That Summer in Paris Read online

  Other than Vedika, no other woman had come to him on the strength of his words, though many had stayed because of it. Valérie had called his words venereal, and when he had objected, saying that he never wrote about sex, she had said that it was irrelevant, they contained a wisdom that included the erotic. His words were still having their impact, diffusing into this young woman’s body honed by yoga. He wondered what she was like, this girl who called herself Dogpose. Did his words reach all the way into her groin or stop in her head? Did they give her a bellyache? The women from the past had, each one, reacted differently to his books.

  Prem used to know Vedika and Harry when he was still with the anger monger, Angie, as he called her in his own mind. After Meher’s marriage Prem found Angie and fancied he’d fallen in love and grown up too. But with Angie it turned out to be more and less than love at the same time. Prem dragged out their relationship for six years out of sheer fear of her temper. Prem and Angie had met the handsome Bedi couple at a party when Prem was writing Raga. He had two books behind him when the Bedis invited them for dinner to their Upper West Side apartment. There was an easy and instant bond between Harry—as Bedi was known to friends—and Prem. Prem just as easily adored Harry’s wife, initially referring to her only as bhabhi or brother’s wife. After he successfully disentangled himself from Angie’s viselike grip and retreated to a monastic existence to focus on his elegy to Meher, the Bedis became some of the few people he frequented. And often, since Harry was away to perform specialized heart surgery in a hospital in Florida, Prem found himself taking afternoon walks with his bhabhi. He started calling her by the nickname he gave her as a joke one day.

  “But why Vedika?”

  “Someone who knows the Vedas. You’re always telling me stories from the scriptures. You know all the stories that involve ‘the good.’ You are ‘the good.’”

  “Why must you mock me thus?”

  “I’m not mocking you. If your goodness were less true, it would be banal.”

  What had started as admiration and adoration for she who was so good and pure, modest, Indian in her virtues, and Western in her openness, turned soon into an anxious longing.

  A longing laden with sentiments he was unable to parse neatly or analyze with the help of his past; his past of two women: Meher and Angie. Meher, the sole recipient of his adolescent longing, sibling love, devotion, and in some of their moments together, the teacher, the adult, the protective older sister. Distinctions as other people learned them, between admiration and lust, platonic love and filial, teacher and student, older and younger, friend and sister, the absolute and the partial, had not existed for Prem. The universe he shared with Meher was organic, a living, breathing, entity that could be divided into these categories no less or more than a little puppy could be divided into its heart, brain, tongue, and tail. With Angie, Prem learned what lust and excitement meant when divorced from brotherly affection and awe. Images of Angie riding him, spreading her cheeks for him, acting obscene, never failed to agitate Prem’s biology as if he were being lashed by a thunderstorm.

  In his quest to understand the hollowness of his being when he did not see Vedika on a given day, Prem asked himself the obvious question, Do I want to sleep with her? He was unable to imagine Vedika exhibiting desire, wanting to be penetrated, wanting pleasure, giving pleasure in the forbidden ways that made him still feel ashamed of his manhood. And because he was unable to imagine it, he couldn’t fantasize his way out of it. How was Harry—no matter how much he loved his wife—capable of making love to a woman as restrained in her sexuality as bhabhi and as incapable of frivolity as a mother?

  Prem put aside all analysis of the problem and dealt instead with its symptoms. By following a strict routine of art, friends, cinema, and classical concerts on the days he did not see bhabhi, he could get through the day without feeling sick.

  The writing of Meher was a self-evisceration in itself so complete and painful that it was hard to imagine that he could feel anything outside of its anguish. Yet the days without contact with bhabhi were so much worse that it seemed the very torment of writing fed the miserable longing for bhabhi. Seeing bhabhi assuaged the pain of his interior life and eased the effort of fictionalizing his life with Meher. Real life impinged on the emotional scars he was dredging up for his fiction, rubbing salt into his wounds.

  Plying himself with excuses of every sort, Prem locked the set of unanswered questions pertaining to Vedika in a steel vault deep within himself. He bore the burden of friendliness and gentlemanliness with a smile for months.

  He was ready for anything but the answer to his unasked questions. It came without any intervention from his will, like a breeze blowing through the quarters of a city, the city that was his brain. The answer in fact came as question: does she shudder when she is in the throes of pleasure, and does she hide her shudder modestly? No longer under pressure from Prem, his imagination had, on its own accord, gone ahead and freed itself.

  The change in his sentiments for Vedika was like the change in the texture of egg white into meringue. The raw material of his feelings, the affection, the love, the caring stayed the same, but that day it hardened in his groin. He said a hasty goodbye after lunch. He still remembered it clearly. Vedika had told him she had just come from buying her spices. She had procured fresh curry leaves for a dish for Prem. There was only one store that sold Indian spices in Manhattan then, Kalustyans. In the scorching midsummer heat Vedika had taken the subway for thirty-five minutes each way to get a few stems of green.

  Prem withdrew more into himself in Vedika’s presence, riddled simultaneously by a sense of shame and a sense of desire. He had been dining in the Bedis’ home several times a week as a matter of course at this point and was welcomed and trusted like a brother. Declining Vedika’s casual—why don’t you come over tomorrow—invitations was not an option, especially with Harry in Florida overseeing the founding of a large heart center. She relied on him to do the manly things that needed to be done when Harry was not around, and Harry relied on his friend to take care of his wife. Vedika had never for a moment shown the slightest tear in the fabric of her love for Harry.

  The change in the texture of his emotions went beyond the meringue in his pants. The constant hollowness he had been feeling now turned into a searing physical pain. His chest burned all the time. Harry’s antacids did not help. Vedika plying him with yogurt did not help. Even Meher his sister and Meher his work receded into the background. Prem went to sleep believing that he could practically see a piece of hot metal passing through his throat and his chest, his stomach, and his cock, so great was the pain.

  To drain out some of the misery, he let it leak on paper. He took the two hundred pages of Meher he had written already and injected them with the sap that was about to burst through his body. I will make love to Vedika in my writing. It was the only way to express what he absolutely had to have without causing harm to them all. The act of writing became the sex he had. Meher became a parallel stage where his transgressions were acted out. For a few liberated weeks he was back in control. Prem was young and still naïve about the power of literature and words, his words.

  He gave the Meher in the book some of the characteristics of Vedika. When he took stock of his new draft and took stock of Vedika at lunch one day, he had the sinking realization that he had just managed to dig himself into a deeper hole. By reflecting on Vedika without the constraints of everyday life and politesse, he had put his foot on the gas pedal. Love was gushing at limitless speed through all the pistons and cylinders of his body. He broke down over lunch and asked her if she would read the draft of his novel. If you will have this sex with me. Full of fondness for Prem, Vedika inevitably said yes.

  Vedika had been susceptible, no less than Prem, to the powerful universe he had created. On reading Meher, she saw herself but also someone not herself. She longed for the intensity of Prem’s love to be directed to her. His imaginary universe heightened real life by giving it the
power of transcendence possible only in art. Art that fitted ordinary people with the wings of Eros, Eros who was not just the god of love but the creative fluid pumping in every human breast.

  Prem’s language in the book, as in all his books, was constrained. The slight physical contact between the characters therefore left Vedika famished for more: a physical hunger that could be satisfied by only one person, the author.

  Prem read the lines on the Internet posting again and then went to the bookshelf on the other side of his studio. He thumbed through Pascal’s latest book and found the chapter titled “Tell me what you would ask him if you met him.” He read the chapter standing up. In the story Pascal went from one provincial bookstore to another and hung around until he saw a woman leafing through one of his books. He’d then approach her and ask what she would ask the writer and proceed to answer the question for real. Prem chuckled.

  He walked to his lectern and pulled out his fountain pen. He wrote several drafts of a possible e-mail to send the girl. They were all too long. Finally he just went back to his laptop to type in an answer directly. Hitting the reply button was not enough. The screen asked him to log in. The log-in button hurled another thirty questions in his direction, but Johnson’s story had somehow demystified the process for Prem, who was determined not to call Kenny and expose himself to total ridicule. After an hour struggling with check boxes and providing information on his age, his address, his income, his sexual preference, and his favorite magazine subscriptions, Prem was finally congratulated on becoming a member and asked to choose a screen name. Impatient and no longer in a mood to agonize, he chose Indian Man of Letters as his screen name, and when an empty message tablet popped up for his message to the girl, he typed:

  I don’t worship at my own altar. What are you going to ask me?

  Maya preened herself in the shower longer than usual. Even if there was no chemistry with Plume, she was sure that an engagement centered on a discussion of the three Ps could not be boring. He had promised her a story about Pascal Boutin. There were few people in her tiny circle of friends who read any fiction at all, and none had followed an author from first book to last. Scrubbing her back with a sponge in the shower, Maya recited some lines from Rimbaud. Water trickled into her mouth. She hummed happily and got ready.

  They met in the fiction section of the bookstore at Lincoln Center. Plume was thumbing From Kerala to Karela. He turned it toward her, pointing to a page full of alliterations. They read it together in a whisper, “perverse, parsimonious, pedagogical, pedophilic, patronizing, parabolic, prevaricating, pensive, poisonous, pig-headed pagan.”

  Plume shut the book and looked at Maya.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said in a low voice.

  “I’m Roger Johnson, by the way,” he responded in an equally low voice.

  “My name is Maya.”

  “Should we get something to eat?”

  Maya’s skin was white with an underlying hue, like a painting that was painted on straw linen and not on pure white gessoed canvas. Her eyebrows were perfect and symmetrical and, like her hair, were a darkish brown color.

  Over dinner Maya and Roger excitedly recounted the circumstances under which they had read every Boutin and Rustum book and the plots, characters, and styles that found most favor with them. They had both been to the museum where Rustum’s blueprints for his various novels were archived.

  “It isn’t the blueprints”—Johnson lifted his two hands to make quotation marks in the air around blueprints—“that make him brilliant. It’s precisely that no hint of all the drudgery shows up in the final work that is amazing.”

  “His prose is electric. You can practically see a current running through his sentences page after page. A tautness and muscularity holding up the ideas.”

  “Your Internet posting asking for Prem was really quite unlike what I’ve seen before. Do you think you’ve mixed up the writer with the man?”

  Maya paused by moving back in her seat. She had thought many times of meeting Prem—how could she not have? The very first paragraph of the very first Prem book Maya had read had caused every hair on her body to stand on end. Her mammary papillae had hardened, and the skin around her areolae had puckered.

  “You tell me. Did he live up to your expectations in person, or were you disappointed by the man behind the writer?”

  “I was nervous at the dinner where I met him. I think I said a few stupid things about other writers. But then I got less self-conscious and I could observe him. The way he was fit with what I had imagined. He was kind—that was surprising, I guess.”

  “You didn’t think he’d be kind? He examines the world with such rapt attention, it’s only possible if one is without barriers. One of my yoga instructors once said that ‘love is attention giving.’”

  “That’s not too far off, actually. Prem looks at you, and you feel like your skin is melting away and he’s penetrating you to the very core. You want to reveal yourself because you get this feeling you can reveal all of you. I hope I can be his friend. Actually, if I were a woman, I might even have been attracted to him. Seventy-five though he is.”

  “Does he smell like an old geezer?”

  “I didn’t get that close.” Johnson came closer to Maya.

  “You know what I mean. Haven’t you taken an elevator with one?” Maya hovered tantalizingly in the space between them. She could smell Johnson, and he smelled of light cologne.

  “No, he didn’t smell. Can we stop talking about him now?” Johnson’s face was all the way forward, inviting Maya for a kiss.

  “You’re the one who started it,” she said with a smile.

  “Surely we are not going to speak only about other writers,” Johnson remarked.

  “He’s hardly another writer!”

  “Why won’t you talk about your work?”

  “It’ll be a novel, that’s all I’ll say.”

  “Do you want to come back to my place for a cup of tea?”

  They returned to Roger Johnson’s apartment and kissed to Miles Davis. Johnson’s hands were soft, his breath sweet.

  “Will you spend the night?”

  “I’m not going to sleep with you even if I spend the night.”

  “That’s fine. Let’s get into bed and cuddle.”

  Cuddle. A childish word. Okay, forget it now. Maya got into his bed in her T-shirt.

  Johnson held her all night running his smooth fingers over her forearms as Maya slept. The apartment was on the avenue, and by six-thirty it was already too loud to sleep. Maya got out of bed and put on her pants.

  “You’re going to leave so soon?”

  “I have to get back and do some work.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes, of course. You forgot to tell me your Boutin story. I’ll call you.”

  Maya went back home and found a new message waiting from someone called Indian Man of Letters.

  What are you going to ask me?

  Almost certain it was a joke, she got to work on the article she was editing for a scientific magazine. She had to check all the footnotes and make sure the citations were exact. At lunchtime she went to the diner across the street and ordered a feta omelet.

  “No book today, miss?” Costas asked her as he put the omelet in front of her.

  “It’s impossible to read here!”

  She ate watching the empty stool where Mrs. Nona sat. On solitary days Maya could identify with Mrs. Nona who, she was sure, was also feeling alone.

  “You want an espresso on me?” Costas offered.

  “No thanks, I don’t drink espresso. She’s not yet here today?”

  “She’ll come along for sure, unless she’s dead,” he said, laughing.

  As Maya paid, Mrs. Nona walked in and sat down ignoring everyone’s hellos. Would Rustum live as long as Mrs. Nona? She prayed he would produce books at the same rate for another ten or fifteen years. There was no chance he was Indian Man of Letters. Him/not him/him. And yet what harm
could come from replying?

  Under the subject heading Maya wrote:

  I am asking you.

  Then she typed her message:

  Do you think desire can be totally arbitrary?

  Simply writing the one line to Dogpose had put Prem in a good mood for the next morning. He woke up feeling energetic.

  “Mrs. Smith, don’t expect me for lunch. I’ll be in the city for the day,” he said when she served him his two toasts with marmalade.

  “Mr. Rustum, did you ask for a car?” He shook his head. “Let me call the service. When should they pick you up?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  Mrs. Smith went to the living room, and he heard her call the car. “The car will be here in ten minutes. You have Matthew today.”

  “Oh! Good.”

  Prem asked the driver to drop him in Chinatown and pick him up in an hour in the Village. He wandered past a frenzy of fish-loading activity before hitting the Chinese cake stalls that smelled like the bakery next to his house in Bombay sixty years ago. Rustum hummed and walked jauntily. He was wearing a blue shirt and a neatly folded silk scarf of a deeper blue. His thick silver-gray hair had a metallic sheen that wasn’t very different from the steel buildings in Manhattan. The contrast against his brown skin was dramatic. If he had looked exotic and debonair when he was young, he now looked terribly striking. There were wrinkles on his face, but it was gaunt, its angular planes almost startling. His nose had always been his best feature. It was still proud, noble, Roman. All in all, a handsome man.

  Prem chose his streets carefully. A block of little Italy, a few gentrified blocks with boutiques, Lafayette Street going north with its wide-angled fish-eye view, and then up on Broadway to take a quick look in the window of Shakespeare & Company. His book was still in the central position, where it had been since it got on the New York Times best-seller list twenty-five weeks ago, the week of its release. From there Prem walked into a diner on University Place. It was still early, and the place was almost empty. He ordered a coffee and looked at the girls on the sidewalk outside. It was a nippy day, and everyone was wearing coats and mufflers. Prem searched their faces for signs of an intelligent life or at least an interior life. He called his agent, Edward.