Drive Me Crazy (46 page)

She is Genevieve.

Genevieve.

She loves her name because to her ear, when spoken correctly, Genevieve sounds intellectual. Not Gen. Not Vee. Not any other variation. She will only respond to her name in total, Genevieve. And she is particular about that. She frowns on the Americanized pronunciation, “JEH-neh-veev.” She prefers the elegant-in-tone French version, “ZHAWN-vee-EHV.” She will answer to both, but only the French version is accompanied with a smile.

She is a precise woman. She is not five-foot-one; she is five-foot-one-and-one-quarter. I suppose, to a woman, a quarter of an inch could be the difference between pleasure and a night of frustration.

She has come up from poverty and, once again I state, has declared herself an intellectual. Not one that has stumbled out of the womb and continues to stumble through life without meaning or purpose. Not one of the problem children Bill Cosby rants about. She has endless goals. My wife is a planner. A degreed woman who knows what she will be doing for the next twenty years. She has it mapped out, literally.

She says that when she was a teenager, she mapped her escape from a small town called Odenville, from her past, drew a road to her future.

She did that the day her father murdered her mother. Cut her throat. She told me that her mother was a woman who had many lovers. Her father was a man who grew tired of being ridiculed in his small town. A man who lost it, then called the police, and sat waiting for them to come take him away, tears in his eyes, his dead wife in his arms being rocked and sung to, his every word telling her how much he loved her, how she had made him do something bad.

No matter how I have tried, Genevieve refuses to let me into her past. That leaves me feeling shut out in that part of her life. She only gives me part of herself. Thus, my needs are beyond those of the loins. My need is to feel complete. To not have this glass wall between us.

Genevieve’s desires are flowcharted, every move thought out like a chess player willing to sacrifice her queen in order to slay her opponent’s king. Every move from Odenville to undergrad at Spellman to grad school at UCLA to PhD from Pepperdine University in Malibu, everything that she has accomplished or plans to accomplish is on light green poster-sized engineering grid paper, laminated and framed, hung at eye level on the west wall of her office, facing due east. Like a prayer. Her ambitions hang on the wall facing east for another reason as well. That way her map to total domination of the free world will be brought to life and highlighted with every sunrise.

The light of my life, the fire in my loins.

LaKeisha Shauna Smith no longer.

Now Genevieve Forbes.

When we married, she kept her last name, the one she had decided would be hers from the first time she picked up a magazine with that title, the new one that sang of richness and power and old money, the name she crowned herself with.

Not Gen. Not Vee. Not “JEH-nee-veev.”

Genevieve.
“ZHAWN-vee-EHV.”

Write her name in soft italics; cross the ocean and learn to speak it in its native language.

Let it roll off the tongue. Allow it to melt like warm butter.

I love her because she is an intellectual. Brilliance is an aphrodisiac.

I despise her for the same reason.

“Tell her Willie done passed.”

“Willie? Who is he?”

“Willie Esther Savage, her grandmomma.”

It starts with a phone call. The caller ID shows area code 256, one that I was not familiar with at the time. It was a call coming in from the Birmingham area, the Pittsburgh of the South. The voice on the other end sounded like that of an old man who took his Jim Beam over ice, his tone Southern and rooted in both poverty and ancestral slavery, a raspy-voiced smoker who had—based on the way he punctuated every other word with a cough—seen his better years: I’m not a doctor, but a deaf man could hear emphysema and bronchitis dancing around inside his frame. When I had answered he had asked for Shauna Smith, a name I was not used to hearing. I told him he had the wrong number. Before I could hang up, he changed and asked for Jennifer. Then tried again, asked for Jenny Vee. Struggled with that name, my guess being that was the closest he could get to the pronunciation of Genevieve. He did not know her as Genevieve.

Cough. “The name she was borned with was LaKeisha Shauna Smith.”

He has my attention. “Yes.”

“I think she calls herself Jenny Vee something-another now she done moved away.”

I say, “I think you mean Genevieve, not Jenny Vee.”

He pauses, then answers, “I reckon so.”

My chest tightens as I lean back from my desk, away from the notes I’m looking over, notes regarding the breakdown of the infected enzymes in semen and drugs we’ve developed, and my eyes go to the clock. It’s after eight, close to the time she usually gets in. Genevieve is off work, leaves at five on the dot, but today is Tuesday. Tuesday and Thursday are her Pilates days. Wednesday is an African dance class in Leimert Park; then from time to time she walks across the street and watches poetry at World Stage. She writes poetry but is not one to perform her work. Those are the evenings she gives herself time to do something in the name of self.

I lean forward and ask, “May I ask who is calling?”

Cough. “What was that?”

“Who is this? Who are you?”

Cough. Cough. “Grandpa Fred. Mister Fred Smith Junior. I’m her granddaddy on her daddy side. Need to get her the word her grandmomma on her momma side done passed early this morning. Willie Esther was gone before the cry of the crow.”

“She ... died?”

“Willie Esther lived to see eighty-three last fall.”

My lips move in awkwardness. “Sorry to hear that.”

“We calling all the family we can find right now.” Another rattling cough. Sounded like his lungs were coming undone. “She passed early this morning. Held on as long as she could after that last stroke, but she done been called to glory. We calling everybody and we didn’t want to not call LaKeisha Shauna Smith and let her know when the funeral gon’ be.”

I correct him. “Genevieve.”

“Death don’t give a rat’s ass about nobody name. All Death care about is coming to collect his due, and Death always collect his due. We all gon’ die. With open arms, or kicking and screaming, come time, we all meet Death, we all make that trip to the other side.”

“Yes, we all will.”

“Yessir, I look out my window and see Death’s doing every day.”

He speaks of death with ease, matter-of-factly, as if it were just a part of life.

I get up from my glass-top desk, roll my chair back so I can stretch my back. My hamstrings stick to the chair’s leather. I have on a gray T-shirt and wrinkled shorts, what I wear most of the time I am at home. I look out the window and see our small backyard, which has a pool, bamboo trees that give us privacy, the gazebo that houses our Jacuzzi. Then I glance due east and see parts of downtown L.A. glittering miles away, its smog and lights in the distance. In that same glass I see my gangly reflection. Hair a little too long. As usual I need to shave.

I say, “May I have Genevieve call you?”

There is another pause. The kind that comes when a person’s mind is spinning, questions rising. I imagine that old man, his back bent, skin leathery and wrinkled, a road map to days gone by, sitting in a worn and frayed chair, cane at his side, thick glasses on, his free hand dragging back and forth over the stubbles and rough texture in his pockmarked face, maybe shifting his stained false teeth side to side, contemplating me and my accent that rings of education and twenty-five years of living in California, my disrespectful urban way that doesn’t add sir to the end of a sentence.

He asks, “Who this I’m talking to?”

“Her husband.”

Cough. “What her last name now?”

“Forbes.”

Cough. “You Mister Forbes?”

“No. Genevieve kept her last name.”

“Woman who keeps her last name don’t intend on keeping the man she marries.”

That is his litmus test for a healthy marriage. Intentional or not, it stings.

“You talk real proper. Where you from?”

“Born in ... I grew up in Fresno, California.”

“You sound the way they talk on television out there.”

I chuckle at his Southern drawl and say, “Okay.”

“When she done married?”

“She done married... uh ... she done married two years ago.”

“You don’t say.” Cough. “What kinna work you do?”

“I’m a research analyst.”

“You do what kinda searching?”

“No, research.”

“What kinna work is that?”

“I’m a research analyst. I study and analyze cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, and now I’m working on AIDS research training in the form of neurology.”

When I finish rambling, he says one word: “Cancer?”

“I’ll have her call you. Let me write down your number.”

“She know the number. Same number we done had since nineteen-sixty.”

Grandpa Fred falls into a coughing fit.

The phone goes dead on his end.

My heart worries for Genevieve’s loss. I look at my wedding ring. Her loss is my loss. This phone call has left me the bearer of bad news, a task I do not want.

The phone screams in my ear, lets me know that it is time I hang up.

His call leaves me feeling prickly, the smell of both mystery and death in the air.

Genevieve has spoken of tragedies in her family, reluctantly. Of her murdered mother and incarcerated father. Only mentioned them once. Never gave any details.

I remember my mother. I remember her dying. Remember living with my grandparents. Remember feeling lost and alone. Remember not being able to attach to anyone for the fear of death separating us and leaving me emotionally stranded.

I remember losing unconditional love.

Now I search for the remedy to my inner pain, bask in pleasure to dull its sting.

Grandpa Fred’s voice fades as I put my work to the side and look at the television.
The Lover,
the adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novel, is on Showtime. What I see makes me pause. She is beautiful and naked, in one of her erotic scenes with her North China Lover, on top of him, her face sweaty, in the throes of passion. She relishes him as he does her.

I envy them, the sensuality they have for each other, their love.

On the television, the lovers love on, endless pleasure and exploration. She is a teenager, still in boarding school, young and inexperienced. He is in his thirties, a playboy, a master lover. Both characters are nameless. Names, those labels do not matter in the end.

I try to get back to my work, but I cannot.

I smile in appreciation and continue to sigh in envy.

But in the end, the erotic moments are not why I watch.

It’s what is said at the end.

That is what I wait for, the words I wait to hear at the dimming of their day.

I watch to see how she answers the phone, now her body aged and worn, and his voice is on the other end, listen to hear how he tells her that despite them parting ways, despite their separate marriages, despite the grandchildren, despite all the irreplaceable years that have gone by on the breath of time, he loves her still, loves her now as he did then, and will always love her.

That is when my face gets hot, when my throat tightens.

That is what I want. That is all I want. Love eternal.

They loved each other to a depth that they could not comprehend.

Yet their affair was doomed.

All love is doomed.