30 Love, page 13
I hold the phone in my hands, briefly considering whether or not I should call her again, but I quickly decide against it. This is something I will just have to wait out. Still, the idea of driving over to her house gives me some small hope. I have to squash this immediately though. I am not going to stalk her just because I am missing her like crazy. After all, I don’t want to be the impossible, insufferable dude that smothers his woman because of the burden of his emotions.
I put the phone down, walk into my bedroom, and fling myself across my bed, closing my eyes until my fatigue gels with sleep and I drift off.
The sale of JACOPLEX goes through without so much as a hitch, and we are told that the disbursements will occur within thirty days. They even bring in a few financial consultants to talk to us so that we understand the tax consequences of such a transaction and what options we would have if we wanted to minimize the government pillaging off nearly half of the amount. They also remind us that we have a six month contract going forward as independent contractors, which means that we no longer have benefits like health and dental insurance. I guess they figure that we will be able to afford that with our buyouts. We are also reminded that Gameland Media might very well hire some of the JACOPLEX team on when the contract period expires. I feel my chances are decent of still having a job with them at that point, but I am not so vain as to believe that a company as large as Gameland Media would not be able to replace me with someone or some group within its existing team. There are clearly no guarantees here.
And when I think about Akil’s offer to come and start a new company with him, I realize that there are hardly any guarantees there either. If anything, I will still be without health and dental insurance. There is also a chance that it might be a minute before I actually get paid much money. The bottom line is that I have no guarantees either way.
Duvall tells us that we will continue working out of our current office building until the independent contractor period expires. He has not told us what he plans on doing at that point, but I would be surprised if he went to work at Gameland Media. He is independently wealthy now, and he is young enough that he will probably want to do a number of other things, besides heading up a division and working under a CEO who is even more outrageous than Duvall ever was. Word is that Gameland Media’s CEO, Greg Dermott, is such an asshole that he sends out his nicer, and much easier on the eye, COO, Mrs. Bishop, to do most of the face-to-face meetings with those outside of the company.
Greg Dermott does not intimidate me, but at the same time, I am not sure I want to continue down the path I am on. Everything just seems uncertain at this point. I don’t know where I stand with Lailah, and I don’t know where I stand with my career either, but sooner or later, I will have to ascertain my answers on both.
Akil asks to meet with me for lunch, and I agree, although I am not sure what I want to tell him about Lailah and me just yet. Thankfully, his mind is in other places when we sit down to eat.
“So are you in on this new venture or what? I need to know something soon, because I have set up a meeting with a few money people, and they are going to want to know just who our team is going to include. People won’t come up off the ducketts, unless they know what they are paying for.”
I nod. I understand where he is coming from and why there is a sense of urgency to his words this time. I have been stringing him along for a while, I know. It was not intentional, but things were just so hectic with the wedding plans that I felt I could afford to push back my response a little while. Well, I have bought more time than I actually had, and now Akil needs to know something.
What’s the worst that could happen, I tell myself. Even if I have to dust off my resume in the future and go interview for a job if everything fails, I will be all the better for venturing out and trying something new. I will have a chance to do a job that I am defining as I go along. It is a rare opportunity to be able to pick up so much experience at one time. Plus, Akil is focused and is every bit the hard worker that I am. I seriously doubt that the two of us together would result in the company failing.
“I’m in,” I finally say.
Akil’s reaches across the table and hugs me so hard that I have a flashback to Mr. Landfair’s last bear hug in Daily, Mississippi. I am both comforted and immediately nervous. I have a million and one unanswered questions swirling around in my head, but I know that I will learn the answers as the days progress.
I wonder if it will be the same way with Lailah, though. It has been several days, and we have still not spoken to each other. I start to tell Akil about what’s going on, but I do not. He even asks about when we will go do the fittings for the tuxes, but I just shrug and offer, “Soon,” returning his attention to our new business venture. “So what will be the name of this new company?” I ask.
“I am still playing around with some different names, but I keep coming back to Dantes Games.”
“Why Dantes Games?”
Akil smiles. “My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The main character’s name is Edmond Dantes.”
I shrug my shoulders. “And how does that connect to what we will be doing?”
“Have you read the book?” he asks. “You majored in English in college, right?”
“Yeah, I can’t say that I got around to reading that one.”
“It’s an excellent book,” he offers.
“Yeah, I’m sure that it is, but you’re still not answering my question.”
“I was just about to get to that. Check this out. Edmond Dantes is framed for a crime that he didn’t commit, just because this dude had the hots for his woman. Anyway, Dantes is sent to this really jacked up prison and forced to serve out his term there indefinitely. While in there, he hooks up with this old dude who tells him about this treasure hidden out there in the world. The old dude starts to train him and make him into a protégé, but the old dude ends up dying before the two to them can break out of prison. Well, Dantes decides to break out of prison on his own and goes off to find the treasure. Once he finds it, he creates a whole new persona and enters town as the Count of Monte Cristo, and no one knows who he is, because he has a whole different swagger about himself since all of this stuff went down. Anyway, he plots his revenge and ends up getting the dude who set him up at the beginning.”
Even after this rambling synopsis, I still don’t know what any of this has to do with naming the company, unless it is just because he likes the character in the story. “So that’s it?” I ask.
“Well, what I was thinking is that we, as a company, are reinventing ourselves to come back and take over the game.”
“But are we doing this out of revenge?”
“Nope. We are doing it one better. We are doing it out of necessity.”
I nod, finally understanding Akil’s motivations. “Well, that’s all you had to say.”
18
I have not attempted to call Lailah again for several days, although each day that passes by feels as if we are causing even more irreparable damage. Never in our lives have we consciously avoided each other for this long. Even during that episode that occurred during our junior year in high school, Lailah never left me feeling as if she had completely abandoned our friendship. Now I am beginning to wonder if she even cares, if her actions are really justified by what has happened so far.
Maybe it is just like she warned me, though. Without me being there to hear her vent her thoughts, I have forced her to confide what she would have automatically confided in me to another person altogether. My guess is that Marcia is the one who is getting an earful at this point. But why hasn’t Marcia stepped in to try to fix all of this like she did after my proposal? Maybe she disagrees with my going out with Jasmine, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Still thirty years of friendship should trump all of that. It’s not like I cheated on her or anything. If anything, I have worked to show that Lailah will never have to question my feelings for her.
I scan the numbers in my phone, hoping to find Marcia’s, and when I don’t find it, I silently curse myself for accidentally deleting it. Only a guy would find himself in this type of situation, because a woman is too smart to be left in this awkward position of being unable to contact anyone in her lover’s inner circle.
With Lailah not answering her phone, me not even having Marcia’s phone number, and my refusal to drive by Lailah’s house, giving off the illusion of stalking her, I am left with very few choices. I can either wait her out completely, hoping that she will end this estrangement sooner than later.
Or there is one other thing I can do!
As the idea fills my head, I immediately wonder why it took me so long to even think of it. I must have been so devastated that I couldn’t see the most obvious solution. I immediately run back to my bedroom and lift Lailah’s letter for me from my dresser. I take it into the room that functions as my office space and begin to read it again. While the act of doing this stings me a bit, I know that it is necessary. Once I finish, I lie it down next to my laptop. I pace the room for a few minutes, collecting my thoughts, before I take a seat at the desk, pull the laptop up to me, and begin typing.
It starts out simply at first, but the longer I sit there, the longer I realize that this might be my only chance to communicate my true thoughts to her without her trying to completely dodge me. I doubt, in my heart, that she is so cold as to not read a letter that I have written to her, especially if I am not there to watch her attempt to ignore it. She has left me little choice than to contact her using the exact same method of communication that she used with me. I am just hoping that she had not expected me to do that all along, because if she did, I totally missed that memo. But knowing Lailah, she was probably preferring that method of communication to begin with. After all, she is a writer of literature, and as she often says, “Characters have to have a legitimate reason to do whatever the action is that the author attributes to them. They can’t just do things for the hell of it. Motivation is important.”
Staring at the laptop screen in front of me, I realize that my motivation is clear: I want my fiancée back—in the worst way—but if I can’t have her back, I simply want the friendship that she has shared with me all of these years to remain in tact so that I can at least feel the wholeness of her presence in my life again.
My fingers move slowly at first, as I search for the right words to illustrate my feelings. I labor through the first paragraph, stopping often to reread sentences and tweak them to make sure that I am paying the same level of attention to the words that I know she had when she wrote me her letter. The farther along I get, the faster my fingers begin to move, until I can see my thoughts jumping eagerly from my fingertips with the click of each key. The screen begins to fill with words, and for the first time since I got her letter, I begin to feel something buzzing deep within my chest: hope. I can’t say that it is hope that everything will work itself out, although I know I want that desperately. I think that it is more of the fact that I am finally able to unload certain things from my mind so that she will at least know my thoughts and feelings. Being unable to transfer these thoughts to her and having to hold all of my thoughts hostage with no form of relief available left me feeling even worse than just being floored by the contents of her letter. It was as if she was saying, “You can sit and dwell on my thoughts, but you can not offer me your own.” And while I could not tell it at first, I was beginning to become poisoned with the inability for me to release my thoughts to her. I had become toxic—until now.
Once I finish typing the words of my letter to her, I stare at the screen for a moment and sigh in relief. There they are. My thoughts. They fill the screen and are no longer clogging my thoughts, tripping over each other and giving off the illusion of being much more amplified than they really are. I was a victim to them before I sat down. Now I have liberated them onto the screen. I quickly save the draft, because all I need is for some freakish act of nature to cause these thoughts that I have so desperately culled from the recesses of my brain to vanish like a fart in the wind. Then I think of Lailah’s embarrassment at learning that she pooted in her sleep. I laugh to myself, feeling a tug in my chest like gravity pulling me back down to earth and the current situation that lies before me.
I reread the letter on the my laptop again two more times before printing it out and lying it down on my desk, right next to Lailah’s handwritten letter. I immediately wonder if I should try to write my letter out, too. The thought comes quickly before scattering away when I realize that it is Lailah who has the beautiful penmanship, not me. My chicken scratch would not make much for a pleasant visual. Plus, her being able to understand my words clearly is the main thing. Anything that would risk creating a barrier in communication has to be cut out of the equation immediately, and my penmanship would definitely fall into that category.
I turn my letter to her face down on the desk and then turn it back over, imagining that I am Lailah seeing the words on the page for the first time. I reread the letter a final time.
Dear Lailah,
My heart is heavy as I write this, because I have missed you so much in the past few days. Not being able to see your beautiful smile or touch your soft hand or hold you in my embrace until I dissolve completely in the warmth of your body has left me out of sorts. My heart remains every bit yours since the day we came to know each other, but my mind is restless with wondering how long this estrangement will last.
I have read your letter so many times that I have committed entire passages to memory, and I understand why you wrote it. I get where you are coming from, and I value and appreciate your thoughts. Please know that it was not my purpose to make you feel uncomfortable. And you, of all people, do not have worry about anyone else competing for my attention—bar none (including Janet Jacme lol!!!). You have, are, and will always be the most beautiful woman in the world to me. The one thing that I have going for me that I can brag on without question is the fact that I knew this from the time we realized that we were even in this world together. Yes, together. Because with you in my life, I have never been alone, nor would I ever want to be.
I could rattle off all of the smooth movie lines that you have heard throughout the years if you need an illustration of what you mean to me:
“You’re my air. I can’t breathe without you.” —Marcus Graham in Boomerang
“You’re my rib.”—Jody in Baby Boy
“You had me at hello.” Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire
Well, you get where I am coming from. The bottom line is that I not only love you with all of my heart; I need you just as much. “You complete me.” (Yeah, I know I am stretching that movie out a bit here.) Still, it’s true. It’s all true. You are all of these things to me.
While I know that this might not mean much to you at this point, I am sorry for everything that I have done that has made you question our relationship. I think that we have both done things that we would have done differently if given a second chance, and I know I definitely did not need to go out on my five-minute luncheon with Jasmine. I knew that from the moment I sat down. What you and I have is so special that I feel as if being in the presence of another woman for longer than a few seconds is a waste of my time. She could never be you, nor did I expect her to be. Deep down, I know I should not have even bothered to see her again, but when you told me about Langston, I was hurt. I tried to play it cool because I thought that was what you expected me to do, and I guess if I had just been honest with you about my feeling jealous, none of this would have unfolded the way that it has.
You said in your letter that maybe we could have avoided this problem if we had not rushed into to this engagement, but I disagree. We are engaged because we are in love with each other, and we want to spend our lives together for the rest of our days, not because we are trying to put ourselves into a category where we never make mistakes with each other again. That is impossible. We are just as bound to make mistakes as we are to have days that are challenging. That is life. But what has made all of that bearable, at least up until this point, is that we knew that we had the other person there to help kiss those sore spots and to make them feel better.
I can’t promise you a perfect life, but I can promise you a life where you will never have to feel unloved or unappreciated. I can promise you a life where your laughter will be my favorite song. I can promise you a life where you will never have to go a day without knowing that you are the queen of my heart. And I can promise you, God willing, that we will still be side by side on the porch of our house at the age of ninety, staring off into the sunset, fingers interlocked, still in love.
That is what I want for us. And this temporary snafu is not enough for me to feel that we cannot be all of those things to each other—now.
Yes, this situation is a bit unexpected. I get that. But it does not mean that our love and commitment to each other is any less true. The way we went about it is just different, not better or worse. Just different. And different is what has always defined our relationship to each other, whether we were friends or lovers. You are my other half. We are the only ones who get the “gooney goo goos” of our relationship, and I love that about us. We can have a house full of love and children who grow up in that type of love and carry it with them into their own relationships. That is us. I understand this. You understand this. Our parents even understand this. We were made for each other, and in the words of Stevie Wonder, “I was made to love you.”
I would apologize for rambling in this letter for so long, but I can’t. I miss talking to my best friend, and this is my way of being true to what we have. I am not the writer that you are, but my motivations can never be questioned. I am as easy to read as a Dr. Seuss book. My theme is and has always been simple: I love you.
With all of my heart,
Dominic “Dizzy” Parker
