She held him close. The contrast with the Mila liaison was very striking. With Mila, Solanka had allowed himself to sink toward the sickly allure of the unmentionable, the unallowed, whereas when Neela wrapped herself around him the opposite was true, everything became mentionable and was mentioned, everything was allowable and allowed. This was no child-woman, and what he was discovering with her was the adult joy of unforbidden love. He had thought of his addiction to Mila as a weakness; this new bond felt like strength. Mila had accused him of optimism, and she was right. Neela was optimism’s justification. And, yes, he was grateful to Mila for finding the key to the doors of his imagination. But if Mila Milo had unlocked the floodgate, Neela Mahendra was the flood.
In Neela’s arms Solanka felt himself begin to change, felt the inner demons he feared so much growing weaker by the day, felt unpredictable rage give way to the miraculous predictability of this new love. Pack your bags, Furies, he thought, you no longer reside at this address. If he was right, and the origin of fury lay in life’s accumulating disappointments, then he had found the antidote that transformed the poison into its opposite. For furia could be ecstasy, too, and Neela’s love was the philosopher’s stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy. Rage grew out of despair: but Neela was hope fulfilled.
The door to his past remained closed, and she had the grace not to push against it just yet. Her need for a degree of personal and psychological privacy was considerable. After their initial night in a hotel room, she had insisted on using her own bed for their encounters, but made it clear that he wasn’t welcome to spend the night. Her sleep was filled with nightmares, yet she didn’t want the comfort of his presence. She preferred to battle her dream-figments alone and, at the end of each night’s wars, to wake up slowly, and definitely by herself. Having no alternative, Solanka accepted her terms, and began to grow accustomed to fighting off the waves of sleep that habitually rolled over him at lovemaking’s end. He told himself that it was better for him this way as well. He was, after all, suddenly a very busy man.
He was learning her better every day, exploring her as if she were a new city in which he had sublet space and where he hoped one day to buy. She wasn’t completely at ease with that idea. Like him, she was a creature of moods, and he was becoming her personal meteorologist, predicting her weather, studying the duration of her internal gales and their sideswipe effects, in the form of crashing storms, on the golden beaches of their love. Sometimes she liked being seen in such microscopic detail, loved being understood without speaking, having her needs catered to without having to express them. On other occasions it annoyed her. He would see a cloud on her brow and ask, “What’s the matter?” In response shed look exasperated and say, “Oh, nothing. For Pete’s sake! You think you can read my mind, but you’re so often so wrong. If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. Don’t meet trouble halfway.” She had invested a great deal of effort in building an image of strength and didn’t want the man she loved to see her weaknesses.
Medication, he soon discovered, was an issue for Neela, too, and this was another thing they had in common: that they were determined to beat their demons without entering the valley of the dolls. So when she felt low, when she needed to wrestle with herself, she would retreat from him, wouldn’t want to see him or explain why, and he was expected to understand, to be grown-up enough to allow her to be what she needed to be; in short, for perhaps the first time in his life he was being required to act his age. She was a highly strung woman, and sometimes admitted that she must be a nightmare to be around, to which he replied, “Yes, but there are compensations.” “I hope they’re big,” she said, looking genuinely worried. “If they weren’t, I d be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?” He grinned, and she relaxed and moved in close. “That’s right,” she comforted herself. “And you’re not.”
She possessed immense physical ease, and was actually happier naked than clothed. More than once he had to remind her to dress when there was a knock at her door. But she wanted to guard some secrets, to protect her mystery. Her frequent withdrawals into herself, her habit of recoiling from being too acutely seen, had to do with this very un-American—this positively English—awareness of the value of reserve. She insisted that it had nothing to do with whether she loved him or not, which she deeply and bewilderingly did. “Look, it’s obvious,” she replied when he asked why. “You may be very creative with your dolls and websites and all, but as far as I’m concerned, your only function is to get into my bed whenever I tell you and fulfill my every whim.” At which imperious dictum Professor Majik Solanka, who had wanted to be a sex object all his life, felt quite absurdly pleased.
After making love, she lit a cigarette and went to sit naked by the window to smoke it, knowing his hatred of tobacco smoke. Lucky neighbors, he thought, but she dismissed such considerations as bourgeois and far beneath her. She returned with a straight face to the question he had asked. “The thing about you,” she offered, “is that you’ve got a heart. This is a rare quality in the contemporary guy. Take Babur: an amazing man, brilliant, really, but totally in love with the revolution. Real people are just counters in his game. With most other guys it’s status, money, power, golf, ego. Jack, for example.” Solanka hated the laudatory reference to the smooth-bodied flag-bearer of Washington Square, felt a sharp twinge of guilt at being favorably compared to his dead friend, and said so. “You see,” she marveled, “you don’t just feel, you can actually talk about it. Wow. Finally, a man worth staying with.” Solanka had the feeling that he was being obscurely sent up, but couldn’t quite identify the joke. Feeling foolish, he settled for the affection in her voice. Love Potion Number Nine. That was the healing balm.
India was insisted upon everywhere in the Bedford Street apartment, in the overemphasized manner of the diaspora: the filmi music, the candles and incense, the Krishna-and-milkmaids calendar, the dhurries on the floor, the Company School painting, the hookah coiled atop a bookcase like a stuffed green snake. Neela’s Bombay alter ego, Solanka mused, pulling on his clothes, would probably have gone for a heavily Westernized, Californian-minimalist simplicity… but never mind about Bombay. Neela was getting dressed as well, pulling on her most “aerodynamically” body-hugging black outfit, made in some nameless space-age fabric. She needed to go to the office in spite of the late hour. The pre-production period on the Lilliput documentary was almost over, and she would be leaving for the antipodes soon. There was still much to do. Get used to this, Solanka thought. Her need for absence is professional as well as personal. To be with this woman is also to learn to be without her. She tied the laces on her white street flyers-sneakers with flip-out wheels built into the soles—and took off at speed, her long black ponytail flying out behind her as she raced away. Solanka stood on the sidewalk and watched her go. The “effect,” he noted as the usual mayhem began, worked almost as well in the dark.
He went to FAO Schwarz and sent Asmaan an elephant by mail. Soon the last vestiges of old fury would have been dispelled by new happiness and he would feel confident enough to re-enter his son’s life. To do so, however, he would have to face Eleanor and confront her with the fact she still refused to accept. He would have to bury finality like a knife in her good and loving heart.
He telephoned to tell Asmaan to expect a surprise. Great excitement. “What’s inside it? What’s it saying? What would Morgen say?” Eleanor and Asmaan had been holidaying in Florence with the Franzes. “There’s no beach here. No. There’s a river, but I douldn’t swim in it. Maybe when I’m bigger I’ll come back and swim in it. I wasn’t stared, Daddy. That’s why Morgen and Lin were shouting.” Scared. “Mummy wasn’t. Mummy wasn’t shouting. She said don’t be stary, Morgen. Lin’s so nice. Mummy’s so nice too. That’s what I think, anyway. He was being a bit stary. Morgen was. A tiny bit. Was he trying to make me laugh? Probably. Do you know, Daddy? What was he saying? We went to look at statues, but Lin douldn’t come. That’s why she was trying. She stayed at home. Not our home, but. Ai caramba.” This, Solanka understood after a moment, was I can’t remember. “We stayed there. Yes. It was very good. I had my own room. I like that. I’ve got a bow and arrow. I like you, Daddy, are you coming home today? Saturday Tuesday? You should. ‘Bye.”