by Rahul Mehta
The first thing Sanj noticed about Sylvie when she stepped into the foyer was that she was wearing sweatpants again. She looked out of place, her sneakers ratty against the marble floor. She’d brought Krzysztof Kieslowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique. Sanj had already seen it, but he didn’t mind seeing it again. A professor had screened it in a film class in college. In the movie, Irène Jacob plays a double role: a Polish singer and a young French woman. The women never meet, yet for a time their lives seem to parallel one another’s before eventually going off in different directions. Sanj remembered the professor having said something about the film being a moody exploration of identity, of free will versus destiny, but Sanj couldn’t remember exactly. He’d earned a “C” in the course.
Sanj liked the soundtrack. Sylvie liked the styling: the clothes, the hair, the makeup. She was enthralled by Irène Jacob. “Fuck Julia Roberts,” she said. “This is a star.” The comment sounded just like something Sylvie might have said four years ago, and for a moment Sanj felt like they were back in high school. But then he glanced over at her—her shapeless sweats, her greasy hair—and remembered neither of them was the same.
The basement had a wet bar, and after the movie, Sanj made margaritas, and the two sat on the sectional, talking, watching MTV on mute. Sylvie asked if he’d ever seen Anna Wintour.
“Of course. I’ve seen her several times in the halls and the lobby.”
“I heard she had a skylight installed in her office so she can wear sunglasses even while she’s at work.”
“I’ve never been in her office. But once, in the elevator, she told me she loved my watch. ‘It’s Lucite,’ I said. ‘I have it in three colors.’ ”
A few minutes later Sanj said, “I love working at Vogue, but it’s a little superficial.”
Sanj noticed Sylvie’s eyes welling up with tears. Her body crumpled, curling in on itself like a worm.
“Four years,” Sylvie said. “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you stop by? I thought we were best friends.”
After a minute, she said, “These years have been really hard for me.”
“I know,” Sanj said.
“If you knew, you would have called.”
Sanj remembered a night during their senior year in high school. It was February, and they had driven to Cleveland to see a Nine Inch Nails concert. In honor of the show, they were clad head-to-toe in black. It was midnight by the time the concert was finished and they started driving home. They’d gone in Sylvie’s Tercel, and somehow they’d taken a wrong turn and ended up on a back road driving through farmland. Something Sanj said, he wasn’t sure what—was it about the concert? about Nietzsche, whom they were both reading, and whom they had been discussing on and off during their drive?—upset Sylvie so much, she stopped the car and stepped out into the cold night without her coat, slamming the car door behind her. Sanj waited several minutes, wondering what to do, before finally getting out himself. Sylvie’s back was turned to him. She was facing the field, her hands tightly gripping the fence. In the silence of the frigid night, Sanj could still hear the concert ringing in his ears. A cow was mooing somewhere in the distance. Sanj put his hand on Sylvie’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry,” although he was unsure what he was apologizing for. He felt her shoulder beneath his hand soften and relax. They got back in the car and drove home without discussing it further.
Sanj tipped his margarita glass back, trying to get the last few sips. The ice cubes were cold against his lips. He set the glass down on the table and reached to put his hand on Sylvie’s shoulder, to tell her he was sorry, as he had that night on the side of the road. But as he reached, he saw Sylvie’s shoulder slightly, though perceptibly, pull away.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Sanj said. “Somehow. I promise.”
Sanj was lying to everyone about what he was doing in New York. He didn’t have an internship at Vogue. He didn’t have an internship anywhere, not anymore. When he first arrived, he’d worked at a trade publication which served the prescription drug industry, and which he’d seen advertised on a flyer in the journalism office at USC. But he didn’t last long.
In college, when Sanj had fantasized about his first job in New York, he’d pictured a spacious, light-filled office, with an open floor plan—no walls or cubicle barriers. He pictured himself wearing tight charcoal gray pants (wool, with a little bit of Lycra for stretch), a white shirt, and a skinny tie. He would share—with an equally stylish young woman, in a blue blouse, with short, ruffled sleeves—a large, antique table, and they would sit facing each other, gold-rimmed tea cups carefully positioned on coasters within easy reach. Occasionally, they’d look away from their work to exchange a clever comment about an art exhibit or a new dance club.
His real job, of course, was nothing like this. The office had drop ceilings and fluorescent lights. The job itself was tedious and uninspiring. Sanj was assigned to an editor and was responsible for sorting through his mail, screening his phone calls, and typing and sending his handwritten correspondence to freelance writers.
His boss had a ridiculous name—Jeep—made all the more ridiculous by how poorly it suited him. Far from rugged or virile, Jeep was stout and fey. “I had a Jeep,” Sanj said, the first day, “but I totaled it on the way back from Burning Man.” He thought Jeep would find this anecdote funny and that it would break the ice; instead, Jeep just shrugged.
Jeep had only been at the trade publication for six months. Before that, he’d been a senior culture editor at Newsday, but he’d been pushed out during a restructuring. For Jeep, the job at the trade magazine was a huge step down, something Sanj understood almost immediately. Jeep mentioned Newsday at least twenty times Sanj’s first day. In his previous position, Jeep had also had his own assistant. Here, he’d have to settle for an intern.
Among Sanj’s duties was fetching Jeep’s lunch—a different place every day—so Sanj, still trying to learn the lay of the neighborhood, often found himself lost. Jeep always paid Sanj after Sanj returned, not before. Sanj wondered if Jeep didn’t trust him with the money. One afternoon, during Sanj’s second week, Jeep sent him out for a turkey sandwich. When the man behind the counter asked if he wanted mustard, Sanj didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. Had Jeep said anything about mustard? To be safe, Sanj ordered two sandwiches—one with mustard, one without—deciding that he would allow Jeep to select the one he wanted and that Sanj would eat the other himself. Back at the office, after Jeep selected the sandwich without mustard, he forgot to pay Sanj, and Sanj couldn’t think of a polite way to ask. Later, sitting alone in the break room, Sanj couldn’t stop thinking about the money. His internship wasn’t even paid, and now he had to buy his boss’s lunches? On top of everything, the sandwich left a bad taste in his mouth. He hated mustard.
The next day, Jeep sent Sanj to a sushi restaurant on Twenty-eighth Street, again without any money. Sanj ordered the sashimi lunch his boss had requested. At the last minute, he amended the order—“To stay, not to go”—and, sitting on a stool at a long table facing the street, he ate the sashimi himself, savoring the delicate fish, relishing it even more knowing that Jeep would go hungry this afternoon. After finishing, instead of returning to the office, Sanj walked crosstown to Penn Station to catch a train back to Long Island. He never went back to work, never even called to explain his absence, and Jeep, to Sanj’s surprise, never called Sanj in Long Island to find out why he’d disappeared.
Sanj knew his parents wouldn’t pay for him to live in New York unless they thought he was working, so he didn’t tell anyone he’d quit. To explain to his parents why they could no longer reach him at the work number he had originally given them, he told them he’d found a better internship at Vogue. When they asked for the new number, he explained that the editors there were very hierarchical. “I don’t even have my own desk, let alone a phone.”
Every day, Sanj would take the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, and then he’d kill time in the city until it was a respec
table hour to return home. Some days he’d walk over to the Mid-Manhattan Public Library, and he’d read the papers, looking for possible employment. Other days, he would take the subway to various neighborhoods and walk around, trying to orient himself to New York.
Sometimes he’d wander around with a handheld tape recorder, and he would approach random people, claiming he was working on an article about this or that for GQ or the New York Post or Paper magazine. He was having a tough time in New York. If he could better understand the minds of New Yorkers, he reasoned, maybe he could figure out how to live in this city. Besides, he had no friends and was starving for conversation. On Forty-second Street, he asked pedestrians what they thought of the haikus an artist had installed on the marquees of the derelict porn theaters. Another time, on a particularly bleak stretch of the Meatpacking District, he asked people what they thought the city should do to beautify the neighborhood. “How about a park?” he’d suggested. “Don’t you ever wish you had more green in your lives?” Part of what amazed Sanj was how quick people were to believe he was who he said he was. No one ever seemed to doubt him.
One day, wandering around Times Square, Sanj noticed, next to a Howard Johnson, a steep stairway with an awning that read, “Gaiety Theatre.” Sanj remembered seeing a small ad in the back of the Village Voice. It featured a naked male torso—slender and smooth—with the words, “Male Burlesk.”
He climbed the stairs and paid the cover admission. Inside was a large room with small tables and a stage where the striptease took place. Most of the customers, at least this weekday afternoon, were businessmen dressed in suits, taking a long lunch or an afternoon break from the office. Or so Sanj assumed. Maybe they weren’t businessmen. Maybe they were like Sanj: pretending. Pretending to be businessmen, pretending to have jobs they went to every day.
The strippers were pretending, too, though, of course this was their job: to pretend to be soldiers or airline pilots or gang-banging thugs or firefighters. They were all different. Some were thick with gym-won muscles. Others were wiry. Some were out-of-work models and actors and dancers. Sanj thought he recognized one of the dancers from Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour, which he’d seen when it aired live on HBO. Some were strung-out junkies. This particular afternoon, there was also a guest headliner, a porn star. Sanj had seen one of his videos in college and already knew what the man looked like naked, somewhat spoiling the tease part of the striptease. But it was more than made up for by the excitement Sanj felt being near someone he’d seen onscreen having sex.
The end of each striptease was always the same. When the performer got down to his G-string, he would disappear backstage, music still playing, and then reemerge completely naked, with an erection. Sometimes he emerged quickly. Sometimes he was backstage for a very long time, trying to get hard.
When he returned to the stage, his penis erect, he wouldn’t dance; his erection was an encumbrance. Instead, he’d sort of saunter, and then he would pick a customer and walk right up to him, standing inches from him, hands on his hips, pelvis thrust forward, like Superman, his dick right in the customer’s face. The customers knew they weren’t supposed to touch. The stripper just stood like this: motionless, smiling, the customer staring at his crotch. If there was time, the stripper would go around to two or three or four customers and stand in front of them one at a time. Sanj could tell he was choosing men he thought might be interested in hiring him out later, men who seemed old or closeted. The stripper could only stay onstage as long as his erection lasted. Once his dick reached four o’clock, he would disappear behind the curtain.
Sanj liked imagining what went on backstage, what the performers had to do to get aroused. Was someone helping them? A boyfriend? A girlfriend? Another stripper? Or was there a special employee whose whole job was to aid them with their erections? Hadn’t Sanj heard of that? Wasn’t it called a fluffer? What images did the men rely upon? What fantasies, what private desires? Sanj wished he could crack their heads open and see. Oddly, his favorite part of the whole show wasn’t when the men were visible, but when they had disappeared backstage, and the crowd was waiting for them to reemerge. He loved the anticipation.
Sanj returned to the Gaiety many times. Once, he even tried to interview one of the performers: a British guy, who, during his act, had worn a G-string with a Union Jack on the crotch. Sanj found him in the small, adjoining lounge where the strippers would sometimes loiter afterward, hoping to pick up tricks. Claiming to be from Genre magazine, Sanj had thrust his tape recorder into the man’s face. “What were you thinking about backstage to get hard?” Pushing the tape recorder aside, the man winked and said, “You.”
Lala, Chandu’s wife, had her suspicions about Sanj. There were days he didn’t wake until noon, didn’t leave for the train until two. She didn’t know much about internships, about the working world of Manhattan, but she knew enough to recognize that there wasn’t a job on earth that would let you show up whenever you happened to feel like it, not a job this boy could get anyway.
And then there were days he didn’t take the train into the city at all. He’d claim he was going to work, but instead he’d put on his Walkman and embark on long walks, returning sometimes two or three hours later. She knew because once she saw him from her car while running errands. He was just standing in front of a Carvel, less than a mile from their house, headphones on, gazing in the shop window.
Lala remembered when she first arrived in America—when her husband was working long hours at the hospital and before her daughters were born or she learned to drive—she, too, would go for long walks. Her mind would often drift back to Ahmeda-bad, back to some typical scene from childhood, like the view of the Sabarmati River from her bedroom window, or the dosa shop her family would visit on Saturdays, or the crowded, narrow streets of the Old City, the jumble of scooters and camels and cows. Then she’d look at her watch and suddenly realize three hours had passed, and she was in a public park she didn’t recognize, sitting on a bench, watching a blond couple playing with a puppy in the grass under a grove of oaks, and she’d wonder, “How have I ended up here?” Sometimes she saw in the boy’s eyes, when he’d returned from his walks, that same lost look.
Yes, there was something she liked about Sanj. These days, her daughters were all busy with school or their first jobs. She saw them only in the evenings, and even then they seemed to come home later and later. She was grateful for Sanj’s company.
One morning when she was vacuuming, and her back, which caused her chronic pain, was particularly achy, the boy—at the table pouring a bowl of cereal—noticed. Without either of them saying a word, he gently took the vacuum handle from her and finished the work. Since then, twice a week he ran the vacuum without being asked.
There were smaller things, too. On nights when he came home very late—which happened often—entering the house long after everyone was asleep, he tiptoed so quietly, no one ever woke up. Lala would leave a plate of leftovers for him, whatever the family had eaten for dinner that night. She’d set the plate and a glass of milk on the kitchen table under a small tabletop mosquito net she’d bought in India on one of her annual visits. Each morning, she’d find the dishes, the glass, the cutlery all carefully washed and dried and put away in the cupboards. Such a small thing, yet she loved this about him. This back and forth—her leaving the food out each night, his washing and putting away the dishes for her to find the next morning—felt like a private communication between them, their only communication, since they shared no languages.
Once, when Lala had invited three ladies over to the house to prepare sweets for an upcoming holy function, the boy sat down with them at the kitchen table and sliced almonds into paper-thin slivers, thinner than any of the women could slice. When Neela looked at him sideways, and said, “Lala, three daughters on their way out of the house, but no matter: you have found a fourth daughter,” and the other ladies giggled, Lala was glad the boy didn’t understand Gujarati.
One morning, when
Sanj was toasting bread in his parents’ kitchen in West Virginia, he noticed his grandfather hovering. Several times, he seemed to start to speak to Sanj, but he couldn’t quite form the words, and Sanj did nothing to make it easier. Sanj had never felt close to his grandfather. He was, at best, a vague and ghostly presence in Sanj’s life.
After several false starts, his grandfather said, “Sanju, beta, tell me about your life in New York.”
Why was his grandfather asking? Sanj wondered. Besides, what was there to tell? What could his grandfather possibly understand about his life?
“I’m working,” Sanj said. When his grandfather seemed to want more, Sanj added, “At a magazine.”
“What kind of magazine?”
“Fashion.”
Again his grandfather struggled to find words, before asking, “Are you happy?”
Sanj didn’t know how to answer. “Were you happy? When you were young and just starting out? Were you happy?”
His grandfather thought for a minute, then said, “It was a different time. I had different responsibilities.”
Sanj remembered, when he was ten, visiting the house in India where his grandfather lived and where his father was born. It was his one and only trip to India. He and his parents had taken a local bus forty minutes from Ahmedabad to the village. Children had followed them from the bus station, through the dusty lanes, all the way to the house. The structure itself was dilapidated, with a badly cracked façade and a trash-strewn entryway. Several families shared it. Sanj’s grandfather’s flat consisted of just two small rooms upstairs. But no one from the family had lived there for twenty years, and no one knew who lived there now. Pointing to the dark window upstairs, Sanj’s mother said, “Can you believe your father is from there?” and, in fact, Sanj could not.