by Abha Dawesar
“Here.” She placed them in his hand, which he was still holding out for her.
He watched her walk up the stairs, her skirt swaying to the rhythm of her hips, her feet navigating the steps one by one.
Edward walked to where Maya was standing and kissed her on both cheeks, gripping her shoulders.
“I’m sorry we are meeting this way.”
“My name is Maya,” she said.
“I know. I’ve already spoken to Pascal and to Prem’s nephew in India. They’re both trying to get on the next plane to the United States, but we’re going to go ahead and cremate the body today. That’s what he wanted. We’ll have the ashes at the service.”
“When will it be? The service?” Maya asked.
“I’ll arrange it as soon as I know that Pascal and Homi have seats on the plane. Homi didn’t want to wait six months to organize a major service.”
Mrs. Smith handed Edward an espresso. He sipped it. Maya stared at his right hand, which held the small cup by its handle. He was holding the saucer in his left hand—he hadn’t placed it on the table. He glanced up from his cup and looked at Maya. Prem had called him the previous week to tell him about Maya. The tone of his voice had been near jubilant.
“I’m writing a book for one person. You’ll never see it,” he’d said with the kind of triumphant tone that Edward had long associated with recalcitrant old men who refused to take their medicines, like his own father now in an old people’s home.
“What is this book? As long as it’s not very good, I don’t care.”
“It’s an erotic journal, a private journal. I gave her the first chapter. I’ll give her the second in a few weeks.”
“Are you ever coming back to New York?”
“I’m flying in at the end of the week. She’s going to move in with me.”
At this Edward was alarmed. But he knew better than to say anything that would provoke Prem’s stubborn streak.
“How did you meet her?”
“Through that boy who sent you that story.”
“You’re with that girl.”
“Listen, I called with a purpose.” Prem’s tone changed.
“What is it?” Edward relaxed. He had been standing and clasping the phone. He undid his tie and opened his collar. It was hot in the office.
“I want you to call the attorney and change my will.”
He’s going to give her everything he has! At this thought Edward heavily fell into his large leather executive seat. Prem has gone senile.
“What do you want to change?”
“I want my notebooks and fan mail to go to her. Maya. Maya Stevenson.”
“And?” Was that all?
“And what?”
“That’s it?”
“No, one other thing. You can take that boy on, the boy who brought her to me.”
“I can’t even remember his name.”
“Find it. It’s important.”
“But I gave you my word. I remember I promised Not till you’re dead.” The secretary had probably thrown out the story when she sent him the formal rejection. Why did Prem want him to go through all this trouble now? What kind of sorcery was Maya up to?
Prem laughed.
“I’m never going to die now, Edward. Never. Not as long as she loves me.”
Edward regretted those words Not till you’re dead. Why had he said it that second time on the phone? And then why had he rushed about finding Johnson’s fax, yelling at the intern, the secretary, and the junior agent until they had turned the office upside down for the meager dossier in which the short story had been filed? And why, oh why had he offered to represent Johnson when Prem was still alive?
“He called me from Paris to make changes in his will. I’m the executor of his estate.”
Maya nodded, not quite listening.
“He’s left you all his notebooks. The original longhand drafts of every book he ever wrote and the private notes that go with them. They are yours from now.”
“Mine,” Maya said mechanically.
“He’s also left you all his correspondence. Some fifty cartons.”
After the body was cremated, Edward drove Maya back to the city with a few boxes of Prem’s letters that would fit in his car. He brought them up to her studio. As Edward placed the last box down on Maya’s floor, he took another look at her. What had Prem said to her in the notebook? Had he seen it all coming? Edward had no choice but to talk to this girl. He had not seen Prem since the time they ate lunch at the beginning of the summer. She was his connection to Prem.
“Do you see what he did in the end? He rejected literature. He used to say his immortality lay in his work. And then he made you his immortality. He wrote for you. Do you know why he rejected literature? Did he speak about it in the notebook he gave you?” Edward spoke in a neutral voice, sweat streaming down his face.
“He told you about the orange notebook?”
“Not what was in it. That’s why I’m asking. What was in it? It’s important. You understand that? This is the life of the most important writer of our times. Of our world.”
“It was personal. He didn’t want me to share it with anyone.” Maya was certain of that. And since she had not a grain of doubt, she knew that this tall, lean, samurai warrior in her studio could do nothing to change her mind.
“The world needs to know why he rejected literature.”
Edward’s voice had gone thin and high like an animal howling at the moon. He had sat down on a chair at some point. Maya was still standing.
“I don’t think he rejected literature. You’re misunderstanding everything. We talked about books and art all summer, the possibility of creation, of art engendering art. He went to Normandy with Pascal and said to me that it was crucial for a writer to talk to other writers.” Maya put a light hand on Edward’s shoulder as she spoke. She felt his breathing calm down, and with it her own muscles, which had scrunched up at his aggression, eased.
“Why did he write only for you then?”
“Doesn’t he have the right to even write love letters?” What did this man want from her? From Prem? Did he want to rob them of everything they had shared?
“He didn’t call it a letter but a book. He said he gave you the first chapter of a book.”
There was a misery in Edward’s eyes, a yellow misery that Maya felt directly in her spleen. But she couldn’t comprehend the meaning of all he was telling her. She slumped onto the floor cross-legged.
“Excuse me a minute.” Edward got up and went to the bathroom. He washed his face and dried it on the only towel hanging there. He could smell the girl’s body on it. Had this scent kept Prem? It was a delicate scent. I shouldn’t do this to her.
“I am sorry, you’re already so upset,” he said, coming back out. Maya was still sitting on the floor.
“Maybe you should ask Pascal. I am sure he can answer your questions.”
“I will. Please don’t worry about it. Are you going to be all right over here?” He looked around the studio.
Maya nodded and stood up. He left her standing contemplating the boxes they had deposited haphazardly on her floor. On the way down he had to lean against the elevator wall for support. He was tired. He wanted to go home and sleep in his wife’s arms for a few hours to gather his forces before all the interviews, press releases, and radio and TV programs he would be needed for. It was best not to mention that notebook to anybody.
If only she had not written that letter and they had not made love as they did. Two times. If only she hadn’t strained him, been so greedy to be close to him, he might still be alive.
Maya’s letter to him lay in the pages of the notebook he had written to her. To avoid picking up the orange notebook, she spent the two days leading up to the service immersed in the cartons that Edward had deposited in her apartment. In the first three boxes the correspondence was all opened flat, but in the fourth box the letters were still in their envelopes, the envelopes themselves of all shapes and
sizes. There was a slip of paper on top that was marked Judith Q and labeled Set III. Maya opened one at random and read it. It began:
How much longer must I wait? I know you are mine, you were meant to be mine.
Maya dipped her hand into the box and pulled out a handful of envelopes. Inside one was a peacock feather. He had told her in their first meeting that Judith Q had no Peacock’s Eye but Maya did. The letter was more or less a repetition of the previous plaint. One had a pink panty with a note tacked on that said mes culottes. There were stubs from flights to Paris, a small stone wrapped in cotton that looked suspiciously like a diamond, and locks of hair. A cardboard reinforced envelope had photographs of a woman in her late forties; there were some wrinkles on the face, and her light brown hair was worn at a medium length. Maya discerned a slight bitterness at the edge of the mouth, but she could have imagined it. She read the letters suspended between disbelief and horror. Their tone was intimate, of the genre that began Dear Diary or Dear God, and Maya had difficulty in following the thread of the conversation. Maya learned facts pertaining to Prem’s life. She learned that it was after Prem had been dropped by the French girls that he decided to permanently give up the sex nest he had maintained in Manhattan and withdraw from the city to suburbia. Scenes from times spent with Prem whizzed in Maya’s head. The peacock dancing in the Bois de Boulogne. Soufflés, drums, walks.
Maya had turned down the volume of her answering machine and her ringer with the first sound of the telephone. She listened to her messages now. Jean-Pierre, Nadine, Johnson, and finally Nadine again. The last message from Nadine said to call her no matter what time of day or night—she needed to talk. Not one of them said Prem was dead. They all started and ended with I’m sorry. Even Johnson, who had not known, who could not possibly begin to know the history.
In the late hours of the night, Maya opened her notebooks from India and read them. They allowed her to be with Prem without the desolation of having lost him; they were from a time when he was yet alive and remote. Edward called her early in the morning to inform her that a car would pick her up for the service scheduled later that day. Both Pascal and he would speak at the service along with a scientist called Krishnan. Did she want to say anything? She declined.
Edward went to the airport himself to pick up Pascal. He saw no other possibility of them talking alone. The limo slowly wormed its way through Queens.
“Do you think he was less than himself this summer?”
“To the contrary. I’ve never seen him better. He had his ups and downs, but he had many, many burst of energy. Brilliant energy. Colorful energy. Joy. Explosions.”
“I can’t understand. The final decision to stop writing. To write for the girl.”
“Oh, that! It was fantastic. I think he loved the idea and loved doing it.”
“He rejected everything he stood for.”
Pascal was silent. He looked out of the tinted windows of the car. It was the flip side of what he, Pascal, needed to do soon.
“You don’t think so?” Edward pressed. They were nearing the Midtown Tunnel and with it the frenzy of public speaking and public relations that would be required at the funeral. Everyone would have time to contemplate Prem, to think of him one last time. But Edward would have to manage the show, always watch from the outside, make sure that what was best for Prem’s legacy was happening. He would need a vacation after this. A vacation with one or two of Prem’s books to bid him farewell.
“Prem held himself back all these years. He never made the final plunge with any of his girlfriends in the past thirty-five years. He had options, real choices with devoted women, but he always held back that kernel of himself to save it for his writing. Just the way I have always saved that kernel of myself for my emotional comfort, for feeling close to people, for love. We decided to reverse it in the summer. We talked about it at Mont-Saint-Michel. He had only so much time left to live. He chose to live.”
“How could he think he would live without writing?”
“I don’t think it was a systematic decision. But you know Prem, when something was circumscribed by time, he thought he was less free. He needed to know he was now in it with Maya, only with Maya, not with books. I don’t think he asked how long he wouldn’t write. What was important was the immediate future. I like to think that once I came out with a book, he wouldn’t have liked me having the last word, and he’d have written another.”
“And you? Your book?”
“Once Irène is gone, I am going to do what he told me to. I am going to keep the isolation and not seek release from it. I am going to write with it.”
“Are you sure that was all there was to it with Prem?”
“I’m certain. He looked back on his life and said, ‘What have I not done that I should have done?’ And he chose to do it. By doing it he affirmed that it was not too late. Do you understand what it means when a man says; ‘It’s not too late?’”
“Tell me.” Edward had not seen Pascal since the previous fall. He missed hearing his accented English. His peculiar facility with language, his complete lack of embarrassment in stating things that most of his American writers would never verbalize.
“It means that I am going to keep evolving. Prem wanted to die in the midst of change, of activity. The important thing is to choose to keep moving instead of getting comfortable, settling, sedimenting. He taught me this.”
Pascal’s words seemed to start from somewhere deep within his huge gut and come out not from his lips but from his eyes. The eyes were burning with a hunger Edward had not seen before. An absolute, total, concentrated hunger. The greed for the prize, the desire for recognition, the craving for praise that he had often seen in Pascal had fallen away. What was left was pure will. Pure by being no longer in the service of another end but in its own service. It was Prem’s will.
“You have to write your next book. I think you should drop the one you are working on about the critics and their criticism. It’s not vital,” Edward said softly.
“That one is almost finished. I write it in Irène’s apartment while I hang around.”
The car pulled up at the chapel where the funeral service was to be held. Within minutes Maya joined them.
“The ashes from the crematorium are inside. We’ll take the urn with us after the service is over,” Edward said to them.
“I’m going to scatter some in the Seine. He wanted that.”
“Are you sure it’s legal?” Edward asked Pascal.
“Je m’en fous. Who cares?”
Pascal turned to Maya. “Were you with him?”
“Yes, I was.” She hadn’t spoken to anyone since she had last seen Edward. Her mouth felt stiff as the words came out.
“Did he suffer?”
Edward turned his body fully to look at Maya.
“I think he was asleep. I was asleep,” she said.
In the early hours of the morning Maya had felt the sheets rustle. And then she had felt Prem get back into bed. Maya, still half-asleep, had reached out to him.
“You wore your clothes,” she whined.
“I was feeling cold. Do you want something too?”
“You. Closer.”
Her warm body reached out and folded him into her arms.
“I know we’re going to renew this lease,” he whispered.
“Our lease will love forever.” Maya was already half in a dream, pulled heavily into a deep sleep.
She woke up with a start. “Prem.”
Even as she shook him, she knew something was wrong.
“Prem, say something,” she said, fumbling for the light switch on her end of the bed.
The light was harsh and hurt her eyes. She tore away the cover. He was still warm but no longer breathing.
“No, you can’t, Prem. Oh God!”
She told Edward and Pascal how she had awakened startled. If he had been in pain, he would have shouted or moved and she would have woken up. No, Maya was pretty sure he hadn’t been in pai
n or she would have known—their bodies had been touching.
The sedan with Homi arrived. Edward walked to it immediately. Homi and Edward came back to them. Homi shook hands with Pascal and gave Maya a hug.
“I haven’t told Ratan. I only told him that Prem was very ill. Was it a painful death?”
“Definitely not. He passed away in his sleep. Couldn’t have been more beautiful,” Edward stated authoritatively. Then he caught Maya’s eyes and lowered his own.
By eleven, when the service was scheduled, the hall was full, and people crowded the aisles. Maya sat in front flanked by Pascal and Edward. They both gave their eulogies. Homi twisted and untwisted his hands. Maya felt as if she were not present. It was hard to focus on what was happening. The Indian scientist who spoke was nothing like Prem. He spoke with an accent that was hard to follow and said that a great man’s measure was the people he had inspired.
The service was already over. All sorts of people came and shook Homi’s hand. They were all four standing together one beside the other.
“I think we can go soon,” Edward said, bringing the urn that had been placed on the table by the microphone.
Homi took the urn from Edward and held it close to himself, his eyes glistening.
A reporter called out to Edward.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, striding to the man.
“Mr. Homi Verma,” a woman’s voice called.
Maya and Pascal both looked at her for a second.
“Yes?” Homi said, turning to the woman. Maya looked at the woman and blinked.
“We met. Don’t you remember?” she asked Homi.
Homi furrowed his eyebrows.
“Pascal, can you come here a minute?” Edward called out to Pascal.
“Sorry, I’ll be right back.” Pascal touched Maya’s elbow before walking away.
The woman talking to Homi had lifted the cover of the jar and fished out a stainless steel spoon.
Maya looked transfixed.
“Madame, I—I—” Homi began.
“He wanted it so badly. You’ll find it in his will. Unfortunately I’m flying out in a few hours.” The woman spooned out some gray powder for her glass jar.