My parents lived with my father’s parents in Mulund, a once sleepy suburb of Mumbai that is now exploding with construction and an influx of residents. Our house was three stories, painted pink with balconies looking over a courtyard blooming with bouganvillia and frangapani, and shaded by a gulmohar tree with its flame colored blossoms blazing in the months before the monsoon. A fountain sent a fine mist into the air, even on the hottest of days. My uncle’s family lived there, too. The house never seemed crowded to me.

My family is traditional in many ways. Both my mother and father are educated, and my brother and I were expected to become professionals. A medical or engineering degree was to be my fate, so that I would be most desirable for a good match, but in this, as in the way my marriage came about, I was a sad disappointment.

Even early in my convent school education it was clear to my teachers that art was the subject at which I excelled. When it became disappointingly clear to my parents that a position in an excellent medical school would elude me and that no bridge I designed would ever be safe to cross, they allowed me to attend the lush green campus of the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai ,with it’s Victorian and Gothic inspired architecture and excellent reputation.

I had always had female friends. My closest was my cousin Padmini, the daughter of my mother’s cousin, with whom my mother had always been close. Padmini’s family was far wealthier than my own. Because our homes were far apart, when school was not in session we often spent many days at one home or the other. We were as sisters.

When we were at her home, Padmini and I were given much freedom. By the time I was in art school, though, we were ranging even farther. Padmini was never a particularly clever student, and she had not grown up to be a beautiful woman. But whatever she lacked, she made up for it by the force of her personality. When Padmini was in a room, it was difficult to notice anyone else. That is why it surprised me so when she introduced me to Darshan Tambe at an informal party of her friends, and he only had eyes for me.

There’s the first time I knew I had pleased my mother, Denise. This was after my braces came off and otoplasty had successfully pinned back my protruding ears. The big moment came after a childhood when I’d realized I was a work in progress and my mother only had time to flit in occasionally to see how long the unveiling would take. This time, though, she had arrived at the country club tennis tournament with selected friends in tow. And when I played like a wannabe Venus, I saw her lift her head in pride as her astonished friends sat forward. Stick a fork and me and declare me ready for consumption.

Then there was the moment that my father, Barney, whose photograph I kept beside my bed so I could recognize him when I passed him in the hall, came home from twelve straight hours at his office and told me to get in his car. We drove to the BMW dealership and he let me pick out any Bimmer on the lot while he reclined in his seat and chatted with Summer, his office manager, on his car phone. Over the years that Summer worked for him my dad, orthodontist to the stars, must have had a lot of chats with her, because about five years ago he got tired of that scene, divorced my mother, and now has chats with Summer every morning over coffee.

I’m thirty-two, but I still have the silver Z3 convertible roadster with black leather seats and spider spoke wheels that I chose that afternoon, and it’s a good thing I let sentiment rule. After we married I refused to let CJ sell my car. When almost everything else we owned was carted away, my roadster wasn’t worth bothering with. 

I know now that my father saw his gift as an investment in my future. No matter. At the time it looked like a loving gesture.

That moment in the solarium when CJ told me he was going to jail was not one I look back to with longing. I had known he was under investigation under California’s Freeze and Seize law, as well as various federal charges. I had witnessed the flocks of attorneys coming in for a landing, heard the accelerating squawking of his cell phone conversations. CJ was away more than usual, and even with my father as an example, I didn’t suspect infidelity. Despite every assurance he would easily beat these charges, CJ looked tired when he returned, yes, but never happy. If there was another woman, I had nothing to fear from her. But I had been completely clueless about how bad things really were. I had been so brainwashed by CJ’s opinion of himself that I believed he would thwart the little guy once again and walk away a free man.

Instead in the end CJ accepted a plea bargain and went to jail. As a real estate wheeler dealer, his crimes were technical, tricky and legion, but in the end mail fraud across state lines earned the largest chunk of his sentence. CJ was not young when I married him, but he had aged several decades by the time I divorced him. He will be walking with a cane by the time he gets out of prison. I will not be waiting at the gate to take his arm.

Tracy’s Story–to be continued

Some people make themselves heroes in monologues like these, but not CJ. He made himself the winner. I don’t think he was concerned about whether the things he did saved anything or anybody. CJ was all about getting there first. Enjoying the view from the top rung. Grabbing the gold cup from the grasp of the runner-up.

And me? Well, I cut my teeth on men like CJ. Driven men, not men motivated by lousy childhoods, but men who simply saw the world as one big football game, and the harder they had to push, no matter who they tackled and maimed on their way to that final touchdown, winning was the only acceptable reward.

So CJ looked normal to me. He didn’t come into my life with a laurel wreath on his head, and certainly not with anything resembling a halo. But I immediately knew him for what he was. Maybe it was the British bespoke suits and shoes. Maybe it was the Maserati that had been chosen to match the blue green of his eyes. Maybe it was the way he showered me with gifts, and never meaningless ones.

He rarely shopped himself, of course, but CJ took the time to hire the best personal shopper in the business, who took her time doing careful research. So while friends were getting trips to places they’d never wanted to go and jewelry that said nothing about them, I was flown to Jamaica to a thatch-roofed beach cottage and spa treatments in a grotto overlooking the ocean, a destination I’d yearned to experience since a sorority sister at The Beach had described a weekend there. And the ruby and sapphire earrings CJ gave me on the night we first slept together had appeared in Tiffany’s window and my dreams on the very same day three months ago. How CJ discovered this was a secret he took to prison with him.

The Feds took the earrings.

Back to that. CJ is in prison. For a very long time. That’s why he sat me down that morning at our home in Bel-Air. There are moments in everybody’s life that are as clear as if they’re on some automatic playback system, rewinding then screeching forward at random intervals and sucking you back into the scene as if it’s happening for the very first time. That moment when I took my second cup of coffee to the sofa in our sun porch and went back for CJ’s, making sure he was comfortable before he started in to whatever it was he wanted to tell me, I had an inkling that the next minutes might turn into one of those scenes.

Tracy’s Story–To Be Continued.