One night, Imre stops by. He wants us to go with him to a movie. In his work shirt and red leather tie, he looks arty or strung out. It’s only been a week, but I feel as though I am really seeing him for the first time. The yellow hair worn very short at the sides, the wide, narrow lips. He’s a good-looking man, but self-conscious, almost arrogant. He’s picked the movie we should see. He always tells me what to see, what to read. He buys the Voice. He’s a natural avant-gardist. For tonight he’s chosen Numéro Deux.
“Is it a musical?” my husband asks. The Radio City Music Hall is on his list of sights to see. He’s read up on the history of the Rockettes. He doesn’t catch Imre’s sympathetic wink.
Guilt, shame, loyalty. I long to be ungracious, not ingratiate myself with both men.
That night my husband calculates in rupees the money we’ve wasted on Godard. “That refugee fellow, Nagy, must have a screw loose in his head. I paid very steep price for dollars on the black market.”
Some afternoons we go shopping. Back home we hated shopping, but now it is a lovers’ project. My husband’s shopping list startles me. I feel I am just getting to know him. Maybe, like Imre, freed from the dignities of old-world culture, he too could get drunk and squirt Cheez Whiz on a guest. I watch him dart into stores in his gleaming leather shoes. Jockey shorts on sale in outdoor bins on Broadway entrance him. White tube socks with different bands of color delight him. He looks for microcassettes, for anything small and electronic and smuggleable. He needs a garment bag. He calls it a “wardrobe,” and I have to translate.
“All of New York is having sales, no?”
My heart speeds watching him this happy. It’s the third week in August, almost the end of summer, and the city smells ripe, it cannot bear more heat, more money, more energy.
“This is so smashing! The prices are so excellent!” Recklessly, my prudent husband signs away traveller’s checks. How he intends to smuggle it all back I don’t dare ask. With a microwave, he calculates, we could get rid of our cook.
This has to be love, I think. Charity, Eric, Phil: they may be experts on sex. My husband doesn’t chase me around the sofa, but he pushes me down on Charity’s battered cushions, and the man who has never entered the kitchen of our Ahmadabad house now comes toward me with a dish tub of steamy water to massage away the pavement heat.
Ten days into his vacation my husband checks out brochures for sightseeing tours. Shortline, Grayline, Crossroads: his new vinyl briefcase is full of schedules and pamphlets. While I make pancakes out of a mix, he comparison-shops. Tour number one costs $10.95 and will give us the World Trade Center, Chinatown, and the United Nations. Tour number three would take us both uptown and downtown for $14.95, but my husband is absolutely sure he doesn’t want to see Harlem. We settle for tour number four: Downtown and the Dame. It’s offered by a new tour company with a small, dirty office at Eighth and Forty-eighth.
The sidewalk outside the office is colorful with tourists. My husband sends me in to buy the tickets because he has come to feel Americans don’t understand his accent.
The dark man, Lebanese probably, behind the counter comes on too friendly. “Come on, doll, make my day!” He won’t say which tour is his. “Number four? Honey, no! Look, you’ve wrecked me! Say you’ll change your mind.” He takes two twenties and gives back change. He holds the tickets, forcing me to pull. He leans closer. “I’m off after lunch.”
My husband must have been watching me from the sidewalk. “What was the chap saying?” he demands. “I told you not to wear pants. He thinks you are Puerto Rican. He thinks he can treat you with disrespect.”
The bus is crowded and we have to sit across the aisle from each other. The tour guide begins his patter on Forty-sixth. He looks like an actor, his hair bleached and blow-dried. Up close he must look middle-aged, but from where I sit his skin is smooth and his cheeks faintly red.
“Welcome to the Big Apple, folks.” The guide uses a microphone. “Big Apple. That’s what we native Manhattan degenerates call our city. Today we have guests from fifteen foreign countries and six states from this U.S. of A. That makes the Tourist Bureau real happy. And let me assure you that while we may be the richest city in the richest country in the world, it’s okay to tip your charming and talented attendant.” He laughs. Then he swings his hip out into the aisle and sings a song.
“And it’s mighty fancy on old Delancey Street, you know. …”
My husband looks irritable. The guide is, as expected, a good singer. “The bloody man should be giving us histories of buildings we are passing, no?” I pat his hand, the mood passes. He cranes his neck. Our window seats have both gone to Japanese. It’s the tour of his life. Next to this, the quick business trips to Manchester and Glasgow pale.
“And tell me what street compares to Mott Street, in July. …”
The guide wants applause. He manages a derisive laugh from the Americans up front. He’s working the aisles now. “I coulda been somebody, right? I coulda been a star!” Two or three of us smile, those of us who recognize the parody. He catches my smile. The sun is on his harsh, bleached hair. “Right, your highness? Look, we gotta maharani with us! Couldn’t I have been a star?”
“Right!” I say, my voice coming out a squeal. I’ve been trained to adapt; what else can I say?
We drive through traffic past landmark office buildings and churches. The guide flips his hands. “Art deco,” he keeps saying. I hear him confide to one of the Americans: “Beats me. I went to a cheap guide’s school.” My husband wants to know more about this Art Deco, but the guide sings another song.
“We made a foolish choice,” my husband grumbles. “We are sitting in the bus only. We’re not going into famous buildings.” He scrutinizes the pamphlets in his jacket pocket. I think, at least it’s air-conditioned in here. I could sit here in the cool shadows of the city forever.
Only five of us appear to have opted for the “Downtown and the Dame” tour. The others will ride back uptown past the United Nations after we’ve been dropped off at the pier for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.
An elderly European pulls a camera out of his wife’s designer tote bag. He takes pictures of the boats in the harbor, the Japanese in kimonos eating popcorn, scavenging pigeons, me. Then, pushing his wife ahead of him, he climbs back on the bus and waves to us. For a second I feel terribly lost. I wish we were on the bus going back to the apartment. I know I’ll not be able to describe any of this to Charity, or to Imre. I’m too proud to admit I went on a guided tour.
The view of the city from the Circle Line ferry is seductive, unreal. The skyline wavers out of reach, but never quite vanishes. The summer sun pushes through fluffy clouds and dapples the glass of office towers. My husband looks thrilled, even more than he had on the shopping trips down Broadway. Tourists and dreamers, we have spent our life’s savings to see this skyline, this statue.
“Quick, take a picture of me!” my husband yells as he moves toward a gap of railings. A Japanese matron has given up her position in order to change film. “Before the Twin Towers disappear!”
I focus, I wait for a large Oriental family to walk out of my range. My husband holds his pose tight against the railing. He wants to look relaxed, an international businessman at home in all the financial markets.
A bearded man slides across the bench toward me. “Like this,” he says and helps me get my husband in focus. “You want me to take the photo for you?” His name, he says, is Goran. He is Goran from Yugoslavia, as though that were enough for tracking him down. Imre from Hungary. Panna from India. He pulls the old Leica out of my hand, signaling the Orientals to beat it, and clicks away. “I’m a photographer,” he says. He could have been a camera thief. That’s what my husband would have assumed. Somehow, I trusted. “Get you a beer?” he asks.
“I don’t. Drink, I mean. Thank you very much.” I say those last words very loud, for everyone’s benefit. The odd bottles of Soave with Imre don’t count.
“Too bad.” G
oran gives back the camera.
“Take one more!” my husband shouts from the railing. “Just to be sure!”
The island itself disappoints. The Lady has brutal scaffolding holding her in. The museum is closed. The snack bar is dirty and expensive. My husband reads out the prices to me. He orders two french fries and two Cokes. We sit at picnic tables and wait for the ferry to take us back.
“What was that hippie chap saying?”
As if I could say. A day-care center has brought its kids, at least forty of them, to the island for the day. The kids, all wearing name tags, run around us. I can’t help noticing how many are Indian. Even a Patel, probably a Bhatt if I looked hard enough. They toss hamburger bits at pigeons. They kick styrofoam cups. The pigeons are slow, greedy, persistent. I have to shoo one off the table top. I don’t think my husband thinks about our son.
“What hippie?”
“The one on the boat. With the beard and the hair.”
My husband doesn’t look at me. He shakes out his paper napkin and tries to protect his french fries from pigeon feathers.
“Oh, him. He said he was from Dubrovnik.” It isn’t true, but I don’t want trouble.
“What did he say about Dubrovnik?”
I know enough about Dubrovnik to get by. Imre’s told me about it. And about Mostar and Zagreb. In Mostar white Muslims sing the call to prayer. I would like to see that before I die: white Muslims. Whole peoples have moved before me; they’ve adapted. The night Imre told me about Mostar was also the night I saw my first snow in Manhattan. We’d walked down to Chelsea from Columbia. We’d walked and talked and I hadn’t felt tired at all.
“You’re too innocent,” my husband says. He reaches for my hand. “Panna,” he cries with pain in his voice, and I am brought back from perfect, floating memories of snow, “I’ve come to take you back. I have seen how men watch you.”
“What?”
“Come back, now. I have tickets. We have all the things we will ever need. I can’t live without you.”
A little girl with wiry braids kicks a bottle cap at his shoes. The pigeons wheel and scuttle around us. My husband covers his fries with spread-out fingers. “No kicking,” he tells the girl. Her name, Beulah, is printed in green ink on a heart-shaped name tag. He forces a smile, and Beulah smiles back. Then she starts to flap her arms. She flaps, she hops. The pigeons go crazy for fries and scraps.
“Special ed. course is two years,” I remind him. “I can’t go back.”
My husband picks up our trays and throws them into the garbage before I can stop him. He’s carried disposability a little too far. “We’ve been taken,” he says, moving toward the dock, though the ferry will not arrive for another twenty minutes. “The ferry costs only two dollars round-trip per person. We should have chosen tour number one for $ 10.95 instead of tour number four for $14.95.”
With my Lebanese friend, I think. “But this way we don’t have to worry about cabs. The bus will pick us up at the pier and take us back to midtown. Then we can walk home.”
“New York is full of cheats and whatnot. Just like Bombay.” He is not accusing me of infidelity. I feel dread all the same.
That night, after we’ve gone to bed, the phone rings. My husband listens, then hands the phone to me. “What is this woman saying?” He turns on the pink Macy’s lamp by the bed. “I am not understanding these Negro people’s accents.”
The operator repeats the message. It’s a cable from one of the directors of Lakshmi Cotton Mills. “Massive violent labor confrontation anticipated. Stop. Return posthaste. Stop. Cable flight details. Signed Kantilal Shah.”
“It’s not your factory,” I say. “You’re supposed to be on vacation.”
“So, you are worrying about me? Yes? You reject my heartfelt wishes but you worry about me?” He pulls me close, slips the straps of my nightdress off my shoulder. “Wait a minute.”
I wait, unclothed, for my husband to come back to me. The water is running in the bathroom. In the ten days he has been here he has learned American rites: deodorants, fragrances. Tomorrow morning he’ll call Air India; tomorrow evening he’ll be on his way back to Bombay. Tonight I should make up to him for my years away, the gutted trucks, the degree I’ll never use in India. I want to pretend with him that nothing has changed.
In the mirror that hangs on the bathroom door, I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body’s beauty amazes. I stand here shameless, in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.
LOOSE ENDS
SHE sends for this Goldilocks doll in April.
“See,” she says. The magazine is pressed tight to her T-shirt. “It’s porcelain.”
I look. The ad calls Goldilocks “the first doll in an enchanting new suite of fairy tale dolls.”
“Bisque porcelain,” she says. She fills out the order form in purple ink. “Look at the pompoms on her shoes. Aren’t they darling?”
“You want to blow sixty bucks?” Okay, so I yell that at Jonda. “You have any idea how much I got to work for sixty dollars?”
“Only twenty now,” she says. Then she starts bitching. “What’s with you and Velásquez these days? You shouldn’t even be home in the afternoon.”
It’s between one and two and I have a right, don’t I, to be in my Manufactured Home—as they call it—in Laguna Vista Estates instead of in Mr. Vee’s pastel office in the mall? A man’s mobile home is his castle, at least in Florida. But I fix her her bourbon and ginger ale with the dash of ReaLemon just the way she likes it. She isn’t a mail-order junky; this Goldilocks thing is more complicated.
“It makes me nervous,” Jonda goes on. “To have you home, I mean.”
I haven’t been fired by Mr. Vee; the truth is I’ve been offered a raise, contingent, of course, on my delivering a forceful message to that greaser goon, Chavez. I don’t get into that with Jonda. Jonda doesn’t have much of a head for details.
“Learn to like it,” I say. “Your boyfriend better learn, too.”
She doesn’t have anyone but me, but she seems to like the jealousy bit. Her face goes soft and dreamy like the old days. We’ve seen a lot together.
“Jonda,” I start. I just don’t get it. What does she want?
“Forget it, Jeb.” She licks the stamp on the Goldilocks envelope so gooey it sticks on crooked. “There’s no point in us talking. We don’t communicate anymore.”
I make myself a cocktail. Milk, two ice cubes crushed with a hammer between two squares of paper towel, and Maalox. Got the recipe from a Nam Vets magazine.
“Look at you.” She turns on the TV and gets in bed. “I hate to see you like this, at loose ends.”
I get in bed with her. Usually afternoons are pure dynamite, when I can get them. I lie down with her for a while, but nothing happens. We’re like that until Oprah comes on.
“It’s okay,” Jonda says. “I’m going to the mall. The guy who opened the new boutique, you know, the little guy with the turban, he said he might be hiring.”
I drop a whole ice cube into my Maalox cocktail and watch her change. She shimmies out of khaki shorts—mementoes of my glory days—and pulls a flowery skirt over her head. I still don’t feel any urge.
“Who let these guys in?” I say. She doesn’t answer. He won’t hire her—they come in with half a dozen kids and pay them nothing. We’re coolie labor in our own country.
She pretends to look for her car keys which are hanging as usual from their nail. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“At least let me drive you.” I’m not begging, yet.
“No, it’s okay.” She fixes her wickedly green eyes on me. And suddenly bile pours out in torrents. “Nine years, for God’s sake! Nine years, and what do we have?”
“Don’t let’s get started.”
Hey, what we have sounds like the Constitution of the United States. We have freedom and no strings attached. We have no debts. We come and go as we like. She wants a kid but I don’t think
I have the makings of a good father. That’s part of what the Goldilocks thing is.
But I know what she means. By the time Goldilocks arrives in the mail, she’ll have moved her stuff out of Laguna Vista Estates.
I like Miami. I like the heat. You can smell the fecund rot of the jungle in every headline. You can park your car in the shopping mall and watch the dope change hands, the Goldilockses and Peter Pans go off with new daddies, the dishwashers and short-order cooks haggle over fake passports, the Mr. Vees in limos huddle over arms-shopping lists, all the while gull guano drops on your car with the soothing steadiness of rain.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked the green spaces of Nam, too. In spite of the consequences. I was the Pit Bull—even the Marines backed off. I was Jesse James hunched tight in the gunship, trolling the jungle for hidden wonders.
“If you want to stay alive,” Doc Healy cautioned me the first day, “just keep consuming and moving like a locust. Do that, Jeb m’boy, and you’ll survive to die a natural death.” Last winter a judge put a vet away for thirty-five years for sinking his teeth into sweet, succulent coed flesh. The judge said, when gangrene sets in, the doctor has no choice but to amputate. But I’m here to testify, Your Honor, the appetite remains, after the easy targets have all been eaten. The whirring of our locust jaws is what keeps you awake.
The Middleman and Other Stories Page 4