The Vine of Desire (42 page)

Now, lying down, the child twists the end of her blanket around her finger and blinks with sleepy surprise at the mother, who doesn’t usually come in at this time. This is because she’s trying to get the child to learn a
good habit
, going to bed by herself. The child is perfectly capable of this, but doesn’t always oblige—it’s better, she’s learned, to keep the adults off-balance at all times. The mother’s wearing one of her saris today, which makes her look prettier, sleeker, like a watered plant. But what is that she’s holding, that she’s putting into the music machine? The child smiles. She likes bedtime songs. She starts to clap, but a voice is calling her, a man’s voice she knows so well that it halts her limbs in midmotion. The mother has left in an agitation of fabric, shutting the door behind her. The child searches the room, her head jerking from side to side. She remembers
the man, the warmth of his chest where she would lie for hours, listening to the stories he couldn’t tell anyone else, old movies that blended backward into other, older movies, or forward into his life. She wants him, suddenly, that steady, comforting breath that she’s almost made herself forget, the voice that never raised itself at her, that curve of arm, hard and soft at the same time, that held her as long as she wanted. But it’s another of those cruel adult tricks, people appearing and disappearing from her life randomly, then coming back again, this time as a disembodied voice full of sorrow,
Dayita kid pumpkin I miss you so much I don’t know if I can live through this when will we see each other again.
She lets the voice flow through her and out of her, carrying the pain with it. When she came to this new house, she cried for him for days, pushed away the food the mother set in front of her. Her chest hurt as if it had been caught in a slammed door. By the time she got better, it was full of silvery holes, like a sieve. She lets the voice flow through the holes upward, to where the boy waits. The dragonfly boy who darts in and out of her mind, always hungry.
Here, taste, here’s what pain is like.
There’s a spiderweb at the corner of the window, catching the afternoon light. A small, swaying rainbow, perfect in its symmetry. So much superior to the untidy tangles humans weave around themselves and each other. The mother has come into the room again, the mother is lying down by her, the mother has put the end of her sari over her mouth, though she makes no sound. The child lets herself wonder about this, but only for a moment. The voice on the tape calls like a thirsty bird. In the center of the web, a tiny spider, poised like a black star. She places her attention on it, lets it carry her away.

Ten

S
unil

From the airplane it looked impossibly green and forested and flat all at once, such a change to the brown hills I’ve been seeing for the last ten years that I thought it couldn’t be. There were large irregularities of water, lakes or rivers, or even ocean. I’d heard that Houston was near the ocean, but in the gloom of this August evening, I couldn’t tell.

I’m thinking of you tonight, Dayita, daughter. (Is it a presumption to call you that?) In my fancy hotel room, where the company has put me up until I find permanent accommodation, on this vast, arctic stretch of bed, speaking into a machine. I know that you might not get this tape, that I have no way of reaching you except through the goodwill of a woman who has every reason to hate me. But I must go on.

The scene from the plane reminded me of the jungle Aguirre saw on his expedition in the Amazon, a hidden violence in the vines, possibility waiting around the bend in the river, toothed like an alligator. (I grow poetic in my loneliness. Or is it melodramatic?) I must learn not to compare my life to the
movies. This is America. I’ve left my wife, misreading invitation in another woman’s eye, and ended up in a city struggling out of recession into strip malls and congested highways bordered by tenements and billboards. If you were with me, we’d laugh at them together.
To get out of Jail, Dial 713-Freedom. Fortune Cabaret, Girls Exposed. Don’t Mess with Texas. Who’s the Father? 1-888-DNA-TYPE.
If there are forests, they are invisible to me. The woman, a runaway, where is she now? I’m a small-time project manager beginning to lose his hair, undistinguished except by the unhappiness he has brought to everyone around him.

Kid, do children know how to hate? Do you hate me?

The people in the office here are surprisingly friendly. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know who I am. A bunch of young men invite me to go drinking with them on Friday nights. They surmise that I must be lonely for my wife. I have difficulty trusting friendliness, but one night I go with them anyway. My room is too sanitary, faceless in its luxury. The queen bed, the matching pastel bedspread and drapes, the empty writing desk and upright chair, gleaming from the maid’s zealous application of Endust. The shine of the faucets in the bathroom hurts my eyes. The gilt-wrapped chocolates someone leaves each evening on my pillow make me gag. Purposely, I leave my dirty clothes on the floor, let toothpaste drip onto the bathroom counter, I who used to hate it when Anju did the same thing. My futile, animal attempt to mark my territory. This is what I’ve come to, kid! In the evenings when I return, the clothes are on a hanger, the
counter spotless. Two golden chocolate mints sit side by side on the turned-down bed like newlyweds. I am ungrateful to complain, no, about this affluence, when all this time I’d craved it? Still, I went to the bar.

The night was blurry, even before I started drinking. There were dim lights in colored domes, the smell of sweat and expectation. Jukeboxes played sentimental country-western. Clink of glass and egos, girls in red heels that opened out in the back. Some of the guys in the group bought drinks for women they didn’t know. Some of them were laughing, their hands on the bare arms of women who were trying to be beautiful. They wanted to set me up with someone. She was young, with pretty, scared-looking eyes, maybe a touch of Hispanic in her. A too-wide, too dark, lipsticked smile. I excused myself and went to the men’s room. It smelled, unremarkably, of urine. A man was there, just he and I, alone. His hand was in his pocket. He pulled it out, I expected a gun. But it was pills in plastic packets. Such pretty, shiny colors. It wasn’t what I wanted. The world is full of lonely people. But sometimes it feels like I’m the only one. I bought what he promised even though I don’t believe in promises. Hadn’t she promised, too? Your mother, the way she raised her chin at me? When I went back to the bar, everyone was laughing. No one saw me. What is worse than everyone around you laughing, and you not able to join in?

Three days later, in the hotel room, I broke the pill like the man had instructed and put it on my tongue. I said to the darkness, Since I can’t have what I want.

Kid, each morning I open the
Houston Chronicle
, delivered outside my door courtesy of the hotel. The headlines are thorned
and black. The stories of the world have nothing to do with my life.

I remember your weight on my chest. All your edges are soft and rounded, nub of elbow, tip of nose. Some nights I wake up, or maybe I have not slept at all, and bring my hand to my face.
If I touch nothing, I’ll know I no longer exist.
A slight, sweet smell in my palms: aloe vera from Baby Wipes. Kid, your cheek has a dimple—but is it on the left, or the right? Memory begins to betray me, tearing along its folds like old silk. Your fingers in mine, slender like the white furl of lilies. Or is it your mother I’m thinking of? In the dark, things run together. In the dark, my body cramps with doubt. She kissed me back, I’m sure she did. Under my body, her body shook with ecstasy.

Have I made a terrible mistake? Dayita, can you hear me? Answer me, Sudha, if you’re listening, too.

My father is dying. No one at the company knows this. They only know that I’m the first to get to the office, the last to leave. A solid worker, tenacious as a bulldog when putting deals together. They don’t know that I use work like a cough syrup, to suppress the symptoms of my disease. More work, more. It makes me loose-limbed and light-headed. But all the while, like a lump in the abdomen, the infection keeps growing.