There were some things he had revealed over the years. His favorite album was pre-radical Harry Belafonte’s Live at Carnegie Hall. When “Jamaica Farewell,” a song about sailors leaving home, came on, he would turn up the volume slightly and hum along, his mind clearly somewhere far from our living room. He’d said that he wanted to study psychology in college but it just felt too impractical. He’d once recalled to me that his favorite psychology professor had said that ninety percent of men masturbate, and the other ten percent lie about it. I had looked over at him, startled; that was as risqué and off-the-cuff as my father ever got, perhaps a sign that there had been more going on beneath his insistently calm, controlled exterior than he let on. More humor, more playfulness. I wish I could have known that side of him.
He’d loved Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He thought poorly of films in general, that they were a waste of time, but when he watched that one, he seemed to be in another world, one I could neither understand nor access. I always assumed he saw himself as Sidney Poitier. But he talked most often about the Spencer Tracy character, the pissy white dude who finally comes around to his daughter’s choice of a black partner. I didn’t understand why until much later, when Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was angry that they had given it to de Klerk, who had benefited handsomely from apartheid. My father countered: the greater courage is de Klerk’s, who, having seen the error of his ways, was willing to admit his wrongs to the world by releasing Mandela from jail.
Why had he been so taken with making amends, with admitting fault? Perhaps he’d done something in his life that he’d later wished he’d handled differently. Whatever the reason, I was sure that if he were here now he would tell me to apologize quietly to everyone and move on. Neither happy in victory nor daunted in defeat: the dictum that shaped his investing and the primary advice he gave his children on how to manage life’s vagaries. Every day when I woke up in my sturdy house, I was thankful for that counsel. And yet this time I didn’t want to move on, to smooth things over, to remain even-keeled.
Coffee in hand, I went to shower.
On my way there, I stopped in the hall between the kids’ rooms. Eva was still asleep with Arun. I walked into Neel’s room, placed my coffee on his desk, and crawled into bed with him. It wouldn’t be long before he outgrew his twin bed. He stirred and then turned to me, his breath sour from the night.
“Is everything OK?” he asked.
He was asking because I’d gotten into bed with him without having been called for. He was asking because when he was in that space between sleep and waking, he saw the world most clearly—he often professed deep love for us in the hazy minutes before he fell asleep at night. And he was asking because he was always tuned in to my emotional tremors.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “I just wanted to see you before I left for work.”
Relieved, Neel purred and leaned in close to me. I held him tight, as if the purity running through his body could somehow cool the continued burning in my chest.
I got up and went to take a shower, my coffee getting a little cold. When we’d had the bathroom redone, we’d asked the tile guy to build a small shelf for the shampoos; I preferred to use it for my mug.
The door creaked open while I was rinsing off. Eva walked in and sat gingerly on the toilet. Every American romantic comedy seemed to have this moment as a marker of a couple’s intimacy. It had always made me wonder: How did this practice evolve? How many real, non-movie people actually did this? Were they just in America? Did couples in Swaziland do this? Norway? What were the cross-cultural habits of couples who peed in each other’s presence? Maybe there was an essay in that for me—though the list of essays I thought about writing kept getting longer and longer, and I never seemed to sit down and draft any of them. Essays, like so many other things in life, were much better in my mind than in reality.
A few seconds later, Eva slipped into the shower and turned on the other showerhead. Her naked body, a bit of Venus on the half-shell, which, after fifteen years of marriage and two babies, still gave me a twinge.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said.
The shower used to be our thing. I passed her the mug.
“How did it go last night?” she asked, taking a sip.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll meet later this week to figure it out.”
“Anyone interesting?”
We were that couple who talked about absolutely everything. But I wasn’t quite ready to tell her about Bill Brown. I needed to process it longer on my own, to be clear about how I wanted to move forward before I heard her take on it. I trusted her opinion so much, it was easy for our thoughts to become intertwined; I wanted to have a clearer sense of where I stood myself before that happened.
“Not really.”
She was rinsing the shampoo from her hair, suds streaming over her breasts.
“How were the boys last night?” I asked, stepping out of the shower and drying off.
“We had our moments, but for the most part they were fine.”
I quickly pulled on my teaching uniform: 501s and a red Lacoste shirt that I always air-dried to keep it from shrinking and a pair of high-top black-and-white Vans I’d recently bought. When I was a teenager, my parents would never have bought me the shoes because they were expensive and impractical. So, of course, as soon as I’d been able to afford them, I’d bought them for myself; but now they made me a little self-conscious, as if I were too blatantly channeling my teenage self. What’s worse than a middle-aged college lecturer pretending he’s not? But the Vans were comfortable and reminded me that, at least when it came to shoes, I now had the freedom to buy what I wanted. I tried to leave it at that. The first day I’d worn them, I gave a particularly lively lecture and the students were engaged through the full hour. When I was done, I said, “It’s gotta be the shoes.” They all just stared at me blankly and shuffled out of the classroom.
I ate a piece of toast with peanut butter and started making sandwiches for the kids’ lunches. On Monday mornings, I usually left early to get to my office. I did the drop-offs and pickups on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while Eva took Mondays and Wednesdays. We roshamboed for Fridays.
“You go,” Eva said when she came into the kitchen, taking the butter knife from me. “I’ll do it.” She gave me the once-over. “Nice. Keep your door open during office hours.”
“I always do.”
I tried to put together the sentences that would explain and defend what had happened with the Browns. Certainly she was going to hear it from Leslie at drop-off; Leslie loved the intimacy of gossip.
“What’s up?” Eva asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I knew that once I told her, the conversation would go on for a while, and I wasn’t ready for that. “Busy day today?”
“Nothing unusual. But whenever I say that, the earth shakes.”
Eva and I had met in graduate school at Columbia, a couple of Californians bonding over long winters that neither of us could comprehend. I was getting a PhD in anthropology, and she was getting a master’s in international and public affairs. I had picked Columbia because it was a highly ranked school, yes, but also because I desperately wanted to have a New York period in my life. I wanted to grow away from my family, something I had decided all young men needed to do, and going to the gloriously hectic urbanity of New York felt like returning to the urbanity of Bombay. I had also wanted to study with the distinguished Palestinian literary critic Edward Said. Years before, in college, I had seen him give a talk on the broad influence of his seminal book Orientalism, in which he lays out the stereotypical ways in which the East has been portrayed—as religious, feminine, exotic—within the long tradition of Western literature and history. He was brilliant; I was rapt. But I also kept my eyes on the perfectly tailored mustard corduroys he was wearing. Mustard? My god. A revelation. You could dress well and say the world was unjust and quote Foucault, all at the same time. I wanted to be that person; I wanted to share bad news about the world, and I wanted to be sharply dressed while I did it.