by Divya Sood
“Besides me.”
“Two,” I said.
“And how many girlfriends have you had?”
“Four.”
“There you go.”
“That’s a 50/50 ratio. That’s pretty good. And what about you, Vanessa? Who have you dated?”
At that moment, I didn’t care about the women she had dated in regards to ethnicity. I cared because I wanted to know where she had lost her heart, where she had broken it and who had repaired it. I wanted to know Vanessa in all her passions, through all her lovers, as she had developed, over her lifetime, to become who she was. But I don’t think she understood that. I don’t think that’s where her mind was.
“Honestly, Jess, most of the women I have dated seriously have been Indian.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does that scare you?” I asked her gently, “Does it scare you with me?”
“Yes. It scares me that any minute you could fucking turn around and run to your sugar mommy because of where she was born and not how she cares for you.”
I touched her hand and she looked at me, her eyes searching me for my prejudices, for my inclusion and exclusion of lovers based on geography.
“I’m not like that, Vanessa. I’m not. I just do what I do because I want to, I love whom I want because I fall for her. If you don’t believe that, then I don’t know how you could stand being with me, waiting for the moment I turn my back on you.”
The silence that followed was a completely full space and I knew that she would have to say something, not me. Anything I could have said would have sounded empty because I had no response to her fear. Not because it was something that was true but because I knew that nothing I said could make the fear dissolve within her. I waited for her to say something. I waited for her to tell me what she needed from me, at least at that moment, to feel a little better about what was troubling her.
“It’s hard getting to know you, Jess. It’s hard because I do fear that you’ll fuck me over for geography.”
“I’ve fucked people over, Vanessa. I have. But never for that. I don’t know if that makes it any better.”
She smiled at me as she shook her head.
“You have the strangest fucking way of making things better.”
“It’s true though,” I said, smiling back at her, touching her face with the back of my hand.
“So is your name really Jess?”
“My full name is Jasbir.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means…brave.”
“You will be,” she whispered to me, “someday, you will be brave, Jasbir.”
“When?” I asked as if she had the answer, as if she knew when I would gain my courage.
“Soon, princess, after Philly. It’ll be magical. You’ll see.”
She must have sensed that my eyes were moistening, that I was a minute away from bawling because she leaned over and kissed me fully, unhurried, unashamed. When she pulled away, the heaviness in the air seemed to have dispersed. I wanted to tell her that the magic she spoke of was named “Vanessa” and I was grateful to have been touched by it. Instead, I smiled slightly, turned away and then ordered us another round of drinks. I was desperately trying to find that place of numbness that came so sweetly sometimes after intoxication, that no man’s land where everything seems dull, muted, unthreatening. But I hadn’t yet discovered it. Somehow our conversations, our togetherness, tugged and pulled at memories and feelings I had sealed in a box and stored somewhere in my mind. I hadn’t been moved in a long time, hadn’t talked about anything except where to eat dinner and when to fuck in I couldn’t remember how long. With Vanessa, it was as if the earth beneath me was being tilled and replanted, another chance, new possibility that maybe this was someone who would answer all the questions I had been too scared to ask all along.
We sat and spoke of frivolous things the rest of the night. We discussed where to buy shoes, the best time to buy Victoria’s Secret undergarments and the best pizza in New York. We talked about the World Cup briefly. We stayed away from matters of the heart, of estrangements and lovers and lovemaking. There’s only so much of all serious talk you can take at once. And someone who is trying to not let the seriousness of things cloud all other possibility deserves the lighter side of things. I realized that night that embedded somewhere within her, Vanessa held fear as well. It was because she had known the demise of love. It was because she realized that sometimes love is not the reason that compels us to act. And, I realized as she pushed my hair behind my ears, that, for all her mischief, Vanessa was falling in love with me just as I was with her.
Chapter Nineteen
I remember every day of our time in Philly. I remember writing every night about the most significant parts of my day and as days went on, there were more significant parts than not and my entries were longer and longer, scribbled in haste in the paisley journal that Vanessa had bought for me. I have gone months and then, looking back, have not remembered most of the time that has passed. But those days in Philly have become, for me, a carved and chiseled artifact of time to which I will always be beholden.
On our third day in Philly, we took the Sebring for a three-hour ride through the city, out of the city, through the suburbs and then turned right back around and drove another three hours. What I remember most about that day is the stretch of road and Vanessa singing Motown hits to make me laugh as we drove. She wore an orange tee shirt that day, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, her arms looking almost golden when kissed by the sun.
“What did you mean by what you wrote last night?” I asked her, pushing my hair back, fighting a wind that was trying so desperately to push my hair forward.
“What I wrote in the journal?”
“Where else?”
“Where else? Well, I wrote a love letter across your back.”
“You what?”
“While you were falling asleep and you asked me to make circles with my fingertips across your shoulders and back. I wrote you a love letter.”
“What did you write to me?” I asked.
“I guess tonight you’ll have to stay awake and figure out the words, Jess.”
“You plan on writing it again?”
“Every night, princess, until you learn all the words by heart.”
I didn’t understand how someone who was so raw had such moments of tenderness and surprise. I had a feeling that afternoon that I would never know Vanessa entirely and that at any given moment, she could flip her words, her tone, her gestures and she would surprise me with a new definition once again of who she was.
It was on our way back from our three hour tour to no island, Gilligan’s or otherwise, that Vanessa took me through the heart of Philly, found a small corner shop with a fruit stand and bought guavas. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what a guava was. And it wasn’t that it was so rare to find one that I was astonished. It was just that through the taste and smell and feel of the fruit, I was tempted to think back to monsoon rains and guava filled afternoons when I had watched, patiently, the peeling of the fruit, the cutting of slivers, the salting and chili powdering of the flesh. I still remembered the taste of those guavas, raspy and sweet against my tongue.
But it had been years since my tongue had known the taste of a guava, the feel of round hard seeds that I enjoyed grinding into a thick paste in my mouth. I taught Vanessa how to salt a guava and she taught me how to spit the seeds without losing any of the fruit.
“I always stop here,” Vanessa said. “When I’m in Philly, I always come here for guavas and mangoes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I found this place once when I was driving around and I was having a bad time of everything. And here was this little bodega like place with guavas and mangoes. I hadn’t eaten all day. I bought fruit here and sat on the curb and ate and it brought me a lot of peace. So it became one of my places in Philly.”
“It’s strange ho
w what you remember effects what you do, isn’t it?”
“That’s always the way it works. Memory is stronger than willpower sometimes.”
“You think so?”
“I think so. We go back to things that we remember as good and happy rather than take a look at the present, at where we are or at what we should and shouldn’t do now.”
We sat quietly in the car, the summer heat relieved intermittently by a breeze. Vanessa fed me slivers of guava slowly, patiently, as if longing for my mouth to enjoy the taste and feel of the fruit.
“How are you still single?” I asked her.
“How am I still single?”
“I’d just think that somewhere someone would be happy to be with you.”
“People always say that, Jess, before they realize the fucked up parts of who you are.”
“How are you fucked up?”
“Hopefully, you’ll never know,” she said as she kissed my forehead, my skin warm and sticky where her lips left traces of guava nectar.
We drove back to the hotel satiated with the fruit, more so with the time that we had spent together. It was a relaxing day, calm and full of pensiveness.
That night we went to a small sushi place where there were only four tables and a sushi bar. We ate at leisure, unhurried and undisturbed. I was beginning to enjoy the idea of not knowing what was coming the day after. For the first time, I was enjoying looking back across days as well as anticipating new ones. For each day that she had been with me, Vanessa had shown me something that I could think back to without dread. We had our words, our sweet words, our angry words, our neutral words, our confused words, our funny words. We also had our silences, full and empty. Without my knowing, and quite dangerously, with our time together, I had started to think of Vanessa as mine.
The drink of the night was a bloody Mary with Tabasco at a bar near the sushi place. The music was a live band from South Philly, a soft jazzy sound that I enjoyed. I liked the bloody Mary better than I had Bombay Sapphire or the Long Island iced tea. But I wasn’t thrilled with it. I listened to the band more than I enjoyed the drink. I watched the fingers of the sax player, a thin girl probably in her early twenties, her hair streaked with traces of auburn, most of it a jet black. Her features were undefined, her lips a thin pink line. I watched her fingers manipulate the keys, the sound a rich, dense sound that captured the night.
Vanessa’s lips had a smear of clear lip-gloss that night and under the calm glow of the lights above us, her mouth looked as if it were inviting my kisses. Her face was peaceful as the music swayed its way into the night. I kept watching her and admiring her. I felt as if I belonged nowhere but here, in Central Philly, listening to jazz and watching the movements of this woman who had become, in the course of a few weeks, my Vanessa. I no longer thought of her as a lover but as my lover, my girl, someone who came home to me at the end of the night, even if home meant a hotel room on the tenth floor of a hotel by the airport.
I had tried desperately to not allow anyone to inhabit that space where the dialogues of possession demanded fidelity and requited affection. I had tried, very successfully, to avoid the void of belonging with Anjali, with anyone I had encountered or slept with or known. I had allowed Julia to enter that part of me. And when she had left, slipping the key to my soul under the door, I had experienced the essence of emptiness. Until I had allowed Julia to enter, I hadn’t known of the vacancy within myself. But once she had left, I felt a void that scared me and kept me away from sleep and rest and happiness. Tiffany had entered partly, keeping the door open a crack in the event that she had to flee. And I had allowed that. But Vanessa had moved in without my knowledge and it scared me to know that she resided within me as someone I thought of as mine.
Vanessa leaned over and kissed me, her lips moist against my cheek.
“Jess, two months ago, you didn’t know I existed.”
I smiled at her and realized she was right. I had found my squatting stranger less than six weeks ago in Central Park. I had abandoned and suspended my life for ten days because she had asked me to. And now I was here, beside her, claiming her in my mind as if we had agreed upon togetherness when, in fact, we had done no such thing. Vanessa had promised me that I would fall in love with her. She had never promised that she would fall in love with me. It made me uneasy but someone who wasn’t interested in me wouldn’t be offering me ten days of undivided attention, would she? If she weren’t falling for me, she wouldn’t care about me finding a means to write either.
“What are you thinking about, princess?” Vanessa asked.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said.
“What about me?”
She rubbed my shoulder with her hand as if she were rubbing my doubts away.
“Nothing,” I said.
She kissed my cheek softly, ran her finger over the ridges of my ear and smiled at me as if she knew where my thoughts had been.
“I like you. I like being here with you. I wish you would just enjoy being here and not worry about anything else. When we get back to New York, as soon as we cross the state border, you can start worrying and I won’t say a word. But here and now, enjoy yourself.”
She leaned closer to me, her lips so close to my ear that I felt her words as much as I heard them.
“Let me be the reason why you are here. Let me be the reason you find a way into yourself and write what you desire. Let me be the reason, Jess, for everything.”
I looked into her eyes and nodded.
“I’m starting to like you a lot,” I said.
“Then let go and like me. What other choice do you have?”
“None, I guess,” she said.
“Absolutely none.”
We sat for another hour lost in music, sometimes in thoughts. When we returned to the hotel, I wrote one line in the journal, words that belonged to me only because they had been given to me during a night of jazz: Let me be the reason why. I didn’t know why I wrote those words, but those were the first words she offered me and I took them from her without hesitation. I stole moments from her as if she had no right to them because she had offered them to me. And yet, in my mind, they had been my moments all along because I remembered them and scribbled them in a journal that she had given to me. And once I took from her, I never looked back.
And Vanessa never asked. She read the journal. She made notes and added to what I had written. Even when she saw her words written in my handwriting, she said nothing and merely wrote another line.
The paisley journal became a sweet flirtation. It became filled with notes and questions and sometimes drawings of a flower I had playfully tucked behind her ear or the tracing of a leaf that had seemed unique in the park. The day after the jazz bar when we had walked along the boulevard of flags, I had stood under the Indian flag and attempted to sing the national anthem of India with the little melody I could manage. I failed miserably as my voice cracked and I couldn’t hit any of the high notes. Vanessa stood laughing so hard she had to double over.
That night, when I had showered and was ready for bed, I opened the journal to find a sketch of the Indian flag, chakra and all, with India written underneath. She had drawn another flag, a solitary white star in a triangle adjacent to horizontal stripes and had, in parenthesis, written Puerto Rico under the mast. In larger, calligraphic letters under both, she had written “I love my Indo-Rican fantasies.’ It made me smile and then laugh. I turned the page and wrote my thought for the day, something she had said as we had sat under a tree, trying to find a way to describe love in all fairness.
“We think it’s this eternal thing, Jess, but in reality, it’s quicksilver that dissolves to ash.”
I liked the sound of it. The words opened up possibilities for me, thoughts and notions and stories that I had never conjured.
“If I ever write a story, it will be a love story.”
Of that I was sure. I wrote those words beneath Vanessa’s words, between indigo inked lines, in a paisley
journal that would become the greatest gift of my life.
Chapter Twenty
When I say that I remember the days in Philadelphia distinctly, I mean I remember what she wore, how she smelled depending on what soap she used to bathe. I remember the feel of her skin depending on whether the day was humid or hot and whether we were sitting indoors or out. When I say I remember those days, I remember the sound and inflection of her voice, her laughs and occasionally, inappropriate snorts when she laughed too hard. And I remember her tears at times when she let them slip from her bittersweet eyes to the perpetual pout of her mouth.
The two days that followed our night at the jazz bar, there was a storm full of fury, crackles of lightening and infinite rain. We did not venture out anywhere those two days, pretending that we could not when, in fact, there were many cessations that would have allowed us an outing or two. We spent those two days together, in our room on the tenth floor, watching nonsense shows on television, making love and eating meals ordered through the luxury of room service. We played with the journal, deciding on whim to write lines back and forth instead of talking for an afternoon, seeing how long we would last without uttering a word. It was during that time that I saw Vanessa cry and it was my turn, for the first time since I had found my squatting stranger, to be a tender lover.
Even thinking back, I cannot say what moved her to cry but I do remember the genuineness of her emotion and, despite her embarrassment or stubbornness, her inability to stop herself. It was one of those moments of knowing Vanessa that I remember being scared to love Vanessa, feeling overwhelmed by her capacity for hurt, realizing that the place within her for sadness was so full and feeling inadequate. I did not know if I could ever be enough to take her hurt away from her. And I did not know if I wanted to spend a relationship trying. From all my experiences with broken people, I had learned that they stayed broken, despite my efforts to put them back together and start anew. Not to say that I had ever entered a relationship with someone who was shattered. But I had always ended up befriending the broken hearted and that had made me careful never to love anyone that was too sad for me to make a difference.