Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  “I thought I’d never have to worry about damage control with you!” Felicia shrieked. “But goddammit, of all the men to mess around with, you have to choose a married one!”

  I dropped my suitcase.

  “What? He didn’t tell you?” Felicia asked, seeing the stunned look on my face. “OK, he’s separated. But he’s still married, for heaven’s sake. To a hotel heiress at that. Do you know how that looks? A supposedly chaste celebrity smooching her married boss on a dark street in St. Tropez? What were you guys thinking? We’re building your whole career on how fabulously elusive and traditional you are, and then you pull something like this!”

  Felicia had talked the editor friend out of running anything, promising a much bigger scoop later on.

  “Look, you’re lonely. I get it,” she said. “But that agent of yours is going to hear from me, I promise you that. In the meantime, let’s figure something else out.”

  Stavros called soon after Felicia left. He apologized-first for kissing me, then for doing it while married. I had not seen him after that night, as he had chosen to stay on for an extra day, I assumed because he didn’t want the awkwardness of being on a long flight with me.

  “But why didn’t you tell me you had a wife?” I asked him, feeling ashamed, reminding myself that infidelity was a severely punishable offense in Allah’s eyes.

  “Sometimes I forget that I’m married,” he said sheepishly. “We’ve not been together in years and just haven’t gotten around to getting divorced yet. But Felicia is right. That’s no excuse. It was stupid and irresponsible of me, and could have easily destroyed everything we’ve worked for. Please forgive me. Can we forget it happened-put it down to a being-overcome-by-the-moment thing?”

  I was prepared to do just that.

  Felicia, in the meantime, had decided it was time to go on the offensive.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Here’s the thing,” Felicia said, her face turning serious, a cigarette dangling between two fingers. “I don’t know how it is in your neck of the woods, but in these parts there’s no such thing as a naïve, socially inept supermodel. It’s an oxymoron. Understand?”

  We were in her office, where she had hurriedly called a meeting with Stavros and me. On the way there, Stavros had described the event as a “summit,” saying that Felicia could strategize more forcefully than an army general.

  There in her office, Stavros looked at me, nodding in agreement.

  “I’ve wanted to create a particular image for you-elegant, elusive, all that crap-and it’s worked,” she continued. “But it’s just getting a little too stale, a little too vanilla.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Stavros asked.

  “An alliance, quite simply,” she replied. “An affair, but one that looks potentially serious, not some one-night-stand, roll-in-the-hay travesty. With a movie star or a rock star. All the girls have one: Gisele Bündchen’s got Leo, Kate Moss has got that rocker chap, whatever his name is. We need to align you with someone who has a great profile, a strong image of his own, who can complement yours. Brad Pitt would have been perfect before Angelina pounced on him. Or Tom Cruise, but he’s taken too, and anyway that Scientology thing wouldn’t have meshed with your Muslimness, would it?” She snorted as I began to protest that “Muslimness” wasn’t even a word. “But you know what I’m getting at. Right, honey?”

  Nana, for all his steadfast traditionalism, would have understood. He believed that fortunes were built and families were founded on the basis of appropriate alliances. He might never have thought in terms of supermodels and rock stars, but he understood and agreed with the general concept. It still pained me to think of him, so I shut him out of my mind.

  “Good point,” Stavros interjected. “She needs a companion anyway. She can’t be doing this circuit on her own for much longer. Even if it’s a temporary thing, she must be seen to be somewhat attached to something other than a runway.”

  “I’m not really clear on what you’re saying,” I said, looking at both of them. “You can’t just expect me to hook up with someone because he acts in movies or has a rock band. And really, I never thought I’d be with anyone until my wedding night,” I said, blushing.

  “Now that’s just adorable,” Felicia said. “But let me explain something to you. This supermodel thing, technically, is over. Sure, Victoria ’s Secret will always be there to make someone a star, but on their own, models are barely worth the clothes they walk in these days. It’s all about brand-building, my girl. It’s about endorsements and acting gigs and fitness videos and cookbooks and clothing lines and anything else you might want to do. If you’re famous enough, people will eat at the restaurant you open and wear the bags you design and see the movies you act in. And how do you get famous? By being beautiful, which you are, and then hanging out with famous people, which you need to be doing more of. You need to be carousing on yachts in the Mediterranean with some A-list hottie, or be photographed in Us Weekly having a cozy coffee with whoever has the number-one single on Billboard that week. I told you from the beginning, this business is all about image. We need to cultivate a fabulous one for you, one that will take you to the top. Because that’s where you are headed, child.”

  For a minute, it sounded like her speech was rehearsed, as if this is what she said to every ingénue who came through her doors. But I quickly realized that she must be talking to me, because I was probably the only nineteen-year-old fashion model she had ever met who needed professional help in finding a boyfriend.

  Felicia spent the next ten days looking through copies of the National Enquirer and In Style. She called other publicists and her sister-in-law’s best friend who worked at ICM in Los Angeles. She called a contact who freelanced for Entertainment Weekly and another who scouted male models for Calvin Klein. She compiled a list of prospects and, in my presence, started crossing them off one by one. The male models were a definite no, she explained to me, because they would be “too vain,” and the competition between us would be too intense. There were some rising stars on the Hollywood scene who might be worth checking out, but the cross-country commute might be a bit too taxing, unless the prospect in question had the means to fly by private jet, and George Clooney had just come out of a relationship with a model. She thought aloud, reeling off names and facts and home addresses, as if any of it really mattered to me.

  “Am I expected to do sex with them?” I said, ashamed at the question.

  “You mean, have sex?” she asked, laughing. “Er, yeah. That’s what an affair is primarily about.”

  I put my head in my hands. To Nana’s dismay, I had yet to fully memorize the Koran. But I was certain that premarital sex was a sin. Even though, back in India, I only went to mosque once a week, walking along the plank of land that stretched into the Indian Ocean to get to the Haji Ali that lay at the end, and even though I was certain that there were plenty of Muslim girls everywhere who contravened that particular edict, I was not about to be one of them. I had done enough to disgrace my nana already.

  “I’m sorry, Felicia, but I can’t. I don’t see myself lying between sheets, naked, with some white-skinned boy. I don’t want to be touched by anyone until we have been blessed by a mullah and my grandfather has blessed me with his hands on my head…,” I said, my voice trailing off as I realized that would never happen anyway. I started to cry.

  Felicia stopped her strategizing, sat back in her chair, sighed, and closed her eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Tanaya,” she said, reaching a sympathetic hand across her desk toward me. “We’ll think of something.”

  His name was Kai. There was no last name, not even an initial. Just Kai. He had opened for Coldplay and Maroon 5 six months ago, and now a single from his just-released album had gone multiplatinum. He was British, from Birmingham, and had conquered the United Kingdom before alighting in the United States. “He’s the personification of Brit pop,” Felicia said excitedly. “It’s no longer underground, and it’s all the rage
, and kids like Kai are making it big.” He was, Felicia continued to point out to me, “absolutely the hottest thing in music today. And cute, too.”

  She had come over to my apartment on a Saturday afternoon as I was packing to leave for a magazine shoot on the sandy beaches of Jamaica. From her bag, she took out a folder containing press clippings and photographs of the man that I was, apparently, going to embark on my first fully fledged romantic relationship with-fake or otherwise.

  He had been chosen as one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, and I had to agree with them. In the clipping she showed me, his hair was dark like mine, spiked up in the front with a smidgen of gel. He had a happy face, slightly creased around the eyes, a shadow of stubble around his mouth. He was swinging from a hammock, his hands folded behind his head, a yellow-colored shirt open to halfway down his chest, a guitar resting by his side.

  “I’m telling you, he’s the one,” she said excitedly. “I came up with a reasonable excuse-something about maybe you and him getting together on his next music video. You know, to wear something sexy and dance in it. We can work all those details out,” she continued, waving her hand dismissively.

  “Oh, and don’t worry about it,” she went on, watching a look of dismay cross my face. “You won’t have to stop being a good Muslim girl. The boy is gay.”

  As fate would have it, Kai’s people told my people that he could drop in on my magazine shoot in Jamaica. He was, I was told, currently casting for his next few music videos and was aiming to have one of them nominated for the MTV Music Awards, so he was going all out to find the best director, best choreographer, and sexiest story line. I was no stranger to him, apparently. He had seen a ten-second clip of me on the red carpet at a movie premiere in New York I had attended recently, and told his people who told my people that I had looked “intriguing.” So he was flattered, if not a little surprised, because, as his manager told mine, Kai didn’t think I would be interested in “that kind of thing.”

  Once it had been decided that Kai would meet me in Jamaica the day after I got there, Felicia and Stavros booked themselves on flights as well.

  “We gotta huddle,” Felicia said as we waited at the check-in counter at JFK. “This needs to be planned perfectly. Can’t let you negotiate this on your own.”

  Stavros, clutching his passport and the ticket that I knew was coming out of my paycheck, looked at me sympathetically.

  Jamaica was unbearably hot. There was no way anyone could walk on the sand without sneakers on; even rubber flip-flops looked like they might melt under the strength of the sun. The water was sparkling and clear, and palm trees swayed at one end of the long beach.

  In India, they would have had a sedan chair for me, a seat on two long wooden poles to carry me from the hair-and-makeup cabana to the water’s edge, where the photography was happening. But instead, two men, employees of the hotel where we were staying that owned this particular stretch of beach, hoisted me up and carried me along, setting me down where the cool, salty water softened the sand and tempered the blazing heat.

  I was wearing a gold bathing suit, my hair tight and uncomfortable in cornrows. The theme of the magazine spread was “the sexiest swimsuits in movie history,” so I was being made to look like Bo Derek in 10, right before she meets Dudley Moore. Next up was Raquel Welch’s fur bikini.

  The men who had carried me picked me up again, about to plop me down a few feet farther into the water, listening carefully to the instructions of the photographer, when I heard Felicia, who was wearing a hat the size of an umbrella, yelling to me from beside the cabana.

  “He’s here!” she screamed out excitedly. “I see the posse approaching!”

  I looked up and saw the man who was number twenty-eight on People’s list of gorgeous people, and decided that Kai should have been closer to the top. He emerged from a walkway that led from the hotel down to the beach, clad in a loud red shirt emblazoned with Gothic crosses, his hands plunged into the pockets of his denim jeans, large sunglasses covering the top half of his face. Even with all the cameras and equipment and chaos on this mild beach, he stood out like a boil. His “posse” was actually only three people, one of whom, based on sheer size alone, had to have been his bodyguard. Kai looked over in my direction and I realized to my utter horror that I still had two uniformed hotel employees holding me up, a leg each, with me squatting between them. I could only imagine how ridiculous I looked.

  Kai grinned in my direction, waved, and continued to saunter my way, Felicia now affixing herself to his capsule entourage. The photographer rolled his eyes and told everyone to “take five.” We were all officially on a break.

  “Good to meet you,” Kai said, extending his hand, which was soft and white in mine. His dark hair was nonchalantly swept back, revealing immaculate eyebrows, of which I was suddenly jealous.

  “Do you want to go somewhere to talk?” he asked, smirking at the sight of me being held aloft by two men. “Not now, whenever you’re done. Don’t want to interrupt the work you’re doing here.”

  I blushed, embarrassed, and Felicia led him away, whispering in his ear.

  Before Kai and his group were set to join us, Felicia, Stavros, and I did our “huddle” in the restaurant, which was essentially one huge, open veranda overlooking the beach and the shimmering sea beyond it. Now, just after sunset, the air had cooled and a fresh breeze blew in from over the ocean. Diners reclined on daybeds overflowing with cushions, low tables in front of them holding large platters of freshly caught fish grilled with lemon and crisp salads drizzled with aged balsamic.

  “You like, no?” Felicia asked, lighting up a cigarette. “He’s a hottie. What’d I tell ya?”

  That night, after dinner, during which our respective camps would discuss a nonexistent project between us, I should suggest that Kai take me for a walk on the grounds, Felicia said.

  “That’ll give me and his people a chance to talk,” she said, eyeing a tray of rum-laced cocktails as it went by. “We may as well come out with it.”

  Nana, had he still been a witness to my life, would have been impressed by this. This was, after all, exactly how things would have been done had I remained in India and agreed to wed. He would have summoned some prospects, his friend’s grandson Tariq being on the top of the list, and then casually suggested after dinner that the boy and I take a walk around the building. By the time the boy and I would have returned from the walk, we would be engaged.

  To me, sitting there in a gauzy poncho and sequined sarong at a five-star resort hotel on the Jamaican bay, that all seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  We flew back to New York together on Kai’s private plane.

  He sat across from me in a caramel-colored seat, his slender frame almost dwarfed by its depth and plushness. He had one leg crossed over the other, and his left hand cupped his chin. He had been staring at me for at least five minutes, all the way through our take-off, as I nervously tried to drink a glass of iced tea. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was in love with me.

  “Want to try one of these?” he asked, holding up a can of Red Bull, something he said he drank several times a day.

  “Thank you, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m happy with what I have.”

  “So, you know what all this is about, right?” he asked. “You know what we’re doing here?”

  I nodded.

  “I know why I’m doing it,” I said. “But what do you get out of it?”

  “Please, don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out,” he replied, rolling his eyes. “I’m supposedly the hottest thing in music since the Beatles, and I’ve never had a proper girl-friend. My agent had to remind me that rock and sex go pretty much hand-in-hand, and that without gossip about groupies, I may as well throw it all in and become a book-keeper. I’ve had a few beards over the past couple of years-you know, female friends I call on to hit the clubs with, get my picture taken. It keeps my gayness at bay, as far as
my fans are concerned. But my team thought it was time for something a bit more established. Or at least they thought it once your people proposed it after dinner last night. You know, it’s not a bad idea. I have a record coming out soon, and if I want to continue living like this,” he said, indicating the plane, “then I’m going to need all the help I can get. You’re a great wagon to hitch my ride to.”

  I suddenly felt soiled, as if I had allowed Felicia to talk me into something that was, fundamentally, unethical. Felicia’s words about this whole business being built on image still smoldered in my ears. But now, agreeing to this sham of a relationship, I was giving in to it. Now I really was going to be lost in the celebrity shuffle.

  But it was too late to do anything about it. Before Kai and I boarded the flight earlier that day, we both signed documents stipulating the terms of our relationship. There were confidentiality clauses and endless paragraphs devoted to financial details. I was amazed at how the people who worked with us managed to get it all together-legalese intact-less than twelve hours after first discussing it.

  I hadn’t fully read all of the small print, quite happy to take Felicia’s word for it that everything was in order. I had skimmed over the section that outlined how we would both respond to queries from magazine editors and talk-show hosts about how we met, and if we were in love, and where the relationship was headed. We were to be seen a certain number of times together every week, the exact nature of which meetings were to be determined by us, but would definitely have to include awards shows or nightclub openings. We had to be photographed kissing wherever and whenever possible. We had to have the appearance of living together, even if we both maintained our own apartments. And we had to keep it going no less than a year, at which time we could release a statement saying we had split amicably. By then, both our careers would be soaring.