Rent A Husband (25 page)

Then he lifts his palms to the sky and says, “So, tell me that story.”

She tells him about Forrest being infatuated with her.

“That I can understand,” Raymond says with a courtly tip of the head.

She tells him about Forrest seeing her with Porter.

About his drunken binge.

About him trying to help out a friend in need.

“A sad and quite moving story,” Raymond says.

“I think so.”

“And told with the requisite pathos.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

He sits back and spreads his arms on the back of the seat.

“Darcy, believe it or not there’s a code of honor in the world of gambling.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Now, I’m not a bookmaker, mind, but if I were and I took a bet, I would be honor bound to make good on that bet. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“And that applies equally to the person placing the bet. In this case Forrest. From what you tell me he used an item of jewelry as collateral. He lost. Therefore he forfeits the collateral.”

She leans forward.

“It was his mother’s ring. She died giving birth to him. It was the only thing he had left of her.”

“Yes. Very sad.”

“Do you have a mother, Raymond?”

“I didn’t arrive in the beak of a stork.”

“Do you love her?”

“Very much.” He sips his water. “I know where you’re going with this, Darcy. You’re trying to appeal to my sentimental side.”

“Am I succeeding.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Does your mother know what you do?”

“She knows I’m a businessman.”

“But she doesn’t know that you’re a bookmaker?”

Flashing a smile he says, “Darcy . . .” He shoots his cuff and consults an expensive wristwatch. “I’m afraid I have an appointment.”

“I meant what I said about going to the police.”

“They’ll laugh at you. I’m known to them as a respectable businessman.”

“What you mean is you’re paying them off?”

“I think you watch way too much TV.” He looks ready to stand.

“Wait,” Darcy says, “I’m asking you to return the ring.”

 He smiles at her. “I’m no jeweler, but I have a passing knowledge of stones. That ring is worth upward of a million dollars.”

She gapes at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I am. You understand my reluctance?”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

He shakes his head again.

Darcy says, “If your mother were here she’d tell you to do it.”

“Happily, my mother’s at home making tortillas for my lunch.”

“That’s your appointment? Lunch with mama?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be able to look her in the eye knowing what you’ve just done to Forrest?”

Raymond stares at Darcy for a very long time before he speaks.

 “You are, as they say, a piece of work.”

He delves into his shirt pocket, fishes out the ring and drops it onto the table.

“I suggest you counsel Forrest to give up gambling. He has no talent for it.”

“You’re a good man, Raymond,” Darcy says.

He stands.

“No, whatever I may be I’m not that.”

Raymond walks away without looking back, leaving Darcy with her heart in her mouth and Forrest Forbes’s ring in her hand.

80

Darcy clips the ring back on the chain around the neck of the snoring Forrest Forbes

Then she takes a bundle of cash from her purse and places it on the bed.

 “What’s that?” Lakshmi asks.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Those are Forrest’s winnings.”

“But how can they be? The horse lost.”

“It came second. He made a place bet,” Darcy says, going back years to when her uncle used to lay a few dollars on the ponies, sitting at the kitchen table shouting at the radio when the race was broadcast.

Lakshmi stares at her in confusion.

Darcy says, “You still win money if the horse places second.”

“I see,” Lakshmi says, when she clearly doesn’t. “And this person, this bookmaker, held onto the ring why?”

“Oh, apparently there is a period of time in which appeals can be lodged. Horses running at the wrong weight or wearing the wrong shoes,” Darcy flaps her hand, her knowledge exhausted, “that kind of thing. Once the all clear sounds, the bets can be paid. Forrest, drunk as he was, left before everything was concluded. Fortunately the bookmaker is an honorable man.”

“Well, good gosh.”

Darcy is no liar and it’s tough not too wilt under Lakshmi’s stare.

She stands and walks through to the kitchenette and pours a glass of water which she pretends to sip from a greasy glass.

It’s not for Lakshmi to know that she stopped off at an ATM and found a credit card that had been in her purse since she and Porter were last in Europe—a back-up card that her ex-husband had organized before they left.

Had Porter forgotten about it?

Darcy fed it into the machine, keyed in the code, and when she asked for the maximum of ten thousand dollars, the machine whirred and gurgled and spat out the banknotes.

Darcy walks back to the bed.

“Lakshmi, this money will go quite a long way in India, won’t it?”

“Gosh yes, a terribly long way.”

“So, take Forrest and fly back home and get busy fixing up your palace.”

“Forrest told you about that?”

“He did.”

“I’m a little embarrassed.”

“There’s no reason to be. He tells me you want to open a hotel?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, perhaps Forrest’s crazy bet will enable you to make a start.”

“You think he would come with me? To India?”

“In a flash.” Darcy gestures around the room. “Things aren’t exactly working out for him here.”

“No, they’re not.” Lakshmi stares at Darcy. “What were you coming down here to tell Forrest?”

“Oh, I wanted to apologize for what he’d seen, but make him realize that we had no future. That he should continue with his life.”

“You really think that?”

“Yes,” Darcy says. “I do.”

She stands.

“I want you to do something for me, Lakshmi.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell Forrest that I was here. Don’t tell him about me going to see the bookmaker and getting his ring back. Just tell him you arrived and found him passed out on the bed with the money in his pocket.”

“He’ll smell a rat.”

“He was drunk. Tell him he has alcoholic amnesia. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Lakshmi rises and they embrace.

“The very best of luck to you, Darcy.”

“And to you.”

“Our doors in Jaipur are always wide open.”

Darcy leaves, and if there are tears streaming down her cheeks it’s not from any kind of emotion, it’s from the LA smog wreaking havoc with her eyes.

81

It’s evening and Darcy sits on her couch sipping wine, Eric lounging in the armchair opposite her.

“You really dropped that bundle of cash to send Forrest Forbes out of your life forever?”

“I did it for him, yes. And for Lakshmi. Maybe this hotel will be a second chance for them.” She drinks. “But, mostly I did it for me.”

“Yeah?”

“Forrest is a dangerous temptation, Eric. One that I find difficult to resist. But look at the man’s life: booze, gambling, weird hookers with beehive hairstyles?”

“That does sound pure John Waters. Even for Forrest.”

“I just don’t think I’m sophisticated or worldly enough for him.”

“Mnnnn.”

“I’m a small town house mouse.”

“I’m not so sure. Not any more.”

“Don’t be fooled. I am.”

“And what is the mouse going to do with her house?”

“I’m going to sell it.”

“Surely you’re not going to give Porter half?”

“Porter can, in the worlds of some teenage poet, swivel.”

She laughs, and so does Eric.

“No, I’m going to give a very generous sum of money to the Children’s Shelter, and then I’m going to get myself a small place to live and find myself a job.”

“A job?”

“Yes. I’m tired of being useless.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea. That will, as they say, be revealed in the fullness of time.”

“I’ll miss you, neighbor.”

“Oh, I’ll still be around. And we’ll still meet up all the time at the Book & Bean.”

“Surely you mean Brontë’s?”

When Darcy looks at him blankly, Eric laughs.

“Oh, darling, what a day it’s been! Poor Billy Bigelow appears to be wildly, crazily, head-over-heels in love with that pale and interesting waitress of his. So in love that he’s naming the place after her. In your absence he asked my advice and I told him it was a fabulous idea, so much more classy than the Book & Bean.”

“It is.” Darcy smiles. “I’m so pleased for Billy.”

“He goes by William now, I think you should know.”

“About time.”

Eric crosses to the couch and seats himself beside Darcy, putting his arm around her shoulders.

“I love you, Darce,” he says.

“And I love you, Eric.”

Darcy rests her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes and tries very hard not to think of Forrest Forbes.

82

After two months in India Forrest no longer hears the incessant cacophony of horns (buses, taxis, motorcycles) as he walks along the crowded sidewalk.

He has become used to the constant press of humanity, too, negotiating the hawkers and the beggars as he strolls.

But the smell still intoxicates him: a heady mix of dust and dung and spices.

A smell that is unique to India.

A cow has wandered into the road to graze at something lying on the asphalt, and the surging traffic streams around it, the animal standing chewing, tail twitching, completely unconcerned.

Forrest has been to the post office to post a letter.

A letter to Darcy Pringle.

He could have sat at Lakshmi’s laptop, of course, and knocked off something, pressed send, and that would have been that.

But this quaint, outmoded form of communication seems well suited to Rajasthan, where bespectacled Mr. Sharma—wearing a jacket and tie over a
dhoti
—sits cross-legged on the sidewalk with his ancient Royal typewriter, selling his services to the illiterate as a letter writer.

Forrest, of course, wrote by hand, in his rusty but serviceable copperplate.

He went through a number of drafts—the letter took him weeks to compose—before he was satisfied with the version that will now wing its way to Santa Sofia.

Lakshmi, after watching him sitting in his room writing, day after day (oblivious to the shouts of the builders who scrambled up and down their bamboo scaffolding, repairing the east wing of the palace) eventually could contain herself no longer and said, “Why don’t you just telephone her, Forrest?”

“Who?”

“Oh, don’t play the fool with me. Darcy. Darcy Pringle, that’s who you’re writing to isn’t it?” He nodded. “Then just pick up the phone and call her. Stop mooning away up here like Mr. John bloody Keats.”

Forrest shook his head.

“I’d feel too exposed. A letter is about all I can manage.”

Lakshmi gave him that look again, that look he’d seen since he awoke massively hung over in that hovel in Hollywood and allowed her to shovel him onto the plane to Mumbai.

The look of a woman with something to hide.

But she’s stuck resolutely to the story of him winning the money.

Money that bought them coach tickets to India (a new and painful experience for long-legged Forrest) and paid for the first renovations on the palace.

When he’d confronted Lakshmi with sketchy memories of losing the bet—and losing his mother’s ring—she’d laughed him off.

“Alcoholic amnesia, Forrest. Plain and simple.”

As he walks through town he stops off at a sidewalk vendor and buys a bottle of water (kept cold in a bed of ice in a plastic cooler) to sip on his return to the palace.

Forrest has been sober since they left the States.

He drinks water and tea and sweet
lassi
.

But no booze.

For the first time since he was fifteen, he’s seeing the world unmediated by alcohol and chemicals.

And what a strange and fantastical world it is.

Yesterday, Forrest wandered into an internet café and Googled
Mr. Darcy
.

After wading through pages of references to Jane Austen’s hero, he finally found the horse.

The race that Forrest had bet the ring on had been the stallion’s last, and he was now out to stud in Kentucky, which sounded like a fine way to end a life.

But Forrest was interested in the details of the race on which he had supposedly won money on a place bet and he saw that Mr. Darcy had, indeed, come in second to Skylark that day at Hollywood Park.

So it was theoretically possible that Forrest had won the money.

Theoretically.

Forrest, walking along the Rajasthan sidewalk, the domes of the old palace appearing above the rooftops of the crowded town, shakes his head.

Never in his life had he wagered on a place bet.

Place bets were for ninnies.

Fence sitters.

Fellows with no gumption.

You bet to win or you didn’t bet at all.

So, Forrest had a theory.

And it was this theory that he had spent many weeks crafting into a letter to Darcy Pringle.

His theory was that he had lost the bet and the ring.

That Darcy Pringle had gone to Raymond and (who knew how?) had persuaded him to return the ring.

And that sweet, generous Darcy had provided the ten thousand dollars and called them Forrest’s winnings.

Lakshmi, of course, had denied all of this.

“I saw neither hide nor hair of Darcy Pringle that day, Forrest. I found you in a state of total inebriation in your revolting apartment with a pocket full of dollars.”