“And I’m pregnant! Have some sympathy. I’m a crazy-gassy-horny-pregnant lady, remember? I should wear a hardhat with a flashing strobe light, so that people can run for cover when they see me coming. Or at least they can reach for a gas mask. Seriously, I’m disgusting. Anyway, I gotta go. I have a pregnancy massage at noon. But listen, why don’t you come over for dinner tonight, and we’ll relax, and everyone but me will have some wine, and you’ll feel better, okay?”
Having worked alongside her for so long, some folks might expect me to be immune to Stefanie’s sarcasm. Fair enough. After so many years of negative publicity around the videos, I might expect drunken coeds to stop flashing the
Girls Gone Wild
cameras. And, after so many years of being like sisters, you might expect me to recognize Sheila’s every ulterior motive.
We would all be very sadly mistaken.
As soon as I noticed the three cars parked in their driveway, I should have gunned it out of there. I would have, in fact, if Sheila’s mother hadn’t waved at me. Now I understand why my clients insist on tinted windows.
“I’m sorry, Monica.” Sheila grasped my arm tighter than that werewolf had, adding an equally beseeching look. “But please please please please please don’t leave me alone with these people. The tension is just too thick. I haven’t brought out the salads, yet, because I’m afraid someone might casually stab someone else with their fork.”
Originally, her parents and in-laws had gotten along like a sailor and his rifle: not necessarily made of the same stuff, but they knew they could help each other get where they wanted to go (namely, the altar). But Sheila’s mother was far too protective not to eventually take Karen’s hostility toward her daughter personally. Tension didn’t begin to describe it, and now that there was a grandchild on the way, the floor might as well have been carpeted with eggshells. Because despite my being more than vocal on the subject, Sheila and Josh had made the typical mistake of tying the knot before agreeing on the religion of their future children.
“Monica,
beti,
come in here and sit beside your Renu Auntie,” Sheila’s mother called to me from across the living room. “How have you been?”
“Great! Fine.” I smiled at everyone, and then glared at Sheila, recognizing immediately that I had been called here to witness and then mediate in the aftermath of the inevitable familial explosion. “How is everyone? Karen? Jim? Good to see you all.”
“You should try the
Kegel
which Karen has brought along,” Renu Auntie insisted, proffering a crystal serving plate containing minislices of something. “She really did a wonderful job with it. Very tasty.”
“It’s
Kugel
, Renu,” Karen corrected, with more than a little aggression in her voice. Both of their husbands stifled smiles over the sexual reference.
“Thanks. Mmm…” I moaned, and tried my best to deflect everyone’s attention from this horrifying wordplay. “This is good. And how are Paul and Adam doing?”
“Oh, you’re such a dear, Monica.” Karen didn’t miss a beat. “My other boys are doing well. Everyone’s doing well. And I made that
Kugel
from scratch, actually. I’m glad you liked it. You know, I have time for that kind of thing, being a full-time mother and wife.”
Awkward. Somehow during the course of our conjoined childhoods, I had become the daughter one would’ve expected from my Renu Auntie, who was also an attorney, and famously well-composed, while Sheila took more closely after my mother, living at home until she got married, and not really giving much thought to a career outside of raising her children and battling her anxieties.
I knew that the comment was aimed at my aunt, but even though it was only a flesh wound, I had definitely been hit in the crossfire.
T
HROUGH THE WINE, THE SALAD, AND EVEN THE FOUR DIFFERENT
entrées, everyone had managed to keep the peace.
If Karen had this much to say over dinner,
I thought while shoving the last spoonful of Indian rice pudding into my mouth,
how had that poor man made it through the past forty-three years of living with her?
“So, I can see that your breasts have been swelling a bit, dear.” In one smooth move, she shifted the focus from her son’s financial health toward the details of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy. “Tell me, any hemorrhoids yet?”
“Mother,” Joshua interjected, meekly. “Umm…how about some more coffee or chai? Anyone?”
“What?” She was undeterred. “These are perfectly normal side-effects of pregnancy, Joshua. You know that, being a doctor. And there’s nothing shameful about it. I had hemorrhoids when I was pregnant with you.”
Sheila’s father wasn’t about to intervene because as we were well aware, he had problems of his own. A recovering alcoholic, he was clearly doing his best to concentrate on his coffee cup, although he seemed to want nothing more than to take just one swig from that bottle of sherry that Karen insisted on having a helping of.
“Karen,” Renu Auntie tried, china cup full of steaming chai in hand, “I think that perhaps that kind of detail is a little bit too intimate for the dinner table. We don’t want to embarrass the children, right?”
“No.” Karen’s husband Jim finally threw in the towel and decided to pour himself a glass of sherry. “Sharing a bathroom with someone for forty-three years is too intimate.”
“James!” Karen warned. “We will discuss this when we get home.”
“Umm…Mom? Do you think maybe we should…” Joshua tried.
“It’s okay, Josh. Your father can do what he wants, but I will not reward this kind of behavior, publicly or otherwise.” Karen turned her attention back to her fellow mother hen. “And we’re Jews, Renu. We don’t avoid. We talk.”
“I want my own bathroom! There, I said it.” Jim congratulated himself. “Even if no one is listening to me.”
“Enough, Karen!” Renu Auntie slammed her fist down onto the table, nearly awakening her own husband, who’d been dozing nearby. “If you insist on getting this out into the open, then fine. I think we should do so now. The religion traditionally passes through the mother to the child in all cultures. The mother is Hindu. Therefore, the child will be Hindu.”
Jim slammed his second glass of sherry onto the table. “One with black marble everywhere…” He was speaking to my uncle, who swallowed and made his best efforts to pay attention, presuming this was what he had been woken up for. “Or maybe steel from floor to ceiling—no claw-footed bathtub! No wood floors with area rugs. No fireplace. And a urinal, so that I can pee standing up!”
My uncle nodded aggressively, suddenly captivated by the magical mystical world of unfettered masculinity that Jim had laid out before him. By the end of the evening, Karen had invoked everything from Josh’s hefty income to the Holocaust in insisting that the child be raised Jewish, while Renu predictably refused to back down. Having had enough of Josh’s failure to intervene, Sheila had quietly walked off and locked herself in their second-floor bathroom while I was clearing the table.
“Maybe it’s time that you and Josh thought about counseling,” I told Sheila through the door an hour later. “To talk about some of the issues that the two of you, and only you two, need to decide on before the baby gets here.”
Technically, I may have been talking to her, but I took the opportunity of being face-to-face with Josh to look him in the eye when I said it.
“And until you start standing up for her, this is never going to end,” I whispered, tilting my head at both sets of parents who were gathered at the foot of the stairs. “For them it may be about the religion, but for her it’s really not.”
Before he could respond, my cell phone rang, and startled everyone.
“It’s Luke,” the contractor announced. “You got a problem with your roof. You better get over here right away.”
“It’s eleven-thirty,” I argued, watching Karen toss Jim’s coat at him before walking out the front door. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“Sure, if you want your roof to collapse. That’ll do wonders for the resale value.”
“The roof is going to collapse?” I blurted.
Jim told my uncle, “She wanted
heated
floors. And did I make a peep? No.” He waved up to us before he got to the front door and stopped to ask, “But you tell me—who has a fireplace in their bathroom?”
Water damage. Of course. Maybe a pipe really had burst while they were working on the roof. Or maybe the keg they had been nursing all day was just too much weight for the roof to handle. Either way, Luke refused to do anything to stop the water without my consent, which I had to provide in writing, after personally examining the damage. Great.
“The world
is
a pretty litigious place,” he told me over the phone. “I can’t take the chance that someone won’t pay me because they never formally authorized the work in the first place.”
Maybe the most important thing that law school didn’t teach me was that contractors don’t appreciate being preemptively rejected by the attorney-daughters of the women who have hired them. It was really very unlike me, I thought, as I pulled up at the house. Engaging emotionally was a rookie mistake, especially since my first encounter with Luke had been such a perfect opportunity to set the groundwork for negotiating on my terms. I parked in the driveway, asking myself,
How could I win him back over?
How could I make peace? How could I get the cursed roof fixed, the cocky contractor paid, and the damn house out of my life? From what I could tell, he didn’t have all that much to be arrogant about, anyway. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that I needed his help, fuelled by all of that sherry I probably would have told him as much already.
I slammed my car door shut, threw my purse over my shoulder, and carefully traversed the unlit cobblestones. Rather than charming in the moonlight, the house was looking to become the bane of my existence. And rather than a spurting water pipe, a sagging roof, or any hint of his team of heavy lifters, I arrived at the porch to find virtually no visible signs of damage. All I could find, in fact, was Luke, waiting patiently for me on the porch swing.
In a suede jacket?
He rose to his feet and came toward me, treating me to a whiff of his cologne. Had he brought a date to my mother’s house? I took a step back and paused, wrapping my pashmina tighter around my shoulders.
“Don’t run away,” he begged. “At least, give me a chance to say something stupid first.”
At night, his ponytail did seem less greasy than glossy and less cheesy than ruggedly chic. Maybe it had just been too long. Maybe Sheila’s friskiness was infectious. I needed to get this over with, I decided, and get myself home and into a cold shower.
“Okay, I’m here.” I tried my best to sound serious but unruffled. “Where’s the leak?”
“Technically?” The skin around his eyes crinkled. “There is none.”
I jutted my jaw out. “Then…why am I here, Luke?”
“Oh, so we’re playing
that
game?” he asked, moving closer, and grazing my belly with the back of his hand in a way that made my insides somersault.
I stepped away. “What game?”
“Whichever game you want, babe.” He spoke with the voice of a man who was used to getting his way. “The sailor and the streetwalker?”
My head spun.
“The war hero and the naughty nurse?” He took another step forward.
I knocked over a small potted plant.
“The plumber and the desperate housewife?” Definitely, a little too close for comfort.
The gladiator and the runaway princess?
I thought.
But wait! No! I hadn’t come here to flirt with my contractor.
“Luke, I’m flattered.” I tried hard to convince the both of us. “Really. But you must have misread my signals. This isn’t a good idea.”
“I apologize, Monica.” He turned to lean his hands on the railing and look out over the manicured lawn. “But I thought I felt something here.”
“I told you that I’m engaged.”
“Okay, but there is something else I should say then.” He elaborated, “Especially if we’re gonna continue this weird working relationship. I should apologize for my behavior the first time we met. I got defensive. It’s that I’m not used to being around such a smart, beautiful woman. I was rude.”
“Oh, come on.” I fiddled with one of my earrings, sort of hoping that he would go on, needing the validation.
“It’s true. And I’m sure that you know it,” he said and turned toward me. “I don’t know you that well, but all this and you’re faithful to your guy, whoever he is. That’s pretty rare.”
I bit my lip. Did I even have a fiancé anymore? Was I technically allowed to be enjoying all this flattery? All I knew was that standing on that porch, being complimented by my contractor, bathed in the moonlight, surrounded by the scent of those flowers, and listening to the burbling of the fountain…it was the most romance I had had in my life in quite a while. So I took it in, even though I felt a little guilty. And to my surprise I was okay with that.
“But you know,” he spoke tentatively, taking my silence as an invitation to go on. “What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. And I wonder…are you the kind of woman who doesn’t mind having a secret, or the kind of woman who would slap me for doing this?”
As if in slow motion, his face moved to mine. It was too late to move or duck. Impact was imminent.
And as it turns out it was also electric. So I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him right back. Because the second I got comfortable with a little guilt, a little more just seemed too marginal to matter. But instead of the gratification of his hands clawing their way around me, all I felt was the sensation of him going frigid in my arms. Extricating myself from the lip-lock, I pulled back to see the horror on his face and to watch him mouth the words
I’m Sorry
.
…in the milliseconds before the camera lights flashed on.
“You really had no idea this was a reality show?” Cassie waved a latte before my eyes as a way of coaxing me from inside my parked car.
I would rather have made sweet love to a Dumpster than looked any of my coworkers in the eye the following Monday morning. To get that point across, I hung my head over the steering wheel.
“Yes—” I spoke into the airbag-container “—I really had no idea.”
“But you’re never naïve, Monica. This just flips my whole worldview upside down. Even
I
would never have believed that a guy that hot was really a roofing contractor. Not that roofers can’t be hot, but come on…that guy’s skin was clearer than
mine
.”
“I know, I know.” I inched open the door and sulked out of my car, yanking the latte from her hands.
“I mean, if roofing contractors really looked like that, I would go out and like…I don’t know…get a roof!”
“I know,”
I quieted her with my tone as we headed for the elevators.
“Sorry.” She got the hint and scaled back the enthusiasm. “But what are you gonna do about Raj?”
There was that. As if it weren’t bad enough to have been the victim of a prank by Luke and his fellow producers of that godforsaken Sunday night hidden camera show, appropriately titled
Smacked!
As if it weren’t even worse that I actually kissed Luke, rather than slapping him across the face like the producers had expected. And as if I wasn’t already planning on spending the better part of the day hiding from meetings, phone calls or any other form of human contact on the off chance that my coworkers had managed to catch the show, there was also the slim possibility that Raj might have gotten wind of it, and that whatever was left of our relationship was now effectively out the window.
Like any of my clients who had ever lived to regret signing a fidelity clause, I decided to handle the incident by acting as if it never happened. But empathizing this much with my clients
was not
in the game plan. First, it was my hankering for tinted windows, and today the very worst of my private behavior was literally on televised, public display.
Lovely.
Pure vulgarity,
my father used to say, whenever he saw celebrities on television, twirling and begging for the attention of the cameras. As he described it,
If an actor is a true artist, then he should never obscure the focus on his art by seeking attention for his affairs. Accomplishment should speak for itself.
True to my worst nightmare, I found that the footage had been made viewable online. Under the title “Producer’s Prank Gone Wrong” was a clip of Luke kissing me, me swallowing his face, and him pulling back and mouthing the words
I’m Sorry
for the whole world to see. Or at least the 5,255 people who had downloaded the clip so far. Given the theory of six degrees of separation, I figured that the video would make its way to Raj’s in-box by the following evening, at the very latest.