Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  Alice had exposed her and Storrow. Perhaps Georgia felt this gave her the right to do some prying of her own, to take advantage of this moment when Alice was doped up and confused enough to give Georgia what she wanted. Explanations. Remorse.

  Charlie’s cell began to ring; one of the nurses was calling from the ward. He waved to the waiter for their check and hurried, more than was necessary, to stand and button his coat. Their time was up, he told Georgia: Alice was awake.

  —

  Alice came down the hall shuffling, puffy socks bunched at her ankles, hospital slippers on her feet; her robe was too short, reaching up above her knees. Sheet marks streaked her bare face. Georgia winced. Alice stopped a few feet ahead of her and stood, squinting and smiling—as if her friend’s appearance constituted some sort of a shared joke.

  Charlie offered to stay with them, but Georgia muttered that they were fine and joined Alice on a bench along the wall. Charlie crossed the room, hiding out on the sofa in the lounge. A young man sat beside him, tapping time on the sofa cushion, watching a pair of children singing and dancing on TV.

  Every few moments, Charlie cast a glance across the room. Alice seemed to be doing all the talking; she sat hunched forward, gesticulating, absorbed in intricate explanations. Georgia listened beside her, politely nodding, evidently baffled but indulgent, like she might be with an overexcited child.

  This went on for twenty minutes until, abruptly, the demeanor of both women changed; Charlie peered over to see the pair seated in silence. Georgia’s hands played in her hair, a nervous gesture; Alice was motionless, staring at her fingers clasped tightly in her lap. At eight thirty, visiting hours ended and an orderly called Alice back to her room. Alice retreated down the hall and Charlie stepped up to join Georgia.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  Georgia blinked up at him, dazed. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  On their way out, Georgia was so hurried that she forgot the suitcase she’d stowed behind the reception desk; a nurse came running to the elevator to stop her. Charlie carried the bag down to the street, where Georgia hailed a cab. Before he let her go, he asked after the address of her hotel.

  “Anywhere in Midtown’s good. There are several places I can try.”

  “You don’t have a reservation?” Forget it, Charlie told her; he wasn’t going to have her searching for a room, not in the addled state that she was in. “I’ll take the couch; you can stay with me.”

  “Really, Charlie, I couldn’t ask that of you.”

  “You didn’t ask me. I’m insisting.”

  —

  Charlie entered the apartment first, moving ahead of Georgia among the light switches, illuminating the built-in bookshelves and tiger oak paneling, the original moldings and restored hardwood floors—all those details the real estate broker had felt obliged to report, though she’d assumed a young guy like Charlie couldn’t give a damn. Your girlfriends will love this space, she’d said; it was full of charms to catch a woman’s eye, to make her feel she’d found a peaceful spot to rest.

  Georgia observed the rooms with a half-teasing gasp: “This is all just you?”

  She circled the sofa, pausing at the wood-burning fireplace, and went to stand beside the window. The George Washington Bridge cast blinking trails of light across the Hudson.

  Charlie moved to the kitchen and poured Georgia a vodka and orange—the closest he had to the vodka cranberries she and Alice used to drink at school.

  “I guess you’ve had a shock,” he began, settling beside her at the window. “Seeing Alice like that, hearing her go on the way she does now. She certainly broke the silence between you two.”

  Georgia nodded, reticent, by contrast. She took a slow sip of her drink.

  “Anything you want to talk about?” He would have liked to confront her more directly, to inquire what exactly had passed between them to leave Alice looking so frozen and Georgia so unsettled. But Georgia shook her head and roughly set her glass down on the sill, splashing its contents on her wrist.

  “She’s confused, obviously—paranoid, delusional, and you know Alice, even when she’s sane, anything she says should be viewed with skepticism. That used to be your view once, too, before.”

  “Before?”

  “Before you became buddies, roomies, before whatever went on between the two of you.” Her tone was blunt now; one thing the meeting with Alice had apparently accomplished, it had banished the hesitance Georgia displayed in the coffee shop before.

  “She needed a place; I was a convenience. What do you think went on?”

  “Some convenient fucking maybe?”

  The suggestion startled him, flattered him as well: that Georgia should be so preoccupied by such a matter, these many years later, enough to need to ask him. “Nothing like that,” he heard himself explaining. “And however it looked, I never took her side against you.”

  “Let’s just forget it; I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Georgia left the window for the sofa, curling one leg beneath her; after a moment, she took a deep breath and sighed. “You were angry; I know—not without reason.”

  “I don’t think reason ever entered it—or into anything to do with me and you.”

  She smiled at this and then grew thoughtful, staring at him from the sofa. Her skirt, the same color as his couch, billowed where her boot kicked back and forth.

  He turned away again to face the window; across the highway, the dark line of trees dropped off at the shore. For the first time since he’d moved here, he felt his loneliness: Why had he chosen this spot to make his own, on the island’s edge?

  “Charlie?”

  Footsteps sounded behind him; a hand brushed his shoulder. He was absolutely still, not even breathing as Georgia came around to kiss him; it was her breath, cool and steady, that he felt on his lips.

  —

  No, reason hadn’t entered into it: not four years earlier, when he’d been embittered against Georgia by jealousy, and not that night, when he’d let his gentler feelings take hold of him again. Afterward, he was better able to be sensible. He wasn’t an idiot, for Christ’s sake: he recognized a fleeting impulse, had already felt Georgia’s excitement giving way to numbness before the night was through. He hadn’t expected her to stay with him, to quit her job and D.C. and move in here; he hadn’t imagined that they’d spend Sunday mornings taking walks in the park or waiting on endless lines at Barney Greengrass or Sarabeth’s for brunch. He wasn’t even surprised when she called three weeks later to announce that she was going abroad for a while—to India of all places, as if anywhere on the same continent as him wouldn’t be far enough.

  Good then. At least there could be no doubt; this wasn’t a beginning but an ending, a chance to put to rest whatever illusions still gripped him. Since their night together he could assault his dreams with facts: Georgia’s ass was square and muscled; her toes were long; he knew the color of her nipples; he’d tasted her mouth.

  After the many times he’d imagined her body, the reality hadn’t disappointed him, and yet he’d felt a sadness while he held her—finally held her—knowing that she wasn’t quite there with him. She was exhausted; that’s what she’d told him, anyway—too tired even to keep her eyes open, too tired to do much but lie back and utter small moans and touch, now and again, his cheek or meet his kiss.

  Of course he knew the true meaning of these gestures and knew that Georgia had just turned up with him again because she was lost and lonely—nostalgia only took root in barren ground. He knew better than to let his hopes be raised when she had pretended otherwise that night, speaking of a future that might make up for the past: I don’t know why I couldn’t let myself be with you before. I was young; I was confused.

  You’re still young and confused, he’d told her, and of course knowing this didn’t change the fact that he was, too.

  15

  The sky outside Chhatrapati Airport was brown; the air smelled of smoke. The result of unchecked industrialization, Geor
gia assumed, until Sanjay, the man sent by the orphanage to collect her, provided another explanation for the smell: it was not the by-product of thousands of poorly regulated sweatshops, but rather of the staggering numbers of home-cooked meals, of Mumbai’s many million humble hearths.

  “That’s forever been the smell of my city,” Sanjay told her on their walk through the airport parking lot, displaying neither pride nor shame. He was about her age, with slightly yellowed brown eyes and a scar across one cheek, and had appeared outside the baggage claim holding a sign bearing her name, or almost: Calvin George. His voice was gentle, though he was stubborn about fulfilling his orders and had to be cajoled into letting her carry even her smallest bag out to the lot herself.

  The car waiting for them was a beige minivan, new or almost new, and kept spotlessly clean, unlike the mostly rusted vehicles around them. A boy was standing by the driver’s side. Sanjay must have hired him to keep watch; he handed a coin to the boy, who took it and ran off.

  Sanjay slid open the door to the backseat, but Georgia moved instead to the front passenger side. When she rolled down her window, Sanjay rolled it up again and turned on the AC.

  “Until you get used to the poor air.”

  The van entered the main road into Mumbai, lined with drooping trees, clusters of small ramshackle houses, and long stretches of fencing—“construction sites,” Sanjay informed her. The city was ever expanding to keep up with its population. Closer to the city center, housing became denser and climbed to two stories: ladders stretched to second floors, and many of the openings were without windows and doors. Women sat in shadow inside; children peeked their faces into the sunshine, peering out across the road.

  Soon the traffic became clogged, and the honking grew continuous. Small, yellow-roofed black taxis nosed into each gap in the lanes. Women in saris beeped past on mopeds; men on bicycles wove, shouting, between the cars; and, without regard for crosswalks, pedestrians dashed into the rush. Each time she saw another body dart out from the curb, Georgia held her breath. Never, not even in the worst reaches of D.C., where kids chased balls into traffic and drunks stumbled down highways, had she seen chaos like this. There must be some hidden method to it: moving through Mumbai couldn’t be the perilous mayhem it appeared to be. No one could take life quite so lightly.

  But wasn’t that just what she’d hoped to discover? Wasn’t that why people came to India? To feel lighter—not to find meaning, in the Western sense, but to disappear, to relax into one’s own insignificance?

  After less than an hour on this new continent, though, she had clues that it would not be as indifferent toward an American—let alone a tall, blond one—as it was toward its own people. Passengers in nearby cars were staring; children in backseats pointed and waved.

  “You’re like the movie stars for them,” Sanjay explained. Several times now, she’d caught him watching her, too, from the corner of his eye. “You have a husband, miss?”

  “Fiancé,” she remarked, a simple lie to spare her future awkwardness. “Back in New York.” She found herself thinking of Charlie, though not only wasn’t he her future husband, he was likely out of her life altogether. Had she been more cautious with him those two days in Manhattan, she might have managed to revive their friendship; instead she’d acted on impulse and then panicked: waking in the morning in his bed, she’d seen his freckled chest rising and falling, ingenuous, exposed. She’d covered him up with the sheet and rushed to the other room to dress.

  Never go backward, her father had told her, by way of explaining why he’d not once been tempted to reconcile with her mother. Such reversals were inevitably a search for comfort that ended in pain, and after the relief that came with Charlie’s forgiveness, Georgia had already begun to sense the gloom stalking them both. They’d done their best to delay it, avoided all references to the horrors of their last weeks at school—they had, but not Alice.

  “You must see what’s happening,” Alice had chattered on, excitedly, as though Georgia alone might grasp the sense where others just saw chaos, as if Alice had been waiting all month for her to appear inside that mental ward. “Everyone thinks I meant to kill that girl. I’m the murderer now. That’s his idea. It’s his revenge.”

  Georgia had assumed—or wished to assume—Alice was talking about Nick, her recent ex; Charlie had told her the guy was furious. Still, some doubt prompted her to ask: “Whose revenge?”

  Alice frowned at her impatiently; the old arrogance persisted through her madness—as if Georgia were the one whose thinking was impaired. “Storrow of course.”

  The fluorescent bulb flickered above their heads; across the room, from the sofa, Charlie was watching. Georgia did her best to maintain her composure. “No one’s taking revenge here.”

  “You’re not seeing the whole picture. I hadn’t expected to find Mary; I’d come by looking for Nick, just like Storrow came by looking for you.”

  Looking for her? Had Storrow really done this or was it merely part of Alice’s delusion? Even Georgia, who’d held on to sanity in the last years, had fallen prey to such imaginings: Storrow tracking her down.

  She’d tried to press Alice for more details—when had Storrow come looking for her, back at school or recently?—but such questions just heightened Alice’s paranoia. Her lips curled into a tense and eerie smile, her black eyes seemed to retreat behind her swollen lids. I must be confused, Alice said at last, and then she’d turned away, to sit staring at the fingers locked together in her lap, until an orderly came by to lead her back to her room.

  What, exactly, had she hoped to get out of meeting Alice? Some insight into why her friend betrayed her, or some understanding of her illness that might allow her to forgive her? What Georgia hadn’t expected was to feel the past suddenly crowding in on them. She hadn’t expected to feel Storrow so much with them he might have come striding down that bright white hall.

  That visit had given Georgia the shove that she required.

  Movement heals the soul, her father said.

  —

  “We’re entering Malabar Hill,” Sanjay informed her, pointing over the hood. “Like your Fifth Avenue.” As they drove past, he indicated Mumbai’s most Western attractions: its tallest skyscraper, its Mercedes dealerships and department stores. Many of the fancier buildings were barricaded, their fences hung with the laundry of families living on the streets. Young men lay sleeping on piles of sheets, their pretty wives beside them. Up above, the many billboards featured pale Indian girls; the advertising copy was written entirely in English.

  “Are we going to the orphanage?” she inquired.

  “First to the office. Another fifteen-minutes’ drive. There you’ll meet the orphanage owner, Mr. Nandi.”

  Leaving behind the glamorous avenues, they came to a more cramped neighborhood; painted billboards stood amid tangled electrical wiring above open-air shops, tables heaped with clothes spilled out onto the pavement, and carts crowded the curb, bearing vegetables and fruit, shaded by umbrellas.

  They passed a shop with a large sign: PATEL GROCERY.

  Patel, she reminded herself, was the Indian equivalent of Smith or Jones. In a country of over a billion people, she was bound to shop in at least one Patel grocery, or be waited on by at least one Mr. Patel at the bank, or chat with one Mrs. Patel at the laundry. And yet the sign still gave her pause, made her think about what she was leaving behind, and the complex of motives she hadn’t wished to examine that had led her to this place in particular.

  India, however, had hardly been her choice. Volunteer opportunities had lately fallen into short supply; she wasn’t the only one in the wake of 9/11 to seek out a more worthy occupation, or a free flight out of the country. Global Aid was the sole organization that had found any use for her, and the options they’d presented her numbered exactly two: the Mission of Hope orphanage in Mumbai or a hospice in Kenya. The company of children sounded like the less dismal prospect.

  But already, she’d begun to fear she
lacked the stomach for her role. At every stoplight, children waded out into traffic to beg at her window. They sold balloons, beaded purses, bracelets made of flowers; some merely held their palms outstretched.

  “Don’t open and don’t give,” Sanjay warned her. “These children will only be robbed by their parents. As long as the parents can make money this way, they will send the children out into the streets.”

  When the children, encouraged by her glances, became too aggressive, Sanjay honked his horn. It wasn’t done with malice, nor did the children appear either frightened or offended. They simply backed away, hard little businessmen already, and moved on to the next car.

  At last Sanjay pulled over to the side of the road; he came around to let her out in front of a shop selling cheap dishware.

  “On the second floor you will meet Mr. Nandi. I’ll wait with the car.”

  Nandi’s office, at the top of a narrow, crooked flight of steps, was very plain: one small room with a desk and a man squeezed in behind it. He stood when Georgia walked in and offered his hand; he had a pointed belly and round eyeglasses, cracked in the corner of one lens.

  “You met Sanjay all right then?”

  “Yes, thank you. Though it really wasn’t necessary to send a driver.” She took her seat opposite the desk. On the walls were posters of sunsets and mountaintops. “Magical India” was written across the top of one.

  “It’s our pleasure, Ms. Calvin. We’re very pleased to have you here. Ms. Roy has sent me some information about you. We don’t get many of your kind.”

  “My kind?”

  “With your qualifications.”

  None of which prepared her for the work she’d come to do, she thought. “Well, I’m eager to get started, to settle in at the orphanage.”