Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

“I don’t think I can handle anything that heavy-duty,” Fran says when she comes back to the room. She means the omelette. “I have to go home in any case.” She lives with her mother and her aunt, two women in their mid-seventies, in a drafty farmhouse. The farmhouse now has a computer store catty-corner from it. Maya’s been to the farm. She’s been shown photographs of the way the corner used to be. If land values ever rebound, Fran will be worth millions.

Before Fran leaves she says, “Has Rab Chatterji called you yet?”

“No.” She remembers the name, a good, reliable Bengali name, from the first night’s study of the phone book. Dr. Rabindra Chatterji teaches Physics.

“He called the English office just before I left.” She takes car keys out of her pocketbook. She reknots her scarf. “I bet Indian men are more sensitive than Americans. Rab’s a Brahmin, that’s what people say.”

A Chatterji has to be a Bengali Brahmin — last names give ancestral secrets away — but Brahminness seems to mean more to Fran than it does to Maya. She was born in 1954, six full years after India became independent. Her India was Nehru’s India: a charged, progressive place.

“All Indian men are wife beaters,” Maya says. She means it and doesn’t mean it. “That’s why I married an American.” Fran knows about the divorce, but nothing else. Fran is on the Hiring, Tenure, and Reappointment Committee.

Maya sees Fran down the stairs and to the car which is parked in the back in the spot reserved for Maya’s car, if she had owned one. It will take her several months to save enough to buy one. She always pays cash, never borrows. She tells herself she’s still recovering from the U-Haul drive halfway across the country. Ted Suminski is in his kitchen watching the women. Maya waves to him because waving to him, acknowledging him in that way, makes him seem less creepy. He seems to live alone though a sign, THE SUMINSKIS, hangs from a metal horse’s head in the front yard. Maya hasn’t seen Mrs. Suminski. She hasn’t seen any children either. Ted always looks lonely. When she comes back from campus, he’s nearly always in the back, throwing darts or shooting baskets.

“What’s he like?” Fran gestures with her head as she starts up her car. “You hear these stories.”

Maya doesn’t want to know the stories. She has signed a year’s lease. She doesn’t want complications. “He’s all right. I keep out of his way.”

“You know what I’m thinking? Of all the people in Cedar Falls, you’re the one who could understand Vera best. His wanting to try out his wings, run away, stuff like that.”

“Not really.” Maya is not being modest. Fran is being impulsively democratic, lumping her wayward lover and Indian friend together as headstrong adventurers. For Fran, a Utopian and feminist, borders don’t count. Maya’s taken some big risks, made a break with her parents’ ways. She’s done things a woman from Ballygunge Park Road doesn’t do, even in fantasies. She’s not yet shared stories with Fran, apart from the divorce. She’s told her nothing of men she picks up, the reputation she’d gained, before Cedar Falls, for “indiscretions.” She has a job, equity, three friends she can count on for emergencies. She is an American citizen. But.

Fran’s Brahmin calls her two nights later. On the phone he presents himself as Dr. Chatterji, not Rabindra or Rab. An oldfashioned Indian, she assumes. Her father still calls his closest friend, “Colonel.” Dr. Chatterji asks her to tea on Sunday. She means to say no but hears herself saying, “Sunday? Fiveish? I’m not doing anything special this Sunday.”

Outside, Ted Suminski is throwing darts into his garage door. The door has painted-on rings: orange, purple, pink. The bull’s- eye is gray. He has to be fifty at least. He is a big, thick, lonely man about whom people tell stories. Maya pulls the phone cord as far as it’ll go so she can look down more directly on her landlord’s large, bald head. He has his back to her as he lines up a dart. He’s in black running shoes, red shorts, he’s naked to the waist. He hunches his right shoulder, he pulls the arm back; a big, lonely man shouldn’t have so much grace. The dart is ready to cut through the September evening. But Ted Suminski doesn’t let go. He swings on worn rubber soles, catches her eye in the window (she has to have imagined this), takes aim at her shadow. Could she have imagined the noise of the dart’s metal tip on her windowpane?

Dr. Chatterji is still on the phone. “You are not having any mode of transportation, is that right?”

Ted Suminski has lost interest in her. Perhaps it isn’t interest, at all; perhaps it’s aggression. “I don’t drive,” she lies, knowing it sounds less shameful than not owning a car. She has said this so often she can get in the right degree of apology and Asian upper-class helplessness. “It’s an awful nuisance.”

“Not to worry, please.” Then, “It is a great honor to be meeting Dr. Sanyal’s daughter. In Calcutta business circles he is a legend.”

On Sunday she is ready by four-thirty. She doesn’t know what the afternoon holds; there are surely no places for “high tea”—a colonial tradition — in Cedar Falls, Iowa. If he takes her back to his place, it will mean he has invited other guests. From his voice she can tell Dr. Chatterji likes to do things correctly. She has dressed herself in a peach-colored nylon georgette sari, jade drop-earrings and a necklace. The color is good on dark skin. She is not pretty, but she does her best. Working at it is a part of self-respect. In the mid-seventies, when American women felt rather strongly about such things, Maya had been in trouble with her women’s group at Duke. She was too feminine. She had tried to explain the world she came out of. Her grandmother had been married off at the age of five in a village now in Bangladesh. Her great-aunt had been burned to death over a dowry problem. She herself had been trained to speak softly, arrange flowers, sing, be pliant. If she were to seduce Ted Suminski, she thinks as she waits in the front yard for Dr. Chatterji, it would be minor heroism. She has broken with the past. But.

Dr. Chatterji drives up for her at about five ten. He is a hesitant driver. The car stalls, jumps ahead, finally slams to a stop. Maya has to tell him to back off a foot or so; it’s hard to leap over two sacks of pruned branches in a sari. Ted Suminski is an obsessive pruner and gardener.

“My sincerest apologies, Mrs. Sanyal,” Dr. Chatterji says. He leans across the wide front seat of his noisy, very old, very used car and unlocks the door for her. “I am late. But then, I am sure you’re remembering that Indian Standard Time is not at all the same as time in the States.” He laughs. He could be nervous — she often had that effect on Indian men. Or he could just be chatty. “These Americans are all the time rushing and rushing but where it gets them?” He moves his head laterally once, twice. It’s the gesture made famous by Peter Sellers. When Peter Sellers did it, it had seemed hilarious. Now it suggests that Maya and Dr. Chatterji have three thousand years plus civilization, sophistication, moral virtue, over people born on this continent. Like her, Dr. Chatterji is a naturalized American.

“Call me Maya,” she says. She fusses with the seat belt. She does it because she needs time to look him over. He seems quite harmless. She takes in the prominent teeth, the eyebrows that run together. He’s in a blue shirt and a beige cardigan with the K-Mart logo that buttons tightly over the waist. It’s hard to guess his age because he has dyed his hair and his moustache. Late thirties, early forties. Older than she had expected. “Not Mrs. Sanyal.”

This isn’t the time to tell about ex-husbands. She doesn’t know where John is these days. He should have kept up at least. John had come into her life as a graduate student at Duke, and she, mistaking the brief breathlessness of sex for love, had married him. They had stayed together two years, maybe a little less. The pain that John had inflicted all those years ago by leaving her had subsided into a cozy feeling of loss. This isn’t the time, but then she doesn’t want to be a legend’s daughter all evening. She’s not necessarily on Dr. Chatterji’s side is what she wants to get across early; she’s not against America and Americans. She makes the story — of marriage outside the Brahminic pale, the divorce — quick, dull. Her unsentimentality seems to shock him. His stomach sags inside the cardigan.