The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Adam loved Lainey for the same reasons Ji Sun did, for the same reasons they all did. For how alive she was, how this made them want to be more alive, to go outside, to sneak inside, to go everywhere, to feel the sun on their skin, to dance in the dark until they fell down. A day spent with Lainey doing not much at all—trips to the dining hall, errands at the drugstore, studying on the lawn—could still take on an expansive quality that left you with that exhilarated, exhausted feeling that could, without Lainey, only be had after much bigger days. She made you long to spend more time with her the next day, every day. They all wanted to be with her, always, and when she had her moods and didn’t want to be with anyone, they conferred together, guessed which one could draw her out. Might she want to go on an early morning jog with Alice? Might Ji Sun take her to a gallery in the city that would jar her storm clouds loose? Might Margaret do something foolish that only Lainey could help remedy? Or would it be another boy, or a woman as it sometimes was, who would clear away the clouds, lift her from the gray, light her up with infatuation once again?

  Though forged around their mutual missing of Lainey, Ji Sun and Adam’s friendship grew easily into its own comfortable rhythms, and they spent most nights together. She found she could talk to him about anything, and she trusted him. He’d shared the byline on the biggest story about Walker, even though he’d done most of the interviews and nearly all of the writing himself, because he knew how much it meant to his coauthor, one of Lainey’s comrades at the campus women’s center who was better at giving fiery extemporaneous speeches than writing. Ji Sun didn’t know many people whose ambitions were tempered by generosity like this, and it interested her. He was smart in the well-read way that the brightest students at her boarding school had been, but more, he was curious. He asked her about herself and he listened to the answers; he wanted to know her.

  They went to art-house movies screened at the campus theater, and took Ji Sun’s car service to the two-dollar theater on the outskirts of town, poured 40s into Adam’s Nalgene bottle and shared it as it grew warm and flat, the way they both liked it. They ate from huge tubs of popcorn with extra neon corn oil the concession stand called “butter food-product.” They took to appending “-product” to other things of questionable quality: book-product, song-product, building-product, person-product. Ji Sun found dark circles of grease on all her black shirts, touched the stains and let them stay.

  Each time they almost kissed, one or the other remembered Lainey, and stopped.

  “The thing is, I’m still in love with her,” Adam said, giving her eyes that she associated with baby seals rather than puppies, so round and doleful that she understood why whole factions would rally to save the seals, and also why someone might be driven to club one.

  Another night, sweaty and sobering up by the lake, he leaned toward her with his eyes closed, and she put her two fingers on his lips, said, “I can’t” in a voice lifted from a K-drama, breathless and triumphant, affording her the pleasure of seeing herself from above, being desired and denying that desire.

  “She told me to mess around. She basically demanded I do!” Adam said.

  Ji Sun could smell that other heat coming off him, not from the weather. One of precious few citizens on the planet to look good in shorts, he wore a pair that stopped well above the knee, unlike all the other boys that summer, who wore board shorts and cargo shorts, primed to surf or save the women and children of the village, both activities equally implausible in inland New Hampshire. She was exasperated by the lust she felt looking at his knee. His knee! She touched one finger to his thigh, just above the knee, as if to test its heat, and snapped it back with a gasp, stunned by how explosive it had felt, by the draw of the dark shadows further up his shorts.

  But not with me! Ji Sun didn’t have to say. She looked at her finger, and back at Adam, who looked at her finger, too. He licked his lips, not in a lascivious way, but in the way where the tongue tucks your two lips in, endeavors to swallow whatever it is you should not say.

  When they finally did kiss, at summer’s end, they still felt Lainey between them, and both experienced more pleasure from the relief of tension than from the kiss itself, though it was a good kiss, long and hungry—both with their hands grasping at the other’s face and neck and hair, both so that they wouldn’t move their hands lower, though if they had not been sitting, Ji Sun knew she would not have been able to stop herself from finding out what shape his ass took in her hands—but when it was over the freedom from that tension curdled, less from guilt or shame and more from the sorrow that comes when a longing is realized.

  “We shouldn’t, it’s not worth it to do that again, right?” Ji Sun said, and Adam nodded so quickly, her spit still shining on his lips, that she was bereft in spite of herself.

  It was not terribly difficult, though, to move him back into the category of unavailable crushes, where she should have kept him all along, and where he would stay forever, she knew, because he was Lainey’s, his heart belonged to her. And she was Lainey’s, also, in a way that included Adam, but transcended him, too.

  Chapter 22

  A year and a half after graduation, Ji Sun ran into Ruby in New York at a party celebrating Asian American women writers.

  “Wow,” Ruby said, standing back to better appraise her. “I’m surprised to see you here.” They were at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

  “Why?” Ji Sun asked. “What about me suggests I don’t celebrate Asian American women writers?” She laughed and made a theatrical gesture around her Celebrate Asian American Women Writers pin.

  “No, I mean after what happened.” Ruby crossed her arms over her chest and tucked her chin, her eyes lowered.

  Ji Sun searched Ruby’s face, where she’d always found some measure of reprove, but saw concern there. They hadn’t been close before the complaint against Walker, and they only grew more distant in the fizzle of the aftermath.

  “What do you mean?” Ji Sun asked, and thought, but didn’t say, “That was so long ago.” College did feel forever ago in some ways, but in others it seemed ongoing. She saw her former roommates often, and talked to them all the time. Margaret lived with Mac, whom she was a month from marrying, on the Upper West Side, while he went for his MBA at Columbia, and Alice was in med school at Harvard, but came down two weekends a month, cramming on the bus ride and studying while the other three fed her takeout, claiming she still studied better with them in the room. Since graduation, Ji Sun had been traveling, working as a consultant for private art collectors, in part to put some distance between herself and the insular, occasionally stifling postgraduate Quincy-Hawthorn scene in New York City. More than this, she wanted to keep America from becoming the only place—a risk that grew, she knew, the longer she lived there. Ji Sun’s parents paid for an apartment in the West Village where she lived with Lainey when in New York. Adam was a research assistant at The New York Times and lived in a hovel in Bed-Stuy with four other underpaid would-be saviors of print journalism, but slept at Ji Sun and Lainey’s most nights. The three of them stayed up late talking about their plans and dreams and ideas, and for the most part, it didn’t even bother Ji Sun that after these talks, the two of them would retreat into Lainey’s tiny bedroom and have what Lainey had once unforgettably described to her as sex that was “catastrophically satisfying.”

  “Oh, my God, you don’t know, do you?” Ruby tucked her chin still lower, and Ji Sun thought she might unhinge her jaw to better illustrate her incredulity.

  “What?” Ji Sun asked. “I’ve been out of the country. Just tell me!” Had Walker done something? Had something happened to him? Had he hurt someone, someone else? She would have heard, surely, if he’d been arrested. She felt a burble of fear at the thought of jail. Had Ruby found out somehow that Ji Sun had been lying? She didn’t consider how it wouldn’t matter now, only felt the panic of imminent exposure, and surprise at how easy it was to still feel g
uilt over what she had done rather than shame at not doing more.

  “Alexa killed herself,” Ruby said.

  “We’re meant to say ‘died by suicide,’ babe.” A beautiful butch woman with bronze skin and a buzz cut appeared by Ruby’s side with two drinks, put her arm around Ruby’s waist.

  “Here,” Ruby said, and passed her cocktail to Ji Sun. “You need this more than I do, and we can share.” Ruby took the tumbler of what looked like whiskey from her tall companion, who wore two thirds of a perfectly tailored navy suit, vest and pants, no jacket, her white shirt unbuttoned to show tendrils of tattoos creeping up from her chest.

  “Ji Sun, this is Samadhi, Sam, Ji Sun. God, I can’t believe you didn’t hear.”

  “Should we sit down?” Samadhi asked, scanning the room for something other than the scattered cocktail-height tables. “Or go somewhere? Are you okay?” She put a large, soft hand on Ji Sun’s shoulder and looked at her with concern unadulterated by judgment.

  “What happened?” Ji Sun asked. “How?” She knew this was a craven question, but it was urgent, as always with death, to know, as though the details could inoculate you against this same fate.

  “Pills,” Ruby said. “Plus gas, from her car, so they know it wasn’t an accidental overdose.”

  “Christ,” Ji Sun said. “Both?” She pictured Alexa slumped over the steering wheel, wondered if there had been music playing, and whether Alexa had chosen it, or if it was just what happened to be on the radio. She remembered, in a rush, how she had forgotten Alexa’s name during the mediation, and felt doubled over by the shame of this. She put her hands on her temples, steadied herself.

  “Did she leave a note?” Ji Sun asked, though she had the sense that even if Alexa had, Ji Sun would never see it.

  “No, no note,” Ruby said, and leaned into Samadhi’s embrace.

  Ji Sun found it hard to absorb this news in the presence of this couple, how magnetic Samadhi was, how Ruby herself took on a kind of confounding allure beside her. Ruby nestled against Samadhi, who lowered her head so that Ruby could whisper in her ear.

  Ji Sun felt still guiltier at this exclusion. She wanted to leave, find Lainey and Adam at their favorite bar, and tell them what had happened, have them reassure her that it was not her fault. She’d come to the party with a friend who worked in publishing, one she slept with on occasion. She looked around for him now, hoping less that he would come stand beside her, and more that he’d stay away long enough for her to extricate herself. She didn’t want him to know this about her, though she wasn’t even sure what this was.

  “I can’t believe it,” Ji Sun said. “That is so awful.” Ji Sun had known people who killed themselves. Just before she left for boarding school, two employees at her father’s company had jumped to their death, together, from the Mapo Bridge. It had been major news, investigated as a possible murder-suicide, with rumors of a gang tattoo having been discovered on the chest of one of the men. Then, just as she arrived at boarding school, a Dutch student who had graduated the year before hung himself while on holiday in Greece. Ji Sun had the sense, that year, that suicide followed her, but she did not feel herself in any way to blame.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t hear. This was months ago.” Ruby shook her head. “Do you not talk to anyone? Are you not even on Facebook? Her obituary was in the alumni newsletter!”

  Ji Sun had only ever skimmed the newsletter, its glossy content little more than one overlong solicitation. Her parents already donated enough, and everyone whose news she needed was still in her life.

  “Were you, did you go to the funeral? Were you in touch with her, after . . . after college?”

  Ruby gaped at her. “You are unreal, Ji Sun.”

  “What do you mean?

  “She was my girlfriend,” Ruby said. “My first!” She shook her head again and began to cry. She turned away from Ji Sun and let Samadhi, who looked at Ji Sun now with the worst, kindest sort of pity, take her in her arms again.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Ruby! I didn’t realize, I didn’t know you were . . . so close.” What she didn’t know about Ruby, she could see tonight, would fill a more interesting book than she might have guessed.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Ruby said, her face flushed and wet.

  “Babe,” Samadhi said, “she’s just hearing this. Give her a beat to process.”

  “Don’t babe me right now,” Ruby said, and loosed herself from Samadhi’s arms to better admonish Ji Sun. “And don’t defend her.” Ruby’s glare might incinerate Ji Sun. “She lives in a world of her own.”

  She did. And she had then, too, she knew. After the mediation, Ji Sun had left the room and not looked back. How quickly she’d tucked the whole thing away as some kind of narrow escape on her part, rather than a failure. Not even a failure to protect future girls, but a failure to defend one in the room, one whose name she hadn’t even been able to remember, whose name must not have mattered much at all.

  Now, nothing could convince Ji Sun that she was not to blame. No matter what she went on to learn about Alexa’s troubled home life or history of depression, no matter what anyone tried to tell her about the fruitlessness of this particular brand of blame. Suicide made narcissists of everyone, and for the longest time it didn’t even occur to Ji Sun how responsible Ruby must feel. She fixated instead on her own guilt, and regret that she hadn’t done more, hauled Walker into a real courtroom, made him face a flank of lawyers paid for by her parents, not the sham of a mediation in that brightly lit classroom, all those schmucks in their suits, and Alexa with her bleached-dry hair, too much concealer, the shoulder pads Ji Sun remembered from her blazer growing in size in her memory until Alexa was, in some dreams, a shrunken husk of a face between two huge columns of coat, drowned little eyes struggling to find any point of contact. She knew Walker didn’t dream of Alexa. She didn’t know if he’d heard what had happened to her, but she was certain that he didn’t blame himself, not even for a moment, and this, more than anything Walker had actually done, convinced her of his depravity.

  She remembered a conversation she’d had with Ruby and Cat, long buried. They had been talking about Alexa, who was waffling on whether or not she would join the complaint. Ji Sun recalled how important it was to Ruby that Alexa join, and how Ruby had refused to share with Ji Sun any of the details about what had happened to Alexa. Ji Sun remembered asking again and again, how not knowing, especially when Ruby did, drove her mad. It boggled her now, to think of how brazen she was, demanding details that she herself had not provided, demanding details at all, as if her need to know his guilt was more important than anyone’s privacy, as if the story belonged to her in any way.

  “She had sex with him!” Cat had finally said, sick of Ji Sun asking. “Er, well, she had sex with him but didn’t really want to?”

  “Rape, Cat,” Ruby said. “That’s called rape.”

  Ji Sun had disagreed then, the word so wrong in her ear that she didn’t even tell Lainey about the talk, had tucked it away until the news of Alexa’s suicide forced an excavation. The vague language in the articles, everything an allegation: of sexual indiscretion, inappropriate amorous relations, harassment. All these ways to obfuscate what he’d done, and she’d shielded herself, too. Walker wasn’t a rapist. He wasn’t the man that they had believed him to be, but he wasn’t that either. He couldn’t be. He was a sleaze, a creep, a predator, even, but a rapist? She didn’t want to say the word even now, and she wondered what of the conversation she might be misremembering, or what was colored by what had happened since.

  When she googled Walker after the party, she saw that he was teaching again, this time at Stanford, and that he had a third baby on the way, or maybe she was born already. Ji Sun didn’t wish to do the math, just stared at the photo of Walker and his family, his wife radiant in the bright California sunshine, belly swollen with the promise of a new life.


  PART III

  The Kiss

  POSTGRADUATES,

  2007–2012

  Chapter 23

  Margaret’s wedding, on the last night of 2007, made the national news, but not for any of the reasons her new in-laws would have hoped.

  The proposal, which her roommates considered absurdly premature, had at least occurred after graduation, if only by three weeks, as though even Mac knew that it would have been unseemly to ask Margaret before she earned the degree he planned for her never to use.

  On Margaret’s wedding website, she’d written The Other Great Loves of My Life as the title for the section where she described Alice, Lainey, and Ji Sun, her maids of honor, all. Lainey read this and thought, Oh, I have that kind of friendship that others dream of having. She loved to see herself in this light, a starring role in the movie of Margaret’s life, untying the gray silk ribbon around the dress box Margaret had couriered to them all, even though she, Lainey, and Ji Sun all lived in New York. The boxes were just the way you did things in this kind of spare-no-expense wedding that was, it seemed, Margaret’s full-time job not to work as planner of, but as consultant on—since there were two wedding planners, and she was constantly meeting with one or both. The first was hired by Mac’s mother, heir to a Kentucky bourbon fortune, and the second by his father’s mother, a French socialite who still hadn’t forgiven her son for marrying an American, let alone one who felt it appropriate to serve barbecue at a formal event.