Dad: When will be the right time? When you are forty? You cannot be so sentimental. We’ll line up ten eligible boys for you tomorrow.
Me: (Wondering why I would be interested in anyone who was willing to queue for my affections.) I’m not ready to look at a lineup.
Mom: Don’t make fun, Vina. We’re just trying to help. If everything fits, you could be married by the end of next year!
“If everything squares away—” Peter sucked at his teeth with his tongue “—then Alan and Steve’ll bet that Luxor will announce a decision to buy.” Denny crunched his ice, and then turned to look at me.
Me: I don’t need help. (Then, to Wade…) Not you, we do need your help.
Dad: Why? Are you married?
Me: No, I’m not. But thanks for the reminder. I’m really not interested in having this discussion right now.
“In that case,” Peter concluded, “they will buy Luxor stock, expecting a positive announcement, and a related jump in the stock price the following morning.”
Dad: If you both agree, then in that case we can have the engagement announced. Of course, we will need a year for the wedding preparations. I mean, if you’re not ready now, then when will you be ready? This American system of ‘dating’ will only land you into trouble. With all of these so-called ‘relationships,’ everybody does the wrong thing because there is always somebody else coming along. Why is number fifteen any different from number twelve? Prakash is an educated, handsome boy, from a good family. All right, he is not Punjabi, which we would have preferred, but what more do you want?
Me: (Attempting to massage away my mounting neck stress.) Look, Dad. I already told you. Prakash is out of the picture because…
“These f lowers are from Prakash, not Jon!” Peter announced. He had been trying to cram the remains of his lunch into the trash when he noticed the unopened card sticking out of the bin.
“Who’s Prakash?” he asked.
Sarah poked her head into my office to see if we were ready to tackle the numbers.
“Oh,” she said, when she caught us discussing my love life on company time, “never mind.”
“Prakash?” I blurted. “You can’t be serious! I don’t know what this is about, but…”
How could I “out him” to my parents now? And more importantly, how could I do it without appearing unprofessional in front of my colleagues?
Mom: Flowers? From Prakash? Oh, how wonderful! Vina, you were just being insecure! Even despite your behavior on Saturday night this boy has seen how wonderful you are and he is sending you flowers? I knew he was a good boy. So we can forget about Raj. All right, I’ll smooth things over with Raj’s family. And you’ll call Prakash to thank him. Bye-bye, darling!
Me: Wait, no! I mean…just because all the criteria are met doesn’t mean that it will necessarily fall into place. There is more to it than that! Trust me.
“Vina is absolutely right,” Peter concluded before heading for the door, with one hand on Denny’s back and the other holding a folder that was overflowing with numbers in need of crunching. “We shouldn’t simplify things too much for you guys. We’ll make you think this is a science. It’s not. We can play with the numbers until they look like gibberish, and spend all our nights in the office until we forget what our apartments look like, but the market is still gonna do whatever it wants. The truth is, without inside information, we’re basically screwed.”
Peter and Denny laughed and walked out. Wade remained because he reported directly to me. I dropped my half-empty cup into the trash. Wade was aware that he was too junior to recline, so he waited tentatively on the edge of his seat, with his back erect, his smile eager and his khaki-panted legs planted firmly on the ground. I held up a finger and made eye contact.
Mom: Okay, okay, Vina. We won’t push. But we don’t want to see you unmarried at thirty. Give Prakash a chance. You are not getting any younger, sweetheart.
Me: (Logging back on to my computer to begin downloading the financial statements.) I’m not?
Mom: Don’t be sarcastic.
Dad: I don’t understand it. When we were your age, we could not wait to begin our lives.
Me: Silly me…I thought life began at birth.
Dad: Vina, we all know you are very good with words, and very highly educated, but that does not mean that we are wrong. Wisecracks will not delay reality. You need stability in your life. And you keep avoiding the topic of getting your MBA, also. I don’t know what else to say. It is only for your good that I say these things. Just give it a chance. And you have to get over this idea of chemistry. It is something which you build over years of sharing your lives. It does not happen overnight.
Me: Okay, Dad. I’m sorry. You’re right.
I replaced the receiver and rubbed my throbbing earlobe, as if their perception of my life might have literally been infectious. Wade had been entertaining himself with my copy of the day’s
Wall Street Journal
. Swiveling away from my screen, I addressed him.
“Find anything interesting in there?”
“Well, certainly nothing as interesting as that phone conversation,” he began, and then caught himself. “I’m sorry. I mean, I tried not to listen, but…”
“No, no. It’s okay. Go ahead. What do you mean?” I leaned back in my chair.
“I was taught that life began at conception.”
I had to smile. “Well, Wade, I was taught that beauty was on the inside, but I’ve got a closet full of six-inch heels and a $200 monthly facial appointment at The Bliss Spa that say otherwise. So anyway, listen, we’ve got a very long night ahead of us. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. For us, it’ll be lots of research and financial modeling. For you, it’ll be lots of typing and photocopying. Grab that pen. Once I print out these financial statements, we’ll be able to get started.”
I
n our awkward years, as much as in the others, self-perception is what matters most. Aged ten, I considered myself to be approximately as swanlike as a bullfrog. The notion was cemented for me at a fateful dinner party hosted by my parents. After clearing my plate, I rose from the sofa and headed for the kitchen. Surely, I would impress my mother and her friends with the stainlessness of my white dress. They would shower me with praise and admonish the other children to learn from my example. But on my way to the kitchen I was sidetracked by an uncle who beckoned me to solve the following riddle.
“Darling Vina, tell me.” He overacted for the benefit of a circle of adults. “What has a big mouth but never speaks?”
“Auntie Neela?” I replied. It was one of my earliest demonstrations of an inability to censor myself.
A roar of laughter erupted around me, like icy snowballs being hurled from every direction. The correct answer, my uncle would explain after recovering from a belly-grabbing, knee-slapping fit of raucous laughter was “A Jar.” I felt my throat getting hot, and my eyes welling up with tears. For the first time, I was aware of a tightness on the right side of my neck that felt like the tugging of an invisible noose. When I turned to run, another adult drew everyone’s attention to the stain across my backside. Without noticing, I’d been sitting on a plate of food. It took all my strength not to dissolve into a puddle of Vina on the floor. I didn’t know whether they were laughing because of what I had said or what I had sat in. I did know that by the time I reached the safety of my room, I noticed I had peed myself.
They say that the universe will keep reteaching a lesson until the person is ready to learn it. The first time I ignored this lesson about the importance of self-censorship, I wound up wetting my pants. This time around, I feared, the consequences could be much worse.
New rule: On less than six hours’ sleep, I am no longer allowed to speak to anyone.
Maybe it was the fact that we had been crunching numbers until three a.m. Maybe it was that triple shot of espresso. Whatever the reason, first thing Tuesday morning, I marched swiftly into Alan’s office, threw my shoulders back and jammed my foot directly into my mouth.
“Not that you’re gonna need this,
what with your inside source in Taiwan and all,
” I blurted while raising an eyebrow suggestively, “but here’s our report on Luxor’s proposed acquisition of that facility. It’s not a sound investment. Needless to say, therefore, I don’t think that we should buy the stock.”
Alan motioned toward his speakerphone.
“Hello? Alan? Are you still there?” a heavily accented voice leaped forth.
“Yes, Yokuto. I’m still here,” Alan replied, taking a deep breath and glaring me out of the room. “Our line must have gotten crossed with someone else’s for a moment. I’m with you now…”
I’m sorry,
I mouthed. I placed the report on his desk, then backed slowly out of the room like a jewel thief who’d been spotted coming in through a window.
Just after the close of business that day, Luxor made their announcement. They had finalized an agreement to buy the Taiwanese facility. Since there wasn’t enough space underneath my desk to accommodate me, I sat perfectly still, trying my best to camouflage into my chair, when Denny appeared in my office. Palms pointed outward, he leaned across my desk like a perched seal, smiling.
“They made the investment anyway,” he said. “At nine a.m. today. The stock is gonna soar at the open of the market tomorrow!”
I sank deeper into my chair. Did this mean that they would fire me because I made the wrong recommendation? Or would they be in too good a mood to fire me over something as inconsequential as a recommendation which they were obviously smart enough to ignore?
“How could I have misread the financials?” I said almost to myself. “What did I miss?”
“It’s not your fault, Vina. We all worked on those statements.”
“Yes, Denny. But I was the one who made the final recommendation. Dammit! What did they see that I didn’t?”
He looked me in the eye. “They must have seen something that convinced them it was a good call. But…”
“But what? I’ve been working here for a long time, Denny, and…it’s just that…I could have sworn I had gone over every damn number in those reports! I rechecked all of the calculations in our Excel spreadsheets. I reran every single financial model. You know what? Maybe it’s a big picture thing? Maybe I was too focused on crunching the numbers, and I missed some larger theme? Did Alan mention anything? Was there some industry-specific news, or some outside factor that I failed to consider?”
“Who cares, Vina? The firm made money! You’ll probably get a little static about it. But as long as our portfolio’s up, everybody wins. You are an asset to the firm. It’s not like you’ll be fired over this, so why don’t you forget about it, and come out with the team for celebratory drinks?”
“You don’t understand, Denny. It’s not about getting fired. Just making money isn’t…well…it isn’t good enough.”
I shook my head. If I wasn’t any good at this job, and I wasn’t any good at relationships, then what exactly was I doing with my life?
The ladies’ room in a male-dominated office is usually a great place to hide. From your coworkers. Your clients. Yourself. And I would have gotten away with spending the next two hours in there if Cristina hadn’t called.
“You know,” I explained to Cristina, leaning closer to the mirror to investigate the unfortunate state of my pores, “I’ll look far worse at fifty than my mother did. And that much more so than her mother before her. They were far too busy pulling the gum out of their children’s hair and the stains out of their husbands’ ties to think themselves into the wrinkles that I seem to be capable of.”
“I take it that your recommendation didn’t pan out,” she replied. “You’re always ridiculously articulate when you’re depressed.
No te preocupes.
They didn’t have Botox when your grandmother turned fifty. And by the time we turn fifty, they’ll have much better stuff than that. Maybe even in the form of a smoothie.”
I clenched the tip of my nose between a thumb and forefinger, and inched perilously closer to the glass. Two years earlier, that first hint of a laugh line had crept its nasty way down my cheek. Since then, I had developed the habit of experimenting with at least a dozen facial expressions before my mirror, to see which ones minimized, and which exaggerated, God’s way of keeping me humble. Sometimes I would scrunch my brows or pout my lips to examine the skin-shifting properties of my smile. With or without parting my lips, with or without raising my eyebrows. Other times I would pull in my chin to see how taller people perceived me. Intellectually, I recognized that this probably did me more harm than good. In the act of searching for an expression that minimized my wrinkles I was almost certainly generating new ones by the minute. Even if I was only headed out for dinner with the girls, I would devolve into some pimply, nervous teenaged boy, practicing my
best James Dean
before leaving for the junior prom.
It wasn’t really age that I feared, so much as the drying up of my opportunities. Kept to myself, such a personal peccadillo would have come to nothing. I would be no worse off than any man who checked for uncooperative nose hair, or winked and lusted after himself in his mirror, just to confirm that he’s still got it. The problem was that Pamela had caught me a year earlier flirting with myself, as she put it, in her bathroom mirror. A sensitive friend might have laughed with me, or joined in to make me feel less absurd. Pam, however, had taken every opportunity since to remind me of the incident. And that evening’s call-waiting bathroom sneak-attack was no exception.
“Hold on, Cristy…Hello?”
“Vina, you’re late,” Pam accused.
“That’s not possible!” I mocked her, “You haven’t made love to me in months!”
“Be serious, Vina. I’m talking about yoga class.”
“I’m not late, Pam. I’m going to the gym with Cristy at eight. And it’s only seven-thirty.”
“Yes, but I know how you are.”
“Oh
yeah?
How am I?”
“You’re fabulous. And also, you’re running late. I’ll be joining you ladies in yoga class. I…Ughh, look at me! I have no right to leave the house looking like this.
No right!
Dammit, my ponytail is lumpy. Now I’ll have to redo it. Anyway listen, we need to talk. And getting a cab at this time in your area is murder. So if you don’t leave now, you won’t make it in time to get a good spot or a clean yoga mat.”
“I know, I know. I’m just finishing up, umm, some paperwork.”
“Vina, stop seducing yourself.”
“What are you talking about? I’m in the office. I’m in my office. I’m not even anywhere near a mirror.”
She huffed impatiently. “Then why did I just hear a f lush?”
I looked up. Sarah was emerging from a cubicle behind me, heading toward the sink.
“Okay, fine,” I relented, “you win. I’m in the ladies’ room. I’m a geek who can’t stop blowing herself kisses in the mirror. And I’ll see you at the gym. At eight. But listen…I’ve had a long day, and I really don’t want to talk about Jon tonight.”
“Vina,” she replied, “I said that we had to talk. Not that we had to talk about Jon. Honestly, not everything is about you.”
When I switched back to Cristina, she had already hung up. I dropped my cell phone into my suit pocket and managed an unenthused smile at Sarah’s ref lection in the mirror. She pivoted to face me, and plunged her dripping fists into a scrap of paper towel. Then she tossed it over a shoulder into the wastebasket as she was heading for the door.
“It’s nice to see that you take your time on the job so seriously,” she stated smugly.
And before I could reply, she was gone.