The Prayer Room

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by Shanthi Sekaran


  “I was speaking to Viji,” Kamla cooed.

  “No,” Viji said. Which sounded rude. She looked at Kamla and smiled.“No, thank you. Can I make you some?”

  George walked in barefoot, glasses crooked, his hands folded sleepily across his chest. He had been working. He fell into a daze when he spent too long in his study, and it often took him at least an hour to return to normal conversation. This, Viji reasoned, was why he forgot to greet Kamla. He made his way to the freezer, took out a pudding pop she’d bought for the children, and shuffled back into the hall.

  “George,” Viji called, “sprinklers.”

  Outside, George watched a spray of water shunt across his lawn. Slowly at first, then a rapid tattoo. Shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop, ratatatatatata. He’d fallen asleep in his study, and now his brain was sludge. His mouth was thick with afternoon sleep and he felt slightly sick. The episode in the kitchen struck him as unusual, but he didn’t know why.

  “Goodbye, George.” Kamla, in blue shorts. She turned to wave as she walked away.

  “Bye.” He waved. The afternoon light cast her in its buttery glow, and she smiled at him. She walked past the sprinklers. A hop to the left to avoid a spray of water. Down the street, out of sight.

  George had a secret: he liked art, all of it. Hotel-room abstracts, landscapes of Provence, Norman Rockwell soda shops. Anathema to an academic. At weeping clowns he drew the line, but even poker-playing dogs amused him. More specifically, they reminded him of Edward Hopper.

  This may have been why he’d never risen through the ranks of Sac State’s art history department. Victoria was at Cambridge now, on her way to professorship. While George mooned over Renoirs, she worked her way through conferences and art journals. It was a rare month that he did not see her name in print in some journal or other. The truth was, George hated the idea of dissecting art, separating intention from execution, influence from inspiration, laying it out on the operating table for theorists to autopsy, like doctors pondering so many sinew-dripping limbs. He knew what it was to make art, how physical it was. Like birth, it was a process of tearing, destruction in the interest of creation. Like birth, it was a tiny shred of death. Sacrilege, then, to bend a painting to something Lacan had once said. Further sacrilege to write an article about it.

  More than anything, George hated the language of academia, its pointless “ologies” and “ifications.” The only function of such words was to increase the page count of the millions of feckless PhD theses that burdened library stacks across the country. There was certainly no place for such language in the world of art. Like a mother, he loved it simply because it had been created. It was beauty solidified, priceless in at least one person’s eyes, however worthless in someone else’s.

  In every work of art there lurked a woman. All of it, no matter what an artist insisted, was made for a woman, about a woman, because of a woman. Sometimes, it worked the other way around. In his mother he’d seen Klimt. In Viji, he’d seen the yakshi, the ancient fertility sculpture. But in Amaré, his assistant, he saw nothing. Proof that he could find a woman in every piece of art, but couldn’t find art in every woman.

  Amaré crouched by his desk. “Sign this,” she ordered. Here were globes of soft skin, rolling from a V-neck sweater. Brown. Placed there for his benefit. Above them, a face of smooth planes. Not at all unattractive. For a moment, he was taken. But then she stood and it was gone. He grimaced. There was little George could do to distract himself from her behind, the way her ass sprawled ungraciously in a pair of pink corduroy trousers. If he were more fashionsavvy, he might have been able to formulate some general rule about the incompatibility of womanly curves and lumberjack fabrics. But he was not fashion-savvy, as evidenced by his own sloppy chinos and untucked shirt. The hip retro appeal of his glasses was a fluke, more a product of a persistent shopgirl than of George’s fashion sense.

  No, Amaré wasn’t for George. She was, however, just the woman for Stan. Something to take his mind off the Bauers’ maid. A way, perhaps, to make Viji happy again. It was an unwritten (and probably untested) rule in Maple Grove that neighbors did not covet each other’s housecleaners.

  “Just a moment, Amaré.” His assistant stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. He looked down at his papers. “Oh, just—nothing.” This wouldn’t do.

  “What?” She turned around, facing him now, her hand on her hip.

  “Forget it.”

  She leaned forward. “What?”

  She frightened him sometimes. Now, specifically. It wasn’t just her exceedingly long nails, or the pugnacious set of her jaw. Or the fact that her hairstyle could change from day to day. Out with it, George.

  “Well it’s just that—I know that I don’t know you particularly well…” He lost what he was saying. She frowned. “Ah—I don’t know you very well, but I thought it might be worth sort of exploring certain social options.”

  She looked mildly interested. “Social options?”

  “As in the possibility of perhaps expanding the scope of your duties, heh heh. No. What I mean to say is—”

  “Dr. Armitage?”

  “Yes?” He was sweating now, but smiling bravely.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She paused in the doorway. “You are married, aren’t you?”

  “Married? Ha! Yes, of course I’m married. I can see where you thought this might be going.” He rubbed his palms together. Wrong. Very awkward. “What I meant to say initially, Amaré, is that I know somebody who might, if he should be so lucky, spark your interest.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Ah, of course, I wouldn’t presume to know anything or assume anything of your…status, in that respect, but it was just a passing thought, really, that perhaps might have interested you, were you interested in this particular gentleman—”

  “Let me get this straight. Are you asking me out?”

  “No.”

  “Then who is?”

  “I am. On behalf of somebody else.”

  “Who?” Nothing but questions.

  “Stan.”

  “Stan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he black?”

  ‘“White.”

  “Does he have a job?”

  “Retired. Taxi driver.”

  “Age?”

  “Sixty-seven.”

  “Hair?”

  “Yes! Plenty.”

  “Married?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Single?”

  “Sort of, yes.”

  “Let me get this straight. You want to set me up on a blind date? With a man who’s sort of single, twice my age, drives a taxi, and isn’t black?”

  “Well, yes.” He could sense that the idea wasn’t catching on.

  “Dr. Armitage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t do that again.”

  She slammed the office door, and the click of her shoes faded down the hall. There, done. He had tried and failed. Viji would have to handle this on her own. George smiled weakly at the closed door, opened his desk drawer, and gathered up a cluster of pencils. Outside, the campus clock chimed four times. Already the sky was dimming, though the day stayed warm. These were classic pencils, yellow with pink erasers and green metallic rims, the number 2 stamped neatly on their hilts. They smelled of fresh wood. He arranged them on his desk by ascending length. There were twelve remaining. They’d come in a box of one hundred, a happy family of them, provided free by the department. Some of the leads were dull. He considered asking Amaré to sharpen them, then thought better of it. He rearranged the pencils by descending lead length, and placed them, one by one, back in their drawer.

  As a teenager, he’d taken a school trip to a pencil factory outside Nottingham. The whole building had smelled of fragrant wood with soft undertones of rubber. He remembered the machine that hadchurned out the fresh pencils, naked of yellow paint or numbers or labels, still missing their pink eras
ers. They had rolled onto a conveyor belt, a sea of smooth wood, and George had felt an overpowering need to put them in his mouth and chew on them, to feel the sweet crunch between his molars. Around him stood his classmates, bored, whispering and slouching, chewing on their sleeves. All George could think of was the feel of the pencils. If he had a roomful, he would bathe in pencil wood, feel it cool and solid against his bare skin, pressing into him like a thousand small rolling pins, filling the crevices between his legs.

  And then, before he could stop it (as if he could stop it), a string of saliva gathered force on his lower lip, dove from his mouth, and plummeted to the factory floor. Plip. It even made its own sound. And of course, because this was how things worked, tall and beautiful Felicia Watson was the first to see. It was too late to wipe his mouth, though he sensed the dewey droplets still perched on his chin. He wanted to vanish. He wished he were a wood slab, to be fed into a splicer, to be sliced into a million slim rods, never to be seen again. But it wouldn’t have made a difference—within seconds, the whole class was staring. Felicia Watson’s mouth hung open, her eyes squinting with disgust. Even the factory tour guide cast a swift glance, grimaced, and looked away. From that day, the names rained down, from the obvious (Pencil Perv, Spit Twit) to the more obscure (Lead Licker, Factory Wanker, Rubber Johnny).

  But here, in the privacy of his office, George could do as he pleased. At times like these, he relished being an adult, getting to close his door and waste time, knowing that instant gratification was easy. From the drawer he picked a single pencil, ran it under his nostrils like a cigar, placed it sideways between his lips, and chewed. The office slipped away. So did his father, the maid, Viji, the triplets, the female student who’d been haunting his office hours. Eyes closed, he gnawed away and fingered the eraser. He lost himself in the pleasure of it and gave up the earth. His was a world of wood and graphite. The wood gave way beneath his canines and crunched between his molars. He was the pencil king.

  When the bell in the tower chimed again, George sat up. The pencil was covered in bite marks. He ran his finger over the toothy Braille, sighed, and chucked it in the waste basket. The afternoon was over. He’d have to ask Amaré to order more pencils. For a lingering moment, he stroked the few that remained. Then he closed the drawer, stood, put on his coat, and left.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  July 1975. So much depended on a fast phone call from an airport terminal amid the jostling of baggage and elbows. Victoria? I’ve made a terrible mistake. This would win him immediate sympathy, but it wasn’t entirely honest. He dialed. Victoria? You won’t believe this. Flippant. Too flippant. Perhaps, he almost hoped, another man would answer. Ah…could I speak with Victoria, please? The phone rang twice.

  “Hello?”

  “Victoria?”

  Victoria took herself quite seriously, as most young

  ladies in academia had to at the time. Even her classmates called her Miss Banks. To all others, she was Victoria. Never Vicki or Vic or Banksy. George liked to call her Sponge on occasion, and when the mood took her, she let him.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  “Hello.”

  “George.”

  “Victoria? I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  Silence.

  “Where are you, George?”

  “Heathrow.”

  “Heathrow? You could have told me you’d be back. I could have given you a lift—”

  “Victoria—”

  “But I suppose you’ve sorted it, anyway. When are you thinking of getting back to Nottingham?”

  “Victoria?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  He felt the silence this time. It rushed through the phone line and cracked the receiver, stormed through the terminal, and hushed the world around him.

  “George.”

  He swallowed audibly.

  “What have you done?”

  “I’ve married someone.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got married. In India.”

  A long, terrible pause.

  “To whom did you get married, George?” Her voice was dry-ice vapor. He preferred the silence.

  “A woman I met there. She’s called Viji—”

  A click and a dial tone. He continued to speak, pouring the story into the cold receiver—for those few minutes, his most intimate friend.

  George, it could be said, had difficulties with women. Based on a single glance, they expected great things of him. From what he understood, this didn’t happen to other men. He could only speculate that these expectations stemmed from something physical—his aquiline nose, or the fact that he showed no sign of balding. Victoria would have blamed them on something Freudian. A wife was supposed to signal an end to the difficulties, a final settlement of the whole romantic mess. But Viji only made things messier.

  George’s mother was elated to learn that her son had found a wife, not to mention a beautiful, spiritually advanced, Indian one. And so were her friends. He hated them for it. What did they know of Viji? She could have been a cannibal. She wasn’t, of course. (The truth was, she grew lovelier every day that she spent in this strange cold country, her skin glowing brown against the gray Nottingham sky, the shape of her softening every hard brick building she walked past. The city seemed to sigh when Viji walked through it. But George knew this could have been his savior complex playing nasty games with his id.)

  His mother threw a party and they came, the friendsof-Marla that George had suffered his entire childhood. Sculptors, painters, writers. All of them certifiably imbalanced, the kind who saved their placentas and danced around fires at pagan harvest festivals. As expected, the friends-of-Stan were less prevalent. His father didn’t have much need for friends or for lengthy explanations, and so his end of the guest list had been brief. The regulars from his pub were not in attendance. Barney from the taxi firm did show up; he took one swift look at Viji, another at the coterie of goateed and silk-swathed artists in the garden, and vanished to the shed with Stan and a bottle of whiskey.

  Victoria stopped by, briefly. She found George in the kitchen.

  “You didn’t need to come, Victoria.”

  She gazed coolly at him. “Your mother invited me.”

  He looked out the window at the garden party. It was summer, still light at ten o’clock. “I’m sorry about all this,” he said.

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m…really very sorry about all this.”

  “Shut up, George.”

  “Well, what am I meant to say?”

  She picked at the chipping paint of the windowsill. “Why did you do it?”

  For this, the question he’d dreaded, he had no actual answer. If he’d been a playwright, like the mustachioed man now plying Viji with glasses of rum punch in the garden, he would have organized the facts thus:

  Setup: Our hero is George, a university student. A few weeks of aimlessly ogling a young Indian woman finally give way to seduction. The seduction leads to further seduction. Viji visits his small student room two days after the first time, and then the day after, and the day after. This continues peacefully for a period of two weeks.

  Turning point: Viji forgets, one night, to get dressed and scamper back home by nine.

  Rising conflict: Early morning, barely light, and a banging on the door. They are discovered by Viji’s uncle. Viji is taken away and George is threatened violently. He neither sees nor hears of Viji for four days.

  Crisis: After class on the fourth day, he is met at the entrance to his dormitory and taken to a house in the Eggmore district of Madras. An older woman receives him. This is Viji’s mother. She asks him to do the honorable thing. There is a large man standing behind her, and a larger man, who seems to be an idiot of some description, sitting on the divan next to her.

  Resolution: The lovers reunite. Our hero marries for honor, if nothing else, and spirits his bride to his kingdom in the West.
>
  But this was no answer for a woman like Victoria. It answered the wheres and whens, but not the hows. A poet would have spoken of the early dawn that broke that fateful morning, the way light had spread over his lover’s breasts. The lizard on the wall above the bookshelf that had watched them every night before scooting into an invisible breach in the ceiling. The unwrapping of the sari, yards and yards and yards of it, a silk ribbon tied too many times around a gift. The bedsheet the next morning, rumpled and dull with sleep, held tightly around Viji’s chest, clinging to her buttocks when she stumbled into the corridor. A novelist, like the one now rubbing his mother’s shoulders, would have mentioned that she’d never complained about his grubby student room, or commented on the water stains in every corner. He would have remembered that George had answered the door in a towel and then followed the angry uncle into the corridor, holding Viji’s sari out to her. An artist, like his mother, would have seen the bouquets of brown faces clumped around the stairwell and poking out of doors, staring, talking, craning for a glimpse of the half-naked woman.

  If he were a poet, if he were a painter. But he was neither. And here stood Victoria, waiting for an answer that lay somewhere at the invisible juncture of his body and his heart, andthat bore no connection to his feeble, dogpaddling mind.

  “It just happened.”

  “It just happened?”

  “I told you not to wait for me. We weren’t together, were we?”

  Disdainful eyes.“No, George. We weren’t. Apparently.”

  George felt like a bigger fool than ever. “It’s getting dark out, finally. I missed the English summer.” Silence. The party outside was growing looser, fuzzy around the edges.“Victoria, maybe we could talk about this some other time.”

  Victoria leaned in close. “There’s not much to speak of, George, is there?”

  She vanished around the door, and her footsteps faded down the hall. A week later, a package arrived for George and Viji. The card read, To George and Viji. All best wishes for a very happy marriage. Victoria and Beckett the Cat.

  “What is it?” Viji asked, on tiptoe to see what George was staring at.

 

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