Valmiki's Daughter (28 page)

“But the Krishnus are old friends, Anick,” she heard. “Our families have known each other for years now. I told you how close Viveka and I were before I went away.”

“Don't you understand, Nayan? Is my business you telling. Not just yours. I don't know her for years. Is shameful what you saying. Is shameful for me, but for you too. Don't you see that? Is because you drinking too much.”

Nayan's voice was stern. “Shameful? I am shaming you? And I have had no more to drink than you. I have had two glasses and a half of wine. Don't start with that nonsense. You want to start controlling everything I do?”

Viveka thought Anick was indeed brave to provoke such ideas when a guest was in their house. That sort of provocation could erupt in a huge quarrel, and even if the quarrel were put off for a few hours until the guest had left it would still cause a sourness in the air that would be only too noticeable. It wasn't what a woman should do, Viveka reflected, and one shouldn't need to be told so — this was knowledge one just absorbed and grew up knowing.

“Why you tell her these things?” Anick insisted. “Tell me this. Why you tell her, and you don't tell Bally and his wife? Is because you too shamed to tell them. You want them to think you so big. But you tell her, like you confessing. You really drink too much — I don't care what you say. We eat a whole meal and you talk the whole time. You never even say if you like the food, but you say how my parents make you feel stupid. You don't even ask her about herself. You take advantage of that girl. Is because she is not like other people. She can be my friend and you making me shamed in front of her. Besides, I hate it you talking bad all the time about my country and my family. How she can be my friend now?”

Viveka thought, So, after all, it
does
matter that it is me who is here at dinner! I am your friend now, Anick, more than his. You and I, we can be friends. We will be. She tried to be as quiet as a blade of grass so that she could hear more.

“Oh Christ, honey,” Nayan's voice said. “Come on. For God's sake, be reasonable. She is downstairs waiting, she will think there is a problem, and there is
no
problem. We're having fun. At least I am. Don't spoil it. And does she look like she is having a bad time? I'm telling stories. I am reflecting. She is the kind of person who I can do that in front of. Why do I have to
tell
you that your food was good? Is there any of the bourguignon left in the dish? The dish is empty. What better compliment is there? We don't have to discuss everything, Anick.”

“Oh my God. Look who is talking! You discuss everything to this stranger. And you tell her all kind of lies, too.”

“I have my pride, Anick. I know what to say and what not to say. I am not, in fact, discussing everything. You want to see me tell her everything? I can do that, you know. Let me see then if she will have a frigging thing to do with you.”

“I sick of all of this. I just sick of this.”

“Oh Christ, just cut it out. She is going to wonder what the heck is happening. Fix yourself and let's go on out.”

Viveka quietly hurried back to the patio.

Together, all three finished clearing the table. Anick put away some things and then rather abruptly she and Nayan indicated that they would take Viveka home. When Anick excused herself for a minute and went back upstairs again, Nayan took the chance to say that what he had liked best in France was lying at night with Anick, listening to children shouting things he couldn't understand, to the click of adult heels on the sidewalks as they passed swiftly beneath the window, a car going slowly down the lane looking for parking, the ping of a bicycle bell. They were in France, and France in all its Frenchness, all its self-assuredness, went on around them, and no Frenchman was in bed with her, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but he, from Trinidad, was.

Viveka listened with the evening's now-habitual forced grin on her face and wondered if perhaps Nayan really was a bit drunk.

IT WAS A SHORT DRIVE THROUGH LUMINADA HEIGHTS FROM NAYAN'S
house to Viveka's, but long enough for Anick's razor-like silence to divide the space in the car into three uneven parts. She occupied the largest space. Nayan, who had become noticeably silent, had a smaller share. Judging by the way he avoided looking at Anick and the way he gripped the steering wheel, hands clocking in at five to one, he seemed aware and nervous of his share. Viveka was given, it seemed to her, an incidental sliver in the back seat. She felt a little sympathy for Nayan, but only a little.

The developers of Luminada Heights hadn't been generous with street lamps. Light flickered weakly here and there from the houses they passed. Down in the distance the outline of the oil refinery at Pointe-à-Pierre was shimmering with dots of brilliant silvery light. Now it looked like a rambling fairground of castles, rollercoasters and ocean liners butted together.

By the grace of darkness, Viveka, from the back seat, watched Anick. Anick seemed to be looking out the rolled-up window. Her reflection could just barely be seen in the glass. Viveka imagined Anick seeing herself and her life as she imagined Viveka might have seen her that night, especially in the light of the stories her husband had so indiscriminately revealed. She wanted to assure Anick that she had heard it all with a grain of salt, and longed to hear Anick's version. Or a different story all together. Anything from Anick, anything that was not about her and Nayan. Her profile was so perfectly set that it was as if Anick had turned just so, so that Viveka might watch her. Her face was thin, but not unhealthy or pinched in its thinness; on the contrary, it was lean and something else indescribable. A woman who, when she spoke to her husband spoke so harshly, who had been so determinedly quiet at dinner, should not, to Viveka's mind, have looked as soft and vulnerable as Anick did staring out the window. Viveka wanted to slip her hand onto Anick's shoulder, press her shoulder to let her know everything was all right. But she didn't, in fact, know anything, and couldn't know whether anything, let alone everything, was or would be all right. And although she imagined Anick discreetly raising her own hand onto Viveka's, squeezing it in acknowledgement of camaraderie, she dared not take such a liberty. Then, much too quickly, the car pulled up at the gate to Viveka's house.

As Viveka unlatched the gate and walked slowly to the back door of her house, her mind travelled to the places that Nayan had talked about: Toronto, Whistler, Perpignan, Paris, the Louvre. The Mona Lisa! Imagine: he had seen it! And had not been impressed. She tried to imagine skiing, but this was difficult. She was more able to conjure up going to the symphony. And she was curious now about chocolate that was as bitter as Nayan described, the chocolate that French people liked.

ANICK SNATCHED UP A BRASS ROSEBUD VASE. NAYAN MIGHT GUFFAW
at that, but she knew he wasn't amused. She raised the vase, and he ducked and shielded his face with his hands. But Anick wasn't crazy; she knew better than to aim directly at him. The vase hit the wall to the side of him.

It was Nayan's turn to scream. “Are you mad, or what! You think I told her everything? I told her nothing. I should have told her about the kind of person you were before I came into your life.” He was not finished but Anick shouted back, interrupting him, wanting to know what, just what kind of a person would that be?

The kind of woman who one day slept with a man, and the next with a woman, the kind no sane man would have risked taking. Lucky for her, Nayan snapped, that he had come along. And if he had not been insane then, she was making him so now. After he had showed her what love was really like.

Anick couldn't believe what she was hearing. “Nayan, you know about Yves. You know I loved him. You know I lived with him for a year. What are you saying? Why you tell her I live with my parents? You tell her so many lies. Lies about me.”

“Lies? I was protecting you. And myself. Did you expect me to tell her that you lived with other people before me? That you
had no discrimination about who and what you loved? I know what I am doing. I know people in my country and how they think. I don't want people thinking — knowing! — that my wife was a host to others before me. Why did Yves leave you? Tell me again. Why? No. Don't bother. Because no matter how many times you tell me I can't understand it or believe you.”

The words seethed between Anick's clenched jaws. “You foolish, Nayan. You too stupid. Yves leave me because he want to own me, and I do not want to be own by anybody. He was too jealous, possessive, oppressive. Words you should learn.”

“He left you because you were — you were a . . .” But he couldn't say the word.

Anick tried to be calm, but her voice trembled. “Nayan, You know very well that Yves and I finish because I did not want to cook his meal and clean up after him and wash his clothes only. I want to do other things. He want a wife who stay at home and look after him and have no friend. Yes, is true, I still loved him. I loved Phillipe too, and Stephane, and after Stephane I love Anh Tuen, and you know I loved Anna Marie. And now I love you. I cannot help it who I love. I do not love a man or a woman. I love this person or that one. And when I love that person nobody else exist.”

“I can't believe you just stood there and gave me a list of people you slept with. I don't know if it is because you are stupid that you talk so much rubbish or if it is because you can't speak English properly. Look I don't want my friends, or anyone in this country for that matter, knowing all of this disgusting nonsense, you hear?”

Nayan had indeed, and naturally, only told Viveka so much and no more. He hadn't told her that when he met Anick, she and her lover, Anna Marie, had only recently ended a relationship Anick had imagined would last forever. Anick was a mess then.
He hadn't revealed that this was why she left Perpignan and went to Whistler to be with her cousin. He deliberately hid the fact that he knew very well Anick was using him to quell that hurt. And he also did not reveal to Viveka that he had wholeheartedly believed, known deep inside of his very soul, that he —
he
— could change Anick, show her what love and happiness could look like.

AT THE RESTAURANT IN WHISTLER, ANICK WAS BEING HARASSED BY
one man after another, even as she could think of no one else but Anna Marie. Nayan was unusual. She saw him watching her, but he didn't say to her the things other men, including his group of friends, did. He was nice enough, foreign enough. And how could she not have been lonely? When he asked her out, she had felt she could say yes and be safe with him. He was indeed sufficiently different from the other men, and he was such a distraction from her heartache. It was not difficult to be intimate with him, but she had no intention of falling in too closely with him. That is why she was so reckless as to tell him about Anna Marie on the first date. It was as if she was cheating on Anna Marie, and all she could do to quell that odd sense was to talk about her. To tell him all about her. It hadn't occurred to her that night, as she told him of this woman she so loved, and of how broken her heart was, that he and she would go on another date. She could see that he was perturbed, even a bit put off by her revelations, but she didn't care. In fact, that was just as well, she had thought.

Then, on subsequent dates, he seemed to become more and more intrigued, as men tended to be, by her interest in women. He wanted details. She wouldn't tell him too much, holding those intimacies close to her heart. He would persist, ask her what it was that women did to each other, what it was that made
her like being with a woman. The only way she had been able to respond and still be respectful of those intimacies, and at the same time not anger Nayan with a refusal to engage with him in such a manner, was to employ the strategy of appearing to educate him. But it took hardly a sentence or two before he would become aroused, wanting nothing more then than to show her, as he would say while in the act, what real sex was and what a real man was like.

Then, once they were married, Nayan's fascination with the subject waned. Furthermore, shortly after they arrived in Trinidad, he was suddenly disgusted. He told Anick he hated that part of her life, that he was appalled, even tormented, by the idea that she had once loved women. Since then, she had dreaded the day he would throw all that she had so recklessly told him back at her. And now, that day had come. She had to fight the breaking of her heart at what she had sacrificed in herself by marrying him. In a strange place, in a family whose ways were so foreign to her, with this man whose body did not comfort her well enough, whose presence bent her spirit and heart, she felt more acutely than ever before all that she had given up.

ALTHOUGH RAM PRAKASH SUFFERED HIS SON'S MARRIAGE AS IF HE
rather had lost his son, he was not unaware of the prestige Anick's Frenchness, her beauty and charm, brought to his family. She brought them the attention of the business world in a manner his cacao, chocolates, and citrus by themselves were unable to accomplish. The Prakashs had not before received so many invitations to dinners. It was not lost on them that these invitations were so that their friends could entertain Anick and Nayan.

People built parties around Anick. They threw these parties after making sure that she was available. They had food catered,
and their homes rearranged, and pieces of furniture and accessories bought with her eyes and approval in mind. Behind her back, and in spite of his love of this new attention to his family, Ram accused Anick of attracting people by lasciviousness and ugly flirtation. His son might have been worth three hundred dollars an hour in cash; but even Nayan knew that this worth had been increased by Anick's presence in his life in ways that numbers and dollars could not measure. On his return to Trinidad, despite his lack of previous business experience, he was asked to sit on the boards of a number of charitable organizations. He joked to those who invited him that they were really after his wife, and they joked back that he was not at all a foolish man. He went to one or two meetings when he was asked, but the unpaid work of being on a board did not interest him.