L'Chaim
We like to eat al fresco by the pool several nights a week, no matter how late I return from work. Tonight was going to be especially lovely, as it was the end of the week.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but there's a private party outside tonight."
"I can't eat in the bar. It'll be too smoky."
"It wouldn't bother me," Pat said.
We left the pub and walked back into the lobby. Pat headed to the elevator.
"Where are you going?"
"Upstairs."
"We have to eat." I can feel that I need to be flexible or the rest of the night will be un-Shabbat-like. "I can eat there; it's all right."
We turn around and the elegant, fluent hostess from Northern India welcomes us back in.
"Can we be seated in the no-smoking section?"
"I have one table."
We follow the hostess and I steel myself. She seats us right by the open door, which invites in a mild night. The breeze wispifies Pat's hair. I'm struck by Pat, and it feels like too long since I've paid her my full attention.
We see coral and white gladioli through the window. Pat says, "Ours are probably peaking now."
"I hope that Sam and Jessica and Jeffrey and Ellen and Meg [neighbors] are taking 'em."
"Yeah, better than their just lying on the ground."
Outside, the party includes almost exclusively men, eating shrimp from a big bowl and other finger-food. One of them is not Indian and he's wearing Converse high-tops and a tropical shirt. He's the VC, we figure.
Non-alcohol, Women and Song
Inside, a musician begins playing the sort of New Age music Pat loves and I loathe, but since it's live, and he's skilled, I surrender to it.
Song by song, he plays the sax, the flute, the clarinet and drums, and depending on the song, sings. He's an artist. And then the songs improve:
- "Easy Like Sunday Morning"
- Maxwell's biggest hit
- "Smooth Operator" by Sade
- "Change the World" by Eric Clapton....
The elegant hostess walks by and asks how we're liking the music. I've been lulled and we're genuinely enthusiastic.
"This is his first night. He's from Australia," she tells us.
We've ordered, and while waiting for our food, an attractive young woman comes to the table, smiling lovelily and holding a platter full of Chivas-logo'ed merchandise. She promises that with every glass of Chivas we order, we'll be entitled to one of the items she's cradling.
"We don't drink, but thanks," we say, practically in unison.
"She's like the St. Pauli Girl," Pat says after she walks away to look for drinkers. I've written about this before:
More than a decade ago, Pat and our friends were meeting a friend from Texas -- a UT-Austin English professor -- and she was late in joining us at Geneva, Illinois' Filling Station, a restaurant near where Pat and I used to live.
While we waited for her, a cleavage-baring, blond woman in a German bar-maid's costume approached our table, promoting St. Pauli's beer. She was giving away a poster of St. Pauli's girls, featuring her and others just like her.
One of our friends asked her to autograph it, which she did with a smile. Our friend planned to give it to the English professor when she arrived.
It was a really fun gift, if only Pat and I hadn't felt instantly guilty for totally objectifying her in service to embarrassing/delighting our friend.
By contrast, the Chivas-girl was Indian, with wavy black hair, light-brown skin, tight blue-jeans, low-heeled, open-toed mules with unpolished toe-nails and a V-neck black sweater that featured the Chivas name in gold, capital letters above her left breast, with a black blouse under it, barely open, revealing only her throat. If I were IBM alumnus, E. Lynn Harris, I'd know how to describe the shade of her skin more artfully.
I'm smiling at how much more modestly she's dressed than her American counterpart.
In between promoting Chivas, she is just barely dancing by herself to the Australian's music. She's standing with her back to us and stops whenever a man approaches. Actually, she's dancing over Pat's shoulder.
If she were a TV with sports or news on it, Pat would be peeking at the picture over my shoulder continually. In fact, while I'm writing this, Pat is watching "Eight Below," a film inspired by Antarctic explorers and their teams of dogs. "I like this story, because it's about animals," she says. Pat is so wholesome and I don't feel as wholesome, recounting this.
The young woman's dancing when the men are not nearby tells me that she doesn't see us as people around whom she needs to be modest at all. The musician takes a break and puts on recorded music. The alcohol promoter starts swaying to Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." The word, "furtive," comes to me as I look at her and look away, and I'm not pleased by it.
That has been a consequence of needing to hide Pat's and my true relationship while moving through Indian society and this hotel specifically. I find myself much more alert to my desires than I think I would be, if I didn't feel the need to hide them selectively.
Or maybe the breeze simply blew through Pat's hair especially invitingly tonight, and maybe there are a lot of beautiful women in India.
2 comments:
Shabbat Shalom,
We just got back from Baltimore. Your brother-in-law has a clean bill of health from the neurosurgeon, thank goodness. I am pretty tuckered out from all the driving in the past few days, but I wanted to check in with you.
Your description of the dancing Chivas woman reminds me of how my female Arabic students used to cover the window to the classroom door and belly dance with abandon with Dominican, Mexican, Honduran, Haitian, Chinese, Nigerian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Polish girls. Absolutely no boys allowed. They explained that this kind of dancing was never to be seen by anyone other than other women and their husbands...
It strikes me now, that one of these same dancers, originally from Yemen, also named Sara, no 'h,' was in the class you addressed about growing up as a lesbian. I remember how open and kind my students were about your talk, expecially given their upbringing in strict, heterosexist, cultural and religious norms and stricures. I wish I could remember exactly what Sara and her friends said, word for word, but I do know that they were not just open-minded, but open-hearted, loving and sensitive in their comments. You did a mitzvah and a service by humanizing differences in sexuality for girls, who although they had most likely never been involved sexually with anyone by age seventeen, were quite in touch with some aspects of sexuality, as evidenced in their dancing.
Anyway, I'm very tired now. Need to turn in. Love you, Kathy
Kathy, thanks for the happy memory of the time I addressed a class of 11th graders at your high school.
My most poignant recollection of that exchange was hearing from the Muslim students, who related to having to make others comfortable with them, rather than simply being able to move through the world like more average/more typical people in America.
I remember, too, the girl from China, who spoke to me afterwards of her bisexuality and how she had no time to start a Gay Straight Alliance at the school, as she was already too busy after school with Mandarin Club and Chess Club membership.
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