White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  “Tell me what’s wrong, really,” Narika insisted, refusing the insult, though she knew losing ten pounds wouldn’t do her any harm.

  Talinda sighed deeply and theatrically.

  “I’ll tell you once we’re done eating,” she said. “I want to enjoy my food.”

  Narika sat up, alert. “Wait, are you having an affair?” she asked, scarcely daring to believe it. “You’re cheating on George, of all people? And it’s guilt that stops you from eating? Or you’re just getting so much exercise—”

  “I’m not even going to dignify—” Talinda began, but Narika, dramatic, interrupted, closing her eyes and holding her forehead with both hands, as if she were a seer.

  “And don’t tell me—it’s Bill. After everything, you’re sleeping with Bill. Bill the jerk who ran off with one of your roommates during spring break, Bill the rich boy cliché, the trust fund baby who picked you up during freshman crush, who cried for you only after you were gone. Bill the screw-up whose only merit was his high-octane you-know-what.”

  “About right, except one major correction. He could barely get it up even in college. I doubt he’s having any luck with his little thing now.” Talinda laughed.

  “But you’re doing something that you haven’t told anyone,” Narika said, “and you’re ashamed, and will tell me. Is it money? That big pharma sellout you got into? Tell me, dammit. You’re driving me crazy. You know I’ll support you, whatever it is. Especially if it involves indulging your vices.”

  “What vices?”

  “Enough with the games—you need to eat,” Narika said, serious.

  Talinda signaled the waitress and soon the menu reappeared on their table.

  “I’ll tell them to add bibimbap to my order, just to shut you up.”

  “Hey—do you remember in seventh grade, when that tall Korean girl—”

  “You mean Hannah, Hannah Eun. She had a name. You should do better. You never liked it when people called you ‘that Indian girl.’”

  “Hannah had this whole thing about how small your feet were. She called your loafers ‘thimbles’ and your mittens ‘thumb-warmers.’ She’d complain that she looked like a giant next to you. Remember that?”

  “Narika, you’re sad. You’re the only person in the world who remembers that. I bet even Hannah has moved on by now. I bet she has tons of short friends and doesn’t even notice it.”

  “Is that why you’re so careful what you eat? Because you never want to be both short and chubby?”

  Talinda shook her head. “Just that it takes me a while to eat these days. I feel nauseous a lot.”

  Narika’s eyes widened in joy for a moment. “Oh, God! You’re expecting! You and George! Great!”

  “No. No, it’s not that,” Talinda said, her eyes filling with tears. Narika stared, waiting, breath caught in her throat.

  “Columbia Onc isn’t sure yet, but they think I have cancer. Stomach cancer—the kind Asians get. If it’s signet ring, my prognosis is laughable. Even if it’s not, I haven’t got long. But who does? You’re the one proving that bad guys come and shoot people down. Isn’t that, like, the thesis of your book?”

  Narika found she couldn’t move or speak.

  Talinda rubbed her own cheekbones, smudging her rouge. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want a scene. I didn’t want to frighten you.”

  Narika nodded, grabbing a napkin and dabbing her eyes, clearing her throat.

  “In case you’re wondering, I was planning to tell George tonight, after I get the biopsy results. After I know how long.”

  “That’s good,” Narika said, too fast. “You have to tell him. But maybe it’ll be negative. Maybe all of it is something else—not cancer. Not cancer at all. Like, isn’t there this thing where you can be pregnant, only it attaches to your stomach and not in the right place, isn’t it—”

  “It’s not an ectopic,” said Talinda, cold. “Whatever this thing is, it’s going where it will be able to grow.”

  Narika, chastened, could only nod her head.

  Talinda, looking past her. “I wish I could feel the kind of childish hope that you can feel, I really do. The head-shrinkers who work at my clinic, they say denial helps at first. But none of that soft science matters now. Neither do feelings. ‘Tissue is the issue,’ like my pathology professors used to say. And if the tissue diagnosis supports the clinical and imaging? Including the weight loss, and my loss of appetite? George won’t matter then. Love has no power in the place where I’m headed, Narika. Not even yours.”

  “Love is all you’ve got, you idiot. You’re going to live. Even if the news is terrible, George will help.”

  Narika, expecting Talinda to say, “Of course I’ll live, you silly bitch,” or even “I don’t need anyone’s help,” found it unbearable when Talinda bowed her head.

  “Your mother,” Narika said quickly. “You’ve told her, haven’t you? She’ll want to come and stay with you.”

  Talinda whipped up, alert and fierce. “Oh no, she won’t know anything. She’s in Korea now. Left just a few days ago for my grandfather’s eightieth. Told me she doesn’t see the point of coming back to the US, ever again. It’s perfect. She’s never going to know. After I’m gone, I’ll get George to send her a telegram saying I died in an accident, suddenly. That I didn’t suffer.”

  “You’re not even going to—”

  “No.”

  “But even if it’s cancer, couldn’t you have time?” Narika asked. “With my grandfather’s cancer, he had years. He spent two years in India recovering. You shouldn’t work. You should adopt with George. Love a child. You should do everything you can to live.”

  Talinda said, “If it’s in the nodes, stage three or four, survival is a year or less.”

  Narika hid her face in her hands.

  “Don’t think for a minute I’m not going to fight,” Talinda said. “I’ve got enough time to make a choice about chemo or not. They would do surgery in a few weeks to make the thing smaller. There’s an experimental protocol at McGill. Canada. They freeze the balls off the cancer. I may elect to do that one instead. So far, some of the subjects have a higher survival. A year or two. One outlier even lived ten years, and trials are still going. NIH is so miserably slow.”

  “What’s NIH?” Narika almost asked. And then she thought of more questions, so many more questions, down to the detail of what kind of nightgown Talinda preferred if and when she had to take to bed, but only because she didn’t know anything, not because the answers would help anything now. Questions. There were more questions she could have asked, but now, choosing to be merciful, Narika shut up.

  She tried to remember Talinda’s favorite dessert but couldn’t.

  “Let me cry, okay?” Narika said. “I’ll stop in a minute.”

  She put a hand on Talinda’s cold, white one, noticing as she always did the difference in their skin color. But this time it seemed like a ghastly difference between a living and dying thing—Narika’s rosy-golden-brown hand, unlined, against Talinda’s pale one.

  Talinda took her hand away and pressed it against her temple, massaging.

  “You’re not even forty. How is this possible?” Narika whispered in a fury.

  Talinda’s smile: self-deprecating, cynical. Savvy. Reminding Narika of just how much reality her friend had seen.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Talinda said.

  4.

  I wish I could say that something deep and abiding, like love for Talinda, is what united us, George and me. That she will live on when we’re together. That we will name our child after her—Kim Tae-Hyun. Her real, Korean name. But all of that would be a lie. What binds George to me is our years of baby hunger, real and plain. That little pirate, growing and greedy, in my belly—four months along now, his heartbeat softer but more regular than the gush of blood through Talinda’s cancer—that little person is a dream.

  Inside me lives a healthy, plundering group of cells that wants what it wants, like George’
s heart. Still I like thinking of me and Talinda having our dinner in Flushing, last year, before my son seized my affections. Even now, I enjoy replaying this scene, and the few weeks afterward, before I betrayed my best friend, remembering details like the texture of the dog’s fur, the taste of the food before Talinda told me about her diagnosis—how much I enjoyed the evening, enjoyed being with her. How, looking at Talinda’s lips as she mocked me, I relived the night in high school when she let me kiss her.

  Then I think of the night I started with George, the first of only three nights that we fucked, hard, loud, and heavenly, before I got pregnant, as if I had been waiting all along, and I wonder if anything, anything at all, would have prevented what George and I have done.

  Tonight—one year since she told me about her cancer, six months of me lying to her face—Talinda knocks at my door. It’s past midnight. Nothing has announced her. My buzzer doesn’t work, along with the stove and one of the windows in this apartment, a casualty of the landlord’s smug indifference, a feature of this neighborhood.

  I’m glad to see Talinda. Relieved that she looks beautiful, unchanged. I don’t ask why she’s come to visit me this late.

  “The Canadian experiment’s not working,” she says. “The meds are shit.”

  She takes off her scarf and shakes her hair loose. If her treatment were working, she wouldn’t have that hair, but as it is it looks exactly as it always has—lush down her back, black with red highlights, a dream-girl’s hair, an illustration for The Pillow Book. George must have fallen in love with it. He never runs his fingers through my hair, which is a witch doll’s powder puff, a mess of black curls that would be wiry if I didn’t take care of them. But always he touches my lips, which are darker than hers and just a bit fuller. And traces my profile, whispering, “Nefertiti.” And my dark nipples. Talinda’s, I happen to know, are the lightest, most delicate and softest pinkish brown. When we were teenagers, it felt like a miracle when she revealed them to me.

  Now it’s nearly 4 a.m. and Talinda’s sitting on my bed, me on the floor, and we’re almost done watching Dark Victory.

  “Wrong choice,” I’d said when she picked it. “Trust me, you don’t want to see that.”

  “You’re making a pretty big assumption, aren’t you?” she said. “Like—thinking because Keanu Reeves isn’t in it, I won’t have a clue what it’s about?”

  “I don’t want you to see it,” I said, feeling the tears. “Come on. Let’s watch something else.” I wanted to distract her from the things she’d said, about how she’d chosen wrong with the Canadian protocol, now it was too late for surgery and too early for hospice, how all this probably meant she had three months at most. How she’d been vomiting and couldn’t stop. How the cancer has proven to be unstoppable.

  But the movie Talinda chose plays on the screen and we’re both enrapt, watching the handsome, stocky doctor tower over tiny Bette Davis, like George towers over Talinda. George said to call him again before I went to sleep, but I won’t. I won’t betray Talinda anymore.

  Without George in the picture, Talinda and I are back where we were. We’re eating popcorn. Talinda jeers, queen of it all on my pillows. Me sitting on the floor at her feet, unable to move, waiting for her to look at me. In thrall to her. Smiling at the movie’s campy parts, loving the way she rolls her eyes.

  It’s not until the end of the movie that she speaks.

  “I know about you and George,” she says. “I know everything you’ve done.”

  I say nothing. If I don’t speak, maybe she’ll think that I’m asleep.

  “It must be that you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” she asks, not waiting for me to respond. “It won’t be long,” she says. “It really won’t be long. Just don’t tell me about any of it. I don’t even want to know if you’re pregnant.”

  She must hear the sound of me crying, exhausted. Slowly, I stand.

  “What can I do?” I ask, the way I should have been asking all along, the way I stopped asking months ago.

  Talinda flicks on the light at the side of my bed, switches the TV off with the remote, makes room.

  “Be close to me,” she says, patting the place next to her. “You’re what I’ve got.”

  I move closer. But I can’t bring myself to sit on the bed next to her. Can’t risk that what is wrong with her will pass to me.

  “There’s no way you have a cigarette, do you?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Then what are you reading these days, anything good?” Talinda says, picking up the book that lies on my bedside table. “Ah yes,” she says, opening to a random page. “Sontag. Even I’ve heard of her. Good for you, starting to read people I’ve heard of. Not that Bakhtin or any of those names that sound like phlegm.”

  “Oh, look at this, perfect,” she goes on, not looking at me. I’m holding the sheet against my front, even now protecting myself, keeping my flesh and the flesh of my flesh, the bone of my bone, separate from hers.

  There is a baby inside me now, and without meaning to, I have forgiven myself.

  “‘Illness is the night side of citizenship,’” Talinda reads. “‘A more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick—’

  “An onerous citizenship,” she repeats, now looking up at me. “I like that. Worse than the exam my mother took, when she became a US citizen. Once you’re sick, part of you, most of the time, more or less feels forced to keep trying to live, even when you stop wanting to.”

  I stand, ready to move away and save myself. Save him. My little love.

  “What now?” I ask. “What do you need? Is there anything that I—? Forget George. I’ll break it off with him. It’s not about him. I am so sorry, Talinda. So sorry.”

  Talinda stares at me, assessing. “You’re not going to be with me, are you?” she says. “Not really. Part of you is gone. You’re committed. You have become somebody’s mother.” Laughing now. “Congrats.”

  I stand there anyway, waiting. The least I can do is try to be the loyal dog. A small, pudgy dog, simple in its love. Ready to serve.

  “Why don’t you fucking let me sleep,” Talinda says, rolling onto her side, but she doesn’t slap my hand away when I come close enough to smooth my bedclothes over her. “In a little while I’ll call my husband, and he’ll come here because I ask, because it’s right. And he’ll ignore you. And you can break up with him then, fine. Sure you will. But meantime, Narika, let me sleep. I mean, really, can’t you? Leave me alone to goddamn sleep.”

  A SHAKER CHAIR

  1.

  AT LEAST THE GIRL WAS NEVER LATE, thought Sylvia. Like most Indians Sylvia had ever known—actually, like most Asians in general—this girl Maya, this twenty-year-old patient who was over two decades younger than Sylvia, was conscientious, consistent. She paid for each psychoanalysis session, in Sylvia’s chic Brattle Street private practice, with bedraggled wads of cash that looked like the contents of the cash register at some filthy curry restaurant. But cash was cash, and even the dirtiest cash would pay for Sylvia’s two new, sturdy teakwood armoires.

  Rosewood, bamboo, tropical breeds. Comfort without indolence; luxury without opulence, the shop’s ad said. Sylvia couldn’t stop spending her money at the overpriced Asian antiques shop because its aesthetic was so understated. The opposite of some Oriental depot palace that would have appealed to dramatic, beautiful Maya, who’d shown up for a few past sessions wearing pointed brocade shoes and carrying rusty old hookahs, one of which she’d offered Sylvia.

  Whenever Maya sat on one of Sylvia’s plain, gleaming, antique wooden chairs, she left behind a strangely sweaty curry smell, which Sylvia was too embarrassed about noticing to ever mention to anyone. As if it might in some way mean Sylvia, of all people, was racist, though the very thought felt bizarre in her mind, as if she were thinking like a white. Like a stranger. Or like one of Sylvia’s own white relatives, not her maternal grandparents but her extended famil
y who had grown up in the South. She didn’t even bring up Maya’s odor in her own psychotherapy, with the teacher she’d contacted when she acknowledged how uncomfortable Maya made her. After years of checking in with her old supervisor once every few months at most, Sylvia had recently begun seeing him once a week.

  Countertransference, that was all—the way her heart beat so fast whenever she heard Maya’s buoyant footsteps on the stairs. The way it felt to let Maya shake her hand, which sometimes she did before sessions, or stare at Sylvia’s legs, or when Maya smiled instead of answering a question.

  Countertransference was what had to be discussed. “Revulsion,” Sylvia had said in a hoarse half-whisper to her old supervisor, now in his eighties. “Revulsion is what she makes me feel.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, I just don’t understand,” he’d said, forcing Sylvia to repeat herself, as if the act of repetition could teach her something.

  “Ah, the revulsion,” he finally echoed. It was a word he would like, for its passionate connotation, its confrontation, its elevation of what they were doing as psychoanalysts in this day and age— “Working for the insurance companies, wasting our time with paperwork”—into something necessary and elemental. “Revulsion. Finally, the smell of blood, of life,” the old man said, leaning back with satisfaction in his chair, as if he’d confirmed that he was supervising assassins.

  Not that Sylvia in any way lacked killer instinct. She made a point of being polished, calm, perfect. Prada bag hanging on the door of her office, delicate high-heeled shoes, silk blouse tucked inside a suit with good, clean lines. Revulsion, anger, and damn it, with Maya, something else—sometimes a pause, a quick breath held, Sylvia thought, as she turned the pages of a Ralph Lauren catalogue, a favorite Gold Amex credit card between her fingers. She paused each time a slender brown young girl modeled a pair of riding boots or a sinuous dress, a girl with hair the texture of Maya’s. Sucked in her breath for girls with Maya’s color skin, who wore lingerie

  Not that Sylvia ever felt that way during session. Despite her loveliness, Maya managed to look slovenly. During the day, Maya was a research drone for some sort of web healthcare startup in Kendall, politely anonymous, as well groomed as Sylvia for the white folks she saw day in and out. Maya only showed up disheveled for black, biracial Sylvia.