Island of a Thousand Mirrors (19 page)

I find her in the bathroom one morning staring into the mirror. There are trailing
snakes of hair on the closed toilet seat, piled on the floor, dripping off the sink.
She has cut it all off with my kitchen scissors, close to the scalp, so that there
is only an angry spiky stubble left. I am ready to make a fuss, but she is dry eyed.
She looks at me, her eyes still red but no longer dull, they mirror the shine off
my butcher knife. She says, “Okay, I’m ready to go back to university.” I take a fist
full of hair off the sink, bring it to my nose, inhale and nod. She continues, “But
I’m not doing business anymore. That was bullshit. I was just trying to please Amma
and Thatha, make them happy, you know.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll paint, of course,” she says. “It’s all I really want to do.”

Later I will remember this as the moment that I knew her work was going to be serious,
even lauded. But in those later years as she was painting, making her name, appearing
in New York galleries, San Francisco galleries, I really wasn’t paying attention,
because by then, after several happy years during which I had thought I was the happiest
woman in the world and we the most blessed couple, my marriage was falling apart like
a house with ill-constructed foundations. Fissures and cracks appearing in the walls
as if earthquake rocked, tsunami washed.

*   *   *

It is years before I learn my husband’s lover’s name. First there is only a vague
distracted look that flits across his face when the phone rings. A hurried click when
I answer. Later a longer pause and I know that someone has called only to hear my
voice, that someone driven mad by curiosity wants to know what I sound like, what
I look like. Someone desperate and yearning wants to tell me what I already know.
When I hear that breathless silence, I slam down the receiver before she can detonate
the bombs buried just under my skin.

In the beginning he was discreet. I thought I had that old wifely disease, a case
of jealousy and overactive imagination, but increasingly there are days when I hear
him in the other room on the phone, his voice throaty and sweet. When I enter, he
raises his voice, says things like, “Okay, Andrew, I’ll see you at the office.” He
hangs up quickly. Looks at me, frank admission in his eyes as if daring me to say
the words, ask the questions. But my throat is constricted by love and I say nothing.

He gets more and more distant; he spends more time away, more nights at far conventions,
we drift away from each other. Now I’m used to sleeping alone. I don’t even miss his
presence in sleep, the way we used to shift and turn together perfectly synchronized,
the weight of his thigh on my hip. It is a busy time after all. I am teaching, writing,
reading. There are conferences I, too, must attend, papers I must write and deliver,
professors to cajole and students to encourage. When we do meet it feels like being
with a stranger from a world I do not understand. I watch his eyes. “Coward,” they
say. “Coward who allows this thing to happen and says nothing about it. You deserve
it.”

*   *   *

One night lying back to back, oceans of silence heaving between us, I can’t stand
it anymore. I whisper, “What is she like?” and the words are suddenly pouring out
of him. She is tall and blond, slim and svelte as a Prada model, all sharp lines and
efficiency, poreless perfection in tailored clothing. He cries and says it is no use,
he’s in love with her. He reaches for me and I let him hold me as he tells me everything.
After that I imagine them together endlessly. Not so much the mingling, her golden
hair falling over him, the rise of her body over his—these images too, of course,
come to rake nails across my heart, but it is the other moments when perhaps they
are in his car, singing along to a song on the radio. Or eating together, some rushed
meal out of boxes. The tenderness of it, the closeness, these are the mundanities
that make me sob.

He holds me as I weep. He is kind, solicitous. “We have so much together,” he says.
“It would be stupid to throw it all away. After all, this kind of thing happens in
all marriages. We must be realistic about it. We couldn’t have stayed the way we were
forever.”

“But why?” I shout. “You had her before we were married. Why didn’t you just go on
fucking her, marry her, whatever. Why did you have to marry me?”

“My parents. They wanted so much to see me with a Sri Lankan girl. Wanted to see me
settled down. Having children and all that. Then they started looking for a wife for
me and I just couldn’t stop them.”

“So you just let them look until they found me. Lucky me.”

“Yes, and then they found you. I was going to make them stop but I thought I’d just
meet you to make them happy. But then when we met … We got on so well, didn’t we?
I didn’t think we would. That it would be so easy.”

“So you married me even though you still loved her.”

His voice is shaking. “I tried to break it with her. I thought once you and I were
married it would pass. You and I have so much in common.…”

I realize that the similarity that I thought would sustain us, the shared language
and culture and history and food, was never enough. Not even the ways in which we
have held each other through that long, faraway war have been enough. Now it is difference
he desires, while similarity is constraining, cloying.

These are the moments I despise him most, trapped as he is by the cultural dictates
of a small island a million miles away. Living his life according to tradition, denying
love, denying passion. So cowardly.
So cowardly!
But I can’t hate him. He has the shreds of my heart caught between his teeth. “But
I want this also,” he says, trying to hold my hand, pull me toward him. “It’s good,
isn’t it? We don’t fight much. I love you. We are creating something together here,
aren’t we? Isn’t it bigger than this thing?” He gestures with his hand, dismissing
the “thing” as irrelevant, unimportant. These are the moment I almost believe him.
Maybe he’s right, maybe it’ll work out and she is only some bright shiny golden thing
he is playing with for a moment.

We go to marriage counseling. The therapist asks us to make a mission statement for
our marriage, to read certain books, to have regular dates and hold hands. I dress
up for these dates. I ignore important deadlines for conferences, stop reading and
writing so that I can buy dresses, makeup, shoes, and stockings. These things feel
like talismans: if I could just figure out how to use them the right way, I know I
could win him back. I paint my eyes and lips, I pull silk stockings along my legs
and slip my feet into unfamiliar high heels. When I meet him at the movie theater
his eyes run over me, taking in these changes. He says, “Oh wow. You look so good.”
But I know he is taking measurements, making notes, comparing, and that I have come
up short. When he slips away claiming to go to the rest room, I’m sure he is calling
her, laughing at my efforts.

He greets my jealous tirade with incredulity. “Of course I wasn’t calling her. I was
using the rest room!”

Jealousy has made me insane. “Then let me see your cell phone.”

“No, are you crazy? This is too much!”

“Just let me see it.”

“No, I’m leaving. It isn’t working, but that’s because of you. I’m doing everything
I can.”

“Let me see your phone.”

When he turns and leaves the lobby, I go back into the theater, sit in the dark, and
watch without seeing. Later that night I dig his phone out of his jacket pocket while
he is showering, scroll through the numbers, and see that I was right.

When I call Amma, she tells me to be patient. “Don’t worry, Duwa, he will come back
to you. It will blow over. He’s not going to leave you for some blond bimbo.”

I splutter through my tears, “How do you know that? He loves her.”

“Love-schmove. It won’t last. You’re his wife. He’s a good Sri Lankan boy. He will
come back to you, don’t worry. I’ll call his mother, have a good talk. They will set
him straight. In the meantime you must do everything to tempt him back. Are you dieting?
Might be a good time to lose a few pounds, you know, make him notice you again.”

I hang up, my heart muscle tearing in even greater rips.

*   *   *

La calls one midnight. It has been months since I’ve heard from her. She is giving
up her studio, her blossoming success, to go back to the island. Her agent is livid,
but she wants to do this. She will teach art at a school for war orphans, children
brought to Colombo from the villages where they have lost their parents. Most are
amputees, she says. Their legs neatly cut off at the knee by land mines. I can’t imagine
this. What good is it, I argue, teaching art to these kids, they’ve gone through incredible
trauma. They need professional help, not messing around with paint and paper. She
grows angry, says, “What else is there to do? It’s what I know. It’s what I can give.
We each have to give what we can.” Then she says, “Come with me,” and for a moment
her words hang in the air like possibility, the sudden scent of jasmine and sea air
swirling in the room

But there is Siddharth’s voice in the next room. If I go, he will belong completely
to her. She will have won. I cannot abide the thought. La says again, “Akka, come
with me.” There is a beseeching in her voice, as if she knows exactly what I am thinking,
the depths of my impotence, even though I have told her nothing of the situation.
I suddenly realize that Amma has probably told her everything. La never really liked
Siddharth. She has always found him pretentious, artificial. She is offering me a
lifeline. I hang up, angry at her, angry at myself for not going with her, for not
being able to imagine leaving my life, my marriage with all its tyrannical love, to
go across the world and teach amputated children to play with color.

*   *   *

A few months later her voice over the international line is disembodied, at 4:00
A.M
. She can never keep in mind the twelve-hour time difference so that I am always dragged
out of bed, heart racing, tragedies of all sorts enacting themselves in my head before
I clutch the phone to my ear and her sunny and broken-up voice travels across oceans
to me. She says, breathless, “I’ve found him!”

“Who?”

“Shiva.” Instantly I am surrounded by that particular shade of blue, the whisper of
his fingers about my wrist, a rustle of breath by my ear.

“Shiva?”

“Yes, him.” She and I acting as if the name belongs only to this one.

“They went to England, after the riots, settled there. He’s back here working at the
hospital now. Doctoring.”

“Where? How did you find him?”

“I went to the Wellawatte house, just to look. Told the people there that I grew up
in it and they let me in to look around. They said someone else had come. Someone
who had lived there around the time we did. They said he was a foreigner, too, like
me, but with a different accent. They gave me his number.”

The excitement in her voice. That of a child who has found a forgotten and beloved
toy, something valuable thought lost. But also proprietary, I hear it already. Had
she always wanted this one thing that I had?

We are quiet. The buzz of static air suddenly between us. She asks, “How are things
there?” and I, cowardly enough to think this is what she wants, say, “Really good.
Siddharth and I are…”

Her voice breaking, “Akka. Stop it. Just leave him! Come here and we’ll take care
of you.…” The roar of the ocean in my ear, her voice lost somewhere in the distance
between us. What remains? Only the ease with which she said the word “we.”

*   *   *

It was predictable, of course, that they would fall in love. How did it make me feel?
Did I gnash my teeth and ponder slitting my wrists because my younger and more beautiful
sister had found the boy who still frequented my dreams? Not completely. I was, after
all, still madly trying to win back the heart of my legitimately wedded husband. And
if he was still enraptured in his blond fairy tale, it didn’t matter. I would triumph
in the end. Some days I was sure of it, I could hear his apologies, feel his hands
on me, on that longed-for day when he finally realized that I was what he wanted all
along. I believed this because he told me this was what he wanted, too. I believed
it because, of course, I so desperately wanted it to be true.

In the end, it is the photographs that make me leave. I find them in his desk. My
husband and her, on top of a sky-blue duvet. His hands curled around her narrow hips,
the pressure of his fingers causing indentations on her white, white skin. Her golden
hair falling over his lean stomach. The tension in his outspread palm as he pushes
away her thigh, his head between her legs, her mouth open in agonized pleasure. She’s
covering her eyes with one elegant hand, with the other pressing into his hair, pushing
him deeper into her. I witness: their varied acts of love, their slim bodies, the
rapture on their faces.

I have not seen him in this state of abandon for years.

I wait for rage, but only a faraway ache comes. That and a raw, painful tenderness.
Impossible to rage against lovers like these, whose bodies hold no secret from each
other, who in the midst of their passion smile. I can see the familiar lines that
radiate from his eyes, the deep groove next to his mouth when he smiles.

It is a crease I have longed to place my finger against for too long. Now I see that
I am the interloper. In these years of marriage, it was always her he was faithful
to. I was the other, the outsider. I pack a bag. Buy a one-way ticket to Kuala Lumpur.
From there I will buy another, moving ever farther eastward. I leave the photographs
scattered across the coffee table. My wedding ring, circling her profile while she
sucks his cock.

ten

Saraswathi, Sri Lanka

On that first day at the Tiger camp, there is more food than I have seen in months.
I eat fragrant fish and steaming rice until my stomach is drum tight. My fingers,
my mouth, my belly rejoicing; my heart aching for Amma, Appa, Luxshmi.