Adrian lifted his beer glass to look through it. They were in their thirties. Everyone had a history. Friends had died. Others had had babies early and divorced. Others had ended up happy—fancy that. Life was approaching its midpoint and not becoming any more transparent with the years.
“And what does he do?”
“Lab tech. University of Alberta.”
He nodded, she nodded.
“Let’s play,” she said. “Table just came free.”
“I’ll get quarters. You go stake it out.” They got up and went in opposite directions.
“Will your husband come to Baltimore with you?” he asked, later, in the car. She had walked downtown to meet him and now he was dropping her at home. His parents still lived out on the farm, a twenty-minute drive from town.
“Nope.”
He waited a sec. “Separation’s no fun.”
“I guess not.”
She asked nothing about his girlfriend, and chided herself for this later as she replayed the evening, chin on her knees in the window seat of her childhood room.
The next night, the phone rang. Because she was in the kitchen, she answered it and was already walking into the family room to hand it to her parents when she realized it was Adrian, calling for her.
“I took my dad to chemo today,” he told her as she mounted the stairs to her room. “Awful, you know? But the alternative, dying of the thing, quick and hard, you have to assume that would be worse. I don’t know.”
“It must be so difficult.”
“My mother looks almost as broken down as he does.”
“Are you thinking about staying on?” She adjusted the window seat cushions as she sat.
“They haven’t asked me to.” He sighed. “It would be such a huge shift. Maybe if I were done med school, but now, and with my girlfriend …”
Was Brinda supposed to ask about her now? Her cheeks burned and she lifted the phone away a little to lay her face against the window glass. “Is she in med school too?”
“No. She teaches at U of T. Art history.”
“Ah.” Power duo. “Nice.”
“I guess.”
Where was he? She wanted to ask, but thought it would sound as though she were asking what he was wearing. She wondered what he was wearing. She pictured him in boxer shorts, absent-mindedly rubbing his chest. She pictured herself running a finger along the waist of the shorts.
“How are your parents?” he asked.
“So far so good.” She got up to turn out the light so that she could see the night sky instead of her own reflection. “I don’t know what I would do if they had a crisis.”
“You have a sister, right?”
“In Vancouver.”
“Does she have kids or anything?”
“No. I don’t have the sense that she wants kids.” Ranjani had always seemed above that. Children, children … the thought made Brinda salivate. “She’s been living with someone for five years or so.”
Brinda heard a fridge door open and shut. He was in forest-green boxer shorts and bare feet, she thought, getting a beer, the dark of the house growing stale around him, his exhausted parents in separate beds.
“My parents have been in a situation for years where they sort of look after a family friend,” she told him.
“Oh?”
She heard what sounded like a beer cap and something in her surged, thinking she must also be right about the shorts.
“You remember the Air India crash? 1985. The trial’s …”
“Yeah, hell, yeah.”
“The wife and son of one of our closest family friends were killed. Did you know that? We were in high school.”
“Oh, yeah. It was … Sundar, right? I remember, I asked you about it.”
“Did you?”
“Didn’t you tell me you were related?”
“Distantly, to Sundar’s dad. He’s a stats prof. He’s kind of a tough person to be around, I suppose it’s not nice to say, but he’s always been a bit of a boor, self-righteous. Though it’s a bit different since he lost his family.”
“How old was Sundar?”
“Twenty-one. Five years older than me. He would have been forty this year. Funny to think.”
“Were you close with him?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Close? We grew up with him.”
“Hmm. And so your parents look after his dad? How’s he doing?”
“I can’t really tell. He still comes over for dinner once a week and my parents look in on him.”
“How’s he feeling about the trial?”
“Obsessed with it. Can’t eat, can’t work. My dad’s thinking he should apply to the U for more stress leave. Harbord’s been super indulgent: the benefits of tenure, as your girlfriend might learn.” She realized how that sounded. “Not that, I mean …”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“Sorry.” She thought it his privilege to determine where the conversation would go next.
“It’s nice to have you here to talk to,” he said. His voice made her think of unvarnished pine. She imagined he might smell like that, too, early in the morning. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. Suppose it’s a bit late to call Europe.” That sounded sarcastic and she didn’t think that was what she intended, but it couldn’t hurt to put up a bit of a barrier. Last time she checked, they had phones in Europe. And why wasn’t she talking to Dev? Because she couldn’t think of anything to tell him.
“Too late to call Edmonton too?” he asked.
“It is,” she said gravely. “Yes.”
She sat in the window seat long after they had said good night. Just one kiss. That’s all she wanted. Dev’s farewell pecks were always exactly that, no more: his lips pushed out into a beak as though to peck her away. Brinda’s deprivation was abhorrent; her need so undignified. Why can’t I get just one kiss? The Violent Femmes song from long ago thrashed merrily into her head. One slow kiss. She sat by the window imagining Adrian’s light, piney smell, his slim, happy-sad looks, his intelligent Azorean mouth.
The next night, June 21, there was a solstice concert in Willard Park, a musician both Brinda and Adrian liked and neither paid attention to once they were there. They had agreed to a picnic and each brought wine in a Thermos as a surprise, and they laughed without saying what was making them laugh, their potluck public seduction, nowhere to go from there but childhood rooms in houses where aging parents drew aging breaths.
They drank the white first, fast, from cups, amid the crowds, then walked around the lake with the red, trading the Thermos back and forth in the indulgent dusk. The longest day of the year. They found a place to watch the sun go down. The sun rested on the horizon a moment for a joke. Brinda laughed, again, and Adrian kissed her. One. Slow. Kiss.
Which was so nice it made her giddy, and they kissed some more, until the dark was complete and they couldn’t quite see the other’s eyes and one said, Perhaps we should go, and the other said, Yes, perhaps we should. When he dropped her at home, she felt him waiting for her to speak, and in fact she wanted to speak but couldn’t figure out what to say.
Tuesday, June 22, they went out for dinner. They dressed up a bit, and drove up along the lake to a well-known restaurant a ways out of town, where they sat at an outdoor table on the waterfront.
Brinda thought of her affair with the married Englishman. While it lasted, it had generated its own justifications, their attraction sparking off his marital unhappiness. Months later, when Brinda was back in Canada, his wife had phoned her, wanting to “ask some questions.” Her husband was in the room, she said, presumably not answering to her satisfaction. What a debacle! she thought, recalling it now.
Adrian looked at her. “Hello?”
She smiled but didn’t know how to restart the conversation, which had been halting and superficial, though not uncomfortably so, all evening.
“I don’t want you to feel guilty, about what happened,” he said at last. A p
elican flew along the lake behind him and landed on a pier.
Was she glad he was talking about it? She had thought so many things since last night that she no longer had anything to say. How to choose?
“I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong. Not yet, anyway,” he said, smiling. Oh God, that mouth! “It’s totally natural you would feel uncertain, this huge change coming up.” Was he even talking to her? “Kirsten and I, we’ve had some rough patches lately too, so I admit to feeling not entirely stable either, as you might have guessed.”
It would not have been hard, that night, to grab a blanket from the trunk of the car and spread it in some isolated spot along the lake, or even stop in at one of the many cabin motels that they passed. They both had known this when they decided to leave town for dinner: a step in the direction of full flight. Who suggested it? Each might have thought it was the other.
But the night-before giddiness did not prevail. Brinda said only, “In my defence, all I can say is that Dev and I have a big problem.” She stopped there. That was all she had rehearsed as an outlet to her guilt. It was the first time she had so much as alluded to their problem, to anyone. Her tongue tasted rusty.
Adrian waited, and as her silence congealed to a full stop, they finished their meal and drove back, not-home, not-not-home.
“Why did you never tell anyone?” I asked.
“I thought it was between Dev and me, I suppose,” she said. “It never occurred to me to tell. Maybe out of loyalty to him. Maybe because it was humiliating. Does it matter why? I called you the morning after Adrian and I had dinner. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and I was having weird physical symptoms, stress, I guess.”
“Do you still? Do you need to see a doctor?”
“I don’t think so. I’m already feeling a bit better, just talking about it.”
“Have you seen him since the night before the memorial?”
“Yes. He called me yesterday.”
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he told her, “as nervous as I am about seeing you. Can we meet up?”
Brinda was far from certain she wanted an affair—she still felt she owed it to Dev to give him an ultimatum, a last chance to shape up—but she lacked the willpower to deny herself the pleasures of Adrian’s company.
They met beside the lake.
“Do you have sex with him?” Adrian asked.
There was a bench beside her and she sat on it as though she had been pushed.
“How did you know?” she asked. Who else knows? Is it so obvious?
“I never would have guessed if you hadn’t—well, aren’t sexual problems the most common marital issue?”
She buried her face in her hands, then looked up at the sky, breathing the lake air. “No, it’s money, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d think compulsive gambling. Really? The most common problem?”
“I had a little fling, shortly before I met Kirsten, with a woman who had been married twenty years. She and her husband had had sex four times. No kidding. Or that’s what she told me. She didn’t seem unreliable. They conceived two of those four times.”
“Quite the success rate. Maybe he was scared to have any more kids.”
“I think he just didn’t like sex. Some people don’t. Physical intimacy isn’t for everyone.”
“Sure, but then he should say that, right, own up to it?”
Adrian nodded, cautious. “I suspect he likes being married.”
“Nice deal for him.”
“And maybe he doesn’t really know what the problem is.”
“Hard to find out if you don’t want to know. Dev implies, most of the time, that it’s me,” she said, checking Adrian’s reaction.
He nuzzled her forehead. “Dubious.”
“D’you think I should have an affair?”
He winced. “Not without me.”
She glared into his eyes, her nose nearly touching his, and frowned. “You’re not available.”
He kissed her and shivered. “If you say so.”
They behaved toward one another, that afternoon, as though they were lovers out in public, exhibiting a restrained show of physical affection that looked like evidence of a deeper, stronger, private love but was in fact the barest venting of the tension between them, as of a tiny train whistle atop a steam engine. On parting, they made no further plans.
That night, Brinda went out to hear a band. A friend of hers owned a ski shop, and a clique of Québecois ski bums, recognizing him, joined them at the bar. One caught Brinda’s eye with his blue eyes and biceps. Could he refill her glass? When he stretched out his arm to take it, she shocked herself by tucking a finger under his T-shirt sleeve, lifting it to check out his tattoo. His date appeared out of nowhere, at his other side. They didn’t talk again, until he sought Brinda out to say goodbye, kissing her on both cheeks and saying, “The summer is young. We will see each other again.”
The summer is young? He couldn’t have been out of his twenties. Men never flirted with her. She snorted with laughter as she returned to the dance floor.
“It’s like something has broken open,” she told me.
I had already noticed. A shekina curled around her, a mystic breeze. Her hair fell over her bare shoulders; her brow was full and light, her lips full and dark. I was surprised she didn’t have to beat men, and—why not—women too, away on the street.
How quickly she was progressing! I should have known to distrust that rapidity, but instead unwisely believed it to be evidence that she knew what she must do.
There is a reason doctors are not supposed to treat their own loved ones: if there is a problem, they will not see it because they don’t want to believe it is there (unless they conjure non-existent problems out of worry). I had told her I wasn’t doing therapy with her, that she should see me as an older friend without a social stake in her situation. I never told her how she reminded me of Asha, though that, too, was already changing. The better I got to know B, the more distinct she seemed from A.
Was I finding a new, real attachment to overwrite the morbid, old one? A better way to change my life?
“I’m seeing Adrian tonight, to say goodbye,” she told me. “The worst choice I’ve ever had to make.”
“But it is not your choice alone,” I told her. I felt certain she would leave Dev, though she wasn’t ready to admit it. She would return to Edmonton and confront him first. I had to think whether to ask her about that the next day, our final session.
She noticed a book in my window seat: Yann Martel’s Self, the Sunday book of a couple of weeks prior. “Are you liking it?” In the novel, a boy in late adolescence spontaneously transforms into a female. “I love how he makes the impossible seem plausible.”
“You yourself hid such a big secret for so long.” I opened the door. “Maybe one of your friends was born as a mermaid, or an alien.”
“Yeah. Maybe Dev was born a woman.”
“Women like sex,” I reminded her.
She laughed. “You’re right, he’s an alien.”
“Aliens don’t like sex?” I asked.
“Only with mermaids,” she said, and trotted down the stairs.
BY THE TIME I FINISHED MY NOTES on our session, I was itching to leave my stuffy, thought-filled apartment. It was the time of evening when slats of sun blasted through my picture windows, when there was no comfortable place to sit. The air in my flat was burning and dancing with dust.
I opened the door, inhaled—air crisp and dry. Checked the sky—blue and clear. Twice now, I had toted my rain jacket up and down town only to carry it home again, dry. I left it on its peg.
I had a craving to walk at the lakeshore. This was yet another way that Lohikarma might have been good or bad for me, I couldn’t decide: I loved walking in the town so much that I did it every day, sneezing at my knees’ insistent protests. It was slightly easier to descend the slope of the road and ascend via the stairs. I kept my eyes down as I descended—the only thing worse for my knees than c
limbing is falling, and one excellent way to fall is looking up while walking down.
I was thinking about a bench I liked to sit on. Painted red, facing west, toward the bend in the lake where the mountains hid it, with a little plaque that read “A Place of Tranquility Dedicated to Victims of Crime and Tragedy.” Maudlin. Obvious. Exactly what one wants, sometimes, when no one is looking.
Snow on a far peak. Goose turds on the lawn. Wild rose bush at the water’s edge. Child on a blow-up alligator. Birds in the trees, those dying generations at their song.
Turgid, clay-coloured clouds—here they came. Their unpredictability was the most predictable thing about them. I rose and turned my back on the lake. Behind me, a splash, as of a boy falling out of the sky. The rain began.
The weather was as crazy as everyone else in this town. I exaggerate, but truly I’m like a cat, I hate getting wet, and I was so looking forward to this stroll.
As I steamed, I saw a couple hurrying through the downpour. Seth and Lakshmi, with two umbrellas.
“Here,” Seth said, holding his out over my head. “Take it. You haven’t learned yet, eh?”
I opened my mouth to blast him, but who could do that to Seth? I was happy to see him, and his beautiful wife.
“We were on our way home,” he said. “Do you want to come?”
I looked at Lakshmi. She wasn’t repeating the invitation, as custom dictated. Should I have said I was busy? But I wasn’t. I wanted to go home with them.
Seth insisted I keep his green plaid umbrella while he and Lakshmi huddled in lockstep under her bell-shaped, floral one. It hid their heads, making conversation difficult, so while Seth and I shouted at each other as we went up the municipally maintained stairs—“Careful,” he warned, “slippery when wet!”—Lakshmi had an excuse to say little.
As we arrived at their gate, the rain frazzled to a stop and the sun re-emerged. We all smiled at each other and shook out the brollies.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 18