All Eyes on Her (5 page)

Mistakenly, I assumed that refilling both of our wine glasses was Raj’s way of putting an end to our Mexican standoff over Thai food that night.

Thank God for reliable Raj, who never ever let things spin too far out of control.

“Actually, I have some news.” He spoke in between shoveling heaping spoonfuls of chili-doused pad thai into his mouth. “McKinsey has offered me a one-month assignment in London. They requested that I be on the team since I worked with this client on another project a few years back.”

“Mmm-hmm…” I played along, tipping back my glass and dropping my shoulders a bit. “And when would it start?”

“I could leave as early as tomorrow or as late as next week.”

“Oh.” I rubbed my ring between my thumb and forefinger, concentrating hard on the plate before me.

“A client requesting someone specifically is always good news, so it might even lead to a promotion if I can get enough visibility for the project. Could you imagine if it turned into a full-time offer?”

I’ll admit it. I actually laughed out loud. Through a mouthful of green coconut curry.

He glanced up without moving his head.

“Oh,
yeah
,” I joked, “because this is the 1920s and all women have to quit their jobs and follow their men across the ocean.”

“So you wouldn’t even consider it?” He spat out the words and his nostrils literally flared. Not sexy. A little scary, actually.

“Well, I mean…come on…” I was quite the articulate litigator. “It’s not really an option. They haven’t made you an offer, so we’re talking hypothetically here.”

“And you won’t even consider it hypothetically?” he asked, sucking at his teeth.

“Raj,” I said.

“Monica, has this whole thing always just been about
you
?”

“No, of course not.”

“I knew what I was getting into when we became friends. Partially this is my fault because our friendship was based on me helping you talk about losing your dad. And it was understandable when we started dating that the focus was originally going to be on you. But I always thought that…in time…in time, things might change. They might become more equal. But they haven’t, Monica. And I don’t know if that’s because of how I allowed this relationship to center around you, or if it’s because that’s
who you are
.”

“I resent that,” I began, but then stopped when he held up a hand.

“Oh, crikey!” He choked and dropped his fork, pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

I was actually shaken by the sound of his yell. Never before had I heard him raise his voice.

“There’s sodding peanuts in the goddamn pad thai, Monica!”
he said laughingly in disgust, while he shook his head. “And I just lost my appetite.”

He stomped straight into the bedroom, leaving me alone to think about what I had done. He didn’t help me clear the table, and he didn’t face me that night as we slept. When I awoke in the morning, he was gone.

His text message from the airport read:

Decided to leave this morning. Will be in London for at least two weeks.

We need a break anyway. This may be good timing.

It was cold, to the point, and exactly what I deserved. Not at all like him. For the first time since we had gotten together, I thought maybe he wasn’t the one with more skin in the game.

And I haven’t heard another word from him since.

All right, maybe you can never be certain of anything. But I am at least as certain that I am heterosexual as I am that some hot teen-queen celebutante under the age of thirty will one day make use of Steel’s promise that
After your first four divorce proceedings, the fifth one’s on the house!

Still, even I couldn’t help staring at the buxom Angelina Jolie look-alike wiggling her way across the intersection of San Vicente and Bundy about twenty minutes later. Unlike most men in my position, I wasn’t wondering what it might be like to sleep with her. Instead, I was wondering if such a woman had any idea what it felt like to stare at a cell phone all day, willing it to boil.

Ring. Whatever.

Anyway, I was guessing the answer was no.

But mine did ring, a few seconds later. I sucked in my stomach, straightened my back and plastered a beauty-school-dropout smile across my face. It’s instinct. Seeing a woman like that reminds me Raj might be aware of her existence. This forces me to admit that no one will ever be anything but repulsed by the vision of my sweaty, spandexed self huffing to cross the street. Which makes me want to eat an entire bundt cake.

In my closet.

With my hands.

Also, I’m sure that being engaged means he can see me through the phone.

As I pulled over, rummaging frantically through my purse to catch the call before it went to voice mail, I realized that this wasn’t like me. I didn’t watch other women run. I didn’t do somersaults at the possibility of a boy calling. I didn’t smile without reason any more than I said my name as if it was a question. All of which meant one thing; my period was coming. Because unlike some women I knew, I only ever spent twenty-four hours each month—the day before my period—curled up in my bed licking trans-fats off my own fingers, watching reruns of
The Golden Girls,
and being convinced that I was fat, inarticulate and incapable of sustaining a normal relationship.

I made a mental note to pick up a pizza, a milk shake and a valium on my way home, yanked my cell phone out of my purse and exhaled.

“Hello?”

“Hello, my sweetheart!” she sang through the telephone in the British accent, which was a legacy of her college days in England. “It’s your mommy, darling, and I have got some wonderful news for the both of us!”

This was going to require two bundt cakes.

My mother was understated in much the same way that dating show contestants wear makeup. It didn’t help when she upstaged me at my Sweet Sixteen party in a dress
cut-down-to-there,
but it didn’t hurt when she told me on the day I left for college that
As long as I was living happily and honestly no matter what choices I made, she would always be right behind me.
Between mother and daughter, the good is just the other half of the bad.

Thankfully, my father always managed to cast her behavior in only the most positive light. And, after all, he had explained to me after a particularly embarrassing incident involving an impromptu conga-line to the tune of “The Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” at my fifth-grade dance that my mother had insisted on chaperoning, she had been hardwired for drama. How else could she have mustered the courage to defy her parents by wearing those tight blue jeans, which were like a bull’s-eye in that small Indian village for the motorcycle-riding, chain-smoking, loner Gujurati boy named Deepak who would eventually become my father?

As the story went, he invited her to meet him for a cup of chai in the bazaar one afternoon during her winter break from college, and she (having grown accustomed to the free-thinking of the 1970s London social scene) decided to accept. It wasn’t until the following morning, after news of mom’s—or rather, the self-important Renu Malhotra’s—brazen public liaison had reached every corner of the village, that word reached her of Deepak’s parents already having committed his hand in marriage. An incensed and insulted twenty-one-year-old Renu’s immediate response was to march over to Deepak’s house, bang on the door, stomp into the family’s living room and demand that he marry her as a form of reparation for thinking that he could sully her reputation.

Who could resist such a fiery
pataka? he would recount to anyone who would listen, while my mother demurred and waved away any comparison of herself to a firecracker.

A
bundook
then?
he would chide.

Do I look like I can spit bullets?
she would mock warn him.

Only if I step out of line, sergeant
. He would salute, with a clip of his heels for effect.

Do you see how your father mocks me, Monica?
she would play along, despite the initiation of my gag reflex.
Whatever you do, don’t marry a funny man.

Happy wife, happy life
, my father would say, over the rim of his glasses, before returning his attention to his usual Sunday morning copy of
India Abroad.

Theirs was the kind of love that every little girl imagines for herself—full of grand gestures, stolen kisses, clandestine rendezvous and passionate choices no one ever second-guessed. I held very firmly to that ideal through most of my formative years. I held on to it through the high school football player who brought me wildflowers, but didn’t love me enough to dance in public. And through that shy boy in my college freshman literature class who wrote poetry to me describing a sort of hunger that I never could have felt for him. I held on all the way to the film major with the dimples, who nearly dropped all those copies of his screenplay trying to hold the student union door open for me our first day of junior year.

His name was Alex, and that screenplay was the first of many that I would read and critique for him over the next few years. I can only describe it as the most consuming love I’ve ever had. Which is probably how it is for everyone, when it really happens, but still…

I might have held on to the grand idea of such a big love for long enough to let Alex become the man of my life, if I hadn’t seen what became of my mother once she lost hers.

One summer afternoon, I came home from lunch to find my father slumped over our kitchen table. My mother stood in the hallway just outside the kitchen. The backdoor key was still in her hand, and she was mumbling something repeatedly to herself about dinner. Later, I learned that there was very little my father hadn’t done for us. He had done so much, in fact, that my mother hadn’t the slightest idea of the terms of his life insurance, the balance of their mortgage, or the location of the key to the bank deposit box. In short, she was the girl in those blue jeans, wondering where the boy named Deepak had gone.

Two months after my father’s death, my mother moved to London to be closer to the extended family who we had visited every summer of my childhood en route to Bombay.

I swallowed and buoyed my voice. “Hi, Mom. Err…okay, so what’s the news?”

“Darling you’ll never believe it!” Her voice almost rose to a shriek. “I’m moving back to Los Angeles!”

M
AYBE IT WOULD BE EASIER IF
I
WERE A LESBIAN.
A
T LEAST IT
would preclude my mother pulling any stunts resembling her telling me “the news” as casually as if she were asking me to pass the mango chutney. Turns out she’s not only planned to move back to Los Angeles within a month, but that she’s already put the down payment on a three-bedroom Spanish-mission style home in Upper Brentwood. This way, there will be room for the beautiful nursery to which every doting grandmother has a legal right. Letting her in on the fact that my fiancé was AWOL at that point would have been a lot like informing a B-list actress making the walk of shame back to her condo at 10:00 a.m. that the “Director” was really just an extra. Why bother? You can’t turn back time.

Mom wanted to know what I thought about a lilac-color palette, you see, and whether I would object to her hiring a portrait artist, who is apparently
All the rage
according to
Pushy Cosmopolitan Grandmother Wannabe Magazine
, to emblazon likenesses of myself and my newborn baby across one of the walls.
Because these people book up months and months in advance, you know….

Lacking convenient proximity to a cliff I could hurl myself off of, and confident that being alone at my own apartment that night would virtually guarantee a drunken and tear-soaked attempt to chop off all of my own hair, I swung a right onto Doheny and headed in the direction of the only person who might begin to understand.

“It’s because I’m too nice, isn’t it?” Sheila asked, swinging her front door open and thrusting an especially appalling dress at me.

“Well, if you mean why did you buy this, then it must be because you went temporarily blind?”

It may sound harsh, but honestly, we’re talking all black, long sleeved, knee length, shoulder padded and with an actual beaded trim. She might as well have let a twelve-year-old loose on her ski suit with a BeDazzler and then tried strolling down Rodeo Drive with a straight face. Being her cousin, I knew it was better to investigate before jumping to a conclusion.

“Mo-ni-ca!” She literally stomped a foot on the marble, fists clenched at her sides.

God bless her, Sheila failed to grasp the negative correlation between the pitch of her voice and the gravity of her words to anyone who is listening. Still, she was my cousin.

“What are you babbling about?” I asked, shoving my own situation aside and walking past her and into the living room.

“This! This disgusting dress!” She fell into step beside me, shaking her head and gesturing with that fashion hate crime as if it were a weapon. “She is being so…so…so passive aggressive!”

“Is this about your mother-in-law again?” I dropped onto the white suede couch in their sunroom. “Look, I told you, she’s going to treat you the way
you allow her
to treat you.”

Tone of voice was only one of the many ways in which Sheila and I were different. Take the copy of
Pucker
laid out on their tree-trunk cross-section of a coffee table for everyone to see. And which I made the mistake of glancing toward. Sheila tilted her head, following the direction of my eyes. A shameless celebrity gossip junkie, Sheila was the last person I would ever admit my
Pucker
fixation to…because she would seize any opportunity to interrogate me about my clients, hooking me up to a lie detector machine, trying to get me to break confidentiality by naming names. Mercifully that day, she was more focused on the issue at hand….

“You don’t under-
stand!
” She sniffled. “She knows that it’s ugly, because…because how could she
not?
And she knows that I have to wear it, because she bought it for me. We’re all going out to dinner tonight, with Josh’s entire extended family! So I’ll either look like an ungrateful daughter-in-law or someone who accidentally wandered in from a Bon Jovi concert, circa 1982!”

While Sheila was only one year younger than myself, at times the gap seemed closer to twenty. Hissy fits like this one were part of the reason why I still had trouble thinking of her as a married woman. Her husband was the loving but spineless Joshua. And in the most storybook fashion, they had met one night when she came in to the emergency room seeking stitches for a gash across her forehead.

The kind Jewish medical intern not only sewed her up, but managed not to laugh while she described the spill off her five-inch heels that resulted in a nosedive into the pavement outside a West Hollywood nightclub. She walked all over him, and saw nothing wrong with his lack of interest in getting up off the floor, until she realized that she wasn’t the only woman making heel marks on his face. He had been in training, in fact, having spent his entire lifetime balancing on eggshells around his mother. About a year into their marriage it was clear that the coach wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of another voice barking orders at her team.

“Your problem,” I began, “is that you’re trying to beat her at her own game by figuring out her rules and then playing them against her. The only way you’ll win is if you refuse to play her game at all. When she presumes that you’ll spend every other weekend at her place, announce how much you would love to but that you already have plans to go to dinner with the chief surgical resident and his wife, which you are sure she will agree is the best thing for Joshua’s career. When she tells you that your choice of lipstick is
interesting,
play dumb and ask her, in front of everyone, to explain what she means by that
because you really value her opinion
. When she insults your food by asking if you would like her extra set of measuring spoons so that you won’t be so aggressive with the salt next time, don’t laugh it off!”

“But I don’t want to be a…a
bitch,
” she lowered her voice, as if the lamp might hear us.

“Fine, then act like a wounded bird,” I said and rolled my eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t act like it’s no big deal. Don’t make it so easy for her. Maybe if you’re visibly hurt in front of your family, then Josh will finally grow a pair and start defending his wife.”

Adept already at the wifely art of choosing her battles, Sheila slam-dunked the dress behind the couch and silenced me with a glance the moment she heard Josh’s key in the door.

“So anyway…like I was saying.” I shifted gears, widening my eyes and acting about as casual as the kid at Fat Camp with the remnants of a Snickerdoodle clinging to his chin. “My mom says she’s moving back to L.A. And she’s serious, Sheila. She already bought a house.”

“Really?” Joshua asked, bounding in from his bike ride, but apparently deeming himself not-quite-sweaty enough to forgo a kiss to the forehead of his giggling bride. “Is this because of Raj and you breaking up?”

“We did not break up,” I warned him, with a cautionary glare at Sheila. “It’s temporary. Do you tell him
everything?
”

“Of course she does, we’re married. So then you didn’t tell your mom about Raj?” he yelled from the kitchen, banging the refrigerator door shut. “But she’s your mother.”

“She didn’t, honey, no,” Sheila answered for me after wiping her forehead with her sleeve. “I told you that she’s afraid of her mother.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, leaning against the doorway defensively.

“Nobody’s afraid of anybody,” I interjected, trying to steer the focus back onto myself. “I haven’t told my mom about Raj because there is nothing to tell. We have not broken up. We’re taking a breather.”

Besides,
I thought, reaching for the remote control,
my mother always got way too involved with opinions that were completely misinformed when I let her anywhere near my personal life.
And as if God didn’t have just the most perfect timing…

“Hollywood studios are abuzz this week with news of one of the biggest screenwriting sweetheart deals to have been signed by Paragon Pictures in years,” some Entertainment Tonight reporter wearing no less than eight necklaces and an entire tube of lip gloss prattled on.

And then they cut to the videotape of Alex.

With that same warm smile. That same humble manner. Those same unmistakable dimples sneaking in an appearance as he sat back and watched the filming from his consultant’s chair on the set of the movie that launched his career.

“Rumor has it,” the talking head continued, “that the movie studio has just inked a landmark seven-figure, two-script deal with the screenwriter whose first movie,
Like You Mean It
, was the sleeper hit of last summer.”

“Oh,
honey
.” Sheila sat down beside me. “I’m sorry. You know I only watch that for the celebrity stuff. Let’s change the channel.”

“Come on, Sheila,” I insisted, in a voice that wouldn’t have even convinced a total stranger, “don’t be silly. I can be happy for him, can’t I?”

The first time Alex told me that he loved me was when he came home from a morning run to find me awake and curled up in his dorm-room bed, wearing one of his T-shirts and reading the original version of
Like You Mean It.
I could tell by the way he said it that he’d startled himself, as much because he’d blurted it out, as because of realizing that it was true. Although my first instinct was to drop the script, grab him by the neck and yank him down on top of me, he held me back, asked me to finish reading first, and made me promise to tell him what I really thought when I was done.
Total honesty,
he announced with an idealism that only someone under legal drinking age can muster,
was the only way that this relationship would ever work.

So like most young couples we managed to be completely honest with each other for the next two years, except, of course, for those little things that we held back. Harmless things, at first, like my insisting that his snoring never bothered me in the least, and his swearing up and down that I was cute when I was drunk. We knew what we had and we shared a quiet instinct to protect it, even from ourselves. It worked for me because by definition a girl’s first real love is the guy who feels like family. And it worked for him because rather than feeling skewered by my gut reaction to his work, he told me that he finally felt as if he had someone on his team.

Yes, we kept up a relationship of comfortable truth even through the summer when he tattooed his biceps and bartended on Sunset, while I donned my sensible suit and interned at an emerging-markets hedge fund. At the time, Alex forcing me to admit that I had
gone corporate
to appease my father only made me love him more. But when the summer was over…

“What do you mean
What am I gonna do after school?
” he asked, while hefting my bookcase into the corner of my new dorm room that September.

“I mean that people are applying to grad schools or applying for jobs.” I flopped onto the bed and watched him work. “So what are we gonna do?”

“I’m not sure what you’re gonna do yet, but I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, even if you have to move back in with your parents for a few months.”

“And what about you?” I rose up on my elbows.

“Whadya mean?” He blew the hair out of his eyes and looked up at me. “What’s wrong with bartending until I sell my script?”

There was nothing and plenty wrong with it, but what was I going to say? That was when I realized just how committed he was to his writing, and it terrified me. Not because I thought he would fail, but because it might take him a very long time to succeed. And I didn’t want that kind of disappointment for him. I came back from summer convinced that it was my responsibility to seek out a career that would work for me, rather than waiting for one to fall into my lap. His summer had convinced him that dedication to writing wasn’t enough. Surviving without a safety net was some twisted sort of price he concluded he had to pay
if he was ever really gonna make it
. Encouraging him to seek stability at that point would have been like telling him that I had never believed in him at all. I snapped my mouth shut and swallowed, recognizing that my silence had made the space for the first small fissure in our relationship.

He didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened as the months took us into the winter and spring of our senior year. To anyone watching us during the Senior Ski Weekend at Bear Mountain or at the beach in Cozumel on spring break, our rhythm must have seemed unbroken. But every now and then I wondered…how much of our connection rested atop my conspiring to allow him to see himself a certain way? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Even then I understood that I was a young woman in the throes of a connection that she knew she would never forget.

So I accepted, rather than decided, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t sweep under the rug just to keep him inhaling me with those eyes. I had to, you understand, because if I didn’t I felt sure that a later, older, wiser version of myself would have never forgiven me.

Just after spring break, Alex had sent copies of his manuscript to a handful of agents. A month later he received his first rejection letter.

“Well, I guess that was Round One,” I said, dropping my backpack on my dorm room steps to take a seat beside him. I slipped an arm around his shoulder. “So what are we gonna change before you send it out for Round Two?”