Part 18 (2/2)

”And your friends?” I asked. ”What were they looking for?”

He lifted his shoulders again. ”Who can say?”

”That would be you,” I said. ”The one who was there.”

He smiled at me, touching my cheek. ”Funny girl.” He paused, thinking. ”Perhaps they wanted excitement. Something new.”

”A treat.”

His eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled at me. ”A treat. I like that.”

I knew without asking that all of his ”friends” had been white. I could guess that they'd see him as exotic, with his accent and his dark skin, and even his arranged marriage. He would have been a kind of diversion, something new on the menu-strange spices, a different taste, a rich dessert they could savor but wouldn't want every night. I guessed that none of them had ever fallen in love with him: these were probably experienced women, sophisticated ladies who'd made places for themselves in the world, who'd never been stuck at home, or behind the edge of a table at a diner, or anywhere at all.

It was snowing the first time he came to my house. We'd been swimming and had our drinks, and then Vijay had asked if I wanted to go with him-to the hotel, I a.s.sumed; this was where we'd gone each time we'd been together. ”Come home with me,” I said.

”Addie,” he said, and I could tell from his tone, from his eyes, that he was getting ready to deliver a speech that he'd given before, one that would tell me not to get my hopes up, one that would let me down easy.

”Please,” I said. I could hear the rawness in my voice, and I made myself pause and start over. ”Please,” I said softly. ”I'd just like you to see where I live. It would mean a lot to me.”

He shrugged, that sheepish, charming shrug, and held my car door open for me, then got into his own car and followed me home to Pleasant Ridge. I could imagine his lips tightening as he turned down my street-its jumble of forty-year-old ranch houses and smallish lawns must have been a shock after his palatial neighborhood-but once we were through my front door, it was just the way I'd imagined it: the house warm and snug, scented with the green chili I'd been simmering since the night before. Vijay made his way along the newly finished floors, exclaiming over each little touch: the vibrant tiles in the kitchen, a bouquet of roses I'd set in a ceramic vase I'd painted myself, the sumptuousness of the bedroom, how soft things were, how sweet, how warm.

At some point after we'd made love, I lay beside him, half asleep, and watched as he collected his cell phone from the table next to the bed, the one I'd painted with half a dozen coats of cherry-colored lacquer. Icy rain pattered on the ceiling. I listened as Vijay spread his hand against my belly and made excuses to his wife.

After that, he came over every Wednesday afternoon, once we were done swimming, and sometimes on Sat.u.r.days. I'd installed a pair of bedside lamps with bubble-gla.s.s shades, tinted pale-green and turquoise, that cast the room in a cool underwater glow. I would keep my eyes open for as long as I could-I was still so shy of my own body that it was almost painful to look at it-but always I would open my eyes and watch his face at the moment of o.r.g.a.s.m. He would squeeze his eyes shut, press his lips tightly together, and I would feel him shudder against me and think, I made him feel this way; I did this to him.

Afterward, he'd roll toward me. He'd kiss my ear and my neck, pulling the sheets out of my clenched fists, easing them down my body. ”You see, Addie? You're lovely. Lovely,” he would say, sliding his fingers against me in a steady rhythm that sped up gradually and made me arch my back and, finally, curl against him, panting and spent.

He had never lied to me. But still, I let myself hope. One afternoon in July, with suns.h.i.+ne pouring gold through the skylight, I said, ”Do you ever think that we could be...” I let my voice trail off, hoping he'd start where I'd stopped.

Instead, he sat up and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. ”Addie,” he said. ”I have always been honest with you.”

I felt like I had swallowed a stone. I closed my eyes, dreading what was coming, unable to prepare myself for it, to thicken my skin or harden my heart for the blow. I wasn't like his other ladies. I had no defenses.

”I am sorry, my dear,” he said in his accented speech. ”But you must know that I will never leave my wife. And I think...” This time, his voice trailed off. ”Perhaps it would be best if we were to spend some time apart.”

”You don't want to see me anymore?” I asked, hating the pathetic way I sounded but unable to keep from asking.

”Of course we will see each other,” he said, pulling on his underwear (white cotton boxers that looked as if they'd been ironed. For the first time, I wondered by whom). ”We will swim.”

I felt numb, ill, miserable, lost. But I made myself move, get to my feet, pull my robe around me, walk him to the door. I said that I understood. I told him I would be all right, that I had enjoyed him. ”My treat,” I'd said, and I even managed a smile. None of the things I said were true. I didn't understand: If we were happy together, and if he was unhappy in his marriage, why not end the marriage and be with me? I wouldn't be all right: I would be lonely again, trying to fill all of those empty hours and empty rooms with something, an unnamed and unknown something, because I didn't have food to do the trick anymore. I'd be even worse off than I'd been before, because now I knew exactly what I was missing: the feel of the water moving over my body, the warmth of his body beside mine in a car or on a couch; his crooked teeth, his charming, head-c.o.c.ked grin, his thick fingers moving against me.

”Addie,” he said at the door, with his hands on my shoulders. ”Do not look so sad. All is well. You will find someone.”

I bent my head, then raised it, staring at his face, his liquid brown eyes, his crooked teeth, trying to memorize it, because I knew I would never see it again. I would never find anyone else. I didn't see how I could put myself through it: the lift and plummet of hope and rejection. I didn't have a thick skin, I didn't have the practice or the skills. I wasn't strong.

”I understand,” I made myself say. ”But could you do one thing for me? Just one thing first?”

Vijay frowned when I told him what it was. ”It is not possible,” he said curtly (and in that curtness, in his tensed shoulders and stiffened neck, I imagined that I was seeing a part of him that Chitra was privy to on a daily basis, a part that his ”friends” never imagined).

”Please,” I said. ”I won't bother you, and I won't ask for anything else. I just want this one thing.”

So on the Friday night before Labor Day weekend, in a little town between Milwaukee and Chicago, Vijay Kapoor took Addie Downs to the fair. The bright colored lights of the midway that blazed against the indigo sky. The air was scented with fried dough and grilled sausage, and the moon hung heavy and orange as a pumpkin. He paid twenty dollars for a roll of tickets, bought me a lemonade, and, after six tries, won me a teddy bear at a game using high-powered water guns to inflate balloons.

We played Skee-Ball. We pitched Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s into goldfish bowls, and slid dimes across a scarred sheet of Plexiglas, trying to get them to land on our lucky numbers. We rode the rickety Ferris wheel (a man with vacant eyes and tattooed hands slammed the metal safety bar down across our carriage, and I wondered what he'd say if I'd told him that a year ago that bar wouldn't have closed at all). Vijay wouldn't look at me, but he did take my hand as our car rose to the top of the wheel and hung there, rocking, suspended in the sky. ”Buy a flower for the pretty lady?” asked a woman with an armful of roses, and Vijay did.

Outside the fortune-teller's patched tent, a pack of laughing teenagers pa.s.sed by. One of the girls had the same pink teddy bear that I did. She swung it loosely by one of its arms. Her jeans dipped low enough to show the pink elastic edge of her panties, and as she ran by, laughing, I felt enormous, and ancient, and exquisitely out of place.

I left my bear sitting on a bench. I sat quietly with my hands in my lap as Vijay's big car purred along the highway. When he pulled into my driveway, I said, ”Thank you for a lovely evening,” the way I'd imagined saying when I was a teenager, coming home from the dates I never had.

His face looked troubled in the glow from the dashboard. ”Addie,” he said, ”are you sure you'll be all right?”

”I am sure,” I said. ”Sure I'm sure. I'm fine.”

”You are crying,” he observed, and ran his finger along my cheek to prove it.

”I'm fine. Thank you again,” I said, and hurried out of the car. For a minute, I thought he'd come after me, racing across the lawn and up the steps and saying, Addie, I have been a fool. Don't leave me. Never leave me. When I turned, I could see him in the car, behind the wheel, but couldn't make out his expression. I unlocked the door and walked inside, and after a minute, his car slid out of the driveway. He flashed his lights, blipped the horn once. I barely slept that night, sitting up with the telephone, which, of course, didn't ring. On Monday morning I went to the pool as usual. ”Where's your friend?” asked the tangerine, waiting to hand me a towel from behind the check-in desk.

”I don't know,” I said. I guessed that Vijay had found another pool. After that night in my driveway, I never saw him again.

FORTY-ONE.

”Oh, no,” said Greg Levitson. ”No, no, no.” He was shaking his big bald head back and forth in time with his nos. It was Sunday morning at the TD Bank branch in downtown Pleasant Ridge, and it looked as if everyone who wasn't in church or at the mall was waiting in line for the tellers.

”Take you ten seconds,” Jordan wheedled.

Greg Levitson stopped shaking his head and glared at Jordan. ”I could lose my job.”

”Sure you could,” Jordan said. ”You could also lose your job if certain other facts came to light.”

Greg pursed his lips, closed his eyes, and exhaled a stream of stale coffee breath in Jordan's direction. ”You're blackmailing me?”

”I'm doing no such thing.”

”This is unfair.”

”n.o.body said life was fair,” said Jordan. He crossed his legs, ate a candy cane, and stared up at the ceiling as if he had all the time in the world.

Greg Levitson had been in Jordan's cla.s.s in high school. Back then Greg had been a slope-shouldered, pink-faced boy with a sunken chest and wide, almost womanish hips, whose brown hair was starting to recede by senior year. He'd gone to Pennsylvania for college, had put in a few obligatory years in the big city (in his case, Philadelphia) before returning to Pleas-ant Ridge with a wife and baby in tow. Greg's and Jordan's paths would cross occasionally-they'd nod ”h.e.l.los” in the supermarket, exchange ”how've you beens” at the Exxon station, and that might have been the end of it, except one night Jordan had pulled over a blue Chevrolet doing seventy-five in a fifty-five zone, and found his former cla.s.smate trembling behind the wheel.

”Please,” Greg had whispered after handing his license and registration through the window. ”Please don't make me get out of the car.”

Jordan looked down and saw that Greg Levitson was wearing a dark-blue gown that left one of his meaty pink shoulders bare, high-heeled shoes and sheer black hose. His cheeks were rouged, and his fingernails were fire-engine red.

”You know the speed limit, right?” Jordan asked.

<script>