Chapter 8
8.
In retrospect, Rafi realized, it was obvious.
When Sunita said she didn’t want to label their relationship, Rafi thought she was modern and progressive: a warrior against gender norms and patriarchal bullshit. But now he understood the whole thing was as casual as a summer Friday. He’d mistaken a grab bag of good emotions—pleasure, attraction, respect—for true love. And it hadn’t been the first time.
“This is like what happened with Jia.” Rafi jammed the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, wishing he could unsee the memory of getting a spontaneous tattoo of the word Hope with his college girlfriend. A week later, Jia had broken up with him. Hope still sprang eternal on Rafi’s left butt cheek. “And Axel.” Rafi’s first and only boyfriend, an emotionally unavailable German musician with preternaturally beautiful hair whom Rafi fell hard for two summers ago.
“Ah yes,” Birdie recalled. The siblings were settled back on the family room sectional. “Your Eurotrash moment. Whatever happened to axman Axel?”
“Axman Axel broke up with me before moving back to Germany,” Rafi reminded her. “I flew to Berlin, where he broke up with me again. I was so sure we’d get back together I hadn’t bought a ticket home. I had to crash at his loft while I figured it out. For a week. ”
Birdie let out a whistle, speaking in a German accent. “Das is way harsh.”
“Did you go into work today?” Liz said from the other side of the sofa, cradling a very full glass of wine. “Was it excruciating?”
“I called in sick.” Rafi slumped farther into the couch. “My manager said I could do the next few weeks virtually. So I bid farewell to the last scraps of my dignity and fled.”
“Oh, Raf.” Liz reached over to squeeze his leg. “Baby boy.”
Being the baby of the family was a role Rafi typically leaned in to. But right now, the word, and its implicit condescension, irritated him. Jesus, he was almost thirty.
He couldn’t relax, still shimmering with anxiety, and regret, and, frankly, astonishment. Why had he proposed ? How could something that felt so right turn out to be so wrong?
“I feel like an idiot,” Rafi admitted, breaking off some ginger milk chocolate from a block Birdie offered. “I obviously don’t get how love works at all.”
“Well, you know how getting dumped works,” Birdie drawled. “You’re an expert in that. You could teach a course.”
“Birdie,” Liz chided, folding back a smile.
“No, she’s right.” Rafi couldn’t even summon outrage at his sister’s needling. “Christmas, obviously, is ruined.”
“Hear, hear.” Birdie raised her glass in solidarity. “Christmas is the takeout container left in the fridge so long it’s become sentient. Christmas is the moment you realize you sat in fresh gum. Christmas is the bad reboot no one asked for, with none of the original cast, and it’s not getting a theatrical release, it’s going straight to Crackle.”
“Crackle?” Liz winced. “Brutal.”
Rafi managed a smile. Despite them giving him shit, he was grateful his sisters had also come up early to Belvedere Inn. Even though they were all technically half-siblings, they’d grown up together. The half was never considered.
Liz nudged Rafi with a socked foot. “We’ll get Christmas back on track for you.”
But how would he get his life back on track? A log in the fire shifted, sending up a spray of sparks. Bright as the diamond ring he would have to return.
Rafi let his head fall back against the couch cushions. “How did I misread it so badly? This is, like, Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping-press-conference bad.”
Birdie high-fived him for the deep cut. “You’ve always wanted to get hitched. You’ve been talking about settling down since college, which is actually not normal.” His sister recrossed her legs on the sofa. “I’m sorry about Sunita, I liked her. Unexpected upside: she lent me fifty bucks, which I might not have to pay back.”
Liz gave Rafi a horrified smile, which he barely managed to return. It was true he’d always wanted to get married. But was Birdie right? Was it normal to have such a single-minded focus on settling down?
“Once you’re ready to get past all this,” Birdie went on, “you’ll see there are plenty more crustaceans at the seafood buffet.”
“No.” Rafi felt certain. “I am off love for the next…I don’t know, but definitely for the holidays. Maybe all next year. I need to stop falling for people so quickly, and start seeing things clearly. No love for me.”
“Me too.” Birdie broke off another piece of chocolate. “Why do I keep doing things that confirm everyone’s worst suspicions of me? I’m like Amy Winehouse circa 2010.”
“I’m off love too,” Liz announced in a too-loud voice. “I need to focus on work. Writing, not…anything else. No love for me.”
Birdie snapped her fingers. “Black Hearts Club!” Then, seeing her siblings’ stares, she said, “This year’s club. Obviously. ”
Every year, the siblings invented a new club name over the holidays, themed to whatever serious or stupid thing was front of mind. It’d started when they were kids. A producer on one of Babs’s films had made them all T-shirts for the When’s Lunch? Club, inspired by their singular devotion to that question when on set. In recent years, there’d been the More Negronis Club, the No More Negronis Club, the Our Mother Is Totally Fucking Nuts Club. “Club meetings” took place in the wine cellar on the basement level and were just an excuse to drink wine and talk about whatever was really going on.
“Black Hearts Club.” Liz already had her phone out, changing their group text name from last year’s inside joke: Justice for Mrs. Claus Club. “Done.”
—
Eventually, the Black Hearts Club dispersed to their bedrooms. Uncharacteristically quiet, the house felt like an unpopulated luxury hotel—its own kind of holiday miracle.
Babs had redesigned Rafi’s bedroom in a Swiss chalet style after he moved out. The ceiling was crossed with raw wood beams. Red plaid blankets were folded on the backs of two deep-seated leather club chairs. The supremely comfortable chairs faced the unlit fireplace, original stone from the Inn’s first life, just like in the family room. Royalty checks from Babs’s biographies had funded her upgrade of Rafi’s childhood bed to a plush king, fitted with soft jersey sheets and a down comforter.
Rafi put his suitcase in the corner, taking in every inch of his old bedroom. Everything was exactly the same as the last time he was here. Ordinarily, the consistency was comforting. Now the familiarity gave him the uneasy sense of being trapped and never-changing. Doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.
He ran a fingertip over the framed photographs on the mantel.
Rafi and his sisters lying on their bellies in Central Park, sunburned and grinning.
Graduation day at Georgetown, Rafi laughing, maybe even handsome, in a cap and gown.
He and Ash, arms slung around each other on a beach in Mexico, barely twenty-one. Ash’s hair was an overgrown mess, his cheap glasses slipping down chubby cheeks.
And on the far end of the mantel, the faded color photograph of a young Indian man leaning against a motorbike, arms crossed, face in profile. Nikhil Daruwala had been younger than Rafi was now when he’d worked as a stuntman on The War of My Heart. The mid-nineties war epic ultimately won Babs an Oscar, pulling her out of a mid-career slump. The story centered around a plucky American reporter (Babs) who falls for a noble Indian general, set against the backdrop of India’s independence from British rule. Babs had snuck beautiful, cocksure Nikhil into her hotel room only a handful of times during location shooting in Mumbai. Despite being on the pill, she got pregnant. Nikhil, who still lived with his parents, was horrified at the news. He quickly signed the paperwork awarding Babs full custody. He kept apologizing, saying he was too young to become a father—he was only twenty-two. His parents could never find out.
Babs told the world she’d decided to get pregnant a third time, and, since she was single (twice-divorced by now), a friend had donated the sperm—a friend whose privacy would be protected. And it was. Babs never told anyone the truth outside her inner circle.
His father’s identity was never a secret to Rafi or his sisters. Babs had repeated the whole story from such a young age it felt like something he always knew. The way he felt about it, however, changed over time.
Babs took the task of raising a half-Indian son extremely seriously. The entire family celebrated Diwali, made homemade curries, and got season passes for South Asian film festivals. Rafi’s early memories were positive—the difference between him and his sisters felt like a good thing; he was special. But as he got older, his identity started to feel more complex. Difference wasn’t always a good thing, even in New York City. He was teased. Then bullied. Most of his classmates in his Soho middle school didn’t look like him, and most had fathers—his sisters certainly did. Rafi felt suspended between two worlds—his white mother and sisters in New York City, and his Indian side—never fully embraced by either.
The desire to connect with his biological father, to understand who he really was, erupted in his mid-teens. His family would never understand him—he barely understood himself, and that was their fault, specifically his mother’s. All of the cooking and film festivals and observance of Indian holidays seemed like a gross approximation of a true connection to culture, a tone-deaf colonialist charade that meant absolutely nothing. He began feeling a persistent, anxious responsibility to fully embrace his Indian identity, but he didn’t know how, or even what that really meant. A difficult year as a nineteen-year-old prompted a much-anticipated visit to Mumbai to finally meet Nikhil in person.
The whole family and Ash traveled with him for support. Rafi was preparing for a transcendental moment that would finally click his identity into place. He couldn’t sleep for a week leading up to it, imagining good tears, bad tears, something explosive, something that would change everything. But when Nikhil sat opposite him in the restaurant of Rafi’s hotel on that humid morning in June, Rafi’s racing heart started to slow. His biological father was nervous but kind, and made an effort to be interested. But he was clearly out of his depth. They didn’t have a lot in common. Nikhil had never married, so there were no half-siblings to meet, and the photos of his nieces and nephews didn’t stir much in Rafi’s chest. They were all strangers. The whole thing was oddly underwhelming.
The trip did deepen Rafi’s relationship with Nikhil—they began talking every year on Rafi’s birthday in January and exchanged the occasional letter. But Rafi stopped feeling a need to “be more Indian”: his experience as an Indian American boy growing up in a white family, without a father, was valid in its own right. Then, in college, when Rafi realized he liked boys as well as girls, he became focused on an entirely different journey of self-discovery, finding community with other queer people of color. Now, at twenty-nine, he felt comfortable inhabiting both his biraciality and his bisexuality. What he didn’t feel comfortable with was this feeling that his life hadn’t yet begun, and he didn’t know how to get it started—like Birdie said, he seemed to know only how to get dumped.
Rafi washed up and got into bed, trying to relax. His sisters had helped, but there was only one person who could give the emotional support he needed.
He tapped open his phone and FaceTimed Ash. A pleasurable crunch of anticipation squeezed Rafi’s midriff.
And then there, on the small screen, was Asher Sebastian Campbell. No bad haircut, no cheap glasses—Ash had Lasik after he moved to the UK. But his eyes were the same. A warm, butterscotch brown. “Raf?” Ash croaked. “What time is it?”
“Oh shit, sorry,” Rafi said, checking the clock. It was 1:00 a.m. Which made it 6:00 a.m. in London. “Should I call back?”
“S’okay.” Ash yawned, glancing offscreen. “What—did you just get home from your Christmas party? How was it?”
“No, that was two nights ago, and it was very bad.” Here goes nothing. “I asked Sunita to marry me in front of everyone we work with but she said no and then she dumped me.”
“ What? ” Ash floundered upright so fast he lost his balance and promptly fell out of bed.
“Ash?” The screen was dark, the phone tangled in sheets.
There was some muffled cursing and then another voice, male with a British accent, asking what the bloody hell was going on.
Great: he’d woken not only Ash, but whomever he’d brought home. Vaguely humiliating that while Rafi had been driving the three and a half hours to the Catskills while tearfully listening to Adele, Ash had been getting his dick sucked by some cryptocurrency journalist who was into Proust, or whatever. Ash’s cool new life made Rafi seesaw between being absolutely thrilled for London Man ’s style editor and desperately missing the boy he used to roam the woods with.
A minute later, Ash was pulling on a T-shirt and sinking to the floor of his flat’s small bathroom, listening to Rafi recount the whole excruciating scene. “So there I am, asking Sunita for her hand in marriage, and she’s looking at me like I’m holding a gun to her head.”
“Oh no.” Ash was half cringing, half laughing. “Oh, Raf.”
Rafi dropped his head into his hand. “I’m never going to trust my stupid heart again.”
“Hey, your heart is not stupid.” Ash’s voice was deep and soothing in the way of a good radio host. “Nothing about you is stupid. You’re emotional and imaginative and an optimist. You’re thriving!” He frowned, puckering his full lips. “Well, maybe you’re not thriving right now.”
“I’m definitely not thriving right now!” Rafi almost had the urge to laugh. If only he could Command-Z undo the last forty-eight hours. “I don’t know how I misread everything. Why I even did it in the first place. I…I wanted it so badly, but it wasn’t marriage to Sunita.”
“What was it, then?”
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t articulate this disorienting longing and itchy dissatisfaction he was suddenly feeling. Or, had been feeling for a while and was only acknowledging now. “I just want my real life to start. Even though I know this is my real life. I have a job, an apartment, friends. This is it. But it doesn’t feel totally right. Maybe this isn’t where I’m meant to be. Maybe this isn’t what I’m meant to be doing.”
Ash’s face crumpled in empathy. “I wish I could give you a hug right now.”
“I need one. I’ve just been dumped! Again!” Rafi snuggled farther into the sheets, gaze not straying from Ash-in-miniature on his phone. “How is it you’ve never once been in this position? Getting your heart squashed like a cockroach?”
Ash considered the question. He tended to do that: thoughtfully process anything that fell out of Rafi’s mouth. “I guess I keep it simple.”
“How?”
“I have boundaries. I keep a balance.”
“I literally have zero idea how to do that.”
It was painfully ironic that Rafi wanted a partner and couldn’t find one, while ambivalent Ash always had some guy on the periphery. Ash had gotten a fair amount of play before leaving the States, but London Ash appeared to be, as Birdie once tastelessly put it, freestyling through a swimming pool of cock.
Ash let his head rest against the Turkish hand towel hanging behind him, his broad shoulders relaxing. “Oh, Raf Attack.” His pet name since childhood. “What are we going to do with you?”
“Nothing. I’ll survive.” Rafi didn’t want the pity party to go all night. Or all morning. “What about you? Do you want to go back to bed or tell me about who’s in it?”
Ash laughed, pushing a hand through his hair. Unlike Rafi’s looping curls, Ash’s dark gold hair had only the slightest wave to it. “No one special. But I do have some work fuckery I need your emotionally intelligent take on.”
The conversation shifted onto Ash’s difficult new editor in chief. Ash was better at his job as a thinking man’s fashion writer than he was at workplace politics, and so they spent a few minutes brainstorming how to respond to his boss’s mood swings. Rafi’s natural empathy made him able to see both sides of the story, and his customer service experience made him good at expressing those ideas with sensitivity. He offered to write up some suggestions and send them through in the morning.
“Thanks man.” Ash smiled at him.
“Anytime. Wish you were here.” He sat up, hopeful. “Any chance you’re coming home for the holidays?”
Ash hesitated. “I was going to stay here.”
“Again?” Rafi said. “But—”
A deep voice cut in from the other side of the bathroom door. “Hey mate. Got any coffee?”
Ash glanced away from the screen. “Yeah, there’s a French press on the counter.”
Envy spread like an inkblot in Rafi’s stomach. How badly he wanted to be making that French press and having this conversation in person, not three and a half thousand miles apart.
Ash refocused on their FaceTime. “Sorry. What was I saying?”
“You have to come back sometime. You’re not still getting settled; it’s been two years. I miss you. My family misses you.” Rafi hesitated. “And there are other, um, things you could do?”
Ash stiffened, his eyes flashing hotly to the screen. “What things?”
Things like visiting your dad’s grave? were the words Rafi didn’t say. Ash’s father, Willie Campbell, had died of a heart attack five months after Ash moved overseas. They had not been close, the relationship had always been difficult, but everyone was surprised when Ash didn’t come back for the funeral. The only people gathered around Willie’s gravestone on that blustery day were a local chaplain, a few of Willie’s drinking buddies, plus Rafi, Babs, and Birdie. Ash never even asked about it. It was the one thing they just didn’t talk about.
Rafi was not about to rip open that hornet’s nest now. He’d made enough mistakes for one week.
“Just our holiday traditions,” he pivoted. “Scrabble and snowball fights. Buying a tree. Our double feature.” Die Hard and Gremlins, the best alt-Christmas movies of all time, watched back-to-back each year.
Ash promised he’d think about it, but he sounded noncommittal. They said their goodbyes, then the room went quiet. It felt so much emptier without Ash in it.
Deep in his gut, Rafi feared that Ash would never come back. That slowly, in a way imperceptible to the human eye, he was fading away, until one day he’d be gone for good, his memory relegated to photos above the mantel, sun-faded images of a boy Rafi used to know. The disturbing idea only increased the disorienting wrongness of the last forty-eight hours.
It was cold in the bedroom. Rafi switched off the bedside light, burrowing deep under his covers. Hopefully, when he woke up, things would be calmer.