Gods Without Men (12 page)

Lisa had the cases open on the bed. The room was small and cramped, papered with an unpleasant pattern of purple flowers. As soon as Jaz got him in, Raj stopped crying, wriggled out of his arms and went off to flush the toilet. Jaz hadn’t the energy to stop him. He was obsessed with toilets. Dabbling his fingers in the water. Sticking his head deep into the bowl to examine the flow. He tried the flush again, before the cistern had refilled. Jaz could hear the hollow thud as he pulled the handle. And again. He could do that for hours.

Jaz sat down in an armchair. The room stank of some kind of artificially scented cleaning product. Carcinogens and lavender.

“Do you need a hand?”

Lisa shook her head.

“You OK?”

“Sure.”

He tried to take over, pulling out one of his shirts and reaching for a hanger.

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“You’ll mix everything up.”

He sat down again. Raj came barreling into the room and tugged at Lisa, who tried to carry on unpacking as he violently twisted her T-shirt.

“Come on,” Jaz pleaded. “Leave Mommy alone. Here’s Bah.”

Bah. Once-white bunny. Bald patches, tufted graying fur. Bacterial Bah, sucked and wiped and dragged, spongy with goo and secretions. Raj threw him at his mother’s head. She ignored the blow, mechanically
sorting through their things, shirts and pants and swim shorts, diapers for Raj, who was now happily wrapping himself in the curtains. Lately Lisa’s face had acquired a fixed cast. The girl Jaz first knew had been a flirt, a wearer of short skirts, a teller of dirty jokes. She liked to do things on impulse: grab a bag and head for the airport; check into the Mercer to watch TV. She once made love to him in the toilet stall of a Lower East Side sushi restaurant while their friends sat in a booth, thinking they’d gone to get money at an ATM. Jaz had known very few women in his life and none at all like her. She had amazed his senses. At heart he was still a typical immigrant’s kid, nervous, on the lookout for social banana skins. She showed him it was OK to take risks, to allow oneself uncalibrated pleasure. He wanted to remind himself of that woman; she must still be there, locked away inside this new version of herself, the princess in the tower.

“Are we going to go visit the park?”

Lisa shrugged. “I guess. It’s what we came for.”

“We need a picnic.”

“Damn it, Jaz. I know we need a picnic. I’m unpacking here, I can’t do everything—”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll take the boss to the market in town. We’ll pick up food, plastic plates, whatever we need.”

“Sure.”

“You could take a nap.”

“I don’t want—OK, sure, I’ll take a nap, whatever. Thanks.”

The boss. The young master. Those were their names for him. They’d become the serfs in his little feudal kingdom. Jaz chased him down, smeared sunscreen on his screwed-up face, collected car keys, dark glasses, the GPS device with its pigtail of black cable. They left Lisa sitting on the edge of the bed, robotically channel surfing the TV.

The motel manager was hovering about outside the office. Jaz hadn’t paid her much attention when they checked in. She was an odd-looking woman, with a mane of permed hair and a lot of turquoise jewelry.

“You all OK there?” she asked.

“Sure,” Jaz said, squaring up. “We’re absolutely fine.” Was she going
to complain? Raj hadn’t done anything. The boy slipped his hand, started examining something on the ground. The woman smiled.

“Room to your liking?”

“Everything’s great. We’re just going to pick up something to eat, get a picnic to take into the park.”

“That’s nice. There’s a market on your right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

“You have a good day. Take plenty of water and don’t sit out in the sun.”

In the time it took them to exchange these pleasantries, Raj had vanished. Jaz looked around but couldn’t see him anywhere.

“My kid. Did you see where he went?”

“Oh, no, honey. I hope he didn’t go out front.”

Jaz jogged over to the corner of the building, where he had a view of the highway. He half expected to see his son playing in the traffic.

“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”

The motel manager was pointing. The British junkie guy was standing at the door of one of the rooms, a small pink towel around his waist. Without clothes, his scrawny body was alarming, pallid and inked with tattoos, like raw chicken drumsticks scribbled on with a ballpoint pen.

“Mate? You looking for your boy? He’s in here.”

Jaz went over. The guy pointed him to the bathroom, where Raj was stubbornly pressing the toilet flush. “Sorry,” he said, gesturing nervously at his towel. “I was having, you know, a kip. Rough night last night. Heard the bog and there he was. Couldn’t get him to budge.”

“I’m so sorry. Raj, you’re not supposed to be in here. It’s not our room. This is the man’s room.”

“Don’t have a pop at him on my account. It’s just—you know—you don’t want some little kid in your hotel room. Looks a bit Gary Glitter.”

He nodded, pretending he understood the man’s accent, then took Raj firmly by the hand, apologized again and headed for the car. Raj didn’t make too much of a fuss, allowed himself to be placed in his booster seat and belted in. As Jaz settled himself behind the wheel, he
tried to work out how difficult the shopping trip was going to be. They really needed a few easy days, so Lisa and he could remember what it was like to be decent to each other.

She had come along without warning, in his final summer of grad school. She was seated next to him at a potluck supper, gorgeous, blond, just finishing up a master’s in comparative literature at Brown. She talked about Henry James and Marrakech and the Kosovo war and the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and he had to stop himself smiling from the sheer pleasure of watching her mouth move. When he spoke, which he did hesitantly and (as he later heard) with painful seriousness, she focused on him so intently that he felt as if he’d been caught in the beam of a searchlight. For a few moments he was the only man at the table, the only man in the building. By the time the main course was served, he belonged to her entirely.

Lisa was well aware of the impression she’d made. As people started to gather their coats, she wrote her number down on the back of someone else’s business card. You need this, she said. He thanked her, flushing with pleasure. She smiled flirtatiously.

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“Sure.”

“Because you’re taking me to the theater next week.”

“What are we going to see?”

“Well, that’s up to you. But make sure it’s good. I get bored easily.”

That week, stochastic modeling took second place to frantic combing of the listings pages. It wasn’t that he couldn’t concentrate. The numbers themselves seemed to have loosened their bonds. His distributions were all improbable, his scattering patterns shoals of little swimming fish. He bought seats for a production of
The Seagull
and waited nervously for Saturday night.

It seemed incredible to Jaz that a woman like Lisa would want him, let alone fall in love. Yet the week after
The Seagull
, she returned the favor, taking him to see a string quartet playing repetitive Minimalist pieces that he pretended to like much more than he did. Afterward they went
for dinner and at the end of the evening he worked up the courage to kiss her. Soon they were seeing each other regularly. His life opened up like a flower. He was drunk with her, her ambition, her intelligence, her sense of entitlement. Academia wasn’t for her, she’d realized. She wanted to move to New York, to become an editor at a publishing house. He marveled at the precise picture she had of her future: children, a house with steps leading up to the front door, shelves of first editions, witty and fascinating friends. She asked him about physics, and surprised him by exhibiting a real fascination with his research. She also asked about his family, and for the first time he risked telling some version of the truth. Her reaction astonished him. She wasn’t mocking or disdainful. If anything, it seemed to make him more interesting in her eyes.

As their relationship grew serious, he realized he was going to have to work hard to keep her. She seemed to be friends with several ex-lovers. He found this intolerable; often he lay awake at night consumed by sexual images of her with these old boyfriends—positions, acts. He wanted to feel as if she’d come into existence the day he first saw her, that there had never been anyone but him. When he blurted something out, she had the good sense not to get defensive. He tried to explain that where he came from it was considered demeaning for a man to marry a woman who wasn’t a virgin. “Marry?” she said. “You’re very sure of yourself.” He blushed and spluttered, until he realized she was teasing him. “You’ll just have to accept it, Jaz. I’m not your veiled teenage bride. If that’s what you want, you better look elsewhere.”

She would talk about feeling rootless. She was an only child. As soon as she left home, her parents severed all ties with the Long Island suburb where she’d grown up and moved to Arizona. “So my dad could live on a golf course and my mom could get skin cancer” was how she put it, her voice dripping betrayal. Jaz had never felt anywhere belonged to him enough to feel strongly about losing it. He did his best to sympathize.

They flew to Phoenix for Thanksgiving. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzman lived in a giant subdivision of identical ranch-style houses. They were kind and curious, asking questions about his family and his “culture,” a word they used as if it denoted something fragile that might break if roughly handled. Her father drove him to the store to pick up wine for
lunch, showing off the neighborhood as if it were his personal property. The tennis courts, the swimming pool, the landscaping in front of the clinic, all of it was important to him; in all of it he had a stake. Jaz felt awkward. The things he’d done with this man’s daughter! He felt he wouldn’t be able to look the man in the face unless he said something. Later, Lisa told him it was the phrase “honorable intentions” that made Mr. Schwartzman erupt into laughter.

When Lisa announced that she was moving to New York, he felt like a sinkhole had opened up beneath his feet. By that time he was writing up his thesis and thinking about applying for postdoctoral jobs. He knew their life, commuting between rooms in shared houses in Boston and Providence, wasn’t sustainable “in the long term.” But that was the long term, not the short term, let alone now. He was happy. He didn’t want anything to change.

“Jaz, I’ve been talking about it ever since we met. It’s not like I’m springing it on you.”

“Sure, but I thought—well, I thought we’d at least talk about it.”

“What’s to talk about? You know it’s what I want.”

“But what about us?”

“It’s up to you, Jaz. If you’re serious about me, you’ll think of something.”

“I am serious.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“How can you say that? I love you!”

“I know you think you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t believe I know my own mind?”

“Well, what about your family? It’s hard, I get that. But if you won’t even introduce me to them, what does that say about us? Jaz, deep down I think all you really want is a Punjabi girl. You’ll string me along for a while because it’s comfortable and—oh, I don’t know—because you like the sex, but you’ll never commit. And then you’ll marry someone else, some girl who can make samosas with your mom.”

“Lisa, that’s not true.”

“I think it is.”

“So you’re going to do this? You’re just going to leave?”

“Well, it looks that way, doesn’t it.”

They didn’t speak for several days. He lay curled up on the couch, watching whole seasons of a TV show about an alien invasion. And then she was gone, staying with a friend in Brooklyn while she looked for an apartment. He thought his life was over. A friend had to explain it to him.

“Go get her, Jaz. She’s waiting to see if you’ll come after her.”

It was the best decision of his life. He rented a car and drove to New York, getting horrendously lost somewhere in Queens. At last, late on a Saturday night, he found himself pressing a buzzer on an old industrial building in Williamsburg. There was no reply, and he hung around outside for more than an hour before Lisa turned up, several cocktails into her evening, hanging on to her friend Amy.

“I want to be with you,” he said to Lisa, as Amy hovered indiscreetly close, covering her mouth with her hands and making little cooing noises. “I’ll live anywhere. I’ll introduce you to my family, all the cousins, my aunts and uncles, so many relatives you’ll beg for mercy. Just say you’ll be with me.”

In later years Amy would tell elaborate, highly embellished dinner-party accounts of the scene, “the most romantic thing she’d ever witnessed.” Lisa always blushed and made feeble attempts to stop her, but it was clear she enjoyed the tales. It had been a proposal in all but name, though Jaz saved the real proposal for after he’d fulfilled his promise. As he made arrangements for the trip, he hid how nervous he was, trying not to frighten her with too many instructions about what to wear and how to behave. He knew the meeting would go badly—it was just a question of whether she’d come away too scared to stay with him. As they drove down to Baltimore, he felt like a condemned man on his way to the chair.

His parents had taken the news of Lisa’s existence about as well as could be expected. On the phone, his mother asked her family name, where her parents lived. When he raised the subject of a visit, she responded with a sort of icy neutrality. If God wills it, she said, you will come. His father was warmer. Your family misses you, beta. It’s
been too long. Jaz booked a motel room, so the question of sleeping arrangements didn’t arise. Lisa wore a pantsuit and a long-sleeved shirt, despite the humid summer weather. As they passed block after block of boarded-up row houses, she looked uneasy, and was visibly relieved when they pulled up outside his parents’ place, which, though small, was at least not in a neighborhood that looked abandoned.