Vine of Desire

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  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, al
l 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.

  He took a half-day today, though it was hard, there were so many loose ends to tie up before he left this office. But he told his secretary he had to. He drove around and around in the rental car, watching the streets for a woman pushing a baby stroller. In his mind she was wearing the same sari she’d been wearing the day of the kiss. Blue like water hyacinths, those beautiful, deadly flowers in the lakes of Bengal where mosquitoes that harbor killer diseases live. He drove to Lalit’s apartment building—it was easy enough to find his address in the phone book—and parked across the street. He waited until it was dark, then darker. Until the lights came on in the apartment, and he was sure there was only one silhouette.

  It’s something he’ll do each evening until he leaves for Houston.

  He’s flossing his teeth now, his hands making that careful, sawing motion. The string is too short, his fingers bump against his lips. It was the last of the floss. He’d looked at the container in annoyance, then thrown it hard into the rusted metal waste-basket.

  He’d called her from work earlier today to give Anju the address of his Houston office. “I’ll send you half my paycheck each month,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about money.”

  “I don’t want your fucking money,” she said.

  The word was like a slap. She never swore like that. Inside his suit, he could feel himself starting to sweat. “Please be practical,” he said. He was afraid to speak her name. He knew he’d forfeited it.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  In bed, he pulls up the covers to his neck, then kicks them off. The blankets smell musty, used. The sheets are abrasive with bleach. Through a crack in the curtains, beams from passing cars will travel, through the night, across his face like searchlights, startling him from slumber. Should he hire a private investigator? Perhaps he could take a loan from the credit union? But what would he say to the man? It strikes him that he doesn’t even have a picture of Sudha to show him.

  He rubs at the back of his neck—to be this tired, and unable to sleep. After a while, he gives up. The TV, then? No. He goes to the scuffed leather suitcase he brought from India as a student. Inside, there’s a new tape player, still in its foam-padded box. He tears the cellophane cover from a tape, inserts it. Where’s the electrical outlet? In the dark, he kneels to search the wall. There, there, the smooth plastic rectangle against his fingertips. The rickety table is cold under his elbows as he bends to the built-in microphone.

  “Kid,” he whispers, “I miss you. Where are you now?”

  Eight P.M. She checks on the old man, who seems to be asleep. Eight-fifteen. She cleans the kitchen counters, but they are clean already. Dayita’s bathed and in bed, tucked between pillows. Eight-twenty-five. Eight-thirty. The night is so silent, even the crickets have gone underground. Eight-thirty-five. She paces the kitchen, lies down, gets up again. Her hands feel dry—she rubs them with the aloe vera lotion she finds in the kitchen. She washes her face in cold water, makes herself a cup of chamomile tea with honey. Eight-forty. Silence packed around her body like shavings of ice. She bites her nail, an old habit. Her mother had made her dip her fingers in castor oil to get her to stop. She thought she’d been cured of it, the way she’d thought she’d been cured of other longings. Eight-forty-five.

  She goes to the music console. Looks through the records. Here—how had she missed it before?—Folk Songs of the Bengal Countryside. In the quiet of the glass house, wood floors overlaid with carpets from Bokhara, the tinny plink of the baul’s ektara is a shock, the raw tenacity of his voice. She turns off the lights. The white leather sofa gleams softly through the dark. He’s singing an old song Pishi used to know, O nodi re.

  River, I have just one question for you.

  O river, on your never-ending journey.

  When one of your banks breaks, you build another.

  But what of me, the banks of whose life

  are all swept away?

  O river.

  She plays the song again, then once more. She plays it for an hour, nonstop, like a teenager. She sings along until her voice grows gravelly. The rivers of the Bengal countryside, which she saw only once or twice, from a bridge, or a passing car. Insufficiently. Nine-fifty, says the clock. To live all her life in a country and not know its rivers. Her face is hot. It hurts to swallow. Regret swells in her throat like infected tonsils. She can’t let Trideep and Myra find her like this.

  In the old man’s room, the night-light is a keen blue. She sees that he’s pulled a pillow over his face. Her breath stops. She runs to him, Baba, what have you done? But no, it’s only his ears he’d been trying to cover. His sleeping fingers still clutch at the white edges. She loosens them slowly, not wanting to wake him.

  Later she’ll recall what she called him. Baba. Father. It’s common enough in her culture to address old men this way. But still.

  He knew the song, too. He thought of the rivers he would not see again. Green water. Kalmi rushes. Cranes stepping stiffly on silt. In sleep his profile is gaunt, stony. All excess fallen away. The evening has aged into ten-fifteen. Ten-thirty. Eleven. She touches the pillow cover, but it’s dry. Some things are beyond tears.

  Anju is putting on her socks. She tugs at them with both hands. It’s difficult, because she has two pairs on already. But it’s so cold, the kind of cold that doesn’t go away even though she’s turned up the heat to the max. Her fingertips are shriveling with the cold. After she gets the socks on, she thinks, she’ll put on her gloves.

  One sweater, two. A brown one bought at a garage sale, a green one Sunil gave her one anniversary. She takes it off, throws it into a corner. She searches in the closet till she finds the blue-and-white shawl Pishi knitted for a forgotten birthday. On her head, a wool cap that covers her ears. She sits on the sofa and draws her knees to her chest. All the lights are turned on. The radio, too. The TV. She pushed at it until it was turned to the wall. This way she doesn’t have to watch the faces watching her. She closes the curtains. The dark outside the window has faces, too. She checks the lock on the door, attaches the chain guard.

  The radio describes suicide bombers in Tel Aviv, the TV talks of air raids in Bosnia. The refrigerator recites the beginning of a novel. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Anju nods. Doesn’t she know more about unrequited love than the rest of the world combined? How it can sit on your chest while you sleep, quiet as a cat, sucking your life-breath. That’s why she must stay awake. She takes out her notebook and begins to write. The cold drags at her eyelids, pulling them down. But she mustn’t. What if the phone … ? What if the doorbell … ? A cup of tea, just the thing, both to warm her and ward off drowsiness.

  The kettle whistles half-heartedly. She pours, she measures, stirs. There, that wasn’t so hard, was it, even with the mittens on. She lifts the cup in both hands. The lightbulb is singing a song about people who need people, how they’re the luckiest people in the world. That’s a good one! It almost makes her laugh. What d’you think, Nicole? The steam from the kettle makes a damp patch on the kitchen wall. If you stare at it long enough, you can see faces in it. Sunil’s face, with that odd look of entreaty on it—when had she seen it first? When she asked him if she could bring Sudha over? His eyes said, Don’t put her so close to me. The pull between us is too strong. I won’t be able to stop our lives from colliding. All tho
se fights they had—why, he’d been asking her for help in the only way he knew. But she’d turned away, her head too full of her own words to hear his.

  And with that thought she’s looking at the broken pieces on the floor, the splash of muddy liquid on her socks, the heat burning through, the splintery crash still echoing around her head. How did it happen? She takes out another cup to see. Ah, like this, the curve of china slipping through her woolly palms. Like this, the sharp star burst of fragments on the cheap, hard linoleum. She tries another, then another, jumps away from each explosion like a child from a lighted firecracker. When the shelf holding mugs is empty, she moves to the plates.

  The many-colored shards around her feet are so pretty. She removes the socks from one foot and tests their sharpness with a toe. Oh, yes! The small pain anchors her to this room, this moment, keeps her safe from the vacuum that yawns beyond. In destruction lies distraction, she thinks, as she navigates the kitchen. The serving dishes hit the floor with a satisfying thunk, breaking neatly into two. Is this what people call a clean break? From the apartment below, someone yells. Someone bangs on their ceiling (or is it her floor?) with the handle of a broomstick. She barely hears. In destruction lies distraction. That’s good! She must jot it down, use it later in an essay. But when she goes to the notebook, there’s no space, the whole page filled. Father father father father father father father.

  When even writing fails you, what else is there?

  Anju moves back to the kitchen, using her arms like a swimmer to part the thickened air. Breaststroke. She’d always wanted to learn it, and now she’ll never get the chance. She steps on the broken pieces as she goes: china, glass, porcelain, pottery, crystal. The crystal is from a set of wineglasses Sunil bought, was it for another anniversary? She grinds her heel into it. In the drawer, in the cutlery tray, are the knives. Each walled into its own neat compartment. The knives know the importance of not crossing borders. Once you break through a boundary, there is no way back without severe tire damage. Her foot has left bloodprints on the floor like Rorschach blots. The knives are magnets. She moves toward them unwieldily, like a block of metal.