“Oh, she is a friend to Manoj’s paintings,” said Padmi. “Well, that is nice too.”
“Manoj is always sending us people.”
“All kinds. Not only girls.”
“Oh, surely not.”
This conversation seemed to reassure them, and they smiled on Sophie with new tenderness.
“The paintings are for sale,” said Avyark. “You can buy them, very reasonable. Proceeds to benefit Golden Age Society.”
“Really,” said Sophie, nodding as if she understood. She thought it must be some sort of retirement fund.
“Avyark, show her the new picture,” Padmi commanded. Avyark got up and went behind the folding screen. “Avyark is president and founder of Golden Age Society, American Chapter.” From a side table she handed Sophie a pamphlet, slightly filmed with dust.
VISHNU, PRESERVER OF ORDER
At the end of the Fourth, or Iron Age, Lord Vishnu will appear in the form of Kalki, the tenth avatar, a man riding on a white horse and wielding a flaming sword. Within three days he will destroy the wicked among mankind, and the earth will be cleansed. The Krita Yuga, or Golden Age, will then begin, when humanity abandons all worldly desires. Signs of the final days of the Iron Age, or Kali Yuga: Greed and dishonesty will prevail. Cheating will be the order of the day in business relations. Wealth alone will be the deciding factor of nobility. Brigands and armies will overrun the nations of the world. People will eat voraciously and indiscriminately. They will live in cities filled with thieves. Men will become dull-witted and unholy, women, wanton and unchaste.
Sophie looked up. “Wow,” she said politely. She’d thought that Christians were the only ones who got goofy about the Last Days. She’d been handed similar pamphlets on street corners, TEOTWAWKI, The End of the World As We Know It. “That sounds really, really . . .” She couldn’t come up with an adequate word.
“Very exciting,” said Padmi, complacently.
Avyark returned, lugging an oversized canvas much larger than any she’d seen.
“Our son Manoj,” he explained. “Currently in India. President of Golden Age Society, Mumbai Chapter. His latest.”
Now that Sophie knew the paintings were all about the apocalypse, it was easy to appreciate this new one, its denseness and detail, its lack of human beings, presumably already purged. In this picture a glowing wave the color of stainless steel rose up in an ornate curl, poised to crash down on a landscape of intricate patterns, like a fancy bedspread draped over a lumpy bed. There were groves of little sprouting trees, mountains, ponds with lily pads, orchards, tilled fields; also highways, villages, towns, cities, and within the houses, even smaller, chairs, pianos, bookshelves, dinner plates, clocks, wineglasses, all of it assembled in order to be swept away. She was momentarily reminded of the video games.
“Your son is a wonderful artist,” Sophie told them. “You must be very proud.”
“He is, like ourselves, an evangelist,” said Avyark. “From the Greek, as you may know, meaning, ‘Bringer of Good News.’”
“Greek,” said Padmi, “is, as you may know, mostly used for showing off.”
Sophie smiled and replaced her cup of tea carefully on its saucer.
It was another twenty minutes before she was able to leave, because they felt it necessary to instruct her about the maha yugas, the great cycles that lasted 4,320,000 human years, about the universal wheel of destruction and rebirth, first up, then down, about the future in which the minds of men would become as pure as crystal, and the growing evidence from innumerable prophesies that the world (As We Know It), would end in the year 2012. Sophie thanked them for their hospitality, and for the quantity of informative literature they pressed into her hands. “Such a pretty girl,” Padmi was saying as the door closed behind her, and Avyark answered, “Yes, but she needs more clothes.”
The security guard was not in evidence as she escaped the elevator and made her way out to the street. She crossed Tenth, then Eleventh, and continued west until she stood at the edge of a viaduct, looking out across the current traffic on the West Side Highway, to the dark ribbon of the Hudson and the lights of New Jersey beyond it.
Was the river even a river anymore? So loaded up it was with human history and human effluvia. Were people still people when they swelled and clumped together in such a steady stream? The paintings had her all confused, her head was a muddle of holy talk, and she felt very small. Was anyone ever shining? Special?
Later, later, very late, Sophie climbed the ladder to the loft bed. It was too dark to see anything, but she thought it was a good sign that the ladder was down, like a drawbridge. She paused at every step, heard nothing. What if he wasn’t there? Well, it was only natural that things came to an end. Everything did. It was only a part of the great cycle. To mourn overmuch, indeed, to mourn at all, was to row against the tide, to overstir the pot of the soul’s misery.
Was she imagining the sound of his breathing? Was it a good or a bad thing that the world was coming to an end? It all depended on how you looked at it. Why was so much of religion about giving things up? All the sober wisdom of the ages. Why did you have to abandon your earthly desires, as long as there still was an earth?
He spoke her name, and she knew from his voice that he had been awake all along, waiting for her. She was on the top step of the ladder. There was nowhere to go but down. She let herself fall into him.
Her Untold Story
The television show aimed to find the most miserable and deserving people in America and shower them with consumer goods: clothing, appliances, real estate. This week they had selected a woman with fourteen children. Four were her own and ten of them were her sister’s. The sister had died of cancer and there had been a deathbed promise. Husbands and fathers notable by their absence. Hah! Lynn raised her wineglass to the television. All those missing men. They probably had a secret clubhouse somewhere.
The family had been living in a dismal hotel. Things had gone badly for them and then had gotten worse. The kids seemed nice enough. The television hosts did their hopped-up best to yank at the heartstrings. How did it feel to be homeless, impoverished, exhausted, desperate? Huh? Huh? “Like holding on with one hand and about to let go,” said the mother, wiping tears. “Like bein’ at the bottom of the bottom.”
She switched the channel. It depressed her to think that in order to get any public sympathy she would need to have twelve more children.
Her younger son walked past the room and stopped to look in at the door. “What are you watching?”
“I don’t know, I just switched.” She knew he didn’t like it when she drank and so she said brightly, “Oh, it’s the History Channel.” Smudgy gray footage showed fighter pilots bombing a carrier. She patted the side of the bed. “Come sit for a minute.”
He picked a spot at the end of the bed. “Here,” she said, tossing him the remote. “Find something you like.”
It was just the two of them now. His older brother was away at college. His father had decamped. The empty house spoke of failure. Lynn knew her son felt sorry for her, in a way that embarrassed both of them. One more year of high school and he could leave also, breathe air that she had not breathed first.
She said, for the sake of saying something, “Did you get your track clothes washed?” He was on the cross-country team and spent all his free time training.
“Uh huh.”
“I wish I was fleet of foot. I’d bust out of here. I’d just keep running.”
“Like Forrest Gump, huh?”
“What?”
“The movie. The guy runs and runs and people all over the country start following him.”
“I don’t remember that part.” She didn’t trust herself to say more. The wine was making her bleary. One picture slid into the next as he changed channels, settling on a basketball game. She watched with him in silence, but it was hard for her to focus on the different teams, the back and forth. It was like the History Channel footage, another war she didn’t care a
bout.
She must have fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes, the television was off and her son had gone. She had to get up for work in the morning. Piece of cake. One stupid foot in front of the other.
She was always nice to people at work. That part wasn’t
difficult. Nice was her default setting. She was agreeable,
sympathetic, interested. It had been her habit, but, Lynn was beginning to suspect, it was not her nature.
After work she called Christine. They were divorce friends. They were allowed to complain until the cows came home. “Last night was bad,” Christine said. “I baked a pan of brownies and ate them all.”
“Did it at least taste good?”
“Up to a point. Then it was just mindless, terrifying self-abuse.”
“Did you throw up or anything?” Lynn asked. It depressed her to think that this sort of thing was the worst they were guilty of these days.
“No, I passed out with the pan in my lap. Crumbs all over the sheets. It’ll probably draw roaches. How are you?”
“Okay.” She thought she’d skip the part about passing out herself. She hoped she hadn’t drooled or snored in front of her son. “Do you anybody who has ten children? Or twelve, or fourteen?” She explained about the television program.
“Were they polygamists?” Christine asked.
“I’m thinking no.”
“If one of us finds a man, we should both marry him. Sorry. What about the show?”
“I disliked those people. Even the kids. I really did. I disliked them for being poor and wretched and I couldn’t believe that woman kept popping out children. I mean, hello, birth control?”
“It is sort of like the old woman who lived in a shoe.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. What’s wrong with me? The whole idea of the show is, you feel sorry for them. You’re supposed to laugh and cry with them and be all happy when they get their new house. And here I am thinking rotten thoughts.” She did not say rotten racial thoughts, although there had been some of that; the family was black.
“Oh, it’s just television,” Christine said. “You shouldn’t take any of it personally. Want to do something this weekend? Go see a goopy movie or something?”
Lynn said sure. Sometimes they actually went to the movie. Or else one of them said they were too tired, or too busy, and they stayed home. They were supposed to be moving forward with their lives. That was the message of all the self-help books and television therapists. As if all anybody ever needed was good advice.
Christine said, “I’ve started buying a lot of magazines. Interior decorating and Southern cooking and travel and crafts and country living. It’s something about the pictures. All those beautiful rooms and fancy cakes. I can’t get enough of them.”
“It’s better for you than the brownies,” Lynn said. She didn’t buy magazines now because the divorce had exploded everyone’s finances and magazines were frivolous purchases. But she looked at them when she went through the grocery checkout line. She was drawn to the ones that showed movie stars and teen princesses on the covers, like giant, pouting paper dolls. Her Untold Story! one of the headlines blared, because interesting and tragic things were always happening to famous people in terms of their fertility, their sweethearts, their drugs. You weren’t meant to confuse such things with real life, and she didn’t. Didn’t expect or want to end up on any magazine cover herself. But what if her life was already used up, and she didn’t even have a story anymore?
She said good-bye to Christine, hung up the phone and went out to the patio. The long spring twilight gathered on the lawn and beneath the trees. The sky was opal, the air was scented with blossom and mown grass. She was going to have to buy more birdseed for her complex of bird feeders. Once you started, you were supposed to keep feeding them. There was no end to their exhausting needs. Across the back fence, her neighbors’ kitchen lights were on, and her heart hurt at the welcoming yellow light against the clear sky. Anything lovely made her feel excluded, envious, melancholy.
Her son was spending the night at friends’. This was what the house would be like once he’d gone away to school. She sat down at the computer, checked email, then logged into the Men Looking for Women portion of the singles’ website. She was too chickenshit to post anything herself, but she liked to check out the men and assure herself she wasn’t missing anything. There was something wrong with all of them; too old, too young, too arrogant, liked country music, smoker, grammar errors. It made instant rejection easy. She clicked on one post she hadn’t seen before. The dim picture showed a smallish man with a moustache, his face blurred from the light of the window. Hello, my name is Allejandro and I am 58 years old. In the day I am a mechanic and in the night I am lonely. I speak some English but Spanish is better.
If only he spoke no English at all. That would be perfect. She could make a gift of herself, show up at his door wrapped in ribbon and bows. Here you go, Allejandro. Congratulations. You’ve been selected. It would be like the television show, except without the home remodeling part. She would transform his life. They would be happy. At least, until he decided he preferred someone younger and more kittenish, as her ex-husband had.
His new wife was pregnant. Did she really wish some gruesome tragedy on them, a dead or deformed child? Was she that far gone, the wicked fairy at the christening? No, not yet. She did allow herself to hope that the new wife would get fat.
She had been divorced for more than a year now. But there had been a couple of years before that when she had not been entirely married either. Her husband’s skulking affair had gone on for some time before Lynn discovered it, and then there had been the hanging-on, the long process of trying to convince Jay that he didn’t really want what he wanted. Then, by the end, when Lynn had been worn down, defeated, willing to bargain, when she’d said, fine, keep her, do whatever makes you happy, but let’s stay married, it turned out that what he really wanted was Not Her.
The other day she’d seen a man wearing a T-shirt that said, choose one: a. i don’t know. b. i don’t care. Maybe the universe was sending her messages. She could cultivate a posture of hostile indifference. She could get some therapy. She could file her teeth into spikes, roll around on the ground until her hair trailed leaves and twigs. She was not moving forward. She was at the bottom of the bottom.
The phone rang. She saw from the handset that it was Jay’s number. There were occasions, all of them unpleasant, when they had to speak to each other. She thought about not answering, decided it was better to get it over with. “What do you want?”
A space of flat silence. Then he said, “That’s a nice way to start a conversation.”
She didn’t respond. Petty rudeness was the only weapon she still had against him. After a moment he said, “How are the boys?”
“Why should I know more about them than you do?”
He didn’t answer that. How could he? He’d divorced his sons too. He was Dad 2.0 now. Corrects flaws in earlier versions. He said, “We need to talk about Tim’s tuition next year.”
The hair on the back of her neck prickled. “Mm,” she said.
“I’m not going to be able to cover the whole thing. I’m just stretched too thin.”
“Wow, Jay. I completely understand and sympathize.”
“I don’t think that tone is very helpful.”
It hadn’t taken long for his own tone to acquire that edge of surly grievance. He was crushed and dragged down by her unreasonableness.
“You know, Jay, between the two boys, there’s eight years of college to finance. We’ve just gotten through the first one.”
“Yeah.” She heard the faint clink of ice cubes in a glass. She wasn’t the only one drinking in the evenings. “That’s why I thought we ought to come up with some kind of plan now.”
“The plan was you’d pay for the boys’ education.”
“I am. I will. But I have other responsibilities now. I need a little flexibility.”
“Say, how flexible is Margot? I mean, when she’s not great with child. Can she really put her ankles all the way behind her ears?”
“Something very sad has happened to you, Lynn.”
“If you’re not going to pay for Tim’s college, you tell him that. Explain to him how your new family’s so much more absorbing than your old one. You tell him, hot shot. I’m through being your translator and mediator. It’s not worth the effort to try and understand you anymore.”
Jay started to say something, but she slammed the phone down. College expenses were in the divorce agreement. She’d sic the lawyer on him. She’d take off his skin piece by piece. She started crying, a noisy, open-mouthed crying, then stopped abruptly. Nothing she did made any difference. Cry or not cry. Who cared.
When her son came home the next morning, she said, “Tell me how I’d start training to run. What’s the first thing?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No editorial comments. What do I have to do, stretch?”
“What’s this all for?” He didn’t like it when she got excited about something. “You mean, show you right now?”
Yes, she said, right now. And so he led her through a basic warm-up. Side stretches, overheads, hamstrings, calves, quads. “Can you do sit-ups?”
She could, a few at least. Then she fell back on the floor, muscles wincing, out of breath. Her son loomed over her. “You’re sure this is a good idea, Mom?”
She wasn’t, but she went to the mall and bought a pair of serious shoes, some running shorts, and a sports bra. She was pretty sure that spending money would make her actually see it through. Back home she found some T-shirts that were big enough to cover most of the shorts. She wasn’t fat or saggy. She was just shy about her body because no one else had any use for it now.
The next day after work she dutifully stretched, then drove to a nearby park where it was acceptable to do this sort of thing. There was a trail that circled around some tennis courts, then looped away into a hillier, forested area. There were already a few serious-looking runners moving along the track, men with nearly anatomical thighs and sports water bottles.
Do Not Deny Me Page 24