Ranjana spoke as Teddy’s mouth was opening to correct her: “That’s coq au vin.”
“Oh, whatever,” Cheryl said. “It’s not like I make it anymore.”
“Why not?” Harit asked. He was pouring himself another glass of white wine, and the too-deliberate way in which he did so revealed his tipsiness.
“Dear, when you get married and have kids, you don’t have time for that kind of crap anymore. Plus, if your kids grow up eating filet mignon, they’ll probably turn out to be assholes.”
“You should write that down,” Teddy said.
As Ranjana enjoyed the last bite of her lasagna, she thought of her countless Wendy’s lunches with Cheryl, of how Cheryl had gone from cooking fancy meats to eating electric fries. Ranjana couldn’t find any trace of sadness in Cheryl. As usual, she couldn’t tell if Cheryl’s happiness was authentic or the by-product of an overwhelming mental dimness.
Sandy, the conference organizer, approached the lectern in the middle of the long dais, which was decorated with bouquets of water lilies and framed by royal blue curtains. The room achieved another one of those complete silences—somewhere in the vaulted ceiling, you could hear the gargle of a radiator—and everyone could see the flutter in Sandy’s movements. No one was listening all that well to her introduction; necks were craning ever-so-slowly to see where the author was standing in wait. Sandy ended by saying, “The extraordinary Pushpa Sondhi,” and everyone saw that she had been waiting in the hallway.
She was even more beautiful in person. There is a quality that beautiful people have that causes their features to take on different meanings, depending on the angle of their heads. That wide, eye-hooded face was arresting even from far away, but there was also an unassuming matter-of-factness to her mien. She was not dressed extravagantly; she wore a blue silk blouse and black slacks. Her hair was short, not even shoulder length. The outfit made Sondhi look more maternal and younger at the same time—like a protagonist in one of her short stories.
Ranjana felt it: jealousy, the top of her mouth turning to metal. All the goodwill that she had built up—the warmth that she had felt upon ingesting the stories and their beauty—was effaced upon the author’s entrance. Ranjana felt sick to her stomach, not because of the jealousy itself but by its speed and thoroughness. There was no emotion as swift and complete. Happiness spread through you and tingled. Sadness hooked your limbs and pulled them down slowly. But jealousy yelled hello from within you.
The topic of Sondhi’s speech was the ability to step outside of one’s native culture and view that culture anew, from a remove. In her case, it was Portugal; she had moved there with her journalist husband (a Chilean) and their two young children. Ranjana remembered reading that they had a brownstone in Brooklyn; on a particularly low evening, she had even clicked on Google Street View to see if she could espy a smudge of Sondhi’s form somewhere in a tall window. These days, in Lisbon, the family was surrounded by buildings of yellow stone, cypress trees instead of leafy maples. Sondhi had taken to reading in Portuguese, and it had given her a new perspective on English, on the turns and twists of its borrowed words. She was reading poetry in Portuguese, novels in Portuguese, grocery store circulars and traffic signs in Portuguese. It was evolving for her into a language of real substance and utility. She was an English-born, American-raised, Portuguese-immigrant Punjabi woman whose own sons would speak fluent English, Punjabi, Hindi, and Portuguese. She was her own fantasy novel.
This should have been evident to Ranjana all along: Sondhi wasn’t some frozen entity contained in the pressed pages of a paperback or the gray static of a Kindle. She was a human who created elegant sentences and fully formed characters, characters whose lives resonated more than Ranjana’s all-too-real but ineffectual life. Hundreds of people had gathered with their breaths caught in their throats to see this woman speak; they craned forward for even the slightest chance to hear something that revealed the inner lives of her characters. Meanwhile, nobody but the people at this table would care about the events of Ranjana’s day.
As a beautiful dance was set to gorgeous music, Ranjana set the eloquence of Sondhi’s speech in this banquet hall to the eloquence of Sondhi’s stories. This led her to a gut-punch conclusion:
She might never be good enough to give her characters the writing that they deserved. If she were a visionary artist like Sondhi—a beautiful thinker, with Portuguese-fluent sons and a glamorous husband—she could give her characters lives full of careful rumination, well-worded wit, boisterous parties populated with smartly observed acquaintances, delightful bedroom escapades. But she was not exceptional, so her characters would never have exceptional lives. An untrained painter couldn’t depict Cézanne’s The Card Players; a pitchy singer couldn’t produce an affecting “Nessun Dorma.” There was that extra dimension, one step below the surface, where the emotions of the best characters roiled. Ranjana could not access that layer, so her characters would be doomed to live without those charms. Sondhi’s version of failure was making the Pulitzer short list and not winning the prize; Ranjana’s version of failure was actual failure.