Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (20 page)

I
met the man who would change
my life on an accidental date. Rick Schwartz (a movie-producer friend) and I had hatched a plan to turn Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of short stories,
Interpreter of Maladies,
into a movie. Rick set up a meeting with Teddy Forstmann, the chairman and CEO of IMG, the global sports and media company, who had deep enough pockets to fund several movies. I suppose to a different sort of person, his name would have at least rung a bell. Not to me. I didn’t know anything about the world of private equity, mergers, and buyouts. If I’d owned a bird then, I’d have used the
New York Times
Business section to line its cage.

I didn’t want to go to the meeting. I didn’t feel I belonged there. After all, Rick was the brains behind the operation. He was the producer, the guy who understood deals and investment and distribution. But Rick insisted. Mr. Forstmann might wonder why a Jewish guy from New York wanted to do a film about Indian immigrants. I’d be there to preempt the question.

This was in early May 2007. Although my and Salman’s attempt at reconciling had failed for good and we had decided—for the second
time—to divorce, we were still living under the same roof and trying our best to be civil to each other. So I was actually in a cab with Salman when I called Mr. Forstmann’s office to set up the meeting. Salman gave me a look when he heard me ask for “Mr. Forstmann.” “
Teddy
Forstmann?” he mouthed, all arched eyebrows.

Salman’s reaction made me feel like I should’ve known about this guy, Teddy. Later, Google filled me in. He had pioneered the leveraged buyout, borrowing money to buy companies, then refurbishing and selling them. He and his partners at Forstmann Little made a fortune doing it, and he owned a production company and had recently acquired the legendary talent agency IMG. He had dated Princess Diana. All of which sounded good to me, because we were trying to finance a movie.

The next day, I got a call from Teddy. We spent a while chitchatting. I remember thinking,
He can’t be such a big deal if he’s able to spend twenty minutes talking to me.
He was available to meet Sunday for dinner, which I thought was an odd day and time for a business meeting. “I’ll pick you up,” he said. I told him I could probably get there myself, thank you very much. “Were she alive, my mother would be upset if I didn’t pick you up,” he told me.

Whatever,
I thought.
He’s eccentric.
I’d just meet him and Rick at whatever restaurant Teddy chose. But two days before the meeting, I got a call from Rick. He had to be in Chicago for a movie he was producing with Tim Robbins. He couldn’t make it back in time.

“No problem,” I told him. “I’m sure we can reschedule.”

“No way,” said Rick. “Teddy Forstmann isn’t an easy man to pin down.”

“Then does it have to be
dinner
?”

“If he wants dinner, have dinner.”

From Rick’s urgency, you would’ve thought this Forstmann guy was the pope. I called his office to tell him Rick would be unable to attend the meeting. Unlike the few big businessmen I’d had brushes with before,
whose secretaries handled all logistical negotiations, when I called Teddy’s office, I got Teddy. I launched into my best impression of an important movie producer.

“Mr. Forstmann,” I said. “My partner is stuck on another production. On Sunday, it will just be me.”

“Great,” he said. “Where should I pick you up?”

Dinner was mostly a blur. We went to Il Cantinori, a quiet, candlelit Italian restaurant in the East Village. Nervous and tasked with convincing this guy to back us, I managed to inhale my scaloppine while talking a mile a minute about the movie. With every sentence that spilled out, it became clearer to me that the man to whom I was hawking this niche film was the type who’d sooner fund a Spielberg blockbuster. There was nothing about Teddy that read “indie” or “niche.” He used the word “neat” a lot. He seemed to me to be the epitome of the Establishment, the very white, very male majority who run corporations, the government, and the world. He wore a sapphire and gold pinkie ring with a crest engraved on the stone on the same hand as a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch.

Halfway through the main course, the conversation took a strange turn. “That house you live in, I only saw one doorbell,” he asked. “Do you live there all by yourself?”

“No,” I said, “I live there with my husband and stepson.” I still had my wedding ring on, not yet ready to accept failure publicly. What’s more, I had no designs on Teddy—dating any man was the last thing on my mind—and I did not want him to know that my personal life was anything but normal and happy.

“I thought you were separated,” he said.

He had read a snatch of gossip about my marriage in a tabloid, a small dose of schadenfreude for the casual reader but thoroughly gutting to me. Apparently someone at the Waverly Inn had overheard a conversation about my relationship with Salman being over. As Teddy spoke, my stom
ach dropped. Not only was I being reminded about my unraveling marriage, but the very private fact was also being delivered by someone I barely knew. Then, after a moment, I understood: I was on a date.

“I thought this was a business meeting,” I said.

“I thought it was odd that you were wearing your wedding ring on a date.”

“Date? I’m pitching you a movie!”

“My dear, it’s not that you aren’t bright and
quite
a talker,” he said. “But this is slightly below my pay-grade.”

I felt like a fool. I hadn’t understood the difference between an executive at IMG and the guy who
bought
IMG. Of course Teddy wouldn’t have met with me about my little project. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, sensing my embarrassment. “You should meet with Rob Dalton, the creative director of IMG, before he goes back to L.A.” The only chance I’d have to do so, he said, would be a few days later, when Teddy and Rob would be at Teddy’s “box” at Sotheby’s auction house. “I’ll be selling some paintings,” he mentioned offhandedly, as if he were telling me to drop by his stoop sale.

A few days later, I went to Sotheby’s to meet with Rob. Because I felt duped about the nature of my first meal with Teddy, before I headed to Sotheby’s I called Rick and read him the riot act over the phone. He insisted he had not sent me to the dinner for anything other than business reasons. I felt further reassured knowing there would be several people from Teddy’s office at Sotheby’s with him. I’d been to the great auction house once before with an art-dealer friend. We’d sat on folding chairs shoulder to shoulder with other dealers and spectators, watching paddles rise and fall. It was exhilarating, the slides of the great works up for sale flashing on the screen behind the podium, the auctioneer calling out the vast sums of money. I never did think to look up, above the action on the floor. But on the day I went with my assistant to meet Teddy and Rob I discovered that above the auction pit there are boxes where heavy hitters look on in privacy—people
who make the strivers downstairs seem like commoners. When I arrived, Teddy was observing an auction for one of his Modigliani paintings.

“Come on, Junior,” he joked many months later, “you were turned on by all that.”

“Not at all,” I said, doing my best impression of a wealthy dowager. “A man is much more attractive when he’s acquiring than when he’s unloading.”

The truth is that Teddy mesmerized me. I felt drawn, not romantically but almost anthropologically, to his presence. His success, mysterious to me in its particulars until later, provided an intriguing subtext to every sentence and every gesture, however banal. Sitting in that box with Teddy, Rob, and a gaggle of their colleagues, I felt like I was watching Muhammad Ali have brunch. At Il Cantinori, Teddy had given me his full attention. Here, he was still a gentleman and unfailingly polite, but he handed me off to Rob with a mere sentence, something like “Rob, this young lady’s got some big ideas. And a book about Indians in America.” Rob took it from there. I tried to explain why a book of short stories on immigrant Indians in the U.S. would make a great movie. But it was hard to be articulate in that atmosphere. Teddy, meanwhile, was busy offloading a couple of Modigliani paintings! I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. Who was this strange creature in black tasseled loafers?

I mentioned to Teddy that I was soon headed to L.A. to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day. How funny, he said. He would be heading to L.A. at the same time. “Would you like a ride?” he said, the way I might have proposed driving a friend upstate. I stared at him blankly, trying to figure out what the heck he meant. “On my plane,” he added, sensing my cluelessness. I’d already bought my ticket, but I couldn’t turn down a trip (my first ever) on a private jet.

Days later, I found myself at a heliport on the eastern reaches of Manhattan. The helicopter took us to Morristown Airport. When we landed, we exited the helicopter directly onto the small runway, then from there we
boarded Teddy’s Gulfstream V, a gift from the private-jet maker for buying, then reviving, the failing company in the mid-nineties. Just walked right up a small staircase and into the plane. No lines, no security, no taking off my shoes. It was exciting. I felt like a child getting on a roller coaster. Inside, instead of the rows of seats I somehow still expected to see, I saw what looked like a cozy living room outfitted with four big chairs facing each other, a small long bar with two crystal bottles of brandy and magazines, and a dining table with plush banquettes that seated four across from the bar. There were three flat-screen TVs total. Toward the back of the plane was another seating area—not the fully reclining seats some airlines sell to first-classers, but two couches that could each seat three and could collapse to become a proper bed, queen-size and plush. As Teddy got settled, I tried to play it cool. He had an apartment that could fly. I couldn’t help thinking about my mom’s first apartment on East Eighty-Third Street. The plane’s cabin seemed about the same size.

Over thirty years had passed since I’d lived in that apartment, since I had first arrived in New York from India, which now felt more like several lifetimes distant. That flight from Delhi to John F. Kennedy Airport, which had been my first, had brought its own kind of wonder. I had been just four years old when my grandparents had put me on a plane, alone, to cross several oceans and continents. A journey that would reunite me with my mother, whom I had seen just once in two years.

When my grandfather left me at the Delhi airport that October morning, I had on shoes, not a typical feature of my wardrobe at the time, and a bright-red wool coat with a hood and a big bow just below the collar. I had never needed a heavy coat before. My grandfather, however, had been to America and knew true winter. Fastened to the inside of my coat was a glassine envelope containing a slip of paper with the address of my grandparents’ house in Delhi—a sort of return address for me, a little red and brown package. Their phone number and my mother’s information
were also listed. I can still hear my grandfather reciting the phone number aloud, saying “naught” for “zero,” prompting me to repeat after him. I was excited. I didn’t understand where I was going or how long my trip would take. But I knew I’d see my mother again.

I flew Air India. The trip—the local-bus equivalent of air travel—took me from Delhi to Cairo, Cairo to Rome, Rome to London, and finally London to New York. I loved every minute of it. The plane’s interior was baby blue and the stewardesses—the supermodels of the seventies—were impossibly glamorous, wearing large
bindis,
bouffant hairdos, and printed silk saris. They strode the jetliner’s aisles, calling out, “Coffee, tea, juice!” in their poshly accented English. Between flights, I watched their saris flutter as they walked briskly down the jetways, each woman carrying a pink Samsonite beauty case.

I sat near the front of the planes, with the other kids flying solo. The stewardesses plied us with coloring books and little paper puppets of the airline’s mascot, a mustachioed maharajah wearing a red Nehru jacket. One older girl who made the trip with me through many planes and airport gates wore plaits in her hair, bottle-cap glasses, and a yellow plaid dress with a ruffle at the bottom and a bow at her back—very Holly Hobbie. Her trip was traumatic. At the gate in Heathrow, I watched her throw up on the back of her chair, staring as the vomit cascaded down the polyurethane. I wasn’t nauseous. I spent my trip marching up and down the plane aisles. I was excited to be flying in the sky, gazing at downy clouds outside my airplane window. I felt elated to be on my way to America, and to be reunited with that most glamorous and elusive member of my family, my mother.

I didn’t know then, of course, that the crossing from New Delhi to New York was more than a crossing of oceans and continents; it was a crossing of cultures, of lifestyles, of ways of being and knowing. I would be debarking in a New World. I would never be fully at home in India again
or ever fully at home in America. I couldn’t have looked back, even if I had thought to.

As Teddy’s plane rumbled into the sky and we settled into our chairs, the disparity between the lives we both had led really struck me. I had a sudden and strange realization: besides the pilot and two attendants, we were the only ones aboard. On that first trip with Teddy, the unspoken agreement of the commercial plane ride—talk minimally to your seatmates, if at all—did not apply. So our flight felt a bit like a road trip, just the two of us looking for ways to pass the six hours it took to reach LAX. We made a game of our conversation. We decided to go back and forth, sharing a story from each year of our lives. I began with my mother’s first divorce and my decampment, my first flight, and our reunion on Halloween night. I told him of moving back to India a few years later, leaving out the most personal details, and then returning to New York. I told him about moving to L.A., modeling in Europe, and my forays in TV.

I found myself, for the first time in a long while, recounting my life to someone far removed from it. He was not part of my ever-overlapping worlds of fashion, food, or TV (as many of my friends were). He wasn’t a writer, editor, or publisher (as many of Salman’s friends were). He was unaffected by the Kool-Aid I had so eagerly drunk. I felt liberated of the self-seriousness that occasionally afflicted my industry’s tales of TV shoots and casting calls. And unlike the Bombay-born Salman, Teddy had grown up in Connecticut. He listened to my Chennai stories with particular curiosity. I saw the strangeness of my peripatetic childhood and young adulthood reflected in his face.