Unaccustomed Earth - Unaccustomed Earth Part 4
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Unaccustomed Earth Part 4

Amit looked on the other side of the pine tree and saw people filing out along a flagstone path that led from the terrace of the hotel restaurant. A photographer leaned over a tripod, surrounded by bags of equipment, and in front of him, a group of young women posed in matching lavender dresses.

"Pam's wedding will be different," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"She won't have bridesmaids."

"How do you know?"

"She's not the type."

"You never know," Megan said. "A lot of women do things that are out of character on their wedding day. Even women like Pam."

Her slight derision washed over him, not penetrating. He knew Megan had been surprised that he'd accepted the invitation to Pam's wedding, given that he and Pam rarely saw each other. And though Megan hadn't protested, he understood that on some level he had dragged her here, to an unfamiliar place full of unfamiliar people, to a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared. He knew that though Megan refused to admit it, she was insecure about Pam, defensive the one or two times they'd met, as if Amit and Pam had once been lovers. When Amit and Megan had first met they'd traded their histories, divulging the succession of romantic interests that led them to each other, but he'd never mentioned Pam in that context. He had loved her, it was true, but because she'd never been his girlfriend there had been nothing to explain.He slouched in his chair, resting his neck on the hard plastic edge and shut his eyes. "I could use a drink."

They stepped back into the air-conditioned room and he opened the suitcase they were sharing for the weekend. He pulled out the thick envelope containing the invitation, directions, a small map of Langford's campus with the ceremony and reception locations marked with a highlighter. He sat on the bed, leaning against a pile of extremely soft pillows, sinking down. Then he looked at the digital clock that was beside the paper pyramid on the bedside table. "The wedding starts in an hour. We should get pillows like this at home."

"Then we'd better get ready." Megan regarded him with a look of professional concern, as if he were a patient on her rounds. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I was just hoping we'd have some time beforehand, to go for a walk or swim in the lake. I was thinking about a swim all the way up here. I didn't think the traffic would be so bad."

"We'll swim tomorrow," she said. "We have a whole weekend."

He nodded. "Right." He stood up and went into the bathroom, to shave and to shower. These everyday rituals felt like a chore. He was uninspired to put on his suit and socialize with ghosts from his adolescence. He undressed, then stood in front of the mirror spreading shaving cream on his face. Since Monika's birth three years ago, this was their first trip without either of the girls. They were overdue for a vacation. Normally, every summer, they rented a cabin for two weeks in the Adirondacks. But Megan was in the last year of her residency at Mount Sinai, and her schedule did not allow it. She'd just finished a rotation in the cardiac intensive-care unit, working thirty-sixhour shifts, returning to the apartment at dawn, falling asleep just as Amit and the girls were beginning their day. Amit, who worked as the managing editor for a medical journal, had a more flexible schedule. Summer was a slow time at the journal, and since June he'd been overseeing the girls' breakfasts and baths, scheduling playdates, dropping Maya off at a day camp in the mornings and picking her up again. Reducing their nanny's hours for the summer months was one of the ways he and Megan had decided to cut back on expenses; the down payment on their new apartment, two stories of a brownstone on West Seventy-fifth Street, had depleted their savings.

He sensed Megan's relief at not having Maya and Monika around, at being free. Amit wanted to share that relief, that sense of escape he'd been looking forward to all summer, after the invitation to Pam's wedding had come and they'd made their plan. But now that they were alone he was nagged by the thought of Monika's runny nose, and wondered if his mother in-law would remember that strawberries gave Maya a rash. He was tempted to ask Megan, but he stopped himself, knowing that she would accuse him of not trusting his in-laws. As a parent she was less fussy, less cautious than he was. On her days off she indulged them, baking with them in the kitchen, not minding if they skipped dinner because they were too full of cookies and cake. He knew that it was partly out of guilt that she tended to be lenient, but it was also her nature. She had not been horrified, as he had, when Maya found a wad of flattened chewing gum at the playing ground and put it into her mouth, or when Monika wandered off during a picnic they were having in Central Park and began playing, with her tiny fingers, with dog shit. Megan laughed at such moments, wiping off their hands and faces, convinced that her children could survive anything. She spent her days with people who were fighting for their lives, and could not be shaken by a scraped elbow or a hundred-degree fever.

It was Amit, who had studied enough about the body to know its inherent fragility, who had dissected enough cadavers to know what a horizontal chest incision would reveal, who was plagued by his daughters' vulnerability, both to illness and to accidents of all kinds. He was still haunted by an incident in the cafeteria of the Museum of Natural History, when Monika, a year old, had nearly choked on a piece of dried apricot. A woman at a neighboring table who happened to be a nurse had leapt up at the sound of Monika's coughing and efficiently swept her finger through the girl's mouth; in spite of two years of medical school, Amit lacked the simple instinct, the confidence, to do such a thing. He had been unable to look at either of his daughters for the rest of the day, to enjoy their time at the museum. He kept picturing the apricot piece lodged in Monika's windpipe, and how it might have silenced her forever. When he read articles in the newspaper about taxis suddenly swerving onto sidewalks and killing half a dozen pedestrians, it was always himself he pictured, holding Monika and Maya by the hand. Or he imagined a wave at Jones Beach, where he had been taking them once a week during the summer, dragging one of them down, or a pile of sand suffocating them as he was flipping, a few feet away, through a magazine. In each of these scenarios, he saw himself surviving, the girls perishing under his supervision. Megan would blame him, naturally, and then she would divorce him, and all of it, his life with her and the girls, would end. A brief glance in the wrong direction, he knew, could toss his existence over a cliff.

He lay down his razor and turned on the shower to warm up the room. He heard a knock, and then Megan opened the door.

"I can't go to the wedding," she said, shaking her head. She said this definitively, the way she told the girls that they weren't allowed to watch another program on television, or spend another five minutes in the tub.

"What are you talking about?"

"Look," she said, pointing to the skirt she'd put on. Above it she wore only her bra, flesh-colored and dingy at the straps. The skirt reached her ankles, and it was made of a diaphanous, smoky gray material, layered over a silk panel of a slightly darker shade. She held up a section, and his eyes went immediately to a spot in the fabric. At first he thought it was a stain, but then he realized it was a burn that had created a small empty patch, charred around the edges. Beneath it, the silk lining looked unsightly, like the bright flesh exposed when a scab is forcibly lifted away.

"It looks awful," she said. "There's no way to hide it."

"Did you pack a spare outfit?"

She shook her head, looking at him with annoyance. "Did you?"

Amit wiped his hands on a towel and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. Running his hands between the two layers of fabric, he felt the gauzy material brushing his palm, the silk at the back of his fingers. In medical school he'd considered being a surgeon, learning to piece together the most minuscule tissues of the body. But he'd never made it to any rotations, had only learned from textbooks and labs. As far as he could see there was no hope for repairing the skirt. It was so simple, so sheer, that the missing patch, through which the pad of one of his fingers was now visible, had ruined it.

"I can't believe I didn't notice when I was packing," Megan said. "It must have happened the last time I wore it. Sparks from a cigarette or something."

He knew it wasn't her fault, and yet he couldn't stop himself from blaming her a little, for not paying closer attention. And he couldn't help but wonder if it was an unconscious move on her part, to avoid Pam's wedding, to sabotage things. It occurred to him that with the excuse of Megan's skirt they might blow off the wedding altogether and spend the night in the hotel, watching movies in bed. Their absence would go unnoticed in such a big crowd, their place settings ignored as the waiters circled the tables. Had the Chadwick Inn been nicer he might have been tempted.

"Is there a store nearby?" Megan asked. "Somewhere I could dash out and buy something else while you get ready?"

"There used to be a mall, but it was about an hour's drive from here. I don't remember any clothing stores in town. Not nice ones."

She turned the skirt to one side, so that the burn was no longer visible from the front. Then she stood beside him in front of the mirror over the sink, their bare arms touching. Normally Megan did not wear makeup, but for the occasion she had painted her mouth with a reddish lipstick. He found it distracting, preferred the intelligent, old-fashioned beauty of her face. It was the face of someone he could imagine living in a previous era, a simpler time, in an America that was oblivious to India altogether. Her dark brown hair was wound up as always, pulled away without fuss from her face and her long pale neck. She wore glasses, frameless oval lenses that seemed necessary to protect her sensitive gaze. They were the same height, five foot nine, tall for a woman but short for a man, and she was five years older, forty-two. And yet of the two of them it was Amit who already looked, at first glance, middle-aged, for by the age of twenty-one his hair had turned completely gray. It was here, at Langford, that it had begun, when he was in the sixth form. At first it was just a few strands, well concealed in his black hair. But by the time he was a junior at Columbia it was the black hairs he could count on one hand. He'd read it was possible, after a traumatic experience, for a person's hair to turn gray in youth. But there had been no sudden death he could point to, no accident. No profound life change, apart from his parents sending him to Langford.

"I suppose if you stood right next to me all night, no one would notice," Megan said, pressing up against him. He felt the warmth of her arms and a twitch of desire, too mired by exhaustion to act upon.

"Do you really think you can survive a whole evening without leaving my side?" he asked her.

"I can if you can." There was a note of challenge in her voice, and Amit smiled, amused by the idea, motivated to go to the wedding now that he would have a specific task to perform. At the same time he thought that in the early days of their love this would not have been an issue, their bodies continuously touching through the course of an evening, something that would have been taken for granted.

"It's a deal," he said.

They looked at their reflections in the mirror, she in her torn skirt and dingy bra, he naked, his penis flaccid, his face covered with bright white shaving cream. Megan shook her head. "What a vision we'll be."

He'd assumed they'd walk to the school-it was just across the road, a few minutes over a sloping field. But Megan was wearing heels and didn't want to get them muddy, so they got into the car. The seats were still full of evidence of their daughters- abandoned books, tiny dolls, the plastic horses Maya had begun collecting. Only the car seats were gone, transferred into his in-laws' car for the weekend. He thought of the girls now at their grandparents', playing in the treehouse his father-in-law had built for their occasional visits, his mother-in-law providing slices of pound cake and juice boxes for a tea party. His daughters looked nothing like him, nothing like his family, and in spite of the distance Amit felt from his parents, this fact bothered him, that his mother and father had passed down nothing, physically, to his children. Both Maya and Monika had inherited Megan's coloring, without a trace of Amit's deeply tan skin and black eyes, so that apart from their vaguely Indian names they appeared fully American. "Are they yours?" people sometimes asked when he was alone with them, in stores, or at the playground in the park.

After just two minutes they pulled off the road and turned up the wide tree-lined drive that led to the gates of the school. The leaves were glossy and abundant, but his memories were of the blazing branches of autumn and the purplish light of the mountains, the shadows that spread in their curves and dips, and the snow that covered the tops of the gates in winter. The school itself was more or less as he remembered it, embarrassingly large and well maintained, pieces of rounded abstract sculpture here and there on the grass.

"This place is nicer than where I went to college," Megan said as they walked across the campus, taking in the pristine buildings, the sculptures.

"It's a bit over the top," he said. When they'd first met Megan had been impressed by his prep school education, but at the same time she'd teased him about it. She was not bitter toward the privileged, but she was sometimes judgmental; were he not Indian, Megan would have probably avoided someone like him. She was the youngest of five children, her father a policeman, her mother a kindergarten teacher. She'd gotten a job after graduating from high school, in a photocopy store during the days and as a telemarketer in the evenings, not beginning college until she was twenty, going part time because she'd had to continue working. In that sense, she worked harder than anyone he'd ever known, including his own father and his parents' uniformly successful crowd of Bengali friends. Megan's ordinary background had displeased his parents, as had the fact that she was five years older than he was. Her stark prettiness, her refusal to wear contact lenses, her height, had not charmed them. The fact that she was a doctor did not make up for it. If anything, it made their disappointment in Amit worse.

He noticed new wings tacked onto some of the buildings, modern elements of steel and glass alongside the brick and white cupolas. His parents had plucked him out of public school in Winchester, Massachusetts, where he'd been raised, and sent him here, for they'd decided when Amit was in the eighth grade to move back to India. He still remembered the night his parents told him their plans. They were sitting in a seafood restaurant on the Cape, in Cotuit, overlooking the water, the table heaped with the bright red claws and shells from which his father had effortlessly extracted the meat for all of them. His father began by saying he was growing restless on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, that there was a hospital in Delhi where he believed he was needed. Amit had been stunned by his parents' decision-his parents, unlike most other Bengalis in Massachusetts, had always been dismissive, even critical, of India, never homesick or sentimental. His mother had short hair and wore trousers, putting on saris only for special occasions. His father kept a liquor cabinet and liked a gin and tonic before his meals. They both came from wealthy families, had both summered in hill stations and attended boarding schools in India themselves. The relative affluence of America never impressed them; in many ways they had lived more privileged lives in India, but they left the country and had not looked back.

At the restaurant his father pulled out the admissions packet for Langford, showing photographs of the campus, smiling students gathered around classroom tables, teachers standing in front of blackboards, caught midsentence by the camera's lens. Academically it was far superior to the school he'd been attending, his father told him, mentioning the percentage of Langford graduates who went on to Ivy League colleges. Amit realized, as his father spoke, that the position in Delhi had been accepted, their house in Winchester already put up for sale. There was no question of his going to school in Delhi; it wasn't worth the trouble to adjust to education in a different country, his father said, given that eventually Amit would be attending an American college.

From Langford, during Christmas after each academic year came to an end, Amit went to Delhi to be with his parents, staying in their flat full of servants in Chittaranjan Park, in a barren room set aside for his stays. He never enjoyed his visits to Delhi, his broken Bengali of no use in that city. It made him miss Calcutta, where all his relatives lived, where he was used to going. His parents had moved to Delhi the year of Indira Gandhi's assassination, and the riots that subsequently raged there, the curfews and the constant vigilance with which his parents had to live, meant that Amit remained cooped up inside, without friends, without anything to do. In that sense it was a relief to him to return to this peaceful town. Four years later his parents were back in America, moving to Houston. In Delhi his father had perfected a laser technique to correct astigmatism that earned him invitations to work and teach in hospitals all over the world. After five years in Houston they'd moved yet again, to Lausanne, Switzerland. They lived in Saudi Arabia now.

At Langford, Amit was the only Indian student, and people always assumed that he'd been born and raised in that country and not in Massachusetts. They complimented him on his accent, always telling him how good his English was. He'd arrived when he was fifteen, for sophomore year, which at Langford was called the fourth form, and by that time friendships and alliances among the boys of his class were already in place. At his high school in Winchester he'd been a star student, but suddenly he'd had to work doggedly to maintain his grades. He had to wear a jacket every morning to his classes and call his teachers "masters" and attend chapel on Sundays. Quickly he learned that his parents' wealth was laughable compared to the majority of Langford boys. There was no escape at the end of the day, and though he admitted it to no one, especially not his parents when they called from Delhi every weekend, he was crippled with homesickness, missing his parents to the point where tears often filled his eyes, in those first months, without warning. He sought traces of his parents' faces and voices among the people who surrounded and cared for him, but there was absolutely nothing, no one, at Langford to remind him of them. After that first semester he had slipped as best as he could into this world, swimming competitively, calling boys by their last names, always wearing khakis because jeans were not allowed. He learned to live without his mother and father, as everyone else did, shedding his daily dependence on them even though he was still a boy, and even to enjoy it. Still, he refused to forgive them.

Every Thanksgiving, he and the other students who had nowhere to go were taken in by Pam's family-boys who were from Santiago and Tehran and other troubled parts of the world, or were the sons of diplomats and journalists who moved around even more frequently than Amit's parents. They would eat in the Bordens' house, located at one end of the campus, with Pam and her three brothers, all of whom went to different boarding schools but always came home for the holidays. For Amit it was the highlight of each year. He and all the other boys were in love with Pam, who was the only girl in her family, the only girl on campus, the only girl, it had felt back then, in the world. They would pray to be seated close to her at the table, and for weeks afterward they would talk about her, imagining her life at Northfield Mount Hermon, imagining what her breasts looked like, or the feel of her light brown poker-straight hair, wondering what it was like in the morning, messily trailing over her back. They wondered about the room upstairs, where Pam slept when she came home. They noticed if she ate white meat or dark, and they noticed the year she did not eat any turkey at all.

She seemed fully aware of their admiration, flattered but offlimits. She was that rare, unsettling thing, a teenage girl already conscious of her power over men while at the same time uninterested in them. She was comfortable with the opposite sex in a way most girls were not, perhaps because she'd grown up in a house full of boys. The Bordens were forthright people, all of them, even the children, trained to act as friendly hosts for the students who washed up at their holiday table. Pam would talk to Amit and the others, asking each of them about their courses as if she were her mother's age and not a girl of fifteen. And then they would disappear from her consciousness until the following year. After the meal, Headmaster Borden would take them out onto the lawn for a game of touch football with Pam's brothers. Or they stayed inside, where Mrs. Borden, who taught French at the school, would conduct complicated word games or charades.

In his final year at Langford Amit was admitted to Columbia University. No one else from his class was going there, but then one day Headmaster Borden told Amit that Pam had decided on Columbia, too. "Keep an eye on her for me," the headmaster said, but it was Pam who'd called first in that same ambassadorial way her parents had, even though New York City, and the world of college, was as foreign to her as it was to him. Suddenly, because she had decided so, they were friends. They would go to dinner twice a week after the religion class they took together, either to Cafe Pertutti, treating themselves to creamy plates of pasta, or to La Rosita for caffe con leche and rice and beans. After that they would study in the same small room in Butler Library, sitting across from each other on armchairs, reading Milton and Marx. Odd things made him love her. The fact that she never put her books into a backpack or a bag, hugging them instead against her chest. That she always appeared somehow underdressed, still wearing a fringed suede jacket at a time of year when everyone else was bundled in wool and down. That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

He'd wondered at first if it was romantic but quickly realized that she was involved in affairs, that he was just a friend. She was used to being surrounded by men who, like her brothers, were protective of her, loyal to her, who paid court without seducing her. And she had appointed Amit to play that role while they were in college. She would ask him to investigate boys she was curious about, learning about their reputations, their history, before deciding whether to pursue them. In exchange she would give him advice on how to approach other girls, how most effectively to flirt with them. It was Pam who had coached Amit through his first college relationship, with Ellen Craddock, going out of her way and befriending Ellen just for the sake of being able to throw her and Amit together on College Walk.

Only once had Amit worked up the nerve to make a pass at Pam, in their sophomore year, kissing her after getting drunk at a party and putting his hand on her breast, on top of a dark green turtleneck sweater she was wearing. She had kissed him back, allowed him to touch her, but then she'd drawn away, as if she'd known all along that one day this would happen. "Now we know what that feels like," she told him, and he knew then that it was impossible, that she did not like him in that way. She had indulged him, just as her family had indulged him once a year in their home, offering a small piece of herself and then shutting the door.

Although Pam still lived in New York, selling foreign rights at a literary agency, these days they saw each other, at best, once or twice a year, usually by accident, on a subway or a street corner or a crowded exhibit at the Metropolitan. But he was permanently on her mailing list, and therefore he received cards at Christmas, and even on his birthday-she was the type to remember that sort of thing. When she learned that Amit and Megan had gotten married, she sent them candlesticks from Tiffany's. And when the girls were born, expensive gifts arrived, European dresses and cashmere blankets for their strollers. There had been no phone call from her to tell him she was getting married, only the invitation. And after all these years, Amit felt both quietly elated and solicitous, as contact from Pam and the Bordens had always made him feel, causing him to set aside whatever it was that he was doing and pay them his full attention.

Guests were gathered under a beautiful tree where a bar had been set up, offering cocktails before the ceremony. On the lawn were rows of white folding chairs, overlooking the deceptively gentle milky-blue mountains. Over them, the sun was just beginning to set. It was here, at this precise spot, that he'd graduated. He'd looked different that day, leaner in frame, his hair still predominantly black. It was Pam, in college, who'd forbidden him to color it, telling him it was distinguished, that women would be drawn to it. He hadn't believed her but she was right; every woman he'd ever been involved with had confessed, at one point or another, that they found his gray hair sexy.

"Other side," Megan said as they approached the crowd. He moved over to her left and matched his stride to hers. Side by side they took their place in the line for drinks. There was the usual array of bottles, and two punch bowls full of lemonade. "Spiked or unspiked?" the bartender asked. They got two glasses of the spiked and approached the lawn, sipping their sweet, potent drinks. He looked around at the faces, at men carrying toddlers on their shoulders, mothers shushing babies in their carriers, nannies chasing after older children. The nannies seemed young, high school students, he guessed, hired for the occasion. The fathers were pointing to the trees, to the clouds that spread and shifted over the valley. He recognized no one and missed his daughters.

"Lots of kids here," Megan said.

"The girls would have enjoyed this."

"But then we wouldn't be able to enjoy ourselves. Cheers."

"Cheers." Because they were standing side by side they raised their glasses into the air in front of them, without looking at each other.

It felt strange to be drinking at the school. He remembered the covert parties, the bottles that would be smuggled into the dorms and consumed Friday and Saturday nights, always fearful of the proctor's rounds.

"I feel old," he said to Megan. He saw a face that was famil iar, smiling at him, walking over. The stylish tortoiseshell glasses were new, but he remembered the friendly blue eyes, the wavy brown hair, the cleft in the chin. They had shared a number of classes, been lab partners, he suddenly remembered, in chemistry. His father and Pam's father had grown up together; he had always referred to the headmaster as "Uncle Borden." He remembered the last name, Schultz, but not the first.

"Sarkar," Schultz said. "Amit Sarkar, right?"

Amit extended a hand, Schultz's first name coming to him just then. "Great to see you. This is my wife, Megan. Megan, this is Tim."

The smile disappeared from Schultz's face. "It's Ted."

"Ted, of course, Ted. I'm so sorry. Ted, meet my wife, Megan." He felt like an idiot, as mortified by his error as he would have been in his first term at Langford, when he worked so hard to please. He berated himself for using a name at all, for not letting it emerge naturally in the course of conversation. "I'm sorry," he said again as Ted and Megan shook hands. "It's been a long day. A long drive."

"Don't worry about it," Ted said, in a way that only made Amit feel worse. "Your parents still in India?"

"They came back. And then they left again."

"Where are you living these days?"

It turned out that Ted lived in Manhattan, too. He was divorced and working at a law firm.

"Do you guys know this guy Pam's marrying? The one she's finally going to settle for instead of one of us?"

"I've never met Ryan," Amit said, wondering what Megan would make of Ted's comment.

"All I know is he writes for television," Ted said. "One of those law shows that makes my job look glamorous. That's why they're moving to L.A. Apparently one of the actors for the show is supposed to be here."

They looked around for someone who might be a celebrity. It was an attractive crowd, many of the women in black cocktail dresses. Amit remembered Megan's skirt and took a step toward her, putting his arm around her waist.

"How did you two meet?" Ted asked.

"Med school," Megan said.

"Oh. Dr. Sarkar, I'm impressed."

"Just her," Amit said. "She stuck it out. I didn't."

A string quartet began to play and people drifted toward their seats. Amit and Megan chose chairs at the back, Megan complaining that her heels were sinking into the grass. They put their empty glasses under their seats. Everyone turned around as the man Pam was about to marry walked between the chairs and took his place at the center where a clergyman was standing. Ryan looked well into his forties, tall, tanned, with a salt and pepper beard, his handsome features lined. And then Pam appeared, coming down the aisle with her father, then her mother and her brothers behind. Mrs. Borden was unchanged, her cropped sandy hair styled in the same practical way, her figure still trim. She turned her head to smile reassuringly at the guests on either side of her. All their lives the Bordens had presided over similarly large gatherings, weekly assemblies and homecoming games and graduations, and in a way this was no different. The only person he didn't recognize was a girl of about twelve or so, with a long, pretty face and a somber expression, carrying a bouquet of flowers. He guessed it was one of Pam's nieces or younger cousins. Pam wore a sleeveless dress with a train, made of crumpled ivory material. The effect was not so much a dress as a long bedsheet that she had wrapped around herself, a careless yet perfect vision. She carried yellow freesias casually in one hand, smiling and waving to people with the other. To this day she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

The couple stood with their backs to the guests, facing the minister and the mountains and the setting sun. It was a brief, simple ceremony, without bridesmaids or a best man, as Amit had predicted. Someone got up and read a poem he could not hear because there was no microphone. Still, visually, it was spectacular, the sky deepening into a combination of dark peach and plum over the mountains, the lush grounds of the school unpopulated save for the spot where the wedding was taking place. He watched strands of Pam's hair, loosened by the wind that had settled over them, causing women to put shawls around their shoulders, that cold mountain air that always replaced the day's heat. She was thirty-seven now, his age, but from the back she looked like a girl of nineteen. And yet she was marrying late, so much later than he had.

As he witnessed the ceremony he felt grateful for the faint connection he and Pam had maintained, enough for him to be sitting there, watching her marry, witnessing the very beginning of that phase of her existence. Amit anticipated only a continuation of the things he knew: Megan, his job, life in New York, the girls. The most profound thing, having Maya and Monika, had already happened; nothing would be more lifealtering than that. He wanted to change none of it, and yet a part of him sometimes longed to return to the beginning of his relationship with Megan, if only for the pleasure of anticipating and experiencing those things again.

There was a round of applause as Pam and Ryan kissed, their eyes open from the excitement, and then the music started up and the wedding party receded down the grassy aisle. Amit rose, this time positioning himself on Megan's left without having to be told, and together they took their places behind the others in the receiving line. Pam tossed back her head and laughed at things people said, leaning over to kiss them or put a hand comfortingly to their upper arms. "Where are your beautiful little girls?" she cried out as soon as she saw Amit, extending her neck so that he could kiss her on one cheek, then the other. Her skin was the same, disconcertingly soft, but now that he faced her he saw Mrs. Borden's crow's-feet forming around her eyes.

"We left them with Megan's parents. It's our weekend of reckless freedom."

"I want to stay up until five in the morning," Megan announced cheerfully. "I want to celebrate all night and watch the sun rise from our balcony."

Amit glanced at Megan, puzzled that she'd never mentioned this to him. He had assumed her main objective for the weekend was to sleep undisturbed. "You do?"

Megan didn't answer him. Instead she said to Pam, "You look lovely. It's such a pretty dress." She said this genuinely, not intimidated by Pam as she'd been in the past. Amit wondered if it was because Pam was married now, belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to Amit.

They shook hands with Ryan. "Pam's told me so much about you," Ryan said to Amit.

"Congratulations," Amit replied. "All the best."

"We'll see if I can make a California girl out of her."

"Ryan's kids are running around here, somewhere," Pam said. "That was Claire, carrying the flowers." She corrected herself, kissing Ryan on the cheek. "Sorry, sweetie. Our kids." She caught Amit's eye, as if to say, Can you believe I'm a stepmother. So this was a second marriage for Ryan, another woman's children involved. The long-faced girl in the wedding procession was now Pam's stepdaughter. It was not what Amit would have predicted for Pam, such complications, Pam who could have had any man.

"I was really hoping to see your girls," Pam said. "Do you have a picture?"

Megan looked in her bag, but she was carrying a small beaded evening purse and had left her wallet in the hotel room.

"I've got some," Amit said. He flipped to two pictures, each taken when Maya and Monika were newborns, their eyes beady, their mouths drawn to fine points. "They look nothing like that now."

"You'll have to bring them to L.A. You'll all have to come and stay with us at Ryan's beach house." She laughed. "I mean, our beach house."

"We'd love that," Megan said. But Amit knew it would never happen, that this was the end of the road, that there would never be a reason for him to step into Pam's world again.

"There's a brunch tomorrow, on campus," Pam said. "We'll see you there?" She said it in her old way, looking at Amit as if there were something of extreme urgency she needed to discuss with him-notes for an exam they were about to take together, or an analysis of his latest college infatuation.

"Of course," he told her.

"It's great of you to come, Amit. It's so good to see you," Pam said. For a moment he felt a flicker of their old bond, their odd friendship. He had always been devoted to her, more so, she'd once admitted, than even her brothers, and he felt that she was acknowledging that again, now, in her glance.

"We wouldn't have missed it," he said.

The line pushed them along, into the crowd of the party. Megan said she needed to use the restroom. "Do you know where one is?"

He looked around. Across the lawn where people stood eating hors d'oeuvres was the admissions building, a massive Victorian mansion with wraparound porches. The double doors at the back were open, and waiters dashed in and out with their trays. He remembered going there with his parents, being interviewed by an unpleasant man named Mr. Plotkin. Mr. Plotkin had asked Amit why he wanted to attend Langford, and because his parents were sitting outside the room, Amit had replied, truthfully, that his parents were moving to India and didn't want him to go to school there. "I'm afraid that reply isn't the mark of a Langford boy, Mr. Sarkar," Mr. Plotkin told him across the desk where Amit's report cards and recommendations lay. And then he folded his hands together and waited until Amit had provided a more adequate reply.

"There's probably bathrooms in there," he said now to Megan. He walked with her, still positioned faithfully at her left, toward the building, but inside they discovered a long line for the ladies' room.

"What should we do?" Megan whispered.

"Well, I can't wait in that line with you. It's all women. I'm sure no one will notice the skirt."

"You think?" She fiddled with her purse, adjusting her wrist so that the purse rested over the burnt material. Over the skirt she was wearing a white buttoned shirt, open to reveal part of a pink camisole below. Her neck was bare. She never wore the jewels his mother had given her eventually, that were too ornate for her taste.

"You look great," he said. He meant it, but he hadn't told her yet. "I'll get us more drinks and meet you back here. Another lemonade?"