Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online Page B

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    â€œI am a Buddhist,” Meg said, but in a friendly way. She let him film her. He did it with an expensive movie camera—a sixteen-millimeter, not a video camera. She didn’t speculate as to how he might have come by such a camera, a man who wore a bum’s old wing tip shoes, gaping at the seams. He had the camera with him at his first meeting with Meg; he lined up the attachments for her to see, taking them out of a case with sculpted compartments.
    How tender on the part of the male, Meg might have told her students, if she had been allowed to teach a course in her own field: this open desire to win the female. This display, like a bowerbird’s, this laying out of goods and assets. And the female approaching with some secret authority, to inspect what was spread before her.
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    MEG INVITED US to dinner. Lali was already there, demure on the couch. She rose to her feet as we came in, a beautiful child dressed in a pale gray suit, slim as an incense stick. Actually she was twenty-seven and had left her family and her fiancé in Darjeeling five years before to visit a married cousin in Seattle, and stayed. Sitting beside Lali, Meg looked large and vague and worn.
    â€œGot many clients?” my husband said as soon as we sat down to dinner, before he had his napkin on his lap.
    â€œJust now I have forty-six,” Lali said, smiling at Meg, who must have predicted the question, and then soberly closing her dark lids big as awnings to think and holding up a finger. “Forty-seven.”

    â€œUh-oh, that leaves somebody out in the cold,” Meg said. We all laughed.
    â€œSo out of the forty-seven there were three who seemed to be young men who might have something in common with Meg,” said Sam with a sinister politeness.
    â€œWell, more than half are women. This is always the case, most regrettably. And while I am happy for women to meet, I am most strictly conventional in these introductions. Men to women. So the field is somewhat smaller for the women.”
    â€œHow small?”
    â€œI have, just now, fifteen men.”
    â€œOut of which three, a fifth, might suit Meg? I guess that changes my sense that three is rather few.”
    â€œOh, Dr. Wagner, all fathers are suspicious! Of course they are! This is your daughter!” I liked the way she said daughter . Doh-ta , with soft consonants, expressing a degree of tenderness. “And my teacher!” She glanced shyly at Meg. “But I am most cautious. Very, very particular. It is not all done with computers, don’t worry. It is done with the head”—she touched her smooth forehead—“the heart”—the neckline of her pink silk shell—“and luck.” She rolled the startling whites of her eyes upward under their heavy, almost disabling net of lashes.
    â€œWhat about karma?” said Sam, who had had many discussions with Meg when she was becoming a Buddhist—a lax Buddhist at best, with all of her hopes—and had been reading up on Hinduism for the occasion of Lali’s visit. “Why would the person that Meg’s karma has earned her have to be found or chosen by somebody else?”
    â€œAh, yes,” said Lali, with seeming pleasure. “But karma will allow us also to meet those who will guide us properly.”
    â€œLali is a computer whiz as well as an A -student,” Meg said, as though she were making a match between us and Lali.

    â€œAnd so how is it that this disturbed Russian crept in?”
    â€œAndrei! He is someone I know! He was so surprised when the e-mail address from the bulletin was me, his friend from class!”
    â€œDo you know him well?”
    â€œOh, I’m afraid I know him only well enough to like him. He is a silly boy, certainly, yes, in some ways, but he is quite trustworthy, of that I am sure.”
    â€œHe climbed in the window of Meg’s apartment.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know, of course, but