“Perhaps,” said Chandra, admitting defeat. “Perhaps you’re right.”
After Jasmine returned to Boulder, he continued to call her twice a week, but she always replied in monosyllables, or sometimes no syllables at all. He tried to focus on his lecture series instead, entitled “The World Economy Today,” but found the students too brash and outspoken for his liking, which only reminded him of Radha. They seemed to come pre-offended, forsaking any analytical content in favor of emotion and outrage. At the end of April, during his final lecture on the credit crunch, a graduate student stood up and rattled on for several minutes about how outrageous everything was, before saying:
“And surely, Professor, someone should have gone to jail, shouldn’t they?”
“It’s a good question.”
It was a horrible question, one that put him in the most awkward of positions, because the truth was that by the end of 2008 the CEO of every bank, mortgage lender, and insurance company should have been in jail, along with half the faculty of Harvard Business School. But he could hardly say that in a public lecture.
“These things are complex. We could look at Goldman’s and others and say they lied about their products, but in this respect they’re no different from the car salesman who passes off a lemon as a plum, or the burger joint that gives you a cardboard pancake instead of a juicy two-incher. As for the credit raters, their response was that they gave their opinion, which turned out to be wrong, and how can we prove otherwise?”
“So they butt-fucked us, didn’t they?” shouted someone from the balcony.
Professor Chandra took off his glasses and laughed. The entire room laughed with him; if he stopped, they would be laughing at him.
“The short answer to your question,” he said, wiping his glasses and returning them to his face, “is yes.”
The room roared its approval.
“But there’s more to it than that. The crash was a systemic problem and must be treated as such. Inadequate regulation, reckless loans to subprime borrowers, greed, and—a lot of the time—simple stupidity. There were economists who shouted it from the rooftops, journalists too, even traders, and they were ignored because the system made them ignorable. We have to put a system in place with proper safeguards so this can never happen again. For obvious reasons, this is a far more urgent concern than locking bankers away.”
The applause was thinner now, the audience disgruntled. Professor Chandra blamed Radha. He blamed her for more or less everything these days, as if she were always with him, lodged inside his brain like a fragment of a bullet. Wherever he went, he could hear her taunting him, telling him he was weak, disingenuous, arrogant, ignorant, self-serving, deluded. She was with him in that voice that had shouted about being “butt-fucked,” just as she’d been there last week when a cab driver spat on the sidewalk after Chandra realized he’d forgotten his wallet, yelling, “If you can’t pay for it, don’t get in the goddamn car.”
And still, Chandra had no idea where Radha was. He doubted she was in England, but nor did America seem likely. India was always a possibility, or somewhere further afield like China or, God forbid, Russia. Presumably they would have told him if she were dead or had joined ISIS or signed up for the 2036 colony on Mars.
He had tried asking Jean, tried several times, but she always replied with, “Sorry, Charles, I gave my word,” a grandiose way of saying, “Sorry, Charles, but I enjoy torturing you.” When he left for Colorado, it occurred to him that Steve probably knew where Radha was. Maybe she was even a frequent visitor to their house.
In early May, Chandra returned to the airport to fly to Boulder for Jasmine’s graduation. On landing, he looked at Steve’s instructions, forwarded to him by Jean in an email, noting the phrase: Try to come before sunset—the ride is imperial!
Imperial! he thought. What did Americans know of imperial? And was this a sensitive thing to say to a man from a country colonized for hundreds of years by wife-stealing white men? Did the child psychiatrist even know this? But of course not. Steve was American, and in America they called all subcontinentals “Indians,” which typified their ignorance of alien lands. Oh, yes, Americans just took what they wanted without even stopping to learn who or what they were taking it from. It was their manifest destiny.
The sun was setting when he arrived. Steve and Jean lived on the ridge of a hill accessible by a dirt track. He had been there only once before not long after the divorce, to inspect where Jasmine would be living. It was a sharp-lined, modern-looking white bungalow, slightly raised on stilts, and with an open garage in which he could see a black Porsche convertible and two motorbikes. There was also a dark-skinned man dressed in dungarees staring up at him from inside the grounds, shielding his eyes against the red glare of the dipping sun. And now the man was smiling at him and opening the gates so that he could park beside the motorbikes that were polished to an alien sheen.
Chandra turned off the engine and realized his hands were shaking. He removed his tie, shoved it in the glovebox, and closed his eyes before trying to recite a mantra he had learned in childhood: “Ramaskandam Hanumantham…” Unable to remember the rest, he switched to the Leontief paradox: “A country with a higher capital per worker has a lower capital/labor ratio in exports than in imports.” A tear leaked from his eye, which he rubbed into the faux leather of the steering wheel.
The man in the dungarees stepped forward to open the car door.
“Bienvenido, sir,” said the man. “I am Rafael.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rafael,” said the Professor, wishing he had indeed learned some Spanish (it would be embarrassing if Jean were to mention it). “Call me Chandra.”
“Okay, Chandra,” said Rafael, taking his hand in both of his.
They walked around the house, passing a column of rose bushes that gave the air a venomous sweetness. At the rear was a pool filled with blue-green water that appeared to tumble over the edge of a precipice beyond which Chandra could see the nascent lights of Boulder. Vivaldi was playing from hidden speakers.
There were two gray sofas on the deck and Jean was reclining on one in a white trouser suit, sandals, and a green coral necklace. She had cut her hair and dyed it from dirty gray to blonde. There was a pair of Martini glasses on the table beside her and a full jug. Jean lifted her head and sat up, turning down the music with a remote control.
“Charles,” she said, rising. At the edge of the pool she clapped her hands, and circular floor lights illuminated the garden. The last time he had seen her was a year ago, on his usual lecture tour in the U.S. She had seemed tense around him then, but looked more relaxed now as she walked toward him and—he had to admit it—younger. He could feel the sadness in his throat, a gristled lump of poison he refused to swallow. But tonight was not the night for grief.
Jean avoided his extended hand and gave him a loose-limbed hug. He heard a cough from behind him. “It’s so good to see you again,” said Steve, who was barefoot. “You look wonderful, Chandrasekhar.”
Like Jean, Steve was dressed all in white, wearing linen trousers and a silk shirt. It felt like a uniform, a signal that they belonged here and he did not. Steve was in his sixties but had this aura of age-defiance, as if in direct competition with the younger generation. Chandra wondered if they felt sorry for him.
“You too,” said Chandra.
“No, really, you’ve lost weight.”
“Well…” said Chandra.
Steve shook his hand and pressed Chandra’s back, which was not quite a hug.
“We were sorry to hear you were unwell,” said Steve. “You had us worried for a while.”
“Oh, I’m all right now,” said Chandra, wanting to divert the conversation away from how, unlike Steve, he had neglected his body and paid the price. “Your home is looking very smart.”
“We did our best, thank you, Chandrasekhar,” said Steve. “Yo
u know, it’s odd me calling you Chandrasekhar, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” said Chandra, who hated Steve’s ability to pronounce his name which, when fully extended, was usually his most dangerous weapon.
“Well, it’s like you calling me Benowitz, isn’t it? I mean, why don’t I use your first name?”
“Technically my name is only Chandrasekhar,” said Chandra. “First and last.”
“So nobody calls you P.R.”
“Oh, no, no. Nobody has ever called me P.R.”
Steve’s hair was white, but his bristly arms indicated a no-nonsense virility. It was easy to imagine him swimming forty lengths each morning. He looked like a man who had spent much of his life on a beach.
“You know,” said Steve, “I get nervous when I meet you. I start feeling like the village idiot or something. I mean, how many future Nobel Prize winners have I met?”
“And how many psychiatrists have I met?”
“Well, I’m mostly retired these days. I just help friends out in a crisis. The last few years have all been about the business. I guess Jean told you.”
“I don’t think so,” said Chandra.
“It was a family thing. My brother died and the business was my father’s, so I thought I’d better step up. Anyway, it keeps the rain off our heads.”
Jean smiled. In the past she would always smile when she was nervous, but in a tight way. This loose smile was something new.
“And what line of business is it?” asked Chandra, though he knew the answer.
“Flowers,” said Steve. “Plain and simple. Grow them in greenhouses, sell them in shops. We deliver, too. Restaurants, funeral homes, anyone who needs them. People always need flowers. You see flowers all day long in cities. It cheers us up like nothing else, even if we don’t notice them.”
“Yes,” said Chandra. “I also like flowers.”
“But it’s serious to me. Business isn’t something you can joke about these days, not since the times darkened. Anyway, I hardly need to tell you that. You’re like a world authority.”
“Well, I suppose that’s my family business.”
“Oh, so your father was an economist?”
“No,” said Chandra, flustered. “Not exactly.”
He shot a glance at Jean who was still smiling. He wondered if she had taken a Valium, or one of the new drugs those emails in his inbox kept inviting him to try. Presumably this was a perk of living with a psychiatrist.
“Ah, but there’s Sunny,” said Steve. “I guess you could call him an economist.”
Not for the first time, Chandra was possessed by the terrible paranoiac fantasy that Sunny and Radha had both spent Christmas with his cuckolder, and that Sunny had covered his tracks by rerouting his home phone to Boulder with some new technology, a feat he was quite capable of.
“Let’s sit down, shall we?” said Jean, pointing to the sofas. “Unless you’d rather be indoors, Charles.”
“Here’s fine,” said Chandra, wondering if she could actually be enjoying this encounter, like a favored lady at a joust. “This really is a wonderful place, Steve.”
“Well, it didn’t turn out exactly as I imagined it, but nothing ever does, does it?”
“No,” said Chandra, wanting to make a joke about his marriage that would make them uncomfortable and put him at his ease, but lacking the courage.
Chandra took care not to slip on the deck; his shoes were Italian and leather, bought for the occasion. On reaching the sofas he barged in front of Jean so as not to face the cliff’s edge.
“Charles has a fear of heights,” said Jean.
“I used to have agliophobia,” said Steve. “Did I tell you? I guess not. It’s hardly something you lead with. Fear of pain. Seriously. It’s why I became a shrink. I was in therapy so long I thought, ‘Why don’t I just do this myself?’ Ninety percent of shrinks are insane when they start.”
“I was a Marxist at university,” said Chandra. “I suppose that’s comparable.”
Steve looked away in confusion. Jean did not respond. She’d had over thirty years of jokes like this.
“I was never a Marxist,” said Steve. “I mean, there’s got to be some redistribution, but all this obsession with justice…it’s not healthy. Whenever you say, ‘That isn’t right,’ or, ‘That’s not fair,’ you’re being violent. I didn’t used to get that, but then I took a course in NVC. You know NVC?”
Chandra shook his head.
“Nonviolent communication. Fella called Marshall Rosenberg who says we got to focus on feelings and needs. If I’m always saying, ‘You’re making me feel…’ or, ‘Your anger is…’ it’ll always end up in a fight; any therapist can tell you that. NVC has a better way of going about it. Gets to the heart of the problem.”
Steve reached beneath the arm of the sofa. At once Rafael’s amplified voice filled the night air.
“Si, señor.”
“Rafael, la guitarra, por favor.”
“Steve,” said Jean. “No. Just don’t.”
“Why not? Chandrasekhar wants me to, don’t you?”
Chandra nodded. “Sure. Why not?”
“He doesn’t even know what you’re going to do,” said Jean.
“I’m going to a sing a song, of course.”
“We did the course together,” said Jean. “The singing’s got nothing to do with it. Steve just likes performing.”
“Folk was my first love. Didn’t give myself a chance.”
“Steve has many talents,” said Jean, stroking Steve’s cheek which made Chandra want to lower himself into the pool until the water covered his head. “Singing isn’t one of them. Trust me.”
“Oh, no,” said Chandra. “I’m sure…”
Jean removed the plastic cover from the pitcher and filled two Martini glasses. Seconds later Rafael appeared with a tray of olives and two tiny wooden spoons.
“See,” said Jean. “Rafa ‘forgot’ the guitar.”
“Great man, Rafa,” said Steve. “Crossed the border when he was five. Illegal, no parents, not even twenty bucks in his pocket. Learned English in nine months. Nine. His English is flawless now. Reads Shakespeare, Melville, you name it. We speak in Spanish for me, not him. I’m putting his kids through school. Made a commitment to see it through all the way up to college.”
“That was very generous of you,” said Chandra.
“I didn’t mean to brag. I just love the guy. He’s like family. That’s an old chestnut, I know, but in this case it’s true. He’s a hero, all he’s been through, all he does for other people. When I help someone I let the whole world know. Not Rafa. He’ll help anyone, rich, poor, doesn’t care. Doesn’t think like that. He’ll go as out of his way for a member of my family as he will for one of his own. A true saint.”
One of the only things Chandra and Jean used to have in common was politics. Jean had always been a conservative. He watched now as she spooned olives into the Martini glasses and handed one to Chandra. Maybe Steve had brought out her inner liberal. Maybe this was behind that loose smile and the hair.
“What about you, Steve?” said Chandra. “Not drinking?”
“AA,” said Steve. “Twenty-four years.”
“Right,” said Chandra. “Well done.”
“Don’t thank me,” said Steve. “Thank my higher power.”
“Charles doesn’t believe in higher powers.”
“Then you haven’t been in California long enough,” said Steve.
“This is what Californians do,” said Jean. “They convince you to be as open as they are, and then they screw you. Crafty buggers.”
Steve puckered up his lips in Jean’s direction.
“Oh, honey, you love Californians and you know it,” said Steve. “What you described is something totally different. It’s called a Canadian.”
Jean took a slug of her drink. “Anyway,” she said, “Steve’s first love is India.”
“You’ve been to more states than I have, as I recall,” said Chandra. “You were there for years, weren’t you?”
“Two,” said Steve. “Two wonderful years.”
“With his first wife,” said Jean, poker-faced.
“I wanted to talk to you about it last time, but I didn’t want to sound like a fucking stereotype,” said Steve, giving Chandra a meaningful look. “I went there in ’68 to find myself.”
Chandra remembered seeing hippies in the sixties. His parents had told him never to go near them, that they were all drug addicts, the dregs of the West. It was only when he came to England and actually spoke with them that he overcame his fear and realized they were essentially anthropologists.
“The difference is,” said Jean, “Steve actually did find himself. He almost never came back.”
“I was mostly in Bombay, Poona, Rishikesh, and Varanasi,” said Steve. “I learned Sanskrit and Hindi, though I’ve forgotten most of it now.”
“Steve was one of the foremost Western experts on the school of Vedanta,” said Jean.
“Oh, no,” said Steve. “I was just in the inner circle of a wise man, a very wise man. And when I fell out of grace with him I drifted back here. I lived at Esalen for a time, but that’s another story.”
“Esalen?”
“Sorry,” said Steve. “I forget there are people who don’t know it.”
“Forgive my ignorance.”
“Oh, no,” said Steve. “I’ve got a very narrow group of friends. Same old fuckers from forty years ago. There’s no reason you should know Esalen. It’s a spiritual retreat center. You can go there for three days, or five days, or a week, and eat good food, relax, look at the sea, and study.”
Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss Page 5
