Some Assembly Required (16 page)

When I met up with Bill at his hotel and told him what had happened, he cried out with distress. Then he flamboyantly zipped his mouth closed to avoid saying he had told me so, but he sniggered off and on all the way to the airport.

I woke up early in Delhi, and had a big breakfast in my room, a cheese omelet, several pieces of wheat toast, and an orange. I tapped on the door of Bill’s room down the hall to say good-bye, but he didn’t answer. I went outside and stood waiting for my driver to Agra, game for a total immersion in quintessential India.

Then an e-mail from Sam arrived on my BlackBerry:

“We are so excited you are coming home. I know we told you that Jax is pre-crawling, which might make you think he is up on all fours—but that is not exactly true. What he can do is the army crawl, using his elbows for rapid propulsion across the floor, with occasional success at getting on his knees. So don’t be disappointed. It is great anyway! Come home!”

I hit the lottery with my driver, Prem. He spoke English, sort of, and pronounced Bush’s name Jaja W. Boot, which made
the entire trip worth it. He drove the car you see everywhere in India, an Ambassador, which looks like a small, fat Peugeot with a snub-nosed hood. Bill had told me that its marketing slogan used to be “The King of Indian Roads.” Most of the Ambassadors are old, and either black, as they were originally in the 1940s, or white, from when they became official government cars.

Prem and I talked about our children and shared my roast cashews and a large chocolate bar. I was glad to leave the city and be in the Indian countryside, passing fields and the suggestions of villages, lots of animals. Everything was fine— except that our car started breaking down. It broke down four times in the first four hours after we left Delhi.

Each time, Prem assured me that it would take just a second to repair, that it was just loose wires. I pretended not to be worried sick. The car broke down by the side of the road in the countryside, and once alongside a curb in a town where beggars descended on it. I made a gesture of waving them away, looking with great annoyance to the opposite window, where there were another dozen beggars. One man on a cart who had leprosy tapped on the window the entire time, smiling.

Finally, I rolled the window down to just above the highest his arm stumps could reach, and said, very nicely, with Christian love, “Nay, nay. EnRaHa!”

The third time the King broke down, when Prem appeared from beneath the hood with his tools, he asked if I
knew anything about car wiring. Me. I can just barely work a toaster.

I said, “Jeez, no, not really.” He went back under the hood with a strip of cloth, came out, and then got the car running. We started up again, and were soon passing fields full of beans and grain and rice, and every so often fourth-world outdoor cafés with white plastic lawn chairs. I laughed out loud at the memory of Father Guido Sarducci saying, “Where did the lawn chairs come from? And what do they want?” Prem and I talked off and on in our best broken efforts about our children, the glue-sniffing children on the streets of Delhi, Obama, and Jaja W. Boot. We were quiet for long stretches. It was an honor to see the countryside with him.

After several hours, much longer than I had expected it would take, we got to the gates of the Taj Mahal. Prem turned me over to his cousin, who worked as a guide there, who spoke perfect English and had a name made up of dozens of syllables.

I had wondered often since we’d set out this morning if it was really worth the time and effort to come here on my last full day in India. I had seen the image of the Taj Mahal a thousand times, and I’d thought I was prepared, but I couldn’t possibly have been, any more than I was for the Great Sphinx at Giza, or Jax. The Taj Mahal fills you with such awe that you feel stoned. The great spotless-white rising domed marble mausoleum, the four minarets, the garden; it’s perfection. It is beauty; it is truth.

Prem’s cousin and I walked solemnly around the grounds for a couple of hours. He told me the history of the Mughal empire and about Shah Jahan and his grief when his wife died. I told him about Jax and Sam. He pointed out the most unbelievable details, mostly inside the mausoleum, where the walls are inlaid with millions of bits of jigsawed gemstones—sapphire, carnelian, lapis, turquoise, coral, topaz. Its sheer glory stupefied me, like a lightning strike in slow motion. I got out my pictures of Jax, and the dogs.

The Taj made me laugh out loud, because it is so amazing, and I cried because I was here for only this one time. Prem’s cousin gave me his handkerchief. Dabbing at my eyes, I asked him to tell me his name again. It was Rasoolasallahualayi-wassallam, or something. I asked if I could call him “Cousin,” and he smiled and said yes.

Cousin handed me back to Prem, and we headed back to Delhi. We drove maybe fifteen minutes before the car started acting up. Prem tore a bleached-out red mechanic’s rag into strips, and disappeared under the hood again. Then I had an inspiration. I tore out the blue cord handle from a bag I had. The cord was pretty thick, almost a foot long. The next time the car failed, about fifteen minutes later, Prem started to get out of the car; I dangled the blue cord toward him, and the relief on his face was radiant.

Bill had promised that we would walk to all of our pet places in Delhi today, maybe take a subway ride. I was flying home at night. We went back to my favorite restaurant for one last
thali
lunch, six dishes on the divided metal plate, two kinds of chapatis. We went to see the Red Fort, finally, the great fortress of gates, courtyards, a moat, and breathtaking mausoleums, and then visited some storefront temples whose walls were decorated in mosaics that seemed to have been created out of peacock feathers, meadows, candle flame, each temple worthy of a day’s attentions. But all I really wanted to do was marinate one last time in the street life.

A gorgeous, sexy woman vendor said sweetly to Bill, “Banana?” He shook his head and we kept walking. She called to him again, more seductively, almost suggestively, “Banana?” He smiled. Then, as we walked past, she screamed at the top of her lungs, “BANANA?”

Bill admitted, after nine days, that there was one person in all of India he felt bad about not giving money to, a woman who had been begging at the subway entrance for a starving guy who lay on the ground beside her, who Bill had heard was dying of AIDS. So, a few hours before I went to the airport, we came upon them on the stairs to the subway. This guy looked much worse than Bill had described—as if he’d been exhumed and cleaned up, though not particularly well. He
weighed maybe sixty pounds, and had the hands of death, badly receded teeth, biblical dirtiness, wild eyes.

Bill approached them and dropped coins into their cup, and I put in most of the bills I had left. I said to them both, “Bless you, bless you,” over and over, beseeched them with my eyes. I was kind of unhinged on their behalf. Then I had to walk on, because of the crush behind me.

A beautiful young woman with two pretty female companions fell in step with me and tugged my sleeve.

“Oh my God—you must
never
give anything to those two.”

I looked over at her and her two companions, who rolled their eyes.

Bill said, “But he’s obviously about to die.”

“Oh, no,” said one of the young women. “Those two have been there forever. He stays in that condition so his wife can beg off him.”

Shocked, I said, “That can’t be.” But all three young women nodded. Bill and I instantly got that we’d been had but good: we were so busted. We laughed and for a while talked about beggars with the three women, who were university students.

“What about the starving little kids?” I asked. “Don’t you help them?”

“No, no,” one of the women said adamantly. “If they are successful at begging, it just makes them want to keep doing it. They’ll never learn a trade.”

“But how do these children eat otherwise?”

“They will probably go home for dinner. Their parents will feed them. Their parents are the ones who put them up to this.”

Bill and I laughed at ourselves all the way to our train, helpless as little kids.

I still sort of thought that we should notify someone from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and maybe get the guy at the subway a checkup. But for once I could not inflict my goodness and good ideas on the world, because I had to get back to the hotel and pack.

I don’t really remember much about flying home, except that it took several years and was pretty awful and that I did the best I could. I rode a cab home from the airport, and now I have been here for two days, and have seen Jax, Amy, and Sam. My house now seems like a bungalow in Beverly Hills, so quiet and clean, with beautiful rugs and fixtures everywhere, and running water in three out of six rooms.

Jax is six months old, and will not need us for much longer. He is a fully formed person with a nice tan and huge black eyes, who now rolls over, and over, and over. I keep thinking of Teri Garr as Inga in
Young Frankenstein
, having a roll in the hay cart, crying out joyfully, roll, roll, roll. Jax is happy and social, rocks and kicks and rolls. He bounces when you hold
him in a standing position, and sits, briefly, before falling over like a drunk.

Amy and Sam seemed to be in a good place when I got back, but demented with jet lag, I had to grip myself by the wrist not to pitch one good idea after another at them. I didn’t say, “Let’s find some great day care for Jax, so Amy can
work
part-time,” but I writhed with the effort to stay silent. I almost offered to babysit twice a week to this end, but didn’t. Since Jax’s birth, my ideas about what would be best for everyone usually got in the way. Life is already an obstacle course, and when you’re adding your own impediments (thinking they’re helping), you really crazy it up. You make it harder to even just cross the room. You should not
bring
more items and hurdles to the obstacle course.

It was pouring rain when I woke. I drove up in the storm to see Millard today. The end is near. He was restless and jerky, in Beckett agitation, like the lady onstage rummaging through her bag. But this discomfort and squirm may launch him into what awaits.

He was a total exaggeration of how this life does not work—he urgently needed to do his lists, and make phone calls, and all this felt frantically imperative to him. I’m really seeing how the machine of our lives is always on the fritz,
whether because of our bodies’ failing us, or our minds’. Millard’s twitchy end-stage agitation looks the way a lot of us feel sometimes, even if we seem fine on the outside.

For some reason, my cousins did not call in hospice while I was in India. It was driving me crazy. I want to make lists of what they need to do, and make their calls for them. But all I can do is show up, laugh with Millard, listen, and breathe with him. All I can do is sit and bring my love to him.

During a moment when he was quieted, like a horse, he told me he was worried that he would live too long like this. I told him about the end of my father’s days, the flurry before the final deep sleep, and how peacefully he passed.

The rainstorm was grotesquely elemental, sheets of blowing rain, a nightmare on the roads. Someone was playing with the hose up there!

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Millard waited for me to get home from India, or that I was in such a jet-lagged mess. The supposed succor of the familiar world, which I missed in India, was not going to bolster me. And it was not going to give comfort to Millard, either—there was not much relief for him, on this side.

I had no choice but to feed the animals, walk the dogs, get my work done, help take care of Jax, talk to friends, and be in what was true. It’s always the same old problem: how to find our
selves
in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else’s destinies.

I miss India, in a way. I had fewer problems to solve there. Actually, I hardly had any, except when I got the monkey tangled in my hair. Oh, and the riot I started in Varanasi. India was spectacular and difficult, timeless, immediate, and demanding—mood-altering, with its ecstatic overwhelm and horror and beauty. I really had to pay attention.

Here at home, I had a different set of problems. Millard rapidly deteriorating. Amy not working. And the dogs have ticks, and the ticks might bite Jax and give him Lyme disease and a lifetime of physical and psychiatric problems. I felt crazy, sad, helpless, like everything was coming together by coming apart. It’s good to be reminded of the fraying weave of the world, but not with advanced jet lag. It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it’s painful—just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them.

Whose life was I living? I was living Annie’s life (and maybe a bit of the dogs’). And it was complex enough. I had enough to wrestle, wrangle, and settle back into, with this one life of mine. Besides, I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.

There are no words for how much I hate, resent, and resist this.

The bucketing rain stopped. Amy called to say she and Jax were coming over later, and inwardly I felt like Lily and Bodhi when I get out the cheese treats, unable to focus on anything else, all but panting. This is terrible.

I went up to see Millard for an hour. He looked like some skinny old prophet from Leviticus at a computer. He was alternately agitated, frantic, in love with me, taking pills randomly, lucid, the man he always was, and nuts. He was sitting elegantly in his chair, telling me how much he had to do; then he suddenly leapt up, looking fearful and angry, his teeth gritted, and sprayed us both with a can of lemony air freshener —as if giant insects were dive-bombing us, and he was going to save us from attack. The air reeked.