I picked up the phone and punched in the numbers from my phone card. It was early evening, and I was hoping I would get Wylie and not his answering machine.
After a few rings, I got my first break in a couple of days. Wylie answered the phone, and I suddenly missed New York terribly.
“Wylie, this is Bart. How ya doing?”
“Where have you been? Do you know your answering machine is full and your cell phone is off? Where are you?”
“I’m in South Beach.”
“Are you still shooting that video?”
“We finished a couple of days ago.”
“Don’t tell me you met another confused man?”
“No, not yet. But I’m not going to let that stop me from moving down here,” I said, laughing. It was the first time I had cracked a smile in days.
“What? You can’t move down there. What am I going to do? I need you,” Wylie said.
“Oh, you’ll be fine. I need a change. It’s all for the best,” I said. I wrestled with the thought of telling him what I had done to Basil and what Ava had done to me, but I didn’t want to hear his “do right and good things happen” speech.
“Bart, you can’t do that. I’ve been calling you every hour on the hour. I have a problem,” Wylie said. I noticed his voice was unusually loud and trembling.
“Wylie, what’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. When can you get back to New York?”
“I can’t do that,” I said firmly.
“I need you, Bart. For once in your life, stop thinking about yourself. How many times have I been there for you?”
“Then tell me what’s going on. You expect me to just change my plans for you because you say so?”
“You know me, I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. I need to talk to someone, and you’re the only one I can turn to.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Wylie said, “I think something’s wrong with …” with hesitation in his voice, and then he was just silent.
“Wylie, are you still there?”
“Yes. Bart, please come home. I think I have HIV,” Wylie said.
I didn’t know how to respond, and my stomach began bouncing like a trampoline. I could hear Wylie crying softly on the other end of the line. He sounded like a little boy crying because he’d suddenly been separated from his parents in a huge mall or park. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I whispered, “I’ll have to call you back.”
Happy Birthday, Yancey
Since it seemed like I wasn’t going to get Desmond into my bed, I would go to his. After a very tense meeting with Michel over my not doing the interview with LaVonya, I’d become upset when he said this might hurt my career. I called Desmond and invited myself to his apartment, and he didn’t object.
We were sitting on his sofa, getting ready to watch a movie, when my cell phone rang. I looked at the number and said, “I better get this. It might be Michel.”
“Or one of your boyfriends,” Desmond joked.
“Hello.”
“Yancey, this is Michel.”
“Are you still upset with me?”
“We need to schedule your interview with LaVonya,” Michel said.
“I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do it,” I said.
“This is free publicity. Yancey, you have to do it. The higher-ups are furious about your not wanting to do the interview. Mr. Hudson is talking about coming in from Los Angeles to talk some sense into you.”
“Like I told you earlier, I think LaVonya has an ulterior motive.”
“What?”
“I can’t talk about it right now,” I said as I looked over at Desmond to see if he was looking at or listening to me. He had moved over to his DVD and CD collection and was searching for something.
“Yancey, I need to give you some advice. Take it or leave it, but not doing this interview would be a very big mistake, and it might alter your relationship with Motown. People will start to consider you difficult to work with, and trust me, there’s a long list of difficult divas that are no longer in the business. You need to call me in the morning and set a time for this interview,” Michel said firmly.
“I’ll call you,” I said as I clicked off my phone. The nervousness I was feeling in my stomach must have moved to my face, because Desmond turned to me and asked, “Is everything all right?”
“It will be fine.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Desmond asked as he sat down next to me on the sofa.
When I looked into his eyes I decided that I was going to try something different. I was going to try the truth. The whole truth.
I began by telling Desmond about my dilemma with Motown and People magazine. I told him I had some secrets about my past I was sure LaVonya was going to ask me about, and how those secrets could end my career.
He took my hands and said, “We all have secrets. But you can’t let your past haunt your future.”
“Some of the things I have to say might change the way you feel about me,” I said softly.
“How could they? Is there something in your past that you’ve done to me? My family?”
“No.”
“Then how could it change the way I feel about you?”
“Let me ask you something. Why didn’t you make love to me when we were in South Beach?”
Desmond responded quickly, “Because it wasn’t time. I want to make love to the entire you. Your body. Your soul. I’m still learning that. Any man could look at you and love what he sees on the outside. I want something more.”
“What if I can’t give you that?”
“Then we both would lose a great deal,” Desmond said as he sweetly touched my face with the back of his hand.
I spent the next hour telling Desmond about my sordid past. I started out on the sofa with Desmond holding my hands, and then I got up and walked around the small living room as I recounted stories of how my grandmother used to beat me. I told him how my mother wasn’t interested in being a mother. I told him what I had done to Basil, and even Nicole.
I started talking and I couldn’t stop, and I felt cleansed. Like I was finally able to remove old photos from a scrap-book I was too afraid to open; tearing up the pictures, which brought me pain. Desmond listened both silently and intently. Several times during my monologue I wanted to rush over and fall into his arms, but I wanted to get everything out into the open. Once and for all. When I finally stopped talking I was exhausted. Desmond moved toward me, rested his arms on my shoulders, delicately pushed my hair back and asked, “So I don’t understand why you don’t want to talk with this reporter. None of us had perfect childhoods. But we survive. We change.”
I took a deep breath and moved away from Desmond’s embrace. For a moment I had my back to him, and then I suddenly turned and said, “I had a child. I gave her up.” And then I began to cry body-shaking tears.
Desmond rushed to me and held me in his arms. One was covering my head and the other was wrapped tightly around my waist as he whispered, “Let it out, girl. Everything will be just fine. Let it out, baby.” I clung to Desmond like he could save me.
Then he kissed me. Deep and hard, like he was making love to me. I had never been kissed so passionately, so lovingly. When he paused, he wiped the tears from my face with his open hand and said, “You said you felt like you were changing. You can. You mentioned feeling like you were shedding the layers of your past. Your grandmother’s beatings. Your mother’s deceit and lies. But Yancey as long as you keep those lies inside you,” he said as he gently tapped my heart, “you won’t shed anything. If it’s causing you this much pain, let everything go.”
“But I can’t,” I said.
“Yes you can. I know you can. Stop trying to be perfect. Let Yancey out!”
Desmond spent the next hour convincing me that telling my story would help others and would allow me to enjoy the rest of my life
without fear. It was not the first time I’d been told this. But I heard Desmond’s words in a new and different way. His sweet-smelling breath caressed my face like a fall wind and everything made sense to me. He told me that I wasn’t the first woman who had given up a child and I surely wouldn’t be the last.
Desmond assured me that keeping Madison would have been the wrong thing to do, since I was worried about passing on the legacy of bad parenting. That it would be better for her to be in a healthy and happy environment and not in a home haunted by secrets and fear.
He also suggested that if I didn’t want to have LaVonya tell my story in People I should consider offering my story to Ebony or Essence. “Think of all the young girls you can help. Our community is still overwhelmed by teen pregnancies, and now we have AIDS to worry about. If you, Yancey B, came forth and talked about the importance of healing by facing our past, just think how much good you could do.”
I spent the night, my first in Desmond’s bed, with his arms holding me tight. I felt safe, protected and new. No, I felt reborn. I promised myself I’d make the most of my rebirth.
We Fall Down
I arrived back in New York and caught a cab straight to Wylie’s apartment. When I got out of the cab, fear clutched my insides as the warm spring air brushed over my face. I was worried about Wylie, because he hadn’t returned my calls.
All I could think about was one evening when Wylie and I were discussing one of his friends who had the virus. Though a little tipsy, Wylie had said he would kill himself before he took his family and friends through AIDS. I still couldn’t believe Wylie had slipped and had unsafe sex while always reminding me to be careful.
My heartbeat slowed a bit when the doorman called Wylie’s apartment and then nodded for me to go up. That was a good sign, I thought, unless someone else had answered his phone, like a member of his family.
When I reached his apartment, I knocked on the door quickly, and a few moments later, Wylie opened the door and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Wylie, why haven’t you returned my calls? I’ve been worried about you,” I said as I walked into his apartment and dropped my luggage beside the front door. I gave Wylie a hug, but his body felt lifeless and his usual smile was absent. His puppy-dog brown eyes looked empty. He must have bad news, I thought.
“Come on in, Bart. I was hoping you’d have the guts to show up,” Wylie said as he pulled himself from my embrace and headed toward his sofa, where I noticed a half-empty glass of wine. The first thing I thought was that I needed to talk to Wylie about his drinking, but I wasn’t going to pile on with what he was going through.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I repeated.
“Because I don’t like lying and I need to say what I need to say to you face-to-face,” Wylie said. There was a sharpness in his voice I had never heard before. It was like our fight a few weeks ago.
“What are you talking about? Have you been to the doctor?”
“No.”
“Why not, and why do you think you have AIDS?”
“I get a physical every six months. I don’t have AIDS.”
For a moment I didn’t believe I had heard Wylie correctly, and I looked at him with a disbelieving look. I suddenly felt a lightning-flash moment of anger and then I asked Wylie to repeat himself.
“I don’t have AIDS.”
“Then why did you tell me you did?”
“Because you’ve got something you need to take care of here in New York. I had to figure out a way to get you back.”
“What the fuck are you talking about!” I screamed as I leaped for the sofa. “What kind of sick game are you playing? AIDS ain’t no joke.”
“And neither is going to jail,” Wylie said calmly.
“Going to jail? What are you talking about? Have you smoked all the weed in New York City, or do I need to talk to you again about your drinking?” I said.
“You can’t talk to me about shit until you get your own house clean,” Wylie said
I was in a state of semishock. In all the years I had known Wylie, I had never seen him mad or this feisty. Something was up, and I needed to find out.
“Wylie, just tell me why you lied to me.”
“Did you take some money from a lady named Ava Parker Middlebrooks?”
“That’s none of your business,” I snapped quickly.
“Is that why you hightailed it out of the city? Did you know she was going to stop payment on the check?”
“That’s my business,” I said.
“No, it’s our business, and we’re going to take care of it,” Wylie said.
Wylie spent the next ten minutes telling me how the bank had called him about the check Ava had given me and the money I had received from the bank. When I asked him why they would call him, Wylie reminded me that because of my bad credit he had helped me get an account and now they were looking to him to either replace the funds or get in contact with me.
“But you didn’t do anything,” I protested.
“What you did was bank fraud. And they are going to arrest your ass if you don’t come up with the money.”
“But I don’t have it,” I said. “That bitch Ava double-crossed me.”
“That’s just too bad. I told you to leave Basil and that lady alone. But you couldn’t do that. You had to go out and try and hurt somebody, and now look what’s happened. I warned you your ass could land up in jail. What did you do to make her give you a check? And I want the truth!”
I told Wylie how I had called several of Basil’s clients, his sister and his father. Wylie looked at me in disgust and kept shaking his head and muttering, “Bart, how could you do this to someone you barely knew?”
I didn’t answer Wylie, but I suddenly felt tears spring from my eyes. I didn’t know if they were tears of guilt about how I had hurt Wylie or for being so stupid to think that I could get something for nothing.
I remained silent as the tears continued to flow and Wylie didn’t say a word. He went over to his CD player and pushed a button, then came back to the sofa with the remote control and said, “I want you to listen to this song and then I want you to think how you’re going to change your life. Your actions and anger have caused me a great deal of pain. And that’s what happens, Bart, when someone like family lets you down.”
For the next half hour, Wylie remained silent as a gospel song played over and over. Every time the song ended, Wylie would lift the remote in the air, press Repeat, and play the song again. It was a great song and the singer had a wonderful voice. The chorus was powerful and painful as the voice sang, “We fall down, but we get up.”
“Who is that?” I finally asked after about the tenth time Wylie played the song.
“It’s Donnie McClurkin and it’s my theme song, and now it’s got to become yours. You’ve got to change, Bart. That’s the only thing that’s going to save you from possible jail time and, at the very least, expensive legal bills.”
“The song is nice and all, but how is that going to get me the money I need to give back to the bank? And they still might press charges,” I said. My body felt warm and sweat was pouring out of me and my knit shirt felt uncomfortable against my skin. I wanted to run from Wylie’s apartment and back to South Beach on foot. But it was clear Wylie wasn’t playing and I was going to have to face up to what I had done.
“If you tell the bank what happened, maybe you can turn things around.”
“They won’t listen.”
“I’ve talked with Mr. Bell at the bank, and we can work something out, but you’ve got to play by my rules. And I mean the first time I get an inkling that you’re not playing the game like decent folk, then you’re on your own, and our friendship is over,” Wylie said, sounding sympathetic but firm.
“What do I have to do?”
Wylie told me that he was willing to pay back the money to the bank, but I had to come and work for him until the money was paid back.
“What am I going to do for you?” I asked.
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“Whatever I tell you, and you’re going to do it with a smile on your face. The first time I hear someone at my company say something about Bart being shady, then it’s over. You’re going to treat people the way you say you want them to treat you. Am I making myself clear?”
“I hear you,” I mumbled. I felt like a child being disciplined by the school’s headmaster.
“None of that ‘I hear you’ bullshit. It’s either probation with me or a chance of probation with the state of New York after some time in the joint.”
“I’ll do what you want, and somehow I’ll make you proud.”
“I’m already proud of my life. Take that pride and save it for yourself,” Wylie said.
I didn’t answer, because I was too busy crying, wondering if I could really get up, or had I fallen down too far?
Promises, Promises
After Raymond’s visit, things in my life changed. My heart had softened, but I wasn’t soft. There was still a part of me that wanted revenge against Bart. Even though I’d promised Raymond I wouldn’t do anything stupid, I still had pangs of great anger.
Raymond and I had spent a couple of days working out and walking around Manhattan, just talking about life and what the second half might hold for the both of us. There was no sex, no kissing, just a lot of intimate moments without physical intimacy. Raymond told me he missed the East Coast and talked about some major changes in his life. When I asked him to elaborate, he turned lawyer on me and said he couldn’t talk about it until he’d worked something out with Trent, his longtime partner. He told me when everything was settled he would give me a call. While I wasn’t holding my breath, I had to admit to myself that I was looking forward to the day when I would pick up my phone and hear Raymond say he had moved back to New York. Solo.
I also found out who was sending me those nasty e-mails. Some mofo named Sean, a sportswriter from Chicago who I assumed had some dealings with Zurich Robinson, an ex-pro quarterback I tried to get with. Sean gave himself away when he sent me an email telling me to keep my clothes on when I was around somebody else’s man. Since Zurich was the only one I had given the full monty, I gave him a call. When I told him the e-mail address, he knew immediately. SWALZ-Sean will always love Zurich. Before I hung up, Zurich assured me I wouldn’t be getting any more e-mails.
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