“Your friend got this round,” the bartender said. He meant the boy from the garden party.
“Très gentil.” Liliane saluted him in thanks.
Barbara introduced herself. “I knew Liliane when she was just a young babe.”
“She’s still a babe,” Rudy said.
“Oof,” Liliane said. “Enough of that.”
The piano player had started again. He had a way of approaching the keyboard as if the motion of his own hands surprised him. He was really the best thing she’d seen in New York.
“You love music, don’t you?” the boy turned and said. “I could tell by the way you walk.”
She had to laugh. “I’m walking very much in your city.”
“You have to let me show you some things. My New York.”
“It’s better than anyone else’s New York?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
Oh, she would? She liked this boy, but his self-assurance could get annoying. She went back to looking at the piano player. How weary and quietly jaunty these tunes were. The man had found a good way to be old, she thought.
“I’ll show you great neighborhoods,” the boy said. “And you can show me Paris sometime.”
“She’s a good guide.” Barbara snickered.
When the music was over, they all got up to leave. The boy went out to help them get a taxi, on the busier corner a block away. “You’re gleaming in the night,” he said to her. “Your satin.”
“Let’s hope a cab sees it,” Barbara said.
“You look like the moon,” he said. He reached out and flicked one of her dangling pearl earrings. His fingertip grazed her neck. What is he doing? she thought.
And then he was waving wildly at a cab, which did pull over and stop. “Tell me the name of your hotel,” he said to her, very fast, “and I’ll call so we can make a time for our walk.” She wasn’t so glad to say the hotel’s name but she did. And then he swooped down on her for a kiss on the cheek. His bristled face smelled of sweat and the oils in male skin, and he whispered, “I look forward to seeing you,” as he held her in a hug that went on too long. She gave him an icy look when it was over, but he was shaking hands with Barbara by then. He told the cabdriver, “Take very good care of these ladies.”
Liliane had never in her life been insulted by the fact of male attention. It had not always been welcome, but she had never held it against men that they were bothering her with their desire or admiration. That was the way of things, and it usually served her well. In the cab, with Barbara half asleep and the dark streets outside, she was affronted by that dramatic hug. If she were young, she would’ve just known he wanted to have sex with her (everyone did), but it was about money. He was trying to use her vanity for money.
And she didn’t have that much money. The insult was for nothing. Was this how the Indian lepers were fed? When she got back to the hotel that night, she went to bed and dreamed that she was entirely naked and sitting on the gritty curb of a city street. She was trying to cover herself — she looked in the gutter for old plastic bags and wrappers, dirty pages of newspaper, and she held these scraps of garbage against her lap. And there were naked children, a whole row of them, settled in the street alongside her, foraging refuse the same way. The children called her “madame,” they were saying something to her, but then she woke up.
She was under clean white sheets in her hotel in New York and the room was cold. Americans liked air-conditioning too much. There was no reason for her to be here. What did she want from this place? Recreation, diversion, escape. This rough, crude city, full of grasping morons: What had she been thinking?
The next day, which was Sunday, Rudy felt the effects of last night’s alcohol, but he did remember that he had to call Deedee before he did anything else. She was a person who actually went to church, so he lingered over breakfast until noon, and then she answered her home phone. “I wanted to ask you about Liliane,” he said. “Donors always want things. You know, kinds of satisfaction. What would she want?”
“You know what I worry about,” Deedee said. “If she’s a Muslim — which of course is perfectly fine — we fund all these centers for Hindus. You can see in the photos they have statues of gods with garlands of marigolds on them in the courtyards. She might not like that. Lot of violence between the groups in India.”
Oh, please. Deedee was usually a little sharper than that.
“Do you think she might want to dedicate something as a gift for her husband?” he said.
“What a lovely idea,” Deedee said. “I never thought of that. That’s how you do what you do, isn’t it? You can think of how people can do the right thing and please themselves too.”
“Yes, well, there’s always a challenge in getting some romance into leprosy.”
“I know there are romantic stories,” Deedee said. “You wrote them.”
It was true that in the last newsletter Rudy had written a feature about Bamala and Pandi, two infected people in a center near Thanjavur. They had been engaged to each other as children in a village, but then the engagement was broken when Bamala became sick. Years later they met by chance at a Hansen’s Hope center when Pandi was very ill. He was now doing well on drugs, Bamala had grown older and stronger, and they were planning to marry.
And how was Rudy going to work that into a conversation? And there were parts left out — damage, abandonment, trauma, ostracism. But he liked the story, and who didn’t like it when love triumphed? Rudy was not himself a fool for love. He had resisted Berry, in India, surely the woman he’d loved best, when she wanted him to settle with her for good. Why had he not leaped at that chance? Well, he hadn’t.
He thought Liliane, who was not likely to get any other husbands at this stage, might go for the idea of a handsome memorial gesture, a Taj Mahal. It was, frankly, the only thing he could think of.
Rudy had dealt with any number of widows. You had to tread very carefully, not to kick against any anguished regrets or buried anger. You had to keep remembrances abstract. No frankness. Once, at a funeral, he’d heard the dead person’s best friend say, “She was such a fucking prima donna.” This was said right in the eulogy, and the dead person had once been Rudy’s girlfriend, not too long before. It was Clara, the girl who’d told him what a high-stress job he had.
How hard he had been on Clara, with her pop-psych sympathy for one well-fed white man’s office job. He’d told her she had no clue, and she’d said, “No one can talk to you, you’re such a snob, you think you’ve visited hell like Jesus.” But she had been weeping as she said it, he was more or less out the door. And a few months later she had died, from the mistake of walking into an unmarked elevator shaft, before she could learn anything.
He was sorry that he hadn’t seen fit to be nicer to her; the dead can get you that way. He let women go too easily (a number of women had mentioned this), and he did act as if he were the only person in the so-called first world untainted by privilege. Liliane could probably tell this about him already.
So this was the plan. Rudy would take Liliane on a fascinating excursion, nothing too exhausting, and then Deedee would join them for a pleasant, cozy cocktail in the late afternoon. He called Liliane at her hotel and told her they were going to skip the obvious spots and get into real neighborhoods instead.
“I’m not sure,” Liliane said. “Can I call you later?”
He was depressed when he hung up. What else did she have to do? He’d had in mind Jackson Heights, in Queens, which had as many South Asians as Mumbai, or was that an urban myth? Rolled leaves of beeda and beaded saris in the store windows. The Patel Brothers Supermarket, bins of okra and bitter gourds and pomelos, sacks of rice in three dozen varieties, rosewood rolling pins, round brass thali trays. Would she like that? An India of plenty — maybe that was the wrong message. No, she would like it.