30 Love, page 12
I am not used to being jealous or having you be jealous. Granted, I probably should have dealt with the Langston situation differently, I did not expect for you to automatically assume the worst of me. I thought you loved me and trusted me enough to know that I would never do anything to hurt you or what we have. Your friendship is all that has ever mattered to me, and the fact that you assumed that none of that mattered to me hurt me more than anything else.
As far as you going out with your ex to spite me, I expected better. I know that you would have never even gone out with her if I had not met up with Langston. That makes me wonder how you would deal with situations in the future when I do something that you do not like. Will you always feel the need to one up me or make sure that I feel what you have felt, although I did not intend for you to feel that way?
I thought that I could handle all of this, but I realize that I just can’t. Not right now. And I think we would have known this about ourselves if we had taken things much slower. I have no doubt that you love me and that you want to be with me. I have never questioned your love, and I have never questioned the love that I have for you, but I think there is still some room for what we have with each other to mature. And when the time is right, we should continue our trip to the altar. But right now, maybe we should take a little time to ourselves to see what it is that we are really trying to do and what voids we are really seeking to fill in our individual lives.
Love,
Lailah
I stare at the letter for a solid minute, my eyes unblinking, before I reread it two more times, stopping only when the tears have blurred my eyes to the point that I can no longer see.
16
After three attempts at calling her, I realize that she will probably not answer my calls for a while. I then consider hopping back in my car and driving to her house and waiting her out. In my opinion, we need to be talking this out, not avoiding each other. The temptation is strong to hop in my Jeep, but I fight the urge, mainly because I don’t want to further complicate the issue by being that guy who just can’t get it through his thick skull that the woman needs space (although I guess I am that guy anyway). I would hate for her to be hiding over at Marcia’s place having some conversation where my acts are deemed “crazy” or “creepy.” Not that I would think Marcia would feed this, but I don’t know what Lailah is going to tell her about my meeting with Jasmine.
On another level, I am more than a bit disappointed. I might have hated every last second of the six hours that I waited for her to come home off of her date with Langston, but I did not bail the hell out of this relationship. That was not even an option to me. The fact that she could ask for space so quickly after I went on my lunch date, not even waiting to hear back from me, makes all of this feel even more one-sided. Maybe I was the bigger sucker. Maybe I should have been more adamant about her not going out on her date, but instead I gave her the benefit of the doubt—like friends are supposed to do. Did she cut me any slack? No. Is she out somewhere thinking of herself as self-righteous, as if she is the victim in all of this? Probably. All I have is her letter, the last word for now on all matters dealing with us.
I am stunned.
I don’t even know what the next move is. Do I wait her out, at least until we can have a true heart-to-heart talk and let cooler heads prevail? Or do I call my parents and tell them that the wedding is off for now? I can hardly admit such a thing to myself, so I am adamant that I not admit that to anyone else. There is a part of me that still feels that I can salvage things. I refuse to believe that we are so far gone that talking can’t fix things. The greatest irony though? I left the lunch date headed directly to be with her. And that move actually was more than she made an effort to do for me.
Unable to stand being in my apartment any longer, I hop in my Jeep and drive out to Interstate 285, a belt around the city. I figure I will just ride the belt until I have a clearer head, and then go from there.
As I exit onto the highway, my phone starts ringing. My stomach tightens as I check the caller display and realize that it is my father, not Lailah. I consider letting the call go directly to voicemail, but I want so badly to talk to someone who might be able to understand more of what is going on than I do.
“Hey, Dad,” I say. My voice is dry and weak, and in that moment I realize that all of the thinking that I had done did not involve my speaking at all.
“Hey, Dizzy!” my father says, his voice jovial and full of life. “How is my favorite son?”
“I’m your only son, Dad.”
“That doesn’t mean that you can’t still be my favorite,” he says, laughing.
“I’m surviving.”
“Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
Against my better judgment I cave in and tell Dad what happened. And I tell him everything. I go all the way back to the day we were putting together the registry and Lailah brought up Langston. It takes me nearly fifteen minutes to get out the entire story, my actions included, and the entire time my father just listens patiently, so patiently that a few times I have to ask if he is still on the phone, because I can’t tell if he is listening or if I have lost my phone connection with him. When I finish, my father says, “Don’t give up hope. Just give her some time and space.”
His words are simple and do nothing to bring me any peace. “How long? I can’t take this!”
“Whether you want to or not, you will take it—especially if you love her. People from your generation are lacking something that we had back in my day: patience. I don’t know if it is all of this Facebook/Twitter stuff that has you guys desperate for immediate feedback or what. Sometimes you have to sit and be inconvenienced with not knowing the answer to a question about something. It’s only been a few hours, and you have jumped to a million conclusions.”
“Dad, you don’t understand,” I say interrupting him. “Things now days are different than they were in your day.”
“Maybe. But I doubt it. You told me what the letter said, and if my memory serves me correctly, she did not cancel your engagement. She just asked for some time to sort a few things out.”
I exhale into the phone. “It means the same thing, though.”
“What makes you say that? We have both known Lailah her entire life. When has she ever said anything but what she really meant? That girl has never held back her true feelings on anything. You have to remember that this is Lailah, not one of those other women you have dated. She doesn’t have an incentive to be vague with you.”
I consider what my father is saying, but I’m still not convinced.
“I feel like I’m losing her. For all I know, she may already be lost to me,” I say.
“So you had a fight. Fights happen. I can’t think of any married couples who haven’t broken some plates over the years. That’s how you learn how a person is in a marriage, and that is usually different than they are outside of a marriage. What I’m trying to tell you is that there are always growing pains when two people start setting up a life together. There are things you learn about each other that you might have never known, and you have to understand that all of that is a part of the process of being one.”
“We were doing so well before all of this.”
My father laughs. “Then you were overdue. That is how you know what your relationship is made of, the mettle, if you will. How you handle the situations where you disagree on things is how you ultimately define your marriage. Do you go running for the hills every time something goes wrong or do you ride it out and find a way to make peace? Seems like you could both stand to learn a little bit about that.”
Listening to my father, I am not comforted by his words at all, but I know that there is probably a great deal of truth in them. I want to make peace with Lailah, but I just don’t know how to do that—not with her taking this space from me.
“Did Mom ever need space from you after you guys had a falling out?” I ask.
“Everyone needs space from time to time. If you don’t get anything else from what I am telling you, get this much: it is hard, very hard, to mend situations if you are constantly all up under each other. Grown people need space sometimes. If every waking moment two people have are spent all up under each other, then when do they get a chance to miss each other and to learn how to have some sense of independence in their marriage. Now don’t get me wrong. You need to be of one accord, especially in your public front, but at home you have to be two people who have your own thoughts. That part doesn’t change. What does change, however, is that you understand that you are on the same team and that you are a part of a championship team as long as the two of you are together.”
I love it when my father uses sports metaphors, but hearing this one in the context of relationships causes me to pause. Up until this moment I had never considered Lailah and I a team, but when I think about it, we have been a team for a very long time. The only things that have changed are our positions.
“So what do I do now?” I ask.
“Stop playing tennis against each other.”
“What?”
“You guys are playing against each other when you should be playing doubles as teammates.”
I shake my head. I have to remind myself that my father loves tennis, a sport that I played briefly in high school but have not played in years. For a moment I think that he has switched metaphors on me, but then I realize that the championship team he was talking about earlier was a doubles championship team and not football or basketball. With my father, it was tennis all along.
“What exactly do you mean?” I ask, trying to catch up with his thinking.
“Seems to me that every times she scores a point on you, you feel the need to answer with a point of your own. She goes 15 - love, and you come back 15 - 15, and then she goes 30 - 15, and you guys go back and forth, but what you do not understand is that it doesn’t matter who wins, because if either of you beats the other then you both lose. It’s not 30 - 15; it’s really 30 - love. The only thing is that you guys are love, not 30.”
His words have my eyes wide open now. The metaphor is as heavy as a greasy piece of Church’s fried chicken, but I understand where he’s coming from. That’s when I remember the cross stitched picture that used to sit in the foyer of our house when I was growing up. The image of two tennis racquets crossing each other to form an “X” comes to my mind.
“Tennis is the only game where love means nothing,” I say, remembering the words beneath the intersecting racquets.
“That’s what they say,” my father says. “But the key to that statement is the ‘only in tennis’ part. Everywhere else, love means everything, and that is what you have to remember with Lailah. Love is all the two of you have. Hell, it should be the only thing that the two of you show toward each other, whether it is just friendship or more. So stop playing tennis against each other. Your love is supposed to mean something, if not to anyone else, at least to the two of you.”
“I see what you’re saying,” I respond.
“You know, I was not going to say anything about this, especially since you are a grown ass man and can make up your own mind about things, but your mother and I were a little surprised about how quickly you guys put this marriage in motion. It’s like the two of you skipped the dating stage altogether. Back in the day we would have to court for a while before we started even thinking about what you guys are planning on doing. Courting gave you not only a chance to get to know each other better, but it also helped you to not make rash decisions. If you had strong feelings about someone, it gave you a chance to get that newness off the relationship before you made any permanent decisions. You guys seem to have just skipped that part altogether and went head long into a situation that put you on the immediate path to the altar.”
At this point, I can’t even be angry at anything that he is saying. This is the first time that my father has told me his thoughts about what Lailah and I were planning, and hearing his words is sobering.
He continues, “Robert and I thought that there was a possibility that the two of you would one day hook up, but that was not the reason that we named you guys Dominique and Dominic.”
“Why did you?” I ask. I had been told various things throughout the years and the one that made the most sense to me was that we were born on the same day, just like twins. I was content to accept that rationale, but now my father has brought up the subject, so my curiosity has returned.
“I know your mother and I always told you that it was because the two of you were born on the same day, but that is only part of the thing. The other part is that we wanted the two of you to be close throughout life. Robert and I grew up together, and we wanted our children to have, at the very minimum, a friendship that spanned their lives. The fact that you were a boy and Lailah was a girl only opened up the possibility that the two of you might one day be more. The funny thing is that it took you guys thirty years to flip the script on us old folks.”
We laugh, and for the first time this evening I have felt a burden lifted from my chest. I know that Lailah is still upset with me, but knowing that we have always been connected to each other, by design, I feel that anything that we are confronting now is small in comparison to the thirty years we have survived as friends.
“Dad, do you think that everything will work out and that Lailah and I will be able to get past all of this?”
“Dizzy, it really doesn’t matter what I think or what your mother thinks or even what Lailah’s parents think. It only matters what the two of you think. We gave your friendship our best shot. The rest of this, engagement and all, is purely up to the two of you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“No problem. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
When I hang up the phone, I start heading back to my apartment. I have an idea of what I need to do now. I just hope that what I think I know about my friendship with Lailah is as real as I believe it is.
17
On the night that Lailah and I agreed to marry each other, all those years ago in her dorm room at Georgia State University, two things came out: one, that I wanted to one day marry Lailah, and two, that she would only marry me if it was her last resort. Those kinds of details tend to escape your mind when you are romanticizing your past. It never occurred to me to replay the entire conversation before launching into my plans to propose to her. In other words, I was only concerned with what I wanted, not what she might have wanted. In fact, this entire situation might just be the result of me pushing her into an area that she might not have originally wanted to be.
Of course, I want to believe that all of that has changed—or at least that it was changing. The love I feel from her is genuine. I feel it not only in her words or when she touches me, but also when she wraps her legs around me and pulls me into the warmth of her body. I can feel it in the movement of her tongue as she kisses me. There is nothing in the way that she physically relates to me that leads me to believe that she is doing something reluctantly, but lest I forget, what is physical does not always reflect the total being of someone. As single thirty year olds, our desires for physical affection are not lost on me. The question is whether or not an engagement and all that is involved in not just a wedding, but a life together as husband and wife, is too much for either of us right now. After all, should two people be bound for life based off of a pact that the two of them made when they were still fresh out of their teenage years? For the longest, I wanted to believe that, but now I am not so sure.
What I do know is that she is so important to me that I don’t want to lose anything that we have together, whether it’s friendship or intimacy. And if I am being completely truthful with myself, I want to marry her more than anything in the world, and I would do it in a phone booth in New York City during the middle of rush hour, if it meant that we could be together forever. But that is what I want. I can’t begin to be so presumptuous as to know what it is that Lailah wants, and the last thing I would want her to do is something that she is not ready to do, pact or not.
Other than talking to my father, I have not told anyone of the road bump Lailah and I are experiencing. I don’t know if she has told anyone either, so I sit quietly, not ready to make any public announcements to anyone about a change of date or postponement of the wedding. More than anything, I just want to talk to Lailah and hear anything that she wants to say. What she wants will largely determine what we do, and I have resigned myself to be as flexible to her wishes as possible.
Admittedly, there is still a part of me that believes that she was wrong to go out with Langston, but if I cling to that feeling, we will never be able to move forward. Sure, my reaction might have been spiteful in some ways, but that, too, has to be left in the past, that is if we want to move forward with our relationship.
I pick up my phone and call her again. I get her voicemail, but I decide against leaving another message. By now, I have left at least five of them, and I figure that if she wanted to call me, then she would have done so by now. My phone has not rang, so my guess is that we have not turned the corner on what is bothering her just yet. Still, there is a part of me that is starting to wonder if it is possible that we will ever turn that corner. And the thought of that stagnant future for us scares me. In fact, it is my greatest fear when it comes to us. Losing her. That is what has haunted me since all of this began. Never has such a feeling been so tangible as it is now, and I have not figured out how to process it. This is the thing over which I have no control. I am completely at her mercy.
