The Meagre Tarmac (13 page)

On their first confidential meeting, Harriet Mehta told him she had an offer for him. Did he know there were trusts written up by Parsis in the middle of the 19th century that are earning more income today than they did back then? “Those old Parsis had powerful algorithms.”

Chutt responded, “At Wharton I figured out an algorithm for assessing the future value of a stock or a commodity.” He didn't mention a woman stole it from him. Or that he'd been involved with her. Or that she was, unknown to him, married.

“I know,” said Harriet. “I read it. And to be perfectly frank, I know about the troubles you had with ... what was her name, Ms. Pinto? Water under the bridge; frankly, I admire you for it. Look, I knew three months ago I'd be taking over Section Two. I spent those months reading files. I had some friends at Wharton and I asked them, is this guy for real? They said if you'd stayed in academic ecopotsy and pansy 133 nomics you were Nobel material. The algorithm for valuing stocks, the algorithm for pricing variables — I stayed with them till those sigmas and deltas got too much. So I told myself, we're not looking over a job applicant here —
we've already got this guy!
”

“I felt smothered in the academic world,” he said.

“Let me put it to you this way. You're too smart for Section Two.”

I know, I know.

“So what if I were to offer you something in
EAT?
”

His confusion must have shown.

“Estates and Trusts. Section Four, out in San Francisco. It's small now, but it's a work in progress.”

We have a Section Four? “What sort of something?” he asked.

“The whole thing,” she said. “We're expanding to California. And we see
EAT
as a special niche.”

He tried to look knowledgeable.

“The first generation Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley aren't getting any younger. They've made tons of money and they've invested it conservatively but they want to retire comfortably to India. They want servants and flat screens and gourmet restaurants and travel and maybe a country house and philanthropies. And they want to leave trust funds for their grandchildren. We think
EAT
is something we haven't exploited.”

“I'm not a lawyer, Ms. Mehta. I've never done estates or trusts.”

“You can hire a lawyer. You can hire a dozen lawyers.”

“How many
EATS
do we manage in Pittsburgh?”

“Hardly any. Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley of the 19th century — can you imagine running Carnegie and Westinghouse and Frick for starters? No, you'll have to relocate out to the Bay,” she said. “It's beautiful out there, believe me. We want someone of Indian origin, but it can't look like some weird kind of affirmative action. That's why I like you for the post. Your resume can stand up to anybody's. And as the head of a major division with untapped potential, I can recommend a doubling of your salary, before bonus.”

Darya had written him, in answer to his inquiry:

What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Chutneywala. For better or worse, those pictures on my FaceBook page are new, and un-retouched. I know my father is probably as anxious as yours to get me ‘settled.' I fear my father and I have radically opposed definitions of that word — perhaps you share that fear.

I am a traditional Indian girl, despite appearances. Since my divorce I have not been in any long-term relationship, although I must admit over the past three years I have been auditioning a number of possible suitors. I have not found what they call “a suitable boy.” I do not despair of finding the right man eventually — only maintaining a reasonably high standard of self-respect as I go through the search.

I will be in Toronto towards the end of the month shooting the English-language segments of the film. I am living in a small apartment on the lakeshore near Harbourfront (any taxi-driver will know the building). Looking forward to our little get-together, if you don't mind sharing our time with a few dozen friends. Darya.

He'd never lied before, but to Becka he'd said, “Something really boring just came up, in Canada of all places. I'll be back on Monday.” She didn't ask for a phone number or the name of a hotel. Everything about Becka was compatible, and nothing except ancestry about Darya. He and Becka never went to movies, never even rented them. On television, they only watched the Steelers and Penguins.

He knew nothing of Darya D'Aquino's world. The big names of her life were unfamiliar to him. She'd written him that “Sutherland” was in her new movie, “Planet-X”, playing an aged 60's prophet, “a Carl Sagan figure,” but he'd never heard of Sutherland or Sagan. “Shatner” — whoever he was — makes a cameo as an outer space skeptic. Witty, no? She'd asked, and he guessed it must be. “Sound of Music” Chris Plummer plays her boss, an “Ottawa Mandarin”, whatever that was. Where had he been, these past ten years? No one he knew at Wharton or the bank had ever uttered those names, at least not to him. Nothing he'd ever read spoke of them. Was it too late to catch up? With her, he'd only be able to nod, or make a fool of himself.

And yet, in front of her pictures and reading her letters, he was powerless. What man could resist a force like Darya D'Aquino? And why hadn't she burst his little bubble and written (as he feared, with each new posting),
I'm sure you're a nice man, but you're very scrawny and funny-looking.

2.

Chutt's thoughts on the flight to Canada: She's Parsi. Beautiful, witty, talented, liberated, and Parsi. Just when I'd given up, they exist. I knew they had to be out there. She's the reason I've been waiting. I can't be blamed.

Toronto, this late March afternoon, was cold but sunny. Spring had already started in Pittsburgh, but salt-pitted old ice crunched underfoot as he exited the terminal and moved down the taxi rank. The drivers appeared Sikh, Caribbean, Chinese, Somali, and Bangla deshi — a variety he'd never experienced in Pittsburgh. Many of the passengers waiting in line were Indian or Chinese, with circulating clots of well-dressed Europeans. From what he'd seen inside the airport, including the customs official who'd stamped his passport and welcomed him to Canada, Toronto was a very large city devoid of white people. The only Canadians he'd heard of were Sidney Crosby, captain of the Penguins, and Mario Lemieux, the team president.

On the long ride from the airport, they passed through a Chinatown, then a second one, and through other ethnic neighborhoods without English signs. He could be any place in the world. He hadn't spoken a word of his native Gujarati or his high school Marathi and Hindi in at least ten years, but something compelled him, in the neutral air of Toronto, to try some Hindi with his pinkturbaned, bristly-bearded, broad-shouldered Sikh driver. Chutt asked, “I've seen a lot of Chinese and Indians here. Any white people?” The driver squinted into the mirror. “Where did you learn an Indian language?” he asked, in Punjabi-accented Hindi. Then he bored deeply into the mirror. “Parsi fella?” he asked, and Chutt pointed to his good Parsi profile and the driver whooped a loud belly laugh. He circled one hand over his head, “Watch out for the buzzards, Brother,” he giggled, still circling his hand added, “in this place, not everybody looks Indian comes from India. Lots from Trinidad. Look like India, live like Africa. White people live way outside,” and he named places, probably suburbs. As the meter clicked past forty-five dollars, the lake, gray with islands in the distance, opened up between the apartment towers.

In the lobby, a Miss Marcia Wu at the concierge desk closed a thick textbook and asked him his business. “I'm here to see Miss D'Aquino,” he said.

“No one by that name here,” said Miss Wu. Thank god. He had the wrong address, and he had no way to find her! Fate had taken the meeting out of his hands. She wouldn't be in the phone book. He didn't have his computer. He could turn around and go home and apologize tomorrow.

“Is there another name?” she asked. It was a book on international trade.

“Maybe ... Batli ...”

“Five-oh-two,” she said, with a smile, then riffled through a thick reservation book. “Your name is ... Mr. Chutneywala?”

Outside the door of 502 he heard loud voices, male and female, tears and lamentations in a foreign language. Then in English, she: “You lie!” He: “You bitch,” then a slap.

And so, he waited. The voices died down to indistinguishable mumbles. A woman's giggle, a man's broad laughter.

After five minutes he rapped softly on the door. It opened widely, almost immediately, without embarrassment. “Mister Bankerman! Right on schedule!” The unmistakable, just-as-advertised but evenmore- so Darya D'Aquino. “Welcome to my humble guest apartment.” She took him in, up and down, all the details, like an advanced scanning machine, before smiling and shaking his hand.

It was a small apartment, sparsely furnished, on a high floor looking over the lake and a scattering of islands. She was as beautiful as her pictures, if slightly shorter than he'd imagined.

“Very nice place,” he said.

“You think? It isn't mine. The studio rents it and furnishes it and I don't even buy the groceries. You want a drink?”

He put up his hand. She stared at his fingers. “You do drink, don't you?”

“A bit,” he said.

“You don't mind if I do?”

“Wine?”

A man stood at a bank of windows, back to the door, looking out on the unbroken vista of the lake.

“Al, please be sociable,” she scolded. “It's Mister Chutneywala, all the way from ... what was it?”

“Pittsburgh.” It sounded absurd, pitiful.

“Red or white?” she asked.

The man turned; the handsomest, the most beautiful man Chutt had ever seen. Indian, but a good size, and maybe Chutt's age. If this is my rival, he thought, the bitch, the slap, there's no contest. The resident suitor seemed to shift through a series of personas before settling on something suitable. Then, hand extended, he approached. “Mr. Chutneywala, I hope we didn't upset you.” They shook hands. “Al Neeling,” he said. “Or Alok Nilingappa, as you prefer.”

“We were rehearsing tomorrow's lines,” said Darya. “Big scene.”

But tomorrow's Sunday; they shoot on Sunday? Sunday was going to be our day together. He had return tickets for Sunday night.

“It's time to take my leave,” said Al. He seemed to wink, or was his face just naturally expressive? “Till tomorrow,” and the two actors kissed, most convincingly.

She ran her fingers through her hair. She pulled her tunic straight. He draped his overcoat over the back of the sofa then went to the window, looking out on the lake. This is a mistake, what am I doing here?

“This must be strange for you,” she called. “Come here.”

And so, of course, he did. She barely came up to his chin. “We have choices. Down here there are some upscale fast food places. There are some great restaurants up in the city proper, any kind of food you could possibly want. Or, we can stay in. The crew fills my fridge every morning, so there's probably something to heat up.”

“Staying in is fine with me.”

“That's good. Now we have to get over the awkwardness of first meetings. How do you propose we should do that?”

“I have no idea.”

“You could start by telling me about your girlfriend. I assume you've got a girlfriend. Let's see, she's obviously an American and probably not a banker. You met her in some public place. If we met, I'm sure we'd get along. She's a little adventurous, right? Maybe even assertive. You like assertive women, don't you?”

“I do,” he said. Prior to Becka, Chutt had had three girlfriends, one of them a gold-digging fraud. Becka, as a barmaid, had hit on him. She confessed that she was tired, looking for a good man and security. For years she'd gone through an average of three men a week, at least.

“Those delicate flowers, they're not for you, are they? But, if I may ask, why have you come all this way from Pittsburgh? Why are you pursuing this little drama, or whatever it is?”

Isn't it obvious? Why do you make me so uncomfortable?

But she was smiling. “Why not just come out with whatever it is you're actually thinking?”

“I'm thinking too many things,” he said. “You're right, there is a girlfriend. She's much as you described her. She's not a delicate flower.”

And I wish I were with her tonight.

“Of course.” She waved her hand, as though a crowd of paparazzi were standing by the sofa, “Hey, over here,” she pointed to herself, “boyfriends!”

“Like Mr. Neeling?”

“Alok? No, Al's just a friend. He hasn't told me much, but I think he walks ... on the other side of the street. We have a big nude scene tomorrow, or at least I do, with him. It's easier with a guy who's only halfway interested. They're shooting it on Sunday to keep the set half-empty. That doesn't bother you, does it?”

She had a way of challenging him with every sentence: confess! Confess to your passions, your jealousy, your two-timing. Maybe that's how actors lived, everything in the open, the opposite of banking and business. “I saw your picture on the Internet, and you answered my letters and there was a tone to them, a personality behind them that made me laugh, and I couldn't get you out of my mind. That's why I'm here.”

“That's very sweet. I'm moved, honestly. Now, here's my solution to the nagging question of initial awkwardness. You start by putting your hands here, just above my ears. And you bring them down the back of my head, to my neck. Exactly. Then down to my shoulders, and then down the front to the top button, here. And then the second button. And you bend down, yes, you're getting it, and I stretch upward to meet you. And there's a bedroom just behind that door. And you're not really that hungry, are you?”