Short Story
Narcissist . . . . . . . .
On the weekends she became the Avon lady selling cosmetics door to door to unattractive suburban wives. She often laughed when she told me stories from that time. She would say with her soft and husky voice, "Frankie, those women thought I was a gene and I could make them beautiful for their husbands with greasy fingernails." I didn't know what she meant by that but I laughed with her anyway. My mother told all these stories about her young life and struggling family while she was setting up her art studio when we moved into our new home.
Next to the studio there was a very tiny space that my mother helped me to convert into a study where I spent hours and hours reading and looking at encyclopedias about world environment. I called it my chamber and thought myself just like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also locked himself up in his third floor chamber. He was shy and a puritan with conflicting emotions about his existence. He suffered a brooding sense of isolation and hid himself from the world. I on the other hand did not have tortured reasons like that. I simply avoided meeting people. I did not admit that to anyone. When frequently asked by my peers why at my age I didn't venture out and go to ice skate or the school gymnasium to shoot basketball, I often reasoned that in Chicago's brutal winter my chamber was my safe haven. My mother thought I was a gifted child and therefore my being an introvert just came with the territory. She never made me do anything that I didn't want to do.
Padma Desai and I were both graduate students at Illinois State University. She was doing her MA in social welfare. I met her at her family's restaurant in downtown Chicago the summer of 1999. I was just strolling and suddenly saw a new establishment with a big neon sign that read Aroma India and decided to peek in. She was working as a hostess at the restaurant that summer. I loved 'spicy' and 'greasy' Indian food. While in Chicago I stayed at my mother's small apartment in downtown. After I went away to college she sold our cozy suburban house and bought a tiny studio apartment just for herself. Before, along with her paintings she used to make prints on cloth that she sold in the summer in different flea markets. A few summers I did that with her. Now she mainly paints for different calendar companies and late summer to fall is a very busy time for her. She loves to repaint all the Georgia O'Keefe paintings. Sometimes I think my mother's paintings are also filled with erotic tension and subtle beauty, just like O'Keefe's earlier New York paintings. I have one of my mother's flower paintings in my house in Bhutan. Another thing I took with me as a memento is my son Robbie's 8"-10" inch portrait when he turned five.
When I met Padma she looked exotic with slanted eyes, caramel skin and a mysterious smile. That summer of 1999 I spent most afternoons at her family's restaurant. My mother had some gastronomical ailment and all my life I saw her taking herbal supplements and all the food she made was bland and tasted like paper. I was very much taken in by Padma's mother Sashi. She had a grand smile and she looked very matronly compared to my own mother. I loved the smell of scented bath oil on her and the way she wore her hair that she made like a big bun on top of her head. She wore vibrant colours. She liked me as well and thought I was underfed. When I ordered food at her restaurant she would make sure my servings were generous. And she never charged me for Indian dessert. I loved her rice pudding that she made herself in the restaurant kitchen.
I blended in easily with them for some reason. I seldom saw her father Ramesh because he looked after the business side of their very busy restaurant and was in a back office most of the time. He always looked exhausted from doing book-keeping. I stayed out of his way. He pretty much ignored me if he saw me. I married Padma after six months. We just went to the city hall to avoid dual ceremonies. Sashi was the only one who seemed very unhappy that we had eloped. My mother said nothing. Within a year we had a son and suddenly I started to feel restless and was looking for ways to get out. Padma just stopped talking to me. She took a job with the social services and during the day she left Robbie with her mother at the restaurant. I didn't feel equipped to take care of my own son. Padma never complained except cast me looks of disdain! I was mostly at my mother's art studio moping and doing nothing basically. That is when my mother said maybe I should go and visit P in Bhutan.
Our marriage didn't last beyond the second year and by then Robbie was talking and demanding attention. I felt suffocated. I left Padma and our son to save the world. Actually, I do not care about saving anything, let alone the world. Everything about life is not black and white. I needed a cover to run away from my family that I made without much thought and from the responsibilities that were piling up on me. I do not actually believe in sentiments. People often commented that I was a 'cynic' and I took that as a compliment.
The only person who really got to me a little was Glory. She knew exactly what I was thinking or saying better than I did myself from across the border. I never admitted to her that she always was right. She tried to know me a little better, but I pushed her away. I did not believe in love and I was afraid that is what she needed or wanted from me. She never gave me any reason for me to feel this way, but I convinced myself of that. From the very beginning I made it clear that we had nothing in common and I had no desire to take it anywhere. Glory wrote back saying how her mountain hydrangeas were in full bloom, or how she found the perfect hand painted photo frame to finally put the picture of the red Panda that she took during her last mountain hike, and was trying to figure out how to fix the broken back door of her small rented house. Then she would add a postscript just to touch slightly about something in reference to my email that she was responding to. Once she wrote, "We both love to read Yasunari Kawabata and we agreed that Snow Country is the best work of literature."
It felt like she was not seeing what I was writing. I think it was only my imagination that she wanted something beyond friendship. She wrote to me the very first time that she had no hidden agenda and the only thing she expected was pure unadulterated friendship. One time, without thinking, I wrote that she was gregarious and energetic and she should keep on smiling. Then I dreaded for days if she was going to write me a love note back. She did not. She in a banal sort of way replied how lovely that I thought that. She makes me feel normal when I think about her. But I do not like feeling that way.
I write her my last email. I thank her for keeping me company during my greyest days. I tell her that I like living alone in my cocooning comforts in my small house that I had built myself after arriving in Thimpu and this house I built with only 'me' in mind. Then I spell it out for her --- that I cannot continue writing to her and hope she takes it in the right spirit. I give her a reason like a dopey and insensitive high school kid after corresponding with her for quite sometime. I tell her I am a cynic and a narodnik and I find her to be too upfront with her feelings. This simply doesn't sit quite well with me. I even try to reason that I am a quiet person and I am unable to give her what she is hoping to get from me. I end my email saying I cannot handle her any further. I was expecting a flurry of long and emotional emails that she would follow up with a phone call. She did not write but called. She simply said in that case she would go away and her life meant something to her and she would continue on her path where she would seek truth and beauty. She said I would be wrong in thinking that someone like 'me' could diminish her in any way. She will not invest her emotions for a narcissist anymore. From this point on to her I will be just like a comet in a night sky that she had only glanced at for a few seconds. The phone went dead. After that I never heard from her again. It has been sixty -three days.
Tonight it feels unusually warm for a winter night. I go and sit out on the porch and all around me is this twittering silence and I see the evening light is flickering in the trees. I look at the jacaranda bushes with their purple flowers. At night the flowers look like dark heads without faces that are staring at me. I get up to go inside and think monsoon is not until another five months. That is my favourite season. I can lie in my hammock with a bottle of crisp Vouvray and listen to the rain all by myself.
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