John Irving - A Son of the Circus

After her bath, she went outside to the palm-hut cooler and drank some bottled sugarcane juice, which she hoped wouldn’t bring back her diarrhea. There was nothing to do but wait for Dieter and Beth to come back. She tried reading The Upanishads , but it had made more sense to her when she had a fever and Beth read it aloud. Besides, she had lit an oil lamp to read and there were suddenly a million mosquitoes. Also, she encountered an exasperating passage in “Katha Upanishad”; it repeated, as a refrain, an irritating sentence: “This in truth is That.” She thought the phrase would drive her crazy if she read it one more time. She blew out the oil lamp and retreated under the mosquito net.

She brought the entrenching tool into the bed beside her because she was frightened to be alone in the cottage at night. There was not only the threat of bandits, of dacoit gangs; there was a gecko that lived behind the bathroom mirror—it often raced across the bathroom walls and ceiling while Nancy took her bath. She hadn’t seen the gecko tonight. She wished she knew where it was.

When she’d been feverish, she’d wondered at the shadows cast by the strange gargoyles along the top of the latticework partition; then one night the gargoyles weren’t there, and another night there’d been only one. Now that her fever was gone, she realized the “gargoyles” were in nearly constant motion—they were rats. They favored the vantage point that the partition gave them, to look down upon both beds. Nancy watched them until she fell asleep.

She was beginning to understand that she was a long way from Bombay, which was a long way from anywhere else. Not even young Vijay Patel—Police Inspector, Colaba Station—could help her here.

When Nancy’s fever came back, the sweating didn’t wake her but the chills did. She knew she was delirious because it was impossible that a beautiful woman in a sari could be sitting on the bed beside her, holding her hand. At 31 or 32, the woman was at the very peak of her beauty, and her subtle jasmine scent should have told Nancy that the beautiful woman was not the result of delirium. A woman with such a wonderful smell could never be dreamed. When the woman spoke, even Nancy had reason to doubt that she was any kind of hallucination at all.

“You’re the one who’s sick, aren’t you?” the woman asked Nancy. “And they’ve left you all alone, haven’t they?”

“Yes,” Nancy whispered; she was shivering so hard, her teeth were chattering. Although she clutched the entrenching tool, she doubted she could summon the strength to lift it.

Then, as so often happens in dreams, there was no transition, no logic to the order of events, because the beautiful woman unwound her sari—she completely undressed. Even in the ghostly pallor of the moonlight, she was the color of tea; her limbs looked as smooth and hard as fine wood, like cherry. Her breasts were only slightly bigger than Beth’s, but much more upright, and when she slipped past the mosquito net and into bed beside Nancy, Nancy relinquished her grip on the entrenching tool and allowed the beautiful woman to hold her.

“They shouldn’t leave you all alone, should they?” the woman asked Nancy.

“No,” Nancy whispered; her teeth had stopped chattering, and her shivers subsided in the beautiful woman’s strong arms. At first they lay face-to-face, the woman’s firm breasts against Nancy’s softer bosom, their legs entwined. Then Nancy rolled onto her other side and the woman pressed herself against Nancy’s back; in this position, the woman’s breasts touched Nancy’s shoulder blades—the woman’s breath stirred Nancy’s hair. Nancy was impressed by the suppleness of the woman’s long, slender waist—how it curved to accommodate Nancy’s broad hips and her round bottom. And to Nancy’s surprise, the woman’s hands, which gently held Nancy’s heavy breasts, were even bigger than Nancy’s hands.

“This is better, isn’t it?” the woman asked her.

“Yes,” Nancy whispered, but her own voice sounded uncharacteristically hoarse and far away. An unshakable drowsiness attended the woman’s embrace, or else this was a new stage in Nancy’s fever, which signaled the beginning of a sleep deeper than dreams.

Nancy had never slept with a woman’s breasts pressed against her back; she marveled at how soothing it was, and she wondered if this was what men felt when they fell asleep this way. Previously, Nancy had fallen asleep with that odd sensation of a man’s inert and usually small penis brushing against her buttocks. It was upon this awareness, and on the edge of sleep, that Nancy was suddenly aware of an unusual situation, which was surely in the area of dream or delirium or both, because she felt—at the same time!—a woman’s breasts pressed against her back and a man’s sleepy penis curled against her buttocks. Another fever dream, Nancy decided.

“Won’t they be surprised, when they get here?” the beautiful woman asked her, but Nancy’s mind had drifted too far away for her to answer.

When Nancy woke up, she lay alone in the moonlight, smelling the ganja and listening to Dieter and Beth; they were whispering on the other side of the partition. The rats on the latticework were so still that they appeared to be listening, too—or else the rats were stoned, because Dieter and Beth were smoking up a storm.

Nancy heard Dieter ask Beth, “What is the first sexual experience that you had some confidence in?” Nancy counted to herself in the silence; of course she knew what Beth was thinking. Then Dieter said, “Masturbation, right?”

Nancy heard Beth whisper, “Yes.”

“Everyone is different,” Dieter told Beth philosophically. “You just have to learn what your own best way is.”

Nancy lay watching the rats while she listened to Dieter. He was successful in getting Beth to relax, although Beth did possess the decency to ask, if only once, “What about Nancy?”

“Nancy is asleep,” Dieter said. “Nancy won’t object.”

“I have to be lying on my tummy,” Beth told Dieter, whose grasp of English vernacular wasn’t sound enough for him to understand “tummy.”

Nancy heard Beth roll over. There was no sound for a while, and then there came a change in Beth’s breathing, to which Dieter whispered some encouragement. There was the sound of messy kissing, and Beth panting, and then Beth uttered that special sound, which made the rats run along the top of the latticework partition and caused Nancy to reach for the entrenching tool with her big hands.

While Beth was still moaning, Dieter said to her, “Just wait right there. I have a surprise for you.”

The surprise for Nancy was that the entrenching tool was gone; she was sure she’d brought it to bed with her. She wanted to crack Dieter in the shins with it, just to drop him to his knees so that she could tell him what she thought of him. She’d give Beth one more chance. As she groped under the mosquito net and along the floor beside the bed, looking for the entrenching tool, Nancy still hoped that she and Beth could go to Rajasthan together.

That was when her hand found the jasmine-scented sari that the beautiful woman in the dream had worn. Nancy pulled the sari into bed with her and breathed it in; the scent of it brought the beautiful woman back to her mind—the woman’s unusually large, strong hands… the woman’s unusually upright, firm breasts. Last came the memory of the woman’s unusual penis, which had curled like a snail against Nancy’s buttocks as Nancy drifted into sleep.

“Dieter?” Nancy tried to whisper, but her voice made no sound. It was exactly as they’d told Dieter in Bombay: you go to Goa not to find Rahul but to let Rahul find you. Dieter had been right about one thing: there were chicks with dicks. Rahul wasn’t a hijra—he was a zenana, after all.