Beauty by Brian D'Amato

Author:Brian D'Amato
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316217231
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Her parents and little brother were really nice to me. The apartment was pretty small, one floor of a row house on some street off of Northern Boulevard. There was a large, probably occasionally violent father, a silent, shy diminutive mother in a sari, and a juvenile-delinquent little brother. The house was Western-style Long Island suburban with clear plastic over the furniture. There were little Krishna and Siva dolls around, and a lenticular 3-D picture of Sai Baba, some nineteenth-century Hindu saint. They were a little suspicious but tremendously hospitable, like all Indians, and they fed me all kinds of samosas and pakoras and authentic Sindhi home-cooked mega-spicy goat-meat things that I’d never had. The father talked about how rich his family had been before the Partition, in 1948, and how they’d been lucky to get out of Lahore and across the border into India alive. He also told me about how once he had actually witnessed the Rope Trick, how the magician’s boy had run up the rope, and the magician had run up after him and chopped him into bloody bits, and then had put all the cut-up body parts into a basket, and the boy had come out whole. The mother, who didn’t speak English, kept telling Jaishree to feed me more and saying Jaishree was too thin. She spoke only Sindhi, so I couldn’t understand. I tried some Urdu out on the father, though, and he was impressed even though I was messing up. They ate dinner late, and we didn’t get back to Jaishree’s apartment until after two. She started getting ready to go to bed. She seemed pretty upset, and I wondered if she wanted me to stay over, but I didn’t want to. I liked her a lot, of course, but that evening I didn’t have any particular sexy feelings toward her.

“It’s amazing that you got out of that environment and became a hip downtown creative personality,” I said.

“Well, you know, it was because of Jeff.” Jeff had been an acting teacher of hers at Queens College when she was an undergraduate, and she started going out with him right after he gave her an A. He was kind of connected and had moved her into some performance-art circles. The next year she’d somehow managed to transfer to Yale.

“He really dicked me over, though,” she said. “He was a pathological liar. He was sleeping with two other girls at the time. I freaked out, and I’m still picking up the pieces.”

She got into bed. “I’m pretty scared and upset,” she said. There was a little bit of a tear in her left eye, and it made her look so young and pathetic, it nearly broke my heart.

“Try not to think of anything but how smooth you’re going to look.”

“What’s so great about smooth? Is that all there is to life, trying to be smooth?”

“Well, I don’t know, smooth’s kind of a key thing. Smooth is everything. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be flip.

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