The Elephanta Suite (7 page)

"Don't worry, madam," the man said—he was young, hardly a man, in white pants and a white smock, barefoot. He looked beautiful.

Beth was choking with anxiety, unable to speak, her upper body rocking for balance.

"They are very bold," the man said. He retrieved his sandals and slipped them on. He was smiling—lovely teeth, great confidence, not even breathing hard, not fazed at all. Audie would have been gasping.

She made a grateful, approving sound, meant to be "thank you," but it was just a nervous exhalation.

"You see, they have been around humans for so long they have lost their fear. They are used to being fed by hand, and others—at the temple in town—they are like little gods, spoiled children, you can say. Are you all right, madam?"

Because she hadn't said a word.

"Where did you come from?" Beth said, with difficulty.

"Hanuman Nagar."

"No, no," she said—he had misunderstood, thinking she'd asked him where he lived. She rephrased the question: "Were you watching them?"

"I was watching you, madam."

He faced her squarely, not smiling, looking intently at her.

"Thank you."

He did not blink. He said, "Since you arrived at Agni, I have not stopped watching you."

That made her pause, and she was at a loss to reply. She had felt giddy, joyous at having been rescued from the monkeys. But now she felt awkward—unaware of the young man's gaze, she had been observed. He was forcing her to concentrate, as though this episode was not over yet, something more was required. He was hovering.

"I don't know how to thank you," she said. "Please take this," and she went back to her bag by the chair and took out some rupees. They felt like cloth in her hand, they were so worn.

"Oh, no, madam," the young man said, and put his hands behind his back in a prim gesture, complete with a show of dimples.

"Isn't there anything...?"

"Yes." He was quick. Already he had control of the situation. "You can request me."

"Request you?"

"For treatment," he said. "Ask for Satish."

 

The slow drip of hot oil on Audie's back, the pressure and heat, suggested her fingertips, and when she drizzled the oil in widening circles it was as if she were caressing him. The brass pot was set down on the heater with a clunk and then he felt her hands. She did not say much, had only greeted him, and she hardly spoke unless he asked a direct question. Yet there was a confident intelligence in her hands as they moved down his back, a wise inquiry in the motion of her fingers. She was able by touching him to find parts of his body that, until that moment, were unknown to him, and so her insinuating hands awakened a knotted muscle, her thumb rested on it and pushed, giving it life.

"That's nice."

Anna paired her thumbs and pushed again, swiveling downward along the meat of his spine, gliding through the oil to the small of his back.

"You are having this in America, sir?"

"Doubt it."

She went silent. Perhaps she hadn't understood his grunt. She worked harder, still on the bundles of muscles next to his spine.

"I would like to go to America. Where is your home, sir?"

He did not say: That's a hard question—we've got a place in Florida, an apartment in New York, a house in Maine...

"I'm from Boston," he said. "Near Boston."

"Boston Tea Party. Boston Red Sox. Boston beans."

He laughed into his towel, then raised his head and asked, "Ever been outside of India?"

"Only to Delhi, sir. School trip, sir."

That reminded him of how young she was. He said, "You could probably make a lot of money in the States. Doing massages."

"But also to meet people, sir. To be happy, sir. To be free, sir."

"You're free here, aren't you?"

"No, sir. Not free. It is very hard here for me. As I mentioned, I am Christian, sir."

She was now working on his right arm. She had begun on his shoulder, squeezed and pressed her way to his wrist and was massaging his palm and, one by one, his fingers. Her manipulating his fingers he found to be like an act of the purest friendship, more sensual, more intimate, as she pushed and pulled, than her touch on any other part of his body. Take my hand, he thought. It meant everything.

"Wouldn't you be afraid to be in the United States alone?"

"Oh?" She was holding his fingers with one hand and kneading his palm with the thumb of her other hand. The way she touched him told him she was thinking. "Maybe I will find someone to look after me."

"Give you money, you mean?"

"I will earn it, sir."

His throat thickened at the implications of what she said. He asked, "What would you do?"

"I can do so many things, sir."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I have training, sir."

"Lots of girls have training."

"But my training, sir, is not in school."

"Experience?"

"Experience, sir. Best teacher, sir."

"That feels nice," he said. "But can you do the hardest thing of all?"

"What is that, sir?"

"Keep a secret?"

She had begun to stroke his other arm. She held it as if it were detached from his body; she weighed it and traced her fingers down his forearm to his wrist as though evaluating it. Then she caught his fingers and brushed them against her body, he could not tell where—her softness, her warmth, perhaps her breast or her smooth cheek.

"Oh, yes, sir. I can do that, sir."

He was aware that he had had this conversation many times in his life, the flirting, the allusion, the euphemism, his earliest talks with girls as a boy of twelve or thirteen, and almost fifty years on, the same innuendo, the same themes—like a language he'd learned early in life, a second language that was used exclusively between a man and woman, the language of suggestion, never quite coming to the point yet always knowing what the point was. He delighted in this inexplicit talk.

"Sir?"

"Yup?"

"Please turn over, sir."

"Not just now."

She sighed in approval. She knew he was aroused and embarrassed. He could not turn over without exposing himself, bulging against the covering, lifting it at an angle, his conspicuous desire.

"That is all right, sir." She was trying to be serious.

"Give me a minute. I'm happy."

"I want to please you, sir."

"You're doing fine."

"Thank you, sir." She leaned against his back as though embracing him, but using her elbow, her forearm, her fists on his packed muscles. She was canted over him, resting on him, her breath warming his shoulders and neck. Because he was faced away from her she seemed bolder, and what aroused him again was his suspicion that she knew the effect she was having on him.

"Did you learn that in school?"

She did not hesitate, she pressed harder, her whole body upon him.

"No, sir." He could tell she was smiling. "In life, sir."

 

For a few days, Audie and Beth found reasons to be busy, to remain apart at the very time when, a week earlier, they would have been punctually together, looking at Agni and its people—guests and staff—and agreeing with each other: at the pool, in the restaurant, in their suite, at yoga, awaiting a treatment, poking golf balls across the putting green, side by side.

Now, "I guess I just missed you," Beth would say, as a way of explaining her all-afternoon absence.

"That's okay," Audie would reply. "I was tied up longer than I'd expected."

Each was grateful for the other's casualness, since in the past they'd seemed to agree that solitude was selfish. But their absences were an unexpected relief, and the fact that they did not need to explain them to each other left the absences ambiguous, almost without meaning, as in other years when, late home from the office, Audie had said, "I was held up." On many of those occasions he'd been with a woman, his secretary, someone from the company, the wife of an employee.

Beth somehow knew but hadn't asked, since asking would have made it real, more serious than she imagined it to be. And Audie, in the wrong, was thankful to her for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because he did not examine these affairs, kept them in the dark where they were enacted, they vanished, and apart from certain moments, the bitterness mainly, even the memory of them was gone. Only in the reveries of the treatment room, being massaged, flirting obliquely with the therapist, did he remember. And in the week when Beth had begun to say that she'd been held up—"Just missed you"—he was calm. He owed her that much.

As for Anna, he had never felt so attracted and yet so resistant to a woman. All his memories had welled up in him, and though he was aroused, the feeling was like a farewell. He was delighted that he still felt it as a throbbing in his ears, a swilling of blood, but he knew that it led nowhere. Knowing that he could have the woman so easily made him generous, and the knowledge calmed him. He saw Anna one evening with a young man, walking through the grove of bamboo, and he smiled, even as she was flustered—he knew that she did not want him to draw any conclusions, for everything in her demeanor said,
I am waiting for you.

Still, he saw her every day. He wondered where she lived, what her room was like, what she wore on her day off, the details of her real life when she was not in a uniform and working. Seeing her in an Agni sari or in the white pajamas of a spa therapist gave her an anonymity that prevented him from seeing her any other way. It was not physical desire he felt, hardly any compulsion at all, but only simple curiosity. He thought, Who are you when you're at home?

Beth, in her absences, which were most of them treatments, wanted to be touched. And in the hours in between she needed to be alone, to reflect on being touched, being held, caressed, dripped with hot oil, and at last whispered to, even if the words were only "Please relax your arm" or "Please turn over for me" or "Is it too hard, madam?"

She found that she could not pass easily from the intimacy of a treatment room, the fatigue following a massage, to a meal or a drink with Audie. She wanted enough privacy and solitude to reflect on what had just happened.

I feel like a schoolgirl, she thought afterward, lying in a chair by the pool, out of sight, near where the monkeys had snatched her food. Had she been with Audie, she would have felt vulnerable and slightly ridiculous. But being alone added something delicious to her reverie—no one to judge it, nothing to measure it by, like the fantasy of a virgin almost, easy for her to recapture, since in her life she had been intimate with one man, whose absence now seemed like a kindness.

And each of them, husband and wife, remembered what they had seen of Hanuman Nagar, the other world down the slope, on a dusty ledge of Monkey Hill, its disorder and its ragged shadows.

Someone breathing hard was waiting for her, someone's wet face watching her, eager for her to join him—all this was new and it made her happy. And as long as she was apart from Audie, she did not have to examine any of it. Unexamined, the thing held no blame: you could call it anything. It was a pulse, nothing more, like a sudden chord in a passage of music, notes played from that other world, the music that she'd been hearing ever since she'd come here. None of it had a name.

Only when she picked something apart with self-conscious fingers, or was made conspicuous by someone familiar, a pair of scrutinizing eyes on her, did a tremble of guilt cause her to hesitate. Otherwise, what did it matter? She had done nothing wrong.

If Audie's contentment was a plus, it was also a puzzle. He was too kind, too beneficent; he left her to herself and did not inquire as to her whereabouts. His benign absence made her uneasy, for her thoughts were complicated, and whenever she saw him—at meals, in the suite, glimpsed in the half spinal twist at yoga—she felt, without any reason, that she was deceiving him, that her heart was halfway down the mountain, in the dusty and littered bazaar of Hanuman Nagar.

Still, she did nothing to encourage Satish—in fact she resisted him. With the sort of impatient clumsiness that he'd used against the wild monkeys, he'd offered her all sorts of invitations. She had first pretended not to understand, then had flatly refused. She stopped short of telling him that he was breaking the Agni rules—that seemed overbearing. Yet why had her refusals made her flush with guilt? Perhaps because she knew they were her secret, and when had she ever had a secret from Audie? None of her refusals had been so strong as to discourage the boy. As the days passed he had become more familiar, which was his way of being persistent.

One day before a massage, while she stood in her robe, the blinds half drawn, the music playing—ragas, chants of Ganesha—he'd raised his hands and said, "Moment, madam."

Satish assumed the lotus position and then, twining his legs and falling backward, hauled himself up in a series of specific but fluid moves, tipped forward onto his forearms, supporting his head and whole body, and raised his legs until they were vertical. Finally he lowered his legs over his back and lifted his neck so that his feet touched his face.

"Vrischikasana,"
he grunted through his wiggling toes.

"I've seen that in circuses," Beth said.

"Scorpion pose."

He was, she realized, trying to impress her, and his effort made her smile. She was happy merely being with him in the incense-filled room, the music playing, anticipating his hands on her, the hot oil, the sounds of his breath as he touched her. But he was young; he felt the need to perform.

"You see this watch?" he said another day.

She looked, but she could not tell the make. It was plump and seemed absurdly technical.

"Chronometer," he said, pressing the protrusions at its edges. "Timer, digital readout. Twistable bezel. Totally waterproof. Immersible for two hundred meters. Self-winding."

"I thought it was a bracelet."

"Is also jewelry. Valuable!"

Wide-eyed, blowing bubbles with his boasting.
Walubloo!

"You're not supposed to wear that when you do massages, are you?"