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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Fiction & Poetry |
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Fiction |
The Better Person
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| The first look at Quarantine, Rahul Mehta’s debut collection of short stories about young gay Indian men adrift in the world |
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| F |
RANK IS ON THE PHONE with my brother’s wife, Ellison. They talk often, which surprises me because they are nothing alike. Ellison has decorated her and my brother’s house with gold-framed posters of Impressionist paintings and plastic flowers in white urns from their wedding. Frank, on the other hand, pisses out the bedroom window when he’s drunk. |
I don’t worry about him hitting people on the street, because the window faces an alley. But on summer nights, when everyone’s windows are open, I wonder if some of it sprinkles into the apartments below. I once asked him this, but he shrugged. In New York, he said, worse things come through your window than piss.
That makes Frank sound like a loser, but he’s not. He loves me, though he wouldn’t admit it. Not in those words. I wouldn’t either. I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘I love you’, except maybe in an ironic baby voice.
But I know Frank loves me. That’s why he talks to Ellison on the phone. They compare notes about me and my brother.
Ellison must have asked about me now because Frank says, ‘Deepu’s been sulking all afternoon.’ He smiles at me, and I scowl back. ‘He always mopes on Sundays.’
I don’t need to hear my boyfriend talking about me like I’m not there, so I take my coffee mug and pack of cigarettes and go into the living room so that I can do what I do best: chain-smoke and play scratch-n’-sniff with my body parts, while obsessing about how much I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.
Though Frank and I have been going out for three years, we had no intention of moving in together. It just happened. I lost the lease on my sublet and planned to stay with him a couple weeks until I could find a new place. Then, without warning, his roommates Jack and Carly moved out. That was three months ago. So we were stuck.
Jack and Carly took everything: the stereo, the TV, and all the furniture. Frank doesn’t own anything. My sublet was furnished, so I don’t own much either. We look like squatters, sleeping on a filthy futon, both of us sharing one nubby grey towel. Neither of us has lifted a finger in three months. What few dishes we have—mismatched and chipped—are perpetually dirty in the sink, and we only wash them one at a time when we need them. There are spaghetti sauce stains on the linoleum floor. Dirty clothes everywhere. Soap scum in the sink and tub. I have to close my eyes when I lift the toilet bowl lid it’s so disgusting.
We haven’t figured out what we are going to do in the long term. Maybe we’ll stay in the apartment. Be a real couple. Buy a bed, a couch, some plants. Invite people over for dinner. Or maybe we’ll decide we’re not ready for all that, and I’ll find a studio for myself in Brooklyn Heights with a loft-style bed so close to the ceiling that I can’t sit up and read, and a bathroom so small that I’ll have to squeeze in sideways. Or maybe we’ll leave this city, one at a time or together—new apartments, new lives. Who knows? Since Jack and Carly moved out, we haven’t even talked about it. The first of the month I give Frank a rent check and without a word he stuffs it, with his, into a white envelope and mails them. Each time I think to myself: Next month...we’ll talk about it next month.
On my fourth or fifth cigarette, Frank finishes his phone call and comes out of the bedroom.
‘There’s trouble in paradise,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘Ellison and Rajiv may be splitting up,’ he says. ‘She suspects he’s about to leave her.’
‘Rajiv didn’t say anything to me,’ I say.
‘I’m sure he’ll call you.’
Frank says he’s going to take a nap. I finish my cigarette, then join him.
| W |
HEN RAJIV AND ELLISON married two years ago it was a big deal in my small town in West Virginia. It was the first Indian wedding, and my parents spared no expense. The ceremony was so lavish the Sunday paper ran a full-color frontpage photo of Rajiv and Ellison flowerladen on the red mandap making seven circles around the wedding pyre. |
The caption read: Tradition has it whoever returns to his or her seat first will be the one who controls the relationship. The caption didn’t identify who won: Ellison. Later, Rajiv told me he let her.
Rajiv rode a white horse to the ceremony, and I walked next to him, carrying an enormous square-shaped parasol over his head, red with gold bells jingling from each corner. That’s not what scared the horse. My cousins did, though not on purpose. When they lit the firecrackers, the horse whinnied, reared up, and galloped away into the woods. Rajiv was barely hanging on, and the trainer had to chase them and coax the horse back to the wedding hall.
When they returned, Rajiv’s turban, stitched with real gold zari, was missing. We sent a search party into the woods, but no one could find it.
When Rajiv and Ellison got engaged, they had only known each other a few months. I thought it was too soon. I remember when the horse ran off with my brother, I thought, first, Please don’t let him get hurt, and then, Here’s your chance, Rajiv: Run!
I was bored during the ceremony—the Hindu priest droning in a dead language I couldn’t understand. The twins kept stealing Rajiv’s shoes, and each time he sent me after them with twenty dollars for payment. By the third time I was so irritated that I didn’t even pay Dilip and Meena. I snatched the shoes and pocketed the money.
Actually, there were two weddings. The day after the Hindu ceremony there was a Jewish one at a Unitarian church. It almost didn’t happen because the string quartet didn’t show up and Ellison sat in her dressing room crying. She said, ‘There has to be music when I enter.’
I was the one who found the girl, a distant uncle’s daughter, who could play Für Elise from memory on the piano, stopping and stumbling when she forgot a chord. Ellison was born Protestant but had converted in college, around the same time she became a vegetarian. At the Jewish ceremony there were exactly three Jewish people present: Ellison, the rabbi, and the ex-roommate Ellison claimed was responsible for her conversion. I didn’t understand that ceremony either. I focused on my father standing next to my brother and how strange he looked in his white satin yarmulke and morning suit, so unlike any father I knew, and my father’s father who had refused to wear the yarmulke, thinking it was a Muslim skullcap and unwilling to be convinced otherwise. It was hot that day. In all the wedding photos my brother’s hair is wet and flat against his forehead, his clothes are in disarray, there are dark stains under his arms and around his collar, and Ellison’s face is streaked with sweat.
| W |
HEN WE WAKE UP from our nap, Frank wants to fuck. I don’t. In my head I count how long it’s been since we last had sex, and when I calculate it’s only been three days I decide I can safely push him away without his complaining. I’m right. He lies on his side, his head propped on his arm, and looks at me, his hand gentle on my back. |
Last week during one of our marathon telephone conversations my mother asked me which one of us, me or Frank, was the woman in our relationship.
‘Neither of us, obviously,’ I said. ‘That’s what makes us gay.’
‘Very funny,’ my mom said. ‘Someone on Oprah said that often gay couples have one person who plays the man and the other who plays the woman. So I was wondering which you were.’
‘Frank and I don’t believe in hetero-normative gender roles,’ I told her. I knew my mom didn’t know what ‘heteronormative’ meant, so I figured she’d drop it.
‘So who does the cooking and cleaning?’ she asked.
I could have truthfully answered ‘neither of us.’ Instead I asked, ‘Is that what you think womanhood is, Mom, cooking and cleaning?’
My mom got quiet. I felt bad. I imagined her cursing herself for coming to America and raising such a disrespectful son, for letting him attend a liberal arts college and take women’s studies classes and think he knows more about womanhood than his mother. I started to apologize, but she cut me off. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I know you didn’t mean anything. I didn’t either. I’m sorry for asking you those questions.’ Like every phone conversation I’ve had with my mother, she ended with, ‘I love you.’
When I was ten and my mother went back to work fulltime outside the house, she stopped watching prime time television with my dad and my brother and me. If I listened, beneath the laugh track, I could hear kitchen cabinets shutting, pots clanging, or the vacuum cleaner humming in the other room. Sometime late at night while I tried to sleep, my bedroom directly above the kitchen, I could hear the sound of water and gold bangles clicking against ceramic plates. Early the next morning, she’d be up long before anyone else, already in the kitchen, another long day begun. Perhaps this is what my mother really meant when she asked, ‘Who is the woman?’ She meant: Who is the better person?
Instead of cooking and cleaning, if my mom had asked me which one of us gets fucked up the ass, me or Frank, I would have said I do and that still doesn’t make me the woman it only makes me the bottom which isn’t the same thing at all. Though I had an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t understand that. One morning after sex he had held me in his arms and begged me to move in with him. Rubbing my stomach, he said, ‘Let’s settle down; let’s make babies.’
After Frank and I have been lying awake in bed for several minutes, he asks me what I want to do tonight. Back when Jack and Carly were here and we had a TV, we would all watch the The X-Files on Sunday nights. Jack and Carly would sit together in the over-sized chair, bundled up with pillows and blankets. They were always touching each other, even when they were in the kitchen or walking down the street, and it made Frank and me sick. To prove a point, we sat extra far from each other on the couch whenever they were around.
Now with no TV, Frank offers Chinese take-out and a movie, neither of which appeals to me.
‘What about going out?’ I ask.
‘Like, out-out?’ Frank asks.
‘Let’s go to a club,’ I say. ‘We haven’t been dancing in forever. We only ever go to bars. I wouldn’t mind sweating out some toxins.’
‘And ingesting some new ones?’ Frank adds.
I think about it. Sunday night is a great going-out night, not too crowded, because all the bridge-and-tunnel kids have gone home and all the yuppies have to wake up early. I have to wake up early too, but all I have to do at my job is answer phones and type and file, so it doesn’t matter if I haven’t slept. I remember a club on Avenue B that’s trashy and fun. We used to love it there. We decide to go. | | | |
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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K. R. Kohli
28 April 2010
12:27 PM
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A short story with lot of wraps which otherwise would have been bland. The characters
seem to be walking and talking before your eyes like in cinema. The situations have been
borrowed from the real life happenings. Rahul Mehta deserves kudos for such a good
piece of fiction.
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