Platinum

by Aliya S. King

  But two years later in came Beth, pregnant for the second time. She was living in Queens with Z, in an apartment in Fresh Meadows. She rode out to Dr. Hamilton’s Englewood office in a new Acura, driven by Z’s manager. A year later she was pregnant with twins and being chauffeured to the office in a Lincoln Navigator.

  Now she drove herself, in one of seven late-model luxury cars, and left the boys with their father or the nanny. Dr. Hamilton had watched Beth grow up. As with all her patients, in some morbid way she was also watching her die. But Beth seemed to be looking for a shortcut.

  Dr. Hamilton took Beth’s hand off her shoulder and scribbled something on her clipboard.

  “Your due date is early May,” she said. “Make an appointment with the receptionist for two weeks from today.”

  Beth nodded and exhaled. Early May. That sounded right. It had to be. She kept her hands folded in her lap until the door closed and then reached for her underwear and began to get dressed. There was a knock and she froze. She grabbed the jacket to her tracksuit and held it up to her body. Dr. Hamilton kept her body outside the door and let her face peek through.

  “What if it’s another boy?” she asked. Her eyebrows were creased.

  “It won’t be. The law of averages is on my side,” Beth said.

  “And if it’s a boy?”

  “Z wants a girl so bad that I think he can will it to happen,” Beth said. “A boy is not an option. We have four already. Are you sure about eight weeks? I’m thinking more like six.”

  “Eight weeks. Maybe more. Look. It could be a boy,” said Dr. Hamilton. “God is just fucking with you at this point. You have to decide if you want to keep creating new life. Or save your own.”

  Dr. Hamilton closed the door and Beth pulled her legs through her pants and knotted them. She took out the elastic holding her hair back, smoothed her hair down with both hands, and then replaced the band. While she reapplied lip balm and lotion she thought about what Dr. Hamilton said.

  She knew the doctor thought she was a fool. Not for trying to have a girl. But for trying to have one with Z.

  How exactly do you explain to a doctor that your husband is your hero? How do you explain what it feels like to see a little black boy with dusty hair talk shit to the white man who managed the general store when your own father was scared to ask his boss for a switch to the day shift? How do you fix your mouth to explain that the memory of seeing Z crack a bottle over the back of Leon Tucker’s head for poking Beth with a stick made you swell with pride years later?

  And what about her boys? Z gave her a reason to take them and run at least once a month. But then what? Then she would become her own mother. What if she couldn’t handle single motherhood? Her mother had left her father and taken all the kids. A year later, the state had all the boys and Beth was pregnant.

  Beth Saddlebrook had no confidence that she could raise her boys on her own. If nothing else, Z was their father. And in some ways, he was her father too.

  Of course there were other women. Of course there was drama. Z was a dog. And as such, he was the leader of their pack. Four boys and a skittish den mother who kept coming up pregnant instead of remembering to replace her NuvaRing. It didn’t make sense. And Beth knew that.

  She ambled out of the doctor’s office, her slew-foot gait making her seem nine months pregnant when she wasn’t even showing. She left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and gestured to the nurse to make sure she saw it. Beth pressed a button on her cell phone and waited. She put the earpiece into her ear and took the stairs to the lobby instead of the elevator so she wouldn’t lose the call.

  “Who dis?”

  “Boo, it’s Beth. Where’s Z?”

  “He’s in the basement. In the booth. I’ma tell him to hit you right back.”

  “No. I need to talk to him now.”

  “Beth, he don’t like it when I give him calls in the booth.”

  “Boo, it’s an emergency.”

  “Hold on.”

  “This is Dylan, who is this?”

  Beth rolled her eyes. “It’s me, Dylan. Put my husband on the phone.”

  “Beth, can I please have him call you right back? I’ve been trying to get him to do these drops for three hours.”

  “I’ll hold.”

  Dylan, the other white girl in Z’s life, the one who always knew where he was, inhaled and then exhaled hard through her nose.

  “Fine. Hold on, please.”

  Beth was two miles away, pulling onto the parkway, when her husband finally picked up.

  “Who is this?”

  “Baby. It’s me.”

  “What’s going on? You a’ight? I’m working I can’t talk.”

  Z had a marble-mouth, rapid-fire delivery that made it nearly impossible for some people to understand him. Sometimes Beth wondered how he managed to sell millions of records when he could barely speak clearly.

  “I just left the doctor. I’m pregnant.”

  “Get the fuck out of here! God is good, baby. You know that? God is good.”

  “I know. It’s just like your grandmother said. Four boys and then a girl.”

  There was a silence on the other line.

  “You know it’s a girl? How you know already?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But Z, I feel it this time.”

  “Yo. You know my grandmother was a powerful woman. She said I wouldn’t have nothing I really wanted till I had a baby girl. You heard her say that.”

  “I know,” Beth said, “I remember. But Z, I mean, even if—”

  “Don’t even play like that, mama. Don’t fucking play like that. My grandmother predicted my mother’s death. She predicted everything that ever happened in my life, so don’t even fucking act like you don’t know. Last thing she told me was that my daughter would save my life. I don’t even know what the fuck she meant. But we gotta have a baby girl, Beth.”

  Beth kept her hands tight on the steering wheel. She heard Z inhale something.

  “What was that?”

  “A Newport, baby, just a cigarette, calm down.”

  Beth took one hand off the steering wheel just long enough to bite at the cuticle of her thumbnail.

  “Are you sure? It’s just a cigarette?”

  “Don’t ride me, Beth.”

  “I’m sorry, Z! I’m sorry. Calm down.”

  “I can’t talk now. See you at the house.”

  “I love you, baby.”

  “Beth, I love you too. Sorry I yelled. You feel okay? You need Boo to get you something?”

  “Are you coming home tonight?”

  “Yes, baby, I’m coming straight home to kiss both my baby girls.”

  Beth looked up into her rearview mirror to see the grin spreading across her face. She told her husband she loved him and continued home.

  He didn’t come home for three days.

  FACT: THERE WERE OTHER WOMEN. BETH KNEW THIS. HAD ALWAYS known it. And she’d turned a blind eye for years. He didn’t love them. He didn’t need them. He just fucked them. Sex was always a necessary evil for Beth. She’d lost her virginity at twelve to a beer buddy of her father’s who thought she was sixteen. Sex was what you did to calm your husband down, keep him home, or apologize. It was not for pleasuring yourself.

  So he fucked other women. Fine. Beth just didn’t like blatant disrespect. One night in a hotel? Fine. Two nights and now the kids need an explanation? Not cool.

  On the third night without her husband in bed with her, Beth turned off Frasier and pulled out her laptop. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, taking her to all the gossip sites she scoured. Theybf.com had a huge photo of her best friend, platinum-certified R&B singer Kipenzi, pulling her underwear out of her butt outside a CVS. Beth winced, knowing her friend would be mortified.

  She scrolled through all the headlines, looking for her husband’s name. When she reached a story she’d read earlier that evening, she clicked out and went to mediatakeout (“You’ll never believe who has HERPES and IS SP
READING IT ON PURPOSE!!!!!!!” screamed the headline), then she went to perezhilton and finally concreteloop.

  There, in the upper-right-hand corner of concreteloop, were three rotating pictures, highlighting the top stories on the site. A photo came up, under the title “Coupled Up!” And there was Z.

  Beth clicked on the picture, enlarging it. She peered closely at her computer screen. Z was at a nightclub, wearing clothes Beth had never seen before. He’d often have Boo or Dylan buy him new clothes to avoid coming home. In the picture, he had his hand running through his thick afro while he leaned over to talk to a woman. The woman was standing on tiptoe, her hand cupping his ear. His mouth was wide with laughter.

  Beth pulled up her knees and settled the computer on her lap. She brought the screen closer, practically to her nose, as if she could see down to the pixels and understand exactly why her husband was bold enough to be photographed at a club with another woman two days after she told him she was pregnant for the fifth time.

  The woman was small and thin with creamy, cocoa brown skin. A long sheet of hair hung down her shoulders. One wide brown eye was visible above her hand. She had on fake eyelashes and tons of mascara.

  From her profile, she seemed plain. This worried Beth. When she saw him hugged up with the cute ones, she never worried. They weren’t really interested in Z, just wanted to get their pictures on the gossip sites. Z was known to go a week without showering or brushing his teeth, just because. It was the plain ones, like this chick, that would hold their breath and deal with his stench just to get pregnant.

  Z usually tired of his groupies before Beth could even catch one. But this one—this one she kept seeing around. Her picture was up in the studio; there were paparazzi shots of them at parties, premieres. Boo told Beth he’d been sleeping in the studio for three nights, overwhelmed by creativity and recording like mad. It was a lie. Beth knew he was with this woman.

  And as always, Z was creeping with a black girl.

  Beth tried to convince herself that it didn’t matter. But it did. She wondered if he was missing something from her. Is that why he cheated? He loved to run his hands in her stick-straight, naturally blond hair. He was constantly staring into her eyes and commenting on how beautiful they were—the color of some marble he had when he was seven. In bed, he’d hold her hand and point out the contrast of their skin. Damn, you pale as hell, he would say, smiling. He said it like it was a compliment. Like it was some worthy feat she’d accomplished down in the Miracle Run coal mines.

  So why did he always cheat with black girls? Did he want to run his fingers through their nappy, kinky hair? Did he like to intertwine his hands through fingers that looked like his? What was it? Beth peered harder into her laptop and jumped when she heard her phone ring. She pressed talk immediately, not taking her eyes off her laptop.

  “Yeah?”

  “Beth, I’m so tired.”

  “Kipenzi, you okay?”

  “No.”

  Beth moved her laptop to the bed and sat up straight.

  “What’s wrong? Where’s Jake?”

  “Jake’s in the studio. Beth, I don’t want to sing anymore.”

  “Is this about the pictures online?”

  Kipenzi groaned. “Pictures? From where?”

  “Never mind. Are you okay?”

  “I’m over it, Beth,” Kipenzi said. “I’m really over it. My feet hurt. My throat hurts. I just want to sleep.”

  “You need a vacation,” Beth said.

  “No, I need a retirement plan.”

  “Sleep on it, Kipenzi,” Beth said. “Call me first thing in the morning. I’ll bet you’ll feel different.”

  Kipenzi hung up and Beth refreshed her Internet connection and did a final lap across all the gossip sites, ending at mediatakeout. (“DOES she have HEMMERRHOIDS!?!? You will NEVER BELIEVE who was caught DIGGING UP HER BUTT at a pharmacy. NASTY!!!! Click here for exclusive photos!!!!!!!”) Beth closed her laptop, slid it into the drawer of her nightstand, and turned to her side, holding her belly as she slept.

  “MS. HILL, IT’S NOW TEN FORTY-FIVE.”

  The bundle wrapped in Leron custom bed linens didn’t move. Ian cleared his throat. And then cleared it again. In seven years, he’d never had to wake his employer. At six a.m. each morning, she packed fresh mint leaves in a tiny teapot her boyfriend Jake had made for her. She was usually wrapped in a thick robe and reading the New York Times over a cup when he came into the apartment. So when Ian came in, the smell of mint was usually wafting through the penthouse in Trump Tower. But this morning there was no smell at all.

  “Ms. Hill?”

  Ian’s heart flipped over once. And then he forced himself to remain composed. If something was wrong, if she was . . .

  Ian thought of his binders. Lined up on a shelf in Kipenzi’s office were ten black binders with her company logo on the spine. Each one contained vital information that was indispensable to a different aspect of Kipenzi’s life. There was the travel binder, which listed all the resorts Kipenzi loved, the hotels she hated, and the numbers to all the private jet companies she used. There was the personnel binder: a collection of all the hairstylists, manicurists, waxers, and stylists that Kipenzi used in seven major American cities. When her personal stylists were unavailable, it was Ian’s responsibility to fly in one of the women or men on the carefully numbered list. There was a hair weave binder, with samples of yaki and remy hair glued down. In that binder, there were contact numbers for dealers who dealt directly with swamis in India who sold the hair their faithful cut off out of religious devotion.

  There was a tenth binder, one Ian had never used. Over mint tea one morning six years ago, Kipenzi had told him everything she wanted him to do in the case of her death. Ian had taken copious notes, nodding solemnly. He spent the rest of the afternoon typing, printing, and hole-punching her notes and organizing the binder with binder tabs labeled Music, Guests, Poems, Funeral Parlors, Pallbearers.

  Ian knew that if he needed that binder, he’d have to take a shot of vodka from the bar in her screening room first.

  He leaned in close and stared at the bundle. Ian let out a silent sigh of relief when he saw the bundle gently rise and then fall. She was breathing.

  “Ms. Hill, if you need to sleep in today—”

  “I’m awake.”

  Kipenzi’s voice was so clear that Ian was startled. He expected her voice to be thick and groggy. Ian took a step back to the bedroom door, in case she wasn’t properly dressed.

  “Oh. I—it’s close to eleven and I thought—”

  Kipenzi yanked the linens off her head and sat up straight in one jagged motion. Her hair, a web of long, tight spiral curls, was a fuzzy nest, some of the ringlets covering her heart-shaped face.

  “Ian. I’m done.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Terminado, fini, acabado. Done.”

  “Done with sleeping?”

  “No. Done with everything.”

  Ian raised one eyebrow and waited for Kipenzi to speak. She tried to blow a piece of hair out of her face. It rose slightly and then fell back over her nose.

  “I’m done with this hair, first of all,” Kipenzi said. She lifted a curl and then let it drop to her shoulder.

  Ian turned to leave the room. “I’ll have Samantha summoned for the afternoon to tend to your hair.”

  Kipenzi growled: a sound Ian had never heard come out of her mouth.

  “I don’t want someone to do this hair. I want every track, bead, sewn-in, glued-in lace front out of my head immediately. I want my hair—the strands that naturally grow out of my scalp—to be styled. Can you handle that, Ian?”

  Ian kept his back to his client. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Ms. Hill?”

  “Do you even understand how draining it is to drag around this fake hair everywhere I go?” Kipenzi asked. “It’s itchy. It feels wrong on my neck. Makes me break out. I feel like I’m trapped in a Halloween costume.”

  Ian nodded w
ithout turning around. “Anything else?”

  “I need you to call Melinda and tell her that I’m done recording for Musictown.”

  Ian turned around. “Excuse me?”

  “Now I have your attention,” Kipenzi said. “Sit down, please.”

  Ian eased over to a lilac settee near the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River. He sat down, crossed one leg over the other, and clasped his hands together.

  “I do not want to sing professionally anymore,” Kipenzi said. “Ever. Not another concert. Not another studio session. No more tours, no more albums. Nothing. I’m done.”

  Ian nodded slowly.

  “I don’t want to watch my weight. I want to eat carbs on a daily basis. I want to gain weight in winter and lose it in summer. I want to walk through Central Park, with my dog, and not be disturbed. I do not want security to trail me everywhere I go.”

  “I can see how—”

  “Ian. Can you please not interrupt me? This is, like, an existential crisis for me and I’m finally verbalizing how my life is, like, totally fucked up. So if you could just let me get this out, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Ian closed his eyes for three seconds as an apology.

  “I do not want to get dressed up every time I leave the house. I don’t want to wear stilettos. I want to wear jeans. And Converse sneakers. High-tops. I always liked that look. And white tank tops. I don’t want to wear foundation, mascara, fake eyelashes, and lipstick. I hate lipstick. It feels foreign on my lips and I always end up smudging it.”

  Kipenzi stopped speaking and stared at Ian. He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped.

  “You can say something now.”

  “What can I do to help you?”

  “Who is in my apartment right now?”

  “Your diction tutor is in the kitchen. You’re supposed to go over the tapes you recorded.”

  “Fuck that. I’m done with that. I’ll keep my southern accent. I like saying y’all. It’s cute. It’s who I am. I’m southern, dammit.”

  “You’re auditioning for a role, so—”