by Laura Furman
“I hate reading.”
“Talk about the place where you live, and what it means to you.” Zubin looked up from the application. “There you go. That one's made for you.”
She’d been listening with her back to him, staring down Ridge Road toward the Hanging Garden. Now she turned around—did a little spin on the smooth tiles.
“Can we get coffee?”
“Do you want milk and sugar?”
Julia looked up, as if shyly. “I want to go to Barista.”
“It's loud there.”
“I’ll pay,” Julia said.
“Thanks. I can pay for my own coffee.”
Julia shrugged. “Whatever—as long as I get my fix.”
Zubin couldn’t help smiling.
“I need it five times a day. And if I don’t get espresso and a cigarette first thing in the morning, I have to go back to bed.”
“Your parents know you smoke?”
“God, no. Our driver knows—he uses it as blackmail.” She smiled. “No smoking is my dad's big rule.”
“What about your mom?”
“She went back to the States to find herself. I decided to stay with my dad,” Julia added, although he hadn’t asked. “He lets me go out.”
Zubin couldn’t believe that any American father would let his teenage daughter go out at night in Bombay. “Go out where?”
“My friends have parties. Or sometimes clubs—there's that new place, Fire and Ice.”
“You should be careful,” Zubin told her.
Julia smiled. “That's so Indian.”
“Anyone would tell you to be careful—it's not like the States.”
“No,” Julia said.
He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice. “You miss it.”
“I am missing it.”
“You mean now in particular?”
Julia was putting her things back into the knapsack haphazardly— phone, cigarettes, datebook, Chap Stick. She squinted at the window, as if the light were too bright. “I mean, I don’t even know what I’m missing.”
Homesickness was like any other illness: you couldn’t remember it properly. You knew you’d had the flu, and that you’d suffered, but you didn’t have access to the symptoms themselves: the chills, the swollen throat, the heavy ache in your arms and legs as if they’d been split open and something—sacks of rock—had been sewn up inside. He had been eighteen, and in America for only the second time. It was cold. The sweaters he’d bought in Bombay looked wrong—he saw that the first week—and they weren’t warm enough anyway. He saw the same sweaters, of cheap, shiny wool, in too-bright colors, at the “international” table in the Freshman Union. He would not sit there.
His roommate saw him go out in his T-shirt and windcheater, and offered to loan him one of what seemed like dozens of sweaters: brown or black or wheat-colored, the thickest, softest wool Zubin had ever seen. He went to the Harvard Co-op, where they had a clothing section, and looked at the sweaters. He did the calculation several times: the sweaters were “on sale” for eighty dollars, which worked out to roughly 3,300 rupees. If it had been a question of just one he might have managed, but you needed a minimum of three. When the salesperson came over, Zubin said that he was just looking around.
It snowed early that year.
“It gets, like, how cold in the winter in India?” his roommate, Bennet, asked.
Zubin didn’t feel like explaining the varied geography of India, the mountains and the coasts. “About sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.
“Man,” said Bennet. Jason Bennet was a nice guy, an athlete from Nat-ick, Massachusetts. He took Zubin to eat at the lacrosse table, where Zubin looked not just foreign, but as if he were another species—he weighed at least ten kilos less than the smallest guy, and felt hundreds of years older. He felt as if he were surrounded by enormous and powerful children. They were hungry, and then they were restless; they ran around and around in circles, and then they were tired. Five nights a week they’d pledged to keep sober; on the other two they drank systematically until they passed out.
He remembered the day in October that he’d accepted the sweater (it was raining) and how he’d waited until Jason left for practice before putting it on. He pulled the sweater over his head and saw, in the second of wooly darkness, his father. Or rather, he saw his father's face, floating in his mind's eye like the Cheshire Cat. The face was making an expression that Zubin remembered from the time he was ten, and had proudly revealed the thousand rupees he’d made by organizing a betting pool on the horse races among the boys in the fifth standard.
He’d resolved immediately to return the sweater, and then he had looked in the mirror. What he saw surprised him: someone small but good-looking, with fine features and dark, intense eyes, the kind of guy a girl, not just a girl from home but any girl—an American girl—might find attractive.
And he wanted one of those: there was no use pretending he didn’t. He watched them from his first-floor window, as close as fish in an aquarium tank. They hurried past him, laughing and calling out to one another, in their boys’ clothes: boots, T-shirts with cryptic messages, jeans worn low and tight across the hips. You thought of the panties underneath those jeans, and in the laundry room you often saw those panties: impossibly sheer, in incredible colors, occasionally, delightfully torn. The girls folding their laundry next to him were entirely different from the ones at home. They were clearly free to do whatever they wanted—a possibility that often hit him, in class or the library or on the historic brick walkways of the Radcliffe Quad, so intensely that he had to stop and take a deep breath, as if he were on the point of blacking out.
He wore Jason's sweater every day, and was often too warm; the classrooms were overheated and dry as furnaces. He almost never ran into Jason, who had an active and effortless social schedule to complement his rigorous athletic one. And so it was a surprise, one day in late October, to come back to the room and find his roommate hunched miserably over a textbook at his desk.
“Midterms,” Jason said, by way of an explanation. Zubin went over and looked at the problem set, from an introductory physics class. He’d taken a similar class at Cathedral; now he laid out the equations and watched as Jason completed them, correcting his roommate's mistakes as they went along. After the third problem Jason looked up.
“Man, thanks.” And then, as if it had just occurred to him. “Hey, if you want to keep that—”
He had managed so completely to forget about the sweater that he almost didn’t know what Jason meant.
“It's too small for me anyway.”
“No,” Zubin said.
“Seriously. I may have a couple of others too. Coach has been making us eat like hogs.”
“Thanks,” Zubin said. “But I want something less preppy.”
Jason looked at him.
“No offense,” Zubin said. “I’ve just been too fucking lazy. I’ll go tomorrow.”
The next day he went back to the Co-op with his almost-new textbooks in a bag. These were for his required classes (what they called the Core, or general knowledge), as well as organic chemistry. If you got to the reserve reading room at nine, the textbooks were almost always there. He told himself that the paperbacks for his nineteenth-century novel class weren’t worth selling—he’d bought them used anyway—and when he took the rest of the books out and put them on the counter, he realized he had forgotten the Norton Anthology of American Literature in his dorm room. But the books came to $477.80 without it. He took the T downtown to a mall where he bought a down jacket for $300, as warm as a sleeping bag, the same thing the black kids wore. He got a wool watchman's cap with a Nike swoosh.
When he got home, Jason laughed. “Dude, what happened? You’re totally ghetto.” But there was approval in it. Folding the brown sweater on Jason's bed, Zubin felt strong and relieved, as if he had narrowly avoided a terrible mistake.
Julia had been having a dream about losing it. There was no sex in the dream; she
couldn’t remember whom she’d slept with, or when. All she experienced was the frustrating impossibility of getting it back, like watching an earring drop and scatter in the bathroom sink, roll and clink down the drain before she could put her hand on it. The relief she felt on waking up every time was like a warning.
She had almost lost it in Paris, before they moved. He was German, not French, gangly but still handsome, with brown eyes and blondish hair. His name was Markus. He was a year ahead of her at the American School and he already knew that he wanted to go back to Berlin for university, and then join the Peace Corps. On the phone at night, he tried to get her to come with him.
At dinner Julia mentioned this idea to her family.
“You in the Peace Corps?” said her sister Claudia, who was visiting from New York. “I wonder if Agnès B. makes a safari line?”
When Claudia came home, she stayed with Julia on the fourth floor, in the chambre de bonne where she had twin beds and her Radiohead poster, all her CDs organized by record label and a very old stuffed monkey named Frank. The apartment was half a block from the Seine, in an old hotel on the Rue des Saint-Pères; in the living room were two antique chairs, upholstered in red-and-gold-striped brocade, and a porcelain clock with shepherdesses on it. The chairs and the clock were Louis XVI, the rugs were from Tehran, and everything else was beige linen.
Claudia, who now lived with her boyfriend in a railroad apartment on the Lower East Side, liked to pretend she was poor. She talked about erratic hot water and rent control and cockroaches, and when she came to visit them in Paris she acted surprised, as if the houses she’d grown up in—first San Francisco, then Delhi, then Dallas, Moscow and Paris—hadn’t been in the same kind of neighborhood, with the same pair of Louis XVI chairs.
“I can’t believe you have a Prada backpack,” she said to Julia. Claudia had been sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking espresso and eating an orange indifferently, section by section. “Mom's going crazy in her old age.”
“I bought it,” Julia said.
“Yeah, but with what?”
“I’ve been selling my body on the side—after school.”
Claudia rolled her eyes and took a sip of her espresso; she looked out the window into the little back garden. “It's so peaceful here,” she said, proving something Julia already suspected: that her sister had no idea what was going on in their house.
It started when her father's best friend, Bernie, left Paris to take a job with a French wireless company in Bombay. He’d wanted Julia's father to leave with him, but even though her father complained all the time about the oil business, he wouldn’t go. Julia heard him telling her mother that he was in the middle of an important deal.
“This is the biggest thing we’ve done. I love Bernie—but he's afraid of being successful. He's afraid of a couple of fat Russians.”
Somehow Bernie had managed to convince her mother that Bombay was a good idea. She would read the share price of the wireless company out loud from the newspaper in the mornings, while her father was mak- ing eggs. It was a strange reversal; in the past, all her mother had wanted was for her father to stay at home. The places he traveled had been a family joke, as if he were trying to outdo himself with the strangeness of the cities— Istanbul and Muscat eventually became Tbilisi, Ashkhabad, Tashkent. Now, when Julia had heard the strained way that her mother talked about Bernie and wireless communication, she had known she was hearing part of a larger argument—known enough to determine its size, if not its subject. It was like watching the exposed bit of a dangerous piece of driftwood, floating just above the surface of a river.
Soon after Claudia's visit, in the spring of Julias freshman year, her parents gave her a choice. Her mother took her to Galeries Lafayette, and then to lunch at her favorite crêperie on the Ile Saint-Louis, where, in between galettes tomate-fromage and crêpe pomme-chantilly, she told Julia about the divorce. She said she had found a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village: a “feat,” she called it.
“New York will be a fresh start—psychologically,” her mother said. “There's a bedroom that's just yours, and we’ll be a five-minute train ride from Claudie. There are wonderful girls’ schools— I know you were really happy at Hockaday—”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Or we can look at some coed schools. And I’m finally going to get to go back for my master’s—” She leaned forward confidentially. “We could both be graduating at the same time.”
“I want to go back to San Francisco.”
“We haven’t lived in San Francisco since you were three.”
“So?”
The sympathetic look her mother gave her made Julia want to yank the tablecloth out from underneath their dishes, just to hear the glass breaking on the rustic stone floor.
“For right now that isn’t possible,” her mother said. “But there's no reason we can’t talk again in a year.”
Julia had stopped being hungry, but she finished her mother's crêpe anyway. Recently her mother had stopped eating anything sweet; she said it “irritated her stomach” but Julia knew the real reason was Dr. Fabrol, who had an office on the Ile Saint-Louis very near the crêperie. Julia had been seeing Dr. Fabrol once a week during the two years they’d been in
Paris; his office was dark and tiny, with a rough brown rug and tropical plants which he misted from his chair with a plastic spritzer while Julia was talking. When he got excited he swallowed, making a clicking sound in the back of his throat.
In front of his desk Dr. Fabrol kept a sandbox full of little plastic figures: trolls with brightly colored hair, toy soldiers, and dollhouse people dressed in American clothes from the Fifties. He said that adults could learn a lot about themselves by playing “les jeux des enfants.” In one session, when Julia couldn’t think of anything to say, she’d made a ring of soldiers in the sand, and then without looking at him, put the mother doll in the center. She thought this might be over the top even for Dr. Fabrol, but he started arranging things on his desk, pretending he was less interested than he was so that she would continue. She could hear him clicking.
The mother doll had yellow floss hair and a full figure and a red-and-white polka-dotted dress with a belt, like something Lucille Ball would wear. She looked nothing like Julia's mother—a fact that Dr. Fabrol obviously knew, since Julia's mother came so often to pick her up. Sometimes she would be carrying bags from the nearby shops; once she told them she’d just come from an exhibit at the new Islamic cultural center. She brought Dr. Fabrol a postcard of a Phoenician sarcophagus.
“I think this was the piece you mentioned?” Her mother's voice was louder than necessary. “I think you must have told me about it—the last time I was here to pick Julia up?”
“Could be, could be,” Dr. Fabrol said, in his stupid accent. They both watched Julia as if she were a TV and they were waiting to find out about the weather. She couldn’t believe how dumb they must have thought she was.
Her father asked her if she wanted to go for an early morning walk with their black labrador, Baxter, in the Tuileries. She would’ve said no—she wasn’t a morning person—if she hadn’t known what was going on from the lunch with her mother. They put their coats on in the dark hall with Baxter running around their legs, but by the time they left the apartment, the sun was coming up. The river threw off bright sparks. They crossed the bridge, and went through the archway into the courtyard of the Louvre. There were no tourists that early but a lot of people were walking or jogging on the paths above the fountain.
“Look at all these people,” her father said. “A few years ago, they wouldn’t have been awake. If they were awake they would’ve been having coffee and a cigarette. Which reminds me.”
Julia held the leash while her father took out his cigarettes. He wasn’t fat but he was tall and pleasantly big. His eyes squeezed shut when he smiled, and he had a beard, mostly grey now, which he trimmed every evening before dinner with special scissors. When she was younger, she had
looked at other fathers and felt sorry for their children; no one else's father looked like a father to her.
In the shade by the stone wall of the Tuileries, with his back to the flashing fountain, her father tapped the pack, lifted it to his mouth and pulled a cigarette out between his lips. He rummaged in the pocket of his brown corduroys for a box of the tiny wax matches he always brought back from India, a white swan on a red box. He cupped his hand, lit the cigarette and exhaled away from Julia. Then he took back Baxter's leash and said: “Why San Francisco?”
She wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know.” She could picture the broad stillness of the bay, like being inside a postcard. Was she remembering a postcard?
“It's quiet,” she said.
“I didn’t know quiet was high on your list.”
She tried to think of something else.
“You know what I’d like?” her father asked suddenly. “I’d like to watch the sunrise from the Golden Gate—do you remember doing that?”
“Yes,” Julia lied.
“I think you were in your stroller.” Her father grinned. “That was when you were an early riser.”
“I could set my alarm.”
“You could set it,” her father teased her.
“I’m awake now,” she said.
Her father stopped to let Baxter nose around underneath one of the grey stone planters. He looked at the cigarette in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it, dropped and stamped it out, half-smoked.
“Can I have one?”
“Over my dead body.”
“I’m not sure I want to go to New York.”
“You want to stay here?” He said it lightly, as if it were a possibility.
“I want to go with you,” she said. As she said it, she knew how much she wanted it.
She could see him trying to say no. Their shadows were very sharp on the clean paving stones; above the bridge, the gold Mercury was almost too bright to look at.
“Just for the year and a half.”
“Bombay” her father said.
“I liked India last time.”