Hobbs just wanted all of them to disappear, all of the noise of the day to subside and leave her alone to her thoughts. But instead of articulating herself, she took it out on Adams, perhaps for no other reason than his physical presence and inauspicious timing.
“Fine, you got it,” Adams said. He threw open the door and then he was gone.
Hobbs waited a few seconds, stood up and locked the door. She found a seat at one of the tables, buried her head in her hands and sobbed quietly.
Chapter Eighteen
July 26, 1998
Roberta Hobbs was in love. Twenty-two years old and freshly graduated from college, she was beautiful and optimistic. Her hair was thick, long and straight, always flowing down her back. Her skin was flawless, even after a night of drinks with him, always with him. She never thought she’d be that girl to drop her friends just because of a guy, but now that she was in thick of it – the eye of the tempest – she suddenly understood everything. What all those love songs were about, the romance novels, the Cinderella stories she’d always dismissed as puerile and illusory. Now it all made sense.
She first saw him walking down the sidewalk on campus. He was older, wearing a business suit while speaking to a few other businesspeople, sandy-colored hair hiding a few forehead wrinkles. Even through the suit she could see that he was muscular, and there was something about his stature that caught her attention. He was a fully matriculated man – not a kid who fumbled with the pen after timidly asking for her phone number. Not a boy who practically drooled after she agreed to go back to his dorm room.
It was all over in a second. She glanced at him and she glided by and saw that he was looking right at her. But still, she had to move forward. At that time, her walk was more of a high-heeled strut, and to pause would be to cut short the illusion.
Roberta thought she’d never see him again, but she was surprised to see him sitting in the booth of the local college luncheonette. Still wearing his business suit, he was alone this time, and he looked terribly out of place compared to the rest of the patrons – none of whom were over the age of twenty-five. Roberta walked over to him and smiled. “Are you lost?” she asked.
He looked up and warmly returned her smile – a ruggedly handsome face. “Not at all. I’m exactly where I want to be. Please have a seat.”
Roberta sat down in the bench across from him and noticed that he was sharing his seat with a stack of legal pads. “Are you a professor?” she asked him.
He laughed. “No, I’m in real estate. I was thinking about building a hotel around here. But after today’s meeting, I don’t think I can justify it to my investors. My name’s Steven.”
He stretched his hand across the table and she shook it. “Roberta,” she said.
That was how it all began – the beginning of everything. It was as if the four previous years of college were just a prelude to this moment. And even though he was quite a bit older, he was still youthful. He was someone she could talk to, relate to, ease into bed with at the end of the day – or sometimes in the light of afternoon.
Everything progressed at light speed, one milestone after the next. She was too excited to experience all of it to wait for the natural pacing of things. Graduation happened and then she moved in with him in an apartment south of St. Louis that overlooked the Mississippi River.
They had only known each other a few months, but Roberta was always looking into the future, casting a vision of their commingled lives – a big wedding at one of his hotels was just the beginning.
Roberta’s friends tried to warn her. Most were worried that she didn’t know him well enough. One was concerned about the age gap and kept referring to Steven as “the octogenarian”. Another said that Roberta had lost her sense of self entirely and had become consumed with pleasing her man, like a 1950s housewife.
“It doesn’t matter,” Roberta would say. “We’re in love.”
And she truly, deeply was in love – a feeling more overwhelming and powerful than anything she’d felt before. Everything reminded her of him; every time she was in a conversation, she thought of how it related to him. All she wanted was to be wrapped up with him at the end of the day, asleep in his arms, her face pressed against his chest, with the rise and fall of their respiration in concert.
She didn’t dare tell her friends but there were in fact a few things that bothered her about him. The first and most troubling was his role in illegal activities. He had a few business associates who came by every now again – men who were different from the others he regularly dealt with. They were pushy to him and leery towards her. When they came by, they stared at her as though she was a prize Steven had won, an art fixture to be venerated. And when they spoke, they used euphemisms for drugs that didn’t hide anything. One of the men once opened a box right in front of her and took out a few packets of white powder. Roberta gasped and Steven glowered at her and told her to leave the room. When he came into bed later that night, he either deflected or lied.
“I’m not selling drugs,” he insisted, while pulling her body against his.
Roberta resisted. “But I saw it, the white powder. Cocaine. I’ve seen it before.”
“Mmmm, let’s not talk about it,” he said, right before rolling over and falling asleep. Roberta turned away and tried to sleep but it took her awhile to drift. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer, and this was a fact she’d have to reconcile with images of him five years into the future – an honest, loving businessman, a husband who doted on her and maybe one or two kids.
Then there was the issue of the future – a topic he refused to discuss. “You’re twenty-two years old Roberta,” he would say. “You’ve got your whole life in front of you. Why are you trying to pin yourself down?”
She tried to explain that it wasn’t about her but about him. He was in his late thirties, almost forty. Didn’t he want to settle down? And she didn’t have any qualms about limiting her options; she already knew whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Then he would shake his head or become intimate, pull her into a full-body hug or laugh and tell an anecdote about one of the hapless guys who worked for him.
These issues bothered Roberta but they didn’t sway her feelings. She and Steven loved each other intensely and they were going to end up together. That was the only fitting ending to their romance.
And then, everything she felt, everything she dreamed about, everything she thought she knew – all came crashing down one rainy night in October.
***
Against her better judgment, Roberta allowed herself to be dragged to a nightclub. It was late in the month, and air was cool and rain-dampened. If it had been her decision, she would have stayed at home under a warm blanket, staring at the barges that occasionally crossed the Mississippi, keeping Steven’s place in the bed warm until he got there.
But a good friend was having a birthday, and that led to several pleading emails and phone calls. Roberta was told in a halting, pejorative voice, that she never went out anymore. She had become a ghost since moving in with Steven. So she went.
The club was called The Thirst – and the first things Roberta noticed about it were the deafening pulse of electronica and the long line of hopeful clubgoers who waited to get in. There were five young women in their group, and they took a place at the end of the line, covering their ears and huddling together under a single umbrella.
As the line inched forward, Roberta had her epiphany. She recognized the architecture, the outside décor, even the way that The Thirst was scrawled on a sign above the entryway in Bickham Script.
“You guys, this is Steven’s place,” Roberta said, and her knowledge of several of the employees at work that night afforded them no-cover access to the club as well as the VIP area.
They paraded through the VIP area as though they owned it – and Roberta felt that she kind of did, in a displaced way. They claimed a banquette that overlooked the dance floor, ordered bottle service and made several heartfelt toasts to the bir
thday girl.
Then Roberta scanned the area and saw something amiss at the far end of the section. There was a girl about her age – blonde, leggy, wearing a tight cherry-red dress. And she was kissing a man who could have been mistaken for Steven.
Of course, it was impossible to see anything from that far of a distance, and through the haze of dancers, wait staff and the occasional puffs from a fog machine. But it was his body language that gave him away. He was leaning into the blonde girl – one hand on the banquette and the other caressing her thigh – a Steven Vance move.
Roberta stood up and made her way over. The whole time, she expected to see the couple pull away and give way to Roberta’s mistake. She would politely change course and then tell a funny story to her trustworthy, loyal boyfriend when he came home later that night. I saw a guy kissing a girl, she would tell Steven. And I must have been drunk because at first I thought it was you.
The couple did separate but only when Roberta was standing directly in front of them. By then, there was no mistaking identity, no changing course. The nightmare was unfolding before Roberta, her worst fear fully realized.
Steven glanced up, saw Roberta, and scooted a few inches away from the blonde. “Roberta! What are you doing here?”
“My friend is having a birthday party,” Roberta said, although it was hard to even find her voice, the breath that would allow her to finish her sentence. In one moment, every dream that she had been building up for months was eviscerated, everything she thought she knew was wrong.
“Hi, I’m Shelly,” the woman said. “I’m Steven’s girlfriend.”
If Roberta was shocked and horrified by the presence of Shelly, Shelly didn’t seem disturbed at all to see Roberta. She leaned over the banquette and poured herself a shot of vodka, quaffed the beverage and glanced around the room. “I’m going to go look around,” she said to Steven, one hand gently placed on his knee. Then she stood up, planted a loud wet kiss on Steven’s lips and sauntered away.
“Shelly is your girlfriend?” Roberta asked.
“Yes, Roberta. And I care for her a lot.”
These words felt like a dagger. It wasn’t enough that he was with another woman, that he confirmed an intimate relationship with someone else. It was this suggestion that he cared for her – as a foil for his feelings towards Roberta.
Roberta didn’t want to ask the next question but she couldn’t help herself. “And what about me?”
“I’m sorry Roberta.”
There was a vice clenching her heart inside her chest. The alcohol made her feel woozy and unsteady. She stumbled a bit and thought about how clumsy she looked – certainly when compared to the graceful bombshell in the red dress who was flitting from table to table, casting adoring glances back at Steven.
“But we live together,” Roberta said.
“Well, you do live in one of my apartments. But I’ve been thinking for a while now that you need to move out, find your own place, and move on. I’m sorry; it’s just not working for me.”
Steven then stood up and joined Shelly at one of the other banquettes in the section. Roberta stayed in her spot for a few moments longer, not even sure her legs could support her if she wanted to leave. Her entire life had been rewritten in a manner of seconds, and in a way that she was completely unprepared for. There was no tenderness – no concern from him. There wasn’t even a real apology.
Roberta stayed at his apartment for another week until she found another place with affordable rent. During this time, Steven was a ghost. Roberta saw his images on photographs placed around the home; she saw his handwriting on papers scattered across his desk. But the man himself did not appear – nor did he respond to phone calls or emails. It was as though his decision was not so much a breakup as a purge. Since he’d made his choice, she no longer existed.
When Roberta thought about it later, she realized that his abolition of her hurt the most of all. The surprise sudden breakup was difficult. The discovery that he was seeing someone else was a shock. But to ignore all presence of her was the most demeaning. It reinforced that all the love she felt between the two of them was entirely in her head. Everything he had so whimsically said about his devotion to her was a lie. Had he once loved her or had he never loved her? Roberta would replay their months-long relationship in her mind like a highlight reel, trying to pinpoint the issue, the catalyst.
She left messages threatening to turn him over to authorities, and when he didn’t respond, she actually did it. To her surprise, it didn’t make her feel any better that he got arrested. She was surprised that in the wake of affection was not anger, or resentment or even a throbbing hurt. It was numbness – a welling up of emptiness, indifferent to sentiment.
This hardened ball of apathy grew over the next few years instead of shrinking. It protected her when others tried to date her, and it helped her cope with her chosen profession. Several months after Steven Vance was arrested in the lobby of one of his buildings by a brigade of law enforcement, Roberta Hobbs decided to become a cop.
***
Life on the beat was working out for Hobbs. She was good at her job, even when it involved the most mundane and unpopular of tasks. She could write traffic tickets – sometimes as many as ten a day – even in the face of a verbal assault from tactless recipients.
It wasn’t just the traffic tickets. Hobbs worked with the diligence of a woman who had sworn her life to the task. Long hours, short lunches and hard work seemed to define her work ethic – and her co-workers took notice.
For Hobbs, sometimes it was easier to work than to think – easier to stay late and go through files than to go home and figure out her next steps for the evening. At the job, the next steps were obvious, well defined. There was more than enough work for the grunts who chose to embrace it, and that’s what Roberta did when everyone else went home.
Steven Vance had moved on too. Three years after the nightclub incident, after his plea arrangement and reentry to the community at large, Vance started appearing in the newspapers again – this time due to community service and large public donations.
Hobbs took notice of Vance’s image rehabilitation, his reversal of character – even as she tried not to notice. Every time she read an article about him, she wondered whether he had actually changed. The articles certainly made it seem so.
Then, she got her chance to find out for herself. In July of 2001, Hobbs was walking along the street on her way to work. It was a blisteringly hot day – the kind of day where the pavement seemed to be melting, and the sunshine made a sodden oval in the center of her shirt, where it clung to her stomach. Just as she was cursing her choice of outfit, she saw Steven Vance advancing towards her. He was striding along, handsome as ever, and when he saw her, he broke into a rakish grin.
Hobbs stopped walking, smiled back and incited a casual conversation once he got closer. She had played this part so many times in her head, but when it actually happened, she was surprised that she reenacted it all wrong. She wanted to be unaffected by him, a once-jilted girlfriend who’d since moved on. But there was a twinge of love or lust that still beat whenever he spoke. After five or ten minutes, when he invited her up to his apartment to see his renovations, she agreed. She was surprised by how giddy she felt during the elevator ride, the promise of a once-unbearable outcome that now seemed so auspicious, so certain.
They spent the next six months in bed together and then parted ways in a manner just as ugly as the first time around. She wanted a future and he needed space. And the more she sought it, the more he resisted.
When Hobbs left his apartment the morning after their second breakup, she called him a litany of names and said a bunch of things she didn’t even believe. As much as she hated him for contesting the future that she so deeply wanted, she still wanted it.
Steven Vance was big and lumbering, macho and unreasonable. But he could also be candid and open, kindhearted and thoughtful. They had meaningful discussions, comical banter, and they were in
credibly physically compatible. Hobbs had no idea whether he was still attached to his old activities, still lording over his old drug enterprises. She suspected as much but never asked. It was better not to know.
This began a decade of what Hobbs referred to as push-pull. She would see Vance at a bar or a charity fundraiser, they would anneal their romance with a passionate bedroom romp and he would make promises that appealed to every crucial desire she held for the two of them.
Invariably, they would spend the ensuing three to six months by each other’s side, and just when Hobbs grew comfortable enough to declare that this time was different, this time Vance had grown up, he would pull away.
Each rejection stung just as painfully as the first one, and it surprised Hobbs – who was stoic, emotionless, sensible at the office – that she could be so imprudent in her personal life.
From a rational point of view, Hobbs knew that falling back in with Steven Vance was a terrible idea, and yet it took until the age of thirty-five for her to officially call it quits, and only after a public confrontation. They had taken an off-night during the throes of another torrid affair and she decided to show up at one of his fundraisers – an auction to raise money for a little league stadium. There she found him happily preaching into a microphone, encouraging donations from the audience with an adoring young brunette on his arm – his new girlfriend.
The ensuing argument in the parking lot had the composition of a play that had been rehearsed so many times before – same actors, same dialog. He had recently realized that he loved the petite brunette and he was sorry – although he didn’t really seem sorry. Before Hobbs stormed away, she declared that she was officially, irrefutably, undeniably done with him.
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