If You See Me, Don't Say Hi

by Neel Patel

  “Akhil’s wife.”

  She hung up the phone.

  * * *

  That night, I cooked lamb curry and set the table for two. Akhil came home with a bottle of wine. Together we drank it over a platter of crackers and cheese.

  “I talked to Celine,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Celine—your mistress.”

  He took a sip of his wine. A piece of cheese fell out of his hands and he picked it back up, slowly.

  “Don’t be silly. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You don’t be silly,” I said, the wine blooming. I put the napkin in front of him.

  “See? She gave you her number. She wants you to call. I thought we could be friends but she hung up the phone—how rude.”

  The rice cooker clicked and I scooped a steaming spoonful of rice onto his plate. Then I went into the kitchen. After dinner, Akhil rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher and began wiping the counters off with a rag.

  “She’s a pharmaceutical representative,” he said, before retiring to bed. “She didn’t have her card.”

  * * *

  He was right: I found Celine’s LinkedIn page online. I was hoping to find a picture of her, too. But there was nothing. In my mind Celine had the kind of bright blond hair that made girls in high school want to kill themselves. She had long legs, too. Probably she was skinny and probably she wore silk blouses over the swell of her breasts. I went home that evening and called her again.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Rupa Varma.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know what the hell you’re doing with my husband.”

  I sat in the living room with the television on mute, vague images flashing over my face. I could hear music on the other end. She was silent a moment, as if she hadn’t heard the question. Then she spoke abruptly, in a voice that was stilted and clear.

  “I’m his friend.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  She didn’t answer me. I could hear the sound of liquid crackling over ice; she was pouring herself a drink.

  Then she replied, very softly, “I’ve given him something you won’t.”

  “A blow job?”

  She laughed.

  “An arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?”

  “A special one.”

  “But he’s married.”

  She hung up the phone. I dialed her number, but there was no answer. I dialed it again. Then I sent her a nasty text message. I waited for Akhil to come home, and when he didn’t, I fell asleep on the couch; then I crawled into our bedroom. The next morning, he wasn’t in our bed.

  “Akhil?” I said, checking the bathroom and the den. “Akhil?”

  I went downstairs and found the doorman, Raul.

  “Where is Akhil?”

  “I haven’t seen him, miss. Not since yesterday morning.”

  I went back upstairs. Hours later, Akhil came home with Chinese takeaway from the restaurant down the road.

  “Where were you?”

  I was wearing sweat socks and leggings. My eyes were smeared with mascara. I was holding a glass of sherry.

  “I was on call,” Akhil said. “You know that.”

  “Liar.”

  He went into the kitchen and opened the cupboards, looking for a pot or a pan. Then he spun around.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “You were with that whore, weren’t you?”

  He was silent. “I told you, she’s a pharmaceutical representative.”

  * * *

  The next evening we had a fight: something about the way he looked at me sent me flying into a rage.

  “Don’t you look at me that way,” I said.

  I’d spent the entire evening drinking red wine on the sofa, watching soap operas on TV. I’d discovered a lump in my breast. It was nothing, really; my breasts had always been lumpy. Still, I couldn’t help but imagine myself bald.

  “You didn’t go to work today,” he said. “You haven’t been to work all week.”

  “I was bored.”

  “They’ll fire you.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?” He arched his brow. “And then what? How will we afford to pay for this loft? How will you afford to buy those five-hundred-dollar shoes?”

  “I’ll sue.”

  “Sue for what?”

  “For sexual harassment,” I said. “For all the leers and the stares. You should see the way they look at me over there: like they’re all screwing me in their heads.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  * * *

  He didn’t come home for three nights that week. I spent my evenings on the sofa, watching reality TV. I wondered if he was with Celine. Probably he was. Probably they were in some dark bar with snifters and smoke. Probably they were screwing in the backseat of a cab.

  I woke up one morning and called her again. She didn’t answer, but later, at work, I found her Facebook profile online. She was pretty but not in the way I had imagined: Her hair wasn’t blond; it was dark and moist and curly. She looked vaguely African American. There were a few pictures and in each of them she looked the same: bright-eyed, smiling, as if she knew I was watching. There was one in particular that I liked. She was standing at a bar in a gold sequined dress. A man stood behind her with his hand on her breast. It was a picture that spoke of perversion or cruelty, or perhaps it was an innocent consequence of drinking too much the night before. I downloaded the picture onto my computer. Then I left work for the day.

  That night, Akhil was late again, but I didn’t bother asking him where he’d been. I ate my dinner on the sofa and went straight to the den. I found the picture again. It flickered brightly—different, but the same, in the way an ex-lover’s face can seem different, but the same. Only this time she wasn’t looking at me at all. This time, her gaze had drifted elsewhere, as if I now bored her.

  I called her the next day.

  “It’s me: Rupa Varma.”

  “Look, I told you: I’m not getting involved.”

  “But you are involved.”

  I was dressed in a business suit. Akhil was in the shower. The apartment windows were streaked with morning light.

  “I’m pregnant,” I blurted.

  She was silent.

  “So it’s important that you stop seeing him. It’s important that you leave us alone. Do you understand?”

  She said nothing.

  “We have a child together—a child—and you’re coming between us. Is that the sort of woman you want to be? The sort of woman who comes between a father and his child?”

  I thought she would tell me to get lost or hang up the phone or threaten to call the police.

  Instead she gave me her address.

  “Meet me at five thirty,” she said. “And come alone.”

  * * *

  All morning I was jittery. I drank three cups of coffee. I ate a jelly donut. I went across the street for a glass of champagne. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. I crawled underneath my desk and took an afternoon nap. Pretty soon it was five and by then it seemed likely that five thirty would never arrive. When it finally approached, I closed my laptop and left work for the day.

  Celine lived in a dark neighborhood lined with restaurants and bars. I had expected something different. In my mind she lived in a condominium with a doorman and a pool. I was wrong. When the cab pulled up to her town house I saw a rusted Dodge in the driveway. The house was tall and crumbling, with sheer white curtains above. There was a wraparound porch with a bench and a swing. I rang the doorbell. She answered it. Moments later, it started to rain.

  “Come in.”

  She looked different from her pictures—she was still pretty, but in a different way. Her face was slimmer. Her house was crammed with junk, too: jade statues and thick books on art and sex and food. There were pictures of her and some woman who looked just like her all over the walls, a sister perhaps, maybe even a twi
n. I wondered if Akhil had been here. I wondered if he had left something behind: a pair of shoes or a hat or something else I would recognize. But there was nothing. Celine led me into her living room, with its beige rug and its soiled chairs and its dusty bookcases that covered the entire length of the wall. She pulled up a chair.

  “When are you due?”

  “What?”

  She looked panicked suddenly, her eyes growing wide. “He said you couldn’t get pregnant,” she said. “He said you were getting a divorce. That was part of the deal.”

  I said nothing. Finally she went into the kitchen and came back with a pot of tea.

  “Would you like some?”

  “Sure.”

  We sat in silence, stirring our tea, the rain drumming against the leaves. Then she put her teacup aside and folded her arms.

  “I take it he didn’t tell you. I take it you don’t know. He told me you did. He said I shouldn’t worry, that you’re not well.” She paused, staring. “But you don’t seem all that unwell to me—and now you’re pregnant.”

  I didn’t tell her I was lying. My eyes landed on a picture of Celine with her arms wrapped around another woman, the same woman from before. The sister.

  “That’s my lover, Claire. She’ll be the one to carry it.”

  “Carry what?”

  “The baby,” she said.

  I dropped my saucer onto the carpet.

  “Of course I’ll be in charge of the insemination. He’ll have no part in that. But we did agree to let him be a part of the child’s life, to be the father in practice and in name, and there’s the biology, too—I mean, it won’t technically be mine.”

  I began to feel dizzy.

  “He didn’t tell you this?” she asked. “He said you didn’t want a child. He said you were barren. I mean a doctor, a graduate of Yale, we couldn’t pass up the chance.” She paused, dropping a cube of sugar into her tea. Then she leaned in and whispered, “He offered me some money, too, but of course I refused.”

  She was lying—I could see it in her eyes. I bolted for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  I ran outside, hailing a cab, instructing the driver to make a left at the curb. I closed my eyes. I kept them closed the entire way home until finally we were sitting in front of my lobby, the rain dribbling to a halt. Then I opened them again.

  “That’ll be twenty dollars, miss.”

  That evening, I saw her everywhere: in the reflection of the shower, in the shadows of the hall, even in my dreams. Where are you going? It was maddening. I couldn’t shake her from my mind. I kept seeing those wild green eyes and that glossy mane of hair. I kept hearing her name, too: Celine, like the whisper in a breeze.

  I never called her again. I didn’t have to. Three days later, she left me an angry voicemail.

  “I haven’t heard from you. You never called. You better not ruin this for us—that baby is ours.”

  I didn’t tell anyone about it—not because I was sad or scared but because by then I had begun to believe her a little. I don’t know why. She could have been anyone, really: a lunatic, a crazy person, someone who invented things the way crazy people did. Still, I was careful. I got pregnant six weeks later during a weekend trip to Tulum, when Akhil and I were celebrating his fortieth birthday. I made sure of it. He was drunk and a little stoned when I led him upstairs and asked him if he was ready, and later, when he wrapped his legs around me, telling me that he was.

  Or maybe he wasn’t. Two years later, I ran into Celine at a hair salon with a BabyBjörn and a baby who looked an awful lot like Akhil. “Excuse me,” I said, walking over to her. “How could this happen?” She raised her hands, backing away from the door. After a few moments she bolted out of the room. I followed her outside but by then it was too late: she had already disappeared. Out of the parking lot. Out of our lives for good. ◆

  world famous

  When I didn’t match, I went home to Illinois and became one of those ghosts you saw at the mall: the ones who never left. My parents were at my sister’s house in Seattle for the summer; she had just had a baby boy. The baby’s name, Rohan, was a link between two worlds, Indian and Gaelic. Rohan was both, with soft, golden skin. I’d met him days after his birth. “Stay,” my sister had said, her eyes rimmed with fatigue. “Spend the summer with us. What are you going to do all by yourself in Illinois?” My parents agreed. I pitied their pity.

  I flew home instead, watching over their house. I answered the telephone the few times it rang in the night. “They’re in Seattle,” I said. “Yes, yes. It’s wonderful news.” The house was unnervingly still. It was a two-story brick structure my father had built for us when I was ten. He was a doctor himself, but he no longer practiced. He owned a clinic and employed other doctors to practice in his place.

  “Never work for anyone,” he would say, after one too many beers. “Everyone is an asshole.”

  When I called to tell him the news—that I hadn’t matched—my father had gone quiet over the phone. I had expected him to berate me, but what he said instead was much worse.

  “Well, what can you do?”

  What can you do? It was the finality that so unnerved me: there was nothing that could be done.

  My mother behaved like a publicist.

  “No need to tell anyone. What business is it of theirs, anyway? Sharmila Aunty will have questions, I’m sure. But don’t worry: I will handle her.”

  Later, I overheard my mother telling Sharmila Aunty that I had taken the year off to do research.

  So it was settled. The dust cleared. My parents could show their faces in public again. Then my sister had the baby and they flew to Seattle, no longer needing to.

  * * *

  The first few days at their house were strange. I kept hearing odd noises downstairs. The white carpets retained the imprints of a vacuum cleaner. The granite surfaces were polished and slick. The rooms, bright and spacious, were empty. I stared out the windows and caught a glimpse of our neighbor, Mrs. Kenyon, fetching the newspaper in her robe. Cars flicked by the cul-de-sac and I saw the glint of their wheels. My cell phone pierced the silence and I awakened from a nap, coated in sweat.

  I drank steadily, whole bottles of whiskey and scotch. Blue-faced gods looked on in disapproval. In school, my teacher, Mrs. Nussbaum, had asked me to make a presentation on Hinduism. She had wanted to know more about my “culture.” We were studying world religions, and, after Jennifer Goldberg talked about Hanukkah, it was my turn. “Encore,” she said, “I’d like you to teach the class about Diwali.”

  My name is Ankur. But it was easier to let everyone call me Encore. After a few years of this, I started saying it myself. “Hi,” I once said to an Indian classmate in college. “I’m Encore.” She looked surprised. Later, she told me her name was Anupuma Vandhana Narayanaswami.

  On my third night at home, I went through my high school yearbook. I was twenty-eight, two months shy of our ten-year reunion. The images of my classmates were younger versions of the ones I’d seen recently on Facebook. I found my senior picture, remembering the sunny afternoon when I had had it taken. It was three weeks before the start of senior year, and my hair was bleached from the sun; a diamond shone in my ear. I was staring at that earring, feeling around for the faint depression it had left behind, when I noticed her face.

  * * *

  At school, everyone had assumed that Anjali and I were related. Some people thought we were dating. A few others said it was both. “Encore and Angelica are having a two-headed baby.”

  She was a shy, quiet girl who kept mostly to herself. Her hair was the texture of wool. Acne scars formed dark pits on her cheeks. I felt sorry for her, remembering the times she had turned bright red when our teacher called on her in class. She was the daughter of family friends, people my parents socialized with at parties but kept at a distance—they weren’t rich like we were. Anjali’s father owned a motel. He drove a Camry. He wore brown dress pants and white tennis shoes, and his hair
gleamed with coconut oil.

  At those parties, Anjali traded her stonewashed denim for lenghas or shalwars. She had a sense of humor, a startling laugh I never heard in the hallways at school. She was friends with other Indian girls who lived in neighboring towns. They giggled while braiding each other’s hair, or choreographing dances to Bollywood songs. Sometimes they performed these dances in the basement of someone’s home, and I, their faithful audience, watched them. In those moments, Anjali came to life, swinging her hips, batting her eyes. Crowds gathered at weddings and Diwali parties just to watch her. Uncles whistled while Anjali spun in circles, her belly, exposed beneath the jeweled hem of her blouse, glistening with sweat. I often wondered what happened to her on Monday mornings when she walked into class with a blank expression on her face. We didn’t talk much at school. We were the only Indians in our class; there was no need to make it more obvious.

  I put away the yearbook and remembered what my parents had told me about Anjali: that her marriage to a man named Vijay had ended one year after the wedding. It was a community scandal. My parents had been invited to that wedding. So had I. I didn’t attend: I was a second-year medical student, wrapped up in my exams. I hardly remembered her. Little was revealed as to why the marriage had ended. Anjali’s parents simply called everyone to tell them the news: the relationship was over. But my parents and their friends speculated. Some said Anjali had a drinking problem. Others said the groom, Vijay, was from a wealthy family, and that Anjali’s parents couldn’t afford to keep up. Still others said it was a consequence of life in America, that kids just did as they pleased.

  * * *

  The next morning, I went for a run in the neighborhood and found Dr. Bernstein watering his plants.

  “Ankur,” he said, walking over to me. “I didn’t expect to see you here. You’re in medical school, right?”

  He wore a white T-shirt over navy shorts. His hair, thinning at the crown, clung to his scalp.

  “I just graduated,” I said.

  He smiled. Dr. Bernstein’s house had Corinthian columns. The shrubs were perfectly trimmed. He was a colleague of my father’s, and he had invited us to dinner throughout the years, though my mother had always complained: “I can’t eat that bland food.”