The mood was not the 3 a.m. wreck and it was not the dining-table court. It was slower. Full. The particular quiet of two people who have already spent their shock and are now living in the bill. Comfort had a weight. So did the sentence about going wet. Neither of us reached for the remote. Neither of us stood up to pretend the kitchen needed us.
I heard myself swallow.
“You can just say that.”
“I said it.” She turned the glass on her thigh. A ring of water darkened the cotton, a small honest circle. “You asked if he was really that good. I am not going to give you a review like a hotel. I told you the lift at lunch. I told you the body still knows the height of his ceiling. Wet is only the short word. If I sit here and replay his hands at my hips, the way he picked me up as if I were not forty-seven and not your mother — yes. It starts. It starts in the stomach and it goes down. I can feel the nightdress. That is the answer. Don’t ask it again if you want a prettier one.”
The cook on the television plated something with a flourish nobody in this hall heard.
I looked at her mouth. She looked at the dark window.
“Does it make you angry,” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Does it make you other things.”
The shorts did not hide the other things well. I did not cover them. The lamp was too honest and I was too tired of arranging cloth.
“Yes.”
She nodded, almost grateful for the lack of poetry.
“Your eight-month girl,” she said, picking the conversation up as if she had laid it on a side table and not on a live wire. “The one who counted while you used your mouth. Did you love the counting or the shaking.”
“The shaking.”
“And when she left for Bengaluru. Did you go home and open the folder or did you lie on the bed like a decent man.”
“Folder.”
A small breath that was almost a laugh. “At least you don’t lie to your mother about being decent.” The nightdress slipped on her shoulder; she left it. The lamp found the yellowing memory of a bite that had faded to an idea. “Nidhi. The mirror. When you watched her face, did you also watch yourself going into her. Tell the truth.”
“Also myself.”
“Mm.” She drank. The movement lifted her chest under the thin cotton and the mood in the hall tightened another notch, still seated, still talking, the air between the cushions gone warm. “Standing, at the wedding. Hand on her mouth. That is the one that sounds like you when you think no one is listening. Fast. Hidden. A little cruel to yourself. You have that streak. I have seen it in more rooms than a store room.”
Outside, a two-wheeler went down the lane and the dog two houses away made a performance of duty, then stopped.
She put the glass on the floor. Leaned her temple into the sofa back. Looked at me over the empty cushion with her eyes half-lidded, not seduction-cinema, just a woman whose body had told the truth and was now sitting in the consequence.
“If I imagine him,” she said, quieter, as if the mute cook might report us, “it is not even the lift every time. Sometimes it is only the may I before a squat. Sometimes the kitchen. Sometimes the way he said queen at the fridge, which I did not hear and you did, and now I have the sentence without the voice and it still works. That is disgusting and it is accurate. I can stay on this sofa and talk to my son about Sneha’s helmet-perfume and still feel the cloth stick. Both. I am not going to get up and change the nightdress to prove I am civilised.”
