The Story Hour (29 page)

One other time I run out of store like this was on Bobby's last day at restaurant. Later that same day, I had tried the suicide. And because of this, I meet Maggie. Who is now gone away also. Almost one full year gone since that day. But nothing has change. My hands were empty on that day. They empty today. My heart was alonely then. And it still.

But then I think, Lakshmi, you wrong. Everything has change. You have change. You will never try the suicide again. Maggie has show you the value of your life. Maggie burn your old life and make you a new one. Now you having your own business, cell phone, car. Even husband treating me more good than before. Something change inside him after I call him a stupid for loving Shilpa more than he love his real wife. For few days after, he look at me different, as if some jaali covering his eyes is gone. One time in the store I make mistake and not charge customer for biscuit packet. He open his mouth to call me stupid, like always. But then he stop and say, “Simple mistake. Anyone can make.”

And last Tuesday, when I come home from Maggie's house and my husband come upstair to check on me? We make the love then in middle of afternoon. First time my husband not pulling for me in the dark. First time he looking into my eyes and first time he smiling, like he not angry at what he seeing. When we are finish, he stay with me for long time, and when he get up to go back downstair, he act like he sorry to go.

A plastic bag blows from the parking lot and dancing in front of my feet. I bends down and pick it up. Maggie say people in Am'rica littering so much that there is a country of plastic bottles and bags growing inside the sea near the California. The litter blow across the whole country to go swimming inside the California sea. Maggie get upset when she talk about it, but in my mind it make such a pretty picture—blue and pink bags flying like birds over the whole country. I wish I free like that, to go where the breeze taking you.

I knows it is time to go back inside store to help poor Rekha. Saturday our busy day. I knows this is my life, with Rekha and husband and store and restaurant. For one year, my life became a big house because Maggie enter it. She give it color and new shape. But Maggie now gone. And I have no idea whether the new house can stand or it fall down.

M
AGGIE WAS GRATEFUL
that Sudhir had offered her a ride to the campus pool. For the past two Saturdays, he had made some excuse for driving separately, and even though he was sullen and silent during the drive there today, hope flared in her heart. But then she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, took in the stiffness of his posture, the set of his mouth, and her heart sank again. The rigidity that had taken over Sudhir ever since he'd discovered Peter's neck chain, that frozen quality, as if his body were encapsulated in a slab of ice that nothing could melt—not apology, not entreaties, not offers to enter couples counseling—was very much present. And yet this was the first time they'd been in the car together in several weeks. The proximity enforced an intimacy that their large house, with its many rooms to escape to, didn't. And surely Sudhir had known that it would when he offered her a ride.

For the past two weeks, Sudhir had studiously avoided her at the pool, chatting instead with the other regulars and looking away if his eye accidentally caught hers. Once or twice she'd swum up to him, made some observation or comment, and he'd paused and heard her out, nodded, and then swum away from her.

Remembering this now, as Sudhir parked the car in the open lot, Maggie felt a spurt of anger. It was this coldness, this precision, this control over his emotions, that had driven her toward Peter in the first place. How unfair it was that, because she was the one who had the affair, Sudhir could forever be the aggrieved party. How unfair it was that he would never have to take a cold, hard look at his own behavior, his culpability. If their friends ever learned about her affair—and Maggie had no idea whether Sudhir was talking to anyone—she would always be the cheating spouse, and Sudhir would forever be the martyr.

But by the time she changed out of her street clothes and emerged into the pool area, Maggie's anger was spent and replaced by sharp regret. She remembered again how uncomfortable Peter had been after Lakshmi had fled the house, how eager to get out of the house himself. There had not been a trace of the warmth, the neediness, with which he had looked at her as he stood at her front door a few hours earlier; it was the hunger in Peter's eyes that had made her invite him in, secure as she was in the knowledge that he was leaving town. They had stood wordlessly in her living room as Lakshmi gathered the vacuum cleaner and left, their earlier passion already a distant memory. Even as the enormity of what had just happened, what Lakshmi had just seen, dawned on Maggie, Peter offered nary a consoling word. He was already eyeing the door that Lakshmi had recently exited, looking at it and the open road that lay beyond, with the same hunger he'd looked at her. Distraught as she had been, Maggie had marveled at Peter's talent for self-preservation and realized it was this quality that allowed him to do what he did. Peter was, above all, a survivor. He had a degree of self-absorption, of single-mindedness, that probably only one percent of the world's population shared. He was in elite company, along with the professional athletes and actors and politicians and sociopaths. Peter would always sweep aside anyone who came between him and his work. Domestic drama—angry husbands, distraught wives, jilted girlfriends—was anathema to him. Maggie had realized all this in a flash. Or rather, she had always known it; it was part of Peter's attraction for her, how light, how unbound and ungoverned, his life had seemed. There was none of the earth-binding heaviness of mortgage payments and car loans and work schedules and family obligations. Peter, and men like him, were the last nomads, the bird-men, the world a series of open doors that they could slip in and out of. In the last few seconds that she gazed at him before he kissed her lightly on the cheek and left, Maggie saw how she'd romanticized his life. Peter had always seemed so rugged to her, so manly, in contrast to Sudhir. But the Peter who stood shuffling his feet had the face of an immature youth, someone who had never been tempered by domestic routine, by duty, by the weight of being responsible for another's happiness.

She had looked away, afraid that he would see the contempt in her eyes. And as she did, a long, silent wail started somewhere deep within her. How wrong she had been. How poor her judgment. What a lousy trade, risking her marriage to Sudhir for the sake of someone like Peter. She had gotten it right the first time with Sudhir, had hit the luckiest of jackpots—a good marriage—and she had screwed it up. Over what? Over a man who stood shifting from one foot to another, emptily saying that everything would be okay, leaving her to clean up the mess they both had made.

We are earthbound creatures, Maggie had thought. No matter how tempting the sky. No matter how beautiful the stars. No matter how deep the dream of flight. We are creatures of the earth. Born with legs, not wings, legs that root us to the earth, and hands that allow us to build our homes, hands that bind us to our loved ones within those homes. The glamor, the adrenaline rush, the true adventure, is here, within these homes. The wars, the détente, the coups, the peace treaties, the celebrations, the mournings, the hunger, the sating, all here. And this is something Peter, for all his travel, for all his worldly sophistication, will never know. He will eat at the finest restaurants in Paris but will never know the bliss of having your spouse make a pot of chicken noodle soup on a damp Saturday evening.

She had been genuinely happy when Sudhir came home that evening, felt truly free, as if she had kicked a drug addiction and now could be the person she was meant to be, could fully be the spouse Sudhir deserved. Despite having gotten home just an hour before she did, Sudhir had already prepared dinner, and her heart tore with gratitude at this kindness. This is marriage, she told herself, these small, precious gestures of responsibility and love. I will never do anything to jeopardize this again, so help me God.

Her world was still whole, unsundered, when she offered to do the dishes and clean up while Sudhir went upstairs to prepare for bed. She turned on the kitchen radio, unaware of how her life was unraveling, unaware that after getting into his pajamas, her husband had opened the drawer of his bedside table, reaching for the book of poems that he read nightly before bed, his hand touching an unfamiliar object. She didn't know that while she listened to NPR, Sudhir was turning the necklace in his hand, recognizing the tiger's tooth immediately, but unable to make sense of the inexplicable, to shape a narrative that would explain why Peter Weiss's ridiculous necklace would land in his bedside table. And then a germ of suspicion attacked his mind. He shook his head to shake it off, but it took further root, bringing with it unwelcome pictures—the breathless quality in Maggie's voice when they'd met Peter at the campus museum during his first stint here, the shameless way in which he'd openly flirted with Maggie, the way the tiger's tooth had sat flush against Peter's pink skin in the pool a few months ago, the sour, dyspeptic feeling in Sudhir's stomach when he'd seen the bare-chested Peter talking to his wife in the water. By the time he walked back into the kitchen, where Maggie was drying the last of the dishes, the necklace dangling from his index finger, Sudhir had solved most of the puzzle. The only missing piece was what Maggie was trying to tell him by placing it in his nightstand.

Maggie watched terror-stricken as Sudhir stood in front of her, resisting the urge to scream. Sudhir was speaking to her, his lips were moving, but the thumping of her heart, the roar of her blood, drowned out all other sound. No easy lie sprang to her lips. There was too much going on—the mesmerizing effect of Sudhir dangling the chain in front of her, the seething anger in his eyes as he asked for an explanation, her initial outrage that Peter would stoop this low, that he would deliberately break up her marriage even as he left town. “Why was this man in my house?” Sudhir kept asking, and even as she struggled to answer in a way that would allay his suspicions, she knew it was too late. This is it, she said to herself, the chickens come home to roost. As soon as she thought this, she knew with certainty that it wasn't Peter who had betrayed her but the last person on earth whom she would've suspected of betrayal. And then she mocked herself for her naïveté, remembering Lakshmi's story of how she had tricked her husband. If anyone is capable of betrayal, she told herself, it's Lakshmi.

Sudhir had left the house that night. Gotten into the same clothes he'd shed earlier and left without taking even his toothbrush. He came home the next morning and silently got ready for work. She hadn't had the guts to ask him where he'd spent the night. After he drove off, she dialed the hospital and called in sick.

She had spent the day driving around town, alternating between disbelief and bone-piercing grief. How could she have screwed up this badly? How could she have hurt Sudhir? But toward evening, as she drove home, she felt a strange peace. She and Sudhir had been together through thick and thin. It would be a long, hard journey, but they would make their way back. They had to. They had to.

She found Sudhir on the back porch with the lights turned off. “Hi,” she whispered. “Can I sit with you for a few minutes?”

She heard the faint rustle of his kurta and knew that he had shrugged his assent. She lowered herself on the love seat next to him. They sat in tense silence for a few minutes, and then Maggie reached over and took Sudhir's hand in hers. She forced herself not to notice how cold and lifeless it felt. “I want to tell you something,” she said. “Something I realized today. Can you listen?”

“Yup,” Sudhir said.

She was unnerved by the flatness of his tone, by the deadweight of his hand in hers. She sighed. Sudhir was not making this easy, and really, who could blame him? But she knew she had to try.

“I've been thinking of how humans are basically earthbound creatures,” she started. “You know? How our concerns are rooted to this earth, to family life.”

This was not what she wanted to say at all. Already she could feel Sudhir's impatience with her.

“Listen,” she said urgently. “What I'm trying to say is, I realized today that you are a hundred times the man Peter will ever be. He . . . he means nothing to me, Sudhir. My life is here with you. I know this now. And I'm sorry for . . .”

Sudhir shook his hand out of hers and rose slowly to his feet. He stood over her for a moment, and now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she saw that he was shaking his head. “If it took you this long to know that I'm a hundred times the man that Peter is, Maggie, then all I can say is I'm sorry. You're far more stupid than I ever imagined. Frankly, I'm insulted to even be compared to that pompous asshole.”

She sat in shock, staring into the dark, after Sudhir left the room. In all their years together, he had never talked to her in this way. She knew that she had blundered, that her inarticulate words had actually made things worse between them; that what had felt like a revelation to her was an obvious fact to Sudhir. And not because Sudhir was a vain man—he was in fact the most self-effacing of men—but because he was wise. He didn't need to have an affair to learn the value of what they'd built together.

Maggie had hated herself then, and she carried that self-hatred into the pool with her this morning. But the warm blue water felt like forgiveness. With each lap she swam, the self-loathing dislodged itself a tiny bit. A welcome blankness fell over her mind, a respite from the anguished thoughts that fired like shards of coal in her brain. After a few more laps, she floated on her back, listening to the Mozart playing on the overhead speakers, looking up at the glass ceiling, recalling a hundred other Saturdays when she and Sudhir had been in this pool together, feeling a sense of connection even when they were at opposite ends, Sudhir flashing a grin or mouthing her a quick kiss whenever their eyes found the other.