The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Read Free Book Online

Kapadia was sixteen and I was ten, she was the biggest star in my world. “Bobby” was the biggest movie of the year. That same year, she married the biggest star in Bombay, Rajesh Khanna, and my sisters and I would read the film magazines about his philandering and her unhappiness, raising her two daughters, one called Twinkle, while he cavorted around with other starlets. After the divorce, Dimple returned to films, still a star but more as a character actress. She once did a topless scene, which was a big scandal but I didn’t see it.
    â€œWe knew India was a poor country like us, even poorer, but in the films everyone was happy and we knew that everything would turn out the way it should. I thought if I couldn’t get to Europe or America, I would try to go to India.”
    What to say? We always thought that we would do anything to get out of India. We’d go to Zambia if we couldn’t get to America. My father turned down fifteen marriage offers from four countries before selecting my husband.
    â€œYou know, Miss Kay, you have eyes like Dimple Kapadia.” He says it directly to me, not to the bins of fruit, as close to me as an eye doctor. And then I did something I have never, ever thought of: I threw my arms around him and gave him a kiss, not an air-kiss on the cheek like I do with Al Wong, but a full, wet kiss on his thick lips, under his moustache. What is the purpose of explaining it? I simply did it. I had not planned it, nor did I even have the desire for it. It just happened. I bit the tip of his moustache.
    â€œCome with me upstairs,” he says, and I follow.
    The word “seraglio” comes to mind, a word I’ve never heard, or used, but I think I know its meaning. Have I been banished to a seraglio, or did I, a free, forty-one-year-old woman, willingly allow myself to be swept up by passion? It is a room of rugs; Persian carpets double deep on the floor, durries on the walls and ceiling and draped across the bed and chairs. It is an urban tent on the second floor rear of a Palestinian-California grocery store. A fan throbs overhead. There is no window. When I go to rug stores I always feel like lying down on the pile of carpets; a tall stack of rugs is the perfect mattress. I grow drowsy in their presence; maybe there’s something in the dyes that affects the eyes, or maybe it’s something older and deeper, something ancestral perhaps, the memory of windowless tents and carpets. My Dimple Kapadia eyes are losing their luster, the eyelids are descending and I settle myself on the wondrous bed, plush with carpets.
    He is over me, in me, around me, in seconds. My eyes are closed but I feel his hard hands and thick fingers unbuttoning my blouse, my skirt, and his hairy back, his mustache — the urgency — and I recognize that same thing in myself, I claw at everything I feel and I hear the popping of buttons, the ripping of cloth.
    It’s over so soon. Too soon, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve never been raised so high, at the top of a roller-coaster ride, but none of it matters. I’ve brought a hardened, calloused man to this, to his panting breath, the clutching at his chest, his smile.
    â€œMa!” Pramila calls, “for you.” And there’s a woman at my door, dark-haired but a little stout. Potato-shaped, I think. She’s American, with no accent. We are rarely visited by Americans without accents unless they’re selling something. “Hello, Mrs. Waldekar,” she says, “my name is Paula, and I’m an old friend of Al Wong. May I come in?”
    She seems harmless. I would call her fashionable, up to a point, wearing an expensive silk scarf pinned to one shoulder, but not particularly attractive. She says, “I was part of that original nanotech team at PacBell. That was then. Now, I’m Al’s new accountant.”
    â€œWould you like tea?” I ask. “Juice?”
    Her smile says