The Vine of Desire (27 page)

Monday morning dawns a beautiful gold, empty of clouds. The opposite of how I’m feeling. But for Dayita’s sake, I make an effort.
We wave cheery good-byes to Anju. Thankfully, Sunil left before I came out of my bedroom. Dayita and I do the breakfast dishes—she stands next to me on a chair and splashes her hands in the soap water. After I’ve wiped the floor, I say, “Let’s do something fun today that we haven’t done before.” I wish I could take her someplace different and exotic, beyond the dull orbit of my everyday walk.

As though in response to my wish, the key rattles in the lock. The door creaks open.

Sunil!

My heart thuds so hard, I think it’s going to stop. But at the center of my startled fear is an icy lack of surprise. What else could come after this past weekend, things built up to explosion point? And yet the weekend was only a catalyst. We’ve been moving toward this moment, he and I—no matter how many detours we tried—ever since our eyes met at the airport in San Francisco and I knew he’d forgotten nothing of the past.

In a strange, chill manner, I’m relieved, too. For months I’ve been dangling from the edge of a cliff, my grip weakening. I’m exhausted from imagining my fall, over and over. The real fall—whatever I shatter in the process—can happen only once. After today, it’ll pass into my past, along with the other things I thought I could not survive.

For a moment Sunil stands at the door, a look of such longing on his face that I’m almost weakened. When he starts toward me, his gait is careful and arduous, a desert traveler pushing against a windstorm. I force myself not to move back. He puts out his hand. My throat is blocked by salt and sand and dim breathlessness. I pick up Dayita and hold her between us like armor.

His hand touches Dayita’s forehead, checking for fever. Perhaps that is all he had intended from the first.

Dayita scrabbles from my arms into his, chattering excited baby words that he seems to understand. He’s whispering something to her, his lips moving across her forehead in little kisses. I lower my eyes, feeling stupid.

“I’m glad she’s better today,” he says. There’s a small smile on his lips, bitter like the crushed neem leaves we take in India to clear the blood.

I know he saw the fear in my eyes.

He pulls our jackets from the closet, fills a diaper bag. “Let’s go,” he says and heads out the door as though this were an excursion we planned weeks ago. He doesn’t check to see if I’m following. How can he be so certain? But perhaps it is only that, like that Greek hero who goes down to hell, whose name I can’t remember in my agitation, he knows he must not look back.

The freeway is lined in part with factories belching smoke, in part with elegant structures of glass and metal. In between, a few dispirited palm trees. The pattern of my life, except I can’t always distinguish the ugly from the beautiful.

We pull off onto a side street. Small, neat houses, freshly painted, cheerily tiled. Careful lawns set out like tea trays, not a weed in sight. I imagine, with brief envy, a life where the quality of grass can assume such importance. Dayita points at blackbirds and babbles happily. We stop in front of green. A sign says,
San Jose Rose Gardens.

“I thought you would like this place,” Sunil says. “It isn’t as fancy as San Francisco, of course!” There’s a challenge in his voice and, under that, a plea.

The first time we were alone, that, too, was in a garden. Arbor of jasmine and bougainvillea. Tuberoses which smelled like bridal nights, making a man forget the promises he’d made already to another woman and her family.

It’s no coincidence that he has brought me here.

We walk, heading for a bench at the far end. A strange, Valium calm has replaced my agitation. Dayita rushes ahead, delighted by the colors. I call to her not to touch anything. Riot of reds.
Scarlet Knight, Rob Roy, Royal William, Don Juan.
Who would have believed that so many roses were named for men?

“I can’t go on this way anymore,” Sunil says. “It’s killing me.” He speaks softly, precisely, his eyes on the flowers. A passerby might think he was telling me the histories of roses. “I should have spoken to you earlier, but I was afraid you’d leave. All these months I thought, At least she’s here in the same apartment, breathing the same air. The glass she drinks from, I drink from it, too, sometimes. Other times I insisted to myself, I’ll get over her if I keep seeing her day after day. See her in the morning, face puffy with sleep, hair pulled back. See her at night, her sari stained with cooking, her eyes lined and tired.” He shakes his head. “None of it was any good. And then you went out with Lalit, and I was afraid I’d lose you again.”

Can one lose again what one never had? But I don’t say anything. Nor do I try to stop him. It’s too late for that. The moment I wrote to Anju agreeing to come to America, it started being too late. Now he must say it all.

“What’s worse? To tell the truth and hurt the people close to you, or to keep it bottled inside and hurt yourself?”

Sunil, it isn’t as simple as you make it out to be. Sometimes you tell the truth, and everyone’s hurt. Sometimes the truth
forces you into places you never intended to go when you spoke it.

“Well, here’s my truth—I don’t love Anju. I’ve failed to make myself love her. I admire her for many things. I feel responsible for her, even more so since the miscarriage. But what I felt toward you—from the day I came to the bride-viewing for Anju in the Chatterjee house—I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if that’s what people call love. But it’s the closest thing to it that I’ve known. If I compare it to what I feel for Anju, it’s like holding a firefly in one hand and a live coal in the other. Don’t think I’ve enjoyed it, not for a moment. Before the wedding, I thought of you night and day. So many times I was set to tell Anju, let’s call it off. But I’d see how her face lit up on seeing me, I knew the humiliation she’d undergo if the match was broken….”

He twists the strap of the diaper bag so hard it breaks off in his hand. He stares at it without seeing, then lets the bag fall to the ground.

“I just couldn’t do it. I thought I was being kind, but maybe it was only cowardice. Was it cowardice, Sudha, is that why I’m paying for it now?”

There’s so much sorrow in his face, I could drown in it. My heart twists like the strap of the diaper bag. Perhaps it, too, will snap.

“I said to myself, love will come after marriage—that’s what happened with many of my friends. When we’re in America, everything will work out. I pushed you from my thoughts—and kept you out most of the time. But Anju and I grew apart anyway. Even before the … miscarriage. I think she sensed the coldness in me. She never spoke of it—she had too much pride—but somewhere inside, she removed herself. If our boy
had been born, we would have made it somehow. Patched up our marriage because of him, like so many couples do. But his death—it towered between us like a wall of ice. We were freezing to death. And then you came.”

He stops for breath. I don’t think he’s ever spoken like this. In an old tale Pishi told us, there was a man who tied an iron cord around his chest at all times to save himself from feeling too much. I’m hearing metal strain and snap. What I don’t know is whether I’m doing him good or harm.

“I was obsessed all over again. I told myself it was wrong, but when I walked into a room where you were, the hairs on my arm stood up. I couldn’t talk to you without breaking into a sweat. I wanted to kill Ramesh. At the same time, I was overjoyed that he hadn’t had the sense to cherish you like I would have. Like I already did, even though I had no right to. But loving you was like breathing. How could I stop myself? All this time with Anju, I’d been only half-alive. I see that now, and I can’t bear to go back into that bleakness again.”

The air around me could be frozen crystal, it is so hard to draw into my lungs. Whoever could have imagined that I, Sudha, the luckless one, would be loved one day with such absoluteness? I feel Sunil’s need pulse through my arteries, the most dangerous of drugs. How easy it would be to grow addicted to it.

“I’ve been waiting for Anju to get better. And now that she’s back in college and doing so well, I’m going to sit down and talk to her. About how we’re no good for each other. All we do is bring out the worst in each other. She sees it herself, I’m sure. I’m going to ask for a divorce.” He swallows hard and takes my hand. “Sudha, will you marry me?”

In their simplicity, the words pierce me. I did not expect them to come at me so sudden and unadorned. Oh, Anju. A terrible
hope smolders in his eyes. It fills me with pity. Pity for all three of us, and for Dayita, who must suffer the aftershock, no matter what I decide today.

“I’m rushing you, aren’t I?” he says. “I don’t want to do that. We’ll wait as long as you like.” And then, watching my face, “You’re feeling guilty. Please don’t. Because whatever you choose to do, I’m going through with the divorce. The breakdown of our marriage began long before you came to America. It has no connection with what I feel for you.”

Oh, Sunil, there’s no end to what we can make ourselves believe, is there?

“Everything is connected,” I say sadly.

“I can’t live with Anju anymore, even if it means that I’ll have to live alone. But I hope it won’t come to that. Please, Sudha, give me some hope.” He is kissing my hand now, his face pressed into my palm. I can feel the small, warm suck of his in-breath against my lifeline. Why does it feel as though
his
palm is against
my
face, pressing? The hunger in him is a black hole into which I could so easily disappear. When you want a thing so much, does that give you a right to it? Something slashes through my body like a sword. Is it desire? It cuts me to pieces. Now there are many Sudhas, each wanting something different. To be independent. To be desired. To be true.

But what is truth, and to whom shall I be true?

“At least don’t say no,” he says. “At least think about it.”

I want to laugh. Even if I wanted to, how could I stop thinking about this afternoon, this hinge from which my future hangs like a door not yet opened?

Dayita comes crying. She’s pricked her finger on a bush of sweetheart roses. I suck away the drop of blood, try to hush her. But she won’t stop whimpering until Sunil picks her up and
kisses her.
Hey, kid, hey, pumpkin, look in my shirt pocket.
She searches, tears forgotten, then holds up a lollipop in triumph.

Another man would have used Dayita in his argument.
It’ll be so good for her—I love her as a father already.
I respect him for not doing that to me.

We walk back along aisles of yellow roses.
Sunsprite, Mermaid, Golden Wings.
Names free of the weight of earth, of the body’s insistences. My sari palloo catches on a bush, and Sunil kneels to free it. I once read that yellow roses symbolized friendship. In his loyalty and kindness, his attempts to hold on to honor, Sunil would have made a good friend. I say a quick, silent prayer: this lifetime is lost to us, but in a future incarnation, may we be blessed by such a bond. If such a thing is possible between men and women. To guide, warn, and console each other. To love each other in that other, better way.

In the car, we are too preoccupied to make small talk—and everything else seems to have been said already. He turns on the radio. We listen to callers giving the talk-show host their opinions as to whether O. J. is guilty or not. He bends forward as though to get closer to the radio, his nose quivers like a fine hunting dog’s, picking up a scent. For all that he’s told me, how little I know him.

And so I ask, “Why are you so fascinated by the Simpson case?”

He hesitates. I think he will retreat behind his usual prickliness. Then he says, “I used to play a bit of football in India—what they call soccer here. Nothing fancy, mostly just with the neighborhood boys, in a muddy field near the bus depot. But I loved it. It gave me a chance to get away from the house. My
happiest memories are of being on that field, running with the ball.” He looks into the distance. The years have taught him to hide his feelings, but I think I catch a glimpse of the boy he’d been, a flash of skinny brown legs across a stubbled expanse, losing himself in an exuberance of speed.

“Anyway, when I knew I was coming to America, I went to the USIS library and looked up a book on American football. That’s when I came across Simpson’s story, how he broke out of the ghetto and made it through college to become one of the greatest players of his time. It made an impression on me—maybe because he was brown-skinned, too. Maybe because he’d overcome so many odds, so many people telling him he was no good. I identified with that. I got a poster of him after I got to the university and put it up in my room, and when things were hard—a class not going well, a fellowship running out, an adviser giving me a hard time, I’d think it must have been even harder for him. Once I saw him on TV, talking about some kind of charity he was involved in, raising money for black kids. Maybe it was just for the publicity, but he seemed to really care. There was a poise about him that I wanted to own. And now—I guess I’m obsessed with wanting to know if I misread him, like I’ve done with so many people. If it was all just an act. But if it wasn’t—and if he really did kill his wife—I want to know what it is that forces a good man into violence like that.”