The Vine of Desire (31 page)

S
udha

It is dark, it is raining. I know this is a dream because the rain makes no sound. It merely falls, solid as uncooked spaghetti. Little pieces of it stack up outside a building. No, it’s a room, a room in the night, and the spaghetti rain has reached all the way to the windowsill. The windows are open, some sticks of spaghetti have landed inside, on the carpet colored like dirty foam. They make a crisscross pattern. He sits in the dark in the recliner. He turns the TV on, then off, then on again. O. J. is on the screen, smiling with his hair, speaking with his skin, reaching out with eyes cut out of black cloth.

She left you, didn’t she
, says O. J.
They all do. I should know.

There are squares of light in the room, rectangles of not-light. He unfolds one of the rectangles. It grows into a letter, my letter to him. Or is it my letter to her? He reads it again. He crumples it, he throws it down. He picks it up. She walks in through the door, her mouth makes the shape of questions, she turns on a switch, no answers flood the room. Where is she, she is asking, where is the baby. He is at the window, he holds out
the rectangle which is my letter, he holds it aslant into the rain, the words slide off the page, there is blankness, she says, give me the letter, give me the letter, what did you say to her, what did you do, you bastard? She is saying, lost, she is saying, my baby.

She comes at him with her fists. Light floods the room. Spaghetti shapes whirl outside the window. In my bed I am drowning. I took the coward’s way. He is holding her wrists. She is weeping. It was the only way I had. He is weeping. Words fall from the corners of their eyes. Small and black and shriveled like raisins. We read a poem in school once,
what happens to a dream deferred.
On the chair next to them is a child’s book I left behind. What happens to a desire deferred? There’s a scratch mark on his cheek in the shape of her nails, bleeding. Stop it, stop. Something balloons inside me, my chest is stretched to bursting. I didn’t know this would happen, he says. He speaks to himself, he speaks to the rain.

Is this a good time? Is this a bad time? I have no way of knowing. I left the Indian calendar behind, too. The room I’m sleeping in is dark and unfamiliar. If I get down from this bed (too-soft, too-large) I will hit my thigh against furniture I don’t know, in the morning there will be a bruise the shape and color of a half-ripe guava. It will be my fault. It was my fault. A rectangle falls over my face, white as a wedding handkerchief from long ago. The writing on it is thick and black, like spaghetti dipped in recrimination. I think of how the word
eka
in Bengali can mean both loneliness and being alone.

Where did she go, all alone?

Why didn’t she tell me, one of them is saying.

One of them is saying, It hurts so much I just want to die.

In sleep my fingers search the bed. Find the small hands, the
toes. In sleep my daughter moves away. When she woke from her nap, she called, Baba, Baba. She said, Anju. She would not eat, she would not stop crying. Her face was red and breathless. The woman who hired me pursed up her mouth like a raisin, as though she had made a mistake. I took my daughter into the bedroom, I begged her to be quiet. I rocked her, I sang, I told a story. She would not stop. She tried to throw herself from my arms. I slapped her. In our sleep, the rain has hard fingers.

One of them thinks, I did a terrible thing.

One of them thinks, It must have been really terrible, what you did.

The woman knocked on the door and said, Give her to me for a little bit. I am a bad mother, wherever I go. There was a purplish blotch on Dayita’s cheek. When the woman took me in to see the old man, his eyes were like burning raisins. Go away, he said. He took his left hand, his right doesn’t move, and pushed the dinner tray off the bed. His eyes were black and plump with hate. Get out of my sight. There was spaghetti all over the floor, red and white swirls like painted peonies. His fingers bent inward, like claws.

She shouldn’t have done it
, O. J. says sadly.
I shouldn’t have done it.

One of us says, I got it all wrong.

Is this my skin I’m touching now, is this my daughter’s skin? Is it a handkerchief, a letter cut from black cloth? The rain shuffles like an old man’s shoes. Before I lay down, I pushed the dresser against the door, then felt foolish. She said, I’m sorry, he’s tired, things will be better tomorrow. She said, Let me help you clean up the spaghetti. He said, Vultures, bitches, leave me alone. He used Bengali words, too. Daini. Magi. Once in childhood, I walked into a field of sugarcane and got lost. There were leaves all around me, their sharp, sawtoothed edges. She said,
This makes it three days he hasn’t eaten. Shit, what am I going to do. He said, Whores. The smell of the cane was ripe and musky, too sweet. I couldn’t breathe. There was no end to the field, to the leaves whispering,
eka, eka.

Anju, I don’t even know how deep it goes, the harm I’ve done.

You don’t know which way to turn
, says O. J.,
to climb out of loneliness. So you turn whichever way you can.

I said to my daughter, I’m sorry. The woman was crying. See what I have to put up with. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. Her face was creased with things she wanted to shout out, like a flower squeezed in a sweaty fist. My husband, he’s never there when I need him. My daughter turned her face away, with a look. My daughter scooted her small body to the far end of the bed.

She says, What will happen to us now?

What will happen to us now? he replies.

Three

The earth turns, hemisphere of darkness, hemisphere of light. Winds shift, herding clouds ahead of them. In Calcutta, Ashok sits down to write another letter. In America, on a pillow dampened by fever or rage, a half-paralyzed old man dreams of flight. Their bodies flung onto separate, disparate beds, Sunil and Anju chase shadows in their sleep: silhouettes of regret, arabesques of what might have been. Stumbling to the bathroom with a tension headache, Myra counts out drops of feverfew into a tumbler of warm water. Two
A.M.
Three. Lalit follows a lone eighteen-wheeler on Freeway 280, on his way home from an emergency at the hospital. Over the hills at Skyline, strips of mist like torn membranes. He turns the radio from a talk show where a woman claims she was visited by Nicole’s spirit to an oldies station.
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.
In her sleep, Dayita’s body loosens and turns toward her mother’s. In her sleep, Sudha puts an arm around her and draws her close.

The sun rises like a blood orange over Grizzly Peak, supremely confident, as though the rain had never been. Dewdrops
glitter in the redwood that fringes Sudha’s window. The window is a huge sheet of plateglass, uncurtained. A jay preens its feathers, sassy-blue in the brilliant morning. It is the year of aggressive movements; a man named Saddam is mobilizing sixty thousand soldiers and seven hundred tanks, which will result in a reciprocal mobilization by the U.S. Army. If she were to walk to the window, Sudha would see the town of Berkeley unscrolled below her, its quirkily angled rooftops slanting down the hillside, its riotous tumbles of bougainvillea and trumpet vine and passion flower where the last of the deer feed in the evenings. Down farther, the square red-tiled buildings of the university, its narrow dorms and sprawling co-ops where students stay up nights to study and argue and get drunk and fall in and out of love, believing all the while that they are the inheritors of the world. Then the Berkeley Bowl, from which Myra buys organic oats, pesticide-free sorrel, soy cheese from Japan. The high school with its metal detectors, flanked on one side by a chain-link fence and on the other by a mural filled with faces like dark, busy rainbows. In People’s Park, the homeless stir stiffly in sleeping bags lined with newspapers. A woman in Birkenstocks sweeps the sidewalk in front of the cafés of Telegraph Avenue, empty at this hour and a little sad. The roads crisscross like old shoelaces, leading us finally to the pier, that gray cement pencil pointing into the water as though it contained the solution for our landlocked lives.

But Sudha doesn’t walk to the window. She lies on her side, unmoving, her knees drawn up to her chest as though she were cold. She keeps her eyes closed, though from her uneven breathing it’s clear she’s awake. She is contemplating interior spaces, the vistas she has left behind. Last night, brushing her teeth, she spoke to the mirror:
I will not think of the past. I will not think. Of. The past.
But now, again, she feels it: the press of a man’s lips on her soul.

The room they have given her is beautiful, decorated with care and an unerring eye. Could the nervous Myra be capable of such grace? The north wall is hung with an abstract weaving in warm browns, with pieces of bleached driftwood worked in. The south wall, behind her head, holds a framed Indian miniature painting in jewel colors, a flute-playing Krishna positioned, unexpectedly, between two dancing lions. To the east is an alcove with recessed lighting. In it sits a many-armed goddess with a bronze scowl and a trident. The room is sparely furnished: bed, dresser, leather armchair, tall brass reading lamp. This decorator—whoever she is—does not believe in clutter. The rug on the floor is Native American, its clean lines depicting triangular human figures, the sun and moon, animals with inquiring, coyote snouts. The quilt is a geometric design in shades of cream and henna red, silk squares over which Sudha, her eyes still closed, slides a slow, appreciative hand.

But now the alarm clock by the bed rings, and Sudha must prepare to meet her future. She pulls her jeans and a sweatshirt from the large walk-in closet where she hung her embarrassingly few clothes last night. In the bathroom, Grohe faucets in gleaming silver arcs, English Lavender Gel in the ceramic dispenser, two thick Turkish towels, white as a pirate’s grin. She shucks off her nightdress carelessly.
Take a shower, very hot. Wash the last traces of him from your body. Bundle the hair into a knot, don’t bother to comb out tangles, there’s no one here to see, thank God.
Along with gratitude, why does she feel a sense of loss so absolute it makes her dizzy?
He had cupped his hands for me, so I could pour all my loneliness into them.
On a glass shelf, bottles of lotion present their labels to her. Claiborne Sport for men guests, Victoria’s
Secret Garden for women. She who is not a guest (is she more? is she less?) lifts a tube, bangs it back down with severity.
Let the skin crack and peel. That will be your penance for opening yourself to desire.

She hesitates at the door. Should she wake Dayita? Is it a good idea to leave her in an unfamiliar room, even if she is walled in with pillows and covered with her favorite blanket? But it’s getting late, she must make the old man’s breakfast, he hasn’t eaten in days. With a glance of misgiving, she shuts the bathroom door tight. There was a story the other night on TV about an accident, a child who drowned in a toilet. From the corridor she raises her hand toward the sleeping girl—a gesture of blessing or farewell, or a command to stay put.

Sunil stands at the living room window watching the sunrise, something he has not done in years. It is a beautiful morning, clear and cloudless pink, the ubiquitous smog washed away by last night’s downpour. Sunil faces it grim and bleary-eyed. Ready or not, his new life is upon him (what else can we call this day, now that his old life lies in shambles?), and he must live it.

The golden morning light has just started moving across the carpet. The same carpet where yesterday…. Yester-day. Each syllable strikes him like a branding iron. He turns on his heel—to hell with the sunrise—to make himself a cup of tea. Before Sudha took over the tea-making duties, he used to be good at it. When Anju was pregnant, he would make her masala cha, opening the pods of cardamom carefully over the rich brown liquid as it came to a boil, carrying it to her in bed. Does he remember the dry rub of the fragrant seeds against the
whorls of his fingertips? Better if he doesn’t. Already I’m learning that forgetting is essential to survival.