Nights Like This (17 page)

That day, as Vanessa had said, we didn't do anything except walk the streets. We went to a used bookstore where I bought an old hardcover copy of
The Catcher in the
Rye
.. We found a bench less than a block away from the bookstore and as Vanessa lay on the bench, her hair cascading across my lap, over my beige clam diggers, I read her the passage I liked from Salinger's tale of all tales.

“Read out loud to me,” Vanessa said.

I searched for the passage and, upon finding it, read it to her, “What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author who wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

“That's your favorite line in the book?” she said.

“Yeah. Strange right?”

“No, it's honest. I'd think you were a fucking “phony” if you tried to play it like your favorite line was the brass ring and the cliff or the damn ducks.”

I laughed.

“Why's that?” I said.

Vanessa was smiling at me and as I looked down at her face, she looked, for lack of a more fitting word, perfect.

“Because then I'd wonder if you actually felt the book or liked whatever it was that everyone else liked in the book or whatever was most talked about.”

“What if that was my favorite part of the book?” I asked.

“Glad it isn't.”

“What do you like in the book?” I asked her.

“Read to me some more,” she said, “Read me another passage and then I'll tell you what I like in there.”

I read random lines from various chapters, flipping constantly to find places that had short passages and interesting words. Vanessa listened with her eyes closed, the sun dancing in rays across her forehead, reflecting off her sunglasses. When I finished reading the end of chapter 25, she took the book from me and started flipping through it.

“There's one line I love in this book,” she said.

She flipped to very end of the book.

"'…how do you know what you're going to do until you
do
it?' The answer is, you don't,'” Vanessa read.

It seemed logical to me that Vanessa would like this line of all the lines in the book. It seemed to suit her.

“What else do you like in here?” I asked her.

“I like the line where he starts kissing the girl just because she's crying. I do that sometimes.”

“I can walk away from a crying woman,” I said. “Unless it's An—,” I stopped short of saying her name.

“Unless it's who? You can say her name,” Vanessa said.

She was smiling. I didn't understand her at all.

“It doesn't bother you?”

“No. Just say it. ‘I can walk away from a crying woman unless it's…”

“Her.” I said. “Unless it's her.”

“I believe that.”

“Is that bad?”

“No, that's just you. I can't see someone cry and I won't stay forever. But I will kiss her while she's crying and I'll let her hold me and sometimes even sleep with me.”

“I've done that,” I said, “but it's not something I do all the time.”

“Unless it's your sugar mommy?”

“Don't call her that please.”

“Well you won't give me her name so what should I call her?”

“Forget it.”

“Good idea. Read it to me from the beginning,” Vanessa said, “keep reading until you get bored or until I get bored.”

“Okay.”

We stayed on that bench for hours. I was almost halfway through the book when we decided we wanted to leave. When we got up, I felt refreshed. We walked slowly to the car and decided to eat real cheese steaks from a van around the corner. We ate, drank water and Diet Coke and wiped our hands on small square napkins. As I saw darkness descend that night, I was uncomfortable. I held Vanessa's hand tightly, as if I were scared of falling. She leaned over to me softly and kissed my neck.

“I got you, Jess, you know that,” she said. “I got you.”

Whether she knew that I was scared of the onset of night or she thought I was just unsure about our time together, I don't know. But I do know that I felt safer because she was there, because she could read my fear and promise me that there was no reason to be afraid. I had never told anyone about that night in Kolkata except Vanessa. I had never even told Anjali. And now I felt somehow beholden to Vanessa because she knew my fear.

When we got to the car, Vanessa made me close my eyes. She placed something in my hands and I thought it was another novel. When I opened my eyes, I saw a journal, a colorful paisley design, a magnetic flap, a secret pocket in the back.

“Every day, write something. Write what you enjoyed most about the day, if you want. Eventually, start something. And see it through,” Vanessa said.

I ran my palms over the cover, opened the book and stared at blank pages lined with expectation. I didn't feel motivated nor did I feel overwhelmed. But I felt that it was possible to run strokes of ink across the pages, to write simple things, like favorite parts of the day or conversations overheard. And then from there, I would see what was to come. But then I thought back to my blank leather journal and wondered if this journal would be any different. Would it also stay blank, begging to be written in? Or would it be different because it had Vanessa's heart in it? I didn't know. But I would soon find out.

That night, as Vanessa showered, I wrote the first lines in that journal. I wrote about the feel of her hair across my lap and the warmth and gentle pressure of her head on my thighs. I wrote about how, hearing her talk of lines she liked, I wanted her to someday tell me of lines she liked in my writing, if ever there were such a thing, if ever I did write anything worth reading. I wrote about how I enjoyed the day and how I hoped that the upcoming days would bring both relaxation and excitement. I wrote about how, if nothing else, I would write every night about my favorite part of the day. That was the least that Vanessa had asked of me and it was the least that I could do. And, for her, I would. And already, my paisley journal was different than the empty leather journal that sat in a dresser drawer in my room.

Vanessa came and sat beside me as I wrote. She kissed the top of my head and then went and sat in the overstuffed chair by the window, watching planes. I felt shy with her in the room.

“Vanessa, we going down to the bar for a drink?”

“Whenever you're ready, princess.”

I closed the journal and put it under my pillow. Vanessa laughed.

“You think I'm going to steal it or something?”

“No,” I said.

I felt silly.

“I'm sorry, princess,” Vanessa said as if she knew she had embarrassed me.

“Let's just go,” I said.

She came to me and stood by the bed.

“I'm sorry Jess.”

“Don't worry about it,” I said as I jumped off the bed, kissed her once and turned away.

“Let's go,” I said.

“Okay.”

What I loved most about Vanessa was that she knew when to let a moment pass. And she did because she said nothing more about my journal resting under a pillow.

We went to the bar and grill in the hotel again. Vanessa contemplated a bar somewhere downtown but decided a bar was a bar and she didn't want to drive back after a night of drinking, even if it was only a drink or two. I respected that. Being a pedestrian except for subway rides, I didn't think about things like that. She did and I was glad she had the common sense to do that.

We settled into the same seats we'd had the night before.

“This'll become our Cheers,” Vanessa said.

“Don't you wish sometimes that everyone would know your name when you walked into a room?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “that's your fantasy. I don't want any of that. Sometimes, if anything, I wish that no one could find me, that I could be left alone.”

“What do you mean?”

Vanessa was quiet for a minute. She was wearing a jade green halter-top that night with a thin line of sequence across the top rim. It looked beautiful against her earthen skin, against the curve of her breasts and the strength of her back. I admired the top as she thought, as she sipped her Long Island Iced Tea, her chosen drink for us to try that night.

“I just sometimes wish,” she said, “that I could just be. Just Vanessa not someone's daughter or girlfriend or w…whatever else.”

“Whatever else?”

“Yeah, whoever else I should say.”

She looked away and rested her palms on her shoulders, her fingers drumming a beat against the skin on her back. She looked uneasy, as if the thoughts within her were brewing and percolating into something that she did not want to think about.

“Vanessa,” I said.

When she turned around, I saw, for the first time that I could recall, a tinge of sadness in the bitter sweetness of her eyes. I didn't know what to think or what was going on inside her.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Just sometimes I wish I could just be Vanessa.”

“You can now, here and now with me. That's what this whole ten days is about isn't it? For me as well as for you.”

“You're right,” she said.

She took a gulp of her drink and smiled at me but the tinge of sadness that I had seen was still present in her eyes.

“Are you liking Philly?” she asked.

“I'm liking being here with you,” I said.

“Why's that?”

“I just like being with you.”

Vanessa looked at me, her sad eyes once again dancing with mischief, luring me into them, past them, into what was inside her.

“You know I wrote in the journal you gave me,” I said.

“Did you write about me?”

“Somewhat.”

“I'll write back.”

“You'll write back?”

“Why not? At the end of every day, I'll write back to whatever you wrote. And I'll put it back under your pillow. When you write back, put it under my pillow. We'll go back and forth as long as we can.”

“Can you do that, write back and forth?”

She laughed as she rested her hand in her hair, her other hand caressing the condensation on the outside of her glass.

“Are there rules, Jess?”

“I don't know I've just never done that before.”

“Well, there's a first time for everything, right? I bet you've never dated a Puerto Rican woman either.”

“Actually I have. The first woman I ever fell in love with was Puerto Rican.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. So let me ask you how many Indian women have you dated?”

“You're Indian,” Vanessa said mockingly. “Finally, the truth comes out.”

“What do you mean?”

“You seemed kind of generic up to this point. I would never have known except that ring you wear, the gold is just so bright that it's too fucking real to be anything but Indian.”

“I told you I grew up in Kolkata. What did you think I was?”

“I guess you did. But it didn't occur to me. You mentioned Kolkata like twice. Other than that, you never give it away.”

“I don't have to wear a fucking flag on my back,” I said.

“Easy, I didn't mean anything by it. I was just saying, princess. All right, so tell me about the stone, the ring. Why do you wear stones in your rings?”

I searched Vanessa to see if she was mocking me. I tried to see if she was suggesting that I had forgotten some integral part of me that I should not have. Truth is, I was generic. I didn't want to look like anything, not be identifiable as Indian or desirous of women or a midtown resident. I wanted nothing to identify me because I had started to feel it kept me guarded from judgments. No one knew what to expect. But as I was learning, there was no way for me to avoid people judging something. In becoming generic all I was gaining was a false view that I was free from contamination and judgment and surmise. What I was losing was all grasp of definition. It would have done more for me to embrace or reject my Indian status. But hovering and lingering in a generic no man's land did nothing for me either way. I knew that. And I was embarrassed that Vanessa seemed to know that.

“So tell me,” she said, “about the ring.”

“The stone on my index finger, right hand, is yellow sapphire.” I said. “I wear it because years ago I was told that it would help me succeed in my chosen field of art.”

“Has it?”

“Apparently not,” I said.

“But you haven't even tried. So maybe it will.”

“You believe that's possible?”

Vanessa shrugged, the sequins on the rim of her top shining when they caught the light.

“Why not?”

I took a gulp of my drink and sat back, careful not to lean too far.

“The other stone. Left hand, middle finger. What's that all about?

“That's a cat's eye. Meant to ward off evil.”

“That's the one you play with when you're nervous.”

“You notice that?”

“Yes. And, by the way, I have dated Indian women. Fucking waste of my time but I have.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You guys have an attitude that we're a step below you, beneath you.”

“How many Indian women have you dated, Vanessa, to arrive at this grand conclusion?”

“You're the third.”

“And from that you get a conclusion?”

“Not just the ones I dated but their friends, the parties, the whole fucking crew wondering when one of you dates outside of Indian. It's like you guys fight the arranged marriage shit, even fight the getting married to a guy you don't really love shit, but when you date whom you want to date, you're still partial to your own. It's fucked up.”

“That's not a rule,” I said. “It's fucked up that you would generalize that we're all the same.”

“So how many of your girlfriends were not Indian, Jess?”