SARAH AND I met when she was twenty-six and I was twenty-four, when Matt dragged me along to a summer rooftop party in SoHo given by a group of artists, one of whom we knew from undergrad school. Sarah intended to come with the guy she’d been dating, and meet up with a group of friends. Earlier that evening they had a tiff, which progressed into an official breakup after she decided he lacked serious-contender credentials. He decided to go home. So she came to the party alone, and instead of her friends, she met me. I soon learned that finding a replacement boyfriend so quickly fit into her routine state of her affairs; she’d never gone half an hour between boyfriends since she began “dating” at the age of sixteen. Despite my initial trepidation over her impulsive, self-assured assertiveness, from the moment we committed to each other on a windy beach on Orient Point on the eastern tip of Long Island, Sarah never gave me reason to doubt her love. Never gave me one reason to feel jealous. If men flirted with her in front of me, she blew them off instantly. If some art amoeba began doing his version of the locomotion, she brought me along to lunch or a gallery hop and that ended that. And I never gave her a reason to doubt me, though, early on, she often searched for clues about patients, nurses, or the few female interns and residents, never admitting her jealousies, which led to some inane arguments. Thankfully, Debbie, though no strict Freudian, worked with Sarah—the girl with a father who physically and emotionally abandoned her, a mother who emotionally abandoned her and physically discarded her to benefit her own selfish needs. And Sarah grew into a secure woman who found in me a partner of unquestioned loyalty who would never abandon her, until …
So, quite consciously fearing those long-ago patterns were repressed but not dead, my defenses were as high as my hypocrisy when Sarah finally called.
Immediately, I heard the quivering tightness in her chest as she spoke my name, “Neil?”
“Hey!” I yelled joyously. “Finally.”
“Yeah, it’s been tough. After that fat bully found me and shoved his ugly hand in my face as I was leaving the gym on Whiskey Row,” that’s what the locals called the town square in Prescott, “I had to get out. I tried to call you but you didn’t answer and I had to leave fast.” She spoke speedily as if trying to justify why she hadn’t called me back.
“You in Santa Fe?” I tried to sound nonchalant but my breathing became labored and I coughed to cover my nerves.
“You OK?”
“Yeah, it’s the Delhi pollution. Not like Santa Fe.”
“Yes, it’s so clean and clear. I’ve always loved it here and it seems safe. For now.”
She didn’t volunteer exactly where or with whom she was staying and I didn’t ask.
We talked about Luisa Torres, and her voice turned taciturn, so I shifted subjects, trying hard to make her laugh, regaling her with my failed exploits with Patel at NDP and of Charlie’s ego on the tennis court, but the laughter chirped out forced and the lighter mood felt frail. I tried to tell her about Levi, whom she knew I idolized, but she dismissed it with a brusque “That’s nice.” This transparent window between us let in refracted light and hid much of what we each did not know.
Sarah had spoken to the lawyer who handled her art business dealings. He compared Karpstein, Forman’s in-your-face tactics to the lowest form of lawyering. He suggested she hire her own representation if Ludovicci-Lint refused or failed to get her out of testifying.
“Please, Neil, I can’t live that day out loud again. I can’t.” Even more forcefully than her words, the lament of her voice begged not to face her questioners.
“They have to listen to me.”
“You hope.” Even before the hospital’s graceless behavior and the new lawsuits, Sarah didn’t have much faith in the class of lawyers and business people whom she endearingly called corpo-rapers. “So, what do you think for …” she could not, had not yet uttered the name “Castor” aloud, “the unveiling?” Again, I imagined her neck twitching anxiously. Her skin contracting so tautly that her veins and arteries thrust out looking like constricted straws.
This question was loaded with so many other questions, questions too soon asked and without answers, possibilities and lost possibilities that I couldn’t yet accept, and imaginings I couldn’t suppress—and in that instant I chucked my prepared answers about the unveiling. “Easter, Easter Sunday. Everyone will be too preoccupied with themselves to care about us.”
“Oh,” the falling hope in her lowered voice was palpable. “I thought maybe that you were coming during Christmas and New Year’s.”
“I thought about Christmas, but it’s too soon.” I spit out my words too fast and without forethought. “I’m not done mourning and I want to make sure I figure this shit out with the lawsuit and you know I always had big problems with those holidays.”
“Sometimes you liked New Year’s.”
“Sometimes, but not this year.”
“Don’t you have any time off?”
Inside that question, she posed the real question, “Can we meet?” and my guilty silence obscured the truth that I had loved spending New Year’s with Sarah. Not this New Year’s as I pictured her strolling along in the red dust and in the brisk air that whips with the comfort of need, and I saw her hand-in-hand with Riegle.
My pause lasted too long and the despair of our lies by silence became verbalized taunts and admissions seeking blood. With the precise vector of words and emotional pitch she proved her power to still hurt me and make me feel like an asshole in one swift sally of verbal projectiles.
“Neil, I came here because I told you I was lonely and I feel so broken, my heart, my nerves, and you were so distant when we talked.” Her voice, instead of fragile, popped out in short cadences of certainty that she chose right by moving to Santa Fe. I saw her; her disappointment hiding in her twitching neck and tightened jaw turning angry, bringing out her fortitude.
I did not answer. She repeated herself. “You sounded so distant, far away, like you were never coming back and I felt so lonely.”
“I understand,” I said, “I’m lonely too.”
“You’re still alone?” Her bluntness surprised her, “I mean …”
“Yeah, Sarah, still alone.” I thought for seconds about the comfort I’d gotten from Holika, but whose elusive presence and my belief that I was no more than a foreign interlude before she eventually committed to Samaka left me chillingly alone. “By myself with a future of more …”
My words, though both true and untrue, bristled not so much with hypocrisy but with a deeper untruth, that by keeping Holika my secret, I hoped to hurt Sarah more if she believed I remained alone. Jealousy would drive her further into self-justification and I wanted to remain the victim, wanted her to feel traitorous for running to Riegle, whose name she had not even mentioned. I thought the old Sarah would see through the transparency of my words, but not this Sarah.
“Neil, what I did was indefensible, stupid, deceitful—almost anything you can think of I will accept. I’ve condemned myself, but I did not kill Castor. I can’t blame myself for that and you can’t either. Just as I can’t blame you because he died in your ER.”
She stopped. Her words drilled through me: the image of Castor limp on the operating table, bleeding, dying, while my hands … no. I, Dr. Neil Downs, failed to save him, my son. This memory that haunted me every damn day, almost every waking hour since that moment, for the first time was said aloud by my wife, the mother of my son.
Silence from both of us filled the space between Delhi and Santa Fe. Suddenly, tears of unbearable sadness for our dead son.
This space between us widened beyond the physicality of thousands of miles with these new accusations, hers spoken and mine silent, and there was no mending the wounds. Not then.
I waited and wished we had not talked about this until we were face to face, but it was too late and so I lied aloud. “Sarah, I don’t blame you and I certainly don’t blame myself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I felt shitty again and wanted to be able to reach and hold and reassure her with my touch. Instead, I hoped the emotion in my voice could console her. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Do you miss me? Because even when I’m hating you and I know you’re hating me, I miss you. Is that sick?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I need to talk when I can see you, to explain things I never got a chance to explain to you in person.”
“I know but it’s so complicated and I miss you too, and I’m afraid.” I stopped, censored myself. I didn’t know if what I missed was a past or future Sarah. The present Sarah disappeared into the past the second my words flowed out of my unconscious creation of language to consciousness, and our nuanced, secret pact in the meaning of words and actions, which she once understood as had no one else, seemed lost.
“Neil, I’m afraid, too, but the longer you wait the more afraid I get.” She let those words hang, penetrate almost as a threat, not as an ultimatum, simply Sarah reacting to her inner self, a woman no longer youthfully impulsive, but a woman of action. “I hate this, this purgatory.”
She was flailing, falling away from me and I couldn’t let her. “I promise I’ll think of something. I will.”
“Neil, what’d you say? I couldn’t hear you.”
So terrified of my own words, I’d spoken too softly. I repeated myself. Said I would call her soon on her new cell phone number and hung up still aching for her body, her smell, her companionship, her hand gripping my arm for comfort as we slept, her caress of my hair, her lips waiting for my kiss, kissing my cock, my head between her legs, my tongue caressing her soft, silky vagina, but I could not take refuge in fantasy sex. Feeling the guilt of my lies and hypocrisy and pain of fevered jealousies, I climbed to the roof of the house and stared into the starless, miasmic, and darkening sky of a suddenly blacked-out New Delhi.
In the not far distance I heard sirens and sniffed the smoke dissipating into the already unclean air. The lights in the nearby homes with generators sputtered on like low wattage fireflies. Chandon turned on our generator and came up with a flashlight to fetch me. Instead of going down and staying inside we brought up a kerosene lamp, which almost all houses had for just these occasions, and two Kingfisher beers.
At first he’d hesitated drinking with me, it went against Indian class and caste propriety, so I made a deal. He would teach me Hindi while we shared a beer or two. That night as we held our Hindi lesson on the roof, Chandon gazed out with his accepting-of-life gleam and uttered my favorite phrase: Ye hai India, a catchall expression which meant, This is India.
As he swilled his beer, the ambivalent waves of desire and repulsion roiling my gut, I murmured, “Tell me this one: cowardly husband.”