“What are you thinking?” Eden asked, looking into my eyes.
It was always, to me, a devastating question, because my answer was always Everything.
“About you,” I said. “About us.”
And then she took my hand.
4
“This place is magic,” Eden said, stretching naked by the window the next morning. Her obvious happiness had made her seem physically different — stronger, bright-eyed, more relaxed and sexier. I had not realized how fretful and nervy she had been in the States until I saw her happy in Agra. But it was not only the Taj Mahal that put her in a good mood; she also loved the hotel, its pool, its fruit juice and its food, its bedrooms and its hot showers. And she was with me every minute. I wondered whether I should tell her that I felt slightly oppressed by our constantly being together. Wouldn’t she understand? After all, she also knew a thing or two about solitary pleasures.
Unmesh drove us to Sikandra to see Akbar’s Mausoleum, a big red crumbly palacelike place with an echoing chamber under the dome. Unmesh howled inside and we timed the echo. He took us to Fatehpur Sikri, the magnificent ghost-town in the desert. We ate stale cheese sandwiches and drank milky tea. Eden said she didn’t mind at all. She had no complaints.
“I like roughing it,” she said.
“This isn’t roughing it.”
She looked at me suspiciously, perhaps wondering whether I was mocking her. Didn’t she know that having a picnic in the splendor of an abandoned Moghul city, among the mynah birds on a sunny day, was luxury?
Unmesh’s car was stuffy and dusty. On the way back it jolted us into every pothole. It was prone to misfire and gasp, and then to chug and hip-hop on the road. Unmesh had a temporary remedy for his car’s convulsions. He pulled over and blew into the fuel line. “Rubbish,” he said, gasoline shining on his lips. About ten miles outside Agra the car began to jog — a flat tire.
“Sorry,” Unmesh said, and swore at the driver in Hindi. The driver replied by kicking the tire.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“The imperturbable Andre Parent,” Eden said.
“That’s me.”
We were standing by the side of a hot dusty road. The road was made of broken slabs of soft tar.
“We could camp here,” Eden said.
A cyclist went past and cleared his throat and spat a squirt of red betel juice at us, just missing Eden’s dress. Eden did not see it as hostility. The man was just a bumpkin on a bike.
“It’s so quiet,” she said.
It was the sorrowful dead-quiet of the plains in summer that always reminded me of stinking shade and stagnant water and cholera.
“There is a willage that side,” Unmesh said. “I am know this place.”
“You see?” Eden said. “We’d be all right. We could live here in a little hut.”
The driver knelt and struggled with the rusty nuts as Unmesh hectored him.
“I want him to hurry,” Eden whispered to me. “I want to go back to that wonderful hotel and make love to you. I want you to use me — just use my body. Do anything you want. Give me commands, make me your slave, tell me what to do.”
I turned to Unmesh and said, “Couldn’t he change that tire a bit faster?”
The following day, when I told Eden we were moving south to Madras, she said, “Do we have to?” in the small-girl’s voice that she affected to win me over.
But I had woken in a state of agitation, worrying that I had made so few notes. I said, “This isn’t a vacation, you know. I have to write an article. I haven’t done a thing so far.”
“Have I kept you from working?” Eden said, looking hurt.
I said nothing. I shrugged. It was my own fault for not insisting on being allowed time to myself.
She said, “You have plenty of time for working when I’m not with you. How long have we been together this time? Two or three weeks on the Cape and ten days here in India. And you’re surprised that I want to be with you?”
“Take it easy,” I said, because I knew what was coming.
“Your wife has you all the rest of the time. Months, years! And I have nothing!”
This was another subject that stifled me and made me silent.
“And you have the nerve to accuse me of keeping you from your work,” Eden said, in a poisonous voice.
She was backing towards the door.
“Okay,” she said. “You want to work? Go ahead and work!”
She snatched her handbag and went out banging the door so hard the wall shook. And another door banged shut in my head.
I sat down at the table by the window and stared at my blank notebook with my head in my hands. I doodled awhile, sketching in the margin, and then I tore out a page and wrote a letter that began Darling Jenny …
The Madras Express arrived just after midnight at Agra Station. Unmesh stayed with us on the platform. He looked mournful, more ragged than ever. He brought out his snapshot of his daughter Vanita, and a tiny picture of his wife, just her face, like a mug shot. He produced two bottles of Campa Cola, and two straws.
The driver stood behind Unmesh, urging us to drink. It was too late to ask him his name.
Eden said, “These guys are starting to get on my nerves.”
When the train began to pull out we lingered in the doorway next to the conductor, crowding the vestibule. Unmesh stood to attention. The driver did the same. They wagged their heads sadly at us.
“You come back, sah. I am taking you. I am showing you. I am know everything. I have good business then.” Unmesh looked at me imploringly and repeated, “Please. You come.”
We found our two-berth compartment and were rocked to sleep by the motion of the train.
In the morning I rolled over and saw Eden sitting gingerly at the edge of my berth, near my feet. I suspected that she had been sitting there for quite a while, waiting for me to wake.
“Good morning, darling.” And she kissed me.
I could not help but think that those words and that kiss were for lovers alone. Did married people say Good morning, darling, and kiss each other at the crack of dawn? I didn’t, and when I tried to picture it the effect was absurd and precious. Most people woke up and muttered Aw shit.
“Why are you smiling?”
I could not tell her why.
“I just remembered where we are,” I said. “Did you sleep all right?”
That was another lover’s question, and so was Can I get you anything?
“Like a log,” she said.
I pushed the windowshade up and was blinded for a moment, dazzled by the brightness — not only the sunny sky but the brilliant green of rice fields and tall slender palms. I turned away and saw Eden’s face — sallow, with lank hair and pale lips and swollen eyes in the same truthful and scorching light of the Indian plains. She had hardly slept; perhaps her little lie was her way of appeasing me.