“What about children?” he managed to ask, reminding himself that in situations like this, which usually involved a nervous client, he felt like an interviewer.
“Thank goodness we didn’t have any, so there were no entanglements. Aren’t there enough unhappy children in the world without adding to their number? Though one sometimes thinks, Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little girl to take shopping and to spoil rotten with all sorts of delicious treats? One can see her on a pony — riding lessons at the Gymkhana Club. Arun wanted a son. Well, maybe his new woman will provide him with one, and jolly good luck to them. He was a good provider. He found me this flat and he still keeps in touch. He knows that it’s not easy for one. A divorced woman in India is damaged goods.”
At the back of his throat he was gargling, blah-blah-blah, and was so intent that he did not notice, until a few moments had passed, that she had stopped speaking. What had she just said? He asked her to repeat it.
“You don’t look it,” he said.
“I assure you one is.”
She laughed because she knew she was attractive and liked the conceit of calling herself damaged. Smiling, she looked even prettier. She tossed her hair, she laughed, she patted her hair into place. Her pale belly was dimpled, and only when she leaned over to refill her glass did a fold of flesh press against the silk. Now, sipping, she looked over the rim of her glass at him.
“What about you?”
She did not know his name, and after—what?—maybe half an hour of yapping, her first question.
“Me? Damaged goods.”
“Not at all,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been at that charity ball, and at Gopi’s table, if you didn’t have some standing. All Mumbai was there, the best sort of people, and—hey, presto—you came up trumps with your bid.”
Her tone annoyed him, but he was still so dazzled by her glamour, he tried to change the subject. “What kind of wine are you drinking?”
“Indian made. A vineyard in Karnataka. Quite drinkable, actually,” she said. “Do you have them with you?”
“The earrings? I think so.” He took the silk pouch out of his pocket. It reminded him of the pouch in which he’d carried his rejected wedding ring. That thought created an afterimage of Indru, who now possessed the diamond ring.
As he handled the silk pouch, Winky extended her arm, dark and slender and articulated—delicately jointed like the limb of a spider—and Dwight shook the earrings into the palm of her hand.
Deftly, she slipped off the earrings she was wearing, and in a set of movements like a dancer’s gestures, more like touching her ears than attaching earrings, she hooked them, one and then the other, and turning to face him made them swing and glitter.
“They suit me, don’t you think?”
Dwight said yes, realizing what was happening, but could not say any more.
“They catch the highlights of my sari,” she said, and twitched her sash where it was trimmed with gold piping.
“Let me see,” Dwight said. He placed his glass of water onto the marble-topped table and went over to the sofa and sat heavily next to her. He lifted her hair and smoothed it, then touched the earrings, poked one with his finger, and peered closely. “I guess they’re a good fit.”
“I’m delighted you approve.”
He saw that this, like her rambling talk, was another test. He did not like her, but he was fascinated by how obvious she was, and he longed to weigh her breasts in his hands.
“Look at me,” he said—because she was looking away, at a cabinet where there was a mirror.
She turned her head and lifted it slightly with a kind of hauteur that the earrings framed and accentuated.
He kissed her then, just leaned over and put his mouth on hers as though lapping an ice cream. She did not part her lips. She remained as she was, like a big doll, and as she did not even purse her lips to receive his kiss, they seemed to bump his, almost to resist. The first awkward kiss he had ever bestowed on a girl—at the age of twelve: Linda Keith, behind the First Baptist Church-had been something like this.
“What’s wrong?”
“Isn’t that a little sudden? A little previous?” She turned back to look at the mirror, as if to assess whether she had been injured by the kiss, and her earrings danced.
“I guess I had the wrong idea.”
“You’re a very nice man. A generous man”—still she was looking at her reflection, the earrings trembling on her ears.
“What’s the plan, then?”
“The plan,” she said, repeating it his way as though to mock him. “Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. Perhaps you can take me shopping.”
Another test, another hoop.
“Perhaps,” he said, using her tone as she had used his. She did not know that when Dwight said “perhaps,” it meant never. At this moment he had finally concluded that he disliked her and almost said: I hope I never see you again. He got up and looked at his watch and put on an expression of surprise and said again, with finality. “Perhaps.”
She seemed startled that he was leaving. She touched the earrings with her beautiful fingers. She said, “Well, then, cheerio.”
“By the way, my name is Dwight Huntsinger.”
“I’m terrible at names. Will you e-mail me? My address is on that card.”
“Perhaps,” he said.
In the street, he was rueful but not unhappy. He mocked himself, replaying some of what she had said. Tingling, yawning with exhaustion, he felt giddy as he walked down the hill to the main road to hail a taxi. And in the taxi he reflected on how, for the hour or more he’d been in Winky Vellore’s apartment, he had not once objected to India. He had forgotten the stink, the noise, the crowds. Now on the main road he was back in India, and he was surprised by his reaction: he was glad.
He was forty-three, and he believed he had made many mistakes in his life, but his pride had saved him from more. He’d married late, the marriage had lasted less than a year, an expensive mistake, but necessary. He knew men who, rebuffed by a woman, pursued her until she submitted; men who were energized by Isn’t that a little sudden? and Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime. By You can take me shopping when they had asked for a simple yes or no to sex. He was not one of them. Meeting resistance, Dwight shrugged and accepted it as final, was in fact slightly ashamed at having met resistance—ashamed of having requested a favor to which the answer was no. The word “no” did not rouse him. He did not pursue the woman, he had never pursued a woman, never tried to woo one without at least a smile of encouragement. He was literal-minded in sexual matters, and so Perhaps we can meet for lunch sometime he translated as No dice. The process of wooing he found discouraging and at times humiliating.
Because of this, his experiences of women were few, and since his divorce the only women he’d had were Sumitra and Indru—essentially streetwalkers who had pursued him, offered themselves to him in the dark.
Now he thought only of Indru, and after the evening with Winky Vellore—those shattering hours, like a whole relationship, beginning, middle, and end—he had never felt more tender toward Indru. That evening with Winky helped him understand Indru. He knew that Winky would have despised her, but that was a measure of Indru’s worth.
At the Taj, he paid the taxi and was saluted by the doorman as he stood in the stew of odors, strong even here on the marble stairs of the expensive hotel. He remembered his first trip, his solemnly worded thought “the smell of failure.” But there was vitality in it, not only death but life, too.