30 Love, page 11
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I know. But that still doesn’t ease the pain.”
We sit quietly for a moment.
“Well, was it worth it?” I ask.
“What?”
“The dinner.”
“I told you that it was over with him a long time ago.”
“But I’m just asking if you got the closure that you needed.”
“I’m beyond closure with Langston. He’s engaged to some Ethiopian model and preparing to move to Paris.”
I chuckle sarcastically. “I wonder if he told his fiancée that he was meeting with his ex-girlfriend for dinner.”
“In fact, he did. That’s pretty much most of what we did talk about, the two of you.”
“I guess I should feel grateful then.”
“I’m not asking you to feel any kind of way.”
I take a long sip of apple juice and clear my throat. “Well, since everyone seems to be dealing with closure issues, does that apply to me as well?”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to know if I get to go out with my ex-girlfriend to gain closure, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Closure. That’s what we are talking about, right? Closure? I figure if all of you can purge your souls, then I should be able to do the same.”
She looks at me strangely for a moment, as if I have told her that I secretly have a third testicle. “I didn’t know that you had an interest in going out with one of your exes.”
“Well, you never asked.”
The words come fast and hard, and I can immediately tell that I have cut her with my words and that I have cut her deep.
I start to back peddle when I see the hurt look in her eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was saying that I should be able to make sure all of my past is completely behind me, too.”
My words don’t sound any better, but I don’t know how they possibly could. The situation I am asking her for is borderline absurd—but it’s no more absurd than what she had the nerve to ask of me, especially while we were out doing a wedding planning activity. I have to stand firm on this or I will always feel like the situation is hanging over my head.
“So you want to hurt me because I accidentally hurt you?”
“No. I just want to do what you did, for the same reason that you did.”
“Then why are you just now bringing this up? Why didn’t you bring this up when I mentioned Langston?”
“I was processing everything. I didn’t want to be vindictive.”
“So you’re not being vindictive now?”
I shake my head. “That’s not what I am trying to do.”
As I watch Lailah, I start to feel really bad. She looks like she is on the verge of tears, and I realize that I am the only one to blame for this. What makes matters worse is seeing her eyes frozen in sadness makes me realize just how much this woman must really love me, and in that love I know in my heart that everything that she said about her dinner with Langston is true. But I also see in her eyes that she feels that she could lose me to another woman, and that pain and fear is next to unbearable. I could be wrong about all of this, but her look is telling me that I am right.
“You know what?” she finally says. “You are a grown man. You can do whatever you want. If you are doing this because you feel that you have to do it for the greater good of our relationship, I will just have to understand—whether I like it or not. I owe you that, at least. But if you’re doing this to get even with me, then I will have to tell you that that is not the best way for us to start a life together. I want to be able to not only trust you, but be able to trust why you do the things you do. I want to know that it is about our marriage and not about your feelings.”
“If I do it, it will be for our relationship.”
Lailah wipes her eyes. “I trust you.”
I walk over and embrace her, and as her face dampens my shirt, I feel that I have already betrayed that trust.
15
The idea to launch a start-up is something that Akil has been tossing around for a while now. Even while we were deep in our gaming projects with JACOPLEX, he would say things like, “If we went out on our own, we could do a lot more radical stuff. We are not changing gaming right now, but we could if we were set free to do our own thing.” I thought the idea was cool, but I imagined that there would not come an immediate point in time where I had to seriously consider that as an option. Even with the payday that we have coming to us, the reality is that we will be expendable six months after the acquisition goes through. In other words, we will be unemployed.
Now as Akil brings up his favorite non-female related topic outside of work, it is taking on a whole new meaning. He is basically suggesting that we take the buyout and just give a six-month notice that we will be leaving Gameland Media. It is a humongous step, though. I have never run a business before, and the thought of being an entrepreneur is very daunting. The only thing that makes me believe that I might be able to do it is the fact that my cousin J did the exact same thing when he left Wall Street to start a record store in Harlem with his best friend, Cool. Even still, the idea of stepping out on my own scares me shitless.
Akil asked two other people, Michael Dukes and Billy Lancaster, to join this new group of his, but I was the only one he asked who worked at JACOPLEX. In this new company, I would in theory continue writing the story lines, designing the visual look and feel of the game’s universe, and, from what Akil is suggesting, do some of the vocal talent for the game—which I have to admit is extremely cool and a definite deal sweetener.
Michael would be there for marketing purposes, as well as other operational needs, and Billy would serve as a software engineer, since he is already working as a consultant for a few tech companies. The fact that Akil was able to lure either of these two guys to work on a start up company is a minor, but noteworthy, accomplishment in and of itself.
Another minor observation is that both Michael and Billy are white, which gives our core unit not only a diversity of ideas, but a diversity of cultural components as well, and I dig that. I am more comfortable working in very diverse environments, which is something that I loved about New York, but don’t see as much of in Atlanta, in spite of their cheesy and untruthful moniker of being the city that is too busy to hate. I will not call that statement an out right lie, but I will say that it is far from the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the city where I live.
I have yet to give Akil an answer, a definite one anyway, to his invitation to get in on the ground floor, but in all honesty, it would be difficult to tell him no, especially since I am the primary writer and illustrator of this pieced together collective.
Even as Akil continues waxing poetic on a future where we get to live out our dreams of launching a tech company from the proverbial garage, I have trouble focusing on any of this. My thoughts are largely dominated by Lailah and the conversation we had about our exes. Truthfully, it is all a slippery slope. If we are not careful, we could easily paint ourselves into a corner where we are asking about the number of former lovers that each of us have had and any other shit that would tip the scale in favor of unproductive information for a spouse to have rolling around in his or her head later on. Relationships are already hard enough as it is—even without you having to stir unnecessary shit into it.
For now, Akil will have to wait—just until I can sort through the immediate things vying for my attention. When that dust settles, I will be game for considering anything that could take my talents to an even higher level.
Things are stilted between Lailah and me in the days that lead up to my meeting with Jasmine. What seems to be the issue, as far as I can tell, is that she has fixed it in her mind that her situation with Langston is somehow different than my situation with Jasmine. She is quick to point out that Jasmine lives in Atlanta, so that presents a lingering issue that Langston’s brief reception did not have. “I don’t want to be at the grocery store and wind up getting into with that girl,” she said. She even went on to add that, because I had moved back to Atlanta already and we were bosom buddies, she was privy to a few of the details of my relationship with Jasmine, and those few details that she was aware of made her suspicious of any motives that Jasmine would have for wanting to see me now.
Granted, Lailah might have a few points, but I could have argued a number of points about her decision to meet up with Langston. First, she had been in a relationship with that dude for a while. To me—or any guy, for that matter—that basically translates into the fact that there was a lot of sexual activity going on. In fact, she was with Langston much longer than we have been together romantically, so I know he has seen a side of her that I have yet to see or may never see, depending on how things evolve. Those details hang over my head like loose chandeliers. But I’m beginning to believe that this will be one of those things that we will just have to agree to disagree on. The issue now is whether she can handle my being in a reciprocal situation. So far she has been pretty shaky, but I know that it will all balance out in the end.
One difference between the meeting that Jasmine and I are about to have is that I opted to make this a luncheon type of thing, as opposed to a dinner where we would be stuck waiting two hours to get a table at some snazzy restaurant in Buckhead. And I am not even dressing up, just throwing on a t-shirt and some jeans. If anything, these details should have mattered to Lailah, but apparently they don’t.
Now, as I sit out in front of a deli in Smyrna waiting for Jasmine to arrive, I wonder if I should call Lailah to put her mind at ease and let her know that she is in my thoughts and my heart, but then I remember sitting up those six hours feeling like a damn fool waiting on her to call while she was out with Langston. I figure that she will be okay. I am sure that she will survive, just as I did.
Jasmine pulls up in her BMW 325 looking like she would never in her life associate herself with the likes of a plain ass Negro like myself. The irony is now that I will have the means to get a car like hers or one far more luxurious, I am not even interested. If anything, I want to see if I can reach the magical number of 400,000 on the odometer of my Jeep Wrangler before I break down and buy, you guessed it, another Jeep Wrangler.
“Hey, Dizzy,” Jasmine says, walking up to me and wrapping her arms around me. She hugs me like a friend—but a friend with history. The touch lingers a second longer than it would have if I was just someone she knew from school. She is wearing a sleeveless pink blouse and a pair of tiny khaki shorts so that her long, toned legs are accentuated. Her hair is done in a way that suggests that she could afford to get real Indian hair rather than the traditional yak from the Korean shop in West End. She looks as if she could be famous by the way she moves, her small Gucci handbag tucked neatly under her arm, the matching Gucci shades resting on the hair above her forehead. She looks good! Painfully so.
I order a sandwich; she orders a salad. We make small talk for a while, before she asks, “So why are you getting married now? What happened to change the nature of you guys’ relationship?”
I consider telling her the truth, but then I wonder if she even deserves to know the truth of it all. The last thing I would want is to open my relationship with Lailah up to any feedback and possible criticisms from a woman who has no shortage of opinions on things. Instead, I respond, “We just realized that we were the ones for whom we had been waiting.”
“June Jordan poem, right?”
“I think so. Still it is true.”
“You know, I kind of wondered if maybe we would get back together down the road.”
“I offered you a chance for us to have a real relationship together, and you were the one who rejected it.”
She smiles, picking over her salad. “You know me and relationships.”
“I never did understand that about you. You would be monogamous and spend all of your time with me, but you didn’t want to be my girl.”
“I didn’t want to feel like I belonged to you. Hell, I don’t want to belong to anyone for that matter. Why can’t two people just spend time together and enjoy each other for what it is without creating all of these artificial labels.”
I sigh. “They are not artificial or arbitrary. They are just people’s ways of affirming their feelings and making it known to others that they stand behind those feelings.”
“Sounds unnecessary to me. Why should I be concerned about what people outside of my situation think about my situation? That’s a bad way to live life—pleasing others. I mean, you knew how I felt about you without me having to make some bold and pointless declaration.”
“How do you know? I’m no mind reader.”
“You know because I spent all of my time trying to please you and keep you satisfied.”
“You make that sound like it was all one-sided,” I say.
She smiles. “Well, we kept each other satisfied. Everything was cool. But then you went and jinxed it.”
“I don’t see it that way, but that is all in past now and there’s no point in waking up that sleeping bear.”
She laughs. “Whatever.”
“What?”
“Whatever,” she repeats. “You don’t want to wake up sleep bears? Right. Why did you want to get together with me if you didn’t want to take a trip down Memory Lane?”
In that moment I see the entire span of our relationship, and I realize at that moment that we were never in love. It was always about sex. We had built up a powerful emotional connection simply based on one emotion: lust. Sex was the way we communicated. It was the way that we expressed our thoughts to each other. It was the heart and soul of who we were as a couple. All of the conversations that we had were simply preludes to sex. I once heard a magazine publisher make the statement that to editors, ads are the things that go between their stories, but to ad people, editorial content is the stuff that fits neatly between the ads. The epiphany is mind blowing. We were never in a relationship that had any real gravitas. We just had a lot of really good sex, and I guess if you could hang your hat on that for the rest of your life, then cool. But I was not that kind of person. There apparently was no way that Jasmine and I would ever have survived in any kind of relationship of any depth. Our relationship was bound to end eventually. The fact that it did when it did is just the result of something naturally running its course.
I can’t even be mad at Jasmine for that. It was what it was for the time that it lasted, and I can tell that she is in no way apologetic about any of the failings of our situation, nor should she be. As I consider this, I realize that her coming to see me would be built more around what connection that we did once have together, and that is when I realize just the magnitude of the mistake I made in coming here. If we defined ourselves on sex and I was not willing to consider that, then we were just wasting each other’s time.
There is still a part of me that is attracted to her, but when I think about how Lailah is the epitome of beauty, sexiness, intelligence, humor, and loyalty and how I have always known this, I am immediately ashamed of the fact that I allowed myself to go through with this situation and sit up here in public with this woman, who while very sexy, is not the woman who can do a damn bit of anything for me at this point in my life, save mess the entire thing up.
“It’s been good seeing you,” I offer, as I rise from the table.
“What? Where are you going?”
“I really shouldn’t even be here right now,” I say, feeling like a bad imitation of Eddie Murphy when he leaves Robin Givens alone on the bed in her thong so he can head home to Halle Berry. But this is not Boomerang. It’s my life, and it’s important for me to bring things down a few notches and refocus on what is really important to me: Lailah.
“Whatever,” Jasmine adds, as if she is totally unfazed.
“We both know that this is not the move. You deserve more,” I say. “And I actually have more. Take care.”
She doesn’t even look up as I walk away, and while I want to think that I might have made her feel bad with my sudden departure, I have a gut feeling that Jasmine does not care one way or the other. Life has always gone on for her, and I have never been the reason that she has changed the way that she has done things. She walked away from me once before, so I know a second time would require even less thought.
As I pull off, she has already initiated a conversation with another guy at a neighboring table.
Jasmine, I think, laughing to myself. I hope she finds what she is really looking for out there, but I can’t be concerned about that now. I need to get to Lailah as fast as I can.
When I get to Lailah’s house I find that she’s not there. I call her, and when she doesn’t answer, I leave a short message letting her know that I want her to come over tonight. By the time I pull into the parking lot in front of my apartment, I am reeling with thoughts of Lailah and how lucky I am that she is the woman I will be marrying. I am already thinking of picking up a bottle of champagne and some rose petals, because I want to do something really nice and special tonight. I am pulling out all of the stops. This will definitely be a night that she will never forget. I don’t just want her to have orgasms tonight; I want her to be unable to walk at all. To put it in the words of Wanda Sykes, I am going to lick that woman cross-eyed.
When I get to the door, I see an envelope taped to it. The penmanship is familiar. In fact, it looks a lot like Lailah’s penmanship. I quickly pull it down, my heart overflowing with joy. Stepping into the apartment I start reading the letter, and within the first two sentences, I find that I have to sit down to stabilize myself.
Dear Dizzy,
This is hard for me to say. I have been doing a lot of thinking about our relationship, and I am not sure that we are ready to get married. Don’t get me wrong. I do love you. And I do want to marry you. But I feel like we might be rushing things a bit. This whole thing just kind of came out of thin air, and I am not really sure how to take all of it. We have been friends for our entire lives, and that is what we are good at. This new thing that we have is nice, but it is new.
