3 Opposition
I was so preoccupied with winning Raj’s vote that I entirely missed the news of the second murder: Mrs. Angela Stephanie McEwan, 28. Angela had one child, a 3-year-old boy who was in preschool at the time of murder, but came home to find his mother shot to death in her home on the Upper East Side.
She had apparently been in the kitchen, sorting store coupons, when someone forced her to kneel down so she could be shot in the head. Though the manner of her death was identical to that of Sindy Parry, the police made no connection until a standard ballistics comparison showed they both had been shot with the same gun.
As I said, none of this caught my attention in the slightest because all my attention was now focused on Raj. A few days after Raj and Cosette had been introduced, Raj, Cose, Helen, and I were sharing supper in Helen’s favorite Chinese restaurant. A young couple quite demonstrably in love, or lust, passed by our table.
As soon as they were past hearing distance, Raj commented: “There are only two reasons a man might be interested in a woman—what was in her bank account and what was between her legs.”
My friend couldn’t let that pass. “What about the stuff between her ears?”
With a nod to Helen and me, he said, grudgingly, “Yes, a man might be interested in her brain, but that’s maybe one woman in a million. We’ve already got a few millions’ worth in the Residue Class. I’m sure you’re smarter than the average woman in this restaurant–even much smarter–but do you really think you qualify?”
It was a clever question, typical of Raj, one that put her in a bind. If she said “no,” she was disqualified by her own admission. But if she said “yes,” she’d labeled herself as arrogant—or “pushy,” as so many men say about forthright women.
So, she very wisely said nothing. I took her by the elbow and said something about powdering her nose. I don’t use makeup of any kind, so Cose didn’t understand until I had her alone in the women’s toilet and explained the American euphemism. She said, “I continue to be impressed by the number of American euphemisms for bodily functions.” She gestured to the stalls. “Does it have something to do with the way their mothers toilet-trained them?”
“Funny you should say that,” I replied. “Do you know about Raj’s mother?”
“What about his mother?” Clearly, she hoped she had not inadvertently said something offensive.
“She’s very traditional. I met her once when she visited from his home in Visakha…–I can’t pronounce the whole name, but he calls it ‘Vizag.’ I never heard of it, but apparently the Ramachandra are big shots back there. Very rich. And very traditional.”
“So what’s she like?”
“Pretty much what you’d expect from the matriarch of a prominent family. She’s a tiny woman with a huge personality, and not shy about displaying her wealth. She pushed Raj around like he was three years old.”
“That’s hard to picture.”
A middle-aged woman entered the room and asked us if we were waiting for the toilets. We shook our heads, then silently decided we’d spent enough time “powdering our noses.” We returned to our table, settled up our bill and left. I wanted to see Cosette’s new apartment, so despite her protests that she hadn’t really settled in yet, we had Raj give us a ride in his converted British taxi.
Upstairs, we took off our coats and started heating some hot chocolate, then resumed our dissection of Raj’s mother. I restarted by saying, “I don’t know what you know about traditional Indian families …”
“Epsilon,”she said, using the math term for an arbitrarily small value. “Even less than I know about families in general.”
“Well, it seems like she has a woman–a girl, really, even younger than me–she expects him to marry. Picked out for him when she was born, and he was six years old. After they’re married, Raj and his bride are supposed to live with his mother, in Vizag.”
“In India?”
“Of course. In his mother’s house, so the new bride can wait on her mother-in-law, hand and foot.”
“Oh my!”
“So give Raj a little credit. He came to America mostly to escape that fate, but his mother hasn’t given up. She thinks his work with us at Residue Class is merely a passing fad, and now it’s time for him to grow up and take his place as a rich merchant, or whatever, in Vizag society.”
Cosette excused herself by telling me that scorching chocolate was a capital crime in Switzerland. She got up and removed the pan from her tiny stove. (It was the only pan in her furnished apartment’s kitchen.) She poured half for each of us, using her entire inventory of mugs, and warned me to allow some time for cooling.
After blowing on her drink, she said, “That explains a lot. I suspect he must be pretty tough to resist a mother like that?”
“He didn’t show his toughness when she was here, but he didn’t give her what she wanted. He really does love his math, and he’s willing to live in poverty if he has to.”
“So she doesn’t support him. Financially, I mean.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that. He get’s a huge allowance–which he’s creative enough to spend completely each month. I don’t think Mama would let her little boy starve. On the other hand, I don’t think she’ll ever give up trying to bring him home. He’s her only son. He has three sisters, but apparently they don’t count for much.”
“Well, I guess I understand him better now, but that doesn’t mean I can accept his behavior.”
“Well, once he figures you’re not available as one of his girlfriends, he’ll probably become more tolerable. He treats me like a favorite little sister, and it’s pretty much the same for Sonia. Helen, of course, he never messed with.”
Cosette nodded her understanding while testing the chocolate and signaled me it was all right to try mine, but carefully. We had half-finished our mugs when the buzzer rang. “My first buzzer,” she said, lifting her shoulders to indicate she didn’t know what to do. I showed her how to use the speaker. It was Raj, downstairs, offering to drive me home.
When he arrived upstairs, I told him I would have been happy to walk. “It’s not that cold, and it’s only a few blocks.”
“It’s not the cold or the distance,” he said, snatching my coat out of my hands and helping me on with it. “It’s not safe for a young woman to walk in this neighborhood alone at night.”
I didn’t know how to feel about his offer. On the one hand, it was very thoughtful, while on the other, it disrespected women. Why should a woman be any less safe than a man?
But out loud, Cosette said something different, something that must have come from the same deep place as my thought. “I guess I’d better get myself a gun. I had to leave my gun collection back in Chernion, but I’m sure I can replace a few of the more practical ones from the set. Firearms are so much easier to buy here in America.”
Raj grinned. “You’re joking, right?”
She shook her head and didn’t smile.
He spread his open hands in disbelief. “Come on, Cosette. You don’t even know how to use a gun.”
She formed her fingers into a mock pistol and aimed it at Raj. “I’m Swiss, Raj. Of course I know how to use a gun.”
I didn’t think that remark would help her win Raj’s vote.