The notice informed them
that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut
off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last
snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings
to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined
street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley
stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years.
"It's good of them to warn us," Shoba conceded after reading the
notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar's. She let the strap of
her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in
the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin
raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three,
like the type of woman she'd once claimed she would never resemble.
She'd
come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches
of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower
lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings
after a party or a night at a bar, when she'd been too lazy to wash her face,
too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table
without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand.
"But they should do this sort of thing during the day."
"When I'm here, you mean," Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot
of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since
January he'd been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his
dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. "When do the repairs
start?"
"It
says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?" Shoba walked over to the
framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a
calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the
first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before
allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent
the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar
hadn't celebrated Christmas that year.
"Today then," Shoba announced. "You have a dentist appointment
next Friday, by the way."
He ran
his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he'd forgotten to brush them that
morning. It wasn't the first time. He hadn't left the house at all that day, or
the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra
hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in,
not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the
trolley stop.
Six
months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference in Baltimore
when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due date. He hadn't wanted
to go to the conference, but she had insisted; it was important to make
contacts, and he would be entering the job market next year. She told him that
she had his number at the hotel, and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers,
and she had arranged with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the
event of an emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport,
Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the mound of
her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her body.
Each
time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was
the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering.
It was cavernous compared to their own car. Although Shukumar was six feet
tall, with hands too big ever to rest comfortably in the pockets of his jeans,
he felt dwarfed in the back seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he
imagined a day when he and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their
own, to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist
appointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to
hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of parenthood had troubled
Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at thirty-five. But
that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he
welcomed the image for the first time.
A member
of the staff had found him somehow among the identical convention rooms and
handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was only a telephone number, but
Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When he returned to Boston it was over. The
baby had been born dead. Shoba was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so
small there was barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the
hospital they hadn't been to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta
had weakened and she'd had a cesarean, though not quickly enough. The doctor
explained that these things happen. He smiled in the kindest way it was
possible to smile at people known only professionally. Shoba would be back on
her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to indicate that she would not be able
to have children in the future.
These
days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He would open his eyes
and see the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dressed,
sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she
searched for typographical errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she
had once explained to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do
the same for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her
the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. He was a
mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity.
Until September he had been diligent if not dedicated, summarizing chapters,
outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper. But now he would lie in
their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the closet which Shoba
always left partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trousers
he would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester. After the
baby died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching duties. But his adviser
had arranged things so that he had the spring semester to himself. Shukumar was
in his sixth year of graduate school. "That and the summer should give you
a good push," his adviser had said. "You should be able to wrap
things up by next September."
But
nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had become
experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much
time on separate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked
forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored
pencils and her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own
house might be rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into
his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still
reached for each other's bodies before sleeping.
In the
beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and Shoba would get
through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three. She was strong, on her feet
again. But it wasn't a consolation. It was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar
would finally pull himself out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring
out the extra bit Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the
countertop.
Shukumar gathered onion
skins in his hands and let them drop into the garbage pail, on top of the
ribbons of fat he'd trimmed from the lamb. He ran the water in the sink,
soaking the knife and the cutting board, and rubbed a lemon half along his
fingertips to get rid of the garlic smell, a trick he'd learned from Shoba. It
was seven-thirty. Through the window he saw the sky, like soft black pitch.
Uneven banks of snow still lined the sidewalks, though it was warm enough for
people to walk about without hats or gloves. Nearly three feet had fallen in
the last storm, so that for a week people had to walk single file, in narrow
trenches. For a week that was Shukumar's excuse for not leaving the house. But
now the trenches were widening, and water drained steadily into grates in the
pavement.
"The lamb won't be done by eight," Shukumar said. "We may have
to eat in the dark."
"We
can light candles," Shoba suggested. She unclipped her hair, coiled neatly
at her nape during the days, and pried the sneakers from her feet without
untying them. "I'm going to shower before the lights go," she said,
heading for the staircase. "I'll be down."
Shukumar
moved her satchel and her sneakers to the side of the fridge. She wasn't this
way before. She used to put her coat on a hanger, her sneakers in the closet,
and she paid bills as soon as they came. But now she treated the house as if it
were a hotel. The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room
clashed with the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her. On the
enclosed porch at the back of the house, a crisp white bag still sat on the
wicker chaise, filled with lace she had once planned to turn into curtains.
While
Shoba showered, Shukumar went into the downstairs bathroom and found a new
toothbrush in its box beneath the sink. The cheap, stiff bristles hurt his
gums, and he spit some blood into the basin. The spare brush was one of many
stored in a metal basket. Shoba had bought them once when they were on sale, in
the event that a visitor decided, at the last minute, to spend the night.
It was
typical of her. She was the type to prepare for surprises, good and bad. If she
found a skirt or a purse she liked she bought two. She kept the bonuses from
her job in a separate bank account in her name. It hadn't bothered him. His own
mother had fallen to pieces when his father died, abandoning the house he grew
up in and moving back to Calcutta, leaving Shukumar to settle it all. He liked
that Shoba was different. It astonished him, her capacity to think ahead. When
she used to do the shopping, the pantry was always stocked with extra bottles
of olive and corn oil, depending on whether they were cooking Italian or
Indian. There were endless boxes of pasta in all shapes and colors, zippered
sacks of basmati rice, whole sides of lambs and goats from the Muslim butchers
at Haymarket, chopped up and frozen in endless plastic bags. Every other
Saturday they wound through the maze of stalls Shukumar eventually knew by
heart. He watched in disbelief as she bought more food, trailing behind her
with canvas bags as she pushed through the crowd, arguing under the morning sun
with boys too young to shave but already missing teeth, who twisted up brown
paper bags of artichokes, plums, gingerroot, and yams, and dropped them on
their scales, and tossed them to Shoba one by one. She didn't mind being
jostled, even when she was pregnant. She was tall, and broad-shouldered, with
hips that her obstetrician assured her were made for childbearing. During the
drive back home, as the car curved along the Charles, they invariably marveled
at how much food they'd bought.
It never
went to waste. When friends dropped by, Shoba would throw together meals that
appeared to have taken half a day to prepare, from things she had frozen and
bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herself with
rosemary, and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of
tomatoes and prunes. Her labeled mason jars lined the shelves of the kitchen,
in endless sealed pyramids, enough, they'd agreed, to last for their
grandchildren to taste. They'd eaten it all by now. Shukumar had been going
through their supplies steadily, preparing meals for the two of them, measuring
out cupfuls of rice, defrosting bags of meat day after day. He combed through
her cookbooks every afternoon, following her penciled instructions to use two
teaspoons of ground coriander seeds instead of one, or red lentils instead of
yellow. Each of the recipes was dated, telling the first time they had eaten
the dish together. April 2, cauliflower with fennel. January 14, chicken with
almonds and sultanas. He had no memory of eating those meals, and yet there
they were, recorded in her neat proofreader's hand. Shukumar enjoyed cooking
now. It was the one thing that made him feel productive. If it weren't for him,
he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for her dinner.
Tonight,
with no lights, they would have to eat together. For months now they'd served
themselves from the stove, and he'd taken his plate into his study, letting the
meal grow cold on his desk before shoving it into his mouth without pause,
while Shoba took her plate to the living room and watched game shows, or
proofread files with her arsenal of colored pencils at hand.
At some
point in the evening she visited him. When he heard her approach he would put
away his novel and begin typing sentences. She would rest her hands on his
shoulders and stare with him into the blue glow of the computer screen.
"Don't work too hard," she would say after a minute or two, and head
off to bed. It was the one time in the day she sought him out, and yet he'd
come to dread it. He knew it was something she forced herself to do. She would
look around the walls of the room, which they had decorated together last
summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing trumpets and drums.
By the end of August there was a cherry crib under the window, a white changing
table with mint-green knobs, and a rocking chair with checkered cushions.
Shukumar had disassembled it all before bringing Shoba back from the hospital,
scraping off the rabbits and ducks with a spatula. For some reason the room did
not haunt him the way it haunted Shoba. In January, when he stopped working at
his carrel in the library, he set up his desk there deliberately, partly
because the room soothed him, and partly because it was a place Shoba avoided.
Shukumar returned to the
kitchen and began to open drawers. He tried to locate a candle among the
scissors, the eggbeaters and whisks, the mortar and pestle she'd bought in a
bazaar in Calcutta, and used to pound garlic cloves and cardamom pods, back when
she used to cook. He found a flashlight, but no batteries, and a half-empty box
of birthday candles. Shoba had thrown him a surprise birthday party last May.
One hundred and twenty people had crammed into the house — all the friends and
the friends of friends they now systematically avoided. Bottles of vinho verde
had nested in a bed of ice in the bathtub. Shoba was in her fifth month,
drinking ginger ale from a martini glass. She had made a vanilla cream cake
with custard and spun sugar. All night she kept Shukumar's long fingers linked
with hers as they walked among the guests at the party.
Since
September their only guest had been Shoba's mother. She came from Arizona and
stayed with them for two months after Shoba returned from the hospital. She cooked
dinner every night, drove herself to the supermarket, washed their clothes, put
them away. She was a religious woman. She set up a small shrine, a framed
picture of a lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the
bedside table in the guest room, and prayed twice a day for healthy
grandchildren in the future. She was polite to Shukumar without being friendly.
She folded his sweaters with an expertise she had learned from her job in a
department store. She replaced a missing button on his winter coat and knit him
a beige and brown scarf, presenting it to him without the least bit of
ceremony, as if he had only dropped it and hadn't noticed. She never talked to
him about Shoba; once, when he mentioned the baby's death, she looked up from her
knitting, and said, "But you weren't even there."
It
struck him as odd that there were no real candles in the house. That Shoba
hadn't prepared for such an ordinary emergency. He looked now for something to
put the birthday candles in and settled on the soil of a potted ivy that
normally sat on the windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches
from the tap, the soil was so dry that he had to water it first before the
candles would stand straight. He pushed aside the things on the kitchen table,
the piles of mail, the unread library books. He remembered their first meals
there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living together in the
same house at last, that they would just reach for each other foolishly, more
eager to make love than to eat. He put down two embroidered place mats, a
wedding gift from an uncle in Lucknow, and set out the plates and wineglasses
they usually saved for guests. He put the ivy in the middle, the white-edged,
star-shaped leaves girded by ten little candles. He switched on the digital
clock radio and tuned it to a jazz station.
"What's all this?" Shoba said when she came downstairs. Her hair was
wrapped in a thick white towel. She undid the towel and draped it over a chair,
allowing her hair, damp and dark, to fall across her back. As she walked
absently toward the stove she took out a few tangles with her fingers. She wore
a clean pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt, an old flannel robe. Her stomach was
flat again, her waist narrow before the flare of her hips, the belt of the robe
tied in a floppy knot.
It was
nearly eight. Shukumar put the rice on the table and the lentils from the night
before into the microwave oven, punching the numbers on the timer.
"You made rogan josh," Shoba observed, looking through
the glass lid at the bright paprika stew.
Shukumar
took out a piece of lamb, pinching it quickly between his fingers so as not to
scald himself. He prodded a larger piece with a serving spoon to make sure the
meat slipped easily from the bone. "It's ready," he announced.
The
microwave had just beeped when the lights went out, and the music disappeared.
"Perfect timing," Shoba said.
"All I could find were birthday candles." He lit up the ivy, keeping
the rest of the candles and a book of matches by his plate.
"It
doesn't matter," she said, running a finger along the stem of her
wineglass. "It looks lovely."
In the
dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair, ankles crossed
against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table. During his search for the
candles, Shukumar had found a bottle of wine in a crate he had thought was
empty. He clamped the bottle between his knees while he turned in the
corkscrew. He worried about spilling, and so he picked up the glasses and held
them close to his lap while he filled them. They served themselves, stirring
the rice with their forks, squinting as they extracted bay leaves and cloves
from the stew. Every few minutes Shukumar lit a few more birthday candles and
drove them into the soil of the pot.
"It's like India," Shoba said, watching him tend his makeshift
candelabra. "Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch. I
once had to attend an entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby just cried and
cried. It must have been so hot."
Their
baby had never cried, Shukumar considered. Their baby would never have a rice
ceremony, even though Shoba had already made the guest list, and decided on
which of her three brothers she was going to ask to feed the child its first taste
of solid food, at six months if it was a boy, seven if it was a girl.
"Are you hot?" he asked her. He pushed the blazing ivy pot to the
other end of the table, closer to the piles of books and mail, making it even
more difficult for them to see each other. He was suddenly irritated that he
couldn't go upstairs and sit in front of the computer.
"No. It's delicious," she said, tapping her plate with her fork.
"It really is."
He
refilled the wine in her glass. She thanked him.
They
weren't like this before. Now he had to struggle to say something that
interested her, something that made her look up from her plate, or from her
proofreading files. Eventually he gave up trying to amuse her. He learned not
to mind the silences.
"I
remember during power failures at my grandmother's house, we all had to say
something," Shoba continued. He could barely see her face, but from her
tone he knew her eyes were narrowed, as if trying to focus on a distant object.
It was a habit of hers.
"Like what?"
"I
don't know. A little poem. A joke. A fact about the world. For some reason my
relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of my friends in America. I
don't know why the information was so interesting to them. The last time I saw
my aunt she asked after four girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson.
I barely remember them now."
Shukumar
hadn't spent as much time in India as Shoba had. His parents, who settled in
New Hampshire, used to go back without him. The first time he'd gone as an
infant he'd nearly died of amoebic dysentery. His father, a nervous type, was
afraid to take him again, in case something were to happen, and left him with
his aunt and uncle in Concord. As a teenager he preferred sailing camp or
scooping ice cream during the summers to going to Calcutta. It wasn't until
after his father died, in his last year of college, that the country began to
interest him, and he studied its history from course books as if it were any
other subject. He wished now that he had his own childhood story of India.
"Let's do that," she said suddenly.
"Do
what?"
"Say something to each other in the dark."
"Like what? I don't know any jokes."
"No, no jokes." She thought for a minute. "How about telling
each other something we've never told before."
"I
used to play this game in high school," Shukumar recalled. "When I
got drunk."
"You're thinking of truth or dare. This is different. Okay, I'll
start." She took a sip of wine. "The first time I was alone in your
apartment, I looked in your address book to see if you'd written me in. I think
we'd known each other two weeks."
"Where was I?"
"You went to answer the telephone in the other room. It was your mother,
and I figured it would be a long call. I wanted to know if you'd promoted me
from the margins of your newspaper."
"Had I?"
"No. But I didn't give up on you. Now it's your turn."
He
couldn't think of anything, but Shoba was waiting for him to speak. She hadn't
appeared so determined in months. What was there left to say to her? He thought
back to their first meeting, four years earlier at a lecture hall in Cambridge,
where a group of Bengali poets were giving a recital. They'd ended up side by
side, on folding wooden chairs. Shukumar was soon bored; he was unable to
decipher the literary diction, and couldn't join the rest of the audience as
they sighed and nodded solemnly after certain phrases. Peering at the newspaper
folded in his lap, he studied the temperatures of cities around the world.
Ninety-one degrees in Singapore yesterday, fifty-one in Stockholm. When he
turned his head to the left, he saw a woman next to him making a grocery list
on the back of a folder, and was startled to find that she was beautiful.
"Okay" he said, remembering. "The first time we went out to
dinner, to the Portuguese place, I forgot to tip the waiter. I went back the
next morning, found out his name, left money with the manager."
"You went all the way back to Somerville just to tip a waiter?"
"I
took a cab."
"Why did you forget to tip the waiter?"
The
birthday candles had burned out, but he pictured her face clearly in the dark,
the wide tilting eyes, the full grape-toned lips, the fall at age two from her
high chair still visible as a comma on her chin. Each day, Shukumar noticed,
her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that
had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her
somehow.
"By
the end of the meal I had a funny feeling that I might marry you," he
said, admitting it to himself as well as to her for the first time. "It
must have distracted me."
The next night Shoba came
home earlier than usual. There was lamb left over from the evening before, and
Shukumar heated it up so that they were able to eat by seven. He'd gone out
that day, through the melting snow, and bought a packet of taper candles from
the corner store, and batteries to fit the flashlight. He had the candles ready
on the countertop, standing in brass holders shaped like lotuses, but they ate
under the glow of the copper-shaded ceiling lamp that hung over the table.
When
they had finished eating, Shukumar was surprised to see that Shoba was stacking
her plate on top of his, and then carrying them over to the sink. He had
assumed she would retreat to the living room, behind her barricade of files.
"Don't
worry about the dishes," he said, taking them from her hands.
"It
seems silly not to," she replied, pouring a drop of detergent onto a
sponge. "It's nearly eight o'clock."
His
heart quickened. All day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out.
He thought about what Shoba had said the night before, about looking in his
address book. It felt good to remember her as she was then, how bold yet
nervous she'd been when they first met, how hopeful. They stood side by side at
the sink, their reflections fitting together in the frame of the window. It
made him shy, the way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
He couldn't recall the last time they'd been photographed. They had stopped
attending parties, went nowhere together. The film in his camera still
contained pictures of Shoba, in the yard, when she was pregnant.
After
finishing the dishes, they leaned against the counter, drying their hands on
either end of a towel. At eight o'clock the house went black. Shukumar lit the
wicks of the candles, impressed by their long, steady flames.
"Let's sit outside," Shoba said. "I think it's warm still."
They
each took a candle and sat down on the steps. It seemed strange to be sitting
outside with patches of snow still on the ground. But everyone was out of their
houses tonight, the air fresh enough to make people restless. Screen doors
opened and closed. A small parade of neighbors passed by with flashlights.
"We're going to the bookstore to browse," a silver-haired man called
out. He was walking with his wife, a thin woman in a windbreaker, and holding a
dog on a leash. They were the Bradfords, and they had tucked a sympathy card
into Shoba and Shukumar's mailbox back in September. "I hear they've got
their power."
"They'd better," Shukumar said. "Or you'll be browsing in the
dark."
The
woman laughed, slipping her arm through the crook of her husband's elbow.
"Want to join us?"
"No
thanks," Shoba and Shukumar called out together. It surprised Shukumar
that his words matched hers.
He
wondered what Shoba would tell him in the dark. The worst possibilities had
already run through his head. That she'd had an affair. That she didn't respect
him for being thirty-five and still a student. That she blamed him for being in
Baltimore the way her mother did. But he knew those things weren't true. She'd
been faithful, as had he. She believed in him. It was she who had insisted he
go to Baltimore. What didn't they know about each other? He knew she curled her
fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched during bad dreams. He
knew it was honeydew she favored over cantaloupe. He knew that when they
returned from the hospital the first thing she did when she walked into the
house was pick out objects of theirs and toss them into a pile in the hallway:
books from the shelves, plants from the windowsills, paintings from walls,
photos from tables, pots and pans that hung from the hooks over the stove. Shukumar
had stepped out of her way, watching as she moved methodically from room to
room. When she was satisfied, she stood there staring at the pile she'd made,
her lips drawn back in such distaste that Shukumar had thought she would spit.
Then she'd started to cry.
He began
to feel cold as he sat there on the steps. He felt that he needed her to talk
first, in order to reciprocate.
"That time when your mother came to visit us," she said finally.
"When I said one night that I had to stay late at work, I went out with
Gillian and had a martini."
He
looked at her profile, the slender nose, the slightly masculine set of her jaw.
He remembered that night well; eating with his mother, tired from teaching two
classes back to back, wishing Shoba were there to say more of the right things
because he came up with only the wrong ones. It had been twelve years since his
father had died, and his mother had come to spend two weeks with him and Shoba,
so they could honor his father's memory together. Each night his mother cooked
something his father had liked, but she was too upset to eat the dishes
herself, and her eyes would well up as Shoba stroked her hand. "It's so
touching," Shoba had said to him at the time. Now he pictured Shoba with
Gillian, in a bar with striped velvet sofas, the one they used to go to after
the movies, making sure she got her extra olive, asking Gillian for a
cigarette. He imagined her complaining, and Gillian sympathizing about visits
from in-laws. It was Gillian who had driven Shoba to the hospital.
"Your turn," she said, stopping his thoughts.
At the
end of their street Shukumar heard sounds of a drill and the electricians
shouting over it. He looked at the darkened facades of the houses lining the
street. Candles glowed in the windows of one. In spite of the warmth, smoke
rose from the chimney.
"I
cheated on my Oriental Civilization exam in college," he said. "It
was my last semester, my last set of exams. My father had died a few months
before. I could see the blue book of the guy next to me. He was an American
guy, a maniac. He knew Urdu and Sanskrit. I couldn't remember if the verse we
had to identify was an example of a ghazal or not. I looked at
his answer and copied it down."
It had
happened over fifteen years ago. He felt relief now, having told her.
She
turned to him, looking not at his face, but at his shoes — old moccasins he
wore as if they were slippers, the leather at the back permanently flattened.
He wondered if it bothered her, what he'd said. She took his hand and pressed
it. "You didn't have to tell me why you did it," she said, moving
closer to him.
They sat
together until nine o'clock, when the lights came on. They heard some people
across the street clapping from their porch, and televisions being turned on.
The Bradfords walked back down the street, eating ice-cream cones and waving.
Shoba and Shukumar waved back. Then they stood up, his hand still in hers, and
went inside.
Somehow, without saying
anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions — the little
ways they'd hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves. The following day
Shukumar thought for hours about what to say to her. He was torn between
admitting that he once ripped out a photo of a woman in one of the fashion
magazines she used to subscribe to and carried it in his books for a week, or
saying that he really hadn't lost the sweater-vest she bought him for their
third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash at Filene's, and that
he had gotten drunk alone in the middle of the day at a hotel bar. For their
first anniversary, Shoba had cooked a ten-course dinner just for him. The vest
depressed him. "My wife gave me a sweater-vest for our anniversary,"
he complained to the bartender, his head heavy with cognac. "What do you
expect?" the bartender had replied. "You're married."
As for
the picture of the woman, he didn't know why he'd ripped it out. She wasn't as
pretty as Shoba. She wore a white sequined dress, and had a sullen face and
lean, mannish legs. Her bare arms were raised, her fists around her head, as if
she were about to punch herself in the ears. It was an advertisement for
stockings. Shoba had been pregnant at the time, her stomach suddenly immense,
to the point where Shukumar no longer wanted to touch her. The first time he
saw the picture he was lying in bed next to her, watching her as she read. When
he noticed the magazine in the recycling pile he found the woman and tore out
the page as carefully as he could. For about a week he allowed himself a
glimpse each day. He felt an intense desire for the woman, but it was a desire
that turned to disgust after a minute or two. It was the closest he'd come to
infidelity.
He told
Shoba about the sweater on the third night, the picture on the fourth. She said
nothing as he spoke, expressed no protest or reproach. She simply listened, and
then she took his hand, pressing it as she had before. On the third night, she
told him that once after a lecture they'd attended, she let him speak to the
chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his
chin. She'd been irritated with him for some reason, and so she'd let him go on
and on, about securing his fellowship for the following semester, without
putting a finger to her own chin as a signal. The fourth night, she said that
she never liked the one poem he'd ever published in his life, in a literary
magazine in Utah. He'd written the poem after meeting Shoba. She added that she
found the poem sentimental.
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each
other again. The third night after supper they'd sat together on the sofa, and
once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her forehead and her face,
and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and knew that she did, too. The
fourth night they walked carefully upstairs, to bed, feeling together for the
final step with their feet before the landing, and making love with a
desperation they had forgotten. She wept without sound, and whispered his name,
and traced his eyebrows with her finger in the dark. As he made love to her he
wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would say, the
thought of it exciting him. "Hold me," he said, "hold me in your
arms," By the time the lights came back on downstairs, they'd fallen
asleep.
The morning of the fifth
night Shukumar found another notice from the electric company in the mailbox.
The line had been repaired ahead of schedule, it said. He was disappointed. He
had planned on making shrimp malai for Shoba, but when he
arrived at the store he didn't feel like cooking anymore. It wasn't the same,
he thought, knowing that the lights wouldn't go out. In the store the shrimp
looked gray and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced. Still, he
bought them, along with a beeswax candle and two bottles of wine.
She came
home at seven-thirty. "I suppose this is the end of our game," he
said when he saw her reading the notice.
She
looked at him. "You can still light candles if you want." She hadn't
been to the gym tonight. She wore a suit beneath the raincoat. Her makeup had
been retouched recently.
When she
went upstairs to change, Shukumar poured himself some wine and put on a record,
a Thelonius Monk album he knew she liked.
When she
came downstairs they ate together. She didn't thank him or compliment him. They
simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a beeswax candle. They had
survived a difficult time. They finished off the shrimp. They finished off the
first bottle of wine and moved on to the second. They sat together until the
candle had nearly burned away. She shifted in her chair, and Shukumar thought
that she was about to say something. But instead she blew out the candle, stood
up, turned on the light switch, and sat down again.
"Shouldn't we keep the lights off?" Shukumar asked. She set her plate
aside and clasped her hands on the table. "I want you to see my face when
I tell you this," she said gently.
His
heart began to pound. The day she told him she was pregnant, she had used the
very same words, saying them in the same gentle way, turning off the basketball
game he'd been watching on television. He hadn't been prepared then. Now he
was.
Only he
didn't want her to be pregnant again. He didn't want to have to pretend to be
happy.
"I've been looking for an apartment and I've found one," she said,
narrowing her eyes on something, it seemed, behind his left shoulder. It was
nobody's fault, she continued. They'd been through enough. She needed some time
alone. She had money saved up for a security deposit. The apartment was on
Beacon Hill, so she could walk to work. She had signed the lease that night
before coming home.
She
wouldn't look at him, but he stared at her. It was obvious that she'd rehearsed
the lines. All this time she'd been looking for an apartment, testing the water
pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It
sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for
a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what
she'd been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of
her game.
Now it
was his turn to speak. There was something he'd sworn he would never tell her,
and for six months he had done his best to block it from his mind. Before the
ultrasound she had asked the doctor not to tell her the sex of their child, and
Shukumar had agreed. She had wanted it to be a surprise.
Later,
those few times they talked about what had happened, she said at least they'd
been spared that knowledge. In a way she almost took pride in her decision, for
it enabled her to seek refuge in a mystery. He knew that she assumed it was a
mystery for him, too. He'd arrived too late from Baltimore — when it was all
over and she was lying on the hospital bed. But he hadn't. He'd arrived early
enough to see their baby, and to hold him before they cremated him. At first he
had recoiled at the suggestion, but the doctor said holding the baby might help
him with the process of grieving. Shoba was asleep. The baby had been cleaned
off, his bulbous lids shut tight to the world.
"Our baby was a boy," he said. "His skin was more red than
brown. He had black hair on his head. He weighed almost five pounds. His
fingers were curled shut, just like yours in the night."
Shoba
looked at him now, her face contorted with sorrow. He had cheated on a college
exam, ripped a picture of a woman out of a magazine. He had returned a sweater
and got drunk in the middle of the day instead. These were the things he had
told her. He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his
chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital. He had held him
until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that
he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one
thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise.
Shukumar
stood up and stacked his plate on top of hers. He carried the plates to the
sink, but instead of running the tap he looked out the window. Outside the
evening was still warm, and the Bradfords were walking arm in arm. As he
watched the couple the room went dark, and he spun around. Shoba had turned the
lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment
Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew.
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