The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  “I’m not much of a photographer myself,” he found himself saying on his fifth highball (and her fourth vodka), “but why don’t we make this meeting in camera?”

  The girl didn’t quite seem to have got it and Jennings wished he hadn’t discarded his alternative jokes about darkroom developments and negative answers. He leaned forward and gripped her by the arm.

  “Come,” he said authoritatively.

  She came. Their lovemaking was brief and blurred, as alcoholic amativeness so often tends to be, but she came, shuddering in his arms, and afterwards Jennings lay still, sobered by her sensual elegance, his mind caressing the perfect lines of her mannequin’s body. He turned towards her, rolling over onto his belly, and she surprised him by opening her eyes and saying, “Jennings, I love you.” The words hit him and he shook her awake abruptly.

  “How did you know my name?” he demanded.

  She was instantly alert. “Of course I know your name, silly. You’re Jennings Wilkes. I’ve seen your picture in Playgirl, with one of your stories—the one about the girl who took drugs, what did you call it—oh, yes, “Methedrine in Her Madness”. I recognized you as soon as you sat next to me in the bar. Anyone would.” Smiling languidly, she tickled him under the chin and turned back to sleep.

  Watching her lying on her side, her graceful curves under his fingertips, Jennings experienced a strange sense of disquiet. She knew who I was, he told himself. She knew all along. But then why shouldn’t she? He did not suffer from any sense of false modesty. His must be a fairly familiar face. Yet the girl, coming so soon after Clausewitz’s last disturbing session, seemed too perfectly timed to be true. What was she? A divine gift? A psychoanalytic plant? He shook her awake again.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She raised a sleepy hand to touch him. “Cheryll,” she said huskily.

  “Cheryll Clausewitz?” he was almost barking.

  “No, silly, where on earth did you pick that name from? Cheryll Smith.”

  He felt instantly ashamed. “Go back to sleep, Cheryll,” he said softly.

  She moved in a week later, by which time they had concluded they wanted each other so much it was pointless living apart. In the meantime, in the few moments he found for writing—since Cheryll demanded more of his time than her few predecessors in residence—he put the finishing touches to a second story about Clausewitz and, inevitably, began one about Cheryll.

  “I’ve got little more than a working title right now, but a lot of empirical data will follow,” Jennings explained to Dr. Clausewitz, who had allowed himself to be coerced into restarting the treatment, realizing full well that Jennings needed him only because he had no other friend to talk to. (“If I was Roman Catholic,” Jennings had admitted, “I could at least have gone to my father confessor.”) “I think I’ll call it ‘Vodka and the Virgin,’ given my penchant for alliteration. And she was, you know, incredibly enough. A virgin. I couldn’t believe the stains on my sheet the next morning. Asked her if it wasn’t her time of month. She—she—started weeping then,” Jennings paused, his brow clouding. “Poor Cheryll.”

  Poor Cheryll was just what she was—she hadn’t proved successful enough a model to be able to maintain herself in the kind of style that successful models could afford and not-so-successful models tried to affect. Jennings, realist that he was, told himself that the saving she would make on her rent had played no small a part in her decision to live with him, and yet the fact that it was him she had chosen proved gratifying.

  Meanwhile the story progressed. She would occasionally stand over his shoulder while he wrote, give up attempting to decipher his scrawl, and retreat to a magazine or the dressing table; but most of the time she was at a studio, or at several, trying to obtain assignments while he wrote. “Vodka and the Virgin” caused him more trouble than he had expected. Sometimes, the creative demon possessing him, he would write an acidic sentence, only to look up and find Cheryll smiling down at him, a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. She would leave him the beverage and rumple his hair and the spell would be broken. He would score out the sentence in self-reproach.

  Somehow, the story moved on.

  “She’s the only virgin I’ve ever known, doc,” Jennings said reflectively, noting idly that a section of the plaster on the ceiling had begun to crack—it’ll peel before next week’s session, he thought. “You know, really—the only virgin. Doc, I’m the first man she’s ever known. I think about that sometimes when I’m writing, and I tell myself, Jesus, Jennings Wilkes, you can’t do this to her. You can’t betray a girl who trusts you like Cheryll Smith does, who gives you as much as she has.”

  “Good,” Dr. Clausewitz said. That was all he said throughout the session.

  Cheryll in his arms in the living room to a Chopin waltz—biting Cheryll’s neck in the kitchen as she garnished an exquisite casserole—Cheryll naked and heaving on the double bed—soaping Cheryll’s back in the bathtub—Cheryll smiling and wet and home on the doorstep—writing about Cheryll in the study. The progression always gave him a sense of guilt. Writing was more painful each time he sat down to it, entirely because he could not write beautiful, romantic, adulatory bilge; his perception was too acute and his prose too incisive, even as his preoccupation with her steadily acquired the dimensions of an obsession.

  Then, one day, he finished it.

  “I’ve done it, doc,” he said in triumph, watching the plaster peel on the ceiling with the quiet satisfaction that comes from the knowledge of inevitability. “‘Vodka and the Virgin’ complete and ready for the typewriter. Five thousand intense, painful but brilliant words. It’s an affirmation of integrity, of an author’s karma. Doc, I don’t mind admitting to you frankly that there were moments when I thought I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I think I’m beginning to fall in love with her, leggy languor, tumbling tresses et al. There’s something so terribly vulnerable in her naïveté—perhaps because her essential simplicity contrasts so strongly with her outward self-possession—that I’m becoming entranced. But you’ve not been entirely right, doc. She is beginning to matter to Jennings Wilkes, the human being—but Jennings Wilkes the author still exults at his completion of her literary exposé. I love the virgin but I’ve violated her virginity. Don’t you see how deep the dichotomy you discerned in me runs?”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Clausewitz responded enigmatically. That was all he said throughout this session.

  Jennings stopped at the bar seventeen-blocks-and-a-left-turn away once more on his way home. It was a strange feeling sitting on her bar stool (the one he had occupied was taken) and then drinking, deliberately, her drink (vodka on the rocks with a dash of lime). Yet Jennings could not define the feeling. He had not come to the bar in quest of anything, not for reminders or assurances or a perverse expiation. Vaguely dissatisfied, he finished the drink and left.

  She was due home, he knew, but somehow he did not want to meet her, though he felt impelled to return—to return not to her in the flesh but to her in black ink on yellow paper. He took the elevator to his floor and used the key he had not given her, one that let him directly into his study from the landing. He wanted to be alone with Cheryll there; alone as only an author can be with his creation.

  The manuscript was still lying on the table, “BY JENNINGS WILKES” proudly capitalized on the top of the first page. He looked at it and his disquiet lifted. There it was, his story, a tangible embodiment of his perception, his wit, his power with the pen. He began to read it, watching, as if from a curiously involved but nevertheless distant vantage point, the words flow across the page, watched them cascade and break in crested waves. He was Neptune, Ahab, Mark Spitz. He was their genesis, their victim, their conqueror. He felt himself caught up in their movement, irresistibly enthralled, felt himself swim in their ambience, sail on their current, rise from their depths. Cheryll’s voice, raised outside his study door, broke into his reverie.

  “It worked, darling!” The excitement was so
foreign to her customary verbal lassitude that Jennings instantly turned his attention to her. She was on the phone in the corridor between his study and the living room, apparently pacing up and down in animation. “He did it, just as you said he would. I came home early today, knowing he’d be away, and sneaked into his study. It’s perfect. ‘Vodka and the Virgin’—familiar Wilkesian alliteration, establishing the story firmly in the general genre. And the contents—even better than some of his other stuff. I think it’s been earmarked for Elle. Just wait till this comes out and half of the continental United States will be abuzz with queries about who the ‘vertiginous virgin’ is. And I’ll be up to my ears in modeling assignments!”

  There was a pause while the recipient of this breathless analysis responded to it. But Jennings was no longer listening. He strove to focus on the sea of words before him, but found himself drowning in them, their sparkle dulled, his limbs heavy. Clausewitz had been wrong, but he had been so much wronger, his perception so pathetically amiss, the truth he had felt compelled to depict now revealed as hollow, tinsel, false. He gripped the sheaf of paper tightly, and then something snapped within him. He was a beached surfer now, watching the foam retreat from the shoreline. The manuscript was ripped apart in two; he watched his hands tear the paper, making no attempt to resist their motion. The story was bisected, and then his hands moved with increasing quickness, and the sheets were torn into furious quarters, the little jagged shreds flying with each fast, flailing violation of their wholeness, till finally no piece was large enough to tear further. He found himself laughing, at first in small sobs, then increasingly uncontrollably, the tears streaming down his face to mingle with the ink on the scraps on the table. With the tears came a greater sense of release than he had ever known, an emptying of the dam-waters through floodgates he had not realized could be opened.

  “I’m free!” he shouted, scooping handfuls of shredded story and flinging them into the air, still laughing. “By the Blessed Virgin, I’m free.”

  He was still laughing when the girl outside finished her telephone conversation.

  “Thank you, Dr. Clausewitz,” she said.

  1977

  The Death of a Schoolmaster

  I was ten years old when Achan came into his land. “His” land—how easily one slips into the possessive pronoun. It was Amma’s land, not even hers really, but her maternal uncle’s. When he’d died heirless, our matrilineal system ensured that Amma inherited his estate. Which meant that Achan, as head of the family, suddenly became a landlord.

  I still remember the little, three-room house we were living in when our fortunes so completely changed. There were six of us children then, banging our heads on the low doorway as we crowded into the kitchen for our breakfast idlis; only six, because my eldest sister had already been married off a year ago, and my youngest brother was not yet born. We would all sleep side by side on a large cotton mattress spread on the living room floor (or rather, the floor of what I have since come to think of as the living room, a word I had never heard in those days), with a thin sheet to protect us against the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes would buzz around our exposed faces, of course, so that we soon learned to tuck our heads too under the sheet. But all the pulling and the stretching involved in the six of us all keeping ourselves covered meant that often one person at the end got no sheet at all. That was usually my elder sister Thangam, who would curl up quietly on one side without complaint, just as she would forego her own meals in ensuring we all had enough to eat, or miss the bus for school in helping me to get ready for class. And when the sheet gave away one night to some rough tugging by my two elder brothers, leaving a rent down the middle, it was Thangam who slept under the hole, Thangam who saved her next few days’ bus fare to buy the needle and thread we didn’t have, Thangam who woke up early in the morning to sew the sheet before Achan saw it and beat us all. Those were days when simple sacrifices meant a great deal.

  Achan was a schoolmaster then. He was a B.A., an educated man; he could read and write English. The cupboards in our house and in the small room he shared with Amma were crammed with books: advanced English readers, University textbooks, local editions (with impossibly small print) of well-known classics. They were dusty, termite-ridden, cracked and tearing, some without jackets, others carefully wrapped in newspaper covers, the paper yellowing and curling with age, but they were all read. My most enduring memory of Achan in those days is of him in the sagging easy chair on the porch, peering in the light of a kerosene lamp at the torn pages of an aging book. That was before he had come to admit his need for spectacles, or to afford them. Amma would always say he was reading his eyes to ruin, but he would dismiss her with a snort, or ask her to get him a cup of tea instead of bothering him.

  Amma was very much the downtrodden wife in those days. When I think of her at that time, I am still startled by the difference between her then and the bustling, vigorous matriarch of later years. Some women grow only in widowhood. As a wife, Amma was quite content to live in Achan’s shadow. He had married her, a barely educated orphan with only a prosperous uncle to her name, when she was fifteen. She had known no other brother, or father, or male friend, or instructor, and it was obvious that for her Achan combined all these roles. This didn’t mean that she was devoid of individual spirit or conviction, for the children were frequently at the receiving end of her whiplash tongue. It was just that whenever Achan was around, her habitual manner was one of compliant diffidence.

  There were so many gaps between them. Age: he was thirty when he married her, double her age, and even as time passed, the fifteen years loomed forbiddingly between them like the shadow of an unscalable cliff. Sex: he was a man in a man’s world, equipped to cope with its mysteries; she had gone from the insignificance and fears of a fatherless girlhood into the insignificance and security of an arranged marriage. Education: she had eight grades of schooling, enough to give her a fine, precise, rounded handwriting in the only language she knew, Malayalam; he was the only graduate in the family, a man of learning, steeped in books. The wisdom of age, the assurance of manhood, the knowledge of scholarship, all were his. To these qualities she could only juxtapose her innocence, her uncertainties, her ignorance.

  But they were happy together. Happiness can only come when poverty is not equated to want. My father earned only (how easy it is to say “only” now) seventy-five rupees a month for his labors, but he never felt he should want more. Others in the village, many without his B.A., would crowd onto trains and travel long distances to seek clerical jobs in cities like Bombay, which paid them twice as much. They would subsist in hovels and send the bulk of their earnings home to their families in Kerala. A neighbor once wondered aloud whether Achan too could not do better by taking the typing course offered in the next town and going to work as a stenographer in Bombay like so many husbands and sons of her acquaintances. The vehemence of his reaction rapidly established for her and anyone else who might have been listening (as I was) that neither the skill nor the profession concerned was worthy of a gentleman’s consideration. In any case, it never crossed Amma’s mind to urge any change upon Achan. He was what he was, and it was her duty to serve him and raise his family. That was enough for her.

  When the inheritance came they were caught off guard. I suppose they must have known, in some recess of their minds, that Valiamaman’s assets would one day be theirs, especially as the years went on and he failed to acquire or produce other heirs. But Amma was not the kind of person to think very much about it and Achan had no place for such prospects in his world of books and school papers. I imagine that, in any case, they were not expecting anything quite so soon. Valiamaman was an active sixty at the time of his sudden death in circumstances which were never satisfactorily explained to us children. Later inquiry and surmise have led me to conclude he had a seizure when closeted with the buxom young maidservant whom Amma dismissed soon after we moved in. He was an energetic man to the end.

  The move was traumatic.
It meant a major displacement from our little town, where Achan taught at the government high school, to our ancestral village over fifteen miles away. It meant changing the habits of a lifetime, bus schedules, games, friends. It meant coping with the mysteries of a thirty-five-room house where suddenly each of us had our own bedroom-cum-study. We could never come to terms with this unwanted gift of privacy and would end up, as before, sleeping side by side on our cotton mattress in the grand front room where Valiamaman used to receive the visits of his fellow zamindars in more prosperous times.

  And for Achan it meant the unfamiliar responsibility of sixty acres of paddy fields, scattered over two villages forty miles apart. His land.

  He had to give up the school. For one thing he was no longer down the road from it. He would have had to walk nearly an hour, catch an unreliable bus and walk ten minutes again, none of which would have been good for either his dignity or his feet. For another, he had to keep an eye on his land, attend to details of its ploughing, sowing, irrigation, and harvesting, employ contract labor, pay the government levies, apply for fertilizer, arrange for the sale of the produce. It was a full-time job.

  It was also too much for him. I don’t know when I began to realize it, but it became apparent before long that Achan couldn’t cope. He would return from a hot, dusty day in the fields, exhausted and irritable. He would delve suspiciously into the dinner Amma laid out for him, and complain uncharacteristically about the vegetables in the avial or the sourness of the thayiru, bark at a few of us, and attempt to seek solace in his easy chair. But no sooner had he turned a page of whatever book he had picked up than someone would emerge on the veranda, hands folded in supplication, to raise some problem about the land. And Achan would put his book down in despair and try to arrive at a decision on some matter he knew less about than his visitor.