The Vine of Desire (36 page)

He took a half-day today, though it was hard, there were so many loose ends to tie up before he left this office. But he told his secretary he had to. He drove around and around in the rental car, watching the streets for a woman pushing a baby stroller. In his mind she was wearing the same sari she’d been wearing the day of the kiss. Blue like water hyacinths, those beautiful, deadly flowers in the lakes of Bengal where mosquitoes that harbor killer diseases live. He drove to Lalit’s apartment building—it was easy enough to find his address in the phone book—and parked across the street. He waited until it was dark, then darker. Until the lights came on in the apartment, and he was sure there was only one silhouette.

It’s something he’ll do each evening until he leaves for Houston.

He’s flossing his teeth now, his hands making that careful, sawing motion. The string is too short, his fingers bump against his lips. It was the last of the floss. He’d looked at the container in annoyance, then thrown it hard into the rusted metal waste-basket.

He’d called her from work earlier today to give Anju the address of his Houston office. “I’ll send you half my paycheck each month,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about money.”

“I don’t want your fucking money,” she said.

The word was like a slap. She never swore like that. Inside his suit, he could feel himself starting to sweat. “Please be practical,” he said. He was afraid to speak her name. He knew he’d forfeited it.

“Fuck you,” she said.

In bed, he pulls up the covers to his neck, then kicks them off. The blankets smell musty, used. The sheets are abrasive with bleach. Through a crack in the curtains, beams from passing cars will travel, through the night, across his face like searchlights, startling him from slumber. Should he hire a private investigator? Perhaps he could take a loan from the credit union? But what would he say to the man? It strikes him that he doesn’t even have a picture of Sudha to show him.

He rubs at the back of his neck—to be this tired, and unable to sleep. After a while, he gives up. The TV, then? No. He goes to the scuffed leather suitcase he brought from India as a student. Inside, there’s a new tape player, still in its foam-padded box. He tears the cellophane cover from a tape, inserts it. Where’s the electrical outlet? In the dark, he kneels to search
the wall. There, there, the smooth plastic rectangle against his fingertips. The rickety table is cold under his elbows as he bends to the built-in microphone.

“Kid,” he whispers, “I miss you. Where are you now?”

Eight
P.M.
She checks on the old man, who seems to be asleep. Eight-fifteen. She cleans the kitchen counters, but they are clean already. Dayita’s bathed and in bed, tucked between pillows. Eight-twenty-five. Eight-thirty. The night is so silent, even the crickets have gone underground. Eight-thirty-five. She paces the kitchen, lies down, gets up again. Her hands feel dry—she rubs them with the aloe vera lotion she finds in the kitchen. She washes her face in cold water, makes herself a cup of chamomile tea with honey. Eight-forty. Silence packed around her body like shavings of ice. She bites her nail, an old habit. Her mother had made her dip her fingers in castor oil to get her to stop. She thought she’d been cured of it, the way she’d thought she’d been cured of other longings. Eight-forty-five.

She goes to the music console. Looks through the records. Here—how had she missed it before?
—Folk Songs of the Bengal Countryside.
In the quiet of the glass house, wood floors overlaid with carpets from Bokhara, the tinny plink of the baul’s ektara is a shock, the raw tenacity of his voice. She turns off the lights. The white leather sofa gleams softly through the dark. He’s singing an old song Pishi used to know,
O nodi re.

River, I have just one question for you.
O river, on your never-ending journey.
When one of your banks breaks, you build another.
But what of me, the banks of whose life
are all swept away?
O river.

She plays the song again, then once more. She plays it for an hour, nonstop, like a teenager. She sings along until her voice grows gravelly. The rivers of the Bengal countryside, which she saw only once or twice, from a bridge, or a passing car. Insufficiently. Nine-fifty, says the clock. To live all her life in a country and not know its rivers. Her face is hot. It hurts to swallow. Regret swells in her throat like infected tonsils. She can’t let Trideep and Myra find her like this.

In the old man’s room, the night-light is a keen blue. She sees that he’s pulled a pillow over his face. Her breath stops. She runs to him,
Baba, what have you done?
But no, it’s only his ears he’d been trying to cover. His sleeping fingers still clutch at the white edges. She loosens them slowly, not wanting to wake him.

Later she’ll recall what she called him.
Baba. Father.
It’s common enough in her culture to address old men this way. But still.

He knew the song, too. He thought of the rivers he would not see again. Green water. Kalmi rushes. Cranes stepping stiffly on silt. In sleep his profile is gaunt, stony. All excess fallen away. The evening has aged into ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty. Eleven. She touches the pillow cover, but it’s dry. Some things are beyond tears.

Anju is putting on her socks. She tugs at them with both hands. It’s difficult, because she has two pairs on already. But it’s so cold, the kind of cold that doesn’t go away even though she’s turned up the heat to the max. Her fingertips are shriveling with
the cold. After she gets the socks on, she thinks, she’ll put on her gloves.

One sweater, two. A brown one bought at a garage sale, a green one Sunil gave her one anniversary. She takes it off, throws it into a corner. She searches in the closet till she finds the blue-and-white shawl Pishi knitted for a forgotten birthday. On her head, a wool cap that covers her ears. She sits on the sofa and draws her knees to her chest. All the lights are turned on. The radio, too. The TV. She pushed at it until it was turned to the wall. This way she doesn’t have to watch the faces watching her. She closes the curtains. The dark outside the window has faces, too. She checks the lock on the door, attaches the chain guard.

The radio describes suicide bombers in Tel Aviv, the TV talks of air raids in Bosnia. The refrigerator recites the beginning of a novel.
The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Anju nods. Doesn’t she know more about unrequited love than the rest of the world combined? How it can sit on your chest while you sleep, quiet as a cat, sucking your life-breath. That’s why she must stay awake. She takes out her notebook and begins to write. The cold drags at her eyelids, pulling them down. But she mustn’t. What if the phone … ? What if the doorbell … ? A cup of tea, just the thing, both to warm her and ward off drowsiness.

The kettle whistles half-heartedly. She pours, she measures, stirs. There, that wasn’t so hard, was it, even with the mittens on. She lifts the cup in both hands. The lightbulb is singing a song about people who need people, how they’re the luckiest people in the world. That’s a good one! It almost makes her laugh.
What d’you think, Nicole?
The steam from the kettle makes a damp patch on the kitchen wall. If you stare at it long enough, you can see faces in it. Sunil’s face, with that odd look of entreaty on
it—when had she seen it first? When she asked him if she could bring Sudha over? His eyes said,
Don’t put her so close to me. The pull between us is too strong. I won’t be able to stop our lives from colliding.
All those fights they had—why, he’d been asking her for help in the only way he knew. But she’d turned away, her head too full of her own words to hear his.

And with that thought she’s looking at the broken pieces on the floor, the splash of muddy liquid on her socks, the heat burning through, the splintery crash still echoing around her head. How did it happen? She takes out another cup to see. Ah, like this, the curve of china slipping through her woolly palms. Like this, the sharp star burst of fragments on the cheap, hard linoleum. She tries another, then another, jumps away from each explosion like a child from a lighted firecracker. When the shelf holding mugs is empty, she moves to the plates.

The many-colored shards around her feet are so pretty. She removes the socks from one foot and tests their sharpness with a toe. Oh, yes! The small pain anchors her to this room, this moment, keeps her safe from the vacuum that yawns beyond. In destruction lies distraction, she thinks, as she navigates the kitchen. The serving dishes hit the floor with a satisfying thunk, breaking neatly into two. Is this what people call a clean break? From the apartment below, someone yells. Someone bangs on their ceiling (or is it her floor?) with the handle of a broomstick. She barely hears.
In destruction lies distraction.
That’s good! She must jot it down, use it later in an essay. But when she goes to the notebook, there’s no space, the whole page filled.
Father father father father father father father.

When even writing fails you, what else is there?

Anju moves back to the kitchen, using her arms like a swimmer to part the thickened air. Breaststroke. She’d always wanted
to learn it, and now she’ll never get the chance. She steps on the broken pieces as she goes: china, glass, porcelain, pottery, crystal. The crystal is from a set of wineglasses Sunil bought, was it for another anniversary? She grinds her heel into it. In the drawer, in the cutlery tray, are the knives. Each walled into its own neat compartment. The knives know the importance of not crossing borders. Once you break through a boundary, there is no way back without severe tire damage. Her foot has left bloodprints on the floor like Rorschach blots. The knives are magnets. She moves toward them unwieldily, like a block of metal.

She fits her fingertips to the drawer’s ridge and pulls. The room is silver and glittery. She’s listening for something she can’t hear. She’s closing down the compartments of her mind one by one. Click. Click. Click. A song on a tape recorder, the old one in her mother’s house, with its fat spools colored a metallic gray, grainy with the static of years that cannot be rewound:
All the lonely people …

With all her strength, she slams the drawer shut. Half-runs, half-stumbles to the living area. The notebook. Her breath comes as if she’s been held down underwater too long. She flips through the pages, then back again. Where the hell’s that number? But when she finds it, she stares down at it. To call an almost stranger—someone she only knows through Writing Group—like this? To face the fact that this stranger is the only person she can call in the middle of a night when she’s considering death?

… where do they all come from?

She was born a daughter of the Chatterjees of Bhavanipur, and grew up in a marble mansion so old and famous that passersby pointed it out to each other.
Look, that one.
On her first birthday, her mother invited a hundred Brahmins to come and
perform a fire ceremony for blessing. Her marriage was written up in the social register of the Amrita Bazaar Patrika. Now, alone in a dim apartment full of broken glass, she must use the last of her willpower to lift the receiver. A sleepy voice mumbles something at the other end. Anju stiffens, all her muscles ready to apologize. To hang up.

She must grip the receiver with both hands. She has nothing else to hold on to.

“This is Anju,” she says. “I’m in a lot of trouble. I need help.”

They’re the hardest words she’s ever spoken.

Six