White Dancing Elephants

by Chaya Bhuvaneswar

  There is that story she is writing too, now nearly two hundred pages long, a whole novel, from which this Harry character seems to have sprung, fully formed, uninvited, and won’t go back into whatever place he’s from, whatever sphere where he exists. As if her imagination cannot contain him.

  The diorama, now that she stands back and looks at it, owes a debt to Salvador Dalí. There are no obvious melting clocks, but the sense of wide spaces and unaccounted time, reflecting Mikki’s own sense, here, dwelling in caves, that all manner of things could have already happened in the world outside. Nuclear war, the overthrow of a demented president. Her husband, cheating with the neighbor’s wife. Not like she hasn’t noticed that last thing.

  HE’S WHAT? THAT FUCKING DOUCHE. THAT WOMAN HAS SUCH A BIG ASS. COME ON, MIKKI, COME ON. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? JUST STEP INSIDE. COME IN. GIVE ME A KISS.

  It is ridiculous—she is ridiculous, she knows—but Mikki finds herself pressing her own lips against her wrist, deeply enough to leave a mark in saliva. Isn’t this what some famous writer told her students to do, when they felt low? And doesn’t it make sense, to inject each rumination with compassion?

  But this kissing isn’t born of karuna or upekkha, or any of the Hindu/Buddhist words ascribing compassionate motivations that Mikki has nearly forgotten how to say, ever since she married a handsome but agnostic, cruel, perfidious Muslim. The neighbor’s wife really is no one of note. Just an exceedingly plump, rosy white woman whose major attributes are near-perfect cleanliness, including housekeeping; robust cooking, including Egyptian treats she researched after first meeting Javed at a barbecue; and above all, silence in bed. Mikki knows this because one time, when she’d come home from work without warning, she’d crept up the stairs and even slid open the bedroom door, only to find neighbor’s wife, fat and naked, splayed and moaning silently, apparently satisfied beneath Javed.

  Neither of them had seen Mikki. But maybe he’d guessed that she knew, when only two weeks later she’d contrived a way to be separated, in this cave.

  It wouldn’t be the first time an Egyptian man—the descendant of kings, Javed jokingly or not so jokingly likes to remind her—has chosen to consort with pale, fat women. In all the emperors’ and even in minor sultans harems were such women, hair shining, wet lips succulent. Mikki has seen them in period paintings, the nineteenth-century European imagination of a slovenly despot’s concubines.

  Javed has never personally been slovenly, though. Even in the midst of Javed’s taboo lovemaking, the covers of the Tempur-Pedic bed were neatly folded, just as usual.

  In his well-paid job as a bond trader, Javed is courteous, pleasant—one might even say gallant—with women who literally weigh half what this white neighbor does. Women with sheer stockings over worked-out, slender legs, women who put on their silk blouses and perfume every morning, expecting strange men to admire and covet but not harass them. Javed is stranger than most. Instead of Playboy or Penthouse, he has a stash of BBB porno magazines—big bold and beautiful, plus sizes, pre-gastric bypass surgery sizes. Folds of flesh gleaming, rendered inhuman and therefore more erotic, huge flattened breasts like those of seals or bloated dogs.

  In the state of uncertainty immediately after her discovery, Mikki decided she had to go back to work. Not at the odd jobs she cobbled together. Like, not walking the neighbor’s dogs (she’d just as soon avoid seeing the lush garden on the other, hateful side of the fence); not painting old houses for cheap; not standing at the register in the hospital gift shop downtown; not tutoring the Korean children whose parents paid Mikki well for every session, though the kids spoke not a word of English and she not a word of Korean.

  Before she’d taken all the odd jobs, she’d lived on what was left of her mother’s inheritance. Before she’d married Javed, Mikki was unashamedly writing and making art, living off love, the love her mother’s mother had for her, leaving Mikki’s mother—baapre! That much money to a girl!—enough so she could be an opera singer. Mikki still loves to play her mother’s records.

  YOU’VE NEVER COME OVER TO WHERE I AM, PUT YOUR FEET ON MY LAP BEFORE A FIRE, AND LISTENED TO OPERA WHILE DRINKING WINE WITH ME. YOU’VE NEVER LIVED, MY LITTLE MALLIKI.

  Malliki. She considers her name. “Now is that sort of like Malachy, the Irish bloke?” one of Javed’s old-slash-distinguished British banker friends once asked. Malachy McCourt, the brother of Frank, who’d had the chance to write his memoirs too. Saint Malachy, who’d restored the sanctity of marriage in Ireland. Whose prophecies, for centuries, had been poo-pooed. All of his doomsday prophecies.

  YOU HAVEN’T PUT MY MEMOIRS IN THIS BOOK. I’M READING IT. IT’S GOOD, IT REALLY IS. ESPECIALLY THE SCENE WHEN SHE REFUSES TO TAKE HIM BACK AFTER WHAT HE DID. BUT WHAT ABOUT ME? WHAT ABOUT OUR TIMES TOGETHER, THOSE AFTERNOONS YOU SAT PREOCCUPIED WITH ME?

  Who will write her memoirs, Mikki wonders. What has she ever done that is really worth writing about? Not children, since she and Javed had never succeeded in creating any. Not Javed, whose ideal woman she fell short of by at least fifty pounds. No one will write about her life, she surmises. And who knows what this Harry guy will do to the pages she’d written. Nothing will stop him from mucking around inside there, distorting the truth.

  YOU KNOW I’M NOT GOING TO GIVE UP. I’M TELLING YOU, I’M NEVER GIVING UP. COME IN, COME IN, WHEREVER YOU ARE. I’M WAITING.

  Since Mikki has never talked out loud to him, she wonders if the man, this character, whoever he is, might be so shocked by her addressing him that he’d stop heckling.

  “Hello,” she says, out to the dark beyond the cave. “Hello? Hello?”

  Silence.

  Emboldened, she begins to sing an Indian religious song, a bhajan about lotus-eyed gods, while putting the finishing touches on the diorama and thinking, for once not of Dalí, but about De Chirico. Old churches, echoing emptiness. The feel of thrilling desolation similar to how she felt, Mikki remembers, when she first read ‘The Crying of Lot 49.” That nauseating, sickening feeling that forces of darkness too elusive for her to even name could be responsible, somehow, for all manner of losses and false turns. Thurn und Taxis. Something going bad. A handsome man who, upon closer inspection, might turn out to be no better than a seedily aging movie star, a man no one would fantasize about anymore.

  I’LL FANTASIZE ABOUT YOU, MY MIKKI, EVEN IF YOU DON’T COME ANY CLOSER THAN THIS EDGE. SO GRATEFUL THAT YOU’RE NOW TALKING TO ME.

  Mikki falls silent. It is nearly time for the old women to make their promenades around each cave, officially clearing excess snow and making sure the pipes were functioning smoothly, unofficially snooping on the indigenous women artists, among whom Mikki alone has no children.

  She has a choice to make; she can see that now. She can say yes to this old Harry—

  FORTY’S NOT OLD!

  —especially since Javed’s infidelity frees her from guilt. How she would say yes, she isn’t sure. The diorama has grown bigger in the last few hours, though. Of that, she is certain.

  There is a haunting, eerie smell—of jasmine hair oil, from when she visited India when she was very young, though she hasn’t rubbed her scalp with even one drop in years. That such a long-ago smell should be here now, here in this cave-studio where characters from novels are speaking out loud, is only logical, Mikki supposes.

  “What about that whole cowshit thing? Are you that Harry, too?” Her own voice out loud, in the cave.

  I WAS WAITING FOR YOU TO FIGURE THAT OUT. THAT WAS THE HARRY FROM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. DO YOU REMEMBER? HOW HE SAID THAT YOU SMELLED LIKE COWSHIT, AND HOW YOU COULDN’T WASH THE BROWN DIRT FROM YOUR HANDS?

  “I guess I remember now,” Mikki murmurs.

  I’M NOT THAT HARRY. LOOK CLOSER NOW. COME HERE. COME TALK TO ME.

  In the diorama, installation, cave within a cave, really, this house built on a cliff, its male and female figures on a bed, one old woman cooking dinner, other old woman sweeping floors, and still another one, witch-like, peering from outside—
in the small place she’s built, inside this place, Mikki has never imagined Harry, but now she does, giving his heckling, needy voice a human form. Suppose she believes he’s not that bully from elementary school. But suppose he isn’t innocent either. Suppose he’s that white guy about whom she’d gone to Human Resources.

  Mikki remembers why, in her book, she might have picked the name Harry.

  She has been working a holiday retail shift at the hospital gift shop. Evening shifts. There was a Harry something who was a doctor, psychiatrist, relatively early on in his career, only forty. He’d come every evening, buying chocolates “for my two kids,” he said, his wedding ring glinting, even laughing a few times and asking if Mikki had kids.

  One day—she remembers this—he came forward, trying to offer her advice. The day after she found Javed cheating. He’d seen the tear marks on her face. That was the moment this adult Harry dared to touch her. She’d been wearing a silk blouse, ruby-colored, with a gold chain and gold earrings. “You look like a Gypsy,” he said, completely free of irony. Since of course he didn’t know.

  I KNOW IT NOW.

  Harry (she’d looked him up online, using her phone)—the well-heeled psychiatrist Bostonian, both father and grandfather trained as famous analysts—had no idea of Mikki’s ancestry, from real Gypsies who’d once traced their ancestry to western India. How the Romani bone structure, hair, gold jewelry reflected in Mikki’s own weren’t accidentally similar, but reflective of Mikki’s own Tamil forebears. An ancestry that Harry, unlike Javed, wanted to know more about, though he claimed he couldn’t be sated by a few minutes’ conversation, she was that interesting to him.

  WE’LL TALK IN BETWEEN YOU KNOW WHAT. PILLOW TALK. HEH HEH.

  She’d made him remember, he said, the history he’d learned as the former leader of a clinic in Somerville for Nepali immigrants. His friendly, progressive views were nonetheless a bit rigid, she thought. Staunchly anti-Palestinian, for one. Not that comfortable with queer identities. Judgmental about sex workers forming a union. Almost Puritanical in his tastes.

  WE HARDLY GOT TO TALK! I TOUCHED YOU THAT ONE TIME. WE EVEN KISSED IN THAT GIFT SHOP. I CHEATED ON MY WIFE AND KIDS. BUT THEN YOUR BOSS SAW YOU, AND YOU REPORTED ME TO HUMAN RESOURCES.

  “I didn’t report you, actually,” Mikki says, still softly, looking at the entrance of the cave but not seeing anyone, wondering if the old women are coming today.

  WAIT, COME AGAIN.

  “I didn’t report you. I only went to Human Resources to see if it was allowed, any kind of dating between someone like me, a parttime employee in the gift shop, and a tall person, a fine person, like you. Doctor and all. Because I liked the way you kissed. Just that one time.”

  KEEP TALKING.

  “I only wanted to make sure it was allowed, what we would do. I mean, if we did anything.”

  WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?

  The old woman assigned to clean Mikki’s cave comes then. She sweeps out the dust that, even in snow, remains all over the island, a testament to its hot, twisted birth out of volcanoes with grand gusto, like millions of champagne bottles popping.

  BELIEVE ME, I WANT YOU TO MAKE AS MUCH NOISE AS YOU WANT.

  They all say those things in the beginning, Mikki thinks with irritation. She nods to the old woman, pretends to work.

  “What else?” she finally speaks the words softly, thinking that perhaps he won’t hear. Her hands are in the diorama now, now that the old woman has finished and gone, sparing only a quick glance of curiosity to Mikki with her taut self-dialogue. Now she is alone, Mikki reminds herself, feeling strange and desolate, like she is being given a fake thing, a false clue, a hopeless and demoralizing view from a window, like Pynchon’s crazy psychiatrist in ‘The Crying of Lot 49,” calling the heroine Oedipa Maas in the middle of the night. Mikki could swear that not only her fingers, but her whole arms are in this diorama now, her whole face and neck and hair and, within minutes, her whole body.

  And now she can see the features of the man and woman on the bed. In this newly warm, cave-like space, so much warmer than the one she’s been in for the women’s retreat, Mikki can make out the dim outline of a bed covered in a down blanket. And in this large raftsized bed lies someone, not the Harry she’d seen in the hospital, the real man, albeit white, who’d seen her sad, and alone. This Harry isn’t that psychiatrist who, until that afternoon, when he’d first touched her ruby-silken-covered shoulders, then her face, and then kissed her, had never done more than smile at her warmly. It was a moment like a moment from the inexpensive paperbacks the hospital gift shop was selling. The moment of a handsome, distinguished stranger kissing a much younger woman whom he’s seen in distress.

  This isn’t him, Malliki thinks, excited. It actually isn’t that random guy from the gift shop, whom she had feared would get her in trouble if anyone saw the video footage. She’d gone to Human Resources to assure her job as being safe. At that point, Mikki couldn’t know, even, if Javed would leave her for some BBB. If Javed would keep essentially bankrolling her art in exchange for Mikki pretending not to have seen what she had seen. The odalisque with her slick, decadent rolls of flesh and Javed, uncharacteristically subdued and content.

  YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T KNOW WHO I WAS? I’M CRUSHED.

  This isn’t a “Harry” she has known before. This is an unknown person. He turns and could almost frighten her with eyes like a sorcerers’.

  I WANT TO FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE.

  That’s her voice, not his. Mikki finds herself speaking the same language he does.

  I’M GOING TO MAKE YOU WISH YOU HAD COME TO ME SOONER.

  HARRY, THAT SOUNDS LIKE A PROMISE.

  DO YOU EVER HAVE TO GO BACK?

  THIS CAVE IS MINE AS LONG AS I WANT IT.

  THEN MY JOB IS TO MAKE YOU WANT TO STAY.

  YOU’RE DOING FINE.

  And so it goes, this back and forth—so loud inside each other’s minds—

  EACH OTHER’S HEARTS, they say in unison.

  Until, instead of being able to talk spontaneously at all, and instead of moving wherever she likes, Mikki finds herself pinned to the diorama’s bed, displayed, not nude but even more exposed, making a kissing motion toward her own outstretched right hand. But this time Harry, the right Harry, is kissing her hand too, and holding her there with his whole body, which feels heavy and immovable, as if it has been carefully glued into place.

  HEITOR

  ONE OCTOBER EVENING IN THE Year of Our Blessed Lord, fifteen hundred and forty-five, a male Indian slave once advertised as being in the most robust health, his young skin shining like sturdy striped mahogany from all the healing scars of past whippings, stood chained in the cool courtyard of the convent in Evora, in Imperial Portugal. He was awaiting punishment.

  As a mercy, one of the sisters had allowed him to continue wearing a loincloth, though, at the moment of his death, he knew that even this insignificant black rag would be forced off. The covering was for the benefit of the fifty or so women, some of them girls, who lived in the convent for lifetimes, and who, like Mariana, a sixteen-year-old novitiate, were never supposed to see any man’s genitals, yet who had contrived once to see Heitor sleeping on the ground outside the stables, had found his body beguiling, had ordered him to stand guard outside her bedroom door on several nights, though he had resisted doing more.

  When death came, it would be a gunshot. Heitor would not be blindfolded. But no one would prevent him from closing his eyes when pistols were raised, and seeing vivid memories.

  As a child, Heitor was taken at the age of seven by slave traders from Lisbon, remote but proud descendants of da Gama, who’d entered the Indian Ocean a century before. Heitor’s tiny mother was struck to the ground in a village in Bengal after the elders, without informing her, captured her son and then sold him. Small for his age, easily bound, Heitor was brought by ship and force, by sons of spice traders, by members of large prosperous companies, brothers of men who had settled in Goa, the place in India whe
re the first human remains of the Old World were found. Those traders had married the most beautiful Indian women they could find. With jewels stolen from their own ancestors, the women were converted to Christianity.

  Heitor was sold for an elite price to work for the nuns of Evora, and their novitiates. Indian, Chinese, Japanese slaves were bought and sold in Portuguese cities, believed to be more intelligent, and less potent as males, than African slaves, and thus allowed to work in the convents.

  As a child, he was striking for his quietude, his gentleness, which formed a graceful harmony with the aggressive energy of his hard and strong limbs.

  Beginning at the quick, observant, diligent age of eight, Heitor was saved from harder labor, given to the convent’s Indian gardener and its cook. They were nowhere to be found on his last night. The men, lovers, were hiding for fear of being chained. They were both drunk and in despair that they had not foreseen his fate. His two passionate, adoptive fathers, who knew how to grow the choicest sprigs of lavender to place on dinner plates, also knew the art of capoeira, a fighting form evolved to fend off slave traders, one of many methods of survival that Indians would learn from Brazilian men, the black crewmembers who frequented taverns and inns in the city where the cook and gardener were sent to do errands. These crewmembers, in their turn, bought young Japanese women as slaves and bragged of how much they had enjoyed them.

  The cook and gardener also were devoted to pleasure. Believing Heitor should have the same, they taught him capoeira, cooking, and all the other arts. The men had intended Heitor to inherit their small trove of possessions. Those two men, slaves of the convent, suggested which girls in the village Heitor could make love with in secret.

  Mariana, the rich virgin who desired Heitor, didn’t know about those girls.

  If the oldest and most powerful of the nuns of Montemor had known about the welcoming village girls, each of whom were after all some respectable tradesman’s daughter, by now the police would have torn off Heitor’s balls and forced him to go oneliving and working.