He stood in the doorway, contrite, awkward. She spoke without looking up from the page. He sat down beside her, his back against the wall. She leaned toward him, just a little, so that their shoulders touched. Her arms were crossed, her hands hugging her shoulders. She stretched out one finger and touched his arm.
“If you smoked cigarettes,” she said, “we would have something in common.”
Cut.
“The following day,” he says. It is the following day, a day in the present tense. “Here we are on the following day,” he says. “Tomorrow, one of the two impossible days. Here we are and it is tomorrow.”
“I am a free spirit,” she says, twisting her mouth dismissively, nothing special, her mouth says. “But you are everywhere in chains. You have inner voices to which you don’t listen, emotions boiling up in you which you suppress, and disturbing dreams you ignore.”
“I never dream,” he says, “except sometimes in another language, in Technicolor, but they are always peaceful dreams. The rolling sea, the grandeur of the Himalayas, my mother smiling down at me, and green-eyed tigers.”
“I hear you,” she says. “When you are not snoring, often you howl, but it is more like an owl than a wolf. Who…who…who…that’s how you are. This is the question you can’t answer.”
They are walking on the Bowery and the pavement and sidewalk around them are ripped apart by construction work. A jackhammer starts pounding and it is impossible to hear anyone speak. He turns to her and mouths silently, really not saying anything, just opening and shutting his face. The jackhammer stops for a minute.
“That’s my answer,” he says.
Cut.
They are making love. It is still tomorrow, still the afternoon, but they are both in the mood and see no reason to wait until dark. However, they both close their eyes. Sex has many solitary aspects even when there is another person present, whom you love and wish to please. And seeing the other is no longer required once the lovers are well practiced in their favorite ways. Their bodies by now are educated in each other, each learning to move in ways that accommodate the other’s natural movement. Their mouths know how to find each other. Their hands know what to do. There are no rough edges; their lovemaking has been smoothed.
There is a way it most often goes, a difficulty that usually presents itself. He has a problem achieving and maintaining an erection. He finds her immensely attractive, he protests as much at the moment of each failure, each softening, and she accepts it and embraces him. Sometimes he does succeed for a moment and attempts to enter her but then at the moment of penetration softens again and his flaccid sex squashes up against hers. It does not matter because they have found many other ways to succeed. Her attraction to him is so great that at his first touch she approaches climax and so by touching and kissing, by the use of the secondary organs (hands, lips, tongue), he brings her to orgasm until she is laughing in spent delight. Her pleasure becomes his and often it isn’t even necessary for him to ejaculate. He is satisfied by satisfying her. They become more adventurous with each other as things progress, a little rougher, and this too is very pleasurable to them both. She thinks, but does not say, that the usual difficulty with young men is that they become hard at once and repeatedly but, lacking patience, self-control, or courtesy, they are done two minutes later. These long hours of lovemaking are infinitely more pleasurable. What she says is, and she has thought a long time before saying it: It’s as if we are two women. It feels so safe, so abandoned, both. The second because of the first.
There. She has said it. It’s out in the open. He is lying on his back staring at the ceiling. For a long moment he does not reply. Then:
Yeah, he says.
Another long silence.
Yeah what, she asks quietly, her hand on his chest, her fingers caressing him.
Yeah, he said. I think about that. I think about it a lot.
Flashback. Circular wipe.
It’s the year Michael Jackson played Bombay. Mumbai. Bombay. On the TV news men in pink and saffron turbans are at the airport, jigging frantically to the music of dhols. A large fabric sign hanging in the arrivals hall crying out NAMASTE MICHAEL NAMASTE FROM AIRPORTS AUTHORITY OF INDIA. And MJ in black hat and red blazer with gold buttons applauding the dancers. You are my special love, India, he says. May God always bless you. The boy D twelve years old in his bedroom, watching the news, teaching himself to moonwalk, mouthing the words of the famous songs, he has all the lyrics down, one hundred percent. Great day! And then the next morning sitting in the car with the driver on his way to school. They come down off the hill onto Marine Drive and there’s a traffic jam by Chowpatty Beach. And suddenly there he is, MJ himself, walking among the stationary cars! Omigod omigod omigod omigod omigod. But no, of course it’s not Michael Jackson. It’s a hijra. A hijra like a giant Michael wearing Michael’s black hat and red coat with gold buttons. Cheap imitations of. How dare you. Take those off. Those don’t belong to you. The hijra with right hand touching hat brim doing pencil turns amid the jammed traffic, clutching at his her its groin. The hijra has a battered boombox, it’s playing “Bad,” the hijra with white face-paint and red lipstick mouthing along. It’s disgusting. It’s irresistible. It’s terrifying. How can it be allowed. The hijra is right up against his car window now, the young milord on his way to Cathedral School, dance with me, young master, dance with me. Shouting against the rolled-up window, pressing red lips against the glass. Hato, hato, the driver shouts, waving an arm, get away, and the hijra laughs, a high contemptuous falsetto laugh, and walks away into the sun.
Circular wipe.
When you showed me the statue of Ardhanarishvara I blurted out, from Elephanta Island, and then I shut my mouth. But yes, I know him-her from long ago. It is the coming together of Shiva and Shakti, the Being and Doing forces of the Hindu godhead, the fire and the heat, in the body of this single double-gendered deity. Ardha, half, nari, woman, ishvara, god. Male one side, female the other. I have been thinking about her-him since boyhood. But after I saw the hijra I was afraid. Everybody was a little afraid of hijras, a little revolted, and so I was too. I was fascinated as well, that is true, but I was also afraid of the fact that I was fascinated. What did they have to do with me, these women-men? Whatever I heard about them made me shudder. Especially Operation. They call it that, Operation, in English. They take alcohol or opium but no anesthetic. The deed is done by other hijras, not a doctor, a string tied around the genitals to get a clean cut, and then a long curved knife slashing down. The raw area allowed to bleed, then cauterized with hot oil. In the days afterwards, as the wound heals, the urethra is kept open by repeated probing. In the end, a puckered scar, resembling, and usable as, a vagina. What did that have to do with me, nothing, I had no fondness for my genitals but this, this, ugh.
What did you say just then, she interrupted. No fondness for your genitals.
I didn’t say that. That is not a thing I said.
Cut.