As Sweet as Honey (19 page)

Stop, she told herself, stop, this was dreaming and living in the past, and what good did it do her?

On Pi, Simon would … Simon would … Simon … Here her fantasy always stopped, because what would Simon do? Would he be as alien there as she felt here? And was it fair to him, he who had literally found her at the last moment, he whom she loved with both passion and devotion? And didn’t that Indian writer say no one could ever go back to his or her homeland again? That nostalgia by its very nature is imagination? In her letters from New Jersey, Mina’s mother, Jyoti, did not mention nostalgia; but then, her days were filled with science—that was how Meterling saw her, in a lab coat, peering
into telescopes and test tubes, solving mysteries like Quincy, M.E. She was here, in London, with her two boys, and that was the reality.

Her two boys. Simon did seem boyish, grinning with excitement as he lay underneath her, like a kid with a Christmas present, and if truth were told, he made her feel like a girl. That sense of tingling hormones that were allowed breathing space in Western dating and teenage coupling, the frantic stolen kisses as well as the we-don’t-care-who’s-watching near-copulations she witnessed on the streets, were not easily available on Pi. When Meterling’s impulses and desires were released, it was like a wave of rediscovery. With Archer, she had been shy, curious, nearly studious as she watched him examine her body, poring over her like a patron of the arts, murmuring soft moans of appreciation. Eyeing his body had filled her with apprehension, and she was certain they wouldn’t fit, that
it
wouldn’t fit in
it
. She didn’t mind so much that what they were doing was desecrating the ancient laws that forbid premarital sex, but she minded her apprehension. She didn’t fully understand his wonder over this coupling, until he released her pleasure, leaving her both surprised and shocked. As she felt her body softening, he—intercoursed—and she had gasped at the pain while he, breathless, withdrew, but not quickly enough. They had only done it that once, that impossible one-in-a-million chance of sperm meeting egg—result: Oscar.

In London, though, desire blossomed in Meterling, quickening desire. In amazement, she found herself in a state between sleep-deprived torpor and acute sensitivity. Mostly, they lay together skin-to-skin, hardly moving, happy in the weight of one another. But other times, she hungrily sought Simon’s kisses, twining her arms around him, pulling him toward her.
Weren’t new mothers supposed to transfer their desire to their infants? But Simon wasn’t the father, so maybe that need to repulse the father came from the subconscious knowledge that he was responsible for childbirth pain. There—a new psychological insight. But whom could she ask? Dr. Morgan? Pa would know, and Pa might even tell, but Pa wasn’t here.

One day, she was late returning to the flat. The sun was coming down as she strolled Oscar back home. It had been raining earlier, and the wet made the asphalt shiny. She breathed in the air, but caught nothing, no surge of freshness, no increased negative-ion activity. The store lights weren’t yet on, but in an hour, as teatime neared, they would be. She stopped in front of a store that sold beautiful cashmere sweaters, hung on steel hangers like artworks, in pale pastels and varying shades of gray. Looking up, she had seen for a moment her own face superimposed by the window’s reflection onto one of the headless mannequins wearing a wool lace miniskirt and boots that stretched over its thighs (did mannequins have thighs, or merely legs?). The breasts were bare and pointy, because either that was the fashion or the store clerk hadn’t finished dressing it and had popped out for a cigarette. The mannequin’s skin was stark white, and Meterling saw herself hovering over it like a ghost wearing its clothes. She pulled her raincoat closer to her body, wishing she’d mended the torn pocket, sewed the button. It belonged to Simon, and the lining smelled like him, which comforted her a bit.

They were in Kensington, and Pimlico wasn’t that far. Looking up, she noticed a black Mercedes pull up to the curb in front of the familiar green awnings of Harrods. The driver got out, and a woman in a burka emerged, wearing sunglasses. Why would she need sunglasses at dusk? She strode swiftly
past Meterling and entered the store. On a whim, Meterling followed. She and Oscar could always take a cab home.

The woman headed for a set of elevators, quickly navigating among the crowd of people buying food for dinner. Smiling, she entered the elevator with the woman, joining a few other women. No one said a word as the lift ascended and the woman got out at the third floor: gift wares and bedding. She followed the woman, curious to see what the woman would buy. Sheets upon sheets of linen, it turned out, prettily packaged, deeply expensive, and forming thin, flat packages. Was she buying for a hotel? That would be a job done on the phone. No, it must be for her own boudoir. She must be the wife of a Saudi prince, or maybe she was an executive, a president of a company that didn’t mind women presidents. There were so many sheets. “Thank you, Ms. Mirazi,” said the clerk, handing her two dark-green bags. If she was someone so wealthy, wouldn’t she have a servant to carry her bags? And at the same moment Meterling thought this, a man stepped quietly from behind—where
had
he come from?—and took the bags. Her servant, or her guard, had been watching Meterling watching the mysterious woman. The pair headed back to the elevator.

Checking on Oscar, Meterling wandered a bit on this floor, until she came across tiny pottery figures of English houses. This was more like the house she had imagined, with a thatched roof. Oscar stirred.

“Do you think you’d like to live here?”

Oscar blinked at her.

“In a thatched cottage somewhere in the country, so when you grow, you can run around?”

Oscar made a spitball and drooled on his chin.

“Well, I guess you are a city boy, then,” she said.

“He should be eating sugarcane and running around barefoot,”
said a voice near her ear. She flinched, but did not speak to Archer.

33

T
he sky was moody, a palette of grays and blues, darkening quickly. Without the lush green color of the tropical island greenery, rain in London fell miserably, creating damp, depression, chills. No wonder the English loved their English teas, their English scones with double cream, which they called English even though in reality the latter had been used in Indian cuisine for thousands of years while the British tore at roast beef and hunted deer, drowning all with ale. My aunt wrinkled her nose; she would not fault the English for their ignorance, she resolved. Still, what did the women drink before the East India Tea Company? Cider from North America? Punch? She knew that when English women first tried to serve tea, they had no idea what they were doing. They served the leaves, boiled like potatoes, in tiny plates, tried to eat it, and wondered what the fuss was about. Yet these same English learned to make tea, and serve sweets to go with tea, little cakes with lemon glaze, and buttery biscuits. On Pi, she had devoured Jane Austen’s books like chocolate, imagining the sprigged muslin dresses, the crowds at Bath. She didn’t recall teas in the books, but she remembered the dinners.
Persuasion
was her favorite—and it was at the table Austen brought together the surprises and catalysts for plot, she remembered Miss Shanta impressing on the tenth standard. Real dinners were not like that; if violent emotions were felt and hidden, it
was because a train was late, or there was less pocket money for the monthly budget. Conversations were unremarkable in her life, unless good spirits and humor were cause for notice. What had George Eliot said—that it was the unremarkable people who made for the equanimity of life in peacetime? Something like that.

Simon had bought her a cookbook that was full of vegetarian British food. It had beautifully photographed terrines and timbales, cassoulets and soups. She leafed through it, and tried to make a tart with leeks. The vegetables were hard to clean; she forgot to blind-bake the pastry and reduce the temperature of the oven. A burnt pie resulted, the smell lingering in the air for days. She cried as Simon laughed.

When she first tried to eat pizza, (“pete-za,” she reminded herself, not “pisa”) slicing across the cheesy top with a knife, Simon had had to convince her the tomato sauce was really vegetarian. Didn’t Americans eat pizza with their hands? The British used fork and knife. It was tasty, if chewy, but the red sauce was disquieting. What would Darshan joke? They put meat in their pies, plugged in their water to boil, and made coffee from a jar. They traveled in tubes. English people, she discovered, spoke very fast, even on that television show with the Indians. They had a secret vocabulary, it seemed, and she wanted subtitles to follow. She resolved not to call the British “they.” She drew her shawl closer to her body over her sweater, because she was home now, having gone out to purchase milk, raincoat dripping by the door, rubber boots off, groceries inside, and having made herself a cup of tea.

She wondered if Susan would share a cup of tea with her if she telephoned. But Susan was so distrustful, so wary, as if
always working to bite back her resentment but not always succeeding. I am the woman who killed Archer, thought Meterling, the woman who made him dance. It was Archer who insisted on the dance lessons. Couldn’t she tell Susan, “Look, could we just start over?” But then, why should she be so conciliatory toward Susan? So her brother married me; so her cousin married me, too. What did it matter? Susan was Oscar’s aunt—wasn’t that enough?

Simon appeared, interrupting her thoughts, tousle-haired, as if he had awakened from a nap. He needed a shave. He treasured his Sundays, and would wear his pajamas all day. Buried under the newspaper or under the covers, he emerged to coo to the baby, eat, and make love to his wife. This is what they meant when they, whoever the wordsmiths were, coined “a month of Sundays.” Absentmindedly giving her a kiss, he walked to the window and rested his head on his arm against the pane.

“Damn. Does the English sun ever appear except in its former colonies?”

“Imagine contented Englishmen at home in sunny gardens, with no need to plunder and pillage.”

“Ah, plunder and pillage,” said Simon speculatively, but Meterling waved him off and went to make him a cup of tea. She liked Yorkshire tea best, strong and good, able to stand hot milk and sugar. She discovered that tea could be satisfying to the end, and wondered if it had to do with the weather. Just as she was to take Simon’s cup in, she heard a plaintive cry. Oscar? But this sounded more like a cat, a
meow
that sounded distressed. Opening the back door, she found a small black kitty, now mouthing its mews silently. She stared in amazement, not having witnessed such a silent appeal since seeing the street widows on Pi with their begging bowls, who were so
exhausted, so tired, they could only mutely ask for alms. Hurriedly, she opened the screen and scooped the cat in.

“Simon, we’ve got a visitor.”

“Oh, dear God,” he said when he saw the cat.

“We have to take care of it. Go get me a towel.”

“What about my tea?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

Soon, wrapped in a once-white towel after being gently but thoroughly rubbed down, the grateful cat softly purred.

“And it might belong to someone else. The landlord won’t let us keep a cat, darling.”

“Well, we’ll have to move.”

She was kidding, of course, but Meterling’s insistence on keeping the cat caught Simon by surprise. He hadn’t witnessed her stubbornness so completely before. Maybe in this strange new world, she needed an ally. They put out flyers and an ad in the paper, but no one claimed the cat. He found himself liking the creature that came running to him after work as he removed his coat. It stood on its hind legs, trying to greet him as people do, and flopped over onto its back, waiting for its belly to be rubbed.

“A thoroughly domesticated kitty,” he said, “aren’t you, Pibs?”

“Pibs?”

“Puss-in-Boots.”

Pibs took to guarding Oscar, who liked grunting into his face. At first, they worried that Pibs would bite suddenly, but Pibs and Oscar seemed companionable. Evenings, Pibs lay contentedly on a pillow by Oscar’s bouncy seat, while Meterling and Simon read by lamplight beside the fire. Simon taught her to twist newspaper, layer kindling and finally a log; and on
drafty days, she liked nothing better than the fire. They had found an old hearth toaster in an odds-and-ends market, and she sometimes heated chocolate between slices of bread.

But despite this warmth and affection and food and lovemaking, there were still long stretches of day which found her doing nothing at all, long stretches when Simon was away and cat and child asleep, days where she often just stared out the window. This was when the blue slipped in, even as her thoughts became full of lush color and strong images, when she remembered sitting on the veranda with tea, the kids beside her, or Grandmother. She thought of Archer, his innate kindness, his joviality, how they began to trust one another. She stopped herself—what if his ghost were to appear? But her thoughts ran on. If only Archer had known Oscar—that was the thought that climbed its way to the top of her thoughts. If only, if only—that terrible trap of the mind. But wasn’t the darker thought that she felt grateful he’d died, if only to have Simon? That was why she disliked these large spaces of day: it made her examine what she didn’t want to examine. It left her ragged.

“But I feel it too, Meti. It’s horrible. It’s almost as if I killed Archer with my mind. When I first saw you at the wedding, I was lightning-struck. I couldn’t believe Archer’s luck, and I’m sure I instantly wished I were in his place,” said Simon when she approached the subject. He bit his lip. “My father said it’s things like this that you don’t question, you don’t torment yourself with, and I have to agree with him.”

Meterling had to agree as well. It was pointless to pick over the past; yet why did the past creep up on her when she found herself lonely? As if on cue, Oscar began to cry, and she went to feed him. Maybe she should be grateful for what she had;
and really, this feeling, Oscar gently sucking, was so lovely, she didn’t, she
must not
, want more.