The Middleman and Other Stories

by Bharati Mukherjee

  “You think I can’t handle the situation, right? You think I’m just a dumb, naive foreigner you have to protect, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Then she leaps on me, green face, glamor-length nails, Dior robe and all. I don’t know about Baby, but for me those rockets explode.

  All day Sunday it rains. The raindrops are of the big, splashy variety, complete with whiffs of wild winds and churned seas. Our winter is starting. I don’t do much; I stay in, play Bach on the earphones and vacuum the broadloom. Marcos seems here to stay because I can’t bring myself to call the ASPCA.

  When the hour for the daily run rolls around, I start out as usual in the doctors’ wing of the VA Hospital parking lot, pick my way around Mazdas, Audis, Volvos—they don’t have too many station wagons in this neighborhood—keep pace with fit groups in running shoes for as long as it feels good, then shoot ahead, past the serious runners who don’t look back when they hear you coming, past the dogs with Frisbees in their jaws, past the pros who scorn designer tracksuits and the Emory runners with fraternity gizmos on their shirts, pick up more speed until the Reeboks sheathe feet as light as cotton. Then it’s time to race. Really race. After Emilou and just before Baby I did wind sprints for a spring at the Atlanta Track Club, ran the three-minute half, ran four of them. I can let it out.

  Today in the rain and the changing weather, colder tomorrow, I run longer, pushing harder, than any afternoon in my life. Running is here to stay, even if Baby is gone.

  Today I run until a vein in the back of my head feels ready to pop. The stopgap remedy is Fiorinal, and so I pop one while I slump in the shower. It feels so good, the exhaustion, the pile of heavy, cold, sweaty clothes, the whole paraphernalia of deliberate self-depletion. At the track club they had a sign from William Butler Yeats: Torture Body to Pleasure Soul. I believe it.

  What to do now? The rain is over, the Falcons are dying on the tube, the sun is staging a comeback. Already, my arms and legs are lightening, I’m resurging, I’m pink and healthy as a baby.

  The nearby mall is so upscale that even the Vendoland janitor is dressed in a bright red blazer. The mall’s got the requisite atriums, tinted skylights, fountains, and indoor neo-sidewalk cafés. It’s a world-within-the-world; perfect peace and humidity, totally phony, and I love it. The Fiorinal’s done its job. My head is vacant and painless.

  It must still be raining on the Chiefs woodsy acres.

  I walk into an art framer’s. It’s the only empty store and the woman behind the counter, a Buckhead version of Liv Ullmann, with a wide sympathetic face, doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t look like a serious shopper. I give her my toothiest.

  “Just looking,” I apologize.

  “Why?”

  “That’s a very reasonable question,” I say. She is neatly and expensively dressed; at least, everything looks color coordinated and natural fiberish. She seems many cuts above mall sales assistant.

  Besides, Blanquita thinks she’s too good for me.

  “Don’t tell me you have something to frame,” she says, laughing. “And I know you wouldn’t buy the junk on these walls.” She’s really a great saleslady. She’s narrowed my choices in about ten seconds. She’s flattered my tastes. Her eyes are the same greenish blue as her paisley sweater vest.

  She’s intuitive. It’s closing time and it’s Sunday, and she opens late on Monday. “But you knew that, didn’t you?” she smiles. She helps me out in her amused, laid-back way. Her name is Maura. Thirty-four, divorced, no kids; she gets the statistics out of the way. She’s established an easy groundwork. In an hour or two she’ll ask those leading questions that are part, more and more, of doing love in the eighties. I check automatically for wedding and friendship rings. The flesh on her ring finger isn’t blanched and fluted so I know she’s been divorced a while. That’s a definite plus. The newly single are to be avoided.

  Maura came down from Portland, Oregon, three winters ago. “I don’t know why I stay.” We’re having a pitcher of sangría, still in the mall. I like her voice; it’s rueful and teasing. I think I even like her big, sensible hands, so unlike Blanquita’s. I spot slivers, chewed nails, nothing glazed or pasted on. Hands that frame the art of Atlanta, such as it is. “Let’s see, there’s Farmers’ Market and the International Airport. What else?”

  “The CDC,” I protest. The doctors and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control may all be aliens but this is no time to diminish the city’s glory. “I’m betting on AIDS to put us on the map.” There, I’ve made it easy, no sweat.

  She laughs. I feel witty. I malinger, making small talk. Hard to tell what real time it is, out there in the world, but it must be dark. She suggests we go on to Appleby’s on the other side of the mall. Appleby’s is perfect for what we have going: relaxed fun and zero sentiment. I’ve struck gold.

  No, I’ve lost my claim.

  We have to drive around to the back of the mall. Her car’s a banged-up blue Subaru. Not her fault, she explains; an Oriental sideswiped her just outside Farmers’ Market on her first week in Atlanta. She kept the dent and let it rust. Her antisunbelt statement.

  We order ten-cent oysters for her and Buffalo wings for me and a dollar pitcher. We don’t feed each other forkfuls as we might have in a prevenereal era. Afterwards we have to walk around some in the parking lot before finding our way back to her Subaru. I haven’t oriented myself to her car yet. It’s these little things, first moves, losing the first step, that become so tiring, make me feel I’m slowing down. We’ve had a pleasant time and what I really want is to let her go.

  “Want to hear me play the harpsichord?”

  She locates her car key inside her pocketbook. “That’s very original,” she says. “Should I believe you?”

  “Only one way to find out.” The harpsichord was part of love’s debris. Wendi was musically inclined.

  “It’s the best line to date,” Maura says as she unlocks the door on the passenger side for me.

  Sunday night eases into the dark, cozy a.m. of Monday. Maura and I are having ourselves perfect times. The world’s a vale of tears only if you keep peering six weeks into the future.

  “You’re good for me,” she keeps whispering, and makes me believe it. “Griff and the Farmers’ Market. You’re a whole new reason for me to stay.”

  “We make a good team,” I say, knowing I’ve said it before. I’m already slipping back. I never used a line on Baby, and she never got my jokes anyway. Maura’s hair, silvery blond in the condo’s dimness, falls over my face. “Partner.”

  “But we shouldn’t talk about it,” she says. “That’s one of my superstitions.”

  I feel a small, icy twinge around my heart. I’ve swallowed too many superstitions these past few months.

  Then the phone rings. I lift the phone off the night table and shove it under the bed.

  “Oh, Christ, I just knew it,” Maura says. “It’s too good to be true, isn’t it?” I can feel her body tremble. It’s the first panic she’s displayed.

  “Look, I’m ignoring it.”

  “No you’re not.”

  The ringing stops, waits a while, and starts up again.

  “I don’t have to answer it.” I squeeze her rough hand, then splay the palm flat over my beard. “Give me a smile, pardner.”

  “It’s all right with me,” she says in her frank, Northwest way. “You have a life. Your life doesn’t begin and end with me.” She’s already out of bed, already fishing through clothes for the simple things she dropped. “But if you ever need anything framed, do me a big favor, okay?”

  The phone keeps up its stop-and-start ringing. It’s the Muzak of Purgatory. Maura’s dressed in an instant.

  “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be involved with someone.”

  Because I can’t bear to hear it ring anymore, I shout into the mouthpiece, “What’s with you, anyway? You’re the one who left!”

  But Blanquita the Brave, the giver of two cheers for a new life in a ne
w continent, the pineapple of Joker Rosario’s eyes, his Baby, sounds hysterical. I make out phrases. The Chief’s into games. The Chief doesn’t love her. Oh, Blanquita, you’re breaking my heart: don’t you know, didn’t anyone ever tell you about us? Under it all, you still trust us, you still love. She’s calling me from a diner. She’s babbling route numbers, gas stations, how to find her. Can’t I hear the semis? I’m all she’s got.

  I hear my voice, loud and insistent. “Amoco?” I’m shouting. “There’s a hundred Amocos between the perimeter and Chattanooga.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I hear Maura tell Marcos as I rush the front door, warm-ups pulled over my pajamas. “I don’t want to start anything complicated.”

  THE TENANT

  MAYA SANYAL has been in Cedar Falls, Iowa, less than two weeks. She’s come, books and clothes and one armchair rattling in the smallest truck that U-Haul would rent her, from New Jersey. Before that she was in North Carolina. Before that, Calcutta, India. Every place has something to give. She is sitting at the kitchen table with Fran drinking bourbon for the first time in her life. Fran Johnson found her the furnished apartment and helped her settle in. Now she’s brought a bottle of bourbon which gives her the right to stay and talk for a bit. She’s breaking up with someone named Vern, a pharmacist. Vern’s father is also a pharmacist and owns a drugstore. Maya has seen Vern’s father on TV twice already. The first time was on the local news when he spoke out against the selling of painkillers like Advil and Nuprin in supermarkets and gas stations. In the matter of painkillers, Maya is a universalist. The other time he was in a barbershop quartet. Vern gets along all right with his father. He likes the pharmacy business, as business goes, but he wants to go back to graduate school and learn to make films. Maya is drinking her first bourbon tonight because Vern left today for San Francisco State.

  “I understand totally,” Fran says. She teaches Utopian Fiction and a course in Women’s Studies and worked hard to get Maya hired. Maya has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and will introduce writers like R. K. Narayan and Chinua Achebe to three sections of sophomores at the University of Northern Iowa. “A person has to leave home. Try out his wings.”

  Fran has to use the bathroom. “I don’t feel abandoned.” She pushes her chair away from the table. “Anyway, it was a sex thing totally. We were good together. It’d be different if I’d loved him.”

  Maya tries to remember what’s in the refrigerator. They need food. She hasn’t been to the supermarket in over a week. She doesn’t have a car yet and so she relies on a corner store—a longish walk—for milk, cereal, and frozen dinners. Someday these exigencies will show up as bad skin and collapsed muscle tone. No folly is ever lost. Maya pictures history as a net, the kind of safety net travelling trapeze artists of her childhood fell into when they were inattentive, or clumsy. Going to circuses in Calcutta with her father is what she remembers vividly. It is a banal memory, for her father, the owner of a steel company, is a complicated man.

  Fran is out in the kitchen long enough for Maya to worry. They need food. Her mother believed in food. What is love, anger, inner peace, etc., her mother used to say, but the brain’s biochemistry. Maya doesn’t want to get into that, but she is glad she has enough stuff in the refrigerator to make an omelette. She realizes Indian women are supposed to be inventive with food, whip up exotic delights to tickle an American’s palate, and she knows she should be meeting Fran’s generosity and candor with some sort of bizarre and effortless countermove. If there’s an exotic spice store in Cedar Falls or in neighboring Waterloo, she hasn’t found it. She’s looked in the phone book for common Indian names, especially Bengali, but hasn’t yet struck up culinary intimacies. That will come—it always does. There’s a six-pack in the fridge that her landlord, Ted Suminski, had put in because she’d be thirsty after unpacking. She was thirsty, but she doesn’t drink beer. She probably should have asked him to come up and drink the beer. Except for Fran she hasn’t had anyone over. Fran is more friendly and helpful than anyone Maya has known in the States since she came to North Carolina ten years ago, at nineteen. Fran is a Swede, and she is tall, with blue eyes. Her hair, however, is a dull, darkish brown.

  “I don’t think I can handle anything that heavy-duty,” Fran says when she comes back to the room. She means the omelette. “I have to go home in any case.” She lives with her mother and her aunt, two women in their mid-seventies, in a drafty farmhouse. The farmhouse now has a computer store catty-corner from it. Maya’s been to the farm. She’s been shown photographs of the way the corner used to be. If land values ever rebound, Fran will be worth millions.

  Before Fran leaves she says, “Has Rab Chatterji called you yet?”

  “No.” She remembers the name, a good, reliable Bengali name, from the first night’s study of the phone book. Dr. Rabindra Chatterji teaches Physics.

  “He called the English office just before I left.” She takes car keys out of her pocketbook. She reknots her scarf. “I bet Indian men are more sensitive than Americans. Rab’s a Brahmin, that’s what people say.”

  A Chatterji has to be a Bengali Brahmin—last names give ancestral secrets away—but Brahminness seems to mean more to Fran than it does to Maya. She was born in 1954, six full years after India became independent. Her India was Nehru’s India: a charged, progressive place.

  “All Indian men are wife beaters,” Maya says. She means it and doesn’t mean it. “That’s why I married an American.” Fran knows about the divorce, but nothing else. Fran is on the Hiring, Tenure, and Reappointment Committee.

  Maya sees Fran down the stairs and to the car which is parked in the back in the spot reserved for Maya’s car, if she had owned one. It will take her several months to save enough to buy one. She always pays cash, never borrows. She tells herself she’s still recovering from the U-Haul drive halfway across the country. Ted Suminski is in his kitchen watching the women. Maya waves to him because waving to him, acknowledging him in that way, makes him seem less creepy. He seems to live alone though a sign, THE SUMINSKIS, hangs from a metal horse’s head in the front yard. Maya hasn’t seen Mrs. Suminski. She hasn’t seen any children either. Ted always looks lonely. When she comes back from campus, he’s nearly always in the back, throwing darts or shooting baskets.

  “What’s he like?” Fran gestures with her head as she starts up her car. “You hear these stories.”

  Maya doesn’t want to know the stories. She has signed a year’s lease. She doesn’t want complications. “He’s all right. I keep out of his way.”

  “You know what I’m thinking? Of all the people in Cedar Falls, you’re the one who could understand Vera best. His wanting to try out his wings, run away, stuff like that.”

  “Not really.” Maya is not being modest. Fran is being impulsively democratic, lumping her wayward lover and Indian friend together as headstrong adventurers. For Fran, a Utopian and feminist, borders don’t count. Maya’s taken some big risks, made a break with her parents’ ways. She’s done things a woman from Ballygunge Park Road doesn’t do, even in fantasies. She’s not yet shared stories with Fran, apart from the divorce. She’s told her nothing of men she picks up, the reputation she’d gained, before Cedar Falls, for “indiscretions.” She has a job, equity, three friends she can count on for emergencies. She is an American citizen. But.

  Fran’s Brahmin calls her two nights later. On the phone he presents himself as Dr. Chatterji, not Rabindra or Rab. An oldfashioned Indian, she assumes. Her father still calls his closest friend, “Colonel.” Dr. Chatterji asks her to tea on Sunday. She means to say no but hears herself saying, “Sunday? Fiveish? I’m not doing anything special this Sunday.”

  Outside, Ted Suminski is throwing darts into his garage door. The door has painted-on rings: orange, purple, pink. The bull’s- eye is gray. He has to be fifty at least. He is a big, thick, lonely man about whom people tell stories. Maya pulls the phone cord as far as it’ll go so she can look down more directly on her landlord’s large, bald
head. He has his back to her as he lines up a dart. He’s in black running shoes, red shorts, he’s naked to the waist. He hunches his right shoulder, he pulls the arm back; a big, lonely man shouldn’t have so much grace. The dart is ready to cut through the September evening. But Ted Suminski doesn’t let go. He swings on worn rubber soles, catches her eye in the window (she has to have imagined this), takes aim at her shadow. Could she have imagined the noise of the dart’s metal tip on her windowpane?

  Dr. Chatterji is still on the phone. “You are not having any mode of transportation, is that right?”

  Ted Suminski has lost interest in her. Perhaps it isn’t interest, at all; perhaps it’s aggression. “I don’t drive,” she lies, knowing it sounds less shameful than not owning a car. She has said this so often she can get in the right degree of apology and Asian upper-class helplessness. “It’s an awful nuisance.”

  “Not to worry, please.” Then, “It is a great honor to be meeting Dr. Sanyal’s daughter. In Calcutta business circles he is a legend.”

  On Sunday she is ready by four-thirty. She doesn’t know what the afternoon holds; there are surely no places for “high tea”—a colonial tradition—in Cedar Falls, Iowa. If he takes her back to his place, it will mean he has invited other guests. From his voice she can tell Dr. Chatterji likes to do things correctly. She has dressed herself in a peach-colored nylon georgette sari, jade drop-earrings and a necklace. The color is good on dark skin. She is not pretty, but she does her best. Working at it is a part of self-respect. In the mid-seventies, when American women felt rather strongly about such things, Maya had been in trouble with her women’s group at Duke. She was too feminine. She had tried to explain the world she came out of. Her grandmother had been married off at the age of five in a village now in Bangladesh. Her great-aunt had been burned to death over a dowry problem. She herself had been trained to speak softly, arrange flowers, sing, be pliant. If she were to seduce Ted Suminski, she thinks as she waits in the front yard for Dr. Chatterji, it would be minor heroism. She has broken with the past. But.