In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (26 page)

Already, just three months since they first slept together, she found herself pulling away when he began to touch her. He always did it the same way, on top, and became shy when she suggested, by her movements, not even in words, that they try other positions. The persistence of his shyness, which placed a limit on their physical intimacy, had disappointed her – when they first met she had thought him piratical and dominating, and had imagined that as they became closer and freer with each other that spirit would come to the fore, energy that would master her, but playfully. A friend had given her a bachelorette present of stockings and a garter belt brought from America. As a surprise, thinking to break up the routine of their lovemaking, one evening before Murad came home from walking the fields, she put them on, lying on the bed otherwise naked, candles lit. He said, ‘So that’s how you wear those!’ and then, instead of joining her in bed, he brought a clipper from the bathroom and trimmed a broken fingernail, sitting on the windowsill and speaking of a problem on the farm, a woman in the village whose husband beat her, and who had come to Lily asking for protection. Coloring, mortified, she had pulled the covers to hide herself, and when he left the room angrily threw the stockings in the fire. Accustomed to rush and passion, to first times, making love with Murad became a chore, something she wanted, but that required effort and planning.

They had been too long on the farm, a month, then a month and a half, then two and a half, but neither had yet raised the question of returning to Islamabad. Neither could bear to leave the farm now while matters stood as they did – Lily knew this of herself, saw it in Murad. She would lie in bed and dream of food, of steak tartare at Ecotex, a restaurant in Islamabad run by a young Spaniard in his own house, or of foie gras and duck rillettes, which a shop in Paris sent to Mino. The two of them would wolf it down on buttered toast, to line their stomachs before going to a party. She missed Mino, missed the life of the city.

One evening Lily and Murad sat in the living room where they now usually had dinner, eating while reading or watching Lily’s television shows – they joked about being like an old married couple. Restless, Lily kept piling more and more wood into the fireplace, poking and shifting the logs. Her colored pens were scattered on a table, she had been making impossible elaborate designs for dresses, fantasies. Now she sat down again and began doodling. They had been flirting all evening, Murad serious and busy, reading a book about greenhouse farming, Lily making excuses to disturb him. Idly wanting to startle him, oppressed by the hot room and his methodical studying, she wrote in large red letters on a sheet of paper,
Anal Sex at Noon Taxes Lana,
drew hearts all around the script, folded the paper into an airplane, and fired it at Murad.

‘Let me guess,’ he said, reading it, putting his book down and smiling at her. ‘You’re bored.’

‘It’s a palindrome. Mino taught me. It’s the same backwards and forwards, get it? Anal sex? Works both ways?’

‘Very witty. You really profited from that boy’s company.’

She sat next to him on the sofa, kicked off her little embroidered slippers so that they went flying, one into each corner of the room, and lay down with her head in his lap. ‘But I am bored, it’s true,’ she said petulantly.

‘You sound like you’re eight years old. Why don’t you read your book, my love?’

‘Bo-ring! Don’t tell me – you’re going to say being bored means you have no inner resources.’

He looked down at her face and stroked her hair. ‘I
was
going to say something along those lines. It happens to be true.’

She sat up again, went over by the fire, and threw in another log, then took the tongs and stirred the burning chunks, sparks flying up and popping.

‘Maybe I don’t have inner resources then.’ She rummaged around some more in the fire. ‘Murad? I’ve been thinking. Let’s have some people up this weekend. Won’t that be fun? We’ll have the gardeners light
diyas
all over the lawn when they arrive. It’ll be a housewarming. That’s the best way, instead of us going to Islamabad. They’ll definitely come, those guys all love doing things at the last minute.’

‘I suppose you’re right. It’s difficult being alone together. You need refreshment – I’m used to this life, and I’ve got the farm.’

She felt this as a reproach, his lugubrious tone, as if the guests were only for her.

‘You make it sound like I’m a baby needing her bottle. We just got married, we’re young. We should play.’

Not waiting for his answer, she sat down at the table and began cutting a piece of colored paper. ‘Come on, Mr. Lone Wolf. I’ll make a funny invitation and someone can go on the day bus to Islamabad tomorrow and deliver it.’

Standing up and observing her for moment with his hands in the pockets of his khakis, he walked over and took her face in his hands, kissed her on the lips. ‘Well, I guess that’s decided, right down to method of delivery! Actually I’m glad.’

She wrote to Mino, inviting him to the farm that weekend – he had promised at the wedding to visit soon – and asking him to bring some amusing people. In the card she giddily called herself ‘the ChÀtelaine of Jalpana,’ and joked about battling scorpions the size of cocker spaniels, living with her husband and the camels for company. An illustration on the front of the card showed her, Murad, and a camel sprawled in planter chairs sipping martinis, all three wearing T-shirts that said, in purple letters,
The Home Team!

They blew in, Mino and the notorious Zora Fancy, one of the Bombay Fancys, who was visiting her family in Karachi after committing some enormity too grave for India to contain it. The security men at Bahawalpur Airport, accustomed to seeing the same fat politicians and well-oiled businessmen pass through, didn’t know what to make of this bright group, Mino’s ear stud and Zora’s tight black jeans, her brazen cigarette. The party also included a slender and mute and very handsome boy, a jewelry designer, sheltering under Mino’s wing, a new protégé, introduced as such.

At the back of the group, soft-spoken, tall and slightly disheveled, came Shehryar Salauddin, known as Bumpy. He and Lily had a history together, though she had never granted him the ultimate favors, as Mino would put it. Lily realized that she had tipped her hand to Mino, that he saw through the tone of her invitation, guessed that all was not well at Jalpana, and brought Bumpy to provide a note of interrogation.

On the drive to the farm Bumpy sat next to Lily and almost too assiduously avoided touching his arm against hers when the jeep swayed. The little jewelry designer, sitting in the far back on a jump seat, looked gloomily out the window into the moonlit night. Murad drove, and Mino sprawled next to him, relishing this adventure, taking possession of the countryside, taking credit for the night air, the canals, the dust thrown up by passing tractor-trolleys piled with enormous loads of sugarcane going to the mill.

Next morning Lily wandered around the house, slightly intoxicated still on the fumes from the night before, preparing for the day, arranging flowers brought to her by a gardener, into the living room, where the servants had already cleaned up the glasses and bottles, the spills and cigarettes. Sunlight poured through the windows and through the French doors which led toward the swimming pool. She had told the gardeners to fill the pool despite the late-fall weather, thinking at some point they would be drunk enough to skinny-dip, in the depths of the night.

Calling the head servant, she told him to make several pitchers of fresh orange juice, to chill bottles of white wine for mimosas – Murad had sent a car to Islamabad for alcohol from his bootlegger, cases and cases of it.

‘Let’s do it right,’ Lily had said. ‘Full-blown. That way we’ll get a name for hospitality. You need a river of booze if you’re dragging people halfway out between Bahawalpur and nowhere. We’ll have a Christmas party next and get people to stay through New Year.’

Since last night Lily had experienced a kind of clarity about everyone, Mino, the others, her husband. She felt in tremendously high spirits, her perception wiped clean as when one is getting a fever – brittle and soul-sightful. All of them were types, all had their little motivations, the jewelry designer, unable to resist the force of Mino’s personality, his liberties and expansive world, his money. Zora Fancy, a blunt strong-looking woman with a butch haircut and disconcerting green eyes, brusque to the point of rudeness, who had very evidently joined the excursion in order to add Bumpy to her list of lovers. Despite her plainness, people said about her, ‘Zora always gets her man.’

As for Bumpy, Lily reflected that he and Mino were opposite sides of the same coin, but whereas Mino liked to watch, Bumpy liked to be the protagonist, what Mino would call ‘the brute,’ in the little dramas that took place around him. Belonging to a certain type, who are almost involuntarily successful with women and spoiled by women, Bumpy indulged himself, had a richer life than most, had a private life, spent months at a time in Paris, where he owned a garret apartment, and where he supposedly worked long days on the great Pakistani novel – though no one had ever been allowed to read it. Lily saw that both Mino and Bumpy understood her in a way that Murad did not. They were feminine in their perceptions, could follow her braided impulses and desires. Murad was wholly masculine, so that he experienced as a mystery Lily’s indecision, her instinct when confronted with two choices to reach for both.

Murad, who had kept up with Mino glass for glass right until they all staggered to bed, nevertheless had woken early and slipped out, leaving a note on the bedside table explaining that he had been called to Multan and would be gone all day. Scanning the note, Lily observed that he was jealous, and that he was removing himself from the scene to demonstrate his trust, perhaps not so much to her as to himself. The previous evening Lily had found herself caught up in a little conspiracy of flirtation with Bumpy. He was solicitous, but lightly, invisibly, and if she spoke he listened, responding, joining her perspective. If there had been any malice against the others Lily would have pulled back – out of loyalty to her husband, to Mino – but in the safehold of Bumpy’s blithe nature she became the instigator, leading him apart, brushing against him, imbibing and sharing his droll or witty comments.

Murad of course had observed this flirtation. When they were alone the night before and undressing, he said to Lily, drunk but still keeping it together, ‘This Bumpy is pretty smooth,’ and she replied artlessly, ‘He’s harmless. It’s just a game, he can’t help it.’

By the time Murad returned from Multan they were all on a tear, the living room thick with smoke, Mino in top form. Murad came into the room as Mino finished a story.

‘Oh my God, and there she was, the baby stuck to one hip, and making that same stew, stirring it with a huge spoon, with her boobs hanging down to her waist, completely drunk. She looked like some kind of depraved Mother Earth.’

All of them erupted into meaty vodka-tonic laughter.

Standing up, Mino said, ‘Come on, Murad, if you’re going to stay, you have to drink a few glasses by yourself. A forfeit.’

He didn’t say it particularly insistently, and Murad replied, ‘No, I’m going to bed. You people keep at it.’

‘We’re leaving in the morning, we’re on the ten o’clock flight. I hope you don’t mind, I sent one of your managers to get tickets. Zora says she needs to get back.’

‘Well, if you must. You’ll have to leave at six. Can you wake that early?’

‘We’ll stay up. But we haven’t seen much of you, Mr. Talwan. It’s too soon in the marriage for your wife to play the man of the house.’

‘Oh, I don’t worry about that,’ replied Murad, disregarding him. ‘I’ll see you in the morning. I keep farmer’s hours.’ Saying a general goodbye to the others, he left.

‘I’ll be right back,’ said Lily after a few minutes.

‘The devoted wife!’ called Mino. ‘Don’t forget the rest of us!’

In their room she found Murad writing in his journal, as he often did before going to sleep, a drink on the table next to him.

She felt shy, as if she had done something wrong. Standing behind him, she put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Is it okay? Why don’t you come sit with us, if you’re having a whiskey?’

He rubbed his cheek against her hand, but doing it consciously, as she observed, to show that he wasn’t upset. ‘No, it’s all right, it’s fine. Your guests are there. It’s not fun when everyone else is more drunk.’

‘Would you like me to stay with you?’

‘If you want to, I’d like it, of course. You could have one drink with me.’

‘All right.’ She went to the bathroom, peed, feeling trapped with Murad sitting quietly by the fire, when the others were pounding hard. When it got late, she always kept up with the guys.

Coming out, she said indifferently, ‘It’s just that it’s a bit rude. It’s their last night.’

‘That’s true.’ Giving her dispensation, he stood up and kissed her. ‘You go. I’ll be in bed in a minute anyway.’

Very late in the evening, with Zora asleep on a sofa under a shawl, with Mino and the boy murmuring to each other by the dying fire, almost asleep himself, Bumpy said to Lily, ‘Come on,
someone
has to get in the pool before it’s all over. Let’s do it.’