The Company We Keep

by Mary Monroe

  Like all the other women connected to the music industry on some level, Nicole wanted to lead a more glamorous life on a regular basis. But for the time being, all she could afford was a one-bedroom apartment, which was always cluttered with items she was still paying for.

  Nicole was just a few months younger than Teri Stewart, a boss that she not only admired but envied. But her envy did not include malice. She adored Teri, and the feeling was mutual. But Nicole didn’t have to drop to her knees and kiss a bunch of funky butts to make people like her. She was “all that” anyway—sensitive, thoughtful, and charming. She had to do very little to win admirers. Especially with the men she came in contact with.

  Despite the fact that she was not a beautiful woman by Hollywood’s standards or if she went by what the black music videos depicted, a lot of men found her casual eroticism and icy aloofness appealing. She had a nice body but a face that she felt was too round. She also felt that her eyes were too big for her face and that her nose was slightly crooked. However, nobody but Nicole noticed her “flaws.” She knew how to work with what she had and turned heads everywhere she went.

  Nicole looked toward the bedroom door, then glanced at her watch and moaned like a woman in labor. The one person she knew who had her at the top of his shit list was on his way. And her trifling ex-husband was the last person she wanted to see tonight, or any other night for that matter. This man had broken not only her heart but her spirit as well.

  “Mama, I can’t find my Transformer.” The small voice coming from the doorway leading to the living room belonged to Nicole’s five-year-old son, Chris. The small living room, with cute little pieces of furniture and knickknacks that Nicole had picked up at places like Ikea and other discount stores, contained a pullout sofa where the boy slept. He was the only reason she still had a relationship with that sperm donor she’d once been married to.

  Nicole whirled around, blinking hard. “Uh,” she started with a sniff. “Honey, your daddy should be here soon to pick you up. Get all your stuff ready. You know how he doesn’t like to wait.”

  Chris gave her a puzzled look, as if he were hearing this for the first time. The fact that he looked so much like his no-good daddy made his reaction that much more irritating to Nicole. “But what about my Transformer?” He pouted with his bottom lip sticking out.

  “Can’t you go just one night without that thing?” Nicole snapped.

  “No way,” Chris snapped back, shaking his head so hard his ears wiggled.

  “Well, tell your daddy to buy you another one,” Nicole suggested, rubbing her chest.

  Nicole had chest pains almost every time she thought about that man. Seeing him in the flesh was enough to make her sick. Chris opened his mouth to speak again, but a loud knock on the living room door made him hold his breath. Nicole braced herself and held her breath, too.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Ask who it is before you open that door,” she ordered, knowing damn well who it was. She slid into the tiny bathroom next to her bedroom and threw on a long, loose terry cloth robe. It was one of several she owned that had seen better days. The belt was missing and the one pocket below the waist had a hole large enough for her foot.

  “It’s Daddy,” Chris announced from the living room, which smelled of fried food coming from the kitchen and floral scents coming from the bathroom.

  Gregory Mason, dressed in dark brown corduroy from head to toe, reluctantly entered the living room with the grim look of a pallbearer on his handsome, dimple-cheeked face. He shook his head in disgust and smoothed back his thinning, wavy black hair. He and Nicole were the same age, but Greg looked at least five years older. That was because he had frowned so much the last few years that the frown lines on his forehead and the sides of his mouth had become permanent. Looking around the room, shaking his head, he rubbed the beaked nose that he had inherited from his Jewish grandfather on his mother’s side. Then he sniffed and coughed as if he’d just stumbled into a room full of cow dung.

  “Hey, Dad,” Chris offered, more interested in his misplaced toy than his father’s presence. Chris was used to seeing his daddy look and act like the giant booger he was. Greg had started exhibiting this rude behavior before he moved out.

  But Chris loved his daddy as much as he loved his mama and wanted to spend time with him whenever he could. Unfortunately, they were not together that often because Greg had his own agenda and it did not include babysitting his own son when there were a lot more important things he could be doing.

  Gregory Mason was an angry black man and had been for years. He blamed the source of his rage on the black woman. She had contributed to his downfall and had been an ongoing thorn in his side for years. An ass-kissing, female Uncle Tom of a black woman had beaten him out of a managerial position at Southwest Airlines where he worked as a personnel rep. His own mama had physically abused him and then dumped him off on his grandmother when he was thirteen for her to finish raising. And that old hag had beat the shit out of him more than his mother. When his mother came to visit, she and her mother took turns beating his ass for one thing or another—masturbating, torturing animals, and trying to look under girls’ dresses. As far as he was concerned, his only crime was just being a boy and doing what all his male friends did. All three of his sisters were bitches on wheels, and the one six-year-old daughter he had, whom Nicole didn’t know about, was already walking around with an attitude, rotating her little neck and rolling her eyes. Black women were more trouble than they were worth. No wonder they couldn’t keep their men out of the white woman’s bed. But he wasn’t into white women, thank God. They’d gotten so big for their britches lately that, as far as he was concerned, Asian women were the only ones worth a man’s time anymore. Shit.

  Nicole let out a heavy sigh from the bathroom, leaning toward the slightly ajar door so she could hear and see what was going on in the living room.

  “Hey, chief! How’re you doing?” Greg yelled, coughing some more. He rolled his eyes at Nicole as she exited the bathroom and strutted into the living room, straightening magazines on the coffee table and rearranging chairs as she moved. “Don’t you ever cook anything but cabbage, greens, and neck bones? This place smells like an outhouse, as usual,” he said with a sneer.

  “Hello, Greg,” Nicole said, sounding as cordial as her temper would allow. She wanted to stomp his smug face into the ground for the way he had disrespected her residence and the way he was looking at her. From the look of contempt on his face and the way he treated her these days, you would have thought that it had been she, not he, who had ruined their marriage by sleeping with every Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino woman in the area. He was now married to a Korean woman, and they had a two-year-old daughter who Greg treated like gold. “From the looks of things, seems like it’s time for you to replace your toupee,” Nicole remarked, talking out the side of her mouth. She knew damn well that all the hair on Greg’s head was his. But he should have known better than to insult her because she was the one person who knew what button to push to piss him off. She knew that his hair was and had always been a sensitive issue with him. Just like hers was with her, thanks to him. He knew from his premature receding hairline, and the bald spots on the back of his head, that he’d be completely bald by the time he turned forty, just like his father and all the men on his father’s side. He ignored her comment.

  Greg smoothed back his hair with his hand again. He blinked hard and chewed on his bottom lip to keep from saying something else to Nicole that would set her off. He had come to believe that black women were like land mines, just waiting to explode and destroy or disfigure their men. Was it any wonder that there were so many black men walking around with no balls?

  “You ready to go, chief?” Greg asked his son, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sliding his hands in and out of his pockets. He wanted to leave. There was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that this was the last place he wanted to be. And it was the last place she wanted him to
be, too.

  “Almost, Daddy. I have to find my Transformer first,” Chris replied.

  Nicole was glad she still had a slight buzz. Had she not been so mellow, there was no telling what else she might have said, or done, to Greg. To keep from saying or doing something crazy anyway, she went to the bedroom to look for Chris’s toy. “You’re two hours late,” she told Greg, talking with her back to him.

  “Kim Loo had a few errands for me,” he responded, entering the bedroom like it was still his. He didn’t even try to hide his exasperation. Neither did Nicole.

  “As usual,” Nicole replied. “The new wifey needs you to play houseboy, so your son comes last.”

  “I am surprised you can find anything in this mess,” Greg remarked, looking around with disgust at the messy room. With the tips of two fingers, he lifted a week-old newspaper from the nightstand next to an empty pizza box. He shook his head and mumbled profanities.

  “And while we are on the subject of being late, you are two months late with the support payments,” Nicole reminded him, with her arms folded.

  “I found it!” Chris yelled from the living room, grabbing his bulging Spider-Man backpack from the coat hook by the door.

  “Good. Let’s get up out of here!” Greg hollered, purposely ignoring Nicole’s last comment. He shook his head some more, waved his hands in the air, and spun around so fast he almost fell trying to get back to the living room in a hurry. He wasted no time opening the front door. But before he could usher his son out, Chris held his arms out to his mother for a good-bye hug.

  “Have fun, little man. I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Nicole told Chris, covering his cheek with hungry little kisses.

  “Come on, Mom,” Chris whined, embarrassed. “I don’t want to keep Daddy waiting.”

  “I don’t want him to wait either, son,” Nicole said with a smirk. “And I hope he doesn’t keep us waiting, either.”

  “The check is in the mail, woman,” Greg snapped, slamming the door behind him as he scurried out.

  CHAPTER 4

  It had been an hour since Teri had spoken with Nicole. While Nicole was still in her apartment stewing over her latest face-off with her ex-husband and trying to decide what to wear, Teri was still at the office, stomping out fires with both feet.

  “Look, Paul, I have to get back to the other line. I am trying to finalize some arrangements for one of our artists. One of our A-list stars,” she said proudly. “I’ve been playing phone tag with his tour promoter for days, so I really need to take his call. I promise we’ll talk later in the New Year.” She didn’t wait for a response from Paul Bailey, the high-strung realtor she’d met at a party a month ago. Since he couldn’t get her to go out with him, he was determined to sell her a new condo. She clicked back to the other line. However, before she could announce that she was back, she heard the loudmouth tour promoter, Ronnie Thigpen, complaining about the fact that she was involved in the tour arrangements for one of his most important clients. The tour that she was so committed to. That punk!

  Teri held her breath as she listened. “That uppity bitch is with the fucking record company, not the artist. Young Rahim is the artist. Compared to him, she ain’t nobody! I don’t know why, but he trusts that woman to make sure all the details are correct. Why? There is no reason in the world we need her help! Hold the line a minute, man. Let me get my beer.”

  Ronnie had recently recovered from throat cancer, and it had taken three surgeries to save his voice. However, he would sound severely hoarse until the day he died. Under normal circumstances, Teri would have felt sorry for a person who had to live with such a condition. But in Ron’s case, his voice was particularly irritating because of the harsh words coming out of his mouth about her. She bristled but managed to remain composed as he continued.

  “We’ve got our own people that can get the job done.” He paused again to take a long, loud drink from his beer can. Then he belched, coughed, and sneezed for almost a full minute. “Excuse me! That shit went down my windpipe. Anyway, how hard is it to hook up a goddamn tour, anyway? That bubble-butt heifer likes to meddle as much as she can just so she can get more money. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear she was kissing Rahim where the sun don’t shine. Either that or he’s heard how she can suck a mean dick and wants to get him a few blow jobs before he goes on his tour this summer. Ha! If it was up to me, I’d tell her to kiss my black ass and bark at my asshole!”

  Teri exhaled quietly. She had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing; she wondered what Ronnie would say if he knew that she hadn’t even seen a dick in six months, let alone sucked one.

  If there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was having somebody disrespect her, even when it wasn’t to her face. But since it was the holiday season and she was planning to get loose before the night was over, she let Ronnie slide this time.

  She cleared her throat to make sure she could be heard. Without hesitation, she directed the tour promoter’s attention to a list of eccentric items that his artist had demanded to have on his tour.

  “Ron, I’m back,” she announced. “I apologize for leaving you on hold for so long…”

  “Oh! Well, let’s talk business, honey. I was just telling Jake about how much I enjoy working with you.” Ron’s voice was so sweet and gentle now; it was hard for Teri to believe that it belonged to the same man who had just trashed her. “Now, where were we, T?”

  “As I was saying, Rahim wants several cases of Cristal, several cases of Jack Daniels, and several cases of Jose Cuervo tequila.”

  “Now, when you say several cases, are you talking about three or four or what? Several is a vague word,” Ron told her.

  “Last count was five cases each. Before that it was three. I don’t know what it’ll be the next time I talk to him,” Teri said.

  “All right, consider it done. Is that all?”

  “He wants several dozen lambskin condoms, several cases of Evian water, his own manicurist and barber, somebody to take care of his dogs, and the phone numbers to the most exclusive brothels in each of the twenty-two cities on the schedule,” Teri revealed with a grimace.

  “Is that all?” Ron asked again, holding his breath.

  “That’s all that I’m aware of,” she replied in a stiff voice.

  “Well, if any of this is going to be a problem, you need to let me know and you need to let me know now so I can deal with it. We can always get our people to do what you can’t do.”

  “I can do whatever he wants, as long as it doesn’t involve standing on my head,” Teri said, trying to make the conversation less painful.

  “But I bet you could do that, too, if you had to, Miss Teri,” Ron muttered.

  “There won’t be any problems. At least not on my end,” she promised.

  “Uh, I hope you’re right. I need to know that a job can get done the way it’s supposed to get done.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Teri said dryly. She had been flattered and annoyed at the same time when the artist in question had insisted that she help organize his tour. She could have turned him down but she liked adding feathers to the many caps she wore.

  “All right now. I’m counting on you. I’ve heard a few good things about you. If anybody can take care of business, it’s you.”

  “That’s good to know,” Teri said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She was surprised that they were able to reach an agreement without a fight. “Well, uh, how can I get the contract to Rahim ASAP?”

  “How ASAP?” Ron asked gruffly. His voice was beginning to sound like a frog croaking for his dinner. “After all, it is New Year’s Eve.”

  “Like tonight? I know this is short notice and all. I’m sure you must have plans for later tonight, so I apologize in advance for the inconvenience.”

  “Uh, Teri, I do appreciate all your hard work. You make your company look good,” he offered. “In more ways than one, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Thank you.” That was all she said be
fore a long pause.

  Ron gasped and blinked. His eyes were burning almost as much as his throat. What the hell was with this woman? Couldn’t she tell when a man was trying to show a little interest in her?

  “Messenger a copy of the contract to me,” she said, pausing to look at her watch. “Within the next hour. I’ll see Rahim later tonight.”

  “Oh? I wasn’t aware of that. Will you be visiting him at his office on Melrose?”

  “No. I received an invitation to attend his New Year’s Eve party at his place. I will give it to him there.”

  There was an excruciating moment of silence before Ron responded. “Oh. I…I see,” he stammered.

  “Will you be there?” She knew he wouldn’t because he would have mentioned it by now.

  “Uh-uh. My brother’s home on leave from the air force so there’s a family thing I have to attend…” Poor Ron. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t even know about a damn party until she brought it up. That was bad enough, but not receiving a party invitation from one of his most important clients made it even worse. And he was too embarrassed to admit it.

  “Well, that’s a damn shame,” Teri said. “You’ll be missed,” she added, trying to think of other ways to rub it in. But he refused to give her that satisfaction. Without another word, he hung up.

  Teri shrugged her shoulders and looked at the telephone, talking to it as if it had a brain. “He could have at least wished me a Happy New Year.” She chuckled.

  With a loud sigh, Teri whirled around in the soft leather chair that had begun to feel like it was glued to her butt. She wasted no time getting up, turning out the lights in her office, and calling it a day.