Girl Most Likely To

by Poonam Sharma

Fabulous. Now we had an audience.

  “Just listen.” His chest heaved as he grabbed an overhead railing to steady himself. I jerked away, and banged my arm.

  “You haven’t left me much of a choice, have you?” I rubbed at my elbow.

  “Vina, I wouldn’t have to chase you into a subway if you would answer the phone, or reply to Instant Messenger or even pay any attention to the singing telegram!”

  “Don’t you dare make this my fault. How dare you!” My forehead was getting hot. “How dare you do this to me? You don’t even have the right to talk to me anymore. I am on my way to work and now you’ve got half of New York listening to our personal business.”

  “Vina, I—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” My voice nearly cracked. “Do you have any idea how stupid that singing telegram made me look in front of my bosses?”

  “You don’t even like that job, Vina. You never have. This is me, I know you.”

  “First of all, don’t…aaaargh!” I opened a shirt button; it was getting warm. “Just because I may not love what I do, does not mean I don’t plan to do it well. That stupid singing horse sucked away at my credibility! And being my ex-boyfriend, you should have known that. Obviously, you were only paying attention when it was convenient.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Now that we’re here, let me explain.”

  “No! There is no ‘we’ anymore. Don’t you get that? It’s gone. Evaporated. If you could lie to me the entire time, then there never was a ‘we.’ And now that we’re here, let me explain. I am a good woman, you bastard.”

  “I know! That’s why I’m following you all over Manhattan and embarrassing myself in front of all these people.”

  The train’s passengers had fallen silent by that point. Most were listening intently, craning their necks and shushing one another to get a better show. My throat tightened with each additional pair of eyes on us.

  “You want a medal for that?” I was becoming more flustered by the minute. “Let me make this really simple for you and for all of the people in this subway car who are probably going to go tell their entire goddamned offices about this. You cheated on me. You lied to me. I no longer give a damn what you have to say.”

  “I didn’t love her. I love you!”

  The old lady, who was now separated from me only by my briefcase, searched my face for some sign that I might give in.

  “You HAD A CHILD WITH HER AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME,” I yelled in his face, blinking away the beginnings of a tear.

  Some nearby Goth kids whispered and giggled.

  “It was just a one-night stand! One mistake! I knew you would never forgive me, so I kept it to myself. She only told me she was pregnant after four months, so then I thought, ‘Now how can I tell you?’”

  “Oh, so this is my fault? I was unreasonable to expect you not to shtup other women?”

  All eyes were on him; even the old lady was now clearly on my side. A bald and goateed man towering over us in a leather jacket shook his head at Jon. A tattoo on his neck read “Feel The Pain.”

  “You messed up, buddy,” he concluded with the grin of a man who had been there himself.

  “Okay, look, I get that I should have told you sooner,” Jon said. “But I thought you would leave me.”

  “Well, you never gave me that choice, did you?”

  “If I had sat you down and told you, and given you the choice, then you would have left me. I didn’t want to lose you.”

  “Is that supposed to be romantic? What you don’t understand is that the loopholes don’t matter.”

  “Vina, you don’t always have to live by the book. You can do what you want to do sometimes, instead of what you think you’re supposed to do. I know that you still love me. Do what your heart tells you.”

  “You’re right, Jon,” I said after a pause that was more than pregnant—it was six weeks past due. “Maybe I should live more by my heart. Maybe I would be happier. So here’s what my heart is telling me right now, more than anything else. You and I are over. And I should care less about what anyone thinks about my choices, than about how I feel.”

  Jon was silent. The teenagers had lost interest. For the first time, I noticed my throat loosening up.

  “I am so sorry, dear,” the old lady chimed in.

  “Don’t do this, Vina,” Jon whimpered.

  “You did this,” I told him, and stepped from the train.

  I went straight to Cristina’s apartment after work.

  “I’m so sorry,” she yelled, throwing her arms around me before I could get my own around her.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I had no right to talk to you like that.”

  “But I had no right to submit that e-mail without asking you!” She gave me a pained smile.

  “It’s over,” I said, feeling some of the tension drain out of my body. “Can we just forget about it?”

  “As long as you know that I only want what’s best for you, chica.”

  “So do I,” I replied. “I wish I knew what that was sometimes. It’s more than Jon. It’s my whole life. I’m suffocating, Cristy. And I don’t even know where to go for air.”

  21

  Seeing Peter in jeans was almost as disconcerting as the first time I saw my mother in sneakers. We are not an athletic people. Peter was sitting on a soggy bench near a fountain in Central Park, wearing a baseball cap and two days’ stubble. The alarm bells in my mind should have gone off at five-thirty that Thursday morning, when I was awoken by his call. Peter wasn’t usually given to dramatic episodes. He had instructed me, without even so much as a Good morning, to meet him here within the hour.

  I took a seat beside him, fixed my gaze solemnly on a man selling marijuana less than twenty yards away and whispered, “You’re pregnant, right? Okay, look, I’ll assume it’s mine. And I want you to know that I’m here for you. We can go to a clinic and have this taken care of today.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” he nearly bit my head off. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  I was taken aback by the contempt in his voice.

  “Peter,” I put a hand to my chest and said, “I’m sorry. I…it’s all this cloak and dagger stuff. You pull me out of bed at this ungodly hour and tell me to come here. You don’t even explain what it’s about.”

  “I think you should be taking this more seriously.” He leaned on his knees, cupping his hands before him.

  “Taking what more seriously, Peter? What’s going on?”

  He tilted his head as if to force me to admit that we both knew what he was talking about. My mouth fell open. He rose to his feet as Sarah approached us, and I (feeling as out of place as if I were at church) rose, too.

  “Peter. Vina. What’s going on?” she asked without looking at me.

  “Look, guys,” Peter began, pacing on the damp grass. “I didn’t know what else to do. We’ve all worked together dayin, day-out for a long time now. I have to believe that means something. So I’m asking you to be honest with me. I really had a lot of respect for both of you…have. I have a lot of respect for you. I hope that I’m not wrong.”

  Sarah and I glanced at each other, shrugging in mutual confusion.

  “The reason I called you both here to talk,” he said then stopped and faced us, “was to tell you what’s been going on, and to see if I can get any answers from you. Yesterday I was contacted and interviewed by SEC investigators. They believe the company—our team in particular—has been making trades with inside information. It’s Alan and Steve, mainly. The SEC believes that both of you knew about the trades. And they have strong reasons to believe that you, Vina, were involved.”

  “What? Why…why?” I stammered, the air having been vacuumed from my windpipe. “Why would they think that? Which trades? Did you talk to Alan about this?”

  “I can confidently say that my record is spotless, Peter. But I cannot speak for anyone else,” Sarah testified, as if before Congress.

  “Vina,�
�� Peter said in a softer voice, like he was coaxing the murderer to reveal the location of the bodies, “I need to know why you fired Wade.”

  “What? Wade?” I put a hand to my forehead. “Peter, I’m not supposed to discuss that. I was…told not to. But look, if this is between us, then I might as well. I fired him for sexual harassment.”

  “Wade? Who was he sexually harassing? How could he sexually harass anyone? He was an intern.” He was now talking at me as if I were insane.

  “A secretary,” I practically whispered.

  “Which one?” Sarah demanded.

  “I can’t tell you.” I was getting dizzy.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know, okay? Alan and Steve told me to do it. Look, what does Wade have to do with this, anyway?”

  “That’s not why he thinks he was fired. He’s a key witness for the SEC. He claims that he walked in on Alan while he was on the phone with a source in Taiwan. That’s how they knew to make that investment in Luxor. Wade went to the SEC saying that we tried to buy him off. And now they have pressed charges against the entire team. You’ve been named in the suit, since you terminated him. Vina, as my friend, I am asking you to tell me what you know. This is my career here.”

  I could see the fear in his eyes. “Well, his last check was larger than usual, but I was told it was severance.”

  “Since when do we give interns severance?” Sarah asked. “And why didn’t this raise any red f lags for you, Vina?”

  “It did.” I sank back onto the wet bench, trying to collect my thoughts. “But it wasn’t exactly severance. You see, Alan said he would take care of it.”

  “I need to get home and think about what I’m gonna do.” Peter shook his head. “I was hoping to get some answers here. Apparently, all we were was coworkers. One last question, Vina. What was your bonus this year?”

  I couldn’t look at them when I said it. “It was…thirty grand.”

  Peter backed away from me as if he had just seen the blood on my hands.

  Sarah, sensing that I was dangerously close to feeling sorry for myself, added her own two cents. “Vina, how the hell could you let this happen?”

  Satisfied with the image of me dumbfounded, mouth agape and frozen in place, Sarah decided that she wasn’t interested in hearing my answer. She walked off into the midmorning chill.

  Like bulldozers across a crime scene before you have had a chance to collect all the evidence, time rolls most aggressively when we are unprepared. I walked the entire thirty blocks home from the park, feeling more light-headed with every step. On the way, I left a voice mail for Cristina, attempting to explain, without the benefit of a clear mind or a complete vocabulary, that the SEC was investigating me for complicity in insider trading. Real friends are those with whom you can be incoherent.

  When I got home, I couldn’t bring myself to take off my shoes or coat, to allow myself a seat on the couch, or even to pour myself a glass of water. Apparently, after so many years of accepting the authority of my parents, elders, teachers and everybody else, I had reached the point where I was nearly incapable of questioning it at all. As a professional woman it occurred to me that even with the best of intentions that kind of attitude meant I was a fraud. So I just stood inside my apartment, wondering at how unfamiliar it felt, wanting to be anywhere but inside my own life.

  22

  On the morning of her wedding day, my mother stood alone in the kitchen of the home where her parents had raised her. She was watching for the chai to boil and she was waiting for a sign. The astrologers and swamis had been consulted, her parents and in-laws-to-be had mutually approved and she had willingly consented to give her hand in marriage. Her groom was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old engineer from America; the son of a police chief and the pride of a Punjabi Brahmin family. During her one and only meeting with him a few weeks earlier, she had found something comforting in his ways, spied some evidence of affection in his face. Even though Hindus believe that spouses are linked karmically through seven lifetimes, this young woman, having left her fate in the hands of the gods when she nodded her consent, found herself feeling uneasy.

  Motionless, she surveyed the contents of the room, inhaling the smells and memorizing the stillness of the air in the only home she had ever known. Silently, she stirred cardamom seeds among the tea bags in the pot of boiling water, and she began to imagine the shape her new life might take. Then, in the moment before her anticipation could round a corner toward dismay, the unexpected occurred. A salamander lost its grip on the ceiling above my mother and plummeted earthward, bouncing off of her head and then onto the floor. As the lizard scurried away from her imposing presence, she smiled. And she exhaled. She was confident now that today was an auspicious day.

  I had never accepted the idea that everything happens for a reason; partially because Hinduism implies a far more complex web of causation, and partially because free will is so precious to me. In my estimation, things happen and we learn to carry on. Eventually, out of some need to make sense of our lives, we cite the good as proof that the bad was necessary, since it must somehow have made way for what came afterward. But I had yet to see any sign that things were meant to unfold a certain way. There were moments when my eyes refused to refocus a situation into any other, and when it became clear that there was no longer any point in trying to deny the obvious.

  There aren’t too many ways for a girl to interpret waking up with her face on the cold, dirty tile of an elevator stuck between the twenty-second and twenty-third floors of the downtown office building where SEC investigators are anxiously preparing to depose her. I could say that I had no idea why all of this was happening to me, but that would be a lie. I knew that it was happening because I had the audacity to speculate aloud whether things could get any worse. And life prides itself on being ironic in only the most twistedly poetic ways. Curled around my purse on the floor of that elevator, it seemed as if for most of the morning I had been in a dream.

  At six a.m. I had called my parents, hoping to explain what was going on, and to tell them I was likely out of a job.

  “We know, honey.” My mother’s voice explained, “We saw it in the newspaper. Daddy and I are on our way to your apartment.”

  The lines and edges of the world began to blur. I scanned the walls and then the ceiling of my apartment, wondering how everyone could remain so calm. My insides shivered and then resettled, and everything sprang sharply back into focus. I felt nothing. Methodically, I donned my robe, unlocked my front door, bent down and reached for the morning paper. And that’s when my legs went weak because there, staring back at me from page one of the business section, was a photograph of myself and all of my colleagues at last year’s company Christmas party. Drunk, merry and sporting matching Santa’s hats bearing the company logo, we were bloatedly toasting in front of the camera. From where I sat now, we looked as if we not only knew but were proud of what we were: cocky Wall Street fat-cats, high on champagne and corruption. Behind us stood an opulently decorated, forty-foot Christmas tree, and above us hovered a large, bold headline claiming “Their Greed Knew No Bounds.”

  By the time my mother and father let themselves into my apartment, I was on my knees in the bathroom, clinging to the toilet bowl as if it were a lover who was trying to leave me. While I didn’t remember eating anything the night before, I felt confident that I had already vomited at least half of my body weight. But the physical reaction didn’t agree with the emotional. Inside, I could have sworn that I felt nothing. My mother knelt beside me and smoothed the spit-soaked hair from my face. Looking into her kind and eager eyes, I realized the worst part of it all; that the problem with compartmentalizing parts of your life so well is that when your life falls apart those who want to help you won’t even know where to begin looking for the pieces. And surrounded by people who want to help, you will wind up feeling that much more alone.

  My lack of coherence stripped away my already shaky ability to censor myself. An
d that was when I made the mistake of challenging the gods, via my mother, by asking her whether things could possibly get any worse.

  So it was fitting that after I pulled myself together, explained the situation to my parents and marched down to the offices of the SEC investigators, who had called and demanded my presence there that morning, the elevator would labor its way past the twenty-second floor before deciding that it was in no mood to go farther.

  And then the lights went out.

  Note to self: This might be a good time to look in to “random-anvil-falling-on-head” and perhaps “flying-pigs-inflicting-concussions” insurance.

  Just after the elevator stopped, I decided that this was comical. It had to be. The universe was testing me. Perhaps this was the final hurdle, to see if I were strong enough not to lose it, right? Right. So I could beat this simply by practicing the deep-breathing technique discussed in the online chat room where I found the information about the St. Agnes Closeted Claustrophobes meeting. No problem. Piece of cake. At this point there was nothing left to do but laugh at myself.

  Laugh at myself, and of course, press the emergency button. So I did. But it didn’t light up. Naturally, the cabinet containing the courtesy phone was locked. Not surprisingly, I was the only person in the elevator. Predictably, I had left my purse-size use-in-case-of-emergency crowbar at home.

  Wait a minute, how did that breathing technique go again? Was I supposed to breathe through my mouth, or my nose? Was I supposed to hold in my stomach? Oh, my god, my pants felt tight. In fact, everything was starting to feel tight….

  My heartbeat had broken into a sprint. Don’t worry about it, Vina. Be reasonable, I told myself. I’m sure someone has noticed that the elevator is stuck. Help must be on the way. The problem, however, was that oxygen was running out, and I was having trouble stifling the twitch in my right eye.

  Don’t lose control, Vina. You’re better than that. Don’t make this a bigger deal than it has to be. I backed myself into a corner, while reminding myself to remain calm. It will be fine, I heard voices resembling my parents’ telling me. And this is no time to be dramatic or overly emotional.