by Abha Dawesar
“I decided to come into the city. Are you free?”
“Lunch?”
“I want to go to someplace young.”
“Let’s meet downtown then.” They agreed on the details and hung up.
Prem paid the cashier and got into his car, which was waiting in front. He asked Matthew to leave him on the western end of Bleecker Street and pick him up later in SoHo. He strolled around slowly, like a tourist—gaping at the tchotchkes on the sidewalk stalls, browsing books, smelling the appetizing mix of meat and turmeric at corner kiosks.
A bald woman in her sixties with a dog smiled at him. Sometimes people thought he was someone they knew but couldn’t place. Prem brought his hand to his hat in a gesture of acknowledgment. He could not look at a bald woman without thinking of Meher’s cancer and her death and, by extension, his own death. But today between his death and himself he wanted to put someone—say, Dogpose. Prem wondered what Dogpose looked like, whether her skin had the same ethereal luminescent quality of Valérie’s or the olive hue of Meher’s.
“I’m looking for an affair,” he said to Edward as soon as they were seated at a lunch table at Babbo.
“After all this time?” Edward let out a short laugh.
“I’m dead serious.”
Edward frowned.
“Pascal mentioned it in passing, and he’s right. I need one.”
“Well, when I was still in the market, I would tell women I was your agent. That was my selling point. So it shouldn’t be hard for you—you are the sale himself! Anyway, there’s always Judith Q.”
“Judith Q the New York nutcase. Thank God I haven’t heard from her in a while.”
“I thought she wrote in the fall.”
“She did. But not since then. The frequency of her letters has dropped. Oh! Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Did Pascal ever tell you that he meets women online?”
“So did I, after Thalia and I divorced. Why do you think we’ve been telling you to get online all these years?”
“I found a fan online. I can feel spring. I am revitalized.” Prem leaned forward as he spoke.
“You should be. The book has had sensational reviews. It’s proven that winning the Nobel hasn’t detracted from your writing. Have you started the next one?”
“Yesterday I was sure there would be no more. Today I am less sure.”
“If having an affair is going to make the difference, then I’ll find you someone.”
“Aren’t you representing any young women writers?”
“We’re taking very few new novelists, but I got a fax from a guy today who said you had commented on his story. He quoted a line from your comment.”
“Who?”
“Roger Johnson. He faxed the story on online dating. I think I’ll take him on.”
“I can’t believe he quoted my comment. I wasn’t crazy about the story at all.”
“Come on! It was really good. He probably put the idea of an affair into your head more than Pascal.”
“You’re not going to take him on, Edward.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No, you’re not. I am serious.”
“I am too. You’re telling me who I can take on now?” Edward laughed, opening his mouth wide open. The inside of his mouth was covered with silver fillings.
“Don’t forget which side your bread is buttered on,” Prem bristled.
“Don’t forget who got you to where you are,” Edward threw back lightly.
“My writing got me where I am.”
“Aren’t we forgetting a few things?”
“I think we are forgetting that I won the prize.”
Edward could sense Prem’s irritation—Prem was saying things he was normally loath to say. But Edward was irritated too and pressed on. “You’re forgetting the time you threw the glass of water on Parma Senior’s lap, and they almost called off the first big deal you ever got. You’re forgetting who bailed you out when the entire publishing industry decided to boycott you after you had told Bobby, Bunty, and Barbara about the deals they each had offered you in confidence.”
“So what? There was always the U.K.”
“Where you had already antagonized the Clapham Seven as well as Charles, McCoy, and Reed. Where would you have gone? To Pastoral Press out of Cork?”
“I actually forgot about that. I think I’ve mellowed.” Prem laughed, remembering.
“Or people have gotten used to the idea of the cantankerous Indian genius.”
“And I’m not changing.”
“I can see that. But what’s your problem with Johnson?”
“He got your attention using my name without my permission. You know I hate that. Moreover, I gave him comments, but I didn’t once praise the story, and whatever phrases he quoted in the letter he must have used out of context.”
“He’s just doing the best for himself. At the end of the day I’m choosing him for the story.”
“His character development is flawed. The reader is left wondering if Milli is a gold-digger or an idealist, if she’s bold or just insane. His narrative is fraught with substandard sentences.”
“They are hardly substandard. There are a few flawed sentences.”
“Enough to see he’s not a born writer.”
“I’d argue there’s enough good in that story that he might yet become a great one.”
“In that kind of stunted, stinted reportage voice of his? I think not.”
“I’ve been an agent forty years, Prem. I think I can tell for myself.”
“Edward, you’ll lose me. My business and my friendship.” Prem spoke evenly and touched Edward’s hand when he spoke.
“You’re blackmailing me!”
Edward had taken Prem onto his list when Prem had two very good books and an excellent one under his belt. He was in flight from his past and wrote books about music, love, and philosophy. Meher was lodged inside him—he could puncture himself anywhere, and she would flow out and appear on paper. This he could bear to do. But what he couldn’t bear to do, until he went back to her bedside, was to look at the country he had left behind. Prem remained in India after she died, taking the train from Delhi to Calcutta to Benares. Then he came back to New York to produce an extraordinary tableau of India as she gained confidence in herself in her postindependence years. In the next decade he alternated his personal books with his big books—this was how Edward thought of them. The personal books were about the individual travails of the characters, their metaphysical truths and ontologies. The big books were about India and later about the United States. India struggling to maintain her integrity under the corrupting influences of a socialist economy. India turning into a dishonest woman, a loose woman, as she succumbed to the license raj, pimped by every small-time office babu, chaprasi, peon, bureaucrat, politician. India manipulated and demeaned, her democratic institutions ridiculed and finally denuded of her democracy like Draupadi, when her sari was unraveled in public. But in this real-life version, unlike in the Mahabharata, no godly Krishna came down to extend the sari. Instead a spineless president put his rubber stamp and declared Emergency, a suspension of all civil rights and personal liberties, leaving India to shiver in the cold, naked. Forced sterilizations, larger-scale corruption, mayhem, and tyranny followed. Prem’s books were now, each one, about everything, the atavistic and the evolved, the blessed and the damned, the public, the political, and the personal.
At this time finally Prem’s personal books and his social books came together in Grinding India. Those who had risen against the Emergency, risking their lives and the disappearance of their beloveds, were its heroines and heroes. Something had opened within Prem. He had once visited the dam on the Tungabhadra River, near Hospet, that held turbulent water in check with floodgates. The creative force of Prem in his forties was the force that water would have had if the floodgates had been lifted.
Edward had seen the furious wave that had the force of an ocean and the magnificent book it produced. H
e stayed up all night reading it and went back and read its best moments once more. Another kind of person would have stood in astonishment and gaped at Prem’s manuscript, but Edward danced. In celebration he fucked his wife when she woke up in the morning and ate her pussy, he drove his kids to school, and he came to his office, closed the door, turned on an LP, and danced. Edward had always known how to live, he was a liver, and in moments of extreme joy he lived extremely. Prem would make himself and Edward a lot of money and win awards, but that was secondary. In his hands Edward had what could only be called greatness. And greatness was exactly what was missing in the impoverished culture of the leveling postmodern world. That day Edward found the one thing he had been searching for in his working life, a cause. He was elated that it came in a physical body, and that the body was that of a writer who was a client of his to boot.
Thereafter Edward did not peel his eyes off Prem and his creations. That mind, the few cubic inches of mush encased in Prem’s skull, were going to restore Greatness with a capital G in the world through Literature. Grand themes came alive because they marched with microscopic detail. Grand without being grandiose. Profound without a moment of pomposity. Prem’s interests became a priority in his mind—at moments above his own. Edward was, after all, serving an idea. And he intended to see that Prem served it too. When he got a whiff of the visit Prem’s friend Krishnan had paid him, with an entourage of computer scientists, Edward had the foresight to realize that everything Prem touched was and would be invaluable. If he could have collected the microbes in Prem’s sneezes, he might have done that too.
Edward stared at the water in his glass. Then he looked into Prem’s eyes. Prem raised his eyebrows for an answer.
“I’m not going to let you go after all this, you bastard.”
“There’s a personal reason too,” Prem said.
“And what is that?”
“I’m trying to get a date with some girl this Johnson fellow went on a date with.”
“Have you seen her?”
“No. But I get this feeling.”
“I almost prefer your immoral libido to your hokey literary criticism.”
“It’s my last chance to live. You know what the last ten years have been for me.”
“The death of the star. A star gets hotter and redder just before it dies.”
“Don’t scoff—you’ll be in my shoes soon enough. Age gets everyone, as they say.”
“Age gets everyone differently. In your case, you’re going to run out of everything to burn, and your ego, big as it is, isn’t the critical mass.”
“Why this sudden devilish delight in my death?”
“No. In stars, and you’re one. I’ve taken on another Nobel laureate. A physicist who wants to do a series of books explaining difficult concepts for the general public.”
“What’ll happen if my ego isn’t the critical mass?”
“You’re going to turn into a white dwarf as opposed to a black hole.”
“And the physicist, your other star?”
“Obviously hopes to end up as a black hole, bending space-time.”
“I hope to get some things to bend for me now while I’m still alive. Critical mass notwithstanding.”
“The physicist wants to meet you, by the way. He says he’s a big fan.”
“Before my death I have time only for those who can bend into a yogic dogpose.” Prem smiled to himself.
“Not an iota of sympathy from me for your old age or your impending death. You’re going to die exactly the way you’ve lived: making people mostly miserable but sometimes immeasurably happy.”
“Did you get the physicist because you were my agent?”
“Of course.”
“So you’re not going to take on Johnson?”
“Not until you’re dead.”
Prem returned to his house after lunch and went straight to his writing studio to log on. When he read the message from Dogpose, there was a simultaneous contraction in his chest and his scrotum on seeing the word desire. It was hard to sit and think in front of the laptop, and he was restless. He ambled in the garden looking at the new flowers Mrs. Smith had planted and thought about the conversation with Edward, his resentment of Johnson’s youth, and his desire for a woman who had no reality in flesh and blood for him.
Maya finished up her work in the early afternoon to plan her upcoming trip to France. As the sole recipient of the Paris Fiction Fellowship, she would have enough money to live decently for three months and write. She wondered if Roger Johnson had applied and if she had won it over him. When should she tell him about it?
At the end of the evening Maya logged on to invite Johnson to dinner, and noticed that there was a message from Indian Man of Letters:
Not just arbitrary but even anonymous, as in this case. Why me?
She went to her bookshelf and picked up By the Thread and looked at the photo on the back cover. She opened the book to a random page and scanned it. Paragraph after paragraph of long articulate sentences jumped out. Would the real Rustum type one-liners? She sighed and saw Prem’s photo on the back again. Her internal organs lurched within her body cavity. She went back to her computer.
It was a general question about desire, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was desire for you. I have only deep awe for PR. Anonymous desire for anyone is impossible in my view. But why PR is a question I can answer. I’ve given myself to Meher, Sara, Bertha, and everyone else who has come along with a promiscuity that even I find astonishing. I do understand you’re not any of your characters. I don’t purport to know you just because I have clutched your books on the Chennai-Pondicherry highway, through humiliating security checks in airports, and in ratty guesthouse beds all over India. I have tried to read your books honestly, allowing the narrative voice such full possession as to reduce myself to a tenant in my own house. It is rare to be so consumed by admiration, and its dictates forbid any veneer of coolness. For one year now, the yin and yang of my life, the pulls of occident and orient, have really been about whether to devour all your books swiftly—for the pleasure of the moment, or to abstain—so that a new one and its promises are always on the horizon. The real world with its humdrum routines and sporadic dramas alternates with this other one, one in which I can arrive like some sort of Vedantic mendicant to partake—without illusion or indifference—of the fruits of your literary tree. But I really don’t believe this is you, Prem Rustum, who I am sending this message to.
Maya pulled out her suitcases from the back of the walk-in closet and made checklists of the items she needed to carry, the books, the notebooks from her Indian trips, the backup CDs of her previous writing, all the while pondering Johnson and the fact of her departure.
Roger Johnson showed up at her door with a bottle of Pomerol at seven-thirty. Maya stirred the mushroom risotto in the kitchen while Johnson filled two glasses of wine and told her about his day.
“You want to taste this and tell me if it’s too al dente for you?” Maya offered a spoon of the risotto to Johnson after blowing on it.
“Perfect.”
“Doesn’t need more salt?”
“No.”
“Let’s go to the table. You owe me a Boutin story.” Maya portioned equal halves from the pot into two bowls, and they sat down to eat.
Roger Johnson had ridden high his first few months at college. He had been the only member of the freshman class to be accepted on the board of The Advocate, Harvard’s literary magazine. His Expository Writing professor was praising Johnson’s work each week in class, holding it up as some of the best writing he had ever seen in his six years teaching the course. Nathan Zuckerman, Harvard’s writer-in-residence for the year, had asked Johnson to apply for the spring session of his ten-person Creative Writing class, the most coveted class of the year, one usually restricted to upperclassmen except at the instructor’s discretion.
It was no wonder then that at literary parties on campus Johnson was a regular invitee and a gregariou
s presence. His years as an outcast in high school, when he was regularly gutted as a bookworm, were finally over. He now had friends and acquaintances who were as familiar with Fitzgerald and Camus, Tolstoy and Rustum, Balzac and Boutin, as he was. He could speak in that wonderful music of writerspeak, where a single page in a book conveyed worldviews and mere references to possessive proper nouns like Bataille’s Simone delivered hard-ons. These were people who had teethed on The New Yorker, people who had been shunned for the same reasons as he had right through their pizza-faced teenage years by peers deemed cooler. In the interiors of The Advocate and in the senior dorms where parties were thrown, Johnson was determined to redeem himself and seduce with precisely those charms and literary games that had been the cause of his pariah status less than one year before.
Pascal Boutin had a new book out on women: a book much like Boutin himself, who at fifty-something was still frank, sexual, and utterly unstoppable. Johnson had laughed his way through the first half of the book sitting on the can. Three bowel movements later Johnson had been persuaded by Boutin’s narrative and went from total astonishment to complete belief in Boutin’s project.
At The Advocate party held at an editor’s senior suite in Eliot House, Johnson arrived in a dapper suit with a handkerchief sticking out of his pocket. The buzz of male conversation centered on words like deconstruction, semiotics, syntax, and that of female conversation on Stein, Woolf, and Morrison. Johnson found himself on a large comfortable forest-green sofa with three young women, one in particular.
“You’re the genius freshman, aren’t you?” she teased.
“Not really.” Johnson was embarrassed by public declarations of his promise. The all-around intolerance of his high school had taught him to be proud and defiant in the face of adversity, leaving him with no tools for dealing with praise.
