All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  Then I noticed the redhead from before, glowering at us from her perch on a barstool nearby. So I reached around Luke’s neck, weaved my fingers in to grab a tight hold, and literally yanked him down onto my face by his ponytail.

  And there was nothing remotely good girl about it.

  twenty-three

  THE LOBBY OF THE MONDRIAN HOTEL, WHICH FEATURED THE entrance to The Skybar, was packed with the usual Saturday night mix of security-flanked celebs, Hollywood industry-types and college kids looking for trouble. Unless Luke and I had set ourselves on fire, nobody would have paid us any attention as we made arrangements and headed for a room. Still, we both felt the need to maintain our composure. At least until we stepped into the elevator.

  I slammed him against the opaque glass wall with the weight of my body once the doors slid shut behind us, while Gnarls Barkley wailed overhead about losing his mind.

  “Ouch!” Luke complained about the barely perceptible little nibble I took out of his lip.

  “Take it like a man!” I ordered, giggling and going in for another bite.

  I can only imagine that from the perspective of the security guards, watching the elevator security camera, I must have looked like a deranged midget-dominatrix attempting to climb on top of this strapping, panting man. And he acquiesced, wrapping his arms around me and kissing me with lips pulled taut in a smile.

  God, I had forgotten how much fun it was to be carefree. I couldn’t remember the last time that Raj and I had a night like this. The best part, I reminded myself as Luke and I stumbled down the hallway without breaking the kiss, was this brief period between giving yourself permission to do something like this, and having to deal with it later on.

  He swept me up into his arms newlywed-style, and whisked me into the room. He grabbed a bottle of champagne from the minibar and treated the both of us to a mouthful. And then he dove into my cleavage like an Olympic swimmer, sending shivers up my spine and lots of heat everywhere else. Moments later he was rustling my hair into a veritable bee’s nest of knots, but I couldn’t have cared less. He lapped sloppily at my neck, swallowing some of my hair and getting a good taste of my chandelier earrings.

  “Man,” he said, “you’re driving me crazy!”

  And to be honest with you it felt a little bit like an accomplishment.

  So, apparently women are easy, too.

  And men are able to sprout multiple arms on call. I could’ve sworn there was a hand on my butt, another in my hair, a third on my breast and yet another one sliding up my thigh, which is probably why I didn’t notice in time to stop him from getting to that spot. The one below my right ear that immediately sends my eyes to the back of my head and my self-control on a one-way trip to Mars.

  “Wow!” I hunched over and tried to refrain from having an orgasm right then and there. “What’s the rush? Let’s…uh…umm…slow it down a little.”

  I took a deep breath and what I could only hope was a graceful step back. He was panting and looking at me like a confused and lipstick-covered bull who had been restrained, midcharge. Seeing him like that I decided I wanted to have some fun with this. Simplicity was so hard to come by that I wanted to make this last. To seduce him. To make this movie scene a little more cinematic.

  And what could be sexier than a striptease?

  For once in my life I was going to be that girl. That effortlessly sexy, genuinely spontaneous girl. The one who took off after graduation with a backpack for parts unknown and returned a year later with a palpable calm, a permanent grin and a much wiser veneer. The one that jumps on the mechanical bull at a Western-theme bar without a moment’s hesitation and leaves the crowds hooting and hollering for more. The one who knows what she wants and takes what she needs without a second thought. Just once I wanted to feel like the kind of woman who can actually pull off an impromptu striptease without blinding anyone with a projectile button, failing to move to the beat of the music in the background, or snagging any zippers or straps on her stockings and tripping all over herself.

  Wait a minute. I wasn’t wearing any stockings. Beautiful! I turned up the volume on the wall stereo.

  Luke dropped onto his elbows on the bed behind him, and started loosening his tie. I twisted and I turned, putting on a pretty good show of arousing myself. And the grin on his face only encouraged me.

  Casting him a “who’s a naughty boy” look over my shoulder, I reached back to unlace my shirt. I paused for a second before yanking it off, and waving it above my head like a sign of surrender. I even sent it flying over a lampshade, all the while keeping my girls covered with my other arm. And then I managed to unzip my skirt and suck in my belly long enough to have it drop to the ground in one elegant flourish.

  Mentally, I high-fived myself. Physically, I acted as if this was just how suave I always was.

  “Well,” he said. “Happy Birthday to me!”

  “Is it your birthday?”

  “No, but I didn’t know what else to say.” He reached out and pulled me toward him by my hips. “It’s not Christmas, either.”

  As he turned me around and kissed up the length of my back I closed my eyes long enough to keep myself in the moment. To savor the feeling of his hot breath, his deliberate hands, and his pillowy, gentle lips and teeth on my neck while he forced me to lean back into him, and Gnarls suggested that perhaps we were all crazy.

  I noticed the view beyond the balcony that looked down over the lounge of The Skybar…as well as into the windows of other guestrooms!

  You know how they say that most managers rise to their level of incompetence within a company? Well, I think most good girls similarly rise to their line of personal craziness on a night of low self-esteem, and then try to claw their way across it. My line, as it turns out, was the one marked exhibitionism.

  I stiffened. “Is that…Do we have shades for those windows?”

  He laughed. “We made out at the bar and you violated me in the elevator, but now you’re shy?”

  I nodded, covering myself with his arms.

  “Man, you’re cute,” he said, hopping off and grabbing a fluffy white robe. “But I guess you’ll have to wear this and then make a mad dash for that hot tub on the balcony.”

  “But this is The Mondrian!” I said, while he wrapped me in the robe and pulled me close. “The place is crawling with paparazzi!”

  “Paparazzi who are looking for celebrities,” he clarified, brushing some hair from my neck, pulling off his shirt and then taking me by the hand. “Not for us.”

  “Hey,” I said and dug in my heels before we made it to those sliding doors. “I’m not taking the chance that they see black hair and brown skin and mistake me for somebody else, and then my butt winds up on the cover of Pucker.”

  He tilted his head, grabbed the champagne off the dresser and then swept me off my feet again.

  “It could happen,” I said, apparently to myself.

  It’s a lot like telling someone that you’ve never been unfaithful. Even if it’s the truth, nobody ever believes you when you say it. Especially because you said it. But still.

  “I don’t normally do this, you know. Go back to a hotel room with some strange man, I mean.”

  “Of course not.” He yanked my foot out from under the water, propped it up against his chest and began massaging it. “Me, either.”

  “No, I’m serious,” I said, grabbing the nearly empty and condensation-covered champagne magnum and tipping it back.

  “Well, tonight you’ve been an absolute tigress,” he complimented me with a sinister glint in his eye and all of the cockiness of a lion who had already cornered his prey. “And what makes me so special?”

  This has always been a big part of my problem: I listen to people when they talk. So when someone tells me that they don’t deserve me, I believe them. And when someone reminds me that I’m acting out of character, I reconsider. While the bubbly suds simultaneously made their way around my body and swished inside of my mouth I paused to think abou
t it. I looked beyond his smiling face and steaming shoulders to the skyline of the City of Angels. I listened to the giggles of the women at the lounge below our sheltered perch. And I felt something I hadn’t felt in quite a while. Sober.

  Those twinkling lights seemed as close as they were far away…and so did this man, who was right there for me, just like all the rest of the readily available excess in this town. I could have told myself that I was merely dabbling in the insanity, merely dipping my toe in a world full of divers. But the truth, I realized with a shudder, was that I was on the verge of submerging myself whole. How had I gotten myself into this hot tub just a few short hours after Raj left my apartment? Had Alex come back into my life to become a part of it, or just to shine a mirror on my own dissatisfaction? Who was this strange man rolling my big toe around on the tip of his tongue, and why had I felt the need to convince him that I was taking him seriously just to get through this night?

  The truth was that I didn’t want him. I didn’t want any of this.

  “Luke, wait,” I began, taking my foot back, much to his disappointment. He looked like a child whose newest toy had been snatched away.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I stared at him while the jets whirred in the background. This wasn’t about Luke. And it wasn’t even about my mother, or Raj, or Alex, or anyone else. It was about me. Me and how I felt about that redhead at the bar. Of course I was attracted to Luke, and of course I was hurting from what had happened that afternoon with Raj. But tonight was about reinforcing my status as a sexual alpha female. The worst part was that I wasn’t even reacting against the redhead in particular. I was battling directly against my own weakened self-perception. I was battling myself.

  Knowing that, I couldn’t go forward with this. I may have been an ape deep down inside, just like Stefanie and every other woman in the world, but unlike them I was going to choose to walk away from it. To walk away from him. Right now.

  “I’m sorry, Luke. I…I have to go.” I hoisted myself out of the hot tub, and started toweling off. “I can’t do this.”

  “Why not?” he asked, alone in the hot tub.

  I avoided eye contact while I zipped up my skirt. “This is not me. I’m just not myself tonight…around you.”

  “Or maybe,” he coaxed, “this is exactly who you are. Did you ever consider that?”

  “I just can’t go through with this, okay?” I attempted to refasten my blouse while searching for my heels.

  He climbed out of the hot tub, swaddled himself in a towel and came toward me. “Monica, you take yourself too seriously. And then when there’s finally a glimmer of your real, playful self, you pull her away!”

  “I’m sorry, Luke. I really am.” I yanked my arm out of his grasp and turned for the door.

  “No, you’re not!” he yelled, and reached out to grab me again.

  And what I saw in his eyes wasn’t anger; it was hurt. But I just didn’t have it in me to deal with it. I had enough of my own problems already.

  So I unbolted and ripped the door open, launching myself into the hallway.

  “Why are you so freakin’ closed off?” he yelled at my back.

  He might not have been poisoned, but I knew I had left a bad taste in his mouth. I tried my best to walk calmly down the hallway with its blue lights, nightclub color scheme and thumping music. I knew that I had been about to do something we both would have lived to regret. There was a chill in the air of that hotel hallway, but I didn’t shiver. I just stood there calmly at the elevator, staring ahead even as the heat was still rising from my body.

  twenty-four

  ACCORDING TO THE ANCIENTS, SONS BELONG TO THEIR PARENTS, while daughters are only on loan. At the end of any traditional Hindu wedding the bride’s family will collapse into mourning over what is seen as the literal loss of their girl. May your new family treat you so well that you never think of us again, they sing, in the hopes that they have entrusted her to the right hands. Off to a new home, with a new family, in a new village perhaps hundreds of miles away, a village girl of my grandmother’s generation could expect to be renamed and to remain with her husband’s family for the rest of her life. Depending on the day, the lighting and the position of the moon, the relationship between a mother and her daughter can resemble anything from prisoner and captor to sister and sister to master and marionette. But common among all these variations is the fact that no matter how far apart they may seem to have grown, mothers elementally understand their daughters.

  When I was about four years old, my mother discovered me alone in our kitchen one afternoon. Surrounded by a mountain of shredded tissue, I stood tall, pulled in my chin and pierced her with a defiant stare.

  Monica, she asked in a warning tone, who made this mess?

  I don’t know. I dared her to contradict me. Being knee-deep in the evidence proved nothing.

  Monica. She stooped down to meet me at eye level. You are going to have to clean up this mess.

  Your kitchen, I answered after the world’s most intense staring contest, YOU clean it.

  What was a mother to do? Raise her voice? Slap her child? Send her to her room?

  She got down on her knees, dragged the wastebasket between us and placed one scrap of tissue into the bin. And then she waited. Soon enough, I was cleaning the rest on my own.

  Thwappp! Thwappp! I awoke to the swift clapping of my mother’s hands beside my head.

  “Hello?” she said, as if I were on the other side of a door. “Hello, hello?”

  “Mmmmmmhhhhhhhh,” I moaned in protest, hoping it might scare the crazy lady away.

  “Monica?” she asked as if she wasn’t sure it was me. “Monica, what are you doing?”

  Why do mothers do that? I forced my eyes open and twisted to face her for long enough to let out an extended yawn and another growl.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  I must have looked like a zombie given the way that she recoiled. And I have to admit I found it more than a little bit satisfying. Snapping my tongue against the paper-dry roof of my mouth, I sat up and got a better look at myself in the massive mirror opposite my bed.

  Which, as I had explained to my mother, was only there so that I could get dressed while…standing on top of my bed.

  I really was a sight. My mascara had mushroomed into a cloud of gray around my eyes, made murkier by the globbed-together patches of once-creamy gold-and-glitter eye shadow. My hair, while pouffy on the top, curly in the back, and dried to straw at the tips, still managed a particularly aggressive showing of bed head. And my lipstick, I imagined, was still making its way through Luke’s small intestine. Basically, it looked like a cosmetics bomb had gone off, and the focal point had been my face.

  Somehow I had managed to swap the backless blouse from hell for a thin T-shirt, but had fallen asleep with my skirt still on. By now, of course, it was more like a belt around the middle of my belly and was threatening to cut off my air entirely.

  Good times.

  “You are obviously not sleeping. You are awake and you are talking to me. And darling, you shouldn’t sleep in such thin shirts,” she said. “Anybody can see your…your parts.”

  “Who’s anyone, Mom? You’re the only one here.”

  “But it is not decent at all to sleep like that.” She tightened the belt on her housecoat.

  “Mom, did you really wake me up to talk to me about the indecency of my breasts?”

  “Don’t say it like that,” she winced. “It’s vulgar.”

  I lay down and pulled the covers back over my face.

  “I thought you were awake,” she defended herself.

  Sure, Mom. And the only things inside my bedside table are a copy of the Mahabarat and a jar of multivitamins.

  “I don’t want to talk right now, Mom. Can I please go back to sleep? Please?”

  “Monica.” Her voice was stern enough to make me think that perhaps after all these years she was finally getting ready to give me the sex talk. “Monic
a, I was not trying to listen yesterday, but I overheard your argument with Raj.”

  I pushed the covers down around my shoulders and let out a very long breath to indicate how little interest I had in where this thing was headed. She took one close look at the damage to my face and winced again: “Oh my God, Monica. Get that gunk off of your face. Here, I’ll get you a tissue.”

  And in that instant when she reached out for the top drawer of my bedside table, I considered letting her go through with it. Feast your eyes on the contents, Mom! Body chocolate, flavored condoms, sexual dice and various lacy thongs sporting slogans like It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself! She would have gone immediately blind and hopped the next mule, puddle-jumper or rowboat back to London.

  But as much as I wanted her to leave, I didn’t want to give her a massive coronary.

  “Mom,” I said, and held the drawer shut. “I don’t need anything.”

  “Yes, beti. I am sure that you know what is right for you.” She sat on the bed and looked down at her hands. “You don’t need my advice. You never did.”

  “Mom, do we really have to…”

  “Listen, Monica. I just want to give you my opinion. I know that you are an adult. Can I just give you my opinion? And you can do whatever you want with it?”

  No matter what she had done, she always managed to make me feel like the guilty one. Brava, Mother, I thought, while I hung my head and awaited her advice.

  “I know that when Daddy died, I could have…or I should have been stronger for you. And maybe you would have felt more secure at that time in your life. But you see, I have never felt that being emotional is a weakness. I always thought, even when you were a little girl, that if I showed my emotions, then my daughter would see how liberating it is. To let these things out so that they cannot control you.”

  I fingered the gunk out of the corners of my eyes. “Mom, I have no problem with the way that you live your life.”