Girl Most Likely To
Girl Most Likely To
Poonam Sharma
Success is all in how you define it With meticulous career planning and a couple of dirty martinis, there is very little that New York City investment banker Vina Chopra can’t do. And now that she’s decided to get serious about fi nding her mate, there is very little that Vina won’t try—even if it means letting her parents get involved. After all, what does she have to lose?Her longest-term relationship thus far has been with the ulcer she ultimately named Fred (unless you count the ex-boyfriend who won’t go away). Amid a series of dates with “the nice Indian doctor” and an offi ce scandal that could permanently end her career, Vina starts to question everything she’s been working for.Who has she been trying to please all these years? Is this the life that she really wants? Can she fi nally learn to put aside her family’s expectations long enough and become the girl most likely to find a happiness all her own?
Girl Most Likely to
Poonam Sharma
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
My Postscript
Coming Next Month
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to…
My agent, Lorin Rees, for helping me
make the leap into fiction.
My editor, Kathryn Lye, who improves the story
without altering the point.
Red Dress Ink, for taking me on.
And my family—for their inspiration, humility,
and for being the sort of people who never give up,
nor fail to be grateful for it all.
For a guy named Michael, who knew me once,
and thought that I should write a novel.
1
“Celibacy is rotting your brain.”
Cristina insisted through my cell phone, while the taxi jerked up Fifth Avenue. It might even have been true, but it was a hateful thing for a best friend to say.
At my age—and my father never missed an opportunity to remind me of my age with all the subtlety of a presidential ass-pat—my mother had managed a screaming child, a barking dog, a doting husband and a medical residency. And she did it from a three-bedroom Colonial in Great Neck, Long Island. By twenty-seven, left to my own devices, I had amassed a lucrative, yet uninspiring, seventy-hour Wall Street workweek, a telling but unintentional track record of shoving plant corpses down the trash chute while the neighbors slept, and a very large, very expensive and very empty bed. It was the latter fact that had me feeling particularly vulnerable. And of the many mistakes I made that Saturday evening, the first was expecting Cristina to understand.
“Just because I’ve decided to be rational and take control of my life, that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” I pouted, checking my watch. Draped in my traditional powder-blue silk salwar kameez and matching satin Charles David heels, I was hurtling helplessly toward another lavish Indian wedding where my parents would be seated where the love of my life ought to be. After ten years of scouring every dormitory bar, party and young singles’ mixer, not to mention checking under every rock and in more than my fair share of countries around the world, I was in no mood for honesty. If bunions were my reward for a decade of running in four-inch heels, then cynicism was my logical response to the umpteenth fix-up with a prince whose castle would eventually make me break out in hives.
“But an arranged marriage? For you, Vina?” her voice climbed. It was laced with all the straight-postured self-righteousness of a New England housewife snatching home hair dye from the hands of a teenaged daughter. “I don’t think so.”
I sucked air through clenched teeth.
“See? This is why I wasn’t going to tell you about tonight. And it’s not an arranged marriage. It’s an arranged…date, and it just happens to be taking place at a wedding.”
Ever since I met Cristina, when we were the lone female interns in the J.P. Morgan investment banking department, she’d refused to cut me emotional slack. And that was what I respected most about her. Unfortunately, she also refused to accept that merely being ethnic (Cuban, and from Miami) didn’t mean she automatically grasped my situation. Convincing her that it was a good idea to be set up with the Punjabi lawyer courtesy of my parents required an appeal to the rational side of her brain. Fortunately, we were both investment bankers; I knew exactly how to put things into terms that she could grasp.
“Look,” I added, cradling my cell between ear and shoulder while aiming my compact at the pinky finger I used to catch errant eyeliner, “I have thirty months left until thirty. I know your mom had you when she was, like, forty. But you have to understand that Indian women don’t have Cuban women’s genes. Sure, our hips were made for childbearing, but that’s where the similarity ends. The fact is that I’m only fertile until, like, thirty-five. And anyway, to figure out ideal fertility age, you take the average age of menopause for women in your family, and subtract twenty years. That’s when your fertility takes a serious nosedive. For my mom, menopause was fifty, so that means that childbirth is supposed to be before thirty for me.”
“But…”
“Also…consider that it takes at least six months to fall in love with anyone and run the required background checks, another nine months to get engaged, and a year to plan the wedding. And my husband and I will need at least a year of being married without being pregnant—to screw like bunnies before gravity has its way with me. That’s thirty-nine months. So even if I meet Mr. Right tonight, I’m still cutting it close.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
My logic impressed her.
“They re-air The Oprah Winfrey Show at two a.m.” I clicked my compact shut, and noticed that one of my heels was stuck in a glob of gum on the floor of the cab. “And you know that I haven’t been sleeping well these days.”
In an effort to spare the hem of my salwar kameez, I leaned onto one hip and lifted my shoe. Naturally, the pleather seat beneath me mimicked a fart. My eyes collided in the rearview mirror with those of the cabbie, who, until that point, had occasionally glanced at me with the standard balance of boredom and curiosity. Suddenly he sat up straighter, spearing me with a look of moral superiority—all this from a man who had never encountered a stick of deodorant. I stared out the window.
“What kind of a name is Prakash, anyway?” Cristina finally asked.
“Um, I don’t know…an Indian one?”
“Well, it’s just not the kind of name that I can imagine you screaming out in a fit of passion.”
“Life is not a fit of passion, Cristy.” I resented her for making me sound like my mother. “And I think the point is that I’m supposed to have learned that by now. Look at it this way. Meeting a guy through my parents means that the background check is out of the way. Up front, I know that he’s single, educated and family-oriented, with no criminal record or illegitimate children.”
“And what if he looks like a frog?”
“He will not look like a frog.”
“But, Vina, what if he does? What if he looks like a bloated, slimy frog…who got hit in the face with a frying pan…twice?”
“Then I guess I’ll have to comfort myself with the thought of his really long—”
“Vina, I’m being serious! Have you thought this through? How much are you willing to compromise? Meeting a guy through your parents is a lot more serious than meeting him by yourself. It can’t be casual. You’ve always told me that.”
“All I know is that there are men that you date, and men that you marry.” I reached into my wallet for a twenty as we turned east onto Forty-seventh Street.
“And never the twain shall meet?”
I paused. “Did you just say ‘twain’?”
“Sorry. I’m feeling silly. I have a date with the cowboy tonight. Maybe I’m subconsciously practicing country phrases to put him at ease.”
“All Midwesterners are not cowboys, Cristy.” I signaled the cabbie for eight dollars in change.
“Yes, but this one is. Seriously. He has the cowboy hat and everything. He even grew up on a ranch.”
“And what…he took a wrong turn at the Old Oak Tree and wound up in New York City?”
“Apparently. And he must have asked someone to point him toward the nearest watering hole, because I met him at Denial, a bar over on Grand Street.”
“That is silly.” I wrenched the crumpled dollar bills from the plastic, swiveling slot, and smoothed them into a pile. Then I folded them and slipped them into my purse.
“Come on! Why don’t you ditch the wedding, and meet up with us instead? I’ll have him bring a fre-end,” she practically sang, as if she were dangling a new doll before my eyes.
“As tempted as I am by the idea of playing Cowboys and Indians twenty years after recess is over, I think I’ll pass.”
“Oh, I get it. When you play with firemen it’s perfectly acceptable, but when I try to throw a little rodeo it’s silly?”
I fought off a mental image of The Village People performing “YMCA,” and feigned indignation at Cristina. “I thought we agreed never to speak of that again.”
She followed suit. “We agreed on no such thing.”
“I was young.” I checked my watch for the tenth time since Union Square. “It’s a part of my past.”
“It was last year.” She paused, probably for dramatic effect. “And I believe the exact line that you used on that guy was ‘If I promise to run home and start a fire, will you promise to come over later?’”
“You gave me that line.” I cracked a smile. “Good times, though.” And then we giggled together, like only two women who know that they will see each other from virginity to Viagra can.
“Vina, I just don’t want you settling for some guy who isn’t your ‘Prince.’” Cristina took a typically cheap shot at our friend Pamela, who wasn’t there to defend herself. “You’ve been way too preoccupied lately with your so-called future.”
“Oh, who are you kidding, Cristina? I’m an Indian chick from Strong Island. I was born preoccupied with my so-called future.”
“I’m not talking about your professional future. I’m talking about your personal future. It’s like you’re turning into, well, I hate to say it, but…Pam.”
“Now that’s mean,” I said. “First, you make me feel more pathetic than I already do by reminding me that I haven’t had sex in forever, and now you’re comparing me to her. And come to think of it, you wouldn’t give her any crap if she was being set up with a nice Jewish lawyer by her parents.”
“You know you don’t want to get me started on Pam.”
“Agreed.” I sighed as we slowed to a halt by the curb outside the Waldorf Astoria. A uniformed doorman sped over and reached toward the door handle. “In fact, I don’t want to get you started on anything at the moment because my chariot has pulled up to the ball. Passionate Princes are a fairy tale, Cristy, but a Practical Prince will suit me fine.”
2
Red rose petals littered golden tablecloths. Gleaming china settings and generous floral arrangements adorned each table. The air was delicately scented. Votives flickered on every surface, fading in comparison to the luster of the many rubies, emeralds and diamonds gliding around the ballroom. Waiters circled the tables while craning their necks to scan the room of the three hundred guests; the servers were determined not to leave any glass unfilled, any mouth unstuffed or any whim unattended. Toddlers peeked from behind the saris of young mothers, while older women sought potential daughters-and sons-in-law. Elders leaned back in their chairs, appreciating how their familiar chai seemed sweeter, and their familiar aches seemed duller in the face of so much life.
By ten p.m., there was no sign of Prakash. I speared a soggy Rasgulla with my fork and lifted the cheese-patty toward my mouth, while glaring daggers across Table 21.
“Certainly I miss living with Mummy and Papa in Delhi,” Cousin Neha gushed at our tableful of captivated parents.
Nearly all of their Americanized children had run as amok as I—moving into Manhattan apartments alone, while refusing to acknowledge “thirty and single” as a hopeless disease.
“Those three years after college and before my marriage were wonderful, really,” Neha continued, “I used to enjoy myself, having dinner and going to the cinema with my friends on the weekends. But Stamford, Connecticut, is also quite nice, although it is a bit chilly for us. Vinny and I drive to work together each morning, and then we go to one of the local restaurants in the evening, if I don’t feel like cooking.”
Rather than nailing Neha between the eyes, the fiery daggers I was hurling instantly transformed into plastic cocktail swords before they could make it across the table. They kept bouncing off of her matrimonial shield, and collapsing into a heap on the dessert plate in front of her. From where my second martini and I were seated, it looked as if that heap was about to topple and bury the remains of my self-esteem. My first martini had vanished instantly after the third consecutive “Auntie” (any non-blood-related woman old enough to be my mother who hasn’t seen me since I was this tall) inquired, before asking about anything else, when I was getting married myself. As soon as he’s paroled, I thought about saying, or perhaps, Tuesday. But you’re not invited. You can just send a gift to my apartment. I’m registered at Frederick’s of Hollywood.
“Neha darling, tell me…Have you also met any nice young couples to socialize with?” another Auntie-type asked from my right. Why everyone was so interested in my cousin was as much of a mystery to me as how The Anna Nicole Smith Show survived while Once and Again was canceled.
“Oh, yes! We have met many friendly couples,” Neha beamed girlishly at her husband, Vineet, who slurped his chai and winked at me. The wink was a gesture of encouragement to persevere, despite my tragic state of spinster-hood. “But you know…there are also many single people in Stamford. There are even single girls from India. I honestly feel sorry for them, being in a different country, spending the whole day alone and then going home to an empty apartment. When I talk with them it seems like it really does not bother them at all. They work, they live on their own, and they don’t even have any interest in marriage. They don’t even want to talk about it. Imagine!”
A three-hundred-pound woman who lives in the middle of nowhere, and has no friends outside of her husband, feeling sorry for me, I mocked telepathically to Marty—I had decided to name my martini by that point, as a reward for all of its loyalty. Imagine!
The same Auntie leaned over and practically yelled into my ear: “And what about you, Vina? Koi nehy milha?” She must have been speaking up to steal my attention from the many voices everybody assumed were living inside my head. These were, of course, the same voices that entertained all single career women when they came home to empty apartments at the end of each day. But I wondered why she also felt the need to shake a hand before her face like a tambourine. Were her fluttering fingers intended to deflect my bad romantic luck before it could infect any of the happy couples in the room? Great. I shook my head at Marty. Now they think I’ve become so hopeless that I require an emotional exorcist.
The bride and groom swirled past us on the dance floor. Twenty-seven-year-old Nikhil and Suraya, an MIT engineer and an NYU medical resident, had met at a friend’s dinner party the summer before. I spotted a number of single career women hiding behind ice sculptures just to avoid answering the same question posed at weddings the world over. I wondered if there was ever an appropriate response to koi nehy milha? Did I get anyone yet? Factually, it sounded hopeless. No, I have not. The truth sounded sluttish. Actually, I’ve had a few men. Even some I would recommend to a friend. But nobody with whom I’m interested in growing old and less attractive.
I chose to hide behind the facade of nonchalance familiar to all unattached Indian women of “marriageable age.” What that means is that I lied. “Oh, Auntie, I don’t have time to worry about that right now. I’m too passionate about my career.”
“Vina is just being shy,” my father interrupted. That man could never be accused of appropriate timing. “We are confident that tonight will be the night. We have found her a lovely boy.”
“Oh? Is this the doctor from Pittsburgh? The one you were telling me about?” Auntie Meenakshi questioned my mother hopefully. What doctor? Did she say Pittsburgh? Howmany other people were my parents discussing my personal life with?
“No, no.” My father shook his head. “We found out that the family in Pittsburgh had a history of divorces. This boy, Prakash, is thirty years old, which is suitable for Vina. He was born in New Jersey, but he lives in Manhattan now. He is an attorney, with a very impressive bio data. He is five feet eleven inches, and both his parents are engineers. We are disappointed that they are not Punjabi—they are Gujarati—but one has got to be open-minded on that point these days. And his father attended IIT in the same batch with the brother-in-law of my third cousin, Prem, who is now settled in Bombay. Everybody agrees that it is a good family. Prakash is the eldest of three brothers, and all are highly educated.”
Table 21 nodded in collective approval. “Lady in Red” wafted through the air. I drained the last of my martini, and checked for emergency exits.
“Why is everybody talking about this?” my maternal grandmother (referred to traditionally as Nani) interrupted in Hindi. “We have done our part. Now we must let the kids decide. And where is this Prakash, anyway? What kind of a boy would keep my Vina waiting?”
My earliest memory is of my Nani making Gulab Jamuns in our kitchen; I watched as she deep-fried and drizzled them with golden sugar water. I must have been six years old when I dragged that stool stoveside, and quietly climbed on top. Elbows on the counter, I waited silently until she tore off a piece of raw, sweet dough, and handed it to me. I never understood how she managed to grab the right amount of dough each time, and roll it so quickly into a perfect ball between her palms. And I asked her about my grandfather, whom I had never met.
“Your grandfather was a very good man.” She shook her head and reached for more dough. “Ithna shareef! Here they would have called him genuine, but he was much more than that. He cared for everybody. And he used to give your mother airplane rides on his shoulders. She was too small then to remember, even smaller than you are now.”
“Did he like Gulab Jamuns?” I swung my heels, chewing happily on the dough.
“He was a Gulab Jamun, daughter.” She stopped and looked at me. “He was my Gulab Jamun.”
“Did he look like a Gulab Jamun?” I leaned my head to one side.
“He did to me. And one day, your Gulab Jamun will come to you.” She caught my chin between her fingers.
“How will I know it’s him?”
“You will know,” she reassured me, before rolling a dozen balls into boiling oil, which refrained from splattering, under her watchful eye.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But what if he looks more like a Jalebi?”
“He won’t.”
“What about a Rasgulla?”
“A Rasgulla looks nothing like a Gulab Jamun. Besides, mommy and daddy will recognize him and they will bring him for you when it is time.”
I paused, tilting my head. “But how will they recognize a Gulab Jamun if he looks like a Rasgulla or a Jalebi?”
She stopped, and eyed me. “You need not worry about such things, Vina. Good girls trust their parents. That is all you need to know.”
With that, I had to be satisfied. My Nani was always right.
“Ma’am? Another Rasgulla?” A waiter appeared. “Ma’am?”
“Vina? Are you paying attention?” my mother asked. Everybody at the table was staring at me. Maybe celibacy was rotting my brain.
“Don’t worry, little cousin.” Neha patted my shoulder before squeezing between the chairs on her way to the dance floor. “You’ll find someone soon.”
I’m not worried, I agreed with Marty. What I am is thirsty.
I scrunched my nose at the chai-bearing waiter leaning over my left shoulder. “I think I’m in the mood for something a little stronger.”
I pushed back my chair, rose to my feet and made a beeline for the bar.
In my defense, I arrived at the wedding feeling nothing less-than-thrilled for Suraya and Nikhil. I raised my f lute, alongside everyone else, in a toast to the newlyweds. I smiled through hours of idle chatter, and now I made my way rather steadily over to the bar. And that was where, as the twenty-one-year-old bartender started looking a little too good to me, it happened. I was reaching out to take hold of my third martini when I felt a warm hand crashing into my own.
My first instinct was to yank at the drink. Snatch it away and hold it above my head. To gulp it down and Take Back the Night. But I paused when I noticed that the very masculine hand was attached to a confident and sturdy arm, which had brought along an alarmingly attractive head. And the man to whom that head belonged seemed to be thinking the same about me.
“Bartender, I believe I asked for this to be shaken, not stirred,” he announced for my benefit.
Oooph, he’s yummy, I thought. If it meant being closer to a smile like that, I might actually consider climbing inside the martini. He was a cross between James Dean and Sunil Dutt (the James Dean of Indian cinema). I smiled and loosened my grip. Countless witty responses raced about inside my head, apparently bumping into one another enough to cause a massive concussion.
“Mmmhhhaaaahhaaahh,” I said. Or snorted. He must have assumed this was my own personal dialect, because he smiled as if he was impressed. I cleared my throat while he replaced the glass on the bar.
“I’ll thumb-wrestle you for it,” he said.
“Seriously?” I blurted. I was too tipsy to play anything cool in the face of such deep, mischievous eyes.
“No, not seriously.” He laughed, as if I were charming and had said it on purpose. Looking down, I noticed that our collision had splashed the martini across the sleeve of his tuxedo. Then I caught myself considering licking it off him. That was when I decided to cut myself off for the night. I must have reeked of mock-confidence and gin.
“I’m Prakash.” He wiped his hand on a napkin before extending one to me. “You must be Vina?”
Honey, I thought, I’ll be whoever you want me to be.
“Oh! Prakash!” I slapped my forehead, regretting it immediately. “Yes, my mother mentioned you. Well…it’s nice to finally meet you.”
Over Prakash’s shoulder I spotted my mother, who was watching us from across the room. She sat with her thumbs and eyebrows raised, as if she were rooting for the lone Indian on Fear Factor. I assumed that that was Prakash’s mother seated beside her, considering that the woman couldn’t resist a nod of satisfaction at the childbearing capacity that the fit of my salwar kameez made plain. With a full belly and an expectant heart, my father napped quietly in his chair, probably dreaming of telling his grandchildren to sit up straight.
The latest version of a classic Bhangra song, which had apparently been mixed with the theme from Knight Rider, trailed off, and “Careless Whisper” picked up. DJ Jazzy-Desi-Curry-Rupee, or whatever his name was, called out to the crowd, “Can we please haw all the luwly gentleman and lehdees join us on the danz floor now for a wery special slow song?”
Hands cupped behind his back, Prakash faked a nervous glance at the floor: “Your mom told my mom to tell me to ask you to dance. So…I mean…do you wanna?”
I grinned, and he led me toward the dance floor. Crowds dispersed. Couples embraced. Prakash took me into his arms. His frame was stiff enough to let me know who was leading, even as he refused to drop his playful gaze. We sailed around the floor, almost as captivatingly as the two five-year-olds who were probably forced out there by some photo-hungry parents nearby. I didn’t need a mirror to know how perfect Prakash and I looked together.
Imagine my luck, I thought. I’ve found an attorney, who’s adorable, and funny, and a good dancer…and Indian? Tomorrow I’ll start auditioning matrimonial henna tatoo artists. On Monday morning I’ll look into the logistics of renting the horse upon which Prakash will arrive at our wedding.
A lesser man might have dropped me at the pivotal moment, but Perfect Prakash held me firmly, as I leaned into his arm and kicked back my leg. He dipped me so far that the ends of my hair touched the floor. I smiled for my parents, as much as for myself, while all the blood rushed straight to my head.
“So, Prakash…you’re handsome, you’re charming, and you’re a lawyer,” I began once he had pulled me up. “How is it possible that no woman has snatched you off the market yet?”
“Vina, there’s a perfectly simple explanation for that,” he replied, watching my form more than my eyes as he spun me around, and twisted me like a Fruit Roll-Up into one arm.
“I’m as gay as they come!”
I unraveled. I think I would have preferred to have been dropped.
3
My grandparents spoke little English, and lived with us while I grew up. Their presence guaranteed my fluency in Hindi and ensured a steady supply of Bollywood movies in the house. In comparison with what they considered morally questionable Hollywood films, the predictability of Indian cinema must have comforted them. Because while the actors rotate, the story never changes.
Bad first impressions inspire mutual disgust between the bratty rich girl and the rebel boy from the wrong side of the tracks. This disgust evolves through flirtation into puppy love, after she offers her silk scarf to bandage his wound one day, which he earned while fixing the engine of her car that had coincidentally broken down by the side of the road right in front of his home. The pair falls in love and meets in secret to perform choreographed dance numbers. Changing outfits between the ballads they sing at river banks and on mountaintops, they end each number with an almost-but-not-quite kiss, while peasants dance spontaneously around them. All hell breaks loose when their fathers—inevitably embroiled in a vendetta which began long before they were born—learn of their torrid romance. Someone fights, someone is kidnapped and someone is warned to stay away from the girl. Girl throws tantrum, mother shares wisdom, and after more fighting, someone is nearly killed. The parents decide to forget about the past, agreeing that love matters most, and throwing an enormous wedding, with more dancing, much singing and still no kissing.
Basically, it’s Romeo and Juliet with more choreography and less sexual content. And unlike Romeo and Juliet, Bollywood lovers always have a happy ending. My parents had an arranged marriage in India approximately two weeks after their parents introduced them. They don’t use a word like love, but my father cannot sleep when my mother is ill, and I have never seen her sip her morning tea without him. To say publicly that they loved each other, my father once told me, would be like taking out a press release to announce that water was wet.
No man had ever understood why I cling to the idea of a happy ending, even as I claim to have accepted the slim chances of it. These guys told me that I made no sense, or that my fixation on how things ought to be could easily mean I’d end up alone. Lately I worried that if they turned out to be right, I would have no one to blame but myself.
Well, that will teach me not to use an eyelash curler, I thought, blinking rapidly while I ran toward the coat check. Judging by the expressions of the hotel guests I rushed past, I must have looked a mess. Conveniently, the eyelash which came loose as I f led the dance floor had settled across the inner rim of my eyelid. And barring a knuckle to my socket, nothing was gonna pull that sucker out. With mascara streaming down my quivering left cheek, I fought off the beginnings of a facial spasm. For anyone who resents our shiny, f lowing locks, let me assure you: What Indian women save in trips to tanning booths and melanoma clinics, we lose in the battle against our follicles. All that waxing, plucking, threading and tweezing could reduce a grown man to tears.
I banged on the courtesy bell while leaning into the coatroom, searching for some hint of a coat check girl.
“Vina.” My mother grabbed me by the arm and yanked me around to face her. “Vot are you dewing hir?” When her voice developed the Punjabi twang, it always meant I had stepped out of line.
“Looking for a coat check girl.” I avoided her eyes.
“Vee thot something had gone wrong.” She overgestured. “You just ran off and left poor Prakash standing like a dummy on the dance floor! Papa thought you had an upset stomach, but I assumed you were feeling sick from those ten martinis.”
“It was three martinis, Mother.” I rubbed my right arm below the shoulder. For four feet and ten inches of relatively sedentary maternal mass, she was actually freakishly strong.
“And this is something forr a vooman to be proud off?”
“No.” I banged not-so-courteously on the bell, and noticed that my throat was feeling tight.
“Oh, beti.” She softened, her face melting into concern. “Are you all right?” Clearly she had misinterpreted the state of my face.
“Yes, Mom.” I took a breath and faked a smile. “I’m fine.”
“Come here.” She produced a handkerchief from behind her bra strap, and proceeded to dab at my cheek.
“Mom.” I jerked my head away, like an adolescent avoiding a maternal spit-shine. “I’m fine.”
“If you are fine, then why are you leaving?” Her eyebrows arched. “Did he do something wrong?”
“No, Mom.” I shook my head. “It’s nothing like that. Prakash was a total gentleman.”
“Then explain your behavior, Vina.” She gathered up the pleats of her sari, and ref lung it over a shoulder, before settling a hand on each hip. “Why are you behaving this way? Don’t you know how much of an insult this is to his family? In front of everyone?”
“Mom, trust me. We’re not a match.”
“Vy not, Vina? Tell me vy not? You are both Indian, and professional, and he is very handsome, and he comes from a good family. Vot more do you vont? And please, Vina, don’t start talking about your so-called Chemistry and Love. You are not a child, and you know that these things take time. Your father is going to ask me why you are being so unreasonable.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or…wait a minute. You didn’t say anything wrong, did you?”
I gritted my teeth.
“No, Mom. Of course not. Of course I didn’t say anything wrong.” I couldn’t stop blinking, or cursing myself for choosing this nightmare over Cristy’s rodeo. “The problem with Prakash is that he’s…”
“There you are!”
“Oh! Hello, beta. How are you?” my mother cooed at Prakash. It was a frighteningly instant transformation.
“Hello, Auntie. You must be Vina’s mother. It’s very nice to meet you. That’s a lovely sari you’re wearing. Is it organza? It must have been made in Delhi, right? My mother says that you can’t find such good quality anywhere in New York, Jackson Heights or otherwise.”
He was shameless. She was beaming. I was at a loss.
“Thank you, beta. Thank you. I’ll go and say hello to your father.” She smiled. I tugged at my eyelid, which made a sucking noise. Glaring at me before she spun on her heels, my mother bounced giddily away. I rolled my eyes and gave up on the coat check girl, opting instead to search for a concierge.
Prakash whispered, while he watched my mother depart: “Vina, we have to talk.”
I paused, and twisted my neck toward him. “We? There is no we, you lunatic. Meanwhile, you and I have nothing to say to each other.” I pivoted away from him.
“You have to listen to me!” He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me backward through the doorway of the coatroom. My cheek spasmed, my eye twitched and I struggled for breath. Being half-blind, half-drunk and immobilized by my four-inch heels, I forgot all my fight-or-f light instincts. So rather than reacting I chose to hyperventilate, while trying to remember the protocol. Was I supposed to poke himin the groin? Knee him in the eyes? Kick him in the gut? Twist and pull? Scream for help? Stop, drop and roll?
“Vina, you don’t understand!” he said, cornering me in the small room.
Hoping for an emergency exit nearby, I lost balance and fell into a pile of coats. Prakash collapsed on top of me. The snapping of my left heel was practically expected, but the groping by the coats I landed on was most certainly not. Rolling Prakash off of myself, I struggled to my feet, and sprang into a defensive judo-stance. (Note to self: Stay away from Austin Powers reruns on cable.)
From below the pile of coats, a giggle and a pair of heads emerged. And one of the heads had something to say for itself. “Heeeeeey baby, don’t be like that. There’s always room for one more person at this party.”
I blinked to confirm what I was witnessing: the missing coat check girl grinning over a bare shoulder while straddling the bartender, who raised an eyebrow as soon as he noticed that I wasn’t alone. And I could’ve sworn I heard him add, “Or room for two more, should I say?” as I darted for the door.
With one hand to my forehead, I sprinted across the lobby, slowing only to throw the broken shoe into the trash. Soon enough I tripped on the other one, and crashed into the lobby’s glass doors, badly skinning my knee. Rather than taking the moment to feel sorry for myself, I remembered that Prakash was close behind. I clambered to my feet, threw open the doors and leaped into a waiting taxi, with just enough time to hurl my other heel out the window before the cab driver gunned the gas.
“My parents don’t know that I’m gay,” Prakash yelled at the window as the cab began to pull away.
“I don’t know why he thinks that’s my problem,” I told the cabbie, who grinned and whisked me safely home.
4
“Chica, who has time for a four-hour Sunday brunch and still manages to pay their rent in this town? That’s what I want to know.” Cristina dragged a chair over to our table at Starbucks. She paused to lay her cell phone and her BlackBerry beside my own, and then checked her pulse on a wrist sensor before acknowledging Pamela. “Oh, no offense, Pam.”
Cristina had an obsessive relationship with her physical fitness, but she also had a point. She and I had spent the better part of our Sundays during the last four years hidden in our offices, catching up on work before Monday morning. In our industry, that didn’t make us competitive; it made us competent. And in an effort to burn off some of the resulting stress, Cristina had become a genius at self-defense. She mastered everything from model-mugging (assault scenarios simulated by mock-attackers in padded suits) to Krav Maga (hand-to-hand combat training based on the principles of the Israeli national army). An even more unfortunate habit of hers was using Spanish words and phrases when trying to convince me of something. She was reminding me of that additional camaraderie all ethnic women supposedly shared. It was unforgivably manipulative. Sure, I had thrown in the occasional Schmoopie or Honey when trying to steer a steak-loving boyfriend toward a Thai restaurant (because the variety would make him a better man), or to convince him that rubbing my feet could stave off the effects of carpal tunnel (I swear, I had read that somewhere). But I would never have stooped so low as to use any of these tactics on my girls.
Pam, on the other hand, hailed from a very different school of thought; a school that didn’t bear the burden of rent. Her father—still guilt-ridden over leaving her mother for an au pair twenty years ago—bought her a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side as a college graduation present. The arrangement kept her in clothing that Cristina and I wouldn’t dare buy for ourselves, even though we each earned roughly three times Pamela’s salary. But I guess Pam needed it more than we did; Chanel, Gucci and Polo were standard dress code at Windsors, the devastatingly upper-crust art auction house where she worked for pennies, and the occasional invite to some of the swankiest social events this side of the Riviera. It was a good arrangement for Cristy and myself, too, since some of those invitations trickled down to us. Each event held the promise of champagne and the company of international aristotrash who probably assumed that our presence meant we were royalty ourselves.
“None taken.” Pamela waved the comment away like so many pesky fruit f lies, and then scrunched up her nose and peered suspiciously into the whipped cream covering my Caramel Macchiato. “Is that decaf?”
“Yes. It is.” I stirred the caramel carefully, trying not to risk whipped cream deflation. Then I realized I should probably have resented the judgment in her tone. “So what?”
Despite the god-awful preppy clothing Pamela had seemed to know it all nine years ago, when she strolled into my freshman dorm room. It was day two of the fall semester. She breezed in, made herself comfortable among my unopened boxes, pointed to a literature textbook and asked if I was taking the Friday class with Professor Feineman. I nodded. It was a bad idea, she told me, unless I wanted to miss out on Thursday-night parties just to be awake in time for the only 8:00 a.m. class requiring attendance. As effortlessly as she said it, she lifted a heap of Ramen noodles neatly into her mouth, using chopsticks. Never having seen anyone my own age handle them properly before, I naturally assumed this was a woman from whom I could learn. Time cured me of that misconception, but Pamela’s perspective had narrowed while her opinions had sharpened with age.
“So…you never drink decaf.” Cristina sided with the enemy.
“Yes, I drink decaf.” I scrolled through old messages on my BlackBerry.
“When?” Pam asked, picking imaginary lint off of my shoulder. “When do you drink it?”
“I don’t know…sometimes. Who cares when I drink it? Why does it matter?”
“Hijole…because you’ve been acting weird lately, and we’re worried about you.” Cristina thrust her chin out at me.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the problem? Maybe I don’t want to get myself all riled up.”
“All riled up…with coffee? Most of your blood has already been replaced by it, Vina. And do you even hear yourself? You sound like you’re about sixty years old.”
“Decaf is not like you, Vina,” Pam interrupted, “any more than letting your parents set you up on a blind date is. And you know that I don’t have anything against you meeting potentially compatible guys. However, we want to talk about what’s really been going on with you. You’ve been frazzled lately.”
Frazzled? I thought. If they had any idea what I had gone through before I arrived at Starbucks that morning, they would consider me incomprehensibly composed.
Three hours earlier, I was feeling even more exposed before a larger and more sympathetic audience. I probably could have been better prepared, but who would’ve guessed that there were so many “Closeted Claustrophobes” in New York City?
“I, umm…my name is Maria,” I had stuttered when thirty pairs of eyes collided upon me. “And I’m a Closeted Claustrophobe. It’s been about eight hours since my last attack.” I cleared my throat, making a mental note to make sure none of these weirdos tried to follow me home.
Admitting that I had a problem was difficult enough. I didn’t see the need to share my name with the motley crew who had gathered in the basement of St. Agnes’ 13th Street Church that Sunday morning. I could just imagine being outed when I bumped into one of these lost souls while strolling through Bergdorf’s with my mother. You wouldn’t have to struggle to fill your time with such silly things if you were married and settled into life, she would explain, before shaking her head at whatever heels I was considering, and strolling off in search of a Talbots.
Emotional problems, according to my parents, were a luxury of the lazy, self-indulgent American. I had learned this early about my parents, and decided around the same time that the best way to maneuver my Indian and American cultural identities would be to keep certain things about myself to myself. I knew that I had overreacted in the coatroom. And I was as sure that I needed help as I was mortified to have finally come looking for it. Twisting in my plastic seat, I cupped the bruise on my knee while committing the Five Cs of the Closeted Claustrophobes to memory: Check for exits, Close your eyes, Count to ten, Calm your nerves, Center yourself.
Delilah, the middle-aged receptionist who spoke before me, teared up twice while describing the torture of her cramped bus ride. Arthur, the elderly man preceding her, explained how his frustration over claustrophobia had resulted in an anger management problem, which was magnified by his Tourettes, and had effectively ended his acting career. Already I was glad that I had come, since I didn’t have it nearly as bad as any of these freaks. Things were going smoothly, especially in comparison to my first attempt at one of these meetings. Three months earlier I stopped short of entering the doorway when I overheard the Rage-aholics director threatening the Claustrophobes director with physical harm unless he surrendered the larger, first-floor room to the Fear of Heights support group, whose director was his ex-wife.
I was wondering how the albino to my left could call himself claustrophobic, given such a determined obliviousness to my right of personal space, when I saw a familiar figure coming through the door. It was my cousin, Neha.
“The government stole my shoes!” Arthur announced without warning, startling everyone, including himself.
I was halfway to the Starbucks before my seat had probably gone cold.
“He’s gay?” Cristina blurted out, nearly choking on her drink. “Wow…I knew your parents were a little out of touch with what you’re looking for in a man, but that’s ridiculous!”
“Obviously they didn’t know he was gay.” I spoke up to dismiss the uninvited pity rushing at me from our neighbors.
“Do his parents know?” Pam leaned in and whispered, as if the topic were a ref lection on her.
“Of course not.”
“Que locura,” Cristina decided. “That’s pretty twisted. So much for counting on those underground, Indian-network background checks.”
“There is nothing underground about the Indian network,” I tried to explain. “And it has nothing to do with the background check, anyway. As far as the background check went, everything was perfect. Generally, Indian parents don’t consider, or even think about, their children’s sexualities or sexual preferences. Some things are just assumed.”
“Seriously.” Pam shook her head at Cristy, ignoring me entirely. “You said he was thirty, right? Talk about living in denial.”
Was she referring to Prakash’s parents or to him? In a way, I felt bad for the guy; I could relate. Our parents grew up in a culture that rejected the concepts of premarital sex and romance. Non-arranged marriages occurred so infrequently among their generation that they were referred to as “love marriages.” Like most first-generation Indian-Americans, I had come to accept that my parents could never acknowledge my premarital sexuality any more than Prakash’s parents could comprehend his homosexuality.
My theories on the value of self-discovery through romantic misadventure were lost on mom and dad, so I kept my mouth shut about my relationships, especially the fifty percent that involved non-Indian boys. And somewhere around age fifteen I decided to take the same stance on my claustrophobia.
“Look, I’m not pissed off that he’s gay.” I concentrated on my empty cup. “I’m pissed off that he led me on.”
“What a tease.” Cristina grinned.
“Basically,” I said, sitting up straighter. “But it doesn’t matter. Prakash was only a blip on my radar. An irrelevant data point. My plan holds.”
Two blank pairs of eyes stared back at me.
“Oh, God. Are you still talking about that ‘thirty months until thirty’ garbage?” Cristina practically yelled.
“First of all, it’s not garbage. Ignoring my biological clock won’t make it go away. And I’m finished wasting time. I have to be honest with myself.” I raised my chin toward Pamela. “And I know you can at least understand where I’m coming from.”
To Pamela, thirty and alone was roughly translated as homeless and afflicted with a disfiguring, terminal, sexually transmitted disease. She had been engaged-to-be-engaged with William, a Harvard-educated lawyer of the lightly pin-striped variety, since the beginning of time; or at least since the beginning of college, when she woke up in his bed on the morning after the Head of the Charles regatta. Although it never occurred to her to question his claim that his parents’ divorce made him maritally gun-shy, I was sure that it also never occurred to her that there was anything wrong with treating the search for a mate like the search for an apartment. A good deal was a good deal, period. And the potential for long-term appreciation far outweighed momentary attractiveness.
“You’re right, Vina. I do understand where you’re coming from. And I do not want to see you single at thirty.” She eyed me like a child who had lodged a marble up her own nose. “I also agree with you that we should all be honest with ourselves. So let’s be honest…let’s talk about what this is really about. Jon.”
5
I once broke up with a man for asking if I spoke “Indian.” He wasn’t kidding, so I asked him with a straight face if he spoke “White.” He didn’t get it. That was my cue to leave. On the other end of the spectrum, I once dated an Englishman who had me groping desperately for my can of mace the moment I entered his apartment. He had collected more Indian paraphernalia than was probably ever assembled outside the Subcontinent by anyone who was not, in fact, Indian. He acted completely nonchalant when he struck up a conversation at the bar, made no mention of his fascination with the country, yet he had filled his apartment with everything from statues of Ganesha to an old-fashioned Jhoola chair to wall-hangings depicting village women dancing while balancing water pots on top of their heads.
He offered me some chai without even a hint of irony, and that was when I decided I wasn’t sticking around to hear his Hannibal impersonation. Perhaps he was a perfectly normal guy, and perhaps he merely liked the Indian designs. (And perhaps I’m actually a natural blonde.) Though if that were true, he should have told me before we got to his place. Surprises are not acceptable in New York City. And as all interracial daters already know, or will soon find out, Ethnic Fetishizers cannot be trusted. I cannot tell you whether or not he knew that Bollywood wasn’t an alternative to Sandal, or if there was a shrine to Indian women in his bedroom. What I can tell you is that I was out of there faster than you can say Samosa.
Little things are always symptomatic of a larger emotional disconnect. Of course, none of this was ever a problem with Jon. He didn’t expect me to belly dance or snake charm or glide into physically impossible sexual maneuvers, which I presumably picked up from the Kama Sutra classes I’d attended while the other kids were in Sunday school. The men who believe that sort of thing are easy to spot; they’re the same ones who claim that “all women are three margaritas away from a lesbian experience.”
Jon asked me questions about me and my family, and he seemed genuinely interested in my answers. Without consulting me, he bought a Hindi for Beginners book and began working choice words and phrases into our everyday conversation. But he also spoke Spanish, French and Italian to me. For all I knew, he was calling me his Little Subway Token most of the time. But if you had seen his smile, you, too, would have gladly answered to anything from Microwave Oven to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, wagged your imaginary tail and drooled all over his Armani shirt. And you, too, would have ignored all the logic against falling in love with a man who was so totally wrong for you. When we met, he was a former chef who owned his own restaurant. Being with him made me feel sophisticated, as if I was physically incapable of spilling anything on myself.
If it hadn’t been for his not cluing in to the fact that my eggs were expiring by the minute, we would probably still be together. Well, that, and if I hadn’t mistaken his cell phone for my own on that godforsaken morning two weeks earlier.
The day had started out like any other. I was running late for work and cursing myself for hitting the snooze button so many times. The twist that morning was an unexpected visit from my neighbor, Christopher, who f lamed so brightly that he sometimes threatened to set the building on fire. His natural sense of style and inability to keep his couture judgments to himself made me feel like less of a woman, and left me no choice but to ignore his prior attempts to befriend me. So you can imagine how surprised I was to find him waiting outside my door at eight o’clock with a story about a last-minute business trip (Did accountants really have those?) and a wheezing, unimpressed Booboo in his arms. Agreeing to cat-sit may only have been the first in a number of suboptimal choices I made that day, but as it turns out, it wasn’t just me. The entire city was off-kilter that day. Without thinking, and because I was then running even later for work, I agreed, despite my chocolate-brown sofa, to take the fluffy white Persian into my home.
The time it took to get the pudgy little boarder settled precluded my Starbucks stop, so I was at the mercy of the Krispy Kremes, which materialized in our conference room before each Monday-morning team meeting. Sarah, the only other woman on our team, shot an irritated look at me for the crime of inquiring if there were “anything chocolate” left in the box. A former professional golfer who’d gone back to her MBA after an injury, Sarah had recently joined our company in Equity Research. While she was a nice person, if you asked me, Sarah was completely ill-equipped for the world beyond sports. She cursed like a sailor, slapped indiscriminant high fives, and called everyone Dude. Some women believe that in order to compete with a man, you must essentially become one. But then again, some women refuse the epidural.
Question: Wouldn’t you like to be more like a man?
Answer: Why would I want to be hairier, lonelier and more confused than I already am?
The rest of the team shook their heads at my request, but Sarah made her opinion clear. Even in an office where most men had their shoes shined, their backs waxed, their suits tailored and their personal trainers on speed-dial, my obsessive culinary peccadilloes made me a disgrace to feminists everywhere.
“It’s not easy being you, is it?” she said, pouting in my direction.
Peter, a fellow Associate, looked up from his copy of TheEconomist; Denny, a lowly Analyst, swallowed half of a jelly doughnut and Wade, the eager Intern, stopped midsip of his coffee. All eyes around the conference table focused on me, but before I could respond the overhead lights flickered off. Everyone glanced up at the ceiling, and the lights flickered back on for a second, before f lashing out again. The digital wall-clock followed suit, as did the Bloomberg terminal.
Dropping my honey-glazed, I swung the door open and stepped into a darkened office. To my surprise, my otherwise narcissistically-hyper-functioning, Type-A-personality colleagues stood dumbfounded, searching one another’s faces for answers. United in temporary paralysis because of the loss of our Internet connection, we huddled around a secretary’s CB radio. That’s when the crackling voice of a lone CNN reporter explained that through a series of technological mishaps at grid centers across the northeastern United States, the juice had been sucked out of the region.
Within minutes we were headed for the darkened stairwell, since elevators are not an option when someone turns out the lights in New York City. We made our way down each f light single file, relying solely on the sounds of each other’s footsteps to avoid a collision. As my forehead began beading over with sweat, I swallowed hard and chose to rely on the Closeted Claustrophobes’ mantra to keep my mind in focus: Check for exits, Close your eyes, Count to ten, Calm your nerves, Center yourself. My team’s co-managing director, Alan, walked before me, and my partner Peter followed close behind. With our palms on the walls and railings, we made it down the first twelve floors without incident. Clearly, it was too good to last. Thanks to my batlike auditory skills and my nearly four-inch alligator pumps, it was the tenth-floor landing that did me in. I must have miscounted the stairs because my right leg stopped short and sent me doubling over. Knees buckled and back bent, I thrust my arms out before me and grabbed instinctively for something that might break my fall. I won’t mention which part of Alan’s lower anatomy did the trick, but I will say, Thank God I didn’t squeeze any tighter.
That blackout was proof positive that New Yorkers cannot be trusted in the dark. They’re almost as mischievous as Australians are in the light. Once we made it outside, I apologized profusely for sexually harassing my own boss, who refused to make eye contact with me.
“Ahem…Never mind, Vina…Let’s just forget about it, okay?” Alan mumbled, before disappearing into the hordes surrounding our building.
I waded through thousands of ornery businesspeople boiling in their suits and trekked the five avenues and ten blocks toward my apartment. Along the way, I arrived at the surprising conclusion that an alligator pump is in fact the most appropriate shoe for a crisis situation in this city. Because the most effective way to express your discontent when someone gropes you in a crowd is to jam your heel into that person’s foot as hard as you possibly can and twist it, like you’re putting out a cigarette.
It took all of my strength to complete the final stretch: the ten-flight hike up an unlit stairwell to my place. It wasn’t until I stood before the comfort of my front door that the mounting tension in my neck began to drain out of me; here I would be safe. As soon as I was through the door, I wrenched off my shoes and I promptly f lung them across the room. That was the moment I remembered my little houseguest, because I nailed him right between the eyes. Booboo let out a squeal that made me wonder whether there wasn’t a small child hiding in all that fur, and darted straight under my bed.
I spent the next half hour lying on my belly, peering under my bed and pleading with Booboo to come out. He stared at me maliciously, blinking away the dust bunnies, and yawning or repositioning himself occasionally on top of my shoes. Eventually, I gave up on the niceties and decided to make a grab for him. Taking a deep breath to prepare for what should have been an elegant gesture, I lunged at him. I shoved my entire arm in his direction, until my head banged against the bed frame.
“Raaaaaargh!!!!” He growled what I could only imagine was Booboo in cat-speak, and scratched my forearm.
“Shit!” I yelled, and recoiled from the bed, with my eyes watering.
This was the problem with being Super Woman’s only daughter. With thirty months to spare until age thirty, my mother had fine-tuned the balance of home and career, secured the illusion of waking up with meticulous makeup, and mastered the art of willing my pancakes down off the kitchen ceiling mere moments after I threw them up there. I, on the other hand, at the same point in my life, was reverse-sexually-harassing my way out of a career I didn’t honestly enjoy and while swooning over one homosexual man, was failing miserably in my attempt to win the affections of the wheezing, fifteen-pound cat of another. Honestly, it was a wonder that I could even feed myself.
Whether or not I look the part, I hail from a long line of loan sharks. My father has planned to make this one of his sound bytes when the New York Times interviews him in ten years, for a two-page spread about his daughter, the globe-trotting financier. Betel-chewing, bindi-wearing, and almost always below five feet tall, most of the women in my ancestral tree had arrived at their careers in high (or more accurately, low) finance by way of necessity, rather than choice. Practicality rules when you are widowed young in parts of Punjab where remarriage is as much of an option as a sex change. The tradition was to borrow against what little land their husbands had left them, and then loan to the poorer of their villages at three times the banks’ normal rates. Pragmatism is what we know. So it was probably less than incredible that, despite my skant affection for the industry, I had managed to thrive on Wall Street.
Most people in my life had no idea what I actually did for a living; nor did they care to find out. And I didn’t blame them. They were better off clinging to some airbrushed notion of what my days as an investment banker were really like. Essentially, I did the research that helped my bosses decide which stocks to invest in, and when. Sometimes it involved speaking with the management of public companies, who either eyed me like an Omaha Steak or dismissed me entirely. At other times it involved combing through mountains of reports on an industry to develop a reasonable opinion about where it was headed.
Typically, I would spend a week researching before I presented a conclusion to my bosses, who often patted me on the back, or otherwise told me the reasons why they believed that I was wrong, if they felt like explaining themselves. Soon thereafter, the market would always prove them right. Apparently, this was good training for the day when, if I was lucky, I would become one of them. It wasn’t being corrected that bothered me so much as it was being wrong. Regardless, my plan was to stick with the job, act like I enjoyed it and apply to business school within a few years.
After earning my MBA, I could start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I would have been a supermodel, but the six-inch heels I’d need just to reach up to the average model’s elbow ended that fantasy. Thanks to the same genes, I was far better suited for sneaking under turnstiles than for strutting across runways.
And I would have been a novelist, but there were other genetic predispositions to consider. My father hadn’t come to this country with eleven dollars in his pocket thirty years ago, mopped floors at a supermarket, begged for an entry-level engineer’s position, tolerated racism and ignorance and decades of struggle, started a business and saved enough to send his daughter to an Ivy League college, only to watch her give up a career of which he could only have dreamed all those years ago.
Another reason why I survived in investment banking was because early on I had learned the folly of questioning the judgment of the people in control.
“This is a waste of her time,” I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother, when she mentioned my excitement over the prospect of entering a poem in a fifth-grade writing competition. “It is not practical, and we should not encourage her in it.”
“Oh, don’t be so serious, Sushil,” my mother replied from the kitchen, while I squeezed my head through the bars of the banister to get within closer earshot. “It’s just a writing contest.”
“It is not just a writing contest, Shardha. It is a signal. And it is a waste of her time. These are important years. She should be working on her Math Olympiad, or on the Spelling Bee. Why should we train her to care what these so-called judges think? Her teacher is no Professor of Literature. He is there to teach her Mathematics and Science and History. Anyway, writing is something where there is never an absolute score. It cannot get her into good colleges. It is a waste of her time.”
“Sushil, be reasonable. I cannot tell her no after I have already told her yes. She’s very enthusiastic. She wrote some poem about Reality, and I think it’s very clever for her age.”
“That is all fine. Yet I do not agree with it. You and I both know that the world does not value these things. They value success that can be measured. We know this. We have seen this. Why should we send our daughter into such a struggling life?”
“Teekh hai,” she agreed. “Perhaps you have a point. Though we cannot do anything about it now. And keep your voice down. She just went up to bed.”
“Chuhlow, fine. But my daughter will not be a writer.”
“And I will not reheat your Rotis if they get cold while you are prolonging this discussion. Let’s eat in peace, okay?”
To my eleven-year-old ears, the distinction between a father’s protectiveness and dismissal of my interest in writing wasn’t exactly clear. What was clear was that he had tried to prevent me from doing something, so I had to do it anyway. I proudly entered my poem “Is This Reality?” into the contest. Based on a dream I had, the poem was made up of questions about what proof we had that our world wasn’t some other child’s dream, and whether or not that child could end our world just by waking up.
The next day, Mr. Kronin called me over to his desk to tell me that it was all right to feel angry and confused about the world, and to ask if I was interested in speaking with the school psychiatrist. Obviously, this was not the response I had hoped for. You talk to the psychiatrist, I screamed, before running to the bus and crying all the way home. If this was what writing would lead to, I told myself, I wanted no part of it.
“Sometimes it’s not the best thing to share these kinds of feelings,” my mother tried to console me. “Because it is not always guaranteed that everyone will understand it. And that can hurt your feelings. But I’m sure that Mr. Kronin didn’t mean it. Not everybody knows what a special girl you are, beti…like we do.”
Burying my head in my pillow, I scooted closer to my Nani. Mom and Dad took the hint and left us alone.
“Vina, you must not be angry with your parents.”
“I hate it that they were right,” I told her defiantly.
“Beti, they don’t want to be right. They want you to be successful.”
I pulled the covers over my face.
“Try to understand….This is the way that it is in India. Boys and girls must choose which line they will take in the eighth grade…either science for medicine or math for engineering. They start preparations for college early. And your parents want to make life easier for you. It’s the same way as they corrected your hands.”
I came out from under the covers. “What?”
“You don’t know this, but you were naturally left-handed as a child, so they corrected you.”
“How?”
“When you were very small, they told you ‘No’ every time you used the left hand. They wanted to make your life easier because the world is built for right-handed people. See? You don’t even remember being left-handed.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Beti, good girls trust their parents.”
I stood corrected, again. And this time there was no point in arguing. It was better not to waste time questioning those who knew more than I did about things like school. They were clearly more intelligent than I was or ever would be, at anything. On that particular lesson, it turned out, I was a pretty fast learner.
6
On the afternoon of the blackout I was still sitting on the floor, examining the wound from Booboo’s outburst, when I heard a familiar voice.
“Vina? You okay?” The voice came from the hallway outside my apartment.
I knew that it was him by his footsteps, and by the way that he left out the verb to save time. Jon had used his elbow to prop himself against my door frame, so his palm obstructed my view when I swung the door open. I was always a sucker for breathless and brave. But he was also sweaty. I imagined him running the twenty blocks between his restaurant and my building, and the ten f lights up to my door. Love is the only thing in life that is not anticlimactic; and as much as I hated to admit it, seeing him in my doorway made me feel like I was home.
Jon was tall, dark and Sicilian, in that broad-shouldered, olive-complexioned sort of a way, so I often told myself that we looked good together. We met in his restaurant, Peccavi, eighteen months ago when I requested a rare vintage of Chateau Cabrieres for myself and my girlfriends. He complimented my choice while personally delivering the wine to our table, and stayed to chat us up and steal a glance down my blouse. I’m the first to admit that I was not above doing whatever I could to make it easier for him. I’ve got to use these puppies while they’ve still got the inclination to stand and salute.
Eventually, he gave me his business card with the following scrawled across the back: “Bella, I would love to continue our conversation alone, some other time.”
I called three days later (sending the message that I was interested, but not desperate), and refused a Saturday-night date but agreed to an early dinner on Sunday (making it clear that while I was far too fabulous to have a Saturday night unbooked four days in advance, I wasn’t dating anyone exclusively enough to have my Sunday evenings reserved).
He wooed me expertly from the start, which naturally made me uncomfortable; would Chinese takeout and a rental of Say Anything be too pedestrian for him? After our first dinner, he draped his jacket around my shoulders as we strolled through Central Park. Then he kissed me, after holding my face in his hands, looking into my eyes and smiling in a way that asked for my permission.
“Do you think he’s embarrassed?” he had asked me, as we passed by a dog who stared at us with one leg raised, peeing against a tree.
Emotional risk-taking never came easily to me. My plan was to have a few months of fun with the big, sexy man, and (All together now…) “to keep it casual.” A year later, I was drafting speeches that might dissuade my parents from disowning me for bringing home an Italian and an engagement ring. Since I had already ventured so far outside my original romantic parameters, I even surprised myself by deciding to end our relationship over his disinterest in my ticking biological clock. One of the few things I knew I wanted for sure in this life was a child. So I had broken up with Jon in a no-fault sort of a way. He got Anne & Marie, the CD we purchased from the band we saw in Vermont on our inaugural weekend getaway. I got David and Melissa, the couple we met at the weekly Latin Dance class he had suggested. And I thought we had split the regrets right down the middle. I thought a lot of things back then and I ignored his attempts to reach out and get back together. A clean break, I reasoned, was the best way to end something that was never supposed to have begun at all. I was the picture of restraint: totally successful in ignoring the chocolates, the e-mails and the phone calls day and night. What I mean to say is that I was totally successful, until he showed up at my door in the middle of that blackout.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay, I guess.” He gasped for breath, wiping his face like the fireman had in that movie Cristina gave me last Christmas.
“Thanks, Jon.” I smoothed the hair off of my face. “That’s sweet of you. Come in.”
“You were at work when it happened, right? You okay for food and water here?” he asked, scanning the inside of my fridge, and the rest of my apartment, as if for intruders.
“Yeah, sure…I walked home from the office and I’ve got a bunch of water bottles, anyway,” I cleared my throat, “Listen, we might run out of water pressure in the bathrooms, and you’re pretty sweaty. So if you want, you can take a shower. There are clean towels in there.” It was odd to hear myself sound so casual with him.
“Thanks, I think I will. And you know,” he hesitated, “It’s good to see you. I mean, I miss you.”
Pamela refused to accept the breakup. Cristina suggested that I jump back on the horse, or at least the occasional cowboy. The thing was, I never gave Jon an ultimatum. I simply realized that he wasn’t interested in more than what we had; therefore, I figured I should look for someone who was. That was when I finally agreed to be set up on a blind date by my parents. I tried to explain all of this to him, but Jon insisted on believing that I was “going through a phase or something,” and still made numerous attempts to reconcile. He just wasn’t ready to take that step, he told me, but he was even less ready to let go of me.
Now that he was naked in my shower, I wondered if maybe he had been right. Or maybe I had been right; maybe if we got back together, he would acknowledge that he wanted me to bear his children and make an honest woman out of me.
Damn. I wanted to rip off all my clothes and climb into that shower after him. I laid a hand on the doorknob and closed my eyes to imagine it. I’d strip down and sneak into the bathroom, tapping him on the shoulder. He’d turn around and grab me, pulling me close. We’d devour each other, making love against all the slippery-wet walls of my bathroom. My hair and makeup would remain perfect. Steam would rise seductively to prevent anyone from seeing anything less than a completely aroused couple. The camera would fade out.
Of course, I reminded myself of the reality before taking that big step backward. Meaning, this scenario was nearly impossible to pull off without someone slipping, or banging against the faucet or dropping someone else on their ass. And even if none of those things happened, someone was sure to wind up with soapy water shooting directly into their eyes, or their nose, or both. Not sexy. I took my hand away from the doorknob—it was all for the best, I decided. I had no business following Jon into the shower, or anywhere else for that matter. I should be sitting on my couch and looking forward to that promising Indian lawyer my father had mentioned.
Yes. Exactly. But that shower did sound inviting. Oh, why not? What was stopping me? I was young and horny and nobody had made love to me in as long as I could remember. And I loved him. And he loved me. Why wasn’t that enough? Why did I always have to be so logical? Oh, all this emotional Ping-Pong was exhausting. I was not going to think about it anymore.
I grabbed some candles from my drawer, along with a set of matches, and left them by my bed. On the couch, I immersed myself in a staring contest with Booboo, who had found a stack of papers on my desk that seemed likely to hatch if warmed long enough. He had decided to oblige with his pudgy body, having already taken care of establishing dominance over me. Deciding that I could not drop Booboo’s gaze without somehow forfeiting total dominion over my apartment, I made no effort to acknowledge Jon’s emergence from the bathroom. He sat down on the couch beside me, and pulled my arm straight, to get a better look at Booboo’s handiwork. After disappearing again into the bathroom he returned, and knelt by the foot of the sofa. Then he unscrewed a tube of Neosporin and began dabbing it gently onto my wound. I looked over and couldn’t help being moved by how hard he was concentrating. And he must’ve sensed my gaze, because he looked up.
He brought my palm to his face, and kissed the middle of it, before tilting his head to rest his cheek inside. He had already parted my lips with his stare by the time his fingers grazed my jawbone. He laid the gentlest kiss on my lips, holding my face lightly in place, like a house of cards he was sheltering from the wind. He searched my eyes before letting his cheek glide along mine and finally burying his face in my hair. The familiar chill set in as he yanked my hips up and around so that I was straddling him.
We sat face to face and I admitted to myself then that I had decided to give in. It was one of those moments you wanted to savor, almost more so than the act, especially when you find yourself back in the arms that used to hold you. And that was how it went…as we wrapped ourselves around each other. As we pressed ourselves together, trying to merge. As his arms resettled among the familiar curves of my back, and his hands dove in and out of my hair, grabbing a clump firmly, and yanking backward to expose my neck for him. As we consumed each other, we took our time because there was nowhere else we would rather have been. He rose to his feet and I tightened the grip of my legs around his waist and allowed him to carry me toward my bed. And lay me down. And climb on top of me. And take me.
He crawled in through my eyes while repeating how much he had missed me. How glad he was that we were together again. This was how it was supposed to be, and he told me that I knew it. As we tumbled around fighting for control and for more of each other, I felt adored and completely, totally open. And even though it was my first, I kept thinking best blackout ever.
7
At the end of our second date so many moons before, Jon had invited me to his apartment.
“For a cup of coffee,” he had explained, “or maybe a glass of port.”
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “I can’t do it.” I avoided his eyes while my heels dodged the cracks in Prince Street.
“Why not?” He stopped, took my hands in his and smiled down at me. “You got another date comin’ over at midnight?”
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I barely know you.”
“Well, if you come back to my place,” he said, cocking his head to one side, “then I might let you get to know me.”
“And also perhaps find three heads in your freezer,” I completed his sentence.
He smirked and raised an eyebrow at me.
“I’m sorry, but I mean, you could be a cannibal…or a Republican. And my instincts are to trust you, but it’s too soon. This is New York,” I concluded. “I don’t make the rules.”
“Who does make the rules, then?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why can’t you make your own rules?” he asked, tucking my hand into his elbow as we continued walking.
“Because that’s not how it works. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not a woman.” I leaned my head on his shoulder as we turned a corner onto West Broadway.
“You got that right.” He tilted his head upward toward the moon. “And I like it that you’ve got morals. It’s a good thing. It’s refreshing.”
“Besides,” I added, “think of it this way—maybe I’m the crazy one. Maybe I’ve saved you the trouble of waking up alone, tied to your bed, feeling used, trying to decide whether you’re more insulted by the fact that you’re covered in raspberry jam, or that your f lat-screen TV is missing.”
When he arrived to pick me up for brunch two days later, Jon brought along a bouquet of white lilies. Pinned to the cellophane was a Polaroid of the inside of his freezer, containing only two frozen lasagnas and a copy of that morning’s New York Times. This was a man I had every reason to believe I could trust.
It was the morning after the blackout, and I nearly tumbled out of bed to grab my cell phone. I often slept closer to the window than to the bedside table, but since Jon had already slipped into the shower, the ringing jolted me out of my comfortable state of goofy-grinned, postcoital malaise. He had sprung out of bed muttering about how the lack of electricity for the alarm had caused him to sleep late. As he scrambled around the apartment in search of his clothes, I grabbed his watch off the bedside table, squinted and announced that it was eleven a.m. Since the city was still shut down, I told him, there probably wouldn’t be any customers lined up yet for lunch outside Peccavi. Then I settled into the spot where he had been sleeping, and drifted back into my dreams. In the moment between waking up and opening my eyes, I could smell him on myself. The walls were red, the air was still and I was back in love—that suspension of disbelief, borne of instinct, nursed on hormones, cloaked in a warm, blinding light. I grabbed and f lipped open the cell phone.
“Hello?” I chirped as if I was the lady of the house, savoring her rockin’ tan the morning after she had had her way with the pool boy.
“Hello?” the caller asked.
“Um, yes, hello. Who is this?” I sat up in bed, pulling the sheet over my breasts even though I was alone, and began to finger the knots out of my hair.
“Who is this?”
“Well,” I joked, determined not to let the caller’s attitude ruin my morning, “you called my cell phone, so you probably already know who I am.”
“No,” she explained as if I were riding the short bus, “I called Jon’s cell phone.”
Assuming she was a salesperson or an investor in the restaurant, I chose not to accept the negative energy. I would kill her with kindness instead.
“Oops, I’m sorry. I must have thought that his was mine. His phone, I mean. We have the same cell phone. Anyway, he’s in the bathroom. But I can give him a message,” I cooed, scrambling naked around my apartment in search of a pen, and feeling like the Lady of My Own House again. “Who may I say was calling?”
Booboo watched my stumbling from underneath the desk chair, tentatively, as if preparing to pounce.
“Lissette. The mother of his son, that’s who. Who the hell are you?”
I doubled over.
Have you ever seen a photo of someone you used to belong to, and wondered if that’s really how they looked? So strong was my faith in the decency of this man that I might have been less shocked if advised by my pedicurist that she had discovered an additional toe. I was aware that the sentiment made me a cliché, but all I could take in at that moment was how much I hated that I had no idea.
His what?!?!?! Whose son? Wait a minute…“son”? Wait…What? Even as my throat was swelling shut, I kept trying and failing to swallow.
“Hello? Hello?” she asked again. “Who is this?” She sounded like someone who might punch me in the face over a pair of shoes on clearance at Macy’s.
“I, um…this is Vina,” I managed, eyeing the bathroom door and wondering if I should tell her anything else. Feeling dizzy, I had to take a seat.
“I…I didn’t realize he had a girlfriend,” I continued, squeezing my eyes shut. “Or wife? Or, um…look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to know. I mean, I’m not sorry…I didn’t know about you or the…the baby? Believe me. I’ll give Jon your message. And I’ll throw him out. But can I just ask you something? How old is your kid? I mean, I know this is awkward. But I need to know.”
“Two months,” she replied after a pause. And then all I could hear was a dial tone ringing inside one ear and the glub, glub, glub of my own blood pulsing inside the other. Booboo yawned and stretched across the window sill, having had his fill of me. I thought that blood was supposed to be rushing right now, although I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be rushing toward. Mine seemed to be draining out of my head like beer from a bottle turned upside down.
I curled up naked on the couch, the cell phone pressed to my face. With my lips apart and a hand to my throat, I listened to the torrent of water from the shower, and speculated what would come next.
I always loved waking up in Jon’s bed to find our cell phone lights blinking in unison. It was as if they were dreaming the same dreams on the nightstand, of a charger for two plugged in beside the four-poster bed, in the master suite of our country home. My parents would complain about the lack of spice in the meals Jon conjured up from the ingredients in our backyard garden. An Amish handwoven straw mat, which was far too quaint for our Manhattan apartment, would welcome visitors at our door.
I missed waking up with him wrapped around me like a teddy bear, so that the hair of his forearms danced with my breath. I missed how he would tighten his grasp and pull me closer when I tried to get out of bed. When he slept, he looked like an angel to me, and when he woke, he would tickle me relentlessly. Grabbing my ankles and kissing my feet, he would ask how I managed to balance on a pair so small. When we went to bed angry, with our backs facing one another, his foot would search out my own during the night, coming to rest once it was wrapped around my ankle.
Jon was inside another woman when he was supposed to belong to me. So why did the thought of it make me feel so disgusting?
By the time he emerged from the bathroom the lights were back on, and I was determined not to let him see me cry. An hour ago I had belonged to him, but now he was a trespassing dog. And I was getting ready to fire a warning shot. I could get through this if it was quick; I would have to rip him off like a Band-Aid. I would not give in or attempt to rescue him when he squirmed. I would not give him the satisfaction of reacting to the knife that was sticking out of my heart.
“I don’t need anything from the store,” I told him flatly, while avoiding eye contact by feigning interest in Booboo’s attempts to scratch his way into my closet.
“Am I going to the store?” He cocked his head, perplexed.
“Well, I don’t know where else you’re gonna get diapers for your son.” I was as matter-of-fact as all hell.
He stood frozen with that idiotic smile erased, as if I had slapped it right off of his chin. Stupidly, typically, maternally, I felt sorry for him. Old habits linger even after they die. I bit my lip to stifle a tear, though I wasn’t sure which one of us it was for.
“Oh,” I added, my voice beginning to shake, “and Lissette called while you were in the shower. Don’t worry. I told her the lights are back on in midtown.”
The look on his face said the wind had been knocked out of him. The pain in my gut said it hadn’t been knocked hard enough. For a second I wished I were another woman, a woman who could take him back, or perhaps a woman who could ask for details that might make a difference. Was it a one-night stand or an actual affair? How did they meet? Was he in a relationship with her now? Did he love her? Was he really, really, really sorry?
Secretly I knew none of that mattered. I reminded myself that the baby was conceived while we were a couple, and I wondered if I was the last to know. Did everyone at the restaurant know? Had they been keeping it from me this entire time? Had Lissette known that I existed? I felt like Jon had tattooed his name on my butt while I was asleep, removed all my clothes in the middle of Times Square and invited a crowd over to point and laugh. In fact, that was exactly what he had done. Suddenly, I went into self-preservation mode, and I knew that I had to get him out of my home as soon as possible.
I opened my door and leaned against it. I felt sorry for him because I knew I could have loved him better than anyone. I hated him because of the fool he had made of me. I wanted to get tested for STDs, and to kick him until he cried. I wanted him to feel what he had done, to see my hurt and to want to comfort me, and to not be allowed to try. I wanted to see this woman, and to know if she was prettier than me. I wanted to travel back in time to the first night he was ever with her, to shake him and make him understand what he was beginning to throw away. I wanted to forget that I ever loved him. I couldn’t look him in the eye before I slammed the door behind him and hurled the leftovers of our relationship into the toilet, but I did manage to force out a whisper.
“Get out.”
8
By the time I escaped the clutches of the “Hispan-iddish Inquisition” at Starbucks (as I referred to Pam and Cristina’s irritating attempts at emotional intervention), I was, of course, running late for work. While there was no expected time of arrival on a Sunday, I fully believed I’d find that Peter and Sarah had been at it since ten a.m. What I didn’t believe I’d find, however, was the following e-mail from Jon.
Sunday, March 27, 10:30 a.m.
From: Jon
To: Vina
Re: Us
Baby,
You have to know that I’m sorry. I deserve a chance to explain.
We deserve a chance to try to work it out. Please give us that.
Jon
In an electronic folder named “Handsome” I had saved every e-mail I had ever received from him. I had planned to print them out one day, tuck them into a shoe box and hide it in our closet. I had planned to pull them out to embarrass our children during their Thanksgiving vacations from college. I had planned to call on them for strength when Jon spent half our savings on a luxury RV. And I had planned to refer to them for proof, ten years and three children into our marriage, when he began to forget that he had ever been romantic.
But now? Now they meant about as much to me as a mug from last summer’s company picnic. Of all the goddamned nerve. How dare he continue to refer to me as his baby? He had a baby, and it sure as hell wasn’t me. And if he had to address me, I would have preferred that he use the title “Ma’am” while dressed in rags and begging me for change. He would have lost everything, you see, after some food critic became ill from his meal, forcing him to shut down the restaurant and downgrade from his Soho loft to a cardboard box in a doorway on Second Avenue. Naturally, I would pass by his new home each morning on my way to a better job, and a better man with more…stamina…and a bigger…wine collection.
I added his last e-mail to the folder and twisted my finger through the air above my head, like a plane in some miniature air show before thumping ceremoniously on the Delete key.
“You have permanently erased all of the messages in the folder marked: Handsome.”
I leaned back in my chair, inhaled and clasped my hands behind my head. I imagined myself strutting toward Grand Central in a shiny gray DKNY skirt-suit, with my chocolate-brown Manolos barely avoiding his spleen as he lay prostrate across my path. My salon-perfect hair would flounce in the wind, synchronized to the beat of my footsteps and the tune of “Who’s That Lady?” being pumped through some invisible speakers in the sky.
I don’t know if the electronic age has made relationships easier or more difficult, although I can testify to the unique sense of comfort inherent in a digital gesture of dissociation. It was especially soothing to execute it from a cocoon of prestige and privacy so many floors above the rest of New York. I comforted myself with the fact that there was at least one aspect of my life that was under control: my career.
Perhaps the only thing more annoying than a company that’s an old boys’ club is one that is but believes it is not. Mine considered itself progressive. My colleagues used phrases like “We’re all fired up” and “I’ll shoot that right over” and “Let’s find a way to leverage that.” Everyone wore suits or Brooks Brothers office casual wear, played squash on the weekends and looked like a WASP even if they weren’t. At least Alan and Steve, my mentors and our team’s co-Managing Directors, treated me like one of the guys.
There were only two ways to win respect at a company like that: either act as if you’re thrilled to have the honor of being part of the team, or encourage the impression that you know everything about the business and are therefore an irreplaceable asset to the firm. Early in my career I chose the latter tactic. My method involved a careful blend of carrying myself as if I had it all figured out, and intimidating people from asking me questions I didn’t know how to answer. Being a self-assured (translation: inherently scary) woman among the type of men who self-selected New York finance in the first place didn’t hurt.
Instead of causing you to want to poke out your own eyeballs due to the mind-numbing details of what I actually do at work, I will share the stuff that’s interesting. I’ll talk about what went on between the people thrown together in a place like that, which is always far more compelling than how the money is made.
My neighbor, Christopher, had apparently decided that he was my new best friend. He was standing at my door not five minutes after I got home from work that Sunday evening, with a presumptuous smile and a blender full of peach margaritas. With Booboo in tow, he barreled right past me and began to make himself comfortable. Having also decided that we were too close to bother ourselves with formalities like Hello, he simply waved the blender in my face, kicked off his flip-flops, and bounded into my kitchen.
“If you turn me away, I’ll become that pathetic queen who lives alone down the hall, drinking margaritas and talking to his cat,” he said. “Please don’t turn me into that guy. I may be getting old in gay-years, but I am still way too cute to be that guy.”
I watched from my doorway as he sat on my couch and began pouring into my mismatched coffee mugs. After rearranging my throw pillows and settling himself among them, he held a mug out toward me. He motioned to the easy chair, and I sat myself down.
“So tell me.” He smiled, propping his heels onto my coffee table. “Why won’t you give Jon another chance?”
Booboo busied himself in my closet, probably trying my best heels on for size. After leaning on my apartment buzzer for about a half an hour the night before, Jon had apparently realized that either I wasn’t home, or I wasn’t planning on letting him in. Since he was drunk, he decided to buzz all the other apartments until he found someone who was willing to hear him out. In the end, he found Christopher, who was all too happy to listen to his side of the story through the intercom. Which leads us to Christopher, reclining on my couch that evening, expecting me to justify myself. The annoying yet endearing thing about gay men is how they assume instant emotional intimacy with almost any single woman whom they meet. That, combined with the fact that I babysat Booboo, probably meant Christopher and I were family.
I took a gulp of my margarita and made no attempt to respond.
“Don’t you at least want to hear his explanation?” he asked, lifting and sniffing each of the candles on my coffee table, and scoping out my copies of The Economist, Newsweek, and Jane magazine. He was probably looking for the Vogue I didn’t have. For a new best friend, his loyalties were all wrong.
“Not really,” I answered, grabbing a package of double-chocolate Oreos from the cupboard. “I think the child speaks for himself.”
“Does he? How old is he?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I kicked his feet off my coffee table before putting down the Oreos.
“I know.”
“Look, I just don’t think he should have the right to explain himself. He forfeited all of his rights when he cheated on me. And made a fool out of me by keeping it a secret. You have no idea how humiliated I am.” I swallowed one cookie, and twisted off the top of another.
“Wait a minute. You mean your friends knew about this?” he stopped.
“I don’t know if they knew, or if they didn’t. The point is that he’s got me wondering if any of them knew. He made me look like a naive, trusting idiot!”
“To who?”
“To myself.”
After a moment of silence during which he contemplated the inside of an open-faced cookie, Christopher decided, “I don’t like double-chocolate.”
“What?”
“The Oreos. They’re double-chocolate flavored. I don’t like ’em.”
“Oh, okay. Well, me, either.” I sucked down the rest of my margarita and then refilled my mug.
“Then why did you buy them?”
I huffed, rubbing my forehead. “Because it was all they had. You know, you’re not a very good houseguest.”
He placed the offending Oreo on the coffee table and lifted Booboo to his feet, before returning his attention to me. “So you’re really gonna let your ego rule your life?”
“That’s not what I’m doing. I’m cutting my losses. I’m being practical. Doesn’t anybody understand that? It’s what it means to be an adult.”
Christopher shrugged, and made Booboo dance before his own ref lection in my mirror. I sank deeper into my chair.
“Hmm, this reminds me of an article I was reading online,” I began, absentmindedly dipping an Oreo into my margarita. I took a bite, which made me gag and immediately spit a mouthful into a paper towel. Christopher was too busy checking the ref lection of his soon-to-be-bald spot in my mirror to notice, so I continued. “The article said something about the similarities between financially independent women and gay men in our dating rituals. Maybe that’s why you think you know how my mind works.”
“Think I know?” He turned around.
“Anyway, the title of the article was ‘You Don’t Get What You Deserve…You Get What You Settle For,’” I slurred, sliding down far enough in my chair to prop my mug on top of my stomach.
“Yeah, sure. Fascinating. Whatever. Listen, you don’t think I look like an accountant, do you?”
Yes…I thought, while I shook my head and insisted, “No! Not at all.”
“You must kill at poker. You’re really too good at telling people what they want to hear.” He smiled. “And for the record, you definitely do not look like an investment banker. Anyway, I’m sorry about Jon. But I think you should seriously consider sleeping with him at least one more time. For me. He sounded sexy over the intercom.”
“You probably think I should sleep with everybody.”
“Well, thank you for the blanket presumption that all gay men are promiscuous,” he said, trying to act offended. “Besides, not everybody, honey. You’re far too sweet for that, even though you try to act like a hard-ass. You leave the skanking to me. For you, just the men you love.”
“Loved,” I corrected him.
With one hand on his hip, he concluded, “Oh, honey, who do you think you’re kidding?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s turning my stomach almost as much as these margaritas and Oreos.”
“Then let’s talk about your weekend. How was that wedding? Did you meet the man of your dreams?”
“No.” I tried hard to focus on Christopher’s face despite my blurring eyes. “But I think I might have met the man of yours.”
9
Hung over, lying on the floor of her apartment, spooning a severely obese cat while being spooned by its gay, balding owner, with the remains of margaritas and Oreos plastered to the roof of her mouth is no way for a respectable Desi girl to wake up.
I struggled to my feet after shaking Christopher awake. And when I noticed a new stiffness in my neck, I thought to myself, Something has got to change.
Coffee was a priority, but as usual on a Monday morning the line at Starbucks stretched into oblivion. Of the three grocery stores within a four-block radius of my office, only one wasn’t out of my way. Unfortunately, it was also the one that was open twenty-four hours, and where personal space was a luxury. I particularly avoided that place before nine a.m. on weekdays, since the middle-aged Indian man working that shift had a habit of eyeing me like a plate of Chicken Tikka Masala while asking suggestively if I were from Punjab. I expected better from my own kind.
I was approaching the register when I noticed a man matching my pace and coming from the opposite aisle. He stopped short and extended an arm, offering a flirtatious smile along with an After you. He was attractive, in a Magnum P.I. kind of way. Normally, I might’ve taken the opportunity to get my own early-morning-flirt on, but the light of recent events helped me see the situation more clearly. He was probably using me to cheat emotionally on the wife he had waiting at home. And if not, then like most men in this cesspool of a city he would probably just as soon hit on me at a bar if I were wearing something low-cut as he would steal my cab on the street if it were raining. I denied him my smile, slammed a dollar on the counter, and headed for the door. I was making a statement on behalf of women everywhere. Without saying a word.
Outside I noticed something over the tilted rim of my coffee cup, which made me stop. I caught a glimpse of a rosy-cheeked, double-chinned woman on the opposite side of Lexington Avenue, dancing gleefully for commuters’ loose change. I crossed over to find “It Had To Be You” booming out of her battery-powered radio. Judging by the wisps of white hair peeking out from underneath her bandana, she must’ve been about sixty-five years old. A self-styled Gypsy, she shut her eyes tightly while twisting in delight, like a schoolgirl crooning into her hairbrush. A small crowd had formed around her, and I found myself staring as much at her as at the people. A man dropped a dollar into the shoe box by her feet, tipped his hat and continued down Lexington.
“Keep dancing!” she yelled.
“I’m not dancing,” he replied over a shoulder.
“Then find a reason to!” She seemed to be looking directly at me.
The crowd snickered, shook their heads and dispersed.
The first thing I saw when I sat down at my desk after our Monday-morning team meeting was a bouquet of f lowers. Logically, I assumed they were from Jon, so I drop-kicked them into the trash. The second thing I saw was an instant messenger chat request f lashing on my screen. Taunting me. Winking at me. Blowing in my ear. “IM” is the modern equivalent of passing notes in class, except that it is sanctioned by the powers-that-be, leaves little chance for some other kid to swipe a note, and is (for most professionally unsatisfied young career-types) slightly more addictive than mediocre sex. I had no choice but to respond when I saw the following prompt from Cristina.
Any time a coworker found me using IM for fun, I felt as if I’d been caught eating my crayons. Looking up from my screen I saw Peter waiting silently for my attention. For a minute? For a week?
“Ready to explain the Luxor deal to the intern?” he asked. Then he noticed the petals sticking out of my garbage can. “Oooh…I heard somebody got f lowers delivered this morning. I didn’t know it was you. Are they from Jon? Is he still trying to get back together with you?”
“I assume so,” I replied flatly.
“Does this mean that he’s patching things up with you and planning on whisking you off someplace to bear his many, many children?” Peter mock-punched me in the shoulder. Which part of my office resembled a locker room?
“Why? Are you writing a book?” I asked.
“I guess I’m nervous,” he replied, grinning as he motioned for Denny and Wade to claim a couple of chairs. “Because if anything ever took you away from the firm, I don’t know how I’d live without your witty retorts to my weekly team e-mails.”
Peter was essentially my partner—the other associate on our team with whom I worked most closely. Born and bred in the Bronx by an African-American mother and a Puerto Rican father, he was the product of a full scholarship to Tufts. He mentored inner-city schoolchildren, ran marathons whenever possible, and seemed genuinely excited to be a part of the team. As if all of that weren’t disturbing enough, he was also afflicted with the need to send uplifting weekly e-mail messages to our group.
That morning’s read: Happiness is fulfilling more than one’s fair share of the teamwork.
I had responded (and cced everyone) with Happiness is a mutually consensual game of grab-ass.
Honestly, you couldn’t have found a straighter arrow. Peter’s cheerleaderlike enthusiasm for the company made me want to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. Or myself. Anyone, really. There was no reason to be that pumped up about something like Equity Research.
“You have nothing to worry about, Peter. I would never dream of neglecting my responsibility to the team. I’ll tell you what—if and when someone does make an honest woman out of me, I promise to still fax a retort over to you from my Mommy-And-Me classes every morning. Somebody’s got to temper your hideous and unnecessary optimism with some good-old-fashioned cynicism. Otherwise you’ll blind us all. Really, Peter, that kind of Little-House-On-The-Prairie crap will get one of our interns mugged.”
“Ouch! Someone’s claws are out today! I like that, I like that,” he laughed like a mental patient at his own jokes. “Maybe you can bring some of that enthusiasm to the all-nighter we’re gonna have to pull to finish up the research on that Luxor deal. You know we have to make our recommendation by tomorrow morning. Now, let’s get young Wade here up to speed.”
The call came from inside the house. As usual, they used separate phones. As usual, they assumed I had an hour to waste in the middle of the day. And as usual, my parents caught me wide open and defenseless at my desk when they decided to attack. Only this time, Peter, Wade and Denny were seated in my office, so they, too, got caught in the crossfire.
Peter reclined in his seat across from my desk while Denny took notes beside him. Wade sat on the edge of his seat below my framed SUCCESS poster of a rock-climber reaching the peak of a mountain. That poster, like the two of them, came with the office, along with its mahogany desk, glass door, and many walls of gray.
“This week, we’ve been poring over the past five years’ worth of financials from a software manufacturer in Taiwan,” Peter explained to Wade, through a mouthful of chicken Caesar salad. “We’re finally making an investment recommendation to Alan and Steve tomorrow morning. However, we thought it might be helpful for you to understand how the research fits into the larger picture.”
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Poonam Sharma
Success is all in how you define it With meticulous career planning and a couple of dirty martinis, there is very little that New York City investment banker Vina Chopra can’t do. And now that she’s decided to get serious about fi nding her mate, there is very little that Vina won’t try—even if it means letting her parents get involved. After all, what does she have to lose?Her longest-term relationship thus far has been with the ulcer she ultimately named Fred (unless you count the ex-boyfriend who won’t go away). Amid a series of dates with “the nice Indian doctor” and an offi ce scandal that could permanently end her career, Vina starts to question everything she’s been working for.Who has she been trying to please all these years? Is this the life that she really wants? Can she fi nally learn to put aside her family’s expectations long enough and become the girl most likely to find a happiness all her own?
Girl Most Likely to
Poonam Sharma
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
My Postscript
Coming Next Month
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to…
My agent, Lorin Rees, for helping me
make the leap into fiction.
My editor, Kathryn Lye, who improves the story
without altering the point.
Red Dress Ink, for taking me on.
And my family—for their inspiration, humility,
and for being the sort of people who never give up,
nor fail to be grateful for it all.
For a guy named Michael, who knew me once,
and thought that I should write a novel.
1
“Celibacy is rotting your brain.”
Cristina insisted through my cell phone, while the taxi jerked up Fifth Avenue. It might even have been true, but it was a hateful thing for a best friend to say.
At my age—and my father never missed an opportunity to remind me of my age with all the subtlety of a presidential ass-pat—my mother had managed a screaming child, a barking dog, a doting husband and a medical residency. And she did it from a three-bedroom Colonial in Great Neck, Long Island. By twenty-seven, left to my own devices, I had amassed a lucrative, yet uninspiring, seventy-hour Wall Street workweek, a telling but unintentional track record of shoving plant corpses down the trash chute while the neighbors slept, and a very large, very expensive and very empty bed. It was the latter fact that had me feeling particularly vulnerable. And of the many mistakes I made that Saturday evening, the first was expecting Cristina to understand.
“Just because I’ve decided to be rational and take control of my life, that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.” I pouted, checking my watch. Draped in my traditional powder-blue silk salwar kameez and matching satin Charles David heels, I was hurtling helplessly toward another lavish Indian wedding where my parents would be seated where the love of my life ought to be. After ten years of scouring every dormitory bar, party and young singles’ mixer, not to mention checking under every rock and in more than my fair share of countries around the world, I was in no mood for honesty. If bunions were my reward for a decade of running in four-inch heels, then cynicism was my logical response to the umpteenth fix-up with a prince whose castle would eventually make me break out in hives.
“But an arranged marriage? For you, Vina?” her voice climbed. It was laced with all the straight-postured self-righteousness of a New England housewife snatching home hair dye from the hands of a teenaged daughter. “I don’t think so.”
I sucked air through clenched teeth.
“See? This is why I wasn’t going to tell you about tonight. And it’s not an arranged marriage. It’s an arranged…date, and it just happens to be taking place at a wedding.”
Ever since I met Cristina, when we were the lone female interns in the J.P. Morgan investment banking department, she’d refused to cut me emotional slack. And that was what I respected most about her. Unfortunately, she also refused to accept that merely being ethnic (Cuban, and from Miami) didn’t mean she automatically grasped my situation. Convincing her that it was a good idea to be set up with the Punjabi lawyer courtesy of my parents required an appeal to the rational side of her brain. Fortunately, we were both investment bankers; I knew exactly how to put things into terms that she could grasp.
“Look,” I added, cradling my cell between ear and shoulder while aiming my compact at the pinky finger I used to catch errant eyeliner, “I have thirty months left until thirty. I know your mom had you when she was, like, forty. But you have to understand that Indian women don’t have Cuban women’s genes. Sure, our hips were made for childbearing, but that’s where the similarity ends. The fact is that I’m only fertile until, like, thirty-five. And anyway, to figure out ideal fertility age, you take the average age of menopause for women in your family, and subtract twenty years. That’s when your fertility takes a serious nosedive. For my mom, menopause was fifty, so that means that childbirth is supposed to be before thirty for me.”
“But…”
“Also…consider that it takes at least six months to fall in love with anyone and run the required background checks, another nine months to get engaged, and a year to plan the wedding. And my husband and I will need at least a year of being married without being pregnant—to screw like bunnies before gravity has its way with me. That’s thirty-nine months. So even if I meet Mr. Right tonight, I’m still cutting it close.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
My logic impressed her.
“They re-air The Oprah Winfrey Show at two a.m.” I clicked my compact shut, and noticed that one of my heels was stuck in a glob of gum on the floor of the cab. “And you know that I haven’t been sleeping well these days.”
In an effort to spare the hem of my salwar kameez, I leaned onto one hip and lifted my shoe. Naturally, the pleather seat beneath me mimicked a fart. My eyes collided in the rearview mirror with those of the cabbie, who, until that point, had occasionally glanced at me with the standard balance of boredom and curiosity. Suddenly he sat up straighter, spearing me with a look of moral superiority—all this from a man who had never encountered a stick of deodorant. I stared out the window.
“What kind of a name is Prakash, anyway?” Cristina finally asked.
“Um, I don’t know…an Indian one?”
“Well, it’s just not the kind of name that I can imagine you screaming out in a fit of passion.”
“Life is not a fit of passion, Cristy.” I resented her for making me sound like my mother. “And I think the point is that I’m supposed to have learned that by now. Look at it this way. Meeting a guy through my parents means that the background check is out of the way. Up front, I know that he’s single, educated and family-oriented, with no criminal record or illegitimate children.”
“And what if he looks like a frog?”
“He will not look like a frog.”
“But, Vina, what if he does? What if he looks like a bloated, slimy frog…who got hit in the face with a frying pan…twice?”
“Then I guess I’ll have to comfort myself with the thought of his really long—”
“Vina, I’m being serious! Have you thought this through? How much are you willing to compromise? Meeting a guy through your parents is a lot more serious than meeting him by yourself. It can’t be casual. You’ve always told me that.”
“All I know is that there are men that you date, and men that you marry.” I reached into my wallet for a twenty as we turned east onto Forty-seventh Street.
“And never the twain shall meet?”
I paused. “Did you just say ‘twain’?”
“Sorry. I’m feeling silly. I have a date with the cowboy tonight. Maybe I’m subconsciously practicing country phrases to put him at ease.”
“All Midwesterners are not cowboys, Cristy.” I signaled the cabbie for eight dollars in change.
“Yes, but this one is. Seriously. He has the cowboy hat and everything. He even grew up on a ranch.”
“And what…he took a wrong turn at the Old Oak Tree and wound up in New York City?”
“Apparently. And he must have asked someone to point him toward the nearest watering hole, because I met him at Denial, a bar over on Grand Street.”
“That is silly.” I wrenched the crumpled dollar bills from the plastic, swiveling slot, and smoothed them into a pile. Then I folded them and slipped them into my purse.
“Come on! Why don’t you ditch the wedding, and meet up with us instead? I’ll have him bring a fre-end,” she practically sang, as if she were dangling a new doll before my eyes.
“As tempted as I am by the idea of playing Cowboys and Indians twenty years after recess is over, I think I’ll pass.”
“Oh, I get it. When you play with firemen it’s perfectly acceptable, but when I try to throw a little rodeo it’s silly?”
I fought off a mental image of The Village People performing “YMCA,” and feigned indignation at Cristina. “I thought we agreed never to speak of that again.”
She followed suit. “We agreed on no such thing.”
“I was young.” I checked my watch for the tenth time since Union Square. “It’s a part of my past.”
“It was last year.” She paused, probably for dramatic effect. “And I believe the exact line that you used on that guy was ‘If I promise to run home and start a fire, will you promise to come over later?’”
“You gave me that line.” I cracked a smile. “Good times, though.” And then we giggled together, like only two women who know that they will see each other from virginity to Viagra can.
“Vina, I just don’t want you settling for some guy who isn’t your ‘Prince.’” Cristina took a typically cheap shot at our friend Pamela, who wasn’t there to defend herself. “You’ve been way too preoccupied lately with your so-called future.”
“Oh, who are you kidding, Cristina? I’m an Indian chick from Strong Island. I was born preoccupied with my so-called future.”
“I’m not talking about your professional future. I’m talking about your personal future. It’s like you’re turning into, well, I hate to say it, but…Pam.”
“Now that’s mean,” I said. “First, you make me feel more pathetic than I already do by reminding me that I haven’t had sex in forever, and now you’re comparing me to her. And come to think of it, you wouldn’t give her any crap if she was being set up with a nice Jewish lawyer by her parents.”
“You know you don’t want to get me started on Pam.”
“Agreed.” I sighed as we slowed to a halt by the curb outside the Waldorf Astoria. A uniformed doorman sped over and reached toward the door handle. “In fact, I don’t want to get you started on anything at the moment because my chariot has pulled up to the ball. Passionate Princes are a fairy tale, Cristy, but a Practical Prince will suit me fine.”
2
Red rose petals littered golden tablecloths. Gleaming china settings and generous floral arrangements adorned each table. The air was delicately scented. Votives flickered on every surface, fading in comparison to the luster of the many rubies, emeralds and diamonds gliding around the ballroom. Waiters circled the tables while craning their necks to scan the room of the three hundred guests; the servers were determined not to leave any glass unfilled, any mouth unstuffed or any whim unattended. Toddlers peeked from behind the saris of young mothers, while older women sought potential daughters-and sons-in-law. Elders leaned back in their chairs, appreciating how their familiar chai seemed sweeter, and their familiar aches seemed duller in the face of so much life.
By ten p.m., there was no sign of Prakash. I speared a soggy Rasgulla with my fork and lifted the cheese-patty toward my mouth, while glaring daggers across Table 21.
“Certainly I miss living with Mummy and Papa in Delhi,” Cousin Neha gushed at our tableful of captivated parents.
Nearly all of their Americanized children had run as amok as I—moving into Manhattan apartments alone, while refusing to acknowledge “thirty and single” as a hopeless disease.
“Those three years after college and before my marriage were wonderful, really,” Neha continued, “I used to enjoy myself, having dinner and going to the cinema with my friends on the weekends. But Stamford, Connecticut, is also quite nice, although it is a bit chilly for us. Vinny and I drive to work together each morning, and then we go to one of the local restaurants in the evening, if I don’t feel like cooking.”
Rather than nailing Neha between the eyes, the fiery daggers I was hurling instantly transformed into plastic cocktail swords before they could make it across the table. They kept bouncing off of her matrimonial shield, and collapsing into a heap on the dessert plate in front of her. From where my second martini and I were seated, it looked as if that heap was about to topple and bury the remains of my self-esteem. My first martini had vanished instantly after the third consecutive “Auntie” (any non-blood-related woman old enough to be my mother who hasn’t seen me since I was this tall) inquired, before asking about anything else, when I was getting married myself. As soon as he’s paroled, I thought about saying, or perhaps, Tuesday. But you’re not invited. You can just send a gift to my apartment. I’m registered at Frederick’s of Hollywood.
“Neha darling, tell me…Have you also met any nice young couples to socialize with?” another Auntie-type asked from my right. Why everyone was so interested in my cousin was as much of a mystery to me as how The Anna Nicole Smith Show survived while Once and Again was canceled.
“Oh, yes! We have met many friendly couples,” Neha beamed girlishly at her husband, Vineet, who slurped his chai and winked at me. The wink was a gesture of encouragement to persevere, despite my tragic state of spinster-hood. “But you know…there are also many single people in Stamford. There are even single girls from India. I honestly feel sorry for them, being in a different country, spending the whole day alone and then going home to an empty apartment. When I talk with them it seems like it really does not bother them at all. They work, they live on their own, and they don’t even have any interest in marriage. They don’t even want to talk about it. Imagine!”
A three-hundred-pound woman who lives in the middle of nowhere, and has no friends outside of her husband, feeling sorry for me, I mocked telepathically to Marty—I had decided to name my martini by that point, as a reward for all of its loyalty. Imagine!
The same Auntie leaned over and practically yelled into my ear: “And what about you, Vina? Koi nehy milha?” She must have been speaking up to steal my attention from the many voices everybody assumed were living inside my head. These were, of course, the same voices that entertained all single career women when they came home to empty apartments at the end of each day. But I wondered why she also felt the need to shake a hand before her face like a tambourine. Were her fluttering fingers intended to deflect my bad romantic luck before it could infect any of the happy couples in the room? Great. I shook my head at Marty. Now they think I’ve become so hopeless that I require an emotional exorcist.
The bride and groom swirled past us on the dance floor. Twenty-seven-year-old Nikhil and Suraya, an MIT engineer and an NYU medical resident, had met at a friend’s dinner party the summer before. I spotted a number of single career women hiding behind ice sculptures just to avoid answering the same question posed at weddings the world over. I wondered if there was ever an appropriate response to koi nehy milha? Did I get anyone yet? Factually, it sounded hopeless. No, I have not. The truth sounded sluttish. Actually, I’ve had a few men. Even some I would recommend to a friend. But nobody with whom I’m interested in growing old and less attractive.
I chose to hide behind the facade of nonchalance familiar to all unattached Indian women of “marriageable age.” What that means is that I lied. “Oh, Auntie, I don’t have time to worry about that right now. I’m too passionate about my career.”
“Vina is just being shy,” my father interrupted. That man could never be accused of appropriate timing. “We are confident that tonight will be the night. We have found her a lovely boy.”
“Oh? Is this the doctor from Pittsburgh? The one you were telling me about?” Auntie Meenakshi questioned my mother hopefully. What doctor? Did she say Pittsburgh? Howmany other people were my parents discussing my personal life with?
“No, no.” My father shook his head. “We found out that the family in Pittsburgh had a history of divorces. This boy, Prakash, is thirty years old, which is suitable for Vina. He was born in New Jersey, but he lives in Manhattan now. He is an attorney, with a very impressive bio data. He is five feet eleven inches, and both his parents are engineers. We are disappointed that they are not Punjabi—they are Gujarati—but one has got to be open-minded on that point these days. And his father attended IIT in the same batch with the brother-in-law of my third cousin, Prem, who is now settled in Bombay. Everybody agrees that it is a good family. Prakash is the eldest of three brothers, and all are highly educated.”
Table 21 nodded in collective approval. “Lady in Red” wafted through the air. I drained the last of my martini, and checked for emergency exits.
“Why is everybody talking about this?” my maternal grandmother (referred to traditionally as Nani) interrupted in Hindi. “We have done our part. Now we must let the kids decide. And where is this Prakash, anyway? What kind of a boy would keep my Vina waiting?”
My earliest memory is of my Nani making Gulab Jamuns in our kitchen; I watched as she deep-fried and drizzled them with golden sugar water. I must have been six years old when I dragged that stool stoveside, and quietly climbed on top. Elbows on the counter, I waited silently until she tore off a piece of raw, sweet dough, and handed it to me. I never understood how she managed to grab the right amount of dough each time, and roll it so quickly into a perfect ball between her palms. And I asked her about my grandfather, whom I had never met.
“Your grandfather was a very good man.” She shook her head and reached for more dough. “Ithna shareef! Here they would have called him genuine, but he was much more than that. He cared for everybody. And he used to give your mother airplane rides on his shoulders. She was too small then to remember, even smaller than you are now.”
“Did he like Gulab Jamuns?” I swung my heels, chewing happily on the dough.
“He was a Gulab Jamun, daughter.” She stopped and looked at me. “He was my Gulab Jamun.”
“Did he look like a Gulab Jamun?” I leaned my head to one side.
“He did to me. And one day, your Gulab Jamun will come to you.” She caught my chin between her fingers.
“How will I know it’s him?”
“You will know,” she reassured me, before rolling a dozen balls into boiling oil, which refrained from splattering, under her watchful eye.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But what if he looks more like a Jalebi?”
“He won’t.”
“What about a Rasgulla?”
“A Rasgulla looks nothing like a Gulab Jamun. Besides, mommy and daddy will recognize him and they will bring him for you when it is time.”
I paused, tilting my head. “But how will they recognize a Gulab Jamun if he looks like a Rasgulla or a Jalebi?”
She stopped, and eyed me. “You need not worry about such things, Vina. Good girls trust their parents. That is all you need to know.”
With that, I had to be satisfied. My Nani was always right.
“Ma’am? Another Rasgulla?” A waiter appeared. “Ma’am?”
“Vina? Are you paying attention?” my mother asked. Everybody at the table was staring at me. Maybe celibacy was rotting my brain.
“Don’t worry, little cousin.” Neha patted my shoulder before squeezing between the chairs on her way to the dance floor. “You’ll find someone soon.”
I’m not worried, I agreed with Marty. What I am is thirsty.
I scrunched my nose at the chai-bearing waiter leaning over my left shoulder. “I think I’m in the mood for something a little stronger.”
I pushed back my chair, rose to my feet and made a beeline for the bar.
In my defense, I arrived at the wedding feeling nothing less-than-thrilled for Suraya and Nikhil. I raised my f lute, alongside everyone else, in a toast to the newlyweds. I smiled through hours of idle chatter, and now I made my way rather steadily over to the bar. And that was where, as the twenty-one-year-old bartender started looking a little too good to me, it happened. I was reaching out to take hold of my third martini when I felt a warm hand crashing into my own.
My first instinct was to yank at the drink. Snatch it away and hold it above my head. To gulp it down and Take Back the Night. But I paused when I noticed that the very masculine hand was attached to a confident and sturdy arm, which had brought along an alarmingly attractive head. And the man to whom that head belonged seemed to be thinking the same about me.
“Bartender, I believe I asked for this to be shaken, not stirred,” he announced for my benefit.
Oooph, he’s yummy, I thought. If it meant being closer to a smile like that, I might actually consider climbing inside the martini. He was a cross between James Dean and Sunil Dutt (the James Dean of Indian cinema). I smiled and loosened my grip. Countless witty responses raced about inside my head, apparently bumping into one another enough to cause a massive concussion.
“Mmmhhhaaaahhaaahh,” I said. Or snorted. He must have assumed this was my own personal dialect, because he smiled as if he was impressed. I cleared my throat while he replaced the glass on the bar.
“I’ll thumb-wrestle you for it,” he said.
“Seriously?” I blurted. I was too tipsy to play anything cool in the face of such deep, mischievous eyes.
“No, not seriously.” He laughed, as if I were charming and had said it on purpose. Looking down, I noticed that our collision had splashed the martini across the sleeve of his tuxedo. Then I caught myself considering licking it off him. That was when I decided to cut myself off for the night. I must have reeked of mock-confidence and gin.
“I’m Prakash.” He wiped his hand on a napkin before extending one to me. “You must be Vina?”
Honey, I thought, I’ll be whoever you want me to be.
“Oh! Prakash!” I slapped my forehead, regretting it immediately. “Yes, my mother mentioned you. Well…it’s nice to finally meet you.”
Over Prakash’s shoulder I spotted my mother, who was watching us from across the room. She sat with her thumbs and eyebrows raised, as if she were rooting for the lone Indian on Fear Factor. I assumed that that was Prakash’s mother seated beside her, considering that the woman couldn’t resist a nod of satisfaction at the childbearing capacity that the fit of my salwar kameez made plain. With a full belly and an expectant heart, my father napped quietly in his chair, probably dreaming of telling his grandchildren to sit up straight.
The latest version of a classic Bhangra song, which had apparently been mixed with the theme from Knight Rider, trailed off, and “Careless Whisper” picked up. DJ Jazzy-Desi-Curry-Rupee, or whatever his name was, called out to the crowd, “Can we please haw all the luwly gentleman and lehdees join us on the danz floor now for a wery special slow song?”
Hands cupped behind his back, Prakash faked a nervous glance at the floor: “Your mom told my mom to tell me to ask you to dance. So…I mean…do you wanna?”
I grinned, and he led me toward the dance floor. Crowds dispersed. Couples embraced. Prakash took me into his arms. His frame was stiff enough to let me know who was leading, even as he refused to drop his playful gaze. We sailed around the floor, almost as captivatingly as the two five-year-olds who were probably forced out there by some photo-hungry parents nearby. I didn’t need a mirror to know how perfect Prakash and I looked together.
Imagine my luck, I thought. I’ve found an attorney, who’s adorable, and funny, and a good dancer…and Indian? Tomorrow I’ll start auditioning matrimonial henna tatoo artists. On Monday morning I’ll look into the logistics of renting the horse upon which Prakash will arrive at our wedding.
A lesser man might have dropped me at the pivotal moment, but Perfect Prakash held me firmly, as I leaned into his arm and kicked back my leg. He dipped me so far that the ends of my hair touched the floor. I smiled for my parents, as much as for myself, while all the blood rushed straight to my head.
“So, Prakash…you’re handsome, you’re charming, and you’re a lawyer,” I began once he had pulled me up. “How is it possible that no woman has snatched you off the market yet?”
“Vina, there’s a perfectly simple explanation for that,” he replied, watching my form more than my eyes as he spun me around, and twisted me like a Fruit Roll-Up into one arm.
“I’m as gay as they come!”
I unraveled. I think I would have preferred to have been dropped.
3
My grandparents spoke little English, and lived with us while I grew up. Their presence guaranteed my fluency in Hindi and ensured a steady supply of Bollywood movies in the house. In comparison with what they considered morally questionable Hollywood films, the predictability of Indian cinema must have comforted them. Because while the actors rotate, the story never changes.
Bad first impressions inspire mutual disgust between the bratty rich girl and the rebel boy from the wrong side of the tracks. This disgust evolves through flirtation into puppy love, after she offers her silk scarf to bandage his wound one day, which he earned while fixing the engine of her car that had coincidentally broken down by the side of the road right in front of his home. The pair falls in love and meets in secret to perform choreographed dance numbers. Changing outfits between the ballads they sing at river banks and on mountaintops, they end each number with an almost-but-not-quite kiss, while peasants dance spontaneously around them. All hell breaks loose when their fathers—inevitably embroiled in a vendetta which began long before they were born—learn of their torrid romance. Someone fights, someone is kidnapped and someone is warned to stay away from the girl. Girl throws tantrum, mother shares wisdom, and after more fighting, someone is nearly killed. The parents decide to forget about the past, agreeing that love matters most, and throwing an enormous wedding, with more dancing, much singing and still no kissing.
Basically, it’s Romeo and Juliet with more choreography and less sexual content. And unlike Romeo and Juliet, Bollywood lovers always have a happy ending. My parents had an arranged marriage in India approximately two weeks after their parents introduced them. They don’t use a word like love, but my father cannot sleep when my mother is ill, and I have never seen her sip her morning tea without him. To say publicly that they loved each other, my father once told me, would be like taking out a press release to announce that water was wet.
No man had ever understood why I cling to the idea of a happy ending, even as I claim to have accepted the slim chances of it. These guys told me that I made no sense, or that my fixation on how things ought to be could easily mean I’d end up alone. Lately I worried that if they turned out to be right, I would have no one to blame but myself.
Well, that will teach me not to use an eyelash curler, I thought, blinking rapidly while I ran toward the coat check. Judging by the expressions of the hotel guests I rushed past, I must have looked a mess. Conveniently, the eyelash which came loose as I f led the dance floor had settled across the inner rim of my eyelid. And barring a knuckle to my socket, nothing was gonna pull that sucker out. With mascara streaming down my quivering left cheek, I fought off the beginnings of a facial spasm. For anyone who resents our shiny, f lowing locks, let me assure you: What Indian women save in trips to tanning booths and melanoma clinics, we lose in the battle against our follicles. All that waxing, plucking, threading and tweezing could reduce a grown man to tears.
I banged on the courtesy bell while leaning into the coatroom, searching for some hint of a coat check girl.
“Vina.” My mother grabbed me by the arm and yanked me around to face her. “Vot are you dewing hir?” When her voice developed the Punjabi twang, it always meant I had stepped out of line.
“Looking for a coat check girl.” I avoided her eyes.
“Vee thot something had gone wrong.” She overgestured. “You just ran off and left poor Prakash standing like a dummy on the dance floor! Papa thought you had an upset stomach, but I assumed you were feeling sick from those ten martinis.”
“It was three martinis, Mother.” I rubbed my right arm below the shoulder. For four feet and ten inches of relatively sedentary maternal mass, she was actually freakishly strong.
“And this is something forr a vooman to be proud off?”
“No.” I banged not-so-courteously on the bell, and noticed that my throat was feeling tight.
“Oh, beti.” She softened, her face melting into concern. “Are you all right?” Clearly she had misinterpreted the state of my face.
“Yes, Mom.” I took a breath and faked a smile. “I’m fine.”
“Come here.” She produced a handkerchief from behind her bra strap, and proceeded to dab at my cheek.
“Mom.” I jerked my head away, like an adolescent avoiding a maternal spit-shine. “I’m fine.”
“If you are fine, then why are you leaving?” Her eyebrows arched. “Did he do something wrong?”
“No, Mom.” I shook my head. “It’s nothing like that. Prakash was a total gentleman.”
“Then explain your behavior, Vina.” She gathered up the pleats of her sari, and ref lung it over a shoulder, before settling a hand on each hip. “Why are you behaving this way? Don’t you know how much of an insult this is to his family? In front of everyone?”
“Mom, trust me. We’re not a match.”
“Vy not, Vina? Tell me vy not? You are both Indian, and professional, and he is very handsome, and he comes from a good family. Vot more do you vont? And please, Vina, don’t start talking about your so-called Chemistry and Love. You are not a child, and you know that these things take time. Your father is going to ask me why you are being so unreasonable.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or…wait a minute. You didn’t say anything wrong, did you?”
I gritted my teeth.
“No, Mom. Of course not. Of course I didn’t say anything wrong.” I couldn’t stop blinking, or cursing myself for choosing this nightmare over Cristy’s rodeo. “The problem with Prakash is that he’s…”
“There you are!”
“Oh! Hello, beta. How are you?” my mother cooed at Prakash. It was a frighteningly instant transformation.
“Hello, Auntie. You must be Vina’s mother. It’s very nice to meet you. That’s a lovely sari you’re wearing. Is it organza? It must have been made in Delhi, right? My mother says that you can’t find such good quality anywhere in New York, Jackson Heights or otherwise.”
He was shameless. She was beaming. I was at a loss.
“Thank you, beta. Thank you. I’ll go and say hello to your father.” She smiled. I tugged at my eyelid, which made a sucking noise. Glaring at me before she spun on her heels, my mother bounced giddily away. I rolled my eyes and gave up on the coat check girl, opting instead to search for a concierge.
Prakash whispered, while he watched my mother depart: “Vina, we have to talk.”
I paused, and twisted my neck toward him. “We? There is no we, you lunatic. Meanwhile, you and I have nothing to say to each other.” I pivoted away from him.
“You have to listen to me!” He grabbed my shoulders and pushed me backward through the doorway of the coatroom. My cheek spasmed, my eye twitched and I struggled for breath. Being half-blind, half-drunk and immobilized by my four-inch heels, I forgot all my fight-or-f light instincts. So rather than reacting I chose to hyperventilate, while trying to remember the protocol. Was I supposed to poke himin the groin? Knee him in the eyes? Kick him in the gut? Twist and pull? Scream for help? Stop, drop and roll?
“Vina, you don’t understand!” he said, cornering me in the small room.
Hoping for an emergency exit nearby, I lost balance and fell into a pile of coats. Prakash collapsed on top of me. The snapping of my left heel was practically expected, but the groping by the coats I landed on was most certainly not. Rolling Prakash off of myself, I struggled to my feet, and sprang into a defensive judo-stance. (Note to self: Stay away from Austin Powers reruns on cable.)
From below the pile of coats, a giggle and a pair of heads emerged. And one of the heads had something to say for itself. “Heeeeeey baby, don’t be like that. There’s always room for one more person at this party.”
I blinked to confirm what I was witnessing: the missing coat check girl grinning over a bare shoulder while straddling the bartender, who raised an eyebrow as soon as he noticed that I wasn’t alone. And I could’ve sworn I heard him add, “Or room for two more, should I say?” as I darted for the door.
With one hand to my forehead, I sprinted across the lobby, slowing only to throw the broken shoe into the trash. Soon enough I tripped on the other one, and crashed into the lobby’s glass doors, badly skinning my knee. Rather than taking the moment to feel sorry for myself, I remembered that Prakash was close behind. I clambered to my feet, threw open the doors and leaped into a waiting taxi, with just enough time to hurl my other heel out the window before the cab driver gunned the gas.
“My parents don’t know that I’m gay,” Prakash yelled at the window as the cab began to pull away.
“I don’t know why he thinks that’s my problem,” I told the cabbie, who grinned and whisked me safely home.
4
“Chica, who has time for a four-hour Sunday brunch and still manages to pay their rent in this town? That’s what I want to know.” Cristina dragged a chair over to our table at Starbucks. She paused to lay her cell phone and her BlackBerry beside my own, and then checked her pulse on a wrist sensor before acknowledging Pamela. “Oh, no offense, Pam.”
Cristina had an obsessive relationship with her physical fitness, but she also had a point. She and I had spent the better part of our Sundays during the last four years hidden in our offices, catching up on work before Monday morning. In our industry, that didn’t make us competitive; it made us competent. And in an effort to burn off some of the resulting stress, Cristina had become a genius at self-defense. She mastered everything from model-mugging (assault scenarios simulated by mock-attackers in padded suits) to Krav Maga (hand-to-hand combat training based on the principles of the Israeli national army). An even more unfortunate habit of hers was using Spanish words and phrases when trying to convince me of something. She was reminding me of that additional camaraderie all ethnic women supposedly shared. It was unforgivably manipulative. Sure, I had thrown in the occasional Schmoopie or Honey when trying to steer a steak-loving boyfriend toward a Thai restaurant (because the variety would make him a better man), or to convince him that rubbing my feet could stave off the effects of carpal tunnel (I swear, I had read that somewhere). But I would never have stooped so low as to use any of these tactics on my girls.
Pam, on the other hand, hailed from a very different school of thought; a school that didn’t bear the burden of rent. Her father—still guilt-ridden over leaving her mother for an au pair twenty years ago—bought her a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side as a college graduation present. The arrangement kept her in clothing that Cristina and I wouldn’t dare buy for ourselves, even though we each earned roughly three times Pamela’s salary. But I guess Pam needed it more than we did; Chanel, Gucci and Polo were standard dress code at Windsors, the devastatingly upper-crust art auction house where she worked for pennies, and the occasional invite to some of the swankiest social events this side of the Riviera. It was a good arrangement for Cristy and myself, too, since some of those invitations trickled down to us. Each event held the promise of champagne and the company of international aristotrash who probably assumed that our presence meant we were royalty ourselves.
“None taken.” Pamela waved the comment away like so many pesky fruit f lies, and then scrunched up her nose and peered suspiciously into the whipped cream covering my Caramel Macchiato. “Is that decaf?”
“Yes. It is.” I stirred the caramel carefully, trying not to risk whipped cream deflation. Then I realized I should probably have resented the judgment in her tone. “So what?”
Despite the god-awful preppy clothing Pamela had seemed to know it all nine years ago, when she strolled into my freshman dorm room. It was day two of the fall semester. She breezed in, made herself comfortable among my unopened boxes, pointed to a literature textbook and asked if I was taking the Friday class with Professor Feineman. I nodded. It was a bad idea, she told me, unless I wanted to miss out on Thursday-night parties just to be awake in time for the only 8:00 a.m. class requiring attendance. As effortlessly as she said it, she lifted a heap of Ramen noodles neatly into her mouth, using chopsticks. Never having seen anyone my own age handle them properly before, I naturally assumed this was a woman from whom I could learn. Time cured me of that misconception, but Pamela’s perspective had narrowed while her opinions had sharpened with age.
“So…you never drink decaf.” Cristina sided with the enemy.
“Yes, I drink decaf.” I scrolled through old messages on my BlackBerry.
“When?” Pam asked, picking imaginary lint off of my shoulder. “When do you drink it?”
“I don’t know…sometimes. Who cares when I drink it? Why does it matter?”
“Hijole…because you’ve been acting weird lately, and we’re worried about you.” Cristina thrust her chin out at me.
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the problem? Maybe I don’t want to get myself all riled up.”
“All riled up…with coffee? Most of your blood has already been replaced by it, Vina. And do you even hear yourself? You sound like you’re about sixty years old.”
“Decaf is not like you, Vina,” Pam interrupted, “any more than letting your parents set you up on a blind date is. And you know that I don’t have anything against you meeting potentially compatible guys. However, we want to talk about what’s really been going on with you. You’ve been frazzled lately.”
Frazzled? I thought. If they had any idea what I had gone through before I arrived at Starbucks that morning, they would consider me incomprehensibly composed.
Three hours earlier, I was feeling even more exposed before a larger and more sympathetic audience. I probably could have been better prepared, but who would’ve guessed that there were so many “Closeted Claustrophobes” in New York City?
“I, umm…my name is Maria,” I had stuttered when thirty pairs of eyes collided upon me. “And I’m a Closeted Claustrophobe. It’s been about eight hours since my last attack.” I cleared my throat, making a mental note to make sure none of these weirdos tried to follow me home.
Admitting that I had a problem was difficult enough. I didn’t see the need to share my name with the motley crew who had gathered in the basement of St. Agnes’ 13th Street Church that Sunday morning. I could just imagine being outed when I bumped into one of these lost souls while strolling through Bergdorf’s with my mother. You wouldn’t have to struggle to fill your time with such silly things if you were married and settled into life, she would explain, before shaking her head at whatever heels I was considering, and strolling off in search of a Talbots.
Emotional problems, according to my parents, were a luxury of the lazy, self-indulgent American. I had learned this early about my parents, and decided around the same time that the best way to maneuver my Indian and American cultural identities would be to keep certain things about myself to myself. I knew that I had overreacted in the coatroom. And I was as sure that I needed help as I was mortified to have finally come looking for it. Twisting in my plastic seat, I cupped the bruise on my knee while committing the Five Cs of the Closeted Claustrophobes to memory: Check for exits, Close your eyes, Count to ten, Calm your nerves, Center yourself.
Delilah, the middle-aged receptionist who spoke before me, teared up twice while describing the torture of her cramped bus ride. Arthur, the elderly man preceding her, explained how his frustration over claustrophobia had resulted in an anger management problem, which was magnified by his Tourettes, and had effectively ended his acting career. Already I was glad that I had come, since I didn’t have it nearly as bad as any of these freaks. Things were going smoothly, especially in comparison to my first attempt at one of these meetings. Three months earlier I stopped short of entering the doorway when I overheard the Rage-aholics director threatening the Claustrophobes director with physical harm unless he surrendered the larger, first-floor room to the Fear of Heights support group, whose director was his ex-wife.
I was wondering how the albino to my left could call himself claustrophobic, given such a determined obliviousness to my right of personal space, when I saw a familiar figure coming through the door. It was my cousin, Neha.
“The government stole my shoes!” Arthur announced without warning, startling everyone, including himself.
I was halfway to the Starbucks before my seat had probably gone cold.
“He’s gay?” Cristina blurted out, nearly choking on her drink. “Wow…I knew your parents were a little out of touch with what you’re looking for in a man, but that’s ridiculous!”
“Obviously they didn’t know he was gay.” I spoke up to dismiss the uninvited pity rushing at me from our neighbors.
“Do his parents know?” Pam leaned in and whispered, as if the topic were a ref lection on her.
“Of course not.”
“Que locura,” Cristina decided. “That’s pretty twisted. So much for counting on those underground, Indian-network background checks.”
“There is nothing underground about the Indian network,” I tried to explain. “And it has nothing to do with the background check, anyway. As far as the background check went, everything was perfect. Generally, Indian parents don’t consider, or even think about, their children’s sexualities or sexual preferences. Some things are just assumed.”
“Seriously.” Pam shook her head at Cristy, ignoring me entirely. “You said he was thirty, right? Talk about living in denial.”
Was she referring to Prakash’s parents or to him? In a way, I felt bad for the guy; I could relate. Our parents grew up in a culture that rejected the concepts of premarital sex and romance. Non-arranged marriages occurred so infrequently among their generation that they were referred to as “love marriages.” Like most first-generation Indian-Americans, I had come to accept that my parents could never acknowledge my premarital sexuality any more than Prakash’s parents could comprehend his homosexuality.
My theories on the value of self-discovery through romantic misadventure were lost on mom and dad, so I kept my mouth shut about my relationships, especially the fifty percent that involved non-Indian boys. And somewhere around age fifteen I decided to take the same stance on my claustrophobia.
“Look, I’m not pissed off that he’s gay.” I concentrated on my empty cup. “I’m pissed off that he led me on.”
“What a tease.” Cristina grinned.
“Basically,” I said, sitting up straighter. “But it doesn’t matter. Prakash was only a blip on my radar. An irrelevant data point. My plan holds.”
Two blank pairs of eyes stared back at me.
“Oh, God. Are you still talking about that ‘thirty months until thirty’ garbage?” Cristina practically yelled.
“First of all, it’s not garbage. Ignoring my biological clock won’t make it go away. And I’m finished wasting time. I have to be honest with myself.” I raised my chin toward Pamela. “And I know you can at least understand where I’m coming from.”
To Pamela, thirty and alone was roughly translated as homeless and afflicted with a disfiguring, terminal, sexually transmitted disease. She had been engaged-to-be-engaged with William, a Harvard-educated lawyer of the lightly pin-striped variety, since the beginning of time; or at least since the beginning of college, when she woke up in his bed on the morning after the Head of the Charles regatta. Although it never occurred to her to question his claim that his parents’ divorce made him maritally gun-shy, I was sure that it also never occurred to her that there was anything wrong with treating the search for a mate like the search for an apartment. A good deal was a good deal, period. And the potential for long-term appreciation far outweighed momentary attractiveness.
“You’re right, Vina. I do understand where you’re coming from. And I do not want to see you single at thirty.” She eyed me like a child who had lodged a marble up her own nose. “I also agree with you that we should all be honest with ourselves. So let’s be honest…let’s talk about what this is really about. Jon.”
5
I once broke up with a man for asking if I spoke “Indian.” He wasn’t kidding, so I asked him with a straight face if he spoke “White.” He didn’t get it. That was my cue to leave. On the other end of the spectrum, I once dated an Englishman who had me groping desperately for my can of mace the moment I entered his apartment. He had collected more Indian paraphernalia than was probably ever assembled outside the Subcontinent by anyone who was not, in fact, Indian. He acted completely nonchalant when he struck up a conversation at the bar, made no mention of his fascination with the country, yet he had filled his apartment with everything from statues of Ganesha to an old-fashioned Jhoola chair to wall-hangings depicting village women dancing while balancing water pots on top of their heads.
He offered me some chai without even a hint of irony, and that was when I decided I wasn’t sticking around to hear his Hannibal impersonation. Perhaps he was a perfectly normal guy, and perhaps he merely liked the Indian designs. (And perhaps I’m actually a natural blonde.) Though if that were true, he should have told me before we got to his place. Surprises are not acceptable in New York City. And as all interracial daters already know, or will soon find out, Ethnic Fetishizers cannot be trusted. I cannot tell you whether or not he knew that Bollywood wasn’t an alternative to Sandal, or if there was a shrine to Indian women in his bedroom. What I can tell you is that I was out of there faster than you can say Samosa.
Little things are always symptomatic of a larger emotional disconnect. Of course, none of this was ever a problem with Jon. He didn’t expect me to belly dance or snake charm or glide into physically impossible sexual maneuvers, which I presumably picked up from the Kama Sutra classes I’d attended while the other kids were in Sunday school. The men who believe that sort of thing are easy to spot; they’re the same ones who claim that “all women are three margaritas away from a lesbian experience.”
Jon asked me questions about me and my family, and he seemed genuinely interested in my answers. Without consulting me, he bought a Hindi for Beginners book and began working choice words and phrases into our everyday conversation. But he also spoke Spanish, French and Italian to me. For all I knew, he was calling me his Little Subway Token most of the time. But if you had seen his smile, you, too, would have gladly answered to anything from Microwave Oven to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, wagged your imaginary tail and drooled all over his Armani shirt. And you, too, would have ignored all the logic against falling in love with a man who was so totally wrong for you. When we met, he was a former chef who owned his own restaurant. Being with him made me feel sophisticated, as if I was physically incapable of spilling anything on myself.
If it hadn’t been for his not cluing in to the fact that my eggs were expiring by the minute, we would probably still be together. Well, that, and if I hadn’t mistaken his cell phone for my own on that godforsaken morning two weeks earlier.
The day had started out like any other. I was running late for work and cursing myself for hitting the snooze button so many times. The twist that morning was an unexpected visit from my neighbor, Christopher, who f lamed so brightly that he sometimes threatened to set the building on fire. His natural sense of style and inability to keep his couture judgments to himself made me feel like less of a woman, and left me no choice but to ignore his prior attempts to befriend me. So you can imagine how surprised I was to find him waiting outside my door at eight o’clock with a story about a last-minute business trip (Did accountants really have those?) and a wheezing, unimpressed Booboo in his arms. Agreeing to cat-sit may only have been the first in a number of suboptimal choices I made that day, but as it turns out, it wasn’t just me. The entire city was off-kilter that day. Without thinking, and because I was then running even later for work, I agreed, despite my chocolate-brown sofa, to take the fluffy white Persian into my home.
The time it took to get the pudgy little boarder settled precluded my Starbucks stop, so I was at the mercy of the Krispy Kremes, which materialized in our conference room before each Monday-morning team meeting. Sarah, the only other woman on our team, shot an irritated look at me for the crime of inquiring if there were “anything chocolate” left in the box. A former professional golfer who’d gone back to her MBA after an injury, Sarah had recently joined our company in Equity Research. While she was a nice person, if you asked me, Sarah was completely ill-equipped for the world beyond sports. She cursed like a sailor, slapped indiscriminant high fives, and called everyone Dude. Some women believe that in order to compete with a man, you must essentially become one. But then again, some women refuse the epidural.
Question: Wouldn’t you like to be more like a man?
Answer: Why would I want to be hairier, lonelier and more confused than I already am?
The rest of the team shook their heads at my request, but Sarah made her opinion clear. Even in an office where most men had their shoes shined, their backs waxed, their suits tailored and their personal trainers on speed-dial, my obsessive culinary peccadilloes made me a disgrace to feminists everywhere.
“It’s not easy being you, is it?” she said, pouting in my direction.
Peter, a fellow Associate, looked up from his copy of TheEconomist; Denny, a lowly Analyst, swallowed half of a jelly doughnut and Wade, the eager Intern, stopped midsip of his coffee. All eyes around the conference table focused on me, but before I could respond the overhead lights flickered off. Everyone glanced up at the ceiling, and the lights flickered back on for a second, before f lashing out again. The digital wall-clock followed suit, as did the Bloomberg terminal.
Dropping my honey-glazed, I swung the door open and stepped into a darkened office. To my surprise, my otherwise narcissistically-hyper-functioning, Type-A-personality colleagues stood dumbfounded, searching one another’s faces for answers. United in temporary paralysis because of the loss of our Internet connection, we huddled around a secretary’s CB radio. That’s when the crackling voice of a lone CNN reporter explained that through a series of technological mishaps at grid centers across the northeastern United States, the juice had been sucked out of the region.
Within minutes we were headed for the darkened stairwell, since elevators are not an option when someone turns out the lights in New York City. We made our way down each f light single file, relying solely on the sounds of each other’s footsteps to avoid a collision. As my forehead began beading over with sweat, I swallowed hard and chose to rely on the Closeted Claustrophobes’ mantra to keep my mind in focus: Check for exits, Close your eyes, Count to ten, Calm your nerves, Center yourself. My team’s co-managing director, Alan, walked before me, and my partner Peter followed close behind. With our palms on the walls and railings, we made it down the first twelve floors without incident. Clearly, it was too good to last. Thanks to my batlike auditory skills and my nearly four-inch alligator pumps, it was the tenth-floor landing that did me in. I must have miscounted the stairs because my right leg stopped short and sent me doubling over. Knees buckled and back bent, I thrust my arms out before me and grabbed instinctively for something that might break my fall. I won’t mention which part of Alan’s lower anatomy did the trick, but I will say, Thank God I didn’t squeeze any tighter.
That blackout was proof positive that New Yorkers cannot be trusted in the dark. They’re almost as mischievous as Australians are in the light. Once we made it outside, I apologized profusely for sexually harassing my own boss, who refused to make eye contact with me.
“Ahem…Never mind, Vina…Let’s just forget about it, okay?” Alan mumbled, before disappearing into the hordes surrounding our building.
I waded through thousands of ornery businesspeople boiling in their suits and trekked the five avenues and ten blocks toward my apartment. Along the way, I arrived at the surprising conclusion that an alligator pump is in fact the most appropriate shoe for a crisis situation in this city. Because the most effective way to express your discontent when someone gropes you in a crowd is to jam your heel into that person’s foot as hard as you possibly can and twist it, like you’re putting out a cigarette.
It took all of my strength to complete the final stretch: the ten-flight hike up an unlit stairwell to my place. It wasn’t until I stood before the comfort of my front door that the mounting tension in my neck began to drain out of me; here I would be safe. As soon as I was through the door, I wrenched off my shoes and I promptly f lung them across the room. That was the moment I remembered my little houseguest, because I nailed him right between the eyes. Booboo let out a squeal that made me wonder whether there wasn’t a small child hiding in all that fur, and darted straight under my bed.
I spent the next half hour lying on my belly, peering under my bed and pleading with Booboo to come out. He stared at me maliciously, blinking away the dust bunnies, and yawning or repositioning himself occasionally on top of my shoes. Eventually, I gave up on the niceties and decided to make a grab for him. Taking a deep breath to prepare for what should have been an elegant gesture, I lunged at him. I shoved my entire arm in his direction, until my head banged against the bed frame.
“Raaaaaargh!!!!” He growled what I could only imagine was Booboo in cat-speak, and scratched my forearm.
“Shit!” I yelled, and recoiled from the bed, with my eyes watering.
This was the problem with being Super Woman’s only daughter. With thirty months to spare until age thirty, my mother had fine-tuned the balance of home and career, secured the illusion of waking up with meticulous makeup, and mastered the art of willing my pancakes down off the kitchen ceiling mere moments after I threw them up there. I, on the other hand, at the same point in my life, was reverse-sexually-harassing my way out of a career I didn’t honestly enjoy and while swooning over one homosexual man, was failing miserably in my attempt to win the affections of the wheezing, fifteen-pound cat of another. Honestly, it was a wonder that I could even feed myself.
Whether or not I look the part, I hail from a long line of loan sharks. My father has planned to make this one of his sound bytes when the New York Times interviews him in ten years, for a two-page spread about his daughter, the globe-trotting financier. Betel-chewing, bindi-wearing, and almost always below five feet tall, most of the women in my ancestral tree had arrived at their careers in high (or more accurately, low) finance by way of necessity, rather than choice. Practicality rules when you are widowed young in parts of Punjab where remarriage is as much of an option as a sex change. The tradition was to borrow against what little land their husbands had left them, and then loan to the poorer of their villages at three times the banks’ normal rates. Pragmatism is what we know. So it was probably less than incredible that, despite my skant affection for the industry, I had managed to thrive on Wall Street.
Most people in my life had no idea what I actually did for a living; nor did they care to find out. And I didn’t blame them. They were better off clinging to some airbrushed notion of what my days as an investment banker were really like. Essentially, I did the research that helped my bosses decide which stocks to invest in, and when. Sometimes it involved speaking with the management of public companies, who either eyed me like an Omaha Steak or dismissed me entirely. At other times it involved combing through mountains of reports on an industry to develop a reasonable opinion about where it was headed.
Typically, I would spend a week researching before I presented a conclusion to my bosses, who often patted me on the back, or otherwise told me the reasons why they believed that I was wrong, if they felt like explaining themselves. Soon thereafter, the market would always prove them right. Apparently, this was good training for the day when, if I was lucky, I would become one of them. It wasn’t being corrected that bothered me so much as it was being wrong. Regardless, my plan was to stick with the job, act like I enjoyed it and apply to business school within a few years.
After earning my MBA, I could start thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I would have been a supermodel, but the six-inch heels I’d need just to reach up to the average model’s elbow ended that fantasy. Thanks to the same genes, I was far better suited for sneaking under turnstiles than for strutting across runways.
And I would have been a novelist, but there were other genetic predispositions to consider. My father hadn’t come to this country with eleven dollars in his pocket thirty years ago, mopped floors at a supermarket, begged for an entry-level engineer’s position, tolerated racism and ignorance and decades of struggle, started a business and saved enough to send his daughter to an Ivy League college, only to watch her give up a career of which he could only have dreamed all those years ago.
Another reason why I survived in investment banking was because early on I had learned the folly of questioning the judgment of the people in control.
“This is a waste of her time,” I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother, when she mentioned my excitement over the prospect of entering a poem in a fifth-grade writing competition. “It is not practical, and we should not encourage her in it.”
“Oh, don’t be so serious, Sushil,” my mother replied from the kitchen, while I squeezed my head through the bars of the banister to get within closer earshot. “It’s just a writing contest.”
“It is not just a writing contest, Shardha. It is a signal. And it is a waste of her time. These are important years. She should be working on her Math Olympiad, or on the Spelling Bee. Why should we train her to care what these so-called judges think? Her teacher is no Professor of Literature. He is there to teach her Mathematics and Science and History. Anyway, writing is something where there is never an absolute score. It cannot get her into good colleges. It is a waste of her time.”
“Sushil, be reasonable. I cannot tell her no after I have already told her yes. She’s very enthusiastic. She wrote some poem about Reality, and I think it’s very clever for her age.”
“That is all fine. Yet I do not agree with it. You and I both know that the world does not value these things. They value success that can be measured. We know this. We have seen this. Why should we send our daughter into such a struggling life?”
“Teekh hai,” she agreed. “Perhaps you have a point. Though we cannot do anything about it now. And keep your voice down. She just went up to bed.”
“Chuhlow, fine. But my daughter will not be a writer.”
“And I will not reheat your Rotis if they get cold while you are prolonging this discussion. Let’s eat in peace, okay?”
To my eleven-year-old ears, the distinction between a father’s protectiveness and dismissal of my interest in writing wasn’t exactly clear. What was clear was that he had tried to prevent me from doing something, so I had to do it anyway. I proudly entered my poem “Is This Reality?” into the contest. Based on a dream I had, the poem was made up of questions about what proof we had that our world wasn’t some other child’s dream, and whether or not that child could end our world just by waking up.
The next day, Mr. Kronin called me over to his desk to tell me that it was all right to feel angry and confused about the world, and to ask if I was interested in speaking with the school psychiatrist. Obviously, this was not the response I had hoped for. You talk to the psychiatrist, I screamed, before running to the bus and crying all the way home. If this was what writing would lead to, I told myself, I wanted no part of it.
“Sometimes it’s not the best thing to share these kinds of feelings,” my mother tried to console me. “Because it is not always guaranteed that everyone will understand it. And that can hurt your feelings. But I’m sure that Mr. Kronin didn’t mean it. Not everybody knows what a special girl you are, beti…like we do.”
Burying my head in my pillow, I scooted closer to my Nani. Mom and Dad took the hint and left us alone.
“Vina, you must not be angry with your parents.”
“I hate it that they were right,” I told her defiantly.
“Beti, they don’t want to be right. They want you to be successful.”
I pulled the covers over my face.
“Try to understand….This is the way that it is in India. Boys and girls must choose which line they will take in the eighth grade…either science for medicine or math for engineering. They start preparations for college early. And your parents want to make life easier for you. It’s the same way as they corrected your hands.”
I came out from under the covers. “What?”
“You don’t know this, but you were naturally left-handed as a child, so they corrected you.”
“How?”
“When you were very small, they told you ‘No’ every time you used the left hand. They wanted to make your life easier because the world is built for right-handed people. See? You don’t even remember being left-handed.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Beti, good girls trust their parents.”
I stood corrected, again. And this time there was no point in arguing. It was better not to waste time questioning those who knew more than I did about things like school. They were clearly more intelligent than I was or ever would be, at anything. On that particular lesson, it turned out, I was a pretty fast learner.
6
On the afternoon of the blackout I was still sitting on the floor, examining the wound from Booboo’s outburst, when I heard a familiar voice.
“Vina? You okay?” The voice came from the hallway outside my apartment.
I knew that it was him by his footsteps, and by the way that he left out the verb to save time. Jon had used his elbow to prop himself against my door frame, so his palm obstructed my view when I swung the door open. I was always a sucker for breathless and brave. But he was also sweaty. I imagined him running the twenty blocks between his restaurant and my building, and the ten f lights up to my door. Love is the only thing in life that is not anticlimactic; and as much as I hated to admit it, seeing him in my doorway made me feel like I was home.
Jon was tall, dark and Sicilian, in that broad-shouldered, olive-complexioned sort of a way, so I often told myself that we looked good together. We met in his restaurant, Peccavi, eighteen months ago when I requested a rare vintage of Chateau Cabrieres for myself and my girlfriends. He complimented my choice while personally delivering the wine to our table, and stayed to chat us up and steal a glance down my blouse. I’m the first to admit that I was not above doing whatever I could to make it easier for him. I’ve got to use these puppies while they’ve still got the inclination to stand and salute.
Eventually, he gave me his business card with the following scrawled across the back: “Bella, I would love to continue our conversation alone, some other time.”
I called three days later (sending the message that I was interested, but not desperate), and refused a Saturday-night date but agreed to an early dinner on Sunday (making it clear that while I was far too fabulous to have a Saturday night unbooked four days in advance, I wasn’t dating anyone exclusively enough to have my Sunday evenings reserved).
He wooed me expertly from the start, which naturally made me uncomfortable; would Chinese takeout and a rental of Say Anything be too pedestrian for him? After our first dinner, he draped his jacket around my shoulders as we strolled through Central Park. Then he kissed me, after holding my face in his hands, looking into my eyes and smiling in a way that asked for my permission.
“Do you think he’s embarrassed?” he had asked me, as we passed by a dog who stared at us with one leg raised, peeing against a tree.
Emotional risk-taking never came easily to me. My plan was to have a few months of fun with the big, sexy man, and (All together now…) “to keep it casual.” A year later, I was drafting speeches that might dissuade my parents from disowning me for bringing home an Italian and an engagement ring. Since I had already ventured so far outside my original romantic parameters, I even surprised myself by deciding to end our relationship over his disinterest in my ticking biological clock. One of the few things I knew I wanted for sure in this life was a child. So I had broken up with Jon in a no-fault sort of a way. He got Anne & Marie, the CD we purchased from the band we saw in Vermont on our inaugural weekend getaway. I got David and Melissa, the couple we met at the weekly Latin Dance class he had suggested. And I thought we had split the regrets right down the middle. I thought a lot of things back then and I ignored his attempts to reach out and get back together. A clean break, I reasoned, was the best way to end something that was never supposed to have begun at all. I was the picture of restraint: totally successful in ignoring the chocolates, the e-mails and the phone calls day and night. What I mean to say is that I was totally successful, until he showed up at my door in the middle of that blackout.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay, I guess.” He gasped for breath, wiping his face like the fireman had in that movie Cristina gave me last Christmas.
“Thanks, Jon.” I smoothed the hair off of my face. “That’s sweet of you. Come in.”
“You were at work when it happened, right? You okay for food and water here?” he asked, scanning the inside of my fridge, and the rest of my apartment, as if for intruders.
“Yeah, sure…I walked home from the office and I’ve got a bunch of water bottles, anyway,” I cleared my throat, “Listen, we might run out of water pressure in the bathrooms, and you’re pretty sweaty. So if you want, you can take a shower. There are clean towels in there.” It was odd to hear myself sound so casual with him.
“Thanks, I think I will. And you know,” he hesitated, “It’s good to see you. I mean, I miss you.”
Pamela refused to accept the breakup. Cristina suggested that I jump back on the horse, or at least the occasional cowboy. The thing was, I never gave Jon an ultimatum. I simply realized that he wasn’t interested in more than what we had; therefore, I figured I should look for someone who was. That was when I finally agreed to be set up on a blind date by my parents. I tried to explain all of this to him, but Jon insisted on believing that I was “going through a phase or something,” and still made numerous attempts to reconcile. He just wasn’t ready to take that step, he told me, but he was even less ready to let go of me.
Now that he was naked in my shower, I wondered if maybe he had been right. Or maybe I had been right; maybe if we got back together, he would acknowledge that he wanted me to bear his children and make an honest woman out of me.
Damn. I wanted to rip off all my clothes and climb into that shower after him. I laid a hand on the doorknob and closed my eyes to imagine it. I’d strip down and sneak into the bathroom, tapping him on the shoulder. He’d turn around and grab me, pulling me close. We’d devour each other, making love against all the slippery-wet walls of my bathroom. My hair and makeup would remain perfect. Steam would rise seductively to prevent anyone from seeing anything less than a completely aroused couple. The camera would fade out.
Of course, I reminded myself of the reality before taking that big step backward. Meaning, this scenario was nearly impossible to pull off without someone slipping, or banging against the faucet or dropping someone else on their ass. And even if none of those things happened, someone was sure to wind up with soapy water shooting directly into their eyes, or their nose, or both. Not sexy. I took my hand away from the doorknob—it was all for the best, I decided. I had no business following Jon into the shower, or anywhere else for that matter. I should be sitting on my couch and looking forward to that promising Indian lawyer my father had mentioned.
Yes. Exactly. But that shower did sound inviting. Oh, why not? What was stopping me? I was young and horny and nobody had made love to me in as long as I could remember. And I loved him. And he loved me. Why wasn’t that enough? Why did I always have to be so logical? Oh, all this emotional Ping-Pong was exhausting. I was not going to think about it anymore.
I grabbed some candles from my drawer, along with a set of matches, and left them by my bed. On the couch, I immersed myself in a staring contest with Booboo, who had found a stack of papers on my desk that seemed likely to hatch if warmed long enough. He had decided to oblige with his pudgy body, having already taken care of establishing dominance over me. Deciding that I could not drop Booboo’s gaze without somehow forfeiting total dominion over my apartment, I made no effort to acknowledge Jon’s emergence from the bathroom. He sat down on the couch beside me, and pulled my arm straight, to get a better look at Booboo’s handiwork. After disappearing again into the bathroom he returned, and knelt by the foot of the sofa. Then he unscrewed a tube of Neosporin and began dabbing it gently onto my wound. I looked over and couldn’t help being moved by how hard he was concentrating. And he must’ve sensed my gaze, because he looked up.
He brought my palm to his face, and kissed the middle of it, before tilting his head to rest his cheek inside. He had already parted my lips with his stare by the time his fingers grazed my jawbone. He laid the gentlest kiss on my lips, holding my face lightly in place, like a house of cards he was sheltering from the wind. He searched my eyes before letting his cheek glide along mine and finally burying his face in my hair. The familiar chill set in as he yanked my hips up and around so that I was straddling him.
We sat face to face and I admitted to myself then that I had decided to give in. It was one of those moments you wanted to savor, almost more so than the act, especially when you find yourself back in the arms that used to hold you. And that was how it went…as we wrapped ourselves around each other. As we pressed ourselves together, trying to merge. As his arms resettled among the familiar curves of my back, and his hands dove in and out of my hair, grabbing a clump firmly, and yanking backward to expose my neck for him. As we consumed each other, we took our time because there was nowhere else we would rather have been. He rose to his feet and I tightened the grip of my legs around his waist and allowed him to carry me toward my bed. And lay me down. And climb on top of me. And take me.
He crawled in through my eyes while repeating how much he had missed me. How glad he was that we were together again. This was how it was supposed to be, and he told me that I knew it. As we tumbled around fighting for control and for more of each other, I felt adored and completely, totally open. And even though it was my first, I kept thinking best blackout ever.
7
At the end of our second date so many moons before, Jon had invited me to his apartment.
“For a cup of coffee,” he had explained, “or maybe a glass of port.”
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “I can’t do it.” I avoided his eyes while my heels dodged the cracks in Prince Street.
“Why not?” He stopped, took my hands in his and smiled down at me. “You got another date comin’ over at midnight?”
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I barely know you.”
“Well, if you come back to my place,” he said, cocking his head to one side, “then I might let you get to know me.”
“And also perhaps find three heads in your freezer,” I completed his sentence.
He smirked and raised an eyebrow at me.
“I’m sorry, but I mean, you could be a cannibal…or a Republican. And my instincts are to trust you, but it’s too soon. This is New York,” I concluded. “I don’t make the rules.”
“Who does make the rules, then?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why can’t you make your own rules?” he asked, tucking my hand into his elbow as we continued walking.
“Because that’s not how it works. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not a woman.” I leaned my head on his shoulder as we turned a corner onto West Broadway.
“You got that right.” He tilted his head upward toward the moon. “And I like it that you’ve got morals. It’s a good thing. It’s refreshing.”
“Besides,” I added, “think of it this way—maybe I’m the crazy one. Maybe I’ve saved you the trouble of waking up alone, tied to your bed, feeling used, trying to decide whether you’re more insulted by the fact that you’re covered in raspberry jam, or that your f lat-screen TV is missing.”
When he arrived to pick me up for brunch two days later, Jon brought along a bouquet of white lilies. Pinned to the cellophane was a Polaroid of the inside of his freezer, containing only two frozen lasagnas and a copy of that morning’s New York Times. This was a man I had every reason to believe I could trust.
It was the morning after the blackout, and I nearly tumbled out of bed to grab my cell phone. I often slept closer to the window than to the bedside table, but since Jon had already slipped into the shower, the ringing jolted me out of my comfortable state of goofy-grinned, postcoital malaise. He had sprung out of bed muttering about how the lack of electricity for the alarm had caused him to sleep late. As he scrambled around the apartment in search of his clothes, I grabbed his watch off the bedside table, squinted and announced that it was eleven a.m. Since the city was still shut down, I told him, there probably wouldn’t be any customers lined up yet for lunch outside Peccavi. Then I settled into the spot where he had been sleeping, and drifted back into my dreams. In the moment between waking up and opening my eyes, I could smell him on myself. The walls were red, the air was still and I was back in love—that suspension of disbelief, borne of instinct, nursed on hormones, cloaked in a warm, blinding light. I grabbed and f lipped open the cell phone.
“Hello?” I chirped as if I was the lady of the house, savoring her rockin’ tan the morning after she had had her way with the pool boy.
“Hello?” the caller asked.
“Um, yes, hello. Who is this?” I sat up in bed, pulling the sheet over my breasts even though I was alone, and began to finger the knots out of my hair.
“Who is this?”
“Well,” I joked, determined not to let the caller’s attitude ruin my morning, “you called my cell phone, so you probably already know who I am.”
“No,” she explained as if I were riding the short bus, “I called Jon’s cell phone.”
Assuming she was a salesperson or an investor in the restaurant, I chose not to accept the negative energy. I would kill her with kindness instead.
“Oops, I’m sorry. I must have thought that his was mine. His phone, I mean. We have the same cell phone. Anyway, he’s in the bathroom. But I can give him a message,” I cooed, scrambling naked around my apartment in search of a pen, and feeling like the Lady of My Own House again. “Who may I say was calling?”
Booboo watched my stumbling from underneath the desk chair, tentatively, as if preparing to pounce.
“Lissette. The mother of his son, that’s who. Who the hell are you?”
I doubled over.
Have you ever seen a photo of someone you used to belong to, and wondered if that’s really how they looked? So strong was my faith in the decency of this man that I might have been less shocked if advised by my pedicurist that she had discovered an additional toe. I was aware that the sentiment made me a cliché, but all I could take in at that moment was how much I hated that I had no idea.
His what?!?!?! Whose son? Wait a minute…“son”? Wait…What? Even as my throat was swelling shut, I kept trying and failing to swallow.
“Hello? Hello?” she asked again. “Who is this?” She sounded like someone who might punch me in the face over a pair of shoes on clearance at Macy’s.
“I, um…this is Vina,” I managed, eyeing the bathroom door and wondering if I should tell her anything else. Feeling dizzy, I had to take a seat.
“I…I didn’t realize he had a girlfriend,” I continued, squeezing my eyes shut. “Or wife? Or, um…look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to know. I mean, I’m not sorry…I didn’t know about you or the…the baby? Believe me. I’ll give Jon your message. And I’ll throw him out. But can I just ask you something? How old is your kid? I mean, I know this is awkward. But I need to know.”
“Two months,” she replied after a pause. And then all I could hear was a dial tone ringing inside one ear and the glub, glub, glub of my own blood pulsing inside the other. Booboo yawned and stretched across the window sill, having had his fill of me. I thought that blood was supposed to be rushing right now, although I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be rushing toward. Mine seemed to be draining out of my head like beer from a bottle turned upside down.
I curled up naked on the couch, the cell phone pressed to my face. With my lips apart and a hand to my throat, I listened to the torrent of water from the shower, and speculated what would come next.
I always loved waking up in Jon’s bed to find our cell phone lights blinking in unison. It was as if they were dreaming the same dreams on the nightstand, of a charger for two plugged in beside the four-poster bed, in the master suite of our country home. My parents would complain about the lack of spice in the meals Jon conjured up from the ingredients in our backyard garden. An Amish handwoven straw mat, which was far too quaint for our Manhattan apartment, would welcome visitors at our door.
I missed waking up with him wrapped around me like a teddy bear, so that the hair of his forearms danced with my breath. I missed how he would tighten his grasp and pull me closer when I tried to get out of bed. When he slept, he looked like an angel to me, and when he woke, he would tickle me relentlessly. Grabbing my ankles and kissing my feet, he would ask how I managed to balance on a pair so small. When we went to bed angry, with our backs facing one another, his foot would search out my own during the night, coming to rest once it was wrapped around my ankle.
Jon was inside another woman when he was supposed to belong to me. So why did the thought of it make me feel so disgusting?
By the time he emerged from the bathroom the lights were back on, and I was determined not to let him see me cry. An hour ago I had belonged to him, but now he was a trespassing dog. And I was getting ready to fire a warning shot. I could get through this if it was quick; I would have to rip him off like a Band-Aid. I would not give in or attempt to rescue him when he squirmed. I would not give him the satisfaction of reacting to the knife that was sticking out of my heart.
“I don’t need anything from the store,” I told him flatly, while avoiding eye contact by feigning interest in Booboo’s attempts to scratch his way into my closet.
“Am I going to the store?” He cocked his head, perplexed.
“Well, I don’t know where else you’re gonna get diapers for your son.” I was as matter-of-fact as all hell.
He stood frozen with that idiotic smile erased, as if I had slapped it right off of his chin. Stupidly, typically, maternally, I felt sorry for him. Old habits linger even after they die. I bit my lip to stifle a tear, though I wasn’t sure which one of us it was for.
“Oh,” I added, my voice beginning to shake, “and Lissette called while you were in the shower. Don’t worry. I told her the lights are back on in midtown.”
The look on his face said the wind had been knocked out of him. The pain in my gut said it hadn’t been knocked hard enough. For a second I wished I were another woman, a woman who could take him back, or perhaps a woman who could ask for details that might make a difference. Was it a one-night stand or an actual affair? How did they meet? Was he in a relationship with her now? Did he love her? Was he really, really, really sorry?
Secretly I knew none of that mattered. I reminded myself that the baby was conceived while we were a couple, and I wondered if I was the last to know. Did everyone at the restaurant know? Had they been keeping it from me this entire time? Had Lissette known that I existed? I felt like Jon had tattooed his name on my butt while I was asleep, removed all my clothes in the middle of Times Square and invited a crowd over to point and laugh. In fact, that was exactly what he had done. Suddenly, I went into self-preservation mode, and I knew that I had to get him out of my home as soon as possible.
I opened my door and leaned against it. I felt sorry for him because I knew I could have loved him better than anyone. I hated him because of the fool he had made of me. I wanted to get tested for STDs, and to kick him until he cried. I wanted him to feel what he had done, to see my hurt and to want to comfort me, and to not be allowed to try. I wanted to see this woman, and to know if she was prettier than me. I wanted to travel back in time to the first night he was ever with her, to shake him and make him understand what he was beginning to throw away. I wanted to forget that I ever loved him. I couldn’t look him in the eye before I slammed the door behind him and hurled the leftovers of our relationship into the toilet, but I did manage to force out a whisper.
“Get out.”
8
By the time I escaped the clutches of the “Hispan-iddish Inquisition” at Starbucks (as I referred to Pam and Cristina’s irritating attempts at emotional intervention), I was, of course, running late for work. While there was no expected time of arrival on a Sunday, I fully believed I’d find that Peter and Sarah had been at it since ten a.m. What I didn’t believe I’d find, however, was the following e-mail from Jon.
Sunday, March 27, 10:30 a.m.
From: Jon
To: Vina
Re: Us
Baby,
You have to know that I’m sorry. I deserve a chance to explain.
We deserve a chance to try to work it out. Please give us that.
Jon
In an electronic folder named “Handsome” I had saved every e-mail I had ever received from him. I had planned to print them out one day, tuck them into a shoe box and hide it in our closet. I had planned to pull them out to embarrass our children during their Thanksgiving vacations from college. I had planned to call on them for strength when Jon spent half our savings on a luxury RV. And I had planned to refer to them for proof, ten years and three children into our marriage, when he began to forget that he had ever been romantic.
But now? Now they meant about as much to me as a mug from last summer’s company picnic. Of all the goddamned nerve. How dare he continue to refer to me as his baby? He had a baby, and it sure as hell wasn’t me. And if he had to address me, I would have preferred that he use the title “Ma’am” while dressed in rags and begging me for change. He would have lost everything, you see, after some food critic became ill from his meal, forcing him to shut down the restaurant and downgrade from his Soho loft to a cardboard box in a doorway on Second Avenue. Naturally, I would pass by his new home each morning on my way to a better job, and a better man with more…stamina…and a bigger…wine collection.
I added his last e-mail to the folder and twisted my finger through the air above my head, like a plane in some miniature air show before thumping ceremoniously on the Delete key.
“You have permanently erased all of the messages in the folder marked: Handsome.”
I leaned back in my chair, inhaled and clasped my hands behind my head. I imagined myself strutting toward Grand Central in a shiny gray DKNY skirt-suit, with my chocolate-brown Manolos barely avoiding his spleen as he lay prostrate across my path. My salon-perfect hair would flounce in the wind, synchronized to the beat of my footsteps and the tune of “Who’s That Lady?” being pumped through some invisible speakers in the sky.
I don’t know if the electronic age has made relationships easier or more difficult, although I can testify to the unique sense of comfort inherent in a digital gesture of dissociation. It was especially soothing to execute it from a cocoon of prestige and privacy so many floors above the rest of New York. I comforted myself with the fact that there was at least one aspect of my life that was under control: my career.
Perhaps the only thing more annoying than a company that’s an old boys’ club is one that is but believes it is not. Mine considered itself progressive. My colleagues used phrases like “We’re all fired up” and “I’ll shoot that right over” and “Let’s find a way to leverage that.” Everyone wore suits or Brooks Brothers office casual wear, played squash on the weekends and looked like a WASP even if they weren’t. At least Alan and Steve, my mentors and our team’s co-Managing Directors, treated me like one of the guys.
There were only two ways to win respect at a company like that: either act as if you’re thrilled to have the honor of being part of the team, or encourage the impression that you know everything about the business and are therefore an irreplaceable asset to the firm. Early in my career I chose the latter tactic. My method involved a careful blend of carrying myself as if I had it all figured out, and intimidating people from asking me questions I didn’t know how to answer. Being a self-assured (translation: inherently scary) woman among the type of men who self-selected New York finance in the first place didn’t hurt.
Instead of causing you to want to poke out your own eyeballs due to the mind-numbing details of what I actually do at work, I will share the stuff that’s interesting. I’ll talk about what went on between the people thrown together in a place like that, which is always far more compelling than how the money is made.
My neighbor, Christopher, had apparently decided that he was my new best friend. He was standing at my door not five minutes after I got home from work that Sunday evening, with a presumptuous smile and a blender full of peach margaritas. With Booboo in tow, he barreled right past me and began to make himself comfortable. Having also decided that we were too close to bother ourselves with formalities like Hello, he simply waved the blender in my face, kicked off his flip-flops, and bounded into my kitchen.
“If you turn me away, I’ll become that pathetic queen who lives alone down the hall, drinking margaritas and talking to his cat,” he said. “Please don’t turn me into that guy. I may be getting old in gay-years, but I am still way too cute to be that guy.”
I watched from my doorway as he sat on my couch and began pouring into my mismatched coffee mugs. After rearranging my throw pillows and settling himself among them, he held a mug out toward me. He motioned to the easy chair, and I sat myself down.
“So tell me.” He smiled, propping his heels onto my coffee table. “Why won’t you give Jon another chance?”
Booboo busied himself in my closet, probably trying my best heels on for size. After leaning on my apartment buzzer for about a half an hour the night before, Jon had apparently realized that either I wasn’t home, or I wasn’t planning on letting him in. Since he was drunk, he decided to buzz all the other apartments until he found someone who was willing to hear him out. In the end, he found Christopher, who was all too happy to listen to his side of the story through the intercom. Which leads us to Christopher, reclining on my couch that evening, expecting me to justify myself. The annoying yet endearing thing about gay men is how they assume instant emotional intimacy with almost any single woman whom they meet. That, combined with the fact that I babysat Booboo, probably meant Christopher and I were family.
I took a gulp of my margarita and made no attempt to respond.
“Don’t you at least want to hear his explanation?” he asked, lifting and sniffing each of the candles on my coffee table, and scoping out my copies of The Economist, Newsweek, and Jane magazine. He was probably looking for the Vogue I didn’t have. For a new best friend, his loyalties were all wrong.
“Not really,” I answered, grabbing a package of double-chocolate Oreos from the cupboard. “I think the child speaks for himself.”
“Does he? How old is he?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I kicked his feet off my coffee table before putting down the Oreos.
“I know.”
“Look, I just don’t think he should have the right to explain himself. He forfeited all of his rights when he cheated on me. And made a fool out of me by keeping it a secret. You have no idea how humiliated I am.” I swallowed one cookie, and twisted off the top of another.
“Wait a minute. You mean your friends knew about this?” he stopped.
“I don’t know if they knew, or if they didn’t. The point is that he’s got me wondering if any of them knew. He made me look like a naive, trusting idiot!”
“To who?”
“To myself.”
After a moment of silence during which he contemplated the inside of an open-faced cookie, Christopher decided, “I don’t like double-chocolate.”
“What?”
“The Oreos. They’re double-chocolate flavored. I don’t like ’em.”
“Oh, okay. Well, me, either.” I sucked down the rest of my margarita and then refilled my mug.
“Then why did you buy them?”
I huffed, rubbing my forehead. “Because it was all they had. You know, you’re not a very good houseguest.”
He placed the offending Oreo on the coffee table and lifted Booboo to his feet, before returning his attention to me. “So you’re really gonna let your ego rule your life?”
“That’s not what I’m doing. I’m cutting my losses. I’m being practical. Doesn’t anybody understand that? It’s what it means to be an adult.”
Christopher shrugged, and made Booboo dance before his own ref lection in my mirror. I sank deeper into my chair.
“Hmm, this reminds me of an article I was reading online,” I began, absentmindedly dipping an Oreo into my margarita. I took a bite, which made me gag and immediately spit a mouthful into a paper towel. Christopher was too busy checking the ref lection of his soon-to-be-bald spot in my mirror to notice, so I continued. “The article said something about the similarities between financially independent women and gay men in our dating rituals. Maybe that’s why you think you know how my mind works.”
“Think I know?” He turned around.
“Anyway, the title of the article was ‘You Don’t Get What You Deserve…You Get What You Settle For,’” I slurred, sliding down far enough in my chair to prop my mug on top of my stomach.
“Yeah, sure. Fascinating. Whatever. Listen, you don’t think I look like an accountant, do you?”
Yes…I thought, while I shook my head and insisted, “No! Not at all.”
“You must kill at poker. You’re really too good at telling people what they want to hear.” He smiled. “And for the record, you definitely do not look like an investment banker. Anyway, I’m sorry about Jon. But I think you should seriously consider sleeping with him at least one more time. For me. He sounded sexy over the intercom.”
“You probably think I should sleep with everybody.”
“Well, thank you for the blanket presumption that all gay men are promiscuous,” he said, trying to act offended. “Besides, not everybody, honey. You’re far too sweet for that, even though you try to act like a hard-ass. You leave the skanking to me. For you, just the men you love.”
“Loved,” I corrected him.
With one hand on his hip, he concluded, “Oh, honey, who do you think you’re kidding?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s turning my stomach almost as much as these margaritas and Oreos.”
“Then let’s talk about your weekend. How was that wedding? Did you meet the man of your dreams?”
“No.” I tried hard to focus on Christopher’s face despite my blurring eyes. “But I think I might have met the man of yours.”
9
Hung over, lying on the floor of her apartment, spooning a severely obese cat while being spooned by its gay, balding owner, with the remains of margaritas and Oreos plastered to the roof of her mouth is no way for a respectable Desi girl to wake up.
I struggled to my feet after shaking Christopher awake. And when I noticed a new stiffness in my neck, I thought to myself, Something has got to change.
Coffee was a priority, but as usual on a Monday morning the line at Starbucks stretched into oblivion. Of the three grocery stores within a four-block radius of my office, only one wasn’t out of my way. Unfortunately, it was also the one that was open twenty-four hours, and where personal space was a luxury. I particularly avoided that place before nine a.m. on weekdays, since the middle-aged Indian man working that shift had a habit of eyeing me like a plate of Chicken Tikka Masala while asking suggestively if I were from Punjab. I expected better from my own kind.
I was approaching the register when I noticed a man matching my pace and coming from the opposite aisle. He stopped short and extended an arm, offering a flirtatious smile along with an After you. He was attractive, in a Magnum P.I. kind of way. Normally, I might’ve taken the opportunity to get my own early-morning-flirt on, but the light of recent events helped me see the situation more clearly. He was probably using me to cheat emotionally on the wife he had waiting at home. And if not, then like most men in this cesspool of a city he would probably just as soon hit on me at a bar if I were wearing something low-cut as he would steal my cab on the street if it were raining. I denied him my smile, slammed a dollar on the counter, and headed for the door. I was making a statement on behalf of women everywhere. Without saying a word.
Outside I noticed something over the tilted rim of my coffee cup, which made me stop. I caught a glimpse of a rosy-cheeked, double-chinned woman on the opposite side of Lexington Avenue, dancing gleefully for commuters’ loose change. I crossed over to find “It Had To Be You” booming out of her battery-powered radio. Judging by the wisps of white hair peeking out from underneath her bandana, she must’ve been about sixty-five years old. A self-styled Gypsy, she shut her eyes tightly while twisting in delight, like a schoolgirl crooning into her hairbrush. A small crowd had formed around her, and I found myself staring as much at her as at the people. A man dropped a dollar into the shoe box by her feet, tipped his hat and continued down Lexington.
“Keep dancing!” she yelled.
“I’m not dancing,” he replied over a shoulder.
“Then find a reason to!” She seemed to be looking directly at me.
The crowd snickered, shook their heads and dispersed.
The first thing I saw when I sat down at my desk after our Monday-morning team meeting was a bouquet of f lowers. Logically, I assumed they were from Jon, so I drop-kicked them into the trash. The second thing I saw was an instant messenger chat request f lashing on my screen. Taunting me. Winking at me. Blowing in my ear. “IM” is the modern equivalent of passing notes in class, except that it is sanctioned by the powers-that-be, leaves little chance for some other kid to swipe a note, and is (for most professionally unsatisfied young career-types) slightly more addictive than mediocre sex. I had no choice but to respond when I saw the following prompt from Cristina.
Any time a coworker found me using IM for fun, I felt as if I’d been caught eating my crayons. Looking up from my screen I saw Peter waiting silently for my attention. For a minute? For a week?
“Ready to explain the Luxor deal to the intern?” he asked. Then he noticed the petals sticking out of my garbage can. “Oooh…I heard somebody got f lowers delivered this morning. I didn’t know it was you. Are they from Jon? Is he still trying to get back together with you?”
“I assume so,” I replied flatly.
“Does this mean that he’s patching things up with you and planning on whisking you off someplace to bear his many, many children?” Peter mock-punched me in the shoulder. Which part of my office resembled a locker room?
“Why? Are you writing a book?” I asked.
“I guess I’m nervous,” he replied, grinning as he motioned for Denny and Wade to claim a couple of chairs. “Because if anything ever took you away from the firm, I don’t know how I’d live without your witty retorts to my weekly team e-mails.”
Peter was essentially my partner—the other associate on our team with whom I worked most closely. Born and bred in the Bronx by an African-American mother and a Puerto Rican father, he was the product of a full scholarship to Tufts. He mentored inner-city schoolchildren, ran marathons whenever possible, and seemed genuinely excited to be a part of the team. As if all of that weren’t disturbing enough, he was also afflicted with the need to send uplifting weekly e-mail messages to our group.
That morning’s read: Happiness is fulfilling more than one’s fair share of the teamwork.
I had responded (and cced everyone) with Happiness is a mutually consensual game of grab-ass.
Honestly, you couldn’t have found a straighter arrow. Peter’s cheerleaderlike enthusiasm for the company made me want to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. Or myself. Anyone, really. There was no reason to be that pumped up about something like Equity Research.
“You have nothing to worry about, Peter. I would never dream of neglecting my responsibility to the team. I’ll tell you what—if and when someone does make an honest woman out of me, I promise to still fax a retort over to you from my Mommy-And-Me classes every morning. Somebody’s got to temper your hideous and unnecessary optimism with some good-old-fashioned cynicism. Otherwise you’ll blind us all. Really, Peter, that kind of Little-House-On-The-Prairie crap will get one of our interns mugged.”
“Ouch! Someone’s claws are out today! I like that, I like that,” he laughed like a mental patient at his own jokes. “Maybe you can bring some of that enthusiasm to the all-nighter we’re gonna have to pull to finish up the research on that Luxor deal. You know we have to make our recommendation by tomorrow morning. Now, let’s get young Wade here up to speed.”
The call came from inside the house. As usual, they used separate phones. As usual, they assumed I had an hour to waste in the middle of the day. And as usual, my parents caught me wide open and defenseless at my desk when they decided to attack. Only this time, Peter, Wade and Denny were seated in my office, so they, too, got caught in the crossfire.
Peter reclined in his seat across from my desk while Denny took notes beside him. Wade sat on the edge of his seat below my framed SUCCESS poster of a rock-climber reaching the peak of a mountain. That poster, like the two of them, came with the office, along with its mahogany desk, glass door, and many walls of gray.
“This week, we’ve been poring over the past five years’ worth of financials from a software manufacturer in Taiwan,” Peter explained to Wade, through a mouthful of chicken Caesar salad. “We’re finally making an investment recommendation to Alan and Steve tomorrow morning. However, we thought it might be helpful for you to understand how the research fits into the larger picture.”
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Poonam Sharma
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Success is all in how you define it With meticulous career planning and a couple of dirty martinis, there is very little that New York City investment banker Vina Chopra can’t do. And now that she’s decided to get serious about fi nding her mate, there is very little that Vina won’t try—even if it means letting her parents get involved. After all, what does she have to lose?Her longest-term relationship thus far has been with the ulcer she ultimately named Fred (unless you count the ex-boyfriend who won’t go away). Amid a series of dates with “the nice Indian doctor” and an offi ce scandal that could permanently end her career, Vina starts to question everything she’s been working for.Who has she been trying to please all these years? Is this the life that she really wants? Can she fi nally learn to put aside her family’s expectations long enough and become the girl most likely to find a happiness all her own?