The Middleman and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

’56.
    In the back of the cab, without even trying, I feel light, almost free. Memories of Indian destitutes mix with the hordes of New York street people, and they float free, like astronauts,inside my head. I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life. I’ve left home, my husband, to get a Ph.D. in special ed. I have a multiple-entry visa and a small scholarship for two years. After that, we’ll see. My mother was beaten by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, when she’d registered for French lessons at the Alliance Française. My grandmother, the eldest daughter of a rich zamindar, was illiterate.
    Imre and the cabdriver talk away in Russian. I keep my eyes closed. That way I can feel the floaters better. I’ll write Mamet tonight. I feel strong, reckless. Maybe I’ll write Steven Spielberg too; tell him that Indians don’t eat monkey brains.
    We’ve made it. Patels must have made it. Mamet, Spielberg: they’re not condescending to us. Maybe they’re a little bit afraid.
    Charity Chin, my roommate, is sitting on the floor drinking Chablis out of a plastic wineglass. She is five foot six, three inches taller than me, but weighs a kilo and a half less than I do. She is a “hands” model. Orientals are supposed to have a monopoly in the hands-modelling business, she says. She had her eyes fixed eight or nine months ago and out of gratitude sleeps with her plastic surgeon every third Wednesday.
    â€œOh, good,” Charity says. “I’m glad you’re back early. I need to talk.”
    She’s been writing checks. MCI, Con Ed, Bon wit Teller. Envelopes, already stamped and sealed, form a pyramid between her shapely, knee-socked legs. The checkbook’s cover is brown plastic, grained to look like cowhide. Each time Charity flips back the cover, white geese fly over sky-colored checks. She makes good money, but she’s extravagant. The difference adds up to this shared, rent-controlled Chelsea one-bedroom.
    â€œAll right. Talk.”
    When I first moved in, she was seeing an analyst. Now she sees a nutritionist.
    â€œEric called. From Oregon.”
    â€œWhat did he want?”
    â€œHe wants me to pay half the rent on his loft for last spring. He asked me to move back, remember? He
begged
me.”
    Eric is Charity’s estranged husband.
    â€œWhat does your nutritionist say?” Eric now wears a red jumpsuit and tills the soil in Rajneeshpuram.
    â€œYou think Phil’s a creep too, don’t you? What else can he be when creeps are all I attract?”
    Phil is a flutist with thinning hair. He’s very touchy on the subject of
flautists
versus
flutists.
He’s touchy on every subject, from music to books to foods to clothes. He teaches at a small college upstate, and Charity bought a used blue Datsun (“Nissan,” Phil insists) last month so she could spend weekends with him. She returns every Sunday night, exhausted and exasperated. Phil and I don’t have much to say to each other—he’s the only musician I know; the men in my family are lawyers, engineers, or in business—but I like him. Around me, he loosens up. When he visits, he bakes us loaves of pumpernickel bread. He waxes our kitchen floor. Like many men in this country, he seems to me a displaced child, or even a woman, looking for something that passed him by, or for something that he can never have. If he thinks I’m not looking, he sneaks his hands under Charity’s sweater, but there isn’t too much there. Here, she’s a model with high ambitions. In India, she’d be a flat-chested old maid.
    I’m shy in front of the lovers. A darkness comes over me when I see them horsing around.
    â€œIt isn’t the money,” Charity says. Oh? I think. “He says he still loves me. Then he turns around and asks me for five hundred.”
    What’s so strange about that, I want to ask. She still loves Eric, and Eric, red