Page 105 of The Encore’s Crown

I was proud of her. I told her that so many times the words started sounding inadequate. She deserved it. She deserved every billboard, every premiere, every review that would try and fail to explain what she could do on screen. At first, the film felt like another distance we could beat. We had practice. We knew airports, hotel rooms, calls made at all hours. We knew how to turn three days in the same city into something that could sustain us for a month.

Then the calls became harder to arrange. The time difference changed every time production moved. Her fourteen-hour days became sixteen. My weeks disappeared into recording, interviews, rehearsals, and meetings. Sometimes one of us fell asleep waiting for the other to call. Then the visits changed. A week became four days. Four days became two. Two became one night in a hotel before one of us had to leave for an airport while it was still dark.

The less time we had, the more Radhika wanted something solid waiting at the end of it. Something distance couldn’t move.

She started asking about marriage. Sometimes it came disguised as a joke. She'd hold up her hand after seeing a ring in a shop window and ask what kind I'd choose for her. She'd send me a photograph from a wedding and tell me the flowers were ugly. Once, while we were in bed, she traced a finger over the tattoo on my hand and asked whether I had ever thought about wearing a ring above it.

“Yeah,” I said.

Her eyes brightened. “You have?”

“Of course.”

“When did you think about it?”

I kissed her shoulder. “I don’t know. Sometime.”

That answer was enough the first time. It wasn’t enough the next. Every visit ended with her going home without a ring, and every time it happened, the disappointment became harder for her to hide.

“When do you think?” she asked once.

“We’ve talked about this.”

“No, I’ve talked about it. You’ve said it isn’t the right time.”

“Because it isn’t.”

“When will it be?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked away.

That was how the fights began. First came the quiet. The careful questions. Her trying to find a door I hadn’t realized I was holding shut.

“Why can’t we just be what we were before?” I asked her during one of those arguments.

“We are what we were before.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means every time I see you, I feel like I’m failing an exam I didn’t know I was taking.”

“I'm not testing you.”

“It feels like it.”

“I want to know where this is going.”

“Why does it have to be going anywhere? Why can’t we just be in love?”

She stared at me.

“As though marriage would mean we stopped being in love?”

“That isn’t what I said.”