If You See Me, Don't Say Hi

by Neel Patel

  “How old do I look?”

  “Nineteen?”

  He laughed again. “Take your dress off.”

  I did as I was told, wiggling out of it in a sort-of dance, aware of how the roles had quickly reversed, how it was he who was suddenly in control. He stared at me baldly, taking me in.

  “Now your bra.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been naked in front of a man, and yet there was power in this, exposing myself to someone I had no interest in, who would never know the inner workings of my life. I flung my bra over the bed and, without him asking, my panties, too. He brought them close to his face.

  “You smell amazing.”

  “I do?”

  “Like flowers.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  I smiled, vindicated. Then I asked him again, “How old are you?”

  He said he was twenty-two.

  * * *

  He spent the night. I wanted him to. He pressed his naked body against mine and we stayed like that for hours. I had a dream that Ricky A. was actually a Ph.D. student who worked as a cable guy on weekends just to pay the bills, that we were married in a small but tasteful ceremony, and that we had three beautiful little girls. I woke up with a smile on my lips, turning over to nuzzle my face against the dark damp nest of his armpit, when I realized he was gone.

  “Ricky?”

  I sat up in bed, scanning the walls for his patchwork body, but he wasn’t in the room. I rubbed my eyes and discovered that his clothes were still in a pile on the floor. His wallet was still on the nightstand. His thick white socks were still hanging from the floor lamp. I could still smell him on my sheets, a mix of cologne and sweat that would remain until I did the washing, which wasn’t very often. I walked downstairs. Ricky was staring at the picture of Lord Shiva on the windowsill, picking it up in his hands, when he noticed me and smiled.

  “Good morning.”

  He opened his arms to hug me and I knew, by the way my body went limp in his embrace, that I wanted him gone.

  “Thanks, Ricky,” I said. “For everything.”

  It was at this particular moment that his expression suddenly changed.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, wincing. “About that. My name—it’s not Ricky.”

  “What?”

  “You kept saying it last night, and I didn’t want to disappoint you, in case it was some sort of fantasy. But that’s not my real name. Not even close. My real name is Ernesto.”

  “But your shirt,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That’s just a generic name. The company doesn’t want us to use our real ones. They definitely don’t want some guy going around introducing himself as Ernesto.” He laughed heartily.

  I lowered my gaze. “Oh.”

  I was strangely disappointed, as if this sudden revelation negated everything that had happened to me the night before, as if the real Ricky A. was still out there, waiting for me. I also knew that I would never see him again. I occupied myself in the kitchen while Ernesto went upstairs and put on his clothes and washed his face and brushed his teeth with his finger, singing and splashing all the while. Then I followed him to the door. Outside, the morning light was bright, the sun blasting through the clouds like brilliant shards of glass.

  “Can I call you?” Ernesto said. “Can we hang out?”

  “Sure,” I replied—though I knew that we wouldn’t, that it was a mistake I would never make again—and I watched him jump into his Chevy Tahoe and disappear down the road.

  * * *

  I have never told Vibash any of this. I was too embarrassed. He called two days later, to ask for a second chance, and we agreed to meet at a restaurant overlooking the water, and a coffee shop the next day, and a movie theater the following weekend. We kept meeting, at restaurants and bars, theaters and nightclubs, playgrounds and parlors, until six months later, when he asked me to move in. It became a legend: the story of our failed first date. Sometimes I would start to tell it, and Vibash would chime in, filling in the gaps. I would cringe when he got to the part about leaving the bar—he had no idea what I had done. No one did. I kept it to myself, wincing whenever a colleague happened to say something positively bland like “What a night!” or “I guess it was meant to be!” I would nod along and smile, resting my head against Vibash’s shoulder. It was something I did quite often: the nodding and smiling. After canceling my lease, I packed my things in boxes and moved into Vibash’s slate-colored house. It had a smooth green lawn and a patio with a pool, and sometimes I liked to lie there with a glass of white wine. I redecorated his house with beaded wallpaper and off-white lacquer. Vibash installed a security system. We threw a party for our friends—the dentists and doctors and lawyers, the engineers at Vibash’s firm—and later, after everyone had left, he surprised me with a ring. I had mended fences with Valerie and some of the other women I had offended during the course of my misery, and was subsequently flattered when they ushered me back into their lives. With their help, I became a new woman, adorned with certainty, varnished with pride, glittering with the trappings of a shared life. Sometimes I looked at old pictures of myself and wondered where all the misery went, if it was still lurking somewhere deep inside. Now, whenever I posted a picture of myself on Facebook, Vibash was there, standing by my side, his arm wrapped lovingly around my shoulder, his hand clasped tightly in mine. At night, I stared at these pictures for hours, reading the comments that proliferated like weeds beneath them, bolstered whenever someone happened to post something positive, offended when they didn’t.

  I was doing this one evening when the Wi-Fi went out again.

  * * *

  It was late, and Vibash and I were watching a documentary on Netflix. The screen halted, and Vibash walked over to the modem and picked it up in his hands.

  “The Wi-Fi is out,” he said. He unplugged the modem and waited a few moments before plugging it back in again. But it didn’t work. “Goddamn it. We were just getting started. I’ll have to call the cable company now.”

  He flipped through a phone book and walked into the kitchen. I heard his voice in the hall. He returned with a smile.

  “They said they can send someone over in fifteen minutes. That’s pretty fast.”

  I finished my glass of wine, quickly pouring another one. Vibash was staring at me.

  “Easy there.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch and the sunset outside, which smoldered behind a row of black, lacy trees. The doorbell rang. Vibash ran to answer it. I sat down on the couch, examining a mysterious stain on the carpet—red wine, or maybe one of Vibash’s protein shakes—when he walked into the room.

  * * *

  He looked the same, except he was wearing a different-colored shirt, and his name wasn’t Ricky anymore; it was Ted. Vibash chatted with him in the foyer before leading him into the house. He didn’t look at me. He went straight to the modem. Vibash was still talking about the documentary he and I were watching, something about Vikings or samurais or spies, when he looked at me and smiled.

  I dropped my glass of wine.

  “Jesus, Anita,” Vibash said. “What’s wrong?”

  The glass shattered against the smooth slate floor, and red wine pooled at my feet. Vibash went into the kitchen to fetch towels and napkins and a portable vacuum cleaner, leaving the two of us alone.

  “So,” Ernesto said, “how long have you and your husband been in this house?” He was staring at the blank walls beyond us, the vaulted ceiling above, and I realized, suddenly, that he had no idea who I was.

  “Just a couple months,” I said. “And he’s not my husband.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s my fiancé,” I said, “and we’re getting married next year.”

  “Congratulations.”

  He stared at me without the slightest trace of recognition. Then he turned and examined the bookcase next to the modem that housed our statues and albums and books. He picked something up in his hands, and
I knew, even before he had the chance to look at me with a curious arch of his brow, what it was: the picture of Lord Shiva. I had always hated it, but Vibash insisted we display it in public, in case my mother ever came to visit. “This is beautiful,” he said. Vibash returned with the towels. The Wi-Fi was up and running again. Ernesto picked up the remote control and reloaded the documentary. It seemed to me, in that moment at least, that we stood like that for a very long time, all three of us, waiting for it to start. ◆

  hare rama, hare krishna

  On Fridays my mother made chicken curry for my father and me. Later, she cooked only for me. The curry was still there; my father was not. He’d moved, not to Cleveland or Indianapolis, but to a one-story house on Devonshire Drive. Often, and with no relevant provocation, my mother brought up his other woman, referring to her as “that lady.” That lady performed black magic. That lady ruined our lives. That lady won’t get a dime of his money—just you wait and see. That lady was ten years younger than my mother. At twenty-seven, she wasn’t much of a “lady” at all.

  Her name was Lisa. She was my father’s secretary. I remember the first time I met her, when I was eleven years old. She was lank, and blond, with glass-colored eyes. Her skin was translucent. She wore chic clothes, far more expensive than anything my mother owned—this in spite of the fact that my father was an ophthalmologist, that we lived in one of the largest homes in our town. My mother was simple—her copper skin without makeup, her dark hair in a braid. When she saw Lisa standing in our foyer that bright summer afternoon, painted and coiffed like a doll, she turned up her nose. “I don’t trust her,” she said, not to my father, but to me. I laughed at her—my mother didn’t trust anyone—but she was right: six months later, Lisa called our house in the middle of the night.

  “What is it?” my mother asked, after my father had hung up the phone.

  “It’s Lisa,” he said. “She’s complaining about a sharp pain in her eye.”

  I heard my parents argue: Why couldn’t she go to the emergency room? Why did she have to call the house? Why did my father speak to her in such an intimate way? Why, at the very least, didn’t she go to the hospital instead? I heard the hum of my father’s Jaguar and saw the flicker of its taillights down the road.

  Then I heard the slam of a door.

  My parents didn’t speak much after that. My father left for work early each morning, returning late in the night. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. Once, he called to say that he had gone to San Francisco for a medical conference; he would be home in a few days. My mother was furious. She spent long afternoons complaining about my father to her sisters over the phone. She prayed three times a day. Sometimes she buried strange objects in our backyard: a coconut decorated with vermilion, a handful of rice, marigold petals that spilled from her hands.

  In the end, my father didn’t deny it. My mother found the love letters Lisa had written to him in the glove compartment of his car. She wanted a divorce. I was surprised. I had heard my mother criticizing other women in our town—women who drank cocktails and divorced their husbands at the drop of a hat. My mother was not that kind of woman. She was faithful. They’d had an arranged marriage; it would never have occurred to her to leave. She was religious, too, leaving trails of incense all over the house. Sometimes she left strange items in the pockets of my jeans: a picture of Lord Krishna, a fragment of ash, a piece of fruit from the temple prasad.

  “Don’t go stepping on your books,” she would say, if I happened to be arranging them on the living room floor. “Everything you learned will be gone.”

  They agreed to separate. My father moved into Lisa’s apartment; my mother looked for a job. She cursed them from my room.

  “Good-for-nothings,” she said.

  I ignored her. With my father gone, I saw no reason to please her. In fact, I blamed her. If only she had been the type of woman Lisa was—if only she didn’t wear those god-awful clothes. I tried to help her, once, suggesting she buy a short black dress from the mall, but she refused. “What sort of boy has an interest in clothes?”

  I did—shoes, too, and Bollywood films. My favorite actress was Madhuri Dixit. I danced to her songs in my room. I stood in front of my mirror with my belly exposed, my T-shirt over my head, the ends of which flowed down my back like a wig. Every now and then, I borrowed one of my mother’s saris and pretended to dance in the rain. Once, I imagined a pair of hands traveling over my naked body, massaging my breasts, at which point I got an erection, putting everything away.

  Unbeknownst to my mother, I spent long hours admiring Lisa from afar: the glint of her hair, the gloss of her legs, the effortless way she dressed, as if she’d only happened to find a gold and turquoise bracelet that matched perfectly with her blouse. Sometimes, at the office, Lisa entertained me while I waited for my father to finish a consultation. She knew about the things that consumed my life: X-Men and Game Boy and Bell Biv DeVoe. We sang along to “Poison” in the back of the office, after all the patients had left, the door to the reception area closed, the blinds shut tight. My father joined in afterward, and the glassy look in his eyes, the way he laughed with his entire body, expressed a love for her I had never witnessed before.

  * * *

  It didn’t last. Eventually, Lisa and my father split up. I don’t know why. Maybe Lisa grew bored with him. Maybe she grew weary of being his mistress. He never brought her around to the Indian functions in our town: dinner parties in the basement of some doctor’s home. He never spoke of her in public. He never allowed her to get out of the car when he picked me up from my house. The last I’d heard, she was attending art school in Chicago. My father returned, penitent, requesting to move back in. But my mother refused. She had no use for him now.

  So they remained married but separated. My father moved into the house down the street from us. He drove me to school. Sometimes he came over to mow the lawn or pay the bills. Once a week, he joined us at the dinner table for a curry or a dal, but he never spent the night. Both he and my mother showed up to my parent-teacher conferences and asked after my grades. To the outside world, to the cousins and teachers and uncles and aunts, they were still a couple, still husband and wife, still bound together by me, their only child. Had anyone understood the true nature of their arrangement, the reason for their separation, they would’ve been appalled. I suspect this pleased my mother. It gave her power. As long as my father was alone, as long as he turned up to our dinners every Saturday night, she would always be in control.

  * * *

  In the fall of senior year, I had to choose a physical activity, so I chose dance. It was the only way I could get out of gym. I registered for an evening class that met twice a week in a dance studio at the center of town. It was October when I took my first class. The air smelled like burnt leaves. I liked this time of year: when you had to sleep with an extra blanket on your bed. I liked that the sky got all dark and smeary, and the leaves turned to fireballs. I liked that every month had a holiday. I was applying to colleges that year. It was nice to know that, at the end of the month, I could dress up as Spider-Man.

  The class was called Urban Groove. The flyer showed a young man wearing track pants and a hooded sweatshirt, spinning on his head. I had tried spinning once—breaking, too. I learned all the moves. I re-created them at school dances and everyone called me “MJ Kapoor.” This was before the incident with Jordan Mann in the boys’ locker room, after which they just called me a queer.

  The whole thing was a mistake. We were changing in the locker room when I happened to notice the smattering of dark brown hair that stemmed from Jordan’s navel. I turned my head. I stared at it again. I couldn’t stop staring. He was swiping a stick of deodorant under his arms, talking to one of his friends, when all of a sudden someone shoved me from behind.

  “Faggot.”

  It was Brendan Simmons. His hair was the color of orange shag carpeting; his skin was the color of boiled shrimp. He narrowed his eyes.

  “I
always knew you were a queer.”

  “Samir the queer,” someone said.

  “Samir the queer,” Brendan echoed, shoving me again. “I like that.”

  For weeks thereafter, Brendan tormented me in the halls, shouting “Samir the queer” whenever I walked past. He waited for me in the locker room before issuing a warning to everyone around: “Put your dicks away, fellas. It’s Samir the queer.” Sometimes he pushed me from behind, or flicked me on my ear, or tripped me in the halls, or rallied his friends so they could throw me into the shower. Once, he went up to Jordan Mann and gave him a ring. “It’s from Samir, man. He wanted me to give it to you.” He said nothing for a while, just stared at the ring, stared at Brendan, stared at me. Then he walked out of the room.

  For weeks I was besotted. I saw Jordan in the halls, walking alone to class, a backpack slung over his left shoulder, white sneakers on his feet. He dressed in tight-fitting sweaters over indigo jeans. His chestnut hair was always swept to the side. He never said more than a word or two all day. Once, before an exam, I asked to borrow a pencil. It was our English midterm, and Jordan was sitting at the desk in front of me. The fabric of his T-shirt clung like film to his muscles as he reached into his backpack and tossed the pencil onto my desk. That night, when I found the pencil stuck in my back pocket, I dialed his number. I’d looked it up in the phone book, memorizing it by heart. My mother was out running errands. The phone rang and rang, and, just as I was about to hang up, Jordan’s voice came on at the other end.

  “Jordan?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I have your pencil.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your pencil?” The blood rushed to my face. “I borrowed it for the exam. I wanted to tell you that I have it. I didn’t steal it or anything. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

  There was silence, during which I contemplated the very purpose of my life. Then Jordan started laughing.

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Samir, man. You can keep it. No worries.”