Cheaters (56 page)

She was reluctant to take my help, but her eyes told me she was in a serious bind and she needed it much more than she’d ever admit. Her eyes were misty, voice was cracking when she said, “I’ll pay you back.”

“Pay me back by getting back in school. Do it for me. Just two or three classes, and I’ll call it even.”

“Chanté—”

“Just think about it.”

“Okay. Then do something for me.”

“What?”

“Slow down. Outlive me.”

We shared one more hug, then headed back to the party.

The hotel faced the mountains. It was a clear night. A sky filled with a million stars.

We were kissing.

Touching.

I had to think of all the things my wife had done to keep the dreams alive. She had sat up a lot of nights and helped me study. Had been patient. Had put meals at my side, kisses on my face while I studied through the night. Had allowed me to be an absentee husband. I owed her a lot.

And even if I disagreed with some of her ways, I had to consider the commitment I had made to a higher power.

To honor and love my mate until my bones turned to dust.

In the true scheme of things, relative to the length of my marriage, I’d known Tammy for a metaphorical fifteen minutes. An intense fifteen minutes that felt more important than the last six years I’d given Dawn. Some people you could be with forever and never love completely. Others you could be with a short time and feel like you’ve loved them a lifetime.

That’s not fair. Not fair at all.

Honey. Condoms. Massage oils.

Dim lights. Jazz on the radio.

Not much on Tammy’s flesh.

Not much on mine.

We stared at the bed. Then at each other.

I looked outside, at the heavens. The sky was lit up with a million eyes that were waiting to see what we were going to do.

Somewhere, an angel sighed.

I said, “We can’t do this.”

“I know.”

“I want to.”

“Me too. Believe me, I do. Save me, Darnell.”

“Let’s save each other.”

A moment passed. A moment with me holding her close to me.

She asked, “Why can’t you? This ain’t one of those Viagra moments, is it?”

We laughed a little. When I was at my lowest, with a simple sentence she’d brought me back up.

I wanted to say that my wife didn’t deserve this, but I told her the other reason, the one closest to my heart. “You deserve better than this.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I know what this is about for me.”

“And that is?”

“Well, the way I see it, every person I meet might not be the one, just the one I learn from while I wait to meet the one. On an emotional level, you’ve raised my standards a helluva lot. I didn’t know I could feel like this for somebody.”

I told her, “You’ve done a lot for me too.”

“I’m gonna look for your handsome face in crowds all day, every day,” she said sadly, “and I’ll dream about you all night, every night. I’ll dream about us kicking it in a villa on a hill so high that it’ll be warmed by the stars.”

“Wow.”

“I wish you could come to Paris. I’d sing all night, then make love to you all day.”

“Sounds good to me. I’d write all night, then rest so I could have the energy to make love to you all day.”

Tammy winked at me, said, “We’d make love so much your wee-wee would have carpal tunnel syndrome.”

We laughed. Then we kissed. That ten-minute kiss absorbed the laughter the way a sponge absorbed water.

I asked, “What do we do now?”

“We try to pretend everything is normal when it isn’t.”

I smiled. “I’m good at that. Projecting a sense of normalcy to everybody around me.”

She said, “Another thing we have in common.”

“Pretending is exhausting.”

“Very.”

She pulled away and led me to the dresser. Tammy

picked up her diamond earrings, put one in her ear and gave me the other.

She said, “Keep this.”

“No, these are my gift to you.”

“And this one is my gift to you.”

“I can’t take this.”

“You can and you will. Give it to me when I see you again.”

“You’re not coming back.”

“Let’s just say I’m creating hope. Something for me to look forward to. I’ll keep this one in my ear and think about you every day. Maybe I’ll get famous and you’ll see me on TV. I’ll do the Carol Burnett thing and tug on it so you’ll know I’m thinking about you, that my heart will always want you, Darnell.”

I closed my hand around the earring. Held on to the hope.

She said, “I wish we were more like our friends.”

“In what way?”

“In search of true love but would settle for a midnight romp.”

For a while she held my face in her hands, and I held her face in mine. We stared at each other like we were memorizing the details. Like we’d never see each other again.

She let me go, went in the bathroom, closed the door.

I stood near the door, said, “Tammy?”

Her word came on top of tears: “Yeah?”

“Sing. You sang me to you, now sing me away.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“Whatever’s on your heart.”

“That’ll be easy.” She cleared her throat. “Darnell?”

“Yeah?”

“You pray?”

“Yeah. Not as much as I should, but I pray.”

“Next time you do, ask God why he sent me my fine-ass-intelligent-black-man soul mate and let him be married.”

Soft chuckles came first from her, then from me.

I said, “I have a few questions of my own, too.”

Tammy stopped laughing. “This must be my punishment.”

“For what?”

“You know my pains and my secrets. You know.”

She started humming out her emotion. The vibrations that came from her soul ran through me, dipped into the crux of me.

Tammy said, “I’m not coming back out.”

“I know.”

“I’m not coming back from Paris.”

I told her, “You can run, but you can’t hide. You’ll take it with you.”

“I’m not hiding. Just choosing where I want to be miserable.”

Silence.

“Bye, Darnell.”

“Bye, Tammy.”

I whispered, “Thanks for everything.”

“You too. You’ve been incredibly supportive.”

I pulled my pants on, wiped my eyes and sat on the bed.

“Love you, Darnell.”

“Love you, Tammy.”

“I’ll send you postcards.”

“I’ll write you letters.”

“I’ll write you poems.”

“I’ll write stories about you.”

We said that, made those promises, but we knew we had no way to get in contact with each other.

“Just write those books,” she told me and blew the sorrow that was stopping up her nose. “Follow your dreams.”

“Then I’d have to follow you.”

“Hush.”

Sniffles came from the other side of the bathroom door.

She sang,
“Ne Me Quitte Pas…”

Her voice was haunting. Crisp and clear. Sounded like a twenty-piece orchestra was backing her up. I shivered.

Ne Me Quitte Pas

Tammy’s words were almost crying, begging.

Ne Me Quitte Pas

I dressed.

I went to the bathroom door, put my hand up to the wood, imagined that she was on the other side doing the same as she sang. I imagined both of us reaching for the doorknob at the same moment, then both of us letting go. Her tears on that side. Mine on this. I kissed my fingers, then

put that kiss where I guessed her face was, at the spot I felt her voice coming through the strongest. Her vibrations ran through the wood straight to my heart.

Every step was so heavy as I walked to the hall door. It was so hard to move away from my heart. The door felt heavier, almost impossible to open. Then too quick to close.

An angel’s voice followed me down the hallway.

Ne Me Quitte Pas…

It felt like I could drive a hundred freeways, cruise a thousand streets, and never find my way home. But I did.

All the way my mind was on the forever that I had stood before God, my pastor, my family, and promised. People leave out the human factor. We evolve, change. We reinvent ourselves a million times over. The things we want today might be the things that we want to forget about tomorrow.

I looked at the earring in my hand. Hope.

Maybe I was lost. So confused I really couldn’t distinguish between reality and fantasy. What Tammy offered was fiction, my marriage wasn’t.

The inside of the garage was dead quiet. Tammy’s voice lingered inside my head. I sat there holding onto the diamond earring. My gift to her, then her gift to me.

Inside, Dawn was on the bed. I didn’t see her, but I heard her shift around, get up, then take a slow, skeptical walk up the hardwood section of the hallway.

I tossed my keys on the marble counter in the kitchen.

On the kitchen table was an open EPT box.

My mail was propped up against the pregnancy test. Car note. Insurance. Another a letter from another publisher in the Big Apple was in the pile. I picked that up first. It was already open.

Like all the others, the letter was brief. Sweet.

But different.

They liked my book. They wanted to talk to me ASAP.

I closed my eyes with the weight of the irony.

Words.

I heard them.

I heard what Dawn had said before I left this evening, what she’d done to rattle my psyche, her effort at making me impotent.

“Darnell, what time will you be back?”

“I haven’t left yet.”

“I know where you’re going.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“How do you know?”

“I know a lot of things.”

“No doubt.”

“What time will you be home?”

“Don’t know.”

“Maybe I should be asking if you’re coming back tonight.”

“You’ve never asked that before.”

“Never felt I had to. Are you?”

“Don’t know.”

“Before you leave, there’s something I should tell you.”

“I’m listening.”

“My period is late.”

“How late?”

“Late enough.”

“I see.”

“So take that with you, Darnell.”

My wife’s silhouette was facing me when I raised my head.

She had on jeans, a pair that looked as wrinkled and worn as I felt. A yellow bra that contrasted with the beauty in her flesh. No makeup. Ashen face. Swollen eyes.

Pages of the novel I had been working on were in her hands.

She raised my labor of love to her chest, held it to her heart, and whispered, “This is good, Darnell. It’s damn good. I never knew. I mean, I had no idea that you could do this.”

I hesitated, spoke softly, “Thanks.”

Dawn cleared her throat. She said, “Borghese.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the name of the perfume I smell on you.”

Tears grew in her eyes.

Dawn whispered, “I saw you dancing with her tonight. I saw you holding her. I saw her holding you. I saw her kiss your face. I saw you kiss hers. I saw more than I could bear.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but she put two fingers to my lips, shushed me.

She reached her hand out to me and said, “Don’t explain. Just come to bed. There are things I need to tell you.”

I didn’t move. “What do you have to tell?”

“What I’ve tried to tell you a thousand times before—”

“Which is?”

“But either you didn’t listen, or my pain didn’t interest you enough to notice. There is a lot inside me. It’s burning. I love you, Darnell. I love you more now than I did the day I married you. It hurts for me
not
to tell you.”

Conversations like the one we had always start with a preface. Dawn told me, once again, about how things had been when I was in law school. The pressure and demands from law school have destroyed many a relationship. The song that Dawn always sang was playing again, at the most inopportune time possible.

My perceived shortcomings were again brought to life. For four years I’d been too busy for the marriage. Never home. A husband in absentia. She had been forced to carry the load of the household.

Home and school. Husband and student. I couldn’t be at two places at the same time. Something would suffer. And like my wife, the law was a jealous lover. Unforgiving. Impatient.

Her master plan had been to marry, have a child within three years, and about a million other things. Decisions she had made on her own. Things that we never talked about before we were married. Things we should have addressed before we exchanged rings. Maybe sooner. Before we exchanged bodily fluids. Maybe before the first time we shared a tongue dance.

In a tone that said it all, Dawn said, “I was lonely.”

“Explain.”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Say it.”

“I was susceptible to someone filling in the hole that was growing in my heart. I was a puzzle with a missing piece.” That stung. I finally understood.

She told me that her affair happened while I was studying for the bar. During the last week I stayed at a hotel

and crammed for the test with a group of people. Space and opportunity. Long before that the loneliness had made her feel like she was dying. The attention she needed, the compliments that make a woman feel like a woman, all of that came from a loan officer. She wouldn’t say who. All she would say was that was then, that her indiscretion was a thing of the past.

I didn’t ask her to explain any more than that.

She’d had an affair long before I’d even considered doing so.

Eyes. Our eyes were on each other.

Dawn said, “I figure that what you did with her tonight, well, I brought that on myself. Let’s forgive each other and move on.”

I should’ve corrected her, let her know that she was rowing in that boat of adultery by herself, but in so many ways I had too. Tammy had touched me with the slight of her hand, and I felt like I’d loved her a thousand times.

Dawn put her fingers on my face. Her hands were damp, trembles came from deep within her. That was when the tears came, when her shoulders slumped and her weight shifted to one foot. She held me, dropped everything that she was holding and wrapped her arms around me. Her nose was deep in my chest, inhaling the scent of another woman.