War by Candlelight: Stories

third avenue suicide

They’d been living in the apartment for ten days when David was first asked to disappear. This was the arrangement, what they’d agreed upon, and he would do so without complaint. His things were put away, hidden in the corners of the closet, or under the bed, or in the bottom drawer where Reena’s mother was unlikely to look. His razor, his boxer shorts, his guitar, his cameras. “Your man things,” Reena said, joking. He liked the way she said it. David kissed her and walked out of the apartment and into the street. The August heat had broken, and the breezy afternoon intimated the coming fall. I’m a good boyfriend, David told himself. It was no sacrifice at all. He loved her. He sat on the curb across the street from their building, smoking cigarettes and watching for Mrs. Shah.

He’d seen Reena’s mother in pictures many times and once in person at Reena’s dance performance the previous spring. Mrs. Shah didn’t know Reena had a boyfriend. She didn’t know they’d been dating for two years, or that they’d just moved in together. And she could not know. These were the rules of the relationship, Reena said. When I’m ready, I’ll tell her.

Her father had not known either. He’d passed away in April, not knowing.

When you’re ready, David said, nodding. He wanted to be patient. Not to pressure her.

Now he waited and wondered exactly how long he would have to be outdoors. A breeze carried some candy wrappers toward the park at the top of the hill. Some older men stood on the corner, thumbing through a newspaper they’d laid out on the hood of a parked car. One of them nodded at David. A game of baseball was under way in the middle of the street. A spindly-legged kid swung wildly at a tennis ball, launching fly balls high into the air.

David bought a paper at the bodega and read the sports. He smoked two cigarettes. The men dispersed and regrouped on another corner, caressing beer bottles in brown paper bags. The call from the Yankees game spilled out of a car stereo. David had forgotten to watch for Reena’s mother. He’d missed her emerging from the train station, or toddling up the hill. Instead, he read the paper cover to cover, news that bored him thoroughly, as an hour passed, and most of another. He walked around the block and sat down again. The afternoon edged toward dusk, and suddenly there was Reena in front of him, grinning. “She’s gone,” Reena said. “Are you coming up?”

“What’d she say?” David asked.

“Nothing really.”

David checked at his watch. “In two hours?”

“Well…”

“Did she like the place?”

“She said it was dark.”

He nodded. It was dark. “Foggy,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ll go crazy in there.” With arching eyebrows, David signified crazy. Reena laughed.

The day they rented the apartment had been sunny and clear, a washed-out and white afternoon. It fooled them: the tiny space seemed, that morning, endearingly intimate and warm. They’d spent more than a week unpacking, cleaning, and painting; not once had it approached the bright golden light of that first day. “Indifferent to light,” was how Reena described the apartment. Outside, the quality of the sun changed: shadows glancing at various angles, transforming the city as the day grew older. But inside their space, the walls stayed a dull white and nothing glowed and nothing shone. A uniform blue evoked midwinter. It was, they decided, the city’s darkest nonbasement apartment.

Now David held his hands out. Reena pulled him up. “She didn’t even look in the closets. Or under the bed. You’re off the hook.” She bit her lip and tucked a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. “She did ask me if I was seeing anyone.”

“And? What’d you tell her?”

“That me and my hoodrat boyfriend make love every night on the fire escape.”

Reena touched his cheek, and David felt the muscles of his face contract into a smile. Over her shoulder, he could see the older men watching them.

“Underneath the stars. How romantic.”

“Without protection,” she whispered.

“Mongrel babies.”

“Half-breeds.

“The best kind,” he said. Her breath tickled his ear. He buried his head between her neck and shoulder, felt her tighten when he bit her earlobe. He kissed her neck until Reena laughed.

“She told me there are Web sites for Indians now,” Reena said. “Web sites? Can you imagine?”

“How primitive modern.” David frowned and pulled away. “She’s not giving up then.”

“Nope.”

He shook his head and realized he was expecting something. It had been two hours. He felt the need to be thanked. They were quiet for a moment. On the sidewalk, the breeze turned the newspaper’s crumpled pages.

“She brought us fruit,” Reena said finally.

“Ooohh.”

“Don’t be an ass.” She twirled a lock of black hair around her finger and then took his hand.

“Do you think she’ll come around much?”

“Probably not.” Reena kissed him. They crossed the street toward their apartment.

But she did come around, once the next week, and twice the week after that. David soon understood exactly what was in store. Reena lived in the apartment, he visited there. All the bills were in her name. David had bought a cell phone, since he was prohibited from answering the land line. It was the number Reena’s mother called. The first weeks of September, there was still little to be done at work, and so often he was home early, only to be displaced by Reena’s mother. He got to know the neighborhood during these periods of exile. He walked up to Riverside Park, where the Mexicans played volleyball beneath the leafy shade of the oak trees. He had coffee at La Floridita and pretended to play Lotto with those stubby yellow pencils. He window-shopped on 125th, looked disinterestedly at bright Timberland boots engineered like SUVs, and baby blue FUBU jogging suits selling for two bills. But always before he left, David waited for Mrs. Shah and tried to intercept her. He’d seen Reena’s mother three times now, walking slowly up the hill from the train station, bearing gifts: a grocery bag full of apples, a duffel packed with bath towels, and once, an electric juicer, brand-new and still in the box. Afterward, when he came home and Reena showed off what her mother had brought them, David warily pointed out that these gifts, no matter how thoughtful, were not for them. They were for her. In any case, he saw Mrs. Shah before Reena did, saw her struggling up the hill with heavy bags, arms clasped around a package, and he never offered to help, though this went against every impulse he had, everything he had ever been taught. Instead he walked by, smiling generously. His idea was to pass her each and every time she came until she noticed him.

“She won’t, you know,” Reena said when he told her his plan. They were unpacking a bag full of sweaters that Mrs. Shah had brought, though the cold was still weeks away.

“She could.”

“Sure. She could. But she won’t.”

“I’ll bump into her,” David said. “I’ll help her carry her bags up the hill.”

Reena groaned.

“I’m playing,” David said.

“Well, don’t. Me living alone is a big deal to her. Everything is. You know she wanted me to move home. Anything more is too much,” Reena said. “She’d die.”

The last syllable hung there, and David believed none of it. “That’s not how people die,” he said. David held a stack of sweaters — ugly sweaters — in his hands, was poised to stash them away on a top shelf in the closet. Instead he tossed them on the bed. “No one dies ’cause their daughter’s got a boyfriend.”

She glared at him. “Don’t talk like that,” she said curtly. “You don’t know how people die.” Her old man had been out running, on a doctor’s suggestion that he get more exercise. He’d been ailing for years but, it seemed, had turned a corner. Then, heart attack.

Reena turned on a lamp. She squinted. They’d declared the dark their enemy, painted the walls a shade of red David called “the color of action.” Hundred-watt bulbs in three lamps. They gave the impression of a room on fire.

“I’m sorry…” David trailed off. “I feel like I’m sneaking around,” he said, turning on the stereo. The wired voice of a radio DJ filled the room.

“You are sneaking around. Jesus. We both are. My mother wants to marry me off to some dentist. My wedding was all they ever talked about. She’s checking the fucking Internet.” Reena picked up the sweaters and, on the tips of her toes, tossed them up on the top shelf. Her breasts bounced once as she jumped. Reena turned to face David, who’d taken a seat by the desk. “I lie to her every day. You think this is a cakewalk for me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“They’re—She’s not going to stop until I’m Mrs. Patel or Mrs. Singh or Mrs. Kumar. Mrs. Nice Indian Boy.”

“And?” he said.

Reena sighed. Her lips were pursed and tight. “You want me to tell her? Are you ready for that?” she asked. “You know what would happen?”

David stared at her black eyes. She was beautiful, too beautiful for him. Once, she hadn’t been so afraid. He turned away from her. “Whatever,” he muttered, grateful, suddenly, for all the diffuse meanings of that word.

“Do you know how fucked up it would be?”

“You’ve told me.”

“She’s alone now.” Reena stepped toward him. “I’m what she has.” She softened. “Don’t make this your problem,” she said. “Please. You don’t want it.”

David sighed. “It’s just fucked up.”

“It is. Of course it is.”

“Come here,” he said and made room for her on his lap. “Who likes fucked up?” David asked.

“No one,” Reena said.

They had been living in the city’s darkest studio apartment for two months when Reena awoke one morning, tired. She’d had the flu or something, and was taking too long to get over it. Weeks and weeks of fighting her own body, of OJ and vitamins and yoga in the mornings to work out the stiffness. She dragged herself to the shower, pulled on her clothes with cumbrous movements, and smiled feebly at David as she got ready for work. He sat up in bed and massaged her shoulders. A radio newscaster announced all the day’s tragedies. David didn’t have to be at the center until ten and, once there, rarely did any real work before eleven. Reena seemed beat, he thought, and he told her so. She confessed that she had felt even more tired the last couple of days. He rose and, before she left, promised he’d call her from work, when he got a free moment.

“Is there another kind at your fake-ass job?” Reena said, laughing.

The room was red and bright. The lamps were on. “I like my free moments. I like my fake-ass job,” he said, which was mostly true. David blew her a kiss. “Feel better,” he called out.

He didn’t think much of it at work. It was late October, and the center was dressed in the obligatory Halloween orange and black. David spent the morning sending e-mails. He answered a couple of phone calls about tutoring. A kid he knew from Stanley Isaacs Houses came in and asked to borrow some money. He and another counselor talked about how pathetic the Knicks would be that year. He watched a trashy Spanish talk show with a roomful of seniors. He ate lunch alone on the benches beneath the project shadows, blew smoke rings and watched the cars drive up Third Avenue.

It was a quarter to seven before he got home. Reena was already there. The apartment smelled awful. Reena looked awful. The bathroom door was open and the light was on. The room glowed a sickly yellow and orange hue. She sat up in bed when he came in. “Hey, babe,” Reena said in a tired voice.

“You all right? What’s going on?”

She wasn’t feeling well, she’d had to come home.

“You should’ve called me at the center,” David said.

“I thought you were going to call me.”

David winced.

“I just came home and fell asleep anyway,” Reena said, shrugging. “Well, slept and threw up a little. I ate some soup. That must be it.”

He made her tea, and Reena said she was feeling better, but all night she kept waking up and stumbling to the bathroom. She threw up four times. It was nearly daybreak when she and David admitted that they weren’t going to get any sleep. The pungent smell of vomit hung in the small apartment like a toxic cloud.

The cab ride to the emergency room reminded David of everything he hated about the city. A weak dawn sun cast no shadows. Dogs and people picked through piles of trash. Reena slumped into his lap, and he stroked her hair. She was feverish. It occurred to David that Reena might be pregnant. He felt his stomach sink. Her eyes were closed and they were still five blocks from the hospital. The idea of it spread until he could feel fear humming in the very tips of his fingers. He didn’t mention it to her.

In the waiting room, Reena called her mother on David’s cell phone. David held her hand as she spoke, could feel in her pulse the effort she was making to sound stronger than she was. Tik, she said, which was the only Hindi word he knew. It meant okay. The conversation was brief. Mrs. Shah was coming, of course.

For a moment, David allowed himself to consider the possibility that Reena was really ill. There they were together, hands clasped, in the waiting room of a public hospital. Her mother would come. He would be courteous. Responsible. Explain things—I am the boyfriend—and everything else: Reena’s last few weeks, how tired she seemed and stiff, and what he’d observed from watching her, being with her, and loving her, every day in the apartment they’d shared since August.

“I love you, babe,” David said.

Reena nodded.

“Should I leave?” he asked, hopefully.

She lay her head against his right shoulder instead. He put his arm around her and rubbed her temple with his thumb. He listened to the soft rhythm of her breathing.

“Not yet,” Reena said finally. “In a while.”

His hand stopped moving of its own accord. David felt a heat in his chest, a sensation so unpleasant he wondered for a moment if whatever Reena had was contagious. Mrs. Shah was on her way from Englewood, just across the George Washington Bridge. It would be twenty minutes more, maybe twenty-five. Another half hour before he was displaced, and until then he could rub her head and soothe her and then he would have to go. Or he could leave now. He felt icy and useless. He eased her head off his shoulder. “How do you feel?” he asked.

“Everything hurts.” Her face drooped into a sad frown. Reena held her hand out, and for a moment, it hung there between them. She looked pitiful. He took her hand in his and massaged it. He pulled it to his lips and kissed the third knuckle. He stood to leave.

“Will you clean up the place?” Reena asked. “In case my mom wants to take me back there?”

David said he would.

All alone in the apartment, David appreciated its darkness. He sprawled out on the bed and left the lamps off. The faucet dripped. It would be such a childish gesture, but somehow satisfying: to leave a clue. Something undeniably his. His basketball, scuffed and bruised on the Riverside courts; or his camera, which he’d used to take pictures of Reena at her last dance performance. He got up and pulled the curtain, the anemic midmorning light filtered in through the window. He thumbed through a stack of photographs on the desk and found the one shot he loved of Reena in her mustard-colored sari, gold earrings and glittering bracelets on her wrists and on her ankles above her graceful, bare feet. She was gleaming and young. Her parents were there. How close he had been to them, as if he could have stepped out of the crowd and into their world, and offered his hand: Mr. Shah. Mrs. Shah. How simple it would have been.

Her father had died a few weeks later. Then Reena had started working at a lab uptown and studying full-time. She had dropped her dance classes altogether.

David showered and put away his things. On his knees, he cleaned the bathroom. He left a fine mist of aerosol disinfectant floating in the air, a lemony medicinal scent that stung the inside of his throat. He left and locked the door.

By mid-December, she’d been to three doctors. Lyme disease, said the first. The second mentioned lupus, but said he couldn’t be certain. The third, whom Reena chose to believe for the calm and reassuring manner in which he spoke, diagnosed early-onset arthritis. It was comforting, she told David, to have a diagnosis, a name to give her symptoms. She’d quit her job. Most days she wanted to lie in bed. Her knees hurt. Her elbows. The individual joints of her fingers. On the worst days, she described steel rods running the length of her legs, unbendable knees, the stiffness of a frozen cadaver. The doctor said it would pass, but Reena told David that sometimes she felt she was dying. I’m too young for this, she said.

Her mother came nearly every day now, and David wondered, in his more selfish moments, what was worse: a sick girlfriend or her overbearing mother exiling you to the streets. Reena and David hadn’t made love since before the trip to the emergency room. She was always tired, or looked so ill and unhappy that he was afraid touching her might be interpreted as an assault. Her mother came and stayed late, sometimes till eight or nine. She cried with her daughter and told Reena that someone had cursed them. She burned incense and herbs with such overpowering odors that the neighbors complained. They prayed together while David waited outside, or at La Floridita, brooding, for Reena to call him on his cell phone so he could come home. He still waited for Mrs. Shah, watching for her unsure steps as she came down the escalator from the train. Each time, Mrs. Shah turned uncertainly toward 125th Street, or looked down Broadway, a pause as if lost, before heading up toward the apartment.

David steadfastly refused to abandon his project. He wanted more than ever to crack into Mrs. Shah’s world. There was something in her that he recognized: the way she walked, the little regard she had for the neighborhood, or for the particulars of the street, or for him, planted somewhere along her short path from train to apartment. That invisibility is not me, he reasoned. It is her. He didn’t know what part of India Reena’s family was from, but it was, he imagined, nothing like this. It was not squat gray buildings. It was not the south edge of Harlem. It was not kids in oversize black jackets huddled on corners, or the boom-bip of a snare drum escaping from the window of a Jeep. It was not lazy Spanish in bodegas, or Goya beans, or storefront windows that bathed cell phones in green neon light. It was not Malian women standing by the train, offering to braid hair with nimble fingers. Wherever Mrs. Shah was from had none of these things. And so, Mrs. Shah could walk through it, as if in a fog, and not see it, and not care; and David could smile and nod a hundred times, and never be seen. Her husband was dead. Reena was the only real person in her city.

The first snow fell and melted into black-brown sludge, piling icy and unclean in the city’s gutters. On a Thursday afternoon, David waited for Mrs. Shah. He sat on the front step of the building, holding a stack of books and folders full of papers. The director had assigned social work readings for an upcoming staff development day. Upstairs, Reena was yellow and sick, drowsy with pills. She complained that the medicine was making her gain weight. David pretended not to have noticed.

The block was quiet, in its winter grays. At the bottom of the hill, Mrs. Shah emerged from the train station. David gathered his things and made his way down the hill to meet her. To walk by her. He would make eye contact this time. He would nod. He would offer to carry her bag for her. The sidewalk was slippery. David wiggled his toes inside his boots. And Mrs. Shah trudged slowly up the block, arms empty, wearing a grim, determined expression, as if fighting the cold. These were sad visits. She was wrapped in a black wool coat, her head covered by a bright orange scarf. She looked straight ahead.

Halfway down the block, David felt the helplessness of that moment just before one is ignored. It stung. Reena, he felt certain, would kill him for what he was about to do, but, in any case, it was done: a few feet in front of Reena’s mother, David pretended to stumble and then, despite himself, he did. He lost his balance on the slick pavement. His books and papers spilled everywhere. He slid back until he was down, ass on the cold, wet sidewalk, Mrs. Shah standing over him. He was out of breath. He looked her in the eye.

“Young man,” Mrs. Shah said, with a look of surprise and worry, “are you all right?”

He’d crossed some line. She seemed genuinely concerned, more than simply polite. She would remember his face. She looked as he imagined Reena’s mother should: with Reena’s deep brown eyes, her full lips, her delicate nose. Mrs. Shah was a little darker than her daughter, who was a bit darker than David. She smiled kindly, the lines on her face deeper and more noticeable than when he had last seen her. She had aged in these months, carrying the burden of her daughter’s illness.

Mrs. Shah asked again, “Are you all right?” She offered him a hand.

“Me? Oh yes,” David said. “Tik. I’m fine.”

“Sorry?”

“Tik,” he repeated. He hadn’t expected to fall. He’d only wanted to drop the books. He felt his palms sweating on the inside of his gloves. “I’m fine.”

By the look of befuddlement on Mrs. Shah’s face, David knew he had gone too far. She would mention it to Reena. Tik. It would become a question. She would want to know what was going on. “Thank you,” David said as Reena’s mother passed him a book. She stood there, watching him as he stacked his things on the sidewalk.

“Thank you,” he said again, then he took his books and papers under his arm and barreled down the hill toward the train.

When they met and started dating, Reena often described the situation ironically: a bind, she said, a circumstance. A context. They talked for hours and hurt themselves laughing. Her situation didn’t change or go away; they simply chose to ignore it. There was no logic to it, no forward thinking: they had no other choice.

Fathers are worse, Reena had said. They’re rock, unmovable stone, bulwarks of tradition. Fathers are more protective of daughters, less understanding, have more invested in the idea of good marriages. Mothers want sons so they can browbeat their daughters-in-law one day, the way they themselves were tormented by their mothers-in-law years before. In fact, everyone wants sons. Daughters: they should marry well and early, avoiding the Western problems of dating, boyfriends, and sex. Prospective husbands: caste matters less than profession. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, in that order. Reena claimed not to know which caste her parents were from. She said it exactly that way, with those words—my parents are from—because she didn’t belong to any caste at all. She was American. A Desi, but still American. I’m both, she said. I was raised this way. They would find her a husband. It wasn’t foreign or strange. It simply was.

“But,” she said to David once, “you could almost pass, you know? You’re vaguely something.”

Ideas were being kicked around, ways to circumvent the context. David raised an eyebrow. “Pass as?”

“They’re your color in the north. With green eyes. Kashmiri. I’ve seen it.” Reena smiled mischievously. “Time to learn you some Punjabi, babe. Teach you to dance Bhangra.”

“And become an engineer.”

“Yep. Social work won’t do.”

“And I gotta rock more gold.”

“And we should clean that Spanish off you.”

They’d been dating for four and a half months when she announced she would try her mother. It surprised him. And it might have surprised her to know that, though he was touched, the first question that crossed his mind was, What will this require of me? He asked her carefully, not wanting to dissuade her, and not at all sure what any of it meant. “Why me?” he said.

“Because I love you,” she answered.

Her father he had a picture of: not well, grumpy in the face of prolonged illness, furrowed brow, deep-set eyes. Probably hated white people more than he hated blacks. At best, indifferent to Spanish folks. Dissatisfied. Nostalgic. David’s first, unspoken question grew specifically out of Reena’s description of her father. The rust-red color of his angry face. How he would disown her. Curse her. Die. Disruptions to the tranquility of the context were described in terms of international crisis areas, civil wars. A family torn asunder, a daughter abandoned, an unsuspecting boyfriend wondering what the hell happened.

Mrs. Shah was his ally against Reena’s father. She was reason, and reason would prevail. Mrs. Shah would recognize that he loved her daughter. She would be his foot in the door. That Reena would risk telling her mother anything at all touched David. It was Reena’s leap of faith.

“I like a boy,” she told her mother.

And this is what Mrs. Shah said, according to Reena: “No, you don’t. Your father is sick. It’s your last semester. You’re going to have to find a job. How can you think about a boy?”

Reena laughed when she told him, recounting the whole incident with an amused smile. Cluelessness. Foreignness. Her poor mother. David felt disappointment and relief in equal parts. He bristled at the notion of being called a “boy” by both his girlfriend and her mother. Reena was something less than a woman if she had to ask permission to see him. On the other hand, it was a war that she probably only wanted to fight once: was he worth it? Reena wouldn’t want to fight alone. War implied all kinds of commitments.

In any case, it was done. There would be no going public. The context would not be disturbed. And so they forgot it when they could, let themselves fall in love, and found those amnesiac moments to be their best.

“Leave,” Reena said. “Please.”

It was February. December had passed, and January, and Reena had stayed sick. The doctors said she’d be better by spring. They told her optimistically that she’d be dancing again in no time at all. Now her mother was coming. Had called twenty minutes before, was on her way. David should have left already. His usual seat at La Floridita was waiting for him, and the curly-haired waitress who would bring him coffee and a Lotto ticket and a stubby yellow pencil. The slick city sidewalks. The rumble of a passing train. All the routines of disappearance were waiting for him out in the streets. But he felt something heavy in him, something leaden and stiff. Something arthritic. Cataleptic. David sat at the desk. The red walls sometimes unnerved him, but today he felt their heat.

“It’s cold out,” he offered.

“David.”

“What?” he said blankly.

“You’re stressing me out,” Reena said. “Go get a cup of coffee. Do you need money? Here, take some money.” She offered him a few rumpled bills.

“You don’t have a job.”

Scowling, she let the money slip from fingers. “What are you trying to do? Are you trying to make this difficult?”

“No.”

“Then? Are you going to wait until she buzzes? Till she knocks?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I’m sick, goddamn it, I’m sick!”

The picture he’d left had made no impact. Reena’s mother hadn’t asked who took it. Or why it was in black-and-white. David had stalked his girlfriend and her parents at Union Square, taking black-and-white pictures that were not quite beautiful. Reena hadn’t even noticed it on the desk. Mrs. Shah had said only how handsome Reena’s father had looked that day.

It was subtle. But falling on his ass in front of Mrs. Shah? Nothing. Reena’s mother had commented on it and forgotten. Found it funny. Tik. That was all. A week after he’d tumbled to the frozen sidewalk, Mrs. Shah had walked right by him without so much as a glance.

Since then, he’d learned two new words that he hadn’t yet had the chance to say:

Namaste. Hello.

Amah. Mother.

If he still wanted to be found, he’d have to stop her on the street. Catch her on the stairs walking up to the apartment. Look into her brown eyes and speak in complete Hindi sentences:

Hello, mother. I am a wealthy Punjabi engineer looking for an American-born Desi to warm my bed. For marriage and dowry, and perhaps for love. My mother will not mistreat your daughter after the wedding. I promise you this, Mrs. Shah.

Would that be enough?

Mrs. Shah, I am David. My parents are Peruvian. I work in the projects. Your daughter and I, we live together. We used to make love on the fire escape. I have cleaned up her vomit. I have watched her get sick. Sometimes, I think I still love her, but I’m tired.

His jacket landed on his lap, followed by his scarf, and then his gloves. He looked up at Reena, tired and sad against the red walls. She sat on the edge of the bed. “You want your sweatshirt too?”

“Yeah,” David said.

She tossed him his hoodie. “We can’t talk about this now,” Reena said.

“I know.”

“Later?”

“Sure,” he said, nodding.

Her face disappeared into her hands. She was taking a dozen pills a day. Each Friday, the doctors gave her a shot in the thigh with a long needle. He put on his sweatshirt, and then his jacket. He took his key off the hook by the door, his knit cap from on top of the dresser. It was cold out. He put on his gloves, left hand first. The room was bright and warm and red.