Three months later, just at the end of the school year, Valerie was suddenly gone. She left Aar not even a note saying where she had gone or when she would be back. He called her mother, who didn’t know any more than he did. He tried contacting Padmini, but she didn’t answer either his e-mails or his phone calls. When September neared, Aar relocated himself and the children to Vienna, arranging to move their belongings and enroll the children in a new school.
“We were meant for each other,” Valerie now says to Padmini. “That is the long and short of it. And although we failed in Uganda, I am optimistic that we’ll be successful in our effort to reclaim my children. I can’t imagine them not wanting to be with us and staying with Bella instead.”
“Yes,” Padmini says, “Bella doesn’t have the patience to look after teenagers, I reckon. Here one week, Brazil the next, then Mali and back to Rome, the life of a sailor.”
Valerie yawns and looks away, eyes closed. She is thinking about Bella and the appetites she senses in her. Yet Bella is so discreet that in all the years Valerie has known her she never worked out where Bella was with sex. With whom did she do it, if at all? Was she frigid or merely discreet?
Valerie asks Padmini what she thinks. “Of course there are lovers,” Padmini says. “There have to be.”
“Some women who hide in plain sight?” says Valerie.
“You reckon she is in the closet?” says Padmini.
Valerie says that she once asked Aar directly about his sister’s love life. “He looked at me, amused. Then he said, ‘For crying out loud, she is my sister.’” That was Aar, proper in every way. And that was Bella, a mystery. “In all the years I’ve known her,” Valerie says, “I haven’t detected any flicker of an intimation of what excites her.”
Padmini says, “Maybe, being Somali, she doesn’t have it in her. Maybe they chopped hers off, all of it.”
Valerie laughs. “How about if we ask her?”
“At the first opportunity.”
Valerie says, “I wonder what circumcised female genitals look like.” She imagines something like the hollow cheeks of an elderly person, a cavern.
“In Uganda,” Padmini says, “they stretch the labia.”
“Ideal for self-stimulation, I hear,” Valerie jokes. She knows they are having fun at Bella’s expense, but the two of them are roaring with laughter when the phone rings. They fall instantly silent, as if suddenly aware that someone has been listening in on their indiscretions. The ringing goes on and on, but neither dares to answer it. Finally it stops, but then it almost immediately resumes. “Maybe my children,” Valerie says. “Hello!”
It is Bella, inviting them to dinner.
“Give me a sec,” says Valerie. She consults with Padmini, who nods.
They settle on an Indian restaurant called Tandoori House at eight. Bella says she has some things to take care of first and that she will meet them there. She doesn’t elaborate. “The reception desk will tell you where it is,” she says.
After Valerie hangs up, she discovers that a new worry has crept into their conversation now that they are no longer saying terrible things about Bella’s privates. Padmini says, “Why is she inviting both of us?”
“Maybe she wishes to take your measure,” says Valerie. “After all, you’re the one who led me astray, made me into a lesbian.”
“You’re too long in the tooth. She won’t believe that.”
And suddenly there is joy on their faces as they prepare to go out. They resolve to ask Bella about her love life at dinner. They shower together and take their time dressing. Valerie chooses a multicolored silk sari that Padmini suggests. And Padmini, not feeling Indian with her shorn head, puts on a pair of jeans.
8
Bella, her stomach churning not so much with anger but with anxiety about what Valerie is about, packs the rest of her belongings and checks to make sure that she has her point-and-shoot in her shoulder bag. That camera, she thinks, will be adequate for what she has in mind. Bella has a plan that she thinks will work in her favor and that she hopes will take the edge off her interactions with Valerie. Into the same shoulder bag she also packs a few photographs she has brought along of the children soon after Valerie left — only the children, never ones with Aar or herself. She checks to make sure she has the car keys.
Just before she leaves the room, she grabs the book she is reading — Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays—so that she will have something to read if Valerie and Padmini are late. She remembers that Valerie likes to make a point of her importance by a tardy arrival. More than once she has showed up for a flight after the gates had closed. What used to bother Aar was not so much her lateness but the gloating that came after. “Let them wait and let the world be damned,” she would say. For her part, Bella would get her sister-in-law’s monkey up by spelling “Valerie” with a y.
Bella takes the lift down to the lobby, looking as if she has just stepped out of a bandbox.
The drive takes half an hour despite the short distance. The night is starry, the sky cloudless, the streets no longer crowded with peddlers but now teeming with pedestrians on their way home and fifteen-passenger matatus — minibuses that stop wherever they please — being driven at reckless speeds. Bella knows that she is taking a more circuitous route to the restaurant than necessary, but this does not disturb her in the least. In fact, she needs to kill some time. She parks the car and walks around with her Polaroid, taking photos.
The waiter shows her to a table. As she waits for Valerie to arrive, she thinks back to the time when they had their one and only overt row. Bella, visiting the family while Aar was away on business, had gone to a supermarket with Valerie and the children in tow — for some reason the supermarket was a place where the children were especially prone to behaving abominably. At some point, the staff felt it necessary to summon the manager because Salif had turned an entire shelf of the chocolate row into disarray, dropping more than half its contents onto the floor and trampling on some of them. When the youth responsible for stocking the shelves pleaded with Valerie to make her son desist, she just shrugged her shoulders and, acting nonchalant, said, “Just tell me how much destruction he has caused and I’ll pay it as part of my grocery bill.”
Bella had seen quickly what Salif was up to; in the process of creating mayhem, he was deftly removing the wrappings of the chocolate bars in such a way that the scanning machine would not have prices to read. That way he could slip a couple of bars into his satchel and get away with it. He undoubtedly knew Valerie wouldn’t allow anyone to question or search him. And indeed, the young manager of the supermarket chose to let them go rather than call the police, saying, “Just go, madam. These are black kids and I do not wish to give them a bad start in life by accusing them of theft. But I worry what will become of them if you do not do the proper thing by them.”
In the car, Salif had boasted of what he had done, and Valerie had said, “How rascally clever of you!” Rather than blow her top right there and then, Bella had waited until she and Valerie were alone. Then they had an epic fight, in which she tried to insist that Valerie speak to Salif about the consequences of his behavior.
And Valerie went ballistic. Pumped up by rage, she seemed to grow an inch taller in her chair. Her voice took on a hoarse tone, and her gestures went operatic in their movements. “How dare you accuse my son of theft,” she shrieked.