“Insensitive is the last thing I am. I’m trying to help you. That’s all I ever do. I’m your friend, Harit. Whether you like it or not, that is what we are now—friends. That’s something to be happy about. If I weren’t with you right now, you’d be home with Mommy.”
“At least my mother knows when to leave me alone,” Harit said, again surprised that he was capable of fighting fire with fire, especially when his words were unfounded: his mother was not leaving him alone anymore. “You’re the type of bad friend that I deserve.”
“Oh, burn!” Teddy said, leaning back melodramatically and putting a palm to his chest. “You’re a regular Kathy Griffin. Keep ’em coming, smart-ass!”
“You’re fat.”
“That’s original. Keep going.”
“That shirt is ugly.”
“Really? Your shirt makes you look homeless.”
“I hate it when you sing in the store. You are never in step with the music. Even Mr. Harriman talks about it. Everyone does.”
“I know they do. That’s why I keep doing it. They also talk about how your hair looks like pubic hair. Because it does.”
“You wear too much cologne.”
“I wear too much cologne? You smell like a French prostitute.”
“At least French prostitutes know how to speak actual French.”
“Oh, ho!” Teddy said, pushing his chin out and lifting his eyes to the ceiling in a gesture that signaled both being impressed and being wounded.
They went silent for a few seconds.
“Haven’t we gotten eloquent,” Teddy said.
Harit had gotten eloquent. He had begun to cultivate a different language. Not a vocabulary of household objects and restaurant foods and asking directions and making small talk and greeting customers with courteous phrases in passing. The heat had moved back into his body and into his back, his feet, into the hardness of his teeth and the tip of his nose. He had learned how to be constructively mean to a friend—which was a different vocabulary and a rare type of happiness.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked, taking Teddy’s empty glass off the table.
“Two gin martinis, dirty,” Harit said.
“You sound like James Bond,” Teddy said.
Indeed, he felt like James Bond.
*
“I really threw you guys for a loop back there, didn’t I?” Cheryl hoisted the bottle of red wine and poured herself another glass, the brim seeming to quiver.
“I was so sorry to hear about your son. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Cheryl had ordered a plate of ravioli even though she had eaten a fair bit at the banquet. She halved one of the ravioli with her fork and stuck the meaty grin into her mouth. “It doesn’t exactly come up in regular conversation.”
“Yes, but … I don’t know. We work in a doctor’s office. How do you work in a doctor’s office all day after that?”
“It’s the reason why I work in a doctor’s office.” Cheryl maintained the same even tone, as calm now as if she had never snubbed them after the banquet. “I want to help people. Even if it’s with their asses.”
Ranjana was enormously impressed with this reveal of Cheryl’s troubled history. Only someone of true fortitude had the ability to hide such a tragic event, not to have it seep into every movement and cause hard-edged resentment toward the littlest things. Take Harit: he had been felled by his loss. It outlined his every action.
Ranjana took a sip of wine. She didn’t want to drink, and this wine tasted like eating the rind of some fruit, but she didn’t want to do anything contrary to Cheryl’s wishes. “I have to ask you something,” she said.
“Shoot,” Cheryl said, looking Ranjana right in the eye. Cheryl must have been very pretty once. No exotic beauty, but Ranjana could see that the soft wrinkles of her face were not etchings but arrows, pointing to where her youthful girliness had been at its strongest: her eyes had been the bright centers where her enthusiasm had pooled, and her mouth had been a stage for smiles and retorts. Her kooky personality—the false na?veté had fooled Ranjana. If they had grown up together, Cheryl would have been the more popular of the two.
“Do you think that I’ve been horribly rude to you?” Ranjana asked. “All this time? The whole time we’ve worked together?”
Cheryl pushed her hand through the air, as if to send the words back into Ranjana’s mouth. “Ranjana. No. We’re friends! Unless, well—have you meant to be rude to me this whole time?” Cheryl folded her hands one over the other and rested her chin on them, her eyes eager at the idea of finding out some great trespass.
Cheryl could have been friends with Seema, Ranjana thought, whatever Seema’s hang-ups may have been. Or no—not friends. They would have made great nemeses. They were both protected by their eccentricity; in the company of comparable eccentricity, they would have felt threatened.
Ranjana felt the need to be honest. “I must admit that I’ve never thought of you as a real friend until today. Or perhaps ‘friend’ isn’t what I mean. I mean that I have never given you the benefit of the doubt until now.” Ranjana paused, processing her next sentence and understanding how true it was just before it left her lips: “I think that I have a habit of thinking I know exactly who people are as soon as I meet them.” She had done this to Achyut. She had judged him immediately. He had been surprising and abnormal in so many ways, yet her opinion itself had not really wavered. She had worried that he’d be problematic, and she had made him problematic. Then he was gone from her life. Such things didn’t happen in books. If he were a character in one of her stories, he would have had a nice throughline, a satisfying plot. But life wasn’t one of her stories. Achyut could vanish, and he had.