Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

I look at her, startled, because this is the first time I have ever heard her use the word fuck . I want to tell her I can’t, because how can anyone live without hope? but instead I shrug. I lean forward into the TV screen and she lets it drop and never says anything about it again. I can’t tell her that I want it to happen all by itself, that I don’t want to say anything. In my fantasies I make millions and buy up Manhattan. In my fantasies I bomb the hell out of Cambodia and sleek women raise their black dresses for me spontaneously, in the backs of Washington limousines.

Toward the end of the semester Mercy Fuller Cunningham throws a party, and this time I get invited. The invitation is embossed, and comes in a heavy cream-colored envelope which she leaves in my desk, on top of an article entitled Ego and Transference: A Post-post-modern Perspective . I spend the next two weeks planning, I study myself, I study the objective, and, so to speak, the ground. I consider my clothes and try to remember if I’ve ever heard Mercy saying anything about haberdashery. I try to think Tom Cruise. I watch her friends. I flip quickly between Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera: “Women Who Love Too Much” and “How to Get the Most out of Your Relationship.” I borrow money.

So finally the day arrives, and I won’t put you through a description of my immediate preparations. I arrive exactly one hour and fifteen minutes late, which delay, by my calculations, conveys the exact intensity of cool I desire. And, I shouldn’t forget, I drive up in my mother’s Volvo, for which I have negotiated and wheedled and pretended impending nervous breakdown. But nobody’s outside on the patio, so nobody sees the car but that’s all right, I knock, and Mercy opens the door, simple white dress, off elegant shoulders that have the exact and right degree of definition and bone, the light behind glows through the dress and highlights the hair, some kind of natural but wet lipstick, all perfect and framed by the natural proscenium of the door.

“Oh, Tom,” she says, “your hair looks great.”

I suppose I should confess that I had, as the final touch on ensemble that night, smeared some soft gray goop into my locks, and had combed it back gently, as the tube advised, to get that slick but elegant wet look. This was the moment for decisive action, I had thought.

“Thanks,” I say. “You’re, you’re dazzling tonight.” In the Volvo on the way up to the house I had practiced being worldly and poetic all at the same time. Think Cruise meets Byron, I’d said to myself, Donne genetically grafted onto a Don Johnson carcass.

She takes me in and I sense heads turning, and she introduces me to some of her friends, and I nod at others I’ve met before. I can see Craig dancing in the next room. Everyone’s sort of golden in the gentle light from lamps, and they’re all standing around leaning on things, hands touching, arms curled comfortably around each other, drinking things from iced glasses. There’s no sign of Mercy’s parents. I talk to her for a few minutes and then the doorbell chimes again and she goes. I listen to the group she’s left me with for a few minutes and they’re talking about people I don’t know. So then I clear my throat and say, “I guess I’ll go get a drink.” They all turn to look at me.

I get my drink, gin and tonic, and stand by the bar. The room stretches away from me and everywhere there’s people talking to each other. Craig brushes past me, “Hey, Dude!” I look at the print on the wall, some kind of birds in flight thing, and then I look at the next one. I finish my drink and go back to the bar for another one. I read the spines of the books on a shelf in the hall. Then I go up the stairs and wait in line for the bathroom. The two girls ahead of me are both in pink dresses, and are talking about going away in the summer. I try desperately to think of something to say but then the bathroom door opens and they go in together. After I finish I head down the stairs cradling my glass, and I hear Mercy’s voice from directly below me.

“Oh, but he is sweet,” she says.

I feel my face flush and I want to wind up and throw the glass across the room to shatter at the wall, but suddenly I’m down the stairs, through them all and past the bar and into the foyer and out of the door. I never see Mercy, and then I’m in the car heading home.

In my room I realize I still have her glass. I put it down on my dresser and peer through the darkness at me in the mirror, at my hair and my new white jacket with zippers, pastel shirt, thin black belt, and I back away to get all of me in the mirror, trip over my two dumbbells on the floor and sit down with’ a jarring shock that races from my tailbone up into my head, and in that moment of real pain, as I look at the top of my head in the mirror, I understand exactly why I am trapped: it is my arrogance, my wiseass secondhand pitiful literary smarminess, my ambition that entangles me. So I get up and get her glass and walk into my bathroom and switch on the light. I open a new pack of Bics and shake them out onto the sink, so that they lie in untidy echelon on the porcelain. Then I take up a pair of scissors and start to clip off my hair. It comes off in tidy swathes and I lay them one by one in the glass. When I’ve finished cutting I squirt lather onto my scalp and set to work with the Bics. My skull comes up blue and bumpy and innocent. The razors scrape and resound through my head, and I cut myself often. When I’ve finished I mop up the lather with a white towel and sprinkle after-shave into my hands. It stings my flesh intolerably and starts the tears from my eyes.

So I take up the glass and go outside, onto the road. I start walking. It is dark, and I am looking for a body of water. This is a gesture I want, one which I do not understand completely myself, but by now I have accepted the necessity of gestures. I walk for a long time. Near morning I find a small pond in somebody’s yard. There are trees around me, and trucks are whistling by on a highway. I lean over a fence and underhanded toss the glass into the water, and even the small splash it makes scares a covey of ducks into the air. Then I start walking back.

When I turn down the road to school, my thighs are aching and it is mid-morning. I walk in through the main gate, then into the halls. People turn and look at me, and by the time I reach the cafeteria a string of kids trails behind me. Inside, the buzz falters and dies down and then there is silence. Mercy, as usual, is sitting in the middle and to the back. She is eating a sandwich, it’s in her hand and there is a plate in front of her, her body is turned sideways and her back is straight, and there are people around her on the benches and at her feet are two of her acolytes, lacing up football boots. I walk up and slide onto the chair in front of her, and then say, in a very clear and proud voice, “I love you, Mercy Fuller Cunningham.” Then I lean over and put my head in her plate.

When I straighten up she is looking at me, the sandwich still in the air, and in her eyes there is not love, not pity, not horror, not repulsion, not abhorrence — forgive the Jamesian flight, but it is appropriate — not loathing, not contempt, not scorn, not derision, not ridicule, not jeers, not sarcasm, not concern, not empathy, not pain, not pleasure, not humor, not sympathy, not disappointment, not discouragement, not dismay, not disillusionment, not despondency, not dissatisfaction, not shock, not alarm, not fear, not anxiety, not dread, not anything but this and only this: embarrassment. And so, then, I am free.

So she gets up and rushes out, followed by her friends. I sit there. Leaning over has stretched my skin and opened up some of the cults on my head, and so I sit there smiling, blood and mayonnaise dripping off my face. Then Ling and Sarah come rushing in and take me home.