What He's Poised to Do: Stories (10 page)

Her mother picked the wrong man to marry. He had run around, had a child with another woman, and eventually left. And it wasn’t as though there was no proof of his error: his daughter by the second wife lived in America now, although everyone said she was crazy. These were some very real consequences, her mother said, and every chance she got, she told Sophie not to repeat her mistake. Sometimes she even made her voice quaver when she said it, so she sounded like a ghost. “Dooooo not doooo what I have donnnnne,” she said. Again, the pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous. The memory of her mother’s ghost voice makes Sophie smile, although she feels a soft thud in her heart at the thought that perhaps the crime has already been committed. The last days have been criminal at many points. She was not able to look at Joe directly during dinner. She was angry at him in the truck. She disparaged him silently while he weighed himself. This is not the way it should be. Joe is kind. Joe will never leave. Joe will eventually fix the car. In “My Man,” Billie Holiday’s lover beat her up and ran around and still couldn’t weaken her devotion. That’s not Joe, not at all.

Joe would be surprised to learn that Sophie knows nearly every song Billie Holiday ever recorded. She knows “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “With Thee I Swing” and “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around” and “That’s Life I Guess.” Joe thinks that she does not know very much about music because she is young. He takes a squinty view of both her facts and her opinions. The night before, in the truck, there was a song that he loved and she didn’t. “I don’t know it or care to know it,” she said. He sniffed and said, “You always have a bone to pick musically.” Sophie was offended. She marked off the distance from Joe in her mind. But now, as she drives, she decides that she loves the sound of what Joe said. She feels like she has been recognized as the virtuoso of some rare instrument. That is what angels should play instead of harps: a bone. She likes the image so much that it relieves the pain of the insult almost entirely.

She drives by the exit she would take if she were going to her office. She has a job that requires her to sit at a desk and decide the fates of others. She would rather sit in her mother’s house, eat some food, have a drink, and talk about her own fate. Her mother never forgets to ask. “And what will happen next?” she likes to say to Sophie. From another mother to another daughter, this could be an overbearing question. But Sophie’s mother does not have an answer in mind. “Sometimes the second step is distant from the first,” she likes to say, waving her hand. What will happen next? It is worth thinking about.

The exit to her office sets her thinking about work. The day before had been the Friday before a Monday that will contain her biggest meeting in months. The Monday meeting was the main reason she could not sleep, even after sex. Her firm is fighting an injunction that would halt construction on a large office park in a subdivision called Potter Grove. The advocates who have filed the injunction are arguing that the construction would most likely pollute a nearby aquifer. The lawyers in her office are trying to get a judge to lift the injunction by arguing that one of the other attorneys is out of jurisdiction, and tracing that attorney’s history has fallen to Sophie and her staff of paralegals. Every detail has to be in place. When, that morning, Joe had started complaining that he did not feel motivated in his own life, that he felt as though he were stalling, she had given him a hug when what she really wanted to do was to push him against the wall. While she hugged him, she noticed that it was harder than ever to reach all the way around him. Maybe he had gained weight. She marked off the distance from him. What would happen next?

Suddenly she remembers the dream she had the night before, when she was stretched out alongside Joe, wondering if she would ever sleep again, backtracking over the sex that had just concluded. At some point, she had answered most of her questions or decided that they could not be answered, and she had remembered that there was at least a little pleasure in it for her. She had squeezed her hand between her legs and then relaxed into sleep, where she had dreamed about Peter. He was a judge, and he was presiding over her life. He was deciding which man deserved her, and what music she should listen to, and whether she needed to work fourteen-hour days, and whether she should have a child. He made his opinions known in writing, behind elaborate wax seals. She was angry at first, and then relieved. Why not put your future in the hands of someone you trust? Toward the end of the dream, issues of jurisdiction returned, but they were blurry.

She is tired in the car. She has been tired all morning. She has never been more tired. While she was making coffee, she had almost put her hand in the machine. Joe does not know she is tired. How would he? The rattling noise, which is usually annoying, is putting her to sleep. In the car she has another kind of dream. It lasts only a second, and then she is back awake, worried that she has missed the turnoff for her mother’s house. The radio isn’t playing Billie Holiday anymore. It’s playing Smokey Robinson. The song is called “Swept for You Baby,” and though she does not remember ever hearing it before, she finds herself singing along. She makes a mental note to tell Peter, and then another mental note that she does not tell Peter anything anymore. It is nothing she can tell Joe. Maybe she will tell her mother. The rattling noise is putting her to sleep again. The sun is in her eyes. Her back itches and she resolves to scratch it the next time the car comes to rest at a stop sign or a red light.

The next time the car comes to rest, it is not at a stop sign or a red light. What are some of the other choices? It is overturned. Sophie is out on the road under the hood. Inertia has brought her there. Broken glass is spread around like rhythm. A bone comes through her arm. An artery in her thigh is laid open for all the world to see. “Look at my blood!” she wants to say. It is healthy blood, and it is running out. Time is running out with it. She is growing lighter than air. She has a sudden urge to weigh herself.

T
HE ACADEMY LASTED ONLY A DECADE, THOUGH THE BUILDING
that housed it, a former boomerang factory, still stands on the border between India and Australia. It is a modest edi-fice, low and long, built in 1912 by the firm of Eyre and Ananthanarayanan, which is today best known for its construction of warehouses throughout Asia but which was at the time interested primarily in erecting a structure for the manufacture of the company’s flagship product. Sections of the factory were rebuilt several times during its first decade, but the façade has been preserved unaltered since 1920. It is a distinctive façade. There is one window shaped like a boomerang and another shaped like the head of Markandeya, and midway between them a large iron door, above which is inscribed the official slogan of the Kaybee Karmic Boomerang Company, “We’ll keep you coming back for more,” which was coined by Andrew Eyre, the son of one of the founders, in 1914. Above the door on the inside are two signs, one above the other, that were installed soon after. The top sign bears a picture of a piglike man surrounded by what looks like fire. No one understands that sign. Below that, there is a sign that says, “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?” This same question appeared, printed on a small laminated card, in selected boxes of the company’s first shipment of Karmic Boomerangs, which were sent to toy stores and Hindu bookstores. Other questions in the series included “When a thief is robbed, should you laugh or cry?” and “How long must the good man wait for his lifetime good deeds to redound to him?” Govindan Ananthanarayanan, also the son of one of the founders, composed eight of these questions in all, and affixed one to the longer arm of each Karmic Boomerang. The question above the factory door was his favorite of them. It was the one he kept coming back to—“as you might expect,” he joked, to the very mild amusement of his family and colleagues—and for that reason he had it turned it into a sign.

The question was interesting to Govindan mainly because he could not answer it. Karmic Boomerangs, which sold slowly at first, became, in the middle years of the decade, a huge hit in both Sydney and Bombay. You could see them everywhere in public meadows and beaches. One writer noted that “these chevrons of virtue fill the sky like a child’s drawings of birds fill a child’s drawings.” Their vogue was short-lived, however. They were considered novelties, though Govindan Ananthanarayanan insisted that they were in fact “functioning ethical devices,” and as quickly as they rose to prominence they fell away into obscurity. Both of Kaybee’s founding families had made small fortunes with the ethical boomerang by then, and while the Eyres went on to become tycoons in the construction industry—taking with them the Eyre and Ananthanarayanan name, which allowed them to do business in India as well as Australia—the Ananthanarayanans, and particularly Govindan, embarked on a more scholarly course. This was not entirely surprising. Before Govindan had composed the eight questions that were packaged with the Karmic Boomerang, he had briefly attended Oxford University, where he had begun to assemble research for a thesis on James Harris Fairchild. Whether Govindan was inspired directly by his father’s company’s boomerang has been lost to history, but what is known is that following the conversion of the company to a construction firm, he reopened the factory as an academy of ethics. Initially, the curriculum was restricted to only nine courses, eight of which were based on the questions from the Kaybee cards. (The ninth was a late addition entitled “Should you ever lie to a man who tells you that he has always told the truth, but whom you suspect of untruth?”) Govindan himself taught “How do you feel when the person who made you the saddest feels sad?”

Govindan’s course notes no longer exist, and as enrollment was extremely limited in those early years, we do not have any extant accounts from the perspective of students. We do, however, have a letter that Govindan wrote to a friend of his, a man named James Rouse, that deals with this same set of questions. A small amount of background is necessary. Govindan was a married man. He had, like so many young Indians, consented to an arranged marriage; his bride to be was Prabhavati Priyadarshini, a young woman whose parents were friends of the Ananthanarayanans. The wedding took place in 1922, and accounts of it suggest that it was generally happy. Three years earlier, though, when Govindan was first informed of the match, he rebelled, insistent that he be allowed to find his own partner. Shortly after, in the summer of 1920, while studying once again at Oxford, he took notice of a young Englishwoman, Louisa Pelham. She was nineteen at the time. Govindan and Louisa embarked on a short and rocky romance that summer, and when he returned to Bombay that fall, he announced to his father that he would not marry Priyadarshini. The family refused to recognize Gonvindan’s refusal. The next summer, Govindan returned to Oxford, only to find that Louisa had agreed to marry another man. Throughout that winter, he expressed his suffering in a series of letters to Rouse, an Englishman he had befriended who was also close friends with Andrew Eyre. Most of the letters between Govindan and Rouse have been lost. This letter survives: in it, Govindan reacts to the news that Louisa’s marriage is an unhappy one, and addresses the same question that would become the focus of his course at the academy.

Dear Jim,

I received a letter from Louisa last week in which she was entirely despondent. Now and again a line would be smudged as a result of what I assume were her tears falling onto the page. The reasons, as I know you know, have to do with her marriage to Bartlett, and his treatment of her, which I am sure that you would call “beastly.” I can see you saying that precise word and shaking your head uncomprehendingly. Your failure to understand human cruelty is one of the most worthy things about you.

I have, though, a separate issue to confront. As I am sure you remember, Louisa, after taking me higher than a woman has any right to take a man, brought me lower than I thought I could go in this lifetime. It felt like I would have to ascend at least a few levels just to reach the sadness of death. It was hardly malicious on her part—after all, I was arranged to marry another woman—but it still, at the time, felt like I had been run through with a sword.

Last week, when I received her letter, and discovered within a few sentences that she was writing from a place of great sadness, I wondered how I should feel. I mean this exactly as I have said it. I did not know how to feel. We all know about the German notion of Schadenfreude, or the Scots Gaelic aighear millteach, or the Hungarian káröröm, but those define a class of reactions to the general sufferings of others. Here, I am wondering about how to react to the sadness of those who cause you sadness. I would have thought there was something in Louisa’s letter that would give me, at least for a moment, a kind of joy. She had spurned me, in a sense, and the choice she made elsewhere had turned out to be a bad one. Some would say it serves her right. But then I started thinking of the times that I would sit with her in the garden, or take walks with her, and the light that would stream from her eyes as she described the type of woman she wished to become in the world. The more vividly I remembered her presence, the more crushed I was to think that any part of that light had been extinguished by fear, exhaustion, or a sense of failure. It would be melodramatic to say that I cried her tears, but inaccurate to claim that they did not at least sting my eyes and make them water.

And yet, there is a countermovement. Does she want my sadness? Is there not some danger of her feeling it as pity, or as an attempt to regain the power and control I lost when she turned me out romantically? Perhaps I am not the right person to feel sad for her. Perhaps indifference, while impossible, would be more appropriate. I do not know exactly, Jim, but I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

Yours,
Govindan

Rouse’s reply has survived.

My Dearest Govindan,

Your question is a hard one, which is why I am making no attempt to answer it.

My thoughts on the matter are the same as usual—I feel like fitting you for a priest’s collar and then pulling it tight around your neck until you are dead. It would be a merciful act, my friend, as you have rarely shown even the slightest inclination toward existing in the moment or on this good green earth, where blood courses through bodies until it finds expression in unmentionable articulations. Your head is in the clouds, as they say, and clouds are in your head. Down here on the ground, we live not by ideas but by impulses and consequences. For my part, I recently put a bun in the oven of a lovely little Belgian nurse. She is carrying high and believes that it will be a boy. Can I trouble you for a few Karmic Boomerangs? They are no longer available at toy shops or Hindu bookstores here in London, but I think the little nipper would enjoy them.

Love to Prabhavati,
Jim

Rouse did not take delivery of the boomerangs. Only six months after this exchange, he arrived at the academy to assume the duties of grounds manager and rugby coach, which had previously been performed by Andrew Eyre, who had departed for America. Rouse came without his Belgian girlfriend or his son. A note that Eyre wrote to Govindan at that time elaborates on the circumstances that brought Rouse to the academy. It is significantly more telegraphic than the other men’s letters: “Jim,” Eyre writes, “ran. I understand. Found out that the child wasn’t his, decided to stay and do his part. Passed through a change. Became a changed man. Then found out that the child was his after all. Some men would have been happy. Jim reasoned that any woman who would have been willing to have another man’s child was—well, Jim ran. Hope he’s good for rugby.” In fact, during Rouse’s time there, the institution earned far more renown for its athletics than it did for its moral and ethical instruction. The teams, whether in rugby or football, were extremely competitive, almost martial, and showed little mercy for their opponents. In fact, the marked contrast between the comportment of students in the classroom and on the field became central to the curriculum. One course dealing with the issue, taught by Govindan in 1929, was called “If you destroy an opponent, should you be eternally worried that your opponent will one day return to destroy you?”

The academy was shuttered in 1931, after a protracted lawsuit brought by the father of a former student who was injured during a rugby match; the suit held that Rouse’s style of coaching led directly to the injury. All of the academy’s remaining assets, including several dozen cases of boomerangs, were sold off to pay the settlement, as was the building itself, which became a community center and a museum dedicated to the history of the transcontinental border. Govindan, who had managed not to lose any of his personal wealth, moved to Sydney with his family—and Rouse, still single, came along. In Sydney, two months later, out walking along the waterfront and back, Govindan Ananthanarayanan encountered Louisa Pelham Bartlett, who had come to Australia after the death of her husband. The two of them resumed a friendship, and Govindan encouraged her to strike up a relationship with Rouse, who was occupying a small apartment in the back house of the Ananthanarayanan estate. “I know that this makes no sense to you, because it makes no sense to me,” he wrote to Eyre in 1933, “but I want to keep her near me, and I am hoping that if she takes up with Rouse it will achieve the desired effect. Desired effect: that is far too neutral and scientific a phrase for the almost childish joy I am hoping I might one day feel.”

It was not to be. Rouse was, by this time, a hard man, impossible to reason with, let alone love, and his abrasive manner drove Pelham Bartlett away from the Ananthanarayanan family. More to the point, it drove her out of Australia; she soon married an American businessman, who then moved to Kyoto. Rouse insisted that Pelham Bartlett’s departure did not bother him, as he had felt nothing for the woman when she was present. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware that his friend was suffering from her absence all over again, and this brought on a nervous breakdown that landed Rouse in Sacred Heart Hospital. “You didn’t want her around anyway,” Rouse wrote to Govindan from the hospital. “She had harmed you. Don’t you remember? Why would you want to keep ties with someone like that? I must confess I don’t understand you. But I am sorry if I have harmed you.”

After six months, Rouse was released, and he returned to the Ananthanarayanan home, where he began to work as a driver for the family. When Rouse heard in 1940 that his former girlfriend had died in a car accident, he was at the horse track with Govindan Ananthanarayanan. “A driver killed her?” Rouse reportedly said. “That evens the score.” He took off his driver’s cap, placed it over his heart, and lowered his head. “My failure to understand human cruelty,” he said, and began to laugh.