The Superman Project

by A. E. Roman

  So there we were, alone together, while she explained what she was doing in Williamsburg.

  “I was visiting Giovanni,” she said. “I’m a painter’s model. Giovanni uses me.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Not like that,” she said and tapped me playfully on the chest. “Giovanni’s not like that. Totally platonic.”

  “You model for extra money?”

  “Not money,” she said. “I’m an exhibitionist by nature. I’m the female wrestler in most of Giovanni’s Struggle sculptures. Anyway, when I saw Pablo running like a madman through the streets of Williamsburg and I took off after him in the car, it wasn’t because I was thinking, believe you me. I’m a total physical coward, the exact opposite of a female James Bond girl. It was nothing but reflex, I’m afraid. That ever happen to you? I feel awful smashing into you with my car. You came out of that bloody alley quite suddenly. I really am—”

  “You already apologized. I forgive you.”

  “Mighty big of you, Santana.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “My most intimate friends call me Chico.”

  “Am I your intimate friend?”

  “We can work on that.”

  “So,” she asked. “Where is Joey? Do you know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ve been frantic ever since my big sister Gabby disappeared.”

  “You were close?”

  “My sister Gabby is an artist and a saint. Gabby is the best human being I’ve ever known. She doesn’t believe in villains. She doesn’t believe anybody is bad.”

  “Doesn’t read the papers?”

  “You let your hair down,” she said, “I’ll let mine down. We’ll trade information.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re both looking for the same thing.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And I’m going to make it up to you for hitting you with my car. I am.”

  And I let her. I lied to myself that it was just part of getting to the bottom of the Joey Valentin case and possibly helping Elvis get out of his jam, beat the rap, if he was innocent. I lied to myself that I thought Zena Gupta might lead me even closer to the truth if I could only spend more time with her. That’s all I was interested in. The truth. I was a sucker for the truth, that’s all. I lied to myself. I could talk myself into anything, as they say, if I talked hard enough.

  It’s what I do.

  I watched Zena watching a Mexican girl twirling two batons on fire.

  “Only in New York,” said Zena with wonder in her voice, taking a sip and letting out a tiny burp.

  “Oh, dear me,” she said, scolding herself. “That’s not very ladylike, Ms. Gupta.” I was staring at Zena’s big hoop earrings when it hit me.

  “Waitaminute,” I said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-five,” she said.

  “A little on the young side,” I said.

  “Young,” she said. “I have a master’s degree. You?”

  “I once had a third degree,” I said. “Burn, that is.”

  “You’re silly.”

  “You’re cute.”

  She stared at my face. “You have very nice eyelashes, Mr. Santana.”

  “Thanks.”

  “May I touch them?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  I closed my eyes as her hand approached. I could smell something sweet on her fingers soft against my cheek.

  That smell. What was it?

  “They’re so bloody long,” she said. “Like a girl’s. I hate you.”

  “I’m getting that a lot lately,” I said.

  After drinking our fruit shakes and talking a lot about how easily we were connecting, and how it felt like we had known each other forever, I found myself promising Zena that I would spend the night with her and talk about her sister’s case. I was to be her guest.

  I would sleep in her bed and she would sleep on the floor, no ifs, ands, or buts. She would see to my every need and desire. I was helping to find her missing sister Gabby, she nearly killed me in the pursuit of my duties, she said, it was the bloody least she could do. She could help me in my investigation.

  Everybody wanted to help Chico.

  Besides, she was having a good time and she didn’t want me to go home.

  When I called Mimi and asked her if she could spend the night with Max and Gizmo and Boo in Parkchester, she moaned about having business responsibilidades. I told Mimi that she could take Max with her to the Cuchifrito. Gizmo the cat was safe in his box with the door closed and Boo (the potential Chihuahua killer of Gizmo the cat) could wait for his evening walk after she and Max got back home. Mimi stopped moaning, blessed me, and hung up. Then came the hard part.

  That night, we walked to her five-story redbrick building on 25th Street and Madison.

  Zena said, “My apartment belongs to TSP.”

  We walked quickly up the stairs, past the doorman, as she shook her head, breathing hard, with a small grin. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me, Chico. I’m still a member of TSP. TSP believes that sexual feelings are not important. They pass. So there’s no need to get all batty about it. People get intoxicated because they want to forget their sadness, they want to be happy but it’s a desperate way to go about it. They scream, they laugh, they howl in drunken merriment, this semblance of happiness is but a tepid form of despair. Smoking and drinking and having mindless sex are things I choose not to do anymore, because of what TSP has given me, and people who do these things are in denial of the truth. I say that without judgment. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t do sex. I don’t eat meat. So don’t get any ideas. I’m just lonely for my sister Gabby and confused about Elvis and full of a need for answers. Are you lonely, too?”

  “I’m not but I can learn.”

  Zena had a big swanky loft with open spaces and exposed brick walls and a staircase and two floors filled with tall windows and sunlight and red and blue furniture that looked like it was bought five minutes ago in a showroom and never sat on and original art (all nudes) that hung on walls and went from the floor to the ceiling.

  There was also an altar full of stones, colorful flags, gems, rocks, oils, and incense. Over the altar was a large painting of a male nude.

  In the painting, the muscled nude was surrounded by Hindu gods and goddesses that she described to me as Ganesh, Shiva, Krishna, Durga, Saraswati, and Hanuman. The painting was signed Gabby Gupta.

  To the right of the painting was a cuckoo clock.

  She pointed at a spotless marble fireplace: “I can’t keep a fire going in that thing during the winter. I think I’m doing everything bloody right, newspaper, kindling, logs, nice and dry. The logs catch, but when they burn, they smolder without a flame. It’s a pretty good metaphor for my currently loveless life. Any advice?”

  “Try a sweater,” I said.

  She took my Rockports and brought me a pair of sandals.

  “Hara!” said Zena. “Here’s my pretty boy!”

  Hara was a fat tortoiseshell cat with greenish eyes. Unlike Max’s cat Gizmo, Hara had four brown and black legs. Some cats have all the karma.

  She picked Hara up and began kissing him, threw him over her shoulders and began dancing about the room. Hara ate it up, purring all the way. I wasn’t too unhappy myself. On a long red coffee table, I spotted a picture of a white woman surrounded by four dark-skinned Asian Indian children, all girls, before the gates of what looked like an English castle.

  “Who is that woman?” I asked.

  “That’s me mummy,” Zena said, and put Hara down. “My mother was white . . . British . . . and Jewish.”

  “I didn’t know they made those.”

  “They do,” she said. “Jews have been in England longer than Shakespeare.”

  “She looks nice.”

  “She was who she was,” Zena said.

  “Where is she now?”<
br />
  “She passed,” Zena said. “She was ill. I gave her injections of morphine almost every day in the end. She’s dead. You’re nosy.”

  “Curious,” I said.

  “Please come up to my office, Curious,” said Zena.

  I walked up to the second floor to her bedroom. I followed her cue and lay on the giant canopy bed with rainbow sheets and rainbow pillows flanked by two shelves, fat with hardcover novels—mostly Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and E. M. Forster. I remembered Ramona having to read those guys, too.

  On the wall before Zena’s bed was a colorful painting of another nude by Gabby Gupta. Embedded in the painting was a greeting card with a list in childish crayon titled How to Be an Artist. One of the requirements was, invite someone dangerous to lunch.

  I pointed at the painting.

  “Am I just part of your to-do list?”

  Zena looked up. “Silly,” she said. “Don’t be daft. It’s way past lunchtime.”

  “Silly me.”

  “Remember,” she said. “You can stay here in my humble flat. But just talking about Gabby and then sleeping. No hanky-panky.”

  “I’ve never hanked a panky in my life, senorita.”

  “You and I, we are a rare breed indeed, Chico,” she said. “Not looking for some sordid hook-up, just looking for a cool hand, just looking for a little sugar in our tea. We’re confused and looking for answers, for someone to fill the void.”

  “I will gladly fill your void,” I said.

  “That’s naughty,” she said and smiled wickedly.

  “That ain’t right at all.”

  Zena exited to one of her four bathrooms, not ashamed, but with a goofy smile. When she came back, minutes later, she was wearing a red nightie. She sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t look at me. “I hope you’re honestly interested in finding my sister. I hope you didn’t just come here so I could play with your thing.”

  Shocked by her directness, I said only, “That dirty thought never crossed my mind. I was raised Catholic.”

  “That would be very Kryptonic,” she said, looking down at the wood floor, and added, “I’m a good girl.”

  I swallowed deep. “I was counting on that,” I said.

  “I’m not looking for sex,” she said. “Or any Kryptonic behavior. No alcohol, no drugs, no cigarettes, no promiscuous sex.”

  “No meat,” I said. “I know.”

  “I just want some sincerity and some answers. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “TSP teaches that love is something sacred, beautiful, and holy, and that you should share your love only when your feelings are pure. You have to wait for that special moment when you know, and then when you know, you give yourself to The Superman and only The Superman.”

  “I’ll keep an eye open for ’im.”

  “I was once too much in Maya,” she explained. “Meaning that my pride distracted me from my search for truth.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  “The way I lived before I accepted TSP as the true way was untruth,” Zena said. “I’ve never, never been stronger and more convinced than now.”

  I nodded.

  “The point is that everything now is going to be different, is going to be clearer,” Zena said. “Everything, even if I’m not prepared for it, Chico. I want it. Do you want it, too?”

  “Oh,” I said, looking at her shapely brown silhouette under the red nightie. “I want it.”

  “What’s the object of suffering?” she asked, and answered, “I don’t know. But will the average person know any better than I do, when they’re crushed by hardship and weakness, an old sick person staring into the dark? What will they have to show for having lived?”

  “Stretch marks?”

  “Stop joking,” she said. “I like it ever so bloody much better when you listen. Have you ever seen any Satyajit Ray films?”

  “Who?”

  “Satyajit Ray. He’s a famous Indian filmmaker.”

  “Not in the Bronx he’s not.”

  “Before you leave here in the morning,” she said, “I am going to give you the gift of Satyajit Ray.”

  So all night long she talked about growing up Gupta and what she knew about Joey and Gabby’s relationship and how the sisters were divided over everything that was happening at TSP and how she felt they were all keeping secrets from each other. She talked and cooked vegetarian Indian dishes. We not only talked about Joey and Gabby but looked at books on Indian folklore and Indian folktales, exchanged body and foot rubs, did yoga, and belly danced and ate more vegetarian food: mixed vegetables, potatoes and cauliflower cooked with spices and yogurt sauce, cottage cheese cooked with spinach, eggplant, onion, green peas, rice, lentils, fritters, stuffed bread with garlic, green salad, rice pudding. Something called barfi fudge and gulab jamun and fried dumplings in syrup and jalebis, fried rings batter dipped in syrup, and melons and rice milk and washed it all down with something called mango lassi.

  And Saturday morning, as the sun came up, I yawned and she gave me a massage for extracting negative energy and read my chakras and insisted we watch that Satyajit Ray film from her big rainbow canopy bed. The World of Apu, about a frustrated Indian poet, was her favorite. She said it reminded her of her cousin Arjuna who died in the war. And not once, even though Zena wore only a skimpy red nightie, did sex ever take place.

  Nothing.

  Not even a kiss.

  Superman?

  Maybe there was something to it.

  Then she said, “My sister Chase and I are going up to TSP’s Utopia Farms to grab some stuff before they sell it. Would you care to join us? Gabby used to keep an art studio up there. You could private investigate. We have llamas and alpacas.”

  “You had me at llama,” I said. “Yes.”

  I had to go, I told myself, I had just wasted an entire night with no clues, no evidence, nothing, and I finally got a bite. It was my duty, as a professional private investigator, to go with Zena wherever she needed me to go.

  Later, washing up, I opened up Zena’s medicine cabinet and in the cabinet, along with Excedrin, coconut massage oil, and vegetable shampoo, I found a familiar little sliver of folded tin foil. Too familiar.

  I left the bathroom, my hands shaking. Zena, wrapped in a red bath towel and ready for a shower, sat by an open window, apparently sleepy, nodding, watching the morning traffic dribble by.

  “Can I have some more rice milk?” I said, wanting to take a peak in her refrigerator.

  “You can have anything you want so long as it’s not Kryptonic, darling.”

  Darling.

  Man, she played rough, I thought.

  Zena went into the bathroom, and I walked to her large silver kitchen and to her large silver refrigerator with a magnet that read, Do no harm.

  I found small bottles of orange liquid hid behind the piles of green vegetables and fresh fruit and soy milk. I thought back to the bits of foil at Giovanni’s and what Zena had told me about her mother: “I gave her injections of morphine.”

  Being who I was, and considering who my father was, this was almost funny. But I wasn’t laughing.

  I grew up with those little orange bottles. My father had them in the refrigerator in our apartment on Brook and in his medical office, and when I’d ask what they were, he’d say, “They’re for the sick people. People in pain.”

  I thought about the little scraps of tin foil in Giovanni’s studio.

  Zena and Giovanni had more in common than art.

  Pain.

  Painkiller, like marble, costs money.

  Where the hell was Giovanni getting his money for the marble and the painkiller?

  I grabbed some rice milk and closed the refrigerator, then sat at the massive silver kitchen table, sipping, petting Hara the cat. It was a big place for one girl.

  Even if her dad was Father Ravi.

  When Zena came out wrapped in wet towels, I didn’t ask about the orange bottles and tin foil. Everything had been so perfect
. In that swanky nude-filled apartment, everything was magic, like the coin tricks Max performed, like Giovanni’s nineteen-foot piece of white marble, only more real. So I said nothing. I didn’t want to push too much and scare her off. Not now. Not yet, I told myself.

  I dressed, wished Zena good morning, and went out into the hall.

  “I’m glad you came.” There was no trace of regret in her voice.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Don’t forget our trip to the farm,” she said, closing her front door. “I will hunt you down.”

  It was only five flights to get myself out of Zena’s building, but suddenly I was getting that awful rip in my gut so I pressed for the elevator. If I had known what was coming next, I mighta taken the stairs, I mighta prolonged the magic just a bit longer. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  When the elevator arrived, the doors opened and I saw Hari Lachan in his silver wheelchair. Even his legs, though unmoving, looked powerful.

  “You must be Chico,” he said with a very soft and calm voice.

  “Yes. You’re—”

  “I’m Hari Lachan. Zena’s husband.”

  “Zena’s husband?” I said.

  Silence.

  “Oh.”

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Hari asked with a pained look.

  She didn’t tell me. Nobody told me. They were all keeping secrets from each other and from me.

  “Yeah,” I lied. “She told me.”

  “And what are you doing here?” he asked timidly with no sign of suspicion or hostility, just curiosity.

  “Interviewing your wife about her missing sister Gabby.”

  “Oh,” he said and smiled. “Mara didn’t scare you off?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  He laughed. “Give her some time.”

  He put out his big hand and we shook.

  He nodded. “I want you to know that I don’t agree with my sister-in-law Mara and that anything you’re doing to help find our dearest Gabby is very important. I don’t know if anyone at TSP has thanked you yet.”