She hugged me tightly. “It’s important, for us, don’t you see? I want you to know everything that matters to me. I want you to understand.”
“I know,” I said. “Go on.”
“When my parents found out, they were both upset with me. My father was back in Atlanta, working at Coca-Cola headquarters, so I saw him just three or four times a year. But he was furious, just because Darryl was black. ‘They’re not like us,’ he kept saying. And, ‘How could you?’ To which I couldn’t always resist replying, ‘That’s a question you ought to answer first, don’t you think, Dad?’ And of course he refused to meet Darryl, not that I particularly wanted him to, anyway. Mom disapproved, too, in that dry way she has, never raising her voice, never even mentioning his color, just saying, ‘Priscilla, you know you can do better. What about that nice boy on the debate team? He wanted to take you out, and you never—’ And of course the boy on the debate team was smart, and rich, and white, and Darryl fell short on all three counts. Which made me love him all the more.” Her voice lightened, as if to take the drama out of her next sentence. “Love in the face of impossible odds. I began to convince myself that Darryl and I would be together forever.” She laughed a little, as if at her own naiveté. “But of course it wasn’t going to last. And our problem was not that he was black and I was blonde, not even that he was a jock and I was a straight-A student. It was that we didn’t talk to each other. Darryl was uncomplicated, and affectionate, and pretty straight with me, but again unlike my father, he was a man of few words. And he didn’t particularly want to listen to mine, either. If I tried to tell him about my family, or about India, or about a book I was reading, he would simply smile a big, gleaming smile and shut me up with a kiss. Which would go on to more than a kiss. And afterwards, he’d want to go get a bite, or a drink, or go dancing; but he wouldn’t particularly want to talk.
“I just accepted that as part of how we were. I would talk instead with my girlfriends, especially Cindy, who’s the closest friend I have, someone I’d known since grade school, since before we went to India. And I thought, well, he doesn’t talk much, but I know he cares about me, and that’s what matters. I didn’t mind his laconic ways till the day he told me, in that happy, direct way he had, that he had received a basketball scholarship from Gonzaga. In the state of Washington, for God’s sake. And he was planning to take it.
“ ‘Gonzaga?’ I practically yelled. ‘You never told me you’d applied to Gonzaga. I thought we were going to stay here, near the City.’ And none of the colleges I’d applied to were anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. Well, it turned out that a Gonzaga talent scout had come around to one of the high school games, liked him in action, and arranged the scholarship. We’d gone to a movie that very evening, and he’d forgotten to tell me about the encounter. So I was completely stunned. ‘What about us?’ I asked at last. And then I realized the question hadn’t even crossed his simple mind, that basketball was what, at that point in his life, he lived for, and I was completely incidental. I had spent so much time in his arms, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.”
She turned to me then, looking directly into my eyes. “He was the first boy who’d really kissed me, you know, kissed properly, not just pecked on the cheek after a date, and of course the first man I’d ever slept with. And in all the ten, eleven months we were together, he never once told me he loved me.”
“Because he didn’t, Priscilla,” I said, pricked by jealousy. “He didn’t love you.”
“He could have said the words,” she replied. “They’ve been said to me by so many guys who never meant them. But Darryl was too honest to mislead me. I’d merely misled myself.
“I turned to Mom after this, and she was there for me, you know? She was patient and loving and nonjudgmental, and she helped me get over the pain. And she said one thing I never forgot. She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.
“But Darryl did one thing for me. He cured me of my father. He went off to Gonzaga, and I wept for a week, and when I stopped weeping I realized he’d freed me. From himself, but also from the distaste and the fear that the thought of sex had evoked in me since the time I saw my father with that — that whore. Through Darryl, I’d sort of become normal again. You know what I’m saying?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“After Darryl, it was easier to be a normal, red-blooded American woman,” she said matter-of-factly. “I went out with a lot of guys in college, dated a couple of them quite seriously, even, but they just weren’t right for me, you know? One of them, a guy from Boston, Winston Everett Holt III, even wanted to marry me. It was in my junior year of college; he was a senior. Win was a Boston Brahmin, very preppy, with that accent only people with his sort of breeding have, y’know, ‘cah pahk’ and all that — no, of course you don’t know, how could you know — anyway, he had it all, name, family, wealth, good looks, good connections, good prospects. This was what my mother wanted for me. And I turned him down.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t love him. Or maybe I should say that I couldn’t love him. He was too much like my father.”
“This father of yours has a lot to answer for,” I said, lightly, but it was not lightness I felt at her revelations. I was troubled, even hurt, strangely, even though intuitively I had known all along that her life must have been something like this, an American life. I tried to gloss over my own feelings, but they would not be contained, and I found myself blurting: “These guys you went out with, did you sleep with them?”
“Some of them,” she replied, and then she looked at me curiously, realizing that the question was not a casual one. “Oh Lucky, does it matter to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, only half untruthfully, because I really didn’t know how much it did, though I could scarcely be oblivious to the emotions seething inside me.
“Lucky, I’m twenty-four,” she said, holding me by both shoulders. “You didn’t expect me to be a virgin, did you?”
“No,” I replied honestly.
“When you made love to me, here, that first time after the sunset …”
“I wasn’t thinking then,” I said defensively.
“Well, you must have been pretty glad I wasn’t a virgin then, right?”
“Right,” I said in the same tone, but my cheerfulness was strained, unconvincing. “It’s not important, Priscilla. Forget it.”
She looked at me quizzically, then nestled herself into my body, her head upon my chest. I was silent. “Can I ask you something?” she said at last.
“Of course.”
“Your wife. When you met her — was she a virgin?”
“Does the Pope’s wife use birth control pills?” I asked in mock disbelief. “Are you kidding? An Indian woman in an arranged marriage? Of course she was a virgin. Forget sex, she hadn’t kissed a boy, she hadn’t even held hands with one. That’s how it is in India. That’s what’s expected.”
“Expected?”
“Expected,” I asserted firmly. “If she wasn’t a virgin, no one would have married her. No decent woman from a good family would be anything else.” I had surprised myself by my own vehemence.
She was very silent, very still, and I realized I’d hurt her by my choice of words. “I’m sorry, Priscilla. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“Just that things are very different here, in India. I guess we’re repressed, after centuries of Muslim rule followed by the bloody Victorians. And of course there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved. But as Wilde would have said, is hypocrisy such a terrible thing? It’s merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” I tried to lighten my tone. “But sex simply isn’t something that’s acceptable or even widely available outside of marriage. There’s still a great deal of store placed on honor here. Women don’t sleep around. And if they did, no one would marry them.”