BOOK OF THE WEEK: Archives

Romance Readers Book Of The Week
November 21, 2005
ARCHIVED FEATURE

DIAMONDS TAKE FOREVER
by Jessica Jiji

Genre: Chick-Lit
Format: Trade Paperback
ISBN: 10 0-06-075474-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-075474-7
Publisher: Avon (Trade)

Buy This Book:
Available at Jessica Jiji's Website

FROM THE BACK COVER:

Hot for the Rock

If her old-fashioned family had never left Morocco, Michelle Benamou would have been in big trouble, being almost thirty and nowhere near married. Luckily, in the hardy multicultural stew of New York City, she’s been able to follow her other dreams, working her way up from broadcast news producer to on-air reporter. Still, there’s something sparkly missing from the ring finger of her left hand…

Michelle thinks maybe her sexy, ex-Marine boyfriend can provide it – until Joe abruptly tells her adios. Her old friend Benny from the Bronx is an intriguing possibility – but he’s out in LA… and not quite divorced.

It’s tough for a sexy, very modern urban woman to follow the traditional calls of the marriage muezzins to matrimony – especially when the rest of her life starts racing rapidly downhill. Suddenly in desperate need of an affordable new Manhattan apartment (an oxymoron), and quite possibly a new career (a catastrophe), Michelle’s got other worries besides finding passionate love sealed with an “I do.”

But a diamond is just coal, after all, until it’s forged by fire and time. And sometimes something precious, strong, dazzling and enduring can turn up when you least expect it…

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK:

"Like the diamonds in the title, this novel has flashes of brilliance."

— Romantic Times

“Jessica Jiji's *Diamonds* rocks the Kasbah with this fun, clever take on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Loved it!”

— Liz Maverick, author of “What a Girl Wants”

“From page one, you're cheering till our heroine drops the wrong guy like last season's shoes, and then gets the man who will never go out of style. The ending leaves you waiting for Jessica Jiji's next.”

— Mary Castillo, author of “Hot Tamara”

"Diamonds Take Forever" is a Manhattan tale about a lovelorn radio reporter who is dumped by her good-looking ex-Marine boyfriend and gradually falls in love with the more thoughtful boy-next-door. Along the way, she cries a lot, takes risks at work and discovers her self-worth.

— Betsy Pisik, The Washington Times

MEET THE AUTHOR:

Jessica Jiji has worked for over a decade as news writer at the United Nations covering breaking international developments. Before the UN, she worked as a freelance journalist, including at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which serves as the backdrop for Diamonds Take Forever. While working for another radio outlet – called Undercurrents – she produced a segment which won a Polk Award for the reporter who covered it.

In addition to writing Diamonds Take Forever, she is the co-author of three feature-length screenplays: Miss Interpreter, a romantic-comedy-political-thriller about a young UN translator who accidentally stumbles on love and adventure; Queen of the CIA, a screwball comedy about the misadventures of a gay fashion designer recruited by the Agency; and I Married a Shaman, a romantic comedy about a young Korean-American woman whose white-bread husband takes up her mother’s traditional Asian religion – to extremes. Miss Interpreter was optioned under the original title “Force for Peace” by Lantern Pictures.

She’s held numerous other jobs less glamorous than out-of-work screenwriter, including garbage man (the preferred term is ‘sanitation engineer’), used-clothing salesgirl at a funky downtown boutique and barmaid at a dive in Chinatown.

She was born and raised in New York City where she stills live with her husband Jeffrey and their two sons, Jake Latif and Kevin Nassim.

READ AN EXCERPT:

“Blow job?” Cherise asked.

“I said boob job,” Wanda whispered in response, her soft tone an attempt to lower the volume all around. We were, after all, seated in the sandstone-colored waiting room of InSPArations on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“Up or down?” I wanted to know, taking a sip of decaffeinated green tea.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Wanda asked. “Reduction!”

“That’s not so bad,” I offered. Somehow it seemed less vain.

“It’s gruesome,” Cherise put in, no less loud than the pink streaks in her dirty blond hair.

“Shh!” Wanda urged. “She’ll hear you.”

The nearby beauty we’d been gossiping about must have done just that, because she suddenly looked up from her copy of Spiritual Makeover.

Silence reigned following the accusing glance, but only momentarily.

“I think it’s a Fogel,” Wanda ventured. Not only could she identify any plastic parts people might have purchased, but she could hazard a guess as to which doctor had provided them.

“You are incredible,” said Cherise, managing to exude both contempt and admiration.

“I,” Wanda replied with pride, “am a professional.” Like so many others capitalizing on the free-floating anxieties of New Yorkers, she was a consultant. An Image Consultant.

“Then again,” she said, wrinkling a brow that was about to be covered with 200 varieties of imported mud, “I’m doing so well I may put myself out of work. I lost three clients already this month.”

“Sweetie…” Cherise cooed reassuringly. We both knew Wanda was neurotically successful, but we liked her enough to assuage her fears.

“Why would they leave? You’re the best!” I reminded her. This was true; through a wardrobe overhaul, creative cosmetics and the occasional nip-and-tuck, Wanda could make Judge Judy look like this year’s It Girl.

“That’s the problem. They get beautiful, and happy, and before you know it they’re engaged to some perfect guy and I’m no longer needed,” she sighed. “It’s awful.”

“Doesn’t sound so tragic to me,” I confessed. Sounds more like a lifelong dream: Happily Ever After. The ring, the dress, the bouquet and, of course, the Prince. “I can’t wait until Joe proposes,” I added, somehow deeply embarrassed by the desire.

“Maybe it’s a Sharma,” Wanda considered, more interested in which surgeon had done some stranger’s tit job than my future husband.

There was a brief silence, until Cherise said, “These plants here look really thirsty,” and surreptitiously poured her green tea into a nearby ficus tree.

I was bashful about wanting so badly to get hitched with Joe, but not about my right to girlfriend counsel. “You guys!” I complained. “Do you think he ever will?”

“There,” Cherise said, stroking the leaves. “Is that better?”

Wanda was more direct. “I have my doubts…” she began.

“Joe’s alright and everything,” Cherise finally acknowledged. “But does he – ” she stopped herself, then started again “– do you really want to get married?”

“Of course she does,” said Wanda, who had already grabbed the gold ring, not with a bad-boy boyfriend but with a sincere suitor. At least one of them understood me. “It’s just that, well… Joe?”

Scratch that – neither of them understood. Neither of them saw that he was not just a ripped ex-soldier with slick Latino moves. Joe was a responsible adult who would make an amazing father. Okay maybe “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” might be a little awkward if Joe reached his goal of joining an anti-narcotics crime squad busting cocaine dealers at the source, but he’d always pay the bills on time.

A receptionist tiptoed over to the three of us. “Who goes first?” she asked.

“Michelle,” Wanda and Cherise replied in unison, both apparently having decided that I was the one who most needed to relax and clear my head. But their kindness seemed patronizing, and I felt myself growing defensive. Joe is a man of action! I wanted to shout over the synthesized bells chiming in the background. He’s probably going to surprise me any day now!

But it didn’t take days. The shock hit that very night.

We were under the stars at the moment of rapture, secluded in a spot he had carried me to while he jogged to the beat of his favorite military pep chant:

Running through the jungle

With my M-16

I’m a mean motherfucker

I’m a U.S. Marine!

We weren’t in 1970 ‘Nam, of course, but it felt nearly as dangerous after midnight in Upper Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park. And although he wasn’t packing – least of all the fabled assault rifle of his little verse – I felt absolutely safe in his arms.

And oddly shielded by the danger which kept most people out of the area after dark. Safe in solitude, Joe and I rolled together in our open-air bed. The familiar refuge of his embrace was all the more sweet in the strange setting. After muffling our achingly lucious moans, we savored that joyous interval of tranquility just after sex but before returning to the dull everything else.

I broke our sacred silence with The Talk – the one which starts, pathetically enough, “I’d just really like to know how you feel about me.”

“I love you – you’re my girl,” he said, rolling over and lying by my side as a car screeched around a corner.

“Like your girl as in you want to stay with me forever?” Colossal neediness prompted me to ask against the odds, since I already knew that none of his fabulous future plans included wedlock. And those plans were closing in: Joe was on track to graduate from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, making him eligible, thanks to his five years in the military, to pursue his dream career as a Drug Enforcement Agent.

But I’d never taken that goal too seriously, thinking he was just besotted with all those young-dumb-and-full-of-cum cop movies.

“Special Agent Utah!” Joe would lecture, reciting his favorite lines from Point Break in the shower as if he were speaking to Keanu Reeves instead of coconut conditioner. “This is not some job flipping burgers at the local drive-in! Yes! – your surfboard bothers me! Yes! – your approach to this whole damn case bothers me! And yes! – YOU BOTHER ME!”

If an overblown sense of drama was the key, Joe could lick all the cartels single-handedly, I was sure.

But it wasn’t only the desire to star in a real-life action thriller that made him long for the hot pursuit of narcotraffickers. His own father had been one, a Colombian money-launderer at that, practically cliché in the Latino neighborhood where he’d grown up.

“Working hard or hardly working?” José Castillo Senior would ask me, more Dale Carnegie entrepreneur than cocaine king, but enough of a lawbreaker to get deported. And to prompt his son, after Anglicizing the name he’d inherited, to join the military in the hopes of proving that he didn’t also get his father’s criminal DNA.

I always thought Joe, who wanted to “smoke those motherfuckers with serious heat,” was the real thug, but in a cozy, sexy sort of way. Sick, yes, but I’d seen too many tough-cop-saves-damsel-in-distress movies myself, and the best ones all end with a lasting romance.

“Michelle,” Joe began, and that was enough for me to know it was ending. I’ve never met a woman who couldn’t sense impending rejection – plenty who ignore their instincts but none who don’t have any – and there was no denying the cold look in his eyes. “I’m not into married life and two-point-five kids. If that’s what you want, you’re wasting your time with me.”

Sensing it all slipping from my grip, I closed my eyes in search of clues, because if I looked any closer at Joe, with his dark hair tousled and his face shadowed from missing the day’s shave, I would have burst out begging.

How did I get there? We’d left the party uptown, thought about taking the bus and then gave up when it never came, running across the park instead. I couldn’t run as fast as Joe so he’d picked me up and ran some more and then stopped to roll on top of me and take me to Heaven and then –

How could I get us back on that path? Realizing we’d been headed home, I conjured an image of the place. Our walls overflowed with decorations from his overseas adventures – flags from Indonesia, masks from Liberia, swords from Japan and Saudi Arabian plaques extolling the virtues of Allah. “Travel to beautiful countries, meet interesting people, and kill them,” Joe used to say in mock praise of his former career as an embassy Marine.

The rest of the place was stocked with goods he’d stolen from his father by way of flimsy revenge: a wet bar, all the stemware you’d need to serve any kind of drink, and an array of designer suits which Joe had altered to his size – slimmer at the waist, broader at the shoulders. It was one way of taking back from the man who’d left his only son with a family to support when he’d off and gone to jail. Joe’s sister Mariana was a single mother at twenty, so there he was, male authority figure to an infant nephew and the only hombre in his Mama’s life.

That was his other reason for swearing off marriage: he never, ever wanted children of his own. “When it comes to taking care of babies, you either do it or you do it,” he’d said by way of illustrating the narrow range of choices facing mums and dads.

Which wasn’t a problem for so long, because after all, he would change, right? I had been clinging to the one or two anecdotes I had heard – okay, only one – about a guy who pledged never to procreate but then magically decided to have children. It had seemed like a rational if remote hope until that moment. Realizing this, I backtracked, rampantly slandering any future progeny Joe and I might conceive.

Let the cavalcade of lies begin. 

“Oh, no, me neither – I don’t care about having little brats!” I assured him.

“Noisy obnoxious kids with snotty noses and dirty diapers!” Joe, withdrawing, remained silent.

“Besides,” I said, flailing for a way to bring him back, “marriage is for suckers!” Joe didn’t look like he believed me, but he looked like he might be willing to try until I whispered, “And anyway, it’s almost like the two of us are already married, right?”

Wrong. With that one little phrase – okay, with the whole fact that we wanted entirely different futures, but whatever – I cut my tenuous hold on him.

“I swear I don’t want children,” I babbled, but he’d probably stopped listening to my desperate attempt to recant all that I’d held out for just to keep all that I’d earned so far: the right to live in bliss with my chiseled ex-fighter whose soft side had made me fall so hard for him. “What’s the point of getting married? It’s only a piece of paper anyway,” I tried to declare, but it sounded more like a whimper.

God should have struck me down right there; any one of my friends could testify that – I hate to admit it but hey – almost more than Joe, I wanted the validation that would come from a simple band across my left ring finger. That magic amulet that could erase any other shortcoming. She may not look like a model, but she landed a man! With that ring, I could be me and be free, kind of like the way I imagined pregnant women never had to stress about looking fat. No more worrying about my middle-of-the-road looks – too ethnic to be conventional (a big shukran to my Moroccan father for that) but too conventional to land me in a Benetton ad any time soon.

I imagined that a wedding band would carry me that far, and if it came with a diamond engagement ring, I could always take solace, draw hope and find inspiration whenever the need struck just by looking down at my shining, princess-cut carat. It would be my Rosetta stone, a prism through which to grasp the world.

Maybe I was so eager for marriage because other remedies for my insecurity never seemed to have their intended effect. My sixties-hippie mom had tried hard to enlighten me about my intrinsic value but it never held me in thrall the way a guy did. I didn’t want to be the princess who found happily ever after in a feminist commune selling home-made pottery, or any other heroine from her edition of I’m Not Your Sweetie: Fables for Emancipated Young Women. Those stories only sent me on a life-and-death search for my hidden copy of Cinderella.

It didn’t help that from my father’s side I’d learned the Arabic version of Romeo and Juliet – Antar wa Ablah, two star-crossed lovers immortalized in stories and old Egyptian films.

That guy Antar would do anything for his babe Ablah, never retreating in the face of danger to prove he was worthy of her love even though his mother was a slave girl. Gangs of bandits, long stretches of desert, ingrained prejudice – none of it stopped him from pursuing his girl.

Antar oh Antar, wherefore art thou, Antar? I wondered.

Doubtless he wasn’t around Washington Heights, I realized as a police siren wailed in the distance.

If I could have relinquished my attachment to fairy-tale endings would I have earned one? Clearly, my devotion had scared Joe off. I was caught in a “catch-twentysomething:” approaching thirty and wanting a commitment and watching it recede every time I expressed that desire, until now it was gone.

Joe and I left the park with all of its magic and headed for the subway, gritty and familiar. He waited until the next night to officially dump me.

The act was marked by taking back the gold string of stars he’d given me three years earlier. It had come in a white box inscribed with a poem about “un coyer de las estrellas” which explained how with the necklace, I would be the envy of all women. Stupid magic jewelry had actually worked.

“It’s like you are killing a little bird,” I tried to argue as we sat together in our living room. That was us – innocent and singing and then over.

“Accept it, Michelle,” he said in a tone as flat-gray as his war-souvenir gun.

Pain outweighed shame and I curled up in the fetal position on the floor watching it all dissipate: the mornings of skipping out to work irrepressibly, the afternoon spent cleaning our Queens one-bedroom mixed with breaks as our tangled bodies tore up the sheets, the evenings of mad skating up Northern Boulevard.

The door clicked and I realized Joe had left the room. It was enough to make me pause from my mourning to gather my bearings. Smell of floor polish against my tear-soaked skin. Strange perspective on a room I knew so well: a cockroach-eye view. The faint outdoor buzz of traffic, generators and teenaged partiers that I’d learned to ignore. I knew I couldn’t stay there all night while my shut-off ex-lover slept alone in our former bed, so I reached for my lifeline.

Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell.

“It’s o-o-o-over,” I sniffed into the answering machine of my truest friend. “He d-d-d-dumped me.” I only recovered my breath after facing my feelings: “I think I’m gonna die.”

That got Marcus to pick up the phone. “You come to chez moi,” he said, right on cue. At least I’d secured a little TLC from my fairy godfather, as Marcus called himself – my gay magic angel complete with affected French phrases and a perfect salon tan.

That’s how I found myself heading to Manhattan in the dead of night. Riding in a taxi which as blaring Chinese opera, I was grateful that my sobs were barely audible under the whining twang of what was undoubtedly beautiful music if you’d been raised in Shanghai.

The driver headed toward the Upper Roadway of the Queensboro Bridge. It was the long way, I knew, but I didn’t have the energy to correct him. Instead, I took solace in the lights of the city ahead. Skyscrapers like icicles, cool and haphazard.

City of my youth. My father had decided on settling in New York because everywhere else he’d been they couldn’t quite deal with his Arabness, much less place him as a Moroccan Jew. When he introduced himself in the Midwest, people would nervously respond by saying, “Nice to meet you, Nejib.” In Manhattan, it was, “Nejib? What the hell kind of a name is that?” Finally at ease, he decamped.

I wish it had been so easy for me, but no such luck. Arabic names are beautiful – each one has meaning, with the effect that greeting someone amounts to complimenting them at the same time:

“Ah-lan, ya Jamila!” Hello, Beautiful.

“Ah-lan ya Latif!” Hello, Gentle. 

“Kay-faq, ya Hanan?” How are you, Comfort?

“B’khair, ya Nassim.” I’m fine, Cool Evening Breeze.

But if you don’t know the meaning, the sound isn’t always so pretty.

In my case, for example. “Good Tidings” would have been a fine middle name; unfortunately my father didn’t translate the Arabic on my birth certificate, so I was immortalized as Michelle Bushra Benamou. Bushra! Sounds vaguely obscene and primitive. I spent high school pretending the B stood for Betsey, worried that if the truth came out I risked being teased more than poor Jack Coff. 

But Joe loved my full, real name. Or maybe it was just the novelty that a Marine who’d been stationed in the Middle East could fall for a girl whose father was a “towel-head,” as rogue elements in the US military have been known to call Arabs.

As the taxi traversed the bridge, over Roosevelt Island with its bleak apartment buildings standing mute I the night, I wondered how my past with Joe could have led to this future.

On our first date, as we shot abandoned beer bottles with his air rifle on the banks of Jamaica Bay, Joe told me about how he’d once killed a man in combat. He talked of the moment of murder with great regret. “I watched him go down, and I had this terrible, terrible feeling inside, like I’d gone against God.”

Raised on my mother’s make-love-not-war ethic, I wasn’t impressed. That must have been why Joe wanted me: I didn’t worship his every move, like the innumerable girls he’d been with before.

But even though I hadn’t been quite as spellbound, I easily cast out my facile politics, and soon Joe and I became exclusive in that special age-of-AIDS way: no condoms.

How sweet it was! Coming home late after a four-to-midnight shift, he would strip off that grey uniform and lie next to me, tracing his fingers almost imperceptibly across my collarbone. A shiver would draw me half out of sleep, and I'd pull him close while he continued with the perfect balance between gentle and rough - un poco más suave, un poco mas duro. By the time I was wide awake and consumed by craving, he'd slide inside me like a heat-seeking missile, hitting the target so directly that we'd both explode with full force before lapsing back into unconsciousness. His wet dreams were my reality.

But my idle imaginings – that this would last forever – couldn’t penetrate Joe. Still, I figured the whole Secret Agent Man fantasy would eventually wear off, just like he’d grow out of his infatuation with Apocalypse Now, the one movie we’d seen so many times I can still recite even the surfing scene by heart.

“The horror, the horror,” I thought as my driver sped past Bloomingdales and down the near-empty streets in dead-of-night Manhattan. It seemed like a small difference at first – me hoping and dreaming of marriage and children, him single and free and averse to attachment – but like two lines moving at an angle the distance between us just grew and grew.

With the city lights burning through my tears, I tried to console myself that at least I might someday forget Kurtz and his men now that this phase was coming to a close. My heart was still rent, the warmth ripped from my bones, but as we approached the West Village, I began to feel the first glimmers of hope. I mean Coppola was brilliant, okay, but there are other movies in this world.

Just ask Marcus. He greeted me at the door with a copy of “Mr. Wrong,” an utterly flat Ellen Degeneris flick from the days before she’d come out as a lesbian.

That was after I’d screamed “Yo!” from the street to the upper floors of his stitched-together downtown triplex. It was probably the least creative way I’d ever announced myself. Owing to a long dispute with his landlord, Marcus has no buzzer for any of his three stacked apartments in the building. Normally I would say “Madame Butterfly,” if we’d discussed it of late, or “George Clooney,” if Marcus said he was cute, or “Stanley Cup,” one of the pen names he sometimes toyed with. But that night I was too spent, and nearly got hit in the face with the sock which careened out the window transporting the key.

Marcus handed me the movie after I walked up the sagging metal stairs in his pre-war, rent-stabilized building. It wasn’t a triplex in the ordinary sense, with spiral staircases between floors; in fact, this caked-over tenement climb was the only link among his levels. By dint of massive bribery worthy of a corrupt third-world official or first-world lobbyist, Marcus had become the proud lessee of apartments 4-C, 5-C and 6-C. Intimates, such as myself, went straight to the top.

But because of said dispute with evil landlord, who owns so much property in New York City he didn’t realize how much of one building Marcus was renting until it was too late, the exterior is in total disrepair. Other doors have been repainted, buzzers installed, pipes even modernized, but for all the upper-level C-line lacked in infrastructure, it more than made up in lavish trimmings. Once past the gray metal doors and piss-yellow walls, you entered museum-quality quarters, complete with soft lighting, smooth interiors, fresh flowers and fine art.

“Ellen looking for Mr. Right? Of course it’s wrong,” I managed to say as he popped in the movie. We had reached the inner sanctum of the top level – the home entertainment center.

“That’s for later,” he said, leaving the VCR off. Or was it the DVD? All of his electronic equipment was encased in a large black wall unit, with one central console hidden in the armrest of his leather lounge chair. With the push of a button, he set us in “intermission” mode, where the movie is paused, the lights go up slightly, and gentle tunes play in the background.

I settled back in one section of his sectional couch and soon felt surrounded by a music that didn’t feel like music at all, but transportation to another realm. Between the lateness of the hour and the strangeness of the circumstances, I hardly registered consciously that Marcus had put on an Um Kalthoum CD. Instead, the slow strumming of the oud and the famous Egyptian chanteuse guided me along in their minor key to an altered state where I was understood.

Not that I understood the lyrics; although my father is Moroccan, he was educated in France and long before I was born decided it would be wiser to pass along the romance language than the oriental one. But he remained fiercely loyal to his mother tongue, constantly asserting that Arabic has nuances and poetry and a mellifluousness that are impossible to interpret into the limited dialects of the West.

Papa insists on using Arabic expressions when those English or French fall short. If you ask him to do chores on a day when his soccer team lost he’ll plead, “Don’t chop onions on my head.” Or when he tries to brag to my mother’s friends about my energy it comes out, “That Michelle, she has pepper in her ass.”

Sometimes I have to agree that his Arabic phrases are more to the point than what we have at our disposal. Sitting all lovelorn and soaked in tears I just felt like a mesquina. The first time I asked Papa what it meant, he said, “Mesquina is ‘pobrecita’ exactly!” Translating with Spanish, which he’d picked up working in the back kitchen at Popeye’s when he first arrived in America. Between the two languages, I understood he was saying “poor thing,” but with real feeling.

Ana fi inti zahark, Um Kalthoum sang as Marcus fluffed pillows around us both. Exhausted beyond articulation, I skipped my usual tribute to the vastness of his entertainment collection, which could double bill the Diva of Egypt and the American Lesbian Comic.

Ya reit – ya reitnee moree ma habeit…

My mother always says she doesn’t like Arabic music because unlike Western compositions, it offers no harmonies. The strings, the voice, they all share the same plaintive cry. But that night I understood where the harmonies are born: between listener and performer.

“Wish I knew what she was singing about,” I murmured, although I sensed that I already did.

“Nah, forget about it,” said Marcus. A nervous dodge in his tone peaked my interest, and before he could stop me I was reading the translation from the CD liner:

I wish, I wish I never fell in love

I need to know you are upset

Or if somebody else occupies your heart

From my hopelessness you make me say

The absence will continue forever

And I ask myself what did I gain from my mistake?

Reading it as I listened to the poignant vocals, I felt terrifically sad and highly dramatic and absurdly synchronized with my surroundings, and I cried.

“Sorry,” said Marcus.

“No,” I whispered. “It’s perfect.”

“Michelle,” he asked gently, setting me off on a new wave of sobs not for the loss but for the tenderness that remained in my life, “What happened?”

It was the very question I’d been asking myself all night, but hearing it come from someone else startled me into defensiveness. “Nothing! We were the perfect couple.”

Marcus gave me a sympathetic but incredulous look, like you might if a child said they didn’t really mean to eat all the chocolate icing.

“He loved me and now he doesn’t,” I confessed. The phrase escaped through cut breaths.

Marcus was pushing aloe-treated tissues my way. He was particular about details like that – wouldn’t want me to scratch my face with harsh napkins and have to endure the added humiliation of tomorrow’s blotchy skin. I appreciated his thoughtfulness but was too submerged in sadness to thank him.

Instead, I gathered the clues. There had been signs before The Talk in the park. “We were at a party,” I began, “and this guy mentions something about going to Bali and Joe says, ‘You won’t believe the babes over there! Most beautiful women on Earth. God! I wish I was you.’”

“What?” Marcus was angry for me, justice personified and in no mood for neutrality. “But that’s not like him!”   

“Right! That’s not like him! Joe always loved me, me, me, and to him I was the most beautiful babe and I was his honey and I was his girl and now I’m not any more…” Another cascade of tears down my sorry face.

Competing with phantom women from Bali comes with the relationship territory, and I’d been through much worse without a scratch. There were the students at college, most of them 18 and me nearly ten years older and he my impressive, sweet, sexy man among them. The amazing trick was, never a problem. Never a problem with those girls, because they could be younger or speak Spanish like him or have some other star quality up their sleeves or dresses, but I’d always be a cut above them, with real tits and a professional career. I’d always be the one he chose.

In the military, he’d had any and every girl, and more before and since, but when it came to me the cheating stopped and the swaggering stopped because his heart stopped when we made love and I was his woman, the best thing in his life, or so he said, or so he meant, until it all died quicker than a cheap carnation the day after Valentine’s.

Exiled in Marcus’s plush pad overlooking Sheridan Square, I knew I’d failed by comparison with the coeds because their only concern was ordering the next Sex on the Beach, while I was like some dour ball and chain trying to pin Joe down in a domestic cell.

Poking holes in the soggy patches of my tissue, I struggled to explain. “We’ve been fighting lately, I guess you could say.” There was money – we had somehow developed the habit of arguing about money, absurd in a household where our combined rent was $650 a month and our incomes substantially higher. Groceries slowly separated, until I had my little shelf on the fridge for vegetable couscous and he the rest for his arroz con pollo.

The there was that book incident. “Do you think he got mad when I laughed at his analysis of Crime and Punishment?” Joe, after reading Dostoyevski’s epic for one of his undergraduate courses, had summed it up by saying, “It’s, like, good info for cops scoping out the Russian mafia here.” I’d giggled, but not with – only at – him, offering a kiss and saying, “You are so cute.” That was one of those times he’d gotten all tense about my spending habits.

Marcus, who had heard the blow-by-blow on that fight already, said, “Yeah, police in Brighton Beach debate Raskhalnikov before making arrests. And Native Son offers helpful tips on killing rats. Puh-lease.”

The literary reference would have been lost on Joe, and suddenly I wanted to trade all of my acquired knowledge for whatever it would have taken to be back in his arms.

Marcus saw that I wasn’t laughing, and added ever so gently, “Honey, he was obviously not the right one.”

“Yes he was!” I screamed, safe in the knowledge that his walls were well-insulated and besides, if a tree falls in New York no one listens anyway. “What do you know about anything? Were you there? He loved me. I loved him. I love him!”

After a few more seconds of ranting, I remembered that Marcus was only trying to help, so I leaned over to his chair and hit start on the DVD. The lights dimmed and the previews came up, while in the distance, I heard the automatic rumble of simmering popcorn.

As I sat numbly watching the movie, Marcus was working the phone. Who he could be calling at 4 a.m. was beyond me. “Here’s your penicillin,” he said finally, handing me the receiver.

“Hello?” I was too consumed by self-pity to care who he’d woken up, but managed to feel some comfort when I heard Isabelle on the other end.

“Michelle, Marcus told me everything.”

“How can this be happening to me?”

“Listen,” she said, and somehow I did. Isabelle has no life experience that I know of outside of work, which consumed her every waking moment, from medical school through residency to saving the world in the West LA clinic she runs now, but she spoke with the soothing authority that doctors use when dealing with the wounded and sick. “If it’s meant to be, I guarantee he’ll come back to you.”

“Really?” I was weak, exhausted, confused and happy. “You think?”

“I know. He definitely will. Definitely.”

Isabelle was brilliant. And Marcus knew it. Not that either of them believed for a second that it was “meant to be.” But her reassurance silenced some of the sobbing. Eventually, he and I decided that “Mr. Wrong” wasn’t worth watching, and my warm but tired host suggested that we turn in for the night. I knew there would be no sleeping, but my restlessness only got worse when he asked me, as he pulled a fresh sheet out of the closet, the question that had been on his mind the whole night.

“So, do you think it had something to do with that adorable Benjamin?”

Benjamin?

I didn’t even know anyone named Benjamin.

“Benjamin who?” I asked.

“Go to sleep,” Marcus replied compassionately.

Nice thought but in reality, impossible.

ROMANCE READERS CHATS WITH THE AUTHOR:

The Struggle of Gems, Princess v. Whore and Buddhist Philosophy: Romance Readers speaks to Jessica Jiji, author of Diamonds Take Forever

Why did you write “Diamonds Take Forever”?

After getting dumped by the love of my life, writing about the experience seemed like a more productive activity than just wallowing in sadness. I figured if I were going to suffer, it might as well be for art rather than over some hunky guy who broke my heart.

How much of the novel is based on your experiences?

Hmmm… well my husband – he’s the happy ending of course – has accused me of writing a documentary, but the answer to your question is not that much! Someone once said that the difference between life and fiction is that fiction makes sense. I’m still trying to get it together in life, but in the novel, all the loose ends are neatly tied.

The heroine in DIAMONDS TAKE FOREVER at one point divides all of her lingerie into two folders, one labeled “Princess” and the other “Whore.” Can you relate to those categories?

In literal terms, no, but metaphorically, definitely. ‘Princess’ here doesn’t connote royalty but rather that side of a girl that wants the finest things in life. And ‘Whore’ is just shorthand for hot.

You are a working mother of two. How did you find time to write a novel?

I wish I could say I did everything brilliantly, cooking organic food for my family every evening and volunteering at the local hospital on weekends, but reality is, again, messier. I wrote whenever I had a spare moment, usually late at night or early in the morning. Because I didn’t have much time, I had to be focused.

So how did you focus yourself?

This may sound strange, but I’ve been a Buddhist for most of my life, and having a sound philosophy and a practice has given me the energy and sense of purpose which underlie my ability to concentrate.

How did you get into that?

Growing up in New York City, I had the fortune of being exposed to all kinds of people, movements and even religions. I went through my different phases, but when I was 17, I learned about Buddhism through the Soka Gakkai International, decided it made the most sense, and never looked back.

Speaking of New York City, there are glittering scenes of Manhattan throughout the novel. Does urban life inspire you?

Walt Whitman said it best:

City of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one
day make you illustrious…
O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own, these repay me.

Why call the book DIAMONDS TAKE FOREVER? Is it all about getting an engagement ring?

On one level, yes: the heroine thinks if she gets engaged all of her problems will be resolved. But more fundamentally, she learns that diamonds don’t start out as beautiful gems, they come from coal which only turns precious after being subjected to enormous stress. Ultimately, her own struggles enable her to shine and be strong, just like a diamond.

What’s next for Jessica Jiji?

At this point that remains a state secret! For now, all I can say is that I’m working on another madcap tale of love. I’ll post updates on my website (www.jessicajiji.com), where interested readers can also contact me.