A Small Indiscretion (25 page)

“India?” she said. “But that’s so dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Not any worse than anyplace else,” I said, as if I were an expert.

She let me go. Not that she could have stopped me. Children will end up a world away, whether you want them to or not—unaware of the havoc being wreaked upon their histories back home. My mother shared news of her own. She’d decided to sell the rock-and-timber house and move with Ryan to a condominium in Burbank. And on the other side of the country, my father and Veronica Cox were engaged to be married.

W
E FLEW FROM
London to Kathmandu. There had been an uprising in Nepal, and there weren’t very many tourists about, most having taken heed of the advisory recommending against travel into the country. Your father said it was the best time to come; we would have the Himalayas to ourselves. What did I think of the idea of trekking? I thought it would be an adventure, and I liked the idea of an adventure. I thought it would help me purge the ghosts.

We spent a few days in a small hotel in the center of Kathmandu. A ten o’clock curfew had been imposed on the city, and when we walked home from dinner at night, there were soldiers with guns standing in the city square. At the hotel we made friends with two Canadian girls and an Australian man. They’d bought a ball of hash on the street. We smoked it on the roof of the hotel. I took two hits and looked out over the darkened rooftops of Kathmandu, but I felt sick, not high.

“Take another hit,” your father recommended. “It might actually make you feel better. Cancer patients take it, you know, when they’re on chemo.”

So I took another hit, and a few more after that, and he became my accomplice.

We took a bus to Pokhara. We stayed in a guesthouse, then set out on our trek. Jonathan said we wouldn’t need a Sherpa; we could carry our own packs. I made it six days, hiking seven or eight hours a day, stopping at dusk to find a house to sleep in. The Nepali people who lived on the trails took in travelers, giving them food and hot tea and a bed for a tiny fee. Once we spent the night in a house on the edge of a ravine, with a majestic view of Annapurna, for the equivalent of fifteen cents. We watched women picking something in a field. We showered under a bamboo tube sticking out of the river. Jonathan washed my hair. It was not so much romantic as practical; my shoulders were so sore from carrying my pack, I couldn’t lift my arms above my head to scrub shampoo into my hair. What did we talk about, during all those hours of all those days? Not much, I think. I was concentrating on not feeling sick—we thought it was the altitude, or the food—and Jonathan was concentrating on making sure we didn’t get lost, but we got lost anyway.

We were crossing a mile-wide dry river valley with cliffs rising on both sides. It was a high desert between mountains, astonishing in both its desolation and its beauty. There was a cold wind blowing down the valley from the mountains. We thought the valley was dry, but it wasn’t. There was water flowing, little rivers, seven or eight of them, down the center of the cracked earth. Each time we reached one of these rivers, we took off our hiking boots and tied them to our packs. We waded across barefoot, rolling our pants up to our thighs. The rivers got deeper and faster, until we were wet to our waists. Beyond the final river was a high cliff. On the cliff we could see a narrow path twisting its way up the side of a rock face. How were we going to get up there?

“We’ll find a way,” your father said.

Why did I expect him to know everything? Because he acted as if he did. It was one of the things I loved about him, all the time we
lived together. He had an answer for everything. He somehow knew it was more important to be reassuring, to seem to be in command of the situation, than to be right. And he was always willing to give in when he was found out to be wrong.

The water in the river was waist-high and very cold. My feet were freezing. Then the water was rib-high and thick with current, and I struggled to keep my feet on the ground. Your father stopped, midstream. There was a little dot of black on the path high on the cliff—a man—yelling in a language we did not speak. But he made himself clear enough, motioning with his hands for us to go back, go back; we had come the wrong way. So we forded the seven little rivers again, taking our boots off and putting them on again seven more times. I was furious with Jonathan by the end. I wanted to be rid of him. I wanted to be alone.

In the distance was a smudge that grew into a shape as we moved toward it. It was a shack, smack in the middle of the bare river valley. There were three women in colorful Nepalese dresses sitting in front of the shack. They smiled and bowed and sat us down on the floor outside the hut. They gave us lemon tea. Your father shrugged. Then he smiled. He opened his arms to encompass the valley, and the mountains, and the brilliant colors that had begun to ravage the sky as the sun set. He was not going to let me stay angry with him. Already he seemed to have mastered me. Already he knew how to insist I be the best I could be. I grinned, though I tried not to. We drank our tea. We climbed the cliff back to the town in which we’d begun our day’s journey. We fell into a single bed, tangled up in each other, and slept for fourteen hours straight.

The next morning I woke up queasy. Your father decided I had giardia. He thought it would be a good idea to get me back to civilization. There was one flight a week, out of a town a day’s walk north. We made the walk. We took a plane to Pokhara, where your
father found me medicine. He promised I would feel better in a day or two. We found a bus that would take us to Varanasi, across the border in India. At some point during that journey, your father’s pack was stolen from the top of the bus. We bought him new clothes at a roadside town. He looked regal, during our difficult time in India, in the white sari of the highest caste. He had not lost his passport, thank goodness. He could still prove who he was.

V
ARANASI
. One of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The place considered by Hindus to be the holiest city, the final resting place, built on the shores of the River Ganges, the river Ma—mother of all rivers—as if named for the revelations we received there.

You’ve seen the photos, Robbie. You’ve heard how I fell in the river and a dead body floated by. You’ve heard it all except the bits we left out.

I remember the city as buildings like painted shoeboxes crushed together, rising in pastel splendor beneath an orange sky. I remember obelisk towers with spires and haunting music playing at all hours, music free of melody and constructed out of an alien scale. I remember the river, of course, and all the life and death it held in its body and on its shores.

I continued to feel queasy. We decided it was a virus; it would run its course and I would get better in time. We rode on a raft to the center of the river to witness a cremation ceremony one morning at dawn. I remember the dark seriousness of our guide’s face in the gray morning, the glow of his skin as the sun first appeared in the sky. From the river we watched people gathering on the stone steps
of a temple on the shore. We watched little boys and girls brushing their teeth, scooping river water into their mouths to rinse, and women beating clothes against the stone steps. A dead cow floated by. It looked like a rubber cow, blown up. We heard music, and the ceremony began. The gray sky gave way to pink. The people on the steps, in their orange gowns, were singing and dancing a slow, ceremonial dance. The air smelled of burning hair. I felt sick. I leaned over to splash some water on my face, thinking it might shock the queasiness out of me. Did I fall, or did I jump? I don’t know, but I ended up in the river. My mouth filled with river water. I gasped and gagged. Your father lifted me out of the water and wrapped his jacket around me, not tenderly but brusquely.

“Why did you do that?” he asked me.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“It looked like you did.”

The guide began to row us in. He maneuvered around another raft in which three boys were poking at something in the water with a stick—an object, wrapped in gauze.

“What is it?” I asked.

Your father leaned in to look. “A dead body,” he said.

A corpse, incompletely cremated, floating right in the spot I had just gone underwater. I threw up in my lap, all over my wet clothes. But it wasn’t the dead body that had made me sick. It was a new one—yours, Robbie—taking me firmly in its grip and not letting go until the fall.

Y
OU ARE THINKING
about the chronology now.

You are thinking about what you’ve been told. The pieces dropped here and there at the dinner table over the years. We met in Ireland. We trekked in Nepal. We traveled in India. We ended up in San
Francisco. We bought the house, and the following year you were born.

Except it wasn’t the following year. It was that year. In January, we went to India. In June, we got married. In July, we bought the house. In September, you were born.

We agreed that if you ever asked, if you made your calculations and found a discrepancy, if you came upon our marriage certificate, for instance, and noticed that we were married in the year of your birth, we would tell you the truth. You never asked, though. And I have wondered of late whether it was only to save us from embarrassment. Some reticence you inherited. Some resistance to putting people on the spot. A natural tendency toward restraint. An ability to put the comfort of others in front of your own.

I wish you
had
asked. I wish we’d come clean years ago. Then these revelations surrounding your conception and birth would not be huddled together in secrecy, ready to pounce on you all at once.

We had planned to travel to Agra and Jaipur and then Goa. But I was too sick. I felt my sickness was somehow tied up in the city, Varanasi. Its filth and crowding and its fetid river, where corpses floated and little girls brushed their teeth at dawn. Where there was endless, formless music rising out of the heat and humidity and coalescing into a single dirty song.

We lay in our filthy room that night on the sagging bed under the slowly turning fan.

“I want to go home,” I said.

Jonathan turned on the lights. He looked at me, lying in a fetal position on the bed.

“You don’t look good,” he said. “You look green.”

“I feel green,” I said. “Actually, I feel black.”

“Maybe … you couldn’t be pregnant, could you?”

I looked at him.

“We’ve been so careful.”

“But that first time … when it slipped.”

“But I had my period.”

“Still.”

He scoured the city and found a drugstore that sold a Western home-pregnancy kit. We stood together in the seedy bathroom down the hall from our room. There were spiders everywhere, and ants. There were dark stains in the bottom of the sink.

I peed on the stick. We watched the line form, then darken.

It’s astonishing to me, now, how shocked we were. Astonishing that we had not known all along.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m really sorry about this.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“What do we want to do?” he asked me. Not what did I want, but what did
we
want, together. I was grateful to him for putting it that way, because all alone, I had no idea what I wanted.

“Go to a clinic, I guess. Get it taken care of.”

“All right,” he said. “But not here. Obviously. We need to get back to the States.”

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, we were in San Francisco, staying at a motel south of Market. Your father found a Planned Parenthood clinic near City Hall. He made us an appointment for the following day. In the morning, we went to a diner for breakfast. I ordered a hamburger, even though it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Beef and bread—those were the things I’d discovered I could keep down. Jonathan ordered eggs and corned beef hash. I ate the hamburger. The nausea briefly receded.

It was a glorious winter day, bright and cold, with white sunlight glinting off the windows of the skyscrapers. In the back of the cab to the clinic, I rolled the window down for air. The wind blew my hair around. I held it back with one hand. Your father reached for my other hand and held it in both of his. But his hands were trembling, and that was the thing that finally made me sad and afraid.

When the taxi stopped, Jonathan opened the door for me. He took me by the hand and led me along the sidewalk. We passed City Hall. Did I think he might say something then? Was I secretly hoping he would suggest that instead of going to the clinic, we turn in to that mass of stone and do whatever it was people did—procure blood tests and marriage licenses and the strength to be faithful and true? If that hope existed, it existed alongside the wish to get the whole thing over with so I could continue with the business of being healthy and normal and young.

The sun was high and full on our faces. The wind was cold. The sky was an aching blue. It had rained the night before and we could taste the residue of water in the air. We stood holding hands on the sidewalk, and it seemed to me for a moment anything might be possible. We might, the two of us together, be capable of beauty and bravery and unfounded optimism. He felt it, too, I think, right then—the possibility of an alternate path.