by Veena Rao
“He doesn’t. I’m divorced.” She took a tiny bite of crunchy, fried calamari, not watching his reaction, quickly changing the topic. “So what brought you to Atlanta?”
“Destiny,” he laughed. He and his partner, Tony Kaputo, owned a video gaming company, Playable Media, in San Jose. They were in the middle of negotiations to buy over a smaller company, Peach Street Games, in Atlanta.
“Does that mean you will be visiting Atlanta often?”
“If all goes well, yes. And now, I have one very good reason to hope it does.”
She smiled, rather stupidly, put her elbow on the table, and rested her chin on a cupped hand. “Where’s your wife?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No wife. Been married twice, though. The first one is up there. The second one is probably in New York.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“You knew her. The first one, I mean.”
“Oh, you married Angela, Annette’s pretty cousin!”
He grinned. “Wrong answer.”
“Michele?”
“Wrong answer again.”
“Oh my God, you married Annette Saldanha? But she was family!”
“Hmm. Yes, but she was in the family way.”
“What?” Her elbow dropped from the table. But why? she wanted to ask him. “You were cousins!”
“When you’re young, you do stupid things.”
A thought then hit her, what he had said earlier about his first wife being “up there.” “What happened to Annette?”
He cupped a hand around his beer bottle, and tilted it along its axis; the smile on his lips waned momentarily when he said, “She died of meningitis. Just two years after we got married.”
“And the baby?”
“He was stillborn.”
“Oh!” She instinctively leaned forward, squeezed his free hand across the table. Her hand was no longer clammy or cold. He held on to her hand, his fingers curling into hers. A tenderness spread across his face, mellowed its features. With the smile gone, she could see that he was older, that time had matured him, that life had thrown curveballs his way, as well.
“I am so sorry,” she said. “So sorry to hear about Annette and your baby.”
He nodded.
Their lunch orders arrived. They ate, and the chatter around the restaurant seemed louder, as if they’d just realized there were people around them.
“The second wife. Who was she?” she asked.
“Patricia. I met her at NYU Stern where we both got our MBAs. Five years down the line, we realized it was a mistake and went our separate ways.”
It had taken him a while to move on, he said, but he had recently started dating again, a woman named Giana.
She tried hard to appear nonchalant. “Sounds like an Italian name.”
“She is.”
“This is good,” she said, pricking a plump shrimp blackened with pepper and a chunk of juicy pineapple on her fork, hastening to change the topic of their conversation. “Would you like to try it?”
“If you’ll let me.”
She leaned forward to drop the shrimp and pineapple goodness on his plate. Without looking, she knew his gaze was on her, not on his plate.
She stayed at the Cheesecake Factory, across the table from him, until people started to arrive for early dinner. Often, it was her own voice reaching her ears, animated and wordy. She told him about Ruth, Dottie, and Alyona, referring to them as her Atlanta mothers and sister. She talked about her newly renewed passion for writing. He filled her in on his interest in yoga and meditation, his charity work. He ran the Annette Saldanha Home for Children in Mangalore with his father, a shelter for abandoned kids.
When he offered to walk her to her car, it seemed likely that he would miss his return flight to San Jose, unless he drove to the airport like a formula one racer.
“Well then,” she said, leaning awkwardly against her Toyota Camry. “Drive safe.”
He touched her shoulder lightly. “Don’t old friends deserve a good-bye hug?”
She took a step forward and leaned in toward him. His outstretched arms enveloped her as if they had been waiting for this moment for decades. He felt warm, familiar; as if they had embraced a million times before. She was awash with long forgotten feelings. When he finally drew back and touched her cheek lightly, much like the scene from twenty-three years ago that she had replayed a million times in her head, her instructions to herself had flown out of her head. She gazed unabashedly into his eyes.
“Thank you for not running away this time,” he said playfully.
It wasn’t a long drive home. Or perhaps it was. There wasn’t much traffic inside the Perimeter. Or perhaps there was. She had no idea. When she turned the key in the lock to open her apartment door, she wondered for a second how she had gotten there. Which route had she taken?
She glided into the bedroom, dropped on the bed in a ninety-degree-angle fall, face up, arms stretched out. Her cheeks were still flushed. She closed her eyes and imagined again, the warmth of his embrace, their long conversation. She had been wrong in her assumption that her adolescent feelings for Cyrus were dead. Those feelings were back with the same intensity.
She smiled at a memory. After she had slid behind the wheel and rolled down her window, he had leaned in, his face and shoulders filling her view. She had noticed his thick eyelashes, how they accentuated his unusual eyes, and a little cut high up on his jaw, below his right ear, where he had probably nicked himself shaving that morning. She had noticed her own immense desire to put her hand out to touch it, to touch him.
“I have a confession to make,” he had said, looking into her eyes. “I was not in Atlanta when your email arrived yesterday. You made me take a red-eye from San Jose.”
She had simply stared at him in disbelief. “It was worth it,” he had said.
“Yes, it was nice reconnecting,” she had mumbled.
There was something else he had told her that made her heart smile now. “I stood at the spot until the sun went down,” he had said of that last day so many years ago. “I kept coming back to the spot, even walked past your grandmother’s house for weeks in the hope of seeing you. Annette said you changed schools and she never saw you after that last day.”
“Oh, really!”
“Oh, really? Is that all you’re going to say?” He had laughed.
“I’m sorry. I was so timid.”
He had leaned forward and given her a peck on her cheek, a gentle brush of his lips against her skin. “Please don’t make me wait a quarter of a century to see you again.”
Her eyes closed at the memory, her face arching up involuntarily. Maybe she shouldn’t have met him. Already, the calm she had spent months building inside of her, around her, had been invaded with ocean waves of emotions.
Chapter 22
His email arrived on the sixth day. The Atlanta deal had come through and he’d be back in town next week, he said. She deleted the email, but let it rest in the trash folder. For two restless days, she resisted the urge to resurrect the email, filling her free time with grocery shopping and elaborate Indian cooking, reminding herself of the pitfalls of rushing into something she wasn’t ready for.
On the third day, she allowed a shift in her thoughts, pondering the purpose of her resistance, her attempt to block the splendored sunshine from flooding her life. Why was she living in the past, in the future? In the present, Cyrus’s return seemed like her karmic bonus for taking care of herself, for not allowing her past to harden her heart.
She found the email, hit reply, and typed a simple Congratulations! She slept easy that night.
He asked her, via email, if he could take her out to celebrate the Atlanta deal when he visited the following week. She met him for dinner on a Thursday evening, driving straight from work to a small café in Buckhead. She had taken care that morning to wear a blue sheath dress that flattered her slim figure. She congratulated him again in person with a quick sideways hug, taking in how the white of
his shirt and the deep red of his tie made his face glow, his eyes sparkle, even in the dim interior of the café. In between bites of his chicken panini sandwich, he told her he had broken up with Giana the week before. She knew she sounded dishonest when she mouthed, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I hope you are okay.”
He said he was fine, they had only dated a few weeks.
She met him for dinner each time he was in town, which was at least twice a month. They found ways to make the dinner stretch, never running out of things to share. He updated her with news on their three mutual friends. Angela had been a flight attendant for Lufthansa until she retired and married a Delhi-based pilot. Michele was a gynecologist who worked in a Bombay hospital. She had married a cardiologist across town and had two kids. James, who remained his best buddy, had taken over his father’s coffee estates after his parents’ death.
She told him what a disappointment she had been to Daddy when she joined the arts stream in college, opting to major in literature. He’d had plans for her to become the first doctor in the family. Just before she graduated with a master’s, she had applied for a sub-editor’s post at the Morning Herald on a whim, with no background or training whatsoever in journalism. She had been the first one from her class to get a job.
“I bet your daddy was finally proud of you,” he said.
“Yes, but he was also quick to add that if I had applied my gray cells a little more, I could have passed the foreign service exam.”
“That’s a typical Indian parent’s reaction. But you stood your ground to do what you loved, so you were quite the rebel.”
She had never seen herself as a rebel, and it tickled her pink that he thought of her as one.
Every waking moment, her mind hopscotched through thought after sweet thought; waiting, endlessly waiting, for their next meeting. By the end of the fall, Cyrus said he was going to be spending a considerable amount of time in Atlanta, overseeing operations of Peach Street Games. It made sense to look for an apartment, to feel at home, rather than stay cooped up in a hotel room. Tara thought he would opt to be near the trendy Buckhead nightlife or the midtown skyline, but Cyrus wanted to be close to nature. He settled for a two-bedroom, top floor, furnished apartment a few miles away from Buckhead, with a large patio that overlooked a thickly wooded park. The patio was perfect for his morning yoga sessions, and the park was ideal for his daily conversations with his inner self, he said.
In the second week of December, a little after Christmas lights began to adorn the city, he moved into Sherwood Park. After he had unpacked his suitcase and duffel bag, the first thing he wanted was a Christmas tree. Tara had bought hers, a seven-foot, Slim Arizona last December at Garden Ridge. She offered to take Cyrus to the same store where, together, they chose the tree, a red reversible skirt, strings of lights, red and silver baubles, and assorted ornaments. He picked an eye-catching five-point star of Bethlehem to top the tree from high up on a shelf. His eyes were trained to spot stars, he said, as he pressed it to his heart. She laughed and slapped him on his shoulder. But beyond his playfulness, she sensed his need to make her part of his Christian family tradition, to involve her in the unwrapping of his new life.
After their shopping expedition, Tara helped him assemble the tree, string the lights, and put up the ornaments. Cyrus heated some spiced apple cider, which they sipped out of large brown ceramic mugs as they worked. When they were done, they settled together on the sofa and looked at their creation: the ornaments, spaced out, yet glimmering delicately in the glow of the lights. The tranquil, mellifluous strains of the santoor gently filled the living room. Tara cast a glance at Cyrus’s Bose home audio system on the entertainment console.
“Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma? What happened to the guy who insisted on playing ‘Funkytown’ every afternoon?”
He laughed. “He got lost in transition.”
“Hmm. Lost in transition. That’s clever. Yoga, meditation, santoor. It is amazing how much you have changed, Cyrus.”
He said he had learned his lessons the hard way, after the Wall Street slump depleted him completely several years earlier, and, after a particularly weary day, when he had taken a flight out of New York to San Francisco where a friend lived, minus his wife of five years. She had moved out just that morning, and he had nothing to lose, nothing to stop him from starting over.
She began her story at a tangent, telling him about the nightmares and sleep paralysis that had started when she married Sanjay. He wanted to know more, so she gave him images of her life in Atlanta to piece together like a montage. When she was done laying bare past hurts, she looked into his moist eyes and smiled. “Thankfully, it is all in the past.”
“What a crazy man.” He leaned forward and took her hand, fingers entwining with hers. “I’m so sorry you had to go through so much pain, and I admire you so much for standing up for yourself.”
She looked up into his eyes, and saw herself, shining, in the middle of two honey pools.
“I love you, Star.” His voice was soft, yet ardent. She opened her mouth to respond, but only silence flew out. She needed to tell him, she was desperate to tell him, so she lunged forward and claimed his mouth. Her eyes closed of their own accord, not seeing the emotions that passed through his face. But she felt them, in the burning of his tongue as it discovered her moist mouth, exploring new territories; in the grip of his hands that cupped her face; in his mildly cinnamon-scented breath, laden with yearning. When she finally pulled back, he ran his hand through her hair, and let her in to the thumping of his heart. She lifted her face to gaze into his eyes; wet, luminous pools in the soft glow of the Christmas tree and the fading daylight.
“You have a wonderful way of saying things,” he said. His voice was gentle, happy, still breathless.
She looked away smiling, suddenly shy. It was as if the years in between had never happened. She melted in his warmth as he kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks; as his hand found the gap where her black T-shirt ended, as it explored the small of her back. He claimed her mouth again, then her long swan-like neck, catching the vibrations in her throat. His hand was climbing up her back, making her spine tingle with longing.
She arched back, pulling him down with her. They made love in the glow of the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. He kissed her shoulder afterward, as they lay in each other’s arms, spent. “I love you, my precious Star,” he said tenderly. “I have loved you from the time we first met.”
“I love you too, Cyrus,” she said softly, turning to kiss the tip of his nose. She had never, ever, in her life, said those three words to anybody; not to Amma, Daddy, or Vijay. They finally came to her lips now, those three profoundly magical words.
They planned an August wedding. It was a natural progression of their relationship. Exactly two months before her big day, Tara telephoned her parents to have the most difficult conversation of her life. She dialed with clammy hands, after considerable phrasing and rephrasing in her head, knowing how upset they still were with news of her divorce.
“I am getting married, Amma. I’ll be happy if you and Daddy will come.”
She was met with silence. She strained to hear a bit of her old mother; the rush of emotion, the sob, the sigh. She heard nothing. The shock of the news had been too much.
“Amma.”
“You seem to have planned everything yourself. You don’t need your parents anymore.”
Tara fought a wave of guilt before responding. “Please come, Amma. You know I need you and Daddy.” She wasn’t being entirely truthful. She didn’t need them around as much as she needed peace with them. She told them about Cyrus—what he did for a living, how much he respected her, how well they got along.
“Cyrus? That is a Parsi name,” said Amma.
“His mother is Parsi, but his dad is Mangalorean Catholic.”
Another long silence. “Is he making you convert?”
“Of course not, Amma.”
“His family might insist on it.”
“At least you could have found a Hindu. Our people will never accept this marriage.”
Tara tried again, two weeks later. This time she offered to make all the arrangements for their travel; they only had to get to the airport. But Amma was brusque in her response. “Daddy’s blood pressure has shot up. We can’t travel now.”
She understood the insinuation. “Is he regular with his morning walks?”
“We don’t go anywhere anymore. Already people are gossiping about your divorce. How long will it be before this scandal hits Mangalore? It is our punishment for being parents. . .” Her voice trailed off, words left unsaid but implied. Punishment for being her parents. Laying guilt came so naturally to Amma. Tara crumpled the calling card, fingers curling over the thick paper in her palm. “Can’t you be happy for me, for once?” she cried.
Amma was quick and elaborate with her answer. Real happiness lay in selflessness, in sacrifices, in putting the family before oneself. A good woman sought a life of character and dignity, not willful pursuit of her heart.
Tara asked to speak to Daddy. He refused to come on the line. Tara disconnected with shaking hands. She took deep breaths, found a magazine to fan her inflamed, sweaty face. She still had to call Vijay, and was eager to get it over with. She gave a moment for her overwrought nerves to calm down, to compose her thoughts, before she dialed his number.
“You bailed out,” he said.
“Vijay, I expected you to understand.”
“Have you ever thought about what dad and mom must endure on your behalf in Mangalore?” His voice was cold. “You didn’t hesitate to throw them to the wolves.”
“It seems like that because they are part of the pack,” she cried. “You all are.”
Falling from grace wasn’t easy, just as being rejected wasn’t easy, no matter how many times it happened. She was an outcast, like Uncle Anand before her, for bringing her family hurt and shame. Suddenly, she went from feeling hot to cold. She wrapped herself in the aqua chenille throw on the sofa, yet she shivered, guilt racking her insides. She must have dozed off from sheer exhaustion, because when her eyes opened, Cyrus was in her apartment, kissing her forehead.
