Good Indian Girls: Stories (13 page)

He sat back in his chair studying me, first with bafflement, then with a grin widening on his lips.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on! She’s told me everything! Don’t lie. I’m not here to fight with you. I want to know what’s going on.”

“She said we were . . . what? Fucking?”

“If you want to put it so bluntly, yes.”

“I don’t know what she told you, but it’s not true.” Then with a laugh, he added, “I don’t know what this is about. She’s a beautiful woman, I’ll admit I was tempted. But no way it’s true.” He paused and looked across the room, toward the window, lost in thought, and finally said, “Who knows? Maybe she suspects something about you.”

“Don’t be an idiot. This is about you and my wife.”

“Is it?”

I decided to launch into the speech I’d practiced on the train.

“When I hired you, it wasn’t as some employee or office flunky. You had the run of my house and my absolute trust, and all you had to do was read my books. Those aren’t ordinary books, those aren’t sweet airs and lullabies, throwaway paperbacks from the mall bookstore. When you read one of those books, the book makes you a promise. It holds a tradition between its pages, one that goes back for generations. If you accept the promise, the book lets you become part of that tradition. Even as an ordinary reader, you’re joining on equal footing. This is what I gave you. You didn’t hold up your part of the deal, did you? No, what you did was—”

I stopped, because there was John, laughing at me. The laugh began as a smirk, but grew quickly, and soon he was almost toppling from his chair, roaring.

“What is it?” I demanded. “What the fuck are you laughing at?” The moment I asked him, his face changed and I felt a deep alarm ringing inside me.

“Do I have to spell it out? One of my oldest friends is Susan Caulfield, you know, little Susie. She’s told me everything.”

A sickening chill ran through me. Susie was one of the girls I’d picked up at one of my new haunts. I’d told her I was a writer, that much of the time I needed to be closeted in my Long Island atelier. She hated the subterfuge and the rationed time we spent together. It ended when she threw a drink in my face at a downtown club and stormed out.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, pushing my fears aside, and stood and approached the painting while John’s eyes followed me. It was a nude, maybe it was Susie, I thought strangely. The woman, though highly abstracted, seemed to be falling. I could feel myself entering the brush strokes, as though the surface created by the layers of paint was a second work embedded in the first, offering a private geography. I rode down low on the broad lines of paint, sliding into the gullies and rising to plateaus and peaks, only to descend again into those shadowy realms.

“I don’t know any Susan . . . what’s her name?”

“Oh, for chrissakes, give it up! I’m no fucking snitch, man, if that’s what this is about. What you do is your fucking business. I don’t know what’s going on with you. Why you came here, what this story with Christie’s about, whatever.” He shook his head, and added, “There’s a lot you’ve got to learn if you’re going to play the game. First, don’t give them the rundown on your conquests. It doesn’t help.”

Instantly, and without thinking, I threw myself at him. It was a sudden, instinctual fury, an act I hadn’t contemplated a moment before. I lunged blindly, wanting to smash into his body with all the force of mine. That’s not what happened. My foot caught the edge of the crate and both it and I went careening. We missed each other completely and I slammed my head violently into the corner of the desk and doubled
back, screaming and in agony, and collapsed into a ball squirming on the floor.

“You fucking maniac!” John cried. He jumped from his chair and I could hear him stalking angrily from one end of the apartment to the other, repeating that phrase over and over.

The pain subsided quickly. When I pulled my fingers away, their tips were bloodied. I lay there, listening to John’s feet strike the hardwood floor and his angry breath roiling across the room. He picked up the phone, dropped it again into its cradle, then I listened as he gathered the shattered fragments of mugs and ashtray and I was washed over with an odd sympathy for this man that only moments before I hated and I wished more than anything that I could tell him that and not simply lie there, my eyes tight shut, shivering and afraid.

VI

The lunch-time streets belched up their crowds as I navigated my way toward the subway. Before I left, John wordlessly handed me a towel and a box of Band-Aids and these, standing crouched under the sloping ceiling of his bathroom, I applied with shaking hands to the gash on my forehead, without once facing myself in the mirror. On reaching the street, all memory of walking the three flights down vanished, though I’d accomplished it seconds before. Well, I thought, tugging what little satisfaction I could from that loose-willed exhibition, I have blood, and with that, I can say something to Christie. But what? The struggle itself, I thought, I’ll describe the struggle. I will tell it as something new, imaginary. I will tell her a story that will announce the depth of my love.

That was when a strange thing happened. Someone struck me hard on the arm and hurried quickly on. It was a young woman who turned for a moment and held me with a look of contempt. Her dark hair fell nearly to the middle of her back and she could easily have been Indian or Puerto Rican or Greek. Meeting her eyes caused an electrifying sensation to spirit through my body and she turned immediately away and without thinking I followed after her, hurrying to catch up. We passed a gaudy row of Indian restaurants with their strings of lights and made a right onto Second Avenue. Her shabby jeans, her red revealing top, thrilled through every step I took and I followed close behind, barely a step or two, so near I could smell her hair. She turned again and only after she stopped did I realize where she had led me: my old street. We stood together at the foot of my one-time home, that tiny studio where I once dreamt of stacking books like an enclosing wall. I was inches away as she slipped the key into the lock and twisted it, pushed the door in and on entering, held it wide for me, like a tamer holding open a lion’s massive jaws, and immediately I knew I was home.

Five flights up and me a step behind her every moment, tasting the sharp odor of her sweat as it pressed through the air toward me. The stairwell graffiti had changed little over the years and we wound up through the stiff artery of creaking steps as if toward a fractured heart. The old door to my apartment hung in the gloom at the end of the hall where all lights had long since been broken, and once there, standing at this familiar portal, I pressed my body against her back and waited, my own heart thumping and my lips touching the nape of her neck, until the door swung open and we were, in moments, swallowed by even deeper darkness. A black
blanket covered the single window, the floors were crowded with refuse, and the bed was simply a mattress with a metal headboard and footboard and no sheets. Broken, leaning against a wall, stood the lamp I had found on the corner the morning I first moved in. Once inside, she moved quickly, gathering up objects and only after several minutes did she approach me and motioned with her eyes to my clothes. I stripped off in a state of excitement and then she looked at the bed and I lay down on it. We didn’t say a word.

Reaching across my body, she pulled one of my wrists fiercely up and tied it with a leather strip to the bedpost. The moment she touched me, I knew, with a certainty beyond words, that we were the same person, and it wasn’t me she was tying, but that I was doing this to myself. Her breast pressed against my face as she tied the leather off and pulled it taut until the band cut almost into the bone. In minutes, I was spread-eagled on the bed, wrists and ankles already humming in soft pain. She climbed onto me and forced an old rag into my mouth and tied it into place with something like a belt. The rag smelled vile and it was all I could do not to choke on it, but moments later, my situation became more dire. I was blindfolded and masked and could hardly breathe except through tiny holes for my nose. Struggling, I threw my head back and to the side, and immediately felt her mouth press against the side of my shrouded head and for the first time I heard her voice: a gentle, consoling whisper of a breath, and instantly, all fight left me. Soon, she was moving again, pulling the bonds tighter at my feet and arms. I lay there, unresponsive, allowing the pain to slice deeper into my flesh, for were we not the same person, the same body, one and the same agony? She will leave me alone to die, I thought, for
that was what I would have done to myself, here, caught in a mad web, naked and in pain, adrift on ever rising waves as if my body floated farther and farther out, and I was already a corpse waiting for the rot of my flesh to be discovered. Instead I felt her move close to me with some object, a knife perhaps, and she jabbed it, creating a hole at my ear, making sure to nip the side of my head, and then there was her miraculous breath pulsing against me in soft, startled whispers.

She was singing an old lullaby, “Rock-a-bye-baby.” Her voice rang out with an otherworldly confidence, as if she had landed here, on this planet, in this age, to do exactly this, to sing this song to me in my time of distress and terror. Above me, the sky opened and my body, which now floated on the epidermis of the oceans, was nothing more than so much flotsam and jetsam in a whole universe of castaways. There were other songs, so many, some I knew, others new to me. “Tom Dooley” and “Mr. Bojangles” and “I Shall be Released” and the hours passed and became days, and the days passed and became years, and on that bed, all flesh fell away, the blood dried up, and I was transformed into something harder and substantive, an alloy, a severe and glinting metal.

When I woke she was gone and the restraints released and I lay there naked on that bed in a state of enchantment. It was some time before I could stand, shaking, nauseous, hungry, and I ran into a corner and vomited violently. Straightening again and searching for my clothes in a slow circle around the room, I experienced a sense of defeat, but over what, by whom, what battles had I ever fought? Eventually I discovered my watch resting on the dresser. According to it, no more than an hour had passed. I was sure it was wrong. I was certain beyond doubt it had been years.

VII

“Do you want a drink?” Christie said. She didn’t look at me when I walked into the kitchen. Instead, her back to me, she was pouring herself a glass of white wine. I had been sitting in the study, watching the garden darken and the colors shift, the green taking on the burden of night while the eastern sky inked over, greedily inhaling a whole palette of colors before losing itself to black. When I heard her, the key in the lock, the pad of steps along the hall, I felt a momentary desire to tell her everything, the whole sorry story from my confusion when I asked her to marry me to all the events of today. The impulse was sudden, and I squashed it as suddenly, but walking down the stairs to meet her in the kitchen, the thought continued to float at the far edge of my consciousness.

“I’ll get it,” I said, stepping in behind her and reaching around for the scotch. I thrust the glass at the ice dispenser and watched five cubes splash into the drink while Christie turned and looked at me. I raised the glass to my lips.

“What happened to your face? You look awful.”

“It doesn’t matter. Some kid on a skateboard decided not to look where he was going.”

“Let me see.”

“No, don’t.”

“Fine,” she said, irritated. “Have it your way.” She turned and began her nightly search of the refrigerator to see if there was anything to eat.

“There’s never a goddamn thing, is there?”

“The fall was nothing, okay,” I said. “A guy in a shop patched me up. It’s not important. What’s important is that I want to talk to you tonight. I want to try and explain.”

She folded her arms, dropped her chin until she was staring at her feet and stood like that, silently tapping one foot. She said, “Okay, we talk.”

We were soon settled side by side on the living-room sofa, each with a drink, staring at the sliding glass doors leading to a hardwood deck we almost never used, and a garden which was alien territory for the both of us. The television was Christie’s old one, as was the glass coffee table where I had earlier placed a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. Her copy, a hardbound Modern Library edition with a worn blue cover whose pages were warped by water. She’d told me, on one of our early dates, that she had dropped it in the bathtub one night when reading. I’d felt a tremendous warmth for her, for someone who’d lie in a tub and actually read that book.

“I don’t know what’s happened to me these past few months,” I said.

“Months?”

“What? You want an exact date? An anniversary?”

“No. Go on.”

“When I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself. I’m not the man you married, I don’t know why.”

“And
. . . so what’s the news here? You think I’m surprised? I don’t know who you are either. I have no fucking clue!”

“Please, Christie, let me try and explain.”

“No . . . you wait. If this is going where I think it’s going, I don’t want stories. I don’t want to hear how much you love me, how fucking sorry you are, how it’ll all be different. It’s too late.”

Perhaps that’s what I would have tried had I come straight to meet her from my encounter with John, but the events of the afternoon had changed everything. I was already
beginning to question whether it really happened—the coincidence seemed too striking: my old apartment, a sadistic siren . . . But what then is reality, I asked myself, if not the coagulation of past circumstance and a person’s present. It is the inexplicable that claims the heart, that shapes us every day, for better or worse. Don’t we lay these traps for ourselves every minute? Simply by living, by acting in the world, we erect a history that must, sooner or later, overpower and strangle us. These were the thoughts I had as I sat alone waiting for Christie, and this was why, if there can be any reason, I chose my curious love song.