There were two men with secrets and I chose the wrong one.
Vanity & Variety, a novella of exactly 21 pages measuring 5X7 inches in physical terms could be written to summate the deeds of the JGG. To be novella worthy, a thing must be original and timeless. Vanity & Variety will never level these heights. I offer you a paragraph instead. Remember the talented Liv?
(see Part 2 and here’s Part 1)
“I’m telling you darlin’. It took me ages to twig! He’s got a common name. You’ve been saying as how this director girl is massively possessive with your bloke. We assume she’s got no skin in the game, coz that’s what he’s telling you ‘it’s all a fantasy’. Only now you’re telling me that your bloke’s ex whose tits are bigger than yours is called Michelle. I’m thinking, hang on, I’ve got a client Michelle. Are her tits bigger than yours? Well, Michelle chucked her bloke of the same name after he got off with a director girl he was working with, about a year ago. Suddenly it dawns, your bloke is Michelle’s bloke and your director girl is the same director girl Michelle’s bloke got off with. And this morning he tells you, ‘Ah no, sorry doll, this weekends out ‘coz me and my new business partner Sarah, we’re on a shoot.’ Fair enough, only my new client Sarah, she’s all that about her new bloke of the same name who’s also her business partner an’ they’re off on a shoot this weekend.” pause “And all of you livin’ right here! In Crouch End!” before it was trendy.
Years pass. I leave London. I move to the Western U.S. Years pass. I visit London and Aashish, living in now-trendy Brixton. Worthy of the novella form, the changing faces of neighborhoods and their inhabitants. We meet at a red-lit wine bar of his choosing.
Aashish, thinner and fitter, reaches out to touch me often, is always smiling, maintaining pillow-chat proximity with my face. Unchanging his sense of personal space, his gestures, outside of British norms, completely his own. London dwellers are wickedly flirtatious. It’s best to think it means nothing. Where is my native skin? Years ago left at Heathrow when I went West? I am married and I am anxious.
“I broke up with you because we were at that stage,” says Aashish. “The serious stage. The things moving ahead stage.”
In this moment I picture that the sky has eyes and is rolling them just for me. I will adjust my thinking about the sky in a moment. Here is that moment. Picture Aashish at five years old. His mother speaks Finnish to him and his father Hindi sometimes, but more often English. His sister has a Finnish name, while he has an Indian one.
like my own children, named by turns
He calls his sister didi.
His parents explain what being adopted means and tell him this is what he is. “Is didi adopted too?” No, not didi. They never speak of it again and neither does he. “How can I ask them about it? If they don’t speak of it, how can I?” Aashish’s parents say to each other, “It’s important not to treat it as anything significant. He is our son and we love him. We are here if he wants to talk.”
Aashish attends a private school. One day he sees a boy in his class being punched on the ground. The punching boys are saying, “Yid, yid!” He doesn’t know this word but he knows it’s not good to be punched. He makes the punching boys laugh so that the boy on the ground can get up. Aashish walks home from school with him. A new teacher comes to the school and calls roll. The new teacher accuses Aashish of taking the piss when he answers to the name Aashish Kumar. An uncomfortable scene ensues. His new friend the punched boy calls out, “My name is Adam Levi. I look like a Yid don’t I, Sir? Full marks for this, Sir, I’m hoping?”
That weekend, the Levis have lunch with the Kumars. So begins their close family friendship, the nucleus of an unlikely cohort of people bent on surviving Little Britain.
Aashish is dying to tell me. Aashish has no gauge for my discretion. Where are my limits? Do I have any? “If only you’d not told me those things about your ex!” Will I tell his friends? He envisions their faces as one, their startled mouths a repetitive ‘O’. That he should tell this girl, this interloper of less than a year’s standing, a thing he’s never told them! What of his Indian grandfather with the blue eyes he always says he looks like? A white boy with a Hindu name will be all alone. He will probably die alone. He will die alone, in the near future, and it will be all my fault.
“And then I would hate you.”
When he finally tells them “They didn’t bat an eyelid! ‘Oh yeah we knew that Aashish, our parents told us! They said not to say anything. We just assumed you didn’t want to talk about it.’”
Aashish, the man I made love to while laughing, laughs again in the red-lit bar, our faces pillow-distance. He’s a better storyteller than I am, always has been. He holds the scene suspended, ekeing out each moment towards climax, unbearably.
“Didi encouraged me to get my birth certificate from the Council. The original one. It arrives. It sits there, on my desk. And I stare at it. Walk past it. Come back, put other papers on top of it. Unearth it again. Adam is away. We’ve agreed, I won’t open it alone. We will go to the pub. I will meet Adam at the pub and we will open it, together. Two weeks I stare at that letter! We meet in the pub. He gets me a pint. That’s part of it, us sitting opposite each other, with a pint to hand. I ready myself. I open it.” pause “Here’s the name of my mother, Cynthia Walker, profession, housecleaner. Then, I look to see my father’s name….
…It’s unconfirmed, which means the father wasn’t there at the birth. It’s the 70’s. And then I read the name. I’m expecting an English name. My father’s name is Amir Singh!” pause “I nearly fall over. Then I stand up, walk to the loo, turn around before I get there, walk back, sit down, start laughing, which sets Adam off, start crying, which also sets Adam off.” pause “Singh being number two on the list of most common Indian names, I don’t expect to find him. I imagine he was a college student. Perhaps he went back to India. But this is why my parents. Why they gave me to my parents specifically. You won’t believe what didi does next…”
And then he tells me a fantastic story. One I will tell you another time, perhaps.
We sit in the red-lit bar, Aashish pillow-close to my face until it closes. He says I should stay at his flat because no more Tube. I go to his flat. I don’t tell him I’m pregnant, with my second child. He wants to sleep with me and I want to sleep with him. Neither of us says so. He gives me uncharacteristic army fatigue patterned sweats to wear and takes me to his guest room. He sits on the bed, then stands in the doorway, putting off goodnight. I don’t say to him, I have a terrible husband and I wish I were a different kind of wife, the kind who doesn’t care.
much as I wish that instead of hanging on, I’d run the JGG a merry dance of deception and disappointment
I like a good fugue, in music, in theatre and in writing. I hate it in life. When I return fugue-like to the day I met Aashish, I remember that there are days like this. Days seen through dappled light, reflections of green reeds overlaying a silty bottom, the dust on my sandals. That I was wearing a red print sundress I’d never think to wear now. Sights and smells we will never forget. Aashish’s hair freakishly just like mine in texture and color, later he will share his perfume with me. I see our hands entwined. I see that this begins a few hours after we meet. I am wearing a plum velvet double breasted maxicoat belonging to our mutual childhood friend Kaatje because the summer night is cool. We steal a punt and Aashish punts. Callously unaware, Aashish and I talk long into the night until Kaatje retires to bed. We flow together in the way we always will. It seems not inappropriate for Aashish to pop next door at 2am and ask Kaatje’s younger brother for a condom. Herein lies the one regretted moment of my life. “Did you enjoy the condom?” Kaatje’s brother says acidly in front of the entire family de Vries next day at breakfast.
Could I really have missed that our mutual childhood friend Kaatje had a tenderness for Aashish? When we were little she peed in my shoes because she was cross with me. During my time with Aashish she tells me, “If only I could express my feelings so directly now! I would pee in your shoes.” When Aashish and I are no longer together I envy her the constancy of friendship, the seemingly endless space into which one may say, “I love you.”
A wonderful ending to a very engaging piece. :)
Ahh this ending. Funny and warm and wraps it all nicely.