First Dates and Other Forms of Torture
Saturday afternoon turned into Saturday night.
Date night.
Andy stood in her guest room at Cadell’s house and dressed in a pretty blue salwar kameez, the hem floating around her knees and the fabric billowing around her, and checked herself in the mirror one more time. She had parted her hair in the middle and slicked it back into a tight bun, low on the back of her head.
She looked like a good, obedient girl who liked to cook and stay at home. All she needed were smudges of sandalwood paste and red kumkum on her forehead to show that she had been to temple that day.
Yep, that girl in the mirror would never go out on a date with an American boy who was not a Brahmin, didn’t speak their language, was born under God only knew what kind of star, and had dropped out of college to become a musician in a rock band.
Not tonight.
Andy stripped off the salwar kameez over her head, nearly tearing out the seams where it was tight under the armpits in a desperate attempt to make her boobs look smaller, and stuffed herself into pantyhose and the tight, red dress. She released her hair from the bun and fluffed it. The tight coils had curled it into large rings.
Her face was too bare, too boring. She lined her eyes with more black eyeliner. After brushing more rouge on her cheeks and applying proper lipstick, she tugged her dress down, popped the price tags off the armpit of the dress, and took one more look.
There. Now, the girl looking out of the mirror at her—the one wearing a curve-hugging scarlet sheath that pushed up her boobs—that girl might date a rock star.
She slipped on a pair of gold high-heeled pumps—just gold fabric, not twenty-two karat gold which is nicer—and trotted down the stairs. Cadell said that he would meet her in the kitchen at six-thirty. He had taken Emily to a children’s play that afternoon for a few hours. Emily loved theater, movies, and music concerts, of course. They had already said good-night to Emily and given the nanny a list of their cell phone numbers.
She rounded the corner into the kitchen, teetering on her heels. “Are you here yet?” she called out.
Cadell was leaning against the counter, drinking a can of soda.
He had managed to tie most of his black hair back into a blue-tipped ponytail at the nape of his neck, though a few wisps straggled around his face.
And he was wearing a suit.
The black suit clung to his body, obviously tailored for his height and muscled frame. He wore a cream shirt, open at the neck, and dress shoes. Even his short beard was shaped in straight lines under his strong jaw and cheekbones.
Andy skidded to a stop. “I’ll go change.”
“Why? You look beautiful,” he said.
“I look like a tramp. You are dressed up to go someplace nice, and I’m practically half-naked. My parents would disown me if they saw me tarted up like this.”
He laughed. “They wouldn’t really.”
She glanced down at her legs, naked except for sheer pantyhose, and the too-tight, too-American dress. “They would scream, and they would yell about the dress. They would forbid me to leave the house and insist that I do pujas for days. Being disowned would take a little more.”
A little more, like dating any American boy, let alone a rock musician with tattoos and ear studs.
A little more, like wanting to marry one.
She didn’t even know where such stupid thoughts came from.
Cadell said, “I think you’re beautiful. Come on. Our reservation is for seven. Then I’ll do my set, and we’ll stay at the club for some dancing.”
So Andy got in the car.
Cadell drove them to a small restaurant that overlooked the ocean. Their table was right by the enormous plate glass windows, and moonlight sparkled on the tops of the waves outside. “This is lovely.”
The waiter held her chair for her as she sat down, grateful that the dress stretched so that she didn’t split out the back of it over the butt.
Ah, karma must be waiting to do something truly spectacular to Andy, instead. The suspense was killing her.
The waiter brought the menus, and Andy sighed with relief that there were two vegetarian items. She hated making a fuss in a restaurant, asking for a salad without the chicken or whatever was on it. Pasta primavera was always an excellent option. Cadell ordered a broiled chicken something.
And then he asked, “Do you want some wine?”
Nothing came out of her mouth. She opened her lips and willed herself to say something, but nothing happened. Her usual response seemed stupid: Dude, I’m a liver transplant surgeon. I’ve seen what cirrhosis looks like.
They both knew that one glass of wine for an adult would not cause cirrhosis in an otherwise healthy liver. It was fear for fear’s sake.
“White, because I got chicken and you got primavera?” he asked, looking over a wine list. “Or are you on call tonight? You’re not, right?”
“I’m not on call,” she said. Hey, she said something. That was a start.
She flipped open her napkin and laid it on her lap, right on top of the skin-tight red dress.
You know what? She wasn’t pathetic little Andal who wore a salwar kameez to formal dinners and who worried about what kind of gold her jewelry was made out of, lest some three-headed echo chamber think that her jewelry was not nice enough.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she was the girl in the bright red dress who was dating a rock star. “I would like some white wine.”
“Great. What kind of wine do you like?”
Rats. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“How about a Moscato?” he asked. “That’s light.”
“Light sounds good.” She didn’t want to get drunk.
He ordered a bottle from the waiter and turned back to her. “So I assume you usually don’t drink.”
She’d had half a martini once during her undergraduate degree. “I’m on call a lot, and I don’t drink around my parents. They never drink. I don’t think they’ve ever had alcohol.”
Cadell said, “You’ve got to try some things in life.”
“Oh, they don’t. They live in some alternate reality where if they do everything the way that their parents asked them to, then nothing bad will happen to them. It’s essentially a form of ancestor worship and magical thinking. They live in mortal fear of doing something that has not been done a thousand times by a thousand generations before them. If they knew that I was out on a date with you, or with anyone at all, they would have a fit. When I got home, my mother would be in hysterics, and my father would be praying over at the puja box until I promised that I would never do it again.”
Cadell lowered an eyebrow, but he smiled. “I cannot imagine anyone caring where I went until whatever time at night.”
“It’s kind of nice knowing that someone will notice if I am kidnapped or die.” It was kind of stifling knowing that eyes were always watching her.
“You mean that this was when you were in high school or something, right?”
The waiter poured the white wine into Andy’s glass, and candlelight flickered in the pale gold wine. She waited until the waiter left. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I’m staying at your house so that they never need to know about this.”
He picked up his glass and swirled the wine inside, staring at it. “But how would they know?”
“Because I would get home late.”
Cadell looked up. “Your parents live with you?”
“No, I live with them.”
He set the glass down beside his plate again. “But, you’re a doctor. And you’re twenty-six years old.”
“Yes, and I’m Indian, so I live with my parents.”
“It’s a cultural thing,” he said.
“Ah, now you understand.”
“Have you ever lived someplace else? A dorm?”
“Sort of. When I was in medical school, I lived in an apartment near Columbia University, but my mother lived with me to take care of me.”
He blinked, his thick eyelashes closing over his dark eyes. “So you’ve always lived with your parents.”
“But I didn’t live at home.”
“I’ve been on my own since I ran away from home when I was eighteen.”
“But you went to college. There must have been tuition.”
“Financial aid and what I had left over from performing when I was a kid. By the time I left college, my whole family was gone.”
“So that’s why you didn’t have parents and aunts and cousins descending on you to convince you that dropping out was a bad idea.
“I should have an uncle out there somewhere, but I’ve never met him.”
“I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine life without a big Indian family around me all the time.”
He shook his head. “Emily is the only family I have.”
She touched her chest. Her boobs swelled above the fabric, unnaturally smashed together by the dress. “My heart is breaking for you right now. I want to take you home to my mother and let her feed you.”
He laughed. “I think I’d like that.”
“First, I hope you like it spicy, and second, that’s more of a threat than it sounds. If she knew that she had a skinny young guy coming over for dinner, she would cook for two days. If you didn’t eat everything on the table, she would look passive-aggressively sad until you did.” She slapped her own, ample thigh. “Trust me on this.”
“Is that why they’re trying to marry you off? So that your mother will have a hungry young man to cook for?”
Andy looked down at the napkin in her lap for a moment. “I don’t want to talk about my family anymore. I want to have a real date with you so that my judgment won’t be clouded about important things.”
Cadell leaned his elbows on the table, and his intense expression looked like she was the most fascinating thing in the world. “Like what?”
“Like important things.” She toyed with her fork. “Many important things.”
“There are lots of important things in life,” he said.
“This is my first real date.”
“We went on a pretend date before.”
One that had ended with a very real kiss. “I don’t know what to do on a real date because I’ve never been on one.”
“And I don’t know what to do on a real date, either.”
She didn’t believe that. “Don’t you date a lot of girls when you’re on tour?”
His mouth scrunched over to the side. “It’s not really like dating.”
There was more to that answer, but Andy decided that she didn’t want to know how girls that he met on tour were different and it wasn’t really like dating.
“And this is the first glass of wine that I’ve ever had.” She sipped. The astringent taste numbed her tongue. “And it’s the first time I’ve ever worn this dress, and it’s the first time that I’ve ever been out when no one will ever know what time I get into my own bed tonight.”
Cadell picked up his wine glass and held it aloft. “To new things.”
She clinked her glass against his, careful to barely touch it because she had no idea how sturdy those fragile-looking glasses were. It would be just her luck if it shattered in her fist and she ended up in the ER, probably with the kind of nerve damage to her fingers that would end her career as a surgeon.
The glasses touched, and the crystal sang.
Nothing shattered.
Nothing was irrevocably ruined forever.
The chime of the crystal rang in the air for a moment.
Andy said, “To new things.”