7
The news of Solanka’s split from Eleanor had sent shock waves through their circle. Each marriage that breaks interrogates those that continue to hold. Malik Solanka was conscious of having initiated a chain reaction of spoken and unspoken questions at breakfast tables across the city, and in bedrooms, and in other cities too: Are we still good? Okay, how good? Are there things you’re not telling me? Am I going to wake up one day and you’ll say something that makes me realize I’ve been sharing my bed with a stranger? How will tomorrow rewrite yesterday, how will next week unmake the past five, ten, fifteen years? Are you bored? Is it my fault? Are you weaker than I thought? Is it him? Is it her? Is it the sex? The children? Do you want to fix it? Is there anything to fix? Do you love me? Do you still love me? Do I still, oh Jesus Jesus, love you?
These agonies, for which his friends inevitably held him responsible to some unspecified degree, returned to him as echoes. In spite of his emphatic embargo, Eleanor was handing out his Manhattan phone number to anyone who wanted it. Men, more than women, seemed moved to call up and reprove. Morgen Franz, the post-hippie Buddhist publisher whose telephone Eleanor had answered all those years ago, was first in line. Morgen was Californian and had taken refuge from that fact in Bloomsbury but never shaken off his slow Haight-Ashbury drawl. “I’m not happy about this, man,” he’d called Malik to reveal, his vowels even more elongated than usual to emphasize his pain. “And what’s more, I don’t know anyone who is. I don’t know why you did this, man, and because you’re neither a dope nor a shit, I’m sure you’ll have your reasons, I’m sure you will, you know?, and they’ll be good reasons, too, man, I have no doubt of it, I mean what can I tell you, I love you, you know?, I love you both, but right now I have to say I feel a lot of anger toward you.” Solanka could visualize his friend’s reddened, short-bearded face, his small deep-set eyes blinking fiercely for emphasis. Franz was legendarily laid-back—“nobody’s cooler than the Morg,” that was his catchphrase—so this heated climax came as a jolt. Solanka, however, stayed cold, and allowed himself to express his own feelings truthfully and irrevocably.
“Six, seven, eight years ago,” he said, “Lin used to call Eleanor in tears because you refused to have a child with her, and you know what?, you had your reasons, you had your deep disenchantment with the human race to deal with every day, and on children, as on Philadelphia, you took the Fields position. And, Morgen, I ‘felt a lot of anger toward you’ in those days myself. I saw Lin settling for cats instead of babies and I didn’t like it and guess what? I never called you to scold you or to ask what was the relevant Buddhist teaching on the subject, because I decided it was none of my damn business what went on between you and your wife. That it was your private affair, given that you weren’t actually beating her up, or given, anyway, that it was merely her spirit you were breaking, not her body. So do me a favor and bugger off. This is not your story. It’s mine.” And there it went, their old friendship, eight or was it nine Christmas Days spent in turn at each other’s homes, the Trivial Pursuit, the charades, the love. Lin Franz called him the next morning to tell him that what he had said was unforgivable. “Please know,” she added, in her whisper-soft, overly formal Vietnamese-American English, “that your desertion of Eleanor has only served to bring Morgen and I even closer together. And Eleanor is a strong woman, and will pick up the reins of her life soon, when she has mourned. We will all go on without you, Malik, and you will be the poorer for having excluded us from your life. I am sorry for you.”
A knife held over the sleeping figures of your wife and child cannot be mentioned to anyone, much less explained. Such a knife represents a crime far worse than the substitution of a long-haired feline for a mewl ing babe. And Solanka had no answer to the hows and whys of this appalling, enigmatic event. Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?There he had simply been, like guilty Macbeth, and the weapon too was simply there, impossible to wish away or to edit out of the image afterward. That he had not plunged the knife into sleeping hearts did not make him innocent. To hold the knife so and to stand thus was more than enough. Guilty, guilty! Even as he spoke his stern, friendship-breaking words to his old friend, Malik Solanka had been starkly aware of their hypocrisy, and he received Lin’s subsequent rebuke without comment. He had surrendered all his rights to protest when he ran his thumb along the Sabatier blade, testing its sharpness in the dark. This knife was his story now, and he had come to America to write it.
No! In despair, to unwrite it. Not to be but to un-be. He had flown to the land of self-creation, the home of Mark Skywalker the Jedi copywriter in red suspenders, the country whose paradigmatic modern fic tion was the story of a man who remade himself—his past, his present, his shirts, even his name—for love; and here, in this place from whose narratives he was all but disconnected, he intended to attempt the first phase of such a restructuring, namely—he deliberately now applied to himself the same sort of mechanical imagery that he had so callously used against the dead women—the complete erasure, or “master deletion,” of the old program. Somewhere in the existing software there was a bug, a potentially lethal flaw. Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do. If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash. After that, he could perhaps begin to construct a new man. He fully saw that this was a fantastic, unrealistic ambition, if intended seriously, literally, instead of in-a-manner-of-speaking; nevertheless, literally was how he meant it, no matter how unhinged that might sound. For what was the alternative? Confession, fear, separation, policemen, head doctors, Broadmoor, shame, divorce, jail? The steps down into that inferno seemed inexorable. And the worse inferno he would leave behind, the burning blade turning forever in the mind’s eye of his growing son.
He had conceived, in that instant, an almost religious belief in the power of flight. Flight would save others from him, and him from himself He would go where he was not known and wash himself in that unknowing. A memory from forbidden Bombay peremptorily insisted on his attention: the memory of the day in 1955 when Mr. Venkat—the big-deal banker whose son Chandra was the ten-year-old Malik’s best friend—became a sanyasi on his sixtieth birthday and abandoned his family forever, wearing no more than a Gandhian loincloth, with a long wooden staff in one hand and a begging bowl in the other. Malik had always liked Mr. Venkat, who would tease him by asking him to pronounce, very quickly, his full, polysyllabically tumbling South Indian name: Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan. “Come on, boy, faster,” he’d coax Malik as his childish tongue stumbled over the syllables. “Don’t you wish you had a name as magnificent as this?”
Malik Solanka lived in a second-floor apartment in a building called Noor Ville on Methwold’s Estate off Warden Road. The Venkats occupied the other apartment on that floor, and gave every indication of being a happy family: one, in fact, that Malik envied every day of his life. Now both apartment doors stood open, and children crowded wide-eyed and grave around stricken adults as Mr. Venkat took his leave of his old life forever. From the depths of the Venkats’ apartment came the noise of a crackly seventy-eight: a song by the Ink Spots, Mr. Venkat’s favorite group. The spectacle of Mrs. Venkat crying her eyes out on his mother’s shoulder hit little Malik Solanka hard. As the banker turned to go, Malik suddenly called out to him. “Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan!” And then, saying it faster and louder, until he was simultaneously gabbling and screaming: “Balasubramanyamvenkataraghavan balasubramanyamvenkataraghavan BALASUBRAMANYAMVENKATARAGHAVAN!”