He closed his eyes and tried to envision himself in some of the clothes that he saw in the store. It was shocking that he had never thought to do this; he had somehow never picked up a Geoffrey Beene shirt and considered how it may look against his chest. How could he extol the benefits of a French cuff to a prospective buyer without thinking how it would fit against his brown neck? He wondered these things, yet he knew the answers. He didn’t picture himself in stiff, colorful fabric because it seemed like a joke to think of his appearance as important. When he saw a new white collar, he immediately thought of the scrubbing it would take to undo the eventual ring-around-the-collar, an inevitable result of his sweaty skin rubbing against the threads all day. When other men put shirts on, did they think about this?
The hardest part of these thoughts was knowing that he was in the dark but not knowing what he didn’t know. If he couldn’t think of something as simple as his neck without imagining the grime it would impart to a starched collar, how could he imagine someone kissing that neck? Worse: if the first thing that he associated with his neck was its potential for grime, he would never know what it felt like to think of only what it felt like to have someone kissing his neck. For the rest of his life, regardless of how he tried to rethink it, he would always have experienced the potential of grime first. Meanwhile, people who had never had this thought would never understand that a whole other level below their worry existed. It was as if they thought they were on the last rung of a ladder, completely unaware that the ladder pierced through the earth beneath, where, underground, Harit was clawing his way through the dirt and roots. Harit—and Harit alone—knew that he was looking up from his ignorance and seeing a ladderful of people fretting over their deepest despairs.
RANJANA WAS SHAPING HER LIFE into a plot from her romance novels. In all of those books, a simple-seeming but truly remarkable woman found herself saddled with a slob of a husband who paid her little attention—especially sexual—and sought out what was missing from her life in the arms of a quiet but romantically robust man. Or if the husband wasn’t a messy pig, then he was a milquetoast, a stick in oversize shirts and pants who put the “oaf” in “loafers.” In fact, if she removed herself from the world of potboilers and down-market romances, if she examined a book like, say, Madame Bovary, she still found the same conceit—the boring husband whose wife looked for excitement outside marriage. She felt doubly guilty—for trying to fit Mohan into this idea and for betraying her love of the genre itself by lamenting a situation in which her life mimicked it. The women in her writing group, whatever their faults, still thought of their writing as vital, and they would never laugh openly at its contrivances. The reason why so many people—women, in particular—read romances of all kinds was because they found them legitimately compelling. They also bought fully into the idea of Romance with a capital R—and all its attendant glamour. Irony, sarcasm, haughty literary criticism—these were not things they cared about.
Still, Ranjana couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t help but notice, for instance, that she could guess almost to the exact minute when Mohan would take to his armchair every night, like the lights they had on a timer for the front porch. No matter how much she didn’t want to, she noticed how, when he burped, he always did so in three distinct humps of liquid and air. The constant utterances that came from him during a cricket match on TV; the way he would mutter Ar-RE when leaning over to pick up something; the blanched crud of his shaving cream remnants in the sink; the monochromatic forest of his dress shirts hanging in the closet; his ever-pervasive smell of Aramis cologne and armpit activity. These all seemed like staples of a literary cuckold. If Mohan wanted to be more dynamic, then he would have to shun these things.
Here is where she was truly wrong, though: Mohan wasn’t choosing anything. It wasn’t like he behaved this way to seem off-putting or uncaring. It was simply who he was. What she wanted was more wanting on his part. She wished that he could show his hand more often. If he could get legitimately worked up about something besides finances and sports, he might be more interesting.
She could feel an arrogance rising in her, the sense that she was Working on Herself and it bothered her that a similar sizing-up was not occurring on her husband’s part.
It reminded her of something that Prashant had said under his breath last New Year’s Eve. His scheduled plans with the other boys had fallen through due to a freak outbreak of pink eye, and as he sat on the couch watching TV with his parents, he muttered, “If only you guys drank…” At first, Ranjana was baffled by this comment—what kid admitted to his parents that he craved alcohol, and what kid wanted to drink with his parents?—but she held her tongue to keep the evening lighthearted. A few days later, as she was pulling laundry out of the dryer and the fabric softener’s soapy dryness hit her nostrils, she realized what Prashant meant. He didn’t want them to be drinking with him; he wanted them to be drinking for themselves, to lighten up their moods. He wanted his parents to be a bit more unpredictable, cooler, more capable of having a good time. He wanted them to be as surprising as the act of doing laundry was mundane. Ranjana was wishing a kind of tipsiness on Mohan: she wanted him to be a bit more spontaneous. She wanted him to surprise her in ways she hadn’t seen since the early days of their marriage. All the same, she wondered if his actions back then had been surprising simply because everything was surprising back then.
When they first arrived in America, they didn’t have a telephone. They didn’t know all that many people, and they hadn’t been in the habit of talking on the telephone that much back in India. They soon realized, however, that not having one was a huge problem here, where people seemed to take pride in how tangled the cords on their phones were.