Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “You’re young. I suppose I should be thanking heaven for my gender that the first heart you broke here is your own. Make no mistake, though. Rathi is worth more to me than you are. Hurt her and you’re out. Hurt any of my girls and you’re out. Screw up in any way—” She drew a finger across her throat with a kchkchkchkch noise.

  I swallowed. “Gotcha.”

  She nodded. “Give me a box of number two pencils.”

  After my triumph on Tuesday, I felt I had some leeway at work. I pleaded a headache and left early. I took a cab to Lolly’s apartment, not wishing to run the gauntlet of the junkies and muggers in her neighborhood. As it was, I had to pick my way to her door past four young men of leisure who were practicing a very loud form of jazz on her front sidewalk.

  Inside, Lolly overwhelmed me with hospitality. She wouldn’t tell me anything until she had laid out cakes and mithai bought, she said proudly, in Little India on Devon Avenue, and poured tea, and made me sit on one of her bright silk cushions at a low table. My gabardine lawyer suit and sensible flats hardly accorded with all this Oriental splendor, but she had clearly made an effort to entertain an official goddess.

  Or else, I thought, feeling mean and unworthy, she feels guilty for having served up my boyfriend as the main course in an orgy with her ravening celestial nymphs.

  But Lolly was in a rollicking humor. “You are the best. I couldn’t believe you walked out on Kamadeva! I mean, I wouldn’t have trusted any guy to behave himself with, like, nineteen ex-girlfriends who all want to bang him.”

  I smiled weakly. My heart sank.

  She leaned across the table and patted my hand. “But there we all were, and he was burning up, you know? He wasn’t joshing you about that part. Not that I touched him,” Lolly said hastily, as I made a face. “But, man.” She shook her head. “That was an a-ma-zing orgy. I’ve read about them, y’know, but I never actually dreamed I’d do one.”

  “Or—” I cleared my throat. “Orgy?” I wanted to die. I wanted to commit a murder-suicide and eat worms.

  “Yeah. You definitely get your merit badge for that miracle, sister.”

  I definitely felt less than sisterly. “Really? What did I contribute?” Besides supplying the main course.

  Lolly blinked. “Well, duh. You made those parrots come alive.”

  “Parrots.”

  “The gandharvas. Shoot, you missed that part, didn’t you?”

  I swallowed hard. “Please tell me what I missed.” I prayed that she wouldn’t.

  “Well!” She cast her eyes up. “After you left, we kinda felt bad for the guy, I mean, he was hard as a telephone pole, and I’m not kidding about the burning-up thing. The smoke alarm went off! Nobody noticed for about three hours, and by then the batteries had almost run down. It was just squeaking. Like, beeeep.”

  I nodded. “And the parrots?”

  “Why, they turned into hot guys. Okay, a couple of ’em are a little paunchy. But I’m not one to complain,” Lolly said, looking shy suddenly and gesturing, I presumed, at her size 48-E bosom. “And we partied. Oh. My. God did we party!” Here she launched into great detail about the orgy.

  I stood it for three and a half minutes and then covered my ears and shut my eyes. “Stop!”

  Lolly broke off, looking at me with amazement.

  “Just tell me one thing. Where was Kama in all this…this merrymaking?”

  “He left. Didn’t you know?”

  “I left first,” I reminded her.

  “That’s right. Oh!” Comprehension lit Lolly’s face. “You thought—oh, honey, we didn’t touch him. He wouldn’t do it. I told you. He turned us down, and then he turned all those parrots into guys for us.”

  “Guys for you? As in, for you personally?”

  “Apparently his powers increase the longer he goes without getting laid. Of course, if he doesn’t get laid at least once a month, he burns to a crisp.”

  “Wh—what?”

  “He told us, remember?”

  “You don’t believe everything he tells you,” I said. I was beginning to disbelieve Lolly’s story, too.

  Her apartment door opened. “Hey, sweetness,” a man’s voice called. “I scored! Just weekends, but they’ll pay us three hundred dollars for two sets a night.”

  “In here!” Lolly yelled. “Here comes Max. He’ll tell you, if you don’t believe me or Kama.”

  Max came in, lugging a pair of drums nearly as big as he was. He turned out to be one of the musicians-at-large from Lolly’s front lawn. He slid to his knees next to Lolly and embraced her in a prolonged, intimate kiss.

  “You’re too good for me,” he said, when they came up for air.

  “You’re just barely good enough for me,” she said calmly. “Max, this is Rathi, your goddess. Show some respect.”

  Max stood up and bowed low in my direction. Lolly’s parrot gandharva hot guy was two inches shorter than Lolly and a good hundred pounds lighter. His brow was craggy and low and his reddish-brown eyebrows bushed out and his arms seemed longer and more sinewy than was humanly possible. He sat back down and cuddled up to her again.

  “I think he’s my soul mate,” she said to me, hefting him against her substantial side.

  I swallowed. “Parrot?” I said.

  “Oh, right!” Max said. He made a wiggly, slithering movement beside Lolly, and then suddenly a green parrot with a red beak burst into the air and flew around the room making sharp musical cheeping sounds.

  Lolly shrieked and tossed her napkin over the dishes on the table.

  The parrot landed beside my plate, snatched a grape off it, and then leaped onto Lolly’s shoulder. Then it tried to stuff the grape into her ear.

  She jerked her head away, giggling.

  In the next moment, Max sat beside her again, pulling his jeans back on.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  Lolly was watching me with concern in her face. “Max, Rathi doesn’t believe about Kama burning up if he doesn’t get laid. She thinks we did him last night.”

  Max got to his feet, holding his hand out to me. “Come and see.”

  I stood up. I wasn’t up for a demonstration of even a Kama-free orgy.

  But Lolly and Max led me into the living room. The hangings were mostly torn off the walls. The cushions were tumbled everywhere. Candle wax had dribbled on the carpet, and I saw many stray green parrot feathers. The smell—the smell was eloquent. Scented candles, incense, parrot excrement, and various human smells, too.

  A lot of people had had a lot of fun in here.

  Lolly was examining the floor. “Let’s see. I was standing here. You were sitting in a chair—oops, guess we broke that. But about here, I think. The apsaras were in a circle around us. A-hah!” She pointed.

  I looked.

  On the carpet I saw the imprint of two bare feet. The fibers were deeply scorched and melted. Patches of soot radiated out around them, exactly as if someone had jumped into a puddle of something burning and splashed it…and then stood there, burning his naked footprints into the carpet.

  After tea, some apsaras came over and Lolly introduced me to more of the parrot men. They came in all sizes, shapes, colors, and ages, like the women who worshipped Kamadeva, but they had this in common—they adored their apsaras. Even Annette had a handsome, muscular friend to hand-fed her sweetmeats and massage her feet.

  I was shocked and dismayed at the scouring envy I felt.

  I made my excuses and went home.

  Chapter Twenty

  That night I lay in bed, sleepless.

  He was mine. I wanted him. I loved him. I shut my eyes, remembering how superior I had felt all through school because I had never fallen for any boy. And now I wanted the biggest boy of all. My beautiful Kamadeva.

  I felt my throat grow tight, just thinking his name.

  Lightning flickered outside my window from far across the lake, lighting up my bedroom ceiling.

  I thought of my lonely thirty-four years and how I’d met Kama
and instantly bonded to him. What a fool I must seem to him! I didn’t know what to think of him—was he that adorable, delusional, puppylike playboy from the mail room? Or my long lost husband? My thoughts whipped back and forth.

  It didn’t help that the more I surrendered to his seduction, the less he tried to seduce me. Why was he tormenting me like this? Why wouldn’t he finish the job? I was so much more than ready.

  I knew now I could bring him to me if I chose. I didn’t need the apsaras chanting, or candles and incense. All I had to do was…want him.

  I wanted him.

  For the first time in many, many years, I was tempted to touch myself.

  My mother wasn’t here to beat me. No one would know.

  I knew if I did, I’d think of Kama. And then he would be in this room with me. Would he touch me at last?

  Or would he reject me again?

  I turned over in bed and pounded the pillow.

  My mother had been right after all to punish that behavior.

  After tossing on my sweaty bed for two hours, I got up and Skyped home. This time my mother answered. I felt like bursting into tears at the sight of her face.

  Immediately she started scolding. “Beti, what have you done?” she cried. “Are you still a virgin?”

  “Yes, Mother, yes,” I began.

  “What did you say to your cousin? He has been shivering in a fever for these past twenty-four hours! I finally got out of him that you had called, and he would say nothing! You know he has final examinations this month! How could you upset him?”

  I was speechless. I hadn’t expected to get comfort, but to be scolded for unkindness to Sunil was a total reversal of all our roles.

  “Are you still dating that man? Does he touch you improperly?” Her voice rose shrilly. “Well? What have you to say for yourself?” Mummy leaned toward her computer and squinted. “You look different. You’re pregnant! I knew it!”

  I couldn’t answer. She continued to ream me out, apparently not willing to hear any excuses.

  I hadn’t any excuses. I watched her as if my feelings were far away.

  I saw a handsome woman of middle age, of the professional caste, with sound lungs, good circulation, and a slight tendency toward jaundice. She was happily married, I judged, but her sex life was only so-so. Her husband was attentive—listening to her voice I could tell she was accustomed to being obeyed—but they had probably settled into a routine that was slowly wearing down her vitality. I found myself idly contemplating what sort of sexual practices would spice things up for them without shocking her middle-class sensibilities—

  —And stopped, shocked at myself.

  “Rathi, this is your mother speaking to you!”

  Rathi, that is your mother you are thinking about!

  I no longer felt the emotions that had prompted me to call her. The wailing child inside me was silent.

  The stranger who was my mother did a double take. I thought her color lightened, or maybe that was the Internet reception.

  I had the answer now to the question that had tormented me since I was nine. I was born a goddess. My parents had known I was a goddess. They loved me and they were proud of me and they credited me with goddess-like wisdom. I hoped I had been wise, and cringed to worry that I had not. Sunil was right, it gave them status in the temple, too, and my mother loved that.

  But which goddess? That mattered. The honor to our family was immense. But it was no surprise that they had raised me to be an uptight virgin. No doubt they hoped the prophecy wouldn’t come true until I was old, and they were dead, and they wouldn’t have to live with the honor and the shame of a daughter who was a lust goddess.

  In time no doubt I might understand how they had decided to get me to safety out of India, far away from the man who might turn me from a good little Hindu girl into a shameless goddess of desire who cavorted naked on temple walls.

  Of course, none of us knew that he had fled our marriage and gone west when I fled east.

  All this was only a story about someone far away. I felt more like a goddess than a lawyer at this moment.

  “What is the matter, beti? You look so strange.”

  I said, “You should stay away from turmeric for three weeks, four maybe. And read chapter seven of the Kama Sutra with your husband.”

  She gasped. “What did you say?”

  “I don’t want you to get jaundice. Read it. Your marriage will be better and you will live longer.”

  The stranger who was once my mother swallowed. “I didn’t want to tell you about the lab tests,” she said in a small voice. “It’s not jaundice yet. It’s still manageable.”

  I found myself slipping into the managing manner I always used with the family. “Good health is not just good eating and sleeping. Improve your love life and it may save the rest of your life.”

  She gasped and smiled tremulously. “That’s my wise girl!” She wiped a tear away with one finger.

  From afar, I realized that she had decided I was back to running her life for her, and she was prepared to stop berating me.

  “I’m not anyone’s girl now,” I said.

  There was buzzing in my ears. Blood pressure, I thought with clinical detachment.

  She started to sob in earnest. “Oh, Rathi. I didn’t want this for you. I wanted you to be a normal little girl.”

  Two weeks ago I might have retorted, at least in my own thoughts, that she had scarcely reared me normally. Now all that old resentment was gone. In a voice I didn’t recognize, I said, “You did your best, both of you.”

  She just stared at me.

  Deliberately, I said, “Bless you.” A long string of Sanskrit words came out of my mouth.

  Her eyes got wider and wider, as if they might fall out of her head.

  “Padminiji?” I heard my father’s voice from another room, seven and a half thousand miles away. “You are speaking to Rathi?”

  He had already told me goodbye.

  I struck like a cobra to cut the connection. The screen went dark.

  I was just a lawyer again.

  I felt ice cold. A trembling came slowly over me. I stood and went to the kitchen to make tea. The trembling came in waves like fever but there was no fluctuating between cold and hot. I was cold through. Some distant part of my mind hurt from my conversation with my mother—still my mother, surely!

  That spot was too tender to touch. I had loved them so much, I had found no friends here in the States—just my crazy Auntieji. Who needs friends when you can speak with your parents every single day?

  But it still hurt that they had banished me.

  I felt I was pleading with myself, seeking to bargain with something as enormous and inevitable as death. Because whatever it was, it was moving toward me.

  While the kettle heated, I ran my hands under hot water. That helped a little. I took my tea to the big chair in my living room, and then, thinking it not enough, I brought two blankets out, one a Rajasthani-style painted quilt and the other an electric blanket. My hands trembled as I plugged in the electric blanket and turned it up to highest temperature. My tea already seemed not so hot. I curled up in the chair, loaded with blankets, holding my tea with both hands and staring fiercely at the plywood the building superintendent had put over my damaged window.

  Like any good Hindu I knew maybe fifty words of Sanskrit, some of which were “please forgive me for pronouncing Sanskrit so badly,” and which I had stopped saying at all when I was old enough to think religion was old hat.

  Yet the blessing had rolled out of me effortlessly, perfectly spoken. Had I ever heard it before?

  *many times.*

  It shocked me, too, how coldly I had diagnosed my mother’s condition. Whatever I might think of her relations with my father, I should not have voiced those thoughts. And I had never before thought about her sex life. Brr!

  *why not? she is a woman, a human being in need. it was the right thing to do.*

  These thoughts did not come from outsi
de me. Rather, they came from somewhere deep inside, and the voice was much stronger than the usual, niggly, self-doubting, mouselike voice in my head. I felt as if I had opened a door at the back of the garden wall and found a mountain, all mine.

  The tea mug began to slip from my hands. I put it on the Jaipuri rug and burrowed deeper into my blankets.

  I closed my eyes and groped inside for that odd new part of myself that knew Sanskrit blessings and felt only distant indulgence toward my family. It helped to imagine a garden wall…a thick, high wall made of many bricks, bricks I had made with my two hands, and set broken glass in the top.

  And in the wall I pictured a door.

  I could hear the mountain whispering on the other side of the door.

  Shrinking into my tiny blanket-wrapped self, I imagined putting a hand on the door…opening it…peeking out.

  It was a very handsome mountain. Immensely tall, filling my view from one horizon to the other, dark with forests to the tree line and snowcapped.

  The mountain spoke to me.

  *welcome back.*

  I slammed the garden door. Pulled my blankets over my head. Tucked my knees up against my chest.

  I had turned the electric blanket to high heat, but it didn’t help. I felt icy to the core.

  It must be this cold on that mountaintop, I thought drowsily. I’m falling asleep and freezing to death. They’ll find me stone dead in this chair.

  What a nice way to die, slow and soft! There was warmth in sleep. I wriggled deeper into the snow, pillowing my head on a chunk of ice, feeling safe and at home.

  I dreamed of a garden. Bel trees bloomed, perfuming the air, and the ground was littered with blue rudraksa fruit. A man sat meditating under a great jujube tree. From the suffering in his face I guessed he wasn’t having much luck achieving samsara, that state of being where one lives only in the moment, the state where time stops, the state where what you are and know and feel and see now, now, is all there is.

  Then I saw my husband. Compared with the other man, he seemed full of vigor and intention and, oh, yes, mischief. My whole being focused on observing him. His brown eyes were young and demanding and boyish and quick. My heart filled with sweet heat, watching him raise his bow and put an arrow to the string, the arrow of scent, hardest of all his temptations to resist. He grinned—dimples showed—I heard him utter a prayer to Ganesh to speed his arrow to its mark.