I’m shy in front of the lovers. A darkness comes over me when I see them horsing around.
“It isn’t the money,” Charity says. Oh? I think. “He says he still loves me. Then he turns around and asks me for five hundred.”
What’s so strange about that, I want to ask. She still loves Eric, and Eric, red jumpsuit and all, is smart enough to know it. Love is a commodity, hoarded like any other. Mamet knows. But I say, “I’m not the person to ask about love.” Charity knows that mine was a traditional Hindu marriage. My parents, with the help of a marriage broker, who was my mother’s cousin, picked out a groom. All I had to do was get to know his taste in food.
It’ll be a long evening, I’m afraid. Charity likes to confess. I unpleat my silk sari — it no longer looks too showy — wrap it in muslin cloth and put it away in a dresser drawer. Saris are hard to have laundered in Manhattan, though there’s a good man in Jackson Heights. My next step will be to brew us a pot of chrysanthemum tea. It’s a very special tea from the mainland. Charity’s uncle gave it to us. I like him. He’s a humpbacked, awkward, terrified man. He runs a gift store on Mott Street, and though he doesn’t speak much English, he seems to have done well. Once upon a time he worked for the railways in Chengdu, Szechwan Province, and during the Wuchang Uprising, he was shot at. When I’m down, when I’m lonely for my husband, when I think of our son, or when I need to be held, I think of Charity’s uncle. If I hadn’t left home, I’d never have heard of the Wuchang Uprising. I’ve broadened my horizons.
Very late that night my husband calls me from Ahmadabad, a town of textile mills north of Bombay. My husband is a vice president at Lakshmi Cotton Mills. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth, but LCM (Priv.), Ltd., is doing poorly. Lockouts, strikes, rock-throwings. My husband lives on digitalis, which he calls the food for our yuga of discontent.
“We had a bad mishap at the mill today.” Then he says nothing for seconds.
The operator comes on. “Do you have the right party, sir? We’re trying to reach Mrs. Butt.”
“Bhatt,” I insist. “B for Bombay, H for Haryana, A for Ahmadabad, double T for Tamil Nadu.” It’s a litany. “This is she.”
“One of our lorries was firebombed today. Resulting in three deaths. The driver, old Karamchand, and his two children.”
I know how my husband’s eyes look this minute, how the eye rims sag and the yellow corneas shine and bulge with pain. He is not an emotional man — the Ahmadabad Institute of Management has trained him to cut losses, to look on the bright side of economic catastrophes — but tonight he’s feeling low. I try to remember a driver named Karamchand, but can’t. That part of my life is over, the way trucks have replaced lorries in my vocabulary, the way Charity Chin and her lurid love life have replaced inherited notions of marital duty. Tomorrow he’ll come out of it. Soon he’ll be eating again. He’ll sleep like a baby. He’s been trained to believe in turnovers. Every morning he rubs his scalp with cantharidine oil so his hair will grow back again.
“It could be your car next.” Affection, love. Who can tell the difference in a traditional marriage in which a wife still doesn’t call her husband by his first name?
“No. They know I’m a flunky, just like them. Well paid, maybe. No need for undue anxiety, please.”
Then his voice breaks. He says he needs me, he misses me, he wants me to come to him damp from my evening shower, smelling of sandalwood soap, my braid decorated with jasmines.
“I need you too.”
“Not to worry, please,” he says. “I am coming in a fortnight’s time. I have already made arrangements.”
Outside my window, fire trucks whine, up Eighth Avenue. I wonder if he can hear them, what he thinks of a life like mine, led amid disorder.
“I am thinking it’ll be like a honeymoon. More or less.”
When I was in college, waiting to be married, I imagined honeymoons were only for the more fashionable girls, the girls who came from slightly racy families, smoked Sobranies in the dorm lavatories and put up posters of Kabir Bedi, who was supposed to have made it as a big star in the West. My husband wants us to go to Niagara. I’m not to worry about foreign exchange. He’s arranged for extra dollars through the Gujarati Network, with a cousin in San Jose. And he’s bought four hundred more on the black market. “Tell me you need me. Panna, please tell me again.”
I change out of the cotton pants and shirt I’ve been wearing all day and put on a sari to meet my husband at JFK. I don’t forget the jewelry; the marriage necklace of mangalsutra, gold drop earrings, heavy gold bangles. I don’t wear them every day. In this borough of vice and greed, who knows when, or whom, desire will overwhelm.
My husband spots me in the crowd and waves. He has lost weight, and changed his glasses. The arm, uplifted in a cheery wave, is bony, frail, almost opalescent.
In the Carey Coach, we hold hands. He strokes my fingers one by one. “How come you aren’t wearing my mother’s ring?”
“Because muggers know about Indian women,” I say. They know with us it’s 24-karat. His mother’s ring is showy, in ghastly taste anywhere but India: a blood-red Burma ruby set in a gold frame of floral sprays. My mother-in-law got her guru to bless the ring before I left for the States.
He looks disconcerted. He’s used to a different role. He’s the knowing, suspicious one in the family. He seems to be sulking, and finally he comes out with it. “You’ve said nothing about my new glasses.” I compliment him on the glasses, how chic and Western-executive they make him look. But I can’t help the other things, necessities until he learns the ropes. I handle the money, buy the tickets. I don’t know if this makes me unhappy.
Charity drives her Nissan upstate, so for two weeks we are to have the apartment to ourselves. This is more privacy than we ever had in India. No parents, no servants, to keep us modest. We play at housekeeping. Imre has lent us a hibachi, and I grill saffron chicken breasts. My husband marvels at the size of the Perdue hens. “They’re big like peacocks, no? These Americans, they’re really something!” He tries out pizzas, burgers, McNuggets. He chews. He explores. He judges. He loves it all, fears nothing, feels at home in the summer odors, the clutter of Manhattan streets. Since he thinks that the American palate is bland, he carries a bottle of red peppers in his pocket. I wheel a shopping cart down the aisles of the neighborhood Grand Union, and he follows, swiftly, greedily. He picks up hair rinses and high-protein diet powders. There’s so much I already take for granted.
One night, Imre stops by. He wants us to go with him to a movie. In his work shirt and red leather tie, he looks arty or strung out. It’s only been a week, but I feel as though I am really seeing him for the first time. The yellow hair worn very short at the sides, the wide, narrow lips. He’s a good-looking man, but self-conscious, almost arrogant. He’s picked the movie we should see. He always tells me what to see, what to read. He buys the Voice. He’s a natural avant-gardist. For tonight he’s chosen Numéro Deux.
“Is it a musical?” my husband asks. The Radio City Music Hall is on his list of sights to see. He’s read up on the history of the Rockettes. He doesn’t catch Imre’s sympathetic wink.
Guilt, shame, loyalty. I long to be ungracious, not ingratiate myself with both men.
That night my husband calculates in rupees the money we’ve wasted on Godard. “That refugee fellow, Nagy, must have a screw loose in his head. I paid very steep price for dollars on the black market.”