Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

from Granta

SHE WAS an American girl, but one who apparently kept Bombay time, because it was three thirty when she arrived for their one-o’clock appointment. It was a luxury to be able to blame someone else for his wasted afternoon, and Zubin was prepared to take full advantage of it. Then the girl knocked on his bedroom door.

He had been in the preparation business for four years, but Julia was his first foreign student. She was dressed more like a Spanish or an Italian girl than an American, in a sheer white blouse and tight jeans that sat very low on her hips, perhaps to show off the tiny diamond in her belly button. Her hair was shiny, reddish brown-chestnut you would call it-and she’d ruined her hazel eyes with a heavy application of thick, black eyeliner.

“I have to get into Berkeley,” she told him.

It was typical for kids to fixate on one school. “Why Berkeley?”

“Because it's in San Francisco.”

“Technically Berkeley's a separate city.”

“I know that,” Julia said. “I was born in San Francisco.”

She glanced at the bookshelves that covered three walls of his room. He liked the kids he tutored to see them, although he knew his pride was irrelevant: most didn’t know the difference between Spender and Spenser, or care.

“Have you read all of these?”

“Actually that's the best way to improve your verbal. It's much better to see the words in context.” He hated the idea of learning words from a list; it was like taking vitamin supplements in place of eating. But Julia looked discouraged, and so he added: “Your dad says you’re a math whiz, so we don’t need to do that.”

“He said what?”

“You aren’t?”

Julia shrugged. “I just can’t believe he said ‘whiz.’”

“I’m paraphrasing,” Zubin said. “What were your scores?”

“Five hundred and sixty verbal, seven-sixty math.”

Zubin whistled. “You scored higher than I did on the math.”

Julia smiled, as if she hadn’t meant to, and looked down. “My college counselor says I need a really good essay. Then my verbal won’t matter so much.” She dumped out the contents of an expensive-looking black leather knapsack, and handed him the application, which was loose and folded into squares. Her nails were bitten, and decorated with half-moons of pale pink polish.

“I’m such a bad writer though.” She was standing expectantly in front of him. Each time she took a breath, the diamond in her stomach flashed.

“I usually do lessons in the dining room,” Zubin said.

The only furniture in his parents’ dining room was a polished mahogany table, covered with newspapers and magazines, and a matching sideboard- storage space for jars of pickle, bottles of Wild Turkey from his father's American friends, his mother's bridge trophies, and an enormous, very valuable Chinese porcelain vase, which the servants had filled with artificial flowers: red, yellow and salmon-colored cloth roses beaded with artificial dew. On nights when he didn’t go out, he preferred having his dinner served to him in his room; his parents did the same.

He sat down at the table, but Julia didn’t join him. He read aloud from the form. “Which book that you’ve read in the last two years has influenced you most, and why?”

Julia wandered over to the window.

“That sounds okay,” he encouraged her.

“I hate reading.”

“Talk about the place where you live, and what it means to you.” Zubin looked up from the application. “There you go. That one's made for you.”

She’d been listening with her back to him, staring down Ridge Road toward the Hanging Garden. Now she turned around-did a little spin on the smooth tiles.

“Can we get coffee?”

“Do you want milk and sugar?”

Julia looked up, as if shyly. “I want to go to Barista.”

“It's loud there.”

“I’ll pay,” Julia said.

“Thanks. I can pay for my own coffee.”

Julia shrugged. “Whatever-as long as I get my fix.”

Zubin couldn’t help smiling.

“I need it five times a day. And if I don’t get espresso and a cigarette first thing in the morning, I have to go back to bed.”

“Your parents know you smoke?”

“God, no. Our driver knows-he uses it as blackmail.” She smiled. “No smoking is my dad's big rule.”

“What about your mom?”

“She went back to the States to find herself. I decided to stay with my dad,” Julia added, although he hadn’t asked. “He lets me go out.”

Zubin couldn’t believe that any American father would let his teenage daughter go out at night in Bombay. “Go out where?”

“My friends have parties. Or sometimes clubs-there's that new place, Fire and Ice.”

“You should be careful,” Zubin told her.

Julia smiled. “That's so Indian.”

“Anyone would tell you to be careful-it's not like the States.”

“No,” Julia said.

He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice. “You miss it.”

“I am missing it.”

“You mean now in particular?”

Julia was putting her things back into the knapsack haphazardly- phone, cigarettes, datebook, Chap Stick. She squinted at the window, as if the light were too bright. “I mean, I don’t even know what I’m missing.”

Homesickness was like any other illness: you couldn’t remember it properly. You knew you’d had the flu, and that you’d suffered, but you didn’t have access to the symptoms themselves: the chills, the swollen throat, the heavy ache in your arms and legs as if they’d been split open and something-sacks of rock-had been sewn up inside. He had been eighteen, and in America for only the second time. It was cold. The sweaters he’d bought in Bombay looked wrong-he saw that the first week-and they weren’t warm enough anyway. He saw the same sweaters, of cheap, shiny wool, in too-bright colors, at the “international” table in the Freshman Union. He would not sit there.

His roommate saw him go out in his T-shirt and windcheater, and offered to loan him one of what seemed like dozens of sweaters: brown or black or wheat-colored, the thickest, softest wool Zubin had ever seen. He went to the Harvard Co-op, where they had a clothing section, and looked at the sweaters. He did the calculation several times: the sweaters were “on sale” for eighty dollars, which worked out to roughly 3,300 rupees. If it had been a question of just one he might have managed, but you needed a minimum of three. When the salesperson came over, Zubin said that he was just looking around.

It snowed early that year.

“It gets, like, how cold in the winter in India?” his roommate, Bennet, asked.

Zubin didn’t feel like explaining the varied geography of India, the mountains and the coasts. “About sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

“Man,” said Bennet. Jason Bennet was a nice guy, an athlete from Nat-ick, Massachusetts. He took Zubin to eat at the lacrosse table, where Zubin looked not just foreign, but as if he were another species-he weighed at least ten kilos less than the smallest guy, and felt hundreds of years older. He felt as if he were surrounded by enormous and powerful children. They were hungry, and then they were restless; they ran around and around in circles, and then they were tired. Five nights a week they’d pledged to keep sober; on the other two they drank systematically until they passed out.

He remembered the day in October that he’d accepted the sweater (it was raining) and how he’d waited until Jason left for practice before putting it on. He pulled the sweater over his head and saw, in the second of wooly darkness, his father. Or rather, he saw his father's face, floating in his mind's eye like the Cheshire Cat. The face was making an expression that Zubin remembered from the time he was ten, and had proudly revealed the thousand rupees he’d made by organizing a betting pool on the horse races among the boys in the fifth standard.