“What’s wrong with working here? You work here, lots of good companies and intelligent people work here. I think it would be good for him to come back,” Mrs. Jha said. “It will be different for him than it was for us.”
“He’s probably fallen in love with some American girl already,” Mr. Jha said.
At six p.m. the next Friday, Rupak got a surprise. Sitting at the bar at Stella’s was a woman not anything like what he had expected. Serena was slim and wearing tight black capris and a dark red silk shirt with thin straps that showed off a set of darker red bra straps. Her black hair hit at her prominent collarbones. She was fiddling with her phone, her face lit up by the blue light, when Rupak entered.
“Serena?” he asked, worried that she’d say no.
But it was her. And she looked up at him and smiled and stood and leaned forward and gently touched her cheek to his and said, “Rupak, it’s nice to meet you.”
She smelled nice and her voice was deep, like a smoker’s. He sat down next to her and looked down at his own cargo shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops and quickly motioned the waiter over to order drinks to settle his nerves. He asked for a beer and turned to Serena.
“I’ll just have a cappuccino, please. With skim milk.”
“Are you sure?” Rupak said. “It’s a Friday night, after all.”
“Thanks,” Serena said. “But I have to get to a dinner after this.”
Rupak already didn’t want her to leave.
“So you’re doing your MBA at Cornell?” Serena said once they were settled in with their drinks in front of them.
He had been rejected from Cornell. The first year that he applied, he had been rejected from all the Ivy League universities, and MIT and the University of Chicago. When he applied again the following year, he changed his approach and applied to NYU, Boston University, University of Michigan, and, what he thought would be just a safety school, Ithaca College.
So Ithaca College it was. With no fellowship money even though, from what he heard, almost all graduate students got at least some fellowship money. Rupak knew it wasn’t the most prestigious of universities, but by that point, he really just wanted a way out of India, so he didn’t care about the brand-name universities.
“I’m doing my MBA but I’ve always had a real interest in film. What are you studying?”
No part of that sentence was a lie.
“I’m doing my master’s in performing arts. I just finished class across the street at the Schwartz Center. Have you been to any shows there?” Serena asked.
Rupak motioned for another beer before he had finished his first one.
“Not yet. First year was really busy.”
Still no lies. He continued, “I write a little bit but I would love to move into directing. Does performing arts mean you’re an actress?”
Was that too obviously flirtatious? You could only ask pretty women if they acted, everyone knew that. But Serena laughed and said, “No, I don’t act. I tried for a while but it didn’t go anywhere.” She smiled.
They waited in silence while the bartender brought Rupak’s second beer over and poured it into the glass.
“Do you think you’re going back to India after this?” Serena continued. “I hear your parents are shifting to Gurgaon.”
Despite seeming uninterested, she seemed to be investigating his future plans, Rupak thought. It was a good sign. It was probably best to downplay his interest in film.
“I doubt it. I’ll probably get a job in New York. Maybe L.A. Investment banking. I’m also looking at consulting jobs. What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to go back to Delhi,” Serena said. “I produced a small play there this summer and it did pretty well. My sister and I want to set up a theater company. I really feel there aren’t enough non-Bollywood voices there.”
Rupak was worried she was going to fire back more questions about his professional plans, and he had no professional plans, so he pressed her to tell him more about her theater company. She had moved into the production side of theater after trying her hand at acting. It was hard, she said, doing theater in Delhi, in the shadow of Bollywood, but she didn’t expect to make massive amounts of money out of it. She and her sister were living at home with their parents—“My father isn’t doing too well at the moment so I think it’s nice for them to have us at home.”
“How did you first start acting?” he asked. “Did you also model?”
He noticed a message flash on the screen of her phone. Serena glanced down at the phone, smiled, pressed the button on the top right to darken the screen, and looked up at him distracted and said, “Sorry, what did you say?”
“How did you start acting? Did you also model?”
Suddenly an image of Mrs. Gupta passed through his mind. Had she also once been young and beautiful, sitting with a man, drinking a cup of coffee? Was Serena related to Mrs. Gupta through her mother? Were those her genes? No. He shook the image out of his head. There was no reason to ruin his evening.
“I did not model, no. Modeling and acting are not interchangeable, even though everyone in India seems to think that. I always liked the stage—even in school, I always auditioned for the plays. I never got the lead roles. I should have taken that as a sign.”
Serena laughed and Rupak used that laugh as encouragement to ask, “Are you sure you won’t have a drink?”
Serena looked into her coffee cup and tilted it toward her as if, perhaps, the answer lay beneath all the foam. She checked her watch, bit her lower lip, and said, “Sure. I think I can fit in a quick one. I’ll just have a glass of pinot grigio.”
Rupak’s phone flashed then, and it was his turn to look down and check his screen. There was a message from Elizabeth.
Drinks at Benchwarmers tonight. Come after your romantic date. See you there.
It hadn’t occurred to him that he might have needed to lie to Elizabeth about where he was going tonight.
Elizabeth always woke up early on Sundays, even if, like the previous night, they had been up late drinking.
“Sundays make me think of death anyway,” she would say. “If I slept for half the day, I’d go crazy.”
When he first heard her say that, he was intrigued but too hungover to ask more, so he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep while she sat near the window in the living room with a cup of coffee and a book. And it wasn’t just the hangover; in the image he had of her, there was no space for being anxious about mortality. Like so much else, it didn’t fit so he didn’t ask.