Beth somehow knew but hadn’t asked, since asking would have made it real, more serious than she imagined it to be. And Audie, in the wrong, was thankful to her for giving him the benefit of the doubt. Because he did not examine these affairs, kept them in the dark where they were enacted, they vanished, and apart from certain moments, the bitterness mainly, even the memory of them was gone. Only in the reveries of the treatment room, being massaged, flirting obliquely with the therapist, did he remember. And in the week when Beth had begun to say that she’d been held up—“Just missed you”—he was calm. He owed her that much.
As for Anna, he had never felt so attracted and yet so resistant to a woman. All his memories had welled up in him, and though he was aroused, the feeling was like a farewell. He was delighted that he still felt it as a throbbing in his ears, a swilling of blood, but he knew that it led nowhere. Knowing that he could have the woman so easily made him generous, and the knowledge calmed him. He saw Anna one evening with a young man, walking through the grove of bamboo, and he smiled, even as she was flustered—he knew that she did not want him to draw any conclusions, for everything in her demeanor said, I am waiting for you.
Still, he saw her every day. He wondered where she lived, what her room was like, what she wore on her day off, the details of her real life when she was not in a uniform and working. Seeing her in an Agni sari or in the white pajamas of a spa therapist gave her an anonymity that prevented him from seeing her any other way. It was not physical desire he felt, hardly any compulsion at all, but only simple curiosity. He thought, Who are you when you’re at home?
Beth, in her absences, which were most of them treatments, wanted to be touched. And in the hours in between she needed to be alone, to reflect on being touched, being held, caressed, dripped with hot oil, and at last whispered to, even if the words were only “Please relax your arm” or “Please turn over for me” or “Is it too hard, madam?”
She found that she could not pass easily from the intimacy of a treatment room, the fatigue following a massage, to a meal or a drink with Audie. She wanted enough privacy and solitude to reflect on what had just happened.
I feel like a schoolgirl, she thought afterward, lying in a chair by the pool, out of sight, near where the monkeys had snatched her food. Had she been with Audie, she would have felt vulnerable and slightly ridiculous. But being alone added something delicious to her reverie—no one to judge it, nothing to measure it by, like the fantasy of a virgin almost, easy for her to recapture, since in her life she had been intimate with one man, whose absence now seemed like a kindness.
And each of them, husband and wife, remembered what they had seen of Hanuman Nagar, the other world down the slope, on a dusty ledge of Monkey Hill, its disorder and its ragged shadows.
5
Someone breathing hard was waiting for her, someone’s wet face watching her, eager for her to join him—all this was new and it made her happy. And as long as she was apart from Audie, she did not have to examine any of it. Unexamined, the thing held no blame: you could call it anything. It was a pulse, nothing more, like a sudden chord in a passage of music, notes played from that other world, the music that she’d been hearing ever since she’d come here. None of it had a name.
Only when she picked something apart with self-conscious fingers, or was made conspicuous by someone familiar, a pair of scrutinizing eyes on her, did a tremble of guilt cause her to hesitate. Otherwise, what did it matter? She had done nothing wrong.
If Audie’s contentment was a plus, it was also a puzzle. He was too kind, too beneficent; he left her to herself and did not inquire as to her whereabouts. His benign absence made her uneasy, for her thoughts were complicated, and whenever she saw him—at meals, in the suite, glimpsed in the half spinal twist at yoga—she felt, without any reason, that she was deceiving him, that her heart was halfway down the mountain, in the dusty and littered bazaar of Hanuman Nagar.
Still, she did nothing to encourage Satish—in fact she resisted him. With the sort of impatient clumsiness that he’d used against the wild monkeys, he’d offered her all sorts of invitations. She had first pretended not to understand, then had flatly refused. She stopped short of telling him that he was breaking the Agni rules—that seemed overbearing. Yet why had her refusals made her flush with guilt? Perhaps because she knew they were her secret, and when had she ever had a secret from Audie? None of her refusals had been so strong as to discourage the boy. As the days passed he had become more familiar, which was his way of being persistent.
One day before a massage, while she stood in her robe, the blinds half drawn, the music playing—ragas, chants of Ganesha—he’d raised his hands and said, “Moment, madam.”
Satish assumed the lotus position and then, twining his legs and falling backward, hauled himself up in a series of specific but fluid moves, tipped forward onto his forearms, supporting his head and whole body, and raised his legs until they were vertical. Finally he lowered his legs over his back and lifted his neck so that his feet touched his face.
“Vrischikasana,” he grunted through his wiggling toes.
“I’ve seen that in circuses,” Beth said.
“Scorpion pose.”
He was, she realized, trying to impress her, and his effort made her smile. She was happy merely being with him in the incense-filled room, the music playing, anticipating his hands on her, the hot oil, the sounds of his breath as he touched her. But he was young; he felt the need to perform.
“You see this watch?” he said another day.
She looked, but she could not tell the make. It was plump and seemed absurdly technical.
“Chronometer,” he said, pressing the protrusions at its edges. “Timer, digital readout. Twistable bezel. Totally waterproof. Im-mersible for two hundred meters. Self-winding.”
“I thought it was a bracelet.”
“Is also jewelry. Valuable!”
Wide-eyed, blowing bubbles with his boasting. Walubloo!
“You’re not supposed to wear that when you do massages, are you?”
Beth took him by the hand and turned his wrist over and squeezed the watchband, plucking open its fastener, slipping it off.
“Isn’t that better?” She had touched him for the first time.
He looked chastened as he ducked outside to allow her the privacy to slide beneath the sheet on the massage table. But in the half-dark of the room, on his return, he was confident again, working on her shoulders, breathing softly against her neck.
“Have a nice night,” he said to her the following afternoon when the massage had ended.
It seemed like an inquiry. She said, “What do you do at night?”
“I repair to my house. Reading to improve education. Yoga to improve body and mind. Also painting.”
“You paint pictures?”
“Classic painting,” he said. “Indian gods and goddesses.”
What made her feel awkward was that she knew, before he said another word, where this entire conversation was going, the next elements of it, her questions, his responses, and how in a matter of minutes it would end. And she had started it.
“Lovely,” she found herself saying. “It sounds lovely.”
“Painting with brush. Making pictures for puja.” He wobbled his head, a misleading movement she now understood as affirmative. “Classic.”
“You’re a man of many talents.”
She was hardly speaking her own mind; she was glad no one could hear these predictable phrases and clichés. It was as though she were reciting dialogue that someone else had prepared for her, that other people had practiced. Or perhaps all love affairs began like this, as repetition, as mimicry, as passionate clichés. Yet she wanted to believe that the feeling was real and originated within her.