Damn, she was beautiful when she was winning. This was the side of Rathi I had put out of my mind, the strong-willed part—the part that had led her to walk out on me four hundred and fifty years ago. I’d been hurt and angry and resentful and all that good garbage for a long time…but half a millennium is a really long time. You just can’t hold a grudge that long. Anyway I can’t. Living well is the best revenge, I decided long ago, and I’d been living very, very well.
Which reminded me.
I phoned the Lair. “Yo, I want to celebrate. Are you willing to make That Soup again?”
“Awww,” Baz grumbled. “It takes three hours.”
“You have some stock frozen. I saw it.”
“I was saving that,” he said.
“For what?”
“What do you have to celebrate?” he countered.
“The love of my life almost kissed me again today.”
“Wow. Break out the champagne.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “What’ll it take? I’m getting out of here in ten minutes.”
“Anything?”
“Half my kingdom.”
“Okay, short arse, bring me four portions of Chateaubriand from Smith & Wollensky so bloody they moo, eight bottles of Veuve Cliquot, and one of those chocolate cakes from the grocery. The one that looks like a brick, with the great frosting. Full size, not the half cut.”
“That’s a very binding diet.”
“You want your soup?” he said.
“There’s room for That Soup in this meal?”
Baz grunted. “No shrimp or veggies. I don’t have time. I’m up to my elbows, replacing the cracked cylinder head on the old Harley.”
“Just the broth?” I thought about it. “Okay. That’s the part I like best anyway.”
“Sheesh, plug your vagina, will you? It’s sucking your head in.”
I hung up, made phone calls to the restaurant to order Baz’s steak and champagne and to the messenger service to fetch it all, and started locking up my cabinets and powering down my copiers. Of course two rush copy jobs came in at the last minute, and I had to reboot and run them.
Just as I finished I heard a scratching at my door. The back of my neck tingled.
It was her.
I drew her inside and shut the door, both halves, and locked it.
She looked flushed and happy and smart and powerful.
“Congratulations.” I grinned at her. “I understand you’re an irresistible force.”
She said, “I want to thank you. I felt very gloomy this morning and you cheered me up.”
“I live to serve.”
“Seriously, Kama, it’s been a very difficult week.” A shadow passed over her face. Then her gaze lifted, and she smiled at me, and I felt my heart fly over the moon. “Thank you.”
“You’re going to be a big success here,” I said inanely. I couldn’t think of any sweet talk, although my heart was filling up with sappy syrup. I reveled in it.
She seemed big with decision.
I waited hopefully.
She gave a little nod. “And you are going to become a big success, too. I’ve decided it is time for you to advance yourself, Kama.” She cocked her head to one side. “I think…something requiring words. You’re good with words.”
My chest swelled. She thought I could be a big success!
“I’m writing a book,” I blurted. Where had that come from?
It threw her off, too. “Really?”
“Rewriting it. It’s the book—” I remembered that she still didn’t know any of our history. “The Kama Sutra.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s a sex manual, not a book. You will not win your fortune by updating a five-hundred-year-old—”
“Two-thousand-year-old sex manual. The five-hundred-year-old revision is full of male chauvinist oinkery.”
She scowled. “Your political correctness doesn’t impress me.”
“Cut me some slack,” I wheedled. “It’s named after me. And it needs rewriting.” I remembered how enraged she’d been with the fifteen fifty revision. “Updating. They didn’t have birth control back then. Or Viagra.”
“Huh. I’ll believe it when I see some pages. Printed pages. The pictures don’t interest me,” she added, but her eyes shifted as if she were thinking of more comebacks and realizing that she couldn’t say any of them.
Or maybe she was imagining the pictures.
Suddenly this was weird for me.
I had slept with somewhere between fifty and eighty-five thousand women in the past four hundred and fifty years and many of them had been virgins.
Before that I had been married to this woman for almost six thousand years. We had done literally everything it is possible to do with tab A and slot B, not to mention every other variation we could think of, sometimes with outriders.
But the two women in one person—the virgin I’d done it all with? Major head twist.
There was no question about who I wanted to kiss me right now. This stuck-up heifer had me by the balls. I wanted her. I loved her. I would probably start howling at the fluorescent lights in a minute if she didn’t lean forward and—
And then she did.
Her lips brushed mine. A thrill shot through me that was definitely not virgin stuff.
“I don’t want you to think I would—that I—because I’m okay with this part, I really am,” she babbled. Her lips were so close, I could feel the vibrations in her throat against my lips as she spoke.
“’S okay,” I said. I ached all over. I wanted that kiss.
“I know it’s not forever,” she murmured.
A completely unreasonable pain stabbed through me like a three-foot sword.
“Rathi, you’re killing me,” I whispered. “Are you going to kiss me?”
Her eyes opened wide and I fell into their deep brown depths.
“Yes,” she said. And she did.
This wasn’t the same woman whose ring finger I’d kissed a week ago. Since then, she’d been waking up. Her energy was alive now. Invisible colors radiated from her: red, gold, emerald, lapis, and brilliant. I held still, breathless, waiting for her powers to meet mine, to bounce me away—or to open and let me inside.
Our colors met. I felt a sizzle in my belly. She was so strong already, so fiercely alive. I raised my hands, palm outward, and she raised hers and laid them on my palms, and light squeezed out between our hands, bright enough to blind me.
And then she opened her mouth to me. Honey and ambrosia flooded my senses. Her breath was the odor of jasmine. Her tongue touched mine and made poems of nectar to cloud the air. I swooned against her hands, and her might and glory carried me as Bhagavati carried the black bee in her palm, trembling its wings the way my heart trembled, a thousand vibrations, soaring and yet at rest from second to second.
Plus, my hard-on nearly messed my chinos.
I directed every ounce of my strength against myself, to hold myself still, to accept her entry into my mouth and let her take possession at her own pace.
I felt our colors spiral around one another, shooting up to the ceiling and through it as if there were no office tower between us and the sun.
When she withdrew, I was calm. My tears ran freely down my face. “Welcome back, baby.”
“What?” She blinked at me. Her long eyelids were sleepy with love. But there was no recognition in them.
She leaned slowly away from me, pulling her palms off mine. I felt our invisible colors sticking to one another, peeling away reluctantly, finally releasing with a palpable smack.
Her expression turned puzzled. “What was that?”
So. She wasn’t remembering anything yet. Time for some smoke screen. I was so disappointed, two more tears came.
“Just a kiss,” I said huskily, rubbing my face dry. “Buy you lunch tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday. I’m volunteering all day at the battered women’s shelter,” she said.
“Okay, Sunday.” I stuffed my han
ds in my pockets. “Let’s make it a picnic. We’ll have all day.”
Her smile came, also slow and sleepy. I don’t think I’d been so happy in the past four hundred and fifty years. “Okay.”
“Meet me at the Bean at eleven?”
She breathed in slowly. How well I remembered the sound of her indrawn sigh! She had to have come during that kiss.
“Okay,” she said again.
She went off to her meeting or whatever, and I floated back to the Lair in a state of bliss. In fact, I had to fend off four women who made eye contact with me on the bus. I finally got out and jogged the last seven blocks to the Lair.
“Dude, your laptop has been pinging every twenty minutes,” Baz said when I walked in.
The smell of That Soup filled the Lair. I sniffed ecstatically. Lovely Rathi…glorious Rathi…about to become mine all mine forever if I could just convince her I was serious…and the sharp, sweet, savory, spicy smell of Baz’s best soup.
I took a hit off the bong he had going on the table.
Ping! That was my laptop, sitting on the table by the bong.
“For fuck’s sake, answer that, will you?” Baz growled.
I took a second hit, then sat and opened my e-mail. “Whoa, Literally forty-five messages. All from the same person.”
I opened the latest.
O Master, I am thy cow and thy handmaiden. Let me serve you as I was destined to serve!!!!!
“One of those multiple exclamation point screamers,” I muttered. “Doesn’t anybody tell them that’s no way to market your shit?” I scrolled down through the message.
The doorbell rang.
Visit my web site and discover what your faithful devotees have done to spread the glory of your name, O Kamadeva The Undefeatable!!!!!
“Get that, will you?” Baz said.
“Wait—whoa—” They had my name? I looked at the e-mail they’d messaged. One of my AOL addresses. That figured. I got a ton of spam on those.
Kama the Bodiless has arisen from the ashes!!!! Let us proclaim your victory to the universe!!!!!
Hairs rose on the back of my neck.
The doorbell rang again.
In smaller type near the bottom, the sigfile said, Click to follow us on Facebook!
And at the very bottom was that photograph of me I’d seen on the KamaKultWhatever web site on Tuesday.
“Holy shit,” I blurted. “She’s found me.”
Baz came and looked over my shoulder. “Huh.”
“How the fuck did she find me?” I demanded.
“Are you gonna answer that fucking door? It better be my steak.”
Prickles ran up my neck. “You get it. And if it’s this crazy bitch, tell her I’m not home.”
Baz rolled his eyes. “Don’t let the soup boil.”
“Thanks,” I said, so grateful that I would even say so.
He disappeared down the stairs.
I went to the overseer’s lookout and peeked down into the old factory space, keeping out of sight, watching Baz cross the basketball court, while the doorbell rang and rang.
He answered. He pulled out his wallet. The front door shut. He started back across the basketball court with his fists full of the groceries I’d ordered plus two big shopping bags from Smith & Wollensky.
I resumed breathing again and bolted back to the kitchen, just in time to stop the soup from boiling over.
“It was your girlfriend. I told her to come back at midnight,” he said, entering and dumping the bags on the kitchen table.
“Liar.”
I ladled soup into a giant mug. Baz spread out his Chateaubriand and champagne orgy across the entire remaining table surface. Only when he had sawn off a chunk of bloody beef and stuffed it into his cheek did he point a fork at my laptop.
“She mentions a web site. Did you visit her site?”
“Well, yeah, but…shit.” I had never worried about cookies before. Demons don’t. Now I was paying for that. “She probably got my e-mail that way.”
“Which e-mail?”
I swung the laptop to face me while I slurped soup, clicking through my browsing history until I found her crazy-ass KamaKult URL. “I was logged in as [email protected].”
“Can’t imagine how she figured that one out.”
“What the hell does she want?” I whined, feeling helpless.
Baz came around to drip beef grease on my screen.
“Hey!” I wiped it off with the hem of my shirt.
“Looks like she wants some more of your good, good lovin’.”
“Well, she can’t have any! I just found Rathi!”
“So?” He sat back down and smirked at me and guzzled champagne out of the bottle.
I was too freaked to tell him to fuck off.
If this weirdo had found my e-mail, she could find my home address.
If she found my home address, she could find me at work.
If she found me at work, she’d find Rathi.
That must not happen.
Chapter Eleven
Sunday was warm but blustery. I put on my flowery underpants and then covered everything up with a baggy taupe polo shirt and pleated shorts. Knowing I was wearing the pretty undies made me feel pleasantly tingly. In fact, my crotch had been tingling all morning—not hot, just comfortably warm. Lately I’d also noticed my belly feeling warm—not exactly my belly—oh I don’t know. For the first time I wished that I had not been quite so contemptuous of my crazy Auntie Lakshmi’s hippy slut talk while I was a grim-faced, feminist teenager.
I had a date with the mail-room boy. Career suicide. My mother had not called, but she had left four instant messages, all of them links to devotional web sites about the virtues of chastity.
I tingled.
At eleven o’clock, I arrived at Millennium Park and walked between planters of giant dark red castor bean plants and bushy datura plants dangling clusters of peach-colored blooms. Whenever the wind gusted my way, I caught a whiff of their drug-like perfume.
I found Kama lying underneath the Bean, starfished, smiling up at his own shiny reflection. I walked under the Bean’s arch and stood looking down at him. He’d outdone himself with the street bling: white high-tops with chasing blue lights embedded in the laces, gold-embroidered black cargo shorts, and the skimpiest imaginable scarlet tank top whose straps came down nearly to where his sharp young nipples poked at the fabric.
I swallowed. “Admiring yourself?”
His smile turned toward me, so warm that I felt as though the sun were bouncing off him and flashing rays into my body.
He stretched out one arm. “Join me.”
“Are you sure there’s room in that mirror for another person?” I came to him and folded myself onto the cool concrete. I lay back beside him, stretching my limbs like his, looking up, knowing I was performing a ritual of self-discovery, as tourists did from all over the world.
The Bean looks like a fat, curvy kidney bean, only it’s more than sixty feet long and forty feet high and it’s made of mirror-shiny steel. Up close it seems immense, mysterious yet friendly, for its curves seize the entire sky and bend it into something you might imagine holding in your hand. Its real name is Cloud Gate, but Chicagoans call it the Bean.
Lying under it at the center, surrounded by children running past our heads and tourists taking their own photographs in the mirror, Kama and I looked like teenagers—one dressed gangsta but hopelessly wholesome and boyish, the other obviously in disguise, dressed like his mother. I frowned. We could only be eight or ten years apart at most. Would I look so staid if I took off the pleated shorts and let the cool lake breeze ruffle my flowered panties?
As if he heard me thinking this, Kama caught my eye in the mirrored underbelly of the Bean. “Doesn’t it hurt, lying on that bun?” He was looking at my hair.
Oh, that bun. It did, rather. I shifted my head on the concrete. “I’m all right.”
“Don’t ever say it doesn’t hurt when it does,” he said.
/> Startled at his sober tone, I met his eyes.
“How long is your hair?” I had a feeling he was changing the subject.
“Too long. I don’t know why I don’t just chop it off.”
His gaze ran along my body, so near his on the concrete. “I don’t either.” He was looking at my shorts as if he could see right through them.
I returned to looking at our reflections on the shiny underbelly of the Bean. “It opens everything, doesn’t it?” I said. “One’s gaze slides all over it, trying to find the edges, and there aren’t any.”
Where we lay, the reflections were mostly of the underside, the concrete plaza, and all the people there with us. But around the very edges I caught glimpses of impossibly blue sky and bits of cloud and the white flash of seagulls on the wing.
As I thought this, a gull came swooping under the Bean and landed near our heads, making an outraged yakking. It walked around among the tourists’ legs, undisturbed by scuffling children, yelling its head off.
“Shoo,” Kama said to it.
The gull only turned in our direction, as if its outrage were aimed personally at us. Yak yak yak yak ya-aaaaar!
“Goodness,” I said. “I don’t think it approves of us.”
“Too bad,” Kama said. I felt him take my hand. “Back off, Mom, I’m not gonna hurt her,” he said to the gull.
I laughed suddenly, thinking of my mother screaming at me via Skype. The gull, apparently offended, turned slightly away, but continued to complain.
“Let’s just close our eyes,” he said, “and maybe it’ll go away.”
Yes, there’s a philosophy for life, I thought, but I closed my eyes. The shouting and babble of the tourists mingled with the gull’s cries, honking taxis and buses on Michigan Avenue, the rattle of the elevated train on Wabash just beyond it, cries of more distant gulls, the slap and clatter of a full can of soda hitting the plaza ten feet away, a baby laughing beside us. I opened my eyes.
Kama’s eyes were shut. In the multicolored muddle of reflected, distorted human figures and baby carriages and concrete under the Bean, I saw our two bodies lying like starfish, joined hand in hand. We began to glow.
I blinked.
We definitely glowed. A soft radiance beat like a heart around our double-starfish outline. As I looked, colored bubbles seemed to float inside us, one bubble at a time, growing larger until they filled our bodies, and then popping inaudibly as if we could no longer hold the colors in, spattering everyone under the Bean with pink, yellow, blue, white, green, and violet.
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