“I shouldn’t be here, Zach.” I pulled my hands off of his back and looked out the window.
He leaned back against the seat of his chair. “Why not? He’s not waiting for you at home, you know.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s true.”
“I know, Zach. My husband is thirty thousand miles away; I haven’t seen him in six months. And here I am, fucking around with another man.” I glared at him.
He shook his head, bent down to remove his feet from their footrests and place them on the floor. “You tell yourself he’s so noble, that he’s got some great calling,” he said as he used his strong arms to move himself onto the bed, dragging the lifeless legs behind him. “But he’s not here because other things are more important to him. That’s the truth, whether you want to realize it or not. If you think you need to leave, you can go. You don’t have to be here.”
I kicked off my sandals petulantly and crawled over to his side of the bed to curl up, cat like, by his side. He kissed my forehead, pulled me against him and we fell asleep.
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The truth of the matter was that I had no logical reason to be so unhappy. I had every single thing I’d ever wanted from another human being offered up to me. It just happened to be by two different men. One who loved me just a little bit less than his ideals, and one who wanted me more than anything in the world.
There was my husband to consider in all this. Husband of five years, with whom I’d only lived for a total of three and a half. When I met him in college it was as if Heaven had opened up and spit him out just for me. He was a fantasy come to life before my eyes: tall, dark, very handsome foreigner. And a medical student, no less. My life was a Winterson novel and I loved every second. Not that Bijendra was perfect—but there was just that one tiny flaw. His parents in Nepal stopped speaking to him on my account no less than three different times. When we started dating, when we moved in together and when we got married. They thought he was making a terrible mistake, marrying an American girl. Even then, I couldn’t really bring myself to blame them. It made me feel special, that he took their displeasure seemingly in his stride for my benefit. For my part, I was eager to try and win them over, to be accepted into his culture. I embraced all aspects of it. I learned Nepali, I read about Hinduism—I wore red the day we were married. And when his father asked him to go work “briefly” at his clinic in Katmandu, I got on the plane along with him. Needless to say, there was an element of culture shock. Plus my mother in law would have burned the house in offering to Lord Shiva if she thought it may have brought an end to my contamination of her eldest son. Plus Bijendra worked ceaselessly, almost so that I forgot what he looked like. I lasted three months.
We came home together, me trailing a comet’s tail of Hindu curses. We bought a house, discussed a child, behaved as a married couple. I came to realize it was in fact not the most exciting thing in the world, but it would do. Until there was Zach.
After the Himalayan fiasco I found a job as an English tutor at one of the colleges in town. BJ made more than enough money for me to stay home, but I had no interest in it. I’d only barely gotten my degree a couple of years earlier, but the Department Head was a friend of the family so there I was. Zach taught upper-level creative writing. A critically-acclaimed novelist, he was writer in residence for the state and a popular attraction on campus. I’d heard of him, read most of his books and was looking forward to meeting him, should the day arrive.
The day was Tuesday. It was March, and it was raining. He wheeled into the archive room of the library behind another professor. To my eternal embarrassment, Dr. Martin introduced me to him as Katy, one of his biggest fans. I may have been able to hide my consternation better if I’d had any preparation for Zach himself. I’d somehow managed to miss the fact that he was disabled, both in conversation and my reading. I knew from book-jackets he had huge blue eyes and curly hair, but the wheelchair was a shock.
Immediately, my cheeks were flaming. I managed a quick “um, hi” and a handshake before I swept my things up and fled the scene. Walking down the stairs to the ground floor I was utterly disgusted with myself, unable to imagine undoing such a lamentable first impression. As it turned out, I had no control over any of it, anyway.
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I was only sort of unofficially employed by the college. That meant I had no office. I had a cell phone, and a few select corners of the library I liked to haunt. I was locatable, but you had to be looking. Many hours after my performance in the archives I was curled up in an overstuffed chair in a corner of the fourth floor stacks when I became aware of someone speaking to me. Looking up from the Bhagvad Gita I saw a face at eye level with mine. A very familiar, very cute face that I had no desire to be looking into.
“It certainly is multi-cultural, isn’t it? Mary Katharine Subedi.” The face spoke to me, the elbows sat on arm rests. My eyes slid down to his feet, still in their Doc Martens on the chair’s footrests.
I put my book down beside me. “Mary Katharine O’Flaherty Subedi,” I said. “Irish Catholic and Hindu. Yeah, I suppose it is pretty multi-cultural.” My face was flushing. My fingers were trembling. None of the biology seemed to care that the man I was with was not my husband.
“How will you raise your kids, I wonder?”
I snorted. “We have a fish, Mr. Miagi. He’s an atheist.”
Zach leaned back in his chair and looked at me, smiling a little so I could see his dimples. “Writers have notoriously inflated egos. Have you heard that? You’re not supposed to run off without telling one how brilliant he is.”
“But the Ontario Review does that three times a year.”
He laughed. “I pay them, that’s different. Can I buy you a drink, Mary Katharine?”
I couldn’t think. Had I been able to, I probably still wouldn’t have told him no. Instead I nodded, slid my book into my bag and stood up. “Sure. But you have to critique my short story.”