The Newlyweds (22 page)

And then something had happened. It was hard to believe Kim would’ve had another abortion, if she were telling the truth about the way she’d felt the first time. Had she miscarried? And if so, how could George have resumed writing to Amina immediately afterward? Why would he have gone on AsianEuro in the first place, if he were already involved with his cousin?

It had been more than two years since she’d sat in Kim’s apartment for the first time. Her memories shuffled and reordered themselves like the numbers on her parents’ old flip clock, baldly revealing their humble mechanics. From that first visit, George and Kim had been acting out a drama for her benefit, and now she saw that the pretense stretched even further back. Who knew? she wondered. Had Annie guessed what had happened, or had she simply thought George and Kim had a romance that didn’t work out? Did George’s mother know, and did Cathy? There was more to Cathy’s antagonism than simple bigotry, if she’d really hoped to settle her flighty daughter with someone as solid and dependable as George. More disturbing, Amina could now explain how warmly Eileen had welcomed her, a stranger about whom she knew nothing—if she’d thought any alternative was better than the one at hand.

She was sitting on the futon with the envelope of pictures in her lap when she heard the key in the lock. She nearly cried out, but controlled herself; instead it was Kim who started and gasped.

“Amina—you scared me! I mean, you’re welcome anytime—it’s just, Lucas said you were sick. I’m glad to see you, actually—I was just at the market and they had all this great—”

But she had seen the envelope. She set two cloth grocery bags carefully on the kitchen linoleum and her keys on the counter. Then she turned back to Amina and smiled.

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” Kim was wearing kneesocks with imitation fur boots that laced up her calves and a long, white sweater with wooden buttons. In place of a knit scarf, she wore a brightly colored embroidered shawl, knotted so many times that her hair stood out wildly around her shoulders.

“No, thank you.”

Kim glanced at the envelope, and back at Amina. “It wasn’t serious. I mean, in spite of what you’re holding. I always knew he didn’t really want to marry me—if it came down to it.” Her voice had a strained quality that Amina had never heard before.

“But he asked you.” Amina kept her eyes on her plain brown socks, wishing suddenly she hadn’t removed her shoes.

“He’s a gentleman,” Kim said. “I was so screwed up, you know, after I got back. It happened the first time right after I got to Rochester, when I was staying with him in Brighton. And then, you know, every once in a while after that—the way it is with those things.”

A flush was creeping from Kim’s neck to her ears. If George had made Kim pregnant without even trying, the failure to conceive was certainly Amina’s fault. The worst thing was that Kim knew it, too.

She looked down at her engagement ring—to which Cathy had reacted so pointedly. She tried to keep her voice neutral, but it came out a strained whisper:

“Did he offer you this ring?”

“Oh, God—no,” Kim said. “Of course he knew I wouldn’t have worn it. And really, we were just getting something out of our systems. I’d never gotten over Ashok, and George knew that. But he was thinking of marrying and having a family. It all started as a game—I used to tease him. I said we should find him a real wife. We looked at Match and eHarmony, but you know, you have to register and everything. We picked AsianEuro because you don’t have to log in—and you can look at all the girls for free.”

George had pointed out the computer to Amina as soon as she’d arrived, the desk where he’d sat to e-mail her, and it had been thrilling to see for the first time the place she had hazily pictured in her mind for all of those months. Now she amended the picture to include Kim standing just over his shoulder, her unbound hair brushing his wrist, her skin smelling of scented oil. Had she been the one to click the mouse on the attachment Amina had been so embarrassed and so excited to send: the picture of herself in red lipstick, modeling Ghaniyah’s red silk sari? If it had been a game, then hadn’t it also been a kind of foreplay between them—looking at the desperate girls from halfway around the world together?

“A
game
.”

“Well, but not afterward,” Kim hurried on, “I mean, I didn’t even know he’d continued it, after I moved out. I didn’t know until my mom told me George was going to Bangladesh to meet a girl.”

She remembered the note that touched her so deeply—about his own hesitancy—and how their correspondence had intensified suddenly after that. It wasn’t hard to imagine George seeing one avenue closing and moving unsentimentally to pursue another. After having written those e-mails, and received a favorable response, he must have reasoned that it made sense to seek a return on his initial investment, rather than beginning again with someone new. He’d needed to justify his period of silence (and his house), and so he’d come up with an explanation. He might have been so eager to forget the recent past that he’d even convinced himself.

“You wanted to have the child with George?”

“I thought about it,” Kim said. “At first.” She shifted from one foot to the other, looking around the apartment as if its condition were a misfortune that had befallen her, over which she had little control. “You know, they were always disappointed in me—my mom and Aunt Eileen and everyone. Eileen used to say I had potential, if I would just apply myself to something. But after a while even she stopped expecting anything from me—I guess I stopped myself. George was the only one who thought I could do anything, stick with anything. He kept telling me what a great mother I was going to be.”

Amina stared straight ahead. If there was one thing she was not going to do, it was feel sorry for Kim.

“But it started to drive me crazy. When it first happened, I said I was going to take something. The morning-after pill, we call it.”

“Plan B.”

Kim looked surprised. “That’s right. Anyway, George was completely against it. He’s more conservative than he lets on, you know. He’d already been looking to move, and then he found the house—and a month later we were moving in there. All I could think about was this
thing
inside me, getting bigger every day. After a couple of weeks I wouldn’t get out of bed, and he told me I had to go to the doctor. He literally dragged me to the car and sat there in the waiting room, like
he thought I was going to run away or something. It wasn’t until I got in the office that I realized I could make the decision on my own. I signed the papers, and then there was nothing he could do.”

“You had another abortion?”

Kim was still standing by the counter where she’d put the bags, as if it were Amina’s apartment and she were waiting for an invitation to sit down. She didn’t answer the question.

A part of Amina wanted simply to walk out, but there was another, stronger part of her that needed to understand.

“I found these,” she said. “I was looking at them—I thought they were from India.”

Kim was already shaking her head. “Oh—I don’t have those.”

“You told me you kept them.”

“I don’t have them here. And I mean, no offense, but if I’d wanted you to see them, I would’ve shown them to you. Or left them out on the table. What were you doing—going through my closet?”

Amina was prepared to defend herself, but she’d gotten better at determining what was sincere and what was a performance, and she thought the irritation in the other woman’s voice sounded false. Kim had hidden her face behind a curtain of blond hair, bending to remove first her boots and then the long wool socks.

“You felt sorry about Ashok’s child—but not George’s? You didn’t care about getting rid of that one?”

Kim stood up, biting her lip in a childish way. Her expression was the same one Amina remembered from the day they’d gone shopping at the health food store: a defensive wariness at odds with the way she ordinarily presented herself.

“I only did it once. And who are you to judge?”

“What about India?”

Kim’s eyes got wide. “I wasn’t pregnant in India—okay? I made that up.”

“You
—what
?”

Kim took one of her yogic deep breaths, adopting an expression of patient forbearance, and came out of the doorway into the room. She dropped cross-legged onto a bright cushion, wrapped her arms around her legs, and put her chin on her knees.

“I used to imagine what it would be like to have a baby there, but
Ashok wasn’t ready yet. I thought they all might get to like me more, once we had a child.”

Amina was still struggling to reconcile the truth with what she’d believed for almost two years. “But you never got pregnant.”

“I used to slip up a little, but he was insanely careful. There would’ve been no way.”

“George wasn’t careful?”

Kim shrugged. “George wants a family.”

Amina’s lungs closed up, and it was hard to breathe. She felt as if someone were walking on her chest in heavy boots.

Kim stretched her legs out in front of her, pushing her hair back from her face with one hand. “And honestly? I guess there was a part of me that wanted to tell you. George was completely against it, of course, and his mom didn’t even want me to meet you—that’s why I didn’t come to any of the wedding stuff. She and my mom didn’t know about the pregnancy, but they knew we’d moved in together.” Kim looked at her earnestly, as if everything that had come before might soon be forgotten. “But I thought if there had been a way just to tell you straight out, you’d understand.”

Amina thought she recognized what Kim was doing. She’d noticed it ever since she’d arrived in America, not only in life but on television. You might cheat, steal, lie, but if you confessed, you could be instantly forgiven—as if the bravery it took to admit it made the thing itself all right.

Kim glanced absently at the table and picked up a wooden necklace with a saffron silk tassel. She fiddled with the beads, threading them through her fingers, keeping her eyes on the ground. Suddenly Amina hated her.

“You thought I’d understand.”

Kim smiled in a relieved way. “Yeah. I mean—I always knew you and I would understand each other.”

“You thought I’d understand about you and George—living together and getting pregnant and everything.”

Kim’s expression changed, and she looked like she was about to speak. But Amina had dropped the photos on the futon and was moving blindly toward the door.

“Amina!” Kim called after her, but she picked up her shoes and
hurried down the steps, grabbing the railing to keep from slipping in her stocking feet, so that at least Kim wouldn’t see the expression on her face.

13
She didn’t remember until she was on the bus going home that George was supposed to pick her up at Kim’s that afternoon. She called as soon as she knew he’d gone into his afternoon meeting and left a message saying that she’d come home early from Yoga Shanti, since she wasn’t feeling well. When he got home that evening, she was waiting for him in the kitchen.

“You’re feeling better?” He removed his parka, looking at her with more than the usual amount of concern.

“Not really.”

“Is it your stomach?”

“Yes,” Amina said.

“Nausea?”

Suddenly she understood him. “Since about ten this morning. But I’m not pregnant.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

George stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought …”

She had been practicing what she would say all afternoon, but now that the time had come, she couldn’t begin.

“Look,” he said gently. “I know you don’t like doctors. But it could be something very simple. They have things they can do to help us—I’ll go, too. It could be me, now that I’m getting older.”

“You were fine four years ago.”

“What?” He was looking in the cabinet for the tortilla chips, which he’d finished yesterday. It occurred to her that this wasn’t a conversation she could’ve had in English a year ago.

“Otherwise why did you buy this big house?”

George turned slowly to face her. His left hand, with the gold ring, gripped the countertop. “Because I hoped to meet you.”

“But you bought the house in March.”

“I told you when I bought the house.”

“You told me May.”

“I told you as soon as I knew we were serious. I always wanted a family.”

“Did you want a family with Kim?”

“
What?
Jesus—who’ve you been talking to?”

“I’ve been talking to Annie,” Amina said.

“Annie,” George repeated. “But Annie—”

“She didn’t know about Kim’s pregnancy. I found that out on my own.”

George frowned at his shoes, which he’d neglected to take off at the door for the thousandth time. They were brown loafers, narrower at the toe, with worn places where you could see his broad feet deforming the leather. She turned away, taking a package of chicken parts from the refrigerator.

“Do you have to cook tonight?”

“It’s already defrosted. I have to make it now.”

George waited, sitting on the couch without turning on the television. He’d switched his beer for a caffeine-free Coke. When dinner was almost ready, he got up without her asking and put the Brita water pitcher on the table.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said when they sat down. “At the very beginning I wanted to tell you. But I was afraid you’d stop writing to me.”

“When you stopped writing to me.”

“What would you have wanted me to do when she got pregnant?” George’s voice rose in frustration. “I thought I’d better try to make it work. You didn’t just talk to Annie, did you—it was Kim. What did she tell you? Did she say I was in love with her?”

“She said you were getting it out of your system.”

For a second George looked relieved.

Amina’s face got hot. “And that you and she were playing a game.”

“I didn’t say I’d never been involved with anyone else,” George said.

She looked at him.

“But I misled you about Kim. I’m sorry about that.”

“Not misled—you
lied
to me. You stopped writing, and I knew you
had someone else. I wasn’t stupid—but then you said it wasn’t that. You said it was because you were buying this house—for us!”