“Thanks for your continued attention and interest today,” I said to the room. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”
The students filed out of the lecture hall. I packed up my things and walked up to my three teaching assistants.
“That was interesting,” Carla said.
Carla was roughly my age, had teenagers at home, and was slowly finishing up her dissertation. I sometimes feared she never would. She had TAed for me so many times that we’d become friends. While the other two TAs—young, polished, and ambitious—were careful about what they said to me, Carla was always refreshingly honest. She’d done her fieldwork with gangs in Los Angeles, which gave her a certain toughness and clarity.
“Interesting?”
“You were a little combative up there.”
I felt a little combative, maybe out of anticipation of Suzanne’s voicemail, but I hated being so transparent. “Was it that obvious?”
“To me. Maybe not to the students. But it was fine. I loved it. What kind of fool buys hundred-dollar yoga pants?” She purposefully did not look at the other TAs as she said this.
I went into my bag and pulled out my phone. “I need to check this. But I’ll see you all on Wednesday. We should start thinking about what we want to put on the midterm.”
I walked out of the lecture hall and read the text from Eva that I had ignored: “Please CALL me immediately after class.”
I was perplexed at the emphasis on CALL, but before I did, I listened to Suzanne’s voicemail. At first, there was just static. And then I heard her, though I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her voice sounded like it had traveled through a cave before making it to me. She was animated, her words moving up and down in emphasis. There were other people whom I couldn’t recognize. At least two. A conversation. Some more static. And then, as if she had stepped out of the cave for a second to get some air, her voice finally cleared: “You know Raj.” Just as quickly, she became muffled again, and remained so for the next two minutes. I listened to the entire message again, hoping that I had missed something the first time.
You know Raj. Three clear words among hundreds of unclear others. Not knowing what came before or what came after, and unable to sense Suzanne’s tone, the words could mean anything. Without thinking it through, because I was sick of thinking through everything, I sent the voicemail message back to Suzanne and added a note: “I think you may have dialed me by mistake.”
As I walked back to my office, I saw Emily Baker’s smiling face on a bulletin board. For the past few months, there had been posters all over campus announcing Emily’s imminent arrival. She and I had attended graduate school together. In the very first class of the first year, she had said something so incisive about Marx that I knew instantly we were on two different tracks. She’d gone on to distinguish herself in graduate school, had gotten a job at Princeton, and published a highly regarded book based on the fieldwork she’d done in Haiti. The book—on what Emily called “Haitian epistemologies”—had informed how Eva and her NGO approached helping the Haitians after the earthquake a few years back.
As if that weren’t enough, all the while Emily had been making a name for herself as a poet, too. Last year, she’d published a book of poems with a simple blurb on the cover from Toni Morrison: “Emily Baker has the poetic sensibility of Emily Dickinson and the grace and power of Josephine Baker.” She’d gotten the cover review of the New York Times Book Review, which I had seen but could not bring myself to read. And she’d won a major award that came with a $50,000 check.
The school had chosen the poetry collection for our annual all-campus read, and now there were posters all over campus with Emily’s smiling, confident face, announcing the public reading she was going to give this Thursday evening. She’d cut her hair since I’d seen her last. She looked severe, but also, with her piercing eyes, quite beautiful.
I’d followed her career, trying hard not to feel so much envy. When her poetry volume had appeared in my mailbox at work, I had initially flipped through it and then set it aside, grumbling something about the pretentions of the craft. But one afternoon a week or so later, I’d bought myself a large cup of coffee and sat down with the slim book. I remembered her academic writing as being typically obtuse, but the poems were clear and bold. The first section—“Black and Middle Class”—had poems about her parents and the bookish, warm childhood they had provided for her and her sister Tracy in Sacramento. In the second section, the work turned more directly to the title of the book: Dear Tracy. Poems about the sisters growing up together, and how much their teachers had marveled at Tracy’s schoolwork. Tracy was a year younger, and more sensitive, and Emily had always felt the need to protect her. Around sixteen, Tracy had pulled away from Emily, her family, everyone. A year later, during the summer before she was supposed to go to college, Tracy disappeared. At first, the family feared that she’d run away. A week after she left, they received a postcard confirming their fear: “I’m fine. Don’t come searching for me. I’m on my own now.”
The collection is a meditation on sisterhood, guilt, and loss. In one particularly heartbreaking poem, Emily sees a homeless woman she’s convinced is Tracy. When it turns out not to be her, Emily brings her dinner anyway. They talk, and at the end of the night, Emily doesn’t know what to do, and so she drives to her bank, withdraws as much money as she can from the ATM, hands it to the woman, and says, “Can I come see you again?”
By the time I’d finished the book, my coffee was cold. And whatever envy I’d felt for Emily was replaced by a sheer wonder at her talent to look into the thingness of things and not flinch. She was able and willing to explore head-on the fact that her sister had left, seemingly rejected Emily and her parents without any explanation. I’d have trouble asking the questions Emily was asking about the possible reasons Tracy had turned away from her family, and answering them in this very public way.
I walked past the poster and called Eva.
“What is going on, Raj? Why didn’t you just tell me what happened this morning?” Eva’s tone was less angry and more bewildered, as if I were Neel and I’d flooded the bathroom floor during a shower. “I had to tell Leslie that we hadn’t talked because you got in late and left early. She knew you hadn’t told me.”
“I’m so sorry. It would have taken too long to talk through it.”
“We didn’t need to talk through it. I just needed the information. Raj, I told you your jokes would get you in trouble.”
“This wasn’t like the other times,” I said. “What did Leslie say?”
“She said you were thinking about other things and that maybe you were trying to connect with the guy.”
Leslie’s unwillingness to give me a supporting hand the night before hurt all the more because she knew me well enough to be right.
“Can we talk about this tonight?” I asked. I didn’t want to have the conversation right then, with students walking by. “I have to get to office hours.”
“Please, let’s talk now,” Eva said. “The students can wait.”
I stopped in front of another bulletin board, Emily once more staring at me. She had on glasses with stylish purple frames. “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know, Raj. I can’t believe you said that aloud.”
“I can’t either. I really can’t.” I’d been thinking about how best to make this all go away. Call Bill right now, apologize profusely, and then send an email to the committee and the Blacks, doing the same? That would smooth it all out. I was very experienced at apologizing. “It wasn’t an insult, though. The guy knows the difference.”
“I’m sure he knows you didn’t mean it as a slur. But you know better than I do that your intention is not the problem here. No one on the committee is going to care about that.”
“Is that what you’re worried about? Them?” I was trying to push this away from me, which I had no right to do.
“I’m worried about us,” Eva said. “Please don’t turn this on me. Yo
u know that I’m worried about you.”
“I know, I know. And I appreciate it. Can we talk about this tonight?”
“I just wish you hadn’t said it. That’s all.”
“I can’t tell you how much I wish I hadn’t either. But my experiences are closer to Bill’s than anyone else’s on the committee. So if anyone has the right to say it—and I know none of us do—wouldn’t it be me?” This line of thinking was going nowhere good. But I was trying to give myself some wiggle room within this straitjacket of stupidity I’d strapped myself into.
“No.”
And I had no quarrel with that. Bill and I were not the same people with the same experiences and the same problems. But I could think of any number of big and small moments when I had been on the receiving end of racist taunts. I didn’t know Bill, and Bill didn’t know me, and yet I sensed that we had both experienced the despair and wretchedness of feeling out of place. That was all I had wanted to talk to him about—or not. Maybe as we were warming up close to the net, hitting balls back and forth. I had only wanted to connect, but I had tried to do so in the worst way possible. I’d not meant for those words to leave my mouth.
“What are you going to do?” Eva asked. “Are you going to get in touch with him?”
“I have his number and his email. I don’t know if it’s best to write or go see him.”
“Maybe both.”
“I really messed up. I know I did. And there’s no excuse for it. But that place has been screwed up for a very long time, and they just don’t know it.”
“I know,” Eva said.
“Can we talk about this more tonight? I should get going.”
“OK.” Eva hung up the phone.
When I got back to my office, Dan was still there.
“Jesus, man. I have office hours.”
“If someone comes, I’ll get dressed.”
“I’m going to grab a quick lunch. Students will be here when I get back.”
Dan made a big show of gathering his things. He put on his jeans and slipped into his shoes. “You know squatters have rights.”
“Go home, Dan. Talk to Julie.” I was more than happy to tell someone else to face up to his problems.
As I walked out the door, my phone buzzed. Suzanne had texted: “PLEASE CALL ME. I want to explain.” I put the phone away and headed out. When I returned ten minutes later with my sandwich, a student was waiting for me. There was a time when I loved office hours, having students come in and engage with the ideas I had presented in class, pushing them further than we’d gotten in the lecture. But now, more often than not, they just wanted me to repeat what I’d already said. Maybe because hardly any of them took notes anymore. Where, in years before, they listened to what I was saying and then translated it by writing it down in their notebooks, now they didn’t have to do that. They simply took their picture and then asked me to explain what I’d already explained.
At least the student waiting was the diligent, careful note taker from my morning class. If I had to talk to one of them, I was glad it was one like him, someone who seemed to have been paying close attention. He had come up to me after class a couple of times to ask for clarification on something I’d said during my lectures. It had been clear that he was working through whatever I’d just said, but both times he’d seemed nervous and cut the conversations short.
Now he was dressed in basic ironic chic: skinny jeans, a button-down checkered shirt, and Top-Siders with socks. But there was something entirely un-ironic and stiff about his bearing. His eyes were set back in his face, and it seemed that smiling was labor for him; his look conveyed that everyone was inevitably going to disappoint him.
“Hi, Dr. Bhatt,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake mine. It was clammy. “I’m Robert. From your morning class.”
Robert? So formal. “C’mon in, Robert,” I said, opening my office door.
He noticed the empty bookshelves before sitting down, as if he were confused about where he’d ended up. “This place is pretty empty.”
“I like clean lines,” I said. “And nothing to carry if I need to make a quick exit.” He didn’t respond. “My books are at my home office,” I added. “Do you mind if I eat?”
I hated to eat in front of students, but I was starving and I sensed that this was not going to be a quick conversation. There were two types of students during office hours: those who left as soon as their questions were answered and those who hung around to chat. It seemed like Robert had no one waiting for him.
“Please,” he said.
I unwrapped the sandwich. “Here is the one genuine benefit of French colonial rule in Vietnam: the bánh mì.” The grilled beef in the soft baguette, layered with jalapeños, cucumbers, and mayonnaise, was perfect.
“It smells good,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if this was courtesy or if he wanted me to offer him some. He was eying the sandwich like he hadn’t eaten all day.
“You want some?” I asked, expecting—hoping—that he would say no.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m starving.”
I was so hungry, I knew the whole sandwich wouldn’t even have been enough for me, but I reached into my desk drawer, found a plastic knife, and cut it in two. Robert picked up the slightly bigger half and took two consecutive bites.
“Where’d you go to high school?” I often asked students this on their first visit, to break the ice, and also to get a sense of their lives.
“Northern California.”
“Where?”
“A town called Martinez.”
“Martinez! I grew up near there. Did you know it’s Joe DiMaggio’s hometown?”
Nothing.
“Jeff and Stan Van Gundy?”
More nothing. There were plenty of women at the Tennis Club who had the same immobile expression on their faces that Robert wore now. But theirs was from Botox.
He continued eating, and finished his half sandwich before I’d taken a second bite of mine.
Perhaps Robert’s family lived in the biggest house in Martinez, but they probably didn’t. I had known it to be a forgettable little place, with endless neighborhoods of drab tract homes built when stucco was in vogue. That’s what Robert reminded me of: drab, white stucco. I’d read all sorts of studies about why children needed boredom in their lives to make them more creative. I got the feeling that Robert had been plenty bored growing up, and somewhere in the midst of a long, hot summer day, he had taken a magnifying glass to a colony of ants, or kicked a cat or two. He probably thought accepting my sandwich offer was the polite thing to do.
I had to stop myself. I realized that I was making assumptions about this young man I knew nothing about. I took another small bite. Maybe I had low blood sugar.
“So what’s up, Robert?” I asked, trying to shift my thinking. “How can I help?”
“Do you like teaching?”
I chewed my food. God, I wished I hadn’t chased Dan out. He would have rescued me. Whereas I stayed in conversations I didn’t want to be in, Dan just cut them off. “We need to end office hours early today,” Dan would have said, without waiting for a reply.
“I do.”
“Why did you become an anthropologist? You could have become a historian, a novelist maybe. Even a lawyer. All the Indian kids in the dorms want to be doctors or head up to Silicon Valley.”
I wiped my mouth with a napkin and finished chewing. There isn’t one Indian kid who wants to make films or hasn’t figured out exactly what she wants to do? What made Robert an expert on that entire swath of the student body? “Do you have a specific question about the class?”
“No,” Robert said. “It’s all pretty self-explanatory. Structuralism. The raw and the cooked. Your lecture last week on dirt was pretty spot-on, though.” He fiddled with his hands before he continued, as if he wanted to be careful about what he was going to say next. “It wasn’t just an abstract theory. Well, it was pretty abstract at first. Of course, I’m not Hindu or Jewish. B
ut as you went on, I realized I know that feeling.” He lowered his voice slightly as he said this, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “I felt out of place growing up. And I feel it on campus all the time. What you were saying made sense.” Enthusiasm was appearing on his face, replacing the apprehension he had when he first walked in. “It kind of hit close to home.”
The compliment felt nice; I certainly could use the confidence boost. Whatever damage I was wreaking in the rest of my life, here I seemed to be making a small difference. Maybe I’d judged Robert a bit too harshly; it could be that he was just a little awkward. And who of us isn’t?
“I’m glad you found something useful in the lecture. And to your question about why I became an anthropologist—I like people.” I was settling into the conversation more. I didn’t have it in me to shuffle him out. And wasn’t this kind of engagement what I wanted from students? “I like talking to them. I like hearing about their lives. That’s what an ethnography is. Ethnos is ‘life.’ Graphy is ‘to write.’ Life stories. The stock-in-trade of anthropology. Doing fieldwork can be really exciting. And I had an anthropology professor in college whom I loved. He was pure charm and erudition.”
“Is that what you’re trying to be? Charming and erudite?”
What was up with this kid? He didn’t seem to have a filter. Or maybe this was all in earnest and he didn’t have the nuance to know how to ask certain types of questions. Given what I had said myself not twenty-four hours earlier, I felt some empathy for him.
Before I could answer, Robert continued: “You do a pretty good job of it in class. I was expecting it to be boring, but you’ve kept it lively. I’ve taken my share of large lecture courses. It’s no easy thing to keep two hundred students engaged. But here’s what I don’t understand. In anthropology you take what people say as evidence for the arguments you’re making. I say one thing and mean another all the time. If you were interviewing me, I would probably tell you all the things you wanted to hear, and not what I actually thought and felt.”
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