Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  20

  The evening Obama clinches the Democratic nomination, Bill picks up Indian takeout on his way home and sets to chill a bottle of champagne he’s splurged on—vintage 2004, the year he and Seema started dating, the year Obama came into their lives. They’re preparing to watch the broadcast of Obama’s speech kicking off the general election campaign against Republican nominee John McCain.

  Seema has been withdrawn ever since her return, retiring early each night, pleading jet lag and later continued exhaustion, rejecting his advances for company, intimacy. She’d become tight-lipped over the phone the last many weeks away—the tense, unexpectedly long primary season must have taken its toll—but he hopes that tonight’s celebration will serve to reinvigorate her.

  Barack and Michelle Obama come onstage holding hands. They wave at the crowd, its blue sea of Change placards. Bill waves back, lump in throat. Before Michelle leaves, she and Obama bump fists, Michelle initiating, which Bill finds strangely moving. He turns to Seema in imitation, his fist out, but Seema hasn’t been paying attention to the unfolding scene, lost in some abstraction. When she eventually responds, the gesture feels forced.

  He has experienced enough of Seema’s periods of withdrawal to know there’s little he can do but wait them out. His elation dulled, he listens to the speech distracted and irritated by Seema’s inattention. Obama thanks his grandmother, and an intense yearning for Mame sweeps through Bill. If only she were by his side tonight—his lips tremble, his eyes prick with the prelude to tears, but he’s stalled by Seema’s apparent disinterest. He even sees her rolling her eyes at some of Obama’s more obvious rhetorical flourishes.

  When the speech is over, Bill picks up the champagne bottle. The cork pops with an anticlimactic whimper, the champagne fizzing onto the carpet, an acrid smell of mown grass. Seema hurries toward him with wineglasses.

  They toast: “To the next president of the United States.” They clink glasses, they kiss.

  But it’s not the evening Bill had hoped for. The one consolation: Obama and Michelle are immediately surrounded by a posse of close-cut rugged men in black suits that follow them as they mingle with the crowd—at last the secret service, prominently protective.

  Seema reheats the takeout, and they sit down to dinner, the pungent spices of bhuna ghosht and achaar chicken washed down with the champagne. She’s preoccupied, even as she inquires about the day’s events.

  They’d decided last year that if Obama won the nomination Bill would take a leave of absence, or quit if he couldn’t, and they’d volunteer together in some swing state, like Florida or Ohio, for the general election. Now that the moment has arrived, Bill has to admit to some misgivings about quitting his job: he’s never taken such risks before. Mame, if she were alive, would surely declare it irresponsible.

  Midbite, as if Seema had been about to broach the topic herself, she says, “Bill, I’ve been offered a director post at my old job.”

  Her news, though startling, doesn’t surprise him. “How come you didn’t tell me about this before?”

  “I’m telling you now. I start on Monday.”

  This confirmation of Seema’s failing commitment, after the evening’s apathy, is beyond vexing. “So I have to go to Florida or Ohio by myself. You’re bailing on me.”

  “I’m exhausted, Bill,” Seema says.

  “But not too exhausted to take on a new job. Something’s changed—Seema, what is it?”

  She flares up. “Well, if you really want to know—I’ve lost faith in your candidate.”

  He sighs wearily: shoring up her confidence in the campaign has been the substance of their interactions the last couple of months.

  “The state supreme court has struck down Prop 22, reaffirming marriage as a basic civil right, and what does Obama have to say?” She proceeds to imitate Obama, contorting her face into a look of sincerity and concern: “I respect the decision of the California Supreme Court and continue to believe that states should make their own decisions when it comes to the issue of marriage.” Her mimicry is atrocious—her Obama sounds upper-class British—but she has got Obama’s inflections and pauses right, though exaggerated to prissiness.

  The court’s judgment was handed down three weeks ago in mid-May, before her return, and she hadn’t mentioned the matter till now. Had she been tracking the case? But, of course, with San Francisco getting ready again for gay marriages, she would have learned soon enough anyway. “Obama supports civil unions,” he replies lamely.

  “You know this—separate is not equal.”

  “Clinton’s no better. At least Obama has made it clear he’s against constitutional amendments.”

  “Clinton is a career politician. But Obama—couldn’t he have at least acknowledged how important the ruling is?”

  “If he says anything more, it will only become a distraction. Republicans will use it to increase evangelical turnout in November.”

  “So, equality is only a distraction? Overturning antimiscegenation laws was only a distraction?”

  The dinner forgotten, the argument escalates so swiftly that Bill is blindsided. How could he suggest that gay marriages and interracial marriages are not exactly equivalent? She flings quotes at him from landmark Supreme Court decisions—Sharp v. Perez, Loving v. Virginia—she’s evidently read up on them. She accuses Obama of hypocrisy and expediency: “He wouldn’t even be here today if it had been illegal in his state for his parents to marry.”

  When he defends Obama’s stance as pragmatic, she tears into Obama with a fury he’s never seen before, in all their quarrels of four years or all her tirades against Bush and Cheney and America. Obama, too, is a lying politician. A conservative in progressive clothing. A White man in a Black body. Obama would betray everyone hoping for change. Consider the way he threw his Black pastor under the bus. Consider all the money he’s accepting from the rich. Consider the inner circle of White staff and advisors he’s surrounded himself with. Obama is too beholden to his White supporters to risk angering them. Obama is too infatuated with his image of uniter to fight for his people. Obama is too cowardly to force big changes. Obama is a smoke screen erected by the rich and privileged to maintain the status quo. Obama is a con man peddling empty hope to the rest.

  It’s a fury Bill has never experienced before. He’s dumbfounded, as he watches Seema, a stranger now, her voice and features and form almost unrecognizable. He can do nothing but let her rave, the tumult within him pinning him to his chair, as he swills down the bitter champagne to fill some hole that’s opened up in him.

  He feels anger at her words, of course, but it’s buried under everything else churning through him. There’s shock at witnessing a side of Seema he’s never seen before. There’s bafflement at the cause for its emergence now. There’s hope that Seema doesn’t mean what she’s saying. There’s fear that she does. There’s anguish that this could be the beginning of the end of everything between them.

  She’s spent as suddenly as she’d erupted. “So you’ve nothing to say?”

  “We made a promise,” he says. “Now this gay marriage issue has become more important to you than getting Obama elected—”

  He picks at the congealed meat on his plate. He can feel the sting of her eyes on him. His heart thuds as she pushes her chair back, picks up her plate, and dumps it in the sink before leaving the dining room.

  He tracks her up the stairs to their bedroom and down the stairs again to the garage; the garage door grinds open, the car throbs out. He clears the table while drinking the remaining champagne directly from the bottle. As always, her presence continues to vibrate in the air, an aroused agitated thrumming this time.

  Yet he prefers that to the dull heartache of her absence in the house. He knows he should be angry with her for ruining this night. But all he feels is the relief of resignation. His guilt from earlier about quitting his job is overrun by the conviction that were he to leave for Florida or Ohio by himself, for another sustained period of separation,
Seema would certainly be lost to him. He sleeps fitfully in an alcohol-induced lifelessness—their king bed is a vast desolate feathertop—only vaguely aware that Seema hasn’t returned yet even as the hours stretch toward dawn.

  He wakes to a pounding headache and the dream sound of rain. It’s seven in the morning; Seema is in the shower. Her side of the bed is not slept in. “Did you just get in?”

  “I slept on the sofa downstairs. I needed some space. I’m sorry I ruined last night for you. But we can’t go on pretending like my life before you didn’t exist. Like I’ve nothing at stake in this election.”

  He doesn’t ask her where she was or whom she’d been with. He’s too glad she’s willing to discuss the previous night to hold it against her too long. He admits that Obama’s stand on gay marriage is at the very least politically calculated. She accepts that her allegations against Obama are otherwise (mostly) baseless. She promises she will take some time before the election to volunteer elsewhere, since it would be unprofessional to un-accept her directorship now; he surmises there’ll be enough for them to do for the general election in adjacent Nevada. They both agree to forgive and forget.

  But Bill cannot completely forget all that has been awakened: the anxieties and insecurities of their early days together; the memory of her at dinner, raging, a woman possessed.

  21

  A few Sundays later, end of June, Seema is at the San Francisco Pride parade with Fiaz. This year’s parade is to be a celebration of the recent court victory and the marriages that have resumed since then; for the second time, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first couple to be (re-)married, and Seema hopes to see them ride in the parade today—probably her last and only chance, for Del is in her late eighties now and wheelchair bound.

  Seema is here at Fiaz’s pleading. Fiaz has been despondent lately, he and Pierre caught up in constant arguments. “I didn’t say anything about getting married,” he complains, as he and Seema wait under the rainbow flags of Market Street for the parade to start. “I only wanted us to march together in this year’s parade. But—”

  He quotes Pierre morosely, mimicking his scholarly tone and French accent perfectly, as if he has internalized Pierre’s comments: “Parades and marriages are products of authoritarianism. I’d rather be at Mack Folsom Prison, hooded and handcuffed, partaking of homosexual delights, than marching with assimilationists and exhibitionists and look-but-don’t-touch queens.”

  Pierre has taken off somewhere, and while Fiaz can’t face the repeated questioning were he to march with his South Asian friends in Trikone—“Why didn’t you bring your partner? Are you still with that French professor? Why aren’t you getting married?”—he’s determined to at least watch the parade.

  The theme for the year is “United by Pride, Bound for Equality.” Kicking off the parade are the usual Dykes on Bikes. The crowd goes delirious as dyke couples blast down Market Street on motorbikes. Today, in addition to their usual black leather or blue denim, some are attired in whites and pinks, wedding dresses straddling the gleam of their bikes, veils snapping behind them in the wind; others are suited and gowned; and yet others ride as everyday brides holding Just Married signs in their newlywed hands.

  This is Seema’s first time attending Pride in a decade. She’d grown blasé about it, limiting herself to the Dyke March, held the evening before on Pride weekend; for the last several years, with Bill, she’s not even been aware when Pride came around. She feels a little like an imposter today: Does she even deserve to be here? She claps her hands to her ears against the deafening din, but the euphoria shocking the air is irresistible, the crowds larger and more exuberant than she’s experienced in the past. Even Fiaz, mournful a minute ago, joins in, bouncing up and down, dragging her with him, easily overcoming her token protest.

  “Any desi dykes on the bikes?” She strains to get a good view through the thronging crowd. “Any dressed like a desi bride?”

  “I can’t see any—” Fiaz scrambles up a lamppost base. “Anyway, it’ll only be the boys dressed as brides, not the dykes. You’ll see them on the Trikone float, dolled up in sarees and ghagra-cholis.”

  Next are the bicyclists, the AIDS Life Cycle riders, and then an outpouring of color: a surge of rainbow balloons flooding the street, as if to wash it of any lingering staidness, any straightness, and carried in by it, a swarm of multicolored anemones and jellyfish, tendrils ballooned and tethered to beautiful men and women gyrating in skimpy underwear. Bare flesh flashes, and thongs and bikinis and star-spangled breasts bob and jiggle, amid twirling streams of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The very light shimmies, shimmers.

  “My eyes are getting drunk,” Fiaz says.

  The Pride theme float that follows is a giant wedding cake, and behind it are the various agencies and individuals instrumental in overturning Prop 22, all met with lusty thank-yous and applause. Signs of Vote No On Prop 8 are also being toted—Proposition 8 being the Right’s redoing of the overturned Proposition 22, a constitutional amendment to force a ban on same-sex marriage that it successfully added to the ballot for the upcoming November election. But the crowd doesn’t let that diminish its enthusiasm. Mayor Newsom, White and straight and well coiffed, cruises by in an open-topped jeep in an open-collared white shirt, accompanied by his fiancée, and receives a homecoming hero’s welcome. Seema had considered Newsom’s defiance of Prop 22 a self-serving political stunt four years ago, but who is she to still argue that, in the face of this positive outcome?

  “You cut social services for AIDS patients and the homeless,” some voice screams at Newsom, though nobody seems to pay it any attention.

  Bringing up the rear are newly married gay and lesbian couples walking hand in hand, almost sedately, the very picture of normalcy, escorting the plaintiff couples in the case against Prop 22, whom Seema has been waiting for. They ride in roofless cars decorated as wedding getaway vehicles trailing cans and streamers, waving and blowing kisses at the cheering crowd. Seema searches among them, nudging through the throng.

  But no Del and Phyllis, no lavender and turquoise of their wedding suits, no wheelchair and companion. The morning’s exhilaration ebbs as swiftly as it had swollen.

  “Fiaz, I want to go,” she says. “I’m getting a headache.”

  Fiaz is still hanging off the lamppost, watching intently a young man in a rainbow leotard, who’d clambered over the security fence and is running to each car, kissing each seated couple in turn and posing for selfies with them, evading the parade monitors chasing after him.

  Fiaz has not heard her, and she drags him down from his perch by his jacket sleeve. “Stop drooling at the boy. He’s too young for you.”

  “I was not drooling.” Fiaz straightens his jacket with exaggerated dignity. “Not that there’s anything wrong with drooling. If Pierre only limits himself to that—”

  “Why do you stay with Pierre, then, if it bothers you so much?”

  “He says it’s only sex.” Fiaz shrugs. “The way we’re fighting, we may not be staying together much longer.”

  The light turns off in Fiaz’s eyes, and Seema feels sorry for him.

  “Ten years together,” he says. “Even my mother is now asking when Pierre and I are getting married.”

  “You’re lucky,” Seema says. “At least she’s accepting.”

  Seema has met Fiaz’s mother during the times she has come to stay with him and Pierre: a smart, always stylish, pixie-like woman in slim tops and loose printed pants, a long narrow shawl usually wrapped around her shoulder-length bob, never missing her namaz or the thirty fasts of Ramadan.

  “Next she’ll want grandkids.” Fiaz laughs hollowly. “Not sure, though, how much she’d approve if she found out how many dicks her favorite son-in-law sucks in his free time. You know, the only thing I asked of Pierre? Not today. Today let’s march together. I want to feel pride.”

  Fiaz still wishes to stick around for the Trikone float, and she consents. They both watch the plodding par
ade with a joyless, even jaundiced eye: elected officeholders and political aspirants, various community organizations, and commercial concerns like banks and nightclubs and radio stations that have muscled in on Pride. The ethnic contingents bring up the distant tail, and more than an hour and a half later, the Trikone float comes by, a small garden of giant metallic red-pink flowers and parrot-green slotted leaves. There’s only space for a few people on the float, and it’s occupied by three men and two women, all dressed traditionally, the men in kurta-pajamas, the women in salwar-kameezes.

  “What, no drag queens in sarees?” Fiaz is shocked. The other desis following behind are also conventionally dressed, many in jeans and T-shirts. “I thought there’d be more dhoom-dhaam today. Where’s the baraat?”

  Though there is music playing—Ishq ki galiyon mein aake ghoom, dhoom machaale dhoom machaale dhoom—appropriately from the movie Dhoom, the dancing, a mix of Bollywood twerking and bhangra, is energy-deprived, as Fiaz comments, from the wait to get started and the long march in the noon sun. “Nobody’s even trying anymore.”

  He calls out to one of the dancers who signals him to join them. He looks to Seema for permission, sheepish and guilty.

  “Go, you know you want to,” Seema says. “I’ll just go home.”

  Fiaz hesitates, but she pushes him toward the float, and he doesn’t need a second urging. He climbs over the fence with a nimble hop, and with one backward wave—“Fuck Pierre!”—he races toward the already moving Trikone contingent, falling in with the dancers.

  Seema watches until his graceful form passes from sight, twirling and skipping down the road blithely, his hips circle-shaking expertly in tight eights, his arms snaking to the music, the morning’s despair seemingly dispelled. Fiaz, she assumes, would just as easily get through his current patch of misery, he and Pierre patching up their differences like they usually do. If it were only as easy for her.