Our Country Friends(59)
And finally, the book was about them. About Karen and Vinod. About a man making a case for himself to a woman, even though it was clear that he was not yet up to the rigors of adulthood or the tasks of being a father.
A thought: If they had started a relationship when they were young and later had a child, would Vinod have become a version of his father? It was impossible to think so now, but had she thought so then? That beneath the gentleness lurked a raised open palm? Was that one of the reasons she had rejected him? When they were still in high school, in the very first year of their friendship, all three had sworn to one another never to have children, and only Senderovsky had broken that pact despite once being its most adamant proponent.
* * *
—
When she was halfway through the book, she wondered if she should tell him that she was reading it. They had gone to his Lullaby Cottage one night after smoking a pungent new strain of marijuana her assistant had sent up from the city—it elicited a kind of gentle paralysis so that everything seemed to happen a minute later than it did—and she could see herself running back to her bungalow, reaching under the bed, and taking out the Teva active sandals box. “Why?” she would ask him, holding the box aloft. “Why didn’t you give this to me before? Why didn’t you have the strength to stand up to Sasha? You could have had a different life.”
She took her time applying the eye cream to his dark pouches, massaging the deep circles of ancient memory, and in the country quiet they could both hear the rising and crashing waves of each other’s breaths. Look how old we are, they were both thinking. They had spent so much of their lives boarding buses and watching the figure of the other recede in the dust.
If it were to happen, he would have to take the first step. He had told himself that he was sheltering at Senderovsky’s for another reason, closing out the books. But No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. What if he were not a Chekhovian character trapped in a life much too small to accommodate the entirety of a human being? What if he—
What if he reached into the small jar and dipped his finger into goo the color of cheap coffee ice cream? It was cold to the touch, but his finger would warm it. And then seemingly a minute later—because of the lag induced by the marijuana—he had brought his index finger up to her eye, to the opposite eye she was touching with her own finger, and smeared “just a tiny bit,” as she would always say, across the slight dark ridge under her eye.
“What are you doing?” she said, laughing.
“You’ve been taking care of us for so long, I thought I’d reciprocate,” he said.
“I can put it on myself,” she said, immediately stung by her own pride. I can do it myself! The daily mantra of her childhood and beyond, spoken to anyone who would listen.
“But you shouldn’t have to,” he said.
He moved her hand aside, bent over, and kissed her on the lips. The shock of it kept her eyes open, even as his closed with religious feeling. She moved her own lips faintly against his, watching his ardor. How did it feel? It felt like Vinod was kissing her, the soft pelt of his mustache scented with turmeric. That was always the problem: that she would know how every second of their romance would transpire, that this was the most expected moment of her life, and yet, if she breathed instead of hyperventilating, she could enjoy the work of those unsurprising lips.
Her eyes remained open, and they saw “a handsome older gentleman,” as her dead mother might have said in English, parroting a line from radio or TV. Their noses touched, always a comical interlude, but then she felt the sex of his hand massaging her nape. When it came to physical encounters, of which there were plenty in her youth, she normally had no problems moving straight to bed—that’s what it was for, after all—but now she caught herself.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. Within the green walls of her high, trapped within the primary colors of the Lullaby Cottage, she now fully registered where they were and who they were. The bungalow felt like the dorm of an artsy college, the kind neither of them had attended, though Vinod had been accepted everywhere he had applied, New Haven included. “What are we doing?” she said. She planted a palm on his chest. Was it to hold him back? For a moment, neither of them knew, but it felt so nice to touch his chest, to feel its wholeness after all he had suffered.
“I was about to say I’m sorry,” Vinod finally said. “Sorry for kissing you. But I’m so tired of all of my apologies.”
“Good,” she said. “Fuck your apologies.” They looked at each other in the glow of the collegiate lamp on his desk. “Can you do something for me now?” she asked.
“What would you like me to do?”
She lifted up her arms. There were tiny rolls of fat beneath them now, which he found endearing. “Can you tickle me?”
“Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.”
He reached under, feeling her warm sweat and then the crinkly barrage of new underarm hairs. “Ha,” she said, tentatively, wishing she could surrender to Nat’s wild bouts of laughter. “Ha!” she said again. And then she started laughing, great jags of squealing joy. Ggul-ggul-ggul. Was this what she had wanted all along? How hard was it to be happy in this fucking country?
“Do you want me to stop?” Vinod asked.