The Middleman and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

through riots, uprootings, separation, my son’s death.
    â€œI’m not taking it personally.”
    The fat man looks at us. The woman looks too, and shushes.
    I stare back at the two of them. Then I stare, mean and cool, at the man’s elbow. Under the bright blue polyester Hawaiian shirt sleeve, the elbow looks soft and runny. “Excuse me,” I say. My voice has the effortless meanness of well-bred displaced Third World women, though my rhetoric has been learned elsewhere. “You’re exploiting my space.”
    Startled, the man snatches his arm away from me. He cradles it against his breast. By the time he’s ready with comebacks, I’ve turned my back on him. I’ve probably ruined the first act for him. I know I’ve ruined it for Imre.
    It’s not my fault; it’s the
situation.
Old colonies wear down. Patels—the new pioneers—have to be suspicious. Idi Amin’s lesson is permanent. AT&T wires move good advice from continent to continent. Keep all assets liquid. Get into 7- I IS , get out of condos and motels. I know how both sides feel, that’s the trouble. The Patel sniffing out scams, the sad salesmen on the stage: postcolonialism has made me their referee. It’s hate I long for; simple, brutish, partisan hate.
    After the show Imre and I make our way toward Broadway. Sometimes he holds my hand; it doesn’t mean anything more than that crazies and drunks are crouched in doorways. Imre’s been here over two years, but he’s stayed very old-world, very courtly, openly protective of women. I met him in a seminar on special ed. last semester. His wife is a nurse somewhere in the Hungarian countryside. There are two sons, and miles of petitions for their emigration. My husband manages a mill two hundred miles north of Bombay. There are no children.
    â€œYou make things tough on yourself,” Imre says. He assumed Patel was a Jewish name or maybe Hispanic; everything makes equal sense to him. He found the play tasteless, heworried about the effect of vulgar language on my sensitive ears. “You have to let go a bit.” And as though to show me how to let go, he breaks away from me, bounds ahead with his head ducked tight, then dances on amazingly jerky legs. He’s a Magyar, he often tells me, and deep down, he’s an Asian too. I catch glimpses of it, knife-blade Attila cheekbones, despite the blondish hair. In his faded jeans and leather jacket, he’s a rock video star. I watch MTV for hours in the apartment when Charity’s working the evening shift at Macy’s. I listen to WPLJ on Charity’s earphones. Why should I be ashamed? Television in India is so uplifting.
    Imre stops as suddenly as he’d started. People walk around us. The summer sidewalk is full of theatergoers in seersucker suits; Imre’s year-round jacket is out of place. European. Cops in twos and threes huddle, lightly tap their thighs with night sticks and smile at me with benevolence. I want to wink at them, get us all in trouble, tell them the crazy dancing man is from the Warsaw Pact. I’m too shy to break into dance on Broadway. So I hug Imre instead.
    The hug takes him by surprise. He wants me to let go, but he doesn’t really expect me to let go. He staggers, though I weigh no more than 104 pounds, and with him, I pitch forward slightly. Then he catches me, and we walk arm in arm to the bus stop. My husband would never dance or hug a woman on Broadway. Nor would my brothers. They aren’t stuffy people, but they went to Anglican boarding schools and they have a well-developed sense of what’s silly.
    â€œImre.” I squeeze his big, rough hand. “I’m sorry I ruined the evening for you.”
    â€œYou did nothing of the kind.” He sounds tired. “Let’s not wait for the bus. Let’s splurge and take a cab instead.”
    Imre always has unexpected funds. The Network, he calls it, Class of