Ivy:A Love Story Mathew Chacko (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration by Liz Priddy For thirty-two years he had lived a life rooted in her care; he had eked out a meager existence on that generous soil, so now, how to live? Coming home from the funeral, he had stood at the door to the flat and, out of habit or disbelief, jabbed at the calling bell button. Joyous peals bounded inside. He waited for footsteps, the clatter of the lock. The flat was silent. He had hurried down the three flights of stairs to the car and driven straight to the shop near Bangalore Club that he had not visited in so many victorious years. The man there—smaller, dimmer, more defeated, but the very same man—had served him in a state of shock. He had rolled up a liter bottle in a sheet of newspaper, like a mummy, and pushed it across the counter. [End Page 63] Now, four months after her death, he began at sunset—brandy, neat, peg by peg in a plain glass. His body still knew liquor as poison, an old and dangerous ally, and he had to take small sips and suck on a wedge of lemon in between. It was a slow journey, but reliably, every night, he reached a point when the TV became incomprehensible, a vague hubbub in the corner of the room. Some nights he wept. He covered his mouth with his hands so the neighbours wouldn't hear. What issued from him was a series of comic explosions. He would stumble around the flat—a big, blubbering bear of a man, shirt unbuttoned and flapping in the wind, lungi tied in a loose knot under the overhang of his belly. He would come to in the dark, early-morning hours, flat on his back, felled across the bed, that side of his body so used to hers unbordered and cold. He spent most of the day behind drawn curtains, stupefied on the sofa. Outside, people came and went, cars honked, children shouted, dogs barked. He kept the flat a sealed tomb. Once a day the cleaning servant, a rail-thin woman who raced through five homes, slipped in through the back door. Her life was elsewhere; she hurried through her chores without reacting to any of the signs in the intimate places she cleaned. The empty brandy bottles were whisked away, the fact that he left fewer and fewer clothes in the laundry basket efficiently ignored. After she had swept the mosaic floors and scuttled crabwise across them, whipping a wet rag back and forth in a semicircular arc, she would come and stand before him in an agony of waiting, while he tried to decide what meal he wanted fetched from the nearby restaurant. How little you needed! How easy to retract! The newspaper went crisp and unread to the wastepaper basket. He'd had the phone disconnected, and he didn't answer the doorbell. It was probably Vrinda. The next-door neighbour. In the lull that followed the ringing, he would hold his breath and listen, imagining her in a similar pose on the other side of the door, silently battling a dozen impulses before moving away. Sometimes there would be two people there and, invariably, a muffled struggle and the sound of something dropping to the floor and a booming shout—Uncle! or Good Evening!—hurled into the apartment through the chink at the bottom of the door. There was something wrong with Nithin, Vrinda's boy. A hormonal imbalance of some sort that could not be corrected. He was overweight and hoarse and constantly lunging at things. They had moved in two years ago—mother, nine-year-old son and a huge, ferocious Alsatian, his collar buried in his bristling coat. The father was dead, in a car accident whose details could not be [End Page 64] properly imagined because it had happened halfway around the world, in Canada, and had involved fog and ice. He tried his best to avoid Vrinda. It was the most care he took about anything. When he had to go to the...