The Vine of Desire (35 page)

I swallow.

“If you’re in trouble, couldn’t you have called me?”

There’s a riff of hurt in his voice—and something else I’m not ready for. How to explain why I couldn’t ask him for help? Instead, I ask, “How did Anju sound?”

“Not good. Like she’d taken a sleeping pill or something. I’d ask something and there would be a pause, as though she were trying to get her mouth around the words. I asked where Sunil was. She said he was gone—whatever that meant. When I asked if she was feeling all right, if she needed something, she didn’t answer.”

All the elation I’d been feeling drains out of me. I lean against the phone booth, the metal wall sharp and chill between my shoulder blades.

“You plan on telling me what’s going on?”

“When I see you,” I manage to say through rubbery lips.

“I’m glad to hear that you plan on seeing me. Would it be too much to ask when?”

Don’t be angry, Lalit. Not you, too. “Sunday morning, if you’re free.”

“If I’m free! Shit, Sudha, you know I’d rearrange—” He breaks off, then says more calmly, “Where?”

I give him Myra’s address and phone number and explain about my job. I ask him not to call, except in an emergency. I tell him not to give the number to anyone.

“Want to elaborate on
anyone?”

I don’t reply.

“I won’t pretend I understand,” he says, sounding tired. “I just wish you’d trusted me enough to say something before you disappeared like that.”

I can’t bear to apologize, so I say, “Tell me a joke, a really dumb one.”

“What, you think I’m a humor machine?”

“Please …”

He sighs. After a moment, he says, “A man goes to visit a psychiatrist. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘I think I’m a frog.’ ‘How long has this been going on?’ the psychiatrist asks. The man replies, ‘Since I was a tadpole.’”

I laugh. But later I’ll wonder why he chose that joke about self-delusion, if there was a message in it for me.

“I’ll see you Sunday,” I tell him.

“I live in anticipation,” he tells me.

Anju picks up on the very first ring, before I’m ready for her. Has she been waiting by the phone? I picture her sitting on the floor of the dark, dusty living room, her head bowed against the sofa, all the knots I combed out of her hair back there again.

How to begin this conversation?

“Sunil?” Anju says. “Sunil, is that you?”

“No, it’s me.”

Anju doesn’t ask me anything—not where I am, not why I left. She doesn’t even ask about Dayita.

“Anju, I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly. I didn’t want to worry you. I had no choice. Please believe me.”

“You don’t have to explain. It’s your life.”

Her tone is casual, just the slightest tremble in it, like a sitar’s overtightened string. Only I, who know her from childhood, can tell how upset she is.

“Anju, listen to me. I couldn’t stay there any longer. The way things were going.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Anju repeats, her voice rough against my ear. “Sunil told me before he left.”

I try to gauge from her tone what exactly he said, how much I can say now.

“You’ve got to hear my side of it—”

“He wants a divorce, so he can start his life over. With you.”

“Anju, that’s not going to happen. I told him that. He knows I don’t love him. I said so again, in the letter I left for him—didn’t you read it?”

Anju continues as though I hadn’t spoken. “I was going to fight it every way I knew. Beg, cry, make him feel like a jerk. I was going to insist that he come with me for counseling—”

“That’s a great idea! That’s exactly what I was hoping for, when I left.”

“But a dead love is like a dead body,” Anju says, “starting to rot even while you’re holding on to it, crying your eyes out.”

Her words scare me, her voice, which sounds so reasonable. “Don’t make any hasty decisions,” I say. “You’re both too emotional. Let things settle a bit.”

“Can you reverse decomposition? All you’re left with is the
stench on your hands. I’m going to sign the divorce papers when he sends them.”

“Anju!” I cry. “Let’s meet and talk first.”

But she’s hung up. All the way back, hunched against the cold bay wind that has come up, I hear the metallic click against my ear, the disconnection I’ve earned.

Five

The last rays of the sun die away, night drops over the cities of the coast like an exuberant net, the constellations play catch with each other, setting off sparks when they touch. No one down below notices this. All across the Bay Area, it is time for dinner.

Some eat it like Anju, opening the refrigerator door to peel a slice from a Saran-wrapped stack of American cheese. They stand at the kitchen counter, spooning Chinese fried rice, cold, from a too-bright red-and-white take-home container, reminder of an earlier, more festive time in their lives.

Some, like Sunil, sit at the narrow restaurant tables meant for customers eating alone, located in the back, near the door marked
Rest Rooms.
They examine a newspaper intently as they wait for their order to arrive. The NASDAQ is down again, and the Dow isn’t doing much better. There’s a whole column of Women Seeking Men (but where are they?). The lone customers take out pads and make notes. A few punch fervently at the numbers on their cell phone. If someone answers, their
faces take on a beatific expression.
I am saved.
Sunil, who disdains such props, stares ahead as though he doesn’t care that he’s alone. When his food comes, he chews slowly, deliberately, not bothering to look.

At Myra’s, the table is set with a silky maroon tablecloth with an Indian block print. Matching napkins, white bone china, expensively thin crystal. Brass candlesticks shaped like peacocks. Trideep opens a bottle of Beaujolais. They’re celebrating.

“Don’t be so hasty,” Sudha says dryly. “He’s only eaten twice, just a few bites each time.”

“That’s a hell of a lot better than our record with him,” Myra says. She sweeps her hand upward, an extravagant, dancer’s gesture. The wine trembles, translucent as a stained-glass window. “Here’s to the magic lady!”

Sudha’s smile strains like a hyphen across her face. She says nothing. From time to time she glances toward the door, as though expecting someone to enter.

“The magic lady who saved our marriage!” Trideep adds. Relief has relaxed the muscles of his face so that he seems a plumper, younger version of himself. “Delicious!” he claims, waving a forkful of curried chicken. “Who could resist this!” He bends to tickle Dayita, who has gravitated toward his deep, male laugh. “Your mom’s a miracle worker, you know that, little girl?” Dayita laughs back and grabs his glasses.

“We want to give you a gift to show our appreciation,” Myra says. On her way to the kitchen for another bottle, she throws her arms around Sudha and bumps cheeks with her in an air kiss. Her thin silver bracelets, twenty to each arm, jingle, exuberant.

“I don’t want anything,” Sudha says, though perhaps what
she means is that they can’t give her what she really wants. No one can. But they insist, and over the second bottle of wine, an agreement is reached. It’s to be a walker for Dayita. (“A playpen’s too, too cruel,” says Myra, shuddering.) They’ll buy the kind with a wide, padded rim so that she can walk up to Myra’s valuables but can’t quite reach them.

“Think how much more relaxed I’ll be,” says Myra. “Why, it’s really a gift for myself! We’ll pick it up tonight, on our way to Sally’s.”

Sally is Myra’s friend from college. “She owns this great boutique, right on University,” Myra says. “Eastern clothing and art. Prime location, very successful. Her partner retired recently, and she’s been pushing me to quit my job and join her. But what with everything that’s been going on at home, I’ve been too stressed to even give it a thought. Maybe now I can consider it.” Shyly, she adds, “She thinks I have a keen eye.”

Trideep squeezes her shoulder. “You do! You chose me, didn’t you!” He leaves his arm around her. Myra blushes brightly. Her hands, clasped in her lap like a madonna’s, twitch once, then grow still. Her fingers are fragile and lovely in repose. They give off a sheen, like mother-of-pearl. She gives a sigh and leans into Trideep, who kisses her forehead. This is how they must have been before the old man’s illness hit their life like an out-of-season hurricane.

Sudha looks away, biting her lip.

“We’ll be back by ten,” they assure her when they leave.

She waves them away. The wine, which has made them bubbly, has only tired her. “Take your time,” she says. The evening stretches ahead of her, a desert, each minute abrasive as rock dust. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.”

Southward, fifty miles, Freeway 880 is immobilized by an overturned eighteen-wheeler that has jackknifed across the divider, spilling produce. Piles of tomatoes are crushed into red sludge across eight lanes, boxes of frozen spinach crunch like bones under the wheels of cars halting and starting and halting again. The drivers stare at the mess. Sirens, highway patrolmen blocking off lanes with flares like giant sparklers. Where’s the truck driver? There’s a four-car pileup behind the truck, paramedics scurrying around with stretchers. A dazed young man sits on the metal divider, holding his wrist, which juts out at an unnatural angle. A woman is crying, pulling at the neckline of her dress. Another woman’s already been carried to the ambulance, an oxygen mask placed over her face, giving her the look of an alien. The drivers blink at the flashing lights. They swivel their heads, not wanting to let go of the wreck just yet. Are they thankful it isn’t them? Are they sorry? Perhaps they’re merely annoyed at the delay, the fact that they’ll miss
Jeopardy.
The patrolman motions to them with a flare.
Move, move.
On both sides of the freeway, houses and houses, in neat, unknowing rows. People cooking dinner, checking homework, paying bills. Then sex, then finally the brief oblivion of sleep. On TV, a newscaster announces that seven million people in the world are now HIV positive. A hundred yards away, someone’s speaking into a bullhorn. Someone else is screaming. The people in the houses do not hear them. Perhaps not hearing is necessary for survival. Traffic helicopters chug above, chopping at the sullen air. Spotlights pick out the truck’s name:
Lucky.
Between mouthfuls of macaroni and cheese, a boy asks his mother about perestroika.
He has to write a definition of it for school. I don’t know, she says tiredly as she scrubs a pan. Ask your dad when he gets home. A hundred yards away, fumes rise from the surface of the road into the white glare, like mist off a winter river.

Off of the freeway, too, the motels, their names studded with words like Slumber and Holiday, Comfort and Discovery. Promises of rest or adventure, all at econo prices. In one of them, Sunil, in pajamas, is brushing his teeth. His pants and shirt hang neatly in the small closet, his suitcases are pushed against the walls of the narrow room. Just a bed and a small table where through the next week he’ll eat his takeout meals, mostly from Meena’s Chaat House (“Lowest Prices, Biggest Sizes”). At the bottom of one of the suitcases, he has two thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, half the money that was in their bank account. He left the other half for Anju. Until he gets his next paycheck, he’ll have to make do with it, and both the motel and the rental car (he left his car for her, too) are more expensive than he thought they would be.