‘I think it has to do with birthing,’ he said. ‘Only women are capable of doing it. Perhaps what you really want is a baby?’
Always, we came back to this.
We had moved from an apartment in Charlotte to a house and then a bigger house in the space of seven years. Blake’s job paid for everything. He was frequently away on projects in counties across the state, working with farmers and their problems with soil contamination or fitting out waste-water management units in hotels and factories. On weekends, as if he hadn’t tired of mud, he’d fuss with the pergola and the deck, coaxing wisteria, taming clematis.
When he was gone I walked through the rooms in the house trying to imagine what it would be like filled with the noise of children. I fought for air even though there was so much space.
I began working out. I’d always despised gymnasiums. All those people conscientiously sweating together on machines, gaping through wide, attractive windows. Silverbacks in tank tops pumping iron. Women in flocks of three clutching at water bottles. I was thirty-two, and what I was hoping for was an awakening in my body.
I quickly grew to love them – the new ridges in my thighs and shoulders, hard tongues of muscle that could stiffen and relax. My heart felt closer to me than it had in years. I listened to trashy music on earphones as I moved on the treadmill, legs pounding as though they had hearts of their own. I felt powerful. I began to watch people watch me. In the changing room I caught flashes of other women’s naked stomachs, their dimpled thighs, the way they stepped leisurely into panties. The smells of deodorant and perfume were like infinity to me. I watched how dexterously frizz could be rolled out of hair with blow-dryers, so many pairs of arms furling and unfurling.
‘It’s shitty that we have to die,’ I said to Blake one night.
We were lying in bed. I looked around at the things we had gathered, the most beautiful of which was the bed we were lying on, a four-poster behemoth. The coloured Murano-glass perfume bottles on the dressing table, the faux-Chola bronze Nataraja in the corner, the Marie Antoinette-style chaise longue, across which my gym clothes were draped – possessions that represented a collective purr of pleasure.
‘I like watching your face when you grow pensive like this,’ Blake said. The hair on the top of his head was beginning to grey and thin, which I knew bothered him even though he said nothing about it. Every morning, after showering, he’d sweep the bathroom for evidence, wrapping the wispy, treacherous flecks in toilet paper and disappearing them into the bin.
‘It reminds me of how you used to be, back in Kodai,’ he said. ‘But we don’t have to die. I mean, there are other ways to continue, you know.’
‘Don’t start, please.’
‘You never ask what I might need or why. It’s not right.’
‘You speak of children as though you could ever really know them, as if you need them in order to live your life. Why can’t you just live your life?’
‘There’s nothing missing from my life. That isn’t what this is about.’
We lay beside each other without speaking. Blake turned over and switched off his lamp. When we argued he slept facing away from me, on his side, palms folded together as if in prayer. He slept easily, silently, with no debts to settle. I watched him as though he were some other person, someone who didn’t belong to me, and I was hit by that familiar surge of tenderness whenever I began to contemplate a life without him. How sad it would be to lose this man who loved me so expansively.
Ma came to visit every April when the heat in Pondicherry began to crush through her skull. ‘Just look at these blossoms,’ she’d say, as we walked around the neighbourhood, its avenues of heaving magnolia and crape myrtle. But I always looked at her face instead, wondering how it had been allowed to grow into this – fruit-like, beyond ripeness. Her cheeks hung off her like kumquats. They juddered. They glowed.
The nights we didn’t go out to dinner Blake threw slabs of meat on the grill.
‘Sorry I’m not a better mother-in-law, I should be cooking for you.’
‘You stay right there, Meera,’ Blake would say. ‘This is your holiday.’ He carried plates of food to her, plied her with Prosecco and packets of Yo-Yos. She accepted these gifts happily like a child. ‘I hope you realise what you’ve got,’ she’d say from the island of her La-Z-Boy whenever he disappeared into the kitchen.
Sometimes, as we sat together watching television on those spring nights, I’d think about Papi, how if he were here, he’d be skulking around in the garden. I wanted to walk out and smoke a cigarette with him. I’d tell him I had looked through his diaries once, and seen naked sketches of Mother – her face always turned towards a window, her small, perfect breasts holding the light to ransom. It had been beautiful for me to think I’d come from this.
Ma wore baggy slacks with long shapeless tunics. She had learned to dress like a woman who always has something to hide. But there was no dissatisfaction about her. She was as limpid and happy as I’d ever seen her. In the mornings after Blake left for work, she and I would preen in deckchairs in the garden. Lemonade in a jug on the table between us, books folded on our stomachs.
‘Can you really take all this time off? I can entertain myself, you know.’
She had grown interrogative, coaxing almost, and I wanted to ask, where have you been all these years? Who is this new person so concerned about my life? Everything about her now emanated a kind of openness. Even her hair – once long and rope-like, hanging uselessly down her back – had been etched into a spunky bob. She cared immensely for her nails, hair, skin – things she could still control. At the mall we leaned over counters, examining expensive products made in France, the sales reps daubing Ma’s neck with regenerating creams and wonder gels. ‘Guess how old I am?’ she’d say. ‘Ma’am, they should get you to endorse their product,’ one of them said, and Ma loved it. Threw back her choppy little head and laughed. Even her laugh was changed, less guarded. Now she boomed. ‘Yes, yes. Me the fashion model.’
The last time she visited she complained I was becoming a hoarder. ‘Typically American,’ she scolded. ‘All this stuff you don’t need.’
We spent a morning in the attic going through boxes. There were things I’d brought with me from India over the years – brass animals, bird feathers, report cards, a doll with a key in its back that had once been able to cry. Ma sat cross-legged on the floor, swatting away cobwebs, her elbows deep in my childhood. ‘Look at this,’ she said, opening a box of clothes. ‘Oh, Gracey, remember these?’
Before I left home for college, Ma had taken me to the Anglo-Indian tailor in Kodai, Ms Bridget, whose workroom was part of a house she shared with her sisters. There were two mannequins in Valentinoesque lace outfits standing by the window and dated Vogue magazines stacked in a corner. For Kodai, it was impossibly glamorous. ‘Sturdy girl,’ Ms Bridget had said approvingly, as she took my measurements. She herself was a bird – thin-boned, blue-veined. ‘These will be just lovely on you,’ she promised.
Walking home, Ma pronounced, ‘Never married. The famous Wilson sisters. So beautiful when they were young. All spinsters. One of them went off to be the mistress of a Tamil film star in Madras and had a bastard child and all, but these three have always lived together.’
And now here was this box of Bridget Wilson’s clothes. All those pintucks and dropped waists. So many blouses and bubble skirts in shades of unflattering salmon. The purple jacket with padded shoulders I’d adored so much. Within months of living in America I had been forced to buy oversized jeans and T-shirts, but I kept these clothes out of loyalty, out of a misplaced sense of the glamour I expected college life to have.
‘I suppose you’d better throw them away,’ Ma said, sifting through the piles. ‘You were so excited about them when they were ready. And I was excited for you.’
‘I can’t bear to look at them now,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of everything I’ve lost.’
‘What have you ever lost? You know nothing about loss,�
�� Ma said, struggling to stand, using one hand to lever herself up.
It began to rain. The sound of water slapping against the windows, softly first, then with a vengeance. Ma fussed with her fingers, examining her hands as if all the golden light that had just been in the room had slipped through them.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘It’s nothing. I’m tired.’
‘Let’s go, then,’ I said, leading her towards the staircase. I watched her body negotiate the stairs, step by step, shoulders slumped as though she were cold. My fingers gripping either side of her neck.
Downstairs, the sitting room looked somnolent, hushed. Blake had left his coffee cup on the table near the television remote, and a note in the bowl of apples – Home early tonight. Let’s do Thai.
Ma settled herself in the La-Z-Boy, legs spread, ungainly. ‘Bring me something to eat please, kanna.’
I made chilli-cheese toasts and tea and brought it out on a tray. We sat together and watched the day grow dark. ‘It’s the most difficult thing to be a mother,’ Ma said, chewing sloppily on the toast. ‘You’re right to resist if it isn’t what you want.’
‘I feel bad for Blake. This is one of those things that could divide us.’
‘There are always things waiting to divide a marriage.’
‘Do you ever miss Papi?’
‘It’s really not important.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘I mean exactly that. Whether I think of him or miss him or wish things had gone differently, we are where we are now, and it’s better this way.’ After a while she said ‘Look at your garden. Your father would have loved it.’
I think about that now, how we always talked about Papi as though he were dead, even though Ma was the first to go. I think about Lucia and I living the way we do now. How we, too, are spinster sisters.
24
Blake arrives early one July morning. The neighbours are burning rubbish again, so the sky is the colour of lead. It has been three years since we last saw each other, but there is nothing surprising about the way he steps out of the taxi and says, ‘Hey.’ He looks thinner. The hair on his head meagre, clinging valiantly. Arms and legs whittled into sharp objects.
‘Grace,’ he says, those familiar lips askew. I go to him and put my face in his chest.
Kadar, my regular taxi guy, inspects the garden while Blake sorts through notes in his wallet. ‘I brought you a curry-leaf plant,’ Kadar says. ‘You should put it here,’ he points to a space in the garden bed.
He deposits the sapling in the mud and walks over to us. The dogs are at his ankles, licking and whimpering. Bagheera fat with new life. Raja, Golly and Dimple, pink-tongued, exuberant. He slaps them softly on their heads.
‘What happened to all your other dogs?’
‘They died. The villagers poisoned some of them and all the puppies got sick and died.’
Kadar’s face closes momentarily. He makes a click-clicking noise with his tongue, which is meant to express the inexpressible. He moves on to another subject. ‘Sir was full of tension for the journey, but I did what you said and drove slowly.’
After he leaves, Blake and I stand in front of the house, looking at each other. Mallika tries to take his suitcase and the duty-free bags inside, but Blake tells her in Tamil, ‘No, no, I’ll do it.’ His accent is terrible, but her eyes widen when she hears him speak, and her mouth opens into a laugh. ‘But how?’ she asks, shaking her head. I tell her we are old friends from Kodaikanal. That he learned Tamil in school.
Blake stares at the house, the blue shutters. ‘What a place this is. I’d imagined something more rustic. This is like a palace.’
Lucia wanders out to take a look. She’s wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt and a frilly tutu skirt. Her hair is loose around her neck the way she likes it these days. Her glasses are smeared with dirt.
Blake lifts a hand. ‘Hey!’
She stares at him, pirouettes, retreats inside.
We’ve been different together after the poisoning and the distemper. The trip to Kodai helped, but I think both Lucia and I believed that when we returned, all our dogs would be magically restored. I do my duties of feeding, bathing, dressing, but I no longer reach for her hand at the dining table so she can give my fingers a squeeze. Our walks are desultory. After fifteen minutes, just as we approach the ashram arches, she presses her knees and says, ‘Legs are broken down,’ and demands we turn around.
Blake sleeps in the room downstairs. He wakes at six and goes running. I keep staring at his feet. We are always barefoot. In the house, on the beach. It’s as if I’ve only just noticed that he has the most beautiful toes. Long, elegant, unmarred by hairs. When he sits in the cane chair reading, one leg crossed over the other, his toes open and spread like the swish of a shapely fan.
I consider what it might mean to fall in love with him again even though I’ve never believed in the return journey.
We sit out every evening after dinner. Lucia lies inside on the sofa watching Tom and Jerry on my iPad. We drink Cuba Libres or small sharp shots of Patrón. I try to explain what it means to live two lives, to inhabit two different spaces. ‘It’s genetic. My parents did it. I do it too. Except I think I’m being more open about it.’
‘What will you do?’
He asks the question everyone eventually asks.
There are evenings here when you can’t believe you’re of this world. Everything is silent except for the sea’s measured hush. Stars hang low. The moon is always rising. You think of the city far away – its harsh lights, its sodden ambitions. You feel excluded from everything that is alive.
He had written to announce his arrival. It hadn’t been a request. I miss India. I have meetings in Delhi about a waste-management project, which could be an exciting development, and afterwards, I’ll go to Kodai, do a few lectures at the school and reconnect with some people. I land in Chennai on the 15th. Let me know if you could organise a cab for me, and if there’s anything you need from here.
‘It makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?’ he said, when he first arrived. ‘I had forgotten what it’s about. The complete mania of it. It gets in your blood. Wakes you up. Kicks you in the balls.’
‘It’s why we stay here. Far away from all that.’
We drive to Pondicherry to buy supplies. Lucia sits in front with me, Blake in the back at the window, pointing things out uselessly. ‘Look, a kingfisher!’ he cries, before we get to the front gate. Salt flats, canals, women bent over digging around for things, leggy palmyras with parched hair. Look, he keeps saying. Schoolgirls in maroon with white ribbons. Bright yellow trucks piled high with green bananas wrapped in leaves that flap wildly in the wind like can-can skirts. Tiny village after tiny village manacled to the road, spilling out their people, goats, meagre vegetables.
At lunch, Blake looks tired and exhilarated. ‘It’s like being away for a very long time and realising that your mother and father, your sister, your childhood house, all of it still exists, alive, preserved. They’ve been waiting for you, wondering where you’ve been gone so long. It’s so welcoming. You feel safe in the world again.’
‘Did you notice there wasn’t a single rubbish bin on that road for an hour? Those pretty little villages are going to be drowning in their own shit soon. You should think of setting up shop here.’
‘I feel like I never appreciated it when we lived here. I was afraid for some reason. It felt insurmountable, a place like this. The problems. But I see things differently now.’
‘Give yourself a few weeks.’
We make love that night. I crawl into bed with him. His body feels like a stranger’s. He isn’t surprised to see me. Drags me to him as though he’s been waiting. I touch the muscles in his back, the soft flesh around his hips. We move slowly, enfolding, stroking. It is all wonder. He is above me, holding me tightly, our knees touching and rolling. I make noises I haven’t made in a long time. Deep, unabashed. Afterwards I stay there with him. A cool breeze from th
e sea blows in through the window grilles. A nightjar makes its chirr-chirr noise.
In the morning, I watch as he sleeps. I want to squirrel away parts of him. The bones in his cheeks, the eyes, the two small hollows at the base of his back. Those strong prosciutto thighs.
After breakfast we change into bathing suits. Blake sets up the umbrella. The dogs scamper around for a few minutes, dipping their paws into the waves before running back to the house to stretch their bellies out on cool floors. Lucia fixes herself into battalion position, bum deep in mud. Blake sits beside her. The waves come. I watch in astonishment. The ever-readiness of them. The way they come and come, rolling forever.
As a child I used to think the sea had a wall. The idea that it could be limitless was unfathomable. I dreamed of swimming powerfully all the way to that wall, touching the smooth tile of it, and swimming back. I was scared of sharks and other sea beasts, but I knew it was possible. When floods came, when the sea raged, I wanted to say, ‘But if you could only keep going, you’ll touch a wall.’
Blake leaves Lucia to join me in the shade. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he says. We look at her together. This large child with inviolable arms and legs. She turns to look at us. All teeth. Her mouth spread wide with joy. The waves keep hitting her, pulling her out of her trench. ‘Get back, Lucy,’ I warn.
A huge wave unfastens her. She tumbles forward, and for a second she is lost. Blake is already in the water, reaching for her. He’s taken hold of her wrist and is pulling her up out of a tornado of spume. She is snorting, giggling, wiping the sand from her eyes. ‘Again,’ she says, ‘again.’
‘It’s not a game,’ I yell. ‘You’re too far out. Blake, bring her in.’
He convinces her to sit with him closer to the shore. I look at them sitting side by side, fingers laced together.
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