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  but now your slack mouth has made it difficult to look or sound like anything but an Arab-American stroke victim. "Use your serviette," Teddy admonishes as you eat a Scotch egg from the tea trolley, and you dutifully pat your chin dry.
Only Trumbull, your night visitor, still wants you, since you've always drooled in your sleep. He has a harder time with your face in the brightly lit bathroom, fixing his eyes on your torso where you remain elastic and nubile. "Turn that frown upside down!" he jokes occasionally, a new smell of alcohol floating off his breath. Suspecting that it's actually symmetry he's after, you offer a full pout instead of a half-smile. "That's my girl!" he crows, and you're touched by him, that he's so overwhelmed.
You hear the Indian man's band at the elementary school one weekend and walk over to show him what happened. "What are you doing here?" he asks, and for once he seems to be referring to the place where you're standing, as opposed to the country in which you live.
"I like this music," you tell him. "I like the song that goes —" and you hum a few bars. He smiles at you and you half-smile back. He reaches out a hand to raise the left side of your mouth, holding it there for a moment before letting it drop down. "Classic Bell's," he notes.
"What?" you ask, thinking he's saying something lovely about your singing.
"Palsy," he says. "Classic Bell's palsy."
"Oh," you say, suddenly remembering that there's an official name for your new mouth besides droopy.
He slips a soft hand inside your shoulder-length hair and lifts it away from your head. You watch his face as he examines the fiercely red scar that starts in front of your ear, then hooks around the bottom of the lobe, continuing down the side of your neck. "The wound is nice," he offers, removing his hand from your hair, "but the rest..." He shrugs.
"Are you a doctor?" you ask him.
"A resident," he says, adding, "I only help out in my uncle's shop."
You nod. "It was a fellow that did this to me. Dr. Harry."
"Who was he working with?"
"Dr. Plumridge."
"I've heard of him."
"I can't do an English accent anymore," you admit.
"You sound sad about that."
"I am. A little."
"You must really want to be like them."
"I guess so."
"Even after what they did to you?"
"They apologized," you say stupidly, and it all comes back to you, what Plumridge said about this being insufficient.
The Indian man smiles meanly. "Well. How polite."
"Wouldn't you apologize if you paralyzed someone?" you ask him.
"Of course," he says.
"So what makes you so much better than them?"
"Ah," he says, "pigment."
His name is Sudhir and he invites you for Greek food (since you seem to enjoy their yogurt so much). A tabby cat weaves among the restaurant's tables and Sudhir shoos it lightly with his foot. "Don't you like cats?" you ask him.
"I like animals who are capable of liking me back."
"Like dogs?" you say.
He shakes his head. "Like people."
When you drool a little into your hummus, he reaches over with a piece of pita to catch it, waving away your thank you as he returns the bread to his plate. Moments later, he takes a bite from the same pita. You wonder if you should warn him, but then he smiles as he's chewing and you imagine he likes the taste of you.
Back in your room, Sudhir's approach is initially clinical. He questions you about your sexual history, methods of contraception, results of any AIDS tests. You've had a few, you say, all negative, and you definitely try to use condoms. Still, he wonders at your passivity, your misassigned trust. Why so many men? he wants to know. Especially the two English ones? You attempt to explain it to him — how you feel like a part of the culture as you hold its people inside of you. You describe the rush of being wanted by white English seemingly in spite of themselves, and Sudhir looks at you, stunned. He says that everything you think, every way you act, is dangerous; that it simply isn't desirable to be tolerated. He worries then that he's much too safe for you, and you assure him that he isn't, of course he isn't, you're scared out of your mind. "Scared?" he says, putting his hand inside your pants, using his classroom skills to pry you open. "You don't feel scared at all."
But you are, you think, as you lie down beside him. Scared, scared, scared.  He's your color, he's angry, he's an affront to every native of this land. If you join his ranks you might as well go home, find a real job, try to make something of yourself. Only how can you be special without a nationality box to tickÑwithout an accent that doesn't distract from your skin tone, not to mention the left half of your face? And where might you locate some pride? Or codeine, for that matter? You'd have to explain to a doctor that everything hurts all the time, when in reality there's no such disease.
Sudhir rises from the bed and takes off his clothes, then lies back down and says it's your turn. You get up, unzip, and unbutton, while he reaches out to stroke your flanks. When you're nude he opens the covers and you slide in on your stomach. His probing fingers make you feel as if he's making love to you in the course of a medical exam, and the combination fells you. When the conditions are right, he dips himself inside you a couple of times, then slowly, carefully, begins pushing his way into your bottom.
He asks if this is dangerous enough, and you say, yes, don't stop, that you've never held anyone there before. You cry a little, not so much because it hurts, but because he makes you wish you had your old face back, even if it was brown. "Shh," he tells you, stroking your hair, and you can't believe how good it feels to be heard above the din of sex.
Once you've absorbed all of him, he caps you off by lowering his body onto your back. In the ensuing stillness, you're certain that you can feel your insides grafting onto him. It's this — being truly locked together — that excites you most, with all its attendant dryness and lack of give. To separate now would require as much as effort as coming together, which is why neither of you budges at the sound of the key in the door.
"Trumbull," you say quietly to Sudhir, who's already heard about your landlord.
He tenses above you and whispers, "Let him see us."
"What?"
"Let him see what we can do."
Trumbull walks in and at first he doesn't look, just closes the door behind him and turns the lock. He puts his keys in his pocket then bends down to untie his shoes, and that's when he sees you, eyes open and staring back at him. "Mr. Trumbull," you say, "this is Sudhir."
The room is dark but a street lamp outside casts enough light to reveal that there are two of you in the bed, both far from white. "Good evening, Mr. Trumbull," Sudhir says now, not in his normal British clip, but in an exaggerated Indian replete with rounded consonants. It's not an accent you can imagine anyone wanting to put on — least of all in this country — unless, of course, they were feeling in the majority.
Trumbull stands there for a moment, his breath filtering down in sweet waves of bourbon. "Sorry, sorry," he whispers, moving away, and suddenly you wish he would pull up a chair and stay. Not to make love, since you only want to do this with Sudhir or nobody, but to try to figure out how you got in such a tangle. "Sorry," he keeps whispering, and soon he's got his back up against your bedroom door. Moments later, when neither you nor Sudhir has asked him to leave, he inches his way forward again. "Have I seen you before?" he asks Sudhir hoarsely.
"Yes," Sudhir says, though he doesn't mention the corner grocery.
"Sit down on the bed, Mr. Trumbull," you say.
He shakes his head from a couple of feet away. "I'm all right here."
It's like a game of Canadian tennis, with Trumbull shifting his gaze nervously from you to Sudhir, while the two of you have the landlord pegged. At one point, Sudhir reaches back and removes all the bed covers, raising himself up slightly so that Trumbull can see. Accepting this invitation, the older man leans in, scrutinizing the link between you. He maintains this politely inquisitive stance as Sudhir eases himself back into you, then gently out again, at last resuming the business of making love.
Eventually you both turn from the strange foreigner who won't go away. In this new country of yours and Sudhir's flesh, he's no kind of threat. He wasn't born here; his accent is wrong; he finds your ways shocking, to say the least. Clearly he, too, knows that he's out of his depth, leaving your key on the nightstand when he finally walks out the door.
Later, Sudhir jokes about the mess he imagines in Trumbull's pants. He calls the landlord a pervert and outlines a plan to share the events of the evening with his wife. You listen to this, but all you really hear is Sudhir's true accent, the English one, the one he can't shake. And you understand why he once got so mad at you for trying to steal it. It's worth less than nothing, as far as he's concerned. Just the sound of an old drunk having his way.
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©2000
Alicia Erian and Nerve.com
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Alicia Erian is the author of a novel, Towelhead, and a collection of short stories, The Brutal Language of Love. Alan Ball wrote and directed a film version of Towelhead, which will be released later this year.
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