Quarantine: Stories (18 page)

Sanj knew his parents wouldn’t pay for him to live in New York unless they thought he was working, so he didn’t tell anyone he’d quit. To explain to his parents why they could no longer reach him at the work number he had originally given them, he told them he’d found a better internship at
Vogue
. When they asked for the new number, he explained that the editors there were very hierarchical. “I don’t even have my own desk, let alone a phone.”

Every day, Sanj would take the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, and then he’d kill time in the city until it was a respectable hour to return home. Some days he’d walk over to the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, and he’d read the papers, looking for possible employment. Other days, he would take the subway to various neighborhoods and walk around, trying to orient himself to New York.

Sometimes he’d wander around with a handheld tape recorder, and he would approach random people, claiming he was working on an article about this or that for
GQ
or the
New York Post
or
Paper
magazine. He was having a tough time in New York. If he could better understand the minds of New Yorkers, he reasoned, maybe he could figure out how to live in this city. Besides, he had no friends and was starving for conversation. On Forty-second Street, he asked pedestrians what they thought of the haikus an artist had installed on the marquees of the derelict porn theaters. Another time, on a particularly bleak stretch of the Meatpacking District, he asked people what they thought the city should do to beautify the neighborhood. “How about a park?” he’d suggested. “Don’t you ever wish you had more green in your lives?” Part of what amazed Sanj was how quick people were to believe he was who he said he was. No one ever seemed to doubt him.

One day, wandering around Times Square, Sanj noticed, next to a Howard Johnson, a steep stairway with an awning that read, “Gaiety Theatre.” Sanj remembered seeing a small ad in the back of the
Village Voice
. It featured a naked male torso—slender and smooth—with the words, “Male Burlesk.”

He climbed the stairs and paid the cover admission. Inside was a large room with small tables and a stage where the striptease took place. Most of the customers, at least this weekday afternoon, were businessmen dressed in suits, taking a long lunch or an afternoon break from the office. Or so Sanj assumed. Maybe they weren’t businessmen. Maybe they were like Sanj: pretending. Pretending to be businessmen, pretending to have jobs they went to every day.

The strippers were pretending, too, though, of course this was their job: to pretend to be soldiers or airline pilots or gang-banging thugs or firefighters. They were all different. Some were thick with gym-won muscles. Others were wiry. Some were out-of-work models and actors and dancers. Sanj thought he recognized one of the dancers from Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour, which he’d seen when it aired live on HBO. Some were strung-out junkies. This particular afternoon, there was also a guest headliner, a porn star. Sanj had seen one of his videos in college and already knew what the man looked like naked, somewhat spoiling the tease part of the striptease. But it was more than made up for by the excitement Sanj felt being near someone he’d seen onscreen having sex.

The end of each striptease was always the same. When the performer got down to his G-string, he would disappear backstage, music still playing, and then reemerge completely naked, with an erection. Sometimes he emerged quickly. Sometimes he was backstage for a very long time, trying to get hard.

When he returned to the stage, his penis erect, he wouldn’t dance; his erection was an encumbrance. Instead, he’d sort of saunter, and then he would pick a customer and walk right up to him, standing inches from him, hands on his hips, pelvis thrust forward, like Superman, his dick right in the customer’s face. The customers knew they weren’t supposed to touch. The stripper just stood like this: motionless, smiling, the customer staring at his crotch. If there was time, the stripper would go around to two or three or four customers and stand in front of them one at a time. Sanj could tell he was choosing men he thought might be interested in hiring him out later, men who seemed old or closeted. The stripper could only stay onstage as long as his erection lasted. Once his dick reached four o’clock, he would disappear behind the curtain.

Sanj liked imagining what went on backstage, what the performers had to do to get aroused. Was someone helping them? A boyfriend? A girlfriend? Another stripper? Or was there a special employee whose whole job was to aid them with their erections? Hadn’t Sanj heard of that? Wasn’t it called a fluffer? What images did the men rely upon? What fantasies, what private desires? Sanj wished he could crack their heads open and see. Oddly, his favorite part of the whole show wasn’t when the men were visible, but when they had disappeared backstage, and the crowd was waiting for them to reemerge. He loved the anticipation.

Sanj returned to the Gaiety many times. Once, he even tried to interview one of the performers: a British guy, who, during his act, had worn a G-string with a Union Jack on the crotch. Sanj found him in the small, adjoining lounge where the strippers would sometimes loiter afterward, hoping to pick up tricks. Claiming to be from
Genre
magazine, Sanj had thrust his tape recorder into the man’s face. “What were you thinking about backstage to get hard?” Pushing the tape recorder aside, the man winked and said, “You.”

L
ala, Chandu’s wife, had her suspicions about Sanj. There were days he didn’t wake until noon, didn’t leave for the train until two. She didn’t know much about internships, about the working world of Manhattan, but she knew enough to recognize that there wasn’t a job on earth that would let you show up whenever you happened to feel like it, not a job this boy could get anyway.

And then there were days he didn’t take the train into the city at all. He’d claim he was going to work, but instead he’d put on his Walkman and embark on long walks, returning sometimes two or three hours later. She knew because once she saw him from her car while running errands. He was just standing in front of a Carvel, less than a mile from their house, headphones on, gazing in the shop window.

Lala remembered when she first arrived in America—when her husband was working long hours at the hospital and before her daughters were born or she learned to drive—she, too, would go for long walks. Her mind would often drift back to Ahmeda-bad, back to some typical scene from childhood, like the view of the Sabarmati River from her bedroom window, or the dosa shop her family would visit on Saturdays, or the crowded, narrow streets of the Old City, the jumble of scooters and camels and cows. Then she’d look at her watch and suddenly realize three hours had passed, and she was in a public park she didn’t recognize, sitting on a bench, watching a blond couple playing with a puppy in the grass under a grove of oaks, and she’d wonder, “How have I ended up here?” Sometimes she saw in the boy’s eyes, when he’d returned from his walks, that same lost look.

Yes, there was something she liked about Sanj. These days, her daughters were all busy with school or their first jobs. She saw them only in the evenings, and even then they seemed to come home later and later. She was grateful for Sanj’s company.

One morning when she was vacuuming, and her back, which caused her chronic pain, was particularly achy, the boy—at the table pouring a bowl of cereal—noticed. Without either of them saying a word, he gently took the vacuum handle from her and finished the work. Since then, twice a week he ran the vacuum without being asked.

There were smaller things, too. On nights when he came home very late—which happened often—entering the house long after everyone was asleep, he tiptoed so quietly, no one ever woke up. Lala would leave a plate of leftovers for him, whatever the family had eaten for dinner that night. She’d set the plate and a glass of milk on the kitchen table under a small tabletop mosquito net she’d bought in India on one of her annual visits. Each morning, she’d find the dishes, the glass, the cutlery all carefully washed and dried and put away in the cupboards. Such a small thing, yet she loved this about him. This back and forth—her leaving the food out each night, his washing and putting away the dishes for her to find the next morning—felt like a private communication between them, their only communication, since they shared no languages.

Once, when Lala had invited three ladies over to the house to prepare sweets for an upcoming holy function, the boy sat down with them at the kitchen table and sliced almonds into paper-thin slivers, thinner than any of the women could slice. When Neela looked at him sideways, and said, “Lala, three daughters on their way out of the house, but no matter: you have found a fourth daughter,” and the other ladies giggled, Lala was glad the boy didn’t understand Gujarati.

O
ne morning, when Sanj was toasting bread in his parents’ kitchen in West Virginia, he noticed his grandfather hovering. Several times, he seemed to start to speak to Sanj, but he couldn’t quite form the words, and Sanj did nothing to make it easier. Sanj had never felt close to his grandfather. He was, at best, a vague and ghostly presence in Sanj’s life.

After several false starts, his grandfather said, “Sanju, beta, tell me about your life in New York.”

Why was his grandfather asking? Sanj wondered. Besides, what was there to tell? What could his grandfather possibly understand about his life?

“I’m working,” Sanj said. When his grandfather seemed to want more, Sanj added, “At a magazine.”

“What kind of magazine?”

“Fashion.”

Again his grandfather struggled to find words, before asking, “Are you happy?”

Sanj didn’t know how to answer. “Were you happy? When you were young and just starting out? Were you happy?”

His grandfather thought for a minute, then said, “It was a different time. I had different responsibilities.”

Sanj remembered, when he was ten, visiting the house in India where his grandfather lived and where his father was born. It was his one and only trip to India. He and his parents had taken a local bus forty minutes from Ahmedabad to the village. Children had followed them from the bus station, through the dusty lanes, all the way to the house. The structure itself was dilapidated, with a badly cracked façade and a trash-strewn entryway. Several families shared it. Sanj’s grandfather’s flat consisted of just two small rooms upstairs. But no one from the family had lived there for twenty years, and no one knew who lived there now. Pointing to the dark window upstairs, Sanj’s mother said, “Can you believe your father is from there?” and, in fact, Sanj could not.

Speaking with his grandfather now, Sanj realized that when his father was born, his grandfather must not have been much older than Sanj currently was. He considered the sacrifices his grandparents must have made to get his father out of that village, to send their son to America. The fare alone must have required months, if not years, of careful saving.

“I know fashion may sound frivolous,” Sanj said, “but it’s a very famous magazine. Anyone would want this job. My friends can’t believe how lucky I am.”

A
fter that first night, watching
La Double Vie de Véronique
in Sanj’s basement, Sylvie and Sanj saw each other every day, sometimes twice. Mostly they watched movies at Sanj’s, downing margaritas or daiquiris or vodka tonics. From the stories Sylvie told, Sanj pieced together that she had taken classes at the community college, but had only lasted one semester. He learned she had spent much of the last year doing what his parents were doing in India now: helping to clean out the apartment of her mother’s mother, who had been terminally ill, and who had died just two months earlier.

One evening, Sylvie asked Sanj to meet her at her house. Sanj hadn’t been to Sylvie’s since high school. It was only a couple of miles from where he lived, just down the hill in the jumble of small houses crowded in the narrow valley close to the riverbank, in the part of town that flooded when it rained too much. Sylvie’s house was a compact, two-story structure that looked neglected, with peeling blue paint and a sagging front porch. A stone goose stood sentry on the front lawn; Sylvie’s mom liked to dress it according to the weather and the season—a yellow slicker when it rained, earmuffs in the winter, a red Santa hat around Christmas. Today had been beautiful, and the goose was wearing sunglasses.

Sanj knocked on the door that entered into the kitchen. Sylvie’s father swung the door open and shook Sanj’s hand. The kitchen was small, with a linoleum floor that needed replacing, and a floral curtain-rod ruffle over the window above the sink. The kitchen radio was set to an oldies station. Sylvie’s mother was standing at the counter, chopping carrots. She turned to Sanj. “We haven’t seen you in forever! Look at you!” Sanj noticed right away that they were both wearing sweatpants, just as he’d remembered them. They looked older, though, more so than the four years that had elapsed. Sylvie’s mother came toward him, her arms open, and hugged him.

Sanj saw Sylvie, who had been lurking in the doorway. She came over to him, grasped his hand, and pulled him away from her mother, whom he was still embracing. At first, her mother looked hurt, but then she resumed her work at the kitchen counter. As Sylvie dragged him into the hallway, Sanj thought he saw someone sitting on the couch in the other room watching television.

Upstairs, Sylvie’s door was shut and locked. It was a heavy bolt lock, the kind you would find on the front door of a house, not an inside bedroom. Sylvie fished a key out of her sweatpants’ pocket.