In Between Days Page 11

  Afterward, as they lay there sweating, Raja had leaned across the bed and mussed her hair. He’d smiled at her.

  “How are you feeling?” he’d asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, right now, how do you feel?”

  “I feel good.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why? Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

  “No, no,” he said, laughing, kissing her arm. “I just wanted to be sure.”

  The next few weeks seemed to pass in a blur. Later, Chloe would realize that these weeks had been among the happiest in her life: waking up next to Raja in the mornings, walking with him to morning classes, meeting up with him in the late afternoons for secret rendezvous in his room, going out at night with him and his friends to various bars and restaurants and private parties off campus. The rest of her life seemed to fall away. She no longer worked so assiduously on her papers, no longer worried so much about tests. She stopped checking e-mails, stopped answering phone calls, even stopped talking to Fatima, who would call her at least once a day and leave a message on her voice mail, asking her where she was. Everything else seemed to recede. Everything else except Raja. And for now, it seemed, Raja was enough.

  It was impossible to explain, but she felt drawn to Raja in a way that she had never felt drawn to another human being before. And it didn’t seem to have anything to do with logic. She would be sitting there, trying to play it cool, trying to be restrained, and then all of a sudden she would see her hand reaching over and touching him, almost like it was out of her control. At times, it felt like being in a dream, the way you believe in a dream that you are in control of your actions, but then at one point you’ll see yourself doing something and you’ll realize you’re not. That’s how she felt around Raja. It was like there was a force outside of her that was stronger than her, and that force made it impossible for her not to be around him, or for her not to touch him when she was around him.

  At the time, one of her favorite things to do with Raja was to meet up with him in the evenings after class at his place of work, a small, dimly lit theater on the other side of campus, on the second-floor annex of the Dramatic Arts Building. As part of his work-study scholarship, Raja had been assigned the responsibility of screening films two or three times a week for the various film students and film classes at Stratham. Usually these films were obscure European films that Chloe had never heard of, but she still loved to watch them, and she especially loved to sneak up the back staircase of the Dramatic Arts Building and surprise Raja as he was screening them. Sometimes she’d bring along a large bag of popcorn and a six-pack of beer, and they’d sit there and stare down at the audience, bathed in the silver glow of the screen, transfixed by the images before them.

  Afterward, once the audience had filed out, Raja would take her into one of the back rooms behind the projectionist’s booth, a large, dusty room filled with aisles and aisles of film stock, the entire library of the Stratham film department. Here he would point out masterpiece after masterpiece, explaining to her at great length why each one of these films was important or how each one had affected his life. Then he’d turn to her very casually and ask her to choose one.

  “Won’t we get in trouble?” she’d asked him the first time he did this.

  But he just smiled and shook his head. “I have the key,” he’d said and then patted his pocket. Then he’d looked around the room. “So,” he said, smiling, “which one will it be?”

  And so, from the hours of midnight until four in the morning, at least two or three nights a week, they had watched some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of the past fifty years. They had watched Bergman and Fassbinder, Truffaut and Godard. They had watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. They had watched old documentaries by the Maysles Brothers and short independent films by American directors like Terrence Malick and John Cassavetes. They had watched these films with a deep reverence, perched there at the edge of the projectionist’s booth, looking down over the dark theater, the quiet whir of the projector lulling them into a sort of hypnotic trance. Sometimes Raja would stop the projector at an important scene and add his own commentary, explaining why the camera angle was brilliant or how the lighting was sublime. Other times, she’d just look over at him, and he’d seem transfixed, mesmerized, by what he was watching. Though he’d declared a major in chemistry, Chloe had known for some time that this had been his father’s decision, not his, and that if Raja had it his way, he would have majored in film. But still, she never mentioned this, never even brought it up. The one time she’d even alluded to it, Raja had grown sullen and cold. To change his major at this point, he’d said, would be absurd.

  “But don’t you ever think about it, though?” she’d asked as they walked along the quad. It was four in the morning, and they were just now returning from the theater, the campus around them silent and dark, everyone asleep in their dorms, the first brisk winds of autumn biting their faces.

  Raja had been quiet for a long time after she’d asked him this. Then he’d looked at her sternly, the first time he’d ever looked at her this way.

  “No,” he’d said finally. “To be honest, I never think about it.”

  Later, when they got back to his dorm room, she’d apologized for bringing it up, and he’d said it was fine.

  “It’s just that you seem to love it so much,” she’d said.

  “I do,” he’d said. “But you don’t understand my family. For me to major in film, it would be an insult, a disgrace.”

  “Even if you became a famous director?”

  “Yeah,” he’d said, looking down. “Even if I became a famous director.”

  Later, Chloe would regret this conversation, as it was one of the few awkward moments in what was otherwise a time of perfect bliss. It was also one of the last normal conversations she’d have with Raja before everything else turned south. The next night, when she returned to her dorm room after class, she’d received that fateful message from Richard on her voice mail: World War Three here, Chlo. I’m serious. All’s not well on the home front.

  According to her brother, it had been building up for a while now, their parents’ troubles. He had seen it coming, he’d said. Ever since she’d left for college, their fights had been escalating, the unpleasantness growing. Their mother had been locking their father out of the house, he said, their father had been breaking things. One day he’d come home to find their father lying in his underwear on the living room floor, hungover. Another night he had found their mother sitting alone in her closet, packing up her shoes into boxes and weeping. It wasn’t just one problem in particular, he’d said, but the culmination of a lot of little problems, all of those years of unhappiness finally catching up with them. Or at least that’s how they’d explained it to him the previous night at dinner when they’d told him what was going to be happening. He spoke very calmly as he told her this, but she could tell, even then, that he was worried. Not for himself, but for her.

  “They’re going to be calling you tomorrow night,” he’d said, finally, “but I just wanted to give you a heads-up, you know, so you had a chance to prepare yourself.”

  Chloe said nothing. She hadn’t started crying yet, that would come later; she was still trying to process it, still trying to understand what her brother was saying.

  “Why don’t they just get a separation?” she’d asked finally. “I mean, really, why does it have to be so final?”

  “I don’t know, Chlo,” he said.

  There was another long silence, and then she said, “Well, who was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, who was it who asked for the divorce? Mom or Dad?”

  “I don’t know, Chlo. I think they just kind of decided on it together, you know.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s always one person who asks, one person who brings it up first.”

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nbsp; Richard was quiet for a moment, then he said, “I don’t know. I mean, if I had to guess, I’d say Mom, but who knows? And, really, that’s not what you should be thinking about right now.”

  “Well, then what the fuck should I be thinking about, Richard? I mean, really, please enlighten me.”

  And just like that, she lost it. Just like that, it finally hit her, and before she knew it, she was crying, convulsing, trying to catch her breath, while her brother, on the other end of the line, was trying to comfort her, trying to apologize, telling her it would all be fine. Stoic Richard. Sensitive Richard. Her perfect, angelic older brother, reminding her that they had seen this coming for a while, that this had been a long time in the works. And she knew that he was right, of course. She had seen it herself that past summer: her father staying out late with his friend Dave Millhauser almost every night, her mother complaining about him at almost every turn, the two of them fighting for hours on end, in their bedroom, with the door closed. But still, as silly and as selfish as it sounded, she would have still rather had them living together unhappily than living apart. And when she said this to Richard, he agreed. Then he sat there on the other end of the line for almost an hour, listening to her, as she did little more than cry.

  The next morning, with only an hour’s worth of sleep, she had decided to skip her morning classes and go over to the other side of campus, to a small, shaded park bench that overlooked the river. Here, sitting on the edge of the bench, she had smoked cigarette after cigarette and continued to cry. She thought about calling up Raja, but decided against it. Instead, she just sat there, thinking about the ramifications of it all, what this would mean for her now. She wondered what family holidays would be like now, what it would be like to go home for Christmas. She wondered where her parents would live, who would get the house, would they sell it? She wondered what it would feel like to see her parents with other people, if they in fact remarried, or what it would be like to talk to them now, separately, as adults. In the distance, she could see a group of students on the quad, tossing around a football in the leaves, the sky above them overcast and dark. For the first time in a long time, for the first time in almost a year, she’d wished she were home in Houston.

  Finally, around noon, she had called up her mother but had caught her on the way to an appointment. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then her mother had expressed her anger at Richard for telling her. This isn’t how I’d wanted you to find out, she’d said, but before she could finish, Chloe hung up. Later that day, when her father called, she’d let his phone call go to voice mail, then listened to his message over and over, his roundabout, circumspect explanation for why this had happened: Your mother and I have been together for a long time, darling … We love each other very much, of course, but sometimes love isn’t enough. Sometimes life gets complicated … She wondered if he was drunk, if he was reciting this speech from a bar. In the background, she could hear glasses clinking, people laughing. She wondered if he was even living at home.

  All day long she had been thinking about Raja, wanting to talk to him, wanting to tell him what had happened, wanting to answer the numerous voice messages he had left on her phone. Almost every hour for the past six hours he had left her at least one message or sent her a text, wondering where she was. But there was still a part of her that didn’t want to get into it with him, to expose herself so openly at such an early stage in their relationship. So instead of returning his calls, she had called up Fatima and asked to come over.

  “You’re still alive?” Fatima had said sarcastically when she’d called. “Really? I thought you might have died.” But then she must have heard something in Chloe’s voice, maybe Chloe sniffling, because she stopped. “Hey honey,” she’d said, softly now. “What’s the matter?”

  Chloe didn’t answer.

  “Honey?”

  “Can I please come over?”

  “Of course,” Fatima said, her voice suddenly concerned. “Come right now.”

  At Fatima’s house, Chloe unloaded. She told her everything, everything she couldn’t tell Raja, how she hated her parents now for doing this, how she hated them even more for the way they were handling it, for talking to her in platitudes, for telling her brother first, for not trying harder to make it work.

  “So you’re having some trouble with your marriage,” she’d said. “Big deal. Go to therapy then. Work it out. You don’t have to get a fucking divorce.”

  And Fatima, whose own parents were divorced, sympathized. “People are weak,” she’d said finally. “The older I get, the more I realize this.”

  And so, on and on they went, late into the night, drinking glass after glass of wine, smoking cigarette after cigarette, ranting and raving about their parents, sharing war story after war story, commiserating about their pasts, philosophizing about the pointlessness of marriage. Meanwhile, Chloe’s voice mail was filling up with messages, messages from her mother, her father, Richard, Raja. Chloe ignored them all and kept drinking. And then, at one point, Fatima had pulled out the small stash of marijuana from beneath her sink and rolled a joint. Sitting at her kitchen table, they had smoked the entire thing down to its nub. Then they’d gone into her living room and tried to watch TV, but the images on the screen were moving too fast, and after a while Chloe began to feel sick. A few minutes later, she was out in the yard behind Fatima’s house, getting sick on the lawn. In the doorway behind her, she could see Fatima, silhouetted by the light from the kitchen and then, a moment later, another figure, standing beside her. She squinted her eyes, trying to make out who the figure was, but she couldn’t tell. Then the figure moved out of the shadows, and her eyes adjusted, and she suddenly knew.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Raja was saying now as he moved across the lawn, and then, kneeling down beside her on the cool grass, he held her in his arms. “Fatima told me,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  She was crying now, and he was holding her head, and suddenly the world was slowing down. He continued to whisper to her, things she couldn’t remember, and she continued to cry. She could smell the stale odor of cigarettes on his jacket, the stench of beer on his breath. She asked him where he’d been, but he didn’t answer. He just kept rubbing her shoulders, comforting her, just as he had that first night they met. And when she looked up at him finally, she noticed for the first time a cut along his cheek, a swelling around his eye.

  “Hey,” she said. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  But he just shook his head. “We’ll talk about that later,” he said. “Another time. The main thing right now is that we get you home.”

  And she realized then, when he said this, that he meant his dorm room, that he meant his dorm room was home.

  3

  LATER, SHE WOULD WONDER whether any of this would have ever happened had she simply returned his phone calls that day, had she not gone over to Fatima’s house. If he had been with her, instead of with his friends, then he would have never ended up at the Cove that night and would have never run into those boys. He would have never known who Tyler Beckwith was, and Tyler Beckwith would have never ended up in the hospital. But this was all pointless to think about now.

  The truth was, at the time, she had no idea what had happened that night, and Raja himself had said little about it. When she’d asked him about it the following day, he’d been evasive, vague, saying only that there’d been an altercation, a misunderstanding, and that he didn’t want to go into it. It wasn’t worth recounting, he’d said. It was really pretty stupid. But through his friends, Seung and Sahil, both of whom had been there that night, she had learned other things.

  She had learned that a boy named Tyler Beckwith had come up to Seung that night at the bar and gotten in his face. She had learned that Seung had been standing on the other side of the bar, talking with Tyler Beckwith’s girlfriend—a short, pale-faced girl from his modern architecture class—and that Tyler Beckwith hadn’t liked this. In fact, befo
re Seung knew it, Tyler was up in his face, pushing him around, calling him shit. Yellow face. Chink. All the worst things he could think of. It was like something from a dream, Seung said. Totally unprovoked. The guy was clearly drunk. Anyway, at one point, Raja had stepped in and tried to defend him, had tried to break things up, and that’s when Tyler had pushed Raja, and then Raja had come back at him full force. After that, what had happened had been a blur. All they knew was that Raja had ended up pinning this guy Tyler down on the floor of the bar and humiliating him in front of everyone, including his girlfriend. Even made him apologize, Seung said. Wouldn’t let him up till he did.

  “Don’t forget,” Seung added. “Our boy used to play rugby.”

  “Raja?”

  Seung nodded. “You didn’t know?”

  “No,” Chloe said, shaking her head, because she didn’t. This was the first she’d heard of it, and like so many other things about Raja, it just didn’t add up. None of it did. The picture that Seung and Sahil had painted of him was simply impossible to reconcile with her own image of him. She knew that he was physically strong, of course, and that he was much taller than most other boys, and yet she would have never pegged him for the type to get in a fight, especially a bar fight.

  Still, whenever she brought it up to Raja, he’d change the subject or else claim that everything that Seung and Sahil had told her was bullshit, exaggeration.

  “Well, is it true that you used to play rugby?” she’d asked him one night, as they were sitting in his room.

  He looked at her then and finally nodded. “For a semester,” he said. “My freshman year. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that rugby seems like such a violent game, you know, and you seem like such a pacifist.”