Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [12]
Gavin and Giles, who seem to be as interchangeable as their names: each had a mum, and a red-faced da in a tight buttoned sweater, both aspired to emigration, New Zealand or the Yukon. They were pure air-and-water fetishists—they monitored things—rainfall and temperatures, pollution and pulse rates—and I dallied with them both on the same days, for I had become insatiable not for sex but for presences that were not immediately dismissible or transparently ridiculous. Their temperaments were sweet, what the French call douce, meaning mild, even gentle, as well as sweet. I thought of them as dolphins and wanted to protect them like endangered species. I had begun to despair that I’d taken a sip of some secret potion that would leave me forever scornful and impatient, which led, upon my return to Yale for my senior year, to a serious contemplation and the fear on the part of my parents that I might not marry soon, or at all.
I had slipped off the continental shelf of shallow, undergraduate affairs into the dark, cold, maritime trenches.
Love’s old sweet story, fate supplies a mate, the melody lingers on, et cetera, et cetera, for then came the older men, the professors and the bosses and men with complicated lives and fatal flaws, addictions, recoveries, encumbrances, married men, older men, brilliant but unstable men, attractive but self-engrossed. My twenties passed in grad school and in travel and in short-term grants and short-term affairs that took me wherever I wanted to go. Past success became my credentials, and I picked up other men—Other men—meaning the natives of other countries whose immediate attractiveness I could judge, but nothing else about them; the codes were different. I forgave selfishness, petulance, unfaithfulness I would have despised in Americans; I fell for charm and sophistication and tolerated laziness that would have seemed insincere or egregious in the men I grew up with. My college friends and other colleagues had, by then, gone through much the same types and numbers and their first marriages; at least, I told myself, I didn’t have a child. Then at thirty I asked myself why I didn’t have a child. But by then, pills offered no protection, we were in the sargasso of disease. And so one night with my AIDS-free certificate in my handbag, I went to a lecture at Harvard Business School on assets recovery, and to a bar afterward, where I met Venn.
The man I was looking for by then would go to evening lectures in fields far outside his own. He would not be American. I’d always pictured him Chinese or perhaps Latin American, a scientist, one of those poetry-writing physicists or musical chemists who went to foreign films for recreation. I just didn’t think he’d be from India, and three inches shorter than I.
I asked him what he did. “A kind of data processor,” he said. “And you?”
Very few men in my recent past had deflected questions back to me. After ten years of bobbing in the tangle and clutter of semiserious relationships, the most attractive trait I could imagine in a man was a modest interest in other people, notably me, and a perceptible lack of self-involvement.
“What’s a data processor doing at MIT?” I asked.
“I’m more an inputter than a processor,” he said.
“Still—” I pursued.
“It’s a special kind of data and a special kind of input.”
“Try me.”
“Four dimensional, digital.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Tell me about asset retrieval,” he said. “That’s a little like what I do. That’s why I went to the lecture.”
I thought that night I had found the world’s most modest man. He would not talk about his research; he belittled its potential, even as my own jaw dropped. He could stimulate sense responses—smell, touch, sound—in any subject properly equipped and programmed. But that didn’t excite him. People will always respond