Heart the Lover (24)
‘You’re gonna get fired, Peggy Lynn, if you don’t hightail it right this minute.’ He says this in a Deep Southern accent and I hear the boy he once was.
She gets up and lets him slide her coat on, hand her the purse and open the door. ‘It was a real pleasure, Jordan. Hope to see you again, honey.’
From there we go to see his dad—Jordan is the kind of girl you divorce—for lunch. He and his wife, Paige, live on a farm thirty minutes outside the city. Yash always said his father left India far behind, but I didn’t expect the ten-gallon hat or the slow Southern drawl. He works in whiskey. He owns a distribution company and it’s all he wants to talk about: value chain, cost base, centralized buying, disintermediation, wallet share. The only time he veers from the topic of work is to tell Yash he knows about his mother’s new boyfriend, Bud. ‘That poor fellow has no idea what he’s hitched his wagon to,’ he says. Paige breaks in with many questions after that. He doesn’t hide his impatience with these side conversations. Yash is humorless and docile. I don’t recognize him. It’s a great relief to get back in the car.
We spend the afternoon with his uncle Percy and his aunt Sue, who are easy and delightful. They are raising their little grandson, Jared, who loves Yash as much as the pigeons do. We eat pie at their kitchen table and play games with Jared in the yard. I watch Yash slowly unwind from the visits with his parents.
That night we cook dinner for EJ and Marni. The girls are our sous chefs. We urge their parents to go have some alone time in the living room but they stay at the kitchen table and watch us.
Late that night, after we’ve had stealth sex on the sofa bed, nervous the girls would bust in at any moment, we hear arguing. At first we can only hear EJ, low and forceful, but as he gets louder, Marni’s responses become audible. She seems to alternate from combative to placating.
‘Well, we avoided it,’ I say. ‘But Marni didn’t.’
‘I don’t think she ever does.’
It stops abruptly a while later and the house is silent. Yash falls asleep. I stay awake a long time. Only after the girls crawl in beside me around three do I give in to sleep.
Yash drives me to the airport the next morning. It is early and we’re quiet most of the way.
My hand is on his leg but his face is rigid and he doesn’t look over. I wonder if he’s angry I’m leaving.
‘What’s going on?’
He takes in a deep breath. ‘I just wish I could keep driving, back to school. I don’t want to be here for another week.’
‘Come home with me.’ I’ve already asked him. He’s already said no.
He stops outside the terminal. He says they fine you if you get out of the car, so we say goodbye right there in the front seat of the Nova. I cry and he doesn’t. He seems so far away, out of reach already, and that makes me cry harder. It feels like a mistake to leave.
‘Hink,’ he says, ‘you’re going to miss your flight.’
I pull my big suitcase out of the back of his car. I lean into the front and kiss him and I tell him I love him and he says it back, but he has disconnected. I shut the door and he pulls away. I wave and he waves though he is looking straight ahead.
I fly to my mom’s for the holidays. Yash and I talk on the phone a few times. Once he gets back to his place on MacDougal Street, he sounds more like himself. He says he’s wearing the red suit and won’t take it off until he gets to Paris.
The day after New Year’s, I leave for France.
Madame Trèves’ niece Léa lives at 16 rue de Vaugirard, two blocks from the Jardin du Luxembourg. There is a blue door, built for carriages, that clicks open with a code. In the entryway is a row of silver mailboxes. The poste comes twice a day, at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. The family has started to call me le facteur, the mailman, because I check it so often for letters from Yash.
His letters are small packets, six to eight yellow legal pages of his small blue ballpoint print, full of observations, allusions, and reflections, perhaps more Henry James than Henry Miller, but with far more humor. I wait weeks for one. We are both broke and can’t afford phone calls, though after three weeks without a letter I will break down and call him from a phone booth, my ten-franc pieces swallowed one by one. An hour’s conversation is a third of my weekly salary. L’argent de poche, pocket money, Lèa calls it, because she is providing me room and board.
That spring, while he is writing his thesis, I do not hear from him for the month of April. I call twice and leave messages with his housemates on MacDougal Street and he does not call back. On the early-May day when Léa brings up the thick white envelope—she has met the real facteur on the street—I burst into tears. I run to my tiny room to read it. It is, as they always are, brilliant, erudite, distant, unapologetic; sweet and affectionate only in the last two sentences, like the turn at the end of a sonnet. ‘Enough of my perambulations. I do love you, babe, cumbersome as it is for me to feel, and to confess.’
This is the first time he’s used ‘babe’ on the page. It’s his most tender endearment, which he uses only in the most intimate moments, when it feels like we are breathing from the same body.
At the bottom of this letter, in even smaller print, almost as a test to see how closely I am reading, is one more sentence: