by Leah Franqui
“What is this?”
“Oh, it’s a bourbon, actually. I guess down here when you ask for whiskey this is what you get.”
“What else would you want?” This had come from the stranger on Rebecca’s other side, his voice twangy and deep.
“I can think of a few things,” Rebecca murmured, finishing her drink and gesturing for another.
“I’ve got this one.”
“I’m here with a friend.” Satya enjoyed being called her friend, even if it wasn’t true.
“I’ll get his, too. What’ll you have, quiet guy?”
Satya shrugged. “This is nice,” he said, taking another sip. The man gestured for more drinks.
“That’s some accent. Where you from? Australia?” Rebecca was already rolling her eyes. Satya had to stifle his own laughter.
“I am from Bangladesh.” The man seemed confused by this response. “It is a country, near India,” Satya added helpfully. He had grown used to people not knowing about Bangladesh.
“Oh, you’re Indian. That’s cool. You like Indians?” This last part was to Rebecca.
“I like a lot of people.” She looked at the stranger for a long moment, giving him half a smile, and then turned back to Satya.
“You two from out of town?” The smile on Rebecca’s face broadened, but only Satya could see it. She quickly turned it to a stern expression as she glanced back over her shoulder. This was a game.
“I’m sorry, we’re just trying to have a drink here.”
“Hell, so am I! But what’s a drink without a little friendly conversation?” The man slid his hand around Rebecca’s waist. Satya’s eyes widened. He was torn between interest and concern. He had grown up in a world where people did not touch each other in public, and watching someone he knew be touched in this way by a stranger both fascinated him and upset him, even though he had just been imagining doing the same thing to the same part of Rebecca. He could not tell if Rebecca was enjoying it or not, but he knew he should not let this man be groping her waist so casually.
“Don’t you agree, baby?”
“I’m not your baby.”
“But you could be. Couldn’t you?” While Satya had been deciding how to react, the conversation had continued, and now Rebecca was tucked up under the stranger’s arm, his hand heavy on her waist. She did not seem distressed, but neither did she seem interested. It was almost as if she were watching this happen from very far away.
“I like bourbon,” Satya said. He didn’t know what else there was to say. Apparently, it had been the right thing, because the stranger released Rebecca to clap him, Satya, on the back in drunken agreement.
“I like you, India! I like both of you. Y’all want another round?”
The bourbon appeared before them like magic all evening. Satya stopped counting what drink he was on, or how many Rebecca had had; she seemed to double him constantly, downing two to his one. Still, her eyes were clear, brighter than before, even. Satya had stopped responding to the stranger, whose name, they had learned, was Ted, about three drinks ago, because not only could he not understand anything that was coming out of Ted’s mouth, he could barely understand the words coming out of his own. He had never been this drunk before. The first time he had been drunk had been on two beers shared with Ravi and they had thrown rocks at stray dogs and laughed and laughed and laughed at their yelps. His tolerance for alcohol hadn’t really improved from there. Now he sat slumped over his barstool, watching Ted paw at Rebecca like one of those dogs finding a piece of meat. He saw them kiss, out of the corner of his eye, and then he watched as Rebecca pulled back, her mouth wet, her eyes hard.
“We have to go.”
“Hey, baby, wha, wha, wha y’sayin?” Ted seemed to be swaying, but Satya didn’t know if that was Ted or himself.
“We have to go. Sorry. Early morning. Great night. Thanks!” Rebecca slid some money down the bar for the bartender and tried to hop off her seat, but Ted’s arms were there, holding her in place. Rebecca looked at Ted’s hand as if it was something disgusting. Her mood seemed to have shifted immediately. When she spoke, it was in a low tone of warning.
“Please get off of me.”
“No, hey, baby, no, I been, I been buying you drinks all night, stay here, okay?”
“No. Not okay.” Rebecca was now struggling to extricate herself from Ted’s grasp while Satya looked on, his mouth open wide. He knew he should be doing something, protecting her in some way, but all he could do was watch. She stamped on Ted’s foot and he released her, swearing loudly.
“You fucking bitch! Dumb slut! What the fuck is this, you whore?” As soon as the words hit Satya’s ears they exploded, and his body moved almost without his mind’s knowing about it. His fist connected with Ted’s face before he knew what was happening, though the blistering pain of his hand meeting the idiot’s firm jawbone jolted Satya into a more sober state. Ted reeled back, and Rebecca grabbed Satya’s hand, the one that had just hit Ted, giving him another nasty shock. She dragged him out of the bar much as she had dragged him into it, thanking the bartender loudly and laughing.
Outside, Rebecca gasped for air and let go of Satya’s hand, the hand he had just used to hit someone, the hand now pulsing with pain. She looked at him, grinning, and suddenly he couldn’t feel his hand at all. From behind them in the bar he heard a roar, shouts, protests. He looked at Rebecca. Together, without a word, they began to run.
They ran almost until they reached the hotel, and stood against a wall, panting and trying to catch their respective breaths. Rebecca turned to Satya, and before he knew what was happening her lips were on his, kissing him gently. She pulled back, her eyes soft.
“Thank you, Satya.”
She was smiling at him. She wanted him. She was happy he had saved her from that man, happy he had saved her for himself. He lunged for her, kissing her so hard her teeth clicked against his. She pushed him away, shaking her head.
“No. Do you understand? No.”
He nodded, but he didn’t understand. Hadn’t she kissed him? Didn’t she want him? It made his stomach lurch and once again, after a night out with her in a strange city, he threw up. This time she stayed with him, and helped him into the hotel, clucking at him gently and making sure he made it to bed. He lay awake, trying to touch himself, only to find his hand was in too much pain to do so. He closed his eyes and slept a drunken sleep, dreaming about her lips and her waist and her breasts until her image blended with those of all the other women in his life, with his mother and her pictures and her big sad eyes, and his grandmother, and he was held by them all, held close and cradled and loved. He dreamed she hadn’t pushed him away, just held him closer and let him in.
The first question Rebecca asked herself as she woke up the next morning in a wash of sunlight from her open windows, hungover and thirsty, was what had she been thinking, kissing Satya. She knew the why, the why was all the bourbon, but it didn’t excuse the fact that it had happened. She stumbled out of bed, brushed her teeth, and gagged at her image in the mirror. The taste of alcohol was still in her mouth as she downed water and Advil and checked the time, seven thirty a.m. She cursed softly. She didn’t have to be up much before nine a.m., but she never slept well after heavy drinking. She lay back on the bed anyway, willing her head to stop spinning.
It had been a stupid, senseless night. She had been feeling confined and reckless after seeing her parents. She had a tried-and-true way to cure this: it was drinking and meeting a man and letting him pound away at her while she went somewhere calm and comfortable in her mind, so she could emerge, rested and refreshed, and go back to being herself again.
But bringing Satya with her ruined that. She couldn’t leave him in the bar alone, and she refused to have sex in a public bathroom for reasons of hygiene, good taste, and physical comfort. So she had resigned herself to blowing off some steam with bourbon alone, and she had been charmed by Satya’s reaction to the drink and by the strange turn her life had taken, drinkin
g with a Bangladeshi tour guide in the French Quarter. But when that guy had shown up, Ted, it had condemned the evening to chaos. She shouldn’t have talked to him, shouldn’t have flirted. She had known from the way he talked to her that he wouldn’t get the game; instead he would get drunk and ugly and make a mess.
He had been a senseless pig, as she had known he would be. She had been fully equipped to handle men like him until her white knight of a tour guide had swung his fist. Thankfully she had dragged them out of the bar before there was a fight, comforting herself with the knowledge that things like this happened in New Orleans all the time.
All of that in and of itself would have been fine. But why did she have to compound the evening of drunken stupidity and kiss Satya? She had forgotten that it might mean something more to him than it did to her. He was so young. He was from a conservative country. He probably thought she was a Western whore.
Her hands were shaking again. Must be a new nerves thing. She clutched them into the bedsheets lying smoothly under her, burying them in cheap cloth so that they wouldn’t be seen. If she didn’t see it, it wasn’t happening.
She looked at the clock again. It was eight a.m. That was a respectable time to arrive at breakfast. Mrs. Sengupta would, Rebecca knew, already be there. She wondered if the woman was sleeping at all. Each day she seemed more fragile, the dark circles under her eyes the color of new bruises. She wondered again why Mrs. Sengupta was really taking this trip. She wished that they hadn’t had dinner with her parents, that her parents lived in Alaska or Italy or New Guinea, anywhere but a stop on this tour. Now there was too much of herself on display, so much for Mrs. Sengupta and Satya to see.
Rebecca rubbed her eyes and went down to breakfast. She spotted the widow immediately upon entering the breakfast room. All the hotels so far had provided breakfast for their guests, but Mrs. Sengupta was surveying that day’s offerings, plainly unimpressed.
“Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”
“This country is allergic to good tea,” Mrs. Sengupta murmured, provoking a laugh from Rebecca.
“Hang on.” A quick Google search revealed a café around the corner whose tea was, to quote a review, “Tea Die For.” Rebecca assumed these awful bits of wordplay were par for the course for rampant tea drinkers, and besides, anything had to be better than this. She coaxed Mrs. Sengupta out the door, leaving word for Satya at the front desk, and had her sitting with a cup of delicately scented oolong within minutes. She herself enjoyed a decent cup of coffee and a croissant, willfully ignoring what the pastry would do to her thighs.
Looking down at her phone, Rebecca realized that she hadn’t actually checked it for two days, other than to see the time or the battery life. At home in New York she was glued to her phone, constantly checking for updates, catching up on social media, reading audition notices and casting breakdowns, examining entertainment news and emails from her agent. You had to, she knew; if you didn’t check your phone you could miss jobs by minutes. It had happened more than once. But she hadn’t been doing it, and life had gone on.
Outside, New Orleans was just waking up, the sun illuminating its gorgeous streets. Rebecca saw a drunk stumble out of a bar and wondered what had happened to Ted. He probably had kept on drinking until he passed out. He seemed the type. What was wrong with her? Everything about him had disgusted her but it was only because Satya had been there that she hadn’t slept with him. She was sick of sleeping with people she didn’t like.
“What do you think?” Rebecca said, referring to the tea in Pival’s hands.
“It is a nice city, as I have said.”
“No, the tea,” Rebecca said, smiling.
Mrs. Sengupta shrugged and wiggled her head from side to side. “Nice.”
Nice seemed to be the most popular word in English among Indians, Rebecca reflected, leaning back in her seat and sipping her own coffee.
“Good tea. Different, but good.” The moment stretched on, with Mrs. Sengupta carefully sipping after adding equal portions of milk and sugar. Rebecca watched the widow slip bits of her scone into the milky liquid and then fish them out again with her spoon, eating the mush with apparent happiness. Their silence was companionable but careful, making a bubble rise in Rebecca’s throat. But Mrs. Sengupta interrupted her thoughts.
“Now. You tell me about yourself. This boyfriend you mentioned last night, was it serious?”
Rebecca almost laughed but caught herself in time. Mrs. Sengupta sounded like a mother—no, like a grandmother, all stern and waiting to hear about Rebecca’s romantic past.
“I wouldn’t say so, no.”
“But you took a trip with him. Surely it must have been—that is, did you have family to stay with here?”
Rebecca looked at the widow, wondering what she meant. “No. I don’t have family here.”
“Oh. But then, did you, did you stay together? In one room?”
“Yes, we—” Rebecca didn’t get to finish her sentence. Mrs. Sengupta’s face had become a mask of fascinated horror, and Rebecca suddenly realized the inquiry behind the questions.
“Did you . . . have many boyfriends?”
Rebecca couldn’t suppress her smile this time. The widow sounded almost reverential.
“I’ve had a few. Some better than others. The one I came here with was nice. He’s living in Texas now, married a girl from business school.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. I’m prettier than her. I checked.” Rebecca smiled and Mrs. Sengupta nervously laughed.
“What was it like? Being with, with so many men?”
Rebecca thought for a long moment.
“Freeing,” she said gently. “And sometimes very lonely, too. But I wouldn’t trade it. And I’m not a prostitute, you know. You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t,” Mrs. Sengupta said, looking in her eyes. And Rebecca knew she meant it. It was time, she thought, to ask some questions of her own.
“Why did your son come to America? If you don’t mind me asking.” She had been rehearsing the words since Mrs. Sengupta had first mentioned him. She wondered where he was, why Mrs. Sengupta spoke about him in such oblique ways.
Mrs. Sengupta looked startled. Rebecca thought to apologize for the question, but then she decided against it. In a few days, Mrs. Sengupta would be gone, and Rebecca would return to New York, never to see either her or Satya again. Rebecca could not spend this much time with people, travel this long a distance, and remain strangers to them. Though she knew that people made journeys with strangers all the time and never thought twice about it, she wasn’t wired that way.
Rebecca maintained eye contact, waiting for the widow to talk about her son. After a moment, Mrs. Sengupta seemed to break through an interior barrier and replied.
“He came here to study. And to leave India.”
“Do a lot of people do that?” Rebecca wasn’t sure if she was asking about studying or leaving India.
Mrs. Sengupta smiled wryly. “Many people want to leave. So many of our young people go, in our community. Bengalis, that is. Some come back. But”—here she hesitated, searching for the right way to say what was on her mind—“for many, there is not such a reason to return. I do not think we make it easy for our young people, sometimes. There are so many ways that people have to be, at home. Here it seems less like that. Is that true?”
Rebecca thought about it for a moment. “Well. You saw my own family, didn’t you? I mean, people expect things of their children, everywhere.”
“Yes, but. Forgive me, but, it does not seem as if those expectations have affected you that much. Please, do not be offended. It is only, you still live the way you want to live. And you live so far from home. On your own. You are allowed to live alone. You do not need to face those expectations every day, you do not see your mother’s face when you come home. There are not people around you, talking about what you are doing and where you are going and what it means with each other and with, with y
our parents. There are not people watching you, caring what you are doing, changing what you do by their care. Are there?”
“No. I don’t know what that would be like at all.”
Mrs. Sengupta nodded. “I see now why so many don’t return. I did not understand before I was visiting here only. I have never seen people so free in this way, free from each other. It is hard to miss your home, I think, but it must be hard to be here and then return to a place where you are so, so . . .”
“Confined?”
“Something like this. My Rahi came here to study, but I believe he stayed because it was better here, for him. We did not make it easy for him at home. He was different than many are and that is, that is not possible. There are so many things here, ways to learn and ways to be. You said it was easier here for people, in different cities. There are so many places to go. Each city I have visited I have asked people, what is it like? And they say different things. There is only one way, at home, it seems, sometimes.”
“What did he study?”
Mrs. Sengupta smiled. “He was a marine biologist. Or, he wanted to be. His father was so angry. Like a little boy, he said, playing in the sea. Rahi couldn’t even swim, just make sand castles and look at the snails. His father said this was what his job would be. No income potential, not a good job at all. But Rahi loved it. He would tell me such things in his letters, and on the phone. I am old-fashioned only, email was not easy for me. Too many buttons. I have learned, now. Too late. Rahi would write me letters, like a good boy. All about fish and plants and things living in the water, such nonsense, but he made it seem so wonderful. I did not understand much of his work, only that he was happy. I do think most parents, at the heart, want their children to be happy. It is only that we want our children to be happy in the right way. The way we were taught happiness was. I think this is a cause of much pain, thinking, perhaps, that there is a right way. I thought there was only one way for him to be happy, I did not understand anything else.”