She glanced up, startled. “Oh—Ali, no, no. Go, enjoy. You’re a guest.”
He hesitated. “I am enjoying. But you look tired.”
She laughed, automatic. “This is what hosting looks like. It’s good tired.”
Good tired. He could have let it stand. He had let a dozen things stand already tonight, including his own. Instead he heard himself say, “Are you really okay?”
The party went on around them. A child shrieked somewhere; someone called for more chutney. For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard. Then she set the basket down, leaned back against the counter, and looked at him with the one expression he had not seen on any face all night: unmasked.
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
The words hung there, small and enormous.
And here was the opening — the clean place where the true sentence could go. Not that there had been a fight; anyone could say that much. The harder one underneath: that the fault had not all been hers, that some small, deniable share of it was his, and that the share was the one thing he could actually have set right.
He felt it climb as far as his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”
That was all. True, and honest in shape and empty in fact. He let her believe his trouble was the large, weatherless kind that everyone carries, when the truth had a date, a cause, and a part in it that was his. She seemed to be grateful for the company of it, and he said nothing of his own. Even here. Even now. He understood, with a quiet that was nearly peaceful, that he was not the one honest man in the house.
She looked at him then, really looked, and he saw the exhaustion that comes of being the one who keeps things running—who hosts, who smooths every edge, who insists it is all fine because what is the alternative? “Of course there are things that can’t be fixed,” she said. “We just aren’t allowed to say so. It frightens people.”
From the other room came the first ring of a spoon against glass. Kajol straightened at the sound the way a stagehand straightens at a cue. “I should go,” she said. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
He didn’t move.
At the door she looked back over her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not telling me I’m overreacting. For not saying I just need to think positive. For letting it be what it is, a minute.”
He nodded. “You can do that with me. Any time. No smiley emoji required.”
He heard the generosity in it as he said it, and underneath, the cowardice—that he could hold a door open to a room he would not walk into himself. She smiled, smaller and softer than any smile he had seen all night, not trying to prove a thing, and then turned back into the current of the party, which carried her toward the middle of the room, where she would lift a glass and thank everyone for coming, her voice level, her performance resumed.
By the time he came back the toast was underway. Someone was making the joke about how they all had to swear not to let another five, seven, nine years go by before they gathered again. Everyone laughed and swore it. Of course. Not again. They drank to a year not one of them could see, pretending, as they always did, that they could.
Alikhan raised his cup with them. He did the checked-out smile; he could feel it settle onto his own face, the lifted corners, the glaze. Across the room he caught Kajol’s eye, and for half a second their faces matched—tired, knowing, awake—two people who saw the whole arrangement clearly and were raising their drinks to it anyway. Then the room closed warmly over both of them.
Outside the night had cooled. One by one the engines woke, taillights reddening the dark, each car pulling back into the street with the calm of people returning to lives that were, by their own accounting, busy, and blessed. From the curb it looked entirely believable—seventeen small Shangri-Las settling into cul-de-sacs and apartment lots, lit from within by warm lamps and tidy stories.
Alikhan watched the last of them turn the corner and go. I saw it, the old thought tried to rise—the strain, the pretending; none of it as solid as they claim. But it had lost its footing somewhere tonight, somewhere back in the kitchen, around the true sentence he had felt climb to his throat and swallowed. He had not been the one honest man in the house. He had only kept a running commentary on the pretending, and called the commentary truth.
And then, without quite deciding to, he got angry—not at them; it did not once occur to him to be angry at them—but at himself. For coming. For the seat beside him. For being the only one in that bright house who couldn’t simply arrive and raise a glass and let the raising be enough. The others had carried the evening; he had dragged his suspicion across it like mud on a clean floor, and then lied as smoothly as any of them, so that he was not even honest in his dishonesty—only watchful, only sour. The fault was his. That much felt settled. He was the one who kept getting it wrong.
He sat a while longer in the old sedan, hands on the wheel, the passenger seat beside him still occupied, still making its claim. He had a brief, absurd urge to apologize to the night for the suspicion—to let it go, to believe the warm windows meant what they seemed to mean. The urge didn’t convince him. But there was an ease in it, in imagining he might simply be wrong, that the unease was a flaw in his own lens and the world out there was as fine as everyone kept agreeing it was. He started the engine. He pulled out after the others, following the thin red thread of taillights toward all those glowing, impossible Shangri-Las—already, without meaning to, smoothing the sentence he would need at the next one, and the one after that—trying, just this once, to believe that the people behind the lit windows, himself among them, were headed somewhere real.