“I am sorry, Miss Chun,” he said, “but next time, it’d be better if your parents called me.”
Late that night, I heard from Jin.
“Did you call Dean Neisman? Why?”
“Because—because Mom made me.”
“How could you do something like that? I told them what happened. What did they think your calling was going to do? You embarrassed me!”
“You’re the one who got kicked out of school! You’re the one who’s been spending all his time at Foxwoods!”
“Just—oh, shut up!” he said. “Just help me!”
“Help you! I can’t help you! What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Talk to them. Try to . . .”
A moment passed and my breathing calmed. Outside my dorm window, I saw two people chasing each other in the dark.
“Explain that it’s no big deal! I can go back next year. It’s easy. I know other people it’s happened to and they—most of them—came back.” He didn’t sound very certain. “They’re coming in tonight,” he said.
“Who?”
“Mom and Dad!”
“Here?”
“Here! That’s why I’m calling. They’re on the last flight out of Atlanta. Will you please, please come and meet us?”
“But I’ll be no good!”
“Please! Dad won’t go crazy if you’re there. He’ll listen to you.”
Fuck. “What time.”
“Twelve thirty.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.”
I wrote down the flight information in the margins of a book I had open on my desk. It was on the same page as a reproduction of Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory, which, according to the book, was the prettiest Cézanne ever made his wife look in a portrait. I looked closer. But I didn’t think she looked pretty. In fact, she looked pained, her lips and hands locked tightly together.
Cézanne hated to be touched. The book said he flew into a rage if it happened but not how, so I imagined him breaking his paintbrushes over his knee and throwing his canvases about like a discus. Stamping and shouting with his voice and his hands until he was red all over from lack of breath. Afterward, he was meek and mild and horribly sorry. Could you but see inside me, the man within, you would be so angry no longer. Do you not see to what a sad state I am reduced? Not master of myself, a man who does not exist . . .
Once, he shouted to no one in particular, I am every inch a painter all the same!
I turned the pages of the book slowly, pushing away all thoughts of my family through Cézanne’s colors. The still lifes were warm and deep, the landscapes cool and flat. But they were doors that wouldn’t open; I couldn’t find my way into his paintings. The longer I stared at any one picture, the less I saw.
There is only one painter in the world, he said. Myself.
Jin got to the airport before me. I saw him waiting in one of the back rows far from the gate. There were only a few other people there, a tired-looking woman flipping through a magazine and two teenage boys. Jin was dressed in dark pants and a crisp white shirt and looked as though he was about to go to an interview. He kept checking his watch and adjusting his shoulders. When I sat next to him, he told me our parents’ flight was delayed by fifteen minutes.
“Lucky,” I said. All the way to the airport on the T, I thoughtof what to say to Jin. I couldn’t think of anything good. So I told him he should leave the country and go to Europe by himself, traveling and working. Prove to them that he could take care of himself. It was just the kind of romantic gesture that might appeal to my father, who had come to America as a man in his forties with a young family and only five hundred dollars.
“No,” Jin said, shaking his head, “they’ll never let me do that. They’re going to watch me like a hawk, make me work at the gas station.”
The woman with the magazine looked at her watch and yawned.
“They must be pretty angry if they’re flying up here,” Jin said. His leg was imperceptibly jiggling our row of seats. It was just like him to be afraid now, when there was nothing anybody could do. Jin had a way of ignoring the fact of the future and couldn’t see past one move.
“Didn’t you know what was going to happen to you?” I asked. “Jesus, Jin. Dean Neisman said you’d stopped going to classes. You’ve been on academic probation for an entire year. What did you think was going to happen if you stopped going to classes? That they’d award you some prize? It’s your friends, isn’t it? Stupid does as stupid says?”
“You sound like an old lady!” Jin said.
“Maybe you should act older! Why do you have to be such a . . . babo!” We went right back to being ten and twelve.
“I am not an idiot!” Jin yelled. The woman looked over her magazine at us with interest. “I am not stupid,” Jin said. “And it’s not my friends. At least I have friends.”
“I have friends.”
“Who? That loser boyfriend with the long hair? The one that plays the electric viola? Who the fuck plays the electric viola? Ha!” Jin gave a hollow laugh. He got up and walked over to the monitors.
I’d never known before what Jin thought of Evan. We didn’t talk about things like that. Jin never talked with people—he told funny stories.
The two teenage boys went to the window. Beyond them I could see lights taking off instead of planes. “Here it comes!” one of them said.
“Hey, will you talk to dad for me?” Jin asked, returning to stand over me. “Explain how I can reapply next year and all that. I would but I don’t think he’s going to give me the
