All Eyes On Her

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

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

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

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

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

He glanced up without moving his head.

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

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

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

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

“Raj,” I said.

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

“No, of course not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

His text message from the airport read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring. Whatever.

Anyway, I was guessing the answer was no.

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

In my closet.

With my hands.

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

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

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

“Hello?”

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

This was going to require two bundt cakes.

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

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

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

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

A bundook then? he would chide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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