Love Has Reasons

Chapter 2: Monica-2

“When are you going to find a nice boy and settle yourself down?” she asked. It was late in the morning after the drag show at The Crossing, and Danny and Monica had sauntered up the shady lane to the Bombay Buffet, their favorite lunchtime hangout across the street from the New Mexico state capitol.

Danny was not the only gay lawyer at the firm, but one of the main reasons he was Monica’s favorite was the fact that he made no bones about it. He wasn’t one of those “My s*x life is my business” closet cases like Lando in acquisitions, who might as well have worn a rainbow flag Speedo and a sailor’s hat to work for all the mystery in which his “s*x life” was shrouded. Nor was he one of those grown-ass people who acted like it was any kind of reasonable to expect his co-workers to believe that he shared his one-bedroom stucco bungalow with a platonic pal like Jane in government affairs, who sported a bow tie and a crew cut and persisted in introducing Mary-Elizabeth as her “roommate” even after they returned from a “vacation” to Kazakhstan with two toddlers that Monica suspected they hadn’t picked up as a last-minute souvenir set at the airport gift shop.

No, Danny was wide open. Suitably “proud,” even if he didn’t wear a rainbow tie or plaster his office walls with black-and-whites of tasteful torsos (despite Monica’s repeated suggestions that he do so; her husband spent nine months a year in Hyderabad, after all). He talked freely about dating men, brazenly cruised tourist twinks in the Plaza, and had confessed to Monica the smoldering crush on Schwartz that had burned white-hot throughout their Ann Arbor days. She had naturally acted suitably honored to receive such a “confession” and pledged complete discretion, as she had once done to a heavily inebriated Schwartz when, days before Danny’s arrival at the firm, he had spilled to her the genuinely shocking beans that, shortly after the arrival of Little Schwartz Number Two, when Papa Schwartz still retained something of an athletic physique—that being the most genuinely shocking element of his revelation—he had allowed Danny to consummate his crush. Drunk and nostalgic, Schwartz had spared Monica few of the vivid details, and her first meeting with Danny had been clumsy. She saw his huge body naked before her as if she had X-Ray vision, and felt like she was meeting a porn star.

A lot of water had run under the bridge since those days, of course, and now she just saw her doofusy officemate across the table from her. She was well accustomed to the size and the boom of him, obviously, and saw around his outward doofusness, too. She saw the command he had of what could have been an unwieldy body, the gusto with which he ate and drank, the dedication he brought to his work as well as the abandon with which he cannon-balled into his time away from the office. She saw, too, the fine material and the flattering fit of his tailor-made trousers and the bespoke elegance of the gleaming silver cuff around his wrist; she’d driven his plush BMW and enjoyed cocktails beside his sapphire hilltop pool. He was burdened neither by budget nor by the vaguest ostentation. His needs appeared few and met, his wants embraced and indulged, he exhibited no hang-ups about his sexuality and he hesitated neither to be assertive nor sensitive as a situation might warrant. Not to put too fine a point on it, he would be the perfect husband for Ashok.

“Oh, Monica,” Danny said with a scolding chuckle. “You’re worse than my own mother.”

“Well, you’re not getting any younger,” she teased.

“I’m thirty-two.”

She pulled a concerned face. “As old as that? It’s worse than I realized.”

“Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with your own son?” Danny asked, swiping half a chickpea samosa through a puddle of vindaloo sauce before popping it into his mouth.

“Funny you should mention him,” Monica said.

“Yeah, I’m a regular Shecky Greene.”

“You haven’t met Ashok, have you?” she asked.

Danny shook his head. “I’ve not,” he said. “You have three kids, right?” Monica nodded. “I haven’t met any of them. Wait…has your daughter come to the office before? Maybe I’ve met her…”

Monica waved the specter of her two older children away. They had spouses—well, Anjali had a boyfriend, anyway—and could fend for themselves. They were out of the house, at least, which could no longer be said of Ashok, who’d been getting up to all sorts of shenanigans since The Big Break-Up last year.

“Yes, maybe,” she said. “She’s got a boyfriend.”

“Good for her?”

Monica shrugged. “He’s alright. Ashok, on the other hand, well…” She raised a suggestive eyebrow. “He’s quite single. Much like yourself. And sweet as pie. Much like yourself. And very handsome.”

Danny waited two beats, then three, before venturing “much like myself” with a laugh.

“Naturally.”

“And you were thinking…?”

“It’s a good thing you’re a lawyer and not a detective, is what I was thinking,” she said, signaling to the beer-bellied young proprietor that he should refill her chardonnay.

“Shouldn’t you be looking for a suitable young wife?” he teased. “You didn’t arrange a marriage for him when he was a little boy?”

She pulled another face, this one with a you’re-not-so-clever tongue stuck out. “It fell through,” she deadpanned. “Because what, you’ve seen one Mira Nair film and you’re going to tell me how it is in Indian culture? You know the ‘old country’ I come from is Albuquerque, right? If you’re fishing for a dowry, you can forget it.” They laughed. “I was this child’s mother, don’t forget. Dear, they practically brought him to me in the hospital swaddled in gold lamé—we gave up on a ‘wife’ for Ashok a long time ago. But a mother can never have too many swell son-in-laws,” she said. “I’d rather grow old by your pool than in some nursing home.”

Danny laughed again. “Can I meet him before the wedding? At least see a photo? I’m not committing to anything until I get a look under any veil.”

Monica’s eyes brightened under her bouffant bob. “So you’ll let me set you up?”

“How tall is he?”

“I don’t know. Five-eight?”

Hot dog. “What the hell,” Danny said with a shrug. “But lunch is on you.”

Monica shook her head. “Guess again,” she said. “I said no dowry.”