The Vine of Desire (41 page)

She’s pacing up and down talking to herself, as is her habit when something upsets her so much that she can’t contain it inside the space of her body. Her mother’s letter with its accusations, which she tore into the tiniest strips she could and threw in the backyard, it was too poisonous to keep in the house. Yet why should she expect anything different? Hasn’t her mother spent her whole life putting her down, thinking the worst? The mother who couldn’t bring herself to ever love her—who blamed her own bad luck on the daughter whose birth coincided with the news of her widowhood. And Ashok’s kindness, his bland, infuriating goodness, like the milk-and-mashed-rice one feeds babies. What makes him think he can take her home?
What makes him think his notion of home coincides with hers? What makes him so sure that she isn’t capable of immorality? She wants to do something wildly, scandalously immoral right now, just to show him. (Then it strikes her that perhaps she has done it already.) In any case, she hates them both, her mother and Ashok, though differently. For their presumption, their certainty that they know her—and what is best for her—better than she does. As though she were a callow teenager. Or a child like Dayita. And with that muttered phrase she realizes that she hasn’t heard Dayita in quite a while.

“Dayita!” she calls, “Dayu!” Calmly, then louder, trying to keep the panic from her voice. She checks the bathrooms first, hounded by that old fear of drowning. (But surely the walker would keep her safe?) Now the closets, even the shut ones. (Who knows if a child might toddle in somehow and close the … ?) She’s sweating, she clutches at the front of her T-shirt, her voice is close to tears. “Dayu, where are you? Oh God, why wasn’t I watching you?” The bedroom? (Maybe she was sleepy and rolled in there and fell asleep somehow?) No. Nothing in Myra’s bedroom either. She makes herself quiet before glancing through the old man’s door, no sense agitating him. Then he might need something, and she isn’t capable of dealing with that right now. There’s the great hump of his bedclothes—he’s often cold nowadays, even with the extra quilts and pillows she piles around him. She sees the back of his head, like some shriveled, fuzzy fruit. (But Dayita won’t be here, she never comes here by herself.) She grips the doorframe, dizzy with terror. What to do now? Should she unlock the front door and check the driveway (but that’s crazy) or the back porch, with (oh God) the narrow stone steps. Could Tree or Myra have forgotten (but they’re so careful about these things) and
left the sliding door open? What if someone came in while she was too preoccupied to notice and—?

Then she sees a slight movement on the other side of the bed, hidden, mostly, by the mound of blankets. Yes! She’s maneuvered her walker all the way around until she’s near the old man’s face. She’s standing there quietly, more quietly than Sudha ever thought possible for her, watching him sleep. Sudha slumps against the doorframe, then jerks upright, infuriated with relief. She’s going to teach that child a lesson so she’ll never scare her like that again! She’s going to—. She starts toward her, then stops.

The old man isn’t asleep, as she thought. (It’s hard to tell, in any case. A lot of the time nowadays, he floats in an in-between state, negotiating the borders of unconsciousness.) As she watches, he shifts his hand awkwardly, his first voluntary movement in days. A few inches, slowly, along the bedsheet. It’s tough to work the awkward contraption of bone and ligament that his arm has become, to force the signals of will along the crumbling paths of synapses. He’s given up now. The hand limp on the edge of the bed. Dayita reaches out as far as she can, on tiptoe, it’s still too far, she can’t touch him, even with her stomach pressed against the walker’s tray. Then she gives a hop of sorts, and her fingers close around his thumb.

At the doorway, Sudha holds still, barely allowing herself a breath. What will happen next? Dayita says something, the end of the word lifting, as in a question. Does the old man understand? Does he whisper an answer? The back of his head shows no movement; his hand, with its curled, yellowish nails, remains still. Dayita’s eyes are caught by the shiny knobs of the dresser. She wanders off, intent on new explorations, the wheels of the walker rumbling softly against the wood floor.

Anju is uneasy. It started when she put the key to the apartment in the lock—the key that never fit right all these years and which they never changed, though, like many things, they intended to—and it turned smoothly, allowing her in. She had the sensation that there was someone inside—or maybe something—waiting for her. Had she been writing a letter to her father, she would have said,
Not in a scary way, as in the horror movies, when the music goes high and fast and the lights turn funny and the camera moves jerkily around corners. Still, I didn’t like it.
But Anju no longer writes to the dead. There was a time for that, but now it’s over. Now it’s the living that she must contend with.

The air inside the apartment is damp and stale. It is like being lowered into a well. She flings open the drapes, Anju who is learning all over again to be practical, to battle the amorphous world of fear and loneliness with actions that are small, precise, geometric. She up-ends the cardboard packing boxes to reinforce them. The plastic packing tape makes a tormented sound, like a prolonged crack, each time she tears off a strip. She looks around for something to cover the sound with. The TV? No, that’s
his
territory. She turns on the radio, not caring which station it is.
Let music be my shroud.

First, his books from the family room shelf, engineering and business texts from graduate school. Software manuals. She’s sure they’re all out of date. He should have thrown them out ages ago. It chagrins her that he should want them to go with him into his new life when he doesn’t want—But she cuts off that thought. Today she’s only a body. A body with two hands and two feet, here for a precise, bodily purpose. Lift. Bend. Stack. Climb on a chair. Old copies of
Business Week
and
Money.
She throws them with vengeance into box after box. Let him pay the extra storage. Why, still, the feeling that someone’s watching her? She’s been to all the rooms, looked in the closets, even checked, like a foolish old spinster, under the dusty beds. She sees the calendar Sudha has forgotten on the kitchen wall, pulls it off, throws it in. She’s had enough of warnings and advice. What more can happen to her? The newscaster announces another suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, a bus blown up this time, killing twenty-one and wounding forty-five. Several of the dead are children. Anju recognizes this as a tragedy far worse than what she is undergoing. She pauses in her packing to try to imagine how the parents must feel, the depth of their distress. But her capacity for compassion has shrunk, somehow. Now she cannot relate to anything beyond the distraught confines of her own skin.

The bedroom now, still smelling of his Claiborne Sport. Nonsense, she thinks, it can’t be. But when she opens the bathroom cabinet, there’s the frosted glass bottle, carelessly capped. She’d bought it at Macy’s for some occasion, it no longer matters what. She’s not going to think of why he left it behind, she’s not going to let that get to her. She throws it into a box half filled with shirts. Let it reek into them. Fold, pile, close, tape. The empty hangers make a clattering, skeletal sound. The closet’s just about done, only some financial papers on the top shelf. She pulls up a chair, climbs on. Bank statements. Prospectuses of old investments. In the back,
Penthouses
parading women splayed in poses that make parentheses of distaste appear at the corners of her mouth. She’s not surprised, though. There’s nothing he can do anymore to surprise her. She throws the last armload into the box and draws a breath of relief. There, her duty’s done.

Then she sees it spiraling down, leaflike. A photograph. It must have been pushed under the stack of magazines. And though she’s promised herself she won’t look at anything, no more than if she were a paid packer, she can’t help it. It’s black-and-white, unexpectedly. Not the photo of a person, as she’d feared. (Okay, she might as well be honest, not Sudha’s photograph.) Its lines and striations confound her for a moment. Then she remembers. It’s the ultrasound photo from when she was pregnant. There’s the lighted blip, like a cartoon star, that had been her son. Sunil had got rid of everything else before she came back from the hospital, the baby clothes, the car seat and stroller they’d bought from Babies ‘R’ Us, the books she’d picked up over the months, browsing through secondhand bookstores.
Mother Goose, Goodnight Moon. The fataka Tales
she’d had her mother send from India. Why this photo, then? Was it merely an oversight? Or is this what’s been waiting for her, a clue into that impossible, unfathomable man who makes her clench with rage every time she thinks of him? Except not now, she’s cold now, all that wind coming in from the windows she opened. There’s a commercial for a car dealership on the radio.
The best deal you can imagine and then some.
Anju holds the photo. Is it a message? But perhaps the dead do not send messages; it is only the living who imagine them. A song comes on, a woman’s voice bittersweet as grenadine.
Love is a shoestring.
Why must there be so many songs about love? Though this one is more accurate than most. It’s only a matter of time, Anju knows, before love comes undone, its unraveled edges dangling, causing you to trip and fall on your face.

She shivers, she’s always been cold in this apartment, all these years to which she must now attach the adjective
wasted
because of his leaving. Even in her new place she’s cold (is it her
karma then, coldness?), the drafty old house she shares with her women friends. Though of course they’re wonderful people and she’s thankful to them in the way one is to people who have saved your life, a grudging, shamed thankfulness, tinted with the desire to get away. She recognizes, suddenly, the fact that she will never love them. Perhaps she will never love anyone again. Her feet are cold, her backbone, even the nubs of her elbows, even her armpits. Has she been warm even once since she left India, her childhood bedroom which, in her treacherously selective memory, is always bathed in sunshine the color of dahlias? Anju sits on a brown smudge of carpet in an unraveled household and thinks of the flowers in her mother’s garden. She is still holding the black-and-white picture, the only proof that a child was ever a part of her.
Prem? Prem, are you there?

Alone with silence, Anju calls up the flowers of her youth, one by one, from the depths of a lost golden world. But nothing is fully lost, is it, as long as you can name it? Joba, Surja Mukhi, Karabi.
He saved Prem’s picture, all this time.
How is it that you can hate and hate a person and then discover that a part of you still loves him? Shaluk. Sarba Jaya. Damp fingerprints on the photo, whorls like you might see, stargazing, through a telescope. Chandra Mallika. Champa. Nayan Tara. The names drawn out like amber taffy. Can flowers that sound so beautiful be real? Syllables of brightness flicker inside her like a tube light with a loose connection, which might turn steady, which might go out at any moment.

It is afternoon in the glass house. The child is lying on the bed she shares with her mother, sucking her thumb. She’s supposed to be taking her nap. She considers sleepily whether it’s worthwhile
to fight this rule, stupid like so many grown-up rules. In the old man’s room, she can hear her mother moving around, closing the drapes, darkening it for his rest. Her movements are elated, the child can tell this by the way her bangles clink. This is because she’s managed the morning with some success, bathing and feeding both her charges without a major accident. Today she brought the child’s high chair into the old man’s room at lunchtime, along with his tray. She was a little nervous, the child could tell from the way she kept swallowing even though she wasn’t eating anything. She spooned food alternately into their mouths as she talked to the child: Tell Da-da to drink his milk. Tell him if he eats up all his dal-and-rice, it’ll make him strong. The child thought it was funny. She babbled obediently—not that any of them were smart enough to understand what she was saying. Well, maybe the old man. He gave her a conspiratorial look when the mother wasn’t looking. They both ate a few extra spoonfuls to humor her.