Gold Diggers

by Sanjena Sathian

  My hand landed centimeters from her lower thigh, testing. I knew things about lust now. Could she tell? Could she sense that I’d become, in some way?

  “You don’t want me to drive,” I said.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” she said.

  “Hang on.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, a beat-up brown imitation-leather hand-me-down from my father, the same thing I’d been carrying since high school. I reached behind the driver’s license and pulled out the two golden hoops I’d taken from Anita’s nightstand ten years earlier. They had lived with me all this time, out of habit.

  “Here.” I unlocked her knuckles from their hard fist and pressed the cold circles into her palm. “These belong to you.”

  I felt the phantom of them on my skin then, all the times in Hammond Creek and Athens and Berkeley when I’d fingered them and placed them under my tongue, as though if I swallowed, I’d possess all Anita was—all we were—back then. And there, in the lingering cool circles of those hoops, those last physical mementos of the Lemonade Period, was one answer to what Anita had asked me. What did I want? It was impossible; all I wanted was what had already been lost. I wanted more than to change the past. I wanted to be consumed by it, to go back to a moment when all was still potential and I had ruined nothing, no one.

  But absent that, there was this—Anita’s eyes widening as she slid each hoop through her bare earlobes and fingered them as though surprised they still fit. Then she was leaning over, her palms taking my head with surprising force, pressing me to her chest, as she whispered thank you, more than once, so I was sure she was not only speaking about the earrings.

  “I need you, Neil,” she said. “Will you do it? Will you help?”

  I brought my hands to her wrists and pressed them against the back of her couch. I nodded then, my cheek moving against her braless breasts, and I breathed, hot and hard, on the poke of her left nipple through the cotton, then the right. I looked up to see her eyes closed, her own mouth open. I didn’t know what private dreamscapes passed behind her lids, and yet I had a sense of the pattern, a collage of what had been lost, and what she craved.

  “Yeah,” I said. I brushed my lips on her neck, still pressing her wrists into the sofa, as though we’d done this a thousand times before. “Yeah. I’ll do it. I have some terms, though.”

  Her eyes opened. I loosened my grip on her wrists. “You want some,” she said.

  I thought about hiding my need, but I couldn’t. “Yes,” I said into her skin.

  “I gathered,” she said, husky but measured. “I need her covered first.”

  “You must want some, too, right?”

  “Oh, Neil,” she said. “I can’t—”

  But I hardly heard the rest, because my mouth had reached her earlobe. I felt against my lips the cool shape of the old gold hoops. “I like them on you,” I said.

  “They’re familiar,” she whispered back, and then I was upon her, and her lips were at first surprisingly clumsy, but endearingly, flatteringly so—was she nervous?

  The last time I had been so close to her body, there had been someone else in the room. I waited for Shruti’s voice (Aren’t you two, like . . . ?), waited for her to wander in and blink at us intently, as though at her dissected frog on the biology lab table. But—nothing. We were alone. My hands were heavy when I pushed them into her hair, a little roughly. I felt, with enormous joy, the little puff of air her mouth expelled at that display of control. I tugged again, my hand on her neck, the years of want that I had worried were weakening me now becoming something like strength. There was a flesh and flop to her breasts as they bounced against her compact body—more than I expected. Jigsawed flashes of all the girls I’d ever fucked—not that many, never a brown girl—swished by me and then were lost. Her darkness was new. The black hair, the blanket of peach fuzz on her belly. I imagined Adah Eckman’s eyes on Isaac Snider, the Snider I’d dreamt up, those eyes erasing the difference between him and the rest of his homeland. Him, disappearing into her. And me, in the present, not disappearing into Anita but becoming more of a person as the friction grew. Me, my uncut foreskin that had made me nervous around anybody new in bed, but Anita was not anybody, hers not any body. She shuddered at my teeth on her neck, her thigh. Her voice lifted, turning vaporous at my tongue, my fingers. “That, yeah, that, unh,” I heard her say, like we were swapping promises, her yeah meeting my yeah.

  9.

  A miracle: here, within groping distance, was the body kept secret for so long. I discovered Anita’s dramatic particularity. Things both attractive and mundane. That her mouth smelled like pungent yogurt in the mornings. That sharpness of her pelvis, that feel of her elfish little hands digging into my lats. What had once been a brick wall between her sexual self and her life-self now became a permeable membrane, and I could and did reach through whenever I liked, to nip the edge of her ear with my teeth as she wrote a grocery list, to cup her breasts in the kitchen as she poured wine, to press myself into her hips while she talked on the phone.

  After just a few nights, she left me a key. “We have to do some planning as soon as I get home,” she said sheepishly. “So you don’t need to drive back to Berkeley, and waste all that time.” She’d return to find that I’d been lying on her floor most of the day, reading, working. (Yes, working! For something about her presence had revived my commitment to the discipline of history. I saw how people did jobs. I could look upon my sample chapters with a kind of aloof pragmatism, because Anita would be home in a few hours, and we had something that needed us, which meant we needed each other.)

  There we were: me, shaking myself off when she opened the door at six p.m., going on a run around the sterile Palo Alto streets. Me, permitted to be myself with dangerous ease in her company. Me, there must be something badly wrong with her if she could tolerate me, like this. Me, you know what’s wrong with her, it’s cousin to what’s wrong with you. Her, in bed, where she was surprisingly muted and mousy, that girlish tongue stealing out adorably between her teeth, that tightening concentration of her features before she undid my pants.

  The revelations came like this: a week or so in—we were in bed. She had her back to me. I pushed my fingers against the nape of her neck and considered my thumb impression. There I was, briefly settled into her skin, and then I was gone.

  “That feels nice,” she said, though I hadn’t entirely meant it to. “My mother used to rub her nails up and down my back when I was a kid.”

  “This way?”

  “Softer,” she said.

  I tried again. Through her west-facing windows, the sun was lowering, darkening her. I had the impression that the years had accumulated on her skin and I was pulling them off, slight scratch by gentle scratch.

  Wendi was the only person I’d ever really dated, and with her there had been a similar sense of having been vetted on some prior occasion, so that when things accelerated, it seemed the jolt had come from somewhere, from before, and there were no mundane introductions. After Wendi, I always wished I could walk into something having been seen in all the necessary ways, so bodies could be bodies and history lighter.

  “You’ve done this a lot,” Anita said. It wasn’t a question. “Slept with someone quickly.”

  “Quickly?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I returned my nails to her back. “I find—found—it easier to sleep with someone when I didn’t know a whole story about them,” I said. “I’d start to feel entangled. The more you know, the more, I don’t know, narrative responsibility you have. You have to make sure you’re not one of those other terrible guys they tell you about.”

  “Whereas if they hadn’t told you anything?”

  “I wouldn’t have to think about what patterns they’re repeating or trying to correct with me.” I nuzzled her neck. “But that’s not an issue . . . here.” I waited to see if I would be
bold enough to say more. “We’ve always known each other.”

  She was silent for a beat too long. I heard only my own thumping pulse. I regretted that I’d spoken—maybe she fancied her inner self a mystery to me still, or wanted to maintain some psychic distance.

  But: “Yeah,” she echoed eventually. “Yeah, I guess we have.”

  She didn’t seem quite as relieved by that sentiment as I did.

  * * *

  • • •

  Eight weeks till the expo, then six, then four. When we were talking, it was mostly about our unlikely jewelry heist. Anita had snagged a whiteboard from the events office and propped it between her kitchen and her hollow living room. Many evenings that early fall were like this one: I sat in my boxers on her leather sofa, shoving lukewarm takeout noodles into my mouth while she contorted herself on a yoga mat in a sports bra and tiny shorts. She talked, smacking Nicorette between clauses.

  She tugged her foot up behind her, arch in elbow crease, her purple toenails touching the bottom of her bra. Her glutes flexed mightily. “Are you listening?” she said, her chin jutting toward the whiteboard—on it, a scribbled map of the planned plays, like a football coach’s blocking. “You don’t seem to be getting it.”

  “I’m getting it.” I plopped to my knees on her yoga mat and pressed one side of my face to the rise of her thigh. My forehead lined up with the crease where her leg met her ass. I looked out the window to see the weird darkness of Palo Alto at the witching hour—the crisscross of the streets around University Avenue all dead by eleven p.m. How odd yet apposite to be back with Anita, brewing strange schemes in a suburb! With little to do, in nowhere-nothing places, you turn to queer, harebrained plans. . . .

  “I heard you,” I said into her flesh. I was feeling slow; I’d popped Adderall all day as I plowed through work and had therefore forgotten to eat until just now. “The raffle. You’ve got it set up and the winner gets the designer whatsit, the gown, by Mani—erm. Manilala Megatron.”

  “Not a gown,” she said. She did not tug her leg away from me, but pressed one too-cold palm against my exposed ear. “A lehenga. By Manish Motilal.”

  “That.”

  “And?”

  “Annnnd . . .” She flicked the top of my ear, hard, the sound of her fingernail on my skin like a woodblock being banged. “Ow.”

  “I’m going to put on real clothes. Sit up.”

  “Please, god, don’t.”

  “Pay attention, then.” She stood. Her body was ruddy from her stretches. She pointed to the whiteboard: beneath the column Tasks, squeezed into the right-hand side, her centipede-shaped girly handwriting read Prachi.

  I had slacked. I had yet to invite my sister to the bridal expo, courtesy of Anita Dayal. (What! she would say. Anita-Anita? You guys are in touch?)

  Prachi, our bride, was to win a rigged raffle. Was to step onto the runway where, moments before, girls would have just modeled the high, fine fashions of brown bridal couture. Prachi was to flutter her French-manicured hands in delight at winning. She was to receive as bounty a designer lehenga—heavy, it was to be heavy, can-can skirt, brocading on the silk. Prachi would watch the dress’s mirrorwork reflecting the light staggering out from the gaudy oversize chandeliers in the convention center. She would feel tizzies being pulled backstage. A tailor would measure her for alterations. Prachi was to feel (Anita promised all girls feel this way) the creep of recognition as the tailor fitted the cloth to her, that sense that the world wished you to look this way.

  Prachi was never to know that her brother had come along to this menagerie in order to stuff golden chains and bangles and tikkas into loose folds and trick pockets in the liner of the skirt, already so hefty one would not notice the extra weight. Anita would tell her, Let Neil take it to the tailor. I would gather it up. Carry it to Anita’s green Subaru parked in the employee back lot, through the doors without metal detectors. I would drive with the windows down on the highway and listen to the airstream whooshes and make straight for Sunnyvale.

  We would give most of the bounty to Anjali Auntie, of course, but surely both of us would take a few fated sips. We would be foolish not to accept the blessing it could confer on our little union. Because now we were together. Because gold was what we did. Because I still badly needed it. Which meant she must need it, too. No matter that she claimed otherwise.

  The junkie’s plan. The belief that another hit, the right hit, will settle everything.

  “If anything goes wrong,” Anita said as she paced, “you do what?”

  “Leave you.” I’d recited the words so often they’d become devoid of meaning. “Leave you, take the gold to your mother and grandmother.”

  “And I do the same.”

  Our eyes met. I rolled over on my stomach so that I did not have to return that stony stare for too long. I did a push-up, feeling strong.

  “Your core is flopping.” She tapped me in the protruding belly with her big toe. “So,” she went on. “The lehenga’s down in L.A. with that tailor, and he’s not concerned why we might be tricking it out. People want weird shit on their wedding days. Little holders in dupattas and skirt hems to keep lucky charms, something borrowed and blue, blah, blah. But the point is, none of that matters unless you talk to your sister, you understand?”

  She clasped her palms above her, and her stomach tautened. It was not as pillowy as it had been when we were younger. But what was I good for if not softening her?

  “Mmhmm.” I reached for her hips, pulling her pelvis to my forehead.

  “I’m putting on clothes.” She removed my hands from her flanks.

  “No, keep talking,” I said. “Tell me more problems, I’ll fix them all.”

  “You used to do this when we studied together. You’d be paying zero attention, and as soon as I said we had to stop, you’d snap to.” She was twirling an Expo marker as she examined the map of which shops and stalls would be located where, along with an estimate of the location of all the Santa Clara Convention Center’s security cameras. I was struck by the sense that she was getting off on the planning, that it wasn’t just her mother’s well-being motivating her. She’d been itching for a challenge. God, she really did need a new job.

  The convention center, like many of the industrial buildings in the Bay Area, employed Anita’s father’s technology, meaning it was studded with hundreds of small, beady lenses, each one like a nerve ending connecting to the brain of the whole beast—a cloud server. Every image collected beamed back to it. What the eyes saw, the brain would record indelibly. We had a notion, formed based on Anita’s understanding, which I gathered she’d gathered from a flirtation with one of her father’s old interns: a Wi-Fi interferer could knock out the images streaming to the server, sweeping clean the record of all we would do. As long as Anita could draw the security attendant’s gaze away from the live feed for an hour or so, he’d never notice the signal had gone out. It was one of those oddities of life in the Valley—with so much technology at hand, people presumed its infallibility.

  “You really don’t want to taste even a bit of it?” I said. I felt terribly sad, looking around at her life, the granite and the wineglasses and the eerie nothingness of Palo Alto outside. “You don’t miss it?” And didn’t she miss her old self? The one who would have demanded more?

  “Sometimes I manage to go months without thinking about it,” Anita said softly. “But then I remember that what we were consuming each time we drank some lemonade was an ambition or energy or power that once belonged to someone else. Which means some people come by this stuff honestly. And I guess I’d like to be one of those people. At some point.”

  I swiveled her around to face me. I could do this now—move her, demand her gaze. But she shimmied away, and my palms went cold. For the first time since we’d begun whatever we were now doing, it occurred to me that perhaps we did not fully understand each other.


  “I’m getting ready for bed. Just please contact Prachi, like, now,” she added, in a voice a less enlightened man than I would have called shrill.

  She excused herself to the bathroom. (That sound of her in the shower in the next room now slightly less extraordinary than it had been when I was fifteen, yet still marvelous.) I began typing a note to my sister: Anita Dayal hit me up the other day . . . Deleted it. So it was Anita you saw . . . Deleted that, too. Clicked forward on the flyer Anita had emailed me a few days before: 15% off everything for vip shaadi expo guests.

  Subject line: Fw: Random but . . . The body text: Hey this is random but Anita Dayal hit me up the other day and we’ve hung out a few times. Turns out that was her you saw. Anyway, she’s running this big Indian wedding thing, maybe you can make it? She says you get a discount with this coupon. Lmk if I can tell her you’re coming. She’d like to say hi she says.

  I shut my laptop—that note had taken a half hour of dithering and blithering. In the bedroom, I found a damp-haired Anita asleep, a water stain blooming onto the cotton pillowcase. One hand rested on her stomach as it rose and fell. I turned out the light and tumbled into this, my new normal. Sometimes, it is not so hard to ad-just, not even to the most sublime unrealities. The new magic seeps into the old world, becomes as commonplace as the hoops strung through Anita’s small ears.

  * * *

  • • •

  Our plan, I calculated quickly on pen and paper as I sprawled on Anita’s floor one weekday morning, would involve the abduction of several thousand dollars’ worth of property. Grand theft. Up to ten years in prison.

  I wish I could have said I felt the kind of thrill a man is supposed to feel when he is released from the confines of daily existence in late capitalism and offered a chance to truly live. To overthrow the system, in some small way! Unfortunately, I was a coward rather than a revolutionary. My stomach gave a growl that suggested I had eaten something rotten. When Anita got home after working a late charity gala, I was on the toilet, reading Crime and Punishment. I came out waving it, only a little embarrassed to have been caught with a book in the bathroom.