Her cheeks are flushed, and I'm not sure why. Claudia is so fair, she's practically transparent. Veins as delicate and finely etched as calligraphy are visible on her temples, and when she is hot or feeling emotional or working out, you can actually track the course of the blood as it spreads up and across her face. Talking about Vikrum would seem reason enough for the high color of her cheeks, but then, too, the kitchen feels warm even from where I sit, and she's the one who has been hovering, chopsticks wielded like a pro, like a native Japanese, over a steaming wok on the stove.
When Claudia was younger, she thought her veins were disgusting, and she hated that she blushed so easily. I used to tell her that there was no way on earth I was the only one who noticed and admired her skin. She would make her you-are-so-crazy-you-know-that? face at me, the one where she lowered her head and looked at me from under raised brows, her mouth pursing up so tight her lips didn't show. She was all eyes when she made that face; it always made me laugh.
That was, to be fair, back when we were teenagers, in the early eighties, when people clad in strips of cloth and pieces of string marinated themselves with baby oil, lay on reflector mats, and allowed themselves to be cooked by ultraviolet rays, when it was considered far better to be the color of well-done meat than of the inside of the bun it came served on. So it wasn't all that surprising that Claudia thought her skin was ugly. I was one of those people turning slowly on that spit, aiming for and achieving that even brown—a fact that I've had plenty of opportunity of late to rue; Claudia, who went from white to painful pink and then right back to white again, who laughed at herself in a bathing suit, wasn't. Still, even in those days of raging tan worship, I noticed her skin, and I don't think it was just me; it wasn't just some latent Japanese adulation of white skin that made me remark on it.
As I sit at the counter of her cluttered, comfortable kitchen, lazily nibbling on cashews while she tosses odds and ends, peas and pineapple and even peanuts (“It's going to be a p-curry,” she says, “made up of foods beginning with the letter p—I wish I had a pumpkin too”), from her refrigerator into the wok, I realize that it all comes down to the transparency of her skin in the end. That, and those big gray eyes. They are the reason she has such an enormously expressive face, the reason the emotions flit across it like block letters formed by a child's hand—large, clear, and so nakedly readable I want to cover her face, hold a red and orange striped dish towel over it so only a trusted few can see.
IT WAS ALMOST ALWAYS the other way. I talked, she listened. Before I met Claudia, I never thought about whether my life was eventful or not. Some time after that fateful encounter, I came with some regret to the conclusion that I had a streak of drama queen in me. What passed between us wasn't just the stories, some complete fantasy and the others less so, about Japan and my mother that Claudia always wanted to hear, but also the ones that were harder to tell and, surely, harder to hear—about the death of my father, say.
She is older than me by just five months. But if we go by the somewhat suspect proposition that the quantity of time logged on this earth is a measure of who is more grown-up, and by yet another proposition, equally if not more suspect, that the more grown-up should look after the less so, then it might just as well have been five years, or fifty. Or at least it felt like that back in the good old days, when we were all part of one family. It was always she who took care of me.
My first day at her school, for instance, when I was, finally, on my way home, and a circle of girls surrounded me: “Chinese, Japanese, squinty eyes, dirty knees . . .” Does Claudia remember the fight she got into? Probably, almost certainly, even though it was more than a quarter of a century ago, even though we never did speak of it afterward. It's not the kind of thing one forgets.
Given this history, it feels good to be able to do something for her for a change. Even if that something is, paradoxically enough, not doing: not moving anything more than my lips, upward, as she talks, not allowing anything more than an occasional hmm and an uh-huh to escape from my throat.
Bite your tongue, Rosie used to say, whenever Claudia and I swore. I had never heard that expression before, and so the first time I heard it I thought, What a strange woman Claudia has for her mom. But I liked her, curious and unsmiling though she seemed, the woman Henry had once been married to, and so I tried to do what she said, biting down so hard that tears came to my eyes, and Claudia asked, Why are you making such a funny face; are the cookies I made so bad?
Perhaps today, as on that day so many years ago, if I open my mouth as I stand in front of a mirror, I will discover that I have two tiny red marks on the tip of my tongue.
Because she deserves to have this evening; she deserves to relive every delicious detail (her story as tasty as her p-curry, whipped up with her own special touch) in her own recounting and reimagining of it, like any other girl in love. And because scolding wouldn't serve any point. Claudia has been scolding herself, and far worse, for a long time now, for easily as long as she has been with Vikrum. That, too, is written in a child's block letters on her face.
SHE NOTICED HIS BICYCLE FIRST. In retrospect, she may have even fallen in love with it first; at the very least, it greased her later headlong descent into that state. She was locking up her own bike and saw that there was only one other bicycle locked up outside the post office, which was not surprising since the sleet had only recently started to lessen. It was February, and cold and wet.
(“Are you still riding . . . ?” I ask hesitantly, unwilling to bring up a potentially painful subject.
“What do you think? You didn't really think I'd trade her in, did you?” she asks, her eyes wide with horror that is only partly mock, and I'm overcome with mortification that I asked such a question. I quickly but only partly effectively reassure her: I thought maybe Stella had broken down, or been stolen—never, ever traded.)
Stella is Claudia's old gearless bicycle, a hand-me-down from Henry. Seventeen years ago, it was so old that it was impossible to tell whether it was black by virtue of paint or age or rust, but it worked well enough. And, too (Claudia reminds me now), it's so heavy it's difficult to steal. Actually, I'm thinking, if the bike thieves do leave it alone, what's at issue is probably not Stella's weight, impressive though it is: after all, the old bat does come with wheels. But I keep my mouth shut, for I don't want to impede the flow of her story, and, besides, what do I know from the bike thieves of Boston? From what I can gather, they're like the New York thieves, a none-too-picky group.
The other bicycle parked outside the post office was like hers, black and upright, ancient and so rusted that at first she thought it was abandoned. But then Claudia noticed that it was locked up with a heavy chain and lock, the almost-thief-proof kind that she herself had. In the midst of scooping the rice onto plates, she turns to me for emphasis as she recounts this last detail, her face lit up with a smile, and it takes me a second to realize that her glow comes from pride, and the pride from the fact that her lover is—can you believe her luck?—a man who treasures his old bicycle.
I can see my stepsister taking a moment out to nod approvingly at the well-locked old bicycle outside the post office, her uncovered head cold and wet in the sleet. I can picture her shaking her raincoat out with care so that she will not further contribute to the spread of the doubtlessly already treacherous puddles on the floor of the post office. I imagine the way she tries to smooth her matted hair out before giving up with a shrug, how she hikes her knapsack, heavy with books for teaching, higher on her back, and how her head is bent forward as she slowly makes her way up the ramp toward the door.
IT WAS A SATURDAY, middle of the afternoon, a busy time at the South Station post office. Standing at the end of the line, her birthday package for her father (a wool hat and two mysteries) tucked tightly under her arm, Claudia was lost in cataloging her to-do list for that day and so did not notice for some time the hands of the man standing a little way up in front of her.
There was no particu
lar reason she should have. The room was filled with people, and he was not one to stand out in a crowd (“Not that he's bad-looking,” adds Claudia to me hastily, “not in the least”). A dark-skinned, South Asian man, he was on the tall side but not unusually so. He was dressed in dark and quiet clothes, a black leather bag slung over his shoulders, and he wore a pair of large glasses that were patched together on one side with Scotch tape. A graduate student, probably; there are so many in the Boston area. Perhaps he was a man who had traveled a great distance to pursue his passion—in philosophy, maybe, or classics; religion as an outside chance—in this red-brick university town.
This man was one of the few in the room engaged in lively conversation; an old man standing just behind him was chattering away to him about what Claudia thought was his dog, or was that his wife? They talked together using the large gestures and the hyperclear enunciation that signified a first encounter. But the conversation itself was also not why Claudia noticed the young magician: he wasn't actually talking himself, his role in the dialogue that of listener only. (Once she did take notice, though, Claudia was impressed with the way the student held up his end of the conversation. He listened in a way that went beyond courtesy; tilting forward a little toward the old man, his gaze fixed upon him, the student seemed genuinely interested and even absorbed in this man that he seemed to have just met.)
No, what made Claudia notice this young man was that his hands were busy, incessantly so. He pulled a red bandanna through his fingers, back and forth, and this is what made Claudia blink and take notice—as he did so the bandanna vanished, then reappeared, vanished and reappeared.
Abracadabra, eye of newt, toe of frog.
Five more minutes in line, five more minutes of steady, almost hypnotically rhythmic vanishing and reappearing of the bandanna. And then the conversation between the two men began to change. The magician began to talk, and because his voice was unexpectedly loud, carrying easily in the cavernous space of the room, Claudia could without difficulty overhear what he said. Yes, I'm married, with two children, a boy and a girl. Ages two and four. Actually, I do have pictures (and with those words, he stuffed the bandanna unceremoniously into his jacket pocket and began rooting around in his bag), right here.
That's my daughter and my son. No, she's the handful—he's actually an angel. Oh, do you think she looks good? My wife—her name is Lakshmi—doesn't like that picture of herself, but I don't think it's so bad. . . . Yes, I did take it myself, thank you, right in our backyard. I'm pretty proud of the shot.
The magician was smiling now, animated and lively; other people standing in line began to turn toward him and ask him questions, their faces reflecting his smile, their voices catching some of the excitement in his. Claudia had half a mind to reach for the pictures herself—what was it about this man?—but there were now three people exclaiming over them and another four waiting their turn. Instead, she turned away. Watching him, she had pegged him as an adventurer or a scholar. A wizard. She tried but could not help feeling crushed (and at this point in the story Claudia begins to laugh, disappointed in herself as much as in this not-so-mysterious man) that his accent was as banal, completely standard-issue American, as the words he uttered.
Still, of course, his pride in his young family was sweet. She had no problem there; she was not, of course, jealous. Of course.
Because Claudia was in love herself, and very happily, thank-you-very-much. For two years and counting, with Doug Foreman, a very nice man, once a teacher like herself and now the principal, no less, at the public school she worked in. Doug, with his honest face and large, flat hands (“farmer's hands, peasant's hands,” he'd always said), who had grown up in Pennsylvania, just over the border from New Jersey, a mere half hour from Claudia's own hometown. Doug had gone to Brown, too, two years ahead of her; they had taken a number of the same courses, almost but never quite at the same time.
People said that it was a wonder she and Doug had not met earlier. They themselves said that it was not a wonder but, rather, the strange workings of destiny conspiring in their favor that didn't allow them to meet until two and a half years ago—when they were in their thirties, ready for love, ready for each other—on Claudia's first day at Parker School.
WHEN HENRY GOT SICK, Claudia tells me now, she didn't have nightmares about losing her father. Instead, she dreamed regularly of walking out into the bright sunshine and seeing only rows and rows of new, brightly colored bikes. If she were lucky, she woke up after finding her lock chewed cleanly through, as if it had been rope rather than metal, and the bike gone; if she were not, her dream would continue with her roaming the streets of Boston, calling out for Stella (yup, just like Marlon Brando, she says, nodding, beating me to it), peering into dark alleys as if for a lost cat.
Yet when she stepped out of the post office that day, it was without a sense of outrage that she noted the young family man leaning over her bicycle, tinkering with her lock.
“Excuse me,” said Claudia, trembling a little; the wind was bitter. “I think that's my bicycle.”
He looked up. The lenses of his glasses were lightly splattered with sleet, and the Scotch tape on the frame was peeling in the damp; behind them his eyes were very dark. For a second he stared at her.
“Oh, so that's why my key isn't working,” he said. His words may have been rueful but he spoke with an easy confidence. “That's my ride over there.” He nodded his head over at the other old bicycle, on the other side of the rack. He didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed, smiling instead, trying hard, Claudia thought (too hard, annoyingly hard), to be charming; his lips were turned upward in a smirk rather than a smile. “I wasn't trying to take your bike, of course.”
“Of course,” she repeated, tight-lipped but still Claudia, polite as ever.
“They look alike, no?”
At this her eyebrows, already arched by this point, shot up further still on her forehead. She spoke with uncharacteristic crispness: Stella, it needs to be remembered, is an heirloom. “If you know nothing about bicycles, yes, they do.”
His smile, she noted with a burst of pleasure so sharp she could almost taste it (for Claudia, this was more than uncharacteristic, it was downright bizarre—how disappointed in him had she been?), slipped off his face like melting slush. He opened his mouth—to apologize or placate, perhaps; already she knew this young man well enough to guess that he was not about to retort—and then, looking away, closed it.
A gust of wind, and with it an extra scattering of sleet. Claudia involuntarily shuddered. She thought it was the cold but was not sure, because just as the wind blew, two facts of overriding importance had suddenly become clear in her mind: first, that she hated to see this man that she had just met looking like this, and second, that she would do anything to call a smile—so what if it was closer to a smirk?—onto his face once again. (“In retrospect, it was a historic moment,” she says to me dryly. She scrapes the jalapeño peppers she has just minced off the cutting board and into the wok, then stands on tiptoe to retrieve the curry powder from the cabinet above her head. “The establishment of a lifelong pattern: he pouts, I die.”)
“Never mind about the bike,” she said. She extended a gloved hand and smiled; doubtlessly she flushed as well, the high color rushing into her face and transforming it. “I'm Claudia; it's good to meet you, even under these circumstances.”
He took her hand, clasped and held it briefly. “Vikrum,” he said.
“So are you a magician?” she asked. “I saw you with that handkerchief in there. . . .”
He threw her a quick sideways glance. “A magician? I wouldn't say that, no.”
Claudia waited. The wind no longer seemed as biting, her to-do list for that day not as long.
“I just—how should I put it?—have a talent, a small one, for finding things. Unfortunately, my gift doesn't seem to extend to my own possessions.” Here he nodded at his bicycle. “But I do okay with other people's stuff. For example . . .”
Taking his bare hand out of his pocket, he reached down and ran a finger beneath her bicycle bell (where were his gloves?—she felt an urge, suddenly, to scold him for forgetting them; as if he were one of her students, she wanted to hold his hands between her own and to rub them and so make them warm) and then plucked out a quarter, shining and new. “Aha. So that's why you like your bicycle so much. The goose that lays the golden eggs. Look, there's more.” He fished out another from one of the tassels that hung down, matted and bedraggled as Claudia's hair, from Stella's handles. “Fertile little bird, isn't she?”
Then the man held the quarters out to Claudia on his palm.
“You should keep them,” she said, shaking her head. “Not to put down your considerable talents, but I understand it's been a rough year for magicians, and—”
“It's okay,” he said, smiling kindly. “I have a day job.”
She peered at him doubtfully. Her feet were getting cold.
“I do,” he said, seeming to read her silence correctly as skepticism. “Really. I'm a neurobiologist.” Then, as her silence continued: “I'm presently working on the theory that the human race originated from one common sex. Because why else, really, would men have nipples?”
Claudia flicked him a look filled with only thinly veiled suspicion. Was he a liar, a creep (the reference to nipples), or, even worse (after all, she's Henry's and, especially, Rosie's daughter, brought up to prize rigor of thought), a real scientist who spewed crackpot theories? Then, abruptly, she gave in. “I always thought men had nipples so they could pierce them,” she said. “But what do I know? I'm just an elementary-school teacher.”
Vikrum looked at her for a second, and then he laughed. He had a full-throated laugh, terribly pleasant to listen to (thought Claudia, who had completely forgotten about her feet), and deep. When he stopped, he said, “I should tell you that I'm lying. I am a biologist, but I'm not working on that theory. Although I did think, until I heard yours, that it's probably right. I clone. Genes, not sheep.” He looked closely at her, and smiled. “Just so you don't think I'm a crank,” he added.
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