Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

So, okay, you say, so she’s not exactly Mercy Sontag Cunningham, but she never pretended to be, and what you really want is her sweet jaunty bottom, her breasts like taut young fruit, her — what other way to describe it? — her magnificent mane, her baby — Billy Budd eyes. And I, too, consider this, consider each item, the sum of, and the greater than the sum of, but am left mystified: qua bottoms, I like the full and rounded; of breasts, the generous; hair, dark and silky; the whole package — I know, I know, the sexist language, this whole odious analysis, but fuck that for now, let’s be blunt — the whole object ripe, mysterious, and a little sulky.

Well, Sarah Nussenbaum, as head of the Hilltop English Society, had organized the first ever Annual Hilltop Poetry Reading, and of course Mrs. Christiansen required attendance by all APs. And me, I brush down my hair as well as I can, wear black and black, shirt open at the collar, think about a hat but decide against, wonder if I can grow a beard or at least a respectable stubble, stand next to the podium and shoot my hip to one side, one hand in pocket and the other carelessly on waist, and rip into my epic poem Me, Her, Bosch Landscape, and I, and I . I refuse to reveal any more of this poem on the grounds that it might incriminate me straight into some special hell reserved for bad poets. Anyway, after, I lean over in the hallway, gulping water from a fountain, still sweaty from my impassioned delivery. I am thinking, of course, of Mercy Fuller Cunningham and my incredibly stupid thing for her, and I think at this point I am resigned to letting it go, to accepting that it would never happen, to accepting who I am and who she is. I straighten up, my lips cool from the water, and then suddenly there are arms around my neck, breasts sliding across my back, and she is leaning over and there are lips, warm and wet, touching me briefly, her saying, “Oh, Tom, that was great. I really liked it.” Then she is down the corridor, and I can still feel her breath in my ear. And I know I am lost.

So now, dear listener, begins the period, the day and season of my madness. I spend that whole night — by that I mean from dusk to dawn, and I swear this is true — writing down “Oh, Tom, that was great. I really liked it” on a thousand different pieces of paper, in a million different ways. I examine every nuance of those words, there is no linguist on the planet who knows those nine as I do, their texture and rhythms, their meaning and derivations, their abundant connotations, and by the time the sun rises I am convinced that Mercy Fuller Cunningham is in love with me. By nine I am crushed, despondent, and full of self-loathing — I see her in the parking lot with her hip buddies, her smart set, her jet-setters, her in-crowd, and with a bare “Hi, Tom” the bitch brushes past, and not a glance more. So then I’m in English, going, fine, Tom, all the poor girl wants to do is be friendly, be nice, platonic, and here you are in some weird woman-as-destructive-other frenzy, but then she dances in, bright and unbearably perky, leans over my desk and kisses me on the nose, the very end of my nose, “Hi, you incredible poet you.” And then Mrs. Christiansen has started on Moby Dick and I am simultaneously, at the very same time, you understand, calling down on Mercy all the pain and hatred accumulated by every teased-and-tormented male in history, and am seeing again radiant visions of me and her and am appalled by my own anger, the wish-to-do-violence of my own reaction. Poor Ahab. Poor Claggart. Life sucks.

I spend the next few days learning up her schedule and dodging down hallways and up stairs, and then trying not to breathe hard, walk casually past her, pleasant smile, nod. Then one day she says, as I take the most intricate route to History the school has ever seen, “Oh, Tom, there you are again.” It’s said with a smile, but that night I spend two hours looking at myself in the mirror and decide to go cold turkey. I skip English three times in a row, spend every spare moment in the library, and hand in my History paper on the Cultural Revolution two weeks early. Now I feel disciplined and strong, scoured and empty, confident that nothing can break me, but right before English I get that same old dropping-helplessly feeling again. So I cut, and read Poe behind the gym, and that afternoon I withdraw four hundred ninety-eight dollars and twenty-three cents from my savings account. I call Sarah Nussenbaum, and pick her up that evening in a stretch limousine.

So I take Sarah Nussenbaum to L’Auberge, where she whispers that she feels underdressed and I suppress my urgent desire to tell her to stop whining and instead ply her freely with expensive red wine. After a while her cheeks get flushed and she starts talking about how it’s great that Ling and she and I are friends, how much it means to her and we should always keep in touch. I murmur, “Anything for you, Sarah,” and narrow my eyes at her above the rim of my glass. Then she talks about something else and I nod and feed her pastry from my plate. In the limo on the way home she turns eagerly to me when I put a hand on her neck, and she runs her hands over my forehead and ears as we kiss, and her mouth tastes of wine but I break away suddenly, saying “I don’t think this is such a good idea, Sarah.” She shrinks away to her corner, and I can see that she wants to ask, then why all this? but she’s way too smart and proud. “I’m sorry” I say.

After I drop her off I let the limousine go and trudge through the empty streets, trying to remember the exact state of my body and brain as we kissed, but all I can remember is my usual unbounded excitement when I’m anywhere near Sarah and an equally strong anxiety, a nervousness that afflicts me so I shake. As I go from shadow into light, I seem to remember that my hands shook through her hair, but I’m almost certain I’m inventing this as I try to see it again. Suddenly I’m in front of her house, not Sarah’s, I mean, but the abode of Mercy Fuller Cunningham. In some hazy hour of self-deception, I’ve casually asked and looked in phone books and maybe even followed her white Audi long enough to get a general idea of where she lives, and now I’m there: “CUNNINGHAM,” a brass nameplate says. Nameplates are signs, I remember Ling saying, because they communicate one sort of information, while flags are symbols, because they stand for a host of things. What sort of flag would Mercy fly, I wonder, as I work my way around the large white concrete house, through hedges and over grass. At the back, I find a window, high above me and curtained, which I know instantly is hers. It is very late, and a few lights burn feverishly in the distance, throwing up halos. I roll in the mud under her window, crushing little yellow flowers, and when I kneel finally, my arms clutched around my belly, sweat and the liquid from plants pouring across my lips, I can feel the moon on my face. It hangs above me as I totter from tree to tree on my way home.

The next day at breakfast, I said to my parents: “What are we?”

“What?” my mother says, putting down her newspaper. They’re both looking at me with a certain eagerness, we can deal with this, we’re both psychiatrists. Existential questions are what they live for, and they’re especially partial to teenage angst.

“I mean, what are we? Are we German, or English, or Dutch, or what? Wasn’t Grandpa’s father from Germany?”

“Your great-grandfather spoke German, but I think he was born in New England,” my father says.

“Why this sudden interest?” my mother says.

They’re both a little puzzled and intrigued. The place of the human in the cosmos they can talk about, it’s how they make their bread and butter, but ethnic stuff is a touch primitive and makes them uncomfortable.