One Good Friend Deserves Another (4 page)

And as of two weeks ago, all those long hours had finally paid off. She and the girls had celebrated with mojitos in Carlos’s trendy new restaurant, Café Havana. She was the granddaughter of Puerto Rican immigrants only a step out of the barrio—and now she was also a junior partner.

Junior partner!

Partner!

Sometimes, when she was in her office at night, breathing in the scent of paper and ink and Pine-Sol as the janitor cleaned the floors, she would listen to the thrumming hum of her laptop and the high-pitched whine of the fluorescent lights and just gaze out her tenth-floor window. She’d sit there taking in the long canyon view of Midtown—so very, very far from Washington Heights—and she’d feel such a thundering rush of glee that she’d leap up out of her chair and do a Sacred Heart basketball team victory dance all around the empty office.

“Marta, what are you grinning about?”

“It’s your fault.” Marta glanced at Kelly, knowing her face was hopelessly bright. “Now you’ve got me thinking about Carlos.”

Carlos, whose sweet patience with her crazy schedule she would reward in abundance tonight. For now that she’d made partner—
mission accomplished—
she could turn her full attention to the next goal in her Life Plan.

Marriage.

After seeing Kelly off, Marta directed the cab driver to go back across town to her Tudor City condo. She checked her phone but saw no message from him yet. Sometimes it took him hours to text her because he was so crazed in the kitchen. He was usually home by eleven on Sunday evenings, and it was barely seven thirty, which would give her time to prepare for his arrival. A leopard-print thong, she mused, and five-inch red stilettos. He always liked her to keep those on.

Once inside her apartment, she reflexively flipped the switch just inside the door, but the light didn’t go on. She frowned up at the fixture, remembering that she’d asked Carlos to fix it.

Then she heard his laugh.

She glanced down the narrow hallway and saw the blue light spilling into the hall from the bedroom door, partially ajar. His wallet and keys lay on the hall table, and his cell phone blinked with notice of her text message. He must have come home early to do some work on his computer, she thought. She hoped nothing had gone wrong at the restaurant.

She went a little weak behind the knees. He was home already. They had a whole Sunday night—hours and
hours
of time. It seemed like months since they’d shared anything more than a quickie. With a growing sense of mischief, she shrugged off her suit jacket and laid it on the floor to muffle the sound of her purse as she set it on top. Flicking at the buttons of her crisp tailored blouse, she tiptoed down the hallway.

Then she heard a voice.

Marta froze. Her instincts bristled to high alert. All kinds of scenarios flooded her mind. She heard the voice again and realized that it sounded tinny, distorted, like it was coming through a speaker. Her relief was swift, but tinged with yet another suspicion. Carlos was video chatting. With a woman.

A cold, prickling sensation flooded her. Marta muffled her footsteps as she drew near enough to see him through the crack in the door. He was sitting at the desk with his back toward her. His laptop lay open. On the screen bobbed the image of a young girl, chattering in Cuban-tinged Spanish. Then the girl opened her mouth to display a missing front tooth.

The relief whistled out of her. She really was a distrustful little jerk. Here was poor Carlos, catching a moment to chat with his nieces and nephews in Miami, while she snuck around suspecting he was masturbating to the sight of that busty, twenty-two-year-old Staten Island waitress he’d recently hired.

Then a new face loomed into view. Marta pressed her palm hard against the doorframe. This was a young woman, with a shock of glossy black hair and the full, dewy skin of a girl not yet out of her twenties. The woman’s eyes arced with humor as she gazed into the camera.

“See? Now you have to come home,
mi amor
.” The woman pulled the child away from the camera and set her snugly on her lap. “You made a promise. And a father never goes back on his promises.”

that weekend

D
hara waved good-bye to her parents, her smile fading as the car rumbled away from the Terrace Apartments. She slipped into building number nine and climbed the stairs to the shared living area.

They were all there, waiting for her, gathered around a coffee table littered with Chinese food containers. Kelly sat cross-legged, ignoring the three sheets of paper on her lap. Wendy stabbed at her lo mein with disinterest. Marta perched on the couch clutching a paper bag that bore the logo of the local pharmacy. Dhara felt a tremor of dread for Marta, for what she knew was inside.

Dhara kicked off her shoes; they all turned to her with stricken eyes.

Marta was the first to speak, skillfully cutting off any chance for Dhara to ask probing questions. “Dhara, that guy your parents brought with them today. He’s not—”

“Yes, he is.” Dhara sank into the chair with a broken spring. “You just met my potential bridegroom.”

Wendy froze with her chopsticks in midair. “But your parents aren’t—”

“Yes, they are. They can’t wait to make arrangements for the wedding. Apparently, our astrological charts are well matched.”

Dhara drew her knees in tight. Her parents had taken her by surprise, arriving for a visit with a young stranger in tow. At the sight of him, her stomach had dropped. Her mother had filled the sudden silence with chatter. Sanjay was in his second year of medical school, her mother said. He had an opportunity to take the weekend off. Surely Dhara would enjoy talking to someone who’d made it through the first difficult year, a boy she must remember from her cousin’s wedding last summer.

Their eyes had brimmed with hope.

“Dhara!” Kelly leaned forward, her gaze incredulous. “You’re not considering this, are you?”

She laid her cheek against her knees. The knocking noise of her parents’ eleven-year-old Hyundai still rattled in her mind. Faded ink stained her mother’s elegant fingers, a reminder of the part-time job her mother had taken in a dentist’s office just to help pay Dhara’s way through college. Now Dhara was about to graduate, and the time had come. In a moment alone, her mother had bubbled over with talk of silk saris and jeweled bangles and all the wonderful chaos of a Hindu wedding.

Dhara wanted all that. She really did. She would marry, someday. She’d just imagined that she’d marry a man she
loved
.

“My sister wants to marry,” Dhara explained, “and it’s tradition that I marry first. I told my mother I’m not ready. I told them to let her jump the queue.”

Wendy exchanged looks with the girls and said, “But that means they’ll try again soon.”

“Yes.”

“That’s medieval,” Marta added. “No offense, Dhara.”

“None taken. The tradition is older than that, actually. But, right now, it’s feeling pretty archaic to me, too.”

“This sucks.” Kelly hugged her own arms, though the room wasn’t the least bit cold. “There should be rules about all of this.”

“Yeah,” Marta said. “And rule number one is a no-brainer: choose your own man.”

An image rose in Dhara’s mind of Cole, sprawled in a chair across from her at the library, absently thumbing the cleft in his chin. Cole, with his long hair combed back, tamed at the nape of his neck with a rawhide tie. Breathlessly beautiful Cole. Forbidden Cole.

Dhara’s heart tightened. She loved her parents. She adored her whole sprawling family. She respected the Hindu traditions.

But in this, she was wholly American.

She would choose her
own
husband.

F
rom the moment Dhara was old enough to walk about town unattended, she and her girlfriends would spill out of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and wander the sprawling business district, squealing over wedding saris displayed in the various shops. Gazing into the windows of the beauty salons, they argued over the henna designs, hair extensions, and head pendants draped over Styrofoam wig models, planning their own glorious weddings.

And now, as Dhara stepped out of the taxi in front of the Mysore Sari Emporium—one of the biggest sari shops in Jackson Heights—she realized that even thirty-seven-year-old cardiologists could still experience girlish thrills.

She slung her purse over her shoulder and pushed into the store, clanging the bells hung on a string. The place smelled of tandoori smoke from the next-door restaurant. She toed off her low-heeled shoes and lined them up on the shoe shelf, craning her neck in search of her mother.

The shop was the old-fashioned kind, a little taste of old Delhi in Queens. The store had no tables, only miles of shelves and cabinets along the walls. The cabinets with the most expensive saris were locked with tasseled keys. As she shuffled her way up the aisle toward a cluster of familiar figures, she noted with amusement that her mother had brought Dhara’s aunts along on the hunt for the perfect wedding sari.

“Nisha, stop making the salesman pull the gold silks.” Dhara’s mother elbowed her younger sister as the salesman left to fetch more saris. “You know Dhara will wear red to the wedding.”

“But she looks so
darling
in gold!” Nisha, the youngest of Dhara’s aunts, looked like a Bollywood star just stepped off the screen, in a brilliant, turquoise sari. “And she won’t need a sari just for her wedding, Roopa. She’ll need one for the
Sangeet Sandhya,
and for the Mehndi ceremony and for after the wedding, when they come back to visit you as a couple.”

Indira, Dhara’s older aunt, gripped the price end of a sari and leaned into Dhara’s mother. “Sixty-three per yard, Roopa, for this scratchy thing.” Indira always looked as if she’d just taken a bite of a lemon. “Now the saris in Jhalini’s shop—”

“Jhalani’s shop doesn’t have silks from Rajasthan,” her mother countered, “nor Banaras brocades.” Her mother turned as Dhara danced up behind her. “Ah, Dhara! You’re finally here.”

“So sorry—emergency at the hospital.” Dhara folded into her mother’s embrace, breathing in the scent of incense her mother burned every night in the hopes of a smooth wedding. “I see that you brought reinforcements.”

“We wouldn’t miss this for the world, darling. We’ve been waiting for it for a very long time.” Nisha took Dhara’s face in her hands and then frowned. “You look so tired! You need to get more sleep, to look your best for your new husband. A little kohl might help—”

“Leave the girl alone, Nisha,” Indira said, pushing her aside. “She’s a doctor. She has more important things to think about.” Indira gave her a dry peck on the cheek and then whispered in her ear. “Talk some sense into your mother, Dhara. This place is—”

“Indira-
didi
.” Her mother’s voice was a warning. “You did not have to come.”

“Of course I did. Do you think I let them do to you what these thieves did to me? Embroidering in silver rather than gold, and—”

“Oh, look, Roopa!” Nisha intercepted  the returning salesman and pulled a length of muted gold silk from his arms. “Can you not see your daughter circling the sacred fires in this?”

“Nisha, really”—her mother gestured to a pile of red silks on the mattress—“it’s red she’s wearing. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

Dhara met Nisha’s teasing gaze and suppressed a smile. Her mother and Nisha were often at loggerheads. Nisha was the kind of woman who shocked distant relatives by opting for cocktail dresses rather than saris at family events. During last year’s
Diwali
celebration, instead of bringing
Kaju Pista
rolls as she was bidden, Nisha showed up at the house with a box of cannolis.

Dhara let the argument flow right over her. Once she’d made the decision to agree to an arranged marriage, it had been a relief to cede the details to her ecstatic and enthusiastic family.

“Have a seat, Dhara,” her mother ordered, pulling at the various reds on the mattress. “Let us show you what we’ve found.”

Dhara lowered herself to the padded white ticking. She probably should have worn jeans instead of coming directly from the hospital in her straight black skirt, but she hadn’t expected this place to be quite so old-fashioned. As she curled her legs to one side, she soon forgot any discomfort in the thrill of the moment—the unaccustomed luxury of having a salesman unfurl bolt after bolt of silky fabric on the cotton batting, a scarlet-and-gold rainbow of texture and hue.

As she watched her mother and aunts rooting through the piles of cloth, Dhara suddenly remembered one of the first family gatherings to which she’d invited Cole. He’d stood in the doorway of her kitchen running a nervous hand over a head freshly shorn of its usual mop of curls. He watched her mother and aunts arguing as they chopped a mountain of vegetables.

“Now I know where the image of the goddess Kali comes from,” he’d whispered. He pointed to an idol of the goddess sitting on a shelf nearby, waving her multiple arms—half raised in blessing and the other half gripping swords.

Dhara smiled at the memory, a smile that softened almost as quickly as it came, doused, as usual, by sorrow.

“You like, Dhara?”

Dhara blinked up at her mother. Her mother leaned in, displaying a length of silk over her arm. Dhara gave herself a quick internal shake. It was best not to remember Cole. Especially the better days, before it all went so very wrong.

She ran her fingers over the smooth silk. She placed her other hand beneath the cloth to gauge the transparency. The fabric was cloud-soft, so deep a red it was almost plum, and slipped across her fingers like water. “Oh, it’s gorgeous, Mum.”

With a flip of her arm, her mother draped the fabric over Dhara’s shoulder. Dhara’s aunts approached on either side, peering down at her, blocking out the harsh fluorescent light.

“Too dark.” Nisha wrinkled her nose, and her nose-stud winked. “It makes her look old.”

Dhara laughed. “Thanks, Aunt Nisha.”

“Dhara, you’re a young girl getting married. You should look your age!”

Dhara resisted the urge to remind her that she was a doctor who’d spent the morning administering stress tests, studying imaging data, and discussing a particularly critical patient’s situation with a cardiothoracic surgeon. Or that her youngest sister had jumped the queue years ago, much to her mother’s dismay, and all but one of her buddies from high school had long circled the sacred fires.

“I think it makes her look lovely,” her mother said, squinting. “We could order a border, embroidered in gold.”

“Well, have her try it on then!” Indira said. “You won’t know until you see how it drapes.”

Her mother and Indira headed toward the mirrors at the back of the store. Aunt Nisha held out her hand to help Dhara up from the mattress. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were bright with mischief. “You know, you don’t have to listen to your mother,” she murmured, drawing her so close that Dhara could smell the musky perfume her aunt favored. “You can wear any color you like. You’re more modern than any of us.”

“Nisha, you’d have me in some horrendous pouf of white satin if you had your way. I really do like the red.”

“I’ve got your best interests in mind.” Nisha led her leisurely toward the back of the store. “I think that it might be better to appear on your wedding day…less traditional than most Indian brides.”

Dhara felt a little frisson. Among her high school friends, it was frequently whispered that it fell to your mother’s sisters to fill you in on the pleasure-secrets of the wedding night—whether you wanted to hear them or not. Dhara hoped Nisha had the good sense to spare this thirty-seven-year-old such a ridiculous conversation, but the look on Nisha’s face suggested there were other secrets dancing on her tongue.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.” Nisha rolled a wrist dismissively toward her sisters. “Your fiancé seems to admire American girls. He had at least one girl with whom he was quite serious.”

Dhara resisted the urge to block her own ears. “In that case,” she said tightly, “Sudesh and I are very much alike, aren’t we?”

“Yes, that’s true.” Nisha leaned in, to speak in a whisper. “And that’s exactly why you might want to break from tradition. Show him you’re not bound to it. That you’re Indian, but modern too, a little bit of both.”

Dhara stared blindly ahead while Nisha spoke like a little devil on her right shoulder. She didn’t need to know this. She didn’t want to know anything more about Sudesh Bohara than that he was Hindu of the Vaishya caste and the Khandewal subcaste, and that his family originated in Ajmer. That he was from a good family, a distant cousin of one of her father’s business associates. That he was a vegetarian, who didn’t smoke or drink.

And that he was a man with very kind eyes.

“Don’t be nervous, Dhara, it’s just a suggestion.” Nisha pressed close and gave Dhara’s arm a little squeeze. “A suggestion from a married aunt to her most favorite niece.”

The question rose to her lips before she could stop it. “What happened to Sudesh’s girlfriend?”

“Oh, he broke it off not long after the engagement.” Nisha raised her brows. “One can only imagine what he discovered to make him forgo a wedding night.”

Nisha should have just poured ice water down Dhara’s back. Her words had the same effect.

“Nisha,” her mother said. “Stop talking mischief to my daughter. Come, Dhara, let’s get this on you.” Her mother clicked her tongue at Dhara’s skirt and shell. “You should have brought a petticoat and a
choli
. I guess we’ll just have to make do.”

In sudden numbness, Dhara gave herself up to them. Dhara’s mother found the plain end of the sari and started tucking the edge into the waistband of her skirt. With deft hands she folded the fabric into pleats, tucked it to just one side of her navel, then brought the rest of the fabric around her back and draped it over her shoulder.

Dhara stood with her arms raised, aware only of the pulling and the tugging, of the vague murmur of Hindi, all the while struggling to ignore Nisha’s revelation. It wasn’t her business that Sudesh had had a serious failed relationship. It wasn’t her business to wonder if Sudesh still loved this other woman—if Sudesh had resorted to an arranged marriage only because of family pressure—if Sudesh, like herself, still found himself needled by memory.

But the knowledge raised an inevitable question: Would Sudesh think differently of her if he knew that she’d had a relationship with an American farm boy of no caste? A relationship that was, in every physical way, a true marriage.

Dhara squeezed her eyes shut. She wished she could take back the last few minutes. In an arranged marriage, the relationship started on the wedding night. It would be a relationship based on mutual respect, mutual goals, and a determination to make things work. She didn’t
want
to know anything about Sudesh other than his basic goodness.

She had known everything about Cole. And that had only brought her pain.

“It’s a game.”

Cole’s voice echoed in Dhara’s head, clear as the memory.

She’d been sitting with her girlfriends in the lecture hall, clutching a cup of strong black coffee. In her other hand, she’d held a cardboard square upon which Cole had drawn a grid. In each square was a photo, apparently copied from the freshman register. She’d recognized Cole’s photo in the center free space.

She’d held the card, not understanding why he’d given this to her. She could have blamed it on the hour. What had possessed her to take Art History 101, which was offered only at 8:30 in the morning? She’d never make it to class on time. The room was always dim, to better see the slides on the overhead projector, and the professor tended to drone. To make it worse, the class had been full of pretentious upperclassmen adding insights from their last trip to the Uffizi. She’d found it odd that the card was full of pictures of all those first-row show-offs.

But it hadn’t been just the hour that made her slow-witted. Her brain had stopped working the minute the wild-haired, lanky Cole Jackson had swung his long legs off the top of the next row of seats and then leaned down to whisper in her ear.

“It’s like Bingo,” he’d murmured. He’d smelled of meadow grass, and sunlight, and sleep-tousled man. “When one of them talks, you cross off his picture.”

Just then, one of the preppy boys in the front row had asked another question. Marta had made a muted yip as she’d crossed his face off her card.

Only then had Dhara understood. Cole had made up the game to amuse them through the sleep-inducing class.

He’d called it Asshole Bingo.

Now Dhara made a sudden choking noise, a bubble of reflexive laughter. Her breath came out with a little hitch. The memory was like a swift blow to the solar plexus, and she stood dazed, trying to breathe.

“Dhara, what’s the matter?” Aunt Nisha gave her a puzzled look, her dark eyes intent. “Are you all right?”