Lightning People (23 page)

“What work? What work is worth forfeiting a free trip halfway around the world?” She preformed a frantic gesticulation of her hands, while managing to remain perfectly still from the neck up, fearing Raj's lens would catch her in some hysterical fit.

He shot through the roll and then turned to his desk to rifle through papers and contact sheets. He pulled out a small square of white paper and held it in front of her. It was the announcement card to his first solo show.

“No!” she screamed proudly. “At a real gallery? Raj, when did this happen?”

“About a month ago,” he said, unable to control his smile. “So you see, I need time to get it all together. I need to make my selections, do the print order, frame the damn things. I can't be riding off to India with you. I've only got a few weeks.”

“Are my pictures going in the show?”

“Of course,” he said, stumbling backward as his cheeks flushed in embarrassment. Raj had never been able to accept compliments from his family. Whenever one of his parents had stumbled on one of his magazine editorials and begun the predictable chorus of praise, he'd instantly cut them short, complaining that the printing had been muddy or that he'd never been paid. He picked up a cigarette from his desk and blew the dust off of it. “Don't get all congratulatory. It could be a complete disaster.”

“When did you start smoking?”

“I don't. I just like to hold it between my teeth when I work. It smells good. And my fingernails don't get bloody from biting them.” Madi recognized the rolled cigarette as the shape of Del's handwork. A piece of tape held the cigarette together at the center, and she wanted to comment on it but knew any remark about Del would send her brother back into the black hole of his thoughts. There was so much wounded pride in Raj that she could hardly believe that they both had come out of the same womb.

“Put on some music then,” she said instead. “If I'm going to be hanging on walls, I want to
relax
.”

Raj turned on his stereo, filling the room with a piano concerto. When he walked back to his desk, still unable to look Madi in the face, she slipped up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder.

“What are those?” she asked, gliding her arms over his ribs and pointing to the contact sheets.

“I did these last week at an apartment uptown. It was built in the 1950s. I stood there for three hours, just watching the condensation build and dissipate on the glass. The woman who owned the place kept running in and out of the room like she was hoping to catch me stuffing my bag with her china. Offering me
tea every five seconds was her way of making sure I wasn't stealing. But I got what I went for.”

“They must be pretty rich to have a greenhouse in Manhattan.”

He wondered if Madi could pick out the difference in the photographs—the crease of shadows, the fractures of bending light, the clarity of the white walls that abutted the wet glass. His sister was a head-trip to photograph, but he lied when he said that shooting people was difficult. It was easier to get the living down than it was to capture a place. The main part of his work—the part that didn't involve Madi—was taking these studies of modernist architecture, those mammoth spare interiors built on sublime mathematical principles and the purity of form and line. They weren't cold shells or unfeeling unions of steel and glass. He often said he could see walls breathing, whole atmospheres moving in and out to fill voids. That's what he wanted his camera to pick up. He had spent hours in that apartment, refocusing the lens, pressing the button, staring straight ahead, listening to his own heartbeat. He had been so patient, and somewhere in those contact sheets, there would be a single frame that revealed how the breath of the greenhouse flowers frosted the glass, how the bare walls opened their pores to take the air in, how the light bled in puddles across the glossed wood. He had to find it, his eye straining through the glass loop, the momentary sense of something human in the sea of raw materials.

“They're beautiful,” she said. “But you aren't going to show them along with me, right?”

“Yep.”

“So I'm competing with architecture? Oh, Christ, which is colder? I get it.”

“I was thinking, which is more humane?”

“Asshole.” She walked over to the window, staring out at the skyline of New Jersey and its watery reflection in the Hudson River. Her eyes moved over the lines of the buildings set against the black sky.

“Remember when we were kids and we'd go to the beach on summer nights and dare each other to dive in?”

“Yes,” Raj said, returning the cigarette to the desk. “We never did. We just watched the hookers walk a few feet in front of the
men who came down from the hotels. Our beaches contained either shells or prostitutes, and the tourists collected both. That's what I remember.”

“We never did jump in, did we? What were we afraid of?”

“Sharks. Riptides. Mom beating our asses for going out without permission.”

A yellow light trailing in the river reminded Madi of the swollen lemons at a market stall in Lisbon, near the bleak Moorish ruins of Castelo de São Jorge. She and Rapha had climbed up to that castle on their only excursion out of the hotel room on their trip to Portugal six years ago. It had been November, and they both had come down with the flu on the plane ride—sickness being what they had been trying to escape by leaving New York in autumn. They had spent four days watching CNN with the trashcan and the remote between their bodies on the coverlet, each taking turns vomiting and changing channels. By the fifth day, they had gathered enough energy to ascend the hill above the city and stood silently under the low, gray clouds that shot out into the Atlantic. She remembered Rapha kindly for once, as he fought with the pharmacist in thick Portuguese to fill a prescription, his hairy, naked body quivering as he ran towels under cold water to place on her forehead. He had taken care of her, and, being the first to feel health return (a fact that later convinced her that she had contracted the flu from him), nursed her with lobster bisque and squeezed lemon juice. Madi's only solid memory of that vacation, the only value she had found in a week of fever and chills and indifferent maids rubbing their cigarettes in the room's ashtrays while vacuuming around her bed, was the rare, indescribable light that drained through the cloud cover over Castelo de São Jorge. It was as soft as the underside of lemon rinds, as frosted as chilled tap water.

It was something to remember.

She wondered if Rapha, six years later wherever he had gone, ever thought of that light.

“Do you think either of us will have children?” she asked, turning to look at her brother.

“Get back on the stool. We'll do one more roll, and then I've had it.” He kicked an extension cord and turned on the light tower. “I'm
hungry. And I'm not eating curry tonight. It's bad to let you get your way too often.”

“I'm serious.”

He knew she was. Her voice had lost its sarcastic guard, and she had the look of someone who had woken up in the middle of the afternoon confused as to how much time had passed.

“Why the hell would you want children?” he snapped.

“We would do a better job than our parents did.”

“That wouldn't be difficult.” Raj grabbed her hand and led her back to the stool. He repositioned her chin with his thumb, pressing the divot in her chin.

“We're not monsters,” she said. “It could happen. You're pretty loving when you want to be.”

“Sit still and think about what you just said. You think about how people like us could get into a situation like that and be glad we're the monsters we are.”

“People like us,” she repeated somberly. “So you do think we're monsters, that there's something wrong with us. I guess we can fight over which parent caused us to turn out like we did. The bad Singhs. Never married. Too screwed up for love.”

Her eyes were a different color than his, chestnut brown instead of blue. Her nose trumpeted at the end where his caught a bump midway down the bridge and slid straight to the tip.

“Monsters don't cut their losses like we did. Monsters, like the ones in the movies, keep coming back, meaner and more hateful, seeing nothing good in knowing when to quit. I'd say we're not the monsters. Other people are.”

“I suppose I should thank you for the honesty,” she said ungraciously.

He smiled at her. “Don't mention it.”

They left the studio and walked east in silence. They passed the art gallery where Raj would soon show his work, but he didn't point it out to his sister, afraid of another spree of compliments and overblown expectations. Maybe it was because Madi had moved to New York first or simply the fact that she made more money, but he could never shake the sense that she was the older one, not he. She encouraged instead of admired, defended instead of looked for reassurance.

Madi shook her purse on the corner and said, “Since we have something to celebrate, I'm buying tonight.” He tried to object, and she rolled her eyes irritably before stepping into the street. Her hair caught the wind of passing taxis. “Can I at least tell Dad about your show?” she asked him. “It would make him happy.”

He was five inches taller than she was, and yet they probably weighed the same. When they were kids—before puberty redirected their ambitions—they were both obsessed with the scale in the bathroom. They competed to see who weighed more, squeezing every muscle to force the scale to deliver a higher reading. Who took up more space in the world? Who was more massive and essential? That was the last time Raj could remember beating her at anything.

As they crossed the street, she slowed her pace to remain next to him. The sweat from the studio lights chilled their skin even in the hot night air, and Madi wrapped her arm around his. Raj made a mental note to tell his gallerist not to let anyone named Madeline Singh buy a single piece of his artwork—not even anonymously. He suspected she might try such a tactic to give him the illusion of success, and she'd never understand the deep humiliation that would result in that kind of sisterly meddling.

Still, when Madi's palm grazed his wrist, he opened his fingers, and they walked two blocks together squeezing each other's hand.

JOSEPH SAT ON the edge of the hotel bed, while Aleksandra dug through a white dress box on the floor. Inside the box were letters and newspaper clippings. Pages of the script she had been working on drifted around her bare feet, a few pages crumpled into Ohio snowballs, others smoothed back out and clipped together with red ink slashed through lines. “They're here somewhere,” she swore. “No wonder I can't seem to get Ray's story down in any order.” Defeated, she brought the entire box over to the bed and sat down next to him, searching though the papers until she found a stack of photographs.

Joseph had not gotten a job in Brooklyn like he told his wife. In the late afternoon he took the subway to the Upper East Side, making certain to turn his cell phone off to avoid Del in case she called. He didn't want to gild the lie of a fictitious last-minute commercial any more than he needed to. And, anyway, it was only a lie of three days—a break from tripping over each other, some needed distance from the sweltering Gramercy apartment and all the unbearable questions he knew were circling in her head. He'd return at night so late that Del would already be lost to sleep.

Aleksandra pressed her knees together on the edge of the bed, the
skin corrugated from kneeling on the carpet. Her pale eyes gently traced his features, and she held the photographs tightly against her chest. Now that she had found them, it was as if she were afraid of letting them go. Her arms were covered in faded freckles, and blue veins cabled along her wrists and fingers. She had used those fingers to wipe his damp hair across his forehead an hour ago when she opened the door. “Thank you for coming,” she had said, blushing awkwardly in the door frame as she brought her hand back down to her side, embarrassed by the intimacy of the gesture. “I thought you might decide not to in the rain.”

The instant he saw Aleksandra standing at the door—her hair tied back in a loose bun, the faint birthmark trailing down her neck, her small, precise lips opening in gratitude, even the gentleness of her fingers pushing the hair from his eyes—he knew why he didn't have the heart to turn her down when she called. He could have said,
I hardly know you, and all you've given me is an outrageous, paranoid story that even the police concluded was a suicide. I'm sorry but I have no time for you. Good-bye, Aleksandra. I wish you luck.
But a person turning around and walking away could never measure the damage they left behind. And one day, he might ask for a similar concession—
believe what I tell you, follow along, don't doubt what is so easy to disbelieve, this is what happened. I swear it's all true.

“I was worried I'd lost these,” Aleksandra said, staring intently at the snapshots in her hands. “I've moved around so often, from one hotel to another, I can't keep track of everything I had.”

“How long have you been at the Carlyle?” he asked.

“About a year,” she said, and then paused, as if to track some jumbled hotel-starred cartography in her mind. “But I moved around a lot at first. A few nights here and there, first in a number of gritty motels on the edge of Times Square and then in some drab, efficient business lodges in the Financial District. At first I always asked for the smallest room they had. I'd unplug the phone and cover the window with the bedspread. I wouldn't even let the maid in. I just wanted to be alone. Some people want to be surrounded by others when they're grieving. I didn't. No one could reach me, and I couldn't reach them. That was as close as I could find to being nowhere.”