Mr. Brandolini's Assignment

Essay no. 1 - Gene Brandolini

Dedicated to AnnetjeValens for her amazing support not just on this story but on my other ones as well :-)

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ESSAY 1 – When you have questions, but don't know what you're asking for.

 By GENE BRANDOLINI

22.2.14

  (Look at me, doing my own students’ assignment like a masochistic ass. But I daresay it’s the best assignment I could’ve hoped for as a teenager and hell, I’m not going to deprive myself of the opportunity to question my adulthood in writing. It doesn’t matter if my students will never realise I’m probably the best English teacher they’ll ever have the good fortune of learning from.)

 In 1997 I flew across the country from Philly to LA, a hopeless romantic dreaming of Californian girls. Then in 2008 I was signing divorce papers. I guess that’s when The Question nagged at me for the first time. It was late – I was twenty-nine and had taken enough foolhardy decisions fuelled by my romanticism (and Romanticism, as it happens), enough to have had The Question hit me earlier. Such as when I fell in love with a milky-faced Berkeley hippie with wide hips, or when I bought a one-way ticket to Bombay from California in 2003, with her. Or when we went to a palatial mansion on the Kerala backwaters to seek her parents’ blessing, and her father chided me in Malayalam as he sat cross-legged on a wooden swing, no doubt cursing me for my Americanness. But none of that mattered. I had enough Om-patterned cotton kurtas, enough philosophical self-actualization, enough quality pot to fend off The Question. And I had Teresa.

 Then in March 2008 I was sitting on Joseph’s couch in his Bandra apartment and staring at the legal papers Teresa had sent me in the mail. She was a few neighbourhoods away with our friend Malini. We’d made things awkward for Joseph and Malini, but we had no other place to stay. That had been part of the problem. That day, I made another one of my aforementioned foolhardy decisions, one that you’re sure could be either the best or the worst of your life; my romanticism, although wearing thin, was still alive and kicking. So I picked up the papers and took Joseph’s beat-up Vespa to her place. Malini opened the door, and I could tell she was ready to throw me out onto the unsuspecting dabawallah on the stairs behind me, but Teresa was there behind her, all creamy skin and puffy eyes, and she got to me first.

 ‘Let’s not,’ we said together, and we kissed. Malini declared that she had given up on us. We ignored her. She was a purebred South Indian, a Subramaniam, and she hung threaded jasmine up on her door lintel every day. And still today I only remember the smell of that jasmine and Teresa’s small hands on my neck, and the crumpled papers in my bag which we didn’t sign. Even then, in the doorway of Malini’s apartment, the question hadn’t quite formed in my mind. It still hasn’t, but it’s there, stumbling through a gestation period that feels like it might last a lifetime.

 I can’t remember the last time we kissed like that.

 Shania Hunt landed up at school three months ago to fill the girls’ basketball coach vacancy. I felt like all the prayers I had been telling myself I wasn’t making had been answered, and naturally, I hated her and wanted to fuck her over a desk. She had the SoCal tan, she had the accent, and her hair was tipped with blond. The first night, I thought of her instead, and Teresa could tell, especially when I came with less indifference. But she can always tell. The second night, I pretended to be asleep by the time Teresa came home. Two weeks later, Shania Hunt came into my office alone to ask if I had spare staples. Afterwards when she had cleaned up and was shutting the door behind herself, I realised that I loathed myself. The funny thing about that was that it was the first time in a long time that I was even feeling something as powerful as that hatred, and so it fuelled me.

 Present tense: it fuels me.

 So here I am, stuck in the darnedest of Indian cities, teaching high-school English, fucking the basketball coach, married to a newspaper columnist, doing my own goddamn assignments, contemplating subscribing to nihilism, because it seems like the only thing that makes sense right now. And The Question is there, making itself known in ways that grow more subtle and potent by the day, but I can’t figure it out, not yet.

 It’s nine-thirty but Teresa’s not home yet. I’m going to keep writing this thing because many times I just sit around and I don’t know what to do with my hands. Mom was supposed to Skype me today but she didn’t, I don’t know why. Last time we Skyped she told me to come back to Philly, to get the divorce and move because it would be good for me. I didn’t have the heart or the energy to tell her that LA was always more of a home to me than Philadelphia ever was, in the five years that I was there, so I just nodded, because maybe she was right about everything else.

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A/N: Comment, vote, whatever. Also I'm nearly done with the next update so yeah.