Immigrant, Montana

by Amitava Kumar

  Sometimes after we fought, I would come back into the apartment and hear her voice on my answering machine. When this happened, I relented quickly and called her back. But there were times when I didn’t care. The stab of guilt I had experienced earlier was no longer there; its place had been taken by rage. I was too angry that she hadn’t written, or hadn’t called, or had been out late with friends.

  * * *

  —

  Nina and I didn’t only fight. Back in February, maybe only ten days after I had placed the Valentine’s Day ad in the Voice, we went through a breakup. It didn’t last long but a change had come: nothing was to be taken for granted anymore. Why do couples fight, or where do such fights have their origin? A minor irritation or a misheard remark is linked to a barely articulated but long-established hurt or resentment. It is as if a closet with a secret trapdoor opened into a dark tunnel that allowed you to crawl to a distant hiding place.

  The occasion was a Friday night dinner. Maya and Peter were our guests. We were at Nina’s but I was doing the cooking. Nina was the teaching assistant that semester in a nineteenth-century American lit class and there had been a big guest lecture earlier that evening. She came back with the report that a distinguished professor emeritus had gone to sleep in the chair next to her soon after the lecture started. The visitor adjusted the rhythm of her delivery to minimize the sound of the gentle exhalations coming from the first row. Nina liked giving titles to events, and here was another one: “The Speaker and the Sleeper.” For Maya, I had brought my tape of Hemant Kumar songs. She sat close to Peter, and she looked happy. We drank wine and then it was time for dinner.

  I had made a special effort and prepared rogan josh even though the smell of the lamb cooking in the spices made Nina throw open the kitchen window as soon as she entered the apartment. Also, chana masala, raita, grilled cauliflower. For dessert, I had bought kulfi from Maharaja Palace on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Peter had been quiet but he liked the food. When he was eating his pistachio and cardamom kulfi, Maya looked at Peter and started on a story.

  —I was outside the Pastry Shop yesterday. A woman was kneeling on the sidewalk, feeding her terrier small treats. “You like it?” she would ask, and then as if the dog had said something in response, she would stroke its face and say, “I love you too!” This went on for a long time. The terrier never tired of her question, which she must have asked a dozen times, or her declarations of love.

  Maya touched Peter’s nose instead of asking him whether he liked his food. I saw Nina looking at me.

  —Thank you for dinner, honey.

  —But did you like it?

  There was an edge in my voice because I didn’t really think Nina enjoyed eating Indian food. She was always gracious, of course, but whenever she praised me I felt she was lying. I couldn’t keep a feeling of humiliation out of my heart. Now, at the dinner, I made the mistake of pointing out the truth.

  —You ate a spoon of rice, a few forkfuls of cauliflower. Anything else?

  Nina laughed. She said she had been so hungry she ate cheese and crackers at the reception after the lecture.

  —Why are you complaining? Maya asked me. Look at Peter! He’s eating enough for all of us.

  Peter pretended to stop eating, returning his fork to his plate. The conversation shifted, and after the wine was gone, we said our goodbyes. I’d have spent the night in Nina’s apartment but when Maya and Peter had left I said I’d go back to my place. Nothing would shake Nina’s calm.

  —Are you sure? Please stay.

  —No, I think I should go. I’d like to read a book that’s in my room right now.

  —It’s Saturday tomorrow. We’ll wake up late and then eat the leftovers.

  —Why do you work so hard at pretending? You don’t need to like what you don’t like.

  In asking that question, was I trying to get rid of my shame? But shame at what exactly? Or did I only want to find a tear in the equability in which Nina wrapped herself at moments like this? Nina was standing at the door, smiling her smile of smiles. And then the literal translated into the metaphorical: in the expression in her eyes, I saw a door closing. When I turned to leave, I was certain she wasn’t going to tolerate any more of this unpleasantness, and as I went down the stairs of Nina’s building, the taste of food turned to ash in my mouth. I was sad, yes, but I also experienced relief. I told myself that there would be no occasion again to wonder whether Nina was being genuine. If this relationship were to be over, and it was acceptable for this frivolous quarrel to be embraced as the cause, I would now forever be free of guilt.

  In my bed, I lay with my face buried in my pillow for a long time. Ultimately, I fell asleep and when I woke up I was relieved that there was no message from Nina on the answering machine. She hadn’t called. And as the days passed, I discovered that she wasn’t going to call. No blinking light near the phone when I returned from my classes. A polite nod in the one weekly seminar, that was all. In my effort to start a new life, I went to the gym. At the university pool, I swam for a while but my thoughts returned to Nina. A young woman in a far lane with a cap on her head and goggles could have been her, I thought crazily. One night, I took out from my wardrobe the black silk dress that Nina had left there after a party. Her perfume lingered in the fabric. There is no love more real than the kind experienced after a breakup. I felt it was important to spread the black dress on my bed and then cover it with my body. When I sank my face in my pillow this time, I must have murmured Nina’s name many times.

  In the months to come, I often repeated this story to Nina, about my embrace of her dress. She listened without mocking me at first but then this story too was folded into her larger narrative about me. I was continually performing in a play in my head and she was enlisted as a player in a role that wasn’t of her own devising.

  * * *

  —

  When she returned from her visit with Jonathan’s mother, Nina said we could go on a trip together. She came to my apartment. We fucked with a mix of efficiency and impatience, we ate Chinese takeout, and then we fucked again as if we were getting rid of the memories of the past weeks. Or, that’s what I thought later as I watched Nina lather her hair with shampoo when we stood under the shower together. No one I had seen in my life, except maybe two half-naked men once beside a village road near Hajipur, bathing next to a water pump after a day’s labor in the fields, rubbed soap on their limbs more vigorously than Nina. She manufactured a skin of foam and was scarcely recognizable when she transformed herself into an unworldly creature with suds in her hair and froth covering even her face. I heard this creature asking me where I wanted to go.

  —Grand Canyon.

  In her silence I knew I had said the wrong thing.

  —No, but there’s Las Vegas close by.

  It was now my turn to remain silent.

  Florida was too close. Hawaii too far away.

  —Can you land somewhere in the middle of the country and then drive through Yellowstone?

  If we were going to drive, Nina wanted to go to California instead.

  —We will drive down Highway One with the Pacific outside the car window. You’ll love it.

  Water had washed away all the soap bubbles from her hair and face: she appeared beautiful and gleaming, scrubbed clean, with dark glittering eyes and a peachy mouth.

  I liked the idea of the drive with the ocean outside but all I had seen of this country were cities on the East and the West Coasts. What would I have known of India if I had visited only Bombay and Calcutta? I wanted to drive through parts of the United States, its vast middle, and then roam in the wilderness. I suspected we weren’t going to the Grand Canyon because of some past association.

  —We’ll land somewhere and just drive through Yellowstone, I said.

  The tickets we bought were for mid-July. When the date drew close we went to the Countee Cullen Library on 136th Street and checked out a batch of Books on Tape: Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (b
ecause it was the thickest and had the largest number of tapes in it); The Great Gatsby; a three-in-one set of Toni Morrison’s works, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved; also Alice Munro (Selected Stories, read by, yes, Susan Sarandon); a book by Elmore Leonard; and Nabokov’s Lolita. Nina didn’t think we’d have that much time but she didn’t protest. She chose a book called Middle Passage, which I’m quite sure we never listened to.

  Next step: a trip to AAA to get a TripTik made for the drive. From Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Missoula, Montana.

  —Yes, madam, thank you, the route should pass through Yellowstone, yes.

  The heavily perfumed woman, of sixty or thereabouts, held three different-colored markers between the fingers of her left hand. She would select one of them and highlight a highway so that the yellow would light up like a runway through the flat green of the paper. Our trip was going to take three or four days. Nina felt we should give ourselves a week; we were flying into Cheyenne and out of Missoula. These names, till now unfamiliar to me, came to possess a kind of magic.

  * * *

  —

  We were graduate students; we used words like research. So, on our second day in Yellowstone, we found ourselves using that word. When we discovered that even though it was still summer, there was snow in some of the park, and that we should have brought jackets and sweaters, we began to tell each other that we hadn’t done the right research. Here we were in a forest of fir, the setting sun having slipped behind the horizon of rock, and the cold hung like desolation among the lodgepole pines stripped by summer wildfires. It was evening and nearly dark, but we weren’t worried. On the contrary, all the uncertainty and the cold outside added an edge of excitement to our drive. We were going to find a motel among the three places marked as Xs on our map. It appeared that we still had anywhere between thirty and seventy or eighty miles to go. We should have bought a travel guide. Instead, we had concentrated on finding the right books. Elmore Leonard was in the cassette player just then, as we drove with our dashboard light lit up in green, white, and red as if it were Christmas. A voice said in the dark: They watched Jackie Burke come off the Bahamas shuttle in her tan Islands Air uniform, then watched her walk through Customs and Immigration without opening her bag, a brown nylon case she pulled along behind her on wheels, the kind flight attendants used.

  I leaned forward in the passenger seat and switched the voice off. The tension in the story was making me jangly. It affected my nerves and I sought release.

  —I read a story once by Milan Kundera. This woman pretends she is a hitchhiker when she gets into her boyfriend’s car. It is an erotic story but a very messed-up one…

  —Did you tell me your name, sir?

  Nina was smiling a little bit.

  It was not very dark, but there was no one else around. Nina stopped the car on the side of the road. I got out to stretch my legs. When I was back at the door Nina slid into the passenger seat and then turned back, facing the road we had driven on. She said she didn’t want her skirt on. I was eager and felt her wetness with one hand—and as I remember this, or think I remember, I cannot help asking if Nina, wherever she may be now, also remembers the same things from our relationship. (I took a picture of her in New York City under the sign of a bar named Chameleon. That’s you, I said. Such cruelty. She must remember that.) I want to believe that she remembers how the sound of our breathing filled the car. In the distance, through the rear windshield, I could see a point of light traveling high up on the mountain: the car’s light appeared and disappeared as if I were watching the flight of a firefly. When I entered her from behind, even in that cramped space, does she remember thrusting her ass back into me with tiny, ecstatic jolts? In the story that I have formed in my head, though this could be from another time, I remember that when I made a caressing gesture, gently touching Nina’s breast, she pushed my hand away and said, Fuck me.

  * * *

  An earlier journey, before I had left India. It was summer and I was taking the train back to Patna from Delhi. The other passengers in my compartment were sleeping; I was reading a novel by Lawrence Durrell, a writer who was born in Jamshedpur, only a few hours away from Patna.*11 The book had been recommended to me by a woman I’d met at college in Delhi. She was an undergraduate too, studying literature, and her parents were professors at a college nearby. I thought of her as modern—which I was not—because she had acted onstage and traveled abroad. She had a high forehead and light-colored eyes. We had drunk tea together and smoked cigarettes outside the college canteen but we weren’t lovers. We were too shy or too young to have even held hands. I had in my bag the address she had given me for her aunt’s home in Baroda, where she would be visiting that summer; she had asked me to write letters to her and I was already writing one in my head as I turned to look at the moon outside the train window. There wasn’t then, nor would there be in the future, any real intimacy between us. What did we know of love? No one in my family had married outside our caste. Love was the province ruled by kids with cars and memberships to clubs; the young men I saw around me bathed in cologne, peeling sticks of Wrigley’s chewing gum before going up to say hello to a woman. I had taken the young woman’s notes from a lecture to a student in the dorm who claimed to be an expert at handwriting analysis. I realized it was a bit like going to an astrologer. He looked at her closed letters and described her as “emotionally reserved and suspicious of others.” Looking at my notebook he traced in the air the long tails beneath my letters and said, with a hint of indecision, that those loops “represented a vivid imagination but might also mean that you are mired in sensuousness.” If there had been any romance it had been entirely in my vivid imagination! But I had acted with exorbitant passion in one respect. On the night before our exams, another student brought to me the question papers that were meant to be unsealed the next day. I didn’t ask him how he got his hands on the leaked papers; without thinking twice, I got into an auto-rickshaw and went to the woman’s house. She was surprised to see me, and to discover that I knew where she lived, and she was more surprised still to find out the reason I was standing at her door. I didn’t study that night. I was nervous and eager to know whether I had given the woman I liked so much the correct information. The test papers turned out to be authentic and she laughed when I confessed that I had performed badly. I hadn’t done the work. Our friendship didn’t grow although we exchanged a few letters in which we enclosed some wan attempts at poetry. A year before I left India, I read in the newspaper that she had been awarded a prestigious fellowship that would allow her to write about Tagore at the University College in London. Then I heard from someone that she had come out as a lesbian, and this news, which I received in New York, pleased me. Both of us had stepped out of the protective armor of our earlier weak transgressions. We had become ourselves.

  * * *

  Gallatin National Forest. Our cabin had a heater but the cold seemed to seep through invisible cracks and pool near our feet. A little before dawn, I felt Nina stirring and then saw that her eyes were open. She complained about the cold and said she wanted pancakes. Pancakes and coffee brewed over a wood fire. I huddled closer to her.

  The Gujarati man at reception said we would have to wait an hour to get breakfast, but if we drove north, we could see wolves at this time. Where would we find them? We had discovered the lodge with much difficulty. But the man was assuring.

  —Turn left when you come out of the gate. Drive north for half an hour, and you’ll see them crossing the road or in the grass leading to the river.

  —Okay, so the wolves are out at this time. What about pancakes? Isn’t there an International House of Pancakes out there somewhere?

  —You’d have to drive to Bozeman for that. They will be open when you reach them because it’ll take you two hours to get there.

  Of course, we didn’t go. We fed each other chocolate and drank bad coffee, lying in bed, listening to the dry, detached voice of Jeremy Irons reading Lolita on the tiny cassette player
that Nina used to record interviews. To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. We looked around the cold room, its pink walls and the framed picture of a young grizzly stepping into a frothy stream, and we laughed. As if by agreement, Nina hunched herself under the blanket and crawled up until she was lying on top of me. She sat up and made small, deft adjustments so that we fitted well together. Jeremy Irons was saying, I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors.

  * * *

  Six months later, I thought of Nina’s face in the motel room that morning when I heard mention of wolves on the radio. It was my father’s birthday and I was going to call him in India. But first I was waiting for Nina to call me from her conference in Boston. I didn’t want her to get a busy signal if she called. On important days, I called my parents. Half a world away, the phone rang in Patna. At that time, my parents still didn’t have a phone. Nowadays every milkman walking on the road ahead of his cows has a mobile phone in his front shirt pocket. Your Honor, I’m describing another time. Calls used to be expensive, and it could take an hour to get a connection. When I called the neighbor’s number, someone would run out to get my father. I usually hung up and then called AT&T to complain that the line had been disconnected. The operator would apologize and then call for me without charge. As far as I was concerned, immigration was the original sin. Someone owed me something. This half-expressed thought had found a home in my heart. It provided me an exaggerated sense of identity, and granted me permission to do anything I wanted. I’m not trying to justify anything; I only intend to explain.*12