Ranjana had a feeling that Cheryl’s interaction with Sondhi was going to be even more dramatic than the interaction with the woman who had lost her child.
Cheryl handed a conference volunteer the copy of The Forsaken that she had bought in the lobby. People had been instructed to write whatever they wanted on a tiny slip of paper, which was vetted by the volunteer and passed onto Sondhi. Ranjana scanned Cheryl’s paper, which read, “To Cheryl: Love your work!” Why couldn’t Cheryl demonstrate this kind of wit more regularly?
The volunteer laughed as Cheryl handed her the paper. “Good one.”
“I try,” Cheryl said.
The volunteer handed the paper over. “That’s funny,” Sondhi said, looking up at Cheryl and then bending over to inscribe the title page.
“I lost a child, too,” Cheryl said.
Ranjana almost dropped her book.
“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Sondhi said. She stopped writing and looked up at Cheryl attentively.
“Cancer,” Cheryl said.
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s the reason why I’ve always appreciated when people are totally honest. When my son was sick, the doctors would tiptoe around his problems because they were so afraid to hurt him—or to hurt me and my husband. But I told them, ‘Just give it to me straight. I’m a big girl.’ So what I’m going to tell you is that I’ve never read a lick of your work. But I will. I will. Thanks for signing my book.”
“Take care. I’m sorry for your loss. I appreciate your candor.”
In light of this conversation, Ranjana could hardly focus during her own interaction with Sondhi and ended up just asking for an autograph. She managed to say “I love your work very much” before shuffling away. Harit looked as if he were in pain as he had his book signed; he didn’t say a word. Even Teddy was so taken aback that all he could muster was “You’re even more beautiful in person” before he joined the rest of them.
“I had no idea that you lost your son,” Teddy said, gently taking Cheryl’s elbow in his hand.
“Ha-ha. Oh, that? I was just kidding.”
“What?” Ranjana swung violently around.
“You were kidding?” Teddy said. Harit looked as if he were going to collapse.
Cheryl’s face went still. She pursed her lips. “No, I wasn’t kidding. It’s true.”
“I … don’t understand,” Ranjana said.
Cheryl sighed. “It’s true, OK? I’m just playing with you. It was just nice to be taken seriously by someone. Too bad it had to be a stranger.” She turned around and walked into the lobby.
“THIS IS ALL I NEED TONIGHT,” Teddy said, holding up a martini so dirty that you couldn’t even see through it. “I’ve had enough of these people. It’s like they want to be writers without any of the alcoholism.”
Harit had sobered up after a nap in his room, and here, in the hotel bar, despite Teddy’s complaints, he ordered a Diet Coke with no booze in it. Although they had eaten at the banquet earlier, they were both pulling cheesy shingles from a tall hut of nachos. At nearby tables, other attendees were huddled over signed Pushpa Sondhi books and similarly slimy snacks.
“You’re awful quiet tonight,” Teddy said. “Even for you.” The large olives in his glass huddled, freezing in the cold.
Harit wanted to be with Ranjanaji, but Cheryl, who had reverted after the signing to her usual, laid-back self, insisted that she and Ranjana have a “girls’ night out.” Ranjanaji looked less than pleased with this suggestion, which made Harit’s evening with Teddy at least somewhat tolerable. If she had seemed happy, Harit would have just assumed that she had no desire to spend time with him.
He was ashamed of his drunken behavior at the banquet. He had sensed Ranjana’s judgment of him as if she were his mother. There was a restraint in her watchfulness that wasn’t outright disapproval but that was cutting, regardless. Her sweetness made you feel as if you were missing a chance to honor it. More important, he still had not found the opportunity to tell Ranjana about his recent breakthrough with his mother, how he had even confessed to a possible lifestyle that left women behind romantically altogether. So now he felt the extra weight of having to tell his new friend about everything all at once, and this sunk him back down into a pit of worry from which he had hoped to emerge.
“Hello? You OK?”
Harit thought for a second before responding, chewing a nacho and waiting for it to slide down. “I’m not sure why I came here,” he said. “I should have known that I wouldn’t have a nice time.”
Harit expected to see Teddy curl his lips, that habit he had of gathering his anxiety in one place lest it affect the rest of his body, but Teddy lifted his martini and took a slow sip. He set his drink down and leaned forward on the table, his upper arms straining against the striped sheen of his dress shirt.
“What would it take for you to have a nice time?”
Teddy’s face reminded Harit of how Cheryl had been right after the signing—serious and angry. Harit looked into his Diet Coke and thought of how nice it would be to lie on one of the smooth, cool cubes, bubbles popping around him like determined jellyfish.
“I worry that you don’t even know how to be happy,” Teddy said. “You don’t even let yourself have a good time. Ever. I always have to drag it out of you.”
“You’re the one having a martini, Teddy. That’s what you do when you’re feeling unhappy.” Harit didn’t know how he was finding the strength to be combative without the aid of alcohol.
“I’m not feeling unhappy right now, actually. But you’re like this even when we’re at the store. You’re always wallowing in your grief.”
People always used this word wallow. For a long time, Harit thought they were saying “swallowing in your grief,” which was, in fact, a fitting way to describe a martini.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Harit could feel his neck heating up.
Teddy leaned even closer. “Come on. Look at all of the things that you have to be happy about these days.”
The heat rose into Harit’s face and came out of his mouth in a puff. “You’re crazy. ‘All of the things’? I have many things to be happy about? You’re so insensitive.”
“Insensitive is the last thing I am. I’m trying to help you. That’s all I ever do. I’m your friend, Harit. Whether you like it or not, that is what we are now—friends. That’s something to be happy about. If I weren’t with you right now, you’d be home with Mommy.”
“At least my mother knows when to leave me alone,” Harit said, again surprised that he was capable of fighting fire with fire, especially when his words were unfounded: his mother was not leaving him alone anymore. “You’re the type of bad friend that I deserve.”
“Oh, burn!” Teddy said, leaning back melodramatically and putting a palm to his chest. “You’re a regular Kathy Griffin. Keep ’em coming, smart-ass!”
“You’re fat.”
“That’s original. Keep going.”
“That shirt is ugly.”
“Really? Your shirt makes you look homeless.”
“I hate it when you sing in the store. You are never in step with the music. Even Mr. Harriman talks about it. Everyone does.”
“I know they do. That’s why I keep doing it. They also talk about how your hair looks like pubic hair. Because it does.”
“You wear too much cologne.”
“I wear too much cologne? You smell like a French prostitute.”
“At least French prostitutes know how to speak actual French.”
“Oh, ho!” Teddy said, pushing his chin out and lifting his eyes to the ceiling in a gesture that signaled both being impressed and being wounded.
They went silent for a few seconds.
“Haven’t we gotten eloquent,” Teddy said.
Harit had gotten eloquent. He had begun to cultivate a different language. Not a vocabulary of household objects and restaurant foods and asking directions and making small talk and greeting customers with
courteous phrases in passing. The heat had moved back into his body and into his back, his feet, into the hardness of his teeth and the tip of his nose. He had learned how to be constructively mean to a friend—which was a different vocabulary and a rare type of happiness.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked, taking Teddy’s empty glass off the table.
“Two gin martinis, dirty,” Harit said.
“You sound like James Bond,” Teddy said.
Indeed, he felt like James Bond.
* * *
“I really threw you guys for a loop back there, didn’t I?” Cheryl hoisted the bottle of red wine and poured herself another glass, the brim seeming to quiver.
“I was so sorry to hear about your son. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Cheryl had ordered a plate of ravioli even though she had eaten a fair bit at the banquet. She halved one of the ravioli with her fork and stuck the meaty grin into her mouth. “It doesn’t exactly come up in regular conversation.”
“Yes, but … I don’t know. We work in a doctor’s office. How do you work in a doctor’s office all day after that?”
“It’s the reason why I work in a doctor’s office.” Cheryl maintained the same even tone, as calm now as if she had never snubbed them after the banquet. “I want to help people. Even if it’s with their asses.”
Ranjana was enormously impressed with this reveal of Cheryl’s troubled history. Only someone of true fortitude had the ability to hide such a tragic event, not to have it seep into every movement and cause hard-edged resentment toward the littlest things. Take Harit: he had been felled by his loss. It outlined his every action.
Ranjana took a sip of wine. She didn’t want to drink, and this wine tasted like eating the rind of some fruit, but she didn’t want to do anything contrary to Cheryl’s wishes. “I have to ask you something,” she said.
“Shoot,” Cheryl said, looking Ranjana right in the eye. Cheryl must have been very pretty once. No exotic beauty, but Ranjana could see that the soft wrinkles of her face were not etchings but arrows, pointing to where her youthful girliness had been at its strongest: her eyes had been the bright centers where her enthusiasm had pooled, and her mouth had been a stage for smiles and retorts. Her kooky personality—the false naïveté had fooled Ranjana. If they had grown up together, Cheryl would have been the more popular of the two.
“Do you think that I’ve been horribly rude to you?” Ranjana asked. “All this time? The whole time we’ve worked together?”
Cheryl pushed her hand through the air, as if to send the words back into Ranjana’s mouth. “Ranjana. No. We’re friends! Unless, well—have you meant to be rude to me this whole time?” Cheryl folded her hands one over the other and rested her chin on them, her eyes eager at the idea of finding out some great trespass.
Cheryl could have been friends with Seema, Ranjana thought, whatever Seema’s hang-ups may have been. Or no—not friends. They would have made great nemeses. They were both protected by their eccentricity; in the company of comparable eccentricity, they would have felt threatened.
Ranjana felt the need to be honest. “I must admit that I’ve never thought of you as a real friend until today. Or perhaps ‘friend’ isn’t what I mean. I mean that I have never given you the benefit of the doubt until now.” Ranjana paused, processing her next sentence and understanding how true it was just before it left her lips: “I think that I have a habit of thinking I know exactly who people are as soon as I meet them.” She had done this to Achyut. She had judged him immediately. He had been surprising and abnormal in so many ways, yet her opinion itself had not really wavered. She had worried that he’d be problematic, and she had made him problematic. Then he was gone from her life. Such things didn’t happen in books. If he were a character in one of her stories, he would have had a nice throughline, a satisfying plot. But life wasn’t one of her stories. Achyut could vanish, and he had.
“As I said earlier, I appreciate honesty,” Cheryl said. Having finished her ravioli, she touched her napkin to the red-tinted corners of her mouth. “So let me say this: I grew up in our town. I’ve lived there my whole life. I’ve seen my childhood friends grow up, get married, push out kids, get fat, not learn anything. They drink and smoke and stay the same. They’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. But what people forget sometimes—people who haven’t grown up in our town, people who turn their noses up at us from far away or even close by—is that some of us choose to stay there. It’s not because we’re too dumb to move away. It’s because we’ve found something comfortable. Comfort is a really underrated thing, Ranjana. My son didn’t know much about it. And I wish he had. I’m not stupid. I know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I do know one big thing: being cheery, even when you’re not feeling cheery, even when you actually feel like walking into traffic from being so sad, brings cheer into your life somehow. I’m smart because I know that. Don’t you forget it.”
Forcing yourself to be cheery. Happiness begetting happiness. Ranjana wanted to think it ridiculous, yet that is why she had come here: to tell stories. To fabricate things. This was its own kind of forced emotion. If you had the capacity to install fear in a fictional person’s heart, if you had the capacity to shove love into a princess or fury into a winged monster, you had the capacity to generate passion or mirth or humility or patience in yourself. It wasn’t just pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. It was through your own generosity of imagination that you made yourself good.
SCRIBBLED CHECK AND LIFTING up from the table and the carpet’s paisley and weaving out of the doorway and the weight of Teddy even heavier than you thought and there are people in the lobby in some bright T-shirts must be some other conference and the woman behind the front desk in her sailor-like outfit and her face is looking concerned but detached she doesn’t want to deal with it tonight and this is what happens at hotels anyway and they’re at the elevator and it takes a long time to come the numbers are lighting upward as one elevator ascends away from them and the numbers are lighting downward closer to them but someone must be getting out at the seventh floor and saying bye because it continues to take a long time and Teddy suggests that maybe they should take the stairs and they make a few steps in that direction but it’s too hard so they turn around and there’s the elevator, at last, so they get onto it and can’t remember which floor they’re on and Teddy starts to hit every floor in a row but Harit remembers that they’re on the tenth floor and so they go into the elevator and then they’re stumbling out of the elevator and down the hall and Harit accidentally swipes a plant off of a decorative table and hears it hit the ground with a thump and they’re staggering down the hallway and there’s no sound except for their feet plodding on the carpet and their breath, which is rhythmic and heavy, and then they’re in front of a door—is it Harit’s or Teddy’s?—and it must be Teddy’s because Harit is magically in the room without having used a key and then he stumbles into the room as the light is coming on and feels himself give way to the ground and he’s on the floor and his cheek is against the carpet and it feels so, so comfortable and it’s actually the most comfortable he’s ever been.
* * *
Harit wakes up in a small lake of his own saliva. Directly in front of him is the large mahogany dresser, gold knobs up its front like a soldier’s buttons. Harit feels like a being contained within his clothes. He shifts and finds that he is less light-headed than he expected. He hoists himself up and checks the clock on the nightstand. It is 2:28 A.M.
Teddy isn’t in bed. Harit hears something from the bathroom. The door isn’t closed, so he walks forward and peers into it. Teddy is just rising from his hands and knees. Harit pulls away slightly, fearing that Teddy has been sick, then sees that Teddy holds a dirty towel in his hand: he’s been cleaning.
“Don’t worry about it,” Teddy says. Harit feels his stomach and mind flip at the same time. It’s his vomit that Teddy has been cleaning up.
A flicker
ing recollection of pushing himself up and retching his drinks into the toilet and missing, then retreating back into the room and onto the ground.
“Teddy, I’m so sorry. Let me help.”
“There’s no need to help now,” Teddy says, chuckling—but not bitterly. He knows to disarm Harit’s self-punishment by offering a bit of laughter. Teddy is walking out of the bathroom. Harit has to step aside to let him pass. Harit has no idea what time he fell asleep. How long has Teddy been cleaning the bathroom?
“How are you feeling?” Teddy asks. He opens the closet and pulls out pajamas that hang blithely on a hanger. They are silken and night blue, like an expensive kurta.
Harit actually feels fine, so he says so.
“Good,” Teddy says. “I’m going to change.” Harit steps aside again, to let him pass, and then the bathroom door closes.
Harit doesn’t know if he should go back to his room or not. He feels indebted to Teddy because Teddy has just taken care of his mess—a mess from his body, horrible to clean up even if it were your own—but Harit also feels that he is hovering for a reason. Upon hearing Teddy’s movements, the clothes being taken off and jettisoned for his pajamas, Harit feels a lift of his body. It feels like a lift of Harit’s whole body, not just the lift of one part. He is eavesdropping on his friend and taking pleasure from what he hears.
Harit ventures back into the room and sits on the end of the bed. The place where he lay on the beige carpet looks like a rough patch of sand. He thinks again of Teddy bent over the toilet, the gentle care in his posture. He thinks of the countless times that he’s wanted to smack Teddy across the face but then can’t think of anything but the funny curve of that face and the cartoonish expressions in which it often contorts itself. He has convinced himself all along that he has no friends and that no one truly understands him; he’s been trying to build his first true friend with Ranjana. He now realizes that Teddy has been the steadfast one—the one who has tried to smooth out his tragedy until it is no longer a barrier in his life but simply a thing that happened, a thing to be dealt with and then discarded.
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