Quarantine: Stories (20 page)

Toward the end of the night, Sanj found himself talking to a guy who had come late and had sat next to him, a man in his late twenties or perhaps early thirties. He was cute, and he wore a red baseball cap pulled low on his head. He introduced himself as Chad. Sanj thought he recognized him, but wasn’t sure. Sanj flirted with him. He took his baseball cap and put it on his own head. When Chad leaned in to retrieve it, Sanj kissed him long and hard. He whispered, “Take me home.” Chad said, “I can’t.”

Driving home afterward, Sanj remembered him: Chad
Webster
. His house was near Sylvie’s. He was a few years older than they were; in fact, Sanj remembered Sylvie saying he’d been her babysitter when she was a kid. Sanj remembered seeing him once, a few years ago, washing his car in the driveway—a sleekly beautiful ’69 Dodge Charger, plum-colored. At the time, Sanj had fantasized about riding in the passenger seat, driving into the horizon with Chad’s arm around him.

The next time Sanj talked to Sylvie, he asked about Chad.

“He went off to D.C. right after high school. He lived there several years, but then he got sick. He’s been sick for a while. ‘He’s come home to rest.’ That’s what his mom told my mom. Why are you asking?”

“No reason,” Sanj said. “I saw him in line at Foodland. He looked familiar, then I remembered he was your neighbor. I was just curious.”

At home that night, Sanj couldn’t stop thinking about Chad.
Sick?

A few days before Sanj had left New York, he’d gone out to a bar in Chelsea. Soon after arriving, he downed three vodka tonics. Much of the night was a haze. A man groped him by the pay phones outside the bathroom. He’d introduced himself as Paul. He was accompanied by a young Indian man named Asher, who lived with his parents in Queens and was a med-school student, though apparently he was on the verge of failing out. Paul kept telling Sanj he and Asher were “just friends.”

When Paul was getting them drinks, Asher took Sanj aside and said, “Paul and I used to be a couple. We’re going through a rough patch, but he still loves me and I still love him. As a fellow Indian, you would never want to come between us. I’m trusting you. You are my brother.”

Outside, Paul put Asher in a cab headed for Queens, and he put his arm around Sanj and said, “Let’s go.” His place was nearby. It was a large, loft-style apartment, beautifully decorated. Sanj recognized the black chaise longue as a Le Corbusier. In bed, when Paul started to enter Sanj, Sanj asked, “Where’s the condom?” Paul said, “We don’t need it. I’m clean.” When Sanj tried to push Paul away, Paul said, “C’mon.” He kissed Sanj on the mouth then said, “It doesn’t feel as good with one of those things on. It kills all the sensation.” Sanj said, “Fine, but if you come inside me, I’ll kill
you
.”

Afterward, it was too late to catch a train back to Long Island. Lying next to Paul, Sanj couldn’t sleep. He felt guilty for betraying Asher, not that he’d actually promised him anything. But more than that, Sanj couldn’t believe, knowing all that he knew, that he’d let Paul fuck him without a condom. Sanj lay awake the next few hours, imagining Paul’s fluids,
infected
fluids, Sanj imagined—a few drops of come or pre-come—invading his body. He imagined he could actually feel it: tiny cells of Paul—a complete stranger Sanj wouldn’t even recognize were he to see him again—coursing through Sanj’s body, up his torso, down through his arms and hands, up through his neck, the liquid pooling in his head in the hollows just behind his eyes. It was like Paul was a part of him now.

At five, Sanj got out of bed and left, Paul still asleep. He slogged onto the A train to Penn Station, waited half an hour for the next train, changed at Jamaica, walked the twenty minutes from his stop in Long Island to his uncle and auntie’s house. The shops along the main street were just beginning to pull up their metal shutters. When he arrived at the house, Lala Auntie was in the kitchen in her nightgown and dressing coat, scraping into the garbage the food from the plate she had left out for Sanj the night before. She barely looked at him as he walked past her.

Sylvie’s words about Chad echoed in Sanj’s head:
He’s come home to rest.
Sanj realized he needed to leave. Now. His parents were due back in just a few more days, but Sanj couldn’t wait. He had to get out while he still could. He thought of the visit to Sylvie’s a few days earlier: the sagging porch, the buckling linoleum floor, everyone in sweatpants. He remembered the promise he’d made to her four years ago, when he’d said, “You’ll get out of here, too. I’ll help you.” He thought, too, of what his father had said on the phone about Chandu Uncle and their early years in America, how neither of them could have made it without the other. He decided that, this time, he wouldn’t leave Sylvie behind.

S
ylvie didn’t need much convincing. She told her parents she was going on a week’s vacation with Sanj, though she and Sanj—in words whispered to one another, as though saying them too loudly might jeopardize or jinx them—both hoped it would turn into something more. Aside from occasional trips across the river to Ohio, she hadn’t set foot outside West Virginia since high school. She was ready for an adventure.

They took a cab to the bus station, a bus to Charleston, and a train from there to New York. The train would take twelve hours overnight.

In the row in front of them were a large woman and her young daughter, who must have been about eight and who was clutching a Bart Simpson doll. Across from them was an out-of-work coal miner—muscular and compact, with dirty fingernails. He was planning to show up, without forewarning, at the New Jersey house of his half-brother, with whom the man had never been particularly close. But he had nowhere else to go, or so he explained, over the course of a couple hours, to the large woman across the aisle. “I tried calling, Lord knows I tried. But I could never finish dialing. Partly because I was worried he’d say no, and then where would I go? But mostly because I’m just so embarrassed for screwing everything up.” Later, he said to the woman, “You’re so easy to talk to. Why can’t everyone be like you?”

Sitting behind Sanj and Sylvie were preteen boys on their way back home to the Bronx (reluctant to be returning—“The Bronx is
tough
”—after having spent the summer with their aunt in South Carolina). As Sanj passed their seat on his way back from the toilet, he thought he’d heard one of them mutter “faggot,” but wasn’t sure. Later, the same boy popped his head over the seat, and asked Sanj if he could borrow the batteries from Sanj’s Walkman to use in his own Walkman, and Sanj, for reasons he couldn’t understand—given what he’d thought he’d heard the boy say earlier—complied. The boy blasted Tupac, sharing the earphones with his brother, listening through one speaker while his brother listened through the other.

It was night. Most of the lights in the train car were off, but many passengers hadn’t pulled their curtains shut, and Sanj could see the lights from the streetlamps outside roll across Sylvie’s face. The half-light gave everything in the compartment a dreamlike quality.

Sanj heard giggling, then moaning from the seat in front of him. When he ventured a peek, he saw that the man and the little girl had switched places. The man was now in the seat with the large woman, the woman’s daughter sitting by herself across the aisle. Sanj saw the man on top of the woman, one hand over her breast, the other under her skirt. Sanj thought about the man’s dirty fingernails.

Sanj and Sylvie slumped down in their chairs, their knees pressing against the seat in front of them. Sylvie whispered, “I want this to work. I want a new start.” Sanj took her hand. She rested her head on his shoulder. In the dark car, cocooned among these people all coupled off—the man and the woman in the seat ahead, the boys sharing the earphones behind them, the little girl across the aisle hugging her Bart Simpson doll—Sanj felt the train tracks rumbling below him, the train car hurtling forward, and he felt hopeful, like they were heading toward something.

E
arly the next morning, groggy-eyed, they switched trains at Penn Station, and hopped on the LIRR to Long Island. Chandu was waiting for them at the stop.

Sanj hadn’t told him he’d be bringing a friend, much less a
female
friend. Chandu Uncle looked surprised, then disappointed, shaking his head, but he didn’t protest. At the house, The Jasmines gave Sylvie the once-over, their lips curling in disapproval as they tossed their perfumey hair. Only Lala showed any sympathy. Speaking to Meghana in a firm tone Sanj hadn’t heard before, she arranged for Sylvie to share Meghana’s bedroom. She also managed to teach Sylvie, through a series of gestures, how to eat Indian food properly, how to tear the roti with only one hand and to use it to scoop up the vegetables.

Still, Sanj could tell, almost immediately, it was a bad idea to have brought Sylvie. Whatever courage or resolve she had managed to muster in the dark on the train had quickly vanished. Instead, she retreated into herself. She didn’t want to leave the house. When she did venture out—Sanj dragging her through SoHo (“This is the newsstand where I saw Naomi Campbell buying three copies of a magazine with her face on the cover; doesn’t her manager provide her with copies?”)—she lagged behind, barely looking up from the sidewalk.

By the third night, Sylvie had given Meghana the emerald green Yves Saint Laurent cocktail dress which she had bought at Bergdorf four years ago, and which she had packed for the trip, not out of any rational belief that she would be able to wear it again, that she would be able to fit into it or have the life that would warrant it, but out of a hope she was too frightened to even fully imagine or name. When Meghana, cooing over the dress, asked with disbelief, “This was
yours
?” Sylvie replied, “No, it belonged to someone else.”

By then, Sanj’s parents had returned from India with his grandmother. He spoke to them on the phone. His father told him about his briefcase, which had been stolen at JFK (“I only set it down for a minute in the restroom”) and about his grandmother, who had pouted the whole way and had barely spoken a word since arriving. “She’s miserable,” Bipin admitted. “But that’s to be expected. It takes time.”

Toward the end of the conversation, Bipin said, “You shouldn’t have left your grandfather alone.”

“He didn’t need me.”

“How do you know?”

Sanj had resumed his charade of pretending to go to work at
Vogue
, leaving Sylvie, most afternoons, alone with Lala. One day, he said, “Great news! They’re letting me write the preview after all, the one about the emerging writer.”

“I know,” Sylvie said.

“How could you know? I just found out myself.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “I
know
.”

“Know what?”

“The truth.”

“About what?”

“Everything.” She was looking directly at him, something, Sanj now realized, she rarely did. He noticed, too, for the first time, her eyes: emerald, like the dress, and glowing.

Sanj said, “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“I know why you were asking about Chad Webster.”

Sanj didn’t respond.

“I know you’re gay.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I know you don’t work at
Vogue
.” She looked to Sanj for a response, but he was quiet. It was he, now, who was averting his eyes. She said, “You’re not fooling anyone.”

“My parents . . .”

“Your parents,” she said, interrupting, “don’t
want
to know the truth.”

He wondered how she knew about
Vogue
, and for how long she’d known. Had she known sitting on the sectional in his basement, watching
La Double Vie de Véronique
, when he told her about Anna Wintour and the Lucite watches? Or when they sat together in the Van Gogh room? Had she listened to him rattle on and on about the article he’d pitched, knowing he was making it all up? When he’d said he was lucky, was she secretly laughing at him?
Lucky, my ass.

“You’re jealous,” Sanj said.

“Of what?”

“My life has possibilities. I may have had a rocky start here in New York, but I guarantee I have a bright future. What does your future hold? Getting fat in your parents’ house in West Virginia? Another failed attempt at fucking community college? Sitting on the couch with your brother, smoking pot? You’ll never be anything other than a loser.”

Sanj took a step back, looked her up and down—the way The Jasmines had when she first arrived, the way so many had over the past four years—and said with disgust, “Look at you.”

He stormed out of the house and toward the station to catch a train into the city. The LIRR was empty, as it usually was this time of day. No one was taking the train into the city; rush hour was long over. Sanj had a whole row to himself; in fact, he practically had the whole car to himself. He lay down across the seats, on his side, curling his body into the smallest ball he could manage. He wanted to disappear. Was it true, what Sylvie had said? Did everyone know? Had everyone always known?

When he arrived at Penn Station, he pulled on his headphones, and started walking. The city still seemed so strange to him. He tried to imagine what it had been like for his father arriving in Oklahoma at age seventeen. How many times must his father have stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, seeing the houses and the lawns and the trees and the cars in the driveways, and, remembering his village, wondered, “Why am I here?”