Free Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times Page A

fill a boys belly with bread, and I never met him on the battlefield
passing out gas masks to the men. And if he cant be troubled to catch some
bullets in his fists, and if he wont reach down to grab a mountain and keep it
from crumbling away, and if he forgets to send the rains one year and millions
die of hunger, is it likely he's bothering himself cursing one beautiful girl
in Jaipur?
    Maybe he's sitting somewhere right now knitting up Providence like
homespun, but I've seen too much blood to ever trust his cloth. I would sooner
trust to a song from your lips than to Providence, though I've seen no proof of
either one. When the day comes that you finally sing I hope I shall be in the
audience. In truth, I hope I might be the only member of your audience, that I
might hoard all your words for myself. I believe I had forgotten about beauty
until I saw you, and now I'm greedy for it, like the boy I was once, recklessly
eating all the imp's portion of bread.
    Yours, enchanted, James Dorsey
    Anamique remembered the way the handsome soldier had stared at her
in the garden, the way he had seen her, and she flushed and had to bite
her lip. She tucked the letter back into her diary but a moment later took it
out and read it again. And again.
    She passed the night restlessly, waking from vivid dreams of
singing to lie wide-eyed in the dark with a pounding heart, listening for any
trace of her voice lingering in the air. Once she even went to
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    her sister's door and strained to hear her breathing and be sure
her voice hadn't escaped in her sleep and slain the whole household. Finally,
afraid to close her eyes, she composed a reply to the letter. It was simply a
quotation from Kipling and it read:
    East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases;
man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and
the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified
supervision in the case of Englishmen.
    After breakfast she gave it to the chaprassi to deliver.
    James laughed when he read it, a bright, surprised burst of a
laugh. He wrote to her again, fabulating a means by which, he outrageously
claimed, the devils of India might easily be outwitted by leaving out saucers
of sherry overnight for their spies, the wall lizards, who would grow tipsy and
forget to carry their mission reports back to Hell.
    This too the chaprassi duly delivered, and Anamique wrote back
again the same day to tell him how her ayah practiced gowli shastra, the
art of reading the stripes and scamperings of wall lizards for omens. She
added, shyly, that she had been to an astrologer once in the bazaar. She had
never told anyone that, and James wondered in his reply what fortune had been
foretold for her, and had it mentioned a soldier, by chance?
    For days in a row they continued in this way, and slowly they
discovered each other. The letters grew longer and Anamique's gray eyes lost a
bit of the haunted shadow James had seen in them, and James's heart began to
lift itself, step by step, out of the swamp of mud and ghosts in which it had
been steeping since France.
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    SIX The First Touch
    The second time they saw each other was at a musical evening
arranged by Anamique's mother. She routinely invited the unmarried young men
over for a spot of light opera to amuse her daughters, and James was handsome,
and he was a war hero, and to top it all off he turned out to have a glorious
tenor voice. The one thing that kept him from becoming a new favorite among the
memsahibs was his irredeemable habit of looking only at Anamique while he sang.
    The others all remembered that stare in the garden, and they could
see now in the look that passed between the two that something was already
under way. A bridge begun at both ends, reaching toward the place in the middle
where they could rest against each other and find completion.
    James cajoled an old missionary's wife to take a turn at the piano
at the end of the evening,