Her eyes remained open, and they saw “a handsome older gentleman,” as her dead mother might have said in English, parroting a line from radio or TV. Their noses touched, always a comical interlude, but then she felt the sex of his hand massaging her nape. When it came to physical encounters, of which there were plenty in her youth, she normally had no problems moving straight to bed—that’s what it was for, after all—but now she caught herself.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. Within the green walls of her high, trapped within the primary colors of the Lullaby Cottage, she now fully registered where they were and who they were. The bungalow felt like the dorm of an artsy college, the kind neither of them had attended, though Vinod had been accepted everywhere he had applied, New Haven included. “What are we doing?” she said. She planted a palm on his chest. Was it to hold him back? For a moment, neither of them knew, but it felt so nice to touch his chest, to feel its wholeness after all he had suffered.
“I was about to say I’m sorry,” Vinod finally said. “Sorry for kissing you. But I’m so tired of all of my apologies.”
“Good,” she said. “Fuck your apologies.” They looked at each other in the glow of the collegiate lamp on his desk. “Can you do something for me now?” she asked.
“What would you like me to do?”
She lifted up her arms. There were tiny rolls of fat beneath them now, which he found endearing. “Can you tickle me?”
“Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.”
He reached under, feeling her warm sweat and then the crinkly barrage of new underarm hairs. “Ha,” she said, tentatively, wishing she could surrender to Nat’s wild bouts of laughter. “Ha!” she said again. And then she started laughing, great jags of squealing joy. Ggul-ggul-ggul. Was this what she had wanted all along? How hard was it to be happy in this fucking country?
“Do you want me to stop?” Vinod asked.
“Nooooo!” She was breathless now, panting, and the lullabies written all over the walls were singing to her in their distant alphabets. “Okay,” she said, her eyes wet, her nose snotty. “Okay, stop.” He took his fingers away, fell silent for a moment, then lifted up the sleeves of her bateau T-shirt and caressed her shoulders. “I’ve never been tickled before,” she said, sighing at how good his hands felt, wondering if the calluses on his fingers were the result of his last job in the kitchen of his uncle’s restaurant. No, they were always there, weren’t they? He had been born callused. “God, I am so stoned,” she said.
“You are a crazy, crazy girl,” he whispered, enjoying how those simple words sounded in his mouth. She wrapped her arms around him and found herself kissing his hair, which, though leavened with gray, was still absurdly plentiful. He pressed her to him and kissed her neck, even softer than he had imagined. “What are we doing?” she kept whispering as her lips descended to the neck hair which crawled up his nape like a worsted turtleneck, hair she had always urged him to shave, but which now felt fine, or, more to the point, in need of kissing. “Oh, Vin.”
Hearing his own name, or an American fraction of it, made him sad, and he did not know why. It was as if he had forgotten who he was for a moment. As if he had entered the body of another Vinod and that was the body she had needed all along. He stopped kissing her neck, though it pained him to stop. The wheezing of his battered lung returned and he remembered that he had come to Senderovsky’s bungalow colony to dissolve, and he was now doing the opposite, taking on more presence and solidity, challenging the engineers in the interstellar Bangalore to constantly come up with new code. What if he couldn’t keep up with her love? Or his own?
He felt her heave against him in a series of spasms and, within the fog of his high, finally understood that she was crying. “It’s okay, baby,” he said, taking the American “baby” out for a spin, a word he’d never used with his one serious girlfriend, a tall, also Korean fellow adjunct almost perplexing in her sadness. He kissed the sparse hairs at the crown of her head and felt his high dissolving. “It’s okay,” he repeated. What had he done? He shouldn’t have kissed her. They moved apart and he took her face into memory—the contrast of her doughy nose with the cheekbones that were only getting sharper with age—as if he would never see her again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for what he’s done to you.”