He didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened as the months took us into the winter and spring of our senior year. To anyone watching us during the Senior Ski Weekend at Bear Mountain or at the beach in Cozumel on spring break, our rhythm must have seemed unbroken. But every now and then I wondered…how much of our connection rested atop my conspiring to allow him to see himself a certain way? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Even then I understood that I was a young woman in the throes of a connection that she knew she would never forget.
So I accepted, rather than decided, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t sweep under the rug just to keep him inhaling me with those eyes. I had to, you understand, because if I didn’t I felt sure that a later, older, wiser version of myself would have never forgiven me.
Just after spring break, Alex had sent copies of his manuscript to a handful of agents. A month later he received his first rejection letter.
“Well, I guess that was Round One,” I said, dropping my backpack on my dorm room steps to take a seat beside him. I slipped an arm around his shoulder. “So what are we gonna change before you send it out for Round Two?”
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 gotte
n 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.”
I shouldn’t have been leaning so far back in my chair to begin with, but when the door to my office burst open, the shock of it sent me sailing backward onto the floor. Clamoring to my knees and curling my fingers over the edge of my desk, I raised my head up ever so carefully. The first thing I noticed was that the door had literally been blown off one of its hinges. And the second thing was that Cameron was headed straight for me. In order to make it easier for him, I backed myself into a corner, and soon enough I was sandwiched between his heaving chest and the wall.
And I have to say that despite the physical threat, it was nice to be pinned against something by someone again.
Oh, and the other thing about having my period is that it also makes me frisky. Go figure.
I tilted my skull back to look into his eyes. There was nothing but anger, and a vein on the side of his neck that was threatening to explode.
Despite everything I knew about him as a man and as a client, my defense instincts kicked in. He was a full two feet taller than me, and easily could have squashed me like a fly. I made a mental note to consider talking to a therapist about the line between adrenaline and arousal, swallowed hard and decided to speak first.
“Cameron.” My voice quivered. “Umm…is everything all right?” I smoothed my hair back, composed myself and noticed there was far more hurt than hate in his eyes.
“I thought you were supposed to be our lawyer,” he told me, stepping back. “Not her lawyer. I can’t believe I’m paying your bills and you’re on her side!”
“I’m working for the both of you, Cameron.” I held my hands up before me.
“Then how come you’re meetin’ with her alone? You plannin’ on giving her a better settlement that I’m gonna get? What else could it be? Ain’t nobody left I can trust, man.” He stepped toward the window. “But at least with a lawyer, as long as I’m payin’ you, I’m supposed to be sure I can trust you!”
“Cameron, you can trust me.” I turned my chair upright and stepped back into the crocodile pumps I hadn’t been wearing when he burst in. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“Oh, I can trust you, huh? Then how come you been meeting with Lydia alone? All I can think is that you’re trying to convince her to end this marriage.”
“Do you want to end the marriage?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Then why are you having her followed?” I stood beside him, placing my hand on the window.
“I’m not. But my staff understands that a man has a right to know what goes on in his own house.” He looked at me disdainfully. “Even if his wife is worth more than he is.”
“Look, I swear that we are not taking sides in this thing, Cameron. That’s just not the business that Steel is in. Now I know that things are confusing, but you if anyone should know that you can’t believe everything you hear. Or even everything you see.”
“Don’t play dumb, Monica. You’re lawyers, not actors. And I don’t believe everything I hear, but I can’t ignore what people think they see, either, since it almost cost me my marriage the last time. And maybe you should be more careful, because we’re paying you a lot of money to make sure this is all kept on the DL. If my people knew you and Lydia were out in Beverly Hills together this weekend, do you really think the paparazzi didn’t?”
An hour after he erupted in my office, I had Cameron pacified and packed off to the home office of an acupuncturist and healer, who’d worked wonders with some of my most difficult clients. I didn’t need to know the details, but in one weekend “Doctor” Senji had convinced the world cage-boxing champion, who routinely tattooed himself with the names of the men he had out-savaged, that he had to embrace his inner bully before he could begin to negotiate the terms of his divorce. Even if Senji was doping them up on opium and having monkeys beat them with licorice whips in that compound in Ojai, all I knew was that he was delivering my clients back to me with just enough vulnerability to allow me to get my job done.
Besides, we just added his $5,000 per day to the client’s expense tab.
Maintenance informed me that it would take at least two hours to rehang my door, so I headed over to Cassie’s desk to see if she wanted to join me in a two-martini lunch at Matsuhisa, which I had every intention of charging to the Camydia account. We were three feet from the elevator when the doors slid open to reveal Stefanie, Jonathan and all of the senior partners laughing and returning from what had clearly been a nice long lunch. One, to which, I can assure you, I had not been invited.
“Oh, Monica.” Stefanie slathered it on thicker than peanut butter. “It’s too bad you couldn’t join us for lunch today. You did read the e-mail I sent out, didn’t you?”
“What e-mail?”
“The one I sent out on Saturday to make sure everyone got it before this morning. You do check your e-mail over the weekend, don’t you?” She cocked her jaw to one side. “We’re all in this together. We’re a family. A team. And we’ve gotta stay connected. For the clients, you know.”
Maybe it was time to call in my favor with that cage fighter.
“I’m sure I would’ve remembered getting an e-mail about lunch, Stefanie. Perhaps you left me out, by accident?”
“No, I’m sure I included you. In fact, I’m certain of it.” Stefanie stuck to the part of the innocent gal pal, shaking her head. “It must have been a computer glitch. Really, you should have your computer checked out. You never know who could be hacking into your files when you’re not looking.”
Moments later, I was yanked into Jonathan’s office.
“So you got my SOS message on your BlackBerry. Don’t worry about it, Jonathan. Cameron just had a little outburst about Lydia’s tantrum over the weekend. Everything’s fine. He’s on his way to Senji’s compound right now.”
“Yeah. That’s fine, Monica.” He closed the door behind me. “But that’s not what I want to talk about.”
“What, then?” I tugged at the chain around my neck.
“Stefanie, that’s what,” he replied, and hoisted himself up onto his desk. Lowering his voice, he leaned toward me, and whispered, “You really have to do something about this little interoffice rivalry of yours. The competition between you two is starting to become obvious. Even to the partners.”
“Jonathan, I am not competing with anyone.”
“Rrrrrraw!” he mimicked a cat, taking a swipe at me.
“Don’t make me hit you.”
“Come on,” he chided me, smiling. “You had to give me at least one. Seriously, though. You know I’m on your side, babe. I like working with you, and I don’t want to see this become a problem.”
“So?”
“So…what are you gonna do about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do about it.” I felt indignant, and was almost shouting. “I’m gonna keep coming to the office every day, doing what I’m paid to do, and expecting recognition for it.”
He shook his head at the lifeguard who’s only
just asked why the heiress isn’t returning his calls the morning after. After a few minutes of the staring game, I realized how serious he was.
“I expect the partners to see past this!” I dropped onto his couch, sounding childish even to myself.
“Monica, you never struck me as naïve. All I’m saying is that if I were you, I would do something about it.”
I actually wanted to stomp my foot.
“Why? Why should I have to engage in this? Why is it my responsibility to teach some other woman to grow up? It’s so childish!”
“It’s not your responsibility, Monica,” he said on a sigh, as if explaining to a guest in rehab why the cough syrup had to be confiscated, “but it is your problem. And don’t you think that acting like the problem doesn’t exist…is kind of childish, too?”
The problem with the insane is that they believe the problem is with everyone but them. Still, as a society we are constantly trying to reason with people who we know are neither capable nor interested. I had to do something to diffuse the situation, and I had to do it soon. So, I casually invited Stefanie to help me in the conference room. I cannot tell you why I expected her to give me even an inch. The truth is that I didn’t even know what I was going to say until I saw her arrive.
“What can I do for you?” she asked brightly, as if the pink elephant in the room weren’t actually doing a striptease.
“Sit down, Stefanie.” I folded my arms across my chest and planted my feet opposite her side of the conference table.
“Noooo…I think I’m fine right here, Monica.” She tilted her head innocently to one side, and asked, “What’s up?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.” I circled the table to close the door.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she delivered, eyes and posture unflinching.
“Fine. Let’s just look at the situation, then. You have tried to put me on the spot in front of the partners at more than one team meeting. You managed somehow to invite every junior associate other than myself to the lunch today. And then you accused me very publicly of not being a team player or even checking my e-mail on the weekends. With a smile on your face. You tell me, Stefanie, how am I supposed to interpret that?”
All Eyes on Her Page 6