Nights Like This

by Divya Sood

  “And then what?”

  “I wasn’t enjoying learning about Danny. But I was enjoying imagining Vanessa being 11, trying to say words that were tainted with her own beautiful accents of life and language. I wanted to know about her. I wanted to somehow know every minute that she had ever lived before I met her. I wanted to know what kind of notebooks she had used, whether she had written notes across the covers or drawn silly hearts. I wanted to know what she had eaten for lunch, what had pleased her and what had made her cry. I envied Danny for having met her then and having stayed in her life ever since. I could never compete with that. And although she had said she hadn’t meant it, I felt as if she could never love me in the way that she loved him. More than attraction, more than sentiment, history is a powerful, eternal force that can bind us to people in ways love never can.

  “From then,” she said, “Danny and I were always together. We never dated in school. We were best friends and we were inseparable. Anyone that dated me had to get along with him. And anyone that dated him had to get along with me. It was that way throughout school. And on the last day, after graduation, we were sitting on my deck. It was hot and it was dark. And Danny said he wanted me to know that he loved me. And he wasn’t much of anything but he would be. And he wanted me to promise him that I’d marry him. And I did. I don’t know why I did. But I felt safe with him. I felt like I could trust him more than anyone I’d ever dated or known. I promised myself to a man I had never touched and that had never touched me. And all the men I had let into me, my heart, my body, none of them captured me the way Danny did. So I said ‘yes’ because I didn’t know that loving someone and being in love are two different things. I didn’t know that, Jess.”

  “You married him then?”

  “No,” she said, “No. We went to different colleges. We never talked of that conversation again. In college my mentor, this professor I had for calculus, his daughter used to come visit him during his office hours to bring him lunch. And I used to always be in that fucking office because I couldn’t do calc for shit. And I started looking forward to her coming there. I was scared beyond shit. I used to sit with my fucking calc book at night fantasizing about her.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  Vanessa tossed her hair back with her right hand and kept her hand there for a moment. Then she let go and her hair spilled down again, straight and brown and rich throughout.

  “She told me,” she said.

  “She told you that you wanted her?”

  “Yeah,” Vanessa said laughing lightly. “Yeah, she told me. One day after I left his office, I found her outside the building. I didn’t realize she was waiting for me until she came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Vanessa, how are you?’ I didn’t even think she noticed that I was in that office half the time that she was in there or that she knew my name.”

  “What happened?”

  “We took a walk and went to a park. And there was this pond there with ducks and a bridge. We were leaning over the bridge looking at the ducks and she said, ‘Have you ever been with a woman before?’ Just like that. And I was so fucking nervous. And I said, ‘No.’ And then she said ‘You want me and you really don’t know what to do with that, do you?’ We made love in my room that night, in the fucking extra long twin bed. And I felt like I had never made love before that day. I felt like all the sex I had ever had had been something different. Because that night, I felt like I had never felt before. I felt awakened and I never wanted my senses to sleep again.”

  “Because she was a woman or because it was her?”

  “Both. I just felt like I belonged in that sex scene. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just that before her, no matter whom it was, I always floated out of my body during the sex and looked down at us. And it was like I could see me and him and I was watching us. I just remember watching myself from a distance, waiting for him to come, wanting to go to sleep. With her, I felt like I was having sex for the first time. She was incredible. And then and there I knew I was fucked.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “She was my first girlfriend. She was the first woman I ever loved. She taught me how to ask for someone’s touch, how to touch someone in return. She taught me the language of lovers, how to spill your heart, how to cry with someone. And then one day, she quietly left my life. She said she loved me. She was Indian though. And she said she had to now do what she had to do. She went to India, got married. I never heard from her again.”

  “Not all Indian women fuck you over,” I said defensively.

  “I don’t think she fucked me over. I don’t think so at all. See, we see marriage as this whole love-filled saga. Not the whole fucking world sees it that way, Jess. In her words, this was her duty. Marriage was a duty. Love was a luxury. She said she was grateful to have had that luxury with me.”

  “How the hell do you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “So graciously forgive people? I talk about my exes and I’m fucking livid. And you get these women who fuck you over and you can’t say a bad word about them.”

  “When you really love someone, their hurt becomes your hurt. And you just learn to understand them. And you help them do what they think needs to be done. Why and how could I ever hate this woman who taught me what it was to love? This woman who spent hours hearing me talk about nonsense because I wanted her to listen? It’s not like she left me because she fell in love somewhere else. She left because in her life, in her belief, marriage was a rite she had to perform. I had to respect that. I had to.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You will. It just happens. It sounds like bullshit to say that when you love someone you care as much about her happiness as you do your own. But it happens.”

  I was quiet for some time.

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Tara.”

  “So you never talked to her again?”

  “No. But I did get a postcard from her. Too little too late.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I went home for the summer. I was a mess. I was lost. I missed her and I was angry with her. I was sad. That summer, my father had his first heart attack. And he had a triple bypass. I sat with him day by day, in the hospital, at home and at the doctor’s office. All he kept saying was he wanted to see that I was okay. He gave me these lectures about how he had wanted a big family, how he hadn’t expected my mom to run away in the middle of the night and never come home. He wanted to see a man in my life that he trusted. He wanted to know that if anything happened to him, I would have someone to call my family.”

  “You don’t have family?”

  “Strangely enough for being Puerto Rican, my parents were only children. My mom left when I was five. No one fucking knows where she went or why. So, for most of my life, it was him and me.”

  “Were you lonely growing up?”

  “Very. But I could deal with it for myself. But I couldn’t see him suffer for me. My father worked 14-hour days so I could have the money to be just like all the other kids. He never, ever let me believe that I wasn’t going to college. I couldn’t see him like that. And I didn’t want him to worry about me anymore. So there I was, watching Papi fight to live. And all I kept thinking about was Tara. I missed her more than ever. I cried for her every night.”

  “Did you at least try to find out where she went?”

  “No. All I did was internalize what she said. I tried to look at marriage as a duty and love as a luxury. I believed I would never have that luxury again. And I was scared.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “I married Danny that summer. I told him how it was, I told him I liked women and that I didn’t want to be with him. He promised me he was not going to try to make it a marriage. He made me believe he was doing this because he loved me and I loved Papi. It was a fucking mess, now that I think back. But that was my summer. And just when I was thinking everything would work out, I got this postcard
from Paris. It was from her.”

  “What’d she write?”

  “She wrote, ‘I look around this city and all I know is that I love you. I’ll tell you now what I should have known: if I had it to do all over again, I’d fuck the duty and follow my heart. Do that for me. And through you, when you find her and love her, that part of me that belongs to you, that beating heart I gave to you, will allow me somewhere, somehow to be happy. With love, your constant stranger.’

  ‘I read that letter every day until I knew it word for word. And whenever I thought of her, I recited it to myself. Every night before I went to sleep. When I woke up.”

  “What’s with the ‘constant stranger’?”

  “That was our joke about how many times she came into that office before she ever spoke to me. I told her she was my constant stranger. You know, that person you see and fantasize about and dream of but you don’t really know her. And you picture all these scenarios in your mind and make her out to be whatever you want. And you fall in love with her before you actually know her. And when you get to know her, it’s not like you fall out of love, you just realize you were right about how wonderful she is. Because, sometimes, life is kind and you’re right about loving someone.”

  I thought back to the day I had found my squatting stranger. I wanted to tell her I understood more than she knew. But I couldn’t tell her that. Because if I ventured out and said, “I fell in love with you the moment I saw you,” and instead of believing me, she made a joke or dismissed me, I would fall to pieces. So I said nothing at all.

  “I know I told you I didn’t want to go to Paris. But I studied French and fuck I teach it just because that’s where she wrote from and I used to think sometimes I would go there and we would live in a small apartment somewhere in the suburbs. I try not to think about it but I do want to go to Paris, just to see all the sights she saw. To know a place where she was, where she discovered beauty and insight. I fell in love with a language and a country just because she wrote me a postcard and I thought she might be there. It sounds stupid doesn’t it?”

  “No. Just sounds like you really loved her,” I said, vaguely jealous of this woman I never knew, this woman who had endeared herself to Vanessa years ago, whose words she still kept like an amulet worn for good luck.

  “I did. And I think I always will.”

  I wondered if Vanessa would ever fall in love with India. I wondered if she would learn Hindi, follow me halfway around the world if I picked up and went. It was a thought born of jealousy and hope and the notion that I wanted to be the greatest love of her life.

  I thought back to Tara and Vanessa’s recollections. I realized that, like me, she stored pasts as well, spilling them out whenever they became too full or too pressing.

  From my past at that moment, for an instant, I thought of Julia. I filed my loves by scents, by fragrances, by smells I knew to signify their presence in a room. And at that moment when there drifted to me the smell of hot asphalt, I remembered hot days at NYU when, walking to my dorm, we would inhale and that same smell would drift to us from the streets as we walked to the infamous arch to find a place to sit and talk.

  I don’t know why we don’t let go of what has been but we don’t. No matter how much time or space goes by, there’s that memory tucked away that can unfold at the least expected moments as we play the songs of our lives and remind ourselves once again of someone who is no longer there for us to reach out to in the middle of the night or in the middle of any darkness that might threaten us at any time. It doesn’t mean we don’t love in the present; it means we come full of loves past and if we deny that, we lie.

  “Danny didn’t marry me because he loved me enough to sacrifice for me. Danny married me because he loved me too selfishly to let me be free. He knew that. I didn’t. I didn’t realize the power in that piece of paper. I didn’t realize that I’d be bound like that. He did. And from then until now, he knows he has that piece of paper.”

  “So what, you’re fucked until he decides to let you go?”

  “What can I do, Jess? He supports my father. He pays the bills. He takes care of him. He’s given me my life up here. But he expects that when I am there, I am his.”

  “And what if you’re not?”

  “You want your husband to tell your 76 year-old father that you like sleeping with women and that the marriage was a fucking farce because he had to have heart surgery?”

  “He would do that?”

  “In a fucking heartbeat. He says it all the fucking time. He asks me to go down there, I say no, and he says ‘all right, I guess I’ll talk to Papi.’ He’s sure that I am scared enough to run down every time he calls and he knows I know he would tell Papi everything because he has not a damn thing to lose.”

  I heard Vanessa breathing harder. And then I saw the tears. Angry, bitter tears running down her cheeks. There was no end to her crying. She took in big gulps of air and her body shook with what I thought was anger.

  “Then, Vanessa, come out with it and fuck the rest.”

  “What?”

  “You be the one to tell your dad. I mean you’re really never going to tell him?”

  “You’re fucking crazy,” she said.

  “I’m just saying if you tell him, then Danny has nothing to hold over you and then you can do whatever the fuck you want.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Weren’t you the one that was telling me to come clean to my parents? Weren’t you the one telling me to just come out with it? Now what?”

  “Different situation.”

  “My father’s had a heart attack too. Does that make it the same?”

  “It’s not about the heart attack. They have each other, your parents, to get through whatever the fuck comes of it. Papi has no one.”

  “It’s the same fucking shit and you know it,” I said a little more forcefully than I wanted to. But here she was instructing me on my life when she couldn’t perform the same way in hers. What was the sense in that? I wished she could admit she was wrong. I knew she wouldn’t.

  She was quiet as she braked slowly for the amber light ahead. She was staring at the road, her thoughts not there with her but, I was sure, somewhere in Florida with Danny. I watched her as she stroked her scalp slowly, as she ran her fingers through her hair. She looked beautiful to me and although I tried to look out of the window and I tried to think of something else, I couldn’t help but feel jealous of him. Was it just a piece of paper?

  “Jess, it’s not that simple.”

  “It is, Vanessa, you just don’t want it to be.”

  She stepped on the accelerator too quickly and I felt the car rush ahead while I was pressed back into the seat. She turned corners as if she were late for a destination. I sat back and started to think of what I had said to her. I felt full of shit. I felt guilty and I didn’t want to think of my own reluctance to talk to my family. As far as my parents knew, I was in New York waiting for the right man to come and claim me. I knew and had always known that my parents living in Kolkata made life easier for me. I had no fear of anyone I knew talking to them without my consent.

  “What about you? If you say it’s so easy, what about you?”

  “My parents don’t live here. They’re all the way in India. So we don’t really talk and I’m not telling them on a phone.”

  “So you don’t have shit to worry about. And you want to tell me how I should live my life?”

  “I’m not telling you how to live your life. I’m just trying to make things easier for you. And I am saying if you aren’t full of shit and really want to get rid of this Danny guy, then you will. No way in fucking hell you’re going to convince anyone that you’re staying with him only because you don’t want him to tell your father what’s going on. Truth is you like having him there.”

  Vanessa pulled into a parking space and the car rolled to a silent stop. She didn’t turn off the ignition and we sat there, listening to the hum of the engine.

  “Jes
s, truly, it’s wonderful to have someone love you. You know that. There is no difference between Danny and me and you and your sugar mommy.”

  “There is,” I said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “She would never, ever hurt me.”

  “Well fuck! That’s fucking fantastic!”

  Vanessa slammed the horn for no reason.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” I asked.

  “You defend her to my face and I’m the one who is hurting you by being with someone else?”

  “I’m not going to lie about her. This Danny guy, he holds your marriage over your head. Anjali has never, ever hurt me. I won’t take that away from her by lying about it.”

  Vanessa turned to face me.

  “Then why can’t you love her? If she’s so wonderful, and she must be because you haven’t said a bad word about her, then why are you here instead of being with her?”

  “Because I’m in love with you, damn it!”

  I didn’t want to talk in circles. I didn’t want to discuss Anjali and me. I wanted to breathe. I wanted to be outside and breathe in the air, know that I was alive and that possibility still existed that I would find whatever and whomever it was that would calm my heart and soothe my searching soul. I stepped out of the car, slammed the door and stood against a pole a few feet away.

  Vanessa finally came beside me.

  “Let’s just try to enjoy the day, okay? I can’t do this,” she said.

  “What are we doing, Vanessa? I just want to know what the fuck we’re doing today.”

  “Why are you so impatient? Just relax.”

  She smiled at me. She could charm me out of death with that smile of hers. Her hair fell straight and obedient onto her back and her eyes seemed to be asking for my affection. We were back where we had been that first day in Philly, downtown somewhere with rows of flags beckoning us to foreign lands.

  “Vanessa, what the fuck is this trip about anyway? All we fucking do is fuck and walk around this one little area in Philly.”