by Leah Franqui
But he did want Bhim to know the city, so when driving hadn’t helped, he took him running. Running was a way to know a city without a car, and because Bhim drove only when absolutely necessary, and badly at that, Jake thought maybe running would help. Jake wanted Bhim to fall in love with the city the way the two of them had fallen in love, and then he wanted Bhim to move in with him.
They had been together for over three years. Three years of bliss, of long mornings with coffee and the Sunday paper and endless rounds of toast and long nights exploring each other’s bodies and knowing they knew each other best of all. Three years of jokes and meals and surprising things in common that they reveled in. Three years of Jake asking for things in ways that made them seem like suggestions, not demands, and living for the weekends, wanting more, dancing around anything difficult. Three years of Bhim trying to open up more, and failing. Three years of Jake trying to accept that about him, and failing. Three years of each of them hoping the other hadn’t noticed their failures. Jake knew that it was insane. He knew that his friends and family thought it was a mismatch, that each was under so much strain trying to change for the other. But he didn’t care. This was Bhim, this was the one person he wanted in the world, and Bhim was worth any price. They just had to go slowly, which Jake had, and wear away the resistance, which he did. Eventually, inch by inch, they would get somewhere. He would think, as Bhim lay sleeping next to him, what the next step would be, the next incremental push in the next day they would have together. It was a journey, wasn’t it? Being with someone?
So he took Bhim running, as part of a grand plan years in the making, and prayed it would work. They ran at night, because Bhim ran like a duck and worried the sleek denizens of Los Angeles would judge him during the day. Together they would run slowly, slowly, down the streets of the city, getting used to this route and to that. Jake, who had been a runner for a long time, was frustrated at first, having to go at Bhim’s glacial pace when he preferred his own punishing strides. But at least this way he could now see the elements around him more clearly, noting the changes of leaves and flowers, the urban wildlife that peeped around the corners of Los Angeles and the coyotes that howled at night.
On one such night he turned to Bhim, who was gasping for breath beside him, and smiled.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” Bhim wheezed.
“Move in with me.” Jake said it quickly, like it was all one word, shattering the night with his plea. He knew he shouldn’t, but some part of him screamed that it had been three years and it had to be now, his life had to start now, or it never would. And Bhim just looked at him, curious, his face confused, a mixture of tenderness and distance. Jake opened his mouth but what he would have said remained a mystery even to him, because it was at that moment that Bhim gently collapsed on the pavement and died.
Later Jake would know that it hadn’t been his fault, that it hadn’t been anything he did, not even the running. Later he would learn that Bhim’s heart attack, random, unpredictable, instantly fatal, was merely one of those things that happen to human beings. But at the time, he was sure, absolutely and completely sure, that his question had killed the love of his life.
Initially after Bhim had died, Jake’s friends and family had told him that whatever he was feeling was okay. He had thanked them for this meaningless statement, too dazed to do anything else. For once in his life, he didn’t have the time or energy to judge himself for his feelings, a fact that would have amused him if anything could have made him laugh then. The idea that he would spend more time judging his feelings than feeling them troubled him. They must think him so selfish, he had thought, as he covered each mirror in his house.
He was determined to sit a full shiva for Bhim, an act that would have confused Bhim, had he been there to see it. Bhim had been a lax and unobservant Hindu, and Jake’s knowledge of Judaism consisted of jokes made in Woody Allen movies and dishes he ate in delis. The memorial service had been entirely secular, with Bhim’s ashes enjoying their own seat in the small hall Jake’s parents had rented for the event, and friends and colleagues murmuring their condolences as Jake sat, his eyes vacant, tears leaking out of them at strange moments, like when Led Zeppelin’s “Ten Years Gone” started playing, or when one of Bhim’s fellow PhD candidates recalled Bhim’s use of a Bunsen burner to cook fish one night when they were working in the lab. Even Bhim’s adviser had come down from Berkeley, explaining Bhim’s research to those around him, even to Jake, who knew each component of Bhim’s projects so well that he could have done it himself. Hearing someone else describe the biology of Pacific marine life felt so much like so many talks with Bhim that he closed his eyes and let the words wash over him, and opened them, wet and red, when they were done.
That had been almost a year ago. Bhim had died in November, and now it was October. A whole year, without Bhim. Jake hated himself for living through it.
He let himself think about Bhim only when he couldn’t control himself, couldn’t help it. Which was almost all the time. He had read many books that told him this would get easier, which felt both completely idiotic and also devastating in its own way. He didn’t want to feel better. Feeling better would also mean feeling less.
He didn’t run anymore. Instead he joined a gym with a pool and would spend hours swimming, and at the end he would float, staring up at the ceiling. After swimming that day in October, the day he realized it would be exactly a year in one month, he tried to drown himself in the pool, but he couldn’t and he cried into the chlorinated water. Then he drove home, parked his car carefully, and groaned as he looked at his front door.
There was a cat there, waiting. It was not his cat. He did not know whose it was. But for whatever reason the cat was waiting there, as it had been every evening for the past week, looking at him hopefully with its glinting yellow eyes. He had not fed the cat or petted it once. Why was it there again? He walked warily to his door, and the animal—he didn’t know its sex—started meowing loudly. As he opened his door, it rubbed his legs frantically, its body vibrating with purring. It didn’t look particularly dirty or sick, but it didn’t look perfectly clean like a house cat either. What did it want? He had no cat food in the house and he had no interest in letting anyone in, let alone someone with fur.
“I’m a bad bet,” he told the cat as he jerked his key in the lock, letting himself into the house. The animal gave a strange little growl of delight, and before he could stop it the cat had run into his house. He cursed. The thing hadn’t been so bold in the days before; it had gained courage slowly. He should have kicked it on the first day. Then the cat would have known where it stood with him. Now he had the vermin-infested fleabag in his home, rubbing up against his furniture and looking at him with love. As he watched, amazed, the animal jumped on top of his counter and sat, cleaning itself with vigor. He shook his head and walked in, leaving the door open behind him. This was outside of enough. He had lost the love of his life to a trick of the human body. Now he had a cat trying to make his clean home its new litter box. He was going to throw this cat out and drink himself to sleep. And the next time he saw a cat, he would kick it, in revenge. He walked up to the counter and explained to the cat in his most authoritative voice, his tone furious, that it would need to leave. That’s all there was to it. The animal looked up at him and, Jake could have sworn, smiled.
That had been three days ago. Since then he had not succeeded at removing the cat, which he had learned was female, from his home. He had chased the cat with various things, including a broom, a bag, and, in one particularly low moment, a meat cleaver. The cat seemed to think this was a marvelous game until it got sleepy and bored and looked at him with the superior way cats have, as if everything humans do is for their amusement. It followed him from room to room. It cried for food and ate the cream he poured for it with relish. He had set up a box with sand for it, though he realized that as soon as he gave up the illusion that the cat would be leaving he would
have to secure himself a litter box.
Lying in bed that night, alone, as always, he thought about the weight of Bhim beside him. When he closed his eyes, he could almost feel Bhim’s warmth there. No, he could feel warmth, but a small and fuzzy amount of it. He opened his eyes and saw the cat, curled up next to him, her face resting on her paws. He thought about kicking her off, but when he reached his hand out to push her away, she shifted her body into his palm and purred deeply. With the warmth of her pulsing through his hand and making him feel not alone for the first time in a year, he knew he would be buying a litter box the next morning.
He had to admit, it felt nice to wake up with something alive in the house. It felt nice that there was a pair of eyes watching him. Even when Bhim had been alive Jake had spent more nights alone in his apartment than with him. Jake was not used to seeing something living around him.
He would find her a home, he decided resolutely. That’s what he was doing, foster care for a cat until the right person came along for her. He was not going to be a single gay man with a dead boyfriend and a cat. His life was already too pathetic. Still, when the cat curled up to him at night as he waited for his sleeping pill to kick in, he felt a warm feeling that had nothing to do with shared body heat.
It was far too easy to care about things. He hadn’t cared about anything, really, since Bhim had died. Nothing new, that was. He would have thought he’d forgotten how, but it was just like anything else. It came right back.
28
Looking at the handsome man in the doorway, Pival’s heart broke, and she realized that it never really had, the first time, because she hadn’t truly believed he was dead. But he was. Rahi was gone. If he had been alive, he would have answered the door. She was a fool for hoping for anything. But she had been a happy fool, for a few seconds, every day. Now she didn’t even have that. She wanted to press her hand to her heart and stop it. She just stood there, looking at the man who stole her son. She would have to kill herself now, after all. But not before she had told him what she thought of him.
The man at the door had brown curly hair and a puzzled frown. His eyes recognized her. He knew who she was.
“Hello,” he said, without a trace of inflection.
“Hello,” she responded, her voice shaking.
“I’m Jake. You’re his mother. I’m glad you’ve come.” He opened his door and let her inside.
The cat had heralded her arrival, Jake thought as he let Bhim’s mother into the house. He had never seen the woman before, not even a photograph, but he knew this was Bhim’s mother as well as he would have known his own. She stood straight and tall in her pure white sari, and she had his face.
He had hated her for so long, hated her silence. He had hated her for being the person who had made Bhim into someone who would never love him all the way, someone who could never love himself. Now Jake stood aside and ushered her into the home he had shared on the weekends with her son and the cat that he should have known was telling him she was coming.
There were two people with her. He wasn’t sure who they were. One of them was a short man of indeterminate ethnic identity with a handsome but hungry face. Jake was politically correct enough not to simply assume he was Indian. His skin was dark and his eyes were as well. He looked about twenty-one years old, and he looked like a person who had once been painfully thin. The overlay of flesh on his bones was newly acquired and suited him well. His face was firm and young, and would, someday, be awfully good-looking if he kept eating. Next to him was a woman, in her late twenties, Jake would estimate, although he had never been good with women’s ages. Her hair was up in some kind of fashionable wavy twist, and he wondered if she was Jewish, too. Her eyes were dark, and they looked at him curiously. It seemed that Bhim’s mother had brought reinforcements. At least he had the cat on his side.
He shut the door behind them and watched them walk carefully through his foyer into his living room, a large open space that looked onto the revealed kitchen. It was a good house for parties, not that he’d ever had one there.
“Won’t you sit?” He said it automatically, etiquette overriding emotion. She sat. He took a seat across from her, and the cat, after looking between them, elected to sit with Mrs. Sengupta, curling up in her chiffon skirts and dozing, the traitor. A thousand things to say to her ran through his mind, accusations, an equal-rights speech for all people of every sexual orientation everywhere, even a proper introduction, with memories of Bhim, how they met, how they fell in love, but he stayed silent. She was the one who had been quiet for so long, who had said nothing and done nothing. Let her talk.
She was looking around his home, her eyes taking in his interior decorating.
“Rahi must have liked it here.”
“Rahi?”
“Rahi. My son, Rahi Sengupta. What did you call him?” She spat it out. He was tempted to shock her, to hurt her, to say, my bitch or my chocolate dream or my personal Kama Sutra or gay Ganesh, but he didn’t.
“I guess I knew his name was Rahi. But he called himself Bhim.”
It was as if he had spoken a magic word, because her animosity fell away, for a moment. She actually smiled, her eyes unfocusing. “Oh, he didn’t. No, he didn’t, did he?”
“I can assure you he most certainly did.” Jake grew formal when he was angry. Bhim had told him he sounded like the solicitors in nineties Bollywood movies, speaking pure truths in a corrupt court. He used his lawyer voice now to lay his claim. Who was she, telling him what he had called the person he had loved?
“This was . . . this was my name for him. He was my brave boy, my Bhim, always ready to save me. It is from a story that we tell. He was just like that, always. As he got older I stopped calling him this and forgot why. But he used the name. I never knew.” She smiled again as tears leaked out of the corners of her eyes. Then she frowned. “I don’t understand why he would have told you my name for him.”
“I suppose he thought that people who loved him should use it.” He said the words deliberately to upset her, because this, at least, was true and was fair to Bhim and was to make up for everything he could have said or screamed but hadn’t.
“It is not right—”
“He and I were in love. We were together. He stayed here with me and he ate here with me and he fucked here with me and he died here, with me, and you weren’t there and you don’t get to tell me what right is. I don’t care what you called him. The man I loved was Bhim.”
She didn’t blink, even at the profanity. “Love like that is wrong. Bhim didn’t understand, he was sick, you made him sick here. It is not like that at home. Love is not like that.” She spoke as though she were speaking to a child, carefully, with the absolute authority that she was right. This must have been what Bhim thought every time he looked at me, Jake thought. This soft, sweet voice in the back of his head telling him he was sick. Jake felt an incandescent rage fill him and he could have laughed, because it was like light pouring through his body.
“Love was like that for your son. He loved me, Mrs. Pival Sengupta. I know your name, I know about you. I know you are from Kolkata, and that you didn’t talk to Bhim once he told you the way love was for him. I burned his body. He told me that’s what he wanted, so I did it. Do you want that, Mrs. Sengupta? Your son’s dust? Is that why you’ve come? You can have it. I would have sent it to you months ago. I would have come to India myself to give it to you. Not for you. But for Bhim, because it’s what he wanted, and he should get what he wanted because it’s the only thing left I can give him. Besides, according to my religion, which isn’t being gay, by the way, it’s Judaism, not that you know the difference, these ashes, these aren’t important. You can have it. After all, it’s all he was worth to you.”
He thrust the box of ashes at her almost violently. It was a neat wooden box, made of olive wood from the town of Lucca, in Italy. He would have loved to take Bhim there. His arm mourned the loss as soon as it was out of his hands. He realized giving her the ashes cau
sed the pain of losing Bhim all over again but he gritted his teeth and bore it, knowing it was the only thing to get this woman out of his house. He couldn’t listen to her gently spoken hate. If she wanted the ashes they were hers. He had Bhim in his mind and his heart and she could have the dust. Bhim wasn’t in there.
She took the box, but she didn’t move. She just sat, staring at it, while large tears pooled in her eyes and slid down along the ladder of wrinkles etched in her face, down her cheeks and around her chin, dripping onto the box itself.
Next to her, the two people she had brought with her were staring, but he couldn’t care about them, there wasn’t space. He looked at her, his face flushed, pumping with blood, and his hands clenched into hard fists, his untrimmed nails biting into his palms.
“You have what you want. Now go,” he said, his voice hard and trembling. He hated that quiver in the back of his throat, that weakness. He was already choking up and he wanted to rip the box out of her hands and he wanted to scream at her until she cried harder, until she made the ashes a paste with her tears. But he didn’t, he just clenched his hands and his whole body tighter and tighter, pushing everything in and down and together.
Suddenly she stood, and without a word she left, fled the house, running out the door, her white skirts swishing around her like a departing flock of birds. The room was still and silent. The two strangers looked deeply uncomfortable. Well, they were not his problem.
“You’re welcome to leave as well. In fact, I must insist that you do.” They nodded jerkily, unable or unwilling to speak. They moved their bodies awkwardly out of his home, shutting the door quietly on the way out. The cat moved briskly around his legs, demanding to be fed.