Margot catches the waitress’s eye and scribbles on the air. Mario staves off panic. It would scare her to learn that her “fan” had eaten dinner and watched her and only spoken to her as she was leaving. She passes so close that he could touch her. Mario wants to cry out, Look at me!
And then she is gone. Nothing worse has ever happened. Maybe something will still work out. He could send her a letter in care of the theater. He could see the play again next weekend, and this time . . . What was it that the priest said? There is infinite hope.
He will leave her a note. He will choose his words carefully. Something that will flatter her and touch her heart. It calms him to imagine this. He only has to cross the desert between now and when he sees her again. It helps that he has things to do. He has to pay for his meal. He has to leave a large collegial tip and thank the waitress. He has to walk a couple of blocks until he’s breathing normally. He has to go home and go to sleep and go to work tomorrow.
He isn’t ready to go home. He concentrates on walking, on not bumping into anyone and not getting run over. After a while he’s surprised to find himself in the subway station.
Mario’s waiting for the train to Queens when he looks down the platform and sees the young woman who gave out the programs and played a cop in Mister Monkey. She’s still wearing her costume with the big yellow shoes, but minus the red clown nose.
Maybe God is rewarding Mario for going to confession. Giving him a second chance—to do what? To make contact with Margot through this woman. Her friend.
Mario moves down the platform so he’s not crowding the police girl, but close enough so they could get on the same car, which she might even appreciate if she goes far enough into Queens so the train empties out. Mario looks safe. Reassuring, he hopes.
When the train arrives the young woman enters and sits near the door. Mario heads to the opposite side, from where he can watch her without being too close. Perhaps he will move nearer and find some way to start a conversation. It would be easier than talking to Margot: less fraught. From halfway down the car, he could call out, very genially, Didn’t I just see you in that terrific production of Mister Monkey? What a coincidence! They could begin with a casual chat. A friend gave him tickets. Well, a little more than a friend. The author of Mister Monkey.
That actress who played Portia was great. Truly brilliant. Doesn’t Police Girl agree?
The train heads into the tunnel. Mario stares into the blackness beyond the glass. He will wait a few moments more. Then he’ll get up and walk down the car.
[ CHAPTER 8 ]
LAKSHMI
LAKSHMI PLANS TO write a one-act drama about a talented, compassionate, hardworking, underappreciated costume designer who gets a walk-on part as a cop in a sweet but basically retarded musical for children. Her play will begin at the theater, with the young woman straightening up the costume racks and saying good-bye to the cast members whose (recorded) voices can be heard from offstage.
No need to hire extra actors, or to slow the opening by including her conversations with the depressed deranged stage mom and her son, the deranged depressed boy-actor whose hormones have turned him into a psycho who deserves a tragedy of his own that Lakshmi’s not going to write. No need to dramatize how the boy monkey is bullying certain members of the cast, a potentially explosive situation, which the director has decided to ignore. Everyone knows about it, but no one has the time or money or energy—or the courage—to hire a lawyer to lodge a complaint against Adam or the theater, which would be expensive and could ruin their careers. The run has two weeks left. It’s better for everyone if they finish out their contract.
Our heroine (Lakshmi will call her Devi) stays behind to neaten the costumes, not only because she is the wardrobe department, but also because with everyone gone she can leave without having to explain why she’s wearing her stage outfit home. Only Roger the director (no need to change names and identifying details until her play is produced, and for now using real names makes it easier to visualize her characters) has caught her leaving the theater in costume. Lakshmi explained that dressing as a cop makes her feel safer on the subway and on the streets of her Queens neighborhood, which still has some rough edges. Roger has probably never been to Queens, so Lakshmi can make it sound like whatever Roger fears most.
Unlike Roger, Lakshmi’s audience will know that no one in their right minds could believe that a woman would feel more secure in a jokey imitation (nightstick! handcuffs! floppy ears! outsize yellow shoes!) police uniform you can buy in a Halloween shop, or online, which is where Lakshmi got it. It’s a fashion choice that signals: this woman is drunk or insane, or an old-school club kid zombie back from hell, or a discount hooker catering to special tastes. So why is Devi dressed that way? That is one question that will run throughout the play and which will, Lakshmi hopes, keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
In the play (as in life) Devi’s outfit will combine a police uniform and a clown suit, more creative and liberating in terms of what she can do onstage and say in her work. In the play (unlike life) she will wear her red nose and floppy ears, even on the subway.
Most (or maybe all?) of the play will be set on the train. The various ways in which strangers react to Devi—looking, not looking, staring, moving closer or farther away—will generate physical comedy as passengers notice that they are sitting across the aisle from a policewoman in a costume more appropriate for a Disney World employee than for one of New York’s finest. The clown who blows a whistle and arrests the clowns in the clown car. The humor will disarm the audience and make them more vulnerable and open to the personal revelations that Lakshmi is saving for later.
The clown idea came from the outfit that Roger is making Margot wear in Mister Monkey. It’s humiliating for Margot, but, to be honest, Lakshmi finds it useful for dramatic inspiration. She’d supported Margot when Margot volunteered a vintage Armani suit that would have been fun to work with and way more in character for Portia. After all the commotion and tears, Lakshmi had to agree with Margot: Roger is punishing her for being a middle-aged woman.
Lakshmi is fond of Margot. Sometimes she wants to put her arms around her and hold her until Margot’s brain and heart stop batting around like crazed birds trapped in Margot’s fragile house of a body. At first she’d liked hearing Margot’s stories about being the star of her class at Yale and touring in the road company of Wicked and about all her insanely bad romantic choices and marriages to gay or otherwise unsuitable husbands. Margot can be funny when she’s trashing Roger and the cast and the collective nightmare of Mister Monkey.
But Margot’s bad-husband stories and the pain she’s suffering because she isn’t famous began to make Lakshmi feel gloomy. Lakshmi believes that it’s better to respect your coworkers than to pity them, and Margot (along with most of the cast and crew) have made this guiding life principle a bit of a challenge to follow. If Lakshmi makes money on her play—or, as is statistically more likely, on her second play—she plans to find some secret, pride-preserving way to channel part of her new fortunes into Margot’s bank account, if she has one.
Lately Margot’s been telling Lakshmi that Adam’s a little perv, that he sexually aggresses her and rubs his penis against her. Margot has tattled on Adam to Roger, who won’t fire Adam with such a short time left in the run and risk destroying the remains of his own future as a director. Lakshmi believes Margot. Something’s wrong with Adam. He’s started playing Mister Monkey like some coked-up gangsta rapper. Young as she is, Lakshmi has already learned from experience (specifically, her experience with her boyfriend Mal) that unruly sexual feelings and thwarted love can make people do things that no one who knew you could ever imagine you doing. In Lakshmi’s opinion, Adam has a crush on Margot, and that’s how this whole mess started. When Lakshmi wants to feel sympathy for Adam (which she does sometimes, though not often) she tries to imagine Mal when he was Adam’s age, and her heart hurts for them both.
Is it morally sketchy for an artist to use the
sufferings of real people as a source for her art? On the scale of suffering, an unflattering wig and an ugly purple suit are nothing compared to what people endure every day in Syria and Gaza, or to the horrors her fathers witnessed before they left India, which they have told Lakshmi about so many times and in such detail that she feels she’s seen them herself. Which she did, though she was a baby, too young to remember.
Sometimes, at gloomy moments, Lakshmi considers finding a hypnotist to take her back to the Hindu-Muslim riots in which her parents were killed and from which she was rescued by a cousin, a distant relative of her Hindu dad’s, who adopted her and brought her to this country. Thank God Roger doesn’t know about that, or he would have used it to try and make the cast feel sorry for real-life orphan Lakshmi, and he would have exhorted them to let their sympathy spill over onto Mister Monkey.
Lakshmi doesn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her. So she hasn’t told that part of her story to anyone except Mal. How free—how almost weightless—she felt when Mal made it clear that he wasn’t impressed. His dad died in a drunken car wreck.
When she was younger, her fathers’ stories made her cry. She knows that her dads have asked each other, Please don’t tell those stories to Lakshmi! A few times she heard them argue about it. But early on she understood they had to tell them over and over, even to a little girl. That was the only way in which her dads were less than terrific parents, but on the scale of the fucked-up things parents do, telling your adopted daughter about what you survived—two men, one Muslim, one Hindu, both in medical school during the communal riots—hardly counts as child abuse.
In the play, the experience of riding the subway with Devi will inspire her fellow passengers to volunteer impassioned confessional monologues. Lakshmi has yet to figure out why this would be. For now she hopes that the audience will get so involved in the passengers’ stories that they forget to wonder why they are telling them to Devi. Lakshmi will use the language of the play, metaphors or whatever, to convey the idea that, for a wide range of New York subway riders, a lady clown cop can function like a priest in a confessional. You don’t even have to be Catholic!
After each speech, the actor/passenger will exit the stage/train, and another actor will enter/get on. And he or she will tell another story—and so on. Lakshmi hasn’t decided how many stories she will include, and now each time she rides the train she looks for a passenger whose narrative she can turn into the missing piece of the patchwork she will craft into her play. Set entirely on one car of the train, and with a minimal cast, all wearing their own clothes, the play will be cheap to produce: a fraction of the Scrooge-like budget for Mister Monkey.
It would be impossible to set a play on the 7 train and not deal with the immigrant experience. So the first passenger who sits across from Devi and stares with frank curiosity at the Indian clown cop is himself Indian: a sparrow-like elderly gentleman whose thin arms stick out of the short sleeves of his white business shirt. He looks at Devi as if he is trying to calculate her family’s origins and caste, but all those surface indicators have been erased by Devi’s life in Queens and in the theater. None of the signs are legible in her round face, her clown nose, and the black braid beneath the police hat. So he asks, in English, where she is from.
“Queens,” says Devi. “And you?”
“Bombay,” says the old man. “Mumbai.”
The spotlight finds him and he turns, so that he is in theory facing Devi but is in fact facing the audience. Slowly and in a sorrowful tone he begins to tell his story about having been a paanwallah, custom-making betel-leaf chews for his customers near the Strand Cinema, in Colaba, and how he saved every penny and bought a sweet shop and then a café and saved and scrimped to send his son to college and then medical school. The son went to America and married for love (an Indian lady obstetrician, at least) and had two daughters and brought the old man to the United States and bought him a small co-op apartment in Queens, where the old man started over and built up a business, importing Indian toothpaste and a special holiday kind of sweet dried saffron noodle.
By now the old man’s wife has passed, and he is a widower preparing to enter the final stage, which in India might have meant leaving home and taking up begging or doing charitable work, but which here means assisted living and babysitting the grandkids. His son and daughter-in-law are in Delaware and have never once suggested that he join them. After selling the importing business, he was at a loss until an old friend from Bombay got in touch to say that he was starting a sort of theme-park Indian market, like Eataly, only South Asian, in Queens. Would he like to design and run a paan stall: a trendier, more sanitary version of his shop in Bombay? More sanitary! He’d resented that, but he’d wanted to try something new. He imported Indian goods based on how elaborate and exotic the packaging was. He’d created a kind of art-piece retail shop with the premium ingredients for paan.
He had plenty of customers, nostalgic grandpas, the fathers of doctors and lawyers, young Indian-identity types, South Asian lesbians, and Brooklyn hipsters who enjoy chewing through bursts of sweet and salty and sour and then spitting a red spume that looks like blood. He hired two pharmacology graduates to work extended hours. He trained them to combine the betel and areca with coconut, herbs, and various pastes based on signs they read in a customer’s skin tone, face, and eyes—and on something less tangible. There were write-ups in health magazines and online naturopathic forums about the digestive and psychoactive benefits of betel, and about paan’s efficacy against psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Then, just when business was booming, his doctor son called to say that he’d read in a scientific journal that, after decades of speculation and anecdotal evidence, it had been conclusively proven that paan increases the risk of oral cancer by more than 30 percent. Not only oral but also cancers of the esophagus, lungs, stomach, and even the brain.
The old man was too shocked to answer, too amazed to learn that he had spent his life depriving himself and his wife to raise a viper who would grow up to call him a poisoner and a killer. Anyway, he doesn’t believe it. Who cares what the doctors say? He has had customers who have lost all their teeth to paan (he admits its unhealthful dental effects, but modern dentistry can fix that) and lived to 120.
So he would like the clown cop to tell him: What should he do now? Sell his business and give away everything and put on a mendicant’s robes and go from door to door, begging for stale hot dog rolls and forgiveness?
Devi says nothing. The spotlight finds her sitting motionless, her palms upturned in her lap, like some stern Hindu clown goddess. The light rises over her head and projects a bright circle on the black sky/backdrop above the stage set/subway car.
The old man asks her, though really he is asking the audience, if she wants to know a secret. He tells her that whenever there is a full moon, he goes up to the roof of his house in Queens and pretends that the moon is the same moon (as indeed it is) that he used to see from the roof of his house when he was a small boy living in India with his parents. He looks at the moon and asks his parents where they have gone, and if, wherever they are, they can hear him. Lakshmi is reasonably certain that by changing some key details—Africa to India, monkey to human—she will prevent anyone from realizing she’s borrowed a few tiny touches from the deservedly obscure children’s musical Mister Monkey.
Devi says, “We are also an immigrant family, and my father is a doctor.” She will save the information that both her fathers are doctors till later in the play. Besides, telling this old man that she has two dads will make him doubt that she is anything like him, that she can understand him and feel his pain.
Devi looks down at her outfit. “Costume party,” she says. For now it’s easier than telling the truth, which she’ll also save for later in the play.
The old man is disappointed by Devi’s failure to give him comfort or helpful advice. The train stops, and he gets off, passing a middle-aged woman with spiky red hair, wearing a vintage Armani su
it. When Lakshmi’s play is produced, she will offer Margot this part, unless the producers insist on a marquee name. She will let Margot wear whatever she wants because she will be playing a lady judge, an even bigger wreck than Margot. Wobbling on heels so high that just looking at them makes Devi’s feet hurt, the woman makes several loopy circuits around the subway car before plunking herself down opposite Devi, crossing her legs, leaning forward, and saying, “Can I tell you something?”
It is, she explains, a story that no one will believe. She herself wouldn’t believe it, if a case like hers came before her court.
In this way Lakshmi plans to build up interest in the woman’s confession and at the same time cover herself because the story she’s about to tell is really very unlikely. Lakshmi herself wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t happened to a friend of a woman who lives in Mal’s mother’s building.
Lakshmi has decided to call her lady judge Portia. It’s the perfect name, nothing else seems right, and nobody’s going to notice if she steals another detail from Mister Monkey, which actually stole this one from The Merchant of Venice. Besides, plagiarism is so old-school. Lakshmi calls it sampling. Incorporation.
Lakshmi’s Portia, the lady judge on the train, has been married for twenty-four years, a close supportive marriage. Her husband, Bill, is a lawyer, and if he ever resented her being a judge, he never let on. He has always been loyal and proud of her. Or anyway, so she thought. He specializes in estate and property cases that require him to travel. He always calls when he’s gone. He tells her that he misses her and can’t wait to come home.
Then one day the mailman brings a letter for her husband, from a doctor’s office, though not her husband’s doctor. It’s marked PERSONAL and CONFIDENTIAL. Actually, it’s addressed to someone with her husband’s name who lives across the street. A coincidence, though not such a crazy one when your name is William Smith.
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