Cheaters (35 page)

I didn’t say anything.

She added, “For a while I thought I was going to be.”

Unfortunately, Charlotte spoke fluent Spanish.

She maintained her hurtful smile and held my hand. She came across as more tired than hurt.

“Before Jake called and lied, Dawn had already called here and told me he was up to something. He was stranded in Orange County somewhere at a friend’s house. She wanted to know why his friend couldn’t take him home, or why he couldn’t just spend the night or wait until a decent hour to call her house. She hung up on him and called me.”

I nodded and listened. That was all I could do.

“After that, I was up walking the floor and worried, peeping out the window every other minute, waiting for him to call me to pick him up from wherever.”

She paused.

I waited.

Charlotte said, “Jake walked in half-dressed, barefoot, stress sweating, and smelling like some other woman’s vagina.”

All I could do was lend an active ear.

“You know,” she went on, “the real reason Jake asked me to marry him was because I found out about him and Pamela. You know that, don’t you?”

I didn’t know that. My eyes told her that.

“I’ve seen her. I drove out to Venice, went to Ralph’s grocery store, watched her, and stood in her line. Stared dead in her face. She knew who I was.”

I wanted to feign ignorance, but her narrowed eyes weakened me. The words slipped from my mouth: “How do you know?”

Her eyes darkened.

“She knew who I was. She looked right here”—Charlotte used two fingers, motioned at her own eyes—“and she smiled.”

Silence. The absence of sound frosted the room.

“He cares about you.” I knew my words were contrived, but I guess true homies always try to stick up for each other. At least this way I could walk out and tell him I tried.

She lost her smile. “I care about me more than he ever will.”

“He’s sorry.”

“He’s sorry he got caught.”

“C’mon, you know he loves you, Charlotte.”

She ran her hands over her hair. “If this is his idea of love and caring, it’s time for him to start hating me and go away.”

I couldn’t give up. “You want to try to work it out?”

“You’re joking, right? Don’t insult me in my own home.”

“I want you to think about it, that’s all.”

She pointed at the engagement ring. “I’ve thought about it for a long time.”

I massaged my neck, hard. No hope lived in this room.

She said, “You want to know why I stuck it out this long?”

“Why?”

“Like a fool, I thought he would change. I thought the power of the right kind of love would make him change. But that was
worldly
thinking. Spiritual changes have to come from within.” Charlotte slid the stack of tapes over to me. “Take these.”

“What are these?”

“I put a recorder on my line.”

“A recorder?”

“I tapped my own phone.”

My breath caught in my throat.

She nodded. “Bought it at Radio Shack. Over the counter. Thirty dollars. Best investment I ever made.”

She held her eyes on me, gauged my reaction.

My raised eyebrows, the way my jaw had dropped, told her I was surprised. “That’s why your phone line was clicking.”

Her eyes looked weary, but her lips curved up at the ends. Underneath her innocent eyes was a canny woman. Educated, underestimated, and as shrewd as the ‘raptors in
Jurassic Park.

I asked, “All of these tapes, you recorded all of these?”

Charlotte rat-tat-tapped her short nails on her cup. “I turned it on when he came over. Clever, huh?”

I sipped my coffee, tasted nothing but treachery.

“I know it was wrong, invading his privacy, but since I wasn’t getting any straight answers for his unaccounted-for hours, I did what I had to do to find out what I needed to know. Listen and you’ll see what I did was justified. Wrong, but justified.”

She handed me the tapes, the engagement ring, a sack of clothes, but kept the cellular phone.

“You know what hurts the most, Stephan? I compromised myself. I went against everything I believed in and compromised myself. That’s what I’ll have to pay for.”

I felt her heart aching, and I looked up at her. Then my eyes drifted away, and my head became too heavy to keep up.

“One more thing, Stephan.”

“Yeah.”

“Those dreams he has, he knows what they’re all about. He’s been cursed with the nightmares of the damned.”

My brows knitted as I echoed, “Cursed?”

“The being chased by evil spirits. The dead coming out of the ground in droves, the familiar faces that won’t stop hounding him, making him toss and turn all night.
He knows.
Some of them look like his parents, that means they look like
him. He knows.
”

The cold-blooded way she said
he knows
chilled me.

Charlotte led the way and clicked her front door open. I went out first. Jake blinked out of his stupor, launched to his feet and looked to me. I didn’t return the eye contact. The clothes in my hand told him there was nothing I could do for him. He looked past me at Charlotte. His face was pleading like a criminal begging the parole board for clemency. So much remorse.

Jake’s voice was humble. “I love you, Charlotte.”

She snorted disgustedly. “It’s over.”

She was angry but still not cruel. Never cruel.

Jake was damn near on his knees. Tears popped up in his red-rimmed eyes, his face contorting. “I need you. No other woman on this planet, in this universe, means a damn thing to me. I love you more than anything. We can get married right now. We can pack up and go to Vegas, or make plans to get married in Cancun, get married at sunrise on Maui, anything you want, just say it.”

The world paused.

“If you felt that way in the beginning,” Charlotte said, and without a drop of harshness or bitterness in her voice, “we wouldn’t be standing where we are now. Take care of yourself.”

Jake begged a little more.

Charlotte’s face changed to something gruesome. “Why would you want to be with a bad-performing, nonfulfilling woman?”

Confusion flooded Jake’s watery eyes.

Charlotte calmed herself, said, “Play the tapes.”

I got in my car. Jake eventually followed.

I maneuvered the surface streets, then drove south on the 71. All the way I fought the heaviness in my sleep-deprived body and headed into the new sun to shuttle Jake to pick up his car.

For a moment I wondered what was up with Darnell.

I asked Jake what he thought about that.

His words rode on a wave of anger. “Tammy. He’s been tipping out to see Tammy.”

“Tammy who?”

“That bitch you was with tonight, her friend Tammy.”

“Her name is Chanté,” I snapped in irritation. “Chill with that
bitch
crap, all right?”

“Nigga,” he wheezed like air was fleeing his lungs, “what’s your problem?”

“Just because your program was one-hundred-percent jacked up last night, and you got
me
smack dab in the middle of this bullshit, don’t mean that you have to blame every-damn-body.”

I was pissed, tired, sleep deprived, constipated. I’d left a woman in my bed and come out to be faced with this crap. All of this told me that I should value Chanté a lot more. It’s not every day a man meets a strong, beautiful woman. That’s as rare as a million-dollar bill.

I said, “Charlotte said you know what the dreams are. She said something about your being cursed with the nightmares of the damned. Some spooky crap like that.”

All of a sudden he leaned forward and let out a hard breath, panted like a dog on a hot summer day. Vulgarities poured from his mouth.

I ignored his temper tantrum and thought about Darnell. Tipping out to see Tammy. Dawn was a good woman. Another strong sister who had life skills.

The world was coming apart at the seams.

Maybe not the world. Just our world.

Jake stopped cursing out the universe and put in one of the tapes. That stole my attention away from every other thought.

Shocking.

First Jake’s voice came out of nowhere.

Then Darnell’s voice came out of nowhere.

Uncut words that made me swerve a time or two. Jake jerked around like a man in an electric chair. His voice was low. “What the—I don’t believe she did this.”

The tapes were crisp and clear, loaded with conversations of Jake and woman after woman. Explicit phone-sex conversations with Pamela. Mocking, laughing, and making plans with other babes while he was at Charlotte’s house. Women accepted his invitations to come by the fire station, to his condo for dinner. One call was to my number, and when he got my answering machine, he pretended he was having a conversation with me, then used me as an alibi to get away. It recorded when he called home and checked his messages, picked up the phone numbers they left behind on the trails of their sweet voices of surrender.

“I got me some of that, and she rolled over and went to sleep. She’s getting better, but still, a bad-performing and a non-fulfilling woman drives a man to stray…. If I hadn’t stayed at Shelly’s so long, I would’ve went to see Pamela. She does some booty-licking shit that drives a nigga crazy.”

I nearly rear-ended the car in front of me. I shouted, “Damn.”

“I’m going to hook up with Pamela. Now, she always answers the door in satin and silk, runs a brotha’s bath water, rubs him down, ain’t got no hang-ups, tries to turn a

brotha out every time she sees him. I try to do some real shit with Charlotte, and she gets all tense.”

“Work with Charlotte.”
That was Darnell’s voice.
“Buy some kama sutra books, check out some erotic movies and watch ‘em together. Maybe try some nude yoga, give each other oil massages.”

“Man, Charlotte is almost thirty years old. What am I going to look like trying to teach her what she should already know?”

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Jake wilted in his seat, grabbed at his goatee, tugged like he was trying to yank out one hair at a time.

Dawn came into the house, making all kinds of noise, talking to herself. I was on the service porch, taking a load of white clothes out of the washing machine and putting them in the dryer.

I asked, “What happened?”

Dawn stopped in the doorway and stared me down. “Did you know about the other women Jake was seeing?”

Her cross-examining tone made me feel like I was on the witness stand. “What do you mean, other women?”

She told me what had happened in Chino. Repeated what Charlotte had recorded on tape. At the end she shook her head. “I’m just going through what every woman goes through when her friend goes through something like this.”

I supplied the mental state: “Doubt.”

“Yeah, doubt.”

I said, “Our marriage must be on shaky ground if some outside party can inject doubt.”

I didn’t know if I was talking to her or talking to myself about the way I’d been feeling since I met Tammy.

Then I confessed, “Well, I’ve been having doubts too.”

She hesitated before she spoke. “What about?”

I said, “Us.”

She looked jarred. “Okay…”

“Something’s changed.”

She thought this over a moment, then responded. “True.”

“There’s a lot of stress under this roof. Stress that we’re not coping with very well.”

She said, “Nobody asked you to sleep in the other bedroom.”

“You called me a rapist.”

“Those were your words, Darnell. I was asking for tenderness. I attempted to communicate my unhappiness with you about that incident, and you turned it around.”

“Do you enjoy making love to me?”

“Yes. For the most part, yes, I do.”

“For the most part? What does that mean?”

“Well,” she shifted, chuckled a little bit, “sweetheart, you’ve put on a little weight.”

“So, I turn you off.”

“There you go doing it again. That’s not what I was saying.”

This time I paused. “Do we still value each other?”

She spoke in a mechanical way: “I love you, Darnell.”

“Maybe you love me the way you want to love me, not the way I want to be loved.”

“How do you want to be loved?”

“Unconditionally.”

She made a face that was supposed to slow me down.

I kept rolling. “But that wasn’t the question.”

“If you have something to say, then say it.” She was getting defensive. “I’ve been up half the night dealing with idiocy—”

“Nobody asked you to run out when she called over here.”

“—and I’m tired. And I didn’t do anything for her that you wouldn’t’ve broke your neck to do for Jake. Damn. Look at the time. I’ve been up all damn night.”

I said, “Don’t walk away.”

“I have an open house, so I’ll have to be up all damn day. I need to sleep a few minutes.”

“I’m trying to make a point here.”

“Then make your point and stop beating around the bush.”

I paused. “Why so hostile?”

“What’s your point?”

I said, “We used to laugh together.”

“That’s it? That’s your point?”

“Most of the time it feels like we’re jockeying for control.”

“You’re the one trying to control our destiny.”

“See, that’s what I mean. Whenever I try to talk to you about what’s going on inside me, a lot of resentment sprouts up between us. It’s like this wedge that’s shoving us in two different directions.”

“Sweetheart,” she folded her arms, rigidified her tone, “my only
resentment
is that I thought that somewhere down the road, after you finished law school, that we would be striving for us to grow and eventually go into some sort of business together. What you’re doing, this hobby, that fantasy that’s taking up
my
quality time, wasn’t the plan. I don’t want to be an old-ass woman having my first baby. Or no babies. I don’t have time to see you start over. If you start over, that means I’m starting over, and dammit, I’m through starting over. Hell, I paid my be-patient-while-I-get-my-career-together dues while you were in law school. Feels like my whole life has been on hold for you.”