All Eyes on Her (10 page)

Little did I know that at the office the pounding was about to get a lot worse. I logged on to my computer to find that I had only one e-mail waiting for me.

My trip was extended. The client has requested that I stay on.

We’ll talk when I get back.

Take care,

Raj

T
AKE CARE?

Take care?

It was just plain insulting, was what it was.

As if I were someone on a subway with whom he had been making small talk while trying to ignore the homeless guy touching himself five feet away? What kind of a person treats someone like a colleague after having sampled no less than three different Cabernets out of said person’s belly button by candlelight at a bed and breakfast in the Napa Valley?

He might as well have asked
if he knew me from somewhere.
Had we not spent the better part of the last few years being one another’s best friends? Had I not nursed him back to health after the bad tequila he drank on a dare from that pushy waiter in Puerto Vallarta? Had he not gotten down on one knee and invited me to help him build a Happily Ever After? Maybe I missed something. Maybe he finally had enough of me. And maybe that really was Raj that my mother saw in London with that redhead. I ran at least three stop signs on my way to Sheila’s place after work. Oddly, the door swung open before I could even get my finger to the doorbell.

“I’m pregnant!” she squealed, grabbing me by the shoulders and snatching me inside.

“Are you serious?” I stumbled into the foyer and blurted, “That’s great! Oh my gosh, congratulations!”

“I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant!” she sang, forcing me into a dance. “Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!!!”

She was about fourteen weeks along, and absolutely beside herself. And she hadn’t told Joshua yet.

“Actually, I just found out myself.” She hopped onto the overstuffed sofa, sat cross-legged and rested both hands across her belly. “You know how I’m on that three-periods-a-year birth-control pill? Well, I guess it’s not a hundred percent effective, because my gynecologist called to tell me that he ran a pregnancy test along with everything else since I mentioned that my boobs were sore last week!”

“So, I take it this is good news?” I asked cautiously.

“Yeah,” she replied, with an affectionate glance at her belly. “Yeah, it is.”

“You’re gonna be a great mom,” I said, reaching out to hug her again. And I meant it.

“I can’t wait to tell him.” Her eyes were welling up.

I imagined her meeting him at the door, overflowing with excitement, throwing her arms around his neck. He would put down his briefcase, rattled by her emotion, confused and concerned by this swell of feeling from his capricious young wife. She would savor delivering those precious words to her husband for the very first time.
We’re pregnant.
And it would be perfect.

Or it would have been, were it not for the fact that while my forehead was sweaty, my throat had completely dried up, tucked inside my happiness for Sheila, was jealousy. And I hated myself for it. I couldn’t even look her in the eye because seeing that kind of joy up close only made it that much harder to ignore the possibility that it might never happen for me. So it turns out that while I may have cleaned up nice enough, deep down I was still an ape in a tailored suit, exactly like everybody else.

I pulled my suit sleeve lower, attempting to cover the fur sprouting from around my wrist.

“Monica, what is it?” Sheila asked after a moment.

“It’s nothing.” I swiped at my eyes. “I’m…I’m so happy for you. I can’t wait to start buying baby clothes!”

“Oh my God!” she shrieked. “I didn’t even
think
about that! How fun!”

“Yeah,” I said with some relief, knowing that I was actually sincere. “But we’ll have to wait until we know the sex of the baby, right? So that means we’ll have to limit ourselves to toys and cribs for now.”

“Okay, but we have to keep it quiet. I don’t want to tell anyone outside the family until we’re like six months along. I want us to have this news to ourselves for a while.”

“Sure, sure. But can we tell my mom soon?” I asked. “You know she’ll be really offended if she’s the last to know.”

“Yeah, but why don’t we tell her when she gets here? She’s gonna have a housewarming, isn’t she?”

I had completely forgotten about it.

“I meant to tell you.” I sighed. “My mom’s not moving back after all. It turns out she’s not ready. So now I have to sell the house and try to make her a profit.”

“Now you’re a real estate flipper?”

“Oh, you know me,” I said, and stared out her window. “I’m whatever she needs me to be.”

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”

I wanted to tell her about Raj’s e-mail, and about how it made me feel. To let go and share how tired I felt. To confide how for the first time in my life I was beginning to appreciate what it really meant to be alone. But not then. And not anytime soon because the difference between me and those apes was that I was able to choose to make it about Sheila. And that I wanted to. There would be many days in the future to squander on my whining. But the days when I received news as good as this, well, those are the days that I had to do my very best not to waste.

“Nothing.” I brightened. “Absolutely nothing at all. So, when are you due exactly, and where can we get you an appointment for your first pregnancy massage?”

Cassie twirled before the mirror in a purple Christian Dior tank dress, while I sat on the white leather couch normally reserved for the husbands and sugar daddies. At least over some window shopping during our lunch hour in Brentwood the next day, I knew that I could bask in another single woman’s woes.

All right, so I wasn’t exactly single. I sure as hell felt like I was. And as anyone who’s ever had a mullet will tell you, it’s how you see yourself that really matters.

“I don’t know if it’s my color,” she said.

“You’re twenty-four,” I insisted, “everything’s your color.”

“Why is everyone so snippy lately?” she asked, leaning over to adjust her hair and her cleavage and then springing back up like a shampoo ad.

“I’m not snippy. I’m just making an observation. Everything was my color when I was twenty-four, too.”

“Is there something you need to talk about, hon?” She chewed wildly then snapped her gum.

“No…but who else is snippy?” I wandered over to the jewelry display.

“Kris with a
K.
” She waved the idea of him away.

Kris with a
K
was a record producer whom she had met about three months before, during a party at some swanky mansion owned by his best friend, who happened to be a retired tycoon in Malibu. (Read: summer rental by a couple of guys studying surfing at Pepperdine.) By “Kris with a
K
” we had deduced that he meant “a guy named Chris who was embarrassed to have been given such a generic name at birth.” And by “record producer” we figured out that he meant “trust fund baby who had blown his most recent monthly allowance on some mixing equipment.” Cassie didn’t care what he claimed or called himself, so long as he kept getting reservations at all the best restaurants, and was willing to ensure that his neighbors were woken by the concert of her nightly satisfaction whenever she made a late-night booty call. The other perk was that he had a cappuccino machine on a self-timer set to wake them up in the morning exactly when the sun lit up the length of the Malibu shoreline that reflected onto an entire wall of his bedroom. The problem, lately, was that he had decided he really wanted to get to know her.

“So Saturday morning I flip on the radio,” she told me, “because I was already awake and didn’t feel like joining him in the shower. And Sade is singing, and you know how much I love Sade, right?”

I nodded, holding a citrine chandelier earring up to my face before a display mirror.

“Well, he comes out of the shower, hears me singing, and then jumps back into bed and starts nibbling on my ear.”

“So far, so good,” I chime in, holding up the other earring.

“Yeah, I thought so, too. But just as I’m hitting the part where she sings the chorus, he asks me,
Hey, babe, who sings this song?
And I go,
Sade.
And he goes,
Why don’t we keep it that way?
”

“So what?” I chuckled. “At least he’s got a sense of humor. Maybe it’ll make up for his lack of ambition.”

“So what? So…that kind of crap is not gonna fly with me.” She marched back into the dressing room.

“Oh, relax,” I teased, and slipped a pair of bangles on to jingle them around. “Why not? It’s funny.”

“
Because,
Monica,” she yelled from inside the cubicle, “I’m a girl who has sex with the lights on.” Reappearing in her tank top and jeans, she slipped her bag over her shoulder.

“So confidence means that you have no sense of humor?” I took her cue to head for the door.

“
So
…when you
get
me—” she yanked a swath of hair out of the back of her tank, and shook it effortlessly “—you get
all of me
. I’m
that
girl. And…”

She paused while we stepped onto Montana Avenue.

“What?” She stopped. “You think I’m crazy?”

“No,” I said, linking my arm in hers to force her to keep walking. “I think you’re great. You’re…authentic. You say what you mean. That’s very rare, and sometimes I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for it.”

“Yeah, right,” she answered, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair. “With
men.
But I could never have the balls that you have at work.”

“Mmm…because you choose not to.” I intended to only think the comment but ended up saying it out loud.

I took her silence as a signal that I should explain.

“It’s not like you ever tried to apply to law school. Not that there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing, if you’re happy. But you could have gone if you wanted to, and…and sometimes the disparaging comments you make about yourself give me the sense that you want something else.”

“Meaning?” she asked, while we paused at an intersection.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, trying as gently as I could to get her to acknowledge how much time she spent picking the ticks out of my fur. “Why do you compliment me so much?”

“I don’t do that,” she instantly responded, and continued across the street, weaving between shoppers.

“Yes, you do, honey. And you don’t have to keep propping me up. We’re not all that different.”

“Monica, it’s not like I idolize you or anything.”

“I know that,” I clarified. “But I care about you like you’re my little sister. And maybe it’s nothing, but it worries me every time you put yourself down in comparison to me. Indirectly, every compliment to me becomes an insult to you. You’re like, upward grooming me or something. And I hope you know that just because I smile about it doesn’t mean that I agree that I’m particularly impressive. Or that I believe you couldn’t do everything I do because I don’t.”

“Okay, okay.” She steered us toward a nail salon. “You caught me. My secret plan was to get you drunk over lunch and lure you to a nail salon and have you groomed today. Honestly though, those paws of yours could use a good buffing, don’t you think?”

“Cassie…” I tried to gently return to my point.

“I know, Monica.” She stopped in front of the nail polish display. “I know. But not everybody was taught to…well, to think about themselves that way. And maybe…sometimes maybe I wish that I did.”

I’d made my point. She knew how I felt, even if she refused to see herself any differently. So we ordered up two express pedicures, settled into the vibrating massage chairs and decided to leave the grooming to somebody else.

The polish on our toes was drying when I got the call that a package had arrived for me at the office. It was a set of house keys from the Realtor. And it was accompanied by a glossy, full-color brochure displaying a three-bedroom, three-thousand square foot, Mediterranean-style ranch with a working fountain in front and a hand-tiled patio with lush landscaping surrounding the pool out back.

At least in the brochure.

The reality (much like an Internet date or the first time you got
reeeeeallly
drunk) failed to live up to the dream. I left work early and headed over to the cozy little upper-Brentwood cul-de-sac where the house was insulated against almost everything. At first I thought it was the wrong house because rather than being drawn in by the serenity of the neighborhood, I was surprised and irritated to find a group of construction workers sawing happily through the roof of my mother’s house.

“Excuse me?” I tried, attempting not to scrape the suede off my shoes by colliding against any of the roofing materials littering the pathway.

No response.

“Hello?”
I raised my voice a little bit.

Still nothing.

“Yo! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I’d cupped my hands around my mouth and barked.

The leader of the pack of what I could only assume were powdered-sugar-covered demolition-men rose to his feet.