Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  The narrow beam of the light that had climbed up the stairs, three or four steps at a time, has now jumped across twenty-odd years. It comes to rest beside Nina and switches off. She is lying on the blanket on her stomach. She has spread some clear gel in her hand and put it on my cock.

  —Higher, she says.

  I haven’t done it this way. It excites me but I’m also, quite honestly, afraid that it might hurt her. I feel the tightness of her muscle and its release, and she is soon pushing against me, making a sound that makes me want to thrust back.

  —Do you want me to come harder?

  Somewhere among her moans a murmured yes, and the fingers of her right hand touching the back of her own neck. By then was I standing or kneeling? I came in a rush and her back arched, and she bucked again and again.

  —I love you, I love you, Nina said. And then, Let’s go down and catch the end of Saturday Night Live.

  That semester in CLIT 300, David Lamb used a book whose title, The Tremulous Private Body, would come back to me after Nina and I had finished making love. She would be holding me and I’d feel her body rocked by a passing shudder. During that moment, she’d clutch me tighter and when the moment had passed, she would turn away and promptly go to sleep. I once mentioned The Tremulous Private Body to her and she immediately began to mock Lamb. I liked this. It took away my feelings of fascination and jealousy. A week or two earlier Lamb had wanted a book report from us on another book he was teaching, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Barthes had quoted a letter from a man in Morocco identified only as Jilali. Jilali’s letter was about what he himself called a disturbing subject: I have a younger brother, a student in the third-form AS, a very musical boy (the guitar) and a very loving one; but poverty conceals and hides him in his terrible world (he suffers in the present, “as your poet says”) and I am asking you, dear Roland, to find him a job in your kind country as soon as you can, since he leads a life filled with anxiety and concern; now you know the situation of young Moroccans, and this indeed astounds me and denies me all radiant smiles…Barthes described the language of the letter as “sumptuous,” “brilliant,” and “literal and nonetheless immediately literary.” Everyone in Lamb’s seminar focused on what Barthes had called “the pleasures of language” that spoke “at the same time truth and desire: all of Jilali’s desire (the guitar, love), all of the political truth of Morocco.” I penned a mini-essay on utopian discourse. But Nina’s book report was considerably shorter. She Xeroxed a section of the letter quoted in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and then distributed copies to everyone in the class. Nina had used a felt pen to write across the page the following question for us: Did that bastard Barthes give Jilali’s brother a job?*7

  Only a few months had passed since Jennifer, but I was deeply in love with Nina. It is possible that an objective viewer would have thought that I was obsessed with her; maybe Nina thought this too, although she never said it. For several weeks during that first summer, she was gone. She was staying at her parents’ summer home. Her parents lived in Pittsburgh but they spent the summers in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where they had a cabin. During her childhood, Nina had spent summers in Rome, which is where her father was from—Nina’s parents met in Rome when her mother had traveled there as a junior from Dartmouth on her study abroad program. But for many years now the family had summered in Maine. Nina told me that they didn’t have a phone in the cottage; so I waited for her letters. The letters arrived every few days, though not as often as I wanted, in envelopes that had pictures stuck on them and, once, a section of a map showing the beach and the ocean. Inside were messages that were invariably brief. They were crumbs that stoked a hunger and only left me famished. I’m aware, Your Honor, of the language I’m using but may I proceed to the bench to present evidence? This is Nina in a letter stamped June 29, 1991: What I have to say about what you have called your situation is this. I want your constant hand on my back, your unwaged agricultural labor in the fields of my nightly dreams, I want your back pressed into my front, your warm Brazil and shy Tierra del Fuegos. I want your cumspattered shirts and your baby, baby.

  Another time she wrote: Today I’ve got something which I’ve never had before, which is laryngitis. I can scarcely make a sound. Today I could whisper sweet filth in your ear. Have you ever wanted to fuck a half mute, honey?

  Filth!

  Your Honor, I have entered the body of America. I have spoken filth in the ear of one of your fair citizens when I was inside her.

  Your Honor, this was something new for me.

  She was hospitable in the extreme, meeting me with laughter. Her laughter alone saved me from my self-ridicule. Or what I imagined as the world’s ridicule. Your Honor, when I was on the phone with her I spoke in a high British accent, having stooped to using words used by Prince Charles in his conversation with Camilla Parker Bowles. (I was a boy in school when Charles kissed Diana on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. A decade was to pass before I read of his long, continuing affair with the aforementioned Parker Bowles, who had approached him at a polo match with an unforgettable proposition: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather—so how about it?”) Such has been my pathetic, unsentimental education! I have relied in my games of seduction on words plucked from the airwaves by a scanner and published by British tabloids for laughs:

  CHARLES: The trouble is I need you several times a week. Oh, God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier…

  CAMILLA: (in a falsetto) What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?

  CHARLES: Or, God forbid, a Tampax.

  CAMILLA: (shrieking) Oh, darling!

  No one had ever talked to me like Nina did. Before she left for Maine, she gave me a leather bracelet with a silver clasp in the middle. I thanked her with a kiss.

  —Try not to let any woman touch it while you’re having sex, she said.

  I had often thought of other women. Did she know this? I might have laughed nervously.

  She said, Do I have dibs on your sperm?

  —Yes, I said. I was unsure what dibs meant but I didn’t care. My sperm, I said, and the scented mangoes from my mango orchards, all the fruits of my toil too, the tree of my childhood, the furnished apartment of my soul.

  These florid speeches. Was she mocking my feverish syntax when she sent me her occasional letters written with great rhetorical flourish? More than once I thought we were like two porn artists hamming it up for the camera. This was not the greatest danger. The biggest challenge to love is not when you pretend you are in a porn film: no, no, it’s when you believe that you are in a bad Hindi film, delivering reassuring saccharine platitudes to each other. Nina lived her life in a B. R. Chopra movie for a while and then made her escape.

  What was Nina’s natural mode of talking? When you phoned her, the answering machine picked up the call. She never answered. Instead, you got Laurie Anderson’s voice saying, Hi, I’m not home right now…A series of electronic beeps, punctuated by a detached repetition of clichés, a language removed from sentimentalism. It was intelligent and all incredibly hip even if a little remote and maybe chilly.

  But this is wrong, of course. Back in April, on my birthday, we had been drinking beer and I said I wanted to see a fish tattooed on her arm. Some weeks later, on her own birthday, she had acquired a tattoo. The new oil on her arm formed a pool in which hung a single fish. Nina owned two eight-pound dumbbells that she used to strengthen her muscles. She watched the fish as, weight in hand, she flexed her arm.

  —Will you marry me?

  I asked her this impulsively, as I watched her exercising. I laughed when I said that, but the words still hurt in my throat.

  —You want to do it for the green card?

  She was smiling. The dumbbell rose and fell in a precise arc.

  —Yes, when they ask me over at Immigration, Did you marry her for love? I’ll say, Yeah, I love the way she climbs on top and fucks me. Nina, I’ll say, li
ck my mouth and show them how wet it is when you are done with me.

  I might have babbled on. There was always just that hint of seriousness between us that made me nervous and talkative. I recognized, not for the first time in my life, that as far as women were concerned I preferred taking the low road of indelicate candor. But I was also, Your Honor, exploring language. I was the poet of my own sexual liberation.

  After the dumbbells and a run, Nina and I ate a simple dinner of rice and beans in her kitchen. The television was on in the next room. Maybe it was something said on the news, Nina turned to me and asked whether the Immigration and Naturalization Service had a uniform.

  —Yes, I said.

  —Do you ever imagine having sex with the Border Patrol? You know, the way porn in Israel has sometimes much to do with the Nazis.

  I was aware that Nina had been in long relationships with others before me, one with a man who was much older than her, a designer of yachts. Then she had dated, for two years, a man named Jonathan who was a labor organizer. Compared to her, I was inexperienced. When Nina put to me this fairly innocent question about the Border Patrol, I asked myself anxiously if she liked to imagine having sex with someone else. The thought of loving Nina forever, and only her, passed through my mind, as it often did, in some kind of quick, sad, dulling way. And, characteristically, what emerged from my mouth was more insincere banter propped up with academic jargon.

  —You’re asking me do I want to be fucked by the state?

  —Well, have you watched The Night Porter?

  I hadn’t. Nina said it was a story about a former SS officer, now a night porter in a hotel in Vienna, and a woman who was a survivor from the same camp. The officer and the prisoner had been lovers in the camp. I interrupted Nina.

  —No, I would like to fuck Susan Sontag. Or maybe Susan Sarandon.

  Nina considered the point. I wanted very badly to be in love with intelligent, well-read women. And Nina was exactly that. I had fallen in love with her, and with her prose. Her perfume and her lips too. No, with her prose and her lipstick. Even plain words seemed so potent. Once, I came out of the shower and she was lying naked in bed, a lovely creature stretched on the dark sheet: on the inside of her thigh, in dark red lipstick, she had written Here.*8

  * * *

  I came home from the library and checked the tiny tin mailbox before entering the apartment. There was a postcard from Maine with a picture of a cowboy stuck on it. The photo had probably been cut from a trashy magazine. On the other side, Nina had written: Just saw a program on TV about American cowboys. There was one small bit that was interesting. These rodeo wrestlers hold a steer by the horns and bite its (very) sensitive lower lip to bring the animal down to the ground.

  I felt an onrush of blood, a sudden heat and an upheaval. This is the effect that many of Nina’s letters had on me. At other times, I was left uncertain. Mystery surrounded her words. One day she wrote that she had fallen asleep in the dentist’s chair and she had a dream about us. We were seated in front of a hypnotist who was putting her to sleep. The two of us were holding hands. Even as she was drifting off to sleep, she was telegraphing a message with her fingers. She was saying that she loved me, she was asking for my help. Help me! I found this appeal indecipherable. And then Nina had added: I’m not at my parents’ place right now but I’m going to drive down there tomorrow. If you are a good one you’ll soon mail me a letter tasting of pears and licorice and your own sweet self.

  Not at her parents’ place? Where was she, and why hadn’t she called? I sent her a card. I was like a man waiting for the bus on a long strip of empty road, uncertain whether the bus ever came on that route. In the food co-op that evening, while purchasing my groceries, I also picked up pear and licorice. But there was no call from Nina. Finally, four days later, a postcard arrived. I couldn’t tell where it had been posted. In Nina’s neat, angular hand, the following message: I heard on the radio today that Columbus’s men, unfamiliar with the migration patterns of American birds, regularly mistook the mid-Atlantic presence of feathered companions (en route to Africa) for signs of landfall. Continually disappointed. Where are you? I tried your office and your house. White featherless biped (f) seeks warm-blooded tropical creature (m) for new world adventures and more.

  It helped that she had mentioned the radio; her story appeared anchored in some sort of reality. But how could she have missed me? If I wasn’t at the office, I was to be found in my apartment, reading all the books that Ehsaan wanted me to read. The truth was that I had grown suspicious of Nina and there were often occasions when I didn’t even know whether what she had written was true. Then I’d feel guilty and simply wonder whether I had misjudged her.*9 At other times, I questioned her judgment. After I was rejected for a journalism internship, she wrote: I’m sorry that you didn’t get the job. Is it at all liberating, I wonder. It’s come to be that I can’t imagine anyone really likes to go to work. The Great Depression was such a fertile period, you know. The things that were invented in that decade include the TV, the helicopter, nylon stockings, the jet plane, and that thing that is a jet plane in nylon tights, Superman. Think of the many classics of literature that were written during that time!

  Was she right? I was so taken by the drama surrounding the messages that I don’t think I got the chance to really understand what she was actually saying in any letter of hers. Such drama! On some days, two or even three letters. She would write, I’m so happy to be tearing the letter I had begun. And I’d spend the day wondering what it was that she had written or not written. And then I would find another one, It’s your world, I’m just livin’ in it. (I checked Nina’s horoscope in Mirabella when I was at a hair salon. This is what I read and, naturally, I tore the page out to take home with me and stick in my journal: If you thought you had your fill of personal and professional dramas, forget it. The fireworks are far from over. You, and sexy Virgo Richard Gere, have spent a considerable amount of emotional energy this year trying to figure out the state of your love life. Now it’s time to move on. The lunar eclipse on June 8 will make you even more intense and sensitive to others’ whims. Surprising events around the solar eclipse on June 23 will clear the air, and you will be ready, willing, and able to do battle for the best reason of all: true happiness.) Clear the air! Clear the air!

  It doesn’t matter if I can’t remember what the fight was about: it was always in a way about the same thing. She was often in another city, she would say she would call, and didn’t; her small lies, which she said were the results of her nervousness from my continually testing her, drove me to the brink of madness.*10 She sent me letters. All her letters were so beautifully crafted—which only added to my suspicion. The mention of any other name in a letter she had sent me would take away all the pleasure of receiving any words of affection from her. I discovered jealousy was a disease whose first symptoms were a sudden darkening of the universe followed by a faint prickling on the surface of the skin, especially the face, before a hammering commenced in the heart.

  I always complained to Nina that she didn’t love me enough, and I didn’t realize for a long time that in doing this I had already lost the game. It was all futile really. There could never be a cure. I had become attached to a story that started one night: I got up in the middle of the night and the thought came to me out of nowhere that Nina wasn’t in Maine. She was in Pittsburgh with her ex Jonathan. As soon as the thought came to me, I knew with deep certainty that it was true. I said this to her when we next spoke on the phone, and she surprised me by accepting my charge, only adding that while the details were correct I had drawn the wrong conclusion. Jonathan’s mother was dying, first her kidneys had failed and then her other organs went kaput. Nina spoke about her for a long time.

  —This is a woman who has been very kind to me, particularly during one long sickness. I wanted to do the right thing by her, but wasn’t at all sure that you would understand. I’m sorry. In retrospect, I should have been honest with you.

>   I accepted this explanation but my doubts lay in repose only for a short while. I had been naïve. I had been blind to the fact that Nina was still in a relationship with Jonathan when I stepped into the picture, and then I treated the discovery of this fact as a revolutionary breakthrough in the way in which knowledge was to be forever organized. I’m certain I was tedious. More than once, Nina protested against my absurd complaints.

  —I’m boxed into a historical corner. One that I cannot seem to get out of, even when I’d give anything to be able to do that.

  —I love you and am not always sure you love me.

  —I sometimes think that if you really loved me you’d let me out of this mess.

  —Are you saying you want to end this?

  —No, I’m just saying that if you could ever let the test be over, I could stop failing.

  Whenever we had a conversation like this, I felt immediately chastened. There was another thing. I fumed, I accused, but Nina never. She didn’t raise her voice. In fact, I don’t think she regarded blunt statements at all as truths. If you weren’t being decent, were you being truthful? When I was bitter, I would think it was a class thing, this obligation to be polite. At other times, I felt like a real heel.