Gods Without Men (13 page)

They ate lunch, which his mom had prepared with help from Seetal and Sukhwindermassi. There was none of the usual bustle, no running around, no jokes or high jinks. For long periods the rattle of the elderly air conditioner was the loudest noise in the room. His dad offered Lisa a whiskey and was displeased to see she accepted. As she sat and sipped her drink, Jaz shuffled his feet and tried to keep the conversation from petering out. In vain he translated some of Lisa’s approaches to his mother, questions about her house, compliments on the food. She wouldn’t respond, just scurried back into the kitchen and pretended to busy herself with pots and pans. Bravely Lisa persevered through the meal, trying fruitlessly to make a connection, helping Seetal and Uma carry dirty plates, even attempting to take charge of doing the dishes; Uma led her politely back into the living room, where Jaz was chatting with his uncles about real estate. She looked thoroughly dejected. Discreetly he squeezed her hand, earning an extra look of disapproval from his father.

Later they sat in the car outside the house. Lisa fumbled angrily in her purse for tissues.

“It’s not you,” he told her. “You understand that, don’t you? They’d be like that with anyone.”

“Anyone white.”

“It’d be the same with a lot of Indians.”

She smiled wanly, dabbing at her eyes. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“Yes, it was.”

“You’re right. It was awful.”

She saw the look on his face and reached out to squeeze his hand. “Don’t worry, Jaz. I won’t run away.”

A few weeks later he took her to an expensive French restaurant in the West Village and asked her to marry him. He was still half expecting
her to say no, but she looked at the ring and grinned and kissed him and a waiter materialized with champagne and the other patrons clapped politely, inaugurating what he now remembered as the best year of his life. They moved into a tiny walk-up in Cobble Hill. He commuted back to Cambridge to see his adviser and she started reading manuscripts for a small publisher. They bought flea-market furniture and went on long walks and made love so frequently and loudly that the crazy French woman downstairs began phoning the super. They cooked pasta and risotto for other young couples, drinking red wine out of ill-matched glasses and arguing about books and films. Once they roasted a chicken for Lisa’s parents, the four of them squeezed around the little kitchen table, clamping their elbows to their sides as they cut up their food. His own parents never saw that apartment. They were too busy, they said, to come to New York. “With what?” he asked. “So many things,” said his father, his voice trailing away.

He complained to Seetal. “How can they visit you?” she snapped. “You aren’t even married yet. And she’s—”

“She’s what? Go on, say it.”

“You chose this, Jaz. You knew what it would mean.”

Jaz successfully defended his thesis, then spent a thankless summer tutoring entitled suburban college applicants, while halfheartedly looking for academic jobs. Then he ran into Xavier, an old MIT friend. He and Lisa were eating in one of the new neighborhood restaurants that had sprung up all across gentrified Brooklyn, a place that served steaks and oysters out of a storefront that retained some of the fittings from the old pharmacy that previously occupied the site. Xavier came over to say hi, and ended up joining them for dessert. He’d been a particle physicist, but had left academia for Wall Street. He wasn’t the first person Jaz had heard of who’d done this. The application of physical models to the financial markets was something of a trend. Banks and hedge funds were hungry for specialists in so-called quantitative finance, mathematicians and computer scientists who could tame the uncertainties of international capital flows. Xavier used words like
revolutionize
and
transformative
. There was serious money involved: He was earning more in a month than Jaz could expect to make in two years as a junior lecturer.
He left behind a business card and a waft of personalized cologne. The next day he phoned to say his firm was hiring. Was Jaz interested? Sure he was. He went for an interview with no special expectations. He didn’t think he’d get the job. Yet six weeks later he found himself in front of a screen, writing code that used the same modeling techniques he’d employed on quantum-probability problems to track fluctuations in the bond market.

Jaz tried not to feel angry that money brought about a reconciliation with his family. Nothing else had worked. Since 9/11 his parents had become increasingly paranoid. They displayed a big American flag in their front window in case anyone mistook them for Muslims; on his first visit after the attacks, Jaz had been furious to find his mother sewing a flag patch onto his father’s work overalls, another charm against white malice. As the war on terror intensified, they seemed more sympathetic to their son’s choices, his decision to “blend in.” Jaz’s rebellion was recast as immigrant cautiousness.

With his Wall Street salary swelling their joint bank account, he and Lisa made an offer on a duplex in Park Slope and began preparations for their wedding. He was so desperate for his family to be there that he resorted to bribery, paying off the remainder of his parents’ mortgage and sending cash to Uma to finance long-deferred dental surgery for her younger son. Coincidentally or not, his mother and father finally found time to visit, a harrowing weekend that began with a two-hour wait at Penn Station (they’d missed the train and, because neither owned a cell phone, didn’t call to let him know), then continued through a minute examination of their son’s domestic arrangements, several excruciating restaurant meals (Italian food they refused to eat; Indian food his mom excoriated, dish by dish, in stage-whisper Punjabi) and sightseeing. The high point was a trip to the Statue of Liberty. Jaz took a photo of Lisa, standing between Amma and Bapu against the rail of the ferry, the three of them smiling bravely into the wind.

In the end they had two weddings: one in a synagogue in Prospect Park, attended mostly by their friends and Lisa’s relatives, the second in the storefront gurdwara where Jaz had spent so much of his childhood.
Jaz’s close family went up to Brooklyn for the Jewish ceremony, where they allowed themselves to be shepherded around, listening politely to the explanations of the various prayers, the chuppah, the broken glass. In Baltimore, Lisa brought an Indian girlfriend for support, who helped her dress and provided a buffer against various aunties who’d appointed themselves to oversee her preparations. Her mother, father and a cluster of Brooklyn friends joined the crowd. At the reception, in a nearby community hall, the two sets of parents attempted conversation, using Uma as an interpreter, while the DJ (one of Jaz’s cousins) spun bhangra at ear-splitting volume, so the younger ones could dance. Jaz was glad none of their Brooklyn friends understood Punjabi; at the reception he overheard some drunken uncle making a remark about gori sluts and had to be restrained from throwing the man out.

Married life was good. Lisa got a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. Jaz swapped his first bonus check for a classic Mercedes sports car, a seventies model that Lisa pretended to dislike. Together they dove into the city, angling for tables at hot new restaurants, taking the subway to the outer boroughs on weekend excursions. They attended charity benefits where traders from Jaz’s firm bid thousands of dollars for dive vacations or the chance to spend a day with the Mets, and book parties where Jaz felt the icy chill of being a “Wall Street guy” among innumerate arty types who disapproved of the way he made his living. Little by little, the apartment silted up with books. They took a summer rental in Amagansett, bought mid-century modern furniture from design stores in TriBeCa and hung over their fireplace a painting by a fashionable young artist, which Lisa had fallen in love with at a Lower East Side gallery. Looking at the collection of gestural swirls and neatly painted little skulls that gave his wife such inexplicable pleasure, Jaz felt replete.

Then Lisa got pregnant. She told work she thought six months off would be sufficient. On the scan Raj looked like a little white ghost, a rag of ectoplasm. Jaz phoned his parents to say it was a boy, and the joy in his mother’s voice affected him so strongly that he had to hold the phone away from his face as he sobbed. Raj arrived, a beautiful little person
with olive skin, a mop of black hair, a big Punjabi nose and brown eyes that would have been the delight of Jaz’s life, had he been able to see anything human behind them.

It felt like a long time ago.

He started the car engine and let it run for a moment, glad of the sudden blast of air. The Mojave sun was high in the sky, bleaching everything white, except for the black strip of the road into town. He reached into the glove compartment and fingered his mom’s latest letter, addressed in Sukhwindermassi’s shaky handwriting. On the backseat, Raj moaned and wriggled in his harness. Jaz opened the envelope and took out the little locket his mom had enclosed, to ward off the evil eye. What could be the harm? He reached back and hung it around Raj’s neck. The boy put up a hand to feel the string and for a moment Jaz thought he’d tear it off, but he settled down, staring at some object on the other side of the window.

Pulling out onto the highway, Jaz reflexively switched on the radio, then turned it off again. Lately music had begun to frighten Raj. The doctors said his hearing was abnormally acute. As a baby he’d cried at the sound of the vacuum cleaner. The subway was impossible, and it took a long time before he was comfortable in a car, but when he was a newborn music always used to soothe him. Another depressing thing, another loss. The drive from L.A. had been undertaken in silence, boredom filling the car like carbon monoxide.

They headed down the hill into town, past billboards advertising attorneys and retirement communities. The sun was fierce. Heat haze splashed mirages across the highway and for a moment Jaz wasn’t sure if the thing he saw was real: a group of women walking by the roadside, swathed in sky-blue Afghan burqas. It was as if a shard of television had fallen into his eyes, a stray image from elsewhere. He slowed and checked his mirrors. There they were, incomprehensible cobalt ghosts, making their way from one place to another. Involuntarily he glanced around to see if everything else was still as it should be—the billboards and power lines, the creosote bushes—as though he might find himself
suddenly transposed, peering at a mud-brick village through the reinforced windshield of a Humvee.

At the market they got a spot right by the entrance. Raj was docile and allowed himself to be led inside. They walked through the aisles, adding items to their cart: sliced turkey, bottled water, crackers, all the things they’d need for a picnic lunch. Raj was fascinated by the shelves stacked with canned goods. He loved to make piles, putting one block on top of another or lining his toys up in a row, and here was an environment with just the regimented order he liked. He clicked his tongue and flapped his arms, expressions of pleasure that Jaz had learned to read and enjoy. When Raj started to fill the cart with cans of corn Jaz managed to divert his attention by handing him an orange, an object he always found absorbing and could carry around for hours, like a plush toy or a pet. There were a few tears at the checkout when he had to give up the slightly squashed fruit to be scanned, but otherwise their expedition went smoothly. On the drive back Jaz whistled and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Raj clicked and hummed. Jaz looked out for more sky-blue women, but saw none.

Back at the motel, they found Lisa sunbathing by the pool, her long legs splayed over a sun lounger. She looked good in her bikini and Jaz felt an unfamiliar moment of passion for his wife. He reached down and kissed her, running his fingers over her thigh. She smelled great, like suntan oil and fresh sweat.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

She sat up and felt Raj’s forehead.

“You’re so hot. Come on, let’s get you into your swim things.”

Jaz kissed her again. “It’s OK, I’ll do it. You lie down.”

In the room Raj made no complaints as Jaz put him into cloth swim diapers and rubbed sunscreen on his body, but when he tried to slip the locket over his head Raj let out a fierce yell and gripped onto it. Jaz decided the battle wasn’t worth fighting. No big deal. The kid could keep it if he wanted.

“Come on, let’s go find Mommy.”

Out at the pool, Jaz saw Lisa talking to the motel manager, laughing
over some joke. The woman walked off as he approached, and Lisa propped herself up on one elbow, shielding her eyes against the sun.

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“That piece of crap round his neck.”

“Oh, something my mom sent. He liked it, wouldn’t take it off.”

“You put that on him?”

“Yeah. It’s just a—a traditional thing. She sent it as a present.”

“Damn it, Jaz, I thought I’d made it clear. I don’t want your mom’s superstitious bullshit anywhere near our son.”

“There’s no harm in it.”

“No harm? As far as she’s concerned, her family’s been cursed because you married a white woman. She thinks Raj is our punishment.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

She pulled the boy toward her and tried to slip the locket over his neck. He grabbed at the string and began to wail.

“You’re hurting him.”

“Raj, let go!”

Finally the string broke. Lisa swore and hurled the charm over the fence. Raj began rocking backward and forward, craning his head into his shoulder like a hibernating bird. Jaz sank down onto a plastic chair.

“Perfect. Good job.”

Lisa glared at him. He got in the pool and swam a few lengths, trying to control his anger. Finally he pulled himself up onto the side and sat with his legs in the water, feeling the heat evaporating the moisture from his back.

“Lisa?”

“What?”

“Could you—I don’t know—just try to see how hard this is for me? She’s my mom.”

“Jesus, Jaz. Sometimes I think you actually believe it. You think there’s something wrong with him.”

“Well, there
is
something wrong with him.”