Nights Like This

by Divya Sood

  “Isn’t that what ambition is?”

  “For some people, I guess. For me, ambition is getting through the month with enough money for rent and having five new photos to sell. Ambition is teaching some kid how to conjugate a verb properly. That’s ambition as I know it.”

  “So what’s my ambition?” I asked.

  “To find a purpose,” Vanessa said softly by my ear. “To find conviction.”

  There it was again, “conviction.” But I knew she was right. I had stopped trying to understand how and why Vanessa knew me like she did. She comforted me by knowing me like that, in a way that no one had ever known me, relationship or not, long time or casual meetings. I felt, with Vanessa, hopeful that something would come of me, that I would someday use a hammer to drive nails into a wall so I could hang what I considered art in a space that I called my own.

  “There is another photographer I like,” I said shyly, not knowing whether my revelation would elicit delight or derision.

  “Who’s that, princess?”

  “Gregory Colbert, the Ashes and Snow exhibit he did a few years back in Manhattan. I really liked that, especially his work with elephants.”

  “I love his work!” she shouted.

  She shifted so she could move closer, her hands in the air, animated, telling me more about the artist.

  “I can’t believe you went to that too. We might have been in the same room, looking at the same work.”

  “Maybe,” I said as I imagined passing Vanessa unknown, without a glance only a few years ago. What if I had run into her then, met her. Would I have loved her? I was sure I would have.

  “What if we’d met then?” she asked as if reading my mind.

  “Fate that we met now,” I said wondering if I truly believed in fate, feeling as if I had to because otherwise, there would be too much randomness in the world.

  “And I’m glad we met,” she said as she ran her fingers across my cheek and then, leaning cautiously, kissed my lips.

  “You want to get something to eat?” she asked. “I was thinking we’d just go downstairs, get some sandwiches, have a few drinks at the bar.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We sat quietly for a while as the sun set and we were surrounded by a musky darkness that would soon become night. I wanted to turn on a light because I could not tolerate the idea of sitting in the dark. I wondered why the darkness still intimidated me like it did and for a moment I started to ponder the idea. But I did not want to resort to pensiveness, not tonight, not while I did not know what the evening would bring. I kissed her shoulder. I tried to get up but she did not move.

  “Wait, let me get up so I can get ready for dinner,” I said.

  “Just trust that I got you,” she said, “Even if your heart’s beating fast and you get scared because it’ll be dark, you’re not alone walking around Central Park, Jess. I found you then and I’ll find you again. Just relax. Just trust me. You don’t need the light.”

  “I got lost in the dark once,” I said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  I held her as I spoke.

  “I was walking home from a friend’s house in Kolkata. I was about ten. And there was a blackout. I couldn’t see a thing. I walked the wrong way, took the wrong turns and I was lost. I was alone and although there were people around me, I couldn’t see them. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was so dark it felt like there was weight on me. And then a hand touched me, grabbed for me and I ran and ran and cried and I was so scared. It took two hours for the lights to come back on. It took three for my father to find me and take me home. I can’t explain exactly how I felt. But that’s how I feel in the dark.”

  “Like love.”

  “How’s that?”

  How was she going to take the most frightening night of my life and equate it to what should be the most wonderful feeling in the world? But if anyone could, I knew Vanessa could. She was, after all, the princess of jasmine. So I listened to her, intrigued, without moving, without even breathing.

  “You take some wrong turns, end up alone and scared and then, just when you can’t breathe anymore, just when all your fears reach for you, you run and run and then someone you love finds you. Always. Today, it’s me.”

  When she kissed me, I needed her to kiss me. We stole hungry kisses in the glow of a sun now gone and I wanted to be nowhere else but there, with no one else but Vanessa. I needed her to hold me in an overstuffed chair, sitting by the window of a random hotel room in Philly. I needed her to make sure that I could withstand an evening when I was running away from darkness, from memories, from ghosts of myself.

  I thought back to Anjali for a fleeting moment. Platonic I had said. But a kiss here and there wouldn’t hurt anything. It wasn’t like I was sleeping with Vanessa.

  “What are you thinking about now?” Vanessa asked. “You’re so damn distracted.”

  I reached for her face and pulled her close to me. I kissed her once. I kissed her again.

  “Just thinking of being conviction-less,” I said. “Let’s go get some drinks please.”

  She smiled at me. She traced my lips slowly with her thumb. This time when she kissed me, I thought only of her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dinner was overpriced Philly cheese steaks at the hotel bar and grill. We sat at a table next to a nice couple from Austin who, after much conversation, discovered that Vanessa and I were not sisters but lovers and left abruptly after scribbling their room number on the check slip. I would have thought they were merely in a rush except that his face was all shades of crimson and he murmured “fucking foreigners” as he took his wife’s hand and walked past our table. I didn’t understand why he chose “foreigners” to describe us because we had both told him we were from New York. Somehow, it seemed to me that he believed that Vanessa and I had to be from a country far away where a lack of morality justified our relationship.

  “That’s fucking great,” Vanessa said.

  “What, that suddenly they think we’re assholes?”

  “Well doesn’t it bother you?”

  I didn’t answer her, unsure of what to say.

  “Tell me you don’t give a fuck about shit like that,” she said.

  “I don’t really,” I said. “I mean, not enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “I don’t know. I always think I should care more. Do more. But at the end of the day, I’m just happy living out my life, you know? If he wants to hate me, let him. If I care, he wins, right? So I just live me life.”

  “Yes and had the Reverend Martin Luther King said that, our world may have been very different today.”

  “That was an altogether different fight, Vanessa.”

  “Really, Jess?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I was waiting for Vanessa to go on a tirade, to lecture me and tell me how it was my social obligation to do something. Sign something. Wear something. Paint rainbows.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know why we’re here arguing when I could be home at peace. I don’t want to argue with you over logistics, Vanessa. You do your thing and I’ll do my thing. I think you said that to me. And when I’m telling you about what I do or don’t, you’re getting upset with me. If you want a political activist go find one. To me living my life the way I want to live it is enough.”

  “Sometimes, that’s the best you can do, right?” she said.

  I looked at her with surprise and wondered how to take her in, how to understand her. I would have guessed that, if anything, Vanessa would be the one to try to shake my nonchalance. She didn’t seem to mind my haphazard attitude.

  “Are you politically active?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t play into the bullshit. I’m not fighting a fucking war. But you come into my world and tell me how to live in it, then I’ll fucking go off. I’m not an activist; I’m not a marcher, not a preacher, not a martyr. Someday, someone will come along and do for gay rig
hts what was done for civil rights. But you know what I think? I think that it’s the art of the time, just like it was back then, that’ll initiate momentum and movement. And then things will fucking explode.”

  “You think so?” I said.

  “Absolutely, princess.”

  “Why not you, Vanessa?”

  “Why not me?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because I’m not the one who is going to write the prologue to the stories that are now being written, lived, breathed, enjoyed or suffered. I know someone, who, once she finds her conviction, will rock the world with her book. A book about us, about this very night and about pasts and presents she has lived. Don’t you feel it yet?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There it is again…. ‘I don’t know.’”

  She smiled at me. We sat quietly, staring at discarded edges of bread, a straggle of meat here and there on our plates.

  “Will you write our story, whatever it turns out to be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s the first conviction you have. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “now can we please have a shot or something? This is too much right now.”

  “That’s a great idea.”

  Vanessa signed the check and we got up and walked slowly to the bar.

  We settled on the bar stools and Vanessa looked around to attract the attention of the bartender, a blonde in her late thirties who looked bored with the bar and with life overall.

  “Can we have two shots of tequila?” Vanessa asked when the bartender looked towards her.

  “Salt and lemon?”

  “Salt and lime,” Vanessa said. “You prefer lemon?” she asked as she looked at me.

  “I could never tell the difference between a lime and a lemon,” I said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now you will.”

  The bartender came with our shots in one hand and a plastic cup with lime wedges in the other.

  “Can we have lemon too, please?” Vanessa asked.

  The bartender smiled.

  “Well sure,” she said as if she was pleased beyond belief to get lemon wedges as well.

  The bartender returned with a saltshaker and a small plastic cup of lemon wedges.

  “Now try this,” Vanessa said as she handed me a wedge of lime.

  I put the lime in my mouth and sucked the pulp. I tasted the sweet sourness, the pungency of the lime. It was like tasting a fragrance.

  “Now try this.”

  She handed me a lemon wedge and I took it.

  I placed the wedge slowly in my mouth. It was a more flavorfully sour, a true sour.

  “Taste the difference?”

  “When you taste them like that, yeah,” I said.

  Vanessa smiled at me as if we had made a great discovery. She reached for her shot glass and gave me mine. Playfully, she pulled my hand, licked the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger and salted my skin. She did the same with her hand.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lemon or lime?” she asked me.

  “I like the lime better,” I said.

  She smiled at me. She looked beautiful.

  “Bottoms up,” she said. “To limes and lemons.”

  We drank the shot, sucked lime wedges, had another.

  “What do you usually drink?” I asked her.

  “Bombay Sapphire and tonic.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yeah well, better than a lot of other shit that you could drink,” Vanessa said.

  I didn’t have a preferred drink. I thought I should but I didn’t have anything I liked enough to drink regularly. I usually ordered Heineken Lights but that was more out of habit. Unless she was experimenting with flavors, Anjali stuck to her very, very dirty martinis, extra olives. I always thought she was trying to fit a snack into a martini glass. Tiffany had liked dry vodka martinis. She had told me once that women who drank fruity, girly drinks were bad fucks. I had been tempted to tell her that she wasn’t that great either but I had refrained myself.

  “You okay?” Vanessa asked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  We sat at the bar, looking at each other. The lighting at the bar was a soft incandescent glow. Vanessa’s skin was brown, baked like raw earth, fragrant with her citrus tainted perfume. I looked at her face, an angelic devilish look about her, as if she were both soft and dangerous, as if she could go either way. I was drawn to her, this woman who in an instant, solved the mystery of limes and lemons. This woman who, on a whim, took me to an airport to watch planes glide on tarmac.

  “What’re you thinking?” she asked, “Ready for another drink?”

  “Not a shot.”

  “No, but will you let me order you a drink?”

  “You going to order for me?”

  Vanessa kissed my arm, close to my shoulder, where the short sleeves of my shirt ended abruptly.

  “We are going to find you a drink. A drink that is yours, a drink you are known by.”

  “Is that important?” I asked.

  “It’s important only because it’s important to you,” she said.

  She kissed my arm again and then looked at me, her eyes softly intoxicated, somehow very intoxicating in their ability to understand me. I did want a drink that was mine, a mixture that identified and defined me. I wanted distinction in everything I did, everything that surrounded me. I wanted to be aware, alive to everything I experienced. I wanted every choice to be deliberate, every action to have meaning not to anyone else, but to me.

  “Tonight, you’re going to try a gin and tonic. See if that suits you.”

  “You think it will?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll try.”

  She ordered two Bombay Sapphires with tonic. The bartender seemed pleased.

  “To us,” Vanessa said as we held our glasses full of transparent, gleaming ice and liquid.

  We sipped our drinks slowly and I felt the night mellow around us. She held my hand as we sat at the bar. I felt like she was holding me, not letting me fall from my idealism into the reality of the way things were. Simple gestures seemed meaningful with Vanessa and that simple evening seemed full of meaning and possibility.

  “So Jess, how do we get you to write?”

  “Break my heart. Sometimes that works.”

  I smiled at her. It was a dishonest smile. Truth was I didn’t know how to get back into it. I didn’t even know how I had struggled with it as long as I had. But all the responses I had gotten, every critique, every rejection, had said the writing was good but needed emotion. I didn’t know how to change that or even what that meant. I just knew that when I had stopped, I had stopped wanting. But I was hungry again, desiring to write but not as I had written. I wanted to write with genuineness. I wanted to write what was inside me but I was scared to see what lurked in my heart. And I truly believe that there lurked, not lived, something inside me that I was scared to bring to my own attention. I sipped my drink, wishing more than anything to achieve numbness.

  “So, Jess, what do we have to do? Fuck? Get drunk? Cry?”

  “No, smart ass.”

  You had to laugh with Vanessa, at her antics, at her choicest of words.

  “Then what?”

  I leaned towards her and kissed her mouth softly.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “All right. Try this. What is Hemingway? I mean if you had to say what the essence of his writing was, what would you say?”

  I thought for a moment. Hemingway.

  “Short sentences but vivid. His language is unique, a style infused with life and vivaciousness.”

  “What is Frost?”

  “Poet of nature but his language is often evoking themes of loneliness, love, sometimes friendship. It is the fusion that makes his poetry stay within the heart.”

  “So,” Vanessa said as she looked into my
eyes.

  She looked within me and then through my hollow self.

  “So,” she repeated softly, “what is Jess?”

  I kept looking into her eyes and I wished she could seep into me. I wanted Vanessa to fill my hollow spaces.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly, “I don’t know. But I want to know. I used to but it wasn’t anything I want to go back to.”

  “You used to write crap.”

  “Well, I guess.”

  “No, you had the skill and you used to use it to write what you thought you should. You wrote what you thought ‘they’ wanted you to whoever the fuck ‘they’ were. You were scared. Write about you. To do that, you have to find you. To do that, you need…conviction!”

  She took a sip of her Bombay Sapphire. I watched the liquid pass her lips, slip past her strong jaw, down her throat. When she swallowed, I watched and I wanted to kiss her neck. I did. She gently pulled my face towards her so she could look into my eyes again.

  “I take photos of what I want, when I want. I could go around wondering what I should shoot, what people might want. But why?”

  “But you don’t want to be a photographer.”

  “I am a photographer because I take photographs. I don’t need anyone to validate that. You are a writer. You can’t own that because you’re waiting for validation. From whom? Whose words are worth more than yours?”

  “Yours?” I joked.

  “Well of course, smart ass. But I’m being honest. Write and write honestly. Because you don’t want to be a fake because then, you’ll never be a fucking writer. Be a sell out if you want. But don’t be a fake.”

  “What’s the difference?” I said as I gulped my drink, anxious once again to enter a state of numbness.

  “You can only sell out after you’ve been going all out for you. Being a fake means you’ve never been yourself. It’s strange. No one will trust you until you’re you. And then whatever the fuck you become, you’ll still be someone. But if you never start as you, no one will ever trust you worth a damn.”