The Blue Taxi (15 page)

And yet, see how Sarie Turner, with her thick, long legs and those—he thought—
kind
eyes, had made things suddenly seem light! How at the first appearance of her small but chubby and not inconsiderable breasts
beneath his gaze and then his own excited hands he’d felt a kind of sway, a circus in his mind! How easy it had been! The
import of what had taken place in his own hallway—the simplicity of it—stunned him. In just one moment he had felt the floor
shift, the air throw off its coat, the evening light a balm. He’d felt joy, and joy. A manliness, a cheer. He hoped she would
return!

But, prey to sorrow and to fear, he also asked himself the following, and the question made him sick: if it could be replaced
so deftly by a hunger for round biscuits, for the flat and endless heft of a foreign woman’s back, and for the awful, hot
excitement of his hands between his tired legs in that old and sagging bed, what
had
the madness, all that long, long grief, been
for?
And had he really meant it?

In Majid’s version of the thing, Sarie Turner had thrown herself quite shamelessly at him, and he, long loyal, so he’d thought,
to lifelessness and Hayaam’s death, had caught the woman squarely in his arms and felt a shivering at his core which he had
heretofore reserved for sleepy fumblings with his, yes, nine-years-dead, once lively, comforting Hayaam. Illicit grapples
with his loins were bad enough, wasting bright seed on a sheet. And with a woman who was dead, much worse—a sin of the first
order! How could he?
But thinking now of a live shape, the possibility of Sarie Turner, who still breathed—a much greater transgression, Majid
thought. Dreaming of Hayaam and thrilling sadly to her in the night… wasn’t it a version of fidelity somehow, talk of sin
be damned?
This
, with Sarie Turner, was a special kind of treachery. Still, had the embracing been his fault? No, he thought. She
took
me. He had not desired it. Sarie Turner was a fleshy accident, Majid told himself for which he had not asked. He cursed her
and himself And in the rippling of his skin, the thoughts he could not help but have—of limbs, and mouths and loins—he discovered
a new fear, a strange one: had it always been Hayaam behind his eyes at night? Because, to tell the truth, it hadn’t been
so difficult, clutching Sarie Turner, not as difficult as he thought it should have been. But if he could so easily take hold
of her, had he already practiced touching other women in his sleep? Had he been disloyal to Hayaam well before Mrs. Sarie
Turner showed up on the steps? Majid began to wonder if his memories of that first and only wife—
Hayaam! Hayaam!
—were true. Did he know, precisely, with any certainty at all, into whose place Sarie Turner had (with his permission, this
he knew) made such a decisive and significant advance?

In a yellow envelope that Majid kept beneath a metal mathematics box that he had won at school (compass, ruler, pencil, chart—for
planning things just so), he’d saved three photos of Hayaam, which he had never shown the boys. In the early days of grief,
he’d studied them, had held them to his heart, had on several nights kept them by his pillow to see her face on waking, had
thought to make a shrine. But in later years, he had rarely pulled them out. For he had memorized them, hadn’t he? Had he
not carved, in tears, an image of Hayaam in the tender darkness of his chest? In his mind’s eye, he
could still—could he not?—call her up exactly as she’d been. Before stepping towards the drawer and clasping the brass handle,
he pictured the three photos in his mind.
There
would be Hayaam, draped in lavender, as he well knew, seated on the sand of Scallop Bay: one knee up, the other folded underneath
her, hands loose among a pretty mess of seashells, her face turned towards the camera, and behind her the blue sky. Hayaam
at someone’s wedding, eyes and cheeks modestly aglow beside a gold-encrusted bride. The last, an accidental snap: Hayaam caught
unawares, Fruity Pop in hand, before the Frosty-Kreem, hair escaping from her braid and playing in a breeze. Majid knew, he
told himself, just what the shots would show. Just as Tahir in his bedroom could dream up his old leg so firmly that its absence
in the morning was a shock, did not an old husband know precisely what was gone?

The questions prompted him to open up the dresser drawer and check his memory’s sharpness. Had he, with a sinking in his bowels,
already known what he would find? It’s possible. When Majid slipped the pictures from their sheath, he frowned. He blinked
to clear his eyes, gave a shake of his sore head. He brought the pictures close up to his face, one after the other, then
held them at arm’s length. Confused, he thought,
What happened?
He unfocused his eyes, tightened them again. He felt each hair on his scalp as though it were a needle traveling through
his skull.

Was
this
the same old picture? Really? The one at Scallop Bay? Hayaam’s dress was
blue
, not violet. Beside her not seashells but stones. And, worse, much worse: rich, still plummy with old colors, the features
of that well-known face did not, he thought, look as he expected. Was it humidity, perhaps, which can turn pictures brown?
Her cheeks, her jowls, had bloated. The skin was darker than he’d known it. The dear flesh at her round skull—that brow he
could recall in sleep, remember with his fingers—had taken on a rubbery
look, had blurred along the temple. Was it decay, perhaps, of paper? At the center of himself, Majid hoped it was. Perhaps
the photograph was ruined. Look: a watery stain across one eye concealed the bridge of her small nose; the edges of a black
spot at her lips had lifted and, just beneath, Majid could see a speck, the blankness, shiny-white, that lurks under emulsion.
Could he still see what would have been there, despite the little gap? Could he match what Hayaam in his mind’s eye had become
with what was left of the old picture? Majid Ghulam tried. He leaned against the dresser and placed a hand on the flat wall.
He closed his eyes. He wished. He tried, and he could not.

Who was that woman on the beach? Majid’s unphotographic visions of her did not match even what he
could
still fathom from the pictures. How could it have happened that he could not recognize his wife? He asked himself hard questions.
Had he grieved Hayaam as she had been? Or had he transformed her himself, so that each remembering of her was, in fact, a
violent defacement? Had he replaced Hayaam already, at some lost, incalculable moment several years before? Before even grabbing
someone else? And was grabbing Sarie Turner nothing but an echo? An empty move he had already, unknown to himself made and
made again, with faulty grabs at his dead love?

He spent several hours sitting on his bed, looking out into the mirror and trying to imagine young Hayaam as she had been
when they first shared that room. Of them both, had she been the heavier? Had he been the stronger of the two? How had Hayaam’s
hair smelled—was it rose, perhaps gardenia? Had Hayaam’s skin, when damp, given off a scent of myrrh, the tartness of a lemon?
In his eyes and in the glass, Majid Ghulam saw nothing. He could call no scent into his nostrils. The session gave him headaches.
He felt guilty and alone. Ashamed, he hid the photographs between the pages of a
book, the book beneath the empty chest. Went down the stairs again.

He would not think of Sarie. He tried instead to focus his attention on the face of his dead wife, but, with a persistence
that alarmed him, his own mind conjured up instead Mrs. Turner’s throat and thighs and hair and the pink nipples that had
stirred him. Intermittently, his thoughts of Sarie broke and Majid thought about his son. Another new, and equally upsetting,
theory came to him: Tahir’s absent foot and calf and now-truncated knee! It was Tahir, after all, whose appointment with a
reeling bus had brought Mrs. Turner in. It was the accident and nothing else that had so churned up the world that Sarie Turner,
just like cream and just as pale, had risen to the top. Oh, Majid Ghulam was mixed up! To feel so many things at once can
tire a body out! When he wasn’t feeling joy, reliving the embrace, or feeling, full of shame, that he’d been grieving a false
memory of Hayaam instead of
Hayaam-she-herself
, Majid Ghulam was tortured by the thought that his youngest son’s left limb had been traded for cheap pleasure, that the
crash on India Street
had brought this lust his way
. Could one be grateful for such gifts?

Oh, nevermind. To each his star!
emergent, manly Majid would insist. But older Majid would demur. How could a man who’d doubted God so much, who no longer
believed in Divine Plans, all at once presume that certain things were meant to be, the blade of life is hard, etc., but that
each moment is the proof of a grand, unfathomable design? How could such a doubting man, falling headlong into a woman who’d
appeared when Tahir’s leg and missing shoe did not, tell himself that God’s work is mysterious and one must simply go ahead?
Two white breasts, an open throat, some fur (perhaps, or so he’d heard, a lot, among the women of her tribe) between two legs,
that extraordinary quivering, traded for a shin-heel-ankle-calf,
for his son’s two-footed life? Was this a Godly switch? A European-woman-gift in place of a boy’s limb, in place of Hayaam’s
photographs as they had been the day they’d got them from the shop?
No, no
, gloomy Majid would reproach himself
no pleasure to be found in someone else’s grief
. And he’d resolve to turn away from Sarie, not to let her in. Whatever God had planned for him, whatever bauble of reward
for having been so sad so long, Majid wouldn’t take. His travails were really far more difficult than Sarie’s. Oh, but life
persists. A force did work in him, despite it all, and nonetheless, something in his lungs and hips and shoulders pushed him
to make do, move forward. Take deep breaths and stand. Time, perhaps? A budding thing? A sign from his own garden?

To his hot confusion Majid attempted to respond by pulling out other items from the past. From behind the dark armoire he
took a cardboard box in which he had, at Hayaam’s death, set aside two tunics and one pair of loose trousers, keeping them
from all the cousins who had taken things away for charity, for poor relations, for the helping-with-the grief He wanted,
if such a thing were possible, to recall Hayaam as she had really been, before deciding what to do. Perhaps the clothes would
help him.
Sight is not the truest sense
, he thought.
Touch and smell may be
. Practicing as he set the old box down, he said: “This is what you wore.” He squared his shoulders, bent forward carefully
and slowly, peeled the cardboard wings apart, and eyed the folded bundle. He took a long breath through his nose. There was,
as he had hoped, a smell, and it rose up and he breathed harder. But it was not a wifely smell. Not once washed since Hayaam’s
death, the clothes smelled, disheartened Majid thought, like Kikanga dampness, mold. Like things left in the rain.

Nonetheless, the clothing called up something from the shadows. As Majid Ghulam pulled the box into the middle of the room
and settled on the carpet—could it be?—he felt the air grow thick; a shape appeared beside him.
Could it be?
In the heavy violet of the curtained morning light, Majid sensed an apparition at the corner of his eye. An apparition! He
was not entirely surprised. He’d seen things after his wife’s death, hadn’t he, that no one else could see. Shadows. Birds
where there were none. Ancient bearded men in white, sneaking through the dawn. Demons with one human hand and one hand that
was wood. At least so people said. Wasn’t sadness-madness made of just precisely this? Why not, why not, when he desired it,
a presence in the room?
A woman
, Majid thought. Why should he not call up the dead?

Squatting on his heels, hands gone still above the cardboard flaps, which were like doors into the past, Majid held his breath
and tried to keep his balance. He felt his chest go tight. He waited. He let the air out of his mouth. He steeled himself.
With every blink the shadow took on weight.
This is not unusual
, he thought.
I have been mad and sad. I have been more than dead myself. I have seen all kinds of things
. He prepared himself to look.
All right
. Majid turned his head. Did he see her in his mind or in the space before his hungry eyes? Was she really there? No matter,
no matter at all. It was, indeed, a woman. A full-sized one, moreover, in a shimmering green dress. With—was it?—Hayaam’s
almost-shape. Majid sought her face.
All right
. The revenant was real. Could be.

But—was
this
the wife he had been trying to recall? Majid could look carefully at things if he willed himself to do so. He kept very still
and tried. Hunched just there beside him, the woman looked, perhaps, as Hayaam’s older sister might have. She was heavier
than Majid’s memory of his own happy bride. More
womanly
, in fact. From the base of her round skull a silky rope of hair reached
down to the floor. Did Majid feel it, prickling, waspish, like a shiver, too long and yet familiar under his bare feet? He
watched. There was no glimmer at the woman’s nose, no stud shining in the light. Was
she
widowed, too? His working mouth went dry.

She was not looking at her husband (if that was who he was). Her head was bent over the contents of the box. Majid’s eyes,
his neck, felt almost frozen, tight. The figure shifted but Majid could not move. He felt no threat from her, no, simply swollen
quiet. Everything felt still. This Hayaam-not-Hayaam, biting at her lip, reached out a hooked finger and pulled the cardboard
flaps aside. Majid’s skin went cold. He felt a bit afraid. But, sensing that
for good or ill
he was in sudden partnership with the woman-shape beside him, propelled by something other than his will, Majid reached into
the box. He brought the tunics out and set the sour pile between them.