The Other Language(40)
“Gifts from the Cannes Film Festival. We were there last week.”
Leo threw his eyes toward Ben and whispered, “Watch out. He had an Italian girlfriend, he speaks some.”
Lara had been scrubbing the house all day and moving furniture around; she’d thrown pillows this way and that, tried a couple of different bedspreads for splashes of color. She had scattered issues of The New Yorker and The Week here and there, with a couple of Vanity Fairs for nighttime reading or in case the conversation languished. She guided them from room to room, telling a story for each one (we had to take down the wall here, see the floor? these are very old tiles, this used to be the barn, the kitchen was in the old days a communal oven, isn’t that interesting?). The two men nodded and hmm’ed in turn and when she sensed they were beginning to get restless she cut the tour short and opened a bottle of cold Leone de Castris rosé.
They had dinner in the garden, where she’d strategically strewn a whole bag of tea lights. She served a lemony Middle Eastern salad, and calamari drowned in parsley. Leo and Ben didn’t comment on the food, engrossed as they were in dissecting a number of the films they’d seen at Cannes. It was a lot of “I loved that bit, hated the ending, she was great, he sucked, oh, she is in rehab.” Lara was eager to contribute but didn’t find an entry into their tight Ping-Pong. The minute they mentioned an Indian director she managed to veer the conversation away from films. Somehow she found herself talking about the Hugging Mother, an Indian guru she’d gone to see in Kerala the previous year, right after the divorce. After only a few sentences she felt their attention waver and their silence go hollow, but it was too late to turn back. She braved it and kept on going.
“I thought, if it’s true that she can make you feel better with a hug, why not? I was going through a very bad patch, anything to make me feel saner.”
“Right,” Ben agreed politely, helping himself again to the calamari. He sure had an appetite.
“There were thousands of people waiting outside the ashram under the sun. But we Westerners had a separate, much faster line.”
“That’s total bullshit,” Leo interjected. “Why would you have a separate line?”
“First-class and second-class hugs?” Ben suggested, rounding his eyes in mock innocence.
“Whatever. I was happy, it was sweltering. Anyway, finally it was my turn and there she was, this small, round person waiting to hug me!”
Lara suddenly realized she didn’t have a punch line, an unexpected twist or a satisfactory ending to the story. The anecdote lacked a tidy structure—a bit like her life, she thought.
“Did it work?” Leo asked with an undertone of sarcasm.
Lara avoided the trap.
“No. It was just a hug, really. It didn’t change a thing.”
Ben looked at her with what she took as sympathy. He surely had put on too much weight but he still had those eyes—honey-colored killer eyes and thick eyelashes that, luckily for him, would never go away.
“I’d love to be hugged by an Indian guru,” he said. “God knows I need a hug these days.”
He and Leo exchanged a look as if they were privy to a secret. With that the conversation tapered off and turned into a long stretch of silence.
“Hey Lara, I love your shirt,” Ben said at last, uneasily, as though he felt the need to fill it in.
“Thank you. My next-door neighbor made it. She’s quite a character, actually a fantastic—”
“I already told him about her,” Leo interjected, as if to say, Please don’t start with another cute tale.
Lara wished she’d let them talk about their movie life and movie friends and had never brought up the subject of hugs. Perhaps it would have been better to play the brooding, slightly eccentric recluse, a much more interesting character to embody than the eager, chirping hostess. Was it too late now to change her persona? Why had she agreed to have a movie star under her roof? Had Leo said they were staying a week? A whole week now seemed an enormity to bear.
She began to clear the table. Ben stood up to help her collect the dishes.
“Oh God, please don’t,” she said.
“Please, I always do it at home.”
“No way. Really.”
“But why? I want to help.”
Lara gave a little laugh.
“I can’t have Ben Jackson load the dishwasher in my kitchen. I just won’t allow it.”
Ben sat down obediently and pulled out his phone. He had been checking it a few times already. Leo lifted his index fingers toward the sky.
“On the roof,” he reminded Ben.
The moon had just come up behind the church tower. The night was sweet and jasmine-scented. She loaded the dishwasher with exaggerated attention. She had read somewhere that, even when loading the dishwasher, paying attention to every tiny movement could be counted as a Zen practice. Apparently all one had to do was be aware and stay in the present moment. Despite all the yoga she had never been sure what being in the moment really meant. Yet she tried to savor sliding the plates into their slots one by one. She waited.
Adjusted her breathing.
Yes.
Maybe that was it.
The moment.
As precious as all the others that she had let go by without noticing, and now so stark in its uniqueness and unrepeatability. She stood still in front of the dirty plates and concentrated harder, waiting for further epiphany. The breeze carried Ben’s voice whispering sweet somethings into his phone while Leo sat in the dark smoking a joint and she could hear him exhale.