The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (26 page)

The next night, the phone rang. Because she was in the kitchen, she answered it and was already walking into the family room to hand it to her parents when she realized it was Adrian, calling for her.

“I took my dad to chemo today,” he told her as she mounted the stairs to her room. “Awful, you know? But the alternative, dying of the thing, quick and hard, you have to assume that would be worse. I don’t know.”

“It must be so difficult.”

“My mother looks almost as broken down as he does.”

“Are you thinking about staying on?” She adjusted the window seat cushions as she sat.

“They haven’t asked me to.” He sighed. “It would be such a huge shift. Maybe if I were done med school, but now, and with my girlfriend …”

Was Brinda supposed to ask about her now? Her cheeks burned and she lifted the phone away a little to lay her face against the window glass. “Is she in med school too?”

“No. She teaches at U of T. Art history.”

“Ah.” Power duo. “Nice.”

“I guess.”

Where was he? She wanted to ask, but thought it would sound as though she were asking what he was wearing. She wondered what he was wearing. She pictured him in boxer shorts, absent-mindedly rubbing his chest. She pictured herself running a finger along the waist of the shorts.

“How are your parents?” he asked.

“So far so good.” She got up to turn out the light so that she could see the night sky instead of her own reflection. “I don’t know what I would do if they had a crisis.”

“You have a sister, right?”

“In Vancouver.”

“Does she have kids or anything?”

“No. I don’t have the sense that she wants kids.” Ranjani had always seemed above that. Children, children … the thought made Brinda salivate. “She’s been living with someone for five years or so.”

Brinda heard a fridge door open and shut. He was in forest-green boxer shorts and bare feet, she thought, getting a beer, the dark of the house growing stale around him, his exhausted parents in separate beds.

“My parents have been in a situation for years where they sort of look after a family friend,” she told him.

“Oh?”

She heard what sounded like a beer cap and something in her surged, thinking she must also be right about the shorts.

“You remember the Air India crash? 1985. The trial’s …”

“Yeah, hell, yeah.”

“The wife and son of one of our closest family friends were killed. Did you know that? We were in high school.”

“Oh, yeah. It was … Sundar, right? I remember, I asked you about it.”

“Did you?”

“Didn’t you tell me you were related?”

“Distantly, to Sundar’s dad. He’s a stats prof. He’s kind of a tough person to be around, I suppose it’s not nice to say, but he’s always been a bit of a boor, self-righteous. Though it’s a bit different since he lost his family.”

“How old was Sundar?”

“Twenty-one. Five years older than me. He would have been forty this year. Funny to think.”

“Were you close with him?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Close? We grew up with him.”

“Hmm. And so your parents look after his dad? How’s he doing?”

“I can’t really tell. He still comes over for dinner once a week and my parents look in on him.”

“How’s he feeling about the trial?”

“Obsessed with it. Can’t eat, can’t work. My dad’s thinking he should apply to the U for more stress leave. Harbord’s been super indulgent: the benefits of tenure, as your girlfriend might learn.” She realized how that sounded. “Not that, I mean …”

“No, don’t worry about it.”

“Sorry.” She thought it his privilege to determine where the conversation would go next.

“It’s nice to have you here to talk to,” he said. His voice made her think of unvarnished pine. She imagined he might smell like that, too, early in the morning. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. Suppose it’s a bit late to call Europe.” That sounded sarcastic and she didn’t think that was what she intended, but it couldn’t hurt to put up a bit of a barrier. Last time she checked, they had phones in Europe. And why wasn’t she talking to Dev? Because she couldn’t think of anything to tell him.

“Too late to call Edmonton too?” he asked.

“It is,” she said gravely. “Yes.”

She sat in the window seat long after they had said good night.
Just one kiss
. That’s all she wanted. Dev’s farewell pecks were always exactly that, no more: his lips pushed out into a beak as though to peck her away. Brinda’s deprivation was abhorrent; her need so undignified.
Why can’t I get just one kiss?
The Violent Femmes song from long ago thrashed merrily into her head. One slow kiss. She sat by the window imagining Adrian’s light, piney smell, his slim, happy-sad looks, his intelligent Azorean mouth.

The next night, June 21, there was a solstice concert in Willard Park, a musician both Brinda and Adrian liked and neither paid attention to once they were there. They had agreed to a picnic and each brought wine in a Thermos as a surprise, and they laughed without saying what was making them laugh, their potluck public seduction, nowhere to go from there but childhood rooms in houses where aging parents drew aging breaths.

They drank the white first, fast, from cups, amid the crowds, then walked around the lake with the red, trading the Thermos back and forth in the indulgent dusk. The longest day of the year. They found a place to watch the sun go down. The sun rested on the horizon a moment for a joke. Brinda laughed, again, and Adrian kissed her. One. Slow. Kiss.

Which was so nice it made her giddy, and they kissed some more, until the dark was complete and they couldn’t quite see the other’s eyes and one said,
Perhaps we should go
, and the other said,
Yes, perhaps we should
. When he dropped her at home, she felt him waiting for her to speak, and in fact she wanted to speak but couldn’t figure out what to say.

Tuesday, June 22, they went out for dinner. They dressed up a bit, and drove up along the lake to a well-known restaurant a ways out of town, where they sat at an outdoor table on the waterfront.

Brinda thought of her affair with the married Englishman. While it lasted, it had generated its own justifications, their attraction sparking off his marital unhappiness. Months later, when Brinda was back in Canada, his wife had phoned her, wanting to “ask some questions.” Her husband was in the room, she said, presumably not answering to her satisfaction.
What a debacle!
she thought, recalling it now.

Adrian looked at her. “Hello?”

She smiled but didn’t know how to restart the conversation, which had been halting and superficial, though not uncomfortably so, all evening.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty, about what happened,” he said at last. A pelican flew along the lake behind him and landed on a pier.

Was she glad he was talking about it? She had thought so many things since last night that she no longer had anything to say. How to choose?

“I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong. Not yet, anyway,” he said, smiling. Oh God, that mouth! “It’s totally natural you would feel uncertain, this huge change coming up.” Was he even talking to her? “Kirsten and I, we’ve had some rough patches lately too, so I admit to feeling not entirely stable either, as you might have guessed.”

It would not have been hard, that night, to grab a blanket from the trunk of the car and spread it in some isolated spot along the lake, or even stop in at one of the many cabin motels that they passed. They both had known this when they decided to leave town for dinner: a step in the direction of full flight. Who suggested it? Each might have thought it was the other.

But the night-before giddiness did not prevail. Brinda said only, “In my defence, all I can say is that Dev and I have a big problem.” She stopped there. That was all she had rehearsed as an outlet to her guilt. It was the first time she had so much as alluded to their problem, to anyone. Her tongue tasted rusty.

Adrian waited, and as her silence congealed to a full stop, they finished their meal and drove back, not-home, not-not-home.

“Why did you never tell anyone?” I asked.

“I thought it was between Dev and me, I suppose,” she said. “It never occurred to me to tell. Maybe out of loyalty to him. Maybe because it was humiliating. Does it matter why? I called you the morning after Adrian and I had dinner. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and I was having weird physical symptoms, stress, I guess.”

“Do you still? Do you need to see a doctor?”

“I don’t think so. I’m already feeling a bit better, just talking about it.”

“Have you seen him since the night before the memorial?”

“Yes. He called me yesterday.”

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he told her, “as nervous as I am about seeing you. Can we meet up?”

Brinda was far from certain she wanted an affair—she still felt she owed it to Dev to give him an ultimatum, a last chance to shape up—but she lacked the willpower to deny herself the pleasures of Adrian’s company.

They met beside the lake.

“Do you have sex with him?” Adrian asked.

There was a bench beside her and she sat on it as though she had been pushed.

“How did you know?” she asked.
Who else knows? Is it so obvious?

“I never would have guessed if you hadn’t—well, aren’t sexual problems the most common marital issue?”

She buried her face in her hands, then looked up at the sky, breathing the lake air. “No, it’s money, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d think compulsive gambling. Really? The most common problem?”

“I had a little fling, shortly before I met Kirsten, with a woman who had been married twenty years. She and her husband had had sex four times. No kidding. Or that’s what she told me. She didn’t seem unreliable. They conceived two of those four times.”

“Quite the success rate. Maybe he was scared to have any more kids.”

“I think he just didn’t like sex. Some people don’t. Physical intimacy isn’t for everyone.”

“Sure, but then he should say that, right, own up to it?”

Adrian nodded, cautious. “I suspect he likes being married.”