Unaccustomed Earth (15 page)

“Let me guess. You’re writing for
The New York Times,
” Mr. Nagle said.

“Actually, I work for a medical journal.”

“Is that right? I didn’t think you were interested in the sciences.”

He hadn’t been. He’d wanted to be a journalist, it was true. He had loved working on the eight-page weekly paper, loved going with Mr. Nagle and the rest of the editorial staff to the offices of the local town paper once a week to do the layout. He remembered sitting in the library, thinking up story ideas, interviewing members of the faculty, and the famous people who sometimes came to Langford to speak at assemblies. Taking an active, reporter’s interest in the life of the school had helped him to endure the fact that he hated it there. But he knew that journalism wasn’t an option as a career, that his parents would never indulge such thinking. It was the one battle he hadn’t had the courage to fight—his parents’ expectation that he go to medical school, their assumption that he become a doctor like his father.

He’d had the aptitude for science and so he’d gone ahead with it, majoring in biology at Columbia and then starting medical school there. He lasted two years, mainly because he met Megan and fell in love with her. But the more he got to know her, the clearer it became that he lacked her dedication, her drive. One night in the middle of studying for a pharmacy exam, he’d gone out for a cup of coffee. He walked a few blocks to stretch his legs, and then a few more. He kept walking down Broadway, one hundred blocks from his dorm in Washington Heights to Lincoln Center, and then continuing all the way to Chinatown where, at daybreak, feeling close to delirious, he finally stopped. Fish and vegetables were being unloaded from trucks, life creeping back onto the streets. He entered a bakery, had hot tea and coconut bread, watched a group of Chinese women sitting at a round table at the back, sorting through a mountain of spinach. He took the train back uptown, slept through his exam. He began to cut one class, then another. A week went by, and in spite of his total passivity, he felt that he was accomplishing the greatest feat of his life. He dropped out, not telling his parents until the semester ended. He’d expected Megan to break up with him, but she’d respected his decision and remained. On a lark, after dropping out of med school, he applied to the journalism school at Columbia but was not accepted. Megan urged him to write anyway, to work freelance and put together some clips. But the job at the medical journal was easier, more predictable work. It demanded less of him, and Amit could no longer imagine doing anything else.

“I had you pegged as a newspaperman,” Mr. Nagle said. “We won that wonderful award the year you graduated. Never managed to win it again. They still have the plaque up in the library.”

A third person joined them, a man who was introduced to Amit as the newly appointed director of alumni affairs. He took an immediate interest in Amit, asking whether he planned to attend the next reunion, talking about plans for Langford’s new gymnasium.

“Excuse me,” Amit said when there was a pause in the conversation, “I need to find my wife.” He realized that in the course of talking to Mr. Nagle he’d finished his drink and now had only the one for Megan. So he stood in the line again and got another spiked lemonade. He began to weave among the guests, going into the admissions building, looking for her. But she wasn’t there, and he realized she’d probably gone out to look for him. It was getting dark, and the only lit-up area was the tent where they would all sit to dine. When he found Megan she was talking to Ted Schultz, her left hand still placed strategically over her skirt. The sight of Ted made Amit feel foolish all over again, for calling him by the wrong name.

“I got you this,” Amit said, handing Megan the lemonade.

“Oh.” She looked at the drink, shaking her head. There was a glass of champagne in her other hand. “I got this off a tray.”

“I was just telling Megan about what it was like here when we were students,” Ted said. “Before these ugly new buildings went up. Where did you live?”

“Ingalls my first year. And then Harkness.” He felt unsure about the names, as if they, too, might be incorrect.

“Guess what,” Megan said. “Our cell phone doesn’t work up here. I tried to call the girls but there’s no service.”

“I’m sure there’s a pay phone somewhere,” Amit said. “I’ll call them before their bedtime.” He was tired of standing, longed for the opportunity to sit down and fill his stomach with something solid. A few elderly people were already under the tent, along with some mothers nursing their babies, and he wondered if it would be improper of him to take his seat as well. He waited for a gap in Ted and Megan’s conversation, to suggest going to their table, but then he felt a tap on the back and turned to see Pam’s parents. He proceeded to catch up with them, congratulating them, pulling out his wallet again and showing the pictures of the girls. “They look just like their mother,” Mrs. Borden said in her usual forthright way.

When he turned back to Megan he saw that her champagne glass was empty. She had moved closer to Ted, and her hand was playing with her diamond earring, a habit of hers when she was nervous. Could it be that Megan was flirting with Ted? Instead of being jealous Amit felt oddly liberated, relieved of his responsibility to Megan, to show her a good time. His head was pounding. He needed a glass of water, needed to dilute the alcohol that had rushed too quickly into his brain. The evening had barely begun but it was as if he’d been drinking for hours. Then he saw that the hand by Megan’s ear was the one that had been formerly concealing her skirt. Now that she’d had a few drinks herself she no longer cared, and Amit realized he was free of his duty to stand by her side.

At dinner they were seated at a table with three other couples. Two of them were friends of Ryan’s from California, and after introductions were made they talked among themselves. The women were in their fifties, both dressed in silk jackets and with heavy pieces of silver jewelry, and Amit suspected they had something to do with television. The men were dark-haired and voluble and seemed to be very old friends. The other couple was engaged to be married. The woman, Felicia, was a friend of Pam’s, and her fiancé’s name was Jared. Jared was an architect, with very fair wispy hair, who seemed to be faintly smiling at everyone and everything, until Amit realized it was the set expression of his face, his thin mouth permanently pulled back at the corners. Jared’s current commission was a new wing in a hospital, and he and Megan immediately fell into conversation, Megan telling him all the things that needed to be improved, in her opinion, when it came to the design of hospitals.

As their wine and water glasses were filled and a salmon terrine was served, Felicia talked to Amit about her and Jared’s wedding plans. She was a petite woman, her girlish figure encased in a high-necked beige sleeveless dress. Her features, though pleasant, seemed too small for her face, as if yet to fill it up properly, the distance between the bottom of her nose and her top lip distracting. She spoke in a tired way, each word weighted down. They were in the process of deciding on a venue, Felicia said, and weren’t sure of the number of guests.

“This wedding is huge,” she remarked. “How many people, would you guess?”

He looked around at the tables, counted eight bodies at each. “Around two hundred, I think.” He drained his water glass and looked over at Megan, her animated face without a trace of discomfort.

“Where was your wedding?” Felicia asked.

“We eloped eight years ago. City Hall.” It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time—instead of asking his parents to fly in from Lausanne, and Megan’s parents to go to the expense, and figuring out how to make everybody happy. He was twenty-nine, Megan thirty-four. It had been exhilarating—the joy of getting married combined with the fact that it would all be in secret, without planning, without involvement from anyone else. His parents had not even met her. He was aware of what an insult it was to them. For all their liberal Western ways he knew they wanted him to marry a Bengali girl, raised and educated as he had been.

“Do you regret it at all?” Felicia asked.

“I think our daughters do.” For they were at the age now when they expected tales of a wedding cake, pictures of their mother in a white gown.

Felicia asked how old the girls were, and again, clumsily, he pulled out the photos in his wallet. “Megan has better ones. More recent, I mean. But they’re at the hotel.”

“Did you have to try for a while?”

He thought it a bold question, coming from a stranger. But he was honest with her, his thoughts still loose from the spiked lemonade. “Would you believe, with Maya it happened the first time,” he said. He remembered how proud he’d felt, how powerful. The first time in his life he’d had sex without contraception a life had begun.

“Will you go for a third?”

“It’s hard to imagine.” He thought back to when his daughters were infants, when swings and play-saucers crowded the rooms and the sticky tray of the high chair had to be scrubbed in the shower at the end of each night. His girls had already turned mysterious, both out of diapers, withdrawing to their room to read or play games, talking in secret languages, bursting into peals of laughter at the table for no apparent reason. He’d been more eager than Megan to start a family. It was exotic, the world of parenting, fulfilling him in a way his job did not. It was Amit who’d pushed for a second. Megan was content with one, telling him she’d paid the price for being from a large family. But Amit hadn’t wanted Maya to be an only child, to lead the lonely existence he remembered. Megan had given in, gotten pregnant again even though she was almost forty, but since Monika’s birth she’d worn an IUD.

A spoon clinked on a glass and they all turned their attention to the front of the tent, to the first round of toasts. They listened to friends of Pam’s from prep school and then from college, a few of whom he vaguely remembered drinking with at the Marlin. They were followed by members of both families, and coworkers of Pam’s and Ryan’s. Amit was distracted by a pale gray spider that crawled up the side of the tablecloth and then into the space between the cuff of Jared’s shirt and jacket. He was tempted to say something, but Jared hadn’t noticed; instead he sat there, the same faint smile still fixed on his face, no doubt anticipating the day people would stand up and offer toasts at his own wedding.

The entrée was served, plates of prime rib with asparagus and potatoes.

“How was it, going from one child to two?” Felicia inquired, picking up the conversation where they’d left it. “A friend of mine told me that one plus one equals three. Is it true?” She sliced into her prime rib, causing blood from the meat to seep into the potatoes.

He considered for a moment. “Actually, it was after the second that our marriage sort of”—he paused, searching for the right word—“disappeared.” He realized it was a funny word to use, but something had been lost, something had fallen through their fingers, and that was the only way he could put it.

“What do you mean?” Felicia asked. She set down her fork and squinted at him with her small eyes, her voice suddenly cold.

He looked over at Megan, full of the radiance that had graced her this evening, still talking to Jared. In the hotel they had vowed not to leave each other’s side, but she was miles away from him. He felt the same resentment that often seized him after he cleaned up the kitchen and bathed Maya and Monika and put them to bed, and then watched television alone, knowing that he had seen his children through another day, that again Megan had not been a part of it. She lived in the apartment, she slept in his bed, her heart belonged to no one but him and the girls, and yet there were times Amit felt as alone as he had first been at Langford. And there were times he hated Megan, simply for this. Had he been sober he would have repressed the thought, reminding himself that it was for his sake, and the girls, that she worked so hard. He would have reminded himself that in a year or so their lives would change, that Megan hoped to find a job in a private practice, so they would once again be able to go on family vacations and throw dinner parties for their friends. But tonight nothing censored his peevishness; he embraced it, felt justified by his very ability to acknowledge what was true.

“It disappeared,” he repeated, with more force this time. “I guess it does for everyone, sooner or later.”

But Felicia’s face had hardened. “What an awful thing to say,” she said, not hiding her disgust. “At a wedding, of all places.”

And yet he felt justified. Wasn’t it since Monika’s birth that so much of his and Megan’s energy was devoted not to doing things together but devising ways so that each could have some time alone, she taking the girls so that he could go running in the park on her days off, or vice versa, so that she could browse in a bookstore or get her nails done? And wasn’t it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn’t it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person, as Amit missed Megan night after night, that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

He considered explaining this to Felicia, but he saw that she no longer wanted to talk to him. She’d been hanging on his every word but now she turned her attention to one of the women in silver jewelry. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost eight thirty. The girls would be in their nightgowns, reading stories before bedtime. He had not finished his meal, had eaten very little of it in fact, but the plate was cleared away and strawberry shortcake was in its place. He looked up and saw that most of the tables were empty. Dancing had begun, couples clinging to each other under a neighboring tent, surrounded by the mountains, the black night. The band was playing a Gershwin song. Jared led Felicia away, and though Amit knew he would never have to see her again, he was relieved to see her go, taking away the depressing evidence of their conversation. Jared was bending down to hear something Felicia was whispering and Amit wondered if she was relaying what he’d said to her. How inappropriate, they would think, to talk that way to a person who was engaged. And they would promise each other not to let that happen in their own marraige, that even after twelve children they would never feel that way.