Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  ‘Well, well, gentlemen,’ he said.

  Katiyar was the school captain, and cricket captain, and a topper in his class as well. So later that night, after dinner and prep, he drilled us until we were dripping with sweat and hurting. He was wearing his blue blazer with his colours and his scarf and looked elegant as always.

  ‘What a bunch of whining babies,’he said. His father had been at Oxford, so he had the same clipped accent. He had us sitting in the invisible chair, with our hands held straight out in front, and my thighs were fluttering so badly I was sure I was going to drop. ‘And I’m being so nice to you.’

  ‘Thanks, Katiyar,’ I said. ‘We’re really grateful.’

  ‘I could have taken you in,’ he said. ‘What would have happened then? Expulsion, don’t you think? Ask me why I’m being so nice.’

  So we chorused, ‘Why, Katiyar, why?’

  ‘Because I got an acceptance letter from Yale today. Full scholarship too.’

  ‘Katiyar,’ I said. ‘You’re a god.’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I?’

  He was, really, and that night he finally let us go after having us each bend over and sending us through his door with a stinging whack, a single smacking blow across the rear with his fine imported English cricket bat, and somehow even in that sharp pain it seemed he was gifting us with possibility, with all the promise of America. So the news of his suicide, years later as we were finishing our own applications, came to us as a kind of impenetrable hieroglyphic, something we speculated endlessly about but never grasped. We were told he hanged himself in his room at Yale during Thanksgiving break. It was stunning and unbelievable and finally absurd. I never knew him very well but I refused to believe in his death. I was sure it was not suicide but something else, a plot of some sort, a lie. To think of Katiyar at Yale was to dream a kind of paradise, and, though I tried, I could never see clearly in my imagination the scene of his death: the room, the rope, the reason why.

  When I stepped out of the police building, it was dark, and there was water on the ground, slick black, mirroring my steps. The Jaguar slid noiselessly across the parking lot, spraying white from its wheels. It stopped beside me and a door clicked open.

  “Get in, Abhay,” Tom said as I leaned over. “We’re going on a road trip.”

  “A road trip?” I said, pulling the door to behind me, feeling safer almost instantly amid the dark, artificed surfaces of the interior, the comfortable soft hum of the machinery as we swept onto the metalled surface of the street.

  “Uh-huh,” Amanda said. “A trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “We’re going to go look for heaven,” Tom said.

  I turned my head to him. In the scrolling light from the street lights, I could see only fragments of his face, but it looked like he was smiling.

  “Heaven?”

  “Yeah. We will seek heaven,” he said, in the voice of a television announcer. “Or at least a little piece of it.”

  “So we’re going into the city?”

  “No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “If you’d paid any attention in English 101, Abhay, you would know that one doesn’t look for heaven in the city. Quite the opposite.”

  “In the other direction,” Amanda said.

  “Exactly. Abhay, we will find heaven in the great open spaces,” Tom said, waggling a finger in my face. “In the prairies and in the mountains.”

  “Go east, young man,” Amanda said, giggling.

  What about school? I started to say, but felt my stomach knot at the thought of it. So I said, “What about money? I don’t have anything with me.”

  “Our young friend here has a stack of credit cards, supplied by dear old Pop. Stop trying to make trouble,” Tom said. “Think of the adventure. Think of heaven.”

  “Heaven.” I couldn’t help laughing.

  “See. You’re feeling better already.”

  He leaned across my shoulder and switched on the radio. The Japanese are buying MGM, a voice said, Sony wants Universal. So we glided up onto a freeway and headed east, past the deep red and blue glow of neon, the facades of huge buildings like frozen black oil, with the comfortable, anonymous companionship of other drivers and, always, the music, the simple but satisfying beat of metal and electricity. We all lapsed into silence, taken, of course, by the slow curves of the freeway, by its loneliness, its giant sprawl, the glittering constellations above and below, the dark, the speed.

  * * *

  In a McDonald’s, as I squirted out red sauce —ketchup, they called it —from a plastic bottle, onto a hamburger, I asked, “Where are we going, really?”

  “Just going with the flow, man,” Tom said, doing a mellow sixties voice.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  But Amanda, she reached out then and took hold of my wrist, made me put down the bottle, and pulled my hand into her lap, where she cradled it in both of hers, not letting go until we were out in the car again and she had to drive.

  “… it was just one of those high school things, but it drove me crazy and crazier than anything before or after, and I don’t know, still, why.” I had changed places with Tom, and was now jammed into the backseat, half asleep, my neck stretched back against the curve of the leather. We had bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed it back and forth until my head had drooped to the seat. His words, slurred, came to me distant and distorted through the steady hum of the engine and the pulling swamp of my own sleep.

  “A high school story,” Amanda said.

  “Sure,” Tom said. “A silly adolescent-type thing. See, this was how it happened…”

  I had known her, known of her for years, we had gone to the same school since fourth or fifth grade, and all that time I knew who she was and she knew who I was, but she went with her crowd and I did with mine, so we never really knew, never even talked with each other, I think. But senior year, second semester, we both ended up in advanced English, AP, you know, American Life through American Lit, with Mrs. Christiansen, and so all of a sudden she’s sitting in front of me, all this blond hair falling over the back of the chair, I’m catching whiffs and gusts and zephyrs of her perfume, and she’s throwing her head back, you know how girls with long hair do, and Ling’s rolling her eyes at me.

  Ling’s my best friend since seventh grade. Taiwanese, her full Chinese name is Ling-Ling Lee, both her parents are doctors, and Ling’s going to Stanford —early decision —and then medical school, then surgery. Ling even had her specialty, right, what she’s going to do as a doctor, when she was a junior. She’s incredible. She works harder than anyone else I know, and is pretty funny when she wants to be, and wears her hair cut short and wears round gold glasses, with her dark eyes behind. So Mercy —the blond —has her hair over the back of the chair and I’m leaning forward a bit to get a good look and Ling’s got her lips together, like she’s on the verge of a smile.

  Now I guess you could smile at Mercy. Her full name is Mercy Fuller Cunningham and that’s how she writes it on her books, she’s got all this hair, teased and brushed and whatever till it falls like the proverbial cascade, and she’s got blue eyes and pale skin and these breasts that gently swell the Saks shirts she wears, you get the idea. When she walks through the parking lot in front of the school all the little freshmen sitting on the back of cars fall silent and a hush follows her as they watch her legs working the back of her skirt. But in any case she twisted around in her chair and stuck her hand out at me, and gave me this big awful bruising smile and said, “Hi, Tom. I guess we’ve seen each other around but we’ve never really met, so I’m Mercy Cunningham.”

  So it takes me a minute before I can get up a smile and grab for her hand, because I’m so stunned and charmed that here’s Mercy Cunningham actually introducing herself, as if anyone in the whole school doesn’t know who she is. Then Mrs. Christiansen starts in, but I sit there and watch the hair for the whole hour, and miss whatever Mrs. Christiansen and
the others say about poor old Rip Van Winkle, who had to go off into the mountains. So now you’re thinking I’m already a goner, but actually I’m sitting there kind of admiring how Mercy Cunningham can be so perfect and yet so incredibly sweet, and I’ve heard other people say this at school —“She’s nice, really, she is!” —but I never really believed it before, because she hung out with the really snotty crowd, the kids with the magazine good looks and the perfect green sweaters and the whatever-it-takes-to-wear-them and the parties you heard about after they happened. And Ling and I, we were always the ones on the edges, we did the theater club and we won the scholarships and we were going to go to great colleges, but in high school we walked around together and nobody really knew us except our friends. So when Mercy Cunningham shakes my hand I just sit there thinking it’s true, it is, but I’m not imagining anything else, and anyway I don’t like blonds. At this point I’ve had one girlfriend, Sarah Nussenbaum, and she’s Ling’s best girlfriend, and is dark and cute and small and very Jewish —Princeton, early decision. Sarah and I went together for six months, and we nearly did it twice, and the second time she jumped up from the couch (her parents’ house), trying to rehook her bra and turning away, crying, saying we had to be friends. I said all right, okay, no really it’s all right, very comforting and sensitive even though I was throbbing painfully inside my jeans, so Sarah and I are friends now.

  Mrs. Christiansen is going on about Rip, and Mercy Cunningham is bent over her notebook, writing industriously. I notice Ling watching me watching the hair, and at this I feel a little embarrassed for Mercy. See, Mrs. Christiansen has a gift for stating the obvious, and most of the kids in AP have read Poetics about sixteen times, and some of them like to talk semiotics, so it’s like a point of honor never to write down anything Mrs. Christiansen says. And now Mercy suddenly perks up and says, “So, you mean, like, Rip is an artist?”

  Mrs. Christiansen flushes with pleasure and I hear a snicker or two, and Ling rolls her eyes. Then the class is over and I stop at the door to let Mercy by, and she says with another one of those smiles, “See you around, Tom,” and reaches out and touches me very lightly on the wrist as she passes. This time that fleeting touch really paralyzes me, I’m left standing by the door staring, preferring brunettes but still feeling a hammer on my heart. Then Ling grabs me by the elbow and pulls me outside, along the corridor.

  “She must shampoo that hair every single day,” Ling says. “My grandmother, in Taiwan, says that modern shampoo destroys hair. All the chemicals, you know. She’s going to lose it someday.”

  “Don’t be bitchy, Ling,” I say. “She’s nice.”

  “Uh-huh, and one of these days she’ll be doing one of those cheerleader leaps and it’ll all fly off and she’ll come down bald,” Ling says, so I punch her on the arm, but I’m laughing, and all the way home we make up this story about a bald cheerleader who lives in the Appalachians and kills innocent hiking teenagers by strangling them with her incredibly muscular thighs.

  We go to Ling’s house, walking through the shady avenues —Elm, Green —standard American upper-middle-class suburbia, in this case a few miles from Cincinnati, but indistinguishable really from a thousand other places anywhere on the continent. In Ling’s living room, her father is seated in front of the television, a just-opened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black by his side. When we come out later that night, he’ll be sitting there, his wife next to him, and the bottle will be half empty. They both wear gray suits and tend to get quieter as the evening goes on.

  So Ling and I walk past him, and he smiles politely at me, and we get ourselves some soda and some cheese stuff and go into Ling’s room and settle down in front of the VCR. Now Ling and I, despite our grades and our good schools and our obvious precocious eighties sophistication, share a ravening taste for bad movies. We had our own grading system and we kept records —we would joke about writing a book someday —and according to our system some grindingly pretentious crap like Paris, Texas would get a 2, out of a possible 10, while our all-time high was a movie called The Snow Beast. The Snow Beast was this guy in a jazzed-up gorilla suit who terrorized a ski resort, only I guess they couldn’t afford to hire a whole gorilla suit, so for the whole movie you saw what can only be described as Buxom Babes being massacred by a gorilla hand or a gorilla head that descended on them from out of frame. The Snow Beast also got two whole extra points because its blond Aryan hero was named “Yar.” The first time somebody said, “Yar, there’s a durn snow beast out there on that there mountain, Yar!” Ling and I fell off the couch and made ourselves almost sick laughing.

  So now we load up Afterwards and Ling punches the right buttons and immediately we are in a post–nuclear-holocaust, post–ozone-depletion, post–polar-cap-meltdown, post–chemical-disaster, post–raging-sexual-disease shopping mall. Scabby radiation-burned zombies, hair falling from cracking scalps, fight over food and designer fashions and wigs and lipstick and base, while the normal leads, unscarred and golden-fleshed, blow them away with full-automatic combat shotguns and worry if any of their small, trusty band is really a zombie in deep Elizabeth Arden disguise. It is quite calculatedly gory and awful, but we don’t enjoy it as much as we’d thought we would, maybe because I sit there, a little absent and distracted, not laughing at the proper cues. I say good night and walk home, skipping a little in the darkness. That night I dream of thighs pressing my ears into my head, and my tongue dipping into gold and pink. I wake up laughing.

  So now you’re thinking I have a normal adolescent crush on the school sweetheart, but the truth is I find this ridiculous. The truth is that the woman is boring: in the next few days I talk to her and discover that she is “bright,” which is to say that she is capable of putting a sentence together and that Mrs. Christiansen litters the margins of her papers with “Good!” and “Exactly!” which is all very well, but I have absolutely nothing to say to her after “How’re you today?” and “What’s the reading for Friday?” Worse, she thinks Third World poverty is “sad,” that a strong defense posture is “necessary,” and Hawthorne is a “depressing” writer, and me, I’m the kid who sits at the back of the History class and insists, insists, that we use the word genocide when we talk about the Dakota and the Cherokee. I write turgid poetry, after Svetayeva and Pavese, which the editors of the Hilltop High Viewpoint accept for publication in a sort of cowed, abject manner just reeking of incomprehension. When I was nine, my father gave me the facts on sex, then turned back, adjusted his gray English cardigan, and said, “And another thing. The three greatest monsters of this century have been Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy, and Margaret Mitchell.”

  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 thinkin
g, 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.