Paul Theroux - The Elephanta Suite - Three Novellas

Without effort, Audie sank into a reverie of women he had known. He did not orchestrate the reverie; he let it wash over him. He could not say why he always had the same reverie, why it began whenever he was massaged. He guessed it was his reaction to being touched by a strange woman’s hands.

“I must check,” the Indian clerk had said when Audie first requested a woman to massage him, and he had been told that in India it was uncommon, though at Agni it was acceptable.

He learned to relax and receive the treatment, the two young women pressing on his oiled back and working their way from his shoulders, down his arms, to his legs, to his feet. As this happened, his mind locked onto the thought he’d suspended when the massage had ended the day before.

The women in his reverie, mainly faces, soulful ones, were lovers he’d had in his life, the ones he’d remembered for the desire he’d felt for them, not casual sex or one-night stands, but affairs that had exhausted him with the pleasure and pain of love. Yet what he recalled in the course of the massage was the last day he’d seen them, when he’d told them it was over, he could not see them anymore, after his desire had died and his guilt at deceiving Beth overcame him.

Only with great difficulty could he recall the moment of their first meeting and the succeeding days, but it was no effort at all for him to remember the day they parted, usually after making love—saying what he had rehearsed, “I won’t be able to see you anymore”—the expression on their faces of shock, indignation, sorrow, anger. And he averted his eyes from the woman’s body, fearing to be attracted by his pity, and watched her get dressed, the awkwardness of it, sometimes sad and slow, sometimes spitefully hurried, the expression in the eyes, the moment that Audie called “the last look.”

Even as he stood there in the room, usually a bedroom, they seemed to recede, grow smaller, losing significance. They were affronted, abandoned, as though they were standing on a railway platform and he was at the window of a train, pulling away, waving goodbye.

Each parting that had caused him pain had caused them greater pain, anguish. But he was always able to say, “What did you expect? I’m a married man. I have obligations. What about my wife?”

The mention of his wife, just the word, had maddened some of them. But anger had usually given way to tears. The opposite of sexual desire was not indifference; it was tears. Tears made him impotent, clumsy, a big pointless jug-eared man with enormous and futile hands, incoherent in his consolation.

The endings of love affairs were tableaux in his mind, nearly always enacted in hotel bedrooms, the room going colder and dimmer, and then just cheerless with white wrathful voices.

“I hate you” and “How could you?” and “You led me on” and “I wish you ill, I really do. I hope something bad happens to you.”

Each parting was a moment of crisis that he relived as he was being massaged. He could not say why this was so, why the occasion of his nakedness in the presence of strangers who were pressing upon his body revived these memories, yet it was so. And there was something new today, the memory of a woman he’d ended an affair with, who had turned to him in fury to insist that he make love to her one last time. He went through the motions, hating himself, feeling that she was made of clay. She seemed to be testing him, perhaps trying to humiliate him. He believed he had brought it off, but at the end she’d said, “That was horrible.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re right-handed?”

“Yes.”

She adjusted herself in the bed and parted her legs and said, “Use that, then.”

On the days of these breakups he’d buy something for Beth—an expensive charm for her bracelet, some flowers, a scarf, a pair of earrings—and offer her the present, saying, “I love you, Tugar. I could never love anyone else.”

She had told him that, as a child, she was unable to pronounce “sugar.” She had said “tugar,” and the name had stuck. He used it only in these moments of grateful tenderness, as in similar moments of gratitude she called him “Butch.”

His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he’d loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion—he shrank at the thought of sitting across a table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he’d known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end—no middle, no future, only its ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than “I hate you” was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.

Then it was over and he heard, “Be careful, sir.”

Anna was wiping the oil from one of his feet, Sarita wiping the other.

They helped him off the massage table and guided him to the shower, where he scrubbed himself clean, and he left the room swaying slightly, fatigued and stunned by the experience.

At lunch, Beth said, “How was it?”

“The treatment? Very nice.”

He had no way of describing the turmoil of it, the women’s hands, the drenching of hot oil, the reverie of sifted memories, the exhaustion, his sense of peace, and he regretted that this seemed like a deception.

They were sitting outside, the sun-speckled shade falling across their table.

“Carrot juice?” the waiter asked.

“Please.”

“Did you swim?” Audie asked.

Beth shook her head. “I wasn’t in the mood.”

That was not the reason, and she pitied this man whom, in thirty years, she had never deceived. After her husband had left to get his treatment, she’d felt that someone had crept up behind her from the trees, a child or a small sinister man; she could sense that creature’s presence on her skin—the prickling of its hovering just out of sight, waiting for her to relax her vigilance, so that he (it was male, and damp) could snatch her Birkin bag. Everything she needed was in the bag—her money, her picture ID, her passport and credit cards, her best charm bracelet, her perfume and make up, her keys, and (not that either of them worked in India) her cell phone and BlackBerry. She knew that if she were foolish enough to jump into the swimming pool, she would return to her chair to find she’d been robbed, her bag gone.

“I might take a dip,” he said.

He was a man, the indispensable person in her life who always said to her, “Let me handle it” or “I’ll take care of it,” and for that alone she loved him. He looked after her. He knew how to look after himself. He kept all his valuables in the room safe. She didn’t trust the safe, but hardly trusted herself with her bag either. She wondered why she was here in India with thoughts of being stalked and violated, and for him the subject never seemed to occur, which was another reason she didn’t bring it up.

“I’ve got a treatment,” she said, setting her soup spoon down, patting her lips with her napkin.

They kissed, brushing cheeks, puckering, a sound like tasting air.

As Beth walked through the bamboo grove to the spa lobby, she passed the gift shop. A woman in an Agni sari standing at the door to the shop stepped aside and said, “Please. You are welcome.”

“I’m running late, but I wanted to know if you have any sha-tooshes.”

“We can obtain,” the woman said, a sweep of her head indicating her complete cooperation. “But it is not easy.”