Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  The Bombayan is aging. Soon he will die, as will his secret. When he boarded that East India Company ship some thirty years earlier, he had hoped to cheat history, to eschew his fate as a colonized man. Now, on the other side of the planet, as he rubs his eyes in the dim newspaper office and steps into the lowering yellow light of a Marysville evening, he sees that he did not manage to cheat history, which is inescapable. No, he raced right into it with all the force of someone swimming upstream. History let him live in its hot, complex swirl for a few decades. And soon it will close in on him, as it takes us all. He shuts the newspaper door and walks to town, where, against all odds, and at all costs, he has made himself a home.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the day I roared down the 880 to meet Anita, Isaac Snider, marvelous distraction though he’d been, was relegated to the back of my mind. As I swung through the bosomy yellow hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, I kept remembering the intensity of adolescence, how everything Anita had said or left unsaid could send pin prickles along my flesh.

  I parked my Honda in a venture capitalist office lot with a view: yellow headlands, highway curve. Buildings down here were invariably beige or brown or other neutral or neutered colors, earthlike tones that blended into the landscape, as though to normalize Silicon Valley wealth, as though to pretend there was something natural about such vertiginous valuations, such sums passing through term sheets every day.

  Anita had asked me to meet her at a restaurant in a posh hotel called the Sonora. She stayed alone in an apartment in the terrible suburban purgatory that was the peninsula; she’d moved there when she was working at Galadriel, she said, which was headquartered on moneyed Sand Hill Road, and she hadn’t yet bothered to relocate. “Sit at the far end of the bar,” she’d said. “Beneath the TVs. It’s quieter.” The lobby was all smooth tile floors, high stone ceilings. An austere chandelier with iron limbs dripped from its apex. Above the bar hung bare bulbs, Californian minimalism. The walls looked to be made of redwood. The bartender wore a blue corduroy vest over a navy plaid button-down. Above him, in a half-hearted gesture at proper bar culture, two screens showed the Giants playing. I sat.

  Around me: older women, several surgically enhanced, wearing cashmere sleeveless sweaters and tight suede skirts and leather pants that hugged their lifted asses; men in T-shirts beneath tossed-on sport coats, flat sneakers, dark jeans—conspicuously casual. A pruny-skinned man in a Cardinal red Stanford hat threw an arm around a younger woman in a corner booth. “You know a little guy,” he said into the woman’s cocked ear, loud enough that I could hear him, “named Mark Zuckerberg?” She sipped her wine, tolerated him. “I knew him when!”

  “Neil!”

  Anita stood in front of me for a dreadfully long moment. She wore a rose-red silky blouse with a ruffle interrupting her breasts, black pleated dress pants, and silver earrings.

  “You look exactly the same,” she said. There was her unblinking gaze. And there, too, was some reverberation of my old desire—to make those eyes look at nothing but me.

  “You don’t.”

  She didn’t. And, actually, I resented the notion that I did. I was now six-one—some three inches taller than when she’d last seen me. I’d filled out. I maintained a good beard line. I’d figured out how to do this thing with my hair, thanks to some pomade Prachi had bought me. In the Bay Area, where a Los Angeles four is a seven or an eight, I’d come a long way.

  She was leaner in the cheeks, muscled in the arms. Her hair was shorter, angled, streaked with chestnut brown, still thick. It was a good result, if you considered the countless ways time could affect people. I dredged her external appearance for signs of the gossip about her at Prachi’s party. What I saw: a woman, comfortably adult. Straight-from-work attire. Quick, evaluating expression. Having located her there, I immediately granted her, once more, power over me. Highly functional, decisive, competent women have always compelled me. The world is enough for them, and they are enough for the world.

  “I’m wrong,” she said, sitting down. I realized we hadn’t hugged, so I leaned over, but we were on barstools and mine was uneven, and I sort of toppled, and she stopped me with her knee. We tried again. A real hug. Warmth. Even a bit of an up-down stroke of her flat palm on my upper back. “You do look different. Older, but also . . .” She paused, reassessing.

  I took it up for her. “Weathered. Wiser. More gallant?” I said. “Wiser? Philosophical.”

  A full laugh erupted, like a hiccup. “Looser. That’s what I mean. Looser. I always think that when I see people from high school, you know? I saw your friend Wendi Zhao one time at this sushi place on Castro Street and she was slouching a little. She never slouched.”

  “Never.”

  “Oh, and Manu!”

  “I see him sometimes.”

  “He’s lovely. Super successful, and now he’s getting very political, isn’t he?”

  “I think that’s relative. The political part.”

  Anita was trying to catch the bartender’s eye and missed my response. “I like their Napa chardonnay. A little oaky, but.”

  “You know wine? Classy.”

  “The basic adjectives. My college roommates only want to hang out by taking these wine tours of Sonoma, and if I want to have any social life at all, well.”

  I ordered an Anchor Steam. The bartender poured Anita’s chardonnay and cranked the tap forward for my beer. Anita pressed her knuckles to the glass and frowned. “I’m sorry, but it’s warm,” she said. The bartender nodded rigidly, and went back for a more properly chilled bottle.

  “Neil,” she said, after taking a sip of the corrected drink, “I’m truly glad to see you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m sorry it was so long.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I didn’t mean for it to be so long, but you look up and all this time’s gone by.” She blinked. Her eyes, though wide, with a tendency to catch the light, revealed little about her emotions—as though something constricted them from behind the pupils. “How’s your sister?”

  “Settled, as my dad says. My mom’s over the moon about the wedding.”

  “Is she chasing after you about your turn?”

  I grimaced. “I’m far from that—what was it you said? The way opposite of engaged?”

  Her lips quivered, as if to imply that she was unsurprised, or maybe that my singlehood was not quite like hers.

  We drank, both of us. A swish, a thud of the glasses back on the bar, and I slid mine to admire the rings it made on the dark wood, also so I could have something in motion to look at.

  “Tell me about your history work.”

  “Uh, well. I don’t know. I’m supposed to be writing about the Gilded Age. But I’ve been messing with some stuff about an Indian dude in the gold rush.” I shifted uncomfortably. I hadn’t tried to explain Snider to anyone. It felt strange to try to account for what I’d been doing for the past weeks. “But really, mostly it’s the Gilded Age.”

  It suddenly seemed that without directly discussing the span of time that had passed since we’d last seen each other, we would, in fact, have nothing to say.

  “I watched your video,” I said, before my bravery dissipated. “Your speech.” She squinted, honestly; perhaps she’d given many speeches. “Miss Teen India?”

  “Oh, yeah?” She shook her hair so it curtained her face, briefly, then re-parted it. “I got in trouble for that. They gave me three minutes to blabber about tech, and I went rogue.”

  I bristled to see that she’d considered invoking Shruti a radical act. “You’re proud of it.”

  “I mean, yes. I was given a platform. I wanted to say something with it. I was angry with that organization—it made girls anorexic and anxious, and I didn’t grasp how much damage all the high school messaging had done until I got to college. . . .” She slowed as he
r eyes flicked across my face. “Huh,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “You’re pissed.”

  “Yeah.” I was speaking with an assurance that would have eluded a younger me. And yet I was afraid to push too hard, in case she retreated back to whatever world had possessed her for so long. “You traded on it.”

  “What do you think I traded it for?”

  My hand shook and beer sloshed. “You don’t think you got credit for being this . . . prophetess of mental health? You didn’t feel hypocritical? You just tied everything up. Like it was all way back in the past.”

  “But it is, Neil,” she said sadly. “It is way back in the past. That doesn’t make it any less horrible. But it’s there. It’s too late.”

  The bartender was forming a kind of metronome, clinking liquor bottles against each other and stacking glasses. I turned to Anita and was surprised to find her unblinking eyes still on me. All her concentration seemed to be focused on convincing me—of something.

  “You think about her a lot, don’t you?” Anita said more softly.

  “Most days.” I drew on my beer glass with my pinky. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “Why not? I don’t mean about the lemonade. I mean about— her.”

  “How could I have?” I’d considered making Shruti my great confession in college. I wanted to erupt with the unsayable story of her during beer-foamy make-outs. When a girl began to tell me about her trauma, which she had learned to wrap in the language of a white therapist, I considered hissing her name, Shruti, daring the girl to ask further. “There’s no language for what happened.”

  “No language? Or language you don’t want to have to use?” The space behind my sternum burned. “Anyway,” she added, “aren’t you quite good with language?”

  I had worried sometimes, with Wendi, with Arabella, that my capacity to feel immense emotions—not just grief or terror, but the kind of rich aches that remake you—had died with the end of the Lemonade Period. What they say about addicts: in the end, the brain is fried, and the daily dramas of life become doldrums. But sitting in the Sonora, with Anita’s gaze haloing me for the first time in years, a glimmer of all that returned, and it felt like grace.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “For being cold to you for so long.”

  “Cold? You ignored me. I had nobody—”

  “I couldn’t have helped you. I needed space. And you’d made me feel so dirty, Neil. That night stuff happened with you and me? I could feel her in my bedroom with us as soon as I realized what you’d done. I swore I could just see her glaring at me. She liked you. That’s all I could think about, how much she’d liked you, and I just couldn’t look at you again.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was the first time I had ever been told by someone else what I had done. And I felt less shame than relief, for at least here was someone corroborating the lonely certitude I’d lived with for years; here was one of two other people alive who knew what I was. “I couldn’t look at me, either.”

  Anita ran a hand through her bob as though to pull out tangles, but there were none. “I was also mad because I thought my mother pushed me too hard when I was already running myself ragged. And then I thought she forgave you too fast, and that she was doing this thing my grandma did with her kids, like, favoring boys.”

  The bartender shook out a new bowl of peanuts. I crammed some into my mouth. “You never told anyone?”

  She chewed her bottom lip vigorously. I waited for a zipper of blood to appear on that plump mouth. “I don’t really like having to sit with myself. But I had to go to therapy eventually, and I talked around it there, got some emotional vocabulary, which isn’t a bad thing. And my ex knew the non-gold parts.”

  “When did, ah, when did you break up?”

  “Which time?” she laughed. “He moved out earlier this year. For good, finally. But we’d been on and off since college.”

  “What’s his deal?” My curiosity about how Anita had spent the past ten-odd years overwhelmed the sense of violation that came with hearing about a guy who’d been in and out of her bed for half that decade. And anyway, I had come to understand, through those many beer-foamy make-outs, that telling a story of who you were before a particular moment is a romantic activity, because the moment of the telling, the moment of you two sitting with each other, is the endpoint to the narrative, and that makes you, the hearer, indispensable to the story.

  “He’s older,” she said. “From this oligarch-rich family. They split their time between Delhi and London. The wealthy Indian-Indians at Stanford had none of the baggage of us ABCDs. They’re, frankly, bored of all our identity shit. You couldn’t call him fresh off the boat—he was fresh off a private jet, you know? Jimmy—that’s his name, Jimmy—just waltzed into Stanford and owned the place. Me along with it. He believed in me, you know? I was overwhelmed there—everyone was so smart—and he still looked at me and said I could be someone. He just handled life for me. He’d read my papers, fix my résumé, help me get job interviews—we actually worked at the same venture firm. And I knew I’d only been hired because of him. He gave me pictures of the world in a way my parents never could. . . .”

  As she went on about what it was like to vacation with Jimmy’s mother in the Maldives and catch his father on a layover in Dubai, and how they never worried about what tomorrow would bring, they simply incarnated the future they desired, sometimes buying it, other times negotiating for it, I understood something new about her. We were both conceptual orphans. Perhaps that is the condition of any second generation. In the space between us and the rest of adulthood lay a great expanse of the unknown. We had not grown up imbibing stories that implicitly conveyed answers to the basic questions of being: What did it feel like to fall in love in America, to take oneself for granted in America? Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being.

  “Did he have to do with what you talked about in that MTI video? Leaving Stanford?”

  “He was part of it. He broke up with me after graduating to go to Oxford for a year, and that unleashed a lot of stuff I hadn’t dealt with yet. I stopped eating and sleeping, and my grades slipped, and my mom and I were in a cold war because I’d said a bunch of awful things to her about how she’d fucked up my life. So, I withdrew. There was this farm-retreat place that a girl in my sorority had gone when she cracked up—it’s not uncommon, at Stanford, to suddenly . . . run out of whatever got you there. Anyway, I stayed at that farm for about a year.”

  “I’m sorry. You lived on a farm?”

  “I was shit at it.”

  “What’s there to be shit at?”

  “An ostrich attacked me once.”

  I chuckled. She was laughing, too. The air lightened. My belly and throat were bloated with beer, and I was aware of how the drive to Berkeley would feel—fizzy and swimming.

  “Did you feel different? After the ostrich incident?”

  “Yes, I did,” she said. “After the farm—not just the ostrich—I was less . . . ruthless.”

  “You?”

  Now Anita was looking at me funnily, surprised. “You’re letting me go on and on.”

  “You never used to tell me so much. It’s a nice change. Less ruthless, you were saying?”

  “Well. After Shruti, I wished I’d wanted less. If I had just been okay being average—”

  “You were never at risk of average.”

  “If I had been okay being any old person, not obsessed with being the best, there would’ve been no lemonade. And the same thing with Jimmy—if I hadn’t needed someone to tell me I was going places, I could have picked a boyfriend I just liked spending time with. But I needed Jimmy because I needed what he promised me about my future.”

  I remembered one of Anita’s old Halloween costumes when we were in elementary school. She’d gone as a businesswoman, in my mother’s
black suit jacket, nineties shoulder pads and all, wielding her father’s briefcase and PalmPilot. “Your mom seemed unhappy that you’d quit your VC job.”

  “Frankly, she’s never really worked,” Anita snapped, “so she has no idea.”

  “Ani,” I said. “She worked, just not—”

  “She has no idea what it felt like to be there as Jimmy’s nepotism hire. I had to get out, and I couldn’t stomach walking into another office on Sand Hill Road and starting over on this path that belonged to him. Anyway, my old boss at Galadriel got pregnant and those assholes didn’t give her flexible hours, so she quit and started this event firm. She’s giving me some work. I’ll have to figure out what to do, soon. But for once it doesn’t feel like I need to obsess about tomorrow today. I think that . . . shrinking of things—I think it’s saved me.”

  I nodded. She didn’t seem shrunken. She seemed more real. I remembered how her ambition had sometimes made her almost illegible to the present. This Anita felt honest.

  Around us, people had begun pairing off and making their way to their rooms. I’d heard about the Sonora from Chidi—it had a reputation for being not only the site of handshake agreements for exorbitant sums of money but also a meeting spot for high-end escorts and their clients. It was the kind of place that prides itself on discretion. I had not yet realized that this quality was exactly why Anita had chosen it that night. She looked to the farthest side of the bar, which was empty. She gestured in that direction, and we absconded into the shadows.

  Anita pulled a pack of gum from her purse. “Nicorette,” she said. “I smoked for a few years.” Then: “Listen. Did you think my mom seemed—”

  “Different?”

  Anita nodded.

  “I guess. It’s been a while.” I picked at the table in front of me, hesitating. “She was on campus for something—a memorial. For a man.”