by Divya Sood
“Yes, but not like that. He’s my best friend from way back when.”
“What the fuck did you marry him for?”
“I don’t have to justify this to you or to anyone else. I am trying to tell you though as best as I can that things are sometimes not what they seem. That’s all I’m going to say about it. And that should be enough.”
I turned around and, even through my tears, I saw her face clearly. I looked into her eyes. I wanted her to believe that I did deserve to know. Whether or not anyone else did, I did. I loved her. And I wanted to believe that no one else could ever love her like I did.
“Tell me you love me. Tell me you don’t share Philly with him or make love to him or want him. Tell me you don’t tell him your secrets. Tell me!” I almost screamed.
She pushed back my hair. The tip of her tongue was touching her upper lip and she looked up towards the ceiling. I thought she looked beautiful.
“I will tell you. Sit and I will tell you. And no, I don’t do those things with him. Ever.”
I sat on the overstuffed chair we had shared our first night in Philly. She sat on my lap. She smelled like juniper berries. I imagined a Bath and Body bottle in the bathroom, still wet with tiny soap bubbles.
She played with my hair. She rested her chin on my head. She kissed me and I took her tongue into my mouth hungrily as if I were suddenly greedy for her. I think I loved her more because I knew there was someone else to love her. It made no sense.
“Truth is, Danny and I were always, always the best of friends. Danny was always, always in love with me. He was the first person to say he loved me. He was the first person to know that I slept with women. He was the first person to know that I desired women and not men. He was the first for everything.”
“So you married him?”
“Let me finish.”
She took in a deep breath and then stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. I pulled away.
“A few years ago my father was very ill. To my father, my getting married meant he felt safe that someone would take care of me. Danny was there for all of that. Danny took care of Papi. Danny got him his meds and stayed with him and I think Papi fell in love with him because next thing I know, he’s telling me how wonderful this man is.
Danny loved me. He promised me he’d find a way to make everything better for me. Danny promised we would get married and then we would say I had a job offer in New York and I could move here and start a life all my own. And every few months he would make a pretense to come see me. And eventually we could get a divorce saying things didn’t work out. But at least my father would know I tried.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“That’s not how it worked out, no. No. I mean he lived up to everything. But he won’t give me a divorce. He thinks I’m in love with him but scared to say so. He’s waiting for me to go home to him. He will not grant me a divorce.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it does. Here you’re pretending you’re in love with all these women and there you are fucking him?”
“Because sexuality is that rock solid? Because what we’re fighting for is a right to be with a certain gender? You should know better than that. Because sex means just one thing? We have sex for only one reason? Seriously, Jess? Are you that naïve or are you just angry that you’re not the only one that has someone to go home to?”
“So you fucked him and you liked it?”
“So I love him as my best friend and he did all this for me and yes, yes I allowed him to make love to me.”
“What the fuck, Vanessa? Like you paid him back?”
“If that’s the way you see it, then yes.”
I didn’t want to talk to her. I felt sick. I felt as if there wasn’t enough air in the room for me to breathe. I concentrated on the fabric on the arm of the chair until it blurred and there I was, crying as I imagined some man with a rich voice kissing her in all the places I had kissed her.
“I want to go outside,” I said.
“Then go.”
I looked at her as she rose from the chair and opened her turbaned towel. Her hair spilled like silk onto her bare shoulders and across the white of the towel in which she was wrapped. I felt my throat constrict. I felt myself throb for her. She was beautiful. And she was mine.
“Love, Jess, is not always about ownership or about one story. It’s a lot of different things. I do want to divorce him. But I never want to hurt him.”
“So you sleep with him instead?”
She turned around to face me. Her hair swayed with the movements of her body.
“What is it with you? That’s what’s bothering you? You’re intimidated because I slept with him? Let me tell you something, you should be intimidated not because we shared a fuck but because I love him enough to do that although I am not in the least interested. I allowed him to touch me and have me. I allowed him to make all his fantasies come true. That’s what should scare the shit out of you. Because I want to fuck you. I’m more attracted to you than I could ever imagine being attracted to Danny. Difference is I love him more than I can ever imagine loving you.”
She stopped my heart. I physically felt it stop at that moment. And it was then that I started to feel as if I were spiraling down from a height. It was then that I realized that if there were any threads that held us together, they were unraveling and we could never find the patterns that they had made ever again. It was then that fear returned. It was then also that I started to miss Anjali.
“I love you, Vanessa,” I said softly because it seemed the right thing to say. It seemed the only sentence that could possibly redeem us, spiral back time, place us in a blissful state of oblivion devoid of past lovers and past mistakes.
I tripped and fell on the floor as I tried to run out. Another graceful exit, I thought. I got up and walked to the door. As I shut the door behind me, I felt as if I were leaving her forever. And I believed, although I should have known better, that I really was leaving Vanessa behind. Somewhere within myself, there was a whisper of truth beyond jealousy, beyond hurt, beyond anger. And that voice said simply this, “You love her, Jess. You love her.”
Chapter Twenty-two
I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t have the keys to the car, Vanessa did. I walked to the hotel lobby and tried to look through the maps of attractions tucked into slots on a wooden kiosk. I didn’t want to travel to Hershey Park or the Crayola Factory. Even if I did have a car or a way to get to any of the places I looked at, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to be with Vanessa, walking aimlessly through the street, finding beauty in senseless things. I wanted to notice flagpoles with her, I wanted to read random passages to her and I wanted to feel the skin of her palm as she held my hand.
As I opened a street map of downtown Philadelphia, I tried to stop wondering why I felt like I loved her. A little over two months ago, I hadn’t even known that there was a squatting stranger at the fountain in Central Park. I didn’t know that I was capable of falling for someone that I had known for less time than I had known anyone else in my life. I didn’t know that within myself, I believed that love stories were possible and it wasn’t all about fucking unless I made it so. Truth was I didn’t want to be in love with Vanessa. I wanted to be the cool breeze that flowed in and out of her life. I wanted her to be the one who waited for a phone call or became devastated by a voice on the phone. I didn’t know what bothered me more, the fact that I was reacting to Danny or the fact that Vanessa was not, and never had, reacted to Anjali. If my being with someone else didn’t move her to want to possess me, then what would?
I must have been looking at the map for a long time because I felt someone standing behind me. I looked up from the map and over my shoulder, expecting a busboy or desk clerk to be smiling at me. Instead, I found Vanessa looking at me, calmly, her skin luring me with the scent of Romance, her eyes more bitter sweet and brighter than I had ever seen them. I
loved this woman. I knew that. I was fucked. I knew that as well.
“Hello, stranger,” she said as if we were in a place where we could be playful.
I tucked my hair behind my ear before she could.
“Hello,” I said.
“Looking to go downtown? I could give you a ride.”
“Just looking at a map,” I said.
“Isn’t it pretty,” she said, “all the different shapes and colors?”
“This isn’t like all the other times, Vanessa. You can’t just make it all better by joking it away.”
I started to walk away but she grabbed my hand.
“Okay, you’re right. I can’t make this go away. But can we get past it? Can we talk it through? Can we find a way to deal with it?”
I turned to face her and looked deep into her eyes searching for answers. I didn’t find any there but I did find that she let me stare as long as I wanted. As if she would let me find the essence of her. As if she truly had nothing to hide.
I didn’t want to let go of my anger. I wanted to change something, solve something before we went back to being Jess and Vanessa. Nothing changed in those minutes. But then she smiled at me. And whenever she smiled at me, I felt like everything was okay or if it wasn’t, everything would be okay. She knew that too and used it whenever I was angry or pretended to be.
Even in a cotton T-shirt and jeans, she looked provocative and beautiful. The curves of her body controlled the fit of her clothes, made the fabric slope at her breasts, quiver at the slight slab of space between the shirt and her stomach. I felt for my anger like feeling for an object in the dark and I could not find it. I was consumed with her and I couldn’t help it.
“Let’s go,” I said as I touched her shoulder, calm once again but still unsettled.
We walked wordlessly to the elevator. I didn’t know what I wanted to say or what I wanted her to say. I was relieved that there was time for silence without anger. I was relieved that she wasn’t going to drag out the drama. But I was scared that she was going to let it end with our words that morning. I was sad to think that my devastation was merely a nuisance to her.
She pushed the button for the third floor and the doors closed before us as if an omen of closed paths and secret pasts. We walked to the car side by side, the glass envelope of a walkway bathing us in light. It was refreshing to see sunlight again after all the rain and dullness in the sky. But somehow, as it is with life sometimes, I had been happiest in the oblivion I had known in darkness and storms. It was only in this sunlight that I felt the heaviness of grief, the true darkness of realizing I might have found love once again in a place I wasn’t allowed to find it.
As she opened her door, I stopped her hand. She looked at me, the flecks of color in her eyes catching the sun as if shards of stained glass illuminated her irises.
“Vanessa, I love you.”
In response to my admission, she smiled slightly and got into the car, shutting the door gently and then pulling her seatbelt and clasping it at her waist. I walked to my door and sat in my seat, wishing for an instant that I were invisible.
“You’re full of shit.”
“What?”
“You know when people say they love you? People say they love you when they’re scared that they’re about to lose you.”
I felt my voice getting higher, half talking half screaming at her disbelief.
“Or maybe when they realize that they really do love you. Maybe that’s it and you can’t see that because you don’t want to.”
She looked at me and her gaze seared me as if she were looking at me with all the intensity of whatever it was that was inside her.
“You love me? You fucking love me after knowing me for less than two months? Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then love me the way I am. Can you do that? Love means accepting someone the way they are and as who they are. Can you love me like that? See I can say I love you. I never asked you to be anyone but who you are. I love you despite what you do. Can you do that for me?”
I was quiet. My silence was like a curtain that shielded me from the taunting of her questions.
“So it’s easy for you to have whatever you want?” I said.
“You think I have whatever the fuck I want? Maybe that’s easy to say because you don’t know what the fuck I want.”
“And you do?”
“I know it’s not what I have. Beyond that, I don’t know. But at least I’m trying to find out. You’re just fucking stay static. You don’t even try to ask yourself what you’re all about.”
“So that’s it? That’s it? You fucking lied to me and we’re comparing who’s doing a better job of soul searching?”
“I never lied to you,” she screamed, “I never lied to you about anything.”
“Selective truth?”
“It’s not lying. And you do the same shit. Whether you do it to me or someone else, until right now, selective truth was your mantra, wasn’t it? You lied to your girl to come down here with me, didn’t you?”
“But I never did it to you.”
“Because you have no reason to. I accept you as you are. And if you had the chance, trust me, baby, you wouldn’t think twice. You know that.”
She started the car and backed out in a single turn. She started to drive out of the parking deck and I didn’t even want to ask her where we were going or what we were planning to do that day. I didn’t care. I just wanted to stop circling and jousting with accusations and comparisons. I didn’t want her to argue with me, I wanted her to love me. I thought of Anjali for an instant and I desired her. I wanted to kiss her again and felt as if I hadn’t seen her for decades.
Vanessa didn’t roll down the top. She rolled the windows down casually and sat back, looking out at the road. I reached into the glove compartment and got her sunglasses. I handed them to her and she put them on with her free hand without saying a word.
“So what do we do from here?” she asked.
She kept looking ahead. She did not take her eyes off her path, wherever it was that she was planning to go.
“I don’t know.”
“Jess, I do love you. I will tell you that in case you need to hear it.”
“Never the way you love Danny, though.”
She sighed.
“I said that and I don’t know why I said that.”
“Because it’s true.”
“No. It’s not. Truth is, I don’t know how to talk about it.”
“That’s a start, Vanessa. Tell me what the fuck is going on. And from there we’ll figure out what’s what, right? I don’t even know what the fuck’s going on with you. You know why I am where I am.”
“Actually, Jess, I don’t know why you are where you are. I don’t think you do either. And it’s not her money, I know that. Because from time to time, I know you think about her. And sometimes, I know that you love her.”
“Not like that.”
“No, just like that. You love this girl. Why don’t you give her a chance?”
“So I can leave you alone?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying, ‘what the fuck?’ What are you so fucking scared of? That she will be what you want and then you’ll have to give up searching your soul? Or that when she knows she has you, she’s going to leave you?”
“It’s not like that.”
“All right, enough said. So tell me what it’s like.”
“I can’t. Just that she’s there. And she’s good to me. She cares about me. At times when I feel that no one does, she does.”
“Do you do the same for her?”
“No. I don’t.”
“I see.”
I breathed in a rush of warm air. I squinted at the gleam of light bouncing off the side view mirror of a car in the next lane slightly ahead of us on the road. I thought of how my life would be if I weren’t so sure that Anjali would be there when I went home, regardless of what happened or did not happen in my day. I couldn’
t imagine soundless walls and empty air. It was true, I didn’t know why or how or how much or even if I loved her. But I did know that without the scent of her body in the room, without the sound of her voice coaxing me to love her, without the comfort of her body in the middle of the night, I could not breathe let alone live. This much I was sure of. And, yes, maybe for those reasons alone, I could say that I loved Anjali. But despite that, I wanted Vanessa. How I reconciled both those truths in my heart, I didn’t know. I thought of Tiffany and our conversation. “Being in love with two people at the same time? It kills you, doesn’t it?”
“I met Danny in French class the first day of sixth grade,” Vanessa said, jarring me from my thoughts.
I looked at her, waiting for her to tell me how this chance meeting between two 11 year olds turned into a marriage.
“I wanted to take Spanish but I couldn’t because they knew I was fluent and they wouldn’t let me take a language I already knew. My fucking fault for writing all my essays about my summer vacations in Puerto Rico, I guess. But I had to take French and I was pissed. I sat there, in the back of class and in walked Danny, too cool to sit too quickly, nodding at me as he sat down. Even then, he was just so innocent. He played it off like he knew everything about everything. But he always let it slip that he cared too much about everything to be above it all.”
“When he was fucking 11?”
She laughed.
“Maybe sometimes we look back and what we know of someone after we know them forever seems to color what they were when we first met them. I don’t know. Maybe all that wasn’t true when he was ‘fucking eleven,’ Jess. Maybe I learned those things about him and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know them. I don’t know.”
I didn’t want to know, either. I didn’t want to know what intimacy she shared with this rich voiced man. I didn’t want to know any of it.
“Danny and I just hit it off. He said he took French because his grandfather was French. He was a mix between French and British. I always teased him about that, about how he was the mix between two countries that were always at odds. I teased him about a lot of shit. He teased me about my accent in French class, how my French sounded Spanish and I rolled my ‘r’s instead of hocking them up like the French did.”