A Dead Hand (29 page)

"This is a pleasant surprise." He clawed his cuff from his wrist and looked at his watch. "We really should go."

Just the thought of her in her vault sensitized me, made me tremulous. And the Calcutta heat helped too. The day was stifling, the humidity like a cloak, but in the way it slowed me and made me breathless, it was like a foretaste of desire, the same heaviness, the same pulse of blood in my head, a flush of eagerness that I could taste—as though right before a great risky leap—and a dampness on my skin and eyes.

As Rajat talked, more urgently than I'd seen him before, we ambled to the street, where I hailed a taxi. When one pulled up, we got in and Rajat gave directions. After that he fell silent. He began gnawing a finger in misery, his knuckle under his nose.

"Won't she mind this? Our arriving together?"

His eyes, set close, gave him the look of a rodent contemplating cheese on a tray—eager yet hyperalert, the same nibble and the twitching nostrils. Yet his tight smile made him the fidgety embodiment of contradiction.

"Not at all. She of course likes you immensely."

"And she likes you too, Rajat."

"I fear she finds me loquacious," he said. "Even if we arrive together she won't suspect us of plotting."

This unexpected remark surprised me, because it seemed exactly what she might think: I had never arrived at the Lodge with him before. But that was at the periphery of my mind. I was concentrated on one thing, Mrs. Unger's vault: the perfumes, the lamps, her hands, her body slipping against the silk of her sari.

Rajat spoke sharply to the taxi driver.

The man threw up his hands. "Traffic. Too many traffic."

"Are you telling him to hurry?" I asked.

"Don't you want to see Ma?" he said.

I said nothing because I didn't want to be quoted; he seemed to be provoking me. He seemed odder, fussier in the taxi than he had seemed in the Hastings, not drinking his tea.

"Ah." He sighed with relief as the traffic began to move. I knew the feeling. I was relieved too as the taxi coursed through Alipore. I watched for the wall, the gateway, the fountain. Mrs. Unger, at the front door, turned abruptly at the sound of the taxi on the gravel driveway.

"Dear, dear boy," she said to Rajat, and to me, "I've been meaning to call you. You absolutely read my mind."

She embraced him, and at first he stiffened at her touch. Then she patted him and stroked his arms, and as she did so, he relaxed and sighed and surrendered.

"What have you boys been doing?" she asked, and when Rajat didn't answer, she said teasingly to him, "Madam has gone all silent."

Rajat seemed uneasy yet watchful, as he had in the taxi, glancing around, smiling in apprehension. We were standing at the top of the outer staircase, on the carved porch, with its plump balusters, the cracked and ornate entry, chunks of plaster missing from the stair treads, revealing old red brick beneath, like a deep gash, the same raw red, the whiteness surrounding it, like flesh, the Lodge like a noble wounded body.

"I didn't realize you had guests." This was spoken by a woman exiting the Lodge, who took me by surprise. She left the front entrance, taking a gingerly step that made her seem old, the chowkidar holding the door open, Balraj saluting. Now she approached Mrs. Unger.

"These are friends," Mrs. Unger said. "They're family."

The woman—thin, middle-aged, auntyish—was obviously American. She looked like a big insect, bug-eyed in large sunglasses, in an expensive, fitted summer dress. She frowned in the heat from beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, dabbing her face with a hanky. Over her shoulder was slung a woven bag, not Indian but designer-stylish. She had thin, pale, bony arms and was brisk, in a hurry, in contrast to the child plodding next to her.

She held the hand of this dazed-looking girl in a starched dress and white ankle socks and black shoes—a classier version of the school uniform of the children at the Lodge. I smiled at her, and looking closer I thought I recognized the child. But all Mrs. Unger's children seemed memorable. They were unlike Indian children with parents; they were street children in a house, always seeming somewhat pent-up, trapped, and a little reckless, with searching eyes, tidy in simple uniforms.

This child was almost certainly the little girl who had ridden back to the house with us the day we'd visited the Kali temple and what Rajat had called "the monthly intake."

"I know your name," I said to the little girl. "I just can't think of it at the moment."

The woman said sharply, "We haven't got all day for you to think of it."

I smiled at her rudeness, then turned away. "What's your name, sweetie?" I asked the little girl. But she stepped sideways as though I was menacing her.

"Any more questions?" the woman said, her clumsy sarcasm snarling her delivery. She kept her mouth open, showing me her teeth.

Taken aback, I stared at her, wondering if I should give her a rude answer.

It was a hot afternoon. The woman seemed irritable and hurried. There was an air of confusion and distress that short-timers and foreigners had in Calcutta: a posture, a scowl of discomfort, of actual suffering. She had that look. I said nothing because Mrs. Unger was there, as always a calming presence.

But it was an odd scene: staring Rajat with somewhat triumphant glistening eyes, Mrs. Unger in a gorgeous sari, the cracked porch, the tense, offhand American woman in her big sunglasses with the spittle of "Any more questions?" on her lips, the stunned-looking child who I'd almost recognized, and the brittle echo of "Madam has gone all silent" directed at Rajat. And I was standing uneasily because I'd come unannounced. All of us on the broken stairs of the grand Lodge, and the noise of traffic outside the gate, the yelling children inside the house, the great strangling banyan tree with its roots showing everywhere, in some places seeming to tear the house apart and in other places holding the bricks together with the fingers and claws of its tangled roots.

"I'll be in touch," the woman said. She continued down the stairs and into a waiting car, one of those shiny new hotel cars with a logo on the door and curtained windows and an obsequious driver. The little girl, bewildered, glanced back at Mrs. Unger with a puzzled face.

"I know that kid," I said.

Mrs. Unger smiled. She didn't help me. She hadn't explained the woman or introduced us. Instead, as the car drew away, she sidled next to me and squeezed my arm.

"Charlie's in the office," Mrs. Unger said to Rajat. "He'll be thrilled to see you." After he left, she said to me, "I'm glad you came. I want to get my hands on you." She spoke in a low voice, her cheek on my shoulder. I got a whiff of her perfume, which was heavy, like a secretion of bodily warmth.

It was what I wanted to hear. I resisted kissing her. She seldom kissed, but I wanted badly to kiss her, to throw my arms around her for making me happy.
I want to get my hands on you
was a male fantasy—my fantasy anyway. It was what I needed, the mothering that had gotten me back to work on "A Dead Hand," a thinly fictionalized portrait of Mrs. Unger in Calcutta.

Children were playing in the outer rooms and some were singing nearby. The odors of cooking food, the slap of bare feet on the wooden floor, the high-pitched laughter. And then, as she shut the doors behind us, Mrs. Unger led me deeper into the house and down to the spa level, which smelled of incense, petals floating in the fountain, and in the damp leafy garden just outside, elephant-eared plants and trailing, gripping roots of the big banyan tree.

"I came to the house while you were away," I said. "I couldn't resist."

Although Mrs. Unger was the model of coolness and poise, I detected disapproval, a shrinking of her being.

"When you were in Mirzapur."

She laughed very hard at that. "I was nowhere near Mirzapur."

"It doesn't matter. I don't even know where it is."

"Neither do I," she said.

"I had a breakthrough with the Rajat mystery," I said. But the only reason I said that was to cover my surprise and somehow (so I thought) save her from embarrassment. I suspected, for the first time since I'd met her, that she was not telling me the truth. Yet she had spoken without any hesitation.

In her aromatic vault, on the table, she worked on me, but something in me refused to cooperate. I felt like clay. Doubt, misgiving, made my flesh inert. I wanted to give my whole being to her, yet a wariness kept me back. All the little hints, her not introducing me to the woman with the child, the woman's sharp retort, my recognizing the child and not remembering her name, Mrs. Unger not reminding me. She had been holding back.

I had never noticed this before, but then I had never visited unannounced. The suddenness produced this disharmony, and it probably hadn't helped that I'd arrived with Rajat. He had seemed to know something I didn't know. I had doubted him, and now I began to doubt myself.

Mrs. Unger's hands swept over me, pressing, smoothing, finding my muscles and the spaces between them. I mentioned earlier that Mrs. Unger's tantric massage was not a sexual act but rather the drawn-out promise of one, foreplay as an end, always trembling on the brink. This produced a tremulous ecstasy that I could compare only to a rapture of strangulation: I was suffocated in a delirious choking as she ran her magic fingers over me.

But today it wasn't working. I could not pretend that it was. Instead of being relaxed by her touch, or aroused, I ached with apprehension.

"You're resisting."

"No—I like it." But I knew I sounded insincere.

"I can tell by the position of your toes."

"Maybe it's my stomach. I ate some odd-tasting bhajjis for lunch."

"Blame the bhajjis," she said. "You need to taste something sweeter." She let go of me. "Get up, slowly. You'll be a little dizzy, so be careful."

She helped me off the table and steered me to the shower. The light was on in the shower, and it must have been bright because when I was done and I reentered the massage room, I could barely see. The taper burning in the dish of oil gave no light. I could not see Mrs. Unger anywhere.

I felt my way to the table and touched her foot, then traced my hand up her naked leg. She was lying face-up on the table, and now I could see that her head was tilted, her back arched, her body upraised in offering, a posture of surrender.

"Ma," I said. I had never spoken the word before.

"Baby." She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. "Yoni puja—pray, pray at my portal."

She was holding my head, murmuring "Pray," and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue. But today she sensed a difference, my diminished will. Bodies revealed much more than words ever could.

"Next time, call me first, or wait for me to call you," she said, releasing me and turning on her side. "You said you had a breakthrough in Rajat's problem. I want you to bring me good news."

"I have some solid leads."

"We can't let that poor boy suffer an injustice," she said. When I didn't reply, she said, "You told me you'd gone to the hotel. Is there something you should tell me?"

I could have told her about the fierce manager, about Mina, about the dead hand and the piece of carpet. But whom would I be telling? She was someone else. I was sensing a different, darker side—or if not darker, then evasive. I did not know this woman. I couldn't make love to her. I couldn't tell her what I knew. She was not the same woman I had known.

And I thought, She's American! I could have imagined being bewildered by an Indian, by her indirection or secrecy. But I knew Americans. Or thought I did.
I'm black
didn't explain anything.

Rajat had said, "This is a pleasant surprise." She had pretended so, but I was not convinced. It was nothing she had said. My doubt arose from the air around her, the vibration, most of all from her hands and fingers—the truth was apparent in her flesh; mine too, probably. The truth was a throbbing in the blood, nothing to do with words or protestations. It was a quality of pressure in her fingertips that told me that part of her was absent, something untrue in the touch.

"I have to go," I said.

"So soon? You just got here. We've only begun."

I slipped off the table, which I always thought of as an altar, and now it seemed like a sacrificial table. I began to dress as she stood over me. I was careful not to say anything, because she was as shrewd an interpreter of the spoken word as she was of flesh and blood.

At the door, she touched me, saying, "There's something you're not telling me."

I kissed her, thinking to reassure her, and in kissing her I felt that I was revealing to her everything I wanted to keep to myself.

N
OW I WAS AS
irritable and bent as everyone else in Calcutta, this deranged city of trapped air and fallen grandeur where in the hot, premonsoon month of May it was as stuffy in the streets as it was in any room. Sooner than I expected, within an hour or so of having left with Rajat, I was back at the Hastings, wondering, What just happened?