Amriika (8 page)

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“Good night. And thank you for everything.”

“You are most welcome. But I’ll see you before I leave. Good night.”

In his attic room he looked out the window at the trees now bereft of snow, ghostly and barren, though the roofs were still covered white. A solitary figure, huddled in a coat, had appeared on the street, mesmerizing in its singularity and the distant regular sound of footfalls. Most likely someone returning from a party; and so the Christmas season’s over — all that anticipation, the festivities and lights.…The phone rang somewhere in the house. A little later it rang again. Both times he heard Ginnie’s voice, caught snatches of conversation. John and the boys calling to wish her a happy new year.

Inside the soft fresh-smelling bedcovers — the temperature in the room, aided by an electric heater, just warm enough for him — he was somewhat annoyed at himself when he realized he had an
erection. Doesn’t know night from day, he mused, recalling an adolescent joke, a statement originally about the suddenness of death, its disregard of time and place, applied to youthful tumescence.

There were steps coming up.

She knocked delicately. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” he said, then louder, “Yes!”

“I heard you,” she said, coming in. “I couldn’t sleep either. John called. Wishes you a happy new year. The boys too. They called.”

“I hope you wished them the same for me.”

“I did.…Are you hungry? You shouldn’t feel shy, you know. You haven’t had a bite since dinner, and that was seven hours ago.”

“It’s late now,” he said. “Soon it’ll be morning.” Actually he was quite hungry.

“What fortitude.…” She sat on the bed, close to his feet, and she gave him a fond look as he tried to raise himself and balance on his elbows.

“What do you think about when you can’t get to sleep?” she asked.

“I don’t know … all kinds of things, I suppose.” He felt awkward leaning back on his elbows, and began to sit up some more.

“It’s all right,” she said, “don’t get up. Sorry I disturbed you. Well, good night.” She moved closer and gave him a peck.

How nice she smells, her family shouldn’t have abandoned her at this moment …

“Why, you’re inhaling me,” she said, lingering over him.

He looked at her, blushing deeply.

She put a hand on his crotch, over the quilt. “My my, who’s going to take care of this little — not so little — problem. Not by yourself …”

He tried hard to swallow.

Deftly she had found his crotch under the bedcovers, over his pyjamas.

He was flat on his back now and staring at her face, at her eyes, anxiously, breathlessly, almost tearfully.

“You should let go a little.…Nothing’s that serious … nothing’s worth holding on to so badly.…It’s no sin to love a woman.…” She was on him, and he felt grateful, immensely, and they were kissing, and he didn’t quite know if he was crying or simply moaning with happiness. His knowledge of such moments was almost nonexistent, he knew he had to do something with his lips, his tongue. Her mouth was large and wet and tasty. He wanted to eat her. “Life’s not so evil,” she said, pulling back.

He felt a pain, somewhere deep inside him; he couldn’t breathe as he looked at her smiling face. He could see a faint down of blonde hair above her lip. There was a thin line, of age, he thought, forming at the corners. Her hair was glorious. She must have been gorgeous ten years ago. He took her hand and kissed her fingers just as she was drawing away, then moved it to his crotch. She pulled down his pyjama with that hand, bent and caressed him with her mouth. “Nice,” she said. “Full blown and ready to burst.” She sat up. “Wait, hold on, think of anything else, the lions on the Serengeti. You have to come properly.” Quickly she had pulled down her panties — he assumed — from under her robe and had climbed on the bed and was wet and sticky on him, and Ramji was enclosed by her and sliding, helpless and joyful, grateful to that loving face above him, and all he could do was grab her buttocks with his hands and move, watching that face contort with pleasure and utter sounds akin to his, say to himself,
I am doing it, I am doing it, I am doing it to her. Thank you, God. Thank you, Ginnie.

“I had it all planned out, you know,” she said.

“I am glad you did.”

He was trying to be in command, pushing her down on the bed and mounting her, murmuring endearments.

“I don’t do this all the time with any guest, you should know that,” she said firmly but tenderly, and pushed him away to sit up.

“I know, I know … but I love you.”

Suddenly she shrank back from him and he gaped at her as he beheld before him a stark-bald Ginnie! Her face looked puffed up, the makeup had smudged; and she was holding her blonde hair, a wig, in her hand. She could have been a clown.

“Ta-raaa!”

“What … what —” he said in utter confusion.

“Do you love me now?”

“Yes I do.” Forcefully. How could he not? But what was the meaning of this?

“Aw,” she cried, wiping her eyes. “Even if you don’t mean it, thank you.”

“But I do mean it,” he said, staring at her baldness, then her face, still glorious. “Put it back.”

“Better?” she asked, putting the wig back on her head. He didn’t reply. “It’s from my chemotherapy treatment — I’ve got cancer in my abdomen.”

Stunned, all of a sudden his heart in his stomach, he choked back the words in his mouth, then recovered and said, “It’s not bad? This chemotherapy — it works?”

She nodded.

“They say it does, but who knows. I lost my hair and my face is pudgy.”

“It doesn’t look pudgy.”

What a time for her family to abandon her.

They lay side by side and she talked. “I want to tell you about myself.”

“Please do, that would be lovely. I’ve often wondered.…I’m very curious.”

He imagined, with her dreamy prompting, a modest American family in Florida. She was one of three sisters and a brother, Chris, who had been killed in the war. It took a moment to realize she meant World War II. Where, he asked. I don’t know, she replied. He meant: against the Japanese or the Germans, in Asia or in Europe. (The war evoked images of heroism in him, he had known it only from the movies.) But he didn’t persist. Her father had worked at an ice cream factory and would bring home buckets of the stuff (“that’s why we’re all so creamy and soft”); weekends he moonlighted at the Post Office. She herself finished high school and went to work at Woolworths. “Never was good at school,” she said. “Not like you — I bet you topped everything.” He turned to look at her: “But that’s not everything, is it.” “No,” she said, showing surprise at his comment, “I guess it isn’t.” One summer in ’49, she and her two sisters took off for Baltimore and Washington. With no intention of returning. “Why? Oh, Dad was sick and had retired, Mother never recovered from Chris’s death, she drank. It had become a miserable house and we wanted fun.” Fun they had,
three beautiful blondes. Her sister Pat, who was the youngest of them, found a boy on the train up and married him in September — “she pretty much had to the way they went on. Never thought my shy sister capable of so much reckless passion. She’s a widow now, in Annapolis, but with a brilliant son in the navy — like his father — did I tell you he was in the navy?”

“And you — how did you —”

“I stayed with Pat and learned to type, and then one day Frank — Pat’s husband — brought home this serious specimen on a blind date and I gasped. What’s that? I asked Frank. So that’s how I met John. He was at Johns Hopkins on a veteran’s scholarship. He took me to meet his mother, who took one look at me and said to him: Are you sure? You’ll have to put a leash on her. Oh, we got along from day one, his mom and I.”

And her older sister Sharon became a nurse and married — or just cohabited with — a rich old man. She knew how to take care of herself. She was a professional golfer now. “You should meet her — she’ll sweep you off your feet.”

She left him with a kiss. Yes, she loved him, she said. Would there be other moments like this, he was afraid to ask her.

“Call me,” he begged.

“Of course I will,” she said. “We’ll meet again, silly. Remember what I said, you come whenever you feel like it, and call collect.”

And the sin he’d just committed, the guilty secret.…He didn’t think about it, not then, this was one glorious night without darkness, and he slept hugging his pillow.

“Nice little bourgeois retreat you’ve got yourself here,” Gudrun said, as he opened the front door for her. She had on a striking new-looking red angora sweater over the patched worn-out blue jeans he recognized from the trip down. “I bet these people vote Nixon.” She walked past him, asked to use a bathroom.

“There’s a powder room just there,” he indicated.

She ran in, and when she came out she insisted on a tour of the house, at least the main floor.

“So this is how the rich live,” she said later, archly eyeing him from John’s wingback chair, a can of Fresca in one hand.

“Didn’t Sam come?” he asked as they drove out of Runymede.

“No, the jerk. You know what? He says he has to go home to visit, and guess what he’ll bring back with him when he returns — a nice little Pakistani wife. Are you also like that — like to screw white women but end up marrying a nice little obedient Indian wife?”

He ignored the question. And she went on and on about Sam. “The asshole, didn’t let on he was a Muslim — a fucking Muslim — and he came with me to meet Guru Maharaj-ji —”

“Who?”

“Guru Maharaj-ji —”

“Oh … oh, the —”

“Yes, the fourteen-year-old, but don’t be fooled by that, it’s only his physical age in
this
birth. We’re all thousands of years old, don’t you know — you’re an Indian. You should come to Guru Maharaj-ji Center — it’s on Boylston Street. Nothing will matter about this … this … material world any more …”

She was not a bad sort, just angry, mostly at Sam, whose real
name she told him was Shamsul. The sweater, she admitted, was a present from her folks.

It was not an unpleasant drive. As they approached Boston that night, she asked him if he wanted to come home with her, she could take him to the Center the next morning. He said no, he’d rather be back in his room. She dropped him off at the front steps of the Tech, on Mass Ave, and drove away.

S
pring brings forth protests on campus — loud reckless rebellion against that war in Vietnam, daredevil bone-risking defiance of authority and its policemen — as stereos blare out rock ’n’ roll’s homages to the sun; and for the new student, with a nagging conscience and in search of a cause, there is no more effective and poignant a call to the plight of the world’s wretched than the movie
The Battle of Algiers
.

For many, their first viewing of the gripping tale (pitting coloured natives against a powerful European army) in a heady political climate is a first step towards radicalism, before they too come out shrieking slogans against colonialism and imperialism, chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is gonna win!” in the streets against their own government’s policies.