“But you weren’t here,” Young Mr. Balim said. “So we started without you.”
“I’ll catch up,” Lew promised, understanding at once that this was exactly what he needed.
There was lots more beer in the refrigerator. It was already well after midnight, but for the next three hours they drank together in the kitchen, telling one another stories, many of them about women. (Ellen wasn’t mentioned; Lew didn’t feel like talking about her, and the others respected his silence.)
Young Mr. Balim described the tragedy of his life. “Women love me,” he explained. Like his father, he had the ability to smile in various sad and unhappy ways. “They find me irresistible,” he said, and sighed.
“That must be tough,” Frank said, looking surly.
“Yes, it is,” agreed Young Mr. Balim. “For what they love is my exoticism. Not eroticism, exoticism. To most women—except to Indian women, of course; I’ll have nothing to do with them—I am something different, an exotic specimen. They must have me. They want to know what I’m like.”
“How come Indian women?” Lew asked. I am not thinking of Amarda, he told himself. “How come you got nothing to do with them?”
“First I tell you about these other women.”
“The ones who love you,” Frank said, looking increasingly surly. “All these cunts finding you irresistible.”
“Those precisely. ‘What is this Bathar Balim really like?’ they ask themselves. ‘He is very pretty,’ they say.”
“Mp,” said Frank, and took a long swig of beer.
“So they pursue me,” Young Mr. Balim said. “And how can I refuse them?”
“Get to the point,” Lew said, because he wanted to go back to the question of what was wrong with Indian women.
“Well, they seduce me, don’t they?” Young Mr. Balim asked, but went on without waiting for an answer. “And they find I am merely a man, don’t they? Not exotic at all. Erotic, certainly, but not mysterious, not dashing, not romantic. Not a hero. I cannot help but disappoint them. And so they reject me for being ordinary after all.” He sighed, and smiled in utter dejection and drank beer.
“You ain’t ordinary,” Frank told him. Lew could tell that Frank was thinking about getting into a bad mood. “You’re a prince.”
“No fights in my kitchen,” Lew said.
Frank gave him an indignant glare. “Who’s fighting? I just said he was a goddam prince; am I right, Bathar?”
“We are all friends,” Young Mr. Balim said. He blinked a lot, as though trying to get himself under control.
Lew said, “Tell me about these Indian women.”
“What about them?”
“You said you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
“Oh, that’s right. Absolutely.” Nodding in agreement with himself, gazing at his brown glass beer bottle, Young Mr. Balim fell silent.
Amazed at his own patience, Lew said, “How come?” And then, because he feared a certain discontinuity in Young Mr. Balim’s thought processes, he laid the whole question out again. “How come you won’t have anything to do with Indian women?”
“Oh,” he answered scornfully, “it’s because with them it’s nothing but fuck-fuck-fuck.”
Frank, who had been nodding, sat up straight. “What’s that?”
“Yes, that’s all they care about,” Young Mr. Balim said, dismissing all Indian women with a disdainful shrug. “Just fuck-fuck-fuck and that’s all.”
“Bathar, pal,” Frank said, “I don’t get your objection.”
“Well, what are we to them? Nothing, just a penis.”
“A what?”
“Cock,” Lew translated for Frank.
“They don’t care about men at all,” Young Mr. Balim explained, becoming more earnest, more doleful, less cynical, as he warmed to his subject. “It’s a society of women, is all, with men on the outside looking in.”
Frank glowered, apparently dubious. “You mean they’re dykes?”
“No, no. It’s all fuck-fuck-fuck with men, but the rest of their lives is women. In India it’s the same, and here, and everywhere you find our Indian culture. The young man marries, he brings his young wife home; right away the important relationship is between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. They talk together; they live together; they have secrets together; they are the true loving pair. And then the young wife sees her husband, and she says, ‘Oh, yes, fuck-fuck-fuck, make babies, now go away,’ and she wipes herself off and goes back to the mother-in-law and they talk secrets together and giggle behind their hands.” He drank beer, and became so extremely sad that the smile was hardly visible at all. “It is terrible to see your culture from the outside,” he said. “Very disheartening.”
It seemed to Lew that Young Mr. Balim’s complaint was somehow an inversion of the social structure American women recently had been criticizing, with the sexes reversed, but the idea was too tenuous for him to try to put it into words. Besides, he was more interested in trying to make Young Mr. Balim’s opinions about Indian women cast some light on his own relationship with Amarda. (He’d forgotten he wasn’t thinking about her.) The fuck-fuck-fuck part was all right, but what about the rest of it? Did it alter his view of what had been going on in that small hot stuffy room in her house the last time he’d seen her? Amarda and her grandmother; he tried to visualize those two giggling together behind their hands, talking sexual secrets about men. Strangely enough, it was easier to see the grandmother that way, and what did that mean?
Soon Frank fell asleep, his head bouncing on the table. “I gotta go to bed,” Lew announced, struggling to his feet, agitating the table so half the empties fell over and Frank snorted and opened one red eye.
“I shall take Frank home,” Young Mr. Balim said. He seemed as neat as ever, but a bit less ironic and more human. Drink apparently was good for him.
“Do what you want,” Lew suggested. “I’m going to sleep. I got a war to go to in the morning.”
At eight-thirty, worn out and hung over, Lew arrived at Balim’s buildings to find Balim’s old canvas-covered trucks in the yard in back, with his forty-eight troops messily loading the food and bedrolls and clothesline and cable and tarpaulins and empty oil drums and cartons of tools and all the other miscellaneous supplies. The forty Evinrude outboard motors Lew had got in trade for the fifty-seven missing sewing machines were already loaded.
Frank appeared unaffected by last night’s debauch, except that he seemed to be having a bit of trouble with his balance, as though something had gone agley in his middle ear. He would sway every now and again, while standing perfectly still on an unmoving flat surface. Otherwise, he was the usual Frank, bellowing and belligerent, slowing the loading process by repeatedly confusing the troops.
As for Young Mr. Balim, he was nowhere to be seen, but a hint to his condition might be garnered from the reproachful look Mazar Balim gave Lew when he came out at one point to check their progress. Lew gave him back a sickly smile, and tried to act as though he for one had had little to drink and a full night’s sleep.
Finally they were ready to go. All the men except for the drivers and two assistants were seated in lumpy crowds in the beds of two of the trucks, and all the supplies had been jammed into the other two. Frank and Isaac and Balim had a little private conversation while Lew sat on the running board of one of the trucks and drank the coffee Isaac had kindly brought out to him. Then Balim and Isaac both came over to smile at him and shake his hand and wish him luck. And then they really did leave.