Читать книгу All Eyes On Her - Poonam Sharma - Страница 9

MAYBE IT WOULD BE EASIER IF I WERE A LESBIAN. AT LEAST IT would preclude my mother pulling any stunts resembling her telling me “the news” as casually as if she were asking me to pass the mango chutney. Turns out she’s not only planned to move back to Los Angeles within a month, but that she’s already put the down payment on a three-bedroom Spanish-mission style home in Upper Brentwood. This way, there will be room for the beautiful nursery to which every doting grandmother has a legal right. Letting her in on the fact that my fiancé was AWOL at that point would have been a lot like informing a B-list actress making the walk of shame back to her condo at 10:00 a.m. that the “Director” was really just an extra. Why bother? You can’t turn back time.

Mom wanted to know what I thought about a lilac-color palette, you see, and whether I would object to her hiring a portrait artist, who is apparently All the rage according to Pushy Cosmopolitan Grandmother Wannabe Magazine, to emblazon likenesses of myself and my newborn baby across one of the walls. Because these people book up months and months in advance, you know….

Lacking convenient proximity to a cliff I could hurl myself off of, and confident that being alone at my own apartment that night would virtually guarantee a drunken and tear-soaked attempt to chop off all of my own hair, I swung a right onto Doheny and headed in the direction of the only person who might begin to understand.

“It’s because I’m too nice, isn’t it?” Sheila asked, swinging her front door open and thrusting an especially appalling dress at me.

“Well, if you mean why did you buy this, then it must be because you went temporarily blind?”

It may sound harsh, but honestly, we’re talking all black, long sleeved, knee length, shoulder padded and with an actual beaded trim. She might as well have let a twelve-year-old loose on her ski suit with a BeDazzler and then tried strolling down Rodeo Drive with a straight face. Being her cousin, I knew it was better to investigate before jumping to a conclusion.

“Mo-ni-ca!” She literally stomped a foot on the marble, fists clenched at her sides.

God bless her, Sheila failed to grasp the negative correlation between the pitch of her voice and the gravity of her words to anyone who is listening. Still, she was my cousin.

“What are you babbling about?” I asked, shoving my own situation aside and walking past her and into the living room.

“This! This disgusting dress!” She fell into step beside me, shaking her head and gesturing with that fashion hate crime as if it were a weapon. “She is being so…so…so passive aggressive!”

“Is this about your mother-in-law again?” I dropped onto the white suede couch in their sunroom. “Look, I told you, she’s going to treat you the way you allow her to treat you.”

Tone of voice was only one of the many ways in which Sheila and I were different. Take the copy of Pucker laid out on their tree-trunk cross-section of a coffee table for everyone to see. And which I made the mistake of glancing toward. Sheila tilted her head, following the direction of my eyes. A shameless celebrity gossip junkie, Sheila was the last person I would ever admit my Pucker fixation to…because she would seize any opportunity to interrogate me about my clients, hooking me up to a lie detector machine, trying to get me to break confidentiality by naming names. Mercifully that day, she was more focused on the issue at hand….

“You don’t under-stand!” She sniffled. “She knows that it’s ugly, because…because how could she not? And she knows that I have to wear it, because she bought it for me. We’re all going out to dinner tonight, with Josh’s entire extended family! So I’ll either look like an ungrateful daughter-in-law or someone who accidentally wandered in from a Bon Jovi concert, circa 1982!”

While Sheila was only one year younger than myself, at times the gap seemed closer to twenty. Hissy fits like this one were part of the reason why I still had trouble thinking of her as a married woman. Her husband was the loving but spineless Joshua. And in the most storybook fashion, they had met one night when she came in to the emergency room seeking stitches for a gash across her forehead.

The kind Jewish medical intern not only sewed her up, but managed not to laugh while she described the spill off her five-inch heels that resulted in a nosedive into the pavement outside a West Hollywood nightclub. She walked all over him, and saw nothing wrong with his lack of interest in getting up off the floor, until she realized that she wasn’t the only woman making heel marks on his face. He had been in training, in fact, having spent his entire lifetime balancing on eggshells around his mother. About a year into their marriage it was clear that the coach wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of another voice barking orders at her team.

“Your problem,” I began, “is that you’re trying to beat her at her own game by figuring out her rules and then playing them against her. The only way you’ll win is if you refuse to play her game at all. When she presumes that you’ll spend every other weekend at her place, announce how much you would love to but that you already have plans to go to dinner with the chief surgical resident and his wife, which you are sure she will agree is the best thing for Joshua’s career. When she tells you that your choice of lipstick is interesting, play dumb and ask her, in front of everyone, to explain what she means by that because you really value her opinion. When she insults your food by asking if you would like her extra set of measuring spoons so that you won’t be so aggressive with the salt next time, don’t laugh it off!”

“But I don’t want to be a…a bitch,” she lowered her voice, as if the lamp might hear us.

“Fine, then act like a wounded bird,” I said and rolled my eyes. “But whatever you do, don’t act like it’s no big deal. Don’t make it so easy for her. Maybe if you’re visibly hurt in front of your family, then Josh will finally grow a pair and start defending his wife.”

Adept already at the wifely art of choosing her battles, Sheila slam-dunked the dress behind the couch and silenced me with a glance the moment she heard Josh’s key in the door.

“So anyway…like I was saying.” I shifted gears, widening my eyes and acting about as casual as the kid at Fat Camp with the remnants of a Snickerdoodle clinging to his chin. “My mom says she’s moving back to L.A. And she’s serious, Sheila. She already bought a house.”

“Really?” Joshua asked, bounding in from his bike ride, but apparently deeming himself not-quite-sweaty enough to forgo a kiss to the forehead of his giggling bride. “Is this because of Raj and you breaking up?”

“We did not break up,” I warned him, with a cautionary glare at Sheila. “It’s temporary. Do you tell him everything?”

“Of course she does, we’re married. So then you didn’t tell your mom about Raj?” he yelled from the kitchen, banging the refrigerator door shut. “But she’s your mother.”

“She didn’t, honey, no,” Sheila answered for me after wiping her forehead with her sleeve. “I told you that she’s afraid of her mother.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, leaning against the doorway defensively.

“Nobody’s afraid of anybody,” I interjected, trying to steer the focus back onto myself. “I haven’t told my mom about Raj because there is nothing to tell. We have not broken up. We’re taking a breather.”

Besides, I thought, reaching for the remote control, my mother always got way too involved with opinions that were completely misinformed when I let her anywhere near my personal life. And as if God didn’t have just the most perfect timing…

“Hollywood studios are abuzz this week with news of one of the biggest screenwriting sweetheart deals to have been signed by Paragon Pictures in years,” some Entertainment Tonight reporter wearing no less than eight necklaces and an entire tube of lip gloss prattled on.

And then they cut to the videotape of Alex.

With that same warm smile. That same humble manner. Those same unmistakable dimples sneaking in an appearance as he sat back and watched the filming from his consultant’s chair on the set of the movie that launched his career.

“Rumor has it,” the talking head continued, “that the movie studio has just inked a landmark seven-figure, two-script deal with the screenwriter whose first movie, Like You Mean It, was the sleeper hit of last summer.”

“Oh, honey.” Sheila sat down beside me. “I’m sorry. You know I only watch that for the celebrity stuff. Let’s change the channel.”

“Come on, Sheila,” I insisted, in a voice that wouldn’t have even convinced a total stranger, “don’t be silly. I can be happy for him, can’t I?”

The first time Alex told me that he loved me was when he came home from a morning run to find me awake and curled up in his dorm-room bed, wearing one of his T-shirts and reading the original version of Like You Mean It. I could tell by the way he said it that he’d startled himself, as much because he’d blurted it out, as because of realizing that it was true. Although my first instinct was to drop the script, grab him by the neck and yank him down on top of me, he held me back, asked me to finish reading first, and made me promise to tell him what I really thought when I was done. Total honesty, he announced with an idealism that only someone under legal drinking age can muster, was the only way that this relationship would ever work.

So like most young couples we managed to be completely honest with each other for the next two years, except, of course, for those little things that we held back. Harmless things, at first, like my insisting that his snoring never bothered me in the least, and his swearing up and down that I was cute when I was drunk. We knew what we had and we shared a quiet instinct to protect it, even from ourselves. It worked for me because by definition a girl’s first real love is the guy who feels like family. And it worked for him because rather than feeling skewered by my gut reaction to his work, he told me that he finally felt as if he had someone on his team.

Yes, we kept up a relationship of comfortable truth even through the summer when he tattooed his biceps and bartended on Sunset, while I donned my sensible suit and interned at an emerging-markets hedge fund. At the time, Alex forcing me to admit that I had gone corporate to appease my father only made me love him more. But when the summer was over…

“What do you mean What am I gonna do after school?” he asked, while hefting my bookcase into the corner of my new dorm room that September.

“I mean that people are applying to grad schools or applying for jobs.” I flopped onto the bed and watched him work. “So what are we gonna do?”

“I’m not sure what you’re gonna do yet, but I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, even if you have to move back in with your parents for a few months.”

“And what about you?” I rose up on my elbows.

“Whadya mean?” He blew the hair out of his eyes and looked up at me. “What’s wrong with bartending until I sell my script?”

There was nothing and plenty wrong with it, but what was I going to say? That was when I realized just how committed he was to his writing, and it terrified me. Not because I thought he would fail, but because it might take him a very long time to succeed. And I didn’t want that kind of disappointment for him. I came back from summer convinced that it was my responsibility to seek out a career that would work for me, rather than waiting for one to fall into my lap. His summer had convinced him that dedication to writing wasn’t enough. Surviving without a safety net was some twisted sort of price he concluded he had to pay if he was ever really gonna make it. Encouraging him to seek stability at that point would have been like telling him that I had never believed in him at all. I snapped my mouth shut and swallowed, recognizing that my silence had made the space for the first small fissure in our relationship.

He didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened as the months took us into the winter and spring of our senior year. To anyone watching us during the Senior Ski Weekend at Bear Mountain or at the beach in Cozumel on spring break, our rhythm must have seemed unbroken. But every now and then I wondered…how much of our connection rested atop my conspiring to allow him to see himself a certain way? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Even then I understood that I was a young woman in the throes of a connection that she knew she would never forget.

So I accepted, rather than decided, that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t sweep under the rug just to keep him inhaling me with those eyes. I had to, you understand, because if I didn’t I felt sure that a later, older, wiser version of myself would have never forgiven me.

Just after spring break, Alex had sent copies of his manuscript to a handful of agents. A month later he received his first rejection letter.

“Well, I guess that was Round One,” I said, dropping my backpack on my dorm room steps to take a seat beside him. I slipped an arm around his shoulder. “So what are we gonna change before you send it out for Round Two?”

In the weeks leading up to graduation, he collected a stack of rejection letters almost two inches thick. There were enough as it turned out to wallpaper his entire bathroom. We discovered this one morning when we woke up—hungover—to find that was exactly what we had done the night before.

But in the light of day Alex didn’t think it was funny. In fact, he crawled into bed and refused to go anywhere for a week. Eventually I had enough of his moping and forced him out when we were to be fitted for our caps and gowns. He came along, but he wasn’t the same. And I was very close to being seriously concerned when he burst into the dorm, interrupting a margarita-soaked slumber party with my girlfriends a few nights before graduation, to wave a piece of paper in my face.

“It’s from ICM!” he shouted, yanking me up into his arms for what became a twirl around an imaginary dance floor.

“Oh my God!” I slapped both hands to my cheeks before remembering the avocado face mask. “They signed you?”

“No.” He ignored my wiping the gunk off on my pajamas, while my roommates poured him a drink. “But it wasn’t a form letter this time! This guy, this agent, he says my writing’s good…like, good enough to sell…if I can just tighten up my plot line. He gave me a few suggestions and said I could send him a new version if I wanted!”

After graduation I had decided to move back home and spend a year temping to keep myself in lip gloss and lemon-drop martinis while I decided where I wanted to land. Alex, as planned, was bartending by night and reworking his screenplay by day, sharing an apartment with a couple of guys in Venice near the beach. He was happier than I had seen him in months. As we rolled into midsummer, I told myself that until I decided to get serious, I had no right to tell him to do so.

However, as the saying goes the only things that truly can change a person are death and divorce. And seeing my mother so helpless in the hallway I had to wonder how long she would have stood there mumbling if I hadn’t come home. I wondered while I booked the funeral home with the crematorium to suit Hindu ritual and ordered the flowers for the small family ceremony. I wondered while I sat with Sheila’s mother, the lawyer, trying to make sense of our family’s finances and pay the inheritance taxes without losing our home. I wondered while I made a list of all of the relatives in Los Angeles, London and Bombay who needed to be notified, and had to decide which of the elder male relatives would take my father’s ashes to scatter over the Ganges River as he would have wanted. And I wondered while I forced my mother to eat something each day, and then stood staring out her bedroom window at the moon each night until the pace of her breathing assured me that her sleeping pills had started to kick in.

The harder Alex tried to connect with me, the more vehemently I told him I needed space. The further I tried to push him away, the harder he fought me for myself. The clearer it became that my mother and I would be lucky if we came out of this owning our home, the more Alex’s belief that love could conquer anything made me stiffen to his touch. I could tell myself that I was being irrational to regard him as naive, but I couldn’t explain myself to him. It was a time when being understood felt like being turned inside out. All I knew was that when he was around he made me feel, and feeling anything at that point simply made me want to throw up. One foot in front of the other was the only way I would make it through this, and I needed to be alone. Then there’d be nobody else left to lose.

So I met him at the Venice boardwalk and told him the one thing that would shake him out of this love, and make him want to run as far away from me as possible.

“I already have a job,” he answered, tugging at the grass as we sat in the picnic overlook. “I’m a writer.”

“Writing is not a job until you sell something, Alex. Your job right now is bartending.”

“So what are you saying? Why all of a sudden don’t you think I’m gonna sell this?”

My eyes were fixed on the horizon. “I’m just saying that after all these rejections…this is the real world. Thousands of people are running around Los Angeles with a screenplay to sell, and…and you might never sell a script.”

I could feel him staring hard at me, willing me to face him. I could hear him breathing heavily, gathering the steam for his words and then deciding against it. Soon enough, it was over. And he stood up and walked away. No matter how hard I tried to search inside myself, at that moment, all I could find was a very deep sense of relief. I knew that I was alone now, and that I could finally grieve. Because if you take away a man’s perception that his woman believes in him, then you might as well just take away the woman herself.