The Vibrant Years(84)

“I’m so sorry to bring this ugliness back for you, Binji.” She swiped a determined sleeve against her cheeks. “But I have an app to write.” With that she disappeared into the bedroom.

Cullie wasn’t the one who’d brought the ugliness back.

The truth just had a way of never going away. A cosmic impossibility, indeed.

“I think I need some air,” Bindu said, and Alisha and Ashish pushed her out the door.

“Go, Ma,” Alisha said, already cleaning up, furiously trying to set things straight. “We’ll clean up and leave.”



The only time Oscar had ever meant to touch Bindu was when the camera was rolling. He’d been honest with her from the start. So, she’d known it would be the only opportunity they’d have to unleash their feelings, the fevered arousal, the uncontainable yearning. The hungry lens was meant to be the curtain protecting the relief of their coupling, containing their release.

Oscar being Oscar, he’d done every scene in one take, never making a mistake, never botching his lines just so he could touch her again.

When her disappointment had colored her cheeks and wet her eyes, he’d explained himself: Film is too expensive. It’s someone else’s money.

He’d always explained himself. He’d always treated her like she was worthy of that, worthy of his thoughts. He’d understood the demands she’d felt worthy enough to make.

How could I make mistakes when the scene involved laying myself bare to you? The mistakes I make are when I have to hide how you make me feel. His hands had trembled as he shoved them into his pockets as she threw herself at him.

How can you make me live without you? Why is that your decision? Why? She’d been insensate with the injustice of it. Back when she’d still believed that life might be fair, that desire and love might be enough.

Because I have children not that much younger than you.

Your daughter is six. I’m seventeen. You’re leaping a bit, aren’t you? You’re barely thirty. My baba is older than my aie by thirteen years.

What you want is impossible, Bhanu.

Why?

Because I’m married. Because I’m Oscar Seth, and the world will never let us live this down without scandal and ugliness. But it’s not just them. I’ve lived and breathed my work for a decade. All these years I’ve looked on with disdain as bastards slept with actresses so they could have the roles that would change their lives. Now I see myself in their faces. I see my own face in that ugly currency.

I don’t want a role that will change my life. I only want you. How reckless she’d been. How out of control of her treacherous heart. How fearless in asking, begging, for what she wanted.

That, of all things, had broken his heart. You should want more. Claim this, Bhanu. What you can do in front of a camera, I’ve never seen anything like it.

His love of cinema had felt like competition, stealing the love she wanted for herself.

I don’t care. She’d said it over and over, believing she would always have the camera, hating the impossibility of having him.

You are the only woman with whom I let my foot slip. I’m married to a woman who struggles with depression. I’m a father. I can’t expose them to the kind of public humiliation that will come with this. I just can’t. I can be nothing more than your director, your costar.

Their bodies they’d controlled, kept them from burning away in passion. But their hearts, those were unbiddable. The flames fed what bloomed there. Over that winter, they’d become so much more than a slipped foot. They’d been a tumble down the Sahyadri peak. A landslide. A mountain collapsed into an ocean. She’d known this in the deepest part of her heart.

So she told him it was enough, he being her director, her on-screen hero. And she gave him the only thing he felt he could take from her. Her all in front of the camera. Her heart and her body. She became the story he wanted to tell, the colors on his film, the light and shadow in his lens. She let herself dissolve into his celluloid and disappeared into his voice as he sang the love song that had been raging in his soul his whole life.

It was watching on a screen what he’d done to her, with her, in those Eastmancolor tones that had broken him, brought him to his knees. The rush from the climax scene had been so heady, so intense, it had vibrated through their beings, tied them together in a way no force on earth could untangle.

He’d pushed into her changing room in a trance. She’d fallen into his arms in one of her own. Their joining had been fast and hard, months of foreplay released in one blinding explosion.

Everything after that had been pure pain.

Nothing had hurt more than his apology. All the beauty I’ve ever wanted to create. You gave me that. And I have nothing to offer you in return.

But she’d had him. In those moments, on that hard cotton mattress, on that timeless celluloid, she had him in a way no one else would ever have him. And she had the camera. It had shown her what being alive meant. Two loves too big to fit in her young heart that she lost in one ruthless swoop.

Deep in the throes of his betrayal, she would take years to grasp what he’d sacrificed too. He had offered her everything in return.

He’d shelved the film. Erased his moment of genius. Destroyed the work that he was never again able to create, even though he spent the rest of his life chasing it. This too she knew, because even as he gave her up along with all of that, she followed him. Through the pages of film magazines. Through the movie-theater screen. From the distance of a fan. Her obsession hidden behind the veil of a generalized obsession with cinema. Her one rebellion against Rajendra.