‘I’m driving over to see you,’ Max said.
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea right now,’ Narayan replied, sounding guarded and reluctant.
‘I really need to see you,’ Max said, hearing frustration in his voice, and worrying about how he was coming across.
‘If you’re sure,’ Narayan replied.
‘I’m sure.’
Max drove too fast to the university campus. He loathed his feelings of uncertainty over Narayan, even more than he hated his guilt about Clare. He convinced himself that Narayan felt bad and wanted to put an end to things between them. To a certain extent, Max welcomed the idea. He hated being so much in someone else’s power. He longed to be free of what he thought in his worst moments was a demeaning obsession that threatened his marriage.
Narayan was apologetic, though, when Max arrived.
‘You took me by surprise on the phone,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I sounded a bit dim. I’m also sorry I didn’t answer your messages when I was down in Mexico. I left my wretched mobile phone behind. I’ve only just read them. Sometimes I’m ridiculously scatty.’
‘Oh, that’s okay,’ Max said. ‘You sounded as if you didn’t want me to come today, though. I thought I was maybe pushing you too much.’
‘You certainly do push, but that impresses me. You’re always reaching out at life, bursting with American achievement complex. If you’re not rushing about controlling things, you don’t feel quite alive, I imagine.’
‘Oh,’ breathed Max, with a smile. ‘So I’m full of aggressive, misdirected energy? Like our president?’
‘I’m just joshing,’ said Narayan. ‘No, not at all like your president. You love being on the move and self-improving, though, while I lazily stagnate. I was pretty active down in Mexico, mind. I climbed Popocatepetl, as I told you on my postcards.’
‘Postcards?’ said Max. ‘I never got any postcards. You climbed Popocatepetl? Wow!’
‘I sent two postcards,’ said Narayan. ‘It seems you and I are doomed to a state of non-communication! Oh well, maybe they’ll turn up eventually. Anyhow, while I was there I got you this.’
And then he produced the gift. It appeared to be an ancient Mayan head figurine but Max at once knew it was a fake, a well-made fake but definitely a fake. It would have cost a fortune if it had been genuine, but Max decided not to reveal it wasn’t. He smiled warmly as he took it. He was touched by Narayan’s generosity, ashamed of his unspoken grievance and impressed by his climbing skills (having no head for heights himself, he’d always been impressed by mountaineering exploits).
‘The antique shop said it was pre-Columbian,’ Narayan added.
‘Really?’ Max feigned being impressed. ‘It’s incredible, thank you. I love it.’
‘I wanted to check it out at the Getty museum first, so I could learn more about it. That’s why I didn’t want you to come today. But as you’re here, I might as well give it to you now.’
It mattered nothing to Max that the head should be a fake. It was the giving that meant so much. Impulsively, he took Narayan’s hand, surprising him. They just stood there in silence for some seconds. Max eventually found his voice. He seemed to drag it husky and disused from somewhere deep inside.
‘I can’t stop thinking of you,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.
‘I think of you, too.’
‘Do you? Do you really?’
‘Yes, Max. I really do.’
‘I think of you in my arms,’ Max blurted out. ‘I want to make love to you. I suppose you’d hate it.’
‘I don’t know,’ Narayan answered candidly, not at all offended, or so it seemed, by Max being so direct. ‘The truth is, I’ve never made love before. Not to anyone. I’ve done a bit of frustrated snogging but that’s all.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Our women are so dauntingly virginal.’
‘Well, isn’t it time you started?’ asked Max, smiling and recovering his confidence. ‘At twenty-six, you’re getting on a bit.’
‘I know,’ Narayan laughed.
They were still holding hands.
‘It’s such a waste,’ Narayan went on. ‘I’m quite disgracefully immaculate.’
Both men laughed then, and Max released Narayan’s hand.
‘So you can’t stop thinking of me. How boring for you,’ Narayan teased. ‘What on earth can you possibly see in me?’
‘God knows!’ Max replied with a grin. ‘You’re as ugly as a…’ – he fumbled for the joke – ‘… as a toad and just as charmless. So anyway, tell me… do you like me back at all?’
Narayan raised his eyebrows.
‘Or have I become a horrible embarrassment?’ Max continued. ‘Have you become all American and cool? Am I being schmaltzy?’
‘Oh yes, definitely schmaltzy… disgustingly schmaltzy. I’m far too cool and cynical to have human feelings of any sort. I’ve become just like those silent majority American males you’re always criticising: tough-minded and impenetrable, terrified of being thought sensitive and soulful. You’ve no idea how hard and mean I am. Beneath my toad-like surface, that’s to say.’
Despite his joking, Narayan seemed embarrassed now. He appeared to lose his humour suddenly and to become vulnerable without it.
‘I like your wanting me, Max,’ he said. ‘But I feel very bad about Clare. If it weren’t for her…’ His voice trailed off.
‘Yes,’ said Max dolefully. ‘I know.’
‘These feelings between men… I know they’re not wrong. But back home they’re thought of as unnatural. It’s such a relentlessly heterosexual culture, fixated on marriage and having children to support one in tottering old age. So it’s not just to do with us being two men.’
‘Then what?’
‘It’s mainly Clare who worries me. If you want me, then you can’t want her. Or can you? You’d be cheating on her. But I’d feel I was cheating on her too… and being a fraud.’
‘Look, I still love Clare deeply. I always will. This’ll make no difference to her and me. Anyhow, it’s all your fault.’
‘What? How so?’
‘You shouldn’t have given me this fantastic present. How did you expect me to react?’
‘In that case, I’d better take it back,’ Narayan answered, his smile returning. ‘You know, it’s not just that I feel bad. I also feel a fool. I’ve no idea what we actually do in bed… what two men do, I mean. You’re dealing with a virgin, as I’ve told you. Unmentionable in your society, I’m sure, where sex is apparently so obligatory, although everyone starts out as a virgin. Even you!’
‘Do you think I did?’
‘But you’re so attractive, in your highly suspect way. I daresay it wasn’t for very long.’
Max had longed for encouragement but hadn’t expected anything this explicit. He moved closer and put his lips to Narayan’s mouth. Narayan didn’t react at first but then very gradually began to return the kiss, which slowly deepened. They put their arms around each other. Max took off his shirt; Narayan, taking the cue from Max, did the same, stripping it from his back with an oddly touching awkwardness, grinning shyly. They undressed and lay on the floor together. The lovemaking that Max initiated, although constrained and lacking confidence, was to some extent reciprocated.
As they held each other afterwards, Narayan turned to look at Max.
‘What are you thinking?’ Max asked him.
‘It’s instinct, I suppose,’ Narayan said. ‘Or maybe I’ve made love in a past life, though God knows what the body was I did it in. It might’ve been that of some hairy gorilla whom you wouldn’t have fancied much.’
He laughed at his own joke, which Max found curiously appealing. His laughing and talking about their sex delighted him. In the weeks that followed, Max went to see him several times in his hostel room on campus. The physical side of their lovemaking improved, Max feeling more actively desired. His own confidence grew. Eventually he told Narayan he loved him, which seemed to add to Narayan’s ardour. His breath came tremblingly. His legs moved as if not under his volition. His eyes glazed over. Max felt the thudding of Narayan’s heart as if it almost came from his own body. Narayan’s spine arched backwards. His legs stiffened. His breathing was a series of rough gasps. With a shuddering of his entire body, Narayan came at last, crying out as from some convulsive pain.
As their mutual passion grew, so did the humour they brought to it. It seemed this was some necessary element to make the passion more acceptable. It made the guilt they both felt about Clare somehow easier to deal with. Narayan joked about his possible previous incarnations, which had set him down this terrible path of sensual desire.
‘Maybe I was a deviant figure from the Kama Sutra, someone whose activities were expurgated even from that masterpiece of erotica. What will happen to my soul in my next reincarnation, I wonder? By the law of karma, I’ll be reduced next time round to something unimaginably frustrating.’
‘Like what?’
‘A lustful spider, perhaps. A spider who’s eaten her husband and suffers badly from second thoughts.’
‘Are you having second thoughts?’
‘No.’
‘The Kama Sutra,’ Max said, shifting his body slightly. ‘I’ve heard so much about it but I haven’t read it yet.’
‘Oh really? I might’ve assumed you had.’
Max smiled at the implication.
‘It says no guilt is attached to sex as such,’ Narayan told him. ‘Women are men’s sexual equals. It’s a paradox that Indian women have become so prudish on the whole since then – some of the middle class ones, at least. They can be so stodgy and respectable, like my harpy aunts.’
‘Village women worship a phallic emblem in the temple sanctum, I’ve observed,’ said Max. ‘And yet kissing in public is frowned on. Another paradox.’
‘Yes, it’s strange that our culture venerates the sexual instinct, and yet there’s this belief in the sanctity of chastity. As with Gandhi in his later years, his aim being moksha and not kama.’
‘Moksha means spiritual enlightenment, right?’
‘You’ve been doing your research,’ said Narayan, pleased. ‘Yes, and kama means the delights of love and sex. Dharma means virtue. All of these are part of being a good Hindu, such as I’m trying to be – but without spectacular success, I must admit.’
Their humorous fantasies grew as their intimacy grew. They spent time together in Narayan’s room, in Max’s car or on the wide windy beaches where they surfed – and the sense of privacy added to the charm Max found in them. Max wanted to keep their whole affair separate, inviolate, outside the equally charmed circle of his life and his love for Clare. Consequently, when circumstances came to threaten it eventually, he had notion how to react.
The first threat came about by accident. Max had given the fake Mayan head pride of place in his collection. When one of his friends dropped by he immediately spotted the new addition and picked it up, subjecting it to his sharp scrutiny. Jimmy, a corpulent, shaven-headed man with wandering eyes, thought he knew more than Max about Mexican art, and a knowing smile spread across his glossy face. Narayan smiled in return, pleased that his present had been singled out for such attention. Max stiffened slightly. He knew what was coming, and he dreaded it.
‘Of course,’ Jimmy said, ‘you know this is a fake, Max, don’t you?’
The air grew strained. Max changed the subject swiftly, not answering the question but instead bringing the subject around to the proposed visit to India. Jimmy, realising he’d made some sort of gaffe, tried to make amends.
‘I visited India ten years ago,’ he said. ‘I loved the Buddhist murals at Ajanta, and the erotic carvings at Khajuraho were incredible. I remember well the noble, painted elephants, not to mention the quite impossibly handsome people.’
The strained atmosphere was not alleviated. Jimmy concocted some reason to be elsewhere and hurriedly said his goodbyes to the two of them. As soon as he’d gone, Narayan turned to Max, his eyes flashing with hurt pride.
‘You knew it was a fake, Max, didn’t you?’ he exploded.
‘Yes, but I like it,’ Max conceded. ‘Fake it may be, but I genuinely like it.’
‘You didn’t respect me enough to tell me.’
‘How does my not telling you it’s fake show disrespect?’
‘It means you don’t think I can take the truth,’ Narayan said. ‘You kept it from me to protect my wretched feelings.’
‘And what’s so wrong about protecting your touchy feelings?’
‘It’s patronising. It’s treating me like a child.’
‘Oh, for fuck sake,’ said Max, exasperated. ‘At the present moment you’re acting very like one.’
‘Damn you, Max! How dare you say that! I loathe all this pretence and secrecy, our horrible false positions. Why couldn’t you be bloody straight with me at once?’
Narayan quickly left and drove away. In his desire for independence, he had bought a second-hand car that was ancient, noisy and unpredictable. Max was left alone, staring at Narayan’s present, which he fancied was staring back as if it mocked him. The row, he thought, was surely of his own making.
‘I guess I overreacted,’ said Narayan, when Max turned up on his doorstep the next day. ‘It’s bad enough deceiving Clare. I couldn’t bear you deceiving me as well, even over something pretty trivial. I dislike myself for giving in to trivial grievances. If only I could wipe them completely from my mind.’
‘But it was stupid of me,’ admitted Max. ‘I did always want us to be honest with each other.’
‘Honest with each other, but not with Clare,’ Narayan pointed out. ‘That’s not very noble of us, is it, Max? You’re not going to get to heaven for that, and I’ll probably come back as something really daunting, possibly a fat, lascivious warthog.’
‘What makes a warthog lascivious?’ Max asked, relieved they found refuge so quickly in their joking fantasies. ‘What’s the sex life of a warthog like, do you suppose?’
‘Rather scratchy, I imagine. The faces of warthogesses, with all those warts, and whiskers, and nasty little tusks! Frankly, they don’t seem all that seductive. Anyway, thanks to you, I’ll probably be a gay warthog.’
‘There might be gay warthogs for all we know,’ said Max.
‘Seriously, Max, the dreadful things you’re doing to my soul. There’s nothing in the Hindu scriptures against being gay, I think, but the Hindu ideal is renounce the world and lust, despite the Kama Sutra, and you don’t exactly encourage me in either. I mean, look at you.’
‘Look at me?’
‘Look at you, Max, with your terrible and conspicuous consumption. It’s madness that I’ve fallen for you a bit. Your lifestyle is so materialistic: jacuzzis and swimming pools, supercharged aggressive sports cars and noisy, fuel-guzzling speedboats. This decadent obsession with flashiness and speed, wilfully ignoring the dire effects on the environment.’
‘I get your point,’ Max said, taken aback a little. ‘So you’ve fallen for me a bit. Well, that’s good news.’
‘No, it’s pretty bad news really. I was taken in at first by your being so sexy and self-assured. I was seduced by your wicked, superficial charm. There was I, an innocent young Indian, whose virginity you robbed so cunningly. Oh well, when you come out to India, I shall lure you into an ashram, where everyone takes vows of poverty and chastity, like with your Saint Francis. It’ll do wonders for your consumerist persona.’
There were only three months left before they were due to leave for India. A fortnight Jimmy’s visit, he discovered from Clare that Narayan had given Max the fake. He rang Max.
‘I’m really sorry for making such a gaffe the other day. I didn’t know Narayan had given you that fake and thought it genuine. But how delightful to be given a fake in such a manner! I wish I’d been given one or two by someone with such good looks and charm.’
Max found him funny, and blurted out what he maybe should not have said.
‘I’m kind of in love with Narayan. Clare doesn’t know yet. So for God’s sake be discreet about it.’
Max didn’t know how difficult Jimmy found discretion, and indeed Jimmy was soon unable to resist telling one of his most reticent of friends, who’d expressed curiosity about Narayan. Within a week, a group of the most discreet people knew about it, and one of them approached Narayan in the gym.
‘I’m giving a gay party next Saturday, to which you’ve very welcome. Jimmy will be coming. Do bring Max along if you so wish.’
Max and Narayan had agreed to go surfing again next day. They met on the beach, where the wind was blowing hard. Narayan angrily told him about the invitation.
‘You shouldn’t have told Jimmy about us. That’s something absolutely private. Look, I don’t mind being thought of as having a few homosexual feelings. But I loathe being seen as the underhand destroyer of your marriage. I’d lose all dignity in other people’s eyes. And I’ll lose all dignity and all self-respect.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You’re being paranoid.’
‘I resent that. Why can’t you be honest with Clare about us?’
‘It could destroy our marriage. What the hell do you expect?’
‘She ought to know. If you don’t tell her, I think I shall myself.’
Max was horrified by the threat.
‘That’s emotional blackmail,’ he said. ‘If you feel like doing a lousy thing like that then let’s not meet any more.’
‘I agree,’ said Narayan. ‘It’s not fair for you to go on cheating on her like this. It’s all so hole in corner… so degrading and contemptible.’
Max momentarily lost his temper, even raising his hand as if to hit Narayan. Although Max immediately controlled himself, Narayan was incensed by this reaction. They left the beach, neither of them feeling in the mood for surfing. Max felt ashamed but was too proud to say so in the face of Narayan’s hostile stare.
‘I won’t be seeing Narayan for some time,’ Max told Clare later. ‘He feels he’s spent too little time on his research, and he needs to concentrate more fully on all that.’
‘Have you quarrelled with him, darling?’ she incredulously asked.
‘To be honest, yes,’ said Max. ‘I have slightly. He gets over-sensitive.’
‘Much better than getting under-sensitive,’ she quipped. ‘What was it about?’
‘That business over the fake Mayan head. He’s a bit thin-skinned and can have real downers from time to time.’
‘Don’t we all? I hope you’ll make it up. You don’t lose friends easily. You’re so loyal and tenacious, like with Rick.’ Clare paused. ‘Incidentally, how is Rick? Any more news?’
Such had been his involvement with Narayan that Max had not been seeing Rick as much as he’d intended, but now he contacted him again.
‘I’ve taken up visiting AIDS victims in hospital,’ Rick told him. ‘I met a former lover of mine there. Ben. It was quite a shock.’
Max remembered Ben from the past.
‘Can I come with you on one of your visits?’
Ben at first seemed more cheerful than Max had remembered him, telling various blue jokes and risqué stories, a habit he’d obviously picked up from Rick, although he lacked Rick’s multicoloured imagination. When Rick left the room to visit someone else, Ben spoke.
‘I appreciate Rick and I were only together for six months, and that was three years ago, but none of my other lovers have kept up with me. Rick comes every other day, but I don’t want to become too dependent.’
Max felt ambivalent about this. The intensity and depth of Rick’s emotional life impressed him. Although he knew he could develop AIDS himself, he refused to avoid awareness of its realities. On the one hand, Rick’s involvement with Mike and his care for Ben encouraged Max, who was working through feelings he’d imagined he’d suppressed, and made him yearn to see Narayan again, despite his conscious resolution not to. On the other, and although he felt no shame at all about loving his own sex, Rick’s commitment to his former lover, difficult and brief as it had to be, inspired Max to devote himself exclusively to his marriage with Clare, which was far easier and more enduring.