All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  “No,” she said, rummaging around inside a purse smaller than my fist for the matches she was already sure she did not have. “But I will be. As soon as I cut that guy I came with loose and get back to my career. Three years without a ring. Can you believe it? What an asshole!”

  “I dunno what to tell you.” I gave her my best shrug of anonymous female solidarity.

  “Well,” she said more to herself than to me, while leaning over and giving her boobs a final adjustment in the mirror. “It doesn’t really matter. There’s a movie producer who just recognized me from a B movie I did before I met this idiot. I think it’s a sign. Maybe that tacky producer might be able to give me something I need.”

  “You’re really leaving with him?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  She winked, tossed her towel into the basket, and sauntered out of the room. I was still absorbing what I had just heard when after another flush, Inga appeared alongside me at the sink, grinning and shaking her head.

  “Wow,” I tried, while she dried her hands and then puckered up to her own reflection. “I guess there are those women who have no problem walking away from a relationship at the drop of a hat, huh?”

  “This is true,” she answered, while smearing candy-apple red across the rim of her mouth. “But there are also many others who stay in the relationship though choose to stray instead. They are merely lucky enough never to be caught in the act. Or on tape.”

  I looked up and we locked eyes.

  “Or on television.” She leered.

  Now it could be argued that Inga had no real designs on my man. Of course, it could also be argued that I was the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. But the truth was that the way Inga said it made it very clear that she was just waiting out my relationship with Raj. In fact, she was so confident of our split that she was telling me as much to my face. And at the risk of embarrassing Raj in front of his colleagues, who probably hadn’t seen Smacked! and had no idea what was going on, I had little choice but to just stand there and take it.

  It just goes to show you, you should never trust any woman who doesn’t know you from a hole in the wall, but still seems a little too enthusiastically happy about your relationship. Lydia wasn’t the only one who had to learn to sleep with one eye open.

  eighteen

  “YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD MAKE YOUR LIFE A LOT EASIER?” Cassie planted herself before my desk on Monday morning and crossed her arms at me. “If you finally accepted relationships for what they really are—a brief period of pheromone overload followed by a sustained mad grab for emotional superiority.”

  I shook my head like a dizzied cartoon character. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What did he do?” She was unmoved.

  “Who?”

  “Raj!”

  “Nothing.” I looked back at my computer screen.

  “Bull.” She squinted, and said, “You never close your office door without even saying good morning to me unless you’re trying not to deal with something. And since Raj came into town on Friday…”

  “Nothing happened.” I tried my best to focus on some spam about male enhancement that had gotten through our IT filters. “Don’t we give you enough work to do?”

  “Why are you so crabby?”

  “I am not crabby, I am busy. Now shoo.” I lowered my chin and raised my eyebrows.

  “Then he’s pissed off at you.” Her eyes went wide with a gasp. “Oh my gosh, he saw you on Smacked! before you had a chance to warn him!”

  “No!” I said. “I mean…yes, he saw it, but no, he wasn’t pissed off.”

  “Really?” She was confused.

  “Really.” I was as enthusiastic as a tax collector at a speed dating event. “About that, or about anything else.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong is Alex.”

  “The client?”

  I exhaled, dropped my shoulders, and decided to let her in on my personal hell: “The ex-boyfriend who is now the client. I used to read his screenplays for him in college. He asked me to read his latest for old time’s sake. The working relationship is totally professional, of course.”

  “Of course,” she added.

  “But Raj caught me reading it yesterday,” I persisted despite the smirk in her voice. “And when I told him whose it was, and that I was working with my ex, he didn’t even bat an eye.”

  “I don’t get it. What did he say when you told him you used to date?”

  “That’s the problem.” I shook my head. “He knows our entire history. All I had to tell him was that it was Alex.”

  “And what did he say?”

  I almost laughed. “Not much.”

  “Oh.” Cassie took a seat opposite me and leaned forward, forming a steeple with her fingers. “That’s what he’s doing.”

  “What?”

  “He’s smarter than I gave him credit for.” She nodded, ignoring me like some self-satisfied movie villain. “Way to go, Raj, growing a backbone on the other side of the pond.”

  “Okay, I’ll say it again—Cassie, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “He’s turned the tables. He still loves you, but he needs you to be aware of how much you care about him. He’s making you aware of it now. This is all about control, babe. And as much as you will refuse to admit it, it turns you on.”

  “Much in the same way as telling me that I’m fat turns me on.” I rolled my eyes.

  “He’s a desperate man.” She shrugged.

  “You’re a fruit loop,” I said, trying to dismiss her.

  “And you’re deluding yourself, Monica.” Her voice was adorably tough love. “Why would he stay with you if he wasn’t even interested enough to give a damn about the fact that you’re consorting with the enemy?”

  “I am not consorting!” I was indignant, and then unclear. “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know. But it has something to do with war.”

  “This is not war, it’s my love life.”

  “Love is a battlefield, Monica. And Raj is fighting for you.”

  “Love is not a battlefield!” I insisted a little too loudly. “And have you been watching MTV 80s Pop-up Video again?”

  “Okay, first of all, yes it is, and yes I have. Also, did you know that Pat Benatar wrote “Love Is A Battlefield,” and that Tell my wife I love her are the most common last words of American soldiers in combat, but that Pat Benatar’s own first marriage to a guy in the military actually ended in divorce?”

  “Well there’s fifteen seconds of my life that I’ll never get back,” I told her. “Can I please get on with work now?”

  “Not until you open your eyes, Monica. When have you known Raj not to be passionate about you?”

  She had a point. And it made me feel better in a twisted sort of way, so I asked her, “When did you decide that relationships are all about control?”

  “I didn’t decide anything. I just admitted it, because it’s exactly what I’m doing with Jonathan. Look, nobody wants anything that comes easily, at least not for the long term. So I’m reminding him now that he needs to win me. That I have other options.”

  “Well, then all I can say is that my cousin Sheila could learn a lot from you. She can’t even control herself, much less any of the people around her.”

  “Fine, I give up on you.” She stepped back, seemingly exhausted by my persistently skewed worldview. “Speaking of people who have a lot to learn, what do we think has been keeping Medusa so quiet lately?”

  “I’m not sure exactly, and I don’t care, as long as it keeps her out of my face. I have enough to worry about without trying to protect myself from the evil eye of some maniac who is jealous of me for no reason. You’re the one dating Jonathan, for God’s sakes.”

  “But that’s how you think, Monica, not how she thinks. I’ve been pondering this and I figured it out. You don’t have to feel better than her to be happy. You’re fine feeling equal. She’s not. And knowing that you won�
�t compete with her is what’s really making her angry. So she can only tolerate you by telling herself that you’re smug.”

  “I’m smug because I don’t base my life around her?”

  “No. But being around someone who doesn’t consider her a threat eats into her comfort zone. You are very similar to her, but you’re also different, and that’s all right with you.”

  “So?”

  “So if she was you, it wouldn’t be all right with her. And she knows that. So what she’s jealous of is your confidence.”

  In high school everything is personal. Even the way that someone eyes you across a crowded gymnasium, no matter if the reality is that they were checking the clock above your head.

  Everything is magnified when your world consists of the five-mile radius of your parents’ home. And so, fortunately, are the lessons that people try to teach us in the precious last moments before we leave high school and emerge into the world. I remember my senior year like it was yesterday….

  “But how can you let her get away with it?” I pounded an idealistic fist down onto Mr. Tonin’s desk one afternoon late in April. As faculty advisor to the school yearbook, he was the only person with the power to censure Carolina for what she had done.

  “Monica, you have got to calm down,” Mr. Tonin insisted, as if he had seen this all before. “It is not the last time something like this will happen to you.”

  Not exactly the response I had been expecting. Carolina and I had been co-editors of the yearbook. We had been co-cheerleaders on the squad. And we had both competed for the same college scholarships. But it had never turned personal between us until then.

  “Sit down,” he said, and indicated a chair across from his desk. “Monica, you must be aware of the fact that you…you don’t blend into the crowd around here. And I don’t mean that simply for the obvious reasons.”

  I glowered, waiting for him to continue.

  “Look, I can understand why you are upset. Carolina had no right to publish senior superlatives without polling the class.”

  “So?”

  He smoothed over his moustache and sighed. “You are always going to be a visible person, Monica. And along with visibility comes scorn. You’re going to have to get used to it.”

  I looked out the window. Clearly, Mr. Tonin was on her side.

  “And that is not your fault. You’re just being yourself. But it is, unfortunately, a fact of your life. Unless you decide to become a shy, quiet, in the background sort of a young woman. And I don’t think that’s you, which is why you’re going to go far in life, Monica. I can promise you that. But there are more Carolinas in your future, kiddo.”

  “Great.” I was supremely sarcastic, even with a pink scrunchie in my hair.

  “I’m not telling you that you’re wrong. But to save yourself a lot of grief and frustration, I urge you to choose now, Monica. Choose today how you will handle people like this. For the rest of your life. Are you going to let them distract you from being who you are and from doing what you’re doing? Or are you going to do the smart thing and ignore it?”

  “But she called me Most Likely To Die Alone! It’s not fair!”

  “No, it’s not fair. But Monica, what she wants from you is a reaction. And if you’ve learned nothing else from my class this year, please take that little piece of insight with you.”

  “So you want me to do nothing?”

  “I want you to rise above it.”

  “So you won’t help me?”

  “I hope I just did.”

  “It’s not confidence, it’s self-assurance,” I told Cassie. “They’re two very different things.”

  I wasn’t always the only Indian girl in the class, but I was a lot of the time. And it wasn’t that I never saw anyone who resembled me on television in the seventies and eighties, but if the truth be told, it was rare. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have an Indian community to identify with for the better part of my life, because I did. But when the majority of the people you interact with on a daily basis, and can safely expect to interact with for the first thirty years of your life cannot properly pronounce your surname, it makes an impression. If you’re wise, you decide early on that comparing yourself to “the norm” is about as clever as doing your own dental work. So you start comparing today’s version of yourself to the version you were yesterday, and you learn very quickly to be grateful merely for progress.

  “Whatever you want to call it,” Cassie went on, “you can’t buy it.”

  “What do you want from me?” I asked, hoping that my return to the computer would signal her to be on her way.

  “You know what I want to do,” Cassie said, forcibly deeming my rhetoric literal.

  “No, Cassie.” I bit my lip. “I can’t. I won’t. I don’t want to ruin her career.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want her to see that she’s a bad reflection on all of us.”

  “I’ve got it!” Cassie almost jumped.

  “What?” I was ready to dismiss whatever it was.

  “You can go over to her apartment, show up on like a Sunday morning, ring the doorbell, and when she answers…punch her in the nose! And then turn around and walk away!”

  “Hmm, now I think you’re actually getting a little scary.”

  “Consider it.” She was totally serious. “She would come in to work the next day with a broken nose, and she would be running around telling everyone that Monica showed up on her doorstep and punched her in the face without a word, and then calmly took off…nobody would ever be able to believe that you were capable of it. Everybody would think she was insane. And you would get to punch her in the nose. It’s the perfect crime!”

  At the very least, it was a beautiful daydream…

  Ski mask (to ensure that Stefanie’s nosey neighbors could not identify me in a lineup): $10.

  Outlast boxing gloves (to protect my knuckles and prevent her having any proof): $50. (Or free, if I could borrow them from Lydia.)

  Blank videotape (with which Cassie could immortalize the event, so that we can enjoy it for years to come): $3.

  Knowing somewhere deep inside that not only had I scored one against the Stefanie in every woman’s life, but that Mr. Tonin would be oh-so-disappointed in me: Priceless.

  nineteen

  I KNOW HOW TO CHECK MY LIPSTICK IN THE REFLECTION OF MY cell phone’s time and date screen when my compact is nowhere to be found (say, because I was so drunk that I accidentally dropped it into a toilet at a club in Vegas). I know how to stare directly into a stranger’s eyes for long enough to figure out whether he’s got something to hide (I am The Queen of visual “chicken”). I even know how to tie my hair up with my thong before stepping into an unfamiliar shower the morning after (in the absence of a rubber-band, who’s gonna risk an awkward conversation just because one’s waiting for her hair to dry?). These are only a few of the handy little tricks that any capable woman masters after a sufficient number of years of living and loving in the ethical funhouse that is Los Angeles.

  What she apparently does not learn, however, is how to maintain her composure when confronted with an ex-boyfriend and a couple of pitchers of sake. As it turns out, fifteen years of living and loving in Los Angeles is no real protection against feeling like a fumbling, geeky amateur every once in a while.

  Case in point: there really is no way to describe the distasteful sound my lips made while I sucked the last sesame seed out from between my teeth as Alex approached the table at The Ivy the following afternoon. It was sort of like the sound of a bathroom drain expelling a clumpy, hairy clog, backward. Even a few of the bitchy waiters turned around to look me up and down.

  “Wow, so it was that bad, huh?” Alex took a seat and grinned at me.

  “No!” I smoothed over my printed copy of his screenplay while cursing my flapping lip as much as the sesame seed that did me in. “Actually, I really enjoyed it.”

  It would have been nice if I had been able to resist the
warm bread they set out while I was waiting. It would have been nice if I hadn’t torn into it like a prisoner into the first woman he’s seen after being paroled. It also would have been nice to have been reincarnated as Aishwarya Rye. But there was no time to dwell on the past. And the present was much more pressing. I cleared my throat and ran my fingers through my hair. He tilted his head, obviously awaiting further praise. Why are men always such whores for positive reinforcement? Never mind, I told myself. Just throw the guy a bone…

  “You’re really very funny, Alex,” I told him while a waiter with a tattoo of what looked just like Gianni Versace’s face on his forearm tipped water over the edge of the pitcher. “Really.”

  “Really?” he mocked me in a high-pitched voice.

  Clearly flirtatious. Clearly testing the waters. Clearly, this was the moment for me to draw my line in the sand. I was spoken for, after all.

  “Really.” I was monotone and intent on delivering some useful feedback. To stall for time so that I could come up with some, I guzzled the entire glass of water before me.

  Why had I agreed to read his screenplay? Why did I care whether he saw a sesame seed in my teeth? How could I feel this way when I was so sure about Raj? Had I become one of those people who claims to be able to love more than one person at the same time? But that was impossible! I had always eyed those sorts of women with the same suspicion that I usually reserved for vegans and men who wore pink shirts in public while insisting that they were heterosexual.

  Regardless, Alex was waiting for my feedback. And if I could visit a strip club for Bruno and crawl into a changing room for Lydia, then this was the least I could do for Alex. But the truth was that I was nervous about giving him my thoughts on his new screenplay, Tell Me More About My Eyes, because it was unlike anything I had ever expected him to write. It wasn’t just funny, frothy and a little tongue-in-cheek. It was the love-child of satire and sarcasm. It was…

  “It was well-organized,” I said. “The plot, I mean. It flowed and maintained dramatic pace throughout. The humor was appropriate for the subject, but it was definitely a lot darker than I remember you being.”