Cheaters (12 page)

I’d tracked him down on base, called him until he finally returned my call, and last week he promised to meet me at the food court in Ontario Mills around noon. I demanded to know why he’d abandoned me like he did. It fucked with me because I didn’t know, so I told him he owed me some sort of answer.

I showed up at the meeting spot at eleven-thirty.

At two he still hadn’t arrived.

Once again he stood me up. That didn’t surprise me.

I kept calling. I knew I should’ve gave it up, turned it loose, but hell, no. Brothers always got off too easy, so a sister had to make them rue the day we were born. I was gonna harass him until I got some kind of an answer.

So, in the meantime and between time, I kept my eye on Thaiheed. Kept dialing his digits and listening to his messages. A couple of times I deleted the ones I felt like deleting.

Over the next week, I heard messages from Peaches, thanking him for a good time, then calling back mad as hell because she couldn’t track him down. Some sista named Nina thanked him for taking her to hear Dr. Khallid Abdul speak on black unity somewhere in L.A., then called back with that sensuous and desperate voice wanting to know if they were going to get back together, or if that was a one-night thing.

They were blowing up his answering machine, and he was blowing up my pager, leaving message after message on my answering machine. And oh, after I saw how easy it was to rip off his messages, I trashed my answering machine and subscribed to Pac Bell’s message center.

Yeah, I’m learning a little every day.

Damn.

It was three in the morning, and my damn phone was ringing. Like the R&B singer Joe said, a true player never gets a chance to sleep. I didn’t have to click my copper-colored lamp on and check my caller ID to see who it was. After knowing Toyomi for over a year, I recognized the frenzied pitch of her ring.

“Stephan.” Toyomi sounded sweet, amorous. “Love you, baby.”

Outside my window a car hit the speed bumps on Town and Country Road.

Toyomi said, “Are you there?”

“Barely,” I groaned. Sleep was all over me. I asked, “What’re you doing up this early, or late, or whatever?”

“Missing you like crazy. I’m sitting here, watching HBO, eating a candy bar, lonely as hell, thinking about you.”

“Damn, baby. Three a.m. Can’t sleep?”

“No.” She hesitated. “Steph, this bed is cold without you.”

“I know. Wish I was there. What are you wearing?”

“Nothing. Just you on my mind. Baby, we need to talk.”

Damn.

No matter how a brother ducked and dodged, every relationship got to a point where a
talk
was needed. Where shit got muggy, the funk couldn’t be denied, and had to be clarified. Boundaries needed to be redefined. Or just defined. When it was time to be upgraded from coach to first-class or get the hell off the plane and find another airline.

“Where’s this going?” she wanted to know.

“Where’s what going?”

“Us. Our relationship. We’ve been spending a lot of time together, and I want to know, you know, if there is going

to be a commitment or if you’re just going to keep dropping by when it’s convenient for you.”

It was early on a Sunday morning. An unseasonably hot Sunday morning that felt like the middle of July. Toyomi was mad because I was supposed to drive out there yesterday, but I called her and canceled after I checked my calendar and saw I had put blue circles around those days—reminding me those were her period days. I didn’t need a PMS weekend where any spark could start a fire. I could have a bad time by my-damn-self. So I dipped into my bag of excuses and told her I had a lot of things to take care of in L.A.

Her tone stiffened. “Oh. You didn’t mention that before.”

“Slipped my mind.”

“What you have to do that’s so crucial?”

I told her that the Los Angeles Black Business Expo was going on this weekend, and I wanted to make some contacts. “It’s time for me to pass out my résumé.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I heard through the grapevine that some of the smaller commercial companies in Culver City, Los Angeles proper, and Santa Monica are looking for experienced programmers.”

“L.A.” A lingering pause. “The opposite direction of where I live. That would be another hour west of where you live now.”

“Forty-five minutes.”

“We’d be three hours from each other, in no traffic.”

“Well, yeah. But I’d be near the beach. Near my family.”

“You don’t like your family.”

“Just my stepdaddy. I love Momma, my brothers, and my sister. Don’t exaggerate.”

Her tone had shifted like a cheap house during an earthquake. “So, you’re considering Los Angeles?”

I said, “Just checking out my options.”

“When did you decide to check out your options?”

“When my job gave me a slamming review, told me I was at the top of my game, then dropped me a lousy three-percent increase.”

“Well,” she paused and chewed, “that’s pretty much standard.”

“It’s bull. That was an insult, like getting a demotion for doing excellent work.”

Toyomi sighed. “Have you looked for anything out this way?”

“It gets up to a hundred and twenty degrees out there in the summer. And that’s in the shade. Cactus shrivels in that heat.”

“It cools off at night.”

“Yeah, it drops to a hundred and nineteen.”

“So, you haven’t even considered looking out my way?”

I groaned, closed my eyes, massaged my forehead. How could anybody pick a scorching desert over a cool beach, a calm place where the temperature drops at the start of every golden sunset?

She wasn’t letting go. “You left L.A. because of the drive-bys and helicopters flying overhead all night.”

“Ear plugs and a bulletproof vest would take care of that.”

“Not funny, Stephan.”

For the last three years I’d been designing firmware for a small company in Brea, writing ancillary programs for testing out flight hardware. Brea is south of Phillips Ranch, down the 57 freeway in Republicanized and used-to-be bankrupt Orange County.

She kept at it. “So you might move back to L.A.”

I let that drift into the land of the rhetorical.

She chewed on her candy bar, slow chomps like the chocolate had become gooey and thick, paused like she was hoping for an invitation to move toward the Pacific Ocean as well.

She proclaimed, “I don’t like what’s happening between us right now.”

“Well, what’s wrong with what’s happening between us?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I don’t want to waste my time.”

“We’re not wasting our time.”

“You know how much I love you. I’ve told you that. It’s just that you live all the way in Pomona.”

“Phillips Ranch.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Twenty thousand dollars a year.”

“Not funny, Stephan. I’m ninety miles away in Palm Springs. And these long distance bills are just too high.”

“Toyomi,” I said, “I’ve asked you to get on-line, and we can do instant messages and chat over the Net for free.”

“Typing messages back and forth is so impersonal. I have to hear your voice. I at least need that much of a connection. But you should see my phone bill, Stephan. I’ve spent over a thousand dollars just calling you in the last six and a half months.”

“Well, my phone bill is high, too. You’ve put quite a few collect calls on my tab. Every now and then you’ll call collect. Then your buddy Shar calls out here for you, collect.”

Toyomi said, “That’s a lot of money we could spend on other things. Vacations. We could use that money on more ski trips, like to Vail and Idaho. Or to the jazz festival in Maui. Anything instead of giving all of that money to the phone company. Not to mention that my rent is five hundred ninety a month and your mortgage is over eight hundred.”

“It’s after three. Can we talk about this in the morning?”

“Five more minutes. Let me give you something to sleep on.”

I exhaled in the darkness. “Okay. Let’s wrap this up.”

“If we put our money together, that’s almost thirteen hundred. If we were smart, we could be living in a three-bedroom house with a garage and backyard for less than that.”

We?

She kept talking. “I need to see you during the week, baby. I want to hook up with you. I’m not saying get engaged or nothing like that. Just maybe we should live together for a while and see which way this is going. Spend some time together. It’s been over a year, and we should move to the next phase.”

Phuck. Capital P-H-U-C-K.

That’s not on the blueprints, ain’t in the plans, and due to my reluctance to commit one way or the other, the conversation went downhill quick, fast, and in a hurry.

Long story short, Toyomi introduced me to Mr. Dial Tone in mid-sentence. I groaned out the stress she’d blanketed my peaceful night with, stared at the erotic art by Merryl Gaye that decorated my cream-hued walls. I was waiting for the phone to ring because I knew she’d call

right back. Ten minutes went by. I rolled over and over and ended up staring at my rotating black ceiling fan. I watched it go in circles, eased back to sleep. Thinking. In a relationship where you love ‘em but you still need to let go. That’s where I was. Coasting. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’d call her after I woke up and, you know, find the right words and phrases and justifications to rationalize continuing what we had, keeping it the way it was. To keep it coasting.

By ten in the morning, sunlight was gleaming, but my vertical blinds were still drawn. I was in my queen-size bed, on top of my green and gold comforter, flicking through the channels on my twenty-six-inch TV trying to find a decent college B-ball game to watch, when the phone rang. My caller-ID said the number was unavailable. I picked it up right before the machine kicked on.

“Morning,” I said.

“Collect from Shar to Toyomi,” the operator said.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled with a lot of attitude. That’s another reason why my phone bill was hitting the ceiling.

The operator asked, “Do you accept the charges?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, dude,” Shar sang with her usual melodic flair. “Put Toyomi on the phone for a minute.”

I said, “She’s not over here.”

“You’re joking, right?” she said. “Yesterday morning after softball practice she said that she was driving out there, and she wanted me to call her.”

“Call her for what?”

“She wants me to meet her. She saw a coat at Burlington Coat Factory, and I wanted to get a Nike sweatsuit. She said you found one for under fifty bucks.”

“Yeah, I did,” I said, then told her, “Toyomi’s not here.”

“Hmmm. She wasn’t home when I called. Her car wasn’t in her stall when I drove by. Maybe she’s on the way to your place.”

Discomfort eased into my chest. I was wondering where she could be. Felt a twinge of jealousy. She was happy with me, but she was unhappy at the same time. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. At three a.m. she was

lonely and frustrated. Maybe if she couldn’t be with the one she loved…

Then I remembered the days I had circled on my calendar, and that insecurity went by in the blink of an eye.

I brought to light, “She always calls before she comes over.”

“Why she have to call?” Shar laughed. “That’s silly, considering you two been hard-core dating since the day you met.”

“Well, if she drives out here, it’d be nice for me to be here, don’t you think?”

“Give her a key. She could come and go—”

“Anyway,” I cut her off. If I gave Toyomi a key, half of her life would be here by nightfall. More like the other half, because she already has a stock of books and plants and clothes here and there. This territory has been well marked. I diverted the conversation. “You and Chuck back together?”

“Nope.” Shar sighed like she was lonely and brokenhearted. “And we never will be. I’ve been interested in somebody else for a while. Very interested.”

I asked, “Who’s the lucky brother?”

“I saw him Valentine’s Day.”

“You were with us Valentine’s Day.”

“I know.”

We paused.

Her voice went soft and sweet, with a side of innocence. “It don’t matter. He’s seeing somebody.”

We talked about other things. She told me she’d broken up with Chuck because he wasn’t consistent. She’d call him in the middle of the night and he’d be on the other line. That pissed her off because he’d never let whoever he was talking to go, meaning she was at the bottom of the scrotum pole.

She’d tell me something about Chuck, I’d tell her something about Toyomi. I clicked the TV off, and for ten or fifteen minutes we were yawning and comparing notes on bad relationships.

“Toyomi wants to move in with you?” She laughed like the idea was absurd. “That girl is not leaving Palm Springs.”

“Yep,” I said. “She called me at the wee hours of the morning with that nonsense.”

“She is sprung.”

“I know.”

“What you decide?”

“Shar, look,” I said. I tried to explain that looks attract me to a woman, but personality and character are what keep my head next to her bosom. Toyomi was a knockout, but there was more to beauty than having more breasts, thighs, and legs than a bucket of KFC. I confessed, “It’s hard for me to feel relaxed around her. Feels like I’m walking on eggshells.”