Quarantine: Stories (7 page)

Frank and I have our pasts, whoring around New York. Literally. When Frank first moved here, he sometimes did it for money, getting paid as much as four hundred dollars depending on the act. I, on the other hand, never
knowingly
had sex for money. Once I went with a German guy back to his hotel and after sex, to my surprise, he gave me forty bucks. I was so offended—not because he thought I was a prostitute, but because he thought I was only worth forty bucks—that when he went to the bathroom I stole the other hundred from his wallet and left.

“I’m not sure about this,” Frank says.

“Think about it,” I say. And I guess he thinks, because we don’t talk for the rest of the ride. We read and reread the subway ads in silence.

O
ne cold gray weekend last fall, Ellison and Rajiv paid for me and Frank to fly down and visit them. Frank and my brother are exactly the same age, and Frank was amazed how different Rajiv’s life was from his own: four-bedroom house, furniture from Ethan Allen, not the Salvation Army, no leaky faucets, no toilet handles you had to jiggle, no warped doors that didn’t close. The guest bedroom we slept in was pink and everything matched exactly—the comforter, the sheets, the pillow covers, even the lampshade and curtains—like they were all bought at the same store.

The four of us took a road trip to see a bridge. Though it was overcast and had rained, the drive was beautiful. The leaves had begun to turn, and the raindrops magnified the colors. The slick bright leaves, sticking to the cars and roads, looked like patches on denim.

The bridge was famous for being the longest or highest or oldest or something. At the designated photo spot, we asked a tourist to take a photo of the four of us. Later, when I examined the picture, I thought we all looked horrible, facing this way and that, not even smiling. I was convinced that we had smiled the second after the photo had been snapped. The tourist should have waited. What a shame. The bridge in the background was perfect, its smooth arch stark against the chaotic rocks of the gorge, the river below the color of gunmetal.

The last night we were there, Ellison offered to cook dinner. Rajiv had made vegetarian lasagna the night before. She said she didn’t need any help, she wanted us to relax and spend time together. “It’s not often enough you two brothers get to see each other,” she said.

Rajiv, Frank and I played Jenga in the living room, taking turns trying to move blocks from the center of the tower to the top without knocking it over. We played three rounds, and I lost all three. During the fourth round, I took a break and went into the kitchen for juice and asked Ellison what she was cooking.

“Thai stir-fry,” she said. “Vegetables, noodles, and peanut sauce. I hope you like it.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m allergic to peanuts.”

“Rajiv didn’t tell me you were allergic to peanuts,” she said.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “Since you haven’t added the sauce yet, I’ll have mine without.”

“It won’t taste right,” she said. She went into the living room. “Rajiv, you didn’t tell me your brother’s allergic to peanuts.”

“I didn’t know you were making peanuts,” Rajiv said, not looking up from the Jenga because he was in the middle of his turn.

“Of course you knew,” she said. “I only ever buy these vegetables when I’m making this dish. You went shopping with me. You knew I was making it.”

“One sec,” Rajiv said, still trying to place the block on top of the tower. “Let me finish my turn.”

“Fuck your turn,” Ellison said, swinging her arm and knocking over the tower. The blocks crashed against the wooden table. Some fell on Rajiv. Ellison returned to the kitchen.

I looked at my brother. He collected the blocks and started restacking them.

I went into the kitchen, and Ellison was dumping not just the stir-fry but the whole wok into the garbage. She was crying. “Your brother knew I was making this tonight,” she said. “He deliberately wanted to make me look like an idiot in front of you and Frank.” She went into the bedroom and shut the door.

In the living room, Rajiv and Frank had started another round of Jenga. Frank looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Rajiv was concentrating. He said, without looking away, “Let’s order Chinese.”

Later that night, my brother came out on the porch while I was smoking. Ellison hadn’t emerged from the bedroom all evening. Frank was inside watching cable.

“Can I have a drag?” my brother asked. I handed him my cigarette, and he took a long, slow drag that must have given him a head rush.

“You should have said something to Ellison,” I said.

Rajiv returned my cigarette. “When Ellison and I first met,” he said, “I was a mess. Really a mess. I didn’t tell you and Mom and Dad because I didn’t want you to worry. I was having anxiety attacks. They felt like heart attacks. The first time I had one, I thought I was dying. I even called an ambulance. But they kept happening. I’d cry all the time. I couldn’t sleep in my apartment alone. Ellison was so sweet to me. She had problems, too. We took care of each other. When I look back on that time, I don’t know how I would have made it without her.”

“Do you still have those attacks?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I got better. But Ellison’s getting worse. We have always been there for each other. So you can see why I can’t ‘say something,’ why I can’t stand up to her or talk back.”

“I didn’t mean you should have stood up for yourself,” I said. “I meant you should have comforted her.”

Rajiv was silent for a moment. “You’re one to be giving relationship advice,” he said. Then he asked if he could have a whole cigarette to himself. He smoked it and then left, and by the time I went inside he was asleep.

The next morning when I woke up, Rajiv had made pancakes. Ellison was smiling. They drove us to the airport, and we laughed in the car at a funny old song on the radio, and they hugged and kissed us good-bye. As I walked toward the gate, I looked back and saw them, arms around each other, waving.

A
t the club on Avenue B, there is a long line outside. The man standing in front of us is wearing fake fur and sunglasses and sputtering into a silver cell phone. His backpack is shaped like an alligator, and the green sequins glitter in the light from the streetlamp.

Inside, I realize I have forgotten how to dance. I have a couple of drinks and try to relearn by watching people around me. I imitate the way one man’s arm windshield-wipes the air. I imitate a bald man who throws his head around as though he has a great quantity of hair and he is making patterns, like a gymnast with a ribbon.

Frank goes to get more drinks. A boy rubs up against me and I rub back. He is cute. I lean against him, following the way his body moves. He is very young, six or seven years younger than I am, too young to be here. His thin face and wrists and long eyelashes remind me of myself when I was his age.

It’s happening. I can tell it’s happening, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. I tug on his shirt and pull him off the dance floor. I take him toward the back room. Frank is there with our drinks. He is with a man, and the man’s hand is on his back. They are entering the back room, too. Frank sees me. He is still looking at me, when I say to the boy, “Let’s go somewhere else,” and we turn and leave.

Outside, we walk past a couple of buildings. I push the boy into an alley. I don’t look at him anymore. I don’t kiss him or stroke his cock through his jeans. I turn the boy around, push him against the brick wall, yank down his jeans. I roll on a condom I got from the safe-sex people in the club, and I start fucking him. I don’t prep his asshole with my fingers. I know it hurts. I know from experience and from the tightness of his ass and the way he doesn’t grunt or moan but cries. I want this to be over. I want to be home with Frank, asleep.

Afterward, I ask the boy if he’s OK and he says yes. I’m sorry, I say, I’m really, really sorry. I tell him I’m going inside and he says OK. I find Frank sitting on a couch alone. The man who was with him in the back room is gone. I ask Frank if he’s ready and he says yes and we get a cab.

Back at the apartment, the first thing I need is a shower. I hope I’ll feel better after. When I get out, Frank is in his boxer shorts standing with the fridge door open, staring blankly into the empty fridge. In the dark kitchen, the light of the fridge makes Frank’s pale skin moonlike. He shuts the fridge door and in the grayness of early morning says to me, “We didn’t do anything—me and that guy in the club—nothing happened.”

“Really?” I say. “I’m surprised. How come?”

He shrugs.

I briefly consider whether I have to tell Frank about the boy in the alley.

After a minute, I say, “Something happened with me.”

“I know,” Frank says. I think he is going to say something else, but he doesn’t and he goes into the bedroom.

I can’t stay here. It’s only a couple of hours until work. I decide to go to a diner, get some breakfast, have coffee. I pick the least dirty clothes up off the floor, put them on, and leave.

For the first Monday in all the Mondays of my adult life, I am happy to be at work. I am thankful for the fluorescent lights, the empty conversations, dress shirts and slacks. Even the filing. I am thankful I can see the order in things.

B
y six o’clock, most of my co-workers have left. I want to leave, too, but I can’t face Frank. He’s bartending tonight, but he won’t leave home until later. I decide to call my brother.

“How you doing?” I say, happy that Rajiv has answered and not Ellison.

“I’ve been better,” he says.

“Ellison told Frank,” I say. “You know . . . that you guys are having problems. And Frank told me.”

There is a long pause. He’s not ready to talk, I think. I should have waited for him to call me. I cough so that he knows I’m still there.

“Am I a terrible person?” Rajiv asks.

“No,” I say. “Of course you’re not.”

And then I ask him the question I have been waiting to ask since Frank and I visited last fall: “Why did you get married?”

If I had asked him two years ago, before they married, why they were doing it, my brother would have said, “We’re in love; we want to spend the rest of our lives together,” and to everyone, maybe even me, that would have been enough.

Now he answers, “We needed each other.”

Then he says, “I called Dad and Mom on their anniversary this year. I talked to Dad while Mom was in the shower. Do you know what I asked him? I asked him if he was always in love with Mom, if he was
still
in love with her. He hesitated and then he answered, ‘Of course, my family is my whole world.’ He didn’t say he was
in love
with
Mom
.”

“That’s what he meant,” I say, but I know Rajiv isn’t satisfied. “Mom and Dad had an arranged marriage,” I remind him. “They hadn’t even met each other when they got married. The phrase ‘in love’ doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to you.”

“Dad hesitated,” Rajiv says. “When I asked him the question, he hesitated before he answered. That means something.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You didn’t see his face. You only talked to him on the phone.”

“In thirty years,” Rajiv says, “when someone asks me if I’m still in love with my wife I want to be able to answer right away, ‘Hell, yes!’ In fact, I want it to be so clear that no one would even think to ask me.”

“No one would ask you because it’s a rude thing to ask,” I say. “What kind of son asks his father that?”

Rajiv says, “You don’t understand. I don’t want to be Dad.”

I don’t want to talk anymore. “I have to go,” I say, and hang up.

S
hortly after my brother got married, my parents insisted that he and Ellison travel to India together. Many of our relatives missed the wedding because they were unable to obtain visas or they couldn’t afford the airfare. “It’s not right that they haven’t met her,” my father had said. “You should go, too,” my mother had said to me. “It’s been ages since you’ve visited India. We’ll pay.” Frank was jealous. He’d always wanted to go to India. I promised to call often and to take lots of pictures.

When we visited the village where my parents were from, the village where my grandparents and many of my relatives still lived, there were whispers among family members about a distant cousin in Bombay (so distant, we weren’t even planning to see him) whose wife had recently left him. Apparently, she had disappeared so suddenly that she had abandoned, along with her husband, a closet full of clothes and shoes. “Such expensive beaded heels!” I’d heard my grandmother hiss.

If there was, in my relatives’ native language, a word for divorce, it wasn’t used by them. Instead, the word was always spoken in English, even when the rest of the sentence wasn’t. In their minds, divorce was a Western concept and the English word should be used. They’d pronounce it with a long “i” and with emphasis on the first syllable:
DIE-vorce
. A divorce wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t a mutual decision. Someone
gave
it. “She gave the DIE-vorce.” Someone had failed. Someone was to blame. “She’s ruined,” an uncle had said, “a complete outcast. Who will have her now?”