Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  Moments later, a Persian waitress came and took their entrée orders. Devi ordered another small plate salad.

  “That all you’re going to eat?” Susannah said. “I ordered three dishes. You can definitely share.”

  “I don’t want to pork up.”

  “You know, I can totally see a family resemblance.” Veronica cocked her head to one side and adjusted her pale blonde ballerina bun.

  Susannah laughed. “Really?”

  “We don’t look at all alike.” Devi tried to hide her distress. “I mean, not at all.”

  “It’s in her bone structure. And that gorgeous skin. She has so much potential, especially now that the agency is looking for more diverse models,” Veronica continued. “But I could also see her as an edgy model, instead of a commercial one. Have you ever considered modeling?”

  “Never,” Susannah said.

  “It’s incredibly hard, of course, but lucrative if you’re on the commercial side. I paid all my college loans within a year. Devi, what was your major at Yale? French?”

  “Italian.”

  “Same difference, right?” Veronica made a face. In her bright laughter, the celebratory clinking of champagne glasses. “No money in it! You ought to move to New York, Susannah.”

  “She’s going to law school.”

  “Oh no! You can’t! That’s so boring.” Veronica seized a Kalamata olive and began nibbling its purple flesh, working her way around the pit. “We’ll see what Jake thinks when he gets here.”

  By the time Jake arrived an hour later, the women were drunk. Jake was tall with rakish dark hair and a weak chin, not especially handsome, but made so to Devi through his impeccable tailored suit and crimson silk tie and the intricate gold timepiece on his wrist.

  Devi excused herself as he slipped into a chair the waitress placed on the other side of Veronica and hurried to the bathroom. The bathroom was sterile and beige, reeking of lemon. Inside one of the stalls, she knelt before the toilet and stuck her finger down her throat. It took some finger dancing, but in a moment, she vomited up the poached persimmons and two or three peach bellinis. Immediately her body felt lighter, unburdened. She was about to flush the toilet when she heard someone come into the bathroom and paused.

  Two people were making out. Lips smacking. Piggy grunts. Heavy breathing. She peered through the crack between the door of the stall and the metal frame. Jake was pulling Veronica’s ruby red slip dress down and sucking on one of her tiny white breasts, murmuring something—repeating sweet little whore—as his trousers collapsed around his knees. He thrust into her hard, knocking her head against the cold beige tiles on the wall. She didn’t flinch. Devi wanted to sob. She’d slept with Jake, too, before she knew that everyone did. So, this was what that looked like.

  Presently, Jake pulled up his pants and Veronica pulled the spaghetti straps of her glittering dress onto her shoulders. Jake splashed some cold water on his face, slapped Veronica’s ass, and strode out of the bathroom. Veronica ran a pale mauve wand around her mouth and smacked her lips.

  When they were both gone, Devi waited a beat before emerging from the stall. She set her compact on the aluminum counter beneath the mirror and pulled a plastic packet from her purse. She dumped some powder onto the mirror of her gold compact and rolled up a dollar bill. Snorted. Trembled with the calm, clear pleasure.

  At that moment, Susannah came into the bathroom. “You do coke?”

  Startled, Devi knocked the compact with the remaining coke onto the floor. A pale cloud floated up from the floor, disappeared like dust motes under the fluorescent lights.

  “No!” Devi stifled the urge to get on her hands and knees and snort the powder right off the tiny floor tiles. She stuffed the dollar bill and compact into her minaudière—she could just imagine this bit of information circulating through the grapevine of aunts, a source of tut-tutting, whispers about where her mother had gone wrong, whispers that it was the influence of America, that drugs were an American vice, what a shame. She fastened the clasp of her bag and rubbed her nose.

  Susannah shrugged and opened the door of a stall. “I don’t care if you do, or anything, you know. No judgment.”

  “Who are you to judge me, anyway?” Devi asked, before she understood Susannah was trying to convey indifference. Unable to swallow her words, she spun and stalked out of the bathroom.

  After dinner, Jake hailed a cab. He and Veronica were draped over each other in the front seat, and Bianca, Angie, Devi, and Susannah squeezed across the vinyl back seats, their lean thighs squished against each other like packaged sausages. Two of the models remained on the sidewalk, lit cigarettes, and motioned them onward. The cab rolled forward into traffic. It flashed across town, eventually stopping at Jake’s request in front of a club with a queue that snaked around the front of the building and turned into a narrow alleyway full of dumpsters and the stink of raw sewage.

  “Are you all right?” Susannah whispered. “We could just go home.”

  Devi ignored her. Jake and Veronica nonchalantly bypassed the line, and the rest followed them inside and through the crowd to the backlit bar. Inside, Devi drank a gin and tonic and danced for a few minutes before snagging a corner booth where she could observe the others grinding against each other.

  In spite of her ballet training, Devi was uncomfortable at popular clubs—uncomfortable with the floppiness of bodies, the gross, unseemly way complete strangers wrapped around each other, crushing their parts together. She’d gone to a well-respected convent school before coming to the States, and the incongruity of her life before, and her life in New York, made her feel as if she were an innocent strolling through an awful, surreal Fellini film, viewing a parade of deplorable freaks.

  Susannah danced by herself in the middle of a throng of strangers. Surprisingly, she was a decent dancer. The last time Devi had seen Susannah was when she was sixteen years old and had just arrived at the San Francisco International Airport from Chennai to stay with her aunt in the suburbs of Fremont for three days before flying to New Haven for college. Susannah had been gangly and awkward. In spite of the skylights, the house was always shadowy, reeking of sandalwood smoke from the incense Susannah’s Catholic father burned all weekend and every evening. Noisy, too, but not with sounds of civil conversation, like her house in Chennai, but with the maddening, discordant sounds of NPR and the Beatles and Siouxsie and the Banshees—each of the three people in that family listened to something entirely different. Evidently, they didn’t want to talk to each other, and who could blame them. Every once in a while one of them would try to drown the others out by turning up the volume just a tad until the whole house vibrated.

  Although Susannah was just a year younger than Devi, she had still been in high school then. They’d taken BART to the city, and because neither of them was in possession of more than their train fares, they window-shopped in Union Square and strolled around the Civic Center. Gaudy baubles and skyscrapers and plate glass windows and pigeons—the new world was startling. Devi noted the clean austerity, and even though San Francisco was not the largest of cities, she immediately saw her own life had been small and disorderly by comparison.

  What she remembered most clearly from the visit, however, was overhearing Susannah complaining to her mother that Devi did not know how to use the toilet and had peed on the back of the toilet seat. Susannah’s overworked and proper mother admonished her that the splashed liquid wasn’t pee, but water, and that using cups of water to wash as people did in Chennai was far more hygienic than using toilet paper. The memory still made Devi burn with shame.

  Exhausted, the dancers came to the booth where Devi was sucking a stiff lemon wedge from the rim of her third G&T. Veronica slid in next to Devi, her face flushed. “I was just telling Jake that he should have Sue come in to do head shots.”

  “You should,” Jake said.

  “You’re so lucky that you know Devi,” Angie said, sticking her blue gum-wrapped tongue out for a second, like a blonde
Kali.

  “I don’t want to be a model,” Susannah said.

  “There’s a lot of money in it,” Jake said. “And I do have a client that wants someone with your skin tone.”

  “She’s awfully dark to be pretty in a conventional sense.” Devi looked down at her glass. It was empty except for ice cubes. She slithered down on the vinyl booth and crawled under the table, past all the legs. She wondered if she should ask Jake directly about the foundation gig in front of the others. The following day was when she was supposed to find out, but surely, he already knew.

  As she emerged on the other side of table and stood up, Veronica was saying, “Oh, I would just love to have such beautiful skin. I can’t tell you the number of tanning accidents I’ve suffered.”

  “If you think it’ll pay well, I’m game,” Susannah said to Jake. She looked at Devi pointedly. Devi shrugged as if she didn’t care. She trudged to the bar to order another drink.

  ***

  The next morning, the cousins woke early. Veronica, Bianca, and Angie were still sleeping. No snow, but the sky was overcast, the light watery and thin. “I can never sleep after drinking that much,” Susannah said as Devi stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes, her tongue furry. Susannah was frying eggs on the stovetop and drinking a glass of almond milk. The odor of hot eggs and paprika made Devi want to throw up. She scooped espresso grinds into the machine.

  After she’d pulled her shot, Devi said, “So, you’re the guest. What did you want to do today? I was thinking blowouts. I need to get my hair done this weekend.”

  “My other cousin Lucy Marie wants to meet us. I thought we’d see some art—I’ve never been to the Frick.”

  “Your other cousin? Does she live here?”

  “She just moved here with her husband.”

  Devi wrinkled her nose. Susannah’s cousins on her father’s side were Catholic villagers, untouchables who had converted to avoid the caste system. Everyone in Devi’s Brahmin family knew the match was inappropriate, and that the scandal was why Susannah’s parents had left India when she was born, not to return for ten years. “They aren’t the type of people who go to art museums.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Those kinds of people are not cultured, are they?” She frowned. Her thoughts weren’t coming out right. How to say this? “They’re not like us.”

  Susannah raised her eyebrows and said nothing for a moment as she scraped the eggs onto a plate. She clattered around, opening drawers. Devi handed her a fork from the dishwasher. “They’ll go. They’re my cousins, they’re family—they’ll want to see me while I’m in New York. And after that, Jake asked me to come in to do some head shots.”

  Devi frowned. Family. Okay. That was probably a dig that meant she should join Susannah at the museum.

  ***

  Susannah’s other cousins waited in front of the Frick, the sloped snow hardening into long dazzling white slides across the steps below them. They were a dark, stout couple, well groomed, and evidently a bit older, wearing thick green and purple overcoats and hats and wool scarves. Lucy Marie wore a tiny gold cross around her neck. Susannah hugged them and called Lucy Marie “akka” because they were cousin-sisters, even though she didn’t call Devi that, and as far as Devi knew, she didn’t even know Tamil. Devi shook their hands quickly in greeting and stuffed her hands back in her pockets. “So wonderful to see you again! Do you like art?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy Marie said. Her husband, Paraag, nodded.

  Devi smiled. Lying, of course. They probably hadn’t been to a single art museum since coming to Manhattan. “Which artists do you like?”

  The couple looked at each other. “Van Gogh?” Paraag volunteered.

  “Monet?”

  “Oh, for Impressionists, we should have gone to the MOMA.” Devi looked at Susannah trying to convey I told you so, but Susannah showed no signs of comprehending her expression, so Devi led them into the building, gabbing the whole way about how dull the Frick collection was compared to the Met or the Guggenheim.

  As they drifted through the collection, Devi was astonished by how much time Susannah took, reading each placard and scrutinizing every painting as if she were trying to determine whether it was a forgery. Devi had completed a room before Susannah was finished with two paintings. Lucy Marie and Paraag followed her, whispering to each other.

  In the next room, Devi asked, “Do you really like these?”

  Susannah frowned, taken aback. “Yes.”

  “But not really, you don’t. They’re kind of boring, right?” Paintings were the sort of thing people pretended to like to appear cultured, to indicate their higher position in the social strata.

  “Art history was one of my majors.”

  Devi hadn’t known that. “But what do you see in them? There’s nothing there.”

  “There’s a there there,” Susannah said, and snickered to herself before scrutinizing the next painting. Mystifying.

  They pressed onward. Devi touched her smartphone repeatedly to determine whether Jake had called her about the foundation assignment. No emails. No texts.

  Frustrated, she excused herself. Once inside the cool, reassuring quarters of the bathroom, she snorted a line of coke and reviewed her Twitter timeline and emails. Still no email from Jake, though he had time to tweet all morning.

  After the museum, they lunched at a Gujarati buffet. Devi listened in silence and pretended to eat as the others caught up on gossip about other cousins Devi did not know. Finally she interrupted Lucy Marie’s monologue about her sister’s friend’s wedding. “Isn’t this the best food? These are the best ladyfingers I’ve ever had. What do you think, Paraag?”

  “Perhaps a little pricey?” Paraag fastidiously wiped his thin lips.

  “Oh, you can’t afford this? I thought you said you were an engineer? Well, that’s okay, lunch on me!” Devi said. “I’m waiting for confirmation that I’ll be the new face of a very chic brand of foundation, so it should be no problem.”

  “He didn’t say he couldn’t afford it.” Susannah’s eyebrows knitted together.

  “Isn’t that what you meant?” Devi asked Paraag.

  “No, no. That’s very kind of you, but I can get lunch.”

  “Yes, we can buy our own lunch.” Lucy Marie glared at Devi, who pretended not to notice as she turned her head to spit more rice into her napkin.

  Once they’d finished the sticky gulab jamuns, Devi and Susannah bid the couple goodbye, and hailed a cab. At the agency, a photographer led Susannah to another room to do her makeup. Meanwhile, Devi found Jake’s office. He was working on his computer. Pleasantries were exchanged, dragged on a bit longer than they should have, and finally she came to the point. “I didn’t get an email from you about that account.”

  “I thought it best we do that conversation in person,” Jake said. “You know how I hate drafting those assignment emails.”

  Bad news. Devi wished she could run outside and pretend she hadn’t confronted him, but instead she used as brave a voice as she could muster. “Give it to me.”

  “The advertising firm wanted to go a different direction. With somebody who looks more  . . . dramatically ethnic.”

  Devi nodded vigorously, so he wouldn’t notice tears welling in her eyes.

  “You haven’t worked in some months now, and my father thinks that, well, perhaps you ought to look for a new line of work. You’re starting to show the signs of aging.”

  “I’m not even twenty-three yet. What signs?”

  Jake looked around as if he wanted to escape, but then with an air of resignation, he propped his legs up on the table and looked into her eyes. “You’re getting crow’s feet, for one, which makes getting advertising work for makeup rather difficult. On top of that, you’ve developed some chub, a spare tire, like so many Indian models seem to do. And your hips—you just don’t have the elongated look that’s called for. I tried to pitch you to some of our editorial clients, but y
ou’re too conventionally pretty for that sort of work. Your look isn’t unusual enough. I’m sorry if this stings, but you’d rather I be honest with you than waste your time, right?”

  “I think I’d rather you waste my time.”

  Jake chortled as if she were joking.

  “Maybe you don’t understand, my visa depends on this.”

  “That’s the thing. Your visa is up for renewal this summer. We won’t be renewing. We can’t sponsor you if you’re not getting work.”

  Devi began pacing the office. She tried to keep the hysterical edge out of her voice. “What? You’re joking. What am I supposed to do? What will happen to me?”

  “Your family’s still in India, aren’t they?”

  She decided to change tacks and approached Jake, placing her hand on his crotch and massaging. She whispered in his ear. “I can’t go back. You don’t want me to go back, do you?”

  He grunted. She unzipped his jeans and stuck her hand in his boxers, running her hand over him, trying to do what he’d liked before. She kissed his neck and ducked down to take him in her mouth.

  After he was finished, she looked up and asked, “Change your mind?”

  “Oh, honey.” He pulled his pants back up with a sigh. She stood. “You’re very good, I’ll give you that.”

  “Going back would be failure.”

  “Come on, it can’t be that bad. You have a humanities degree, don’t you, hon? You can get some secretarial work.”

  Afterward, Devi left the building and went to the cafe next door. She ordered a cup of coffee with cream and two sugars, realizing that it no longer mattered, if it had ever mattered, if she added cream and sugar to everything now. As she rode the elevator up to the agency to wait for Susannah, she sipped her too-sweet coffee and thought of the tropical heat of Chennai and her parent’s cramped yellow stucco house on a quiet street. The tiny back room where she’d practiced going en pointe, where she’d rehearsed for the part of Clara, the parts of Odette and Odile. Her mother frying dosas and bringing her filter coffee topped with foam during breaks, how much her mother adored her. She thought of the financial sacrifices her parents had made so she could go to an Ivy League college and live in the States, so she could be a star.