Quarantine

by Rahul Mehta

  Outside, we walk past a couple of buildings. I push the boy into an alley. I don’t look at him anymore. I don’t kiss him or stroke his cock through his jeans. I turn the boy around, push him against the brick wall, yank down his jeans. I roll on a condom I got from the safe-sex people in the club, and I start fucking him. I don’t prep his asshole with my fingers. I know it hurts. I know from experience and from the tightness of his ass and the way he doesn’t grunt or moan but cries. I want this to be over. I want to be home with Frank, asleep.

  Afterward, I ask the boy if he’s OK and he says yes. I’m sorry, I say, I’m really, really sorry. I tell him I’m going inside and he says OK. I find Frank sitting on a couch alone. The man who was with him in the back room is gone. I ask Frank if he’s ready and he says yes and we get a cab.

  Back at the apartment, the first thing I need is a shower. I hope I’ll feel better after. When I get out, Frank is in his boxer shorts standing with the fridge door open, staring blankly into the empty fridge. In the dark kitchen, the light of the fridge makes Frank’s pale skin moonlike. He shuts the fridge door and in the grayness of early morning says to me, “We didn’t do anything—me and that guy in the club—nothing happened.”

  “Really?” I say. “I’m surprised. How come?”

  He shrugs.

  I briefly consider whether I have to tell Frank about the boy in the alley.

  After a minute, I say, “Something happened with me.”

  “I know,” Frank says. I think he is going to say something else, but he doesn’t and he goes into the bedroom.

  I can’t stay here. It’s only a couple of hours until work. I decide to go to a diner, get some breakfast, have coffee. I pick the least dirty clothes up off the floor, put them on, and leave.

  For the first Monday in all the Mondays of my adult life, I am happy to be at work. I am thankful for the fluorescent lights, the empty conversations, dress shirts and slacks. Even the filing. I am thankful I can see the order in things.

  By six o’clock, most of my co-workers have left. I want to leave, too, but I can’t face Frank. He’s bartending tonight, but he won’t leave home until later. I decide to call my brother.

  “How you doing?” I say, happy that Rajiv has answered and not Ellison.

  “I’ve been better,” he says.

  “Ellison told Frank,” I say. “You know . . . that you guys are having problems. And Frank told me.”

  There is a long pause. He’s not ready to talk, I think. I should have waited for him to call me. I cough so that he knows I’m still there.

  “Am I a terrible person?” Rajiv asks.

  “No,” I say. “Of course you’re not.”

  And then I ask him the question I have been waiting to ask since Frank and I visited last fall: “Why did you get married?”

  If I had asked him two years ago, before they married, why they were doing it, my brother would have said, “We’re in love; we want to spend the rest of our lives together,” and to everyone, maybe even me, that would have been enough.

  Now he answers, “We needed each other.”

  Then he says, “I called Dad and Mom on their anniversary this year. I talked to Dad while Mom was in the shower. Do you know what I asked him? I asked him if he was always in love with Mom, if he was still in love with her. He hesitated and then he answered, ‘Of course, my family is my whole world.’ He didn’t say he was in love with Mom.”

  “That’s what he meant,” I say, but I know Rajiv isn’t satisfied. “Mom and Dad had an arranged marriage,” I remind him. “They hadn’t even met each other when they got married. The phrase ‘in love’ doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to you.”

  “Dad hesitated,” Rajiv says. “When I asked him the question, he hesitated before he answered. That means something.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You didn’t see his face. You only talked to him on the phone.”

  “In thirty years,” Rajiv says, “when someone asks me if I’m still in love with my wife I want to be able to answer right away, ‘Hell, yes!’ In fact, I want it to be so clear that no one would even think to ask me.”

  “No one would ask you because it’s a rude thing to ask,” I say. “What kind of son asks his father that?”

  Rajiv says, “You don’t understand. I don’t want to be Dad.”

  I don’t want to talk anymore. “I have to go,” I say, and hang up.

  Shortly after my brother got married, my parents insisted that he and Ellison travel to India together. Many of our relatives missed the wedding because they were unable to obtain visas or they couldn’t afford the airfare. “It’s not right that they haven’t met her,” my father had said. “You should go, too,” my mother had said to me. “It’s been ages since you’ve visited India. We’ll pay.” Frank was jealous. He’d always wanted to go to India. I promised to call often and to take lots of pictures.

  When we visited the village where my parents were from, the village where my grandparents and many of my relatives still lived, there were whispers among family members about a distant cousin in Bombay (so distant, we weren’t even planning to see him) whose wife had recently left him. Apparently, she had disappeared so suddenly that she had abandoned, along with her husband, a closet full of clothes and shoes. “Such expensive beaded heels!” I’d heard my grandmother hiss.

  If there was, in my relatives’ native language, a word for divorce, it wasn’t used by them. Instead, the word was always spoken in English, even when the rest of the sentence wasn’t. In their minds, divorce was a Western concept and the English word should be used. They’d pronounce it with a long “i” and with emphasis on the first syllable: DIE-vorce. A divorce wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t a mutual decision. Someone gave it. “She gave the DIE-vorce.” Someone had failed. Someone was to blame. “She’s ruined,” an uncle had said, “a complete outcast. Who will have her now?”

  Listening to my relatives’ hushed conversations, I wondered whether there was, in their language, a word for homosexuality. I doubted it. I doubted, even, that the English word was used. For them, the concept was unspeakable.

  When I finally leave work and go home, Frank is gone. The apartment smells like Pine-Sol. The floor is mopped, the toilet scrubbed, the clothes washed and folded. The kitchen sink is empty, the dishes stacked in the cupboard. The apartment feels strange and new.

  Taped to the fridge is a note: “You’ll probably be asleep by the time I get home,” it says. “We should talk soon.”

  Walking around the clean, empty apartment, I have images of a red chair here, a floor lamp there, a poster on that wall. This apartment could be someone’s home. Maybe someone else’s, a couple more like Jack and Carly, holding hands in the kitchen, clinging to one another on the couch. Or maybe a couple like us.

  I’m exhausted. It’s been almost two days since I’ve slept. In the bedroom, I remove my clothes, careful to fold them and stack them neatly in the corner. I pull back the comforter on the futon. There are fresh sheets, I realize, as I climb in.

  Five

  Ten Thousand Years

  When I told Thomas about my experience—“transcendent” I called it—he was skeptical. I had only been studying yoga for three weeks. Thomas, on the other hand, had been practicing yoga and meditation for eight years. In all that time, he hadn’t felt anything even close to what I was describing.

  I told him maybe I had an edge, being an Indian and currently in India.

  We were on the phone, but I had originally mentioned the experience to him in a greeting card. Here’s what I described: I was on a city bus, traveling from Opera House to Breach Candy. I had just been to class at Kaivalya Dam—the same place my father had studied, reluctantly, half a century earlier, because a doctor had prescribed yoga to his mother, and she’d refused to go alone. The bus was loud and crowded, so, to escape, I decided to practice the meditation techniques I had learned in class. I chanted my mantra silently. I followed my breath. I closed
my outer eyes and opened my inner ones.

  That’s when I transcended. My proof? I was supposed to alight near Parsi General Hospital, where I was meeting an old family friend. Instead I ended up at a shopping mall in Bandra hours later with an overwhelming sense of contentment and no memory of how I’d gotten there.

  On the phone, I could tell Thomas was avoiding giving any reaction to my story. When I pressed him, he said, “I’m not sure it was what you think it was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sunil,” he said, “are you sure you didn’t just fall asleep?”

  “I know what I felt,” I said. “You don’t believe me?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that, as you deepen your practice, you’ll understand how naïve your claim sounds.”

  Naïve. I remembered the card I had sent him: A sheep on the front dabbed at its tears with a Kleenex wedged in its hoof. Inside it said, “I miss ewe.” I thought he’d think it was funny.

  “Someday,” he said, “you’ll reread what you wrote and laugh.”

  “How will I reread it?” I asked. “Haven’t you thrown it in the trash?”

  The previous fall, a few days after Thomas’s birthday, I’d found the birthday card I had given him in the wastebasket by his bed. When I asked him how it had gotten there, he said something about “avoiding clutter” and “just because I don’t keep things doesn’t mean they mean any less to me.” I reminded him now of that conversation.

  “I’ll keep this one,” he said. “I’ll show it to you when I visit in May.”

  “Keep this up, and you may want to consider canceling.”

  I had come to Bombay three months earlier, leaving Thomas, my boyfriend of less than a year, in New York. Parting was difficult. He brought me to the airport, accompanied me through the long line at the Air India counter, kissed me good-bye before I made my way toward security. I told him I would return as soon as I could, though I wasn’t sure when that would be. Thomas promised to visit.

  My parents thought that, as the eldest grandson, I had come to Bombay to take care of my grandmother, since all her children lived in America, and she was increasingly unwell. I thought I had come mostly to learn Hindi and its close cousin Marathi, so I could translate some little-known eighteenth-century Indian poetry and finally finish my dissertation. Thomas thought I had come because I didn’t know what I wanted—in life or in love—and it was easier to run away than stay and sort it out.

  As for my grandmother, I wasn’t sure what she thought. She looked at me suspiciously. Late at night, I could hear her rummaging in cupboards she kept locked. I was living with her in the same flat in which my father had grown up, on the third story of a well-appointed building in Breach Candy. She had windows facing the sea and marble floors everywhere, but she had let the place deteriorate since her husband had died. The couch in the living room had lost its legs and was now fit only for dwarfs. The drapes were dingy. She couldn’t bother shooing the crows that flew in the window, so she let them come and go as they pleased. They hopped on her kitchen counters, picking at lentils and taking chapatis to go.

  Worst of all, when I picked up the phone upon my arrival, I found the line dead. In my grandmother’s bedroom, I discovered a desk drawer full of unopened bills.

  At the telephone office the next day, none of the clerks spoke English, and my Hindi failed me. We honked at each other and flapped our wings but got nowhere. A few days later, my grandmother’s upstairs neighbor intervened on our behalf. Afterward he said to me, “It could be weeks—maybe months. Who knows? This is India.”

  So I would make my calls to America from one of the expensive international pay phones scattered about the neighborhood. I had two nearby from which to choose. One was attached to an open-air tobacco stand abutting a busy boulevard and lacked the benefit of even a booth to dampen the sounds of scooters and cars. Men hung around it in a cloud of smoke and exhaust fumes, bidis pinched between their fingers. Some chewed betel nut; their red spit stained the sidewalk like paint splatters.

  I preferred the phone at the laundry across the street. The shiny, heavily air-conditioned shop catered to a wealthy clientele. The shopkeeper was pleasant and always wore a clean white shirt with a Western collar. But even here, privacy was a problem. The small phone, an urgent red, was on the same counter across which business was conducted. As I talked, customers would come and go, looking at me curiously as they waited for their clothes or change. The phone was wired to a digital readout that hung on the wall, displaying the charges as they accrued at an alarming rate. The shopkeeper, when he wasn’t busy, would listen to my conversations, chin in hands, elbows propped on counter, eyes on the red numbers as they raced higher. I thought he’d be thrilled by his profits, but he looked concerned, perhaps wondering if this would be the time I couldn’t pay. He appeared relieved only when my money was in his palm. Then he slapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand vigorously.

  As I entered and exited the store, two raggedy boys loitering on a low stone wall tried to sell me American products I didn’t want: one day a package of Schick disposable razors, another day a travel-size bottle of Shower to Shower deodorant powder. They held the items in their small fists, which opened before me like dirty lilies.

  Once, one of the boys showed me a single Marlboro menthol.

  I said, “I don’t smoke.”

  He looked baffled and said sternly, “You should.”

  Not long after my conversation with Thomas about my “transcendent” experience, I phoned him from the laundry. After we’d discussed our mutual friends in New York, my grandmother’s idiosyncrasies, and Thomas’s impending visit to India (“You will see things that will haunt you for the rest of your life,” I said, refusing to elaborate), Thomas told me unceremoniously that he had cheated. At first I thought taxes. Then I understood.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” he said. “I love you.”

  In some ways, I wasn’t surprised. We’d promised to try to be faithful to one another while I was away, but I’m not sure either of us really believed it.

  “How did it happen?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “I meant to go straight home after yoga, but I had overdone it. My body ached. I stopped for a beer.”

  “Where?”

  “The Works.”

  I knew the bar. I had been there once, before I’d met Thomas. That night I had gone home with a stranger—tall, muscled, blond—who would realize the next morning, in the stark fluorescent light of his building’s elevator, that I wasn’t cute enough for him. His realization would be so visceral, so obvious that, upon reaching the lobby, I would know without having to be told that we would not eat brunch as planned, would not linger alfresco over eggs Florentine and mimosas, would not exchange phone numbers or promises to call. I pictured Thomas with such a man, but because Thomas is much more handsome than I am, the outcome in the elevator would be different.

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  “This isn’t going to help,” Thomas said. When I didn’t respond, he said, reluctantly, “Medium build. Average height. Nice smile.”

  “Was he cuter than me?”

  “No.”

  Before, I hadn’t been sure I wanted to know the details. Now I couldn’t seem to stop. “What did the two of you do? Did you do the things we do? Or did you do something new?”

  “I was lonely,” he said. “I miss you so much. I only wanted to be touched.”

  “Did you suck his dick?”

  I looked at the shop owner, who was looking straight at me and biting a hangnail. His English was good, but how good? Did he know dick? Did he know suck?

  “What did it look like?” I said more quietly.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Thomas probably thought his lack of attention to detail would prove to me that the incident had meant nothing, that he hadn’t lingered. Instead, it made me think
that he didn’t notice anything, not even what was right in front of him.

  “I’m the one who got hurt,” I said. “You owe me at least this. What did his dick look like? Big, small? Hooded, cut? Thin, thick?”

  Thomas sighed. We were both silent.

  After a moment, he said, “Bent.”

  I hung up on him.

  Much later, walking along the rocky seashore toward Mahalaxmi Race Track, fixating not on Thomas’s infidelity but, more specifically, on how Thomas had described the man’s dick, I thought, Like a finger, beckoning.

  I waited a week and a half before calling him back. I had meant to say something funny—perhaps “How’s my little adulterer doing?” I had hoped we could laugh and move on. Instead I started crying and couldn’t stop.

  Thomas stuttered syllables that sounded like “Sorry”; I interrupted him with sobs. The laundry man watched the numbers on the digital display shoot upward. I watched, too. Finally, after a very long time, I hung up. I paid the laundry man one thousand rupees—about thirty dollars, a small fortune.

  He asked me if I wanted my clothes now. I said I did, and he said, “Thirty rupees,” and I gave him that, too. He brought me my bundle, and I left.

  Outside, the boys stared at me as I walked past them. They must have seen I had been crying, was still crying. One of them offered to sell me a saltshaker shaped like the Empire State Building, and I waved it away.

  Thomas arrived in Bombay a few weeks later, as originally planned, except a day late, and in the morning instead of at night. There had been a delay in Kuwait, and he and the other passengers had spent the night in a hotel. Thomas was cranky because the officials had confiscated the bottle of Grey Goose vodka he had brought for my grandmother. I’d told him she would like it, even though she didn’t drink, because foreign liquor was a status symbol, and she could serve it to guests. The officials hadn’t returned the bottle, although they had promised they would.