The Full Moon Bride

by Shobhan Bantwal

  We settled our respective bills. When Lou turned to head out, I quietly left an extra tip on the table for Vincent, my favorite cherub-faced Italian waiter who made sure my antipasto arrived just the way I liked it.

  There was still light outside but the pedestrian traffic had thinned out. Manhattan took on a different flavor as soon as the office crowds went home. The atmosphere was more casual, with shoppers wearing jeans and sneakers, mommies pushing baby carriages, seniors strolling, and dog owners exercising their pooches.

  We stood on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes. “Give me a few days, Soorya,” Lou said. “Like I said earlier, I have to work on a number of individuals to get them to see my point of view.”

  “Whatever you can do will be appreciated, Lou.”

  With a warm handshake Lou walked off in the direction of the train station. I watched his large back recede and blend in with the crowd.

  In a single evening Lou had altered my image of a black urban male.

  Chapter 8

  When I reached home, I found Mom and Dad sitting companionably at the kitchen table, sorting the day’s mail.

  Dad, dressed in comfortable shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, was tearing open the clear plastic cover from a medical journal. He glanced up when I walked in. “Hey, princess. How was your day?”

  “Very busy,” I said, looking up at the cuckoo clock on the wall and noting it was late. Pamma had probably gone to bed.

  On the table, Mom had neatly separated the bills from the junk mail so she could put them in her pocket folder marked “Unpaid.” Twice a month she sat at the desk in the upstairs study and wrote checks to settle those invoices. She didn’t believe in online accounting, but Mom’s old-fashioned record keeping was still thoroughly organized.

  I sometimes wondered what sort of working woman Mom would have made, had she ventured out to find a job. She’d probably make an excellent office manager.

  She rose to give me a maternal squeeze around my waist. It was her way of saying she missed me at dinner. Mom had many such nonverbal ways of communicating her sentiments. I squeezed her shoulder in turn.

  She felt so tiny. The top of her head barely touched my shoulder. For every pound of weight Dad appeared to gain, it seemed like Mom lost one. Instinctively I placed my cheek on top of her head. She was already in her long cotton nightgown. Around nine o’clock each night, Mom slipped into her old-fashioned nightclothes and slathered generic-brand moisturizer over her face.

  It rarely failed to bring a fond smile to my face, and the memories of childhood.

  When I was little, Dad used to kiss me good night and then Mom used to slip under the covers next to me in my bed and read to me until I fell asleep. The scent of Dad’s aftershave and the Downy fabric softener on Mom’s nightgown combined with the herbal odor of her moisturizer would always remain with me.

  Sometimes I wished I’d stayed about eight years old. Being a little girl was so much simpler. Back then, I couldn’t wait to grow up and do all those mature grown-up things like drinking, driving, going to late-night parties, and holding down a job.

  Well, now that I was there and had done all those things, none of it felt half as exciting as it had seemed when I was itching to get my hands on it.

  “I hope you ate something decent, baby,” Mom said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “I had a hearty Italian antipasto, Mom. Very decent.” Her expression clearly spelled not decent enough. So I quickly added, “Maybe I’ll have an apple before I go to bed.”

  “You went out with friends?” Dad tried to be casual about it, stretching his big legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. But I knew where his mind was. He was always hoping I’d go out with an eligible Indian guy.

  Wedding bells had never been far from his mind or Mom’s since the day I’d reached puberty.

  It seemed Indian parents lived for only one thing in life—getting their kids married. Pamma had come to live with us and made marriage even more of a priority in my life. In her old-fashioned mind, a woman of thirty years had no business being without a husband and kids.

  I grinned at Dad. “Don’t look so hopeful. I had dinner with a widowed attorney who works for the NJDEP.” I laughed when Dad’s face fell. “It was business, Dad.”

  It was now two days since the Vadepallis’ visit and, judging from the expressions on Mom and Dad’s faces, no word had come down yet. Since neither of my parents brought up the subject of Roger, I didn’t mention it, either.

  This was more or less standard procedure in our home. Unless there was something to tell, my parents sort of pretended the bride viewing had never occurred, and I went along with the farce.

  When the rejection call or letter or e-mail arrived, they informed me with the saddest faces. Pamma quietly shed tears into her sari’s pallu. I had to remind them it wasn’t exactly the end of the world, although I felt just as deflated.

  “Good night, you guys,” I said on a cheery note and headed upstairs to my room.

  “Don’t forget your apple, Soorya,” Mom reminded.

  “I’ll get it later.” I had no intention of getting that apple. I already felt bloated.

  When I sat down at my computer to scroll through my messages, one in particular caught my eye. The subject line read: Hi from Raj V. Who the heck was Raj V? I wondered.

  It took a few seconds to register. Roger! How had he found my address? After a moment I knew it had to be Mom who’d given it to him. So what did Roger want with me now? It had to be a polite and friendly rejection. What would his excuse be? Incompatibility? His lack of finances? Too sexy for his own good?

  Unable to suppress my curiosity any longer, I opened the message.

  The note was friendly all right, but it wasn’t a rejection. How about that? Hi Soorya, Just wanted to thank you and your parents for your warm hospitality this past weekend. I enjoyed the movie, the company, and your mom’s cooking. I’m thinking about moving to NYC . . . soon as I can find an investor to put enough faith in me and Mumbai to Manhattan. So long. Rajesh V.

  Nice and cordial, but impersonal all the same. He’d said nothing about us meeting sometime or even talking over the phone. On the other hand, he’d mentioned moving to New York if he could find an investor. Was this yet another oblique way of asking me to sink my money into his play? He’d said something about my marrying him and financing his project, but then I’d put a quick stop to that.

  It was just my luck that when a charming, bright, young Telugu man wanted to marry me, I couldn’t say yes to him—for various reasons.

  To Roger, marriage was business, pure and simple. He’d marry a plain woman like me to further his career—a commonplace occurrence in India. But this wasn’t India, and I wasn’t the typical shy and sweet India-born-and-bred girl who’d settle for anything that primitive.

  Where did Roger’s kind of philosophy leave me, then? Wouldn’t I, a woman considered a loser in the marriage market, be marrying a bigger loser, just so I could get a husband?

  To me, marriage was a serious commitment, not merely some legally binding contract. I had more than enough legal contracts to deal with at work.

  I could only imagine introducing him, all six feet plus of long hair, jeans, and killer smile, to my friends and stuck-up coworkers. Meet my husband, Rajesh Vadepalli. To their questions about his occupation, I’d have to say something like, He’s unemployed and has no immediate plans to find a job. He wants to produce a play that may or may not see the light of day. Until then I’m supporting him.

  When analyzed in such practical terms, marrying Roger and squandering away my nest egg on his project sounded insane. I reluctantly deleted his message and went on to the next.

  End of Roger Vadepalli.

  Chapter 9

  Some three weeks after my meeting with Roger, I ended up in Seattle with my boss, Matthew McNamara. We were scheduled to meet with the owners of Murzak Pulp and Paper, a large pulp mill that the EPA had targeted for polluting the Puget S
ound and destroying its salmon population along with other types of aquatic life that called the sound home.

  Up until then, my cases were pretty much confined to a two hundred-mile radius. As a junior attorney, during my first year, as part of my initiation and training, I had merely assisted the veteran lawyers, mostly doing research, preparing briefs, and conferring and coordinating data with other junior attorneys like myself.

  In my second year, I was given my own cases, but minor ones that didn’t require a lot of deep knowledge or sophistication. They were tedious but good experience nonetheless. I’d traveled to a few nearby states in the course of my work. Now I was into bigger and slightly meatier issues.

  This was my first coast-to-coast business trip. I was excited to be chosen by Mac to accompany him during this initial fact-finding conference. And I was nervous. Despite his notoriously sleazy private life, he was still my professional role model.

  Someday, in the not-too-distant future, I wanted to be in his shoes—senior partner in a posh law firm in midtown Manhattan.

  And here I was, side by side with my idol, going to a meeting across the country.

  Neither Mac nor his partners took on an important or high profile case without personally meeting with the party interested in hiring their services. After the fact-finding meeting, if they felt strongly that there was substance to the case, they would take it on. There had to be a reasonable chance of winning, or at least reaching a resolution the client could accept and live with. And the case had to be lucrative. If not, they turned it down.

  Curious as to why Mac had requested me to go with him, I’d puzzled over it all through the limo ride to the airport and then some. It was a last-minute request, too, with less than a day’s notice.

  I didn’t need to worry about my personal safety with Mac. He could never have designs on me. First of all, I was neither pretty nor Mac’s type—slim, blond, and lovely. Secondly, Mac was never known to fraternize with his staff—it went against his own official rules.

  Something about this trip didn’t quite add up, and I was dying to know what it was.

  I couldn’t summon the courage to ask Mac outright why a junior employee was hand-picked for this trip. As we both sat on adjacent chairs at the boarding gate, waiting for our flight to be announced, I sort of hemmed and hawed around the subject, but Mac’s answers were vague and I didn’t want to push him. I couldn’t afford to pester and antagonize a man who hired and fired people at will.

  All I knew was that the Seattle client was a pulp mill owner with pollution-related legal problems. I assumed the bloodhounds from the EPA and/or the Washington State Department of Ecology had been sniffing around for a while. Didn’t they always? At least where our clients were concerned?

  Besides, I figured, why not enjoy the first-class travel accommodations and go for the ride, if nothing else? I’d never been to Seattle before and never had more than a few polite words with Mac outside my job interview and our Monday staff meetings.

  This was my opportunity to see Washington state’s renowned and breathtakingly beautiful Puget Sound, and get to know the enigmatic Matthew McNamara—brilliant lawyer, playboy, and one of the best known deal-makers in the country.

  With a full head of gray hair, a tall, well-preserved physique honed with weekly trips to the gym, and a disarming smile that effectively hid the steel underneath, the man had a magnificent presence. He had an air of measured sophistication that many men strived for but never quite achieved.

  I’d always been curious as to what kind of surgery Dad had performed on Mac. It had to have been something significant for Mac to pick me for a job when he’d had his choice of top law graduates in the country.

  After we’d boarded the flight and been in the air for a few minutes, the stewardess came by to take our drink orders. Mac asked for a double scotch on the rocks and I got my usual diet soda.

  Mac gulped his drink and promptly fell asleep, making me wonder if some sweet young thing had wiped him out the previous night. How did a man in his late sixties keep up with the young beauties he caroused with? He probably lived on a steady diet of Viagra or some such drug in those TV commercials featuring middle-aged men looking deliriously happy.

  Unlike Mac, I couldn’t fall asleep right away, so I opened the Stephen King paperback I’d purchased at the airport. Reading always helped me unwind. The book held my attention for a half hour, after which our meals arrived.

  I toyed with the food on my plate. Other than the salad, there was nothing I could eat. Mac woke up and ate his steak accompanied by more scotch. With a mumbled apology to me about being such poor company, he fell asleep again.

  I was glad, since I felt a little tongue-tied with him. Besides, my novel was getting more horrific by the minute. I was really getting into it.

  In the end, I managed to get about three hours of sleep.

  Since we’d taken an evening flight after a full day’s work at the office, by the time the flight was ready to land at Sea-Tac Airport, it was something like three in the morning by our body clocks. I was exhausted, but Mac looked refreshed from his nap. A trip to the plane’s restroom had his gray mane looking neat and fresh. He smelled good, too. The old fox probably kept a bottle of cologne in his pocket.

  While I was beginning to yawn and wilt, he was turning downright chatty, asking me if I’d ever been to that part of the West Coast before. When I shook my head, he started telling me little anecdotes about his previous trips until our plane landed and came to a stop. The old charmer was back.

  It was drizzling outside, but the dampness was refreshing after spending hours in the dry atmosphere of the plane. Fortunately we didn’t have to wait for our transportation. The limo arranged by Sandy was waiting for us at the airport exit and transported us to a downtown hotel that was plush and attractive. It boasted an atrium tastefully spilling over with orchids and tropical ferns.

  Mac and I got our key cards at the registration desk and headed for our respective rooms—mine was on the fifth floor and his on the sixth. I stole a covert look at Mac as we rode the elevator together. He was positively humming with energy, making me wonder if there was perhaps a woman waiting for him in his room.

  My room was big and comfortable. The bathroom was grand, with an oversized tub and two marble sinks. This was one of the things I liked about my employers—everything they did was first class. But the splendid bathtub would have to wait. I barely had the energy to brush my teeth and sink into bed.

  Just before shutting off the light, I said a quick prayer to my small, laminated picture of Lord Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who removed obstacles and bestowed confidence. Whenever I traveled, I carried the Ganesh in my purse.

  In less than fifteen minutes after I’d entered the room I was asleep. The alarm was set for 6:30 A.M. since I was supposed to meet Mac in the restaurant adjoining the lobby at 7:30 A.M.

  I had the weirdest dream. Roger Vadepalli featured in it in all his quaintness—bearded face, hobo jeans, and crumpled T-shirt. The details were a bit fuzzy, but we parted with angry words in the dream. When I woke up, it bothered me for some reason. We had argued in some ways the day he and his parents had visited us, but we hadn’t had a fight as such. So why did a silly spat with a virtual stranger, especially one that occurred in a dream, bother me?

  Well, Roger had no business invading my dreams.

  Chapter 10

  I was up well before the alarm went off. My mind and body were on East Coast time, wide-awake and raring to go. What was I going to do at 5:20 in the morning? Maybe I could go for a brisk walk. But it was still raining outside. So what else was new in the Pacific Northwest? How did people live with such dreary weather day in and day out?

  On an impulse I looked up the hotel’s directory of services and found out their gym was open twenty-four hours a day. Dragging on exercise shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, all of which I’d fortunately thought to pack at the last minute, I took the elevator downstairs to the well-equipped b
ut nearly empty gym and walked on a treadmill for forty-five minutes.

  The only other folks using the gym at that ungodly hour were two middle-aged men. One of them grunted as he lifted weights. The attendant on duty at the front desk was a young man with a crew cut, reading what looked like a heavy textbook. College student working part-time, I concluded. When did the poor guy get to sleep?

  As I walked away from the treadmill and toward the door, wiping away the dripping perspiration with a towel, the young man smiled at me. “Fly in from the East Coast?”

  I nodded. “How’d you guess?”

  “Who else comes here at this hour? See those two guys?” he said, indicating the man on the bench press and the other one using some contraption that looked like a medieval torture instrument. “They got here before you did. I bet they’re from the east, too.”

  I chuckled. “I’m sure you get to know all the guests’ habits after a while.”

  “Yep. You here for the big conference?”

  “What conference?”

  “The software guys’ conference.”

  “I’m here on legal business. I’m an attorney.”

  Obviously impressed, the guy arched a brow. “East Coast law firms must pay really well if they’re putting you up in this place.”

  “They do okay.” I glanced at his textbook. “Exams coming up?”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, physiology.”

  “Are you a pre-med student?” Roger came to mind again.

  “Physical therapy major. But if a young attorney can stay in this hotel, maybe I should think about switching to law,” he said with a grin.

  I shook my head. “It’s not at all like the stuff you see on TV. It’s pretty boring.”

  “So you’re saying I better stick to PT?”

  “Definitely,” I replied, grabbing the door handle. “Good luck on the exam.”

  “Thanks. You have a good day now,” he said as I pushed the door open and stepped outside.