• • •
BY THE LIGHT of their bedside lamp, Rishi watched Kavya lie awake, eyes closed. She was naked still, the bedsheet gathered at her feet. He wanted to touch her, to run his finger along her borders, the patchwork of colors that comprised her—a wash of warm earth along her abdomen, her legs scaly and dry, the Aurelian valley from her breasts to her neck, the shades of her body warming and cooling, as variegated as a map of air currents. Rishi had been thinking all day of this time, when they could be together and alone with a whole night stretching before them, nakedness untrammeled. But what had happened—failure on his part, unprecedented flaccidity, like cramming a wand of string cheese into a parking meter—Rishi had no explanation for. He’d tried to forget the first half of the evening, and bring the second half, its feathery kisses, the easy reconciliation, to the end he’d been anticipating for days—for weeks, now that he stopped to count.
But it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working. He’d been charging forward for so long, gathering steam, thriving on work, that when the time came for release, his body refused. His body was home, but his mind was slung with workplace burdens. He could feel them still, his abdomen wrung tight with nervous energy that had gripped him for days, interrupted his sleep, chained him to his desk at the office, followed him home at night. Thinking about earthquakes all day hadn’t exactly eased him into weekend mode. That evening, he hadn’t been able to focus mentally on either Kavya or the very pleasant task at hand; his penis, truly an extension of his brain, proved correspondingly dissolute.
“Don’t worry about it,” Kavya said, staring at the ceiling.
“Let’s try in a few minutes.”
She sighed loudly and closed her eyes, but he could see she wouldn’t sleep. Her eyelids pulsed with tension, her shoulders ground with dissatisfaction into the mattress, her lips pursed and peeved. She whipped her head around to face him. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
It was an accusation, and Rishi recoiled. “I— Nothing happened.”
She rose to her elbows and searched his face.
“I was distracted. I’m a little overwhelmed right now.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Not with Ignacio”—though, yes, he did feel sunken by sudden parenthood—“mostly with work.”
“What’s happening at work?” She was trying to soften her voice, he could tell.
“Well.” He paused, reconsidered. She cocked her head to the side, waiting. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this, actually. I’m on this pretty interesting project now. It could be big. Vik Sen and I are heading it up.”
“Vik Sen? Since when?”
“Since a while ago now. He wants me to do this—thing. I can’t actually talk about it.”
She scoffed. “What, it’s top secret?”
“Kind of.”
“So that’s why you’re never here anymore.” She tilted her head as if considering him anew. “Is it for the government? Like a WMD thing?”
Rishi laughed. “No—it’s more a clean-air thing. That’s all I can say.”
“So why the secrecy, then?”
Good question, Rishi thought. The only apparent answer: “It’s going to make them a shitload of money.”
“Them?”
“Weebies.”
“Vikram Sen.”
“Yes. Vikram Sen.”
She crossed her arms.
“Oh, come on. Are you jealous? Yes, Vikram Sen. Yes, Preeti Patel. So if I do this for him, Weebies will be, like, even bigger than it is. And yes, Preeti Patel will have more money to play with. More money than you.”
She shrugged. “Who said anything about that? I wasn’t even thinking that.”
“Right.”
“No, really.”
“What, then?”
“I was thinking that you are like, a—a wizard of clean air—you’ve done a Ph.D. in it, and clean air is valuable. It’s important. And you know how to get it. How to keep it. Most people don’t. You have this great gift, you’ve done all this work, you have a Ph.D.! And you’re giving it away to Weebies. For what?”
Rishi shook his head, shook it so vigorously that it seemed he would shake an answer out. “It’s my work, Kavya. I work for Weebies, so they get my intellectual property. And Vik said—” He pressed his palms to his eyes, summoning the promises of big things in store, promises that felt hopelessly vague now, and tried to weave them into an answer eloquent enough to convince his wife that he wasn’t, for lack of a better term, Vik Sen’s clean-air bitch.
She placed a hand on his knee. “Hey.”
He waited.
“Listen,” she said. “If you ever want to go out on your own? Start your own business? I would totally be fine with that. You could be a consultant, you could start your own company . . .”
He brought his hands to hers. “Start-ups are a ton of work, Kavya. Like, nonstop work. It wouldn’t be a kitchen job.”
“You’re right,” she said quietly, stiffening. “It wouldn’t be a kitchen job.”
“You know what I mean. I wouldn’t be home, like ever. And with the adoption—who wants to give a kid to a family with an absent father? With no money?”
She lay back and pulled a sheet over her middle. “Maybe you’re right. I wouldn’t be able to take on an extra job, not with Ignacio.”
The question was nixed before it was truly posed. Rishi felt his head grow heavy. “Are you going to sleep naked?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Nothing.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s just— Nothing. I’m going to put something on.”
“Oh.” She smirked, tried to fold the smile away.
“What’s so funny?”
“Earthquakes, right?” She dug her knuckles into his side, laughing now. “You think I’ll run out to the street naked?” She wrapped herself in the sheet, a sculpture under protective cover, and laughed into her pillow. “If there’s a massive earthquake, my friend, we’ll have more than nudity to worry about.”
35.
The next morning, Rishi woke to Kavya, her arms splayed, her impressive wingspan covering most of the bed, still naked, blinking. “Hi,” he said, and placed a hand on her shoulder. She slipped from his touch to reach her robe on the floor.
“I hear Iggy,” she said. “You stay in bed.”
At the breakfast table, Ignacio sat in his high chair, gnawing on buttered bread. Kavya stood at the counter, gazing into her teacup, and stayed put this time when Rishi placed a hand on her back.
“Why so glum?”
She looked up. “I miss my mom.”
“Well, call her,” Rishi said. He popped bread in the toaster, watched the coils turn orange.
“I’ve been calling her. You know that.”
“Well, keep calling her. Call her three times a day if you have to. She’ll have to talk eventually.”
Kavya resented Rishi’s solutions. She didn’t want a practical solution. She wanted him to tell her that her mother was just so wrong, that Kavya had done the right thing, the best thing, that Rishi and Iggy were all Kavya needed and that they together would be the happiest of families.
Even Rishi’s parents called with advice. Rishi’s parents never called. It was one of the things Kavya loved about them—that and the fact that they’d moved back to India, had given up their wide sidewalks, their supermarkets, and their sleek black Acura to return to a bungalow with a dirt driveway. (What she did not know, and chose not to imagine, was that now they had a driver to handle their Maruti Alto, that Rishi’s mother spent her weekends at air-conditioned malls and at ladies’ luncheons that meandered into teatimes and early-evening naps, that their bungalow in Hyderabad was three times the size of her bungalow in Berkeley, and that the dirt driveway leading to it gave way to a veranda of
milk-white Kashmiri marble, swept three times daily by a bent-back servant who earned less than a Berkeley panhandler.) In any case, Rishi’s parents had called when they’d heard about Ignacio, had cooed down the phone line to him, had congratulated them and asked questions. They spoke with the carefree bubble of parents who had given up and given in, who’d released their adult children to the world and returned to a life of self-fulfillment, who’d moved back to their homeland and remembered that, in returning home, they were giving up the need to prevail, to ward off the unstoppable wave of foreign influence, to stop and breathe and look around and renounce, at last, the great American fight.
Kavya’s mother was still fighting. With Kavya, with America, and with the fact that no matter how she raged, her daughter refused to simply do as she was told. Uma Mahendra stuck to a few basic tenets. The first: Obey and be obeyed. The rule held that if one obeyed one’s parents, unquestioningly, long-sufferingly, one would be rewarded, from the onset of parenthood to death, with several decades of sovereignty over one’s own household. Her husband had conceded long ago to the rule. Kavya had not. What resulted was her mother’s sense that she’d been cheated of a birthright. Her mother had been nursing this notion since Kavya was a disobedient child, and now that she was a disobedient adult, her sense of injustice had swollen to a sore and heaving tumor, large enough to show up on her silhouette, to change the way she walked. After decades of minor infractions, Kavya had gone and done something big. She had adopted a child. Or fostered one. The semantics made no difference to Uma. What had come before—the suspect boyfriends, the tattoo, the tax hiccup, the smoking—had been misdemeanors. This, however, this taking in of a child against her mother’s wishes, was a very, very naughty thing to do. Uma would carry on in the face of her daughter’s insolence, but not with an eye roll of exasperation. Disobedience, at the best of times, was met with a shrill telephonic tirade, with claims of poor health and imminent death, woven through with the conviction that if one did not obey one’s parents, one’s parents would surely die. Disobedience, at the worst of times, was met by silence. This was the worst of times. Uma fell silent, and from ninety miles away, Kavya felt it.
When Ignacio had been in the bungalow on Vine for five weeks, Uma still hadn’t called. Kavya had called her, more times than she could count, and most often spoke to the answering machine. She spoke once or twice to her father.
“Hi, Dad.”
“And how is your foster-care child?” he asked, his voice sleepy and distant.
“He’s good. He likes his daycare.”
“Very good.” He snuffled into the phone, cleared his throat, and fell silent. Kavya’s father was deeply comfortable with prolonged silence, even on the phone. Kavya knew it could stretch for minutes.
“Is Mom home?”
“Tuesday ladies’ yoga.”
She said goodbye. Her father was less gratifying than the answering machine. And she knew Uma was there, at home, listening. She knew that her disobedience had not, in fact, killed her mother.
In her immediate world, Iggy was adjusting, and Rishi was having an affair with the top secret Weebies project. She’d fallen into a pattern of quietly resenting her husband, of feeling overburdened with work and childcare, and then for feeling the shame of this burden, of not adoring seamlessly the motherhood she’d longed for. The fact that Rishi had virtually abandoned his new son to work night and day for Preeti’s husband was an issue she’d decided to shunt to the sidelines. To take it in her hand and ponder it, to really feel every facet of that situation, was something for which she simply had no capacity. But on the surface, her daily life had fallen into a rhythm of functionality. Her pursuit of a family, which had started so simply and grown so complex, had flipped back to simplicity. Ignacio had begun stringing words together. Their days were flowing into their nights, sleep was being achieved, food was being eaten. Iggy no longer wept at the sight of the front door, no longer seemed to pine for a social worker. Now that she could relax with her son, she began to love him. She’d thought she’d loved him before, but this new sensation was something else. It was love that verged on physical desire, jagged and dense and alive inside her. If Ignacio were, one day, to go away, she doubted she’d survive.
It didn’t worry Kavya, the boundless commitment of her soul. How else should she feel, after all? How else could one mother?
Iggy had been coughing since he’d arrived at the bungalow, a lingering remnant of some past bug. Every night, he’d finish his coughing and fall asleep, only to wake them in the morning with a full-throated “HEY!” And their house seemed to expand to fit this new life. But over the smooth mechanics of their days, Uma’s silence hung heavy. The high whine of it kept her awake most nights, until pure exhaustion pushed her into sleep.
Later that week, Kavya left work early with a fever. In the heat and bustle of the sorority kitchen, she’d thought she was simply hot and tired. But as she creamed eggs and sugar in the mixer, watching the mechanical whisk dance loops around the twenty-cup mixing bowl, her vision began to swim. Her eyes seemed to cross. She blinked. Her vision crossed again, then swam. The room creaked and shifted like a cargo ship, and she found herself reaching for the countertop, gripping it with her fingers, losing her hold, and falling.
She landed hard on her elbow on the kitchen floor, and the room went dark and blotchy. A heavy shuffle, and Miguel was at her side.
“Hey, there,” he called. He placed a hand on her cheek. “You with us? You alive?”
He came into focus. “Of course I’m alive.” The room swarmed with stars.
“Who’s the president?”
“Help me up.”
He propped her up to sit.
“I’m all right,” she said, and tried to stand. Halfway up, her head spun again. “Oh,” she said. “No, no.” And Miguel lowered her to the floor. Her chest was leaden, breathing painful. She closed her eyes and saw stars again, dozens of them, a meteor shower.
The next thing she knew, she’d risen from the floor in the sturdy harness of Miguel’s arms. He was carrying her out of the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she muttered.
“Don’t worry, I won’t drop you.” They trundled clumsily, and she believed very strongly that he would drop her, but she couldn’t protest. To keep off the nausea, she closed her eyes.
Growing closer was Martina McAfee’s reedy trill. “Excuse me! Excuse me! What’s going on?”
She stood at the kitchen entrance and Miguel pushed past her. She might have blacked out for a minute. When she came to, Miguel was opening the door of a car.
“What is this car?”
“It’s my car,” Miguel said. “It’s my pretty little Pontiac.”
The pretty little Pontiac was taxicab yellow, its hood streaked with black racing stripes. He buckled her in. “Let’s get you home, Princessa. Where do you live?”
At home, Miguel deposited Kavya on her sofa, then sat beside her and placed the back of his hand on her forehead, on the side of her neck. “Your skin’s hot,” he said. “You want to call your man?”
“Rishi?” She considered it. Rishi would be at work. He would hem and haw about leaving. “No, thanks,” she answered. Miguel got up and opened the fridge, guessed the right cupboard, and poured her a glass of juice. He found a box of Girl Scout Cookies and sat down beside her. He waited for her to take her first bite of a Samoa before he stood up.
“Okay,” he said, and teetered in place, suddenly uncertain.
She looked up at him, chewed, said nothing. His passata-stained kitchen pants seemed not to belong in her Craftsman living room.
“I should get back, I guess. Back to the wrath of McAfee.” He made a monster face, arched his fingers into claws. “You got things taken care of here, right?” She nodded.
He stepped back, picked his keys up off the table, opened the door, and left.
“T
hank you!” she called, but the door had already shut.
• • •
KAVYA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP, the last of a Samoa dissolving between her teeth, when the phone rang. Rishi: “Are you all right? Your work called. What happened?”
After a foggy debriefing, she was off the phone and asleep again. She listed in and out of dreams, half aware that she was sleeping, urging herself to wake, waking up in a dream state, moving about her day, only to realize that she hadn’t yet woken. She found herself, in this dream, standing at the kitchen sink. She picked up a dream plate, crusted with egg yolk. And as she started to scrub it, it broke apart in her hands. She picked up a large shard of it, and this crumbled in her fingers, too. She picked up another plate, and it broke, and another, broken again.
The doorbell rang. Kavya sprang awake. Someone was banging. The phone was ringing.
She ignored it and lumbered to her feet. She opened the door to Uma, holding a cell phone at arm’s length. She pressed a button and the house phone stopped ringing. Uma looked up, stricken. “What happened to you?”
“What?”
“Rishi called me! What happened? What happened to you?”
Kavya blinked at her mother. “It’s just a virus or something,” she said. The fact that they hadn’t spoken in six weeks seemed not to matter now.
She pushed past Kavya and into the house, carrying a bag made of blue and white woven plastic, the same bag she’d toted around since Kavya was a child. She heaved it onto the counter and pulled out a stainless-steel tiffin carrier, Tupperware, her own serving spoons.
“I’ve brought you rasam,” she said, watching Kavya from the corner of her eye. “And cabbage khichdi, and I made some rice, but I made it yesterday so maybe you want fresh rice, no? And some idli and some carrot halwa from temple, and some pickles, but I know you have pickles, and I know you have papadums, because last time I gave them. We can put them in the microwave, no need to fry. And I wanted to make you vada, but I thought I had no time—”
“Mom.”
Uma began shoving dishes into the fridge, muttering about the shelf space and the mess. “You need to clean out some Tupperwares, Kavya. Too much mess means you can’t even think. Every day I wipe the shelves, okay? Every day. I can’t even think when I look in this fridge! It’s making me crazy, Kavya.”
Lucky Boy Page 28
