Unaccustomed Earth (12 page)

“It’s crazy,” Megan said, joining him. “But I guess they can get away with it, given that we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

It was true, they were in the middle of nowhere, though he did not feel the same way. He’d known, without having to review a map, which roads to take after exiting the highway, remembered which direction the town was in. But he had never been to this hotel. His parents had not stayed here for parents’ weekends; when Amit was at Langford they had lived in India, in New Delhi. They hadn’t made it to his graduation, either. They’d been planning to, but Amit’s father, an ophthalmologist at one of Delhi’s best hospitals, was requested to perform cataract surgery on a member of Parliament, and so Bengali acquaintances of his parents’ from Worcester attended in their stead. After graduating, Amit had not kept in touch with his Langford friends. He had no nostalgia for the school, and when letters came seeking alumni contributions or inviting him to the succession of reunions, he threw them out without opening them. Apart from his loose connection with Pam, and a sweatshirt he still owned with the school’s wrinkled name across the chest, there was nothing to remind him of those years of his life. He couldn’t imagine sending his daughters to Langford—couldn’t imagine letting go of them as his parents had let go of him.

He looked out at the hotel grounds. A pine tree growing directly in front of their balcony obstructed most of the immediate view. The pool was small and uninviting, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with no one swimming or sunbathing on its periphery. To the right were the tennis courts, concealed by more pine trees, but he could hear the soft
thwack
of a ball flying back and forth, a sound that made him tired.

“It’s a shame about this tree,” he said.

“If only it were a few feet that way,” Megan agreed.

“Maybe we should ask for another room. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Amit and Megan had a tradition, in their relationship, of switching hotel rooms. On the first trip they’d taken together after they met, to Puerto Rico, they’d gotten a room on the ground floor, and there was a dead lizard in the bathroom. Megan complained and they were switched to a deluxe suite overlooking the mesmerizing blue-green ocean and the contrasting blue of the sky. For the entirety of their stay they kept the curtains open to that view, making love sideways on the bed as they faced it, waking to it in the mornings, the effect being as if the whole room, and the bed, and they themselves, were somehow afloat on the sea. A similar thing had happened in Venice, where they’d gone to celebrate their first anniversary—after one night facing a stone wall, they moved to a room by a canal, where a small barge docked each morning selling fruits and vegetables. In this case, Amit reflected, they were already on the desirable side of the hotel—the rooms at the front would overlook the parking lot.

“It’s not worth it, for just two nights,” Megan said. She leaned slightly forward in her chair and peered over the railing of the balcony, craning her neck. “Is the wedding here at the hotel?”

“I told you, it’s at Langford.”

“Well, another couple is about to get married in that gazebo. I see bridesmaids.”

Amit looked on the other side of the pine tree and saw people filing out along a flagstone path that led from the terrace of the hotel restaurant. A photographer leaned over a tripod, surrounded by bags of equipment, and in front of him, a group of young women posed in matching lavender dresses.

“Pam’s wedding will be different,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“She won’t have bridesmaids.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s not the type.”

“You never know,” Megan said. “A lot of women do things that are out of character on their wedding day. Even women like Pam.”

Her slight derision washed over him, not penetrating. He knew Megan had been surprised that he’d accepted the invitation to Pam’s wedding, given that he and Pam rarely saw each other. And though Megan hadn’t protested, he understood that on some level he had dragged her here, to an unfamiliar place full of unfamiliar people, to a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared. He knew that though Megan refused to admit it, she was insecure about Pam, defensive the one or two times they’d met, as if Amit and Pam had once been lovers. When Amit and Megan had first met they’d traded their histories, divulging the succession of romantic interests that led them to each other, but he’d never mentioned Pam in that context. He had loved her, it was true, but because she’d never been his girlfriend there had been nothing to explain. He slouched in his chair, resting his neck on the hard plastic edge and shut his eyes. “I could use a drink.”

They stepped back into the air-conditioned room and he opened the suitcase they were sharing for the weekend. He pulled out the thick envelope containing the invitation, directions, a small map of Langford’s campus with the ceremony and reception locations marked with a highlighter. He sat on the bed, leaning against a pile of extremely soft pillows, sinking down. Then he looked at the digital clock that was beside the paper pyramid on the bedside table. “The wedding starts in an hour. We should get pillows like this at home.”

“Then we’d better get ready.” Megan regarded him with a look of professional concern, as if he were a patient on her rounds. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I was just hoping we’d have some time beforehand, to go for a walk or swim in the lake. I was thinking about a swim all the way up here. I didn’t think the traffic would be so bad.”

“We’ll swim tomorrow,” she said. “We have a whole weekend.”

He nodded. “Right.” He stood up and went into the bathroom, to shave and to shower. These everyday rituals felt like a chore. He was uninspired to put on his suit and socialize with ghosts from his adolescence. He undressed, then stood in front of the mirror spreading shaving cream on his face. Since Monika’s birth three years ago, this was their first trip without either of the girls. They were overdue for a vacation. Normally, every summer, they rented a cabin for two weeks in the Adirondacks. But Megan was in the last year of her residency at Mount Sinai, and her schedule did not allow it. She’d just finished a rotation in the cardiac intensive-care unit, working thirty-six-hour shifts, returning to the apartment at dawn, falling asleep just as Amit and the girls were beginning their day. Amit, who worked as the managing editor for a medical journal, had a more flexible schedule. Summer was a slow time at the journal, and since June he’d been overseeing the girls’ breakfasts and baths, scheduling playdates, dropping Maya off at a day camp in the mornings and picking her up again. Reducing their nanny’s hours for the summer months was one of the ways he and Megan had decided to cut back on expenses; the down payment on their new apartment, two stories of a brownstone on West Seventy-fifth Street, had depleted their savings.

He sensed Megan’s relief at not having Maya and Monika around, at being free. Amit wanted to share that relief, that sense of escape he’d been looking forward to all summer, after the invitation to Pam’s wedding had come and they’d made their plan. But now that they were alone he was nagged by the thought of Monika’s runny nose, and wondered if his mother-in-law would remember that strawberries gave Maya a rash. He was tempted to ask Megan, but he stopped himself, knowing that she would accuse him of not trusting his in-laws. As a parent she was less fussy, less cautious than he was. On her days off she indulged them, baking with them in the kitchen, not minding if they skipped dinner because they were too full of cookies and cake. He knew that it was partly out of guilt that she tended to be lenient, but it was also her nature. She had not been horrified, as he had, when Maya found a wad of flattened chewing gum at the playing ground and put it into her mouth, or when Monika wandered off during a picnic they were having in Central Park and began playing, with her tiny fingers, with dog shit. Megan laughed at such moments, wiping off their hands and faces, convinced that her children could survive anything. She spent her days with people who were fighting for their lives, and could not be shaken by a scraped elbow or a hundred-degree fever.

It was Amit, who had studied enough about the body to know its inherent fragility, who had dissected enough cadavers to know what a horizontal chest incision would reveal, who was plagued by his daughters’ vulnerability, both to illness and to accidents of all kinds. He was still haunted by an incident in the cafeteria of the Museum of Natural History, when Monika, a year old, had nearly choked on a piece of dried apricot. A woman at a neighboring table who happened to be a nurse had leapt up at the sound of Monika’s coughing and efficiently swept her finger through the girl’s mouth; in spite of two years of medical school, Amit lacked the simple instinct, the confidence, to do such a thing. He had been unable to look at either of his daughters for the rest of the day, to enjoy their time at the museum. He kept picturing the apricot piece lodged in Monika’s windpipe, and how it might have silenced her forever. When he read articles in the newspaper about taxis suddenly swerving onto sidewalks and killing half a dozen pedestrians, it was always himself he pictured, holding Monika and Maya by the hand. Or he imagined a wave at Jones Beach, where he had been taking them once a week during the summer, dragging one of them down, or a pile of sand suffocating them as he was flipping, a few feet away, through a magazine. In each of these scenarios, he saw himself surviving, the girls perishing under his supervision. Megan would blame him, naturally, and then she would divorce him, and all of it, his life with her and the girls, would end. A brief glance in the wrong direction, he knew, could toss his existence over a cliff.

He lay down his razor and turned on the shower to warm up the room. He heard a knock, and then Megan opened the door.

“I can’t go to the wedding,” she said, shaking her head. She said this definitively, the way she told the girls that they weren’t allowed to watch another program on television, or spend another five minutes in the tub.

“What are you talking about?”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the skirt she’d put on. Above it she wore only her bra, flesh-colored and dingy at the straps. The skirt reached her ankles, and it was made of a diaphanous, smoky gray material, layered over a silk panel of a slightly darker shade. She held up a section, and his eyes went immediately to a spot in the fabric. At first he thought it was a stain, but then he realized it was a burn that had created a small empty patch, charred around the edges. Beneath it, the silk lining looked unsightly, like the bright flesh exposed when a scab is forcibly lifted away.

“It looks awful,” she said. “There’s no way to hide it.”

“Did you pack a spare outfit?”

She shook her head, looking at him with annoyance. “Did you?”

Amit wiped his hands on a towel and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. Running his hands between the two layers of fabric, he felt the gauzy material brushing his palm, the silk at the back of his fingers. In medical school he’d considered being a surgeon, learning to piece together the most minuscule tissues of the body. But he’d never made it to any rotations, had only learned from textbooks and labs. As far as he could see there was no hope for repairing the skirt. It was so simple, so sheer, that the missing patch, through which the pad of one of his fingers was now visible, had ruined it.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice when I was packing,” Megan said. “It must have happened the last time I wore it. Sparks from a cigarette or something.”

He knew it wasn’t her fault, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from blaming her a little, for not paying closer attention. And he couldn’t help but wonder if it was an unconscious move on her part, to avoid Pam’s wedding, to sabotage things. It occurred to him that with the excuse of Megan’s skirt they might blow off the wedding altogether and spend the night in the hotel, watching movies in bed. Their absence would go unnoticed in such a big crowd, their place settings ignored as the waiters circled the tables. Had the Chadwick Inn been nicer he might have been tempted.

“Is there a store nearby?” Megan asked. “Somewhere I could dash out and buy something else while you get ready?”

“There used to be a mall, but it was about an hour’s drive from here. I don’t remember any clothing stores in town. Not nice ones.”

She turned the skirt to one side, so that the burn was no longer visible from the front. Then she stood beside him in front of the mirror over the sink, their bare arms touching. Normally Megan did not wear makeup, but for the occasion she had painted her mouth with a reddish lipstick. He found it distracting, preferred the intelligent, old-fashioned beauty of her face. It was the face of someone he could imagine living in a previous era, a simpler time, in an America that was oblivious to India altogether. Her dark brown hair was wound up as always, pulled away without fuss from her face and her long pale neck. She wore glasses, frameless oval lenses that seemed necessary to protect her sensitive gaze. They were the same height, five foot nine, tall for a woman but short for a man, and she was five years older, forty-two. And yet of the two of them it was Amit who already looked, at first glance, middle-aged, for by the age of twenty-one his hair had turned completely gray. It was here, at Langford, that it had begun, when he was in the sixth form. At first it was just a few strands, well concealed in his black hair. But by the time he was a junior at Columbia it was the black hairs he could count on one hand. He’d read it was possible, after a traumatic experience, for a person’s hair to turn gray in youth. But there had been no sudden death he could point to, no accident. No profound life change, apart from his parents sending him to Langford.