My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  But Eden made herself comic by exaggerating her faults, and she was happy to let me disprove her self-criticism. I loved her vitality, the way she always said yes, her willingness, her energy—she could spend a whole day swimming or hiking and the rest of the night making love. She took pleasure in cooking—clipped recipes out of gourmet magazines and we made the dishes. We shopped at the big supermarket in Hyannis and bought fresh fish and vegetables and went back to my house and prepared it. I associated her with fresh air and good food and rowdy sex, and I never felt healthier than when I was with her.

  There was often a slight suggestion of What now? or What next? in her face or voice. She was thirty-four. She had never been married.

  Some months after I had met her she became depressed. I asked her what was wrong. At first she said nothing, but her mood did not lift.

  “I just wonder where all this is leading,” she said.

  I felt oddly ensnared by the sentence, yet wasn’t the answer to that always Nowhere. Most women I had known had needed to look ahead—the future was always on their mind, the sense of time passing was strong in them; if I listened closely to any woman she seemed to tick like a clock, and even the silliest of them made plans. Eden thought about growing old.

  In that same mood of depression she said, “What would you say if I told you I’ve been seeing someone?”

  I’ve been seeing someone was inevitably an oblique sexual admission. It meant everything.

  I couldn’t speak or answer her—my mouth was too dry.

  She said, “I was just joking. I wanted to find out whether you cared.”

  “I do care.” It came out as a pathetic croak.

  She became very serious. She could see that she had shocked me.

  “You really do, don’t you?” And she kissed me. “I’m sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m a very bad girl.” Her voice changed and softened to that of a small girl. “You should put me straight to bed. You should punish me.”

  That day she was naked underneath her short skirt and green cashmere sweater. She came alive when I touched her, and so did I.

  She sometimes wore knee socks when we made love, or a lace collar—nothing else—or a ribbon in her hair. She always wore something—a silk sash, a leather belt, a pair of high-heeled shoes. “I feel more naked that way.” Once she wore a mask. She was never completely dressed, nor completely undressed.

  If she was vain about anything it was her stylishness, her flair, the way she presented herself—and this look was reflected in the way she wrapped presents, always so beautifully, with glossy paper and multiple bows. She took a pride in such things, as she did in styling her hair or wearing the right color contact lenses; but as with the gift-wrapping I had the impression she was calling attention to something that she happened to be good at. That was why it was vanity—because it didn’t need emphasis. And also I suspected that she faintly despised the sloppy way I dressed or my casual gift-giving—I seldom wrapped anything. I felt like a buffoon putting a ribbon around anything except her neck when we made love. But we got along: she allowed me to be a brute and I encouraged her in her stylishness.

  That awareness of the look of people and things probably came from her job. She was assistant editor of a Boston magazine that specialized in antiques and decoration, and she lived not far from me, in Marstons Mills, in an old house that she had restored. She had the skills of someone who had become self-sufficient by living alone. She had a vegetable garden, a good one full of healthy plants; she preserved fruit and froze vegetables; she made jam, she stewed tomatoes and kept them in mason jars. She had painted her whole house alone, wallpapered it, sanded the floors and varnished the planks. She had hooked her own rugs, sewn her own curtains, made her matching cushion covers. She was a painstaking cook, and like a lot of brilliant cooks was not a great eater—she loved watching other people eat her food, her sculptured vegetables.

  Why hadn’t she gotten married? If she had married she probably would not have mastered all these skills, but there was also another answer. She did not like children much. She was frequently childlike herself—a characteristic of some people who don’t have kids. And she told herself—she told me—that she still had time to choose whether or not to have any.

  We were on the plane out of Logan, flying east in the darkness, the pilot giving us details of our flight path over Newfoundland.

  Eden wasn’t listening. She tore a page of out a magazine.

  “Doesn’t that look delicious?”

  A good cook looking at a recipe is like a musician looking at a music score—the simplest notation suggests everything they need to know, and just glancing at a line their senses are aroused.

  I read Chef Bernard’s Lobster Bisque. It was a three or four hour operation; it contained wine and cream and several items I had never heard of; and it was made in about ten separate stages. Step seven, I noticed, was pulverizing the lobster shells to give it the right pinky color.

  Eden rested her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers. She said, “We’ll make it on the Cape when we get back from India. We’ll bake some bread. We’ll have profiteroles for dessert.”

  She was expert at making the lightest puffballs of choux pastry—she knew that, too. It was another part of her vanity, but forgivable because she took such pleasure in cooking for other people and working hard to please them.

  But why, I wondered, were antique fanciers and restorers nearly always lovers of gourmet food? Was it part of an ingenious attempt to live well, or was it all conspicuous and self-boosting pretension and the narrowest, most intolerant snobbery?

  Yet Eden would have been the first to admit that she was like one of the objects she meticulously restored, or something she went to great trouble to prepare. The difficulty was that she had the gourmet cook’s fastidious pedantry. That could be inconvenient.

  As we talked about this great meal we were going to cook when we got back from India we were served a tasteless, overcooked airline meal that had the faint stink of baked plastic, and only surface color—when you scattered the peas they were no longer green. The chicken was wet and fibrous and coated with wallpaper paste, and surrounding it were sodden rice grains, brown-flecked salad, cold bread, and a cube of dry cake.

  “Garbage,” Eden said, and ate an apple from her handbag.

  The food was terrible, but hunger gave me patience. Nevertheless, I felt so self-conscious eating a meal she had rejected I could not finish it. I resented her severity—the fact that she couldn’t joke about this stuff. She was so certain that she made me doubtful, and I could not understand why.

  A moment later she said, “We’ve never been on a plane together—we’ve never really traveled, have we?”

  That was it—that was the reason. We had only known each other on the Cape, not in the world.

  The movie Trading Places came on after the meal but I fell asleep in the middle of it, and just before dawn we flew low over London. I looked down at the pattern of yellow lamps on the city’s irregular streets. I kept my face at the window, picked out the river, and then the larger parks, and finally as we dropped lower I could spot York Road and check our progress through southwest London, over Wandsworth and Putney and Richmond. We arrived at Heathrow in light brown morning light as rain plinked in puddles on the runway.

  “Now that we’re here I can ask you why we came this way,” Eden said. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to go to India via the West Coast?”

  “This is more direct,” I said, and when she looked doubtful I added, “Because you don’t cross the International Date Line.”

  She seemed to accept this. Well, it was six o’clock in the morning—not an hour that encouraged lucid discussions.

  She said, “But isn’t it strange being in London with me?”

  “We’re not in London,” I said, evading the real question. “Didn’t you know the airport’s in Middlesex?”

  We sat in the Transit Lounge for a while, and then she
excused herself. She was away for about twenty minutes, but when she returned she had a newly painted face. She was fragrant and looked refreshed. She had the knack—it was makeup, and clothes, and something about her hairstyle—of being able to renew herself throughout the day.

  Our Air India flight was not leaving until noon, and so I bought the London newspapers and read them over breakfast. I enjoyed eating and reading, and not saying much. But Eden was restless and more talkative than usual.

  “It’s all grease,” she was saying of the eggs and bacon. “And what’s this supposed to be?”

  “Fried bread,” I said, glancing up. “It’s a big English thing.”

  “Yuck.”

  She ate dry toast and an orange which she peeled with her own knife, and she drank Earl Grey tea—which she asked for by name.

  “Tea bags,” she said contemptuously, because she always made tea in a pot with loose leaves. “What is this country coming to?”

  That was another thing about antique fanciers—besides being gourmets they were usually anglophiles, and like the worst anglophiles they weren’t just lovers of England but they were very critical and class-conscious, too. It seemed a characteristic of such people that no matter where they had come from in America they always included themselves with the English upper-middle class.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I was frowning—disgusted with myself for noticing these characteristics in her.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed in England. But remember this is just the airport. All airports are identical. We might as well be in Tokyo. Even cities are getting similar—the big capitals resemble each other more and more.”

  “All countries have a different smell,” she said.

  Had she read that somewhere? She had not traveled much, only to vacation places like the Caribbean and Mexico and Florida. I guessed that she was rather intimidated by foreign parts. She wanted to know more than she knew, she wanted to be expert. In her way she was a perfectionist, or tried to be, which was why she was such an energetic self-improver. She was good at tricky things, but she was self-conscious, and so she seemed amateurish no matter how skillful she was. I felt that at Heathrow she was noticing everything and would mention it all later—the peculiar telephones, ashtrays, carpets, signs, spellings; the shoes people wore, their hats, the way they smoked and ate.

  We dozed in the chairs of the Transit Lounge and when we woke I showed Eden the Duty Free Shop.

  “Please buy something for yourself,” I said.

  “You look so serious!”

  “Because I want you to buy something.”

  “I don’t want anything in the Duty Free Shop,” she said. “I just want you.”

  She did not leave my side, nor would she let me buy her a bottle of perfume.

  “Shall we get some vodka? In India it’s—”

  She clutched me and kissed me and said how happy she was to be with me, and I was all she would need in India.

  “And all Jumbo jets have a different smell,” she said, as the Air India flight filled with passengers—skinny parents with fat children and more hand luggage than I had ever seen on a plane.

  It was nine hours to Delhi—two meals, another movie, and what they called “high tea.” Eden found the meals acceptable—she chose the vegetarian menu, when she saw the other high-caste orthodox Hindus doing the same. She snuggled up to me and slept for part of the flight with her head on my shoulder. She said she felt very cozy. I did not tell her that she was preventing me from sleeping, because I was glad to see her so serene. Besides, it fascinated me to see this tall person folded up and fast asleep.

  We arrived in the middle of the night at Delhi Airport, were jostled by the other passengers and pestered by porters, and eventually found our way through the grubby terminal. Then we were driven through the darkness and the empty streets to our hotel. The night was cool, but the battered taxi smelled of dust. And there was at the window the mingled smells of dirt and vegetation, cowshit, rotting fruit, woodsmoke, and diesel fumes.

  Eden took a deep breath and gagged.

  I said, “You’d know you were in the Third World even if you were blindfolded.”

  She seemed either angry or unhappy—she said nothing, only frowned.

  “Poverty always has a bad smell,” I said. “But India looks better in daylight.”

  The long drive into the city made her uneasy, and I could tell she was spooked by what she glimpsed from the window, and the odors, and the chattering and whine of the cicadas. Her nervousness made her sharp with the taxi driver.

  “Why didn’t you put the meter on?”

  She had to repeat this.

  The driver said, “Meter broken, mahdhoom.”

  “I’ll bet it is!”

  I didn’t intervene. I had been told at the airport that the standard fare was 120 rupees, and I knew that Eden would be calmer at the hotel, reassured by the style of the place, its look of a mughal stage-set—marble floors, and flowers, vases of peacock’s feathers, and chairs like thrones; the fountain in the lobby, the men in gold turbans and uniforms waiting anxiously to be flunkies.

  And that was how it was, and it had its effect. When she was calmer Eden was more compassionate, but in the queenly way of a prosperous person in a poor country.

  “Don’t you wish you could take a couple of these little kids home with you?” she said as we were walking through the Red Fort the next day.

  “They seem pretty happy here,” I said.

  The children were scampering among the stalls and shops.

  “Think of all the things you could do for them,” she said. “I’d like to gather up that little girl and spirit her away.”

  She made it sound like an abduction.

  “Would you be doing that for your sake or for hers?”

  Eden became formal and ungainly when she was angry. In a deliberate and wooden way she turned away from me, stumbling slightly.

  “I keep forgetting you’ve got a child,” she said. She was still walking with a ceremonial step, as though in a procession. She was still angry, her voice became poisonous when she added, “And a wife.”

  “Eden, relax. It’s just that these children are happy as they are.”

  “Are they happy? I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any children.”

  “And this is Hathi Pol,” the guide was saying. “This is place where elephant can enter Red Fort, carrying howdah on back. Sometime being clad in silk and jewels.”

  Big ragged crows perched on the battlements of russet stucco, cawing at us as we tottered on the uneven cobblestones. We visited the Moti Mahal and the Throne Room and the Marble Pavilion.

  “That is ghat where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated,” the guide said, pointing over the parapet and beyond the wall to the memorial on the banks of the Jumna River.

  “I feel dizzy,” Eden said, sagging slightly. “I must get back to the hotel.”

  “Memsahib is poorly?”

  “Yes. Memsahib is poorly,” I said, thinking how anywhere else in the world the word was absurd, but here memsahib suited her perfectly.

  Later, by the pool, she said, “What bothers me is that everyone seems to be reaching out and nagging—beggars, guides, taxi drivers, hustlers, people selling postcards and souvenirs. Even the birds—the sparrows and starlings and those horrible crows. They’re all pestering.” She sipped her tepid fruit juice and said, “God, I wish I had a real drink. We should have bought some duty-free booze.”

  My friend Indoo met us at the hotel the next day. He was a journalist who had become a travel agent and publicist. He liked the glamour of travel, and dealing with foreigners—finding them always jet-lagged and compliant—suited his bossy nature. But he was, like many other Indian men I had known doing non-Indian jobs, more a big nervous boy, whose tetchiness made him a taskmaster. He told me frankly that he was in the business because he got cut-price tickets and was able to fly all over the world.

  “It is a pleas
ure meeting such an attractive woman,” he said to Eden, and I knew that her height—she was a foot taller than him—unnerved him. And his charm had become more mechanical with each passing year.

  I was surprised by the effect it had on Eden. She clearly enjoyed hearing this formula being repeated to her. I was embarrassed both by the flattery and by her reaction.

  “I am at your service,” Indoo said, seeing instantly that she was susceptible. “I can see that you will want to be shown something very special of India.”

  She was beaming—she was the memsahib, he the chowkidar, her servant.

  “One of its many fascinating secrets,” he said, and glanced at me with a wan smile, perhaps hoping that I would not interrupt or mock him.

  Eden said, “You’re very kind. But I think I’ve done all the sight-seeing I want to.”

  She had told me that morning that she did not want to see Humayun’s Tomb, or the mosque in Old Delhi, or the lovely tower on the outskirts of the city, called the Qutub Minar. So we had taken a taxi and made a round of the antiques shops. In the course of browsing and buying she had learned some new words that she had already begun to use—company paintings, mughal, Rajasthani. She was full of questions. Three times that morning she asked shopkeepers what a particular stone object happened to be, and each of the men wagged his head and gave her the same answer: It is a lingam, madam. By lunchtime she had bought some painted wallhangings (“company period”), a carved chest (“mughal motifs”) and some brightly woven cloth (“Rajasthani”). I had been on the verge of complaining about all this tedious shopping when she bought me a brass inkstand and kissed me—much to the delight of that shopkeeper.

  Indoo said, “She is right. Why look at ruins? It is all tourists and disfigurements. Adventure tours are the big thing now. Thrilling, I tell you. Special—we go tomorrow.” He showed his teeth. “Adventure tour.”

  “Do you want to, Andy?” Eden said. “It’s up to you.”

  “I’d like to try,” I said. “What are we in for?”