But, more important, it was also a love story between two people and a society that would rather see them apart. This was conventional to be sure, especially for a story set in India, with its frequent allusion to family status and fairness of skin and the brutal constraints of caste. But the protagonists were familiar to her. They were his mother and his father, their love treated almost as a sacred object, Vinod’s only birthright. This was his parents’ passage out of innocence, the jerky years between a decent middle-class upbringing in a poor country before the travails of immigration to a wealthy one.
Here, the young man who was Vinod’s father did not strike him across the temple, did not disburse a daily cry of bhenchod over the strum of his own impotence, and the young woman who was his mother did not belittle him, did not compare him with his two older brothers whose many-toothed smiles and simple mercantile greed were an engraved invite to American success. Because this was a “love marriage,” rare for its time and place, the protagonists had to fall in love. And because they had to fall in love, Vinod had to plumb the best his parents had to offer each other during their youth, ignoring the dross of their later lives, the inevitable disappointments of Queens, the stark hatred of their respective families.
And finally, the book was about them. About Karen and Vinod. About a man making a case for himself to a woman, even though it was clear that he was not yet up to the rigors of adulthood or the tasks of being a father.
A thought: If they had started a relationship when they were young and later had a child, would Vinod have become a version of his father? It was impossible to think so now, but had she thought so then? That beneath the gentleness lurked a raised open palm? Was that one of the reasons she had rejected him? When they were still in high school, in the very first year of their friendship, all three had sworn to one another never to have children, and only Senderovsky had broken that pact despite once being its most adamant proponent.
* * *
—
When she was halfway through the book, she wondered if she should tell him that she was reading it. They had gone to his Lullaby Cottage one night after smoking a pungent new strain of marijuana her assistant had sent up from the city—it elicited a kind of gentle paralysis so that everything seemed to happen a minute later than it did—and she could see herself running back to her bungalow, reaching under the bed, and taking out the Teva active sandals box. “Why?” she would ask him, holding the box aloft. “Why didn’t you give this to me before? Why didn’t you have the strength to stand up to Sasha? You could have had a different life.”
She took her time applying the eye cream to his dark pouches, massaging the deep circles of ancient memory, and in the country quiet they could both hear the rising and crashing waves of each other’s breaths. Look how old we are, they were both thinking. They had spent so much of their lives boarding buses and watching the figure of the other recede in the dust.
If it were to happen, he would have to take the first step. He had told himself that he was sheltering at Senderovsky’s for another reason, closing out the books. But No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. What if he were not a Chekhovian character trapped in a life much too small to accommodate the entirety of a human being? What if he—
What if he reached into the small jar and dipped his finger into goo the color of cheap coffee ice cream? It was cold to the touch, but his finger would warm it. And then seemingly a minute later—because of the lag induced by the marijuana—he had brought his index finger up to her eye, to the opposite eye she was touching with her own finger, and smeared “just a tiny bit,” as she would always say, across the slight dark ridge under her eye.
“What are you doing?” she said, laughing.
“You’ve been taking care of us for so long, I thought I’d reciprocate,” he said.
“I can put it on myself,” she said, immediately stung by her own pride. I can do it myself! The daily mantra of her childhood and beyond, spoken to anyone who would listen.
“But you shouldn’t have to,” he said.
He moved her hand aside, bent over, and kissed her on the lips. The shock of it kept her eyes open, even as his closed with religious feeling. She moved her own lips faintly against his, watching his ardor. How did it feel? It felt like Vinod was kissing her, the soft pelt of his mustache scented with turmeric. That was always the problem: that she would know how every second of their romance would transpire, that this was the most expected moment of her life, and yet, if she breathed instead of hyperventilating, she could enjoy the work of those unsurprising lips.