The Blue Taxi Read online

  They didn’t speak of it. Did not dissect the thing. Sarie’s enervated skin gradually grew chill, as damp ground does when the red sun sinks at last. Majid sat beside her. For a long, slow moment, he did not open his eyes. He felt: emptied at the core, as though a cleaning crew had come, removed everything he knew, and hosed his insides down. Sarie felt a tenderness consume her. She waited. At last, Majid Ghulam reached out and gave her thigh an earnest squeeze. Eyelashes aflutter, a bit more formal than Sarie had expected—though she didn’t, really, know what to expect at all—Majid Ghulam said, “Thank you.” Sarie ran her hand across her forehead from the left side to the right, as though combing back the skin. She smiled at him and tried, as Majid rose, to pull him close to her. She would have liked for him to rest a moment, head upon her shoulder. But Majid squeezed her thigh again and got up from the bed. She watched him fasten his old trousers. At her frown, “I’ll come back,” he said.

  Sarie remained still. Majid gathered up a hair comb and a towel (threadbare, with a faded rosy print), and slipped out of the room. At first, with Majid gone, Sarie felt alone. She wrapped her arms around herself. Such closeness in a coupling! Such loneliness just after! It was like being given, without notice, extra body parts to manage; growing speedily accustomed from desire to their weight and warmth and style; and next, just when it feels right, suffering a graceless amputation that excises much more than was brought. She heard water tumbling, splashing, from the bathroom, wished that she could see him as he bathed. She wondered, as she would for a long time, what his limbs looked like unclothed.

  In the small bedroom’s green light, she felt the air around her as a substance. She became aware of dust motes, the wrinkled look of things. She heard the rumble of the street as one hears a distant river, and was glad for the room’s height. She thought how far away it seemed—all this—from her own apartment, with its books, Gilbert’s favorite chair, his pictures, and the broken, dead piano that took up so much space. Prepared, almost, to see things from it that she had not seen before, she rose to look out of the window into Majid’s street.

  Out there, three men ferried lengths of wire down the road: road, men, wire, all aglint in the ebbing afternoon. In a shady place along the sidewalk, below a scarlet awning, the man with the potbelly and slim ankles turned the crank of his cane press and sold a frothy glass to a woman dressed in black who had just come from the market. A boy wove down the street, hawking colored images of Jesus, Parvathi, and the Kabbah tied together with white string. High above the fray, Majid Ghulam’s new lover wiped her face and cupped her rugged chin. She stretched her mouth and cheeks, felt her skin go taut. Majid Ghulam looks from this window every day. She yawned and reached out for her dress.

  Once Majid was fresh again and Sarie’s top was buttoned, she called into Tahir’s room for Agatha. “Tahir’s sitting up now,” Agatha announced. He was sitting on the chair still, had liked playing the part of the hot sun while Agatha, now Jupiter, now Mars, revolved. Sarie smiled at them. “Very good,” she said. “Come on.” Agatha helped him back over to the bed. Majid found a basket, into which he placed four bunches of bananas. “You like these, I think,” he said to Sarie’s little girl. She did. She thanked him, and Sarie, looking down at her, felt proud. Agatha took charge of the basket. Neck tight with the effort, arms long and stretched against her chest, she held it with both hands and struggled to make sure her feet could move beneath it. Sarie thanked him, too, and said she would be back—then, wondering if she shouldn’t have (being clothed again, having been bare only once, brings a special kind of doubt), she added, almost sadly, “If that will be all right.” Majid Ghulam smiled, nodded with his eyes, then looked quietly away.

  From his bedroom window, he watched Sarie and Agatha make their way down Libya Street. Agatha was tired. She did battle with the basket but refused, with quick shakes of her head, Sarie’s efforts to assist her. As Majid trembled at the window, a pair of yellow fruit, plump and bright, no longer than a thumb, spilled out from the basket to wobble in the road. Sarie didn’t notice. A bit farther down, she tried to help again, but this time Agatha turned sharply from her and made an ugly face. Sarie, tired, too, made a show of looking up, at anything but Agatha. She meaningfully stared, instead, at the awnings of the hardware stores and tea shops. Agatha continued to make faces, and Sarie, well aware of it, ignored her. Surprised, a little pleased, Majid thought, Mrs. Turner is still young.

  He felt oddly bereft—not as he had for Hayaam, of course. Death, true love, was something else. A mistress is no wife. But, still, he surely felt relieved of something he had not had time to savor, felt a sweetness-sadness, something like regret. There they were, there, the girlish two, receding. There she was, the woman who had stroked and pulled at his most private skin. They moved past the white-tiled doorway of R. Tea Shop, became too small for him to see.

  From the boys’ room he heard Tahir call. He went to him, peeled the sheet back carefully, and lifted him over his shoulder like a carpet. Aware of his son’s lightness, he wondered how much the missing length of leg, from calf to toes, might measure on a scale. Much less than a sack of flour, Majid thought. Less than a half-used bolt of cloth. And yet what a difference it made. How cold his son’s skin was. He took him to the bathroom, where, holding his boy by the shoulders, he looked carefully away. As Tahir did his business, Majid thought of Sugra, hoped she’d come back in the morning. Hoped that she would help.

  Just before the mosque, Agatha refused once more to be assisted with the basket. Sarie lost her temper. She was feeling late, exposed. I have done it now, she thought. It. La chose. The thing. The private glow she’d felt had changed, had settled, was now more like a stain. She wondered if Gilbert would look at her and know. To Agatha she said, “Why are you so difficult!” She squeezed her daughter’s shoulder with a vigorous hand, to stop her, take the basket from her arms. Agatha wriggled free. “Give me those bananas,” Sarie said (did she also, missing his light hands, wish herself to hold what he had given, things that came from Majid’s house?). She tried again to pull the handles from Agatha’s tight grasp and this time gained some ground.

  Before the mendicants, Agatha had stopped. Three of them, the regulars, whom they both knew by sight: a tiny woman, head tucked under her arm, sleeping, drooling silver; a man with one eye missing and one blind was propped precariously against the wall like an unrepaired umbrella. His unseeing eye was blue. A second woman, weaving palm fronds on the ground, made snapping sounds with her wet mouth.

  Agatha did not have a well-developed moral sense. That is, she didn’t think, We have a basket of bananas and these people are hungry. She was no gracious child. But she had a sense of shame and knew for certain that to refuse her mother’s predatory fingers there, right there in front of the three beggars, would cause her some embarrassment. The sleeping woman might awake; the blind-eyed man might stare, and the sucking woman with the palm frond in her lap might stick her sharp tongue out. All at once, she gave up the bananas so easily and unexpectedly that Sarie lost her balance, flailed to keep herself and the basket from falling to the ground. “Well!” she said. And watched, abandoned, as Agatha raced ahead to make her own way home.

  When Sarie came into the apartment, Agatha sat at the piano, thumping softly at the untuned keys with her left hand, right arm stretched above her like a swaying water plant. Unkindly, without looking up, Agatha asked her mother if she’d dropped any bananas. Sarie grunted. She was sweating. She wished there were a looking glass in that front room, or a window lit up with a darkness that could show her her own face. She smoothed her hair, felt her nose and brow for shine. She held her chin a moment. Then she took a breath, on the airy heels of which there came a Majid-Ghulam-Jeevanjee-shaped pang. Do I look like a woman who has just been with a lover? Do I smell like love? She thought for a moment of what love smelled like, sniffed lightly at herself, and hoped instead that she gave off a smell of street and city sweat. She remembered the bananas. These fruits have a scent.
She filled her fists with them before stepping down the hall.

  As she crossed into the bedroom, Gilbert’s body jerked. Lying on the bed, socks off, hands over his eyes, Sarie’s husband bleated. He was suffering from hiccups. The spasms, having grabbed him by the collar as he left the Palm with Uncle James’s letter weighing down his heart, had not yet let him go. Sarie gave her crumpled husband the heavy kind of frown that results from a desire to conceal the tender thing. “What is wrong with you? Gilbert. What is it you have?” Gilbert only moaned.

  Sarie said, “What’s that silly noise?” Gilbert peered at her between two parted fingers. A cruel hiccup shook him. “Oh, Sarie,” Gilbert said, “an awful thing—has happened.” He covered both eyes with one hand and with the other searched beneath the pillow for the aerogramme, which he found and held out to his wife. “Read this.”

  Sarie was suspicious. He’s acting. He wants me to find him sympathetic. How like her husband to demand all of her attention when she, instead, was the one who needed love. In defense, she set her eyes and cheeks as solidly against her skull as she could manage, made all of herself flat. She could not bear, just then, to find an ailing Gilbert worthy of her kindness. “I do not mean the letter,” Sarie said, sitting far away from Gilbert on a stool before the dressing table. She tossed four bright bananas lightly on the bed as if Gilbert were a monkey she was hoping to distract. “Tiens. Take these.” Gilbert, still covering his face, did not look out to see what she had offered. Sarie sniffed and took up a banana. Mouth full and damp with fruit, she said, “I mean the noise. What is wrong with you?”

  A hardness in her voice, so different from the softness and also from the sobbing Gilbert thought that he had wished for, did some tonic work. Something like cold water on a distraught person’s face. Gilbert slowly took his hand down from his eyes. Careful, he sat up against the headboard. “Hiccups, Sarie. I have—a case of hiccups.” These he demonstrated, ably.

  Sarie rolled her eyes. She quickly thought: A blushing man; a man with rashes on his skin; a man who gets the hiccups. What a husband. Quel mari I have. But there were some things Sarie could not do. Her nurse’s bent prevented her from cruelty. She knew very well that Gilbert’s hiccups usually came with other pains that cannot be outdone by clove-brews, salty things or bars of sulphur soap. She thought briefly about sugar, water swallowed backwards, sudden scary noise. “Hiccups, tiens. What is it, then, what’s wrong?” She considered shocking him by saying, “I have taken on a lover!” but did not. Gilbert, tired, and resentful because he felt in this condition that he merited attention, spoke the next thing rather sharply. “I’d like to tell you why, if you could bring yourself to li—sten.”

  Sarie, too mixed up just then to feel surprised that Gilbert (who hated, hated, confrontations!) had just accused her of neglect, sniffed again and took the light blue thing from him. She read. As her face changed, Gilbert imagined he could see the fine hairs at her nape and temples stand on end. This pleased him; surely she cared, too. His squawks subsided for a moment. With the sausage of his tongue, he pushed against the twisting in his throat, tried to breathe in, slowly. He remembered that he had not eaten since a modest lunch of beans. “Well?” he said. Briefly safe, he took up a yellow fruit. They might do him good.

  Sarie, letter on her lap, examined the pale sheet. She blinked, and bit her lip. Yes, she could see why Gilbert was upset. But, having just come from another bed, she could not support him fully. She had no wish either to soothe him or to make him feel she understood his trouble (their trouble. She wished it to be his). As he had been, she was moved by Uncle James’s punctuation; she chose to comment on this first. “He is angry! Look at that!” she said, without moving, without making any gesture to show Gilbert what she meant. “Yes, look at that.” She meant the vividness of it, the wildness of the writing.

  Gilbert felt his wife had missed the point. He moved a little on the bed. A hiccup came from him. “Did you—did you read it? The part about—the money.” Of course Sarie had. But she wasn’t ready to discuss it. Among the heavy curls and towers of the letters and the patches of spilt ink, Sarie sought a weapon, and she found one. I cannot support your wife and children any longer. Sarie thought a moment. She took this very personally. Children? Agatha was all they’d managed, the only one they had. One child. Had Gilbert let the man believe that she had borne a brood? Three children, even four, and boys, moreover, so Uncle James would send along more money? Worse, had Gilbert meant to put her through that swollen business once again? Did he want more than one child? What could that plural mean?

  Gilbert hiccupped loudly. His hips and chest rose up in concert from the bedding in a high, unmanaged jerk. Sarie noticed that her husband’s feet, high-arched, fat-toed, landed sideways on the sheet like two fleshy letters C. He jerked again, again. Each hiccup yanked his big toes towards him in a spasm, thrust the eight remaining digits back. She wondered if he knew how strange, how ridiculous, his feet looked. “Gilbert,” she said, loudly, leaning forward, a banana in her hand. She wished he would stop moving. “Gilbert!” The sharpness of her voice did still him. Breath free for a moment, Gilbert, hoping once again for gentleness and wondering if he’d get it, peeked out rather gingerly between a forefinger and thumb. A soft bleat came from his lips. “Au pluriel?” she said. When Sarie spoke to him in French, Gilbert knew that she was moving back from him, receding, looking at the world from a vantage point he could not share—one from which he and everything he stood for was foreign and disdained. “Gilbert.” She poked her husband’s trousered leg with the unpeeled part of her banana. “You told him we had children, au pluriel?”

  Once he’d woken the next day, Gilbert, struggling still with pockets of trapped air, unsure of his breath, went nonetheless directly to the Frosty-Kreem, where, he thought, he might be treated kindly. Because it was a Saturday, the place was overrun; he had to wait outside. The air was bland and silky, swollen and too warm. The morning light glowed dull. In the grayish gloom, behind twenty-seven boys and girls who formed a thick, unruly line outside the door, he waited on the pavement for over half an hour. Several pairs of parents—women in approaching middle age, broad-torsoed in their shining weekend wear, mustachioed men with canes—watched their offspring proudly. An older man with spectacles and the refined mien of a schoolmaster laughed kindly with the daring ones who jockeyed for positions closest to the door. Schoolboys in short-pants, girls in colored dresses made of knees and elbows, they jostled one another, shrieked. Gilbert stood behind them trying to look stern, arms folded on his chest. But he was tortured, still, ungallantly, by sporadic closures of his throat.

  Near him, a lean boy with early stubble on his cheeks and a comely curve in his oiled hair announced that he felt rich enough this Saturday to purchase something other than a cone (“An Italian cup! Pink and brown and white!”). A round girl with fifty-two small braids huddled on her scalp (Gilbert counted, to pass time) pointed the boy out to her companion; they frowned in his direction. Someone said, “Thinks he is a Jeevanjee! A Topan! Arre baba!” and a tiny boy in short-pants who had been attempting to sneak past Gilbert in the line paused in his attempt to let his mouth fall open at the sound of so much change.

  A Jeevanjee. Gilbert felt oppressed. So much glee, children with new coins hard and bright in their hot hands, so much noise, so much Saturday behavior! He scanned the young, thrilled crowd; its members, he was suddenly, bitterly, quite sure, had more funds than he could even dream. Millionaires and capitalists, he thought. Each and every one. His gaze settled on a parent in a dark blue tailored suit whose neatly combed mustache gleamed bluish like wet silk. The man raised a soft, clean hand up in the air against a band of flies (which scattered!); at his wrist a gold watch shone. And Gilbert, lost, abandoned by the world, said quietly between his teeth: “Parasites, each one.”

  His stomach hurt. Desperate for Sarie’s company, for talk, for something kind to make him feel less fear, he had been hiccupping all night. But Sarie’s sleep had been
so firm that when he tapped her three times on the shoulder, on each occasion offering a new term of endearment (“Sarie-love?” “Dear?” “Sweetheart?”), she had not even groaned, or pushed his hand away.

  When he finally made it to the door and stepped into the Frosty-Kreem, he was, as always, startled by the coolness of the place and by how sound was different there. Though the customers were tightly packed and many, their voices came out muffled, and this softness was principally due to one of the Frosty-Kreem’s two defining features: a herd of multicolored animals—plush, crocheted, and furry—that hung down from the ceiling. Yellow monkeys, red and orange kittens, polka-dotted donkeys, a dozen vivid zebras, mute themselves, suckled at the people sounds. The clash and clink of spoons on bowls, the drizzle of cold coins, the trilling of the metal bell, had a weird, dry softness to them. Behind the scarlet counter, Kazansthakis, dispensing chocolate and vanilla cones with what looked like eight quick hands, was plush and soft himself A bear, thought Gilbert idly. My friend would be a bear. The Frosty King did not speak to him, but he was sensitive to changes in the air—to grown-ups in a room—and he noted Gilbert’s presence the moment he came in. He’d deftly slipped a cone to Mrs. Frosty (a pink one, for a change) and asked her please to place it into Gilbert Turner’s hands so he’d have something to do.

  Behind the door, pressed against the wall, Gilbert folded—Like an aerogramme, he thought—each time a set of boys and girls came in and each time a set went out. He hiccupped, hiccupped, still. With each attempt to press the cone against his mouth, his insides tightened and his jagged throat shut down. Some children noticed him and stared, elbowed one another. Their close attention was difficult for Gilbert to withstand because (and this was feature two) the Frosty-Kreem’s four walls each boasted a mirror. A single laughing child was therefore 4, or 16, 64, 256, a staggering, incalculable repetition beneath the breeding toys. He saw himself, himself, himself, and them, and them, and them, the back of Mr. Frosty’s head as well as its red front, again, again, again. The reflections made him dizzy. Against them all, Gilbert closed his eyes. By the time the rush died down and Kazansthakis stopped to wipe the counter, Gilbert’s ice cream, uneaten for the spasms, had melted thickly all across his hands. His pale brown eyes were red.