Habitations, page 18
Later that week, he lay next to her, tracing on her arm the circular mark of her childhood smallpox vaccine. They had hardly spoken over the previous two days. In class, they barely acknowledged each other. Afterwards, she had graded his students’ papers and left them in his mailbox, neatly clipped together, and he followed with a quick email, indistinguishable from so many others he had sent her that semester. But that morning, when she arrived on campus, he was waiting for her outside the social sciences building. It was cold and drizzling. His hands were stuffed in his pockets. She followed him back to his apartment, and seconds after he opened the door, they were on his bed.
Now, it was nearly noon. The drizzle had turned to rain, and through the small window in his living room, the world looked gray and punishing. For a moment, Vega indulged in a fantasy: she and Winston were married, and Asha was their child. In a few minutes, Winston would make some tea, and they would spend the afternoon working from home, their books and papers spread across the kitchen table. Later that evening, they would set Asha in her highchair while they cooked dinner. They would play music and have a glass of wine. Winston would lie next to her at night while she nursed.
“We match.” He turned to his side and showed her the mark on his arm. “I don’t recall the last time I was with a woman who had this.”
The line snapped her out of her fantasy. “What are you saying? Your wife is susceptible to smallpox?”
He kissed her nose. “You’re funny.”
“And you’re married.” She had looked through Winston’s apartment once when he was in the shower, hoping for a photograph of his wife, but had found only a single trace of their marriage—a tube of lip balm, the surface stained pink.
“And you aren’t?”
That was different, she thought. Her life with Suresh was something, though it wasn’t exactly a marriage. But she couldn’t explain that to Winston, in part because she didn’t fully understand it herself. Sometimes she thought that Suresh’s view of their marriage was similar to hers: a plank that steadied the foundation of a happy immigrant life. Other times, she considered the awful possibility that he loved her. “Is this part of your master plan? Your unvaccinated wife will die of smallpox, and you’ll be a free man?”
He laughed. “My wife’s English. She was born immune to our third world diseases.”
“English?” Vega turned to him. She had assumed Winston’s wife was Jamaican, maybe a childhood sweetheart for whom his affection had faded over time, an arrangement to which he had resigned himself. There was no reason this revised impression of his life should hurt her, but it did.
“I’ve told you this, I thought.”
“You didn’t. I assumed she was somebody from home. I don’t know why.”
“She’s a professor of anthropology. At Bryn Mawr.”
“You met in graduate school?”
“Does it matter?”
“She must be a smart woman.”
“You’re a smart woman too.” He put his hand on her bare hip and she plucked it off and set it on the sheets.
“Whoa,” he said.
“This is idiotic, Winston.”
“What do you mean by idiotic?”
“What does anybody mean by idiotic? The word has one meaning.”
He stood up and pulled on his underwear, and she thought he was about to walk away angrily. But he went into the bathroom. A few seconds later, the toilet flushed, and he came back. “Okay. You want my thoughts?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“The way I see it, we can spend our time discussing our marriages and the mistakes we made in our lives. Or we can give ourselves one, maybe two days out of the week when we make each other happy.” He put his hand back on her hip. “Look. Mine wasn’t a green card marriage, but it wasn’t far from it. I was working as an adjunct at three universities. That was where I met Ellie. She was an assistant professor at Temple, and I watched her career from the ground up. I saw how she and her friends waltzed into the job market with their degrees from Cornell and Michigan. They had choices at every step of the way. They chose their disciplines, and they chose their doctoral programs. And on the other end of that, they had three or four offers. Each rung led to another rung. And I was sitting there with my piece of paper from Rutgers.”
“People have all sorts of paths, Winston. I did my undergraduate at Sri Vidya. Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“Precisely.”
“I’m going to tell you something about me, Vega. When I was a kid, I wanted to live in a neighborhood called Norbrook. I wanted a two-story cement bungalow with a long driveway and a swimming pool in the back. I liked the idea of people bringing me shit. You know why I wanted that?”
“Because of the neocolonial condition.” She meant it as a joke, but he seemed to consider the possibility.
“Sure. Yeah. But also, I was a child. My values were off. And I didn’t know how big the world was.”
“I think it’s too big sometimes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Vega closed her eyes. “I don’t know. We can’t get back to things. We seize the best opportunity, but it happens to be on the other side of the world, and we can’t get back.”
“You’re saying you want to go back to India?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
He smoothed her hair. Nobody had ever touched her hair, not romantically at least, and she didn’t know, until Winston, how good it felt. “We’re allowed to change, is all I’m saying. We’re allowed to want different things at different times. We’re allowed to be happy, even if it’s not what we thought happiness would look like.”
* * *
This became their routine. She met Winston at his apartment on Friday mornings, dropping Asha at the day care center just when it opened, and rushing to be with him by eight o’clock. They spent hours in his bed. Afterwards, they would stop at a coffee shop on Bloomfield Avenue. They browsed in Chatham Booksellers, where he bought her copies of magazines—the Atlantic, the Nation, and once a slim volume of poetry by Claudia Rankine.
“You’re aware Friday is not technically a weekend, no?” she asked. “You can get away with this in India. Possibly Jamaica. But I think in the States, they are fairly attached to the concept of a five-day workweek.”
He laughed. “I’ll make up for it tomorrow.”
Sometimes, they ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant in South Orange. At first it seemed brazen to be in public together, but Winston was unconcerned. “They know me here,” he said. “The owner’s married to a Jamaican girl.” He was playful with the servers—young men who looked, to Vega, to be newly arrived and bewildered, touched when Winston addressed them by name and inquired about their weekends, the health of their mothers and grandmothers, their visa applications.
He slipped into a gentler, musical style of speaking on those afternoons. She, in turn, taught him Tamil phrases he tried earnestly to repeat, mangling them delightfully. “What language do you speak to your daughter in?” he asked.
They rarely spoke about Asha in specifics. The question both charmed Vega and made her uneasy. “I suppose a bit of both.”
“Well, when she gets older and starts responding only in English, then what? You’ll insist she speak Tamil, or you’ll let it go?”
“That seems so far away. She’s just a baby.” In reality, Vega spoke mainly English at home, just as she had growing up, and Suresh spoke mainly Tamil. If Suresh had his way, Asha would grow up like Tara, who understood English but prattled in Tamil. For whom Tamil would always be her home language, her native tongue.
“Well, yes,” Winston said. “But babies grow up.”
One afternoon, over bottles of Habesha, he told her the story of the Rutgers professor he had met when working as a tour guide at Port Royal. Though Vega had heard a skeletal version, she examined this new one for details, trying, as she always did, to piece together the fuller story of Winston’s life.
“The shit I made up as a tour guide,” Winston said. “You wouldn’t believe. All sorts of shit about Jamaican naval history.” He shook his head. “Anyway, when I told him I wanted to study medicine and become an American doctor, he told me the truth about things. He told me no hospital in the States hires from Caribbean medical schools. He said they’re something of a joke. Told me of a grant to study aging, that it was an emerging field nobody wanted to enter, because when old people die don’t nobody care. It’s not interesting or political. There’s no right or wrong to it. It’s just the way of life.”
Vega, warm from her Habesha, reached across the table. Their hands were sticky and streaked with stew. With Suresh, she would have found this revolting.
“I owe the man,” Winston said. “If not for him I would be here emptying bedpans. But sometimes I see these big scholars who didn’t need a grant, whose families paid their way. And people like me have to work twice as hard in our research, and still don’t nobody care about aging.”
He told her other stories, too, and each time, she sat entranced, like a child being read to. “My first flat was in Crown Heights, the summer before I started at Columbia. I shared it with five men. All Jamaican guys. It was a word-of-mouth thing. Two to a bedroom, and one on the couch. The Huxtable residence, it was not.”
“It sounds like it had a certain charm.”
“Maybe. What made it interesting is that our paths wouldn’t have crossed back home. Two guys were taking classes at Kingsborough Community College, working at a grocery store around the clock. I was a middle-class mama’s boy from Kingston. One guy was from this neighborhood in Kingston, Arnett Gardens. When I was a kid, my mother told me I was not allowed to go there, under any circumstances. I couldn’t even walk through it. And there he was, living in the next room, drinking from the same carton of milk, pooling money for beer and calling cards.” He put his hand on her knee and slid in closer.
“Where are they now, these men?”
“I could probably find out, but I didn’t have enough of a connection with any one of them to stay in touch. Thing is, I miss the whole collective of it. Coming home so damn tired at the end of the day. Watching sports. Listening to these boys complain about their bosses or their girls or whatever. Just being.”
Vega didn’t know what to say. Sometimes she ached so much for Ashwini that there was no room for any other longing. Other times, the feeling was compounded by other losses: Naomi; evenings with Halima and Zemadi; her girlhood with Gayatri before Ashwini was sick, when their lives were airy and free of consequence. Even beneath the weight of this sadness, the acquaintances still tugged at her. People she had passing conversations with. Friends of friends she’d likely never see again.
Winston wiped his hands and reached for the check. “It’s the things that aren’t all that special at the time that you end up missing.”
* * *
One night, Shoba called as Vega was washing dishes. Asha was asleep. Suresh had just finished his call with Vikas and was in the television room, watching the news, practicing his backhand in the air.
“I’ve missed you,” Shoba said. “You and the baby.”
They had seen each other only once since the semester started, a dinner at Chand Palace with the men sitting across from each other, locked in their own conversations, while Vega and Shoba tended to the girls. Tara ate pliantly, but Asha rejected her food and reached for Vega’s shirt. Vega and Shoba spent nearly an hour in the parking lot, pushing Asha in her stroller, hoping she would doze off. It had been such a waste of a night. “I’m sorry,” Vega said. “It’s been hard to find time these days.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’re so busy with school.” Shoba paused, as though planning her next words, and Vega wondered if she had somehow found out about Winston. Maybe this was why she called. Maybe she had driven past them in Montclair or South Orange. But that didn’t seem possible. Vega and Winston weren’t discreet in public, but they weren’t terribly obvious, either. And Shoba didn’t have a driver’s license. She had failed her test on the first try and had since been putting it off.
“Can you come on Saturday?” Shoba asked. “Come for coffee, when the men are playing tennis.”
Shoba still made plans around the men’s schedules, as though Vega, too, didn’t know how to drive. But Vega always played along. “I’d love that,” she said. “I’ll have Suresh drop me.”
* * *
Winston had to leave town on Friday and asked if they could push things back to Monday. “Meet me straight at the apartment,” he had said. “We can go to campus from there.”
Normally, on weekends, she was so consumed by Asha that she didn’t think much about Winston. She spent days with her at the park, or reading to her in the brightly lit children’s room of the Parsippany Public Library. There were always small moments, when Asha dozed off next to her, or when she smiled spontaneously, that Vega wondered if she wouldn’t need any love besides this. If she could be happy in a world tightly enclosed around the two of them.
That weekend, though, the anticipation distracted her. She only remembered, as Suresh was leaving for tennis on Saturday morning, that she had promised Shoba she would visit. They took separate cars, Suresh to the tennis courts, and she towards Edison.
Tara opened the door, painstakingly. If she stood on her toes, she was now tall enough to reach the lock. “Big girl!” Vega said, bending down to kiss her. On the kitchen table, Shoba had set out a pot of upma, sliced fruit, and homemade yogurt.
“You didn’t have to do so much, Shoba.”
“I wanted to. There’s so much I want to talk about.”
Shit, Vega thought. She knows. But her anxiety gave way to a feeling of relief. She could sit in Shoba’s kitchen and calmly explain the whole thing. How much easier would it be to walk away now than in five years, ten years? Asha would have no memory of any of this. Suresh was a man of logistics. He would plan. He would manage.
“I’m expecting,” Shoba said. “Ten weeks.” She smiled coyly, almost embarrassed to be sharing the news. For reasons she couldn’t understand, Vega sometimes tried to imagine Mohan and Shoba having sex. Tara slept in their bedroom most nights. Where had it even happened? On the couch?
“I’m so happy for you.” Vega nodded to Tara, who was sitting on the floor, dangling a pair of plastic keys in Asha’s face. “She’ll make a wonderful sister.”
“My sister is coming to stay for a bit,” Shoba said, spooning the upma. “She’ll come before the baby is due, then she’ll stay to help.”
Vega wandered over to check on the girls. They seemed fine, but she was feeling restless. If it didn’t require so much effort to get them all out the door, she would have proposed a walk. She fixed a loose barrette in Tara’s hair and wiped some drool from Asha’s chin. When she came back to the table she said to Shoba, “You know, if you need another driving lesson, I’m happy to show you. Really. It’s the easiest thing. And you’ll need to get yourself back and forth.”
Shoba shook her head, her hands resting on her belly though there was no visible bump to protect. “There’s really no need, Akka. I’m happy as is.”
18
On Monday morning, she and Winston arrived at his apartment at the same time. He was unshaven and dressed in a T-shirt and jogging pants. He kissed her as soon as they closed the door. “I left as early as I could,” he said. His wife’s friends were visiting from London, he explained. There was much drivel about wine. They had spent the days talking about films he had never seen.
She walked to his bed, hoping he would stop talking. It was one thing that he had a wife. It was another that this wife was an actual person with opinions, with friends who flew across an ocean to see her.
He undid the top button of her blouse and then the second. Two Saturdays back, Vega had maneuvered Asha’s stroller around the racks of the lingerie section of Macy’s. In the dressing room a woman who appeared to be Vega’s age, but nonetheless addressed her as mom, wrapped a measuring tape around her chest and rib cage. She had leaned towards Vega and, with a sisterly intimacy, advised her not to be disappointed if her breasts seemed deflated from nursing. “You’re doing the right thing, mom,” she said. “Treating yourself to something nice. Men notice these things.” The dressing room suddenly seemed so cramped, the lights artificially bright, and the task so provincial. She bought two lace bras, both overpriced, and in the car she felt an impulse to apologize to Asha.
“It’s nice to be here,” Winston said. “Without all the white people and all the pretentions.”
“Perhaps you’ve never considered this. But if you have children, they’ll be half-white. The half-English type, specifically.”
“Fortunately for me,” he said, “my wife doesn’t want children.”
“Never?” Vega asked.
“That’s the idea.”
“Do you want them?” she asked. She had known childlessness to be a circumstance but never a choice. She found it at once both enviable and desperately sad.
Winston ran his hands over her shoulders. “I suppose it isn’t really my decision, is it?”
Vega was newly conscious of his eyes on her. She put a hand on her stomach, stretched in ways his wife’s would never be.
* * *
One cold Saturday Vega agreed to accompany Suresh to Newark Airport to watch the airplanes. They bundled Asha and she squirmed, fat and padded in Suresh’s arms as he tapped her fingers against the glass. “There it is,” he said. “Lufthansa. The 747. You see?” To Vega he said, “You can spot the 747 from its hump. Like a whale hump.” His proclivities, Vega sometimes thought, would be endearing if he were eight years old.
