ASHA
Yuvi Zalkow |
 |
AS IS TYPICAL WITH ME, IT ISN'T UNTIL AFTER I'VE BROKEN UP WITH A
woman and am holding her hair back while she vomits in the toilet that I find her beautiful.
Asha and I were roommates and in our late twenties at the time of the vomit. We had dated six years prior for a three-month period. We didn't have great sexual chemistry and our arguments were terrible when we dated. But eventually we became sincere friends and the notion of our dating seemed distant and absurd to both of us.
Asha is Indian (parents from Bombay) but she was raised in Illinois -- with all the beautiful confusion of being raised in two opposing cultures. It's tricky to know where to start when talking about her. She has these beautiful fat lips, big big brown eyes, black hair almost down to her waist, she could dance all night at a club and then ace a five-hour standardized test the next morning. She has a brilliant overactive mind, a collection of her grandmother's saris, an ability to drink beer after beer, and the most absurd obsessive streak I've ever witnessed in my life.
I'd never met a person more preoccupied with the idea that people in her life were treating her improperly. In a way (particularly if you were not the cause of this improper treatment) it was fun to witness, because she had a child-like charm when she asked, "But why? But why? Why did he say that to me? What did I do wrong? Did I do something wrong?" But the questions never stopped. She was almost always preoccupied, she almost never listened to advice, and she always got people (read: me) to go out of their way to console her, even when the task was hopeless.
But there were those moments (usually after two drinks and before five drinks) when she had this sweetness about her, when the worries would drop away. Her smile got big and her giant eyes looked right through your veins. Sometime she'd touch you on the arm with just her fingertips and she seemed so happy to just be sitting there with you. She complemented you so genuinely and you complemented her so genuinely and it was funny and touching and interesting and intimate and it just felt so perfect hanging out with Asha during happy hour. Those moments made it seem worth all the frustration -- at least that's what her friends would have to acknowledge if they were to remain friends.
At the time of the vomit, Asha had been dating the same man for five years. They had gotten into this rut where she was constantly telling him what to do and he was constantly obeying. Once I witnessed her say to him, "Tie my shoe!" And this man bent over and tied her shoe, right there on a Chicago sidewalk without question. Asha's personality can be so extreme, that you either need to learn how to say NO, or you're on your knees tying her shoes on a Chicago sidewalk. She won't even let you break up with her she's so good at arguing a weak man down. My eventual technique (after five failed attempts) was to write a letter and then leave the country. Or, as in the case of her boyfriend at the time, you can avoid figuring out how to break up with her by simply taking jobs located in other cities. He was in the software business and he took contract jobs in other states whenever he could make it happen.
At the time, the three of us were living together in Atlanta -- me, because that's where my family lived; Asha, because it had the right combination of paying jobs and happy hour specials; and Asha's boyfriend, because of Asha. But he was on a contract in Boston, coming home only on weekends. Except on this particular vomitous weekend, when he decided he wasn't coming to Atlanta, that he was going to hang out with two old friends who happened to be in Boston that weekend. I was surprised to hear that just as she was getting ready to invite herself along, he got up the courage to ask her not to come visit -- he just wanted to hang out with the boys.
This did not go over well. And she came to my bedroom in tears after their telephone conversation, telling me what a bastard he was. It was a typical situation in our apartment -- I was trying to read a novel while Asha was dealing with a daily trauma. She was weeping so hard that she could barely explain to me the situation. But then again, I knew her well enough to get the gist of it. Boy wants something that girl doesn't want. Argument ensues. Beautiful Indian girl wins.
I failed to mention that Asha was holding her packed suitcase as she explained this whole story to me.
"I thought he didn't want you to visit him," I said.
"I know," she said. "And that's why I'm going." At this point, she had squatted down on the floor and opened up her suitcase, inspecting it for something that she might have forgotten. On my floor, Asha was weeping and sorting through her underwear. "If I don't go to Boston, he's just going to have a great time." This concept made her cry even more and she had to stop rummaging for a moment. After she calmed herself, she picked up a pair of pink underwear, she folded it nicely, then she crumbled it up again, and threw it back in the suitcase. "No," she said, "I can't have that happen."
She could've focused on the fact that he was making a last minute change in plans. Nobody likes that. But she was far more upset by the idea that he was having fun without her and she didn't pretend otherwise. What was amazing to me was that most adults cover up their motives with tricky altruistic-sounding explanations but Asha often got right to the absurd contradictions under which humans actually operated. She didn't want the man whom she loved to have fun without her -- and that was that.
I spent the next hour trying to persuade her not to go. I don't know exactly how it happened, but this was one of the few times I succeeded. I made her promise not to fly out to Boston that night. I tried to convince her that she didn't have the money to blow on a last minute flight. I told her that if she still wanted to go in the morning -- when she was more levelheaded -- then it would be fine with me. But I got her to stay in town that night as long as I promised to go out drinking with her. I originally planned to stay home and write, but I was so excited about breaking through her stubbornness that a night out seemed a small price to pay.
The night out wasn't as much fun as advertised. Most of the time she worried about her boyfriend and all the fun he was having without her. But even so, we danced, we drank, and I got her to laugh once or twice.
I was in a phase where I was reading and rereading Kurt Vonnegut novels and I tried to distract Asha (and show off my supposed literary knowledge) by telling her about Slaughterhouse Five . I tended to focus on the little particulars about a story rather than savor the story as a whole. And on that day, I was obsessed with how Vonnegut got away with saying, "And so it goes," at the end of every paragraph that involved a death of some sort. I kept trying to put these types of phrases in my own stories, but my stories never had a compelling pull, and nothing ever died in my stories, except the stories themselves, which all eventually went straight into the trashcan icon on my computer.
Asha tolerated my faux-literary insights, but always quickly returned to the emotional trauma at hand, which I tried over and over to get her to forget.
"Have your own fun," I told her. "Wouldn't it be a better way to get back at him if you had more fun than he did?" She agreed with me, but only with a half-hearted interest. And then she went back to "But why? But why? Why is he so mean to me?"
We apparently drank too much that night, and when we lost count of how many drinks we'd had, I suggested that we go home. Asha must not have eaten all day, I decided, because she was far drunker than I could have imagined. She couldn't walk down the hallway to her bedroom without hitting both sides of the wall. And when she said she was going to be sick, I helped her out of her shirt (those big breasts that I had forgotten about all those years) and I escorted her to the bathroom. I helped her down on the floor and then held her long hair back as she vomited into the toilet.
"Why do I do this?" she said.
I didn't know what this meant, but I was too focused on making sure her vomit didn't get on either of us (partly because I was scared about getting any more physically intimate than where we were at). I made vomit-small-talk, something like, "You shouldn't worry so much, Asha," while I held her hair back and let her dry heave.
Eventually, she leaned back against the bathroom wall and then I leaned back next to her. We were both exhausted. She reached for my hand and held it tight. We held hands and stared at the unflushed toilet.
"You're so patient with me," she said. "No one has ever treated me so well." And then she leaned her head against my shoulder and fell asleep. She was snoring within three breaths. I could feel her warm breath go inside my shirt.
I carried her to her bed and tucked her in and then went to my own bed. Her suitcase was still in my room but I was too tired to move it. That night, for the umpteenth time, I finished Slaughterhouse Five . As I fell sleep, I decided that Asha had made some progress. I thought that maybe she had grown wiser that night. I thought that maybe my friendship with her could be easier than it had been in the past. I admit that I even wondered if we could ever start dating again. Maybe there was a way it could work. I imagined sleeping in the same warm bed with her.
The next morning, the first thing I noticed was that the suitcase was out of my room. But I didn't think much about this fact, partly because I needed a cup of coffee worse than usual.
Then I noticed there was a note on the refrigerator. It said, "Thanks for last night. Went to Boston. - A"
I poured myself a cup of coffee and tried to forget about Asha, tried to forget about how sweet it felt with her head against my shoulder. I tried to get myself excited about a Saturday morning alone in the apartment, reading more Vonnegut, and writing another story that would probably end up in the trash.
But even with the odds against me, it still wouldn't stop me from trying to tell a story, if for nothing else, it would make me feel a little less lonely, a little more at peace. This was my way of living in the world. This is how I knew to survive. Everybody looks for some way to calm the madness inside of them. Even if, on some occasions, it takes them to Boston to make their lover miserable.
And so it goes.
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