She waited on her husband hand and foot for the first five years of the marriage, as he moved from being a studio session musician for local artists in New Jersey, to being an in-demand producer who charged six figures for a studio session. She looked up to him, admired him, and worshipped the ground he walked on.
Until she found out about Cleo.
The realization that her husband was being unfaithful knocked the wind out of her. And it had been a slow dawning. There were no whispers. No rumors. No hard evidence. Just a nagging feeling that her husband was disappearing right in front of her.
She had friends with cheating husbands. They talked about the phone numbers and photos found in pockets. But Josephine never saw any proof. Her husband never rushed into the shower when he came home. He stalked around the house, smelling like another woman and daring Josephine to question him. Rough and unyielding, he made love to her nightly. He didn’t make sure to bring her to orgasm and often left the bedroom to watch television alone for hours afterward.
He took no meals with his wife. Josephine was convinced that he couldn’t see her at all.
Every night, she crawled into bed with him and curled up against his chest. And every morning, she woke up to find her husband facing the wall, curled in a ball away from her. It killed her. Knowing that even in his sleep he was somewhere else. He never spent the night away from home unless he was on tour. That would be too blatantly disrespectful. But though she struggled to embrace him at night, she always woke up to find him turned away, hugging the wall.
This went on for a full year. Josephine prayed. She flew alone to Pedernales to ask her maternal grandmother for help. Her grandmother shrugged and told her she would have to wait it out. She cried on the entire flight home. She begged Ras to talk to her, to tell her what was going on, to explain. He looked straight through her. Stepped over her when she fell to his feet. Closed the door behind him and turned the lock. Started the car and sped off. Came home hours later, his eyes wild, smelling like sex.
And then it was over. One day he came through the door whistling. And Josephine knew her husband had returned to her. She also knew she would never forgive him.
She hadn’t left him. Her religion would not allow her to do that. But she would never, ever forgive him, though she wanted to. Hours, days, weeks, months would go by. And then she’d feel it all over again.
By the time Cleo came to her office, it had been a year since he had seemed to return to normal. There had been the one night when he broke down and admitted the affair, telling Josephine every detail. And he refused to discuss it again. Josephine let it go. Until Cleo came to her office to tell her about the book.
After that visit, Josephine made Ras’s life a hell. He couldn’t leave the house without incurring his wife’s wrath. She called him constantly at the studio and showed up unannounced if he didn’t call her back. She rifled through his pockets when he came home, and he’d even caught her sniffing his boxers after he’d thrown them into the hamper in their dressing closet.
On the thirty-fifth morning after the visit from Cleo, Josephine woke up, staring at the ceiling, an icy rage filling her chest once again.
“She came to my office,” Josephine whispered into her husband’s ear. “She was six inches away from me. I touched her. Had no idea who she was. What kind of woman would do that?”
Ras had been pretending to be asleep for thirty minutes. He made sure his lips were parted just so and kept his breath even and measured. He’d been praying that she would leave him be, for just one morning. If she took a shower first, he’d have a few minutes to dash out to the guest bedroom and use the shower and get dressed. If he could make it to the kitchen before she started in, he’d be free for the day. In his mind, he kept hearing the opening chords of a ballad. He hadn’t written it yet. But he knew it was special. He needed to get to the studio and work it out on his keyboard. Felt like something that could work for Bunny Clifton, the girl from Port Antonio he was working with that afternoon.
But Ras couldn’t move. Not yet. He could feel his wife’s hot breath on his neck. She was so close he could smell the evening cream she smoothed all over her body before bed each night and the mint oil she rubbed on her hair. She was too close. Hovering. Although his eyes were closed, he knew she was seething.
“Baby, she’s a dirty whore,” Ras finally said to his wife, keeping his eyes shut. “She’s a dirty fucking whore. I should have never gone anywhere near her. I will snap her neck in two if you let me.”
Josephine snorted and moved away from her husband.
“Snap her in two. You did that already. She told me how you loved to hold her legs open and do all those things to her that you would never do to your own wife.”
Ras’s eyes popped open. “I told you she was lying about that!”
That had continued to be a sticking point for Josephine. She knew that all Carribean men were known for not performing such acts. But who knew for sure? Maybe they did different things with black American girls.
“How should I know what you did with her? Everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie!”
“No. Not true. I came clean. I admitted my mistakes. I told you what I did.”
“Tell me.”
Ras groaned and pulled the covers over his head. Josephine whipped them back and punched Ras in his shoulder. He winced although she hadn’t hurt him at all. To Josephine, her knuckles felt like they were on fire.
“Josephine. Love. We’re not doing this again. I have to get to the studio.” Ras sat up and tied his locks into a knot.
“You tell me right now. Everything. I want to know.”
“You don’t need to hear this again!”
“I will hear it for as long as I need to!”
Ras took in a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “You’d had a miscarriage. You were on pain pills after having the procedure to …” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It was a stressful day for both of us. I brought you home, took care of you. We cried together. You went to sleep.”
Ras looked over at his wife. She was wearing a cream silk dressing gown that was seamless with her skin. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun and each facet of her hazel eyes shone bright like a diamond. She had not a drop of makeup on her face and she was ten times more beautiful than any of the video girls he’d fucked. And most definitely more beautiful than Cleo Wright.
Josephine beckoned him to continue.
“After you were asleep, a few people came over.”
“Men. You had strange men in our home.”
“Not strange men. Friends that you don’t know.”
“That makes them strangers as far as I can tell.”
“We met up in the garage. Started drinking and smoking. She came over with some girlfriends. They were supposed to be picking up one of my boys.”
“She. She who?”
“Josephine, you know—”
“I said who. Say her name, you fucking bastard!” Josephine’s face was contorted and she pointed one long finger in Ras’s face.
“Her name is Cleo. She sucked my dick in the bathroom of the guesthouse.”
It was at this point that Josephine always broke down and cried. An ugly cry, heaving like a three-year-old with snot coming out of her nose. As she slid from the bed down to the bedroom floor, a sob choked in her throat, Ras jumped out of bed to catch his wife and hold her in his arms.
“Why do you make me do this? Why do you want to know?”
“Tell me,” Josephine said. “Were there others?”
“No,” Ras said firmly. “No others.”
“Why her?”
“I was drunk. I was high. I was grieving.”
Josephine just stared at him.
“I have no excuses,” Ras said. “I am a man. I am sinful. I did something wrong. And I have been trying to make it right.”
“She’s writing a book.”
“I know.”
“She said she love
s you. And that you love her.”
“I’m not dignifying that.”
“She said you told her to write this book.”
“She told me she was writing it. Wanted me to beg her not to. Fuck that. Let her write it. I’ve come clean to my wife and we can make it through this. It will be fine.”
Josephine was lying on her side on the floor next to the bed. Ras was in a half-kneeling position crouched awkwardly beside her, half trying to pick her up. Josephine looked up at him and drew her hand across his face. The sound of the smack was piercing.
“It will not be fine. It will never be fine.”
Ras stuck his tongue inside his mouth, soothing the area where she’d hit him. Two seconds away from smacking her back, he held strong. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and calmed himself.
“What you wanna do, big man?” Josephine taunted. “You wanna hit me back? Divorce me? File the papers. I’ll sign.”
Ras stood up and sat on the bed, his head in his hands.
“I don’t want none of your stinking money either,” Josephine said, a sneer twisting her pretty face. “I will go back to Boca Chica. I can teach. I have property there or I could go back to selling real estate. You can turn this house into your own private harem. Let all your lovers live here with you. They’ll take good care of you.”
“Divorce me,” Ras said softly.
Josephine looked up at him from the floor where she was still in a heap. “What did you say?”
“Divorce me, Josephine. File the papers. We have no prenup. Take me for everything I have. Take the house.”
“Is that what you want?”
Ras grabbed Josephine by one arm and pulled her to a standing position. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, so he used his other hand to hold her chin and force her to face him.
“What I want is my wife’s forgiveness.”
“I can’t give you that.”
“You can work on it. You can try.”
“It sounds like you’d rather I leave.”
“You can do that. And then I will go into that guesthouse, load my pistol, and blow my brains out.”
Ras leveled his eyes at his wife. “And you know I would do it. I told you I was going to marry you. I told you I would never live in this life or the next without you as my wife.”
“Ras … Ras … I love you. I just … She … she came to my office …”
“I know, baby, I know,” Ras said, wrapping his arms around his wife’s waist and rubbing her back as he hugged her.
“I’m so sorry, Ras. You must hate me.”
Ras was silent. Josephine whipped her head up to search his eyes. He was smiling.
“You do hate me!”
“I do not. I love you.”
“I should have had sex with other men before you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I could still,” Josephine said, holding her chin up.
“You could.”
“And you couldn’t stop me.”
“I could not.”
“But I don’t want to.”
Josephine felt light-headed and dizzy, the way she always did after a good long cry. No matter how many times she tested her husband, he passed. He withstood her agony, her abuse. He never wavered. Not even an ounce.
“Josephine, sit with me,” Ras said, patting the bed next to her.
Josephine sat down and Ras reached for the glossy brochure they kept at their bedside. It detailed the various months of a woman’s pregnancy and how the fetus was growing at each step. Ras flipped the pages to the section marked “Five Months.”
“This is how far along Marie is, right? Five months?” Ras asked.
Josephine nodded.
Ras smoothed out the page and read aloud to Josephine about the size of the fetus at that point and what it was able to do. “How do you feel?” Ras asked.
“Afraid. Something could go wrong. It’s not my baby.”
“It is your baby. This girl got accepted to Harvard. We’re paying her college tuition, paying off her parents’ debts, sponsoring her brother’s immigration, giving him a job. You gave her sister a job … We’re practically buying this child.”
“Ras,” Josephine whispered, a hand over her mouth. “Don’t say such things. Adoption is not buying.”
“All I’m telling you is not to worry.”
Josephine made a guttural sound and leaned her head back onto her husband’s chest. She had majored in worrying. It was what she did best. She’d worried about not being able to conceive a child since she was fifteen years old and found out her mother had been unable to conceive until she was forty-one. She had no reason to suspect the same thing would happen to her, but alas, it had. After three miscarriages and seven failed rounds of IVF, she’d given up hope.
And then, just before the visit from Cleo, Ras got a call from an uncle in Jamaica. Marie Josef, a young girl attending a prestigious boarding school in Manchester Parish, had been accepted to Harvard. The entire town was celebrating—until her mother found out she was pregnant and too far along to terminate. Calls to the States were quickly made. Ras agreed to finance the girl’s pregnancy if she and her family moved to New York to have the baby. Her older sister, Mali, had been hired as Josephine’s assistant, primarily so that Josephine could have constant contact with someone in the girl’s family. She’d never met the young woman and didn’t want to.
The plan was for Josephine to come to the hospital within twenty-four hours of the child’s birth, sign all the paperwork, and take the baby home to the nursery she’d been decorating, bit by bit, in her mind’s eye, since she was eleven.
“What made you think I would come with you that day?”
Ras and Josephine had returned to bed. Josephine brought her right thigh up to Ras’s stomach and he grabbed it instinctively, rubbing the soft skin and kneading the thick, ivory flesh. After the brutal confrontation, the quiet was heavy in the Bennett residence. On Monday mornings there were no staffers in the five-thousand-square-foot house. Josephine didn’t like to start off the workweek with a lot of strangers in her home. So Monday was a day off for the two full-time housekeepers, three gardeners, full-time chef, and handyman. It was the only morning that she could have a few minutes of uninterrupted time with her husband. Usually it was also when she lost her marbles and cursed him out nine ways to Sunday. But the “bad time,” as Ras called it, had passed, swept away like clouds in a fast-moving storm. Ras shifted his weight to pull his wife’s leg closer to him.
“I just knew,” Ras said, closing his eyes and yawning. “Every time I took the bus home from school with Pierre, I would see you coming and going, and I just knew I was going to marry you.”
“Ras, are we going to be good parents?”
“Let’s stay right here in the present, Josephine. You are forever trying to get grief on credit.”
Josephine smiled and nodded, sitting up in bed. “I have an interview with Alex this morning,” she said.
Ras frowned. “That story’s already out,” he said, nodding his head toward the copy of Sounds of Caribbean America.
“This is for Vibe. It’s about what it’s like to be married to a rapper.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, mon amour.”
“It’s more publicity for J. Bennett Designs …”
“But at what cost?”
“What could happen?”
Ras was silent. He got up from the bed and crossed the room, going into the bathroom and closing the door.
Josephine stayed on her stomach, listening to the shower run. Usually Ras sang in the shower. She waited to hear his deep baritone seep through the bathroom door. Nothing. She rolled over onto her back and ran her hands over her flat, tight stomach. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the child she was preparing to raise. Five months along. The baby would be kicking by now. She couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like, a human life stretching and reaching, making its presence known. Did the young girl fe
el movement? Josephine held her breath and prayed.
HE WAS FUCKING HER AS IF HE THOUGHT THEY COULD BE CAUGHT AT any time. She was up against the wall; he was behind her, cupping her breasts and thrusting very quickly. Then he would stop, as if listening out for any sounds, and then start pumping again. With the married men, sex was like a fourth-grade cop-and-feel in the coatroom. The lovemaking was always furtive and rushed, even when they were thousands of miles away from their wives. They always fucked her like the wife was standing right there and she had just turned her head away for a second. Annoying.
He pulled her away from the wall a bit and then pressed on her back so she could bend down. She hated it when they tried to bend her in unnatural ways. She widened her stance so that she could bend from the waist, and he held her fast, pushing hard until the front of his thick thighs were completely pressed against her backside.
“I’m about to bust … ,” he said in a soft, strained voice.
Cleo pulled away from him, dropped to her knees, and took him in her mouth just in time.
“Oh God. Oh shit. Ma chérie, ma chérie,” he whispered, standing on tiptoe and shaking his head back and forth.
When he was done, he collapsed onto the bed nearby and tried to catch his breath. Cleo went to him and tried to lie down next to him. But he pushed her away as soon as she sat down.
“Go,” he said firmly.
Cleo opened her mouth to protest.
“Go now,” he said, turning away from her.
Cleo stood up and exhaled.
“You want me to go home?” she asked.
“No. Go next door. Will and Rich are over there. Come back when you’re done.”
Cleo nodded, reaching for a towel draped over the chair next to the bed. She wrapped it around herself and started for the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” he asked, when he heard the bathroom door open.
“I gotta take a shower,” Cleo said, one hand on the doorknob.
He stood up and led Cleo to the door of the hotel room.
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