Suddenly I felt something. Her. Rathi! Here? How had she found me?
I came to the surface sputtering and choking, treading water.
And there she was, her low heels tapping on the tile as she marched across the pool area.
The handful of other swimmers in the water took one look at her and got out, gathering their towels and flip-flops and scurrying for the door.
She paused at the deep end of the pool beside a low diving board, scanning the lanes.
Then she saw me.
“Kama!” Our eyes met. She threw her purse to the tile behind her and knelt at the water’s edge, putting her hands on the lip of the pool and leaning out toward me. “Are you all right?”
She looked so sweet and kind and softened, I felt a weepy weakness. Her eyes were puffy, too—had she been crying? How had I ever let this woman walk out of my life?
By being a horse’s ass.
Something else I saw immediately was that her aura was about thirty times normal size.
I caught my breath. “You—you’ve remembered?”
She sighed and sank back on her heels in an Asian squat. “Maybe. I think so. It’s more like finding that the tiny island I’ve been standing on is the tip of an iceberg. Only the iceberg is above me, not below me. I feel—I feel connected to that other part of me, but it doesn’t rule me. It hasn’t tried to take over my brain or anything. Yet.”
She didn’t sound hugely comforted by this fact.
I swam a little closer. “It doesn’t work that way. You’ll find yourself merging with all that stuff sometimes, but mostly you’ll just be yourself.” I hated to see anxiety in her eyes. “Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry!” she said, suddenly energetic. “How should I not worry when you left me a suicide note on your voicemail?”
I might have blushed. I was so damned hot, I couldn’t tell. “I was feeling maudlin.”
“You didn’t come to work.”
I licked chlorine off my lips. “I feel kinda feverish.”
“You look like you’re burning up.” Her eyes narrowed. I saw her noticing the bubbles forming along my meridians and boiling to the pool’s surface. “Kama, how could this happen? Speak to your wife, not to an ignorant thirty-four-year-old virgin,” she added.
Oh, lord. Here we were at the hard part, and I hadn’t planned for it. I had no idea how to deal with it if she went ballistic on me.
The fact was, I was so terrified of her anger, I would literally die to avoid it.
“Try the truth,” she said, as if she’d read my thoughts. Yep. She’s back—my wife, in all her glory.
I began cautiously. “I told you some of it last night, when we were with those crazy women.”
“Your apsaras. They have earned their rank. You gave them gandharvas of their own,” she reminded me.
“You gave them. I just made them into men.”
Her tone turned steely. “Talk.”
“When I took the death ray,” I said, swallowing, hating even to talk about it, “you stole a pinch of my ashes. Shiva would have shit if he knew. He kept the rest of them, to prevent me from reincarnating. He wanted to keep me helpless—Kama Ananga—Kama the Bodiless,” I said bitterly.
“I know all this. Go on.”
I hated to bring it up. If she remembered, she’d hate me all over again.
Well, that was the big idea. If she was a goddess again, she remembered. And if she still wanted me, life was worth living.
And if not…then not.
“Things deteriorated between us. It took a long time. You wanted me to flip Shiva the bird and reincarnate. His devotees were really fucking over women’s rights. You were mad about that, too. And then they rewrote the Kama Sutra into a how–to-beat-your-wife manual.”
I could see her brow darkening. Oh, shit. Yup, she remembers. Moving right along.
I couldn’t help glossing over the worst part. “So we had a lot of fights, and you left, and my mother found the ashes you had stolen, and she made this body for me. It’s a damn good body. It just needs…a lot of exercise.”
“Fucking,” she said crisply. Though our old life had been pretty much all about fucking, it still shocked me to hear that word on prissy RathiRaani’s lips.
This close to her, I thought about fucking, too. Not good for my core temperature. I could feel the water warming up around me, because I was treading water in one place. I cast a yearning look behind me at the Olympic-size vat of cold water and wondered what would happen if I burnt up while I was immersed. Whole lotta steam, I imagined.
She began to look steamed, too. “I see. And then you did what? That’s my question.”
“I didn’t. You did. You had stomped out on me, Rathi,” I said wistfully.
She bit her lip. Apparently she wasn’t ready to destroy me with her anger yet. “And you?”
I shrugged. “I took off. Nobody missed me. Shiva’s cardboard cutout of a bodiless Kamadeva just stood there where his devotees hung it, and the real me sloped off to the west—Byzantium, and what they now call northern Europe, and finally across the pond to the US.”
“Having sex every twenty-eight days.”
“Oftener.” I grinned weakly. “Fire insurance.”
“So that this doesn’t happen.” She pointed at my steam bubbles.
The way she squatted over me at the edge of the pool, I could look up her skirt. It was hard to tell through the pantyhose, but I thought she might be wearing the undies I gave her. That gave me a sentimental rush that made me forget to paddle, and I sank and rose sputtering.
“Come out of there,” she commanded.
I almost jumped out. I hadn’t heard that tone in a long time. “Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m burning up, Rathi.”
“You haven’t had sex in all this time?”
“Three weeks, six days, twenty-two hours, fifty-one minutes.” It was twenty-three hours and fifty-one minutes, but I wanted some maneuvering room. I looked up her skirt again and swallowed. “How about you sit on the diving board?”
Rathi stood up. “How about you come out of the water and make love to me? I’m here. I’m as much my old self as I feel comfortable with. I’m—” She paused, looking down at me. Her glance left eye tracks on my skin that made Shiva’s fire feel like an ice cube. “I’m more than ready.”
I could smell that, even over the pool chemicals. I shut my eyes. If she wouldn’t keep me, it wasn’t worth it, and despair would kill me. Fire was fast anyway. “I need to think about this.”
A cry escaped her. “Why didn’t you take the apsaras last night! They wanted you!”
“Didn’t want them,” I said gruffly. I pictured the geyser of steam that would undoubtedly erupt when I went. Would it scald her? “This is all my fault. I know it. I can’t apologize enough. I saw you, I recognized you, and—and I just didn’t think. It didn’t occur to me you’d get through this transition so fast.”
Steam rose between us, sizzling off my skin. Time was running out. I talked faster.
“The thing is, love, you walked out on me because I was a dope. And to be honest, I haven’t changed all that much. When I had worked out all the consequences—too late, I know, too late—I finally got to that one and I knew I couldn’t risk it.”
“But you can risk this?” She glared, and I shrank inside.
“It nearly killed me when you left last time,” I said plaintively, sounding like a little whiny baby to my own ears. I didn’t want to die whining. I swallowed and pulled myself together. “I am what I am, Rathi. You deserve everything. Extreme love. A smart guy. Somebody with plans for the future.”
Her scowl had darkened to the green-and-black rage before the tornado. “Why are you doing this?”
And here it was. My last two minutes on Earth would be spent getting my head torn off by my wife. What made it hurt worse was that I deserved it, and I loved her so much I ached inside with a pain that prayed for death.
“B
aby, don’t be mad. You don’t want just a fast—”
Her voice rose. “I want you. You need me. I’m so—so horny I could make love to a goat! And you’re worried about making me angry?”
Sizzling rose in my ears. Jets of steam were shooting out of my palms and the soles of my feet, bubbling up in belches and making me bob like a balloon in the water.
I longed to touch her. Just once.
At this point, I would probably leave a burn mark that’d never heal.
I shook my head and began treading water harder, crawfishing backward, away from her, not trying to hide the misery in my eyes.
She rapped out, “Kamadava, you get over here right now!” She extended her hand over the water and plucked me out, as if she had thirty-foot-long Gumby arms and had yanked me out by my hair.
I found myself standing on the tile before her.
I steamed dry in seconds.
“We are going to find a broom closet right now,” she said grimly. “And you will not burn.”
“I love you,” I said. The sizzling in my ears became a buzz, a deep roar like a jet engine revving up.
Her voice rose to a wail. “Kama!”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “Here we go.”
There was a moment of white heat—
Chapter Twenty-Three
When my eyes cleared from the flash, nothing was left of him but a scorched mark on the floor. I stood swaying, looking down at the spot. My heart pounded unpleasantly hard and slow.
I would not allow this to happen.
Foolish thought, because it already had.
Mechanically I located my purse. I found an envelope from my cable bill. I knelt.
There was indeed just a pinch of ash left.
I scooped it up in the envelope.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was crying hysterically, screaming Kama’s name. My body curled in on itself. Would I ever make love to anyone? Before Kama, I could not have imagined it because I had no interest. Now I couldn’t imagine it with anyone but him.
And here he was, scarcely making a bulge in this envelope.
Apparently the goddess part of me was more resourceful than the weeping, screaming, frustrated, grief-stricken mortal woman trapped inside me.
I put the envelope in my bag and shut the bag with a snap. Then I opened it, took out my phone, and hit speed dial two.
“Darling, what’s happening out there?” said Auntie Lakshmi.
“Kama just burnt up again,” I said without preamble.
“What? Oh, no,” she said, as if he had sprained his ankle.
“Oh, yes,” I said, making my heels ring on the tile as I strode out of the East Bank Club. “I have his ashes—the pinch we started with—and you will now tell me how to reconstitute that sweet little body you made him.”
“I—what?”
“I know who you are now, Lakshmi.”
After a long pause, she said, “Very well, who am I?”
My loved aunt, who saved my sanity and freed me and drove me crazy with her wild ways since I was nine.
“You’re my mother-in-law.”
Silence. Then she said, “Well, dear, I suppose that’s true.”
Outside, the summer sun was still blazing. I turned my face away from its heat and brilliance. My poor Kama.
“And you pretended to be my aunt.”
“I am your aunt in this incarnation, darling.”
“Why? Were you planning to bring me back into Kama’s life?”
The Rathi I had been would have been offended. The Rathi I was now didn’t bother. In the back of my mind I remembered that this woman and I had been one another’s aunt, niece, sister, mother, and daughter many times before.
Lakshmi confessed, “I hoped it might happen. You were being brought up in a very eccentric and damaging way, my love. I had to see to it that you got some tools for living.”
“I was miserable.” I didn’t have to remind her how often I’d cried myself to sleep in her arms when I was nine. “You could have told me why they sent me away.”
“Let’s see,” Lakshmi suggested, her voice only a little sarcastic. “‘You may be only nine, but your parents know that you are the avatar of a love goddess, and they want to keep you away from your divine husband for as long as possible.’”
I conceded the point. “Okay, okay.” I walked straight into a cab at the queue outside the health club. “The Darth Vader, please,” I told the driver.
“They’ve always been terribly proud of you,” Auntie said.
“I know.”
“Your mother cried to me over the phone as often as you cried on your pillow in LA.”
“I know. And now,” I said to my long-ago mother-in-law, “You are going to see to it that I do not lose my husband again.”
“I told him that he needed to find you.” My wild goddess auntie sounded as unrepentant and breezy as ever.
She had, I admitted to myself, made a positive difference in my life. “Thanks,” I said gruffly.
“You have the ashes?” she said.
“Yes. Tell me what to do.”
“If you remember what you are, then you have the means to use the ashes. Do it yourself,” she said.
“Don’t play with me,” I said dangerously. “I’m a woman on the edge.”
“Rathi, you must become yourself. Somewhere in your memories you’ll find the answer. Don’t be afraid to dip into the ocean that is the past. It’s not enough to have power. You must remember how to use it.”
Great, now she was going Zen on me. “I don’t have time to waste.”
“True.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Don’t help. If I go insane, you can explain to the psychiatrists.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.” I hung up and stared out of the taxi until it arrived at the Darth Vader Building.
In my apartment, my parrot greeted me effusively. It flitted like an arrow around me, bringing me pigeon feathers and grapes and the corpses of flies. Absently, I ate a grape and stroked the parrot’s green head, staring out of my remaining unbroken living room window at the blue expanse of Lake Michigan.
The envelope of ashes lay useless on my coffee table.
Somewhere in the memories of the mountain outside my tiny little RathiRaani identity, I would find the means to bring Kama back to his temporary body.
And then, I promised myself, I will see to it personally that he is safe for another month.
But first, these ashes.
I looked at the envelope on my coffee table. What was I supposed to be remembering? How in heaven or on earth was I to find some distant memory to direct me?
Lakshmi had called the past an ocean. Maybe that was a better way to think of it. I felt an ocean, all right, but it was hanging over my head. Or maybe I felt it much lower down—in the part of me that most wanted Kama for my husband again.
I caught my breath.
Did I really want to do that again? To be married to this mad, bad boy?
Nobody married boys like Kamadeva. His kind was brilliant at the one-night stand, a terrible mess, long term.
Was that what I wanted? Long term?
It occurred to me finally that Kama had wondered that, too.
He must have known how close to death he was when I arrived at the pool. Yet he chose to burn.
He didn’t want to be saved if all I wanted was sexual initiation.
He had worked so very hard at the brilliant one-night stand persona. But from me he had wanted more.
With me he had been gentle, patient, and so generous, tending to my sexual wakening without demanding anything for himself. Somewhere in the mountain were sexual memories that reminded me how randy he could be, how tireless, exuberant, inventive, voracious. He had set all that aside to bring me along slowly and safely. At his own risk.
I haven’t changed all that much, he confessed moments before he burned. And the night before, he had said, You were pretty mad at me when yo
u walked out.
Well, it couldn’t be clearer than that.
It was coming back to me now—our long-ago ruined marriage. I felt a painful lump in the throat and stale rage in my chest.
How we had fought! Shiva had barred me from visiting my devotees at our temples. Our heavenly palace felt like a prison. My husband drifted around, sometimes nearly invisible in his ethereal state, sometimes more present, but distracted, anxious, vague, like a ghost of himself, which I suppose he was. When I could get his attention, he seemed indifferent to the changes in our estate and in the lives of our devotees, who relied on us. Over and over I demanded that he reincarnate, or at least appeal to Shiva for a mitigation of this terrible sentence.
He wouldn’t hear of it. He was afraid of Shiva, and terrified of what I might do in my wrath and frustration. Neither of us had realized how much the world was changing—not just in Hind but around the world. It was as if a star had shifted course, and withdrawn some element vital to the joy of sex out of the air of our planet.
Back then, I hadn’t been willing to surrender.
But I hadn’t been the one who was burnt to death, either.
Having seen him suffer this twice in twelve hours—once in my dream, and once before my eyes—I conceded finally that he may have had reason to hesitate.
What it came down to was this: I could continue to do without him—maybe for the rest of this incarnation, as my mother had suggested.
My heart twisted at the thought.
So would I accept him this way? However changed or unchanged he might be?
How could I not? As enraging and charming and lazy and attentive and gentle and cowardly and generous as he might be.
I felt I was talking myself into a corner.
I faced the truth.
I couldn’t do without him.
By my own choice I would take him back.
I let go of my anger. It was too fatiguing to live with any longer.
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