“I hear they’ve got their power.”
“They’d better,” Shukumar said. “Or you’ll be browsing in the dark.”
The woman laughed, slipping her arm through the crook of her husband’s elbow. “Want to join us?”
“No thanks,” Shoba and Shukumar called out together. It surprised Shukumar that his words matched hers.
He wondered what Shoba would tell him in the dark. The worst possibilities had already run through his head. That she’d had an affair. That she didn’t respect him for being thirty-five and still a student. That she blamed him for being in Baltimore the way her mother did. But he knew those things weren’t true. She’d been faithful, as had he. She believed in him. It was she who had insisted he go to Baltimore. What didn’t they know about each other? He knew she curled her fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched during bad dreams. He knew it was honeydew she favored over cantaloupe. He knew that when they returned from the hospital the first thing she did when she walked into the house was pick out objects of theirs and toss them into a pile in the hallway: books from the shelves, plants from the windowsills, paintings from walls, photos from tables, pots and pans that hung from the hooks over the stove. Shukumar had stepped out of her way, watching as she moved methodically from room to room. When she was satisfied, she stood there staring at the pile she’d made, her lips drawn back in such distaste that Shukumar had thought she would spit. Then she’d started to cry.
He began to feel cold as he sat there on the steps. He felt that he needed her to talk first, in order to reciprocate.
“That time when your mother came to visit us,” she said finally. “When I said one night that I had to stay late at work, I went out with Gillian and had a martini.”
He looked at her profile, the slender nose, the slightly masculine set of her jaw. He remembered that night well; eating with his mother, tired from teaching two classes back to back, wishing Shoba were there to say more of the right things because he came up with only the wrong ones. It had been twelve years since his father had died, and his mother had come to spend two weeks with him and Shoba, so they could honor his father’s memory together. Each night his mother cooked something his father had liked, but she was too upset to eat the dishes herself, and her eyes would well up as Shoba stroked her hand. “It’s so touching,” Shoba had said to him at the time. Now he pictured Shoba with Gillian, in a bar with striped velvet sofas, the one they used to go to after the movies, making sure she got her extra olive, asking Gillian for a cigarette. He imagined her complaining, and Gillian sympathizing about visits from in-laws. It was Gillian who had driven Shoba to the hospital.
“Your turn,” she said, stopping his thoughts.
At the end of their street Shukumar heard sounds of a drill and the electricians shouting over it. He looked at the darkened facades of the houses lining the street. Candles glowed in the windows of one. In spite of the warmth, smoke rose from the chimney.
“I cheated on my Oriental Civilization exam in college,” he said. “It was my last semester, my last set of exams. My father had died a few months before. I could see the blue book of the guy next to me. He was an American guy, a maniac. He knew Urdu and Sanskrit. I couldn’t remember if the verse we had to identify was an example of a ghazal or not. I looked at his answer and copied it down.”
It had happened over fifteen years ago. He felt relief now, having told her.
She turned to him, looking not at his face, but at his shoes—old moccasins he wore as if they were slippers, the leather at the back permanently flattened. He wondered if it bothered her, what he’d said. She took his hand and pressed it. “You didn’t have to tell me why you did it,” she said, moving closer to him.
They sat together until nine o’clock, when the lights came on. They heard some people across the street clapping from their porch, and televisions being turned on. The Bradfords walked back down the street, eating ice-cream cones and waving. Shoba and Shukumar waved back. Then they stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside.
Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions—the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves. The following day Shukumar thought for hours about what to say to her. He was torn between admitting that he once ripped out a photo of a woman in one of the fashion magazines she used to subscribe to and carried it in his books for a week, or saying that he really hadn’t lost the sweater-vest she bought him for their third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash at Filene’s, and that he had gotten drunk alone in the middle of the day at a hotel bar. For their first anniversary, Shoba had cooked a ten-course dinner just for him. The vest depressed him. “My wife gave me a sweater-vest for our anniversary,” he complained to the bartender, his head heavy with cognac. “What do you expect?” the bartender had replied. “You’re married.”
As for the picture of the woman, he didn’t know why he’d ripped it out. She wasn’t as pretty as Shoba. She wore a white sequined dress, and had a sullen face and lean, mannish legs. Her bare arms were raised, her fists around her head, as if she were about to punch herself in the ears. It was an advertisement for stockings. Shoba had been pregnant at the time, her stomach suddenly immense, to the point where Shukumar no longer wanted to touch her. The first time he saw the picture he was lying in bed next to her, watching her as she read. When he noticed the magazine in the recycling pile he found the woman and tore out the page as carefully as he could. For about a week he allowed himself a glimpse each day. He felt an intense desire for the woman, but it was a desire that turned to disgust after a minute or two. It was the closest he’d come to infidelity.
He told Shoba about the sweater on the third night, the picture on the fourth. She said nothing as he spoke, expressed no protest or reproach. She simply listened, and then she took his hand, pressing it as she had before. On the third night, she told him that once after a lecture they’d attended, she let him speak to the chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his chin. She’d been irritated with him for some reason, and so she’d let him go on and on, about securing his fellowship for the following semester, without putting a finger to her own chin as a signal. The fourth night, she said that she never liked the one poem he’d ever published in his life, in a literary magazine in Utah. He’d written the poem after meeting Shoba. She added that she found the poem sentimental.
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again. The third night after supper they’d sat together on the sofa, and once it was dark he began kissing her awkwardly on her forehead and her face, and though it was dark he closed his eyes, and knew that she did, too. The fourth night they walked carefully upstairs, to bed, feeling together for the final step with their feet before the landing, and making love with a desperation they had forgotten. She wept without sound, and whispered his name, and traced his eyebrows with her finger in the dark. As he made love to her he wondered what he would say to her the next night, and what she would say, the thought of it exciting him. “Hold me,” he said, “hold me in your arms.” By the time the lights came back on downstairs, they’d fallen asleep.
The morning of the fifth night Shukumar found another notice from the electric company in the mailbox. The line had been repaired ahead of schedule, it said. He was disappointed. He had planned on making shrimp malai for Shoba, but when he arrived at the store he didn’t feel like cooking anymore. It wasn’t the same, he thought, knowing that the lights wouldn’t go out. In the store the shrimp looked gray and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced. Still, he bought them, along with a beeswax candle and two bottles of wine.
She came home at seven-thirty. “I suppose this is the end of our game,” he said when he saw her reading the notice.
She
