The Newlyweds (19 page)

“But you always wear Indian clothes,” Amina said.

Kim laughed. “I wear my own version. This kind of thing.” She indicated the bulky sweater she was wearing over an unseasonable cotton dress and a pair of black tights. “But trust me—I look stupid in a sari.”

“I can’t wear a sari either,” Amina said. “I trip.”

“But you have the right figure for it,” Kim said. “You need curves. And Ashok always said he hated shalwar kameez—that it was a Muslim thing, designed to hide a woman’s body.” She smiled at Amina. “He was totally ignorant about your religion, obviously.”

“That might be true about shalwar kameez,” Amina said. “I prefer Western clothes, but a shalwar kameez is comfortable for women.”

But Kim had moved on to Ashok’s character, her favorite subject. One of the things she liked about him was his definite opinions about India, both positive and negative. After spending several months at the yoga retreat in Mysore, with people whose knowledge was as sketchy as their enthusiasm was absolute, it was appealing to be with someone confident enough to deplore some of what he saw around him. But even when he was critical, Ashok was never ashamed; he was
of
the place he was from more solidly than anyone she’d ever met.

The thing she didn’t like was the way he looked at other women.

“He always used to say he
appreciated
women, and why was I so threatened by that? Part of growing up around movie stars, I guess. I felt like it was a test—like, was I cool enough to handle it? And so I pretended that I was, and then it got worse.”

“That’s different from Desh,” Amina said. “Well-educated men don’t do that.”

“And I felt so pale and gawky all the time,” Kim continued. “Everyone looked like you.”

Amina flushed, because of course Kim was flattering her. She hadn’t gotten fat in America—as her relatives had joked she would—but she thought her looks had nevertheless declined. It had something to do with her clothes: jeans or casual trousers never fit her correctly, and she couldn’t bring herself to wear the kind of fitted tops that emphasized a figure like hers. At home she’d been a respectable 1.6 meters, but once that was translated to an American five foot two inches, she’d suddenly become short. She pinned her hair back and wore her glasses all the time, and she’d grown accustomed to the dowdy, serious person who greeted her in the bathroom mirror before work each day.

“But I look wrong here,” she told Kim. Around the women who frequented the yoga studio she felt perpetually diminutive, and that physical feeling augmented the psychological sense of her own childishness that she felt in America. As soon as she had mastered one set of references, she was thrust into a situation that required another. The yoga students were kind and seemed to appreciate her, in the same way they appreciated the smell of the incense and the Sanskrit
letters stenciled in purple on the orange wall. Whether those words meant something to Lucas, something related to the astonishing contortions she observed through the plate glass, pushing a basket of clean towels from the laundry to the changing rooms, or were simply decoration, Amina didn’t know. She wasn’t any more familiar with boutique shopping in Bombay or the challenges of dating someone in the movie industry, but she knew what it was to feel that you would never become fully adult in the country where you lived, would never understand the jokes or master the graces that came so naturally to everyone around you.

7
Kim had been thrilled by the apartment Ashok rented in New York City: a loft on the twenty-first floor of a building just north of Madison Square Park, with views of the Empire State Building. She had never bought new furniture before, and she loved going into Crate and Barrel with Ashok, standing next to him as he selected a bed, a living room set, and a glass-and-steel dining table. He paid no attention to the prices and wanted everything to be as modern and clean as possible. (Kim told Amina that she wished her mother could be there for five minutes and then disappear, just to see where her daughter now lived.) He asked her where they ought to go to find household help, and she laughed at him: she said it would be ridiculous to hire someone to clean what was after all a relatively small space and that, since she wasn’t working, she would have plenty of time to do the housework and the shopping herself.

The apartment was only a short subway ride from NYU, but Ashok was displeased with it almost immediately. He thought the small bedroom was claustrophobic and the air-conditioning too strong; he was constantly walking around in a wool sweater. Bathrooms, he thought, ought not to be next to kitchens, and he often used the half bath near the entrance. The apartment was one floor below the penthouse, and Ashok found the sound of the wind oppressive.

He had told her long ago that he was a Brahmin, laughing off this antiquated distinction as if it were an affectation of his grandparents’ generation, but Kim couldn’t help wondering if this was somehow connected to his obsession with hygiene once they arrived in New
York. The enemy, as it turned out, was not only dirt but clutter: if Kim left a magazine in the bathroom, or papers from work out on the table that served as desk and dining table, Ashok would frown with irritation upon arriving home. She learned to put things away immediately after using them and to wash pots as she cooked, since it was hard for her husband to enjoy a meal if he could see the dirty pots sitting out in the open kitchen. They kept their shoes on a rack just inside the door, and Ashok always went straight to the bathroom, where he took off his socks and stepped into the bathtub, squeezing a drop of antibacterial soap onto each foot and then expertly washing one with the other, using a frantic scrubbing motion. He had taught her to wash her feet that way in India, since they were always wearing sandals, but she noticed that he performed the ritual even more thoroughly in New York, where they both wore shoes and socks.

At first Kim hadn’t known what to do with herself during the day, apart from taking care of the house, cooking, and shopping. As a child she had been fascinated by cooking shows, which seemed to depict a realm of luxury and style wholly absent from her mother’s world-view. In her first Manhattan apartment—a place on Avenue C shared among four girls—Kim had been the only one of the roommates who cooked, in exchange for a smaller share of the grocery bill. Those girls had been hugely grateful for the casseroles, pastas, and roasts (she was not yet a vegetarian) that Kim would prepare every other day and leave in the refrigerator for whoever got home at whatever time, and she had come to think of herself as a good cook. But of course she’d never learned to make the dishes Ashok missed once they got to New York.

One night her husband told her they were going out on a date, and took her to a formal Indian restaurant on Forty-fourth Street. They had champagne to begin and then a bottle of wine with dinner, and Ashok ordered the dishes as if they were back in Bombay, and might as well have a taste of everything. The waiter was deferential in a way also familiar from Bombay, and she could see Ashok relax into the person he’d been when she’d first fallen in love with him, confident and at ease with his position in the world. At the end of the evening he asked her what was customary to tip in restaurants, and thinking of her own waitressing days, Kim had said 20 percent; it was
only when she paid the credit card bill that month (she paid all the bills with Ashok’s checkbook) that she saw they’d spent two hundred twenty-five dollars on a single meal.

Although the allowance his parents had given them seemed princely to Kim, once she started managing their finances she immediately saw that Ashok had spent an unreasonable percentage of it on furniture and rent. He talked casually about asking his father for more, but Kim was afraid that would reflect badly on her; she could hear his mother talking about how she was living off of Ashok. She’d always thought that the one useful thing Cathy had taught her was economy: for as long as she could remember, she’d been aware of what everything cost and took almost as much pleasure as her mother in a bargain. She took the train to the old C-Town she remembered from her East Village days, sometimes stopping at the farmers’ market in Tompkins Square Park for produce. She found a discount store that catered to students furnishing dorm rooms, where she outfitted their kitchen and discovered certain “storage solutions” that made it easier to keep the apartment the way Ashok liked it. The standard of care her husband required allowed little time for thinking about either the past or the future, and Kim said she felt a satisfaction she’d never before experienced when she heard his key in the lock and knew that everything in the apartment was as he would want it. Occasionally she even thought of Ashok’s mother, and wondered if she’d known things about her son that Kim hadn’t when she’d given her blessing to their move to New York.

“I’m making him sound like a real pain,” Kim said. “But if you met him, you’d understand. It was like, I felt so special when I was with him. Like a princess—like you imagine when you’re a kid. It was just a totally different world. I can’t believe I’ve never shown you a picture. Do you want to see one now?”

Amina nodded. Kim had shown her a photo album from her first backpacking trip to India, in which the pictures had been mostly documentary: a naked child selling bananas on the ground in a marketplace; a procession of pilgrims in black loincloths outside an ornamented temple; a mahout on an elephant threading his way through a street dense with rickshaws and the same brightly painted Tata trucks that she knew from home. Now Kim left the album on the shelf and
went to her desk, where she started going through a drawer. “I try not to look at this too much,” she said. “I get miserable. But showing you is a good excuse.”

Amina had hoped for a family picture, one that included Ashok’s parents, but Kim had pulled out a single snapshot of the two of them. They were at a sort of public promenade, in front of a grand archway, and you could just see a harbor beyond it. A crowd of Indians stood behind them: tourists, vendors, and the sort of idle, staring young men that Amina was familiar with from home. Ashok had black sunglasses pushed up on his head and was wearing a collarless gray linen jacket. His hair flopped in his face, and he was indeed handsome enough to be a movie actor, with sharp cheekbones and large, liquid black eyes. He and Kim were just about the same height. Kim was wearing a short-sleeved blue dress with a belt and small buttons down the front, unlike any of the clothes Amina had seen in Rochester, as well as a fair amount of lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara—cosmetics that she normally went without. She was smiling at the camera and holding a heart-shaped balloon.

“This was before—”

“Before we got married,” Kim said. “It was my birthday that day, and we made love—I thought that was a stupid euphemism before I met him—and then we were just wandering around. We ended up at the Gateway of India, and I wanted to take a picture with one of those tourist photo guys. He usually hated that kind of stuff, but that day he said okay. I was twenty-three.”

“And you’re still in love with him?”

It was the second time she’d seen Kim cry, but this was less graceful than before. Deep pink blotches came out on her pale skin, and she wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Completely.”

“He’s very handsome,” Amina said diplomatically, although nothing she’d heard about Ashok so far seemed to justify Kim’s devotion.

“It was also the sex,” Kim said. “To be honest. He was just the only guy who could make me, you know, like every time. This doesn’t make you uncomfortable to talk about, does it?”

“No,” Amina said, although it was one of those times she would’ve liked to dismiss her Deshi self entirely, ask it to wait in the hall.

“I mean, I feel like I can tell you this—I’ve been with a lot of people.
I sometimes wish I hadn’t, but it’s destructive, hanging on to the past like that. Instead I’d rather think that all those guys were the path I had to take to get to Ashok. And then with him it felt like we were just this deep physical match. Like my body recognized him that day on the film set, before I even turned around to look at him.”

Amina was standing by the window, looking down at the few human shapes hurrying past on the sidewalk outside. It was November, and the season had officially changed; according to 13WHAM this morning, the temperature would drop below freezing overnight. When she saw George’s car pull up at the curb, she actually blushed, imagining what he would think if he’d been able to hear the conversation they were having.

“He’s here,” she said.

“Oh my gosh, you think I’m disgusting,” Kim said. “I shouldn’t have told you all that stuff.”

“Not at all,” Amina said. “Please don’t worry.”

“But you do—I can tell.”

“I’m happy to have someone to talk with about—family matters,” Amina said. Kim looked startled for a moment, and then she burst out laughing. Before Amina could stop her, she was hugging her again.

“I’m so glad we’re friends, Amina,” she said.

8
Kim had begun her temp job on September 8, 2001. They could use the money, she argued to Ashok, and it would take her mind off everything that had happened in Bombay. It was a small advertising firm on Thirty-first Street, and her responsibilities had mostly to do with documents, which needed to be photocopied and distributed around the office each morning. She was already standing at the copy machine on her third day of work when the first plane hit the tower. There was only one other person in the office, a young account executive named Charlie, whose mother calling from Pittsburgh was the first one to tell him what had happened three miles downtown. Charlie and Kim were looking at the computer, discussing where they might go to see a television, when the boss came in and told them about the second plane. Kim remembered Charlie saying, “That can’t be an accident,” and Kim asked what it could mean.

“I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean,” the boss said. “It doesn’t mean we’re not still getting fucked over on the Patterson account. So let’s focus, people.”

In fact, Patterson had closed their offices for a week; three days later, when the bridges finally opened, Kim and Charlie’s boss had done the same, driving straight out of the city to his brother’s house in Englewood, New Jersey.