“He didn’t come home last night,” she cut me off, twisting an emerald ring on her trembling finger. “But instead of assuming that he was practicing late or staying at a buddy’s, my mind went to the worst place. It’s like I got no real feelings about my own life anymore. I’m just watching it all happen on TV and believing what they tell me, just like everyone else.”
She stood straighter before her reflection, as if she was only now recognizing the ridiculousness of the situation. Stiffening her upper lip, she yanked the tiara from her hair and handed it to me. I decided I would have to smuggle her home anonymously in my car.
“So then stop listening to your own hype, Lydia.” I rose to my feet and put an arm around her shoulder, noticing that I myself was no prize without makeup on a Saturday morning. “Go home and talk to your husband.”
She turned to face me with an almost apologetic smile.
“But I’m gonna have to insist that you hand over the rest of those jewels first.”
An hour and a half later, I was waiting to leave through the electric gates of Camydia’s private driveway. Harold, the paunchy former marine, stood guard at the foot of the mile-long driveway leading up to their Malibu mansion.
“What was it this time?” he asked with a bitter smirk and the flash of a gold tooth as I idled beside his white-shuttered guard stand. “She thinks she looks fat on her new album cover?”
“Something like that,” I said, rubbing my forehead to signal that I wasn’t up for chitchat.
“I wish I had her problems,” he whined. “Paparazzi been swarming all over the gates like monkeys this mornin’. I just turn up the juice on the electric fence whenever they get too close. Usually they read the signs or they hear it crackling and they keep their distance, but once in a while they try touchin’ it anyway. Then I get to watch ’em sizzle.”
“You’re living the life.”
“I can’t complain,” he acknowledged, then bowed his head. “You take care of yourself, Miss Gupta.”
“You too, Harold.”
As I watched her 30,000-square-foot, sea-facing faux-Spanish hacienda shrink in my rearview mirror I felt more than just pity for Lydia. Because at the moment, the people supposedly looking out for her were only doing it because she paid them, and she knew it. Not that we weren’t worth the money, that is. For my part, I had delivered her safely into the loving arms of her waitstaff, instructed them to keep her away from the morning’s newspapers and gossip shows at all costs, and convinced her to submit to the healing touch of the most-requested masseuse at Le Merigot spa. Normally, Stefan’s heavenly hands were booked up many months in advance. But twenty minutes after my call that morning he was making his way over to Lydia’s mansion for an emergency hot-stone treatment.
I deserved a facial and a massage of my own, I decided, and fished the cell phone out of my purse to redial the spa. But when I flipped it open the screensaver of Raj and I reminded me of what I really wanted: simpler times. Times like the beginning of my relationship with Raj—when things were new and uncomplicated between us—and he’d booked us a poolside couple’s massage as part of an overnight stay at The Mondrian Hotel for our one-month anniversary.
Rather than make the call, I made a right onto Pacific Coast Highway. I opened the sunroof and skipped through my presets on my radio, looking for something that might take me away. Naturally, Stevie Nicks was belting out “Dreams” and I turned it up, although it made me miss Raj even more.
four
“WHAT’S STRANGE IS THAT THIS DOESN’T FEEL ODD,” RAJ HAD told me across the twelve inches separating our poolside massage tables that sunny March afternoon a year and a half before. “Wouldn’t you have thought that since we practically grew up together, this would seem bizarre?”
“You only moved back from London two months ago,” I pointed out.
To be fair, we weren’t moving fast at all. It was true that in the first few years since he had left for college in the UK, Raj and I hadn’t spoken much. We had no reason to; he was one of a group of about twenty kids whose parents had settled in Orange County around the same time in the 1970s and formed a mini Indian community to keep us in touch with our heritage. Amid the series of dinner parties and weekend picnics and poolside Sunday afternoons our parents took turns organizing at their homes, Raj was only one of the many boys and girls I grew up with but barely knew anymore.
Yet when my father passed away just after my college graduation, the Raj that I had scarcely remembered had burst back on the scene and was determined to be there for me. It began with the obligatory condolence call, and evolved into a sort of transatlantic e-mail penpal-ship with little more than the hazy image of him, aged seventeen, remaining comfortably etched in my mind. Perhaps the lack of romantic expectation was why we became fast friends. We opened up to each other to the point that when his work as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company brought him back to Los Angeles some three years later, he knew I would be there to receive him at the airport.
I was there, but I wasn’t prepared for the vision that was waiting for me when I pulled up curbside to LAX. Besides a much-needed growth spurt and a new truly fantastic European sense of style, Raj had become the sort of man whose stance made it clear that he knew where he was headed. And the moment he saw me the smile that spread across his face was at once familiar and full of things I wanted to discover.
“Yes, and you are certainly not the proper little girl I remember,” he teased and raised a mischievous eyebrow at me from his massage table two months after we sped away from the airport.
Besides his confidence, his clothes, and the encyclopedia of little British sayings he sprinkled casually throughout our conversations, he had even developed something of an aristocratic accent in all his years overseas. It made me think of horseback riding across the countryside and scoundrels whose flirtatiousness almost compensated for their bad teeth. Looking back on it now, I can see that I didn’t stand a chance.
“You’re not a bit proper either.” I bit my lip, savoring a flashback involving room-service bananas flambé all over my breasts the night before. “I don’t remember playing any of the games we played last night at those family dinner parties.”
“If we had been playing any of those games at those parties back then,” he stated resolutely, “I never would have left for London in the first place.”
So proper yet so naughty. Like I said, I didn’t stand a chance.
“If we had known any of those games back then, our parents would have sent us both away to convents in India,” I mused.
“Agreed. But I’m being serious. Our families know each other. My God, Monica, our fathers used to play thaash together,” he said for emphasis, and then reached to connect us. “We have a lot of history behind us, and yet none of this feels even the least bit awkward to me.”
And I remember watching his fingers inch toward me. That strong, familiar hand lifting and intertwining with my own. Until then I wasn’t sure what I wanted from all of his attention. A friendship? A relationship? Something in between? It wasn’t that I felt nothing, exactly. It wasn’t fire but it wasn’t apathy; and more than familiar, it was comfort. At the very least I could feel how definitely he wanted me to be ready for everything he was saying.
And
