Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

That was the way it was with Tessa. Their first conversation was about William Gaddis; they had both read Carpenter's Gothic , and Zubin was halfway through JR. In fact he had never finished JR , but after the party he’d gone home and lain on his back in bed, semierect but postponing jerking off with the relaxed and pleasant anticipation of a sure thing, and turned fifty pages. He didn’t retain much of the content of those pages the next morning, but he remembered having felt that Gaddis was an important part of what he’d called his “literary pedigree,” as he and Tessa gulped cold red wine in the historic, unheated offices of the campus literary magazine. He even told her that he’d started writing poems himself.

“Can I read them?” she asked. As if he could show those poems to anyone!

Tessa moved closer to him; their shoulders and their hips and their knees were pressed together.

“Sure,” he said. “If you want.”

They had finished the wine. Zubin told her that books were a kind of religion for him, that when things seemed unbearable the only comfort he knew was to read. He did not tell her that he was more likely to read science fiction at those times than William Gaddis; he hardly remembered that himself.

“What do you want to do now?” he’d asked, as they stepped out onto the narrow street, where the wind was colder than anything he could have imagined at home. He thought she would say she had class in the morning, or that it was late, or that she was meeting her roommate at eleven, and so it was a surprise to him when she turned and put her tongue in his mouth. The wind disappeared then, and everything was perfectly quiet. When she pulled away, her cheeks and the triangle of exposed skin between her scarf and her jacket were pink. Tessa hung her head, and in a whisper that was more exciting to him than any picture he had ever seen, print or film, said: “Let's go back to your room for a bit.”

He was still writing to Asha then. She was a year below him in school, and her parents had been lenient because they socialized with his parents

(and because Zubin was going to Harvard). They had allowed him to come over and have a cup of tea, and then to take Asha for a walk along Marine Drive, as long as he brought her back well before dark. Once they had walked up the stairs from Hughes Road to Hanging Garden and sat on one of the benches, where the clerks and shopgirls whispered to each other in the foliage. He had ignored her flicker of hesitation and pointed down at the sun setting over the city: the Spenta building with a pink foam of cloud behind it, like a second horizon above the bay. He said that he wouldn’t change the worst of the concrete-block apartments, with their exposed pipes and hanging laundry and water-stained, crumbling facades, because of the way they set off plain Babulnath Temple, made its tinseled orange flag and bulbous dome rise spectacularly from the dense vegetation, like a spaceship landed on Malabar Hill.

He was talking like that because he wanted to kiss her, but he sometimes got carried away. And when he noticed her again he saw that she was almost crying with the strain of how to tell him that she had to get home right now. He pointed to the still-blue sky over the bay (although the light was fading and the people coming up the path were already dark shapes) and took her hand and together they climbed up to the streetlight, and turned left toward her parents’ apartment. They dropped each other's hand automatically when they got to the driveway, but Asha was so relieved that, in the mirrored elevator on the way up, she closed her eyes and let him kiss her.

That kiss was the sum of Zubin's experience, when he lost it with Tessa on Jason Bennet's green futon. He would remember forever the way she pushed him away, knelt in front of him and, with her jeans unbuttoned, arched her back to unhook her bra and free what were still the breasts that Zubin held in his mind's eye: buoyant and pale with surprising long, dark nipples.

Clothed, Tessa's primary feature was her amazing acceptability; there was absolutely nothing wrong with the way she looked or dressed or the things she said at the meetings of the literary magazine. But when he tried to remember her face now, he came up with a white oval into which eyes, a nose and a pair of lips would surface only separately, like leftover Cheerios in a bowl of milk.

When he returned from the States the second time, Asha was married to a lawyer and living in Cusrow Baug. She had twin five-year-old boys, and a three-year-old girl. She had edited a book of essays by famous writers about Bombay. The first time he’d run into her, at a wine tasting at the Taj President, he’d asked her what she was doing and she did not say, like so many Bombay women he knew, that she was married and had three children. She said: “Prostitution.” And when he looked blank, she laughed and said, “I’m doing a book on prostitution now. Interviews and case histories of prostitutes in Mumbai.”

When their city and all of its streets had been renamed overnight, in ’94, Zubin had had long discussions with Indian friends in New York about the political implications of the change. Now that he was back those debates seemed silly. The street signs were just something to notice once and shake your head at, like the sidewalks below them-constantly torn up and then abandoned for months.

His mother was delighted to have him back. “We won’t bother you,” she said. “It will be like you have your own artist's loft.”

“Maybe I should start a salon,” Zubin joked. He was standing in the living room, a few weeks after he’d gotten back, helping himself from a bottle of Rémy Martin.

“Or a saloon,” his father remarked, passing through.

He didn’t tell his parents that he was writing a book, mostly because only three of the thirty poems he’d begun were actually finished; that regrettable fact was not his fault, but the fault of the crow that lived on the sheet of tin that was patching the roof over his bedroom window. He’d learned to ignore the chain saw from the new apartment block that was going up under spindly bamboo scaffolding, the hammering across the road, the twenty-four-hour traffic and the fishwallah who came through their apartment blocks between ten and ten thirty every morning, carrying a steel case on his head and calling “hell-o, hell-o, hell-o.” These were routine sounds, but the crow was clever. It called at uneven intervals, so that just as Zubin was convinced it had gone away, it began again. The sound was mournful and rough, as depressing as a baby wailing; it sounded to Zubin like despair.

When he’d first got back to Bombay, he’d been embarrassed about the way his students’ parents introduced him: “BA from Harvard; Henry fellow at Oxford; Ph.D. from Columbia.” He would correct them and say that he hadn’t finished the Ph.D. (in fact, he’d barely started his disserta- tion) when he quit. That honesty had made everyone unhappy, and had been bad for business. Now he said his dissertation was in progress. He told his students’ parents that he wanted to spend a little time here, since he would probably end up in the States.

The parents assumed that he’d come back to get married. They pushed their children toward him, yelling at them: “Listen to Zubin; he's done three degrees-two on scholarship-not lazy and spoiled like you. Aren’t I paying enough for this tutoring?” They said it in Hindi, as if he couldn’t understand.

The kids were rapt and attentive. They did the practice tests he assigned them; they wrote the essays and read the books. They didn’t care about Harvard, Oxford and Columbia. They were thinking of Boston, London and New York. He could read their minds. The girls asked about particular shops; the boys wanted to know how many girlfriends he had had, and how far they’d been willing to go.