“It’s not that kind of date.”
Before Del left that evening, she took a note card from the cabinet and wrote APOLLO, CROTALUS ATROX in black marker before attaching it with tape to the plastic top of the terrarium. The sticky little body curled against the corner, but she was relieved to see it breathing. No matter how traumatic her day had been, it didn’t match his. You can see it in animals better than in human babies: that stunned, determined look of taking up space in the world. Apollo, she thought, tapping her nail against the glass. Welcome to the Bronx.
WHEN THE SETTING sun gutterballed between the East–West streets of downtown Manhattan, Del had to be careful about keeping her head in check. It wasn’t just the speeding front bumpers of taxis she had to watch out for while crossing the street, it was the past that could slam into her and send her spinning violently through the air. It occurred to her that only the ring on her finger separated her from a phantom version who had walked these same blocks after work every evening through Chelsea almost a year ago. As always, her eyes traveled through the windows of the brownstones between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. The flower boxed frames were surprisingly free of curtains to allow full-on flasher views of oak bookcases, crystal chandeliers, Ed Ruscha single-word paintings, and all the fine possessions that Wall Street executives made it their hobby to collect. She heard the chime of plates being dealt across tables and saw housekeepers plugging white candles into thick, silver sticks. It amazed her that these West Chelsea lives could be so clean, so secure in their own habits, that they didn’t find the constant stares from outsiders a threat. At Columbia, she had spent her sophomore year in one insanely small L-shaped dorm room, whose single window opened onto an apartment building of competing rectangles. It had taken her months to remember to keep her shades closed when she dressed. Once she saw a hirsute young man masturbating in a window across from hers, and she stood there watching him, hoping he’d see her but also fascinated by the furious arm pumping his fantasies through an afternoon rainstorm. When he did finally look over, perhaps searching for a glimpse of naked bodies compartmentalized in university housing, teenage torsos glowing in their lit windows like insects trapped in amber, she waved.
She wondered if Joseph masturbated when she wasn’t at home. If he chain-locked the front door and walked into their bedroom with his pants cuffed around his ankles. Sex with Joseph. The urgency of his pale body fumbling over her as if constantly trying to find a better position like a nervous mountain climber unsure of the distance to the summit. She had no complaints. Even if a guy was a disaster in bed, she could usually find a meeting point with him, learn to adapt to the geography of his body, discovering the softness of his chest hair or the sensitivity of his neck, because everyone took on extra dimensions when they were naked. Everyone had secret avenues and unwelcoming slums and unexpected detours of scars and muscles hidden when the clothes went on.
But to be honest, she had preferred sex with Raj.
This familiarwalk to the West Side Highway where the brownstones dissolved into car washes and art galleries reminded her of their old routine: entering his studio with the wood floors glowing purple at sunset and Raj sitting shirtless at his desk, staring at photographs with a glass loop in his hand. Del would creep over to him, prizing the silence, the slight weep of the floorboards under her shoes, the clink of her keys on the dresser, the echoing motors speeding along the Hudson River. She’d slide her fingers over his collarbone, sharp as a coat hanger and strangely hot, his skin was always so relentlessly warm, and he’d drop the loop and soon they would be naked on the floor glowing purple themselves. Raj had what she always called doomed eyes. They were delicately ice blue, encased in baggy brown lids from his father’s Indian ancestry, almost fluorescent but filled with a sadness so disarming that she often wondered, even as he worked his penis into her, if pleasure for him stemmed more from a sudden lack of pain than from the spasms firing down his back. Maybe that’s what made sex with Raj so memorable. There was a sense of temporary relief, a sense that she was helping him.
She stepped over a collection of cardboard boxes and blankets on the sidewalk, unable to determine whether someone was sleeping underneath them. She did not use the key Raj had given her when they had been a couple, although it still drifted somewhere at the bottom of her purse. Instead she rang the buzzer—a sure marker that their relationship had turned a corner in the year since their breakup.
“Hello?”
“It’s Del,” she said, and the door gave.
Raj was not shirtless. He was dressed in a yellow button-down with a coffee stain smeared on the collar and loose khaki pants worn to holes in the knees. His hair had grown long and curly, fraying over his ears like a man much younger than his age. As he leaned into her at the door, she deflected a kiss that landed on her left ear.
“Well,” he said, recovering from the rejection with a grin. He waved his arm back to welcome her in. “Late as usual. Glad to see some things don’t change. You don’t come over this way much anymore.”
“There aren’t many reasons to.”
“Has it been too long to ask how your day was?”
She considered telling him about the rattlesnake as she paused for a moment just inside the hallway. She didn’t know how to begin and felt that Raj was already studying her, probably determining how different she looked from the last time he had seen her almost a year ago. She swept her hand over her forehead, intentionally blocking a direct view of her face. But she was also looking for what had changed as she walked past him into the studio. His place had undergone a few renovations since she last visited. A black couch replaced two broken armchairs by the window. A bulbous metal light shone on a number of photographs tacked to the wall—interior shots in Raj’s style: cold uninhabited rooms of chilly modern design. A wire birdcage and two empty leather trunks were stacked in the far corner. Sentimental junk was not his aesthetic, and she wondered if someone else had been around the past few months renovating his room with her own sense of what a home should look like.
“My day?” she said to pick up a strand of conversation. “I texted with Madi.”
“Texting with my sister is wiser than talking to her on the phone,” he laughed. “She won’t shut up. Right now she’s big on trying to talk me into going with her on a business trip to India. ‘Come on, Raj,’ she whines. ‘Let’s go see our homeland. I’ll pay for you. You can take pictures.’ I keep telling her, ‘Madi, we were born in Ft. Lauderdale. If you want to see where we came from, turn on MTV Spring Break.’ Anyway, how’s work? You still unhappy?”
“Of course,” she said and instinctively reached into her purse for her rolling papers.
“Ah, the slow cancer of a nine-to-five.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the heat of his palms through her shirt. “You want a drink? I still have one of your whiskey bottles around here saved just in case.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m afraid a drink might knock me out.”
He shook his head and retreated into the kitchen to pour her a glass of water.
The studio was still organized in Raj’s maniacally clean but dusty fashion. Photographs, contact sheets, and blunt red pencils flooded his desk. A sagging pole that hung across the ceiling created a waterfall of sport coats, wrinkled shirtsleeves, and pant legs. His sunken mattress still lay without a frame on the floor.
She licked the sweat from her upper lip and stared out the window at the cars, half in headlights, rushing in both directions along the West Side Highway.
“Could it be any hotter in here?” she yelled. “No wonder you don’t get many visits.” She wanted to say why don’t you move, but this was an old complaint that she no longer had the right to make. One of the reasons she had broken it off with Raj was the agony of having to spend all of their time together in this tiny rented studio, as if stepping outside for dinner or a drink would have wrecked Raj’s delicate sense of reality. The entire duration of their relationship consisted of actions in this fiv
e-hundred-foot square—a cliche of a bachelor pad that she had endured to constitute coupledom. It was here that they slept and ate and mixed toiletries like warring chess pieces. Once, on an off chance, she had brought up finding a new place, something together, and Raj had turned and stared at her with those cold, blue eyes and said it would be difficult for him to live full-time with someone, even her, but he’d consider it. She knew he never would.
The day she broke up with him, she had picked up his camera, focused the lens, and snapped three shots of Raj rubbing his hands in one of the now absent armchairs. She thought that when he developed those pictures he might recognize them as his last moments with her, right before the inevitable, before she grabbed the bras and underwear and tampons she kept in the top drawer and blew out once and for all. She wondered now if he had ever bothered to look at those pictures of himself—a thirty-five-year-old adolescent defending his own space against any intrusions.
She pulled a rolling paper from the packet and sprinkled the tobacco grains.
“You can’t smoke in here,” he said when he returned from the kitchen, setting the glass of water on the desk.
“Since when?”
“New rule. Sorry.” He smiled.
“God, you’re just like the mayor now. Can’t smoke in bars, can’t smoke in subway stations. Can I ask, why do they even bother selling me these cigarettes if there’s no place I can smoke them?”
“It’s bad for you,” he said softly, placing his dark, calloused fingers over her own. “You should quit.”
She placed the cigarette in her mouth, squinted defiantly at him, and went for the lighter in her pocket. Before she could free her hand, Raj snatched the cigarette from her teeth and replaced it with his lips. She let his tongue move across her own. Just for a second. His fingers reached for her bra strap, and that enormous warmth he stored inside of him hit her.
“Stop.” She wrestled her hands between their bodies and shoved him back. “What was that for?”
“Did that bother you?” he said, spinning around to gather his balance before dropping onto the couch. “It hasn’t been that long, has it?”
“Yeah, it has.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still dating that actor.”
“Raj,” she said, and it took courage to complete the next sentence but there was no escaping it. If she didn’t tell him right now, she would never summon the nerve. “We got married.”
“Married.” He clenched his fingers on the armrest.
“Things change,” she said, hating the triviality of those words as soon as she heard them leave her mouth. “You and I haven’t talked for a while.”
Raj dug his tongue into his cheek and then brought his chin back up to face her.
“You did it for the green card. I get it. So you did find a way to quit your job.”
“I figured you’d hear about it sooner or later from Madi, so I thought it would be better to hear it from me.”
“God, that was fast.”
“It wasn’t only for the green card, Raj. And I didn’t pay him, if that’s your next question. You don’t have to be insulting.”
“I’m insulting?” His voice had finally caught up to his anger, but it was louder than she expected, as if in all this time alone in his studio he had forgotten the advantages of keeping his feelings close to his chest. “Is this why you came over?”
“I don’t know why I came over. You called and asked me to, so I did.” But she did know why. She had come over to do what adults can do to each other: behave like children. She wanted Raj to feel the extent to which things had changed. She wanted him to understand that people can walk out one day and be lost for good. Because relationships never end, do they? All that built-up energy has to go somewhere. But now, as her presence in his apartment felt even more intrusive, she hated herself for the weakness of wanting to tell him the news face to face.
She moved to pick up the cigarette off the floor, but it signaled a faster reaction in Raj. He lifted himself from the couch, struggling harder than a man of his age should, and stood looking at her with those two magnificent glaciers of ice on either side of his nose and his lip snarled upward. He reached his arm out and for a second she thought he might be moving to hit her. Instead he grabbed the cigarette from her mouth and snapped it in half with his thumb.
“You can’t smoke in here. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Fine,” she said in a restrained tone she hoped he would copy. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone? Is there a girl hiding in the stairwell, waiting for me to go?”
Madi had told her a few months back that Raj had gone on a few dates with an Italian translator at the U.N. with long black hair much like her own. Nothing had come of it, but Del had been touched with the thought that lovers were as compulsive as serial killers. They couldn’t help tripping over their own patterns, falling for the same type.
“Don’t ask me a question like that,” he said harshly. “We all don’t have to be happy, and I’m not going stand here trying to prove to you that I am.”
The last rays of sun were throwing him in shadow against the window, and Del resisted the urge to step closer to gauge the expression on his face.
Instead, she walked over to Raj’s mattress resting on the floor in the far corner under the canopy of his clothes. She sat on its edge with her knees bundled against her breasts. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m sorry. I had a terrible day.”
“Don’t you have a husband you should be telling this to?”
The same faded green quilt still covered the bed. It was torn so that the patches hung from their stitching like a collection of unsealed envelopes. Raj always said the quilt smelled of gasoline because his mother had sewn it while working nights at a twenty-four-hour service station outside of Miami when he was a kid. Del leaned back and pressed her face into the thin fabric. The quilt smelled of curry, not gasoline, the bed being the closest thing to a dinner table Raj owned. When they dated, he even lit candles and set silverware across it, using the wedge between the pillows as a bottle holder. They had sex on wine stains. She often stopped mid-foreplay to wipe crumbs off of her ass.
“I’m just tired,” she said.
“Didn’t anyone warn you about married life? It makes you old fast. My mom always said that. But only after the divorce.”
She stood up and reached for her purse. She waited for him to stop her from leaving, but he didn’t. He leaned against the windowsill watching her go with his arms crossed over his chest. The smell of gasoline filled her nostrils. Engines burned along the highway outside the window. She had made her peace with Dash on the night of her wedding. Now she was saying good-bye to Raj. She was extinguishing the past one ghost at a time.
CHAPTER FIVE
ONCE, RAJ TRAVELED the world. Call Vienna, he was there two days ago. Try to reach him in Berlin, he’d just left. He’d be on the stopover in Shanghai, ten hours of airport shopping and a nap in the passenger’s lounge and then a small turbojet over the Himalayas where the gas masks fell from the ceiling and every tooth filling jittered but no one panicked because they were all staring down at the face of Mt. Everest. He hit São Paolo, the Amalfi Coast, home for two days, then Dubrovnik, Bahrain, back home as a pit stop to pay the electric bill before Vancouver, on to Fairbanks, skirting over the cocaine-line Straits into Russia. Raj had become a photographer, he so often thought, from a love of stillness. Vases, trees, dust—whatever the camera caught, it held. But, in supreme artistic irony, the job of photography offered few similarities with the final product. His twenties had been spent in constant mule-backed motion—lugging his equipment all over town, wheezing up five flights of stairs for an assignment to shoot three piano progenies in a Queens living room, hanging over the ledge of a roof to snap a suicide from the vantage point where a mother of four, now splayed under a nylon tarp on Seventy-Second Street, lost her balance on purpose. Then the world came calling—bigger tragedies, better heartbreaks, prettier vie
ws. He shot for an extravagant travel magazine and a human interest periodical, carting his camera all over the globe, sweeping through exotic locales on two-day timetables, shooting, here, children holding glue bottles caked in snot, and, there, a waterfall descending into mist. Raj had devoted all of his muscles to freezing images, until his thirtieth birthday, when his muscles froze, his agent screamed, and he stopped.
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, three years before he started dating Del, he sat on his mattress with a box of granola, a pint of skim milk, and a plastic spoon. Two days later he could be found in practically the same position, the milk sour, the cereal stale, and the answering machine blinking on overdrive. He shook uncontrollably at the thought of boarding a plane. He refused to let go of the spoon in his hand. He refused to let an open window wipe the dust from the air. He sat in the frame of his bed, matted with his own green quilt. He had taken his picture, and there he hung in his apartment indefinitely.
On day two, the front door opened, and feet stomped worryingly down the hallway. He was discovered by his then twenty-six-year-old sister, who wore a red sari layered around her shoulders and white denim pants flared like yacht sails at the ankles. She walked into the studio, at first overtaken with the smell of rotting dairy, went directly to the windows where she freed the trapped air and lost a fight with the metal blinds that refused to gather, and screamed when she turned to find her older brother lying as still as death in his bed.
Madi wrestled the utensil from his grip, threw a glass of cold water on his face (she admitted later that she had always wanted to do that to someone and she couldn’t resist the opportunity), and then, with a corrective smile, wished him a belated happy birthday. She opened the greeting card envelope, still wet from her tongue, and placed the card in his hands. Then she blew up a purple balloon and tossed it wobbling into the air.
“Raj,” she sighed from the edge of his bed. “This can’t be your response to turning thirty. Tell me there’s a better reason for the crack-up. I mean, you were never really fun the last decade anyway, so this can’t be some fear about your youth slipping away.”
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