Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

I waited for him to rise out of the stairwell. The wind made my petticoat, drying on the clothesline, go clap, clap . I was smiling rigidly. How was your day? How was your day? Was your day good? Don’t be so afraid, I told myself. What does it matter how you say hello? Tomorrow will come, and the day after, and the day after that.

His steps sounded like a shuffle. Leather rubbing against stone. Something forlorn and steady in the sound made me feel as if I were twenty years older and this were a game I should stop or I might get hurt. Rajinder, Rajinder, Rajinder, how are you?

First the head: oval, high forehead, handsome eyebrows. Then the not so broad but not so narrow shoulders. The top two buttons of the cream shirt were opened, revealing an undershirt and some hair. The two weeks had not changed him, yet seeing him, I felt as if he were somehow different, denser.

“How was your day?” I asked him while he was still in the stairwell.

“All right,” he said, stepping onto the balcony. He smiled, and I felt happy. His helmet was in his left hand and he had a plastic bag of mangoes in his right. “When did you get home?” The “you” was informal, and I felt a surge of relief. He will not resist, I thought.

“A little after three.”

I followed him into the bedroom. He placed the helmet on the windowsill and the mangoes in the refrigerator. His careful way of folding the plastic bag before placing it in the basket on top of the refrigerator moved me. “Your father is fine?” I did not say anything.

Rajinder walked to the sink on the outside bathroom wall. I stood in the bedroom doorway and watched him wash his hands and face with soap. Before putting the chunk of soap down, he rinsed it of foam, and only then did he pour water on himself. He used a thin washcloth hanging on a nearby hook for drying.

“Yes,” I said.

“What did the doctor say?” he asked, turning toward me. He is like a black diamond, I thought.

She said, I love you. “She said he must lose weight and watch what he eats. Nothing fattening. That he should rest at first and then start exercising. Walking would be best.”

I watched Rajinder hang his shirt by the collar tips on the clothesline and suddenly felt sad at the rigorous attention to detail necessary to preserve love. Perhaps love is different in other countries, I thought, where the climate is cooler, where a woman can say her husband’s name, where the power does not go out every day, where not every clerk demands a bribe. That must be a different type of love, I thought, where one can be careless.

“It will rain tonight,” he said, looking at the sky.

The eucalyptus trees shook their heads from side to side. “The rain always makes me feel as if I am waiting for someone,” I said, and then regretted saying it, for Rajinder was not paying attention, and perhaps it could have been said better. “Why don’t you sit on the balcony, and I will make sherbet to drink?”

He took a chair and the newspaper with him. The fridge water was warm, and I felt sad again at the need for constant vigilance. I made the drink and gave him his glass. I placed mine on the floor and went to get a chair. A fruit seller passed by, calling out in a reedy voice, “Sweet, sweet mangoes. Sweeter than first love.” On the roof directly across, a boy seven or eight years old was trying to fly a large purple kite. I sat down beside Rajinder and waited for him to look up so that I could interrupt his reading. When Rajinder looked away from the paper to take a sip of sherbet, I asked, “Did you fly kites?”

“A little,” he answered, looking at the boy. “Ashok bought some with the money he earned, and he would let me fly them sometimes.” The fact that his father had died when he was young made me hopeful, for I thought that one must suffer and be lonely before one can love.

“Do you like Ashok?”

“He is my brother,” he answered, shrugging and looking at the newspaper. He took a sip of the sherbet. I felt hurt, as if he had reprimanded me.

I waited until seven for the power to return; then I gave up and started to prepare dinner in the dark. I sat beside Rajinder until then. I felt happy and excited and frightened being beside him. We spoke about Asha’s going to America, though Rajinder did not want to talk about this. Rajinder had been the most educated member of his and my family and resented the idea that Asha would soon assume that position.

As I cooked in the kitchen, Rajinder sat on the balcony and listened to the radio. “This is Akashwani,” the announcer said, and then music like horses racing played whenever a new program was about to start. It was very hot in the kitchen, and every now and then I stepped onto the roof to look at the curve of Rajinder’s neck and confirm that the tenderness was still there.

We ate in the living room. Rajinder chewed slowly and was mostly silent. Once he complimented me on my cooking. “What are you thinking?” I asked. He appeared not to have heard. Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! I thought, and was shocked by the urgency I felt.

A candle on the television made pillars of shadows rise and collapse on the walls. I searched for something to start a conversation with. “Pitaji began crying when I left.”

“You could have stayed a few more days,” he said.

“I did not want to.” I thought of adding, “I missed you,” but that would have been a lie, and I would have felt embarrassed saying it, when he had not missed me.

Rajinder mixed black pepper with his yogurt. “Did you tell him you would visit soon?”

“No. I think he was crying because he was lonely.”

“He should have more courage.” Rajinder did not like Pitaji, thought him weak-willed, although Rajinder had never told me that. He knew Pitaji drank, but Rajinder never referred to this, for which I was grateful. “He is old and must remember that shadows creep into one’s heart at his age.” The shutter of a bedroom window began slamming, and I got up to latch it shut.

I washed the dishes while Rajinder bathed. When he came out, dressed in his white kurta pajamas, with his hair slicked back, I was standing near the railing at the roof’s edge, looking out beyond the darkness of our neighborhood at a distant ribbon of light. I was tired from the nervousness I had been feeling all evening. Rajinder came up behind me and asked, “Won’t you bathe?” I suddenly doubted my ability to guard my love. Bathe so we can have sex. His words were too deliberately full of the unsaid, and so felt vulgar. I wondered if I had the courage to say no and realized I didn’t. What kind of love can we have? I thought.

I said, “In a little while. Comedy hour is about to start.” We sat down on our chairs with the radio between us and listened to Maurya’s whiny voice. This week he had gotten involved with criminals who wanted to go to jail to collect the reward on themselves. The canned laughter gusted from several flats. When the music of the racing horses marked the close of the show, I felt hopeful again, and thought Rajinder looked very handsome in his kurta pajamas.

I bathed carefully, pouring mug after mug of cold water over myself until my fingertips were wrinkled and my nipples erect. The candlelight made the bathroom orange and my skin copper. I washed my pubis carefully to make sure no smell remained from urinating. Rubbing myself dry, I became aroused. I wore the red sari again, with a new blouse, and no bra, so that my nipples would show.

I came and stood beside Rajinder, my arm brushing against his kurta sleeve. Every now and then a raindrop fell, and I wondered if I was imagining it. On balconies and roofs all around us I could see the dim figures of men, women, and children waiting for the first rain. “You look pretty,” he said. Somewhere Lata Mangeshkar sang with a static-induced huskiness. The street was silent. Even the children were hushed. As the wind picked up, Rajinder said, “Let’s close the windows.”