Before We Visit the Goddess (27 page)

I ventured to say that no air-conditioning in Austin in the summer was a bad idea.

“No air-conditioning,” the agent repeated. “Also, no photography, no taping, no questions after the talk. And no cell phones. This one's really important. He's been known to storm off the stage if a cell phone rings.”

It was my night to dine with Mrs. Dewan in her apartment, but first I needed to decompress. I threw down a stack of notes that I had to go over later, turned on the CD player, and got a chilled beer. Mrs. Dewan had recently started going to meetings, so I did my drinking before dinner. I had just put my feet up on the coffee table when she knocked. Sometimes she ran out of ingredients and came over to check if I had them. I never did, but I think it made her feel neighborly to be able to do this.

I opened the door. It was David. A thinner, more somber David. He had shaved his head. It made him look monkish and sexy. He carried two of my shirts, ironed and neatly folded. He looked nervous, which was not his normal condition. I wanted to hate him. I was halfway to forgiving him.

“I found these among my clothes,” he said. “I thought I should return them.”

He could have left them outside the door. We both knew that.

The world never ceases to surprise. Did I mention this already?

“Would you like to come in?” I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again.

“I would,” he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. “Thank you.”

I was distracted by that thank-you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other. “You're welcome,” I said.

We sat on the couch next to each other, staring at the blank rectangle of the TV screen. Around us, like the soundtrack to a bad movie, rose the sounds of Simon & Garfunkel's “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I picked up the remote to turn it off, but he put his hand over mine. His nails were blunt and wholesome and familiar. It took all my effort not to turn my wrist and clasp his hand.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. He was waiting, but I didn't ask him anything.

“I'm not doing so well,” he said. “I miss you.” He ran a thumb along my jaw. Then his mouth was on mine. He tasted, unexpectedly, of blackberries.

After that, things moved in and out of focus. His shirt hanging unbuttoned. The dip of his navel. The slight softness to his belly, which I've always loved. His impatient hands on my belt buckle. I banged my shin against a chair and heard it topple to the floor. I don't remember how we got to the bed, but there we were, straining against each other on the blue quilt he had bought me as our first anniversary gift, whispering into each other the special names we had created for such moments.

He heard the knocking on the door before I did and stopped mid-motion.

“Kenneth?” I heard Mrs. Dewan call out. “I heard a crash. I was worried because you're usually down for dinner by this time. Kenneth, are you there?”

“Dinner?” David said. “Usually?” He looked at me. “Who the hell is this woman?”

“Just the downstairs neighbor,” I said. “I'll explain later.” I felt absurdly guilty and annoyed for feeling this way. I pressed against David, trying to get him to continue, though I feared the moment was lost.

“Kenneth,” Mrs. Dewan said, knocking again. Her voice was unsteady. “Are you okay? Can you talk? Do you need help? Shall I call the ambulance?”

“Ambulance?” said David. His raised eyebrow said,
Oh, Ken, what kind of crazy mess did you get yourself into while I was away?

I was not sure which of us three I was most angry with. “I'm fine, Mrs. Dewan,” I said, making my voice cheery and casual. “I've just been delayed. Please go back to your apartment. I'll see you in a bit.”

“You sure?” She sounded calmer now, about to leave.

“I'm sure.”

But David was off the bed already. “Stop!” I called. He yanked his arm away, shrugged on the robe hanging on the door hook—a green yukata, another of his elegant gifts—and strode to the door. I barely had enough time to pull on my jeans before he threw it open.

“Ken's busy right now,” he said.

“Who are you?” Mrs. Dewan's voice was suspicious.

“My name is David,” he said. “I'm Ken's boyfriend.”

I saw Mrs. Dewan staring past him at the bedroom, where I stood half naked. In the dim light of the passage, I could not make out the look on her face before she turned away. But I saw the slump of her shoulders. I heard the heavy clatter of her footsteps receding down the corridor.

Over the next few days, I called Mrs. Dewan numerous times. She did not pick up. I sent her texts. She did not reply. I waited around the staircase to catch her, but she was orchestrating her arrivals and departures carefully to avoid me. I stopped by the grocery during her shift. Usually she would be stocking shelves or tidying up after customers. Now she was nowhere to be seen. Finally, I asked Lance. It was awkward. We hadn't spoken to each other since the botched date, only nodded across the corrugations of checkout lanes.

He gave me a look. I was not sure what it meant. Overnight, I had become expressions-illiterate.

“Maybe she's in the back,” he said. “Avoiding you.”

I walked to the storage area and peered through the glazed plastic sheeting into the bowels of the store. Employees scuttled around trays of bread, carts mounded with carrots and kale. I could not find Mrs. Dewan. “Excuse me, sir,” a plump Asian woman in overalls said as she pushed a dolly loaded with laundry detergent past me, “customers are not allowed in here.”

David and I had had a fight that night, the fight we did not have when he left.

“You didn't tell her, did you?” he said.

“You are not my boyfriend,” I said.

“Why didn't you tell her?”

“What gives you the right to ask me?”

“Ken,” he said in his reasonable voice, “I still care about you as a person. Whatever this codependent thing is that you have going on with her, it's unhealthy.”

“Please go,” I said. The traitor part of me wanted him to refuse. To insist on staying. But he left.

After four days, I stopped calling Mrs. Dewan. What was the use?
Let her turn away from who I am
, I thought.
I don't care
. But it was untrue, just as it had been untrue with my parents. I felt restless and feverish. At work I paced up and down, and people looked at me strangely. At night my head swarmed with troubled thoughts. Had I pushed Mrs. Dewan back into alcoholism? Had I, in telling David to leave, made a dreadful mistake? In my imagination, Mrs. Dewan tilted back her head and drank straight from the bottle, wine spilling redly down her chin. In my imagination, I grew old and shriveled in my empty bed as the years limped by. In the mornings, I felt hungover. A headache squeezed my brain. I took double doses of aspirin. They did nothing but roil my stomach.

In the middle of all this, the famous author arrived, sweaty and irritable. I had forgotten the limes to go with his Evian. Things devolved rapidly after that. At the restaurant I had chosen, he said, “You call this pad Thai?” Introducing him at the event, I stumbled over the name of a major prize he had won. In spite of my request to turn off phones, one rang during his talk. He threw a tantrum onstage, making certain comments about Texans. People shouted back. Some walked out. Books were not sold. I knew I would pay for it when I met with the bookstore owner the next day.

It was midnight by the time I got back. I had stopped at a 7-Eleven on the way and picked up a six-pack of beer, which I consumed in the car. My headache was so bad that even my jaw hurt. I dragged myself up to my apartment and stood outside the door, staring at the dark vortex of the peephole. Then I made my way down to Mrs. Dewan's apartment, taking the stairs one shaky step at a time. I punched the bell. She did not answer.

“Okay, Mrs. Dewan,” I shouted. “This has gone on long enough. I'm not leaving until we have a talk.” I sat down on the doormat and leaned against the door. It was strangely restful. I found myself drifting off. It was a sensation like falling backward. No, it was a falling backward. Mrs. Dewan had jerked open the door. I found myself lying in her entryway, staring up at her. Her face appeared, upside down. For a moment I thought she was smiling, but it was only a turned-around grimace.

“Go away,” she said.

“Not until we talk,” I said.

“Oh, God,” she said. “You're drunk.” She tried to push the door closed, but my body was in the way. Finally she said crossly, “Five minutes.”

At the table she moved aside her laptop—I saw that she had been typing a recipe for singaras for
Bela's Kitchen
—and set down a large glass of ice water and a jar of Tiger Balm. As an afterthought, she brought out a packet of saltines. I ignored the insult of the saltines and drank the water in small, offended sips. The Tiger Balm smelled vile. I pushed it back at her. The things I wanted to say, apologies and accusations, crowded my mouth but refused to give themselves up.

Mrs. Dewan said, “I can't believe you'd keep such an important part of your life from me! Why did you do it? And you could have told me about David.”

I searched for the right words. One of my Indian friends at college, also gay, also cut off from his family, had told me they had thought his condition—that was the word they used—a perversion.

“I didn't want you to think I was weird,” I said finally. “I didn't want our dinners to stop. And David—he'd left me even before I met you.” A part of my mind noted, in surprise, that it didn't hurt to say his name.

“You thought I would be upset because you were gay?” she said. “That I'd stop seeing you because of that?”

“You
were
upset when you found out,” I said, with justified truculence. “You
did
stop seeing me.”

“That was because you didn't trust me enough to tell me,” she said angrily. “My husband, he was like that, too. Kept all kinds of things from me. Thought I wasn't strong enough to deal with them.” She shredded her paper napkin into furious strips. “And this after I'd opened up my life for you, told you shameful things I hadn't ever discussed with anyone. You thought I was such a petty, prejudiced person? That's what you thought about me?”

She started on another napkin.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I was no longer angry, just tired. “After I told my parents, my mother couldn't look at me. When she served me dinner, she squinted down at the plate. When she asked about my classes—the only safe subject she could come up with—she stared at a spot on the wall to the right of my head. It made me feel . . . lopsided. Finally, I stopped coming home.”

Mrs. Dewan was silent. Then she leaned forward. For a moment I thought she would take my face in her hands, as one might with a child. Instead, she whispered, “I've kept things from you, too. Do you know, I caused the deaths of two, maybe three, people. People who loved me.”

I must have stared. She shook her head. “I'll tell you, but not tonight. Tonight we need something different.” She took away the saltines and brought rice and fried okra in two small bowls. Left over from her dinner, I guessed. I fell upon them as though I had not eaten in days.

She watched me indulgently. “Don't eat so fast,” she said. “You'll get a stomachache. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

She ducked into her bedroom.

Her cell phone, which she'd left on the dining table, rang, making me jump.

“It's probably Lance, with a last-minute schedule change,” Mrs. Dewan said from the bedroom. “Could you pick it up for me?”

Lance. My insides lurched at the possibility. But it was a woman, most likely conducting a survey of some kind. I asked her to hold, but she hung up.

“Really!” said Mrs. Dewan. “These salespeople! You'd think they'd let people have some peace and quiet this late at night.”