The week before last they had gone out four nights in a row. At the industry parties, she was pursued by the wives or partners of other entertainers and subjected to endless talk about stylists and shopping. On the other end of the spectrum were the women Shawn called the “baby factories” – on average, they had three kids with their famous spouse and had devoted their entire lives to taking care of them. With those women, the conversation centered on pre-schools and the difficulties they experienced finding “good help.”
Needless to say, she had little in common with either group and Riley sat mostly silent while they prattled on. When the occasion was a dinner with a record executive, Riley was also pretty quiet then too. None of them were much interested in Shawn as a person but rather, saw him as a product and she was essentially his accessory.
Most of the evening, they used industry jargon she didn’t understand. She didn’t complain because it was obvious Shawn liked having her there, taking particular pleasure in saying the words “This is my wife, Riley.” And she took pleasure in it too, but the novelty had worn off and now the way people reacted was starting to grate on her nerves. Raised eyebrows and invariably an ooh or an aah, as though she’d won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Lately, she was just a writer who had run out of ideas.
There was a sharp knock on her door which she immediately recognized. Riley straightened her back and grabbed a pen, preparing to look busy. Greg Harris was a handsome man, about fifty-five, tall and dapper, reminding Riley of that old actor, David Niven with a similarly thin face and elegant manners. Everyone at the magazine knew he had been with his partner for more than twenty years but throughout the time Riley had known him he had never so much as hinted at any kind of private life, gay, straight or otherwise.
A former sixties radical turned magazine publisher and editor, he was now firmly entrenched in the upper-class but dabbled in the more acceptable forms of protest like letter-writing campaigns and petitioning. The tone of the articles he permitted to be published by Power to the People was consistent with his philosophy of speaking softly but carrying a big stick.
“I wanted to speak with you before the meeting,” he said now.
Riley tensed. If what he had to say was too heavy even for that bloodthirsty gathering, it could not be good.
“It’s somewhat connected to your new situation.”
“I’m not sure I understand, she said, deliberately obtuse.
“Your marriage.”
“Yes?”
“Someone approached me recently and made a suggestion. I wondered how it might sit with you.” He perched on the edge of her desk where Dawn had been sitting earlier, and fiddled with his glasses the way he always did when he was contemplating something troubling. “It was suggested that because of your recent marriage, you may have entrée into certain circles - circles that were not as accessible to us before.”
“I’m not sure I . . .”
“Entertainment circles,” Greg said flatly. “Particularly the . . .”
“Hip-hop community?”
“Yes. And it occurred to this person – and to me – that if Power to the People is to stay current and fresh, maybe we should pay more attention to that segment of our readership.”
Riley waited, saying nothing.
“You could do a series. Let’s call it a trial run. A column that deals with different aspects of hip-hop culture, or youth culture in general.” He stopped, probably reading something in her face or manner that told him she wasn’t exactly thrilled at the suggestion. “Do you know what the numbers were for the issue with your article on, ah, your ah, your husband?”
Riley shook her head.
“Well, let’s just say they were more than fifty percent higher than our next best-selling issue, which – to give you some perspective – dealt with the O.J. Simpson verdict. That tells us there’s an audience out there that we haven’t been reaching. And we think a series like the one you did could help us reach that audience.”
“Greg. With all due respect, I don’t want to be an entertainment writer. If there’s a questionable police shooting I want the option to write about that. If a Black woman beat a white man to represent South Carolina in a Senate race, I don’t want to be stuck writing about a Mariah Carey concert.”
Greg smiled. “Understood. And that’s why I give you free rein. Make your pieces as hard-hitting as you want. I’m sure there’s a dirty underbelly out there waiting to be exposed. But we want it all grounded in a certain demographic if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not getting the sense this is optional,” Riley said.
Greg pursed his lips. “I would like you to consider it very seriously,” he said finally.
Riley said nothing, leaning back in her chair. Unless she was a complete moron, that meant there was no option.
“I’m not asking you to take notes at parties,” Greg smiled at her, attempting to lighten the mood. “But you, more than anyone else, may have the opportunity to see emerging trends and issues. Before they wind up on the cover of Newsweek,” he added, alluding to how she’d wound up interviewing Shawn.
“How much of a trial run is it? Like two issues, three?”
Greg cleared his throat. “We’d like to give it a fair chance and allow you to find your voice.”
“I feel I already have,” Riley said, surprising herself, as well as Greg with her confrontational tone.
“Well, in investigative pieces and social commentary certainly. But this would be somewhat different, I think you’ll agree. So anyway, we were thinking a year. Twelve issues minimum.” He waited for a reaction, and when he saw there was none forthcoming continued. “Riley, I wouldn’t have given this assignment to you just because of your husband if I didn’t also think you were a fine writer with the potential to make an incredible success out of this.”
“Thank you,” she said without feeling.
“Well,” Greg cleared his throat and glanced at his watch. “It’s almost three. I’d appreciate it if you don’t discuss this with anyone else until you’ve made a final decision. Naturally, if you refuse we’d offer it to someone else and I wouldn’t want them thinking they were handicapped by being my second choice.”
“Of course,” Riley said dully.
“So,” he stood and smoothed an imaginary wrinkle in his pants. “I’ll see you in there.”
He left without closing the door and Riley sat staring at her desk. She couldn’t refuse. That much was clear. If she did, he would never forget it and no matter what she produced from then on would be judged with harsher eyes. She twisted her rings back and forth. Her mother was right. Wedding bands may as well be yokes about a woman’s neck.
Greg, Dawn, the fucking mailroom girls; no one seemed to be able to look at her and see just Riley anymore. Now they saw ‘K Smooth’s wife’ and whatever significance they attached to that label. Riley picked up a notepad and gathered her notes for the slumlord piece. She would have to kick ass with this story because the way things were looking, it might be the last piece of serious journalism she produced for a long while.
Just when she thought her day couldn’t get any worse, on the subway ride uptown after work Riley wound up sitting next to an old man who alternately coughed and blew his nose into his bare hands. She could feel herself inhaling his germs, and knew even before she got to her stop that she was probably going to get sick from that little encounter.
Ed was as cheerful as ever opening the door for her, but she couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm necessary to smile and return his greeting. In the mailbox there were two more guaranteed acceptance credit card applications. She rode up to the apartment leaning on the rear wall of the elevator, guiltily hoping that Shawn wasn’t home, so she could process everything on her own.
As soon as she walked in Riley could hear the thumping of the bass beat coming from the second bedroom suite. They’d made it into a den where all of Shawn’s ‘toys’ were - the oversized television, the state-of-the-art stereo equi
pment, the video games and miscellaneous electronic gadgetry. When he was home, he spent most of his time there, headphones on, listening to music, picking samples. It was his space, into which Riley seldom intruded.
The master suite was her personal sanctuary. They had lined the walls with bookcases that Riley filled with her favorite texts, novels and volumes of poetry she had collected since she was a teenager. Shawn joked that it made him feel like he was sleeping in the Brooklyn Public Library. Apart from the bookcases, there was very little furniture besides the bed - just the matching dressers and a comfortable overstuffed armchair where Riley did most of her writing.
After her initial resistance, she’d gone along with getting a decorator for the condo and had watched with amazement as a stranger – after only a few conversations with her and Shawn, and a couple consultations about textures and color palettes – managed to put together a living space that suited them both perfectly. It was calm and soothing, the colors a combination of browns, beiges and mossy greens; the furniture had simple, clean lines interspersed with more durable, substantially upholstered pieces. It was beautiful enough that she still frequently stopped in the doorway of each room, just to enjoy the décor, not quite believing she was in her own home. Tonight though, she didn’t want to be here.
Now she stood in the foyer contemplating, and was still standing there when Shawn emerged from his den. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her.
“Hey. What’s the matter?” he asked, noting the look on her face.
She was still holding her messenger bag and had only made about a four-foot incursion past the front door.
“I . . . I think I forgot something at work,” she lied before she stopped to think about why.
“Do you need it tonight?” Shawn asked.
She gave him a brief kiss on the cheek and turned to head out again.
“Yeah, I do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Send a messenger service.”
“They wouldn’t be able to get into the building this late,” Riley pointed out, her hand already on the doorknob. “Or know where to find it in my office.”
Without stopping to first think about it, she called Brian from the corner and arranged to meet him at Luke’s, a diner near his house, then took the train back downtown.
g
Chapter Eight
Riley waited in their regular booth, drinking stale coffee, arranging and rearranging the utensils on the table in front of her. What was bothering her most was directly connected to Shawn himself, and so she couldn’t tell him. Not without making it seem as though she was blaming him for her problems. And the truth was, he just wouldn’t understand. People in the entertainment business tended to forget there was another world out there besides their own, and in that respect Shawn was no different. He wouldn’t get why she thought writing about entertainers and glitz and glamour was not only boring but might possibly ruin her career. And she was in no humor to explain it.
Brian came about fifteen minutes after she sat down, wearing a gray Columbia Law School shirt and sweatpants, looking like the quintessential college student. He’d recently gotten a haircut, and was flushed from the cold. He kissed her on the cheek before sliding into the seat across from her. Riley smiled, thinking not for the first time how happy she was that in spite of everything that had happened, he was still in her life.
“Career crisis,” she said.
Brian signaled for the waitress and started glancing through the menu. “What, they want you to interview another rapper?”
Riley heaved.
“I’m sorry.” He touched her hand. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Well actually you’re not too far off . . .” she admitted. She related her conversation with Greg as close to verbatim as she could remember and then leaned back. “What d’you think? Could I refuse him and still keep my job?”
Brian wrinkled his nose and shook his head slowly. “I don’t think he’d fire you, but . . .”
“But I’d be pretty much on his shit list from then on in, right?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Shit.”
The waitress came and Riley ordered a double cheeseburger, extra fries and a thick vanilla milkshake. Brian ordered a gyro and a Pepsi, then leaned back and grinned at her.
“What?” she asked testily.
“Still pig out when you’re stressed, huh?”
Riley shrugged.
“Some things never change.” He was still smiling at her, looking at her in a way that suddenly made her feel as though she was doing something wrong by sitting and eating dinner with him. “I’m glad you called me, Riley.”
“It’s no big deal,” she said looking at the table. “Tracy doesn’t get home till late so . . .”
“Is that the only reason you called me?”
“No,” she admitted, looking up. “But I don’t want you to misunderstand.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re a married woman now.” He looked her directly in the eye. “You think a day goes by that I don’t remember that?”
“Brian. It was never that deep for you.”
He shrugged. “If that’s how you make yourself feel better about what happened, then fine; let’s say it wasn’t that deep for me.”
“Was it?”
Brian shrugged again “I wasn’t getting ready to propose if that’s what you mean. But I thought we had something. Could’ve seen it going somewhere. Didn’t know I was going there by myself.”
There was nothing to say to a thing like that. Riley sipped the remains of her tepid, bitter coffee and stared out the window at the dusk. A homeless man on the corner was trying to get the attention of passers-by. Most people pretended they didn’t see or hear him. He was invisible.
“Something else is wrong,” Brian said. “You want to tell me?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He sounded hurt.
“Maybe sometime I’ll tell you, she said. “Just not today. Okay? Today I just want to have dinner with you. Talk about stuff.” Like before.
“I could tell you about the article I’m editing for law review.”
Riley smiled. “Sounds like just the kind of ‘stuff’ I had in mind.”
“Good. Because this is complicated.”
“The more complicated the better.” She leaned back and relaxed.
After dinner, they walked over to Washington Square Park and sat near the courts. Brian picked up a game and Riley watched, drinking a latté that was a vast improvement on the coffee from Luke’s.
It was well after ten by the time they decided it was better to call it a night. Brian walked her to the subway and Riley paused at the turnstile, turning to face him.
“So call me,” she said.
Brian’s eyebrows rose. “You sure? I won’t get a K Smooth beat-down?”
Riley laughed. “I promise.”
“You take care.” He put a hand at the back of her neck, stroking it briefly before turning and disappearing into the crowd.
The apartment was quiet and dark when she got in, and Shawn was nowhere in sight. Riley walked through the too-huge rooms, but she was indeed, all by herself. Surprised by how disappointed this made her, Riley sunk into the plush, Italian leather sofa and reached for the phone. She was all over the map these days – one minute exasperated by how much her life had changed with him in it, and then just as suddenly, craving him once again.
Just as she started dialing, she heard his keys, and there he was. Relieved, Riley dropped the phone and stood to greet him. He had changed since she’d first seen him this evening, and was wearing beige slacks and a chocolate brown crew-necked shirt.
“I’m sorry I stayed out so late,” she said. “I was in a crappy mood.”
“That’s okay, I had someplace to be anyway.” He kissed the top of her head.
She held him away from her, and looked him up and down. “You’re all dressed up. Another one of those dinners?”
“Something like
that,” he said vaguely. “Where’d you go?”
“To get something to eat. Lots of stuff happened at work today,” Riley said, rushing past the meal and launching into an explanation he hadn’t asked for. “And that’s why I was in a foul mood.”
“What happened?”
“Well. One good thing - I talked to Lorna finally . . .”
“You did?”
“. . . and she wants us to come upstate this weekend.” Riley waited for his reaction.
Shawn walked into the kitchen and she could hear him in the refrigerator. He emerged moments later with a soda, and sat on the sofa, sliding off his shoes. Riley waited.
“And you forgave her? Just like that?”
“I was the one who called.”
Shawn looked up, surprised. “She didn’t come to our wedding, and you just let that go. And now all of a sudden she wants to meet me.”
“She’s the only mother I have, Shawn. And I understood her reasons for not wanting me to get married.”
“Oh, you understood? Well explain it to me.”
Riley sighed. “We’ve been over this. She’s got different ideas than most people about marriage and all that. She thinks it’s a racket.”
Shawn held up a hand to stop her. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll go. You’re right. You want to go, we’ll go.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Of course we’ll go.”
“Thank you.” She went to sit next to him. “And there was something else too Greg gave me a new job description basically.”
She went on to relay the conversation in much the same way she’d told Brian about it earlier. It felt sleazy, telling him second. Shawn listened and leaned back, taking a long, slow sip of his drink.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally.
Riley sat stock still for a moment. She would never have thought in a million years that he would realize just how disappointed she would be to have her work constrained in the way Greg had done. She’d underestimated him, as always.
Commitment Page 22