I had never spoken to my family about Nina. My father’s questions when I was on a visit to India were like the following: Can you tell me why Americans are more punctual as a people? Or, Is there any way of explaining why Indians spit so much? For her part, Nina had never asked me much about my parents. This surprised me a bit. Not just my parents, I don’t think even India interested her. I remember her saying once that if she ever visited India, she would be sure to skip the Taj Mahal. In Grand Central, we had seen an ad for travel to India: in the sky above the marble dome of the Taj, a monument to Shah Jahan’s love for Mumtaz Mahal, were the words And to think these days men get away with flowers and chocolates. Nina wasn’t very impressed.
—Don’t you think it’s somewhat perverse—beautiful monuments built for women when they are completely dead?
She chuckled when she said that. To show that she meant well, she kissed me on the ear.
A few months after we had been together, I decided to introduce India to her by showing her one or two films by Satyajit Ray, starting with Pather Panchali; but then I grew nervous, fearing that she would get bored. Another evening we went to Blockbuster to find a video. Nina was standing behind me in the store, her breast pressed against my back. I told her I wanted to watch a movie neither of us had seen before. I picked The Silence of the Lambs. She said that she had always wanted to see that movie. I liked it from the very first scene. After a while, I put the new VCR on pause to reach across and kiss Nina because, unlike Jodie Foster, she had a full, insolent mouth. Later, while we were still watching the movie, she made a comment that told me right away that she had seen it before. I didn’t ask her about it. I had stopped doing that now, but I kept a private count of the times she lied to me. Insidious intent on my part, yes, Your Honor. This was a small obsession. The way in which a country will stamp your passport every time you enter and leave. An exercise in record keeping. I was in love with Nina and afterward, when the film was over, I said to her, in my best Anthony Hopkins impersonation, I’ll have you with a little Chianti and some fava beans. Her dark eyes brightened and she made an eager swallowing sound with her tongue.
A week later, I woke up in the middle of the night and grew conscious of a memory that I had forgotten. I recalled Nina telling me once while we were out on a walk that she had a history professor as an undergrad whom she now called Hannibal Lecter. After she had graduated, she had gone to thank the man in his office. And the professor, reserved and more than twenty years her senior, had left his chair and come to her. He had stuck his tongue into her mouth and sucked hard for a moment and then as abruptly withdrawn and sunk back sheepishly into his chair.
I was now sitting waiting for Nina’s call from Boston and the story crossed my mind—a thin cloud moving across the face of the sun—about that night we had together watched The Silence of the Lambs. In a self-pitying way I told myself that I had come so far from my roots: there was nothing of my day-to-day affairs that I could share with my parents. I wondered what I would say to my father on his birthday when he came to the phone in Patna. I was sitting close to the phone. Nina hadn’t called even though she had said she would. The conference in Boston was titled Moving Image. The coffee I was drinking was a Sumatran variety called Mandheling that she liked. We had bought it together, not that it really mattered. I didn’t even like drinking coffee, but there I was, with a cup in front of me, waiting, pretending to listen to the radio. That is what mattered, that I drank coffee now. I also let people smoke in my car because then Nina’s doing the same wouldn’t bother me as much. I switched on National Public Radio most mornings because she liked to wake up to it and I told myself that this way we’d have more things to say to each other.
Immigrant, Montana. Those were the words I suddenly heard on the radio. The name of a place. NPR’s Liane Hansen said that federal officers had killed a wolf at a ranch near Immigrant, Montana. I was instantly back in Yellowstone with Nina, listening to tapes as we drove through the forest. Her mock fear of bears when she took off her clothes. And the wolves. That morning in the motel, they were only half an hour north of us!
—Wolf Number Three, Hansen said with a slight smack of her lips, had developed a taste for sheep.
A man from the National Park Service said that Number Three had killed at least one sheep, maybe three, and then he was moved sixty air miles away, but he came back and another sheep was attacked.
—Three made a mistake, we gave him a second chance, he made a second mistake; we removed him from the population.
I felt like laughing. In the quietness of my apartment, I heard this man trying to sound like Harvey Keitel. I realized I was doing what Nina always did—talking back to the radio.
—This is NPR! When did you hire Quentin Tarantino?
I yearned for Nina. Now I felt I understood why she listened to the radio: it was as if she was walking alone down a crowded street and the world reached her in the form of scraps of overheard conversation and shouts. I wanted my voice in her ear. It was my father’s birthday, he was now sixty-five, and his weak heart was killing him. He would not live long. So I told myself that on this special day the least I could do was love my girlfriend. If Nina were around—or even if she would simply call me that day—I’d say to her, I love you. I wanted to see her laughing when she heard me say that I liked Wolf Number Three and his preference for unbrainy sheep over vixen. I had this image of the wolf running through sixty miles of undergrowth, across frozen lakes he had never seen before, never pausing because his eyes were hungry for home, for the sight of the familiar fence and the sheep ranged inside.
—Honey, I hope he got to pull one down by the throat, the sheep’s head thrown back and the blood warm near his mouth, before some stupid, solemn jerk with a hard-on nailed him with a three-thousand-dollar rifle.
*1 I have in my notebook this advice on writing about place, advice presented in the black-and-white shades of noir lighting, apparently for men only—although Cai, as a woman, called into question the fungibility of all these categories:
*2 Alice reminded me of Jennifer and no one else. That memory, and the accompanying feeling, was special to her. I read somewhere that Bobby Fischer could run into someone and say, about a game they had played fifteen years earlier, You should have moved your bishop to e7. I’m very bad at chess but the remark spoke to me because I’m aware I sit outside a cave with a hoard of precise memories. Each half-eaten meal, filet mignon abandoned on the table in a Spanish restaurant, each darkened window and accompanying hangover, each sunrise, each sunset, Patsy Cline on a jukebox in a grimy rural bar in Montana, each touch, its temperature, each empty bottle of wine thrown in the trash but now locked in that cave behind me, belongs to a particular moment and a particular woman I’m in love with at that moment in the past.
*3 Where could Maya have found help or taken her complaint? Here is another newspaper clipping pasted in my notebook:
*4 Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 328.
*5 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, eds. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith; trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), see p. 147.
*6 This immense solitude in the middle of the city. I’m reminded now of another clipping in my notebook. A flourishing slum is written on the top and the following section pasted below: Parapa then fixed a man-sized plank to the hutment wall, so that while his father and brother made love to their wives below, he could stay chastely on the shelf. Still, he sometimes sleeps outside, beside an open sewer, in the blissful quietude of the street. (A Google search reveals that this clipping is from The Economist, December 19, 2007. I conducted this search because I wanted to find out why I had written A flourishing slum on the top of the page. It is the title that was used in the magazine.)
*7 The affectations of graduate student life: love expressed in the idiom of required reading in the doctoral seminars. A reader of The Village Voice on Valentine’s Day that year (
1991) would have encountered in the personals, in the section captioned “Public Display of Affection,” the following message for Nina, which had cost me thirty dollars: Hey babe: Let’s snuggle in bed and read the poetry of the future or even the missionary-position Marxist writing you so greatly admire. XOXO.
*8 After Katherine Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary on January 28, 1923: Our friendship had so much that was writing in it.
*9 I told Nina that last Christmas, I was thinking of her while sitting alone in the dark at a movie theater watching Pretty Woman. I was weighed down by self-pity. But Nina wasn’t much concerned. She said, Ugh…Couldn’t you have found another movie? That film represented the dream of Reaganomics: that the recession could be brought to an end by giving a blow job.
How could I not love her! She gave me a map of the world in which we lived!
*10 I have now looked in all the four notebooks I have from that period but I can’t find a sheet I had torn from a magazine: it was a “found text” that a man had left behind in his airplane seat, with the names of two women on top of the page and the attributes, both positive and negative, listed under each name. “Great cook,” “honest,” “good in bed,” “bad breath,” “kind to my parents,” and the like. How many times I had drawn lists about Nina! And sometimes matched them with another name next to hers! “Gracious,” “sexy,” “smells nice,” “little lies,” “careless,” “forgets to mail letters,” “good scotch,” “doesn’t cook,” “smokes too much,” “distant,” “beautiful laugh,” et cetera. No mention of “love.”
*11 Durrell’s novel has an enigmatic epigraph from one of Sigmund Freud’s letters: I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that.
*12 I have the following quote in my notebook: I carry a brick on my shoulder, in order that the world may know what my house was like.—Bertolt Brecht
Part V
Agnes Smedley
In a magazine, the list of 237 reasons people have sex, from a poll conducted by University of Texas psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss. The list started with “I was bored” and ended with “I wanted to change the topic of conversation.” In between were others like “I was feeling lonely” and “I wanted the person to love me.” And “I wanted to burn calories.”
Nina didn’t forget the wolves.
Months after we had broken up I looked inside my mailbox and found a postcard showing Old Faithful with a small news clipping stuck on it. Nina’s handwriting was recognizable in the address she had written, but she had written nothing else.
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park has failed to stop elk from eating quaking aspens, disappointing scientists who had hoped that the wolves would do so by creating a “landscape of fear.”
That was the last note I received from Nina after she told me that she no longer had the stomach for any more fights. When she said she was going to just walk away, I began to apologize. We were outside my apartment on Morningside Drive, standing on the broad sidewalk. The day was cool, the locust tree had put out white flowers, and fresh leaves covered its branches. A garbage truck was idling on the corner. The breeze carried a faint stench, I remember this clearly. A graduate student in art history, who had had beers with me, saw our serious faces and kept walking. Nina looked sad but she had made up her mind. She left me admiring the strength of her decision. I had nothing to support my despair. So many times I had complained to Nina about our relationship, and not once had she been the one to say it was over; now it was she who was walking away and it was clear that nothing I said would make a difference.
—I love you. You know I love you.
—Try to find someone who loves you, and love her back.
She was right about that, but she was wrong about the wolves. Just the other day I watched a video called How Wolves Change Rivers. The introduction of wolves in Yellowstone changed the ecology in unexpected ways. The wolves didn’t just kill the deer. Their presence meant that deer and elk avoided certain areas like valleys and gorges. Vegetation returned to these parts and so too did other forms of life like birds and beavers. Grass grew on the banks. The new grass held the soil together, reducing erosion, and the rivers stopped changing course. On the brief video, the presenter, George Monbiot, spoke about this as a miracle. He spoke in a voice that was gushing, often breathless, wholeheartedly enthusiastic, even optimistic.
I wonder whether Nina has watched the video. Because of the lies. I don’t mean Monbiot, with his fast-flowing words. Instead, I’m talking about my lies. Once, after we had been arguing for an hour, Nina had said she had read my journal. My anger vanished, replaced by panic.
—Kailash, she said, I found it depressing to just read those pages. How do you even manage to live the life they describe?
She usually called me AK but used my formal name when she was upset. Which pages had she read? I kept quiet.
—I always knew about the girl from the coffee place.
When we had been fighting, fighting and then making up the same day or three days later, then, in between those days, or maybe after dinner, or in the morning, I would try to wrangle a bit of intimacy with someone else. There was Amy from the organic coffee place down the block from the university; after a fight with Nina, I had gone to watch Cape Fear with Amy. For much of the movie, I had my hand between Amy’s thighs. I’m sure I put this detail down in my journal. (I had probably also noted what Amy had said to me after we first slept together. She said that a friend of hers had acted in a porn film in which she had given a blow job to a dog. A German shepherd. I put this in a poem. Peter used to go to the café where Amy worked. He heard me read the poem and his only comment was that Amy was describing not her friend’s experience but her own.) There was a second Amy too, a photographer at the student newspaper, who was going through a breakup. I had kissed her in the darkroom while working on my own prints. It didn’t matter who you fucked in the dark. One face became transposed on another; anyone’s body could be Nina’s. Had Nina read about her too? I had written about the night I spent with Trish from Comp Lit. She rode a motorcycle; Trish was the only grad student in our cohort who had slept with a professor, a man who taught Lacan. Trish had delivered a conference paper about phone sex. She wore tiny black skirts and I had admired her in the couple of classes we had taken together because she appeared fearless. There was very little emotion in Trish’s brief encounter with me, however, and she had barely concealed her boredom, even her contempt, when I started talking about Nina in bed. If she had read my terse but accurate description, Nina didn’t say anything. It was clearly too depressing to even talk about it.
When we broke up, I made an entry in the journal about a young visiting assistant professor who had been hired to teach screenwriting for that semester. She was French-Algerian and had a boyfriend back in Lyon who was away teaching in Dubai for a year. My journal records that I told Fadela about Nina, and she was frank about her boyfriend. When we went to Kinko’s to make a photocopy of her manuscript we kissed in the store for twenty minutes.
* * *
More than two decades have passed since that last morning on Morningside Drive. Not even work has brought us together again, although at airports, for some reason, I look around to see if Nina is there. Airports, Your Honor, are the places where immigrants feel most at home. And also most uneasy. The closest I came to a sense of her, except for the sudden dreams that appear in my sleep and catch me unawares, her lips on mine, her hot tears on my shoulder, was when I rented a car in Denver and drove through the day to Yellowstone Park. I had gone to Denver on behalf of an Indian newspaper to report on the Democratic National Convention when Barack Obama accepted his party’s nomination. Hope was in the air. But even the expression of hope can very quickly appear routine, as in the ritual of the roll call, when the different states offered their electoral votes to each nominee.
“Madam Secretary, Maine, the sun comes out in Maine the first in the nation…” “Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln.” “Mississippi, home of the blues.” “Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Democrats and friends, we bring you greetings from the great state of Georgia, the thirteenth state in our union, birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr….where we look to the future with an optimistic gaze…we, the empire state of the South, the jewel of the South, the great state of Georgia…” No, Your Honor, I mean no disrespect. I only mention this to communicate my interest in the democratic process and in the sweet, folksy music of American speech. And I wouldn’t put too fine a point on the manner in which, even in that moment, when the votes were announced, the bland and cheerful tribute to homeliness barely hid the preceding battles over political real estate. But that was in Denver. After a day and half on the road, in the tiny pale green Mazda, I was at the mouth of Yellowstone National Park.
It was three o’clock in the morning and I drove past the unmanned ticket booth. The car’s lights grazed bushes of sedge and boulders beside which grew small yellow flowers. Near a turn, three elk appeared right in front of me, as if they had conjured themselves out of the darkness. Like ladies of the night, stepping on high heels, the animals gingerly crossed the asphalt and disappeared into the pines on the other side. I rolled down the window. The air was cool and I saw above the dark outline of the hill to the right a small moon. Over the sound of the car, I heard the nearby howling of the wolves. In another half an hour, when the first tattered signs of day appeared in the east, I could see that the dark shapes that looked like boulders in the field were bison. And when it became lighter, closer to the river, were visible the gray wolves trotting amidst the solitary pine and the rows of cactus. Number Three, where have you gone!
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