I listened to all this. The tips of my fingers grew cold and I shivered under my business gray. On the wall opposite, in the mural, a rickety plane teetered into the sky.
We abhor, execrate, despise.
Why does it have to be the thing, why must it be the thing, it shouldn’t be this important.
This is not the jungle.
Just stop it.
So finally I shoved my chair back and stood up, and at the scrape of the wood they all looked at me, mouths open, their faces white splashes in the bluish light. I unbuttoned my coat, moving not hurriedly but deliberately, and shrugged it off. Nobody reacted until I had my blouse half off, and then a huge hubbub of voices rose, somebody shouting for a stretcher, I heard the reporters behind me scrambling over the railing, curses as a camera light crunched into somebody’s head, then my bra was off and somebody screams, I step out of my skirt, the panties peel in a single movement, two cops are reaching over heads, I stand skin goose-bumped by the cold, hands by my sides, I cry: “No fear, no fear,” but a woman is fighting her way through the roiling crowd, her face is so deeply red that it looks like a kumquat, she shouts, spraying spit, I haven’t ever seen so much spit coming out of a person’s mouth before, “Whore, whore!” and I think I know her, I’ve seen her before, an assistant D.A. or something, one of the cops shoves her aside and she swings at him with a pocketbook, he reels holding an eye, a small spot of blood appears on a white shirt, the cop’s partner backhands with a nightstick and blood sprays from the woman’s head, it spurts in a powerful, jerky stream that spatters everyone and everything. For a moment the screen freezes and I run.
I don’t know how I got out of there. I remember running down a yellow hallway and into somebody’s office, finding this dress in a closet, and then out onto the street and into a cab. I found some money at home, but I had barely finished paying the cabbie when the TV vans began to screech around the corner. So I grabbed a handbag, threw some stuff into it and climbed over the back wall. I caught another cab to La Guardia, and took the first plane I could get a ticket for. It dropped me off in Burbank, and from there I found a Greyhound, then I bought a car on one of my credit cards, and here I am.
When Kyrie paused, I turned to look at her. Listening to her I had slid down in my seat until I was as nearly flat as I could be. Now she smiled at me, her chin on her knees.
“I don’t know why I tell you this,” she said. “It isn’t even perhaps a part of the story. But for some reason it sticks in my mind. You remember those two girls who went to the movie with Mother, the debater and the hockey player. Well, both of them died bad deaths. Janine Alcott, in ‘seventy-four they found her dead by a highway near Pasadena, Texas. She had been stabbed seventeen times. They never found who did it, or even had any ideas. Carol Ann Mayberry, who got married and moved to California and got divorced, in ‘eighty-one she tried to stab a lover with an eight-inch carving knife, and he shot her in the head. She died right there.”
She looked away from me, out of the window. The only sound was the circular buzz of the tires. Overhead, two white trails slowly disintegrated into the blue.
“Bombers,” Tom said. “Bombers from the air base at Edwards.”
“I don’t know why I tell you this,” Kyrie said, stretching lazily and lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know why.”
Amanda and I kept a silence with each other as we skimmed across the country in the Jaguar. In motel rooms, under my fingers she opened to pleasure but in it went even further into some privateness that I could not follow into or penetrate. In spite of all the talk in the car she told me nothing about herself, and the only thing I knew was the sometimes strange look of inwardness that came over her when she thought nobody was watching her, a heaviness that she turned away from with a quick shake of her shoulders. When she was driving she was beautiful: we flew across the desert under the elegant skill of her hands, and sometimes the dust behind us, illumined by the sun, followed us like a contrail, and the car banked smoothly and turned to the contours of the road. That she took pride in her driving I could see, and there was a joy in it, as if she had forgotten herself, but I didn’t know enough about the skill to praise, and so I watched her instead.
We went by the towns so fast that all I saw was a general, anonymous rush of storefronts and billboards. Once I woke from a deep sleep to see the same fragments of light in the dark, the same facades that I had seen a few hours ago. Where are we going so fast? I said, and I saw her shoulders shrug, outlined by a rapid red light that whipped past us with a distant howl of wind. I went back to sleep and awoke again to the same speed.
We stopped at a small town for food, on a scrubby main street surrounded by brown hills. I tried to eat at a diner, but I felt sick and finally the only thing I could have was a McDonald’s milk shake.
* * *
I awoke startled to the sound of Gujarati, children’s voices, catch it, get the ball, here to me. For one confused moment I thought I was back at high school in India, and felt a surge of panic: oh, God, I’m late for breakfast. Then I felt Amanda’s leg against my own. She slept on her back, legs straight and hands folded on her stomach, never moving. I touched her shoulder and she came awake immediately, and in the quick moment between sleep and her smile at me there was an unguarded look of fear, a childlike glance of terror at the white ceiling and beyond. But it passed so quickly that I thought I must have imagined it. She turned over on her side and stretched slowly.
“What’s this?” I said. High up on her left shoulder was a small smooth patch, an infinitesimal shade lighter than the surrounding skin, so subtle that it would have been invisible but for my fingers, which felt the change in texture.
“Oh, that,” she said. “It was a birthmark. My mother had it removed when I was a kid.”
“Why?” I called to her as she went into the bathroom.
“You can’t wear off-the-shoulder gowns with a thing on your shoulder.”
“A thing? Was it ugly?”
“I don’t know. It must have been.”
“Was it red?”
When she came back in she was laughing. “I don’t know.”
She sat on the bed, and I pulled her over until I could look at her shoulder. “Must have been red,” I said.
“I don’t know. You’re so weird.”
I kissed her shoulder. Making love with Amanda was slow and tense and tight and full of unexpected fierceness, and she held and held and relaxed only with a sob.
The children outside, boys and girls of nine and ten, were playing a game of Kings. I sat and watched them as they threw a tennis ball at each other, dodging and shouting. Then Kyrie and Tom walked past me.
“See you in a while,” Kyrie said. “We’re going to find a haircut.”
They strolled away, and as they turned a corner Tom swung around and waved at me. I wondered what the sleeping arrangements had been in their room, but really he didn’t seem cocky. Maybe just relaxed. But I was too lazy to think about it, and I put my chin on my knees and drowsed, the children and their game vague gray figures behind my eyes.
“Let’s go.” It was Amanda, buttoned up and packed and ready to move. I told her about the haircut and she turned about without a word and went back into the room. After a while the children broke for lunch, and when I went back in she was sitting upright on the bed watching television. I went past her into the shower, and when I came out she was still there, straight and concentrated.
“What’s the matter?”
I could’ve sworn the look on her face was hatred, but she said, merely: “I’m bored.”
“Change the channel,” I said. “They’ll be back soon.”
A group of buffalo rumbled across the screen. We watched them move from right to left in an endless stream.
“I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored.”
“So tell me a story.”
“No.”
I was annoyed by her now, and so I went outside again. I went around to the lobby, which w
as green all over and had bright pictures of fruit on the wall. The owner was a small Gujarati man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles who introduced himself to me straightaway as Desai. Desai’s equally small but plump wife came out a little while later and gave us a cup of tea, and Desai said, “Is that your wife?” I shook my head, and he said, “Get married, young man. Get married.”
I went back to our room and Amanda was curled up on the bed. The television was blaring but I thought she was asleep. She turned over and I saw that she was wide awake, trembling and holding herself tightly, her fists clenched between her knees. When I lay next to her and touched her forearm the muscle twitched away and back.
“Are you still bored?” I said.
She said nothing but her eyes had the blank glaze of panic now.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Tell me a story.”
“No,” she said, and started to get up. I slapped a hand around her waist and held her back.
“No. Tell me something.”
She twisted against me and the sheer force of her quick struggle almost had her away from me. We fought each other in a silent but completely serious tussle, and she was very strong. Finally I had her hands twisted above her head in her T-shirt and my knees on either side of her chest. We stared at each other, panting, and I felt my sudden, causeless anger collapse inside me. I started to get up, and she hissed, “No,” and hooked a leg over mine, and she turned her head and bit my wrist. My hands left marks on her sides.
When we got into the car I had a comfortable kind of emptiness inside me. I was tired, and was anticipating the rush of the freeways. Amanda started the car, and as she backed the car out of the motel parking lot she smiled at me, a small tight smile empty of happiness. Behind us, Tom put his head on Kyrie’s lap and dozed. They had strolled in lazily in the late afternoon, their heads shining and fragrant. Kyrie’s hair was now a deep brown, and the change from the startling white-blond of the morning made her look younger. Tom had his hair very short, in what I thought of as a child’s haircut, spiky on top. Both of them looked new. So we drove into the setting sun, and Amanda put on round, silver-rimmed shades that gave her a face from another, younger decade.
“Let’s go to Texas,” I said.
“Why?” said Amanda, and I could see that putting a direction on her flight displeased her.
“I want to go to NASA,” I said. “Maybe we can see a rocket taking off.”
Kyrie leaned forward. “Maybe I’ll find my grandfather,” she said, grinning, I suppose, at the absurdity of the thought.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Want to see a rocket,” mumbled Tom.
“All right,” Amanda said. “We’ll go.”
So she wheeled us about in an enormous arc from one freeway to another, somewhere in the middle of that huge American night, and we went south. I sat back, wide awake, and for some reason, I kept on remembering Mayo, and a boy named Shanker, older than us, a prefect who every afternoon sat on the patio in front of his room wearing an enormous Stetson, and read avidly and thirstily one out of his almost complete collection of Louis L’Amour, while we threw stones at a tamarind tree to knock down clumps of the sour fruit. When we annoyed him too much with our shouting he would look up out of his dream, eyes glazed, point a forefinger at us, and cock a thumb back. So, Shanker, at last the real Texas.
“Real Texas?” Amanda said.
I must have mumbled it aloud, but the story was too long ago and seemed somehow too absurd to tell in that car, in that place, and so I shrugged. “Real Texas,” I said decisively, and she cocked an eyebrow but asked no more. In real Texas I will find you. In real Texas we will see what it is. In real Texas we will come to the heart of it.
When we actually crossed into Texas I was asleep. What woke me up was the radio buzzing about Hindu-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad, and I fumbled with it until it clicked off. It bothered me not because of what it was about but because it seemed too messy, it had too much of the stink of belief and the squalor of passion. I wanted the blade-edge feeling I had, the keenness of my senses and the rush of the speed.
“We’re in Texas,” Amanda said.
We flew in a long floating curve, the road smooth and the yellow line perfect and steady under us. I leaned low over the dash and peered ahead, straining as if I would see instantly the long white trail of a rocket far to the south. I looked at Amanda, and I said, “Cool!” and I felt my lips pulling back from my teeth. She laughed, her hair a dark red and flying, I could see her eyes shining, and it was something like love.
We came into Houston on a hot afternoon, and the road passed through dense, swampy land, where nothing moved. Then suddenly the city sprang up in front of us, as abruptly as if it had nothing to do with the wetlands around it, as if it had been created complete and whole out of a foreign imagination. The buildings ahead were huge and fantastically beautiful, so symmetrical and straight-edged that it frightened me to look at them. It was like a city on another planet. I glanced at Amanda, and she had a remote expression on her face, a look of concentration and resolve, like a soldier scanning a terrain for lines of fire and dead ground.
She stopped at a motel called The Hokaido, with exposed fake-wood beams and a rock garden in the front. The floor in the rooms was covered with a dense brown carpet colored to look fibrous and grainy. I sat rubbing my feet over it, waiting for Amanda to emerge from her endless shower. When she finally did come out, she was pink as a baby and as defenseless, and I held her in my lap and kissed the top of her head, which smelled fresh and wet and of innocence. I began to hum a song, a song from some half-forgotten black-and-white matinee, “Too Kahan ye bata,” and she couldn’t have known it or understood but she must have felt it in my chest, so she made small noises of contentment and wrapped her soft white towel tightly around her; for a moment the Japanese were at bay and mad India was far away and Amanda’s hungry velocity was ceased and Houston was gone, the only sound was falling waters, and we were quiet with each other.
That night we drifted from bar to bar, and Amanda drank vodka steadily, the only change in her being a translucent look about the skin, so that in the humid night she had the appearance of a marble statue. The city itself was hot, huge, with a feeling of danger that puffed up from the exhausts of the cars and the blowing of the air conditioners on the sidewalks. I tried to imagine Amanda on the streets as a child, happy and skipping, but the picture faded away amid the clinking of the glasses and the slow waves of conversation.
“How will you find one man in a city?” I said to Kyrie.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was a drunk. He’s probably dead long ago.
“We’ll look,” said Tom.
“What, police stations, public records?”
“No, just around here. We’ll ask.”
So they got up and started working the bar from one end to the other, leaning down to people’s ears, over the music. Every now and then somebody would stare after Kyrie, as if they were trying to remember her, identify her among the vague memories of childhood.
“They’re crazy,” I said. “It’s impossible.”
“Yes,” Amanda said.
I took a deep breath, and said, looking at my glass, “When are you going to call your parents?”
“My parents?”
“They’re here, right? In Houston?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to go, visit them, I mean?”
“No.”
“Amanda, they’ll know you’re here. When the credit card bill gets there, at least.”
“So?”
“So? So you’ve got to go there.”
“Why?”
“Pay your respects.”
She blinked, looking at me as if 1 was speaking a language she didn’t understand. The words felt foreign and strange even to me, in the light from the red plastic–encased candle between us.
“You have to,” I said. “You really do.” I kept on saying this, and we gaped at each other unti
l finally both of us burst into laughter. But I kept on at her, while Kyrie and Tom went from bar to bar, and finally at some hour of the night so late that it was actually cool, she broke and drawled, “All right, all right, we’ll go,” and I slept in a strange happiness, as if I was to meet somebody I’d been looking for a long time.
We went the next morning, leaving Kyrie and Tom at the motel with Amanda’s credit card. It was a Sunday morning, and the roads were empty and quiet. The car turned a corner, and it seemed all at once that we had left behind the malls and the condos and the straightforward seediness of motels. Now the houses were two-storied and lawned, ivied and crenelated, the street was suddenly smooth and was no longer a street but an oak-lined boulevard.
“Amazing,” I said. “Where are we?”
“River Oaks,” Amanda said.
“Where’s the river?” I said, but she didn’t reply. She was spinning the wheel, and in a quick turn we faced a very large building, built on a slight rise at the center of the plot, that was unmistakably the same house I remembered from dozens of Classic Comics set in another-century England. “Wow,” I said. “Wuthering Heights, man.”
Amanda opened the door with a gold key on a chain. Stepping inside, I had the sensation of being transported to another time: the parlor was full of fussy Victorian chairs, all curlicues and massive feet, hunting prints, a quizzical deer head on the wall. Inside, the corridors were white and high-ceilinged, and the rooms were as gleaming and brown and perfect as film sets. Amanda walked ahead of me to the kitchen, and it was only here the dizzying illusion was broken, because she picked a sparkling glass from the shelf and held it under a tap inset into the fridge, which was enormous and white.
“Wow,” I said. “Running cold water.” That tap in the fridge fascinated me, and I gulped down my water quickly just so that I could stick my glass in and watch it fill under the gleaming tap. “This is so amazing.” She looked at me, a faint grin on her face. “No, really, it’s like really so damned elegant because it works.” I drank another glass of water. It was funny tasting, clean and flat but impeccably cold. I took another glass and now I had to sip it. “You know when I got obsessed with America? It was a damn long time ago. It was when I was really little. This was when I was so little I hadn’t even gone away to boarding school. I must have been five or six or maybe at the most seven. From somewhere or other there showed up in our house a nineteen-sixty-seven Sears catalog. It was quite thick and big and I used both hands to pick it up. I think one of our neighbors brought it over to show my mother dress patterns for her daughters. But I found it one winter day in the drawing room when I came home from school, when my mother was asleep, and I carried it up on the roof, where I sat and started to go through it page by page. I started with the men’s wear, with all the blond, blue-eyed guys wearing checkered shirts tapering to their bodies. Then the men’s underwear, then the women’s dresses, then the women’s underwear, then the whole family groups, the mothers and daughters wearing the same dress and same bell-shaped hair, then the garden tools, all these slick hedge cutters and long lengths of green pipe, and, amazing and unbelievable, drivable grass cutters, little too-much too-deadly tractors that you drove around the lawn and the grass came out packed in bags. But best of all, at the back, saved for last, whole working and usable and immaculate swimming pools! Swimming pools you could order through the mail, that would come to your house in boxes, that could be assembled, on your large and expansive back lawn, into what it said, into goddamn amazing swimming pools, so that your pretty daughters, your crewcutted sons, your bloody stunning wife could paddle and float gently under the best sun in this best of all worlds. I mean it felt as if the top of my seven-year-old head had come off, that I had seen heaven, no, not that exactly, but that this, this in front of me was what life must be. This was bloody it. So when my mother called for me I jerked up and hated her, felt instantly angry at the un-neatness of our house, how weathered and cracking all over it was, old and old in everything. I wanted to chop down the old peepul tree that hung its branches over the roof and scattered its leaves in our court-yard. I was so desolate with the feeling of who I was and where I was and how stuck I was in the whole untidy clutter that I started down the stairs with the catalog still in my hand, and only when I was halfway down did I think to go back up and hide it under the water tank. I kept it there for years and years until it fell apart. I used to go up there all the time to look at it. I kept it for years, until all the pages were curling and some of them had fallen out and blown away, and the families were faded, but still the pictures, the idea of them, were bright in my mind.”