Lightning People (8 page)

“My day?” she said to pick up a strand of conversation. “I texted with Madi.”

“Texting with my sister is wiser than talking to her on the phone,” he laughed. “She won't shut up. Right now she's big on trying to talk me into going with her on a business trip to India. ‘Come on, Raj,' she whines. ‘Let's go see our homeland. I'll pay for you. You can take pictures.' I keep telling her, ‘Madi, we were born in Ft. Lauderdale. If you want to see where we came from, turn on
MTV Spring Break
.' Anyway, how's work? You still unhappy?”

“Of course,” she said and instinctively reached into her purse for her rolling papers.

“Ah, the slow cancer of a nine-to-five.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the heat of his palms through her shirt. “You want a drink? I still have one of your whiskey bottles around here saved just in case.”

“No, I'm fine. I'm afraid a drink might knock me out.”

He shook his head and retreated into the kitchen to pour her a glass of water.

The studio was still organized in Raj's maniacally clean but dusty fashion. Photographs, contact sheets, and blunt red pencils flooded his desk. A sagging pole that hung across the ceiling created
a waterfall of sport coats, wrinkled shirtsleeves, and pant legs. His sunken mattress still lay without a frame on the floor.

She licked the sweat from her upper lip and stared out the window at the cars, half in headlights, rushing in both directions along the West Side Highway.

“Could it be any hotter in here?” she yelled. “No wonder you don't get many visits.” She wanted to say
why don't you move
, but this was an old complaint that she no longer had the right to make. One of the reasons she had broken it off with Raj was the agony of having to spend all of their time together in this tiny rented studio, as if stepping outside for dinner or a drink would have wrecked Raj's delicate sense of reality. The entire duration of their relationship consisted of actions in this five-hundred-foot square—a cliche of a bachelor pad that she had endured to constitute coupledom. It was here that they slept and ate and mixed toiletries like warring chess pieces. Once, on an off chance, she had brought up finding a new place, something together, and Raj had turned and stared at her with those cold, blue eyes and said it would be difficult for him to live full-time with someone, even her, but he'd consider it. She knew he never would.

The day she broke up with him, she had picked up his camera, focused the lens, and snapped three shots of Raj rubbing his hands in one of the now absent armchairs. She thought that when he developed those pictures he might recognize them as his last moments with her, right before the inevitable, before she grabbed the bras and underwear and tampons she kept in the top drawer and blew out once and for all. She wondered now if he had ever bothered to look at those pictures of himself—a thirty-five-year-old adolescent defending his own space against any intrusions.

She pulled a rolling paper from the packet and sprinkled the tobacco grains.

“You can't smoke in here,” he said when he returned from the kitchen, setting the glass of water on the desk.

“Since when?”

“New rule. Sorry.” He smiled.

“God, you're just like the mayor now. Can't smoke in bars, can't
smoke in subway stations. Can I ask, why do they even bother selling me these cigarettes if there's no place I can smoke them?”

“It's bad for you,” he said softly, placing his dark, calloused fingers over her own. “You should quit.”

She placed the cigarette in her mouth, squinted defiantly at him, and went for the lighter in her pocket. Before she could free her hand, Raj snatched the cigarette from her teeth and replaced it with his lips. She let his tongue move across her own. Just for a second. His fingers reached for her bra strap, and that enormous warmth he stored inside of him hit her.

“Stop.” She wrestled her hands between their bodies and shoved him back. “What was that for?”

“Did that bother you?” he said, spinning around to gather his balance before dropping onto the couch. “It hasn't been that long, has it?”

“Yeah, it has.”

“Don't tell me you're still dating that actor.”

“Raj,” she said, and it took courage to complete the next sentence but there was no escaping it. If she didn't tell him right now, she would never summon the nerve. “We got married.”

“Married.” He clenched his fingers on the armrest.

“Things change,” she said, hating the triviality of those words as soon as she heard them leave her mouth. “You and I haven't talked for a while.”

Raj dug his tongue into his cheek and then brought his chin back up to face her.

“You did it for the green card. I get it. So you did find a way to quit your job.”

“I figured you'd hear about it sooner or later from Madi, so I thought it would be better to hear it from me.”

“God, that was fast.”

“It wasn't only for the green card, Raj. And I didn't pay him, if that's your next question. You don't have to be insulting.”

“I'm insulting?” His voice had finally caught up to his anger, but it was louder than she expected, as if in all this time alone in his studio he had forgotten the advantages of keeping his feelings close to his chest. “Is this why you came over?”

“I don't know why I came over. You called and asked me to, so I did.” But she did know why. She had come over to do what adults can do to each other: behave like children. She wanted Raj to feel the extent to which things had changed. She wanted him to understand that people can walk out one day and be lost for good. Because relationships never end, do they? All that built-up energy has to go somewhere. But now, as her presence in his apartment felt even more intrusive, she hated herself for the weakness of wanting to tell him the news face to face.

She moved to pick up the cigarette off the floor, but it signaled a faster reaction in Raj. He lifted himself from the couch, struggling harder than a man of his age should, and stood looking at her with those two magnificent glaciers of ice on either side of his nose and his lip snarled upward. He reached his arm out and for a second she thought he might be moving to hit her. Instead he grabbed the cigarette from her mouth and snapped it in half with his thumb.

“You can't smoke in here. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Fine,” she said in a restrained tone she hoped he would copy. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone? Is there a girl hiding in the stairwell, waiting for me to go?”

Madi had told her a few months back that Raj had gone on a few dates with an Italian translator at the U.N. with long black hair much like her own. Nothing had come of it, but Del had been touched with the thought that lovers were as compulsive as serial killers. They couldn't help tripping over their own patterns, falling for the same type.

“Don't ask me a question like that,” he said harshly. “We all don't have to be happy, and I'm not going stand here trying to prove to you that I am.”

The last rays of sun were throwing him in shadow against the window, and Del resisted the urge to step closer to gauge the expression on his face.

Instead, she walked over to Raj's mattress resting on the floor in the far corner under the canopy of his clothes. She sat on its edge with her knees bundled against her breasts. “I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm sorry. I had a terrible day.”

“Don't you have a husband you should be telling this to?”

The same faded green quilt still covered the bed. It was torn so that the patches hung from their stitching like a collection of unsealed envelopes. Raj always said the quilt smelled of gasoline because his mother had sewn it while working nights at a twenty-four-hour service station outside of Miami when he was a kid. Del leaned back and pressed her face into the thin fabric. The quilt smelled of curry, not gasoline, the bed being the closest thing to a dinner table Raj owned. When they dated, he even lit candles and set silverware across it, using the wedge between the pillows as a bottle holder. They had sex on wine stains. She often stopped mid-foreplay to wipe crumbs off of her ass.

“I'm just tired,” she said.

“Didn't anyone warn you about married life? It makes you old fast. My mom always said that. But only after the divorce.”

She stood up and reached for her purse. She waited for him to stop her from leaving, but he didn't. He leaned against the windowsill watching her go with his arms crossed over his chest. The smell of gasoline filled her nostrils. Engines burned along the highway outside the window. She had made her peace with Dash on the night of her wedding. Now she was saying good-bye to Raj. She was extinguishing the past one ghost at a time.

ONCE, RAJ TRAVELED the world. Call Vienna, he was there two days ago. Try to reach him in Berlin, he'd just left. He'd be on the stopover in Shanghai, ten hours of airport shopping and a nap in the passenger's lounge and then a small turbojet over the Himalayas where the gas masks fell from the ceiling and every tooth filling jittered but no one panicked because they were all staring down at the face of Mt. Everest. He hit São Paolo, the Amalfi Coast, home for two days, then Dubrovnik, Bahrain, back home as a pit stop to pay the electric bill before Vancouver, on to Fairbanks, skirting over the cocaine-line Straits into Russia. Raj had become a photographer, he so often thought, from a love of stillness. Vases, trees, dust—whatever the camera caught, it held. But, in supreme artistic irony, the job of photography offered few similarities with the final product. His twenties had been spent in constant mule-backed motion—lugging his equipment all over town, wheezing up five flights of stairs for an assignment to shoot three piano progenies in a Queens living room, hanging over the ledge of a roof to snap a suicide from the vantage point where a mother of four, now splayed under a nylon tarp on Seventy-Second Street, lost her balance on purpose. Then the world
came calling—bigger tragedies, better heartbreaks, prettier views. He shot for an extravagant travel magazine and a human interest periodical, carting his camera all over the globe, sweeping through exotic locales on two-day timetables, shooting, here, children holding glue bottles caked in snot, and, there, a waterfall descending into mist. Raj had devoted all of his muscles to freezing images, until his thirtieth birthday, when his muscles froze, his agent screamed, and he stopped.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, three years before he started dating Del, he sat on his mattress with a box of granola, a pint of skim milk, and a plastic spoon. Two days later he could be found in practically the same position, the milk sour, the cereal stale, and the answering machine blinking on overdrive. He shook uncontrollably at the thought of boarding a plane. He refused to let go of the spoon in his hand. He refused to let an open window wipe the dust from the air. He sat in the frame of his bed, matted with his own green quilt. He had taken his picture, and there he hung in his apartment indefinitely.

On day two, the front door opened, and feet stomped worryingly down the hallway. He was discovered by his then twenty-six-year-old sister, who wore a red sari layered around her shoulders and white denim pants flared like yacht sails at the ankles. She walked into the studio, at first overtaken with the smell of rotting dairy, went directly to the windows where she freed the trapped air and lost a fight with the metal blinds that refused to gather, and screamed when she turned to find her older brother lying as still as death in his bed.

Madi wrestled the utensil from his grip, threw a glass of cold water on his face (she admitted later that she had always wanted to do that to someone and she couldn't resist the opportunity), and then, with a corrective smile, wished him a belated happy birthday. She opened the greeting card envelope, still wet from her tongue, and placed the card in his hands. Then she blew up a purple balloon and tossed it wobbling into the air.

“Raj,” she sighed from the edge of his bed. “This can't be your response to turning thirty. Tell me there's a better reason for the
crack-up. I mean, you were never really fun the last decade anyway, so this can't be some fear about your youth slipping away.”

“I have decided . . . ” They both waited, but he couldn't finish the sentence.

“Decided? To urinate in your own sheets? Did you get my messages? I've been calling for two days. I finally got a hold of your agent so I could reach you wherever the hell you were on assignment and she said you never showed. ‘That's not Raj,' I said. She must have disagreed because she hung up.”

“I was thinking about crowds,” he managed through a dehydrated tongue. “Whole packs of people all together until they spread out like a sea . . . ”

“Ugh.”

She actually said “ugh.” Madi was all for the romance of mental breakdowns, but not when it involved her own bloodline. She threw the cereal in the trash, ran a shower for her brother, and touched up her makeup in the reflection of picture glass, behind which a line of soldiers cut a human curtain across Red Square. By the time Raj had returned to the land of the living, or at least dressed the part, she promised never to mention the “birthday granola incident” again.

Raj didn't mention it either. But after that birthday, he stayed in more. He became less visible. He kept to his studio as much as he could, and the laugh lines around his mouth began to diminish. He dated Del from the comfortable reaches of his set of broken armchairs and let her go without a single romantic chase down the stairs. Now at thirty-five, he watched summer mornings fade into gray afternoons without once stepping foot outside of his apartment. In the past week, he had managed to go four days without leaving the building. When Del had shown up that evening, he had kissed her in part because he was ready to touch the world again.