All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  “Does that make me a city boy, born and raised on the wrong side of the tracks?”

  “I don’t think the wrong side of the tracks would know what to do with you, Jonathan.” I shook my head, seriously hoping that he wasn’t about to break into the chorus of “Don’t Stop Believing.”

  I love him like the cousin I tried to smother in his sleep. For the record, he started it when he hid a bullfrog in my underwear drawer. But I am quite sure I would have had to chop off Jonathan’s head if he ever did that. No singing before morning coffee, either.

  “Granted. But L.A. has its hands full with women like you running around.”

  This was information that I did not need. In my mind, up until that moment, I was able to believe that I don’t run. I glide.

  “Meaning?” I snatched the cash from his hands, deciding that he was gonna have to buy me a blueberry scone, as well, for punishment.

  “Meaning…nothing.” He fiddled with the bags of coffee beans lined up beside the counter. “Meaning that you’re cute and you’re spunky. So you usually get your way…two grande lattes, please.”

  “Toying with my emotions before I’ve had my morning coffee may not be the safest life choice, Jonathan,” I warned while handing over his cash. “If there’s something you want to talk about, spit it out.”

  “It’s Cassie,” he stated, while we moved down the counter toward the barista.

  “Ooooh.” I remembered the two of them laughing together at the Fete, and how quickly he had left my office the last time she walked in. “Wait. What’s going on with you guys? Are you guys…”

  “No. We’re not. We’re not…anything. Anymore, I mean.”

  “You were a thing?” I gasped.

  “Not really.” He seemed to be trying to figure it out.

  “You slept together?” I lowered my voice, feeling terrible that I could have been unaware of an office romance blooming right under my nose. So now I’m ungraceful and self-involved.

  “No…we didn’t.” He glanced to both sides, and insisted, “We, uh…never got that far.”

  “So what does that mean? Does that mean that you’re actually…dating? I thought you didn’t do that. What happened to love ’em and leave ’em Jonathan? If you go all decent on me then I’ll have to start believing in love, which will mean I’ll have nobody to blame for my fiancé’s disappearance but myself. Don’t do that to me.”

  “Two grande lattes?” the barista announced, and handed them over.

  “Monica, keep it down!” Jonathan clenched his teeth as we made our way toward the condiments. “We went out a coupla times. Nothing big. But I guess I thought it was going somewhere, and now I know it’s not.”

  “What happened?” I popped off the lid and began dousing the foam with sugar.

  “All of a sudden she doesn’t want to go out anymore. All of a sudden she’s just busy.”

  “Did she say she’d never go out with you again? What did you do?” I spoke to him as if to a child who had been sent home early from school without any explanation.

  “Nothing.” He stopped midstir. “Why did you assume that I did something wrong? Besides, she didn’t say never again. She just…cooled off.”

  “Jonathan,” I said, and faked a huff, “how many times have we been over this? Women are not race cars…”

  But I could see that he wasn’t in a playful mood that morning. He was actually hurt about this one. So I changed my tune.

  “Look, I don’t necessarily think that means…” I began, and then paused to check the message buzzing on my BlackBerry. “Hang on a second.”

  It was a message from Alex, including an attachment of the first draft of his latest screenplay. And the e-mail asked me to read it and to give him my honest opinion. For old time’s sake.

  It was an olive branch, obviously. And I was touched that he still valued my opinion after all this time. I was getting ready to respond and let him know I would be happy to give it a read-through, when I felt Jonathan’s hand on my arm.

  “Monica,” he whispered. Clearly it was taking a lot out of him to ask me this. “Would you just…try to find out what went wrong?”

  seventeen

  MY JAW WAS CLENCHED SO TIGHT I WAS WORRIED I MIGHT actually crack a tooth. By 6:00 p.m. I’d finally taken the Los Angeles International Airport exit off the 405 expressway. And within ten minutes of idling outside the Lufthansa arrivals terminal, I had chewed my lower lip practically raw.

  How was I going to explain myself to Raj? Never mind the little matter of my newest client being the only other man I have ever loved. It’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m just reading his screenplay because I can’t find anything worthwhile at the local Barnes & Noble. And you mustn’t take my brazen public intimacy with a complete stranger as any indication that I gave up on this relationship mere moments after you left for London. I was just bored. Did I mention the intimacy had been televised?

  The main question was: Would it be more humane to get him drunk before telling him everything, or would that be just plain selfish? I didn’t know the answer, but I did know that I had to admit to that on-air kiss before Raj found out about it for himself. Still, there was no real need to tell him within the first five minutes of seeing him. After all, I had him all to myself until the following morning. One thing at a time, I decided. Like maybe I could make sure we were back on solid ground about the whole pad-thai incident before bringing up anything else. I checked my watch. His plane had landed twenty minutes ago, which meant that he could be coming out of those sliding doors at any second.

  I considered opening with a joke. But all those years in England had rendered him practically immune to knock-knocks, and sadly they were all I had. I thought about greeting him with tears as a distraction, since he could never focus on anything outside of fixing it when I cried. But that was a little too low, even for me. So I decided to distract him with sex. Luckily, I was wearing a red and black lace push-up number I had gotten just for the occasion. I was unfastening the second button on my blouse when a knock on my car window startled me and made me look up.

  There he was, and for a moment I felt as if nothing had changed. I unlocked the door, let him into the passenger side, and leapt instinctively across the divider to smother him with kisses.

  “Thank God you’re home,” I managed, in between ravenous mouthfuls of his face.

  “Charming ring.” He lifted my hand out and stared, creasing the skin around his eyes in exactly the way that I remembered falling in love with. Then he dropped his gaze to the south. “And is that a new bra? Because I quite like it.”

  Everybody knows that make-up sex is fantastic, but I didn’t realize it could actually render me blind, deaf and dumb. Blind, because I was down on all fours, squinting across Raj’s beige carpet, scanning for any signs of the pearl stud that had popped from my earlobe one of the many times we showed that headboard who was boss the night before. Deaf, because I didn’t hear him calling my name from the kitchen the first two times. And dumb, because I genuinely believed there was still some chance he hadn’t seen my humiliation on Smacked!

  Goddamn the Internet. And goddamn whoever designed the backs of earrings to be so tiny and easy to lose.

  “Monica.” He poked his head into the bedroom and stated, “I was calling you.”

  “Sorry.” I pouted like a naughty girl who was kind of hoping that her fiancé might teach her a lesson. “I was looking for the pearl earring that you knocked right off of my ear last night, you stallion.”

  His grin and the arm he extended to help me back up to my feet was all the reassurance I needed. I was in the clear.

  “Darling, I’ll buy you a new pair. Are you hungry? I’ve made pancakes.”

  I brushed my teeth, slipped on one of his T-shirts and snuck up behind him in the kitchen. Wrapping my arms around his waist without a word, I pressed my cheek up against his shoulder blade. My eyes were shut, and I was savoring the moment. God, he was so cute when he wore nothing b
ut the bottom half of his pajamas. God, I was lucky to have a man who actually took the time to slice up strawberries and fanned them across our pancakes. And God, I was planning on making it worth his while when we hopped back into bed after breakfast.

  “In case you were wondering,” he mentioned over his shoulder, as casually as if he were asking me to get the powdered sugar, “I saw you kiss that construction bloke.”

  Living with my mother had taught me that standing perfectly still wouldn’t make the comment go away. Instead, I took a big step back.

  “Relax,” he said, spinning around with two plates of pancakes and walking them over to the table. “Eat your breakfast.”

  He sat down and motioned me over. I walked slowly, keeping my eyes on him the entire time. He just hacked into his breakfast like a serial killer opening his mail calmly amidst the bodies.

  “What?” he asked, noticing that my mouth was still open, and that I had yet to touch my food. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Bloke?” I blurted out. It was all I could manage at the time.

  “You know that whenever I’m in London I fall back into the Queen’s English.” He squirted maple syrup rather in-elegantly across his breakfast.

  “You weren’t gone for that long.” I crossed my legs and tucked my hair behind an ear, trying my best to remain stoic.

  “I’ve always been an overachiever,” he said, and spooned another sloppy mess toward his mouth. “Besides, what else would you call him? Not exactly a barrister.”

  I couldn’t take this anymore. And I wasn’t sure which part to react to first.

  “Raj!” I slammed my hands onto the table, setting the silverware aquiver. “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Raj!”

  “Look.” He put down his fork and furrowed his brow as if suddenly deep in thought. “You don’t need to worry about anything, Monica. I’ve decided that I’m not going to be angry with you.”

  Rather than relieved, I was surprised. Surprised and disappointed.

  “I’m not happy about it,” he continued. “You made a poor choice. But technically I suppose we weren’t together at the time. Neither of us really knew where we stood. So in a sense, we were on a hiatus.”

  We were?

  “Raj, I’m…”

  “There’s no need for that, Monica.” He waved away the beginnings of my apology before reluctantly forcing a reassuring smile in my direction. “Perhaps this separation was what we both needed. To be sure about us. And now we are. So why don’t we move on?”

  If I hadn’t still felt guilty about Luke, I never would have agreed to dinner with Raj’s colleagues the following night. As I donned the new pearl earrings that he bought me a few hours before, while we strolled hand-in-hand through Nordstrom’s at The Grove, I reminded myself that nobody sleeping in the doghouse had the right to make any decisions on her own. He had assured me that his coworkers were not the sort of people who would spend their time watching reality TV—even if they had been stateside at the time. And I had no choice but to trust him. It was either that, or send him off alone to a dinner full of couples and effectively confirm what many of them probably already suspected: that we were over.

  It’s just one evening, I repeated in my mind, while he helped me on with my coat, and I gave myself the final once-over in my hall mirror.

  And then he chortled.

  I questioned him with a glance.

  “Imagine,” he mused out loud while unlocking the bolt on the door, “you, leaving me, for a construction worker.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, standing firm against the hand on my waist that was trying to guide me through the open door.

  “I suppose it means that…you’re not like that.” He thought about it a second before looking me in the eye. “You’re reasonable.”

  This was certainly a less-than-appealing color on him, but worse than that was what sort of a shade it implied about me. The man who supposedly knew me better than anyone had been willing to dismiss my indiscretion not because he believed I was sorry, but because he couldn’t imagine me taking a “construction bloke” seriously. I wasn’t totally sure which part of my brain to file that in, but I was sure that somehow I was now embarrassed for the both of us. And since we were running late and the whole situation had become too convoluted to dissect at that particular moment, I made my way outside. As I allowed him to open the car door for me, to spirit me away to dinner, I wondered: was this what marriage would be like?

  Never before had I been so pleased to have a gorgeous, buxom redhead towering over me.

  “And this is Rogier’s girlfriend, Inga,” Raj explained while we were meeting and greeting at the bar of the Napa Valley Grille. “Why don’t I get you ladies a couple of glasses of that white from Alsace that we had enjoyed so much? I believe they carry it here. And Rogier? Your usual Glenlivet?”

  “Perfect,” Inga said, before returning her focus to me. “This way we can get to know your beautiful fiancée. We’ve heard so much about you, Monica. You know, you’ve really got a good one there.”

  “I know,” I replied, and smiled for the handsome couple, mostly because it seemed like the logical response.

  I hadn’t realized until that moment how much my mother’s “spotting Raj’s lookalike with a redhead” comment, combined with Raj’s silent treatment, had made me doubt our relationship. Maybe I was taking everything a little too seriously. Marriage was a big-picture endeavor, anyway. Now that I had evidence of the irrelevance of my mother’s sighting standing before me, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself.

  I locked eyes with him while he ordered our drinks, and felt more in sync than I had since he’d returned. It was the small, truly intimate glance which is almost imperceptible to anyone other than the two people involved, but which means so much more than all the others. It was a connection across the crowd. A reminder that we were still us. A reassurance that the connection had not been severed. And the screws in my neck began to loosen for the first time since the previous call with my mother.

  Maybe Raj and I were getting off on a stronger foot now that we had been through something rough. They say that the only way a desert fighter pilot knows he’s crossed over something important in the dark is because all hell breaks loose. Maybe Raj needed to see that I had other options in order to convince himself I would never really leave him for anyone. Maybe my suspicion about Mom’s comment would have eaten away at me from the inside unless I had met Inga and seen for myself that the mysterious redhead was actually very happily involved with somebody else.

  Soon enough, we were ushered to our table. We ate. We laughed. General merriment all around. Somewhere between the pumpkin tortellini appetizer and the second bottle of wine, Raj placed a hand over mine and tilted his chin in the direction of an impeccably dressed, unmistakably miserable couple seated a few tables away. It was a ritual of ours; whenever we were at a restaurant where a couple looked particularly unhappy, we pointed them out to one another as a reminder of how glad we were to be on our date rather than on theirs. We would keep an eye on them for the rest of the evening, go out of our way to eat off each other’s plates, and then gossip about the miserable couple all the way home. It provided hours of entertainment in a city full of relationships that were little more than a way to kill time on the way to a bigger, better deal.

  “Shane and Eliza,” Raj whispered into my ear, indicating the names of tonight’s anonymous couple.

  “Professional baseball player and aspiring actress from Wisconsin,” I explained to him in return, with a mischievous grin. They were a life-size version of Malibu Ken and Barbie, down to the anatomically impossible measurements and almost entirely plastic faces. They had yet to look each other in the eye, or say more than a few words by the time our entrées arrived.

  A few more glasses of that wine from Alsace and our table was erupting in laughter at Rogier’s jokes concerning the foibles of the British. But things were a lot less
fun over in Shane and Eliza’s corner. Raj had nudged my attention toward them when a waiter walked over to the table, handed Eliza a note, and pointed to a plump, balding gentleman smoking a cigar at a large table at the far end of the restaurant. Despite Shane’s mounting irritation, Eliza had perked up, scribbled something on the opposite side of said note, and sent it back to the gentleman by way of the waiter. Promptly, Melvin (which was what we decided to call baldy, having determined that he was a dirty old movie producer who wanted to get the young Eliza onto his casting couch) belly-laughed at her note and made some hilarious comment to his friends, all of whom suddenly raised their champagne flutes in Eliza’s direction.

  Raj and I exchanged confused glances. Was this the end of the road for Shane and Eliza’s relationship? Did this mean that she was accepting a part in an X-rated movie despite his protests? What about the pomeranians?

  Shane was pissed. Eliza was defiant. He threw his napkin down on the table, dropped some cash on top and made his way out the door.

  Being on my third glass of wine, I decided it was time for me to make my way toward the powder room. I did my business well enough, but was really in no condition to deal with a test. While I appreciated the beauty of the shiny copper bird fountain/sculpture/sink, I was about ready to give up on my search for the faucet when someone else flushed and came out to help me.

  “It’s down here,” Eliza told me, swiping a delicate and bejeweled wrist across an invisible sensor at the base, causing water to spring forth. “These things are so annoying.”

  “I know.” I started washing up alongside her, wondering how I had morphed into such a hick. “Thanks.”

  “You got a light?” she asked, handing me a towel and grabbing one for herself.

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

  “Figures.” She exhaled and leaned against the sink, clearly anxious about something.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her reflection, while I checked my teeth in the mirror.