Best Friends Forever (32 page)

Weird: TITANIC-SIZED WOMAN DROWNS

ON MAIDEN VOYAGE.

I walked toward the deep end, letting my feet drift up and back behind me, until I was floating. Then I put my face in the water, the way I’d been taught at my swimming lessons long ago. I blew a gentle stream of bubbles out of my mouth and stretched my arms in front of me, parting the water as if it were a curtain. I hadn’t been swimming in years, but I had to hope that it was like riding a bike, that it would come back to me once I got started.

I put my face back in the water, set my feet against the concrete wal , pushed gently, and did a tentative breaststroke toward the opposite end of the pool, twentyfive yards away. I figured I’d try two laps

—one out, one back—and then cal it a day, but I felt okay. Before I knew it, my fingers were brushing the lip of the deep end. I turned around, pushed off again, and stroked gingerly to the other side. I looked at the clock. The entire enterprise had taken me less than three minutes. I started off again. My eyes were starting to sting from the chlorine, so this time I kept my face above the water. I fanned my hands out in front of me and fluttered my legs behind. Every four laps, I checked the clock, and before I knew it, twenty minutes had gone by.

I didn’t realize how hard I’d been working until I pul ed myself up the steps in the shal ow end and felt the muscles of my thighs and calves trembling.

“Harder than it looks, isn’t it?”

The man in the other lap lane had gotten out of the water and was toweling off. He was thick-shouldered, barrel-chested, with brown skin and a thatch of silvery hair on his chest that matched his close-cropped silvery hair. I nodded, breathless, certain that my cheeks were red and that I was sweating as wel as dripping. I dabbed at my face with the tiny towel I’d picked up on my way to the pool, wishing I hadn’t left my bigger one back in the locker, wishing that I wasn’t panting like an elderly asthmatic dog.

“Have a good day,” the man said, and I managed, “You, too,” before wobbling back to the locker room and col apsing on the bench in front of my locker, where I stayed until I could breathe normal y and trust my legs to support me.

I went back to the pool every day, Monday through Friday. I would have gone on weekends, too, except then the pool was usual y fil ed with kids, or the members of a water aerobics class made up of women age seventy and up, their swim-capped heads bobbing gen-teel y in the deep end. Each session, I’d alternate between trying to go a little longer or swim a little faster. After eight weeks of swimming five times a week, my Barney swimsuit was flap-ping around my hips. I ordered a smal er one, this time in black, figuring I’d be Orca, a kil er whale, instead of a friendly dinosaur.

“A new suit!” the man from the next lane said, and smiled his approval with teeth that were slightly stained and a bit crooked. “You are shrinking.” His accent clipped each of his words precisely. I watched as he shook beads

of

water

from

his

hair,

unselfconsciously rubbing his towel over his arms and his legs. I nodded and picked up my own towel. “Wil you join me for some juice?” he asked. I was so startled that I couldn’t think of how to tel him no, or that I had somewhere else to be, which would have been a lie.

Twenty minutes later, I sat in the juice bar with my smoothie, and the silvery-haired man from the pool sat across from me. His name was Vijay, he said, and he slid a business card across the table: Vijay Kapoor, M.D.

“You’re a doctor?”

“Retired.” He rol ed his r’s. I imagined his tongue, curled against the roof of his mouth, tril ing lightly. “Now I do a bit of consulting for the drug companies. I fil in, here and there, to keep busy. And you?”

It had been so long since I’d had a conversation like this with someone who wasn’t, in some way, paid to talk to me, to take my medical history or my credit information, to give me my prescriptions or my latte or my stamps. “I do il ustrations for greeting cards,” I said.

He smiled kindly. “And may I have your name, my dear?”

I felt my blush intensify. “Addie Downs.”

We lingered with our drinks as he coaxed the particulars from me. I told him where I lived, a little more about what I did, and how I’d started swimming. “I lost some weight,” I said. “I’m just trying to tone up a little.” He raised his eyebrows and said nothing. I felt my face getting hot, wondering if he was trying to figure out exactly how big I’d been before the weight loss began.

“You look wel ,” he said, making me blush again.

“What about you?” I asked. He said that he was fifty-nine, which was older than I would have guessed, and he was married, the father of two grown sons. He and his wife lived in a big house in Evanston. She volunteered for charities and as a docent at the Art Institute. He kept busy with part-time work, with the consulting he did for drug companies, the occasional lecture he delivered to medical students. “It is not a bad life,” he said, and he looked at his watch, a gold disc that glowed against his burnished skin. “Until next time?” he asked, and I agreed, bobbed my head shyly, an oversized schoolgirl in a sweatsuit. We were friends. That was al . He was old enough to be my father, and he was married, so what else could we be?

Vijay was always in the pool by the time I arrived, and he’d lift his sleek, dripping head out of the water and raise one hand. out of the water and raise one hand.

“Hal oo, Addie!” he’d cal as I waded, as graceful y as I could, into the shal ow end, and took the lane next to his. At first he was always faster, but eventual y I found myself able to keep up with him. Our fingertips would touch the edge of the pool at the same time. We’d raise our heads, inhale, duck back under the water, and start swimming again.

Afterward, he’d help me out of the water, extending one square hand, handing me my towel. I’d take my shower, change my clothes, and we’d sit at what I’d come to think of as our table in the juice bar, talking about everything: the election, the weather, a prime-time medical drama we were both addicted to, even though he said the technical mistakes they made were cringeinducing, and that the show would be responsible for “an influx of idiots” into medical school. He inquired about my family. I told him about Jon, and he’d listened, asking thoughtful questions about the location of Jon’s injury and the length of his rehabilitation, what seizure medication he was on and whether it was adequate.

“And Mommy and Daddy?”

I blinked, caught off guard by the diminutives, thinking for an instant that he was talking about his parents. “Oh, they died when I was a teenager. My father had an aneurysm, and my mother had breast cancer.”

“So you are an orphan.” I almost laughed

—the word sounded so strange, like something out of Dickens, or a song I’d heard Emmylou Harris sing about being an orphan girl. Vijay clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I am sorry,” he said, and briefly placed his hand on top of mine.

At night, in bed, I could cal up every detail about him: the shape of his bare feet on the pool’s tiled deck, the tilt of his head when he asked me a question, the aggressive jut of his nose, his endearingly crooked teeth. I knew that I was being sil y, that he didn’t like me as anything more than a friend, a person he saw in the pool, a fel ow swimmer he barely recognized as female.

Except I knew that wasn’t true. My black tank suit started bagging around my hips, so I ordered a new one. The smal er I got, the more cuts and colors were available. Now, if I wanted, I could buy a tankini, or a magical patented Slimsuit in an exotic tiger print designed to whittle inches off my waist and keep spectators’ eyes from resting too long on what the tag coyly cal ed my “trouble zones.” I went for a variation of my comfortable, familiar black tank suit…only I bought it in a color the catalogue cal ed

“bright raspberry,” imagining how Vijay’s eyes might light up when he saw me, picturing his smile.

I wasn’t wrong. “Addie,” he crooned when he saw me, “how nice!” I smiled at him, did a modest, mocking half-turn before hurrying into the water, tugging my swim cap over my ears.

An hour later, we sat across from each other in the juice bar and, unprompted, he started talking about his sons. “American boys,” he said, his voice half proud, half rueful. One of them had an MBA, and the other was in medical school. The one with the MBA lived in Texas and was married with a baby, the other was engaged. Then he started tel ing me about his wife, whose name, I’d learned, was Chitra. It had been an arranged marriage in London. Vijay had met her the day before their wedding, and they’d been married for forty-two years.

“The two of us rattle around in that house like the last two peas in a can,” he said.

“There is no passion left, no connection. We are like roommates; just two people living together.” Even as I made eye contact and sympathetic noises, I recognized this as a variation of the song that every married man who’d strayed had ever sung to another woman: My wife doesn’t understand me, but

oh, you, kid. Stil , I couldn’t keep my heart from lifting, couldn’t ignore the way his touch thril ed me when he pressed his hand on mine and then, as I held my breath, reached across the table to stroke my cheek with one blunt fingertip. “Addie,” he murmured. “Do you know how lovely you are?”

He took me to a hotel downtown, not too expensive but not cheap, either. As I sat on the bed and watched him slip off his belt, then his shoes, then his wedding ring, the thought crossed my mind that I was no better than Valerie’s mother, no better than any woman who thought it was okay to help a man break his wedding vows. He has children, I thought as he embraced me, smel ing faintly of the pool’s water. I could see our reflection in the mirror above the dresser, his middle-aged body, with the slight paunch that the laps hadn’t eradicated, the purplish discs of his nipples, the silvery tangle of his chest hair.

His hands looked tiny on the vast white field of my back, his short, compact body dwarfed next to mine. I felt the old self-loathing rise up inside me, and I squeezed my eyes shut, wil ing myself not to think, not to see, only to feel, tel ing myself that I deserved this, I deserved a little happiness; after everything I’d been through, I deserved some sweetness, even if it was only for an afternoon, in a rented room that smel ed of cigarette smoke and bleach, even if it was with someone else’s man.

His lips brushed my forehead, then my cheek. I shivered, closing my eyes. I kept my legs pressed tightly together as he caressed me, whispering in my ear, swirling his fingertips against my breasts and my bel y.

“Imagine that we are in the water,” he whispered, twining his fingers in the tangle of my pubic hair. I felt my hips lifting, as if they were borne upward on a wave, my thighs locked and trembling as he bent his head over my breasts. It hurt a little bit when he slid inside of me, but I didn’t bleed, and Vijay didn’t seem to notice my sudden, shocked inhalation, or that I’d started to cry, from the pain of it and from the joy that was just as intense, the feeling of being fused with

someone

else,

being

entirely

connected, of not being alone anymore. I thought of him when I woke up in the morning.

At night, I’d remember something he’d said, the way he’d wrapped his hand around mine, showing me how to touch him. I was giddy, giggly, girlish, lighter than air. For the first time in my life, I found myself forgetting to eat. When we were together, I would take in every detail of how he looked and moved, of what he said, and replay them at my leisure when I was alone and he was with Chitra. I let myself imagine a life together, the two of us coming back from the pool to my house, eating lunch together in the kitchen, walking together in the cool of a summer’s evening.

Vijay had never lied to me or led me on, never once suggested that such things were possible. Stil , I couldn’t shake the feeling that grew into certainty every time we swam that he was fal ing in love with me, that he would leave his wife for me, that we would have a life together.

If this was going to happen, I knew that some changes were in order. My house would look shabby and smal compared to the eight-bedroom mansion that he and Chitra had bought twelve years before (how did the lovelorn manage before the Internet? I’d wondered as I’d looked up street maps and the purchase price and, eventual y, downloaded satel ite pictures of his house on Google Earth). I considered the rooms in which I’d spent almost my entire life and saw al the ways they were wanting: the linoleum that was thin and graying, the carpet worn down to the fibrous backing in spots, the dingy paint and scratched-up toilet bowl, the scraggly rhododendron beside the front door.

I started slowly, with a pile of renovation magazines: Kitchen & Bath, Cottage Style, Metropolitan Home, and Country Living, figuring that I’d pick from the best of al worlds. After a few weeks’ consideration, I ordered new tile for the kitchen floor, big hand-glazed squares imported from Mexico, the color of butterscotch, and a tiled backsplash in a pattern of azure and gold and plum.

Every day I fixed something, bought something,

did

some

smal

bit

of

rearranging, imagining with each change Vijay’s reaction to coming home to such a sweet, cozy little place. (He’d complained to me often about the extravagant size of his current home, the trophy house Chitra had pushed for, with the two-story foyer and the his-and-hers bathrooms, and rooms Vijay claimed he didn’t even understand. “A mudroom? Are we pigs?”)

Outside my little house, the landscapers I hired planted rosebushes and morning glory and trumpet vines that bloomed profusely and twined around new wrought-iron railings and the latticed frame I’d built around the front door. Working from a picture I’d seen in a magazine, I hung new shutters in dovegray and had the house painted a warm, soft white the catalogue cal ed buttermilk. I pul ed up the worn old carpet and had the oak floors underneath refinished, and I painted the wal s in shades named after foods I no longer ate: bisque and cream, vanil a and honey. I drew up plans to redo the kitchen, combining the dining room and the kitchen, combining the dining room and living room into one big “great room,” with one of the new flat-screen TVs anchoring one wal , new couches and a red-and-gold wool rug. Bigger windows, sliding doors, a brand-new master bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub big enough for two, a shower that converted to a steam stal …nothing was too grand for me to imagine, and to imagine sharing with Vijay.

Besides, I could afford it. The house was paid for; disability paid for Jon’s room at the Crossroads. The only expenses I had were health insurance and my car payments, and there’d been years when I hadn’t bought much besides groceries and the occasional new bra or cotton panties or socks. The smal savings account my parents had left me for going to col ege and caring for Jon had been quietly increasing in a moneymarket fund, and I’d added to it every time I got paid, holding on to just what I’d need to pay my bil s, socking the rest away.

I’d never been acquisitive, never traveled, never wanted fancy cars or clothes (even if they’d fit me)…but now it felt as if I couldn’t get rid of the money fast enough. Sometimes I imagined it whispering to me at night: Spend

me, spend me, spend me.

So I pored over my plans and painted wal s and ripped up carpet and til ed a patch out back for a garden. On Saturday afternoons, I took the free classes at the local home-improvement store and learned how to strip paint from furniture, how to instal a new sink and hang wal paper (I felt such a pang at that, remembering the pinkand-green stripes that Val had yearned for, hearing her voice in my head: Al I wanted was a nice pretty room with pink and green.

A nice pretty room like Addie has). I suffered through blisters and splinters and hot-gluegun burns, throwing out my back, ripping out a fingernail, not minding any of it as I imagined Vijay’s delight.

I finished my bedroom first, splurging on a king-size mattress and a headboard, because Vijay had once told me how he loved to read in bed once the day was done. I tossed the per-cale sheets that dated from my parents’ marriage and replaced them with the most sumptuous, silky-soft, outrageously expensive Egyptian cotton I could find. I ordered a fringed cashmere throw that spil ed over the foot of the bed like a pool of caramel, and set up a wooden table against one wal that I stocked with a coffeepot, a grinder, and a little refrigerator underneath for juices and cream. I pictured the two of us in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, swapping

sections

of

the

newspaper before we got out of bed and went swimming.

I wasn’t his first. Vijay had told me that early on, one rainy morning when we lingered at the juice bar, waiting for the skies to clear before attempting the dash to our cars. “Over the years, I have had friends,”

he said. “Friends?” I’d repeated. And he’d shrugged, cocking his head at me in a gesture that made it easy to imagine the little boy he’d once been, stuffing his pockets with sweets, then turning his charming smile on whatever woman caught him. His friends were nurses, a psychologist who worked down the hal , one of his son’s teachers.

There

was

a

mutual

understanding about these adventures, he explained:

he

was

looking

for

companionship, not to leave his marriage.

“And your friends?” I asked. “What were they looking for?”

He lifted his shoulders again. “Who can say?”

“That would be you,” I said. “The one who was there.”

He smiled at me, touching my cheek.

“Funny girl.” He paused, thinking. “Perhaps they wanted excitement. Something new.”

“A treat.”

His eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled at me. “A treat. I like that.”

I knew without asking that al of his

“friends” had been white. I could guess that they’d see him as exotic, with his accent and his dark skin, and even his arranged marriage. He would have been a kind of diversion, something new on the menu

—strange spices, a different taste, a rich dessert they could savor but wouldn’t want every night. I guessed that none of them had ever fal en in love with him: these were probably experienced women, sophisticated ladies who’d made places for themselves in the world, who’d never been stuck at home, or behind the edge of a table at a diner, or anywhere at al .

It was snowing the first time he came to my house. We’d been swimming and had our drinks, and then Vijay had asked if I wanted to go with him—to the hotel, I assumed; this was where we’d gone each time we’d been together. “Come home with me,” I said.

“Addie,” he said, and I could tel from his tone, from his eyes, that he was getting ready to deliver a speech that he’d given before, one that would tel me not to get my hopes up, one that would let me down easy.

“Please,” I said. I could hear the rawness in my voice, and I made myself pause and start over. “Please,” I said softly. “I’d just like you to see where I live. It would mean a lot to me.”

He shrugged, that sheepish, charming shrug, and held my car door open for me, then got into his own car and fol owed me home to Pleasant Ridge. I could imagine his lips tightening as he turned down my street

—its jumble of forty-year-old ranch houses and smal ish lawns must have been a shock after his palatial neighborhood—but once we were through my front door, it was just the way I’d imagined it: the house warm and snug, scented with the green chili I’d been simmering since the night before. Vijay made his way along the newly finished floors, exclaiming over each little touch: the vibrant tiles in the kitchen, a bouquet of roses I’d set in a ceramic vase I’d painted myself, the sumptuousness of the bedroom, how soft things were, how sweet, how warm. At some point after we’d made love, I lay beside him, half asleep, and watched as he col ected his cel phone from the table next to the bed, the one I’d painted with half a dozen coats of cherry-colored lacquer. Icy rain pattered on the ceiling. I listened as Vijay spread his hand against my bel y and made excuses to his wife.

After that, he came over every

Wednesday afternoon, once we were done swimming, and sometimes on Saturdays. I’d instal ed a pair of bedside lamps with bubble-glass shades, tinted pale-green and turquoise, that cast the room in a cool underwater glow. I would keep my eyes open for as long as I could—I was stil so shy of my own body that it was almost painful to look at it—but always I would open my eyes and watch his face at the moment of orgasm. He would squeeze his eyes shut, press his lips tightly together, and I would feel him shudder against me and think, I made him feel this way; I did this to him. Afterward, he’d rol toward me. He’d kiss my ear and my neck, pul ing the sheets out of my clenched fists, easing them down my body.

“You

see,

Addie?

You’re

lovely.

Lovely,”

he would say, sliding his fingers against me in a steady rhythm that sped up gradual y and made me arch my back and, final y, curl against him, panting and spent.

He had never lied to me. But stil , I let myself hope. One afternoon in July, with sunshine pouring gold through the skylight, I said, “Do you ever think that we could be…”

I let my voice trail off, hoping he’d start where I’d stopped.

Instead, he sat up and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. “Addie,” he said. “I have always been honest with you.”

I felt like I had swal owed a stone. I closed my eyes, dreading what was coming, unable to prepare myself for it, to thicken my skin or harden my heart for the blow. I wasn’t like his other ladies. I had no defenses.

“I am sorry, my dear,” he said in his accented speech. “But you must know that I wil never leave my wife. And I think…” This time, his voice trailed off. “Perhaps it would be best if we were to spend some time apart.”

“You don’t want to see me anymore?” I asked, hating the pathetic way I sounded but unable to keep from asking.

“Of course we wil see each other,” he said, pul ing on his underwear (white cotton boxers that looked as if they’d been ironed. For the first time, I wondered by whom). “We wil swim.”

I felt numb, il , miserable, lost. But I made myself move, get to my feet, pul my robe around me, walk him to the door. I said that I understood. I told him I would be al right, that I had enjoyed him. “My treat,” I’d said, and I even managed a smile. None of the things I said were true. I didn’t understand: If we were happy together, and if he was unhappy in his marriage, why not end the marriage and be with me? I wouldn’t be al right: I would be lonely again, trying to fil al of those empty hours and empty rooms with something, an unnamed and unknown something, because I didn’t have food to do the trick anymore. I’d be even worse off than I’d been before, because now I knew exactly what I was missing: the feel of the water what I was missing: the feel of the water moving over my body, the warmth of his body beside mine in a car or on a couch; his crooked teeth, his charming, head-cocked grin, his thick fingers moving against me.

“Addie,” he said at the door, with his hands on my shoulders. “Do not look so sad. Al is wel . You wil find someone.”

I bent my head, then raised it, staring at his face, his liquid brown eyes, his crooked teeth, trying to memorize it, because I knew I would never see it again. I would never find anyone else. I didn’t see how I could put myself through it: the lift and plummet of hope and rejection.

I didn’t have a thick skin, I didn’t have the practice or the skil s. I wasn’t strong.

“I understand,” I made myself say. “But could you do one thing for me? Just one thing first?”

Vijay frowned when I told him what it was.

“It is not possible,” he said curtly (and in that curtness, in his tensed shoulders and stiffened neck, I imagined that I was seeing a part of him that Chitra was privy to on a daily basis, a part that his “friends” never imagined).

“Please,” I said. “I won’t bother you, and I won’t ask for anything else. I just want this one thing.”

So on the Friday night before Labor Day weekend, in a little town between Milwaukee and Chicago, Vijay Kapoor took Addie Downs to the fair. The bright colored lights of the midway that blazed against the indigo sky. The air was scented with fried dough and gril ed sausage, and the moon hung heavy and orange as a pumpkin. He paid twenty dol ars for a rol of tickets, bought me a lemonade, and, after six tries, won me a teddy bear at a game using high-powered water guns to inflate bal oons.

We played Skee-Bal . We pitched PingPong bal s into goldfish bowls, and slid dimes across a scarred sheet of Plexiglas, trying to get them to land on our lucky numbers. We rode the rickety Ferris wheel (a man with vacant eyes and tattooed hands slammed the metal safety bar down across our carriage, and I wondered what he’d say if I’d told him that a year ago that bar wouldn’t have closed at al ). Vijay wouldn’t look at me, but he did take my hand as our car rose to the top of the wheel and hung there, rocking, suspended in the sky. “Buy a flower for the pretty lady?” asked a woman with an armful of roses, and Vijay did. Outside the fortune-tel er’s patched tent, a pack of laughing teenagers passed by. One of the girls had the same pink teddy bear that I did. She swung it loosely by one of its arms. Her jeans dipped low enough to show the pink elastic edge of her panties, and as she ran by, laughing, I felt enormous, and ancient, and exquisitely out of place. I left my bear sitting on a bench. I sat quietly with my hands in my lap as Vijay’s big car purred along the highway. When he pul ed into my driveway, I said, “Thank you for a lovely evening,” the way I’d imagined saying when I was a teenager, coming home from the dates I never had.