The Middleman and Other Stories

by Bharati Mukherjee

  “Well, señor Andreas, you’ve got the money and the woman. Now what’s it to be—a little torture? A little fun with me before the sun comes up? Or what about him—I bet you’d have more fun with him. I don’t scream, señor Andreas, I warn you now. You can kill me but you can’t break me.”

  I hear the safety clicking off. So does Clovis.

  I know I would scream. I know I am no hero. I know none of this is worth suffering for, let alone dying for.

  Andreas looks at Maria as though to say, “You decide.” She holds out her hand, and Andreas slips the pistol in it. This seems to amuse Clovis Ransome. He stands, presenting an enormous target. “Sweetie—” he starts, and she blasts away and when I open my eyes he is across the bed, sprawled in the far corner of the room.

  She stands at the foot of their bed, limp and amused, like a woman disappointed in love. Smoke rises from the gun barrel, her breath condenses in little clouds, and there is a halo of condensation around her hair, her neck, her arms.

  When she turns, I feel it could be any of us next. Andreas holds out his hand but she doesn’t return the gun. She lines me up, low, genital-level, like Bud Wilkins with a bird, then sweeps around to Andreas, and smiles.

  She has made love to me three times tonight. With Andreas today, doubtless more. Never has a truth been burned so deeply in me, what I owe my life to, how simple the rules of survival are. She passes the gun to Andreas who holsters it, and they leave.

  In the next few days when I run out of food, I will walk down the muddy road to San Vincente, to the German bar with the pay phone: I’ll wear Clovis’s Braves cap and I’ll salute the Indians. “Turtle eggs,” I’ll say. “Number One,” they’ll answer back. Bud’s truck has been commandeered. Along with Clovis’s finer cars. Someone in the capital will be happy to know about Santa Simona, about Bud, Clovis. There must be something worth trading in the troubles I have seen.

  A WIFE’S STORY

  IMRE says forget it, but I’m going to write David Mamet. So Patels are hard to sell real estate to. You buy them a beer, whisper Glengarry Glen Ross, and they smell swamp instead of sun and surf. They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room, stash their savings under futons in Queens, and before you know it they own half of Hoboken. You say, where’s the sweet gullibility that made this nation great?

  Polish jokes, Patel jokes: that’s not why I want to write Mamet.

  Seen their women?

  Everybody laughs. Imre laughs. The dozing fat man with the Barnes & Noble sack between his legs, the woman next to him, the usher, everybody. The theater isn’t so dark that they can’t see me. In my red silk sari I’m conspicuous. Plump, gold paisleys sparkle on my chest.

  The actor is just warming up. Seen their women? He plays a salesman, he’s had a bad day and now he’s in a Chinese restaurant trying to loosen up. His face is pink. His wool-blend slacks are creased at the crotch. We bought our tickets at half-price, we’re sitting in the front row, but at the edge, and we see things we shouldn’t be seeing. At least I do, or think I do. Spittle, actors goosing each other, little winks, streaks of makeup.

  Maybe they’re improvising dialogue too. Maybe Mamet’s provided them with insult kits, Thursdays for Chinese, Wednesdays for Hispanics, today for Indians. Maybe they get together before curtain time, see an Indian woman settling in the front row off to the side, and say to each other: “Hey, forget Friday. Let’s get her today. See if she cries. See if she walks out.” Maybe, like the salesmen they play, they have a little bet on.

  Maybe I shouldn’t feel betrayed.

  Their women, he goes again. They look like they’ve just been fucked by a dead cat.

  The fat man hoots so hard he nudges my elbow off our shared armrest.

  “Imre. I’m going home.” But Imre’s hunched so far forward he doesn’t hear. English isn’t his best language. A refugee from Budapest, he has to listen hard. “I didn’t pay eighteen dollars to be insulted.”

  I don’t hate Mamet. It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me. First, you don’t exist. Then you’re invisible. Then you’re funny. Then you’re disgusting. Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance. No instant dignity here. A play like this, back home, would cause riots. Communal, racist, and antisocial. The actors wouldn’t make it off stage. This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up.

  I long, at times, for clear-cut answers. Offer me instant dignity, today, and I’ll take it.

  “What?” Imre moves toward me without taking his eyes off the actor. “Come again?”

  Tears come. I want to stand, scream, make an awful scene. I long for ugly, nasty rage.

  The actor is ranting, flinging spittle. Give me a chance. I’m not finished, I can get back on the board. I tell that asshole, give me a real lead. And what does that asshole give me? Patels. Nothing but Patels.

  This time Imre works an arm around my shoulders. “Panna, what is Patel? Why are you taking it all so personally?”

  I shrink from his touch, but I don’t walk out. Expensive girls’ schools in Lausanne and Bombay have trained me to behave well. My manners are exquisite, my feelings are delicate, my gestures refined, my moods undetectable. They have seen me through riots, uprootings, separation, my son’s death.

  “I’m not taking it personally.”

  The fat man looks at us. The woman looks too, and shushes.

  I stare back at the two of them. Then I stare, mean and cool, at the man’s elbow. Under the bright blue polyester Hawaiian shirt sleeve, the elbow looks soft and runny. “Excuse me,” I say. My voice has the effortless meanness of well-bred displaced Third World women, though my rhetoric has been learned elsewhere. “You’re exploiting my space.”

  Startled, the man snatches his arm away from me. He cradles it against his breast. By the time he’s ready with comebacks, I’ve turned my back on him. I’ve probably ruined the first act for him. I know I’ve ruined it for Imre.

  It’s not my fault; it’s the situation. Old colonies wear down. Patels—the new pioneers—have to be suspicious. Idi Amin’s lesson is permanent. AT&T wires move good advice from continent to continent. Keep all assets liquid. Get into 7-I IS, get out of condos and motels. I know how both sides feel, that’s the trouble. The Patel sniffing out scams, the sad salesmen on the stage: postcolonialism has made me their referee. It’s hate I long for; simple, brutish, partisan hate.

  After the show Imre and I make our way toward Broadway. Sometimes he holds my hand; it doesn’t mean anything more than that crazies and drunks are crouched in doorways. Imre’s been here over two years, but he’s stayed very old-world, very courtly, openly protective of women. I met him in a seminar on special ed. last semester. His wife is a nurse somewhere in the Hungarian countryside. There are two sons, and miles of petitions for their emigration. My husband manages a mill two hundred miles north of Bombay. There are no children.

  “You make things tough on yourself,” Imre says. He assumed Patel was a Jewish name or maybe Hispanic; everything makes equal sense to him. He found the play tasteless, he worried about the effect of vulgar language on my sensitive ears. “You have to let go a bit.” And as though to show me how to let go, he breaks away from me, bounds ahead with his head ducked tight, then dances on amazingly jerky legs. He’s a Magyar, he often tells me, and deep down, he’s an Asian too. I catch glimpses of it, knife-blade Attila cheekbones, despite the blondish hair. In his faded jeans and leather jacket, he’s a rock video star. I watch MTV for hours in the apartment when Charity’s working the evening shift at Macy’s. I listen to WPLJ on Charity’s earphones. Why should I be ashamed? Television in India is so uplifting.

  Imre stops as suddenly as he’d started. People walk around us. The summer sidewalk is full of theatergoers in seersucker suits; Imre’s year-round jacket is out of place. European. Cops in twos and threes huddle, lightly tap their thighs with night sticks and smile at me with benevolence. I want to wink at them, get us all in trouble, tell them the c
razy dancing man is from the Warsaw Pact. I’m too shy to break into dance on Broadway. So I hug Imre instead.

  The hug takes him by surprise. He wants me to let go, but he doesn’t really expect me to let go. He staggers, though I weigh no more than 104 pounds, and with him, I pitch forward slightly. Then he catches me, and we walk arm in arm to the bus stop. My husband would never dance or hug a woman on Broadway. Nor would my brothers. They aren’t stuffy people, but they went to Anglican boarding schools and they have a well-developed sense of what’s silly.

  “Imre.” I squeeze his big, rough hand. “I’m sorry I ruined the evening for you.”

  “You did nothing of the kind.” He sounds tired. “Let’s not wait for the bus. Let’s splurge and take a cab instead.”

  Imre always has unexpected funds. The Network, he calls it, Class of ’56.

  In the back of the cab, without even trying, I feel light, almost free. Memories of Indian destitutes mix with the hordes of New York street people, and they float free, like astronauts, inside my head. I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life. I’ve left home, my husband, to get a Ph.D. in special ed. I have a multiple-entry visa and a small scholarship for two years. After that, we’ll see. My mother was beaten by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, when she’d registered for French lessons at the Alliance Française. My grandmother, the eldest daughter of a rich zamindar, was illiterate.

  Imre and the cabdriver talk away in Russian. I keep my eyes closed. That way I can feel the floaters better. I’ll write Mamet tonight. I feel strong, reckless. Maybe I’ll write Steven Spielberg too; tell him that Indians don’t eat monkey brains.

  We’ve made it. Patels must have made it. Mamet, Spielberg: they’re not condescending to us. Maybe they’re a little bit afraid.

  Charity Chin, my roommate, is sitting on the floor drinking Chablis out of a plastic wineglass. She is five foot six, three inches taller than me, but weighs a kilo and a half less than I do. She is a “hands” model. Orientals are supposed to have a monopoly in the hands-modelling business, she says. She had her eyes fixed eight or nine months ago and out of gratitude sleeps with her plastic surgeon every third Wednesday.

  “Oh, good,” Charity says. “I’m glad you’re back early. I need to talk.”

  She’s been writing checks. MCI, Con Ed, Bon wit Teller. Envelopes, already stamped and sealed, form a pyramid between her shapely, knee-socked legs. The checkbook’s cover is brown plastic, grained to look like cowhide. Each time Charity flips back the cover, white geese fly over sky-colored checks. She makes good money, but she’s extravagant. The difference adds up to this shared, rent-controlled Chelsea one-bedroom.

  “All right. Talk.”

  When I first moved in, she was seeing an analyst. Now she sees a nutritionist.

  “Eric called. From Oregon.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wants me to pay half the rent on his loft for last spring. He asked me to move back, remember? He begged me.”

  Eric is Charity’s estranged husband.

  “What does your nutritionist say?” Eric now wears a red jumpsuit and tills the soil in Rajneeshpuram.

  “You think Phil’s a creep too, don’t you? What else can he be when creeps are all I attract?”

  Phil is a flutist with thinning hair. He’s very touchy on the subject of flautists versus flutists. He’s touchy on every subject, from music to books to foods to clothes. He teaches at a small college upstate, and Charity bought a used blue Datsun (“Nissan,” Phil insists) last month so she could spend weekends with him. She returns every Sunday night, exhausted and exasperated. Phil and I don’t have much to say to each other—he’s the only musician I know; the men in my family are lawyers, engineers, or in business—but I like him. Around me, he loosens up. When he visits, he bakes us loaves of pumpernickel bread. He waxes our kitchen floor. Like many men in this country, he seems to me a displaced child, or even a woman, looking for something that passed him by, or for something that he can never have. If he thinks I’m not looking, he sneaks his hands under Charity’s sweater, but there isn’t too much there. Here, she’s a model with high ambitions. In India, she’d be a flat-chested old maid.

  I’m shy in front of the lovers. A darkness comes over me when I see them horsing around.

  “It isn’t the money,” Charity says. Oh? I think. “He says he still loves me. Then he turns around and asks me for five hundred.”

  What’s so strange about that, I want to ask. She still loves Eric, and Eric, red jumpsuit and all, is smart enough to know it. Love is a commodity, hoarded like any other. Mamet knows. But I say, “I’m not the person to ask about love.” Charity knows that mine was a traditional Hindu marriage. My parents, with the help of a marriage broker, who was my mother’s cousin, picked out a groom. All I had to do was get to know his taste in food.

  It’ll be a long evening, I’m afraid. Charity likes to confess. I unpleat my silk sari—it no longer looks too showy—wrap it in muslin cloth and put it away in a dresser drawer. Saris are hard to have laundered in Manhattan, though there’s a good man in Jackson Heights. My next step will be to brew us a pot of chrysanthemum tea. It’s a very special tea from the mainland. Charity’s uncle gave it to us. I like him. He’s a humpbacked, awkward, terrified man. He runs a gift store on Mott Street, and though he doesn’t speak much English, he seems to have done well. Once upon a time he worked for the railways in Chengdu, Szechwan Province, and during the Wuchang Uprising, he was shot at. When I’m down, when I’m lonely for my husband, when I think of our son, or when I need to be held, I think of Charity’s uncle. If I hadn’t left home, I’d never have heard of the Wuchang Uprising. I’ve broadened my horizons.

  Very late that night my husband calls me from Ahmadabad, a town of textile mills north of Bombay. My husband is a vice president at Lakshmi Cotton Mills. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, but LCM (Priv.), Ltd., is doing poorly. Lockouts, strikes, rock-throwings. My husband lives on digitalis, which he calls the food for our yuga of discontent.

  “We had a bad mishap at the mill today.” Then he says nothing for seconds.

  The operator comes on. “Do you have the right party, sir? We’re trying to reach Mrs. Butt.”

  “Bhatt,” I insist. “B for Bombay, H for Haryana, A for Ahmadabad, double T for Tamil Nadu.” It’s a litany. “This is she.”

  “One of our lorries was firebombed today. Resulting in three deaths. The driver, old Karamchand, and his two children.”

  I know how my husband’s eyes look this minute, how the eye rims sag and the yellow corneas shine and bulge with pain. He is not an emotional man—the Ahmadabad Institute of Management has trained him to cut losses, to look on the bright side of economic catastrophes—but tonight he’s feeling low. I try to remember a driver named Karamchand, but can’t. That part of my life is over, the way trucks have replaced lorries in my vocabulary, the way Charity Chin and her lurid love life have replaced inherited notions of marital duty. Tomorrow he’ll come out of it. Soon he’ll be eating again. He’ll sleep like a baby. He’s been trained to believe in turnovers. Every morning he rubs his scalp with cantharidine oil so his hair will grow back again.

  “It could be your car next.” Affection, love. Who can tell the difference in a traditional marriage in which a wife still doesn’t call her husband by his first name?

  “No. They know I’m a flunky, just like them. Well paid, maybe. No need for undue anxiety, please.”

  Then his voice breaks. He says he needs me, he misses me, he wants me to come to him damp from my evening shower, smelling of sandalwood soap, my braid decorated with jasmines.

  “I need you too.”

  “Not to worry, please,” he says. “I am coming in a fortnight’s time. I have already made arrangements.”

  Outside my window, fire trucks whine, up Eighth Avenue. I wonder if he can hear them, what he thinks of a life like mine, led amid disorder.

  “I am thinking it’ll be like a honeymoon. More or less.
”

  When I was in college, waiting to be married, I imagined honeymoons were only for the more fashionable girls, the girls who came from slightly racy families, smoked Sobranies in the dorm lavatories and put up posters of Kabir Bedi, who was supposed to have made it as a big star in the West. My husband wants us to go to Niagara. I’m not to worry about foreign exchange. He’s arranged for extra dollars through the Gujarati Network, with a cousin in San Jose. And he’s bought four hundred more on the black market. “Tell me you need me. Panna, please tell me again.”

  I change out of the cotton pants and shirt I’ve been wearing all day and put on a sari to meet my husband at JFK. I don’t forget the jewelry; the marriage necklace of mangalsutra, gold drop earrings, heavy gold bangles. I don’t wear them every day. In this borough of vice and greed, who knows when, or whom, desire will overwhelm.

  My husband spots me in the crowd and waves. He has lost weight, and changed his glasses. The arm, uplifted in a cheery wave, is bony, frail, almost opalescent.

  In the Carey Coach, we hold hands. He strokes my fingers one by one. “How come you aren’t wearing my mother’s ring?”

  “Because muggers know about Indian women,” I say. They know with us it’s 24-karat. His mother’s ring is showy, in ghastly taste anywhere but India: a blood-red Burma ruby set in a gold frame of floral sprays. My mother-in-law got her guru to bless the ring before I left for the States.

  He looks disconcerted. He’s used to a different role. He’s the knowing, suspicious one in the family. He seems to be sulking, and finally he comes out with it. “You’ve said nothing about my new glasses.” I compliment him on the glasses, how chic and Western-executive they make him look. But I can’t help the other things, necessities until he learns the ropes. I handle the money, buy the tickets. I don’t know if this makes me unhappy.

  Charity drives her Nissan upstate, so for two weeks we are to have the apartment to ourselves. This is more privacy than we ever had in India. No parents, no servants, to keep us modest. We play at housekeeping. Imre has lent us a hibachi, and I grill saffron chicken breasts. My husband marvels at the size of the Perdue hens. “They’re big like peacocks, no? These Americans, they’re really something!” He tries out pizzas, burgers, McNuggets. He chews. He explores. He judges. He loves it all, fears nothing, feels at home in the summer odors, the clutter of Manhattan streets. Since he thinks that the American palate is bland, he carries a bottle of red peppers in his pocket. I wheel a shopping cart down the aisles of the neighborhood Grand Union, and he follows, swiftly, greedily. He picks up hair rinses and high-protein diet powders. There’s so much I already take for granted.