11

ON THE MORNING after Phil’s email, Sarayu quit her job as a traveling RN. In a phone call, she told her boss that she had a family emergency in Toronto. She packed a small suitcase and took her car to the mechanic for an oil change and tire rotation. When she picked up her car, she leaned her head on the steering wheel and tears poured from her eyes. The mechanic knocked on the window and asked if she was all right, and could she move her car?

She drove north toward Wisconsin, away from the northwestern Illinois towns where she had traveled for work. She did not go to Toronto and her family. What would she say to them? That she had been in a relationship with a married man? Her grandmother had grown up in India. What would she say to her? And Sarayu’s sister, married and raising her two young boys?

Now, driving into Wisconsin, she faced her obsession with Phil, her embarrassment over the sex in motel rooms, in dark, secret places.

Sarayu wanted to forget their first meeting, going to Phil’s home. His family was away. He had grilled salmon and they drank a lot of wine. She felt a trancelike state of sexuality. When they walked in the darkness along the river, she went into a nearby thicket and took off her clothes. As she slipped into the water, she knew he was watching her. Her boldness surprised him.

At a truck stop near Green Bay, she bought two bottles of cheap wine.

That evening, drunk from the wine, she tried her best not to telephone Phil. But when she did, his daughter answered, and Sarayu hung up, suddenly frightened of what she had done, and by her inability to control herself. She didn’t know how much Phil’s wife and family knew about the affair. She had never called his home before.

Waking up in a sweat and tearful, she could hear the air conditioner hum and the pounding of children’s feet on the carpeted hallway. She dozed. At one point she thought Phil was there in the motel room with her. She took some Ativan.

In the morning, Sarayu woke with a hangover. She made coffee, placing the premeasured filter pack in the coffee maker and filling the machine with water. There was something calming about following the simple instructions, when she was far away from her problems. She drank the coffee and peered out the window between the drapes at the untended field beyond the parking lot. She felt the compulsion to check her phone, even though she had blocked Phil’s number.

She threw her bag in the back of the car and filled the gas tank at a nearby station. She continued her journey north, without checking the rearview mirror.

The following morning, in northern Minnesota, Sarayu woke without a hangover. She showered, and, in her mind, she tested herself. She thought about Phil. Her pulse did not increase. Her head felt clear. She stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Her summer tan lines had faded and her skin was an even tone. As she smoothed her wet hair with a brush, she could feel the tension of the plastic bristles against her scalp. She dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and went to the lobby for breakfast.

Over coffee and a hard-boiled egg, she watched young children insert bread in the toaster and pour milk over cereal. She saw adults absorbed in newspapers or the broadcast on the television set attached to a wall. A hotel server refilled her coffee, and as she said thank you, she did not recognize the voice that came from deep in her throat.

Sarayu was thirty-seven years old. She had never wanted to have children. She had been independent for a long time. Even while seeing Phil, she had kept to her own schedule, which was often complicated.

Back in her room, she checked the emails and messages from her friends at home on her phone. Of course, there was nothing from Phil. She took a deep breath and decided that this was good, that her friends cared about her. She took time to send answers, that she was coming home, an estimate of when she would be there. She used the hair dryer to fix her hair. She put on a face moisturizer and hand cream, lipstick and a sweater, and straightened herself out before folding dirty clothes into her suitcase. Then she did a once-over to see that she had packed everything.

At the desk she asked for directions to the nearest gas station, where she filled the tank, washed the windows, and checked the windshield wiper fluid. She still carried the physical ache of rejection. She knew it wasn’t just Phil, but perhaps a series of similar instances with men who could not commit, who would not interfere with her independence, who would not want children or the life her grandmother and sister had chosen. Out on the highway, she drove toward Chicago and her apartment. It was time to be independent again. It was time to go.

DRIVING SOUTH FROM Green Bay, Sarayu noticed the trees were yellow and orange and dotted with brown leaves. Fall. She had not noticed them on the drive north, as if they had changed completely in a few days. Now she saw rows and rows of dried cornstalks crumpled in the fields.

At the point where she reached the edge of the Milwaukee suburbs, she could not help but think of the time she had met Phil at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a white, skeletal structure that imitated the riggings of a boat. On that spring day it had been unusually cold, and she wore a winter coat over a silk blouse and a skirt, thinking he might take her to dinner after the museum. But in the end, the museum was merely a meeting place before going to a hotel. She saw him waiting at the entrance and flew at him. He caught her in an embrace that made her think they were really in love. “I’m right here,” he had said. They wandered briefly through a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, pretending to concentrate on the drawings and floor plans of various homes and businesses, holding hands while they looked at paintings of uncomfortable chairs in tall, empty watercolor-washed spaces. It was so much like the college romances she’d had, where she and the boy whose hand she held only thought about each other as they wandered the concrete campus, through crowds of students. At least, this was what she remembered. Afterward, when Phil took her to the hotel, he didn’t want to go out to dinner, and she stupidly agreed. They ate cold room service on top of the sheets. It had been another one of those times with him where she felt hidden away, even in a city far from his own. At the time she could not articulate how much the whole thing bothered her. Instead, she let him decide how things would be. This way, it had helped her not to think about his wife and daughter, or about her own family, about the layers of disapproval.

She drove along the beltway of Milwaukee, past industrial buildings colored by soot and age, and snaked along a skyway in between them, billboards lining the roadway as if sticking up from nowhere. Eventually the roads forked, one way west toward where Phil lived, the other back home to Chicago.

NOW THAT SHE had quit her job, she had time to clean her apartment and throw out the rancid food. She kept busy, meeting friends for coffee, lunch, dinner. She filled her calendar, and friends assumed she was simply taking a vacation between jobs. Or they did not altogether understand why she had quit something she had seemed to enjoy. She had never told them that the part of traveling for her job that she loved most had been spending time with Phil. Instead she simply said that she didn’t want to stay in another hotel. She wanted to be home. This her friends accepted without question. In fact, upon arriving home, she never wanted to smell the starch of hotel sheets or the dry floral scent of hotel soap. She never again wanted to eat takeout or room service on top of a bed. She didn’t want to ever worry if the man she was seeing felt the same way about her as she did about him, or about the consequences of what she was doing to his family.

Gradually, she willed herself not to remember his face, or his eyes, or the difference in color and size of their clasped hands. She did not look at couples walking entwined together on the streets of her Andersonville neighborhood, or sitting on the same side of a booth in a restaurant. She no longer had anything to remind her of Phil in her apartment, on her computer, or her phone. She tried, in the middle of the night, to read The Economist when she woke up thinking about him, and to forget him so that he was not a part of her anymore in the times when she could not control her thoughts. Soon, she would find that she had gone a whole lunch with a girlfriend, or a dinner in front of a television program, without him popping into her thoughts.

And things began to settle down.