by Anne Cherian
“I’ll let you know.”
“You’re actually going?”
“I haven’t seen Frances and Jay and Vic in ages. Might as well laugh and eat good khaana at the same time.”
“You haven’t seen me in ages either.”
“Too bad you weren’t invited!”
“Maybe I’ll just invite myself.”
She knew their banter was high-schoolish and would have died of embarrassment had anyone read it. Yet while she was going back and forth with Aakash, she felt like an overeater, unable to stop reaching for the next cookie.
“You’re coming down just for the party?”
“I’ll be driving down from Santa Barbara. My husband is giving a talk the same day.” She hardly ever mentioned Jonathan, but every now and then she slipped in some information. She wanted Aakash to know that though he had not wanted her, she had found someone who had given her a good life. Santa Barbara was a beautiful place, and while she had been there enough times to wish they were going somewhere else, many people thought of it as a resort.
Aakash was slow in responding. Immediately she regretted typing “my husband.” In their computer chats, they typically avoided personal information, just as they had back at UCLA. She knew he didn’t have children, he knew she had one son, but other than that, they acted as if they were sitting across from each other in a Westwood café. She had spoiled their rhythm. Was he angry?
“There indeed is a medical conference in Santa Barbara that weekend. What will you be doing while your husband is busy?”
He had been Googling Santa Barbara events while she worried that he didn’t want to hear about her home life. Instead of feeling hunted, she was—flattered.
“I’ll hang out at my favorite bookstore and then have lunch at a wonderful Thai restaurant.” Her sentence had such a cosmopolitan ring to it. Neither of them had ever heard of Santa Barbara when they were in India, but now she was intimate with the place.
“Maybe I’ll meet you at your favorite bookstore. Unless your husband will object.”
And so, what began as a good laugh at Vic’s expense ended up with her agreeing to meet Aakash.
Yet as the days curled into nights, and Saturday was no longer a faraway day on the calendar, she remained undecided. When they were writing each other, she acted as if she were going to meet him for lunch.
That was all he wanted, he said. “I’ll leave San Diego early in the morning and drive straight on up, which means I’ll be starving by the time I get there. Thai food sounds almost as good as Indian khaana.”
She had dressed this morning as if she were going to rush out of the hotel room as soon as Jonathan left, grab a cab, and tell the driver, “Chaucer’s Bookstore, please.” She had bought the brass-studded blouse at Nordstrom in order to look good for Aakash.
The entire morning had been an obstacle course in her race to the bookstore. The button, the burnt tongue, the ding! at the airport. Was she deliberately ignoring the signs that she should not go?
Yet, after feeling so conspicuous at security, everything had gone well. Jonathan had agreed to keep quiet about Aaron, they had arrived in Santa Barbara on time, and Jonathan had taken off shortly before eleven for his conference. She had already told the other wives that she would be busy this morning. She had already planned to say, “What are the odds of running into an old friend?” if anyone saw her with Aakash.
11:13.
She tried to switch her mind to the evening party. She had been so excited about seeing her old friends—until Aakash decided to meet her for lunch and filled her imagination with various possibilities: What he looked like now. How he would greet her. If he would flirt with her in person. Now she forced herself to think of Frances and Jay. Had they put on weight? Were they still full of themselves? How would they react to seeing her married and living a successful life? Both she and Frances had given up their original careers. Frances was probably doing well despite the weak market. Would they think her job at the college was dinky? Jay and Vic had kept to their professions.
But she just could not bring herself to care about the party.
She looked at the clock: 11:14. Only one minute had passed.
If she really didn’t want to see Aakash, then why was she feeling bad?
It was just lunch. Not dinner, no candles or wine. And of course Aakash was joking about the roses. They were friends meeting after years. It was no different from what she would be doing later in the evening at Vic’s house. There was no reason not to go. She stood up.
There was a knock on the door.
Jonathan had returned.
That was it, she thought. Her decision had been made. She could not go to meet Aakash while Jonathan was in the vicinity.
“Coming,” she called out, even as she scanned the room for the key he must have forgotten.
“I so sorry,” the woman from Housekeeping apologized. “I did not know you was inside.”
“We just checked in,” Lali said, as her heart continued to beat rapidly. “There’s no need to clean it.” She glanced at the clock.
11:20 exactly.
She raced to the elevator, and, as if she was meant to go, the doors opened. A taxi pulled up just as she approached the revolving doors of the hotel.
They made every light. But as the taxi wove its way toward the bookstore, Lali wavered.
“Stop,” she instructed the driver when they were one block away.
“But it’s farther down.” He continued driving.
“This is fine,” Lali insisted, as she paid him.
She imagined Mary telling her not to go. She hadn’t told Mary she was corresponding with Aakash. She didn’t want her friend to think less of her.
She thought of Jonathan’s compliment, his concern that she be happily occupied while he was giving his paper. Their recent rapprochement had filled her with thankful love, had almost made her forget that he spent all his free time studying and going to the temple. Would she even be on this street if he hadn’t turned so Jewish on her? For months she had worried that he regretted not marrying a good Jewish woman whose children would automatically be Jewish. When he had mentioned that it was too bad Aaron hadn’t had a bar mitzvah, he had also said, “Of course he will need to convert.”
“Unless your husband will object,” Aakash had taunted.
She hadn’t objected to the days and evenings Jonathan spent away from her. She never asked if he was meeting a woman or a man. Why should he object to her having lunch?
She started walking toward the bookstore, staying on the opposite side of the street, eyes fixed on the glass door.
“I’ll be standing just inside,” Aakash had written.
She had prescription dark glasses, but, as she told her optician, her vision was blurry at a certain distance. She strained her eyes but could not detect a brown figure.
“I’ll be wearing a Madras check shirt in honor of your South Indian heritage.”
She glanced at her watch. It was 11:40. Had he come and gone? Her disappointment was so fierce she needed to stand still for a moment. Why hadn’t she come on time? How could she have missed this opportunity?
But wouldn’t he have waited? What was twenty minutes after all these years?
She remembered the time they had planned to see a movie. Her adviser had kept talking to her, and she had run all the way to the theater, even though she was sure he had gone inside by then. But he was standing near the box office, neither angry nor upset. He had laughed away her apology and told her that of course he knew she would not ditch him. She had been so relieved when he suggested they go in and stay behind for the next showing. “We can see the beginning after the ending,” he had said.
He would not have come up all the way from San Diego and left because she was late. He knew about airplanes and hotels—and spouses who could cause delays.
Perhaps he hadn’t come, had never planned on coming. He would write next Saturday and joke that he would not be caught dead wearing a c
heck shirt because that’s what cab drivers wear in India. And of course, she of all people knew that he would never be able to stand inside a bookstore. He would be reading books, making a pile of the ones he planned to buy. He had never invited her to his apartment near UCLA because he claimed it was too full of books.
She stopped, abashed, then realized that she had nothing else to do. She might as well go to the bookstore. She hadn’t lied when she said it was her favorite one.
She was waiting for a group to go ahead of her on the crosswalk when she saw a man in a khadi kurta rushing toward the bookstore.
Aakash?
Lali had never known that her heart could speed up so suddenly. She had read somewhere that racing cars and hearts have the same ability to go from zero to 150, but until now she had never experienced that surge.
The man was on the bookstore side of the street. She focused in on him. It was definitely Aakash. The kurta, the jeans, the cloth book bag slung across his chest, coffee cup in hand. If she erased the coffee, he could have been the person she had met in the UCLA Student Store all those years ago.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think how he would look, too concerned with her own appearance. But deep down, she had imagined a more elegant version of the man who had always attracted attention because he carried himself so well in both Western and Indian clothes. When he suggested they meet for lunch, she had, without realizing it, pictured him in a nice pair of slacks with a polo shirt, or a striped shirt accentuating his height. He would look like a man who had stepped out of a fancy car with leather seats. The shirt he told her he would be wearing counted as fashionable.
Instead, he had the grungy appearance of a lingering graduate student still working on his dissertation. He could be the barman who told a good story about the PhD he had never finished. He didn’t give off the rich whiff of a man with a corner office, or one who even worked in an office, for that matter.
She looked down at the $150 blouse, the old pants, the ten pounds she had tried so hard to lose as she attempted to gain back the lithe, elastic body of her youth.
He had simply found some old clothes and thrown them on. He hadn’t even had a haircut, or shaved.
He was at the door of the bookstore, about to open it. He was late, yet he obviously was so sure she was inside, waiting for him, that he didn’t even look around.
Then she saw it. A rose. A single, long-stemmed rose that was drooping.
“I’ll be the one with the dozen roses,” he had written.
She didn’t want the roses, considering them a ridiculously Western gesture for two Indians. But she felt the insult of just the one. Wasn’t she worth the money?
Years earlier, she hadn’t been worth the courtesy of an “I’m sorry but Clare’s back, and we’re engaged” call.
She had been taken in by him once, had misinterpreted the gift of a stuffed animal, had thought their meetings over tea and food signified a growing relationship.
This time it was clear that he was expecting something—with one lousy red rose in his hand.
“Will your husband mind if I keep you all afternoon?” he had asked.
She turned and fled the way she had come. The taxi was still idling at the corner.
This, she knew, was a sign.
“You forgot something?” the driver asked.
“My dignity,” she wanted to say. Instead she looked out the window and responded, “I changed my mind.”
When the taxi deposited her at the hotel, she ran in. As she kept pressing the up button of the elevator, she heard her name.
“Lali! Lali!”
All she wanted to do was go to the room and lock the door. She turned around, reluctant, nervous.
“Hi, Lisa.” Lisa Frost was a cardiologist whose husband had left her for another man. She had lost weight, and Lali could feel her bones as they hugged.
“Are you going to hear Jonathan’s paper?”
“Oh, no,” Lali brought out her stock response. “I wouldn’t understand it.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. Jonathan’s always saying how smart you are.”
“He’s the smart one,” Lali protested. At another time she would have used her other standard line, “After all, he chose me.” Now she wanted to hurry upstairs and call Reception, tell them to hold any calls for her. She didn’t want to take the chance that Aakash might phone the hotel.
“Well, it’s back to work for me,” Lisa wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry I’ll miss you tonight.”
The elevator came, and Lali was glad it was empty. She watched, impatient, as the numbers changed from four to five to six, relieved that it rose, uninterrupted, all the way to the eleventh floor.
Jonathan had told Lisa she was smart. He had told her she looked pretty.
Thank God it had been Lisa, not Jonathan, downstairs. Jonathan would have realized something was wrong, would have wanted to talk about it. He had always been like that, asking questions, telling her that problems should be resolved, not allowed to marinate for days.
What would he say if she told him about Aakash?
And, as if the trick pattern she had been looking at suddenly revealed itself, Lali saw her actions from Jonathan’s perspective.
He had told her about his previous girlfriends, had assured her, “They were as wrong for me as you are right.” Then, after seeing that her album contained snapshots only of family and friends, he had thrown away all the pictures of his ex-girlfriends. “This way we’re equal,” he said.
She had never told him about Aakash. She wasn’t worried that Jonathan would run away because she wasn’t a virgin. She was terrified that he might think less of her, as a woman, when he heard that Aakash had discarded her after sleeping with her for one night. She had never wanted to give him any reason to lose his high esteem of her.
Today, too, she had hidden Aakash from him. And for what reason? To meet a man who had walked out of her apartment after accepting her virginity? Who had married another woman six months later, not caring how that night had scarred her?
She held her head in her hands. Even she could not understand her actions.
She had blamed her Aakash adventure on Jonathan and had whined to Mary and others in the office that her husband preferred Judaism to a real-life wife.
Yet he had never stood in her way—for anything. When they were first married, and he was still paying back his loans, he had not made a fuss about going to India. He had even agreed to baptize Aaron as a Jacobite Syrian Christian, then he commiserated with her when the priest refused, because he was a Jew.
What if she had decided to return to the church? How would she feel if Jonathan corresponded with another woman while she was attending services? Would she understand, forgive, that it was just e-mails and a lunch?
She took off the wretched blouse, the pants, the shoes she had polished the night before, and took a long, hot shower.
She suddenly remembered that other shower, the one she had stood under after Aakash left in the early hours of the morning. “I’m a real woman,” she had thought as she scrubbed her arms, legs, all the places he had touched.
She had thought, then, that she was taking a shower because that was what she did every night just before going to sleep.
But she hadn’t washed away Jonathan’s scent after she first went to bed with him. She had slept in his arms, awakened in them.
The glass door of the shower fogged up and Lali closed her eyes. All these years she had been so upset about giving up her virginity, had been so humiliated by Aakash’s cavalier disappearance that she had never considered why she had taken that shower.
These past six months, she had enjoyed stepping back in time, yes, but she had also wanted affirmation that she was worthwhile, that he should never have left her apartment forever.
Today she had lied to her husband, had given up shopping and chatting with the other wives, for a man who thought so highly of her that he had been late.
Aakash had been saunte
ring down the sidewalk and at one point had slipped, glancing down at his feet. Was it possible that he had even resurrected his old kolhapuri chappals?
“We’re both wearing kolhapuris,” he’d said that day in the UCLA Student Store, pointing to the very distinctive slippers that have two straps separating both the big toe and the little toe. “This means either we both have good taste or we’re from the North.”
“Well, I know I have good taste,” she had responded. “In fact, I have such good taste that I hail from South India.”
He had laughed and laughed, and she was feeling very pleased that he appreciated her joke when he stopped and said, “I haven’t heard hail used that way in ages. Thank you, thank you, for taking me back to India without needing to pay for a ticket.”
She had thrown away her kolhapuris a few months after moving to San Francisco. It was too cold to wear them, and the soles had become slippery with age.
He, on the other hand, seemed to have kept too much.
She was done with him, her nostalgia for what had never been.
Thank God I didn’t tell anyone, not even Mary, she thought. She could simply bury this episode in a spot where she would never venture again.
VIC HAD BEEN awake half the night, tracking the weather on the computer. He had become a little nervous when Nandan announced at dinner that there was a 50 percent chance of rain the next day.
Vic had immediately dismissed the possibility. “It was nice and sunny today,” Vic said. “It will be exactly the same tomorrow also.”
But all night long he clicked onto the weather page, and his mood changed depending on what he read. The weather people were so fickle. At midnight they reported it was going to be sunny all day; at one, that changed to morning showers. Then at three, there was the possibility of scattered showers. “Scattered?” Vic scratched his head. The idiots didn’t say when during the day those scattered showers would come down.
He was worried because he had deliberately not ordered a canopy, even though Priya had begged him to do so, and the owner of the store where he rented the tables and chairs suggested it as insurance. It wasn’t stinginess, as Priya had accused him. It was hard science. He had checked the weather for the past three years, and the entire week around June eleventh had been sunny.