Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

“I, well—”

“It isn’t a terrible side hobby.” He tented his fingertips, the veins in his sinewy forearms popping, and in a nauseating moment, I saw that he was offering me a way out. “I’d be happy to see more people in the academy thinking about art alongside their work.”

“Yes,” I said, in a very small, very breathy voice.

“But between you and me, Neil, I wouldn’t make a habit of passing around your fiction until you’ve earned yourself a stable floor as a historian. Yes?”

I nodded. My mouth was thick with saliva; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

“And you might explicitly indicate, when you’re sending someone something, that you intend it to be fiction. Otherwise your diligent reader might start looking for citations, and proof, and clear argumentation. Of course, once one lets go of such expectations, this little Tale of Isaac Snider is quite a thrill.”

“It is,” I said. “It was. A thrill, I mean. To, erm, to write.”

“You know, I almost did an MFA myself,” Wang said. “Poetry. In Austin.”

“Really?” Wang always struck me as a hardheaded, practical sort.

“But. You can’t eat poetry. You can barely eat history. It’s a few chunks of stale bread.”

“Do you still write?”

“Of course I still write,” he said, a bit haughtily. “This is a creative pursuit, getting in touch with the past. I used to write letters to the people I was studying, you know? In a journal. I’d say, TO: EUGENE DEBS, 1883. I’d tell young Eugene everything I thought he might be interested in about life today. Which as it happened, was a whole lot. And then I’d hear him talk back to me. And I’d come to understand where I should be looking in his life, in his story, et cetera. That’s a kind of art, though my colleagues from The Harvard Advocate might not agree.” He chuckled. “If you find that you have extra energy for external, ah, diversions, by all means—but if I were you, I’d be sure it wasn’t coming at the expense of the thing you can eat. Understand? You don’t need me to rehash the requirements for you to keep your funding.”

I gulped. I did not.

“Want to catch me up on what you got through this summer, aside from this . . . story?”

I found my voice and spent the next half hour discussing my incomplete chapter, overstating its readiness and exaggerating my claims about late-nineteenth-century Protestantism; it was xenophobic, capitalistic, a precursor to think-your-way-to-wealth Sandbergian hogwash.

“Sounds better,” Wang said, a little bemused. He gazed out the window of his top-floor Dwinelle Hall office, at the sea of Mediterranean red roofs that rolled across campus. The slender campanile pierced the sky north of us. Gaggles of undergraduates were pouring out of lecture halls, their first classes back. “I’d like to see that and the new chapter by October.”

I left Dwinelle, reeling from what I’d promised, and walked through the redwood-shaded trails and along the edge of the north side of campus. I took out my phone to scroll through the texts that had been dribbling in from Anita over the two weeks since I’d met her at the Sonora. She’d gone down to Los Angeles to rustle up some vendors from Little India; this morning, she’d pressed yet again: Do you have an idea? If you’re in?

My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I traipsed along in the wake of some chattering brown undergraduate girls, around Memorial Glade, toward the life sciences building, not far from where I’d bumped into Anjali Auntie earlier that summer. The campanile sounded again, heralding the fall. All around me, the chattering sounds of new-semester autumnal excitement.

And then these girls collided with another pack of sorority desis. There were screams that at first startled me; someone was hurt, I thought, from the timbre and pitch of the shriek. But, no—it was just old friends re-encountering one another after a summer apart. Names were shrieked. Ohmigodyouresotan. Priya! Ranjana! Shehzeen! I skirted them, then looked back once I’d passed to see that one throng of girls had blended into the other. They were so packed together, a single amoebic blob, that they blocked the whole walk.

As they began to move, one girl slipped off the trail and onto the high point of a ravine. In her instant of solitude, I saw Shruti—not the menacing ghost of Shruti stealing this girl’s likeness, but the echo of Shruti, the kind of memory normal people see all the time. I thought of Anita saying, It is way back in the past. Perhaps holding the most abstract version of Shruti, as a blur of my own regrets and the generalized pain of the world, was all wrong. Perhaps I should have been trying to remember her. What she looked like. How she used to gather herself in a beat of silence against the lockers when a swarm of girls pushed past her. The fierce narrowing of her eyes when someone said something harsh to her. The way she searched herself for a retort, and fought her way back into a world that made her life so unpleasant, how she waged that fight over and over again, for years.

This girl, who was not Shruti, tugged on her fat braid and stepped back onto the cement, jogging a little to catch up.

I opened a new text to Anita: you free tonight?

•   •   •

Anita lived in one of those sandy-colored buildings off Embarcadero Road that put me in mind of a Florida beachside motel, and whose facade belied its exorbitant rent. I found my way to her one-bedroom on the third floor. She’d pulled out the deadbolt against the frame so the door remained ajar. I knocked, heard her call, “Come in,” and pushed it open.

There were only two pieces of furniture in the living room, a black leather sofa with wooden legs and a gray crocheted ottoman that looked like it had been purchased from a dorm furniture bin at Target. No television. The kitchen—cellblock-gray granite countertops, dark