Bodies in Motion

by Mary Anne Mohanraj

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father, Chaya, and sorry for your sake that you won’t be going to California. But I’m not sorry that you’re planning to stay here for a while longer.”

  Daniel looked up then, and Chaya was startled to find that she wasn’t surprised by what she saw in his face. It wasn’t love. But there was concern, and desire. She wasn’t surprised—maybe she’d known for months, since she first met him last August. Had he been watching her? Had she really not noticed? But he’d always respected her boundaries, kept a friendly professional distance.

  Chaya shook her hands loose from his. She dried them slowly on her napkin. Part of her wanted to just run out the door, disappear into the rain, dissolve. But she liked Daniel. He sent her almost-funny astronomy jokes culled from the Net; he liked to stop by her barely open door, pushing it open further to share a tidbit of department gossip. He had bright green eyes; Daniel seemed happy with his life. Somehow, those had never seemed good enough reasons before; she wasn’t sure what had changed. Had anything changed?

  Starting with the spilled liquid, Chaya wiped the table clean, meticulously. Daniel watched until she finished. Then she carefully, precisely, put her hands out again, and he took them in his. He leaned forward, and so did she. When they finally kissed, it was the very lightest brush of lips.

  CHAYA BURST OUT OF HER MOTHER’S DOOR, HER BOOTS SLOSHING through puddles—it was still raining almost every day, though the calendar now claimed it was May. Her mouth was pressed tight, her head tucked down. From the door, her mother called out to her, “Don’t be so sensitive!” before letting it slam closed. Behind that door, the conversation of her mother and aunts would continue, the endless conversation. Chaya wrapped her arms tightly around herself and continued to march down the sidewalk. She circled the block, her thoughts running in circles too.

  Every time Chaya went home, all four of her aunts came by the house. Every single one had to hug her, kiss her, pinch her waist, and say she was putting on a little weight, wasn’t she. Well, to be fair, Leilani Aunty usually didn’t participate in the poking and squeezing; she preferred to lean against the kitchen counter and watch the show—but she was a poet, unmarried and strange. The others would tug at her hair, checking if it was still strong, still thick, until Chaya felt like a horse being readied for sale. Her mother would even come pry her mouth open and check her teeth. “Brushing every morning? Every night? Flossing?”

  Chaya would endure, would bite the inside of her cheek until it bled, would wash the salt blood away with her tongue, telling herself they meant well. But this last year, her visits to Oakbrook had grown less and less frequent, though it was only half an hour away from her Greektown condo.

  It wasn’t as if she were pretty like her sister, Savitha, who would sometimes indulge her mother and be slim and fair and beautiful in pale pink saris. Chaya always refused to wear them; she wore sensible slacks and Gap button-down shirts. She had a good postdoc now, had published a few papers. She was reasonably confident that she could find a tenure-track job in the Chicago area in a year or two, if they would just leave her alone to work in peace. Some of the aunts were academics—they should have understood. But they never talked to her about her work; it was always marriage, marriage and babies.

  She could have told them about Daniel—he wouldn’t even be the first white boy in the family. One of the aunts had scandalized everyone by marrying a white boy, decades ago. But it was all so new, so fragile. Chaya couldn’t bear to put him under their lens.

  After circling the block for the third time, she finally stopped at her car. Chaya unlocked the door, climbed in, pulled her seat belt on. She was fanatic about seat belts. She put the key in the ignition and started the car. She bit her cheek again, closed her eyes, opened them, deliberately released her sore cheek, and then smoothly pulled out. It was late, and she was teaching tomorrow morning—Chaya knew she should go home. But she could never sleep when she was feeling this crazy; work was the only thing that would help her. She could work all night, teach in the morning, and then sleep. Daniel would understand.

  She drove at precisely fifty-five on the highway all the way back to her office.

  SHE’D WANTED TO BE UNDER THE STARS FOR IT, HAD WANTED EVERYTHING to be as perfect as she could make it. Chaya had gone to the doctor, gotten a prescription for the pill. Daniel had suggested condoms, and maybe it was silly of her to prefer not to, but he didn’t complain. In some ways, condoms would have been easier, would have kept a distinct separation between them. But separation wasn’t what she wanted. As they waited the weeks until the pills took effect, the weather warmed. It seemed the perfect conjunction in late May, when it was finally safe, and warm, enough.

  The hardest part had been letting him touch her. Hands were relatively easy. She had had to shake hands often. But anything more was almost impossible—she’d endured so many embraces. Poor fatherless child, they said, clicking their tongues in sympathy, reaching to pull her into their sticky, smelly arms. She’d been lost in folds of shifting silk. Her mother had clung to her, pulling her around by the arm like a rag doll, making Chaya sit on her lap when the baby was asleep. Chaya had closed herself away, placed her secret self in a deep chamber of her heart, and only when she was alone did she let it come out again. When she climbed the long flights of stairs to the roof of her apartment, lugging her homemade Dobsonian, the telescope she’d built herself, bundled in layers of thick wool, suffering the cold because if she plugged in a portable heater, any heat would rise, obscuring the view—she saw the stars, and they saw her.

  Chaya endured her family because she had to, but until Daniel, she let no one else touch her.

  She was learning to take pleasure from his touch. Chaya didn’t invite him to her apartment—that was her place, her sanctuary. Even her mother wasn’t allowed there. But she spent hours in Daniel’s bed, where he slowly persuaded her to open her body to him. He didn’t talk much in bed, and she was grateful. It meant she didn’t have to talk either, which made it all easier. She closed her eyes and let him touch her, closed her eyes while he unbuttoned and removed her shirt. Music often played on the stereo, something sweet and Scottish, and Chaya lost herself in it, smothering her worries deep enough beneath the music that she could continue onward.

  They spoke with their bodies, with leanings and touchings and gentle fingers. Daniel kissed patterns along her body, points of light that connected in strange and shivering nets. The first time she came, with his mouth between her thighs and her fingers tangled in his red hair, their bodies covered in sweat, Chaya felt herself an exploding nova, racing outward, expanding furiously, and then, slowly, coalescing again into inert matter.

  In late May they drove north, over the border to Wisconsin, and hiked through the woods until they were nowhere near anywhere or anyone. The stars were bright and unblinking, a brilliant profusion, far away from the haze of city lights. It was in an unnamed field, a cow pasture, that Daniel entered her. Chaya lay below him, looking up at the luxuriant night sky. If the grass was itchy and the air cold, she didn’t notice.

  “TALK TO ME.”

  Daniel’s voice was soft, and Chaya knew it would remain so, but she could hear the frustration underneath. Only a month had gone by, but they had already had this conversation too many times.

  “There’s nothing to say. Come to bed.” She lay beneath the white sheets, waiting for him. He paced up and down by the window, and she watched his pale muscles moving in the moonlight.

  “Something’s wrong, and you won’t talk about it!”

  Chaya didn’t know what he wanted; she didn’t know what to say. “Daniel, come to bed.” In bed, she could talk to him with arms and legs, with soft moans and hurried breaths. Couldn’t the opening of her body be the answer to his questions? “Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s changed.”

  He stopped pacing and stared at her. “That’s right. That’s exactly it. Nothing changes, Chaya. I don’t know where I am in your sky, but it’s impossibly d
istant, and I can’t move closer to you.” Daniel sank down on the edge of the bed and took her bare feet in his hands, squeezing gently. “All we do is have sex. I want you to talk to me. Tell me about your family, your childhood. Tell me your dreams—or hell, your nightmares. Anything! This silence—it’s driving me crazy. Don’t you get it?”

  Chaya shook her head and her hair swung loosely. She was growing it because Daniel liked long hair. He had never said so, but his fingers reached for her hair and tangled happily there during sex; she could tell he’d like it longer. How many times had her mother told her to grow her hair, and how many times had Chaya ignored her? And now she was growing it for Daniel—couldn’t he see how she felt? She wore earrings now, gold hoops, and sometimes even bangles on her wrists. She tried to be beautiful for him.

  She was good with math, good with small, precise calculations. If Chaya added this to that, then looked over there, in exactly the right place—she’d find the hidden star. A tiny bit off, subtraction instead of addition, a misplaced decimal, and it would be lost to her sight, lost in the expanse of constantly moving celestial bodies, and the vast spaces between them. But she rarely lost a star. She didn’t know words—bodies in motion, that was what she knew. That was all she knew. He was an astronomer too, so why wasn’t it enough for him?

  Daniel sighed. He continued to hold her feet, and after a time his fingers started to caress them, tracing the instep while Chaya tried not to jerk them away. Eventually, his hands moved up her legs, and she gratefully parted them for him. As he bent to kiss her, he said softly, “Talk to me…”

  JULY WAS BLAZING THAT YEAR. CHAYA SPENT MOST OF HER TIME IN her air-conditioned office, and when Daniel came by, she was always too busy running analyses to talk. His apartment wasn’t air-conditioned, so they weren’t having much sex. Once or twice, they used the upholstered chair in the office Daniel shared, but his officemate was often around, even at night. It wasn’t very comfortable in any case.

  By the end of the month, Daniel was stopping by less often than he had been. Chaya’s hair was still growing, but she wasn’t sure why.

  THE END, WHEN IT CAME, WAS NOT UNEXPECTED. THE HURT, BEWILDERED look in Daniel’s eyes had faded, and Chaya had no trouble reading the pure frustration that replaced it. The night he chose to break up with her, she watched him pace around his living room, building up his nerve while she turned the pages of a book she wasn’t reading. Her heart twisted, and she decided to make it easier for him. Chaya closed the book and said, “We need to talk.”

  It went quickly after that. She said that she was sorry, but this wasn’t working. He politely protested, but not for long. Daniel said he’d always care for her. She didn’t say that her chest felt as if it were being pierced by long, thin knives, that her throat felt like it was being choked of air, strangled by a Thuggee’s silk cord. Daniel gave her a long hug, and she tried not to go stiff in his arms. Chaya kissed him once, gently. He offered to drive her home, and she said she’d rather walk the twelve blocks.

  “Are you sure?”

  Chaya nodded. He walked her to the door, and she went out into the night.

  The stars were shining brightly, in a sky unnaturally clear for that time of year. It didn’t seem appropriate; it should have been a cloudy night. But at least it meant that she didn’t have to stay home in her empty apartment. Chaya picked up the Dobsonian, loaded it in her car, and drove north until she found a good cow pasture, wide and open and relatively free of cows. She watched the stars all night, counting them, naming them, the way she had as a little girl, sitting on the back porch and leaning against her father’s strong arms.

  He had introduced her to the constellations, had traced the outline of Orion’s belt, his scabbard. Her father hadn’t been a scientist, or even an intellectual. But he had loved the stars, had talked about how he’d like to take her on a rocket ship and go out there someday, just the two of them. Go out and visit the moon, or Mars—and just keep going, out and out. Leaning against her father, Chaya had always felt as if she knew exactly where she was, and where she was going.

  When Daniel had held her in his arms, she had felt just a little of that feeling again.

  SHE WENT OFF THE PILL. THERE SEEMED NO REASON TO CONTINUE with it after he left. Chaya knew she should date, should try to meet someone else—but why? The gaps were too large, the spaces unbridgeable. No matter how precise your calculations, people never moved along the expected paths—she hadn’t dated anyone before Daniel, but she had always known that was true, had felt the certainty buried deep within her, where logic couldn’t reach. She had not known how to warn Savitha before her sister married and moved away. She had never known how to say this to her mother, how to say it without reminding her of Appa.

  Her mother knew nothing of Daniel’s presence, then absence, in her life. Her mother still said to her, “Chaya, what about this one? Dr. Singh’s son—medical school at Northwestern, so close, and handsome too.”

  “Not right now, Amma. I don’t have time to take care of a husband.”

  Her mother sighed. “You’re getting so thin, Chaya; you’re not eating right. Just settle down with a nice boy—let him take care of you! No wonder none of you modern girls are getting married; you’re too self-sufficient. You think you don’t need anyone.”

  In mid-September, Daniel knocked on her door. It was bright and sunny that day—one of those brief warm days that come to Chicago in September. Yet he looked cold. Maybe that was why she let him in. Daniel hated the cold; he did all his viewing from inside insulated control centers, protected by thick layers of glass. He should never have become an astronomer.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  They stood there for a moment with the door still open, and then he stepped forward, letting it close behind him. Daniel stepped forward, and Chaya stepped into his arms. He bent his head down and took her face in his hands; he began kissing her. Fierce, hard kisses, oddly contrasted with the gentleness of his hands. He lifted his head for a moment to start to talk, “Chaya…”

  “Shh…,” she said, and went up on her toes to kiss him again. Her lips were aching for his.

  They didn’t make it to the bedroom—they slid down to the floor. Chaya didn’t know what to say to Daniel, whether to tell him to stay or go, but her fingers were unbuttoning his shirt, unbuckling his belt. His hands slid under her shirt, caressed her spine, unhooked her bra, and cupped her breasts. Their bodies knew how to speak to each other. His mouth was on her skin and her mouth was on his skin.

  Very quickly they were both naked enough on the scratchy carpet, and he was whispering her name as he slid into her. Was it then that she remembered? Was it then that Chaya said softly, “No…”—while her body strained up to meet him? There was no time to explain the why of it, almost no time at all between his first feverish, frantic entry and their mutual explosion. Just time enough for confusion to taint it all, and afterward she lay with his face against her neck, his mouth still whispering her name.

  She didn’t explain. Daniel started to say something about missing her, needing her, wanting to work things out. Chaya pulled away and dressed again. She asked him to go.

  After Daniel left, she climbed into her old rocking chair, pulling her legs up to her chest. Chaya started to rock; as she rocked, she replayed the scene in her mind, the moments when he knocked on the door, the kiss, the undressing, the entry, the protest, the conclusion. Or was it the protest, the entry, the conclusion? Or even the entry, the conclusion, with no protest at all? Chaya didn’t know. She did not know what she had said with her atrophied mouth, and the language of the body had betrayed her.

  Tomorrow she would go to a clinic, minimize the consequences. And after that—she didn’t know.

  CHAYA DIDN’T KNOW WHEN EVERYONE LEARNED ABOUT THE NEW woman. She only knew that she was the last to find out, in the bitter cold of late November.

  She learned from the silences. Colleagues would either fall silent as she
walked into a room or turn and heartily greet her: “Chaya! So, what are you working on these days?” She hadn’t even realized that they had known about her and Daniel—Chaya had thought it was private, their own secret, but clearly her colleagues had known. Oh, everyone was very kind, very tactful. If they had been less so, perhaps she would have found out sooner, and been saved some embarrassment.

  Daniel was engaged. What was worse, as Chaya discovered, was that he had started dating the woman, a young poli sci professor, in August. Chaya didn’t know whether it had happened before or after they’d broken up, and she wasn’t going to ask Daniel. But it had started before the incident at Chaya’s apartment, which raised unpleasant questions of what else Daniel hadn’t told her. The questions spun in her head, tracing new elliptical paths. Chaya had almost decided, at the end of October, that she should call Daniel. Had almost decided that she should trust him, had been persuading herself to try to forgive him for that day, for what had happened, if it had happened…

  Chaya had stared at the phone, cursing her indecision. She had almost called a dozen, a hundred times. She was lucky she had not.

  Perhaps she should tell him that.

  She wasn’t getting any work done anyway. Hadn’t accomplished anything productive in weeks. In a few days she’d be flying to Tucson for some time on the big telescope at Kitt Peak. The time had been scheduled months ago; Chaya had been so pleased when her proposal had been approved, with three whole nights of observation. Enough time to gather the evidence that might actually prove her latest theory. But now she couldn’t bring herself to care; lately, Chaya hadn’t even been going up on the roof. She just sat in her office, stared at the computer, and stewed.

  On the first day of December, Chaya cut her hair, so short that the ice wind bit at her ears. Windchill put the temperature at minus fifteen, with worse to come. She didn’t care.