He didn’t recognize the number. The message was simple: “hi.”
Returning the phone to his pocket, he took a sip of whiskey. He leaned back and gazed around the restaurant. He’d reached the stage of the evening—of evenings like this on the road—when a rosiness came over things, a slow, flavorful, oozing light invading the restaurant almost like a liquid. The rosiness came from the glow of the bar with its rows of colorful bottles stacked on mirrored shelves, but also from the wall sconces and candlelight reflecting on the plateglass windows etched in gold. The rosiness was part of the hum of the restaurant, the sounds of people talking and laughing, convivial, city sounds, but it was also part of Matthew himself, a rising sense of contentment at being who and where he was, free to get up to whatever mischief presented itself. On top of it all, this rosiness had to do with his knowledge of the single word—hi—that lay hidden in the cell phone tucked in his pocket snug against his thigh.
This rosiness wouldn’t survive on its own. It needed Matthew’s participation. Before excusing himself, he ordered another whiskey. Then he stood up, gaining his balance, and walked through the bar to the stairs that led down to the lavatory.
The men’s room was empty. Music, which may have been playing upstairs in the loud restaurant, was pumping from high-fidelity speakers in the ceiling. It sounded surprisingly good in the tiled space, and Matthew moved to the beat as he entered a toilet stall and closed the door behind him. He took out his phone and began typing with one finger.
The response was almost immediate.
Matthew hesitated. Then he wrote:
It was like skiing. Like the moment when, at the summit, you first lean downhill and gravity takes hold, sending you flying. For the next few minutes, as they texted back and forth, Matthew was only half aware of the person he was communicating with. The two images he had of the girl—one in the baggy sweatshirt, the other in the tight white top—were hard to reconcile. He couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like anymore. The girl was specific enough yet vague enough to be any woman, or all women. Each text Matthew sent generated a thrilling reply, and as his tone escalated in flirtatiousness, the girl matched him. The excitement of hurling impetuous thoughts into the void was intoxicating.
Now ellipses appeared: the girl was typing something. Matthew stared at his screen, waiting. He could feel the girl at the other end of the invisible pathway connecting them, her head lowered, her black hair falling over her face as it had at the book table, while she worked the keys with her nimble thumbs.
And then her response appeared:
Matthew hadn’t seen that coming. It sobered him up at once. For a moment he saw himself for what he was, a middle-aged, married man and father, hiding in a bathroom stall, texting a girl less than half his age.
There was only one honorable response.
Ellipses appeared again. Then vanished. Did not reappear.
Matthew waited a few more minutes before exiting the stall. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he grimaced and cried out, “Pathetic!”
But he didn’t feel that way. Not really. On the whole, he felt rather proud of himself, as if he’d failed while attempting a spectacular play in a sporting contest.
He was climbing the stairs back to the restaurant when his phone went off again.
*
On the dresser in the master bedroom stood a wedding portrait. In garish color, it showed the boy and girl who would become Prakrti’s parents standing solemnly beside each other, as though prodded into position by a goad. Atop her father’s impossibly slender face sat a white turban. A diadem depended from her mother’s smooth forehead, its gold chain matching the ring in her nose and shadowed by the veil of red lace that covered her hair. Both their necks were draped with heavy necklaces made of multiple strings of shining, dark red berries. Or maybe they were too hard to be berries. Maybe they were seeds.
On the day the photograph was taken, her parents had known each other for twenty-four hours.
Most of the time, Prakrti didn’t think about her parents’ wedding. It had happened long ago, in another country, under different rules. But every now and then, compelled by outrage as much as curiosity, she forced herself to imagine the events immediately following the taking of that photo. A dark, provisionary hotel room somewhere, and, standing in the middle of it, her seventeen-year-old mother. A na?ve village girl who knew next to nothing about sex, or guys, or birth control, and yet who knew what was required of her in that particular moment. Understood that it was her duty to take off her clothes in front of a man no less a stranger than someone she passed on the street. To remove her wedding sari, her satin slippers, her hand-sewn underclothes, her gold bangles and necklaces, and to lie on her back and let him do what he wanted. To submit. To an accounting student who shared an apartment, in Newark, New Jersey, with six other bachelors, his breath still smelling of the American fast food he’d wolfed down before getting on the plane to fly to India.
Prakrti couldn’t reconcile the scandal of this arrangement—it was almost prostitution—with the prim, autocratic mother she knew. Most probably, it hadn’t happened like that at all, she decided. No, more likely nothing had gone on in the first weeks or months of her parents’ marriage but only much later, once they’d gotten to know each other and any hint of compulsion or violation had disappeared. Prakrti would never know the truth. She was too scared to ask.