Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

And so the courtship enters a second phase.

When she gets back to Cedar Falls, Ted Suminski is standing on the front porch. It’s late at night, chilly. He is wearing a down vest. She’s never seen him on the porch. In fact there’s no chair to sit on. He looks chilled through. He’s waited around a while.

“Hi.” She has her keys ready. This isn’t the night to offer the six-pack in the fridge. He looks expectant, ready to pounce.

“Hi.” He looks like a man who might have aimed the dart at her. What has he done to his wife, his kids? Why isn’t there at least a dog? “Say, I left a note upstairs.”

The note is written in Magic Marker and thumb-tacked to her apartment door. DUE TO PERSONAL REASONS, NAMELY REMARRIAGE, I REQUEST THAT YOU VACATE MY PLACE AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER.

Maya takes the note down and retacks it to the kitchen wall. The whole wall is like a bulletin board, made of some new, crumbly building-material. Her kitchen, Ted Suminski had told her, was once a child’s bedroom. Suminski in love: the idea stuns her. She has misread her landlord. The dart at her window speaks of no twisted fantasy. The landlord wants the tenant out.

She gets a glass out of the kitchen cabinet, gets out a tray of ice, pours herself a shot of Fran’s bourbon. She is happy for Ted Suminski. She is. She wants to tell someone how moved she’d been by Mrs. Chatterji’s singing. How she’d felt in O’Hare, even about Dr. Rab Chatterji in the car. But Fran is not the person. No one she’s ever met is the person. She can’t talk about the dead space she lives in. She wishes Ashoke Mehta would call. Right now.

Weeks pass. Then two months. She finds a new room, signs another lease. Her new landlord calls himself Fred. He has no arms, but he helps her move her things. He drives between Ted Suminski’s place and his twice in his station wagon. He uses his toes the way Maya uses her fingers. He likes to do things. He pushes garbage sacks full of Maya’s clothes up the stairs.

“It’s all right to stare,” Fred says. “Hell, I would.”

That first afternoon in Fred’s rooming house, they share a Chianti. Fred wants to cook her pork chops but he’s a little shy about Indians and meat. Is it beef, or pork? Or any meat? She says it’s okay, any meat, but not tonight. He has an ex-wife in Des Moines, two kids in Portland, Oregon. The kids are both normal; he’s the only freak in the family. But he’s self-reliant. He shops in the supermarket like anyone else, he carries out the garbage, shovels the snow off the sidewalk. He needs Maya’s help with one thing. Just one thing. The box of Tide is a bit too heavy to manage. Could she get him the giant size every so often and leave it in the basement?

The dead space need not suffocate. Over the months, Fred and she will settle into companionship. She has never slept with a man without arms. Two wounded people, he will joke during their nightly contortions. It will shock her, this assumed equivalence with a man so strikingly deficient. She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak.

One night in spring, Fred’s phone rings. “Ashoke Mehta speaking.” None of this “do you remember me?” nonsense. The god has tracked her down. He hasn’t forgotten. “Hullo,” he says, in their special way. And because she doesn’t answer back, “Hullo, hullo, hullo.” She is aware of Fred in the back of the room. He is lighting a cigarette with his toes.

“Yes,” she says, “I remember.”

“I had to take care of a problem,” Ashoke Mehta says. “You know that I have my vices. That time at O’Hare I was honest with you.”

She is breathless.

“Who is it, May?” asks Fred.

“You also have a problem,” says the voice. His laugh echoes. “You will come to Hartford, I know.”

When she moves out, she tells herself, it will not be the end of Fred’s world.

ENG stands just inside our bedroom door, her fidgety fist on the doorknob which Sharon, in a sulk, polished to a gleam yesterday afternoon.

“I’m starved,” she says.

I know a sick little girl when I see one. I brought the twins up without much help ten years ago. Eng’s got a high fever. Brownish stains stiffen the nap of her terry robe. Sour smells fill the bedroom.

“For God’s sake leave us alone,” Sharon mutters under the quilt. She turns away from me. We bought the quilt at a garage sale in Rock Springs the Sunday two years ago when she moved in. “Talk to her.”

Sharon works on this near-marriage of ours. I’ll hand it to her, she really does. I knead her shoulders, and I say, “Easy, easy,” though I really hate it when she treats Eng like a deafmute. “My girl speaks English, remember?”

Eng can outcuss any freckle-faced kid on the block. Someone in the killing fields must have taught her. Maybe her mama, the honeyest-skinned bar girl with the tiniest feet in Saigon. I was an errand boy with the Combined Military Intelligence. I did the whole war on Dexedrine. Vietnam didn’t happen, and I’d put it behind me in marriage and fatherhood and teaching high school. Ten years later came the screw-ups with the marriage, the job, women, the works. Until Eng popped up in my life, I really believed it didn’t happen.

“Come here, sweetheart,” I beg my daughter. I sidle closer to Sharon, so there’ll be room under the quilt for Eng.

“I’m starved,” she complains from the doorway. She doesn’t budge. The robe and hair are smelling something fierce. She doesn’t show any desire to cuddle. She must be sick. She must have thrown up all night. Sharon throws the quilt back. “Then go raid the refrigerator like a normal kid,” she snaps.

Once upon a time Sharon used to be a cheerful, accommodating woman. It isn’t as if Eng was dumped on us out of the blue. She knew I was tracking my kid. Coming to terms with the past was Sharon’s idea. I don’t know what happened to that Sharon. “For all you know, Jason,” she’d said, “the baby died of malaria or something.” She said, “Go on, find out and deal with it.” She said she could handle being a stepmother — better a fresh chance with some orphan off the streets of Saigon than with my twins from Rochester. My twins are being raised in some organic-farming lesbo commune. Their mother breeds Nubian goats for a living. “Come get in bed with us, baby. Let Dad feel your forehead. You burning up with fever?”

“She isn’t hungry, I think she’s sick,” I tell Sharon, but she’s already tugging her sleeping mask back on. “I think she’s just letting us know she hurts.”

I hold my arms out wide for Eng to run into. If I could, I’d suck the virus right out of her. In the jungle, VC mamas used to do that. Some nights we’d steal right up to a hootch — just a few of us intense sons of bitches on some special mission — and the women would be at their mumbo jumbo. They’d be sticking coins and amulets into napalm burns.

“I’m hungry, Dad.” It comes out as a moan. Okay, she doesn’t run into my arms, but at least she’s come as far in as the foot of our bed. “Dad, let’s go down to the kitchen. Just you and me.”

I am about to let that pass though I can feel Sharon’s body go into weird little jerks and twitches when my baby adds with emphatic viciousness, “Not her, Dad. We don’t want her with us in the kitchen.”

“She loves you,” I protest. Love — not spite — makes Eng so territorial; that’s what I want to explain to Sharon. She’s a sick, frightened, foreign kid, for Chrissake. “Don’t you, Sharon? Sharon’s concerned about you.”

But Sharon turns over on her stomach. “You know what’s wrong with you, Jase? You can’t admit you’re being manipulated. You can’t cut through the ‘frightened-foreign-kid’ shit.”