Homeland Elegies(64)
Asha had watched me silently as I spoke, a gravity and stillness in her eyes, but when she realized I was done, something changed. She seemed to force a laugh: “So you stole it?”
“I tried to give him the money. I wasn’t trying to steal it.”
“I could never do that.”
“Take a cross?”
“Wear one,” she said shortly. I understood. We—like all Muslims—had grown up on tales of the first believers valiantly persecuted for not denying their faith. “Did it help?” she asked.
“Let’s just say I didn’t have any trouble until I took it off. That’s when the dirty looks started, more stuff like what happened at the hospital.”
“Like what?”
“Look, it’s not that big a deal. I don’t want to—”
“No, what?”
“I mean…the usual. The tense looks, the double takes, the old ladies worried when they see me on the bus or the subway. The shit people say under their breath. The Mets game where some drunk guy starts calling me Osama. And then I get thrown out of the park for the argument we get into…I mean, none of it was anything like what you all were dealing with in Texas, guys walking into gas stations and shooting clerks, the rest of it…but we had stuff up here, too. Cabdrivers pulled from their cars. People jumped in the streets. People losing their jobs, even on Wall Street. I wasn’t wearing a turban, so that helped. So did the cross. I’m pretty sure of that…”
“But then you stopped wearing it?”
“After a while, I just couldn’t see myself in the mirror with it anymore. Once the fear died down just enough.”
“Why’d you save it?”
“I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t intend to. Where you found it’s where I put it when I took it off. I forgot I even had it.”
She bit down on a piece of buttered chappati. “We bought flags,” she said as she chewed. “Big ones, small ones. The Pakistanis in Houston went crazy with the flags. A friend of my dad’s would walk around with the pole stuck into his lapel buttonhole, with the flag waving around under his chin.”
“We did the same—”
She cut me off: “But I never heard about anybody wearing a cross.” I didn’t know what to say. “So what ever happened to your cousin?” she asked.
I was the one to force a laugh now, aware I was appearing weak, wanting to find some way back to seeming strong. “He’d gotten homesick for Pakistani food and went to stay at his aunt’s in Tarrytown. He was supposed to be back in the city that morning, but he didn’t get on the train. I was wandering a war zone while he was happily eating his nashta of parathas and sooji halwa.”
“Probably not happily, right?”
“I mean, no. Of course not. I just meant…if you knew him…”
She wasn’t amused. “Did you ever go back and pay for the cross?”
“No.” I lit up with a sudden idea. “Maybe that’s something we can do together…”
Her ensuing silence completed her retreat. I can’t say I didn’t understand it. I, too, had long avoided revisiting the terrible isolated sadness of it all, avoided any reminder of our repulsive condition, at once suspects and victims when it came to this, among the great American tragedies. There were so many awful reasons we’d spent much of our lives desiring whites—and here I was illustrating the worst of them. She picked up her phone and went to the couch to read what had come in—presumably from Blake—as I’d spoken. I got up and went to the window to sit on the sill for a smoke. The morning’s light was unchanged, clean and gray, but there was no longer any comfort in it. I lit up and drew troubled relief into my lungs; behind me, Asha’s fingers clicked away at her phone’s screen. As I listened to her text, I knew I’d made a mistake from which we were unlikely to recover.
*
I doubt there was any point at which Asha seriously considered a future with me, but if she did, if she had ever wondered dreamily, the way I did, what it might be like for us to marry and have children, I don’t think she wondered any longer. We lasted two more months, during which time my attachment to her grew stronger and hers to me weakened in perfectly indirect proportion. I will spare you the portrait of my mounting romantic insecurities, the episodes of jealousy over Blake, the humiliating erectile challenges, the torrents of needy nighttime tears. I bought a slightly included carat-and-a-half engagement diamond and asked her to marry me. Twice. Some of this apparent desperation, I must have known even then, was the result of my mother’s decline. She was dying slowly, surely, yet I rarely cried at her bedside. There, my days of vigil were limned with unruly hope, for as I stared at my mother’s morphine-slack face, I dreamed of another, and every reprieve from my mother’s slow demise led back to Houston, despite Asha’s reluctance to have me. Her place was off-limits, so I would take a room at a hotel I knew she loved across town, a converted antebellum mansion, still well beyond my means. I would book a suite for two nights and hope she could be persuaded to stay in for room service on at least one of them.
The end finally came over the phone.
She’d told Blake about me, which had the effect—I would later conclude—she’d been hoping for all along: he, too, confessed his infidelities, and after a teary reconciliation, they decided to give up their extracurricular involvements and double down on the relationship. She wished me only the best ahead, she said. I was an amazing person, and I deserved more than what she could give me. Asha sounded like she meant these kind words—or at least like she was trying to—but beneath the patient, saccharine tone, I picked up a dispassion it was hard for me to accept. Could it really be I was simply an errand to be completed, a loose end in her life that needed tying up?