Good Indian Girls: Stories (12 page)

She’d warmed to the book only after Sonia Semyonovna’s appearance, confessing with a drunken sway and a furrowing
of her brows, that it confirmed a deeply held belief of hers. She meant the
necessity of suffering
. Not suffering on the scale of Raskolnikov’s—a person shouldn’t have to murder an old woman to find some answer to questions in their life! But it offered a grand vision, a life so much larger than itself, as if it were projected onto an oversized, multiplex screen, though in her mind she didn’t see a static screen, but a sheet of white canvas rustling in the breeze. This way, parts of the image fell in and out of focus. The lesson she drew from the book was that suffering was a constant companion, however small or large your life was. Maybe
necessity
was the wrong word and, now she thought about it, she preferred companion. Yes, she said, that’s closer, the
companionship of suffering
. Look at Raskolnikov, he was an ass, a murderer, totally self-involved. Look what he had to go through just to have a glimmer of true feeling for Sonia! But she stood by him and the reason was not some outdated notion of a woman standing by her man, but because she saw that through him, they could together arrive at something essential. She thought it unspeakably romantic, and often while she was reading, she’d think of herself as Sonia. Would it be so terrible, she asked, to have been alive then under those circumstances?

I’d thought just that: myself as Raskolnikov. Not the murderer, except in a sort of way, the man who murdered the old woman, the Raskolnikov bewildered by the world, thinking it low, hypocritical, who believed himself set apart! There was something of that in me, I confessed. “I get the feeling somewhere, something went wrong. A sort of crazy mistake. This isn’t me, this world isn’t mine. I don’t know which.”

She raised her glass and offered in a funny, grave voice, “Then I will be your Sonia,” clinking glasses, “and you my Raskolnikov!”

That’s when I did a surprising thing, a surprise even to myself. I placed a hand firmly on her thigh and looked into her eyes, and said, “Will you be
my
Sonia? Will you marry me?”

III

Within months, we’d put a down payment on a four-bedroom on Long Island. Every morning, I promised, I’d commute in, reading on the LIRR and return home every night to write. Work on the dream study progressed rapidly. Knocking out a wall between two bedrooms opened a grand space where we installed bay windows overlooking not acacia and spruce but an aged and dying oak. Ceiling-high shelves lined the walls with sliding ladders along each section and I commissioned the pine table from a Japanese woodworker on West 17th. The table took close to a year to complete and arrived in time for our first anniversary.

The marriage, as rapidly, faltered.

We clashed over bills, cooking, chores, the diminished time we spent together, our deflated suburban lives. The commute offered me no peace. People barked into cell phones, others snored, the smell of breakfast burritos pervaded the cars, the train conductors clicked tickets incessantly. My work responsibilities expanded and soon I returned home later every night, tapping out not great stories on the train but memos on office etiquette.

Far into the evening, I would sit alone in the study, nursing a whisky and reflecting on my purposeless days and the
increasing strains with Christie. The broad, custom-built table scolded me. I had not written a word, not imagined what I might ever write. Recessed lights in the ceiling lit the room brightly but obscured the garden, painting the windows black and hiding the broad gloom beyond. Out in the suburban darkness, I sometimes sensed shapes moving, animals, prowlers, strange beings. Figures formed in the blackness and I gave to them my darkest imagination: something was out there, hunting me, drawing ever closer, a creature on the scent of my disorder, a monster of chaos, with only one thought in its head: my annihilation.

The plan first offered itself to me as a means to fend off this terror. It was a preposterous idea, and I brushed it away without thought. But there it was, nightly reappearing, and during those shapeless nights when I sensed the dim thud of a phantom step, I would sit and stare at my surrounding morgue of books with rising discomfort and fear. I’d come to believe, in my lonely bachelor nights, that a book without a reader is a dead book. I’d even feel a dread pass through my body on finishing one and consigning it to the piles leaning against walls. That dread now echoed throughout this room. Was that it? Was that the scent of death the creature stiffened at? My marriage was a failure, this room that I’d had such hopes for was no more than a child’s playroom in a childless couple’s home, and my own days were unfulfilled and compassless. Something had to be done.

This was the idea. I would hire a reader, someone to read these books during the day while I was at work. He’d be another me. He’d sit in this room and read, read everything. And in the evenings we would talk, and sometimes Christie would join us, and we’d be an eccentric and happy threesome.
If I could save the books, I reasoned, I would salvage the rest of it, the marriage, my sense of self. I’d even be given, as if miraculously, the time and will to write my book.

IV

John invariably wore a white T-shirt and jeans and I clocked his daily late-morning arrival by having him call my cell from the home phone. Caller ID placed him there. How he spent the rest of the day, at least until Christie returned home, I accepted on trust. Sometimes I would call and speak calmly into the answering machine. “John, are you there . . .?” Only twice did I have to wait over a minute before he picked up, and when he reached the phone he was panting. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Nothing. Just reading,” he replied without concern.

My hope was he’d stay some nights until I returned, because not only did I want to know what he read, but I wanted to hear his thoughts, to listen to him compare and discuss my many books. I was surprised when our meetings turned out to be simple, almost clinical affairs, closer to interrogations than brotherly chats. John gave brief and to-the-point answers and our relationship, to my confusion, never developed beyond those I had with my own assistants. Even after months, I lacked the courage to ask John to call me by my first name. This wasn’t how I’d imagined it. I had hoped we would sit together like college buddies over a bottle of scotch, talking late into the night of things that matter.

Christie viewed the exercise as grossly irresponsible. It was ludicrous, bordering on the pathological, to think a book without a reader is a dead book, and worse, to imagine a reader might somehow salvage our faltering marriage.
She wanted us to enter therapy, she suggested we go on dates together, as though we were again an unmarried couple, or that I read to her, the way I had when we first met. All practical suggestions, I agreed, but none could solve the essential problem, whose full outline even I didn’t understand. The great stories did not resolve their conflicts through everyday solutions, so why should not a life, my life, have found structure in the tangents of narrative, in the unseen influence of shadowed myths?

Then one day at the office, I slipped my wedding ring off and placed it in my desk drawer and asked Jenna, a new intern and a senior at Columbia, to join me for a drink after work. I was shocked at myself, at my own sudden ability for action, and as I walked along the corridor to her cubicle, as I spoke, as I waited for her response, it was as if another man was standing in my body. Her short black hair, the stud in her nose, her loose, sensual clothes reminded me of the women I once chased but never caught, women with the irresistible aura of unknown, bohemian lives.

We cabbed it to an old Second Avenue haunt of mine where I had always come alone and left alone. In the intervening years, it had transformed. Gone were the impoverished characters I remembered. Now the place was high-end, video screens on the walls, drinks more than double the price.

Three rounds and we were both laughing, and the sudden ease left me feeling elated. Who were these women who had terrorized my student lusts? Did they care about the books I loved? Did they read the ones they carried so elegantly to and from coffeeshops? Finally, I had to do it. Placing a hand on her thigh and letting my fingers run perilously close to her crotch, I said it, the question that had doomed one date
after another, what Anton called the weird name of a weirder writer:
“Bohumil Hrabal?”

She stopped, drink in midair, and stared at me. A moment later she exploded into peals of laughter, thrusting the glass high over her head and rocking back and forth on the stool, until eventually, returning the drink to the counter, she wrapped a hand around my neck and pulled me close.

“I’m fucking sorry,” she said, her lips brushing my earlobe. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. But is that how they talk where you come from?”

It was my turn to laugh. “Yes,” I nodded vigorously. “Yes yes!” Exultant, I repeated a stream of nonsense syllables and soon Jenna was almost toppling off her stool, she was laughing so hard.

That’s when I reached out a hand, enclosed her waist, pulled her to me and kissed her.

I phoned Christie from my mobile, holding it close to my mouth as I stood in the restroom to drown the noise from the bar, and told her I’d be sleeping at the office. Soon I was sleeping at the office once a week, sometimes more. There wasn’t only Jenna. The old campus bars where I’d suffered one rejection after another proved now to be excellent hunting ground for co-eds and soon I discovered how easy it was to pick up a young student, take her to a hotel room, and never talk to or see her again. The remaining evenings with Christie left me strangely lighter, as though in our time together I was floating a few inches above her, bobbing on the puffs of our spare conversation. During our dinners together we talked shop, she new accounting models, me statistical challenges. When this flagged, it’d be office politics, frustrations during the day, whether to rent a movie
or watch the box. Sex happened when we found ourselves in bed together with nothing else to do. It became, to my surprise, an enjoyable life.

Then one evening, when I arrived home late as usual, Christie met me in the kitchen. She asked if I’d eaten, and I said yes, at one of those Indo/Pak taxi delis on the West Side, and I poured myself a scotch and only then did I see she was staring at me with a hard, intent glare. An argument, I thought, and wondered what I’d done. But she didn’t want to argue. She had only one thing to say. She wanted a divorce.

That night I slept in the study, bundled in heavy sheets, sensing, even in my dreams, the breath of that phantom hunter, the creature in the night, as step by step it drew ever closer.

V

I woke sweating, still in my clothes and wrapped so tightly I could hardly breathe. The sun sliced in through the windows, filtered by the leaves of the oak, and the room looked brilliant and alive and perturbed.

The night before, I’d telephoned John and told him not to come in today, that I would drop by and visit him. I didn’t say why, I wasn’t sure myself. Christie’s demand hit me hard, and I thought if I lost her, I would lose everything, myself included. Action was needed, a violent break with my past, to show Christie I might yet be the man she married.

John greeted me in a white T-shirt and boxers and on opening the door, retreated into the darkness of the kitchen. A bed stood near the window at one end of the long, narrow apartment, while a desk held a computer with
the remaining free space buried under books and papers. A large, brightly colored painting hung on the wall, unframed, the canvas edges irregular and worn, and a beaten-up sofa sat opposite with a crate substituting for a table holding on it an overflowing ashtray and three coffee mugs.

“Pretty different,” he said, returning with coffee. “From yours, I mean.”

“I used to live nearby in a place even smaller.”

Gone now was the forced stiffness, the sense that I was the employer and he the employee, and the change unsettled me, leaving me uncertain where to start. I’d thought it out on the train, what I was going to say, how exactly I would phrase it, but now all my plans were slipping rapidly away.

“Are you a writer?” I realized suddenly how little I knew of him.

“No. I do freelance web design. The market’s cold these days for the independent guy. Your gig was a fucking godsend.”

“The economy?”

“Uh huh.” He produced a tin box and opened it. “Joint?” he asked.

I shook my head and he lit one for himself. The smoke filtered through the room and I changed my mind and reached out and took a long drag, then another. Instead of relaxing me, the drug caused my body to stiffen and a sharp ache spread through my back.

“Careful, it’s strong.”

“Uh huh.”

Turning to the computer, he said, “Do you want to see?”

“What?”

“My sites. The money’s in porn these days.”

A sudden fury rose in me and I decided I hated John, that I always had, and I wanted nothing more at that moment than to strike him. I decided to come directly to the point.

“I know,” I said. “I know everything.”

He looked confused. “About what?”

“You and Christie. She told me last night. The affair, how long it’s been going on, the smallest details. She said she couldn’t stand the lies anymore. She was in tears.”

I was hoping for a fight. He’d protest, I’d accuse, sooner or later he’d be driven to rage and come flying at me. And I’d be the one defending Christie. It was ritual combat I was after, a duel for Christie’s honor. What were all those books about, I’d thought last night lying alone in the study, but duels moved to the page? The author against his past, the words against the author, the characters against each other, the reader against everyone. These were battles to the death, shifted from their ancient arenas, the colosseums, the jousting fields, the forest glades, and moved onto an inner theatre. Everything happened within, and it was a cheat, I thought, a stupid, lowdown swindle! Where was the blood? No one saw it. No one actually died. My mistake was that I’d believed them, these books, that if you read them they would change a life! It was all crass bunk. What I wanted was the real thing, real blood, John’s blood.