One Good Friend Deserves Another

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “Well, have her try it on then!” Indira said. “You won’t know until you see how it drapes.”

  Her mother and Indira headed toward the mirrors at the back of the store. Aunt Nisha held out her hand to help Dhara up from the mattress. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were bright with mischief. “You know, you don’t have to listen to your mother,” she murmured, drawing her so close that Dhara could smell the musky perfume her aunt favored. “You can wear any color you like. You’re more modern than any of us.”

  “Nisha, you’d have me in some horrendous pouf of white satin if you had your way. I really do like the red.”

  “I’ve got your best interests in mind.” Nisha led her leisurely toward the back of the store. “I think that it might be better to appear on your wedding day…less traditional than most Indian brides.”

  Dhara felt a little frisson. Among her high school friends, it was frequently whispered that it fell to your mother’s sisters to fill you in on the pleasure-secrets of the wedding night—whether you wanted to hear them or not. Dhara hoped Nisha had the good sense to spare this thirty-seven-year-old such a ridiculous conversation, but the look on Nisha’s face suggested there were other secrets dancing on her tongue.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.” Nisha rolled a wrist dismissively toward her sisters. “Your fiancé seems to admire American girls. He had at least one girl with whom he was quite serious.”

  Dhara resisted the urge to block her own ears. “In that case,” she said tightly, “Sudesh and I are very much alike, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Nisha leaned in, to speak in a whisper. “And that’s exactly why you might want to break from tradition. Show him you’re not bound to it. That you’re Indian, but modern too, a little bit of both.”

  Dhara stared blindly ahead while Nisha spoke like a little devil on her right shoulder. She didn’t need to know this. She didn’t want to know anything more about Sudesh Bohara than that he was Hindu of the Vaishya caste and the Khandewal subcaste, and that his family originated in Ajmer. That he was from a good family, a distant cousin of one of her father’s business associates. That he was a vegetarian, who didn’t smoke or drink.

  And that he was a man with very kind eyes.

  “Don’t be nervous, Dhara, it’s just a suggestion.” Nisha pressed close and gave Dhara’s arm a little squeeze. “A suggestion from a married aunt to her most favorite niece.”

  The question rose to her lips before she could stop it. “What happened to Sudesh’s girlfriend?”

  “Oh, he broke it off not long after the engagement.” Nisha raised her brows. “One can only imagine what he discovered to make him forgo a wedding night.”

  Nisha should have just poured ice water down Dhara’s back. Her words had the same effect.

  “Nisha,” her mother said. “Stop talking mischief to my daughter. Come, Dhara, let’s get this on you.” Her mother clicked her tongue at Dhara’s skirt and shell. “You should have brought a petticoat and a choli. I guess we’ll just have to make do.”

  In sudden numbness, Dhara gave herself up to them. Dhara’s mother found the plain end of the sari and started tucking the edge into the waistband of her skirt. With deft hands she folded the fabric into pleats, tucked it to just one side of her navel, then brought the rest of the fabric around her back and draped it over her shoulder.

  Dhara stood with her arms raised, aware only of the pulling and the tugging, of the vague murmur of Hindi, all the while struggling to ignore Nisha’s revelation. It wasn’t her business that Sudesh had had a serious failed relationship. It wasn’t her business to wonder if Sudesh still loved this other woman—if Sudesh had resorted to an arranged marriage only because of family pressure—if Sudesh, like herself, still found himself needled by memory.

  But the knowledge raised an inevitable question: Would Sudesh think differently of her if he knew that she’d had a relationship with an American farm boy of no caste? A relationship that was, in every physical way, a true marriage.

  Dhara squeezed her eyes shut. She wished she could take back the last few minutes. In an arranged marriage, the relationship started on the wedding night. It would be a relationship based on mutual respect, mutual goals, and a determination to make things work. She didn’t want to know anything about Sudesh other than his basic goodness.

  She had known everything about Cole. And that had only brought her pain.

  “It’s a game.”

  Cole’s voice echoed in Dhara’s head, clear as the memory.

  She’d been sitting with her girlfriends in the lecture hall, clutching a cup of strong black coffee. In her other hand, she’d held a cardboard square upon which Cole had drawn a grid. In each square was a photo, apparently copied from the freshman register. She’d recognized Cole’s photo in the center free space.

  She’d held the card, not understanding why he’d given this to her. She could have blamed it on the hour. What had possessed her to take Art History 101, which was offered only at 8:30 in the morning? She’d never make it to class on time. The room was always dim, to better see the slides on the overhead projector, and the professor tended to drone. To make it worse, the class had been full of pretentious upperclassmen adding insights from their last trip to the Uffizi. She’d found it odd that the card was full of pictures of all those first-row show-offs.

  But it hadn’t been just the hour that made her slow-​witted. Her brain had stopped working the minute the wild-haired, lanky Cole Jackson had swung his long legs off the top of the next row of seats and then leaned down to whisper in her ear.

  “It’s like Bingo,” he’d murmured. He’d smelled of meadow grass, and sunlight, and sleep-tousled man. “When one of them talks, you cross off his picture.”

  Just then, one of the preppy boys in the front row had asked another question. Marta had made a muted yip as she’d crossed his face off her card.

  Only then had Dhara understood. Cole had made up the game to amuse them through the sleep-inducing class.

  He’d called it Asshole Bingo.

  Now Dhara made a sudden choking noise, a bubble of reflexive laughter. Her breath came out with a little hitch. The memory was like a swift blow to the solar plexus, and she stood dazed, trying to breathe.

  “Dhara, what’s the matter?” Aunt Nisha gave her a puzzled look, her dark eyes intent. “Are you all right?”

  Suddenly, three women gathered and peered into her face. Her heart palpitated oddly. She looked away to hide her expression—and instead caught her own reflection in the three-way mirror.

  She stared at that woman swathed in plum-colored fabric. She searched the reflection for the free-spirited girl who had dared to fall in love with the Frisbee-wielding American son of a single mother and bring him home to her tradition-bound parents. But all she could see was the pure Indian in her, the Hindu (religion), Vaishya (caste), Khandewal (subcaste), Pitalia (clan), from Jaipur by way of Dholagarh. All dressed up like a village bride.

  “I need some air.”

  She yanked at the pleats at her waistband. She tugged at the fabric with strangely fumbling fingers. Her mother and aunts cried out and tried to stop her, their hands everywhere at once. She wrenched and pulled, panic rising.

  Every jerk only bound her more firmly amid eighteen feet of Rajasthani silk.

  chapter three

  It was a rainy Friday night, and Kelly clutched the DVD of What’s Your Raashee?, a lushly filmed love story from Bollywood director Ashutosh Gowariker. Dhara’s aunt Nisha had recommended the movie at the engagement party last week, and Kelly had spent three lunch hours searching for the DVD among the dusty boxes of several downtown street vendors. She’d squealed when she found it—which upped the price a few bucks—but Kelly didn’t care. Juicy, romantic stories were her favorite rainy-night date. So she’d put on her softest pajamas, popped the movie in, and settled on her couch with a box of tissues and a bowl of microwave popcorn.

  Suddenly, the door buzzer sounded.
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  Kelly froze, a fistful of popcorn halfway to her mouth. She stared across the room at the intercom. There was only one person who would arrive at her apartment building without warning this late at night.

  She jumped off the couch, upsetting the bowl. A warm flush prickled over every last freckle. She thrust her fingers into her unwashed, humidity-frizzed hair and frantically tumbled it on top of her head as she glanced around the living area of the one-bedroom apartment. She noticed the torn window shade she’d been meaning to replace, and the cat box in the corner that needed cleaning. She wondered if she had any eggs in the fridge or coffee in the cabinet. Then she gave up on her hopelessly wild hair, ran her palms down her pajama bottoms, and scolded herself for not taking a shower when she’d come home from work.

  The buzzer went off again.

  Shoving her hair behind each ear, she hurried to the intercom and pressed the button, tensely balancing on her toes. “Yes?”

  “Kelly?”

  The voice gave her pause. “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Cole.”

  Kelly stared at the slats of the intercom, not understanding. She thought he’d said “Cole,” not “Trey.” She must have heard wrong. She pressed the button harder. “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Kelly. It’s Cole.”

  She knew that voice, though she hadn’t heard it in a long time. Disappointment dropped her to the soles of her feet.

  “Kelly, you there?”

  She fumbled with the button. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”

  She pressed her head against the wall and berated herself for her raised hopes. She had her own damn self to blame. Trey had promised he’d call the next time he had a chance to come over—and he hadn’t called tonight. She really shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Look what she was becoming—exactly what she’d sworn not to be: pitiful Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the sound of the buzzer.

  “Hey, Kelly, it’s friggin’ pouring out here. Can I come up?”

  Kelly shook herself to her senses. “Of course.” She pressed the button to buzz the building door open. She wondered what Cole was doing here at ten o’clock on a Friday night when she hadn’t heard from him in months. After he and Dhara had broken up, Kelly had expected him to call her to commiserate about the state of the relationship and, perhaps, ask for her help to patch things up. But Cole had mumbled through every phone call Kelly had made to him, and so, after a while, she’d stopped calling.

  When he tapped at the door, she unbolted and unchained it, pulling it open to peer at him from around the edge.

  She started to say hello stranger, but the words died in her throat.

  Cole had been raised as a vegetarian on an organic farm in Oregon. He’d always been long-muscled and whip-lean, the kind of guy who could wolf down prodigious amounts of food and not develop a fatty bulge. But she’d never seen him so thin that his clavicle pushed against the wet cotton of his soaked shirt, his skin so pale that she could see the bones in his wrist where he braced himself against the door.

  “Hey, Kelly.” His eyes were lost in shadows. “Can I come in?”

  She swung the door wide, and he stumbled over the threshold. He looped an arm around her neck, almost taking her down with him. Kelly seized his wrist and steadied him as she caught a blast of his breath. “What the hell, Cole—you’re drunk!”

  “I had a few with the guys.”

  “A few what? A few gallons?” Stumbling under his weight, she kicked the door closed behind her and then led him teetering toward the sofa. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

  “Started after the markets closed,” he muttered, pushing aside the popcorn bowl and tumbling onto the couch. “No big deal.”

  Kelly took a good, long look at him. His once sun-bleached brown hair, chopped short years ago in deference to Wall Street conformity, had grown dark and far out of its cut. It curled against his neck and stuck up at odd angles from his head. His face was sharp-edged at the cheekbones and chin, and his green irises showed eerily bright against the bloodshot whites.

  Kelly didn’t always pick up on what the girls called normal social cues, but she didn’t need a neon sign to know that the drunk keeling over on her couch was in the midst of dealing with—or not dealing with—some serious issues. After Dhara’s sudden engagement last week, she had a pretty good idea what those issues were.

  Poor Cole. She dropped to one knee to pull his size ten shoes from his feet. “Jeez, you’re as wet as if you were out in a nor’easter.” She tipped the two-hundred-dollar Johnston & Murphy shoe to dump the water onto the carpet. “I didn’t think it was raining that hard.”

  “I walked. From Mondo’s.”

  Kelly frowned. The name was familiar. It was the kind of place that showed up on Page Six of the New York Post. “Isn’t that place on Houston Street?”

  “I needed the air.”

  For forty, fifty blocks? She tossed the shoes toward the door. “Why didn’t you just take a cab?”

  “Tapped out.” He blindly yanked at his pants pockets, pulling out the white cotton insides. “Totally tapped out.”

  His argyle socks sagged with moisture. She pulled them off and dropped them into a soggy pile. His feet were icy to the touch. “You should have gone straight home. Your apartment is much closer to that bar. One phone call, and I would have caught the subway over. You know that.”

  “Can’t go home.” He let his head fall onto the back of the couch, his Adam’s apple jutting. “I’ve been evicted.”

  Yeah, right, Kelly thought. Evicted from the relationship with Dhara for sure, but certainly not from his apartment. This was just his puckish sense of humor. Cole swam in cash from working as a trader on Wall Street.

  “Stop with the fish tales,” she said, determined to take care of first things first. “You need to get out of these clothes.”

  Cole laughed, a phlegmy laugh that threatened to turn into a cough. “I knew I came to the right place.”

  “Shut up.” She stood up and headed to her bedroom. “I think I have a pair of pajamas that’ll fit you. I don’t want your wet butt staining my yard-sale couch.”

  She returned a few minutes later with a towel and an old pair of drawstring pajama bottoms. She flung them both in his general direction. He struggled to pull the damp button-down shirt over his head and then fumbled with his belt. To give him privacy, she went into the kitchen to clean the dishes in the sink and put on a pot of water to boil. She heard him stumbling around, drying himself, kicking off his pants, swearing as he tripped back onto the couch while pulling the pajamas up over his legs.

  When she turned around, he was shirtless, wearing a pair of white cotton pajama bottoms speckled with little red hearts, which ended just below his knees. She thrust a glass of water in his hands and held out a couple of pills. “Take both of these and drink all the water.”

  “Tell me they’re quaaludes.”

  “Vitamin B12 and some aspirin. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass.” She tugged a Star Trek throw blanket off the back of the couch and then tossed it across his chest. He pulled it over him while he slugged back the pills. “Now, are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I told you,” he said, shrugging one bony shoulder. “I was evicted.”

  “Cole—”

  “Came back last night to find the locks changed,” he continued, lifting the glass, “and a sheriff’s posting on the door.”

  Kelly fell silent. The Ramen noodles she’d eaten for dinner shifted. He couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. If he were, he wouldn’t be so frustratingly calm. Cole knew what it meant. Evictions happened to people like his mother, a feckless ex-debutante who, along with her organic garden, cultivated marijuana on the side to help pay the heating bill. Evictions happened to men like her father, fishermen in Gloucester, whose income rose and fell on seasonal stocks of flounder.

  She said, “It must be a mistake.”
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  “No mistake. I was legally warned.” He looked beyond her, toward the kitchen. “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Vodka? Whiskey?”

  “You’ve had enough, don’t you think?”

  “No.” Then he closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the couch. “It’s never enough.”

  Kelly sank onto the couch next to him, giving up all expectation of a cozy night watching a Bollywood movie. A boatload of real drama had just arrived on her doorstep. “You want to tell me how you got to this point?”

  He made an ugly sound, a bitter little laugh. “Like you don’t know.”

  “No, Cole. I don’t.”

  He turned his head, opening his eyes into slits, and she could see the effort he was making to focus on her face.

  “Dhara’s been tight as a clam.” She curled her legs up under her. “I had no idea your situation was so serious. At her engagement party last week, I confronted her, but she didn’t say a word about you.” Well, Kelly thought, except for that unbelievable tidbit that Cole had asked her to marry him and she’d said no. “She certainly didn’t say anything about an eviction.”

  Cole went unnaturally still. His pupils constricted, making his striking eyes all the more green. He looked like he’d just received a fierce right hook and was struggling to regain some sort of equilibrium.

  “Hey.” She pushed the hopeless frizz of her hair out of her eyes and leaned into him. “Are you okay?”

  His lips moved, but no sound came out. He had the distressed, tight-faced look of a landlubber on his first deep-ocean voyage. She glanced at the Star Trek throw blanket, an old present from the girls, already so thin from age that she feared the threadbare split by Spock’s face would rip entirely if she washed it any more. She cast a swift glance toward the sink, wondering if she had enough time to fetch a bucket from under the counter before he hurled.

  He tried to say something, but it came out garbled. Then he visibly took hold of himself.