The Vine of Desire (10 page)

In this amniotic place, Anju pushes her glasses up to her forehead, takes out a sheet of paper and a fountain pen she has carried, with a nostalgia she didn’t know she possessed, all the way from India.

Dear Unknown Father
, she writes.

On the car radio, a voice informs Sunil that the Pentagon has dropped its eight-billion-dollar Doomsday project, that more Serb planes have been shot down in a no-fly zone, that the Germans have wrested from the French the distinction of being the world’s largest consumers of alcohol.

“Bully for them,” he says.

The voice goes on to warn him of a chemical spill on 101 and Montague, traffic backed up to Mathilda Avenue.

“Shit!” says Sunil. He is like an animal whose hair, ruffled the wrong way by a thoughtless hand, stands up in prickly patches. Whose skin is uneasy with exposure. Can you sense inside him the desire for speed, building like compressed steam? But the four-thirty traffic has him firmly in its embrace. Raindrops gather their fatness against the windshield and trickle lazily downward. He slashes them away with the wipers, which he operates, unnecessarily, at full speed. His handsome lips (Mel Gibson lips, a woman who knew him once said) are thin with annoyance, his fingers tap a staccato code on the steering wheel. He made himself wait in a café, drinking cappuccino after cappuccino
until it was time for Anju to be home. Does he think of his act as honorable, or foolish? He hasn’t had lunch and the caffeine makes him nauseous and jittery, makes him take turns too quickly, without signaling. He gives honking motorists the finger and—finally—roars into the parking lot of the apartment.

Taking the stairs two at a time, what is Sunil wishing for? He rings the bell. There is no answer. “Out at the mall again, I bet,” he mutters, letting himself in with his key and dropping his briefcase on the couch. He undoes the buttons of his shirt—he’s breathless today, everything tightens its coils around him—and walks into the bedroom. And sees them.

Dear Unknown Father—

It’s a bit awkward, as you might imagine, writing to a person who died before I was born. A man I hated all my growing-up years because he destroyed his family. Yes, Father, you destroyed us by dying—a death you brought upon yourself by going off in search of treasure—a foolish, clichéd enterprise which should have remained where it belonged, between the pages of a children’s adventure tale.

But it isn’t my intention to berate you. Now that I’m mired in the middle years of my own life, I find my old hatred as useless as the adventure you went on. I need instead (the way one needs to know about the genetic defects that kill one’s parents) to know what drove you. Perhaps the same desperation is beginning to drive me. I need to know what you were most afraid of in your life. Because one knows people best through their fears—the ones they overcome, and the ones they are overcome by.

These are what the people closest to me are afraid of Sunil of earthquakes, flying insects, the sky at dusk, and the loss of control; Sudha of the silence that rises from furniture in an empty room at noon, culinary disasters
,
and the resurrection of desires she has put to death; Prem (yes, Prem) of dissolvement, the crying of bats and aborted babies, and my despair. Only Dayita among us is afraid of nothing.

And me—to give you all the things I am afraid of, it would take an aeon. So I will write only of one: love. Love which gives you a taste of itself and makes you greedy for more. You hold it in your addicted hands, terrified by its frailty. It makes you lie incessantly. You would kill anyone—including yourself—to keep it from breaking. Then it breaks anyway.

All the loves I’ve loved, I’ve lost them—except one. And this one too—I think I hear it cracking underfoot, like lake ice in a thin winter.

Father, what was it you loved so much that you had to leave us for it?

—Anju.

He stands very still in the middle of the bedroom, his unbuttoned shirt fallen from his body. His chest does not rise and fall. He has forgotten to breathe as he stares at the woman and the child on his bed—which makes them, for the moment, his. He looks like a man struck dumb by a miracle.

The frog video has ended and a static drone comes from the TV. To this dissonant music, Sunil walks to the bed. He looks down at Sudha, her slightly swollen lids, her hair tendriled over his pillow, the sudden excitement of her flared hips. At the child sleeping with her hand fisted around her mother’s finger.

He kneels by the bed. He kisses her. A feather kiss on the mole on her cheekbone, a breath kiss on her left eye, then her right, and then he can’t stop himself. His lips take hers, her face is in his hands. He will crush her into himself, he will swallow her if that’s the only way for them to be together. This is the kiss he has imagined over a hundred unsatisfied nights. He breathes in the clove scent of her dreams, which will now become his.
His arms crush her to him. Her skin makes him drunk with silkiness. He strokes her shoulder blades, the curve of vertebrae, each fitted to the other like pearls on a string. His lips move to the rise of her breasts. Does her body arch up, compliant? If only he could contain himself within this perfect moment, looking neither before nor beyond.

Then she’s crying out, pushing him away, he cannot read the look on her face, he would like to believe that it is an ambiguous joy, or at least desire, but her words are not ambiguous,
Let go of me, let go.
She’s hitting out. To save himself from falling, he must take his hands from her, balance on his heels, kneeling by the bed. She sits up, clutching her sari to her face. Only her eyes, wide with shock, are visible above the bunched fabric. The child, too, awake now, stares—first at one, then the other, trying to decide if the situation calls for a smile. The man’s breath makes a crazy, whistling sound in his windpipe. Against the lean brownness of his body, the gleam of his belt buckle. His chest hairs are dark and curly. The child laughs as she reaches out to touch them. That laugh, that touch. They bring reality crashing down around Sunil like the door to a tiger trap.

In the 7:00
P.M.
bus, Anju holds on to the metal armrest of the seat, her thumb caressing its smooth, bluish sheen. She feels a wondrous, party-balloon lightness, as though she might float up at any moment to the roof of the bus. The letter she wrote is safely hidden between the pages of her thickest notebook.

When she gets off, the rain hits her in immediate, wild sheets. The road has turned into a river, dull and evening-nickeled. Soaked, shivering, she hugs the bag to her chest, hoping the letter will stay dry. Rain falls on the lenses of her
sunglasses, further dimming her vision. She is elated by blindness, by the mysteries of unseen puddles.

In the parking lot Sunil swings open the door of the car where he has been sitting, and calls her name. She gives a gasp, her fingers tightening on the backpack.

“You scared me!” she says. “I didn’t see you in the dark!”

“You’d see a hell of a lot better if you took those blasted glasses off. How come you’re so late?”

Anju is taken aback by his vehemence. She squints and bends forward to look into his face, but keeps the glasses on.

“Well?”

“I … something came up … I needed to do some work in the library. I lost track of time. Why are you so mad?”

“I was concerned, that’s all,” says Sunil. He steps out of the car, his shirt turning dark in the rain. Water flows over his face, obscuring his expression. “Look at you, dripping wet. What if you get sick again? Can’t you carry an umbrella, at least? Here, let me take your books.”

“No, no, it’s quite all right—you’ve got your briefcase to carry.”

“Anju!” says Sunil in exasperation. “Why must you always fight me when I try to do something for you?”

Anju relinquishes her backpack with reluctance and watches as he swings it cavalierly over his shoulder. To keep herself from asking him to give it back, she says, as she follows him up the stairs, “Was the traffic bad? Did you just get here, too?”

“The traffic is always bad,” says Sunil, not looking back.

Inside the apartment, Sudha is trying to chop onions for a curry. She cannot make up her mind as to what kind of curry it should
be—some of the onion pieces are long and curved as for kurma, others chunky, as for chochori. Their edges are bruised because Sudha, usually meticulous about such things, has picked the wrong kind of knife. Large and thick, meant for cutting meat, it was the first thing that came to her hand as she felt about in the drawer. From time to time she pauses in her chopping to heft it in her fist like a weapon. But she doesn’t see it—or the onions, or the dal that’s on the verge of boiling over, or Dayita, who’s playing in the living room with a metal paperweight she’s been told not to touch. She tilts her head, the way one might when holding to a dismayed ear an expensive watch that has stopped in spite of a warranty.

Dayita bangs the paperweight on the table. She likes the sound it makes, a solid thump, followed by a pulled-out vibration that hangs in the air, and decides to make a game out of it. Bang! Bang! Bang! Until it jerks Sudha out of her trance. But where on another day she would have snatched the paperweight from Dayita and possibly given her a slap on the behind, today she merely looks. Is there something new in Dayita’s face, that awareness by which children begin to separate themselves from their parents? Sudha abandons the onions and the dal, which is by now boiling over, making a yellow mess on the stove, and steps into the bathroom. She searches in the mirror for visual manifestations of the afternoon’s upheaval. But there isn’t always such a straight line between cause and effect. Her face remains lovely as ever, not a wrinkle added, not an iota of luminosity taken away. Only the keenest sight would detect the faint swelling of her lips, which she scrubbed over and over after Sunil, shirt in one hand, briefcase in the other, stumbled from the apartment. Anju, busy with her own dissimulations, will not be capable of such vision.

Once, when Sudha and Anju were teenagers, Pishi had told them the tale of Damayanti, a queen so beautiful that the gods grew jealous of her husband. They took away all he had and forced him to wander in the wilderness for many years. “Be careful,” Pishi had ended. “A woman’s beauty can be her wealth, but also her curse.”

Anju had wrinkled her nose ruefully. “I guess I don’t have to worry, then!” But Sudha, who would usually rush in at such moments to say that Anju was beautiful, too, and, besides, she was smart, which was more important, had been too lost in her thoughts to say anything.

Now Sudha brings her hands to her face and traces the outlines of the bones. Is it true that beauty can be a curse? She moves her fingers slowly, cautiously. The way a doctor might touch the victim of an accident, feeling for fractures. Or the way a lover might touch his beloved’s face. The way Sunil touched her.