My Nine Lives Read online

  He asked about the years I had spent on my own travels. He was particularly interested in my Buddhist period. He himself was of course a complete agnostic, that was the way he had grown up among those whose mission it had been to overthrow everything. I said that had been my mission too, to overthrow the nihilism they had left us with. “But a nun,” he said, smiling. Although I had long ago given up that ambition, I defended myself. I said that having started on a path, I wanted to follow it as far as it would take me—I had more to say but stopped when I saw the way he was looking at me. His lips were twitching. I didn’t really expect him to take me seriously; it wasn’t only that I was so many years younger than he, I suspected that he took none of us seriously. He even seemed to have the right to be amused by us, as though he were a much wiser person. I don’t know whether this impression derived from the fact that he was a great artist, or from the mixture of the Talmud and Marxist idealism that I thought of as his background.

  Since it seemed to take longer and longer for his sleeping pills to have effect, our conversations became more protracted. He wanted to know about my marriage, a subject that I disliked talking about except to say that it had been a mistake. He drew me out about the nineteen-year-old boy who had been the mistake. I admitted that what had attracted me to him was his frailty, which I had interpreted as vulnerability (later he turned out to be hard as nails). It had started when we had bathed together in the Ganges and I saw his frail shoulder blades—it was the first time I had seen him without his robe. “His robe?” Yakuv asked; so then I had to admit that he too had been in the religious life and had been planning to become a monk. I glanced at Yakuv, and yes, his lips were now twitching so much that he could not prevent himself from laughing out loud. I laughed too, maybe ruefully, and he pinched my cheek in his usual way. Only it wasn’t as usual, and that was the first time I stayed with him all night. Although for the rest of the tour we still took separate rooms, we usually stayed in his, except when he was very tired after a concert and then he said I had better sleep in my own little nun’s bed. But mostly he wasn’t tired at all but with plenty of energy left in his short and muscular body. His chest and back and shoulders were covered in grey fur; only his pubic hair had remained pitch black.

  He gave me no indication of what to tell or not to tell at home, but it turned out to be easier than expected. Leonora and Kitty were astonished at the way I had stuck it out with him. All their questions were to do with the practical side of my duties—how I had managed to make him catch planes on time and tidy him up for his performances. I gladly supplied them with answers, adding an amusing anecdote or two which made them clap their hands in joyful recognition. They had been there before me. Soon everything settled down. Yakuv and I continued to play dominoes, Leonora fulfilled his daily needs, and he had another home in Kitty’s loft where he kept his furniture and his other piano. Kitty visited us often and she and Leonora met to exchange confidences in their favorite Palm Court rendezvous. They still did not invite me to join them, considering me too young and immature to understand.

  However, I understood more than I had done. For instance, I realized that when Yakuv was shut away in his room and there was only the sound of his piano, he was not as oblivious of us as I had always thought. Somehow he was tied to us as we were to him. My mother and aunt never realized that I too was now part of the web that bound them. They took it for granted—and it was a relief to them—that I would accompany him on all his tours. In New York, there was no sign of what went on between us on these tours. Only occasionally, during meals, he slipped off one of the velvet slippers my mother had bought for him and placed his feet on mine under the table. While he was doing this, he kept on eating as usual with his head lowered over the plate, shoveling food into his mouth with tremendous speed.

  I was never sure—I’m still not sure—about my father. It was impossible to tell if he suspected anything: he was so disciplined, so used to accommodating himself to difficult situations and handling them not for his own satisfaction but for those he loved. Every time I packed my suitcase to go on tour with Yakuv, Rudy came into my room. I said, “It’s all right: I like it.” He continued to watch me in silence while I happily flung clothes into my suitcase. At last he said, “And your writing?” He sounded so disappointed that I tried to think of something to make him feel better. I said I was continuing my attempts at writing, and in fact, inspired by Yakuv’s performances, I had begun to write poetry. I knew that for my father poetry and music were the pinnacle of human achievement, so perhaps he really was consoled and not only pretending to be so.

  Yakuv outlived Rudy by many years; he also outlived Leonora and Kitty. He became a wizened little old man, more temperamental than ever, his hair, now completely white, standing up as he ran his hands through it in fury. He continued his tours till the end and became more and more famous, people lining up not only to hear but also to see him leaping around like a little devil on his piano stool. He made many recordings and was particularly admired for his blend of intellectual rigor and sensual passion. When he died, he left his royalties to me, as well as quite a lot of other business to take care of. Of course I have all his recordings and often listen to them, so he is always with me. I no longer write poetry but have returned to prose and have published several novels and collections of stories. These are mostly about the relations between men and women, which appears to have been the subject that has impressed itself most deeply on my heart and mind. I keep coming back to it, trying again and again to render my mother’s and my aunt’s experience, as I observed it, and my own. This account is one more such attempt.

  3

  Gopis

  MY FATHER had been a successful publicist, and during his last illness, I took over his business. I have been very lucky; I know that the girls who work for me would like nothing better than to become as I am now. Besides his office, I have inherited my father’s apartment in a doorman building on the Upper East Side. My social life is mostly confined to my clients, though occasionally I have dinner in a neighborhood restaurant with a friend at which we exchange confidences. I used to have a lot to confide, but in recent years I have been listening more than talking. That is one indication of how things have changed for me. Looking back at the past, I’m astonished by my former self; though this would be nothing to the way my former self would be astonished by my present one.

  When I first met her, Lucia was twenty years old. She didn’t have a job or an apartment of her own, nor any ambition for either; all she seemed to want—as I did at her age, twenty years earlier—was to go to India. But it was far from there that I met her: at one of those public relations charity dinners that I have to attend as part of my job. It was the usual sort of affair where tables for $50,000 each had been bought by some corporation with the careless generosity of a tax write-off. The only reason Lucia was there was to fill up one of the places at my client’s table. She had been brought by my secretary, a former room-mate of Lucia’s, who had since moved far ahead and seemed inclined to patronize her. Only this was difficult because Lucia did not appreciate the occasion, what appeared to her friend to be its glamor. To lend star value to the event, a famous Hollywood actor had been invited as the guest of honor. His presence was like an electric charge. Everything scintillated—he himself of course, in his fame; and the room, which was a ballroom in a hotel with walls mirrored and silvered and a ceiling that hung down in a swath of silver clouds. The women glittered with their jewels and their newly blonde hair, and the men glittered too, with polished bald heads and velvet lapels. Faces were turned toward the top table where the actor radiated glorious sun. There were speeches, jokes generating obedient laughter, references in respectfully lowered voices to the good cause of the charity, and then at last panegyrics (some respectfully humorous) for the actor met by cheers and a thunder of applause.

  Lucia stood out in not even pretending to listen to the speeches or focus her desire on the star. Instead she pushed the food around
on her plate—food that to me is always symbolic of these occasions, as dead as the speeches and the laughter. By contrast, the waiters serving it are very much alive—young men, most of them out of work actors, greatly in need of the evening’s wages and therefore as alert as for a performance on stage. I noticed that Lucia sometimes looked up to exchange glances with the handsome young waiter serving her, and these seemed to me the only true flashes of human intercourse taking place that evening.

  She was wearing a flimsy little flowered dress, which may have had the label of a famous designer or have come off a rack in the street. She had long hair, some strands chopped off and others dyed in a mixture of colors. She was probably the only woman there who had not been to a beauty parlor that day—apart from myself, that is, for it is my policy not to dress up too much. It isn’t my job to be noticed but to have others noticed, photographed and publicized. It may have been this fact that drew Lucia’s glance toward me occasionally; after some whispered questions to her friend, she suddenly leaned across the table, her attention and her eyes at last alight, and called: “Diane, have you been to India?” It was the beginning of our friendship.

  She was learning Indian dance from a woman teacher who had recently returned to India to be with her teacher. She wanted Lucia to follow her, and of course Lucia was dying to go. But she had to reckon with her parents—not so much her mother, who was too engrossed in yet another relationship to have time to worry about Lucia, but her father. It was he who had to finance the trip, and Lucia, he said, was not responsible enough to take it. “He can talk,” Lucia told me—this was over a little dinner in a neighborhood restaurant to which I was treating her. She leaned across the table, her multi-colored hair dangling over it, along with her chains of oversized colored stones. “Every time I turn around there’s a new girl friend, and all of them younger than I.” She laughed with a dry ironic sound which was at once swallowed up in her usual fervor: “Talk to him, Diane.”

  This was the role she had assigned to me: to talk to her father and convince him that, despite exposure to India, it was possible to remain perfectly sane and make money in business. “If he meets you just once, he’ll know that it’ll be all right, that I’ll be all right.” It made me laugh—her assumption as well as my own feeling of ambiguity about it. She told me that I would be an antidote to her dance teacher whom she had introduced to her father. It had been a mistake. The teacher, middleaged but painted and dressed in flamboyant colors, talked with a dancer’s passion and incessant movements, her hands fluttering in strange gestures, her eyebrows—dyed pitch-black like her hair—emphasizing her eyes, which had a double existence through being encircled by kohl. While she spoke, she kept touching the father’s face and hands to convey the philosophy and beauty of Indian dance. She failed—“Daddy is such a stick”—but, not realizing it, kept phoning him. “Get that bitch off my back!” he had yelled at Lucia who recalled this with the comment: “Of course it would have been different if she had been a nineteen-year-old blonde . . . Or you, Diane. He’ll listen to you.”

  She continued to call me and visit me at home with little gifts of pretty rings and bracelets she had picked up at street fairs. She fitted them on me, then stood back and admired me so much that she had to kiss me—not only because of what she wanted from me, though that too, but because I was her friend. Finally, there was no way I could not meet her father; except that now something happened that made us both change course. This was the unexpected, unexplained appearance at my door of my Indian past: Vijay, whom I had known, and more than known, all those years ago. He came with the huge suitcases that Indians bring abroad to fill up with shopping for the return journey; and he wore the sort of shiny suit with wide flapping legs that he had always worn, and new shoes that he took off as soon as possible. It appeared he had no money for a hotel, so naturally he stayed with me. We hadn’t seen each other for longer than either of us cared to say—but “You haven’t changed at all, Diane, no, not one bit. I’m not telling you a lie,” he said, looking at me with the innocent eyes he made when telling a particularly outrageous lie.

  So the next time Lucia came to claim my help and friendship, she found him ensconced in the center of my largest and most comfortable sofa, helping himself to the contents of my liquor cabinet. He was completely relaxed and at home, in a muslin kurta and his knees apart under his cotton lungi. These flimsy garments showed off his huge bulk; he had kept the studs of his kurta open to an expanse of chest with a forest of hair that I remembered as black but was now mixed with grey. Less adept than he at telling lies, I could not say that he had not changed: he had become bloated with drink and age; and yet—and yet—I could see that he impressed Lucia as he had impressed me at her age. Of course there was the fact that he was Indian—tremendously, overwhelmingly Indian—to enchant her now as it had me then. He was different from the men one had known; more, somehow, and not only in bulk. And there was his easy familiarity, which made him greet Lucia as though he had expected her, was glad to see her, and felt privileged to be her host. He poured a glass freely for her from the vodka bottle he had already half finished; and laughed uproariously when he heard she was a teetotaller, and a vegetarian—“Like you,” he said, turning to me, with difficulty, for his trunk was too heavy for easy turning. “Like I used to be,” I corrected him, having long since abandoned my program of inner purification. But Lucia was still intent on this ideal, for which, like me, she hoped to find fulfillment in India; and maybe also in Vijay in whom she saw some sort of physical embodiment of India. And besides, he was regarding her with an appreciation to which any woman could thrill and respond; she may not have noticed that he was showing the same toward me. It was a trick he had of making one feel unique and uniquely desired. Or it may not even have been a trick but something he truly felt: the love of women, all women, indiscriminately bestowed by Krishna, by the god of love himself.

  I had first met him in his shop in New Delhi. It may be odd to think of the god of love as a shopkeeper, but that was what he was, what his ancestors had been; it was his caste—shopkeepers, moneylenders. He had a crockery shop, a large, well-stocked establishment taken over from his grandfather and his father. He was very much the proprietor in charge, far more knowledgeable about every item in stock and its current price than the assistants whom he sent scurrying around. Yet although he gave the impression of belonging to the place, and it belonging to him, there was also a sense that he extended into other, wider regions. It was not clear to me, and never became so, what these might be. He certainly seemed to have more money than one would expect to be generated from his shop—he only had to put his hand in his pocket to draw out bundles of notes, some held by rubber bands, others loose so that they dropped to the ground. He also appeared to have many connections, which made it easy for him to fix anything I asked for: a ticket to the Republic Day Parade, a seat on an overbooked train. It was thrilling to think of a secret life stretching into the recesses of New Delhi politics, or even into a criminal underworld. And maybe there were several secret lives, a whole tangle of them, of which I too constituted one strand.

  He certainly kept me secret; he could hardly do otherwise, for he was not only a respected businessman, a member of the chamber of commerce, but also of a large extended family, with a wife and many children. I never met any of them but I did see them—this was when I had become so infatuated with him that I lurked around places he might be, not to spy but simply to get a glimpse of him. He lived in a large pastel-pink house he had built for his family, with little balconies inspired by Indian miniatures and a large concrete porch copied from some architectural magazine. Several imported cars stood outside and I saw him shoo his family into them—a horde of little boys and girls shining with satin and oil, and stout women slow-moving in their heavy brocades and weighty jewels. They often drove to one of the big hotels; and here too I peered in at them, in the dining room done up like the Ajanta caves where they sat among dishes overflowing with pilaos and tandoo
ri chickens, surrounded by a posse of waiters whom he tipped out of the cornucopia of bank notes bulging in his pockets.

  He never took me into any such place, or anywhere at all where we might be seen. I had rented a room in a guest-house known to young Europeans and Americans traveling on very little funds. It was not far from his shop—in fact, around the corner in the service lane on to which several restaurants backed with their refuse and their waiters squatting to smoke or urinate. I had wandered into his shop to buy a water mug, and it amused him that I couldn’t afford its price. He said something to his assistant who protested, so he said it again and I realized he was saying, “Give it to her.” He wrapped it himself and soon we were in conversation. He seemed familiar with the guest-house where I was staying—how? Had he visited other girls there, pale wanderers like myself? He came to see me that same evening when he had shut up his shop, and after that it was the place where we mostly met.

  It is easy to see how I came to love him so much: my age, my aloneness, my openness to travel, to adventure, to India. And he: handsome, easy, experienced, some twenty years older than I. He would never admit his age outright but—“Guess,” and then he would laugh and say, “Wrong.” He was still saying it to Lucia now: “Guess,” and out of politeness she would guess many years less than he could possibly be; and then he would laugh as before and say: “Right.” He must have been in his late fifties by now and he looked it. Grossly overweight, he would breathe heavily and groan when he had to get up out of a chair. But his face remained more or less as it had been, his expression open as a boy’s, receptive as a lover’s. He drank too much; he had always needed alcohol, he used to come to my room with a bottle of whisky that he tried to make me drink with him out of the mug he had given me. But I remained at that time staunchly non-alcoholic, though I did everything else he wanted.