? That’s what you do, what you’ve always done. Deny and avoid everything you don’t like. Racism, bigotry, misogyny. Just pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe it’ll go away!” Anger, hot and throbbing just beneath her skin. It was a relief to finally say it, even though she knew her mother, never one for introspection, had no idea how to respond.

  Her parents glanced at each other and frowned but said nothing.

  When her father left for the bathroom, her mother murmured in a soft voice, “I just don’t want you to be alone your whole life.”

  “What do you want from me? I’m not alone.”

  “Life is so hard. Marrying someone who is looking in the same direction makes it easier. You and Drew are so different.”

  Susannah wanted to ask how well her mother had known her dad in the three months before they married, and whether she would do it again, knowing the isolation that would come from being just the three of them alone in a foreign country. “Mom, come on, you don’t even know him.”

  When she returned to the warehouse, it was almost midnight. Drew and Aristotle were watching Adult Swim at a tilt, sitting on the couch with a missing leg. A pungent spliff still fumed in the ashtray, a brilliant orange gleam on a balsa coffee table stippled with ash and cluttered with spare car parts and the metal guts of a half-built computer.

  Susannah slumped on the armrest of the couch and stared at the screen. The thought of dumping Drew made her heart feel small and cramped—wasn’t true love supposed to transcend all that? Her parents had been so in love once, they flouted all convention and escaped to another continent to start a new life. Perhaps it hadn’t worked out so well, perhaps they were no longer in love, staying together only because that was what you did, but at least they had their original happiness, their hope, to look back at.

  ***

  Sometimes you find someone hot because they trigger a secret, rarely traversed corner of your psyche, because they induce a strong click of recognition inside you. Other times you lust after them only because they aren’t who you expect them to be. Drew was neither of these. Aristotle was both.

  Aristotle was muscular and black with a voice like molten gold. “I’m a cinephile. I want to make films,” he said one evening early in his acquaintance with Susannah, when Drew was out delivering marijuana to a buyer.

  “What’s your favorite movie?”

  “Hard to say,” he said. “There are so many.”

  Susannah smiled and turned back to her book, ready to dismiss him as just another pretty face.

  “In a Lonely Place and Bridge Over the River Kwai. It’s a tie.”

  “You serious?” A jab of delight.

  “You thought I’d answer with some Spike Lee title? Or maybe—”

  “Not at all. But that decade for film is my favorite, too. For the quietly glamorous films, more than the grim ones.”

  “Quietly glamorous like what?”

  Susannah was taken aback again. Drew rarely asked her questions about herself, and they usually watched the movies he wanted to watch, full of pointless irreverence and fart jokes.

  “Roman Holiday,” she said. They compared notes about film until Drew returned a few hours later, needing Susannah to help him trim leaves for another delivery.

  The following week, Drew’s parents, who were retirees, invited them to dinner with some of their friends. They drove an hour and a half to their mansion in the hills and ate under heat lamps on the patio at a reclaimed redwood table overlooking a Benedictine monastery. Drew’s mother had dyed her grey hair platinum blonde and introduced Susannah to her friends as Drew’s friend, not his girlfriend. Drew did not correct her. Susannah smiled politely and shook hands.

  Drew’s parents asked how he was doing, and he lied without even blinking, claiming he was doing some freelance work for an animation company. “How’s that extra bedroom for another renter coming?” his father asked. He passed her a glass of Two Buck Chuck—a two-dollar Pinot Noir. Drew had told her that they saved their special reserve wines for romantic evenings alone, the opposite of Susannah’s parents, who only ever brought out their best for guests. “Can I get my tools back?” Drew had borrowed tools from his father to build the grow room and developed an elaborate cover story. “It’s all done,” Drew said. “It looks fantastic. I’ll show you pictures sometime.”

  “You look so handsome these days, Drew. Just like a younger version of your dad,” said one of the friends. She pushed her purple designer glasses back up on her attenuated nose. “And handy, too! I bet Susannah appreciates that. It’s getting so expensive in the Bay Area to hire folks to help around the house.”

  Susannah smiled and nodded.

  “Drew’s friend just graduated law school,” Drew’s mother said.

  “Oh, are you planning to be a corporate lawyer?” another woman wearing garish pink lipstick and culottes asked Susannah.

  “No, environmental. Plaintiff’s side.”

  “Oh. Isn’t that interesting,” said the woman, conveying with her tone that it was not interesting at all. She began eating the arugula salad that Drew’s mother put in front of her.

  “I keep trying to get her to interview with blue-chip firms so I can retire and we can be fabulously wealthy,” Drew said. “But she’s a do-gooder.”

  “Well, I think that’s wonderful. Just so long as you’re not planning to work for the Southern Poverty Law Center or some kooky liberal organization like that,” said Drew’s father. Drew’s mother started to reminisce about the good old days when you could get a colored girl to clean your house for dirt cheap. Colored girl. Although she was Indian,
Susannah wondered if Drew’s parents saw her as the colored girl with whom their son was “friends.” She seethed. Why did Drew let them see her that way?

  On the ride home, they listened to rap music, not speaking. An intense heat wave had arrived in Oakland, and the moment they walked into the warehouse, Drew turned on an industrial-strength fan. Susannah went into the kitchen. She didn’t want to clean it again. It took Drew three or four days to bother loading his dishwasher, and in the meantime, he stacked the dishes high inside the sink and then barricaded the edges with five more towers.

  “I can’t do this, I can’t do this. I hate the stink. I hate everything about this! Can’t you just cut back? Just a little?” She threw a metal spoon into the careful pagoda of dishes. A cup at the top slid off and all the other cups followed, landing with a clatter. She palmed sweat from her forehead.

  Drew said something, and they yelled back and forth, not able to understand each other over the wind from the fan, until Drew turned it down. “No. I mean, come on, Susannah. You knew this was me going in.” He stepped back toward the refrigerator.

  “Well, you weren’t growing back then. You weren’t dealing.”

  “What do you want? I got a medical card.”

  “It’s just for personal use.”

  “The po-po aren’t coming into this warehouse and they wouldn’t care even if they did. My best doesn’t seem to be good enough for you.”

  “Maybe we should break up.”

  “Is that what you want?” He grabbed a Red Bull from the refrigerator.

  “Why don’t you see yourself, like really see yourself?” Susannah crossed her arms. “You’re an addict. All your friends are addicts.”

  “Pot isn’t addictive.”

  “The worst part is you think all this is normal.”

  “Well, it’s not like I ever told you I was normal. If you’ll remember, I warned you I was just the opposite.”

  “You can’t start your day without it, not an hour passes without you smoking it. How can you not see how depressing that is?”

  “Everybody loves a wake-and-bake stoner.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “If it’s so depressing, why be with me?”

  “Because I love you.” Just as the words left her lips, she realized they weren’t quite true, and maybe never had been. He never probed who she was, he never criticized her, and so they were perfectly comfortable together—but had he ever really seen her?

  “Listen, the world is cruel. It’s a fucked-up place,” Drew said. “I need something to make it less terrible, so what? That’s America, baby.” Silence. A hiss after he cracked the aluminum tab back to open his drink.

  Susannah took a deep breath, trying not to say too bluntly the angry things she was really thinking. “You’re always saying it’s fucked up. But really, your parents are filthy rich and you’re talented. This world was designed for people like you.”

  “Well, I told you about my issues from the beginning.”

  “I should have believed you.” Susannah stomped into the warehouse bathroom, locked the door and sat down in the tub. He didn’t follow.

  Drew had once promised their relationship would be entertaining. It was during their fourth date, a night of chicken tikka masala and a Kabuki-influenced theater performance about a green bird. He had passed her Indian food test by agreeing to eat some form of it, even though he would have preferred steak. Back then, contrasted with all the Federalist Society joiners in her 1L class, she found him refreshingly anti-corporate and sweet and odd, and so she didn’t quibble that chicken tikka masala wasn’t truly Indian, but a British bastardization of Punjabi cuisine.

  They were walking up Euclid Avenue to Susannah’s apartment when she asked Drew what his tragic flaw was. The wind picked up long ochre and sienna-colored leaves as they climbed the steep hill, passing them forward like batons.

  “Tragic flaw? What do you mean?” he asked, lighting a cigarette and holding it out to her. She shook her head. He took a drag.

  “Everyone has one. Like Hamlet might say that his flaw was being indecisive. Romeo might say he fell in love too fast. Frasier might say his was being pretentious. Or maybe the characters wouldn’t say, but other people, professors, would. You know what I mean.”

  “Jesus. Does anyone watch Frasier anymore?”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “I just want to say the right thing.”

  “There’s no right answer.”

  “Well, I mean it’s not like I have no flaws.” He had big bones and stood there like a fairytale giant, a hulk, a shelter, with the wind blowing his wispy chestnut hair back. Enormous and unapologetic.

  “Ha, I hope not!” Susannah tapped her black leather boot on the pavement. “You’d be boring if you had no flaws.”

  “My flaw is… I’m always trying to make girls laugh.”

  “Not exactly what I had in mind. I was thinking something sad.” She started walking down Scenic Avenue toward her apartment and he followed.

  “Oh, trust me. I want it so much, it is sad. Though I’m sure all the shrinks my mom dragged me to would come up with other stuff.”

  “What flaws would they say?”

  “Oh, god, it’s what they’ve already said, which is everything,” he said. “ADHD. Oppositional defiant disorder. Bipolar disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder. Conduct disorder. Since I was five, my mom had them watching me in a little room to figure out what was wrong with me, observing how I played. They all had different diagnoses. You name it, I’ve been diagnosed with it.”

  “You’re kidding.” Viewed through the lens of diagnosis, Drew’s calmness seemed peculiar, rather than organic, something to fear rather than trust as Susannah had been doing.

  “No, she thought something was wrong with me. Really all I wanted was her attention.”

  Susannah laughed to be amiable.

  “I was on a boatload of pills until I was eighteen. Then I refused to take them. But pot is nature’s medicine. It keeps me feeling normal.” He wasn’t curious what Susannah’s tragic flaw was and she didn’t know what she would have answered.

  In her kitchen, she had uncorked a bottle of sparkling wine. The cork narrowly missed Drew’s head as it sailed toward the blue and pink chalk messages on the blackboard her roommates had stolen from TGI Fridays. She poured the bubbly into two garage sale beer steins. Drew handed her a black-market Vicodin and she washed it down. Meanwhile he busied himself at the kitchen table, shaking a trail of pot into the center third of a rolling paper and arranging the flecks with thick, freckled fingers.

  Susannah wondered how his parents could put him in a room to be observed when he was five—however much her parents annoyed her, she could never imagine them trusting someone else to tell them who she was—and a wave of tenderness washed over her as she imagined Drew as a little boy, slowly becoming aware that people were watching him from the other side of the glass as he played, the paranoia he might have felt.

  He had finished rolling the spliff and clinked his glass against hers. “To our relationship. I can promise it will be entertaining.”

  ***

  When Aristotle came home, the heavy metal door to the warehouse slammed behind him, and Susannah climbed out of the bathtub and listened at the door. He and Drew began talking and Aristotle admitted he’d lost his job. “So I was late to work. Again,” he said, his sheepishness plain in his voice. “But I also think they were looking for an excuse to fire me.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Drew said. Someone turned on the television—another cartoon with its sounds of wascally wabbits falling off cliffs and a popgun going off like fireworks.

  Susannah washed her face in the sink, thinking about the matrimonial ad her mother could place. To draw interest from any of the Indians in America she’d ever met, it should say something like “Fair Brahmin woman with wheatish skin seeks handsome young doctor.” But those were lies. She was not fair. She was not a Brahmin. You were
supposed to take your father’s caste, and so she could say Christian or Dalit, to attract other Dalits, but that, too, didn’t seem quite right. After all, she’d grown up mostly among Brahmin immigrants like her mother, eating TamBrahm food, reading Amar Chitra Katha comic books, and learning Hindu mythology. She was an outcaste, a misfit by all the standards.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, Aristotle and Drew stopped talking. Drew looked down at his book. Aristotle was extremely handsome, distractingly so when he looked at Susannah. Even his gaze unnerved her. She slipped into the bedroom to continue eavesdropping in peace, but neither of them said anything notable. Eventually Drew came to bed, and they fucked, the kind of clawing and sweating and writhing that led to an intense orgasm on his part and a faked one on hers. After a fight like that, their relationship was too fragile not to do it. As usual, Drew was out of condoms and he pulled out before coming.

  ***

  “We’re going to be late,” Susannah said. She stood by the front door, winding a scarf around her neck.

  “Let me just finish rolling my joint.” Seeing Susannah’s irritation, Drew said, “What? You know I can’t sit through the whole movie without it.” As she waited for him to finish rolling, and knowing they would be late to the movie, she could not stop thinking about her parents. Every time she thought of their worried faces and juxtaposed them with the entitled yuppie obliviousness of Drew’s parents, the more anxious she grew.

  But as they hurried to the movie theater, a homeless Latino man asked for change, and Drew paused to hand him a twenty. “Need change?” the man asked.

  “Nah, man, keep it,” Drew said. She squeezed his hand as they continued toward the theater.

  When they returned from the movie, Drew had to drop a bag off with a customer. Susannah was supposed to be studying for the bar exam, but instead she started cleaning the warehouse. She was going through her purse, throwing away receipts and old business cards, when she noticed Aristotle watching her from the couch. “What’s gotten into you?”