Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes Page A

tripped—but Ratu stood and took her hand. “Come, Ginger, it is best to be safe.” He led her down seventeen flights of a dark gray stairway, insisting on carrying her tote bag. When was the last time a man had carried her bag?
    As the fire trucks appeared, she said, “I have an idea.”
    At a café on Waverly Place, over herbal tea, Ratu told a story about a terrible fire in his village, Savusavu, started by a French tourist who had fallen asleep smoking in his beach-front rental. The fire burned ten homes, including Ratu’s. He said it was the first time he had seen his father weep. He stared at Ginny, his eyes a lustrous mahogany.
    The small table and the dim lights of the café unleashed in her a feeling of intimacy.
    “You should write about it,” she said. “You’re quite talented with narratives. And you make great use of Fijian history. You see, in ‘Bird of an Ancient Land’…” She set his manuscript on the table and slid her chair beside his so they could examine his poem. She glanced around to see who else from the university might be there.
    Her students were graduate level, a few of them older than she was, but a classroom triggered certain dynamics, particular boundaries. Whatever maternal urges Ginny had were directed toward her students; she asked endless questions about their dating lives and vacation plans. She brought chips and sodas to class, and always, on a student’s birthday, produced a cake with candles.
    But with Ratu she had refrained from asking questions, and in the café she realized it was because she had a small crush she’d been keeping in check. Whenever her students turned in poems, she read his first, with an unusual excitement, studying them for clues about what kind of person he was. It did not displease her to see him muscle open the window.
    “Your use of juxtaposition is really good, Ratu. Eighty percent of good artistry is knowing what to put next to what.” He shifted his leg beneath the table and it came to rest against hers; she found herselfafraid of what silence would bring. “There was this famous editing experiment in 1918. Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker, edited a short film using static images of an actor’s face alternated with shots of a plate of soup, a girl at play, and a coffin. After seeing this montage, audience members raved about the actor’s varied emotional expressions—pensiveness, happiness, sorrow—when, in fact, the image of the actor was the same in all the shots. Viewers created narratives based merely on the sequence of images, and on their reactions to those images. It’s called the Kuleshov Effect.”
    She began straightening the sugars and the Equals in the dispenser.
    “You are an amazing woman, Ginger. Brilliant. When you were my age, you were already published.”
    His compliment was lost in the thud of the word age —she was thirty-three, ten years his senior—and she couldn’t stop the blush invading her cheeks. He reached for her hand.
    “You’re my student,” she said, but didn’t pull her hand away.
    He walked her home that night and came upstairs, and from then on they were inseparable.
    Every night, he sat on her bed and slowly brushed his thick hair, smoothing on coconut oil. His chest, tattooed with birds and trees, glowed in her reading lamp. On his right hip, a long, narrow leaf tattoo, feathered with veins, contained the scripted words Tagane Vuka, which he said meant “he who can fly.” Before sleep, he flossed for a good ten minutes; with an orange rubber tip, he probed the soft arcs of his gums. He rinsed with a bright green fluoride treatment she had last seen as a child. His father and grandfather had lost their teeth at a young age, and Ratu, terrified of decay, avoided sweets and sodas.
    In the afternoons Ratu swam three miles in the university pool, furious butterfly and crawl strokes. For the rest of the day, she could smell chlorine on his hair.
    He always woke early to make the coffee, and when