Pictures of other brides, other people’s babies.
And now, among her friends, all she wanted to do was sink her head onto this sticky café table and collapse into a bubble of shame, remorse, and self-pity. These friends had followed her romantic misadventures with great compassion since that life-altering weekend in college. They knew better than anyone how important it was for her to keep her head on straight, to avoid getting swept away and making a dangerous misstep. She’d thought, after meeting Carlos, that she’d finally figured it all out.
But she’d come here not to wallow, but to understand. She filled her lungs with air and summoned the memory of Coach Sammon at the regional Catholic Sports League finals, rolling his wheelchair in front of the bench at halftime when they were down twelve points, his black hair standing up from clutching his head in frustration. He’d yelled at her—bruised, heaving, and achy—to get up off her sorry ass and stop acting like a sobbing little girl.
Start playing smart.
Playing smart. It worked for her in basketball. It worked for her in college. It worked for her in the law firm.
It must work for men.
Seizing her briefcase, she riffled through the pockets and pulled out a fresh yellow legal pad. “Now that you’re all here,” she said, slapping it on the table, “it’s time to start the Marta Lauren Sanchez Arroyo love-life reclamation project.”
“Uh-oh,” Wendy said. “Deposition time.”
“I need some help figuring out what went wrong so I can make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.”
Wendy arched a brow. “Can we start by trashing your infamous Life Plan?”
“My Life Plan is fine—it’s my love life that is not. Now, I’ve been thinking it over, from the first time I met him, all the way to the moment he grabbed his Williams-Sonoma corkscrew and walked out my door.” Marta rolled the pen between her fingers. It felt good, to pull back and think logically about things. She was good at picking details out of six hundred pages of documents. She was good at carrying through plans. “What were the signs I missed? There had to be a pattern of some sort. One thing I do know is that you girls never really liked him. And I, blinded by the Cuban god that was Carlos, just ignored everything you said.”
The three women exchanged furtive glances.
“Ay Dios mío, be honest, please! How am I ever going to figure this out, if you all don’t help me? I mean, c’mon, Carlos was perfect—he was smart, he was ambitious, and he was one of the hottest guys I’d ever had.”
Six foot three, all lean muscle, and even now, after all that had happened, she found her body responding to the memory of him. She hated herself for thinking with her loins. She was smarter than this.
At least, she liked to think she was smarter than this.
“Honestly, Marta, we hardly knew him.” Apparently, with the silent vote tallied, Wendy was chosen as the spokesperson. “I think I met him only three times.”
“No, no, that’s not right.” Marta resisted the urge to pull out her BlackBerry and scroll through past appointments. “Off the top of my head, I can think of three times you all have met him just since the New Year’s Eve party.”
“At the New Year’s Eve party,” Wendy said, “he was working in the kitchen.”
“And when I made partner—”
“Again,” she interrupted, “he was working in the kitchen.”
“And your engagement party.”
“At my ridiculously large engagement party,” Wendy added, with a roll of her eyes, “I was lucky to speak more than two words to anyone all evening.”
“That’s the only time I remember him too,” Kelly added. “I mean, you talked a lot about him, Marta, and we made a lot of attempts to get together, but that’s the first and last time I remember actually meeting him.”
Marta looked at Dhara, waiting for her take on the subject.
“He was a very good-looking man,” Dhara conceded, “and apparently he made a mean mojito. But frankly, Marta, he was no Tito.”
The sound of Tito’s name brought the old familiar pang. Her friends still adored him. Tito, with his easy ways, his laid-back attitude, his quick laugh. Years ago, when she was in law school, Dhara in medical school, and Kelly struggling at her first job, it was generous, dependable Tito who’d take them all out to a small Puerto Rican restaurant in Brooklyn, plying them with drinks and food, and showing them how to dance the merengue. He never had much money, but he spent it generously. Tito had adored her. Marta had adored him back.
Ah, mi bonita, you’ll never marry a man like me.
“No, he was no Tito,” Wendy agreed, slipping her hair behind one ear to expose a Tiffany knot earring. “And that’s just the thing, Marta. You never talked about Carlos like you talked about Tito. You talked about Carlos in the same way you talked about the three-foot regional basketball trophy you helped bring to Sacred Heart.”
Marta sputtered mid-sip.
“You asked for honesty.” Wendy reached for her, her eyes soft. “Even if he was a trophy, even if you didn’t really love Carlos, what he did was such a bastard move it would still break the strongest of hearts.”
No. No. Marta dismissed Wendy’s words. Wendy didn’t know what she was talking about. Wendy had Parker, after all. Faithful, friendly Parker, who Wendy had known since they were kids. Parker would never get caught with another woman because he wouldn’t dare—he’d be terrified Wendy would find out through their special telepathic twin language.
Marta shook herself. It was a jealous thought—unworthy of her. Leave it to her old roommate to cut to the heart of the matter with a cold, sharp cleaver. Marta had been so fixated on making partner this year that she’d barely noticed that Carlos had avoided contact with her friends and her family. She thought he was being accommodating. She thought he was being sweetly patient. The truth was that he was using her for free rent and quick sex. She’d been using him too. Their relationship, on both sides, had been based on convenience. He was as much her fuck-bunny as she was his.
“I’m just going to remind you,” Wendy said, as she pulled the red stirrer out of her drink and made a little circle in the air, “that, just as you proved at Pete’s Place on Founder’s Day junior year, you still have the power to rise from this table, swish that lovely backside, and have half the men in this bar on their knees, remember?”
Marta doubted it. First of all, it’d be pretty hard to put on the confident act, when her ego was a quivering lump of jelly. But, more important, when she glanced toward the bar, to the eclectic collection of young couples, clusters of men just off from work, and a few hipsters from the neighborhood, what she noticed was that most of them were younger than she. Less the age of a thirty-seven-year-old partner in a law firm and more the age of Carlos’s lovely wife.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
Just then, the tapas arrived, sparing her from further analysis. She slipped the unused pad of paper off the table, tucked it back into her briefcase, and felt grateful when the conversation shifted to another subject.
“All right, I have some news,” Dhara said, spearing a tiny battered and fried squid—a chopito—with a toothpick. “It should cheer you all up immensely.”
Kelly pulled away the shrimp she was about to pop in her mouth. “You’ve called off the wedding?”
“No,” Dhara said, drawing out the word, “but I am having coffee with Sudesh tomorrow. Just the two of us. No chaperones.”
With her index finger, Wendy painted an invisible line in the air. “One point for the American side.”
“Buy some stock in incense. Ever since I told my mother about the date, she’s burning it to Ganesh twenty-four/seven.”
“Hey,” Marta said darkly, “do you want some advice on the dangers of getting involved with a man you hardly know?”
“In India,” Dhara said gently, “the courtship starts after the wedding.”
Kelly blurted, “When it’s too late to do anything about it!”
“Here�
��s the difference. I actually do know quite a bit about Sudesh. About his family and his commitment to this marriage.” Dhara cast her gaze away from all of them. “But I’ve decided that all of you are right in one particular way. It can’t hurt for us to start the conversation a little early.”
“If you don’t like him,” Kelly asked, “will you stop the wedding?”
“Frankly, it’s more likely after our talk that he’s not going to like me.”
Dhara started to say something more, then stopped. Biting her lip, she toyed with a tip of a toothpick stuck in the tapas on the tiny plate before her. Looking at Dhara’s suddenly stricken face, Marta’s heart turned over. She reached out to touch Dhara’s arm, and with a sudden rattle of glasses and plates, Kelly and Wendy did the same.
What a jerk I am. Here Dhara was, holding back boatloads of pain. Real pain. From a real relationship with Cole. Unlike herself, whining over some hot jerk who took advantage of her own ridiculous self-absorption.
“Hey, girl.” Marta gave Dhara’s sleeve a tug. “If it doesn’t work out, it’s you and me hitting the bar scene on Saturday nights, got it?”
“Unlikely.” Dhara’s shoulders rose and fell. “My mother will have me doing another Shiva fast, poring through online profiles of other prospects.”
“Mine is on her knees at every eight a.m. Mass praying to the Holy Mother, but that’s not going to keep me away from Nobu on a hot night.”
“Oh, but you can’t do that.” Kelly talked around a mouthful. “That breaks the rules.”
“She’s right, Marta.” Wendy tipped her martini at her. “You have to take a six-month hiatus after a serious relationship. It’s the only way to avoid a rebound. So no dating, no looking. Got it?”
Marta felt a prickle of unease. Her biological clock was ticking at a beat much faster than the Spanish guitar music thrumming through the restaurant. Carlos’s betrayal had been a serious setback to her Life Plan. She’d learned the hard way that any deviation was dangerous, any mistake could upend a lifetime of dreams. She did not realize how much she’d been counting on Carlos to be the one to complete the next step, until he walked out of her life.
Him and his thick black hair and his broad, strong shoulders and his fancy food processor.
The girls were watching her, chewing in silence, anticipating her response with expectant eyes. She felt a sharp pang of guilt. She didn’t want to do this on the sly. But she couldn’t let some dusty old dating rules—or Carlos’s betrayal—put a stop to the plan now hatching in her heart.
“Oh, what fun is that?” Marta gestured to one of the dishes. “Pass me that chorizo, will you? Looks like it’s the only real sausage I’ll be getting for a good long time.”
chapter six
The first time Dhara slipped on a pair of jeans, she’d been a private high school student changing out of her uniform in the stall of a movie theater bathroom. The jeans had been a pair of cast-offs from a schoolmate—contraband—and Dhara had breathlessly accepted them. She remembered marveling at the way the thick seam lifted and separated her buttocks. She remembered feeling a terrible half-angry, half-shameful thrill in bucking her parents’ rules, along with a growing exhilaration that the prep-school boys at the nearby academy would now see what she’d been hiding under a shapeless plaid skirt.
Now, wearing a far-better fitting and more upscale pair of jeans, she felt some of the same sense of rebellion as she took the steps, two at a time, out of the subway stop at Houston Street, about to meet her fiancé on a date for the very first time.
She saw him before he saw her. He was leaning against the wall with one foot flat on the bricks behind him, so totally absorbed in his iPod that he was oblivious to the New York crowds passing by.
Sudesh was a good-looking man. Dhara had noticed that from the first. He had the sort of medium-roast complexion that held up well with age and a youthful leanness, probably due to the fact that his family raised him as a vegetarian. Her mother had eventually admitted that he was nearly forty. That explained the look in his eyes when he’d first met her—the patient but nervous gaze that, miraculously, remained above her neck rather than traveling with avidity over her ever-softening, thirty-seven-year-old figure.
She remembered being almost wearily grateful that he wasn’t steeped in cheap cologne like the first man her mother had suggested, or laden with gold jewelry and a porn-star mustache like the second.
“Hey, Sudesh.”
He glanced up. Behind the shade of her sunglasses, she watched his expression as he pulled out one earbud. She was suddenly, exquisitely, conscious of the slinkiness of her black tank top, the sleek fit of her jeans, and the careless way she’d clipped up her hair to get it off the back of her neck. Last time he’d seen her, she’d been swathed in an apricot sari.
He pushed away from the wall to greet her. She couldn’t quite tell if the flicker in his eyes was his gaze slipping, lightning-quick, over her figure, or just a moment of sudden recognition. His gaze was difficult to read behind the glasses that made him look both scholarly and a little bit owlish.
Funny, the two times she’d seen him before today, he hadn’t worn glasses.
“It’s good to see you, Dhara. But please, call me Desh.”
“Desh.”
“That’s what all my friends call me.” He searched the sidewalk behind her, his lips quirking into a smile. “What, no protective hordes?”
She let out her breath, not realizing until that moment she’d been holding it, nervous about his reaction to her appearance. “I shook them off in the subway. Though I wouldn’t put it past my mother to send a spy or two.”
“Ah, so you made the same mistake.”
“Pardon?”
“I told my family over dinner last night that I’d be meeting you today.”
“Oh, no.”
“I’d never noticed before how the smell of incense can ruin a really good vegetable curry.”
“Ah, yes,” she murmured. “Guilt is a terrible seasoning. My mother is wearing out her knees praying to Ganesh.”
“For my mother, every day, a havan to Lord Agni,” he said, “to rid the evil spirits.”
Dhara nodded in sympathy. Only an Indian mother could make her daughter feel guilty about having coffee in a public place with her own fiancé. First by dramatic and devout prayers, and second by a good hour and a half of strenuous and apparently logical arguments.
What for, Dhara? What good can come of it? You’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other after the wedding is done.
And now, face-to-face with that man, Dhara wasn’t entirely sure that her mother was wrong.
“Come on.” He picked up a sports bag and something clanked within. “This place has the best iced masala chai.”
She was surprised he remembered. She’d ordered one at the engagement party after the confrontation with Kelly, in the hope that the milky spiced tea would ease the twinge of a headache.
“After we order,” he said, opening the door for her to a blast of air-conditioning, “I have a proposition for you.”
Proposition.
Dhara gripped the strap of her purse as a whole fleet of possibilities rippled through her mind—a mélange of dark rooms, clean sheets, and sweaty skin. She dropped her gaze as she sidled by him, inadvertently brushing his arm as she entered the coffeehouse.
“Desh,” she said, opting to sound casually blasé as she stopped before the counter. “I’ve already said yes, remember?”
He coughed a little laugh—a nervous hiccup of a sound—as he came up beside her. “I mean a small proposition,” he corrected, as he pushed his glasses straight with his index finger. “I was just going to suggest that, after we get our drinks, we could go to that park over there.”
With nervous relief, she glanced out the window to the green space across the street. “And?”
“They’ve got bocce courts.”
“Bocce.”
“Yes.” He ordered a double-shot latte
along with her iced chai. “I play it sometimes with a crowd of local guys. Have you ever played?”
“The closest I’ve ever gotten to sports is the StairMaster in the hospital gym, three times a week.”
“It’s simple. I’ll teach you.”
She paused, uncertain. A coffee date had a particular advantage. She could call an end to it whenever she wanted, just by rising and leaving. She’d even set up a plan. Marta was scheduled to call her at 6:05 p.m., pretending to be from the hospital, just in case Dhara needed an excuse to get away. The way Dhara figured it last night, while tossing sleepless in her bed, this date could go two ways. Desh could wave off her confession with an easy laugh…or he could break off the engagement, a seismic event whose reverberations would shudder all the way to Jackson Heights.
“Listen, Dhara,” he said. “Why don’t we pretend, just for a moment, that we’re simply two people on a blind date, and thousands of Indian ancestors—and maybe my mother—aren’t watching us right now.”
Dhara loosened her grip on the strap of her purse. “Tell me, how do we do that?”
“Like this.” Desh tucked the iPod in his pocket and thrust out his hand. “Hello, Dhara. I’m Desh Bohara. I’m a professor of philosophy at Hunter College.”
She took his hand. It was smooth, and his grip firm, and the unfamiliar feel of it sent a little tremor through her. “A pleasure to meet you, Desh. I’m Dhara Pitalia, a cardiologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital.”
“The pleasure is mine. See?” His teeth flashed. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“Actually,” she said, dropping his hand, “aren’t all blind dates awkward?”
“Absolutely. Which is why I figured,” he said, as steamers steamed and coffee grinders whirred, “that it would be a lot easier to talk while we played a game. Otherwise, it’ll be the classic blind date.” He tilted his head toward a table by the window. “You and me staring at each other across that rickety table, with nothing to distract us from the fact that in three months, we two strangers will be wed.”
Wed.
One Good Friend Deserves Another Page 7
