Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  “I-I . . . ​I-I . . . ​Yeah. I . . . guess not. I mean, I do. I mean, yes. No . . . ​no . . . ​maybe not,” I got out before my throat started swelling and the pain in my back wrapped over my shoulders.

  “Maybe?” Yolanda repeated, her eyes disbelieving. “What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”

  “Well . . .  ​I—”

  “You know what, don’t even answer that crap,” Tamika said, cutting me off. “You’ll get married when you want to get married, if you want to get married. I hate it when married women make it sound like it’s the best and only thing you can do with your life, when truth be told, most of them are just fronting for the cameras. Ain’t that right, Yolanda?” Now Tamika was the one serving up wide eyes to Yolanda.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Yolanda answered coolly. “Certainly some people are faking, but that’s with anything. Plenty of people are happily married.”

  It was like a trap set for a cross-eyed bear. The moment Yolanda said that, I knew how Tamika would answer.

  “Are you happily married? Any small problems lurking around?” Tamika asked suggestively.

  “Why would you ask that? Of course I’m happily married,” Yolanda said, laughing nervously.

  “Well, that’s not what I—”

  Glory be to God, that Leah pulled her sister’s arm and announced that they were just about to leave, because if Tamika had stood there to speak her mind one second longer, poor Yolanda would’ve been cursed (or blessed) with the baldfaced truth about her marriage. It was all stuff I was sure she knew, but she’d die right there on the spot if she knew that we knew. And I wouldn’t blame her.

  “What was that about?” Yolanda said, turning to me with a confused look. “Your cousin is so crazy.”

  “She’s just sensitive about certain issues,” I said. “No big deal.”

  “Well, I hope that doesn’t roll over to you. Don’t give up on love, Kim. I understand what it’s like for you single girls.”

  “Oh, you do?”

  “I didn’t meet my husband until I’d already graduated from college, girl!” Yolanda said, as if she was, like, fifty when she graduated. “But I stayed slim and fly, and when he saw me, he knew what was up. That’s what you have to do. Keep yourself up. Get in the gym!” She looked down at my hips like she’d been dying to say that to me for months. “Get your hair done.” She looked up at my frizzy updo that was half natural at the roots. “Keep your nails right. Look, you’re successful. You have a good résumé. Assistant district attorney in New York City! Any man would be happy to have you! I’ll ask my husband if he has any friends.”

  I was really ready to tell Yolanda all about her little dick husband myself then. Not for anything, but if all a woman needed was a nice shape, decent hair, clean nails, and a great résumé to find love, most of my friends would be married. Someone needed to tell Yolanda to shut the hell up, but I knew her type. She would never know she was wrong, so I chose sarcasm. “Really? That’s a great idea.”

  “Yes it is, girl. Look, don’t even worry about it. And don’t give up. You never know. Your blessing could be waiting right outside that door.” Yolanda pointed toward the door Tamika and Leah had exited through after pulling Miles away from his buddies. She looked so sincere, I was about to burst out laughing.

  “Right,” I said, backing away from her slowly. “And that’s a good thing, because I was about to walk out that very door. Guess I’ll see you next time.”

  Outside, I found Leah, Tamika, and Miles awaiting my escape.

  “I don’t know why you continue to entertain that woman,” Tamika nearly shouted at me over a siren wailing from a patrol car that had stopped to arrest some man a few feet away from the community center. Right across the street was an older park that still attracted people and daily dealings the new Brooklyn pioneers preferred not to see.

  “She is crazy and delusional.”

  “I wasn’t entertaining her,” I said, watching the cop load the man into the back of his squad car. “She just came over.”

  “Notice she never comes to talk to me if you or Lee aren’t there,” Tamika said.

  “That’s because you’re crazy,” Leah pointed out.

  Miles laughed, and Tamika looked at him as the cop car drove off.

  “What you laughing about? You’re in grown folks’ business?” Tamika sounded like our grandmother. “Don’t play with me. I’ll knock your teeth out, boy.”

  We laughed because Tamika was clearly joking. As hard as she was, she could never bring herself to lay a hand on Miles.

  “Yeah, you can laugh now, but we’ll see later,” she said, laughing at her attempt to sound threatening. “Now thank your godmother for coming all the way out here to Brooklyn to see your match.” She pushed him toward me.

  “Thank you, Cousin Kim,” he said with his braces shining on me. He was so tall and lanky, but in his face was a baby boy our entire family raised.

  “No problem, precious,” I said. “I’ll see you next time. And I’ll be on time.”

  Tamika told Miles to walk ahead and turned to me again.

  “Now, Attorney Kind, when do I get to see you again?”

  “What do you mean? Just let me know when the next match is.”

  “You know what I mean. You need to get out. Why don’t you come to Wind Down Wednesday with me and my girls this week?”

  “You know I don’t have time. And your friends are crazy. All they talk about is men and sex. Am I right or wrong, Lee?” I looked at Leah.

  “I’m not in it. You know I don’t hang with any of them,” Leah said, excusing herself from the conversation.

  “Well, what else is there to talk about?” Tamika joked.

  “Anything. Politics. Social issues. Hair. Celebrity gossip,” I listed. “I don’t know.”

  Tamika closed her eyes and pretended she was asleep. After snoring a bit, she opened her eyes and looked surprised I was standing there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I just fell asleep while you were talking.”

  “Look, I’ll try to come, but I am not participating in some all-night dishing session about horrible dates and great sex. It’s pointless.”

  “It’s what you need,” Tamika said, grinning at Leah.

  “What is that for?” I asked.

  Once again Leah pulled her sister’s arm.

  “On that note, we’re out of here,” Leah said, laughing, making Tamika follow her away from me.

  “No, really, tell me,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you on Wednesday,” Tamika said as she waved good-bye and blew me kisses. “You better come. And you better not be late. We’ll be at Damaged Goods. The old spot right around the corner from here.”

  Chapter 3

  I got to work late the next day. My cell phone alarm went off at 6 a.m. as regularly scheduled, but I slept right through it and woke up after 10, when I rolled off the couch and hit the side of my head on one of the claw-feet on my coffee table. The alarm was blaring then, and I had, like, six urgent text messages and voice mails from my assistant, Carol.

  But all of Carol’s messages were urgent, so I didn’t even bother with them. I’d just won a big case the week before, and I was determined to take it slow this week. I ran myself into the ground during my first years working in the DA’s office, but lately I’d been feeling run-down and even considering leaving prosecution altogether. Anyway, I knew Carol had to have been texting and calling about a witness I was supposed to interview an hour before I woke up. She’d probably had to reschedule him and needed to confirm a time with me that she’d eventually pick on her own. I had to keep telling her that half of being a good assistant was thinking on her feet. And to stop calling me about every little thing every day. But she was new and young and scared by the slightest sign of trouble.

  The side of my head was hurting from the bump on the table, so I had to squint my left eye to lessen the pain, and on my way to the bathroom I almost knocked the bottle of wine I’d been drinking
off the coffee table.

  In the mirror, I squinted to see if the claw-foot had left a mark on the side of my eye like it had before, but there was nothing I could see there yet. Still, the pain was sharp and ringing in my ear, so I could hardly get dressed and out the door as quickly as I needed to.

  While I normally used the long walk from my apartment in Tribeca to the DA’s office as my form of morning exercise and meditation, the thumping in my head led me to a cab, where I sat in the backseat trying to remember how I’d ended up on the couch the night before. Listening to the cabbie sing along to “Gangnam Style,” I remembered lying in bed and trying to figure out why Tamika was laughing at me when Leah was pulling her away after Miles’s fencing match. My back had started hurting, and I recalled looking at the clock on the side of my bed and thinking it was still early—definitely before midnight. I got out of bed and found my painkillers in the bathroom. I took two after counting out the hours since my last dose. I went back to the bedroom and lay down, praying the pain shooting up my back would go away and I’d find my sleep. But I didn’t. I just lay there hearing Tamika laughing and repeating, “It’s what you need . . .  ​It’s what you need . . .  ​It’s what you need . . .  ,” and looking down at my waist. I remembered looking at the clock beside my bed again. It was after 2 a.m. and I was wide awake. I decided to get up and walk around the apartment, thinking it would make me tired. I stopped in the kitchen and looked at the fridge. Maybe a sandwich would work. Turkey? Milk? A little tryptophan. I needed to sleep. The interview was in the morning. He was already a skittish witness. On the fence. I had to be on point. I opened the refrigerator, and there was no milk or turkey. Just the wine. A half-empty bottle of Riesling with no top. I grabbed it and went to the cabinet to get a glass, but they were all in the sink. I needed a dishwasher, I reminded myself. My next place had to have a dishwasher. That and a washer and dryer. Those were the things I hated about living in New York City—dirty dishes to wash and laundry to schlep up and down flights of stairs. I remembered placing the bottle on the table and sitting on the couch. I looked at the bottle across from me, and I saw Kim 2 swimming around inside. Thin. In a bikini. I knew I was tired then. I blinked, but there she was. Still swimming and smiling. Then I heard her: “You didn’t have a ring. He never even asked you.” She laughed, and then there was Tamika back at Miles’s match, laughing and waving good-bye.

  “That’s seven dollars, mamita,” the cabbie said, looking at me from the front seat of the cab. “Gangnam Style” had gone off, and we were idling outside 1 Hogan Place—a building that had consumed too many hours of my life. “You okay? You look like you dazed and confused, mami? Maybe we turn around? I take you home? Take care of you?” He grinned at me like there was any chance of that.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said, slipping him a ten. “And for that little comment, give me my change.”

  I don’t know if Carol had some kind of lookout person sitting outside the building waiting to announce my arrival, but when the elevator doors opened onto my floor, there she was standing with her iPad in one hand and a cell phone in the other, ready to pounce.

  “Kimberly, you’re here! I was just about to call you!”

  “Again?” I nodded to her. “And good morning to you, Carol.”

  “Good morning. I’m sorry. It’s just things are crazy here right now. I didn’t know you were coming in late, and I . . .  ​things are crazy.” Carol was a bony Irish girl from Westchester who couldn’t keep a tan—not even in the summer—to save her life. Right before my eyes, she turned beet red and looked like she was about to hyperventilate.

  “Well, I’m not sure how you didn’t know I wouldn’t be in until later. I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. Remember?” I lied, walking toward my office with her panting beside me. The floor was quiet because most of the other ADAs were probably in court or prepping for court. In New York County, we have more than five hundred assistant district attorneys in bureaus covering any kind of crime imaginable—elder abuse, human trafficking, sex crimes, public integrity. One of my classmates from Columbia Law is the ADA in animal cruelty. Last Christmas he was in the newspaper for leading the prosecution of a Russian man who’d been breeding bats in the basement of a building in Alphabet City, killing them, and selling the skin to Chinese herb shops in Chinatown.

  “What? Really? I don’t know how I missed that you had a doctor’s appointment. It’s not on the schedule,” Carol said, looking down at her iPad. She clicked through a few screens. “I know I would’ve caught it.”

  “Carol,” I called to get her attention once I’d made my way to my office. “Do you need anything from me?”

  “Yes. I do. It’s about Bernard Richard—the ex-boyfriend of that guy in the Christopher Street meth-lab case.”

  “Oh, I forgot all about his appointment this morning. Did you reschedule him?”

  “That’s the thing—I tried to. When you didn’t respond to my messages, I figured that was what you wanted me to do—”

  “Good. And?”

  “And I tried, but he wouldn’t reschedule. He’s still here.”

  “Here?” I looked back down the hallway to the empty waiting area. “Where?”

  “In the interview room. I had to put him in there.”

  I rushed to my computer and looked at the time. “It’s after eleven. He’s been here since nine?” I hung my purse and a thin sweater I’d draped over my shoulders in the cab behind my office door.

  “He won’t leave. Said something about people coming for him,” Carol said. “Think he may be kinda . . .  ​you know . . .  ​crazy.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” I snapped, grabbing the files for the case from my desk and walking out of the office in front of Carol. “No breaks! There are no breaks for me,” I added under my breath.

  “Wait! One more thing!” Carol called on my heels.

  “What is it? I don’t want to keep this guy waiting any longer,” I said.

  “I know, it’s just that Paul’s assistant keeps coming down here, asking about your brief from the Lankin case.”

  “Right. He needs it. I told you to send it up last week. Is there a problem?” I asked, heading toward the interview room.

  “Actually, there is,” Carol started. She turned her iPad to me. “I was just looking it over before I e-mailed it, and I noticed a few things. Little errors. Nothing too big.”

  I read through a few corrections Carol had noted in the margin. Somehow, some of the words were misspelled, and I did see that the punctuation was incorrect in a few places.

  “Must’ve been my computer,” I said nonchalantly. “Spell-check and whatever happens when I move my files around between computers.”

  “I know. Your briefs are always impeccable, Kim. That’s why I wanted you to see it again before I sent it. I know you would never want this out.” Carol leaned into me and whispered, “Not with how much Paul seems to be coming around here now.”

  “Right. Good call,” I said, patting Carol on the shoulder. “Look it over again and let’s get it out.”

  “Okay.”

  When I started with my class of ADAs working in the district attorney’s office, I vowed to work myself into the ground. I mean, I told myself I’d be the best ADA or “die trying.” Although I’d never told anyone, I struggled through law school. While everything was coming easily to Ronald and he seemed to do more drinking and barhopping with his law school buddies than he used to, I basically slept in the law library and had to take writing classes every summer to keep my head above water. I think I was the most surprised person in the world when I realized that I’d actually passed the New York State bar examination. I read my name, like, a hundred times to make sure it was really me, and then I didn’t tell anyone I knew I’d passed for, like, three hours. I sat on my couch and cried. I thought about my mother. None of us had heard from her in months, and the last person to see her was Tamika, who said she’d seen my mother standing in a rainstorm on
Jamaica Avenue in Queens selling umbrellas but not bothering to put one over her own head. She’d had on her old favorite red hoodie. Sneakers with holes. No socks. I looked at my phone. I had no way to contact her. To let her know what was happening to me. I had no way of knowing if she’d even care. If she was alive.

  Both Ronald and I applied to work in the district attorney’s office in New York City. For the first time in so many years, a black man, Paul Webster, had been elected to the position, and every black law school student in the city was planning to put muscle behind him. While Manhattan wasn’t exactly the impoverished district Ronald imagined himself working in to save the world, he really admired Paul. I think that was why it was so hard for him when he wasn’t accepted into the ADA class that year and I got the position. He said it was cool. Reminded me of the long hours and low pay of an ADA and said he’d have more fun starting his own firm. He was too smart to be led by anyone. He’d make more money and do more good on his own.

  “Bernard Richard,” I started, walking into the interview room with my hand outstretched to shake his hand, “I’m Attorney Kimberly Kind. It’s great to meet you.”

  Bernard was slumped over the table and looked like he was actually asleep, so I had to stand there holding out my hand.

  When he finally stood before me, I realized he was much taller than I’d imagined based on listening to recordings of his interviews with the police officers who’d shut down a meth lab his boyfriend was operating out of the Candy Shop, a gay club on Christopher Street. On the tape his voice was soft and rather genteel for a twenty-seven-year-old male prostitute living in New York City. But in front of me, he was the same height as Kent, definitely more muscular. His hair was blond but red at the roots.

  “Good morning,” he said, and there was that soft voice again. Maybe he was from Alabama or Mississippi. He looked down at his watch.

  “I apologize for being late. I had a doctor’s appointment. My assistant and I got our wires crossed—”