All Eyes On Her

In the weeks leading up to graduation, he collected a stack of rejection letters almost two inches thick. There were enough as it turned out to wallpaper his entire bathroom. We discovered this one morning when we woke up—hungover—to find that was exactly what we had done the night before.

But in the light of day Alex didn’t think it was funny. In fact, he crawled into bed and refused to go anywhere for a week. Eventually I had enough of his moping and forced him out when we were to be fitted for our caps and gowns. He came along, but he wasn’t the same. And I was very close to being seriously concerned when he burst into the dorm, interrupting a margarita-soaked slumber party with my girlfriends a few nights before graduation, to wave a piece of paper in my face.

“It’s from ICM!” he shouted, yanking me up into his arms for what became a twirl around an imaginary dance floor.

“Oh my God!” I slapped both hands to my cheeks before remembering the avocado face mask. “They signed you?”

“No.” He ignored my wiping the gunk off on my pajamas, while my roommates poured him a drink. “But it wasn’t a form letter this time! This guy, this agent, he says my writing’s good…like, good enough to sell…if I can just tighten up my plot line. He gave me a few suggestions and said I could send him a new version if I wanted!”

After graduation I had decided to move back home and spend a year temping to keep myself in lip gloss and lemon-drop martinis while I decided where I wanted to land. Alex, as planned, was bartending by night and reworking his screenplay by day, sharing an apartment with a couple of guys in Venice near the beach. He was happier than I had seen him in months. As we rolled into midsummer, I told myself that until I decided to get serious, I had no right to tell him to do so.

However, as the saying goes the only things that truly can change a person are death and divorce. And seeing my mother so helpless in the hallway I had to wonder how long she would have stood there mumbling if I hadn’t come home. I wondered while I booked the funeral home with the crematorium to suit Hindu ritual and ordered the flowers for the small family ceremony. I wondered while I sat with Sheila’s mother, the lawyer, trying to make sense of our family’s finances and pay the inheritance taxes without losing our home. I wondered while I made a list of all of the relatives in Los Angeles, London and Bombay who needed to be notified, and had to decide which of the elder male relatives would take my father’s ashes to scatter over the Ganges River as he would have wanted. And I wondered while I forced my mother to eat something each day, and then stood staring out her bedroom window at the moon each night until the pace of her breathing assured me that her sleeping pills had started to kick in.

The harder Alex tried to connect with me, the more vehemently I told him I needed space. The further I tried to push him away, the harder he fought me for myself. The clearer it became that my mother and I would be lucky if we came out of this owning our home, the more Alex’s belief that love could conquer anything made me stiffen to his touch. I could tell myself that I was being irrational to regard him as naive, but I couldn’t explain myself to him. It was a time when being understood felt like being turned inside out. All I knew was that when he was around he made me feel, and feeling anything at that point simply made me want to throw up. One foot in front of the other was the only way I would make it through this, and I needed to be alone. Then there’d be nobody else left to lose.

So I met him at the Venice boardwalk and told him the one thing that would shake him out of this love, and make him want to run as far away from me as possible.

“I already have a job,” he answered, tugging at the grass as we sat in the picnic overlook. “I’m a writer.”

“Writing is not a job until you sell something, Alex. Your job right now is bartending.”

“So what are you saying? Why all of a sudden don’t you think I’m gonna sell this?”

My eyes were fixed on the horizon. “I’m just saying that after all these rejections…this is the real world. Thousands of people are running around Los Angeles with a screenplay to sell, and…and you might never sell a script.”

I could feel him staring hard at me, willing me to face him. I could hear him breathing heavily, gathering the steam for his words and then deciding against it. Soon enough, it was over. And he stood up and walked away. No matter how hard I tried to search inside myself, at that moment, all I could find was a very deep sense of relief. I knew that I was alone now, and that I could finally grieve. Because if you take away a man’s perception that his woman believes in him, then you might as well just take away the woman herself.

six

I GET A DAY OFF ABOUT AS ROUTINELY AS MEN IN BOW TIES GET invited up for a nightcap. And for me, that’s fine, because I knew what I was getting into when I chose the life that I did. So I saw no good reason to look a technical glitch in the mouth that Sunday afternoon when I was unable to log on to the computer in my office. After a few unsuccessful attempts, a message popped up telling me that my password was incorrect and I should contact the IT administrator. Had I known his name or had any interest in really working that day, I might have tried. But the skies were blue, the streets were clear, and I was still overdue for that trip to the salon.

I made a quick phone call to the Georgette Klinger spa, known as much for their signature orange salt scrubs as for the imported champagne and fresh chocolate brownies laid out for guests to nibble on in the plush pretreatment waiting room. Four warm brownies, three glasses of Vueve, and two blissful hours of cleansing, scrubbing, rubbing, buffing, paraffining and polishing later, I was reborn.

The cosmetologist did such a fantastic job with my eyebrows that I couldn’t help but admire them via the mirrored double doors of Steel’s elevators on my ride up that Monday morning. Unfortunately, the doors opened to reveal a far less pleasing image. Stefanie’s beaming smile sent my defense mechanisms into overdrive. I furrowed my brow and clutched my shoulder bag a little closer to my heart, as if it were bulletproof. Maybe she was just delighted to detect my period-induced pimple, I told myself. And maybe, one of these days, I would wake up and decide that rather than fighting, I was ready to age gracefully.

Not likely. Stepping off of the elevator, I remembered the problem about logging on to my computer, and headed straight for the IT help desk.

“Hey, Monica,” said some twenty-three-year-old in a singsong voice who I was sure I had never seen before in my life. He stood up to greet me. Judging by his arching eyebrow, I assumed he thought he was flirting. I reminded myself that I was just cranky because of my period, and resisted the urge to tell him that he would have to be at least this old to ride this ride.

That might sound harsh, but I’m telling you, he probably didn’t even shave yet.

“Hey…you.” I tried a smile, wondering who he was meant to be conspiring with, and hoping that I hadn’t gotten to know him a little too well at that Cinco De Mayo Company Happy Hour during which there was still an hour I couldn’t account for.

“We were expecting to see you earlier this morning,” he said, seated again, tapping a few strokes onto his computer and then tilting the screen toward me. “We have never seen anyone try so hard to sneak onto the system using an actual login name. The password automatically resets after fifteen failed attempts when you’re outside the office.”

“But I came in on Sunday to work and couldn’t get into my computer,” I said. “I didn’t log on remotely at all this weekend.”

“Well, someone tried to.” He laced his fingers together behind his head, as if he were in charge of IT for NASA. “But no worries, we’ve reset your login to your direct phone number, and your password to Sphinx. We thought vgupta was a little too obvious. You can go into the system now and reset both the login and password to whatever you want. But you might want to be careful about who you tell even your login name to in the future.”