The Super 8 Motel in Wendover, Nevada, was fairly Spartan even for one-star accommodation, but when Lakshmi pulled in at 8:30 p.m., thirteen hours after she’d left Berkeley, the place seemed as luxurious as the Winter Palace. A big parking space right up front. Free coffee in the lobby. A maroon-quilted double bed all to herself. She took a steamy bath in the slippery bathtub, wrapped herself in a small scratchy towel, collapsed down on the bed and closed her eyes.
Although she was not used to hotels as a rule, she’d spent the night with him in one eleven times, the Berkeley Travelodge near the interstate. He’d paid. His roommates were messy, he explained, and prone to barging in; a hotel provided them with a much more private, and pleasant, environment. And even though he could rarely stay the entire night (too much studying; his orals were scheduled for May), they’d spent hours wrapped around each other under polyester bedspreads much like the one she was lying on now. Barely two months ago, the Travelodge had seemed so glamorous to Lakshmi, so adult. They had ordered nachos up to the room and eaten them naked in bed.
She’d met him on her third day in Berkeley, during the hot, fleeting week before classes started, when the freshmen were supposed to engage in sweaty get-to-know-you games, scavenger hunts and pizza nights and multicultural seminars. Lakshmi played along, but felt silly being the star of the diversity socials (not because she was Indian, but because she was from Delaware and didn’t know Eureka from La Jolla). On her third morning in Berkeley, she ducked out of a Sexual Assault Awareness Bagel Brunch in order to find the gym, do some laps in the indoor pool and cool off for the day to come.
Looking back, as she often did, she was never able to pinpoint the precise moment she first saw him. She would only remember that it dawned on her, slowly, that someone was doing laps in the lane next to her and matching her stroke for stroke. She switched from breast stroke to side and back again, but every time she touched the wall, the swimmer was right there next to her. He smiled once, and did a queer sort of back-flip in the water, and Lakshmi rolled her eyes because she didn’t like show offs.
“You should try out for the swim team,” he’d said to her when she got out of the pool. He was still in the water, panting, wearing goggles. His damp curls were stuck to his forehead.
“Excuse me?” She’d been pretending not to notice him, and was startled by his voice.
“There’s a swim team here,” he said. “You should try out. You swim beautifully.”
“I’m not very competitive.” Lakshmi wished she were wearing more clothing. The chlorine was stinging her eyes, and she blinked.
“Have I seen you before?”
“No,” Lakshmi said. “I’m a freshman.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m a doctoral candidate,” he said. “You swim beautifully.” He lifted his goggles onto his forehead. “I guess I just said that.”
Lakshmi shrugged, blinked harder, but she could feel herself blushing.
“What’s your name?”
“Lakshmi,” she said, wishing she were less forthcoming.
“The Hindi goddess of war.”
“The goddess of abundance,” she said, then got the hell out of there.
Later he would tell her that she’d been the most stunning thing he’d ever seen, slicing through the water like a dolphin, water beading up on her skin as she emerged from the pool. He’d needed to talk to her, he would say – he’d needed her to notice him. He would tell her that he’d had a hard time keeping up with her in the lanes, and she would laugh because she secretly she liked being flattered. But by that point, they would be doing laps together most mornings, and during the evenings he wasn’t working on his dissertation, they would be curled up together in the corner of some cafe. By that point, they would be in love, and she wouldn’t mind anymore that he was a bit of a show-off.
Listen, she hadn’t known he was also a liar. How could she have known? Why should she distrust the man she loved?
But still, no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t let herself off the hook. Lakshmi was bone-tired, aching for sleep, but every time she closed her eyes she saw the wife’s face, pale in shock, then reddening in rage. She turned on the bedside lamp, counted pinholes in the Super 8 ceiling’s acoustic tiles.
The last several hours of her drive had been shrouded in pitch-blackness; there were few other cars on the road to the Utah border, and even the truckers had diminished. She’d stopped in Winnemucca to use the bathroom; by the time she reached Creek City, all she saw out the car window was the cool dark nighttime. She knew that the country she was driving through was filled with striking desert landscape, but she didn’t even have the energy to yearn to see it. Instead, she played the Indigo Girls over and over again, foot to the gas, eyes glassy with exhaustion. She kept hallucinating the Super 8 sign in front of her, although she wasn’t entirely sure what the Super 8 sign looked like.
By hour eight or nine along satiny Route 80, Lakshmi had started to feel a new appreciation for the insane vastness of America, for the stark emptiness and barren nowheresvilles. Every so often as she sped along the highway, she could see Golden Arches, bright blue Wal-Mart signs, enormous movie theaters and desolate truck stops. Periodically a bright city would sparkle along the route, pretty Truckee or neon Reno. But mostly she skirted towns with evasive names and no landscape: Fernley, Lovelock, Battle Mountain.
It occurred to Lakshmi that out here, she could disappear into the desolation. She could be the only person for entire square miles, with no neighbors but the sand and the pollutant-spewing mines. She could move to Fingerburg or Ringman’s Pass, she could find an apartment in Reno, she could learn to be at peace with being alone.
Listen, how could she have known?
Still wrapped in her damp white towel, Lakshmi fell asleep counting holes in the ceiling. She dreamed about working in a Wal-Mart with a name tag that bore the wrong name.
* * *
The South Bend Howard Johnson’s prize amenity was an indoor swimming pool; at six a.m., only eight hours from her next destination, Lakshmi removed her suit from her car. The air in the pool room stank so strongly of chlorine that it was hard to breathe; the tiles were mildew-stained and the grout between them was mossy. It didn’t matter. She tucked her braid into her swimming cap and took a shallow dive halfway across the small, greenish pool. When she came up, she gasped.
They’d swum three thousand laps together before they ever kissed, the day before winter break, on the concrete steps outside Hearst gym. Josh was following her out of the building the way he always did, his yellow t-shirt turning see-through because he never bothered to properly dry off. He’d grabbed her by the shoulders. His hands were stronger than she would have thought.
During the preceding months, they’d developed a fond kind of friendship, even though they didn’t know each others’ last names. They always arrived at the gym at seven-thirty, always did fifty synchronized laps, always met outside the locker rooms and walked together across campus before saying goodbye. While they walked, they talked about their coursework and books they liked and music and campus politics and restaurants they wished they could afford. They did not mention their personal lives. On three separate, brief occasions, he bought her a cup of coffee at Café Workstadt before they went their separate ways.
And then, that morning in mid-December, he’d grabbed her by the shoulders with stronger-than-expected hands and kissed her right on the mouth. She’d been daydreaming about him in her classes, scrawling his name in the margins of her notebooks, but still she pushed him away and smacked him on the arm. “Now why would you go and do that?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he looked it, too – much sorrier than she would have liked.
“It’s just that you’re too old for me,” she said. There was something about Josh that made her feel playful, sarcastic. She was a smartass with him, and never with anyone else.
“I am,” he agreed. “I’m much too old for you. I could be your grandfather.”
“My great-grandfather.”
“Great-great.”
“And I don’t know anything about you,” she added. “You’re practically a stranger to me.”
“But we swim together every morning,” he pleaded. “You know I’m an excellent swimmer.”
“Please.” She put her hands on her hips. “I don’t even know where you live. I don’t know who your friends are.”
“I live in the English department.” He brushed the water out of his eyes. “And I don’t have any friends. Who are your friends?”
She giggled. “I don’t have any either.” It was cold out, and she could see the goose pimples rising on his arms. His eyes were such a clear, lovely hazel. “You’re shivering, Josh.”
“I should probably dry my hair before I leave the gym.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’m afraid you won’t wait for me.” He shrugged, sheepish. “Being with you is the best part of my day.”
She could feel it even now, the clutch in her chest when he said that. Even here in the slimy smelly Howard Johnson pool she could feel it. “Go home and dry off,” she’d said, looking down at the concrete steps, pinching her palm to keep from blushing. “I have to go back to my dorm now.”
“Lakshmi,” he said as she hurried off the step, “I’m sorry about what I did just now. That was uncalled for.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. Running away, she was once again playful, sarcastic. “I mean seriously, Josh. I was wondering what took you so long!”
* * *
From there, it had been easy. She went home for Christmas break, logged into the Berkeley computer system to receive her grades (A’s in biology, Hindi, astronomy, a B+ in comp), visited her favorite former teachers at DuPont High. For her nineteenth birthday, January 3, she asked her parents for a new bathing suit.
“I missed you while you were in Delaware,” he said, after they’d finished their fifty laps more quickly than usual. She’d arrived back in Berkeley at two in the morning, waited five hours, then raced for the pool.
“Really?”
“Really,” he said. “It’s lonely swimming all by myself.”
January in Berkeley was chilly, and they were wearing sweatshirts, scarves, socks. Lakshmi wanted to hold his hand as they crossed the campus but had no idea how to go about it. However, that morning, after they were finished swimming, she’d waited for him to dry his hair.
“So how was your break?” she asked, when they sat down at Café Workstadt with double lattes. They’d never sat at a table together before – he’d always bought her coffee to go.
“It was… I guess it was surprising.”
“Problematic surprising?”
“Not exactly–” he paused. “No, not really. More like I just found out that someone in my life is – well, there are some unexpected… surprises.”
“Like what?”
He looked at her again, a bit shyly, but his eyes were sparkling. He seemed, to Lakshmi, to be suffering from a strange mix of anxiety and pleasure. “It’s sort of hard to explain-“
“Try.”
He breathed deeply. “Okay, well, I’ve been working on my research for several years, right?” Another deep breath. “I mean, for better or worse – it’s sort of hard to tell – I’ve been dedicating my entire adult life to threads of narrative dating from just before the industrial revolution in England and America.”
Josh’s research traced the ways in which industrialism and feminism collided to produce new strains of literature. On his suggestion, she’d read John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill and Wilkie Collins, which was more, he told her, than his own students usually read all semester.
“And this might seem like a small thing, might seem like an unimportant thing, to people not trained to understand it. But for academics, even just for readers” — and here he flashed Lakshmi a complicit smile – “this is an important subject. It’s worth exploration. And I have this plan, you know? I’d like to finish my dissertation, and then move on to a post-doc, preferably here – Berkeley has the best English department in the country, as far as I’m concerned – and then find a tenure-track spot somewhere reputable. And continue my work.” He shrugged. “Perhaps spend a year in England for my research.”
“That sounds good to me,” Lakshmi said.
“Do you like England?”
The only England Lakshmi had ever seen was in the movies. “I love it,” she said. For a moment she could see herself in a bonnet and Josh in riding boots strolling, Austen-like, through some pale British countryside. She buried her smile in her coffee cup.
“But then suddenly – suddenly – ah…” That sheepish look again. “Well, suddenly someone threw a wrench in my plans, a surprise wrench, and I don’t even know if I’ll be able to continue on here. I might have to – “he grimaced – “start teaching high school English or something.”
“Wow,” she said, knowing that, for Josh, teaching high school would be a serious blow. And thinking also of her senior year production of “Bye Bye Birdie” at Dupont High: An English teacher is really someone – how proud I’d be if he had become one.
“I’m sorry to be burdening you with all this, Lakshmi. This isn’t really your problem.”
“No,” she protested. She wanted to be a comfort. “It can be my problem, too, if you want it to.”
And from then on, not only did they swim together in the mornings, but they ate together most evenings, and, when he could escape his dissertation, curled up together in the Travelodge. She never asked him about his personal problem, but he seemed so much happier to her that she assumed it had gone away. Or maybe, she thought (secretly, hopefully), he was happier because he was with her.
She crossed the Howard Johnson pool, five strokes to a lap. He’d needed money because his wife was pregnant. The surprise wrench in the plans was that his wife was pregnant.
Lakshmi pulled herself out of the pool. Eight hours until she reached Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania. The chlorine stung her eyes so badly she couldn’t help but cry.
* * *
Two days later, seven states down, and one more to go until she reached Heyward, New Jersey, where the wife had escaped after she’d found them at Café Workstadt, Lakshmi and Josh, kissing in the corner. She’d turned red, she’d run screaming, all the way back to her hometown, her father’s house in New Jersey. The pregnant wife had a hometown, a father, had run screaming there because of what Lakshmi had done. Lakshmi’s ribs squeezed tight around her lungs when she thought of it, which she did all the time. She borrowed her roommate’s Honda. She got in the car with a road atlas and a dim goal: she would find the pregnant wife, and she would apologize. And then what? She had no idea. Josh had vanished somewhere too. He had raced out after the wife, screaming also, screaming that he was sorry.
Lakshmi woke up in the Super 8 Motel in Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania, and decided to avail herself of the in-room coffee service. She plugged in the midget-size coffee maker and opened up the thin disk of dehydrated grinds, then sat there and eyed the pot as it burbled full. It occurred to her that, back in Delaware, she didn’t even drink coffee. In Berkeley, she drank it more frequently than water. She stood and looked at herself in the wavy, full-length mirror, holding a steaming mug. She looked older, she decided. Older, and messier, with her stained, dirt-softened jeans ripping at the knees and dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was long and greasy from repeated washings with bars of hotel soap, and she’d put on weight. Her breasts were bigger. Her mother would think she looked like a tramp.
Well.
This afternoon, she would apologize to Josh’s pregnant, estranged wife. She knew what she would say, or at least what she would start to say. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please let me make it up to you somehow.
She would wear her dirty clothes. She would smear dirt on her cheeks.
“Please, Mrs. Haller, I’m so sorry. I can’t live with how guilty I feel. I can’t study. I can’t do anything. Please let me fix this somehow. Please make this like it never happened.”
But still when she closed her eyes she could remember what his fragile collarbone felt like under her fingers. She could remember how his curly hair grew damp and springy from sweat. She could feel the soft press of his tongue against her own, and it made her burn with longing and hideous disappointment in herself.
Lakshmi packed up her bag, paid the check, and got back on Route 80, towards New Jersey, and the wife.
* * *
As he sat on the stoop, his wife’s head on his shoulder, Josh gazed at the green lawns of New Jersey. They’d been sitting like this for more than an hour now, and it was starting to feel right. One day he would have a lawn like this, he figured, and a tenure-track job somewhere, and a houseful of children, and this beautiful wife on his arm. Maybe it wasn’t the life he’d wanted, or thought he was going to have, but it wasn’t a bad life either. He reassured himself that he had done the right thing. He’d followed her here, he’d groveled, and she would forgive him eventually.
Across the street and down several yards, parked under a maple tree, was a dusty old Honda. Josh hadn’t noticed it before, but now he saw it – and saw the woman sitting in it. A woman with a long dark braid. She was looking at him through her rolled-up window. As soon as she met his eyes, she turned her head, turned the key, pulled away from the curb and down the street, much faster than necessary.
Was it–
But no. No, it couldn’t be. Lakshmi didn’t have a Honda. She couldn’t have driven all the way here, not by herself. She would have come in a taxi or something. She would have taken the bus. It couldn’t have been her. There was no way she would have come all the way here just to sit on the street. Josh’s heart began pumping furiously. He tightened his hold on his wife.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m just–”
There was no way it was Lakshmi, which was probably for the best, because if it was Lakshmi, he would have gotten up and run after her. If it was Lakshmi, he would have never let her leave his sight again, if he only knew for sure that she had come for him, and that he was forgiven.
* * *
Infinite FiveChapters continues tomorrow with a new story by Lori Ostlund.
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