Nights Like This (6 page)

“Why not?” she asked, “I don't interrupt their evening. I don't talk to them. I just take a seat and watch them. And I get a feel for how they live, what they know. It's interesting.”

“What are you, a stalker?”

She laughed.

“No, I'm a writer.”

I didn't know how to feel about Vanessa being a writer. Every coffee shop I knew had many writers most of whom used “writer” to mean jobless and slightly depressed. I was somewhat turned off by this image and I felt as if my magical evening of full worlds and empty words was coming to a quick end. I asked the question I thought needed asking.

“Have you ever published anything?”

“I don't talk about my writing.”

I was relieved. I didn't want to hear about her writing either. I didn't want to hear about anyone's writing. We started walking again towards our unknown destination.

“I'm employed as a schoolteacher,” she finally said.

“So you're a teacher?”

“No, I work as a teacher. I define myself as a writer.”

It was a lot of bullshit for someone who spoke of empty words. I wanted to change to the subject to whatever it was that would allow me to float in my great transparent lake again.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“I am employed as an optical sales professional.”

“Smart ass,” she said.

“That I am. But mostly, I am studying for MCATs this summer. I want to take them over and hopefully go to med school.”

“Oh,” she said.

This time the silence was awkward. I wondered if she was judging me. Was this connoisseur of empty words criticizing my decision to go to med school? I thought perhaps she could see into me. Did she know that I did not want to study? Did she know I did not want to go to med school? Did she know I envied her because, despite my agitation with coffee shop writers, I had failed as a coffee shop writer and I wished that I had not? I wished that I were not scrambling for a life I did not want because I had failed at the one I had desired.

“Jess?”

“Yeah?”

“Listen, you do your thing and I'll do my thing and we'll leave it at that. Personally, with your body and those eyes, I don't care if you live in a fucking cardboard box in Union Square. I'd still do you.”

“You would, wouldn't you?”

“Hey, four walls are four walls. Cement, wood, cardboard, whatever you got to give us some privacy, babe.”

I laughed and was relieved. Vanessa was back to herself, back to the woman that had intrigued me with photos and incense and raw beauty. I forced myself to abandon my thoughts. The evening started to feel comfortable again. I was walking without a destination with a stranger whom I somehow adored. It seemed as if everything was in place and full of a promise I had never even tasted let alone believed was possible.

It wasn't that I wasn't a believer; it was just that I had never known exactly what to believe in. I never doubted that anything was possible or impossible. Yet that faith that people seemed to have in the Universe was lost to me. Anjali had immense faith in the Universe and its doings. But then she had immense faith in me as well and here I was. But wasn't she with Ish? Hadn't she neglected to call me? Despite it all, I knew I was wrong, reaching and grasping for explanations that were so frail that I couldn't hold them within me without them breaking. Anjali…

“I don't want to do you,” I blurted out. “I have someone waiting for me at home. And I love her. But I'm here because I feel safe with you. I can't wait to see you. I somehow like being with you.”

Vanessa stopped walking. I felt like an idiot and my face felt hot. She placed a hand in my hair and moved it slowly. She smiled at me.

“You don't even know me,” she said. “You know nothing about me.”

“But…it's true.”

I wanted her to tell me the same. She did not. She kissed my forehead and my temple and my cheek.

“You're sweet, Jess.”

I didn't respond. She took my hand and we kept walking. I tried not to think of what I had said and her lack of an answer. We stopped in front of a karaoke lounge. Vanessa faced me and was silent.

“I don't do karaoke,” I lied.

“You don't do karaoke,” she said as she pushed a stray strand of hair behind my ear for me.

“There is more to life than doing women.”

“It's not that. I just…”

“Half an hour. And if you're bored out of your mind, then we'll go back to my place. How's that?”

“No.”

“We could stand out here all day,” she said. “But I'm not going anywhere else.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Why not? I just feel like it's a karaoke kind of night.”

We stood in silence. I looked at her and she looked back, unfazed.

I sighed.

“Okay,” I said, you win.”

She smiled.

“I knew I would.”

“How so?”

“Because of all that you have, you lack conviction.”

“That's quite an accusation,” I said.

“But it's true. Shall we?”

I took her hand and we entered through a small entrance that opened to a bar on one side and a few low square tables with shabby couches throughout the room. In one corner, some too tall blonde was singing her rendition of “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks. I walked to the last table there was and took a seat in a chair that was farthest from the karaoke set up. Vanessa came and instead of sitting in the chair next to mine, sat in my lap. Then she slid off my thighs and made a space for her body between the arm of the chair and me. Her hair smelled like fresh peaches. I felt her leg against mine and wished we were in her apartment undressing instead of here, in a dark bar listening to bad voices.

“What do you want to drink?” she asked.

“Whatever you are having.”

As she walked to the bar, I rest my gaze on the flame that danced in the little candleholder on our table. The ridges in the dome prevented me from seeing the flame clearly, but I could see the movements of yellow behind the glass, like a genie in a lamp asking to be released. Or like puja tea lights set afloat on water. I moved my gaze to the table, splintering wood covered with a sheet of mirror. I leaned forward and looked at my reflection in incandescence.

I wondered what Vanessa saw when she looked at me. I stared at myself and wondered what about me she liked, what she chose not to notice. My eyes stared into themselves, eyes so black I couldn't see my pupils against the color if my irises. I knew that the definition and clarity of my nose and jaw made women notice me. Most women even forgave my thin lips and otherwise plain face. Only once had someone told me I was hard to kiss because there was nothing to really hold on to when she kissed my mouth.

I had fucked her anyway. I had then told her she was a terrible lay and had left while she whimpered behind me that she could do better. I remembered that night clearly because when I had stepped out onto the street, it was so cold I had almost considered turning around and going back to her apartment, mumbling some lie about how I really liked her other than the sex and we could try to work something out. But I hadn't. I had walked home slowly, declining the idea of a subway and had reached an hour and a half later. Anjali had made me ginger tea and had wrapped a blanket around me before quietly going to bed. I remembered her silence that night as a force so sad, so powerful, I had wanted to do anything to appease her. She had asked for nothing. I had given nothing. It was the way we were. Always. Hadn't I vowed to try only a day ago?

Vanessa came back with our beers. We shared a chair as we drank quickly and listened to the noise before us. Vanessa started kissing my ear.

“How much am I turning you on?” she asked me.

“Here? Not much,” I said.

“I bet before we go home, you'll be so turned on you'll be wet.”

“Then why can't we just go to your place?” I asked.

If she couldn't think beyond the lay, then who was I to argue?

She traced my ear with her tongue and kissed my neck.

Then she said, “Because I want you to realize how beautiful every situation can be. It'll open your mind, princess. When is the last time you fell in love?”

“This coming from somebody who wants to stick to the basics? I don't want to fall in love. Ever.”

“Why not?”

“I am not looking to fall in love,” I repeated.

“Neither am I,” she said.

“So why did you ask?”

“Love doesn't come by invitation, Jess. It just shows up.”

“You can control what you do with it.”

She laughed.

“You try that.”

I was restless and irritated. The music was too loud. Vanessa, I felt, was talking in riddles that turned into senseless circles. I just wanted to leave.

“Why can't we just go?”

“Because I still have twelve minutes until my half an hour is up and then we can go. And besides, we have to set some ground rules.”

I smiled at her and touched her face slightly with my palm.

“Fine. What rules do we have?” I said.

As she kissed me, I felt we had conquered this evening and made it our night. As she kissed my neck and my ear and then my mouth, I did get turned on. I would never tell her that she had been right but she had. Somehow, she knew what I had spent a lifetime trying to understand and had never learned. Love and desire do not come by invitation. I wondered for an instant then if love had arrived and seated itself between us as she had shown me the first 5-by-7. What if that were true? If there were anywhere love would have resided, wouldn't it have been between Anjali and me? Wouldn't that have been the logical intervention? I rose from the overstuffed armchair.

“I really, really want to go,” I said.

She got up and leaned towards me.

“What you said about it not just being about a lay? About liking me?”

“What about it?” I asked.

“I started falling in love with you the moment I saw you. And I don't want to because love…love changes you. So let's just keep it at lays. But here's the thing with that. I don't think we should jump into bed either. I want to know you. And I think you want to know me. Why don't we start there?”

It was my turn to be silent. I turned and looked into her eyes. Were we fooling ourselves with what we thought we could and could not control? Love? Love has wings of her own. I know that now. But that night at the karaoke-lounge, all I knew was that I wanted to stick to the little things because the enormity and vastness of the big things scared me. So that night, Vanessa and I kissed it all away. And as we stood there, my hand in her hair, her kisses strong and powerful, all the noise of bad voices and tinny music was lost.

She kept her word. We left exactly when a half hour had passed.

 

 

 

Vanessa's studio was a five-story walk up in the East Village somewhere between Avenues A and B and 10th Street past bodegas and Thai restaurants and bakeries. The entire building was old and inconvenient and the stairs were dull and worn. I climbed cautiously, the floorboards creaking and rocking under my feet. She said what I thought just as I thought it.

“Glad you don't have to live here, aren't you?”

“No.” I said defensively.

“Not all of us have foolish rich bitches in love with us, paying our bills for the one fuck they might eventually get.”

I held my breath and stopped my ascent. She kept walking.

“If you know all this about me,” I said, “then why are you here with me?”

She didn't answer and I climbed towards her as fast as I could. Finally we were at her door and she stopped. She turned to me, her eyes catching mine in a quick glance.

“I'm here for same reason you're here. Because I want to undress you and use you and let you have me.”

“Let's keep it at lays,”
she had said. But then she had said we wouldn't be jumping into bed. The confusion in my mind began to manifest itself in a slight headache.

I said nothing but looked away towards the spiral of the staircase. She turned the lock and held open the door, waiting for me to enter her life. I did. I stopped short in the hallway and realized there was only one room with a bathroom to the left, the door slightly ajar. The kitchen was a stove and an oven, a small sink and a refrigerator all in a row to the right. She shut the door.

“So what do you think?” she said, “I bet this whole place is smaller than your bedroom.”

“No,” I said, “it's not. It's nice.”

“It's not nice; it's convenient, kind of like her apartment is to you.”

I shrugged.

“Four walls are four walls, remember?” I said.

“I remember,” she whispered as she came towards me. She flung her bag into a corner and took my face in her hands. She kissed me.

“Slower,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “What are you scared of?”

“I don't want this night to end.”

I wanted to be here with Vanessa, in a worn down studio, just allowing the night to wash over us and leave us alone.

She kissed my neck. I imagined her as a baby in Puerto Rico, drenched with summer sun and squinting against too much light. When she placed her head on my shoulder, I stroked her back.

“Do you want anything to drink?” she asked.

“Look at you, the hostess!” I said as I smiled at her.

“Papi always says ‘Make sure your guests are hydrated.' Don't know why he says that though.”

“I would like a Diet Coke if you have one,” I asked.

“You're in luck,” she said, “I have one and exactly one Diet Coke.”

She went to the fridge and brought me one of those glass bottles you see at Christmas time. In her other hand she had a dark brown bottle, the cap a striking blue.

“What're you drinking?” I asked.

“You ever have Malta?”

“No. Is it beer or something?”

“No it's soda. You're going to try it.”

She sat on the bed and I followed her lead. She opened her bottle of Malta and held it out to me. I put it to my lips and titled my head back. It was sweet, very sweet and almost syrupy.

“I don't like it,” I said.

She laughed and ran her hand through my hair.

“It's an acquired taste I guess. Or if you drink enough of it as a kid, you end up liking it regardless.”

“It's like Thums Up,” I said. “I'll bring you one sometime.”

She turned so I could see her, her face aglow in the faint light cast by the bulb overhead. We sat against the wall, our feet dangling from the edge of the bed. I took a sip of my Diet Coke. We sat for a long time without words. When our drinks were finished, Vanessa took the bottles and placed them by the sink. She walked back to me and looked into my eyes.

“You're so tired,” she said.

“Just think a lot.”

“Don't. Let's watch a movie or something.”

She put on the TV and lay down. I looked to the screen where
Kung Fu Panda
was beginning.

“I love this movie,” I said.

“So do I.”

While I loved an oversized cartoon Panda any day of the week, Vanessa was right, I was tired. I tried to fight off sleep but couldn't.

“Sleep, baby,” Vanessa said as she stroked my back. As her fingertips slowly grazed my shirt, I remembered Aisha, a friendly maid we had in Kolkata who would perform this art for me, stroking my back slowly until I fell asleep night after night. At times I missed her stories, taken from her village, involving uncanny happenings and phantom presences. I started to think back to her scent, a hint of coconut from the oil she used to slick her hair. As I thought of Aisha, I finally I started to drift to sleep when I heard a phone chime. Vanessa rose from the bed and the bed was warm where she had been lying next to me. She followed the ring to the kitchenette counter by the fridge. She picked up.

“Hey baby,” she said. “No, I was just going to sleep. Can I call you tomorrow?”

Silence.

Then she said, “Okay, baby, I'll call you. Love you too.”

She closed the phone casually, threw it on the bed and then lay back next to me.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That was my situational partner,” she said.

I exhaled a laugh.

I wondered if I should care that she had a situational partner. But then I reminded myself that I was not here to be involved with her. I had a perfectly dysfunctional situation waiting for me when I returned to Anjali. I was here because of her body, her movements, the length and darkness of her hair. But despite my lies, somewhere within me, I knew this was not just another night with a woman. This was the prologue to a story that had yet to come.

“Hey, Jess?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay? That didn't faze you, did it?”

“No, I'm fine,” I said.

She looked into my eyes and her lips kissed my face gently, every kiss making me desire her once again.

“You're fucked,” she whispered to me.

“Why's that?”

“Because there's no turning back. You're going to fall in love with me.”

I didn't answer her. I didn't know if it was the silence around us, or the slight glow of the light overhead spilling onto us, but I knew that Vanessa and I had only just begun. But did she know it too?

“You talk of lays and then of love all at once,” I said.

“So fuck me for being as confused as anyone else,” she said.

I kissed her.

“I'm glad you're as fucked up as anyone else,” I said. “If you were just a fuck, it would kill me.”

“I'm not, Jess. And princess, neither are you.”

I kissed her wrist as she touched my face. I wanted to sleep beside her, to feel the ebb and tide of her chest as she breathed. But at the same time I did not want anything more than what we had. In a way, I wanted to return to the night before when she was nothing more than my squatting stranger. But then I wanted to be connected to her in every way a body can be connected to another. I didn't know what was wrong with me or what I was after.

“Jess?”

“Yes, Vanessa?”

“I just like hearing you say my name.”

I sat up. She sat up as well. We leaned back against the wall.

“You ever get scared?” she asked.

“Of what?”

“Of not knowing. Sometimes of what you know.”

I held her hand and played with her fingers.

“Of both sometimes,” I said.

“I've known you a day and already we talk of love.”

“I know. But then…” I stopped.

“But then what?”

“Nothing.”

I could not bear to tell her that she had captured my heart in a glance and I wanted it back, untouched.
“You ever get scared?”
she had asked. How could I say,
“I'm terrified of what I feel for you?”
How could I say,
“If you were just a random fuck, it would break my heart?”
I couldn't tell her these things because for all I knew, she would not understand. So I said,
“nothing”
as in
“Nothing I say can impart what I feel and what I feel is a ball of confusion but the only thing I know is that I was meant to love you even if I am terrified of loving and don't know how.”

“I need a massage,” I said.

“I can give you one later if you want.”

“Maybe.”

And so we started talking of random things, safe things that had nothing to do with love or lays but everything to do with the details of our lives, our likes, our dislikes, food, clothes and our routines in general. She told me usually wore Romance but hadn't worn perfume that day because she had forgotten. I told her I never told anyone what I wore and that it wasn't something I ever discussed. She said I smelled faintly of cloves mixed with another scent she couldn't quite place. And so in shadows we spoke in whispers and I had never been more content than I was in that five-story walk up, talking to my lover. We talked the night into breaking and when dawn came, we were still sitting and whispering to one another about randomness. For two people who didn't want to fall in love, we should have known that these kinds of dialogues could lead to nothing else. But I think we believed we could defy it all if we just stuck to the little things, the simple things.

When we could see the sun outside her window, Vanessa suggested we sleep. I rest my head on her shoulder and heard her breathing. There was nowhere else I would rather have been. Anjali seemed a faraway dream, the princess of some faraway land that had captured my body once. And Vanessa? Vanessa, above anyone I had known, was meant to be the princess of jasmine.