The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (18 page)

10

Haiku

L
ate in the afternoon, Goldie told Anna to leave for a while. She wanted to nap, she said, though Anna suspected that she really wanted privacy. Anna had brought her grandmother's cell phone, and though Goldie had carefully scanned her
CALLS MISSED LOG
, she had thus far followed the nurses' advice to “keep activity to a minimum.” The Friends All Over the World would need a report, however, and Goldie would want to make that report herself. By four o'clock, she seemed unable to resist another minute. “I need to sleep,” she said. Anna pretended to believe her, but as she picked up her backpack to go, she saw that Goldie's hand was already curled around the phone.

On the road back to the Hampton Inn, Anna spotted a movie theater. It depressed her to think of sitting in the empty hotel room alone, so she pulled into the cinema parking lot and bought a ticket for
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. On the way inside, she stopped by the snack bar for a Diet Coke, a bucket of popcorn, and Skittles.

The theater was empty except for one person sitting a few seats in from the aisle. It was Dr. Choudary. She could not pretend she didn't see him, because they were the only two people there. Anna walked over, suddenly sheepish about the amount of food in her hands. He was holding an apple.

“I guess you keep weird hours,” she said.

He bounced the hand holding the apple against his leg. “I'm a doctor.”

“Right.”

“Do you care to sit down?”

It would have been rude to say no, so she sat, feeling ridiculous and annoyed. What were the chances that her only acquaintance in the entire state of Indiana would have decided to see
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
at the same time she did? “How big is this town?” she asked.

“I don't know. Maybe ten thousand people.”

“You want some popcorn?” She tilted the bucket toward him.

He looked down at it. It really was an awful lot of popcorn. “No, thanks,” he said.

“It's too much for one person,” Anna said, though she had no doubt that, sitting by herself, she would have gone right through it.

“How is your grandmother feeling?” he asked.

“She walked down the hall three times this afternoon. Now she's resting.” She put a few kernels of popcorn in her mouth. They both stared at the screen, which flashed an ad for a local chiropractor.

“Did you read this book?” he asked.

“What book?”

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
.”

“Oh. Yeah. I love Roald Dahl.”

“Me, too.”

“What's your favorite?”

He thought for a moment. “
James and the Giant Peach,
I suppose. And yours?”

“Maybe
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
. I liked those farmers drinking apple cider and eating goose liver.”

“Boggis and Bunce and Bean.” He had seemed so serious, almost severe, but then again, a Roald Dahl fan had to have some capacity for delight. They both watched the screen for a while. Finally the lights went down. An announcement appeared: “In consideration of other patrons, please silence your cell phone.” Anna's cell was already set to vibrate in her pocket. The doctor reached down into his satchel and switched his off.

“Can you do that?” Anna whispered. Her grandmother might need him.

“I'm not on call,” he said.

They watched a couple of trailers.

“I think I should know your first name,” he said, tipping his head in her direction while his eyes remained on the screen.

“Anna.”

“Nice to meet you. I'm Naveen. People here call me Nathan, but you might prefer Naveen.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“Naveen.”

She leaned the popcorn toward him again. He reached into the bucket.

After the film ended, they sat in the theater until the lights came up, comparing the two movie versions of the book. “Johnny Depp is pretty freaky, but I miss the humanity of Gene Wilder,” he said.

“ ‘So shines a good deed in a weary world.' ” The thought of that moment in the earlier film nearly brought Anna to tears.

He looked at her and smiled. “It seems we're both old-fashioned.” A teenage theater attendant appeared with a broom, and they stood up and stepped out into the aisle. As they headed toward the exit, Naveen glanced in Anna's direction, and with more feeling in his voice than she'd heard before, said, “I'm terribly sorry for your grandmother's troubles, but it was a nice surprise to see you here.”

Anna stopped, and for a moment they just looked at each other. It seemed to Anna that any positive response would somehow come across as insensitive to Goldie, but the length of her silence caused such an awkwardness that he finally said, “Well, I guess I'd better be going.” He turned away, moving with such speed that he looked like he was racing through the hospital with whole wards of patients wailing for his attention. Anna had to rush to keep up.

In the parking lot, they both stopped again. “Well,” Anna said. Naveen watched her. “I don't suppose you'd want to have dinner together or something? I mean, obviously I don't have any plans.” Goldie had accepted Anna's proposal to return to the hospital at around seven but had refused to let her stay the night. “Neither one of us will get any sleep,” Goldie had said, “and besides, I need to make phone calls.” The Friends All Over the World apparently needed constant updates on the suitcase drama and Goldie's ongoing condition.

Naveen looked at his watch.

“Don't worry about it if you're busy,” Anna said hurriedly. “It was just an idea.”

But he was calculating. “It's not yet six o'clock. I usually cook for myself because the food in this town is terrible. I'm just wondering if I would keep you up too late if I cooked something. You'd eat better, but go to sleep later.” His tone sounded professional, as if he were cautioning a patient about risky behavior, but he did seem enthusiastic. She wondered if he was lonely here.

“I have to go check on my grandmother first anyway,” she said.

He pulled out a prescription pad from his pocket and drew a little map. “My house is only over here. Maybe a mile or two.”

She ran off toward Bridget, and when she reached the car and turned around, she saw him still standing on the curb, apparently trying to absorb the fact that she and Goldie had driven a Rolls-Royce to Indiana.

 

“Are you looking for a way to get out of here?” Anna asked him later. She had brought a little potted begonia from the hospital florist, and now she was sitting on a bar stool in front of his kitchen counter, idly pulling off the dead leaves.

The doctor stood facing her from the other side, pounding spices with a mortar and pestle. He had taken off his professional clothes and put on sandals, jeans, and a cream-colored version of the long, collarless cotton shirts that men seemed to favor in India. Earlier in the day, his face had conveyed an almost impossibly narrow range of expression, basically from serious to extremely serious. Now, though, in his own home, some barrier seemed to have come down, or perhaps she was just seeing him differently. His eyes, wide and nearly as black as the peppercorns in his mortar, registered, with a simple blink and lift of the brow, a complex tangle of emotion: fatigue and resignation mixed with hope for the future. “I've been here three years,” he told her. “At first I felt like I was in exile because, you know, I'm from New York. It's a very good job and I've gotten used to this place, but yeah, I can't see spending the rest of my life in Indiana.” Anna revised his age down to the late thirties.

The apartment complex lay on a busy street about a mile from the hospital. It was a warren of meandering lanes, each two-story townhouse exactly like the one beside it, with the exact same bush and the exact same little patch of lawn. Inside, the decor of the condo looked like something from Extended Stay America: sturdy gray couch, white rug, glass coffee table in a stained-wood frame. “Did this apartment come furnished or something?” Anna asked. Except for one plain set of shelves packed with books, the room looked almost completely anonymous.

He looked around. “Well, yeah, almost all of it came with the place.” Everything seemed very clean, but she wondered if he had ever actually noticed the furniture. He asked, “Do you think it's really awful?”

She started to shake her head, then stopped. “It's not awful, but it doesn't have any personality.”

“I guess I don't really care about decorating,” he said.

She looked at the bookshelf. “You're a doctor. That takes a lot of concentration.”

He shook his head. “It's a certain kind of concentration. You absorb a huge amount of information, but there's nothing subtle about it.”

“I've heard medicine called an art.”

“Maybe for some people. I think poetry's an art.” He slid spices into a pan, and as they began to sizzle, the room filled with the aromas of cinnamon, cumin, and coriander.

“Are you a poet?” she asked.

“I write poetry.”

“Why the verb and not the noun? Would you say that you practice medicine, but you're not a doctor?”

He stopped, pushing his glasses higher onto his nose with the back of his hand, keeping his eyes on the stove. Behind him, steam made the lid of the rice cooker begin to jiggle. “You need to have confidence to use the noun instead of the verb,” he told her, tossing onions into the pan now. “I have more confidence in the way I practice medicine. And I have a degree.”

“What kind of poetry do you write?”

He was moving quickly now, dropping handfuls of cauliflower in with the onions. He looked up. “Do you mind spicy?”

She shook her head.

He threw in a few pinches of something from a jar. “It's a kind of collage poetry. I use fragments of sentences and phrases that I pick up during the day, and I try to arrange them in ways that resonate. It's a rather chaotic method. I carry a little notebook with me and write down things that I find interesting.” He looked up, sort of embarrassed. “I take a lot of notes at movies, actually, but I didn't this afternoon because I didn't want you to think I was odd.”

Anna realized that he was probably as disappointed to see her in the cinema as she had been to see him. “You could have missed something profound because of me.”

“ ‘So shines a good deed in a weary world,' ” he reminded her, his eyes completely on her now.

Anna wove her fingers through the begonia. “My husband used to write poetry sometimes,” she said. “For a while, he liked haiku, but then he read something about haiku being a cliché of Japanese poetry, so he stopped.”

“That's like saying tabla is a cliché or jazz is a cliché.”

“If you're not a poet,” Anna reminded him, “it's easy to feel insecure.”

“That's true,” Naveen admitted. He lit another burner and began a dish that contained chicken and a few heaping tablespoons of a yellow spice. “And where is your husband now?” he asked.

Anna realized that if she didn't get her hands out of the begonia, she would kill it. She reached across the counter and picked up a pencil and a piece of paper by the phone, then began to draw the plant instead. “That's kind of an existential question,” she said. “He had leukemia. He died two years ago.”

She glanced up quickly to see his reaction. His expression didn't change, but his focus on her seemed to soften a bit. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Does that explain why you're driving your grandmother across the country in a Rolls-Royce?”

“That's not her reason. She didn't like him. But maybe it's my reason. I'm in an in-between period. What do you call that?”

“Siesta.”

“No. I think
purgatory
is a better word.”

He poured some coconut milk onto the chicken, adjusted the heat, and then pulled a couple of beers out of the refrigerator. “Maybe it's best to call it a transition.”

While they ate, Anna talked about Ford, not because Naveen had asked but because she felt compelled to recount what had happened, or at least most of what had happened. He listened closely. She could skip all the medical explanations, which made the tale flow much more quickly. In any case, though Ford's situation had been both sudden and incomprehensible to them, it had, from a doctor's perspective, unraveled in a way that was more or less routine. In other words, Naveen knew the story already.

They did the dishes together, then he put on a piano sonata and they sat on the sofa with fresh bottles of beer. “I hope you don't think that I planned to reveal all this when I invited you to dinner,” she said. It struck her as unfair, too, that though she had asked him out, he had provided all the food. “I haven't quite figured out the best way to integrate that one fact with the rest of my life.”

He leaned his head against the back of the sofa and set his glasses on an end table. “I'm no expert on this issue,” he said. “Only a few courses in medical school dealt with grief.”

Anna might have explained that she was dealing with more than grief. She felt a lot of guilt and anger, too, but it didn't seem fair to weigh down the evening with that much revelation. She slipped off her sandals and pulled her feet under her on the ugly couch. “Grief is really boring,” she told him, half apologetically.

Naveen turned his eyes to her. “I'm not bored. I just don't want to pretend that I understand something that I don't understand at all. Let me recount my own losses: A couple of grandparents died. I didn't get into the medical school I dreamed of. I wanted to live in Chicago, but I ended up in Angola, Indiana, instead. I'm divorced. I didn't tell you that one. These are disappointments—divorce is more than that—but I haven't experienced your level of grief.”