‘Why are you so angry?’ he mouthed through the windshield. Chris wound down a window.
‘Get the fuck off my car!’
‘I’m sorry’ he implored. ‘Why are you angry with me?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘But tell me why?’
‘Because — because I hate bigoted assholes like you. Just because your religion or whatever says women are your slaves doesn’t mean I have to play along. Now will you get off my fucking car or am I going to have to run you down?’
Now Arjun was scared. Never before had he faced the serious threat of violence.
‘You mustn’t do this!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not a religious person. I’m a rationalist! Please, Chris!’
Chris leaned her head against the steering wheel. How did she get into this? Splayed across the hood, Arjun looked like a tall, skinny marsupial. A lemur perhaps. Or a sloth. A mall security guard was jogging towards them, speaking into a walkie-talkie. She waved him away.
‘It’s fine, OK. Don’t sweat it.’
Uncertainly, the guard slowed down. She waved again and smiled a sweet good-citizen smile. Then she stuck her head back out of the window
‘Get in.’
Arjun gingerly released his grip on the windshield wipers and slid into the passenger seat. Chris pulled the rest of the way out of the spot and headed for the exit. Arjun decided to trust her. It seemed unlikely she would do anything rash now.
Since the night they got too drunk, Arjun’s feelings about Chris had undergone a transition. The sounds that seeped through the partition wall had flayed away a skin of romantic possibility. He understood now that there could never have been true love between them, not as he had pictured it: Radha and Krishna, Devdas and Parvati, Raj and Bobby. Only after the illusion was crushed did he admit to himself he had considered it at all. What would his parents have said? It would have been impossible.
They were on the freeway before he felt it was safe to try to clear things up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began, truthfully. ‘I’ve offended you. I don’t think you’re sick and I have no professional legal experience and I know this is the land of the free and you have full citizenship rights to do whatever you want at any time.’
Chris allowed herself to be slightly mollified. ‘That’s a start.’
‘All I wanted to know is — well, this is all rather new to me. I expect you are taught about it in sexual-education classes. You have to remember I haven’t had your experiences.’
Chris narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean, experiences?’
‘Sexual experiences. Of course — I understand the procedure. I’m not entirely ignorant, you know.’
‘You understand the procedure?’
‘For sex. I’ve read a lot of things about it. It’s important to educate yourself. I’ve seen pictures too, of course…’
‘You’ve read a lot.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ve done it too.’
The silence stretched out between them, broken only by the rumble of passing cars. Arjun looked at his hands.
‘Well, not as such.’
‘You mean with another guy. Homosexuality.’
‘With anyone.’
‘You’ve never had sex at all?’ She picked her words carefully. ‘Arjun, are you telling me you’re a virgin?’
‘There’s no need to be crude about it.’
‘I’m sorry. But you’re how old? Twenty-three?’
He nodded. Chris considered the matter.
‘This is a line, right? You think if you say you’re a virgin I’m going to feel sorry for you and fuck you.’
Arjun went very quiet. When he spoke again his voice was small and tight. ‘Maybe you should just stop the car. I don’t like to sit here and be insulted.’
‘My God, you’re telling the truth.’
‘Why would I lie?’
‘Why would you lie?’
She decided not to get into that one and carried on driving down the road, thinking to herself, a virgin? Oh, brother.
Chris would want it known that her decision to have sex with Arjun should be put down solely and entirely to drugs. Were there a national system of learning from mistakes, the story would be written up and distributed to schoolchildren as a government information leaflet, a true-life illustration of why drugs are bad and the people who take them are stupid.
A few weeks later, on one of Nic’s guy Saturday nights, when their apartment was invaded by men with beer and snack-foods and a primal urge to swap Mariners stats, she found herself at the Iron Bar, a vaguely fetishy mixed-gay place in the city, filling in Tori’s crowd about that evening at the mall and the world of Arjun Mehta more generally. Arjun, she explained, was actually a sweet guy. He wasn’t really misogynist or homophobic, just naive. Get him on the subject of computers and you almost forgot what a freak he was.
Maybe it was cruel to bring up the virgin thing, maybe it made her a bad person, but it was Saturday night and she did it and it got a laugh. I’m telling you he’s as fresh as the day he stepped off the plane. You’re kidding. How old? Carlos (predictably) said oh give me his phone number. Tori (ditto) started talking about strap-ons. In the air hung the consensus idea that it would be somehow entertaining to do something about Arjun. The topic cycled back intermittently through the evening. Scenarios were imagined, positions devised. For a while an extended riff on the word deflower took hold of the table. Somewhere later down the line Chris did half an Ε and a line of speed and some time after that, when she had done a couple more lines and was bored with the music at the club but not yet ready to face drunken horny badbreath post-guynight Nic, it started to feel like a good idea to actually go through with it, to take another half a pill and go round to Arjun’s place and fuck him.
This, she thought as she slid around in the back seat of a taxi, was going to make a great story. She was getting little fluttery rushes and the idea of being touched seemed really good, and she took sips of bottled water and chewed gum and didn’t really think about what she was going to do or say when she got there. He was a guy. She was going round to offer him sex. Lab-rat stuff. What could be more simple? Her serotonin-drenched brain pulled up a sugar-coated version of Arjun, somehow less gawky than lean, less sallow than mahogany-skinned, a tender young man in more or less matching clothing, ready to be initiated into the art of love.
Standing outside Berry Acres, reality failed to bite. Arjun’s voice on the intercom was perplexed, but he buzzed her in, opening the door dressed in a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt with Hi from Seattle! printed over a picture of the Space Needle. Chris rose above this and dispensed her most seductive grin, which, in her narcotized state, somehow extended itself into a sort of street-corner leer, an expression to match a stained polyester suit.
‘Sorry, did I wake you up?’
‘No, no, I was working.’
She amped the grin up a little. ‘Aintcha gonna invite me in?’
‘Sure.’
She had never been inside Arjun’s apartment. It looked as if someone had gone dumpster-diving behind an electrical store and left what they didn’t want there. Computer equipment was everywhere, coated in a teenage-boy mulch of dirty plates, underwear and paper waste. The whole place smelled strongly of fried chicken. As she stood, swaying slightly, Arjun ran around, kicking a hole in the mess so they could sit down.