Billings, more aware than she of a range of conservative opinion outside Manhattan, where the phrase “American atrocities” might possibly grate, readjusted his rimless glasses on his sharp-tipped nose. Almost inaudibly, he cleared his throat. These delicate alterations registered with his wife. Her lips took on their numb look, and she slightly changed the subject. “Did either of you happen to be in the city when they had these big fat Botero people in bronze all up and down Park Avenue? That center strip has never looked so good, even in tulip season. The statues shone—is that the word?—in the sun. They were noble, and ridiculous, and everything all at once!”
“Terrific,” Milford said, meaning her entire presentation.
“I never saw them,” Jean coolly interposed, “but I read about them, somewhere. Where was it, Henry? Time? But I never see Time, do I, except in the dentist’s office? Oh dear,” she added, sensing her husband’s displeasure at her interruption, “we’re such bumpkins.”
Afterwards, when the Milfords were alone, Jean said, “They were very sweet, indulging us.”
“I was fascinated,” Milford told her, “by her husband’s face. It’s so minimal, like one of those happy faces. He gives away absolutely nothing.”
“He’s a lawyer, dear.”
Milford had been a professor, teaching statistics and probabilities at a small but choice business school in Wellesley. It surprised him, upon retirement, to find how little he cared about his subject once he no longer had to teach it to classrooms of future profiteers. His teaching had been dutiful, and so now was his tourism. The world’s wonders seemed weary to him, overwhelmed by the mobs that came to see them. The tour’s head lecturer, too, after two weeks of shouting to make himself heard above the echoing hubbub of temples and the shuffling distractions of museums, seemed to be losing interest and looking forward to his next tour, of German castles. The experienced travellers on the tour explained to the Milfords that everything was simpler and more concentrated on the Rhine; you stayed in your cabin in the boat, instead of hopping by bus all over southern India and constantly packing and repacking.
As the tour leader’s passion slackened, his native assistant, Shanta Subbulakshmi, a short, dark woman from Madurai and the warrior caste, took the microphone in the bus and spoke, shyly yet fluently, of herself—her parents’ unusual determination that she pursue an education, the ornate etiquette (the advance scouts, the ceremonial visitations, the seclusion of bride and groom from each other) of her arranged marriage. She spoke of the way the roads of Tamil Nadu used to run, when she was a girl, through the emerald green of rice fields, field after field, before the advent of industrial parks and a ruthless widening of the dusty, pitted roads. “The roads are deplorable,” she said. She made the only case for Hinduism that Milford had ever heard. “Unlike Buddhism and Catholic Christianity,” Shanta explained in her strict, lilting English, “Hinduism does not exalt celibate monks. It teaches that life has stages, and each stage is holy. It says that sexuality is part of life, and business also—a man earns a living for his family, and this fulfills his duty to society. In the last stage of life he is permitted to leave his family and business and become a seeker after God and life’s ultimate meaning. But the middle stages, the worldly stages, are holy also. Thus Hinduism allows for life’s full expression, whereas Buddhism teaches renunciation and detachment. Hinduism is the oldest of religions still widely practiced, and also the most modern, in that nothing is alien to it. There are no Hindu disbelievers. Even our particle physicists and computer programmers are good Hindus.”
Shanta helped the women of the tour dress in saris for the farewell dinner. The saris had been acquired in little shopping sprees squeezed between the long bus rides (some along a coast swept as bare as a desert by last year’s tsunami) and the great temples—dingy mazes surmounted by towering polychrome pyramids of gods, gods upon gods, their popping eyes and protruding tongues and multiplied arms signifying divine energy.
Jean, a thrifty New Englander, reasoned that she would never have another occasion for wearing a sari, and showed up in her best pantsuit. “These clothes people buy on vacation in a kind of frenzy of being there,” she said, “look so flimsy and tawdry back in the real world. They just collect dust in the back of the closet.”
The luxurious New York wives, however, wore saris; their silks and sateen glimmered in the firelight of the lawn torches while their excited voices shot Spanish compliments back and forth beneath the palms.
“¡Qué bonita!”
“¡Tú eres una India! ¡De verdad!”
But in truth the costumes did not flatter most of the women: the fashionably thin appeared scrawny and starved, and those with more flesh seemed uneasy in their wrappings, as if something might at any moment pop loose. Milford would not have thought that a garment consisting only of an underblouse and a few square yards of cloth could fail to fit anybody, but the women by torchlight resembled a cluster of hotel guests who, chased by a fire alarm into the street, had in their haste grabbed gaudy sheets to cover themselves.
Except for Lorena: this bronze-haired, Americanized Latina looked in Milford’s eyes as if she had been born to wear a sari, or at least this particular one, its pale-green border framing a ruddy, mysterious pattern that suggested in the flickering light rosy thumbprints. Her eyes seemed nearly golden. He had come up to her intending to say something jovial and flattering about her costume, but was struck dumb by how, with a kind of shameless modesty, she had given the tucked and folded cloth her shape—the inviting pelvic width, the exercise-flattened abdomen.
His voice came out croaky: “Terrific,” he said.
She seemed uncomfortable, ambushed by this new version of her own beauty. Her shoulders defensively cupped inward and, in a plaintive New York whine, she asked, “You like it?”
Milford’s stricken voice regained a little strength and smoothness. “I adore it,” he told her, adding, kiddingly, “De verdad.”
He offered to move past her, releasing her to the company of her Upper East Side friends, but—a misstep on the uneven lawn, possibly—she moved sideways, blocking his way, just as Jean sometimes did, as a way of saying, “Look at me!” Lorena asked, “Do you and Jean ever get to New York?”
“We used to, but now almost never,” he told her, wanting to flee this apparition.
When, with the night’s torch-lit farewells jangling in his veins, Milford lay in bed face-down beside his sleeping wife, he seemed again to be confronting Lorena, body to body. A few nights before, the entire tour, but for its oldest and frailest members, had been taken to a giant city temple where, each night, a group of bare-chested, sweating priests carried a small bronze statue of Parvati, clad in wreaths of flowers, out of its sanctuary and through the temple corridors to stay until morning with the goddess’s consort, Lord Shiva. The bronze statue, much less than life-size, was carried in a curtained palanquin, so there was nothing to see but the four Brahman priests shouldering the poles, and the other priests accompanying the procession with drums and shouts and a blood-curdling long trumpeting. The priests trotted, not walked, except when they halted for a serenade to the hidden goddess. The trumpet riffed in an orgasmic rapture that reminded Milford uncannily of, on a younger continent, jazz. The mob of sensation-seeking tourists and God-seeking Hindus jostled and stampeded in the fast-moving procession’s wake; flashbulbs kept flashing and Ian Billings, his arm uplifted like the Statue of Liberty’s, was videotaping the proceedings with a digital camera whose intensely glowing little screen projected what the camera saw—bouncing bodies, bobbing heads, the curtained palanquin—and betrayed, above the thundering pack, his and his own consort’s whereabouts.
Milford followed at a timid, elderly distance, but his height enabled him to see, at the intervals when the procession halted and drummed and trumpeted as if to renew its supernatural sanction, the circling, sweating, blank-faced priests. One of them looked anomalously fair, grimacing and squinting through the smoke of incense in a skeptic
al modern manner—a convert, perhaps, except that Hinduism, in its aloof hundreds of millions, accepted no converts. The procession, after one last noisy pause, hurried down the corridor to Shiva’s sanctuary, where non-Hindus were forbidden to follow.
Sleepless on the verge of departure, Milford saw that this had been truth, earthly and transcendent truth, one body’s adoration of another, hidden Shivas and Parvatis united amid the squalor and confusion of happenstance, of karma. He rejoiced to be tasting lust’s folly once more, though the dark shape he was lying upon, fitted to him exactly, was that of his body in its grave.
Blue Light
THE DERMATOLOGIST was a tall and intelligent fair-haired man who gave the impression that of all the things that exist in the world the one that interested him least was human skin. Twice a year he inspected Fritz Fleischer’s epidermis—plagued by psoriasis in childhood, then by sun damage in old age—glancingly, barely concealing his distaste. Nevertheless, he kept up with the latest developments in the field. “There’s a new technology,” he said, “that flushes out precancerous cells. Before they turn cancerous. It might do well on your face. Blue light.”
He spoke with a halting diffidence, while averting his eyes from the sight of his nearly nude patient.
“Blue light?” Fleischer echoed.
“The same sort ordinary light bulbs give off. No UVA, no infrared. Blue, only brighter. The skin is cleansed with acetone and then painted with delta-aminolevulinic acid. ALA. It sinks in and makes the cells respond. They shatter. It destroys them.” A certain enthusiasm had entered his voice. His bills listed “destruction of lesion” and then some outrageous charge—two hundred ninety dollars, say—for spraying a spot with two seconds’ worth of liquid nitrogen.
“Destroys them?”
“The bad ones,” the dermatologist insisted, defensively.
“The immature ones?”
Fleischer had learned the term from his previous dermatologist, an older man who, before he in rapid succession retired and died, used to talk lingeringly, lovingly, about skin, tilting back in his swivel chair and closing his eyes as if peering into a mental microscope. Pre-cancerous cells, he explained, have simply failed to mature, and the reactive ointments—Efudex, Dovonex, Aldara—that he prescribed helped them to mature. “Maturing” seemed to be a euphemism for death—an unsightly convulsion of cells that faded away eventually, but not before making the patient look as spotty and insecure as a teen-ager. In his mental microscope Fleischer’s former doctor had foreseen a bright future when the molecular secrets of skin lay all exposed for manipulation and cure.
The old healer’s successor resisted the word “immature,” with its implied teleology. “The damaged ones,” he clarified. He manifested a faint, hurried enthusiasm: “You’d be a new man. Look ten years younger.”
“A new man?” Fleischer barked out a greedy laugh at the thought, and the other man winced at the sight of the patient’s oral membranes. “I’ll give it a try.”
The dermatologist bleakly nodded. “Let Sheela set it up. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we do it. Sixteen minutes and three-quarters—that’s the exposure time. Seems an odd time, but that’s what’s been worked out. Less doesn’t do the job, and more doesn’t seem to add anything. Good luck, Mr. Fleischer.” While Fleisher was still drawing breath to thank him, the tall, fair man loped around a corner of the hospital’s labyrinthine dermatology department and vanished.
Sheela wore a sari, advertising the department’s diversity. She was short, with the round teeth of a child and a skin of smooth Dravidian darkness. Towering awkwardly above her, Fleischer felt disgustingly mottled and leprously pale. “How undressed should I get?”
“Not one bit,” she told him in her merry lilt. “Today concerns just your face.” Using swabs of cotton that felt like a kitten’s paws, she stroked Fleischer’s face with one colorless fluid and then with another. Her nostril-bead glinted in his peripheral vision as she worked, moving around him as nimbly as an elephant trainer. “Now,” she announced, “you must wait an hour, for the skin to absorb. Please sit with a magazine.” There were others sitting and waiting, men and women mostly as elderly as he, all of a Northern European paleness and pinkness, but with nothing conspicuously wrong with what of their skins he could see. We are all, Fleischer thought, victims of the same advertisements, the same airbrushed photos of twenty-year-old models, the same absurd American dreams of self-perfection. A new man, my foot.
He picked up a tattered month-old edition of People and read of celebrities getting divorced, getting pregnant, confessing to unhappy childhoods, adopting an African orphan. He had never heard of most of these beautiful people, but, then, he had been long locked into the financial world, poring over The Wall Street Journal and its columns of figures, its rumors of collapse and merger. Now that he was retired from his Boston firm, he had begun to reread the classics of his college years—Dickens, Dostoevsky—and discovered that his callow initial impression that they were windy and boring was, surprisingly often, reinforced, with the difference that now he was under no academic obligation to finish the book. He spent an hour a day walking, with other retirees, the sidewalk above the littered beach, lined with condominiums, from which the sepia skyscrapers of Boston could be seen like a low cloud in the distance. He watched his investments. He feebly tried to keep in touch with his three adult children, and their children.
The blue-light device proved to be less elaborate than he had imagined. A thick large horseshoe-shape, it half-encircled his head and bathed his face in a humming brightness. His eyes were covered with small cup-shaped goggles; Sheela’s voice kept him company in his blindness. “People tell me,” she said, “the worst prickling is the first five minutes, and then the discomfort diminishes.”
Fleischer had lived near a beach for much of his life, and, aware of no remedy for psoriasis but raw solar rays, had done more than his share of sunbathing—lying in the sheltering dunes in the windy spring, and floating face-up in the soupy sea of high summer with bright buttons and sequins of reflected sun glittering and bouncing all around him, and in the cool fall courting the last slant, dimming rays. Now, compressed into seconds, the sensations of those prolonged exposures were revived and ferociously intensified. Light pressed through the substance of the goggles and his eyelids to register red on his retinas. Needles of heat were thrust deep into his face. He could feel, at the tip of each, immature cells bursting like tiny firecrackers.
Sheela poured her lilting voice over his pain: “You’ve done two minutes. How is it?”
“Thrilling,” Fleischer said.
“I can switch the machine off at any time, and resume after a break,” she said. “Many patients are grateful.”
“No, let’s keep at it.” Fleischer liked talking while blinded; his conversational partner, unseen, filled the room, giving the inescapable radiance a voice.
“My offer is good at any time,” she continued. “Many patients discover they cannot stand the sensations.”
“Tell me,” Fleischer said, as the fire consuming his cheeks and brow boiled deeper beneath his skin, “about Hinduism. Does it have a God, or not?”
“It has a large number of gods.”
“I mean,” Fleischer said, as if his agony gave him the rights of a seeker—as if being blinded made him a seer—“beyond all that, Shiva and Shakti and so on, an overarching God—a Ground of Being, as it were.” In his mind’s eye the needles of light dug in like talons, each tipped with poison.
“We call that Brahman,” Sheela’s disembodied voice responded. “Not to be confused with Brahma. Brahma, with Vishnu and Shiva, is a major deity, though he has not generated the legends and temples of the other two. People do not love Brahma as they love the other two. But behind them is Brahman. He is what you might call Godhead, beyond describing. He is closest to your Christian concept of God. You have gone now more than six minutes. Almost halfway.”
“Does anybody believe in Him? In It?”
&
nbsp; “Numerous millions,” Sheela assured him, her soft voice stiffening a little. “There are no disbelieving Hindus.”
“Does He ask you to feel guilty?” Cell after cell, it seemed to Fleischer, was igniting within him, one microscopic sun after another.
Her voice became merry again. “No, we are not like Americans. We are still too poor for guilt. I do not mean to be flippant. Each Hindu feels set down in a certain earthly place, and tries to fill that role. Each person, from the maharajah down to the crippled beggar, is doing what is prescribed. That is what Krishna said to Arjuna on the battlefield in the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘Be a warrior,’ he said, ‘and do not trouble yourself with the ethics of killing.’ You have done over eight minutes. From now on, most patients assure me, it becomes easier. It will be downhill. Can you feel that yet?”
“At my age,” Fleischer announced from the center of his burning blindness, through lips immobilized by a mask of inward-directed needles, “it’s all downhill.”
Each of Fleischer’s three wives had borne one child—girl, boy, girl. They in turn had each produced two children, all boys, oddly. Odd, too, was the way they all, against the dispersive tendencies of American independence and enterprise, lived within an hour’s drive of the Swampscott condo to which he had retired. Guilty about his inadequate grandfathering—he never, unlike grandfathers in television commercials, took his grandsons fishing or onto idyllic golf courses—he tried to visit each household once a month. In the weeks after his blue-light treatment, he would rather have hidden in his stuffy bachelor quarters, their curtains drawn to keep out any further light, while the television set in the corner muttered and shuffled its electrons like a demented person playing solitaire.