The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  * * *

  In the week before James makes it to Baltimore, we have three euphoric phone conversations—conversations with no allusions to Philip Roth or drunken confessions about our fears of never getting published. He doesn’t even want to get published—he wants a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. During our first phone call he tells me that bee venom is acidic. I tell him I’ve never been stung by a bee, but as a child I was obsessed with the movie My Girl, in which Macaulay Culkin’s character is stung, has an anaphylactic reaction, and dies. In the funeral scene, his best friend, Vada Sultenfuss, floats past a roomful of grown-ups wearing black, clutches the edge of his casket, and cries, “He can’t see without his glasses! Put his glasses on!” Her grief was a sharp object I swallowed. I memorized that scene, trapped in a loop of playing and rewinding my VHS copy in my parents’ VCR.

  That week, I add a long scene to a story I’m writing about a girl who gets dumped by her boyfriend and then buys ice cream at a convenience store near Point Pleasant Park. As she sits on a bench by the ocean, she becomes so engrossed in the rare sight of a crested caracara alighting on a white birch that she lets the ice cream melt.

  We workshop my story promptly that Friday—the same day James is scheduled to come to my place and bake ziti. The professor is a woman who speaks firmly and eloquently, as though her words have an underlying rhythm. She has brown hair cropped an inch below her ears and a clear gaze that looks through you, along with whatever you’ve written. On the back of your manuscript she’ll write a one-sentence critique. Reading it, your mind oscillates and fragments and flowers into a billion ideas. Sometimes, when she speaks in class, she is so brilliant I hold myself still, to keep the enchantment from breaking.

  At the other end of the table is a lanky guy named Tom, who says, “There’s a real opportunity here in the symbolism, but I don’t buy that she’d be distracted by a bird for so long that the ice cream would actually melt.”

  “I didn’t know anything could melt in the Canadian climate,” adds Murphy, a charming, affable fellow whose last story was about keeping a woman as a slave.

  “What is a South American bird doing on the east coast of Canada?” asks Francis, the fact checker.

  “Is it meant as hyperbole, do you think?” wonders Natasha, the only other female student in the class. She wears her scarf looped in ways I try and fail to replicate.

  “The whole thing is very lyrical, as your work always is,” says Graeme, quiet and serious, nodding at me, “but the sentences are long. Aren’t we past long sentences? But beautiful stuff, undoubtedly.”

  “Can a type of sentence go out of style?” asks the undergraduate next to me, who is auditing the class and evidently hasn’t read the story. Nobody has bothered to learn his name. He’s been drawing continuously through the discussion, and he has sketched the professor in black felt-tip pen on his copy of the manuscript. It doesn’t do her justice.

  Our classes are held in a room at the top of a brick tower. It has five tall, hexagonal windows without screens. A bright orange oriole flew in once, whistling and rustling around the top of the table before the caretakers managed to shoo him out again. Now the table has eleven copies of my story on it, dog-eared and scribbled over in various colours of ink. After the discussion my classmates will hand their copies to me, and I’ll go to one of those desks in the stacks of the library and read them one by one. I’ll highlight each criticism and hold each morsel of praise in my mouth like an everlasting gobstopper.

  “Why does this one character have an Indian name?” Francis asks. “Like the characters aren’t doing anything Indian…Could the story be set in India instead? Or in the dinner scene could they be eating chicken tikka masala?”

  “I don’t want to be prescriptive,” says Tom, his long legs endlessly jiggling under the table, “but you gotta change the names of the twin brothers. One of their names, at least. Who gives twins rhyming names? Why would you do that?”

  I can think of two pairs of twins with rhyming names: 1) on the TV show The Bachelor, where Bachelor Brad Womack brought on his twin brother Chad to see if the women could tell the difference (they could); and 2) in a comic strip called Ram and Shyam, the Indian equivalent of Goofus and Gallant. But I don’t say this. You aren’t allowed to speak while your own story is workshopped, though you have a chance to respond at the end of the discussion. The undergraduate had used this time as an opportunity to explain why everyone’s suggestions for his story were incorrect; throughout the workshop you could see he was not fully listening but storing up his responses like acorns in his cheeks.

  Out one of the hexagonal windows I can see the grass of the quad and, farther beyond, an apartment building where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived while Zelda convalesced in a nearby sanatorium. Our Character Development professor told us this, gesturing to the building with his copy of This Side of Paradise, as I imagined Zelda writhing in a straitjacket worn over a flapper dress.

  “The guy’s motivations for breaking up with her don’t make much sense,” says Natasha. “He ends it because she refuses to ask for directions? Is this a gender thing?”

  She’s referring to a flashback scene in the story, where the couple travels to France and the girl wants to visit the best macaron shop in Paris, so they wander the 6th arrondissement but can’t find it. The guy tells the girl that this is the ideal opportunity to practise her French by asking a passerby for directions, but she refuses and won’t tell him why.

  “Why won’t she?” asks Murphy, and they all turn to me, even the professor.

  I had the answer figured out when I was writing the story—because the story is partly autobiographical. It has to do with fear, but also with having made fear into a habit for so long that it is now instinctual. I’m trying to think of how to articulate this, but I feel as though I have a cold metal ball rolling in my throat. The professor looks me in the eye for a second before turning back to the page and writing something down.

  The truth is I’ve never been to Paris. I’ve never even eaten a macaron. I wanted to write about the kinds of relationships that last as briefly as a song. Like the ones I had with my university friends who, after graduation, went off to other parts of Canada and the world, as though they’d never considered staying. We spent four years together, joking in our pajamas and dreaming—and then that time was over. We started an email chain to keep in touch, but it dwindled to nothing halfway through the summer.

  After class I walk straight to one of the lower levels of the library (its floors go deep underground, so it is exceptionally quiet). I tuck myself into a study cubicle and read the scribbled comments on each copy of my story, sucking in my breath, saving the professor’s for last. When I get to hers, I go through every page, noting each word she has circled and every question mark in the margins. Then I flip to the back to read her final remarks.

  You can do better, she’s written. And under that: The best macaron shop in Paris is in the 12th arrondissement.

  * * *

  James arrives at my door with a backpack full of vegetables and dry noodles. He has a baseball cap on, and it seems like he’s changed his beard, trimming it significantly. There’s more neck showing, pale and newly shaved. He and the backpack overwhelm my kitchen, which has enough room for a table the size of a bicycle wheel. Onto the table go the ingredients: a lump of mozzarella, a crisp white onion, a can of crushed tomatoes, a container of ricotta, and an assortment of mushrooms in a paper bag. I get out two cutting boards and two knives, and we begin chopping—James on the table and me on the wedge of free counter space.

  Prior to his arrival, I swept up the Borax and turned on every lamp to scare the cockroaches into submission. We haven’t really spoken yet, except for hellos and a twenty-second tour of my studio apartment: A twin bed that doubles as seating since there’s no couch. A desk I found by a dumpster. A shelf that holds only the books I need for my courses—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. (“
You must read a lot!” James exclaimed.) He complimented my embroidered Mexican pillows, his positivity so incongruous with the sad nature of my apartment that I wondered if he meant it sincerely, before deciding that he probably did.

  Conversation is difficult without the Muppets. When we talked on the phone at night I said silly, flirtatious things—a mistake that was easy to make when the room was dark and the only light was coming from the year-round holiday bulbs dotting the eaves of the house across the street. I could keep my eyes closed, the cool plastic of my phone balanced between my cheek and the pillow. I didn’t have to make eye contact.

  He chops the mushrooms clumsily. This kind of claustrophobia flows over me—a reaction to his being in my apartment. I want him to go home. I wish that we were finished eating, that he was catching his train and heading back to D.C., so I could comfortably end things by phone tomorrow. This is probably irrational. I try to recall if there’s anything about this in my Myers-Briggs profile. I chop the onion with robotic precision. He reaches past me to get the can opener and pauses to rub my back. It feels like the hand of a total stranger.

  We eat the pasta on my bed while watching The Wire on my laptop.

  “They filmed a scene in my grocery store,” I tell James.

  “I was on the same plane as McNulty once.” He leans in and rasps against me with his beard. The ziti is mush in my mouth. The mozzarella has cooled into a skin. I set it on the floor by the bed. James moves closer, wraps his arm around me, and gives me this smooch sort of kiss—all gums and teeth.

  “It’s bright in here,” he says. Then he stands up and turns off all my lamps. It’s just us and the neighbour’s Christmas lights, and it should feel romantic. Instead, I think of cockroaches rushing through drainpipes and silverfish slipping into electric sockets. I think of the train that will take James back to Washington. Earlier I consulted the schedule in anticipation of his arrival and noticed that the last train left at 11:15. When I take the plates back to the kitchen, I check the oven clock and it’s already 10:30. It’ll take at least twenty minutes to get to Penn Station. That means he has to leave by 10:50 to be safe.

  When the episode ends, he puts on the next one and then settles back into place beside me. We have time for half of it, probably.

  On The Wire, McNulty says, “Fuck this case.”

  Daniels tells him, “This case is going to move forward with you or without you.”

  I keep thinking of the time and trying to guess how much has passed. James cracks a topical joke, and although I missed the beginning, I just laugh anyway. He kisses me again, the brim of his hat joining our foreheads, his hand low on my back. I turn away, pretending to be invested in what is happening on the show, though I’ve zoned out of several scenes and have lost the thread of the story. I try to remember if James mentioned having a friend in Baltimore that he’s planning to stay with. If he doesn’t, I can’t ask him to stay at a hotel or take a several-hundred-dollar cab ride back, can I? And I certainly can’t afford to offer to pay for it. Did he check the schedule? Did he assume he was staying here?

  I know I should just ask, so I consider how I might phrase the question. “Do you know what time your train’s leaving?” Or, more simply: “What time’s your train leaving?” But wouldn’t that sound as though I’m trying to get rid of him? It isn’t really that late for a date to end.

  When I check the time again, it’s 11:00. James will miss his train. When the show ends, he stretches his long arms behind him, yawning. “One more?” he asks. “Or is that enough TV for one night?”

  “That might be it for me,” I say. “I’m getting sleepy.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “It’s still early, but I guess we could go to bed. I’ve got a morning train ride tomorrow.”

  I go to the washroom and change into my PJs, which I button austerely to the neck. When I come out, James has undressed to only his boxers. We get into my bed, and I notice how small it is for a long man whose knobbed feet angle out from under the blankets. The bed’s size forces us close, two spoons pressed coldly together. His beard is against the back of my neck, lips kissing gently. His hand roves over my hip. I make myself stay still. I impersonate taxidermy. James must know I’m not asleep. When his fingers pass my stomach, it’s rigid.

  Be reasonable, I tell myself. In the morning he’ll catch his train and I’ll never see him again. I can wait it out, just as I waited out my panic at the edge of Point Pleasant Park last summer, sitting on a bench facing the Atlantic, gripping the weathered seat planks on either side of me, trying to get ahead of my erratic breath. I focused on the caracara poised plumply on a branch, raising the finger-like edges of its wings.

  From here it could fly to Portugal and never see a soul.

  Hindu Christmas

  I’M SITTING IN THE middle of a crowd of people on a huge red-and-gold medallion rug from Canadian Tire and watching a dancer performing solo. She’s acting out the Sanskrit lyrics of the song that crackles over the speaker system. Around the temple, statues of goddesses mimic her expressions. Her eyes are kohl-rimmed, giving the whites of her eyes an otherworldly gleam, and when the music turns sorrowful, they widen and brim with tears. Even her chin emotes.

  “So expressive,” murmurs one of the aunties sitting behind me.

  The dancer, whose name is Savithri, is staying at my parents’ house. She’s visiting from India for a few months to complete a medical technician course, and she also happens to be a professionally trained dancer. My mom says she’s related to us, though I doubt anyone could pinpoint how.

  Savithri is wearing metal costume jewellery so heavy I can feel its weight on my own neck. Garlands of white flowers hang down her back, attached to a pitch-black braid that flings outwards from her waist as she spins. The performance alternates between quick, elegant leaps and slow poses that require athletic balance. Her movements are angular and fluid, as precise as math. Clusters of bells are strapped to her ankles, producing a tight, rhythmic jingle with each thump of her feet against the concrete floor, which has been painted maroon. The soles of her feet are caked with grey dirt—the temple caretakers seem to paint the floor instead of cleaning it. I imagine the layers of paint accumulating millimetre by millimetre, for centuries, until the floor meets the ceiling and there is no space for us.

  An aunty comes to sit beside me. “Nina, how long has it been since I saw you? Do you even remember me?”

  “How could you even ask that question, Aunty?” I say, in the cheerful voice I use to communicate with aunties. I have no idea who she is.

  “So, how are you liking Boston? Studying journalism, right?”

  “Oh, it’s, ah, Baltimore.” Aunties in Halifax view U.S. cities as interchangeable. Also, nobody can figure out why I would have gone to Baltimore. “It’s okay, I guess…” I don’t tell her I was there to study creative writing, because that would only baffle her, and because correcting her twice seems rude.

  “So good to have you here. Heading back after the holidays, I suppose.” She squeezes me with one arm, and I’m enveloped in strong synthetic perfume. I let her make her assumptions, while I lean into her warmth.

  We clap as the dance ends. Savithri stands with palms pressed together for a second, out of breath, then runs behind the curtain bordering the makeshift stage.

  My dad approaches the microphone, followed by my mom. They’re part of the temple’s organizing committee. They help manage the place, putting up signs that say things like All Must Wear Modest Clothing Inside Temple, and making sure the priests aren’t siphoning money out of the donation boxes. “Thank you, my friends,” says my dad, craning his neck because the mic is set for someone taller. “We are so honoured to see this incredible performance by one of our talented youngsters.” Savithri is the same age as me—twenty-two years old. My dad categorizes people as either youngsters or oldies. I’m not sure when you cross the threshold.

  “We hav
e only known Savithri a short time, but she is truly a daughter to us.” My dad’s voice trembles, as my mom nods in solemn agreement beside him.

  Savithri appears again from behind the curtain. She runs over to my parents holding a bouquet so humongous I wonder where she’s been hiding it. They embrace, and everyone applauds.

  “They forgot about you, eh?” asks the aunty, poking me with an elbow.

  I shrug.

  This is not the first time my parents have adopted a surrogate daughter—a visiting niece or an international student for whom my mom will cook extra rice and also buy a personal-sized rice cooker and deliver both to her dorm room, befriending the girl’s three roommates and inviting them all to come to our house to eat more rice. Once it was a French exchange student we were hosting through a program at my high school. I remember my mom ironing her jeans, then holding them up to exclaim over how small her waist was. “Comma sava?” my mom would say to her, the only French she knows.

  The exchange student was with us for two weeks. I filled out a form and then she was there, fresh off an airplane, smelling like cigarettes and the Mediterranean, though she had said on her form that she didn’t smoke. When we went to McDonald’s, I asked her if the French really call it “Le Big Mac.” I later overheard her telling her exchange student friend that I didn’t speak French very well. A boy in my chem class fell in love with her and stood outside our house serenading her with Savage Garden. One night for dinner, my mom made chapatis, which the girl had never seen before, and, not knowing it was customary to use your hand, she began to eat with a fork and knife. My dad watched the girl, caught my eye, and made a subtle gesture with his head towards my cutlery. Then he picked up his knife and fork, too.