I slithered over the plush carpeting (which was far softer than any sweater I owned) and into the cubicle (which was larger than my bedroom). Lydia was sitting on the floor cross-legged opposite the mirror, absentmindedly examining her split ends. Her hair made mine (which had not yet been brushed) look professionally done; however, her teal-green Juicy Couture track-suit had seen better days, and she was in truly desperate need of a facial. Or Proactiv. Or a vat of cover-up.
Imagine how much money I could make right now with just one snap of my camera-phone, I thought, cursing my morals to hell.
Clinging to her wrists, neck and ears were at least three million dollars worth of emeralds, diamonds and pearls in necklace, choker, bracelet, ring and chandelier earring form. There was even a pearl-encrusted tiara threatening to slide off her head. Over years of working with people surrounded by yes-men, I had learned that the best way to get them to do something was to let them talk first. So I sat up, settled in beside her, folded my hands in my lap and waited.
“When I was fifteen, my boyfriend Angelo Damiano gave me a necklace for our one-month anniversary,” she began a few seconds later, while fingering the emeralds imbedded in a platinum, chain-link bracelet on her wrist. “It had this one really tiny emerald hanging at the bottom of a mad-thin five-carat gold chain. I swear I had to use a magnifying glass to find it. And it was probably just a chip of green glass, anyways. But it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me back then. I never took it off. I even slept with it on.”
“Lydia,” I pleaded, covering her hand with my own. “Things will get better. You had a fight, right?”
“You don’t get it.” She shook her head. “I trusted Angelo. I believed in my man back then. No question. It was me and him against the world. Things was simple. I miss that.”
“So this is about your high school boyfriend?”
“It’s about Cameron. I know he’s cheating on me, Monica. I just know it.” She stood up and confronted herself in the mirror. “But the messed-up part is that I don’t know if I really know it, because everybody has somethin’ to say. They all want to put in their two cents. And the media just wants to rip us apart.”
“That’s terrible, Lydia, but it’s also a fact of public life.” I borrowed a line from the boilerplate Steel Associates speech. “I’m here to help the two of you make sense of things, privately. But I still don’t understand why you’ve locked yourself in here.”
She turned to face me, her chandelier earrings shimmering at me as an echo of the gesture. “You have any idea how humiliated I am?”
“Oh, don’t even worry about that. There’s no paparazzi within five miles of the store. No one even knows you’re here, other than the staff and me.”
“It’s not that, Monica. I’m not humiliated that people will find out. I’m humiliated because I don’t even know if I trust my own instincts anymore, much less my man. There’s just too many people in this relationship, and there have been from the beginning. Me, Cam and everyone else in the world. I don’t even know who I can trust…they called my agent and my ‘best friend’ from my phone before they called you, Monica, I heard them. And they both saw my name on caller ID and didn’t even answer their phones. My divorce lawyer is the only person who would take my call. So why would I trust my own husband, or anyone else?”
“Lydia, I’m sure it’s not that bad—”
“He didn’t come home last night,” she cut me off, twisting an emerald ring on her trembling finger. “But instead of assuming that he was practicing late or staying at a buddy’s, my mind went to the worst place. It’s like I got no real feelings about my own life anymore. I’m just watching it all happen on TV and believing what they tell me, just like everyone else.”
She stood straighter before her reflection, as if she was only now recognizing the ridiculousness of the situation. Stiffening her upper lip, she yanked the tiara from her hair and handed it to me. I decided I would have to smuggle her home anonymously in my car.
“So then stop listening to your own hype, Lydia.” I rose to my feet and put an arm around her shoulder, noticing that I myself was no prize without makeup on a Saturday morning. “Go home and talk to your husband.”
She turned to face me with an almost apologetic smile.
“But I’m gonna have to insist that you hand over the rest of those jewels first.”
An hour and a half later, I was waiting to leave through the electric gates of Camydia’s private driveway. Harold, the paunchy former marine, stood guard at the foot of the mile-long driveway leading up to their Malibu mansion.
“What was it this time?” he asked with a bitter smirk and the flash of a gold tooth as I idled beside his white-shuttered guard stand. “She thinks she looks fat on her new album cover?”
“Something like that,” I said, rubbing my forehead to signal that I wasn’t up for chitchat.
“I wish I had her problems,” he whined. “Paparazzi been swarming all over the gates like monkeys this mornin’. I just turn up the juice on the electric fence whenever they get too close. Usually they read the signs or they hear it crackling and they keep their distance, but once in a while they try touchin’ it anyway. Then I get to watch ’em sizzle.”
“You’re living the life.”
“I can’t complain,” he acknowledged, then bowed his head. “You take care of yourself, Miss Gupta.”
“You too, Harold.”
As I watched her 30,000-square-foot, sea-facing faux-Spanish hacienda shrink in my rearview mirror I felt more than just pity for Lydia. Because at the moment, the people supposedly looking out for her were only doing it because she paid them, and she knew it. Not that we weren’t worth the money, that is. For my part, I had delivered her safely into the loving arms of her waitstaff, instructed them to keep her away from the morning’s newspapers and gossip shows at all costs, and convinced her to submit to the healing touch of the most-requested masseuse at Le Merigot spa. Normally, Stefan’s heavenly hands were booked up many months in advance. But twenty minutes after my call that morning he was making his way over to Lydia’s mansion for an emergency hot-stone treatment.
I deserved a facial and a massage of my own, I decided, and fished the cell phone out of my purse to redial the spa. But when I flipped it open the screensaver of Raj and I reminded me of what I really wanted: simpler times. Times like the beginning of my relationship with Raj—when things were new and uncomplicated between us—and he’d booked us a poolside couple’s massage as part of an overnight stay at The Mondrian Hotel for our one-month anniversary.
Rather than make the call, I made a right onto Pacific Coast Highway. I opened the sunroof and skipped through my presets on my radio, looking for something that might take me away. Naturally, Stevie Nicks was belting out “Dreams” and I turned it up, although it made me miss Raj even more.
four
“WHAT’S STRANGE IS THAT THIS DOESN’T FEEL ODD,” RAJ HAD told me across the twelve inches separating our poolside massage tables that sunny March afternoon a year and a half before. “Wouldn’t you have thought that since we practically grew up together, this would seem bizarre?”
“You only moved back from London two months ago,” I pointed out.
To be fair, we weren’t moving fast at all. It was true that in the first few years since he had left for college in the UK, Raj and I hadn’t spoken much. We had no reason to; he was one of a group of about twenty kids whose parents had settled in Orange County around the same time in the 1970s and formed a mini Indian community to keep us in touch with our heritage. Amid the series of dinner parties and weekend picnics and