‘That,’ he said, humming one of the tunes from the film, ‘was just too too good.’
Chris spotted three other white faces, a man and two women, each half of a couple, each looking as mystified as she felt. Quickly she devoted her attention to rustling up some kind of critical response; Arjun was going to ask her what she thought, and she was going to have to come up with something better than the real-beard-real-rocks-real-palace conundrum or he would be offended. This was supposed to be about the two of them making up, after all.
She was prevented from giving an opinion by one of those sudden and unexpected encounters that can be given a positive spin only by reminding yourself that it would have been worse if you were with your mother. What Tori and the girl-bar crew were doing staggering around at midnight in the Totem Lake Mall was anyone’s guess. The first Chris knew about it was when her hair was jerked back and a pierced tongue was rammed down her throat as the centrepiece of a very wet French kiss.
‘Hey there, you little piece of chicken,’ growled Tori, releasing Chris’s face and playfully pinching her nipple. ‘How you doing?’ Six-one in her socks and worked-out some way beyond the call of duty, Tori (the joke went) was born too late. Had she been on the scene before 1989, she could have found work as a monument in an Eastern bloc town square. Ordinarily she was a handful, but tonight, whacked up on this week’s c.n.s. stimulant of choice, sweating profusely and surrounded by her adoring biker-jacketed fan club, her name would head any list Chris could compile of people not to introduce to shy heterosexual men from countries with conservative moral codes.
‘Who’s your buddy?’ asked Tori, eyeing Arjun like a particularly dubious fast-food menu item.
‘Christ, Tori,’ seethed Chris. All around them, the South Asian film fans of Kirkland were reacting to their first lesbian kiss. Tutting parents scooped up their children. Gap-clad teens experienced a sudden broadening of their horizons. Arjun looked as if someone had rewired him, badly. Chris was pissed off. Tori’s friends were making eyes at her and sniggering at Arjun. Luckily the crew were on their way to a party, and once Chris had made it clear she wouldn’t be tagging along, they headed off in a tramp of engineer boots and ripped cotton. She watched them, relieved that nothing involving more nudity had taken place.
Next she had to deal with Arjun, whose system appeared to have hung.
‘You. Bar. Now. We need to talk.’
And so Arjun was led to a Mexican-theme place with a plastic bandito figure outside it where the staff served them even though they were stacking chairs and wiping the tables and there he was made to down two shots of tequila and given a crash course in contemporary American sexual mores. Chris, it seemed, lived and slept with Nicolai, and, though they were not married, this arrangement had been their default setting for the last two years. Though Nicolai could correctly be called Chris’s boyfriend, the two of them (here was where it got complicated) also slept with other people, on a basis described as open but limited, the limit being defined by the degree of emotional involvement with the outside partner. As Chris explained all this, Arjun experienced a turbulent flow of emotions including (but not limited to) disappointment, jealousy, hope, intrigue, sexual arousal and guilt. Blushing furiously, he tried to bury them all. He put it to Chris (perceptively, he thought) that her limit-definition was unsound, and a less vague system for running her relationship would be to use measurable criteria like time spent away from the partner or the performance of particular sex acts. Chris told him to concentrate on what she was saying. Arjun started to argue that this was precisely what he had been doing, but something in her expression stopped him. He had a question.
‘Where is he from?’
‘What?’
‘Your boyfriend. Which country is he from?’
‘Nic’s Bulgarian-American. Is that relevant?’
‘Ah, it was Bulgarian.’
He stared intently at his empty shot glass; even in America it was probably indecent to meet someone’s eyes while remembering what they sound like having sex. He was so busy trying to route around this problem that he missed what she said next.
‘I beg your pardon?’
No, he had heard right. Some of the people Chris slept with were women, and the tall one with the shaved head was one of them. Chris accepted that because of his culture Arjun might be shocked by this but she hoped he would try to be open-minded. He ought to recognize that it was not as if she owed him this explanation, or anything at all. She just wanted things to be clear.
Arjun was in fact familiar with lesbianism, which was a favourite theme of the CD-ROMs Aamir sold at Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack. Admittedly the physical appearance of these particular lesbians had thrown him, since all the ones in Aamir’s pictures had big hair and lacy underwear. But that was only one of a number of problematic areas in Chris’s speech. It was difficult to know where to begin. In confusing semantic situations, he had often found it helpful to define terms before proceeding.
‘Is there a word for someone like you?’
‘Hello? Think before you speak there, buddy.’
‘You are a bisexual, yes?’
‘You make it sound like a medical condition.’
‘Oh, so you think it has a physiological basis?’
For some reason the question seemed to make Chris angry, and she stormed out of the bar. Arjun was careful to leave a tip for the barman before he followed her. Four drinks. One two three four singles, tucked under a glass. He tried to take this mood-swing in his stride. Christine Schnorr was an alien creature (what Indian girl would have such tattoos?), and her unusual operating rules were part of her difference. Some things about her personality were clearly national traits: her hostility to her family, for example. Others, like her anger and this new set of sexual revelations, had some mysterious alternative source.
Apart from Priti and a couple of cousins (aunties didn’t count) Arjun had never spent much time with women. He certainly had no idea how to handle an angry one. When he caught up with Chris at the car, she was pacing up and down, twirling her keys threateningly round one finger. Spotting him, she launched into a tirade which echoed through the underground lot.
‘I don’t fucking believe this, I really don’t. What in hell gives you the right to talk to me that way? I don’t have to answer to you for anything. Not a damn thing, you understand? Yeah I fucked Tori. So what? I mean, is this Nazi Germany or something? Who are you to call someone sick? What gives you the right to judge people? You know what? Fuck you, Arjun. Fuck! You!’
She pulled open the car door and got in. The engine started with a roar. Arjun’s composure began to fall to pieces. His wrong doing was obviously more serious than he thought. Why would she be like this? What were you supposed to do? Maybe there was a physical technique, a fireman’s lift, an angry woman Heimlich Manoeuvre. Chris started to pull out of the parking bay. Desperate to stop her, he ran round to the front of the Honda. As she jerked the car forwards, he ended up sprawled over the hood.