by Teal Swan
He smiled from ear to ear. He tasted the value of that smile. He felt its symmetry against his lips. Once she was out of sight, he walked back to his car. The sound of his footsteps was no longer the sound of his movement forward in life. There was no longer a destination. Omkar knew he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
CHAPTER 21
Aria traced the scores lacing her arms. The cut marks she had made had been reformed into purple scars beneath the confines of her coat sleeves. Though raised, they were smooth to the touch. One part of her was ashamed of them. Another part wanted them to be her voice. She wanted them to scream for the rescue that she couldn’t. She waited until she was finished peeing, wiping herself with a leaf that she had pulled from the soil, and stood up from her squatting place in the woods.
Having done some research on edible plants at the library recently, Aria had been scouring the cracks between sidewalks in the vicinity of the car lot looking for purslane. And she had found some. Not in the dense mats that they are so often found in, but she found more than a few solitary patches crocheting the cracks in the cement. Its tiny jade-like leaves stretched outwards on stems whose red tint made them appear to be dyed with cherry juice. She had wandered off into the woods with a handful to find a spot to eat them. The tart flavor of the weed reminded her of watercress stained by citrus.
Aria was inspirited by the potential of foraging. Until recently, the idea was something she had never contemplated. It wasn’t until her body started breaking down that she began to value the freshness of natural foods. So much of the diet she had access to on the street was restricted to what contained enough preservatives to not need refrigeration, what cans of food were available at food banks and what uneaten leftovers could be salvaged out of trash cans. Her diet was causing her to crumble and her body told the tale. The idea that edible plants and especially weeds could be growing in abundance all around her, but that she didn’t know enough to recognize them yet, opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. It opened up the possibility of feeling good. It opened up the possibility of not panicking about where her next meal would come from. And it opened up the possibility of not having to entangle herself so deeply in the humiliating, and strings-attached, dependence on other people’s charity.
After such a successful mission, she resolved to return to the library soon to learn everything she could, and she walked back to the car lot in high spirits. Feeling passion again toward anything at all was like a tonic to her veins.
Climbing over the fence to the car lot, she felt happy to see that Taylor had arrived there first. He was sitting in the front seat of the Land Cruiser, looking through the black and white mesh of words in a local newspaper. She opened the back door to get inside. “You would never guess what I found,” she said. “There are plants growing all around the city that you can just eat. It’s so cool.”
Taylor smiled at her, more enthusiastic about the uplift of her attitude than he was about the actual subject matter responsible for that uplift.
She had brought him back a sprig of purslane to try. She handed it to him. Taylor put it in his mouth skeptically, twisting it around with his tongue and scrunching up his nose in disapproval of the taste.
“Oh my God, stop it. It’s good,” she said in response to the faces he was making and they both started giggling.
“Hey, do you know why these things were on the hood of the car?” Taylor asked nonchalantly, lifting a small collection of items from the area beside his feet. He expected Aria to give him an obvious answer. He handed them to Aria. “These newspapers were on the car too,” he added. Aria examined the items; a bottle of sunscreen, a pack of feminine hygiene pads, two juice packets and a gift card to the fast-food restaurant that was closest to them, which just so happened to be a Subway sandwich store.
“I literally have no fucking idea,” Aria said.
“Seriously? Hm. Maybe Luke put them there,” Taylor said, throwing the paper down to go ask him.
Aria watched him walk over to Luke’s tent and crouch down to pet Palin, while he asked Luke about the items. The confused look on his face did not dissipate. He came back to the car. “Nope. He’s got no idea either. But he saw ’em there before I did and was about to tell us how dumb it was to keep our stuff there out in the open for everyone to see.”
Aria thought about telling Taylor about the first items that she had found in the exact same place, but decided against it. “I’m totally keeping this, then,” Taylor said, lifting the sunscreen into the air. “I’d like to avoid looking like a tomato, thank you. I’m so white I’m practically see-through.” He stashed it in his backpack. “Oh, and this. I have to keep this because you never know when that shit’s gonna start,” he said, framing the feminine hygiene pads between his hands as a joke. Aria started laughing and so did he. “Come on, I know what we’re gonna do today!” he said, displaying the Subway gift card between his fingers.
Taylor began to open the door of the car, taken by the wave of the impulse to walk with Aria straight to the store. “OK, wait just a minute. I’ve got to go ask Mike about something. Give me ten minutes,” Aria said.
“OK, hurry up ’cause I’m hungry.” Taylor said, lifting the newspaper back up in front of his face.
Mike was cleaning the dirt off of a pair of Carhartt working boots. He stopped what he was doing when Aria approached him. “Hey, did you see anyone put stuff on the hood of our car?” she asked.
Mike peered around her in the direction of the Land Cruiser. “Nah, I can’t say that I did. Course I’s gone most o’ the day.” He went back to his work on the boots as if their conversation were over.
“Do you know if anyone was here today?” Aria asked. Given the proximity of his tent to the Land Cruiser, Mike was her best chance at finding out who was leaving things on the hood of the car, so she was grasping at straws.
“Ya might try Bob. I don’t think he went no place today.”
“OK, thanks anyway,” Aria said, running over to Robert’s tent instead. True to form, he was there, whittling away on a little wooden statue of a bluebird. “Hey, did you see anyone put stuff on the hood of our car?” she said, startling him out of the asylum of his artistry.
Robert stopped to think. “As a matter of fact I might’ve. There was a willowy fella here earlier today. I figured he was one a’ Luke’s friends or somethin’ ’cause he ran over toward his place.”
“Well, can you remember what he looked like or anything?” Aria pleaded.
“Well, lemme think. He was a tall, skinny fella. He was dressed proper. And he might’a had dark skin. But it could’a just been cause the light was shinin’ in my eyes. Ya think it might’a been a friend o’ yours?”
“I don’t know,” Aria said. “If you see him again, can you stop him and ask him who he is?”
“Sure thing,” Robert said, smiling at Aria with his toothless smile, pleased to be included in the sudden intrigue of the mystery afoot.
Aria ran back toward the car, knocking on the passenger window to indicate her readiness to go.
The Subway store smelled like Elysium. The yeasty smell of freshly baked bread turning from white to golden brown made both Taylor and Aria feel buttoned up in warmth. The gift card had $10 on it. They ordered a foot-long veggie sandwich and deliberated over what makings to add to it while the man behind the counter slid it down the bar. They took it, with a bag of salt and vinegar chips, to one of the tables and each took half of it.
They indulged in silence until Taylor decided to throw in casually, “I met a guy. I mean, it’s prob’ly nothing, but whatever.”
“You’re just now telling me this?” Aria asked, amused.
“He came into the studio a couple of times this week. And when I was on my break, he took me to go get a coffee. He looked at me all weird ’cause I ordered an orange juice. He took me home after my shift was done and I fucked him.” Taylor lifted his eyebrow and opened his mouth wide; impersonating the look of self-congratulatory s
hock that he imagined Aria would feel hearing the news.
Aria smacked his arm affectionately. “Well … what’s his name?” she asked.
“His name’s Dan,” Taylor said, his mouth full of food.
“Do you like him?” Aria asked.
“Yeah, I mean I guess. He’s good so far,” Taylor said, sorting through the way he really felt about the sizeable gap in their age difference and life circumstances.
Taylor had been working at the front desk the day that Dan came into the studio. Dan was in his fifties, a retail real estate executive with an affinity for buying houses at auction and flipping them. Except for the impeccable fit of his black turtleneck sweater and perhaps the tightness of the way he strung his words together, nothing about him would lead someone to guess that he was gay. His penchant for real estate was surpassed only by his penchant for stage acting and for younger men. In the first two minutes of their meeting, Dan had told Taylor that he looked like a Roman statue come to life. The hunt had already begun.
They had coffee at a café a block away from the studio. Instead of asking Taylor about his life, Dan had lamented how many men in the past had broken his heart. Dan could not figure out why the lavish lifestyle that he afforded each of his conquests was not enough to make them stay. In his mind, they had all taken the expensive gifts and Broadway musical shows and trips to Venice for as long as they wanted to milk him for it until they ran away with other, younger men. He could not see that by sitting down with Taylor at the coffee shop, he was marching to the heavy beats of the exact same drum.
When Taylor divulged that he had slept with Dan after just having coffee, Aria couldn’t help but tell him a joke. “You want to know why gay men have sex so much faster and so much more often than straight men?” Not pausing for him to answer, she went on. “Because the only thing standing between a man and sex is a woman.” She laughed out loud.
Taylor’s laughter rose up to meet hers. “That’s a good one,” he said.
Dan had driven Taylor to his house in upper Laurel Canyon in his powder blue, convertible Bentley. Taylor had never seen a place like it in all his life. He tried to act unimpressed so as to not give Dan the upper hand. But underneath the impression he was trying to give, it took his breath away. The modern design of the house opened up on an infinity pool with an uninhibited jetliner view. A metal spiral staircase swirled up through the air. When Taylor walked into the kitchen, he stood in disbelief that it boasted two ovens instead of one. The countertops were made of glittering white quartz. And all through the house were relics from old movie sets. Many of them related to Audrey Hepburn.
Dan had disappeared into the bathroom to use a douche bulb before inviting Taylor to take his clothes off and join him to fuck bareback in the steam shower. In truth, Dan had liked it more than Taylor did. He was already smitten with the new lover he had found in Taylor. Taylor did it more to guarantee himself a dram of security with Dan as well as to secure himself a position of power over him. Something about it felt like a protective measure, except that protection worked both ways. If he could secure Dan’s attachment, he would have some measure of safety and control over with Dan himself. He could also use Dan and his wealth as a kind of shield protecting him from the world. The fact that Dan had traveled the road of being gay and of making a success out of himself in the world long before Taylor had made Taylor feel less vulnerable. In order to fuel Dan’s interest, Taylor had declined to stay the night, but promised to see him again and took off on foot before the sun had begun to sink below the horizon.
When Aria and Taylor finished eating, they parted ways. Having spotted a donut shop, Taylor decided to go in to ask if they had any day-old goods they might be willing to part with before he went to the nearest gas station in order to elicit spare change from the customers. Aria went back to the car lot. On her way there, a thought crossed her mind. If someone had managed to sneak into the lot to put items on the car, that meant they were probably watching to see when she and Taylor left. So, the surest way of finding out who the person was would be to fake that she was leaving and make a stake-out in the woods to watch over the car.
On the first day that Aria faked leaving the lot, only to hide out and watch over it, no one came. She regretted having wasted a day that she could have spent out finding food. But curiosity drove her back to her hiding place the next day. The sunset had turned the clouds a violent fuchsia. The trees had become soft silhouettes against it. Having sat so long waiting, Aria’s mind wandered to some imaginary landscape in which it could entertain itself, until movement in the car lot arrested her attention. She squinted in an attempt to see more clearly and could not believe her eyes. The man who was jogging toward the Land Cruiser, a bag of items in his hands, was none other than the man who had been tending the little market by the church. Overwhelmed with dizziness, she watched him line the items up across the hood of the car.
The man ran back even quicker than he had come. Aria was frozen in the shock of a million contradictory emotions. She raced toward the car, collecting the items before anyone else could lay their eyes upon them, and sat in the potpourri of her dismay.
Aria was embarrassed. She felt ashamed that he had discovered things about her life that she never wanted him to know. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t known someone was following her the last time she had seen him. Aria hated that because of his generosity, it felt like she owed him something. But despite that shame and imagined indebtedness, she also imagined that if he had discovered these things about her and had continued to come back, he must not have rejected her for them. This confused her more than anything else, but it also made the fondness she already felt for him grow. No one had ever done something for her in secret, because giving her something had always been a ploy to get something in return.
When Taylor came back later that night, bouncing with excitement that he had managed to procure over $35 from his efforts standing on a curbside with a cardboard sign, Aria said nothing. She listened to him talk, giving the impression that she was listening when half of her was not. She was fighting with her burgeoning feelings for the mystery man. Her wishes and fears ran through the hallways of the house of her hope. She followed them out of grace. There was no way of knowing whether any of what was happening between them would lead to anything good. But she could not kill the promise growing within herself. Like a weed, its roots had wound themselves deep into her heart, and it scared her.
She knew she had to confront him. If not to make the decision to let the flowers of that weed blossom, to decide to kill it dead. Either way, she had to see him again.
CHAPTER 22
The bell on the door serenaded her entrance. Aria looked around to see if he was there, but he wasn’t. Instead, the man who was tending the counter at the Super Sun Market was an older man with a turban and fierce features that had been cushioned by age.
“Hello, welcome to the Super Sun Market, what are you looking for today?” the man asked.
“Um, is there a younger man who works here sometimes?” Aria asked him, stepping far outside her comfort zone by doing so.
“Yes, that is my son, Omkar, why? What has he done?” the man asked with the immediate assumption that his son had made a mistake or committed some offense against her.
“No, no, he didn’t do anything, he just promised to help me figure out some stuff about Indian cooking the other day, and …”
Neeraj cut her off before she finished her sentence with a condescending laugh. “Omkar doesn’t know what I know about Indian cooking. Come with me,” he said, expecting her to follow as he turned to take her straight over to a shelf lined with little packets of spice.
“One of the things that people find intimidating about cooking Indian food is the vast array of spices used. I find that as soon as people are able to identify and understand the spices we use, then suddenly this cuisine is not as hard to make after all. Most of the spices are dry-roasted to release their essential oils before being ground
into spice mixes.”
He picked up a box filled with little sage-colored pods which Aria thought resembled immature green pea pods that had been set out to dry. Letting her examine it, Neeraj continued his sermon. “There are two kinds of cardamom used in Indian cooking: green and black. Green is the more common variety, used for everything from spice mixes to lassis to Indian desserts. The flavor is light and sweet. Green cardamom can be blended whole when making spice mixes, like garam masala. However, when using them in sweets or desserts, what you would do is to pop the pod open and lightly crush the fragrant black seeds before using. Black cardamom, on the other hand, is very powerful and smoky, and needs to be used with extreme carefulness. Normally only the seeds would be used, and if using the whole pod, it’s best to pull it out before serving the dish, or it won’t taste good to bite into.”
Aria allowed Neeraj to pull her from aisle to aisle, explaining the ins and outs of the ingredients used in Indian cooking and how to use them, until he had exhausted his medley of products to show her. Even if she had come to the store interested in information about Indian cooking, the speed at which he expected her to absorb the information was unreasonable. But she found enjoyment in his passion for it all. “What recipe is it that you are wanting to make?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t actually know. I guess I was gonna make up my mind about that after I came in here,” Aria responded, proud of herself for a moment for having lied so seamlessly.
That moment was short-lived. “One minute, I have something,” Neeraj said, turning to search behind the checkout counter. He walked back across the store with a small, brightly colored flyer advertising the store. Holding up the reverse side for her to see, he said, “This here is a beginner’s recipe, very easy. You can try for yourself and maybe you will like it.”
He stepped back, folding his arms with satisfaction. Aria looked at the recipe for chicken tikka masala, which was printed on the page. It was one of the Agarwals’ small ways of introducing people to the superior taste of their country and culture. “Thanks,” she said, wondering whether she should just leave or work up the courage to ask him when Omkar would be back. Not able to let the opportunity pass, she trampled over her apprehension. “Um, do you know when the man, I mean Omkar, will be here again?” she asked.