Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [57]
In the bottom drawer of one of the two filing cabinets that had INACTIVE/STORAGE labels on them, I came across an accordion letter file. In the C compartment of that letter file, bound together with twine and topped with a note in Ham’s handwriting, Tricia and I tied the knot in Vegas last night. Thought you might want these back, Love As Always, were postcards Jess’d mailed Ham from places with pretty names. Surakarta, Seremban, Chiang Mai, Mandalay, Tabrīz, Ranpur.
My sweetest, dearest friend, If you could see my aura now, you’d understand why I had to leave …
and
This place is magic and I’m seeing in a new spectrum of colors, I’m feeling with a whole new velocity …
and
Today’s lesson had to do with western attitudes to disease. R. is my lover and more, he is my guru, my teacher, my prince. He’s taught me that illness is punishment for a past life’s sins. Malaria, cholera, leprosy: they’re our just deserts …
and
At R.’s command, I’m giving out herbal pills and potions to tourists so that their bodies and souls may be purified without their knowing it …
Stuck in the back of Ham’s folder was a photograph of Jess in a peacock-feather tutu and of Ham in a penis sheath and nothing else. In the background, dancing around an oak, were other wood sprites in gourd-straps and forest nymphs in bird-feathers. I recognized the woman who had shaved her head for Ham. She had a thick, frizzy halo of red-gold hair. The hair could pass for a wig. Hats looked better on her. I slipped the photo in my pocketbook.
I should have been content just finding those postcards. It’s wondrous, the self’s capacity for growth and change. But Jess wanted me to find more. She hadn’t destroyed any of it; she wanted someone—me—to come along. I scoured the files, dug into shoeboxes discarded on closet shelves, unlocked the petty-cash drawer, sprung the safe-deposit box Jess kept behind a sofa. And then I sat at Jess’s workstation with the antique scribe’s lap desk from India, trying to think like Jess, doodle like Jess, tap a nervous knuckle against the desk leg like Jess, and there it was, a secret compartment glided open in the antique desk. Inside that long, shallow space was a single snapshot. A mother and her just-born. Mothers look radiant, always; the just-born wriggly, helpless, uglier than garden slugs. My eyes were slits, hair long and black, plastered by heat, by afterbirth, to my forehead. It must have been him who took the picture.
Late that exhilarating afternoon, I dialed her number. “Jess, tell me what I can do.”
“You’ve done enough,” she snapped. “You show up and three friends are dead! ‘Dying! Dying in the night! / Won’t somebody bring in the light / So I can see which way to go / Into the everlasting snow?’ ”
One of Emily’s, I assumed. When I made the call, I hadn’t been thinking Suicide Hot Line.
“You don’t get it, Devi. I loved Fred.”
“I’m coming over, Jess. Don’t do anything stupid before I get there.”
“Someone has me in his crosshairs,” she said. Her voice was mean and guarded this time. “Call him off, Devi.”
“I would if I could, Jess. I want to.”
“I’ve still got friends, you know. I’ll be staying at Ham’s, Fred expected it could happen, he was in the business, he said one day he’d turn over the wrong rock … but Beth’s and Sandy’s murders, I can’t get over …”
So that was the gloomy woman’s name. Sandy. Death finally demystified her.
“It’s the end of something. We never expected to die.”
I waited for more. It wasn’t jealousy. A tsunami of envy rushed me forward. Envy of whatever made possible Jess’s eternity of makeovers.
“Ham and I’ve been friends a long time, you know,” she finished. And when I still didn’t absolve her, she added, “Over twenty years. We even brought up them word.”
I know about the abortion. You didn’t want a daughter.
“Can you picture me in the burbs? Orinda?” She laughed.
I sensed her uneasiness. The laugh sputtered into a smoker’s hacking cough.
“You’ve started smoking, Jess?”
“No. I’ve gone back.”
I know about