* * *
—
“YOU’VE BEEN SPOTTED,” Karan said, glancing up at the rearview mirror. “Reacquaint yourself with our friends, Tina. We’ll see you later in the day.”
With that, the Jaguar pulled away and Tina looked up to see the two men walking toward her. The one with the cigarette in his hand, she saw now, was unmistakably Rocco Gallagher. Could she retreat back into her cottage, pretending she hadn’t seen him? She had to; she hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet. She squinted her eyes, as if the sun was blinding her, and nodded at them the way, she imagined, one would nod at a stranger in the distance. Escape at hand, she took two confident steps backward, and fell over a potted bougainvillea. The pot broke into pieces and Tina landed squarely in the spilled soil, the crushed bougainvillea nestled into her armpit.
* * *
—
TINA HAD LAST SEEN Rocco two years ago in London when he had slipped out of her room at the St. Martins Lane Hotel early in the morning.
She’d agreed to meet Shefali in London on her way back to New York after a weeklong business trip to Bombay. By coincidence, Shefali had been on her way to Nice to partake in a vintage car rally through France. Tina had worked the whole flight to finish a partnership proposal for an ad agency in Bombay—this had also never come to fruition. The VP of the ad agency gave birth to twin daughters and Tina never heard from her again—and hadn’t slept. She’d landed at Heathrow Airport early on a Thursday morning and gone straight to the hotel in Leicester Square, stopping only for a sausage puff and a cup of coffee. She fell asleep for the remainder of the day, waking up at dusk to a slew of text messages from Shefali wondering where the hell she was.
Shefali was waiting for her at the bar downstairs with a very handsome white man and a long-limbed Pakistani-British woman who was a comedian of some repute on her way to do a stand-up set in Covent Garden. Tina wondered, as she often did, where Shefali found friends like these. She never saw Zahra, the stunning Pakistani woman, after that night but the handsome man turned out to be Rocco, from Australia, lately of Bombay, who Shefali had met at the previous year’s car rally in Lausanne. The rally kicked off at the Château d’Ouchy, and Shefali and Rocco had shared the driving of a small white and green Morris Minor convertible for the first twenty-four hours and hit it off enough to meet again for a pre-rally drink in London. Two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc later, Zahra the comedian had to head to her show and Shefali wanted to go with her. She asked Tina to come along but Tina said she was too exhausted for stand-up comedy and begged off, staying at the St. Martins Lane hotel bar with Rocco for another drink. From there, on Rocco’s recommendation, they ended up at the Boheme Kitchen and Bar sharing a French onion soup and a porterhouse steak. Rocco had ordered, and Tina remembered how odd she found it that he wanted to share soup so soon after meeting.
Tina also remembered how much he made her laugh that night, how little he was interested in kissing her, and how interested this had made her in kissing him. After dinner, they had walked past a man on the sidewalk auctioning off a box set of perfumes, a cluster of women gathered around him shouting out numbers. Rocco had rushed up to the group and shouted out ten pounds, twenty, twenty-five, all the way up to fifty, at which point he won the box set of perfumes and handed it to Tina as a gift.
“To remember this magical night,” he said, right as a double-decker bus turned a corner inches away from them. “May every London cliché come true.”
Tina put the perfumes in her purse, quite charmed by this impulsive bidding, but when they went back down the same street a little while later, they saw the perfume seller sitting on a sidewalk with the other people who had been bidding, all drinking beer.
“I was cheated. They were all in on it. Come on,” Rocco said, grabbing Tina’s hand. “That’s not a gift I can give you so that means we have to give all three bottles to strangers. Let’s go.”
Tina remembered now that Rocco had pulled her purse off her shoulder, opened it, and looked for the bottles. Inside her purse he found a small, red mesh bag that contained her makeup.
“You don’t need makeup,” he said. “Throw this out.”
“Don’t be an asshole. All men think they don’t want a woman with makeup but that’s just because they’re too dumb to see well-applied makeup. It’s the best trick we play on you,” Tina said. “Give my purse back.”
“You carry vitamin D pills around?” Rocco asked, taking out the white pill bottle and rattling it around.
Tina pulled her purse back, took out the three bottles of perfume, and handed them to him.
“Do what you want,” she had said. “I’m going back to my hotel.”
“No, wait. We bought these together, we have to get rid of them together. Don’t get mad so easily,” Rocco had said and for whatever reason, probably the stubble on his face, Tina had agreed.
They gave one to a woman in a tight dress standing in line outside a club. They gave one to a woman smoking a cigarette by herself outside Wagamama. And for the last one, Rocco flagged down a taxi, got in, asked the taxi driver if he had a wife, gave him the bottle to give to his wife, and got back out. A taxi driver in New York would have cursed him for that, despite the free perfume, but this British taxi driver apologized for some reason.
From there, they had gone to another bar—she couldn’t remember which one now, but it was near Seven Dials and it was in a basement—and they had each done a bump of cocaine off a key, had another drink, talked for what seemed like hours, and ended up back in her room at the hotel because Rocco was staying in a hostel in Brixton, since he had spent all his money on nonrefundable accommodations along the vintage car rally route and didn’t want to take a bus or taxi all the way back out there that night. They hadn’t had sex, of that Tina was sure. They had kissed a bit, nothing spectacular, and both fallen into bed and asleep before any clothes could come off. No, she was forgetting a detail. Soon after they had fallen asleep, she had woken back up and walked downstairs in search of a McDonald’s, in desperate need of chicken nuggets. She hadn’t found any and had returned to the hotel room and looked at Rocco, marveled at his jawline, and fallen asleep again.
The next morning, in a daze, she gave Rocco her number and told him it was a pleasure meeting him and then felt relieved when he left her alone in the big, fluffy white bed with nothing to do except order room service and laze around until she had to meet Shefali for lunch. He never called. The night had lingered in her memory and from time to time she googled him. She had been fascinated by him, his way of inhabiting the world, so at ease. How he’d traveled solo through Brazil and Cambodia, how he’d been in a motorbiking accident in Ubud and stayed there for two months recovering. How he’d moved to India.
Back in New York City, she had met Andrew, who was everything Rocco wasn’t, and she found that safer, if duller. On a real estate site, Andrew had showed her a listing for a “compact” two-bedroom house on a quiet lane in Portland. It had a small front and backyard, and the current owners had a bright yellow plastic swing and slide set up on the grass. In the pictures, the skies were blue and the kitchen counters were clean and Andrew had said, “I should be able to afford something like this in the future.”