And the World Changed (43 page)

“Can I join?” Sully's turning the knob but I've locked the door—he must think I'm a silly, sweet American to be sharing a bed but showering in private.

I call out I'm done, turn off the water, and then realize that, in my hurry to get away, I've forgotten to bring any clothes.

“Can you hand me my clothes?”

“Are you kidding?”

He must think I'm mad, and to keep some sanity intact I emerge bundled up in towels, open my suitcase, turn my back, let the towels fall, remember he's a butt man, turn around, and see him smoking again, looking at me, one brow raised.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn't I any good?”

“It's not that.”

When I'm fully clothed, it comes out. “I didn't like being ‘practiced' upon.”

“Thought that would get you.”

“I don't like being played mind games with, either.”

“Why are you so upset?” He ashes on the tourist guide to Reno.

In the dim lamplight his fingers look like old, discolored wooden chopsticks.

“I don't,” I say, “like calling a fuck a fuck.”

“It's not just . . . a fuck . . . It's . . . we're friends.”

I roll my eyes.

“Michelle?”

I turn away.

“Again not talking?” He shrugs, takes a last long drag of the cigarette, swishes it under the tap in the sink built into the room, then tosses it into the garbage can. The room smells of wet smoke, a maggot-infested carcass slowly burning.

In Reno and not going to a casino. I feigned sleep while Sully got ready and left. I talked to Mom and then to God. I could have called Erin or Dad but they would have gotten worried, thought I'd been raped, but how:
I just couldn't put my finger on it.

I wanted to get a separate room but there was a Bette Midler concert and apparently we were darned lucky to get any room at all.

When Sully came back I was watching a
Beverly Hills 90210
rerun. He crawled in next to me—to forgive is divine—but when his fingers crept up my knee I stiffened, pushed them off, and lay down with my back to him.

What does he know about me: that I like onion dip with ruffled potato chips, that I only drink Dr. Pepper, that my mother's dead, that my father had an affair and remarried, and that I've had a heart attack that cranked open my legs.

What do I know about him: nothing I care to recall.

“Do you mind if I change the channel?”

I don't answer, and after a second he flips through and finally settles on Leno. I hear Leno taking digs at Kevin Eubanks, mocking Donald Trump, and then making a fool out of a couple in the audience on account of them dressed in identical jeans, T-shirts, and hats.

Sully's tickled. The bed's shaking. He's laughing like his life depends on it: He sounds like I imagine a donkey being castrated would.

He's laughing and I wish we'd respect ourselves, us Americans—all of us and each other—and quit thinking that pointing out our mistakes is healthy and will endear us to the world, because here is this man come for an American education and planning to stay for an American job and making room in his plans to fuck an American girl or two per week, but first confuse her about demure or not demure, confuse this naïve American who thinks she's bold and brave and going about the world on her own terms.

He's in deep sleep, his eyelids jerking in the way that used to scare the life out of me when I was a kid. I pack my duffel bag. I leave.

I wonder what he'll think in the morning. Me gone, my car gone, and I hope he knows that this is me screwing him up his butt.

I think about him often those first few months and it keeps
coming down to “practice, practice, practice,” but over the years as I relate my experience with a Pakistani man, he goes from being that fuck to that arrogant prick to that asshole (no pun intended), to that jerk, to that stupid guy, and to finally rest as this guy who made me feel like a slut, worse, an unpaid slut.

I push this matter into a cabinet, right into the blackest corner at the back.

Monday night preparing to watch TV.

The kettle whistles. I pour the boiling water into my favorite mug, a pink one Josh gave me saying, “I Have a Dream . . . for All Mankind . . . PMS.” The instant vanilla cappuccino froths up. It smells, as my daughters would say, yummy. I turn on the TV to watch Ally McBeal but I cannot. I just cannot.

Tuesday afternoon in the garden.

I am loosening up soil. My beefsteak tomatoes are doing very well, but I don't think that my Russian roses will win anything this year. Leaves have fallen into the pool again. The soil is damp and smells of life and I may as well lay me down and die.

Last Sunday morning at the BookWorm, browsing.

There's no trick of the light upon the eye. I am not going mad or having a heart attack. I recognize him—Sully.

It is Sully.

Dark brown Sully in a white shirt, a little heavier in the jowl area, his hair thinner and much shorter.

Sully on the cover of
Writers Inc
.

Is he still making fun of us and being rewarded with fame and fortune?

I am an animal going on my perfectly normal way only to be run over and left there.

Many summers ago Josh and I met and married. Josh did good, and I'm a full-time Mom who shops from a farmer's market and buys only organic, cage-free eggs, and goes to lunches
at the club, hosts a huge Christmas dinner annually, and sometimes doesn't mind wearing the same color T-shirt Josh is wearing.

Wednesday evening.

I visit Dad, taking him a big basket of home-cooked goodies. He outlived his second wife, too. I turn the key to his front door and find him watching
The Philadelphia Story
, chuckling away as if he'd never seen it before.

It's the first time that whole week, as I sit on the ottoman with Dad's feet in my lap, cutting his toenails, that I don't feel completely useless or totally empty and sad.

I am the proud founder of two successful book clubs. I read to the blind once a month. Josh and I vacation twice annually. Once with the kids and then without. Then there's always sex on Saturday night so as to keep ignited the eternal flame, followed by lazy Sunday mornings and BBQs with friends. I enjoy gardening, swimming, and taking Bundt, our dalmation, for walks in the park.

So why did I leave the bookstore as if my life were one very big joke?

Saturday, twenty to midnight.

I am not the spider woman I usually am in bed.

“What's up?” Josh says.

I tell him:

The Maritime Warrior
: “Best novel of the year.”

Entertainment Weekly
: “A must read.”

Author Jean Splice: “It's a beauty.”

Amazon: “Four hundred and ninety-nine reviewers out of five hundred have given it four stars out of five.”

It's about a foreign student from Pakistan and a guy, their chance meeting, which leads to a cross-country trip and love or something like it, and hate too, definitely hate.

Josh tells me not to fret, it will come, will my time.

He kisses me, turns over, and falls asleep.

I'm up all night.

Thursday afternoon.

I'm lunching with two girlfriends. We're low carbing this month and wondering if we dare have a caramel frappacino each. I laugh on cue, don't chew on my straw, lay my napkin out just right, but when they ask how my novel is coming along, I get tears in my eyes and it makes them really uncomfortable, which makes me feel worse.

I do write, yes, I contribute regularly to
Kitchen Cooks
and
The Four Walls Chronicles
, both stellar webzines, but I wish I'd never told anyone that I was working on a novel because it's been years, and is still a work in progress about a guy who leaves a girl asleep and carless in a motel after she inadvertently says something terribly offensive to him—but here is my book, my idea,
my life
stolen from right under me, and I'm still incomplete and he seems all done.

Friday, quarter after four p.m.

Why do I stare at Bundt thumping his tail faster now, a sure sign that the kids are nearly home from school?

“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit, shit,” and Bundt cocks his ears and raises his head off the floor to look at me.

“I'm okay,” I say but it feels like I'm having a heart attack.

I breathe again when Judy and Nora rush in, toss their bags in the foyer, Bundt is barking his behind off, Nora's upper arm is bruised.

“I fell off the swing,” she says, covering the yellow indentation on her golden skin with the opposite hand.

“Did not!” says Judy. “She thinks she's Laila Ali and got into another fight.”

“At least I don't think I'm Beyonce.”

“Judy, please take your hands off your hips,” I say.

I place on the table slices of smoked turkey, honey mustard, crustless nine grain bread, two tall glasses of 2 percent milk, and they're still arguing about swings and fights and sneaks when I go up the stairs two at a time.

Last time I ran away from Sully and eventually from life, as I'd envisioned, it had turned me into a runaway truck up a dead-end ramp at an incomplete stop.

“Go,” Josh told me when I began blubbering about wanting to ask Sully if he'd ever felt sorry and hadn't known where to reach me to apologize.

“Just put it away,” Erin said.

But the past cannot be tucked into a cabinet behind the files of one's present. A snide remark, a betrayal, a mistake, an unrequited love, an insult: These are the one-night stands that determine the future of the rest of our nights.

I suppose I could read Sully's book for answers, but I wanted to get my heart down and dirty—I want to see if he meets me with open arms or asks who I am.

I wanted to know what became of his fiancée.

I would like to say that I just threw on anything to attend Sully's book reading, but it took me two hours to come up with an outfit, and even then I wasn't wholly satisfied.

THE OPTIMIST

Bina Shah

Bina Shah (1972– ) is a short story writer and novelist. Though born in Karachi, she spent her first five years in the United States, where both her parents attended the University of Virginia's graduate school. She was educated in Karachi and in the United States at Wellesley College and at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has lived in Karachi since 1995, and contributes columns to
www.chowk.com
,
Dawn
,
the
Friday Times
and a fashion glossy,
Libas
.

She has published two short story collections:
Animal Medicine
(Oxford University Press, 2001) and
Blessings
(Alhamra, 2007); and three novels:
Where They Dream in Blue
(Alhamra, 2002),
The 786 Cybercafe
(Alhamra, 2004), and
Slum Child
(published in Spanish; Random House Mondadori, forthcoming 2009). She is a coeditor of Pakistan's new English-language literary journal,
Alhamra Literary Review
.