30 Love, page 10
Duvall gives all of us the rest of the day off after Mrs. Bishop leaves. His net worth just blew north of seven figures, so I suspect he is about to go and do something outrageous with his wife to commemorate the occasion. I am just so glad that I was fortunate enough to ride this situation out. My annual salary was hardly impressive, but a windfall like this makes it worth all of the headaches and the move from New York to Atlanta.
And all of this couldn’t have come at a better time. I don’t think that I have ever been this high off the ground before, and all I want to do is go home so I can shout my brains out without scaring the hell of those standing around me. Even Akil is not trying to linger. I have no idea of where he’s headed, but he ducked out so quickly that I am guessing I will have an anecdote coming from him the next time we meet up.
When I arrive at Lailah’s house, she comes to the door dressed in a beautiful and stunning black dress. She is so fine that I have to do a double take. From her small purse to her heels, she looks as if she is about to go hit the red carpet at an awards show.
“Where are you headed?” I ask, holding on tightly to my good news like a child afraid of losing a helium balloon to the wind outdoors.
“This is the night I am supposed to meet up with Langston. Remember?”
Hell no, I don’t remember, but I play it cool. I’m supposed to be happy about all of this, right?
“It must have slipped my mind.”
“I’ll only be gone a few hours, but when I get back, I’m going to rub your feet and grant you any one wish.”
I nod, still unable to believe that she’s going to go through with this. I feel like such a fucking fool. Even as I look at her, I realize I haven’t even seen her in this outfit before. I hope to high hell that she didn’t go out shopping for something to wear just for this dude. My insides are starting to boil over with jealousy, and I’m afraid that I’m going to get seriously ethnic up in this piece and say something I can’t take back.
“Have a good time,” is all that I can muster.
I walk her outside and give her a kiss on the cheek before hopping in my Jeep and pulling out of the driveway. I am not even down the street good before I have picked up my phone and started searching for Jasmine’s number.
As I pull up Jasmine’s number, I realize that I am still too heated to place the phone call. I drive straight home and sit alone in the darkness of my increasingly cramped apartment. I try to temper all of the anger and frustration I am feeling with all of the wonderful moments that Lailah and I have recently shared. A few times I am able to calm myself down and remind myself that this closure that she is so desperately seeking is a good thing for the survival of our marriage, and then just as quickly as I had managed to calm myself down, I think to myself, fuck that shit! No dude should have to put up with this. What kind of sucker do I have to be to let some other dude take my girl out on a date? Seriously. I must be out of my fucking mind. Part of me even considers trying to find the restaurant they are meeting at—if they are even meeting at a restaurant. I never asked her where they were going. They could very well be meeting up at his hotel to get one last fuck in.
Now I’m steamed. It takes everything in my body to keep from screaming aloud in the room. I am too dignified a brotha to trip out like this, I tell myself. I just got news of the biggest paycheck of my life, and I am only thirty years old. I don’t have to sit around taking this kind of shit off of anyone, especially the woman I am supposed to marry, the woman who has been my best friend in the world since the beginning. Hell, I still have enough swagger to pull someone. If I really wanted to, I could probably call Jasmine and she would come over here and hook a brotha up and make him feel like a million bucks—or at least half a million bucks.
I go to my bedroom and lie down on my bed. The darkness of the room feels like the room is closing in on me. I’m having a thousand thoughts a second, and I can’t seem to steel my mind. Maybe I should hold off on telling Lailah about the money. At this point, I’m not sure she deserves to even get the news for a while. Then I realize that she is the only person I would have wanted to celebrate this information with. That must be what she was referring to before about not wanting something to happen that would fuck up our ability to be best friends.
I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I actually consented to her going out with him. Langston, whatever the fuck his last name is. Who the hell does he think he is that he can just come in out of the fucking blue and scoop up my girl for the evening. No respect at all for me. I should have agreed to go out with them to the dinner. Naw. Fuck that. I’m not trying to be a third wheel in a dick-a-thon.
After I finish being mad at her and then him, I get mad at myself for a good hour, before finding my way back to her. The reason I am so angry and hurt is because she looked so good when I saw her last. She was perfect, amazing, capable of taking my breath completely away and leaving me to die of suffocation. I am not even saying that if she had looked “to’e up from the flo’ up” that I would feel any less hurt.
Once I have taken all that I can take of this feeling, I grab my phone and call Jasmine. She doesn’t answer, but I leave a brief message for her to call me when she gets a free minute.
I head to the kitchen and pop open the champagne I had bought for the special occasion and take it straight to the head. I polish off the bottle and lie down on my bed. The room swirls around me, and within minutes, I pass out.
When I wake up, I look at my watch. It’s nearly eleven. I pick up my phone from the night stand and immediately check for missed calls and text messages. There is one voicemail on the phone. No text messages. I stand there holding the phone to my face, desperately wanting to hurl the phone through my window. Although my head is not completely clear, the anger boils back up. The only message is from Jasmine. Lailah has not called.
She left the house shortly before five o’clock, and nearly six hours have passed without so much as a phone call or text. “What the fuck?” I scream.
The anger before returns with a vengeance. I don’t know whether I should be worried that something has happened to her on the road or worried about what she is doing with that Langston guy. I grab the phone and call her number. And then I wait. And wait. The phone continues ringing and eventually goes to voicemail.
I lift the empty bottle and realize that I will not be driving anywhere tonight. No, I will be sitting in my room worried about Lailah, hoping she is okay and that she is still my fiancée after tonight.
To calm myself down, I listen to Jasmine’s voicemail.
“Hey stranger,” she says. “I’m surprised to hear from you! I am just returning your call. I hope all is well on your end. You can give me a call back whenever. It doesn’t matter what time. I’ll be up for a while tonight anyway. Talk to you soon.”
I turn on the television and watch some show on the Spike channel. It is mindless entertainment, which is exactly what I need right now. I am not yet distracted when my phone rings. It’s now 11:15 p.m., and I immediately see that it’s Lailah.
I stare at the phone for a moment, weighing whether or not I should even bother to answer it. It’s been over six hours and fifteen minutes since I last saw her! She doesn’t even deserve my time right now, but I’m desperate to know why she hasn’t called. In the back of my mind, I can’t think of a single excuse or explanation for why she would have gone incognegro for so long. I am still groggy and there is a dizzying pulse at the front of my head, but I still answer the phone.
“I am so sorry,” she starts. “I didn’t know it was this late.”
At that moment, I just go completely numb. I realize that I just can’t afford to care anymore.
“Dizzy?” she asks. “Dizzy, are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I respond, my voice flat and listless.
“I really have no excuse, but my phone got misplaced and we ended up having to wait two hours to get a table at the restaurant, and then we were talking for a while.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I’m just listening. I figure after waiting over six hours to hear from you, I can wait to hear you explain yourself.”
“I just did.”
“Okay.”
“Dizzy, what’s going on?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who hooked up with your ex-boyfriend for six hours. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“We just had dinner. Nothing else.”
“Okay.”
“Let me let you go then. I’m trying to have a conversation with you and you are just being all humdrum and detached.”
“Don’t put this on me. This is all you.”
“I told you I was sorry.”
“Whatever.”
“Maybe we should just talk later then.”
“Peace,” I say and hang up the phone.
At this point she can go and leap her fucking ass into a lake for all I care.
I roll the cell phone around in my hand for a moment, wondering if I should call her back and tell her what I have been thinking about for the past few hours. Then I consider calling Jasmine. But there is a part of me that doesn’t want to stoop to her level, although I know I am already dwelling there.
I reason that if I’m going to go out with Jasmine, I should do it the same way Lailah did me with Langston, just to see if she will play the double standard card against me. I want to see how she would feel if I were to go out for six hours with my ex-girlfriend and not pick up my phone to call or text. I want her to see what it feels like to wonder about what someone is doing. I also want her to worry about me the same way that I was worrying about her, not knowing if she was in a ditch somewhere or in a hotel in Buckhead. I want her to feel all of the pain I’ve been carrying around during this fourth of a whole damn day.
There is a part of me that knows that my doing this will not help the situation, but I don’t really care at this point. I just want there to be some balance to things. If I have to play the fool once, then she should have to play the fool once.
I know that she will never tell me everything that happened when she went out with Langston, and I don’t plan to tell her what happens when I go out with Jasmine. I am guessing we will just keep those secrets from each other like other secrets that married people keep from each other that border on the level of a trip to Las Vegas. Personally, I can’t stand the idea of it, but at this point, it all feels like it is far beyond our control. This will be the situation where Marcia gets the real details from Lailah, and I am just relegated to being her “man” and not her best friend. Likewise, this is where Akil will get an ear full, where I would have normally confided most of this stuff to Lailah directly.
My finger hovers over the screen of my phone as I consider whether I should make any phone calls at all, whether it’s to Lailah or Jasmine. What I really want to do is hem up that motherfucker Langston in a corner and whip his ass for even thinking that he should intrude on my space like that. Seriously, what kind of punk motherfucker would call up some other guy’s fiancée and ask to take her out on a date? A stupid one.
But when all things are considered, I must be a stupid brotha, too, because I’m the fool who let him.
14
We don’t talk the next day or the following day. I am still angry and upset, and Lailah is still blaming me for this breakdown in communication. I want to drive by her house to see what’s going on over there, but I am much too proud to risk having her see me drive around her neighborhood. I keep thinking that she is trying to stall me out. This is basically a staring contest, and I don’t want to be the one to flinch first.
I consider the possibility of just calling Marcia, who has interceding on our behalf before. But what sense does that make? Will we have to call Marcia to fix problems for us when we are married? I need to just get over myself and call her.
So I do.
“Hey,” I say, when she answers the phone.
“Hey.” Now her voice is as listless as mine was the other night.
“You busy?”
“No.”
“Wanna talk?”
“Oh, so now you want to talk.”
I know she’s being smart, but it doesn’t matter, because we need to squash this situation one way or the other. “Yes, I do.”
“Okay. Then talk.”
“I was hoping we could talk face to face.”
“Well, I will come over there then.”
“Why can’t I come to your house?”
“Because everything that we do is over here.”
There is a part of me that is starting to think that she is trying to conceal something from me, but I quickly shake those thoughts away. I have to keep in mind what the objective of our talking is: to make things better, not worse.
“Have you eaten?” I ask.
“Not yet. I had glass of juice earlier. Why? Do you want to go out and get something to eat?”
I laugh. “No. Not even. I was hoping that you would let me cook for you.”
I can feel her mood lightening over the phone, and I can sense that we are part of the way out of the woods.
“Okay. I’m about to leave out in the next five minutes. Try not to burn anything before I get there,” she jokes.
When we get off of the phone, I feel slightly better about the situation, if only because we are able to talk to each other without the deep-seated animosity. I still feel the anger bubbling beneath the surface, but I breathe deeply, knowing that I am going to have an elastic mind to stretch to her level of dealing with things.
I walk into the kitchen and look in the refrigerator. Thank goodness there is some produce in there. I crack open the freezer part of the unit and take out some chicken breasts. Within minutes, I am sautéing green peppers, yellow onions, zucchini, and squash in a nonstick skillet with a few drops of extra virgin olive oil. In a separate skillet, I am cooking the chicken that I have seasoned with various herbs, salt, and pepper. On a third eye of the stove, I am boiling brown rice. A few broccoli crowns sit off to the side. I will steam them last.
By the time Lailah arrives, I am just setting the small table in my kitchen. Because I drank up the champagne two days ago, I have no choice but to fill the glasses with apple juice. When she comes through the door, the first thing she comments on is the delicious smell of the food. She greets me with a kiss and a very long, deep hug. Being in her arms again makes me feel as though I have really been tripping too hard over the past few days. I want to believe everything that she told me and curse myself for assuming that this sweet angel would ever do anything that would put our love in jeopardy. But it is not easy to do that. No. There are still many things we need to discuss to get over this hump.
But dinner first.
As we sit at the kitchen table, enjoying our meal, we keep the conversation light. I am afraid that if I pop the seal on what I really want to talk about at this exact moment, I will ruin my appetite and possibly hers, too. Instead, I listen to her talk about how things are going with the wedding plans and how she and Marcia will be trying on wedding dresses this weekend. The way that she talks so effortlessly about the wedding would suggest that there is no real issue between us that needs resolving. For a second this angers me, because I have had trouble sleeping, but it seems like she has been getting a good night’s sleep the entire time. I hold my tongue and just nod where I am supposed to nod, knowing that once we have cleaned our plates, I plan on shifting gears immediately.
“I love you,” she says out of nowhere.
“I love you, too.”
“And I’m sorry.”
I find that I can’t even look at her. When I am finally able to face her, I ask, “Did you know how worried I was about you—about us?”
“I was okay, and as far as you and I are concerned, we will always be okay.”
“It didn’t feel like that the other night. It felt like you had just completely decided to disrespect our relationship. I mean, who the hell goes out for six hours with their ex while their fiancé sits at home waiting for them? I felt like such a fucking fool!”
She leans forward. “Dizzy, I know you’re mad. I get that. But don’t think for a second I’m going to just sit here and let you raise your voice at me and cuss at me. I don’t play that game.”
I soften my voice. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just hurting, that’s all. I had a million thoughts running through my head while you were out and about.”
“I told you what happened. If you want, I can tell you where we ate and even ask one of the servers at the restaurant to tell you that I was where I was and did nothing but eat and talk.”
“It’s not even that serious,” I say. “I’m just saying that it was a special day for me, and I had to spend it alone, because of how you handled things.”
“Special day?”
“Yeah. This company called Gameland Media is buying JACOPLEX, and they’re buying out my shares.”
“Are you cool with that?”
“Am I cool? Yes! I pocket over half a million out of the deal.”
Rather than jump up and down like a woman who has just won the lottery, she smiles that deep, rich and dimpled smile of hers, the one that I have always been in love with. “I am so proud of you!”
I don’t know how I was expecting her to react, but this calmness is not what I had in mind. She is responding as if she knew that I would always be in a position to catch this kind of windfall, as if I am merely fulfilling a destiny that she had always known I would fulfill.
“Thank you,” I say. “But I have to be honest with you. It’s all still bittersweet.”
“I can understand how that might be bittersweet, especially if you are no longer working with your company.”
I shake my head. “No, I’ll stay on with the company—for now, at least. I was talking about it being bittersweet that all of the stuff from the other night had to happen on the same day. I had hoped that we could celebrate that evening, and then when I got home and saw you all dressed up—for him—I just totally lost it.”
