Vine of Desire Read online

  and you said

  Thank you.

  Nine

  The inside of the Los Angeles International Airport is like a speeded-up filmstrip. Seasoned travelers hurry ahead, jackets folded over their arms, pulling carry-on bags behind them like well-trained pets. They glance at their watches, adjust their dark glasses, pick up a bottle of Evian or a USA Today, and sidestep a roadblock of eager Hare Krishnas without missing a beat. Stressed families with children strapped into strollers stutter to a stop by the flight-information monitors, matching the gate numbers on their tickets, then rush at the line snaking out of the McDonald’s. Bumping into strangers, they mumble an absent-minded apology. Only the children in their strollers, thumbs in mouths, have the leisure to observe everything.

  There’s a certain magic in airports. Loci of arrivals and departures, they make the air crackle and surge. Worries circle overhead in airports like disoriented birds. Possibilities also. In airports, the horizon is always golden—but eminently reachable. In a minute you might be pulled up into it, released of gravity. One can take on a new body here, shrug off old identities.

  What of those who are left behind, who must get into their cars with only the talk-show host on the radio for company, who must pick out the parking ticket from the messy glove compartment of their lives, and pay for it?

  Here’s a stranger a lot of people are bumping into because he has the disconcerting habit of stopping unexpectedly in the middle of a crowded walkway. He isn’t looking at anything, monitor or lighted sign or pointed arrow. He seems to know exactly where he’s going, even though it’s his first time at LAX. It’s just that he’s distracted, from time to time, by the enormity of his contemplations. It’s Sunil, who left Houston this morning before daybreak, who has lost a good amount of weight. This makes him appear taller, older, more distinguished. A touch of gray at his temples gives him a new air of thoughtfulness. He’s wearing his best suit, but under its elegance, his shoulders slump with disinterest, as though he’s remembered that there’s no one left in India to whom he has to prove his success. His eyes flick quickly through the crowd, do not rest for long on anything but the children. Correction: the girls. Older, he whispers to himself. Younger by two months. He is comparing their ages to Dayita. From time to time, he slips his hand into his coat pocket. Inside is a miniature tape recorder, complete with extra batteries. Sunil touches it lingeringly, the way an alcoholic might finger a bottle. Not yet, not yet. He’s been speaking into it much too often recently. It’s becoming a weakness, a new dependency, the last thing he needs in his life just when he’s peeling off the rinds of old attachments. He must focus, instead, on what he has to do to make himself happy. But what is that? All this time he thought he knew, but nowadays certainty keeps shimmering away from him like a mirage. Dull as old coffee, his eyes indicate a betrayal. Something had been promised him, some incredible adventure, if only he left the numbing mundaneness of his days with Anju. Where did it vanish?

  Passports checked, ticket stubs taken. It is the year of exiles returning home: Arafat to Gaza, Solzhenitsyn to Russia, and Sunil to a childhood he thinks of as an unhealed wound. He gives his seatmate a curt nod and leans into the window seat. He pulls a blanket over himself and instructs the stewardess that he is not to be wakened for meals. He has not taken off his jacket. The tape recorder presses against his hip, solid as a weapon. In his other pocket, earphones. Later, he will rewind the tape and listen to himself, trying to understand what he hears. Even when I’m airborne, kid, I feel gravity’s hooks in me. Safety announcements, now. In the unlikely event of oxygen shortage, says a cheerful voice, masks will be made available. For improved safety, you must put on your own mask before assisting someone else with theirs. Sunil frowns his disbelief. Sometimes—he knows this from experience—there’s only enough time to save one life.

  Four hundred and fifty-three miles north, Anju wakes heavily, in the old house she shares with three women, with the sense that something unpleasant looms ahead. Ah, she remembers it now, today she has to pack up Sunil’s—what do they call them?—personal effects. She wanders with groggy steps into the bathroom, which is crowded with wet towels, various articles of underwear hung up to dry, an overgrown wandering Jew that trails its furry purple leaves over a wicker shelf, a stack of Mother Jones that is in imminent danger of toppling over, and sundry toiletries whose labels proclaim they were never tested on animals. She turns on the shower and washes angrily in water that cannot seem to make up its mind to grow hot. Why hadn’t she just called the apartment manager and asked her to do it? She doesn’t owe that man one red cent. So why did she decide to put herself through this useless, masochistic exercise? She glowers at herself in the foggy mirror as she pulls on her oldest pair of jeans, a fraying work shirt. She’ll throw them away after she gets back from the apartment, the way one does with contaminated things.

  Fifty-six miles to the northeast, the postman rings the bell, hands Sudha a package too large to fit in the mailbox. When she sees the writing, she has to sit down, her knees feel so weak. Anju, she whispers. Anju, as though it is a prayer. But, inside, there are only things from other people. She recognizes Ashok’s handwriting, her mother’s dramatic slashes and loops. She doesn’t know the writing on the largest envelope. She tears it apart, and a tape falls with a clatter to the wooden floor. For Dayita, says the label. She stares at these objects, wanting to deny their claims on her. Maybe she could just throw them into the garbage compactor? But finally she gathers them up, her movements rigid in their economy. For a little while she made herself new under a new roof, among people innocent of her history. But the past has the habit of catching up with you, even in Berkeley. Now she must deal with it.

  Seven thousand eight hundred twenty-three miles to the southeast, another airport. Cacophony of coolies, blurred announcements over the loudspeaker in Bengali. A man extends his passport to be stamped. The officer looks at the name.

  “Going for a nice tourist visit, Ashokbabu?” he asks familiarly, leaning forward, giving the man a knowing wink. “Where do you plan to stay during your trip?” People are leaving the country all the time on visitor’s visas, never coming back. Not that he cares. It’s good riddance, as far as he’s concerned. Let the American government deal with the illegals. Still, he likes to hassle them a bit, maybe make a few extra rupees along the way. But this man stares back at him, arms crossed.

  “Yes,” he says with polite self-possession. “I think it’ll be a very nice visit. I’ll be staying with friends. Their address is filled out on the form already.” He holds the passport officer’s eye until the man shifts from one foot to the other. “Watch out you don’t get disappointed—or worse,” he says spitefully as he stamps the passport. “I hear San Francisco is full of AIDS and earthquakes.”

  She’s pacing up and down talking to herself, as is her habit when something upsets her so much that she can’t contain it inside the space of her body. Her mother’s letter with its accusations, which she tore into the tiniest strips she could and threw in the backyard, it was too poisonous to keep in the house. Yet why should she expect anything different? Hasn’t her mother spent her whole life putting her down, thinking the worst? The mother who couldn’t bring herself to ever love her—who blamed her own bad luck on the daughter whose birth coincided with the news of her widowhood. And Ashok’s kindness, his bland, infuriating goodness, like the milk-and-mashed-rice one feeds babies. What makes him think he can take her home? What makes him think his notion of home coincides with hers? What makes him so sure that she isn’t capable of immorality? She wants to do something wildly, scandalously immoral right now, just to show him. (Then it strikes her that perhaps she has done it already.) In any case, she hates them both, her mother and Ashok, though differently. For their presumption, their certainty that they know her—and what is best for her—better than she does. As though she were a callow teenager. Or a child like Dayita. And with that muttered phrase she realizes that she hasn’t heard Dayita in
quite a while.

  “Dayita!” she calls, “Dayu!” Calmly, then louder, trying to keep the panic from her voice. She checks the bathrooms first, hounded by that old fear of drowning. (But surely the walker would keep her safe?) Now the closets, even the shut ones. (Who knows if a child might toddle in somehow and close the … ?) She’s sweating, she clutches at the front of her T-shirt, her voice is close to tears. “Dayu, where are you? Oh God, why wasn’t I watching you?” The bedroom? (Maybe she was sleepy and rolled in there and fell asleep somehow?) No. Nothing in Myra’s bedroom either. She makes herself quiet before glancing through the old man’s door, no sense agitating him. Then he might need something, and she isn’t capable of dealing with that right now. There’s the great hump of his bedclothes—he’s often cold nowadays, even with the extra quilts and pillows she piles around him. She sees the back of his head, like some shriveled, fuzzy fruit. (But Dayita won’t be here, she never comes here by herself.) She grips the doorframe, dizzy with terror. What to do now? Should she unlock the front door and check the driveway (but that’s crazy) or the back porch, with (oh God) the narrow stone steps. Could Tree or Myra have forgotten (but they’re so careful about these things) and left the sliding door open? What if someone came in while she was too preoccupied to notice and—?

  Then she sees a slight movement on the other side of the bed, hidden, mostly, by the mound of blankets. Yes! She’s maneuvered her walker all the way around until she’s near the old man’s face. She’s standing there quietly, more quietly than Sudha ever thought possible for her, watching him sleep. Sudha slumps against the doorframe, then jerks upright, infuriated with relief. She’s going to teach that child a lesson so she’ll never scare her like that again! She’s going to—. She starts toward her, then stops.

  The old man isn’t asleep, as she thought. (It’s hard to tell, in any case. A lot of the time nowadays, he floats in an in-between state, negotiating the borders of unconsciousness.) As she watches, he shifts his hand awkwardly, his first voluntary movement in days. A few inches, slowly, along the bedsheet. It’s tough to work the awkward contraption of bone and ligament that his arm has become, to force the signals of will along the crumbling paths of synapses. He’s given up now. The hand limp on the edge of the bed. Dayita reaches out as far as she can, on tiptoe, it’s still too far, she can’t touch him, even with her stomach pressed against the walker’s tray. Then she gives a hop of sorts, and her fingers close around his thumb.

  At the doorway, Sudha holds still, barely allowing herself a breath. What will happen next? Dayita says something, the end of the word lifting, as in a question. Does the old man understand? Does he whisper an answer? The back of his head shows no movement; his hand, with its curled, yellowish nails, remains still. Dayita’s eyes are caught by the shiny knobs of the dresser. She wanders off, intent on new explorations, the wheels of the walker rumbling softly against the wood floor.

  Anju is uneasy. It started when she put the key to the apartment in the lock—the key that never fit right all these years and which they never changed, though, like many things, they intended to—and it turned smoothly, allowing her in. She had the sensation that there was someone inside—or maybe something—waiting for her. Had she been writing a letter to her father, she would have said, Not in a scary way, as in the horror movies, when the music goes high and fast and the lights turn funny and the camera moves jerkily around corners. Still, I didn’t like it. But Anju no longer writes to the dead. There was a time for that, but now it’s over. Now it’s the living that she must contend with.

  The air inside the apartment is damp and stale. It is like being lowered into a well. She flings open the drapes, Anju who is learning all over again to be practical, to battle the amorphous world of fear and loneliness with actions that are small, precise, geometric. She up-ends the cardboard packing boxes to reinforce them. The plastic packing tape makes a tormented sound, like a prolonged crack, each time she tears off a strip. She looks around for something to cover the sound with. The TV? No, that’s his territory. She turns on the radio, not caring which station it is. Let music be my shroud.

  First, his books from the family room shelf, engineering and business texts from graduate school. Software manuals. She’s sure they’re all out of date. He should have thrown them out ages ago. It chagrins her that he should want them to go with him into his new life when he doesn’t want—But she cuts off that thought. Today she’s only a body. A body with two hands and two feet, here for a precise, bodily purpose. Lift. Bend. Stack. Climb on a chair. Old copies of Business Week and Money. She throws them with vengeance into box after box. Let him pay the extra storage. Why, still, the feeling that someone’s watching her? She’s been to all the rooms, looked in the closets, even checked, like a foolish old spinster, under the dusty beds. She sees the calendar Sudha has forgotten on the kitchen wall, pulls it off, throws it in. She’s had enough of warnings and advice. What more can happen to her? The newscaster announces another suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, a bus blown up this time, killing twenty-one and wounding forty-five. Several of the dead are children. Anju recognizes this as a tragedy far worse than what she is undergoing. She pauses in her packing to try to imagine how the parents must feel, the depth of their distress. But her capacity for compassion has shrunk, somehow. Now she cannot relate to anything beyond the distraught confines of her own skin.

  The bedroom now, still smelling of his Claiborne Sport. Nonsense, she thinks, it can’t be. But when she opens the bathroom cabinet, there’s the frosted glass bottle, carelessly capped. She’d bought it at Macy’s for some occasion, it no longer matters what. She’s not going to think of why he left it behind, she’s not going to let that get to her. She throws it into a box half filled with shirts. Let it reek into them. Fold, pile, close, tape. The empty hangers make a clattering, skeletal sound. The closet’s just about done, only some financial papers on the top shelf. She pulls up a chair, climbs on. Bank statements. Prospectuses of old investments. In the back, Penthouses parading women splayed in poses that make parentheses of distaste appear at the corners of her mouth. She’s not surprised, though. There’s nothing he can do anymore to surprise her. She throws the last armload into the box and draws a breath of relief. There, her duty’s done.

  Then she sees it spiraling down, leaflike. A photograph. It must have been pushed under the stack of magazines. And though she’s promised herself she won’t look at anything, no more than if she were a paid packer, she can’t help it. It’s black-and-white, unexpectedly. Not the photo of a person, as she’d feared. (Okay, she might as well be honest, not Sudha’s photograph.) Its lines and striations confound her for a moment. Then she remembers. It’s the ultrasound photo from when she was pregnant. There’s the lighted blip, like a cartoon star, that had been her son. Sunil had got rid of everything else before she came back from the hospital, the baby clothes, the car seat and stroller they’d bought from Babies ‘R’ Us, the books she’d picked up over the months, browsing through secondhand bookstores. Mother Goose, Goodnight Moon. The fataka Tales she’d had her mother send from India. Why this photo, then? Was it merely an oversight? Or is this what’s been waiting for her, a clue into that impossible, unfathomable man who makes her clench with rage every time she thinks of him? Except not now, she’s cold now, all that wind coming in from the windows she opened. There’s a commercial for a car dealership on the radio. The best deal you can imagine and then some. Anju holds the photo. Is it a message? But perhaps the dead do not send messages; it is only the living who imagine them. A song comes on, a woman’s voice bittersweet as grenadine. Love is a shoestring. Why must there be so many songs about love? Though this one is more accurate than most. It’s only a matter of time, Anju knows, before love comes undone, its unraveled edges dangling, causing you to trip and fall on your face.

  She shivers, she’s always been cold in this apartment, all these years to which she must now attach the adjective wasted because of his leaving. Even in her new place she’s
cold (is it her karma then, coldness?), the drafty old house she shares with her women friends. Though of course they’re wonderful people and she’s thankful to them in the way one is to people who have saved your life, a grudging, shamed thankfulness, tinted with the desire to get away. She recognizes, suddenly, the fact that she will never love them. Perhaps she will never love anyone again. Her feet are cold, her backbone, even the nubs of her elbows, even her armpits. Has she been warm even once since she left India, her childhood bedroom which, in her treacherously selective memory, is always bathed in sunshine the color of dahlias? Anju sits on a brown smudge of carpet in an unraveled household and thinks of the flowers in her mother’s garden. She is still holding the black-and-white picture, the only proof that a child was ever a part of her. Prem? Prem, are you there?