“May I please see the letter?” Alex held out her hand.
“Not at the moment, no, I’m afraid not.” Miriam slid it back in the desk drawer. “But you’ll see it soon. And I want you to know that I do understand how we make assumptions about all our students — background, socioeconomic status. If it were up to me, it would end with this conversation.”
Alex didn’t know what to do, and she realized some principal’s office experience would have come in handy. Did one grovel now? Burst into tears? Make a joke? It was hot, so she rolled up her sleeves. In the office of the South Australian Parks Department, she’d just told her story again and again while they plied her with tea and cookies and tried to ensure she maintained a pleasant impression of Australia despite the legal trouble. A cookie might have been nice right now.
“What’s going to happen next is that the dean of students will recommend Miss Su take this to the Grievance Committee, and you’ll just have to do a written statement. I predict that they’ll discuss this briefly and dismiss it. And if there’s no disciplinary action, it won’t come up in your tenure review. That’s my very strong prediction.”
On the way to her car, she called Malcolm and canceled dinner, saying she had a monstrous headache and ten calls to make. She’d just have seethed silently, and she couldn’t bear his asking what was wrong, trying to guess if it was something he’d said or done.
Usually, it was.
That night she drank an entire bottle of red wine, played A Night at the Opera with the sound too low to hear, and attempted to catalog any potentially racist thoughts she’d ever entertained. When she was five, walking in Boston, she’d grabbed her mother’s hand because there was a black man coming toward them on the sidewalk. But she was so young, and she’d grown up in New Hampshire, for Christ’s sake.
More recently, she hated the way any NPR reporter using Spanish words would roll out the thickest accent possible, just to prove to his boss and the listening public that ten years of Spanish classes had paid off and he was down with the people. “It’s going to be a big issue with Ell-a-diiii-no voters,” for instance. In a way he’d never refer to “the Français community” or “Deutsch immigrants.”
And there was a journalism professor, Mary Gardner, whose creamy brown skin Alex once stared at in a faculty forum, becoming (profoundly, inexcusably) hungry for chocolate.
But that was it. Honest to God, that was it. A resentment of overzealous reporters, a perverse admiration of Mary Gardner’s complexion, a small child’s ignorance.
She hadn’t even been around much overt racism. Once, in college, a girl on her freshman hall had said, “If everyone in Asia is, like, lactose intolerant, then how do they feed their babies? Is that why they’re all so skinny?”
It occurred to Alex, lying drunk on the couch, that if all she could summon up was one incident of someone else’s racism, while she could pin three on herself — no, four, let’s not forget the big one — that made her the most racist person she knew. By 300 percent.
Malcolm called at nine to see how she was, but she was too drunk to pick up. He called on Saturday morning, when she was too hungover, and again on Sunday night, when she was once again too drunk. He didn’t seem terribly concerned about her absence, not even in the Sunday message. “Just checking in,” he said. “Call me later.”
She passed herself in the mirror late that night, and the gin and the bathroom lighting made her look somehow speckled, like a grainy photograph. She gripped the sink edge and squinted, to see how she’d look to a stranger. Interesting, maybe. Striking. From a certain angle, ugly, and from a certain angle, not.
Sometime after midnight, she called Malcolm’s cell phone, knowing it would be turned off. She said, slowly, trying to enunciate, “Just checking in. I want you to know, Malcolm, that I cannot live the rest of my life being ugly. You need to know that. That is all.”
She drank three glasses of water and passed out.
On Monday, Eden wasn’t in class. Why this should have been a surprise, Alex had no idea. Was she expecting her to show up obediently until the registrar came through with official permission for the late drop? Did she, on some level, think this because she expected Asians to be more mindful of authority? No, no, no, she was just hungover still, from the whole long, miserable weekend, and the coffee had only made things worse. Let’s be honest: She was still drunk. She thought she might be missing a couple of other Asian students, too, and the fact that she wasn’t sure was a very bad sign.
“‘Tintern Abbey,’” she said, and found she had nothing else to add. “Let’s read it aloud.”
She ended class fifteen minutes early, threw up in the bathroom on the second floor, bought a cheeseburger from the co-op to absorb some of the alcohol, and went back up to put her head on her desk until her afternoon class.
She woke to the ring of her office phone reverberating through the desk, a hundred times louder than it should have been. It was Malcolm.
“Your cell’s off,” he said. Really, she had no idea where it was. “So you were pretty drunk last night.” He was laughing. “What were you drinking?”
“All of it.”
“Everything okay?”
“You mean this morning? Yeah.” She turned down openings like this all the time. Because what could she possibly say? Asking if he still found her attractive was desperate and unattractive. Telling him he needed to compliment her was worse. In either case, she’d never believe anything nice he said, ever again. She realized that what she was supposed to be upset about was Eden Su. That should have been what she was working up the nerve to tell him. But it had come down to this: After twenty-two years of schooling and eight years of slogging away at her CV, she somehow cared more about her appearance than her career.
“So what’s new?” he said.
And she said, “I don’t think I can marry you.”
Bill Tossman found her on a bench outside the library, trying not to vomit again. She was sitting very, very still, hands clasped around a paper cup of coffee she didn’t think it wise to drink. “There she sits,” he said, “‘as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’” She tried to laugh or smile, but it must have come out a grimace.
“I have something for you.” He sat beside her, shaking the bench just enough to make her head throb and stomach slosh. He was a big man. Long limbs and a smooth, bright face, a soft gut that aged him. He had a crush on her. Or at least he’d always been sweet to her. She wasn’t sure she could trust her judgment anymore. Tossman was a poet, the one department member with a Pulitzer instead of a PhD. It made his loud voice all the more surreal.
He slipped his hand into his briefcase pocket, pulled out a rubber-banded pack of playing cards, and shuffled them on his knee. “Cut,” he said, and she managed to. He took four cards off the top and laid them facedown on the bench. “Okay,” he said, “flip them up.”
Seven of diamonds. Seven of hearts. Seven of clubs. Seven of spades.
“See? Your luck is turning!” He laughed, proud of himself.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Where’d I learn what?”
He was making her feel like his niece, and although it was sweet, she didn’t appreciate it. On a professional level. She gathered the cards and held them out to him, but he shook his head. “Why don’t you hang onto those? And hey, I’m sorry about the whole letter thing. That shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t necessary.”