Love Frustration

by RM Johnson

  I went to the open closet door, pulled the string on the light, and stepped in.

  I pushed through the shirts, coats, and pants hanging there, randomly going through the pockets of some of the garments. I grabbed some of the purses from the hooks they were hanging on, and went through them, tossing them out on the floor, after finding nothing.

  I was annoyed, growing angry and frustrated that there was nothing to support what I had seen. Nothing that said I wasn’t indeed dreaming. I looked up, and saw there was a shelf above me. I threw an arm up there, and swept everything off that was on top of it. A couple of shoe boxes fell down, opening up, knickknacks, hair barrettes, CD cases, and things of that sort falling out at my feet. A photo album came down as well, which I quickly picked up and opened, confident that I would find something in it.

  I flipped through the first ten or so pages of black-and-white photos of Asha’s parents, of Asha as an infant, and the faded color snapshots of her as a little girl with the pigtails on either side of her head, wearing tiny white shorts, and knee socks. I continued turning past homecoming, her smiling teeth covered with braces, and prom, her standing next to a handsome boy she didn’t appear to like, but probably thought was handsome all the same.

  I was about to turn past the next page, when I saw my face staring back at me. The first photos Asha and I had taken together on our first date. We’d gone to the Navy Pier, off Lake Michigan, and jumped into one of those one-buck photo booths that take four snapshots.

  I looked down the row of shots, at our smiling faces and remembered how happy we were then. I slowly turned the page, and saw more pictures of us. The time we went to Cancún, when we were on the beach, and I had buried her in the sand. There was a photo of the time we went skiing in Vermont, pictures of the great time we had at Mardi Gras, and a snapshot of me and Asha standing in front of the first building I purchased. I was holding up a bottle of champagne, and she had her arms thrown around my neck and was kissing me on the cheek. We were so happy. I thought we were going to get married then, and even now, standing in her closet, looking down at that photo, I couldn’t help but smile.

  I turned the next page, and immediately, the smile dropped from my lips. It was another picture of Asha and me. We were sitting on a bench in the park, my arm around her. I was smiling, but she was looking in the camera with the saddest, guiltiest eyes I had ever seen. She looked like she wanted to cry, even though it was apparent she had made some effort to smile.

  She was wearing a white sweater with long sleeves, and frilly French cuffs. We had gone out earlier that day to buy that sweater to hide the white bandages around both her wrists. The wounds under those bandages were the reason I had suggested going outdoors, hoping that the air and sunshine would cheer her up.

  Two weeks prior to that, Asha was driving down to Atlanta with her younger sister Toi, who was about to start school at Clarke University. It was a long trip, and they took turns driving. When it was Asha’s third turn, she was tired, but she knew she had to be back at work the next morning, so she took the wheel anyway.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to keep on driving so you can sleep a little more?” Asha’s sister had asked.

  “No, no. I’m fine. You go ahead and go to sleep, and by the time you wake up, we’ll be there,” Asha said. But when Asha woke up, the car was flipped on its top, the windshield shattered, smoke coming from everywhere. And when Asha looked to her side, she saw that Toi hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. She was upside down, all her body weight pressing down on her neck, and Asha could tell by the extremely unnatural way that her sister’s head was canted, that her neck had snapped, and there was no way that she was still alive.

  It was all her fault, Asha kept crying when she called her mother from the hospital to tell her the news. Her mother kept telling her it wasn’t, and insisting that saying so wouldn’t bring back her sister. That didn’t make Asha feel any better.

  Asha went back home to stay with her mother for a week in Indianapolis, but after those seven days, she told me that she could no longer take being there, walking the halls that she and her sister walked as kids, seeing her pictures in her room, her clothes still folded neatly in her drawers, as if waiting for her to come and put them on.

  That would never happen again, and there was no one else to blame but her, Asha still told herself. Almost every night, Asha would cry atop her sister’s bed, clutching her sister’s favorite stuffed animal, wishing that she could’ve gone back to that night, accepted her sister’s offer to drive like she should’ve. She would’ve still been alive if she had, if Asha hadn’t been thinking about herself, about some damn job. She sacrificed her sister’s life so she wouldn’t be late for work. When she thought about it in that way, Asha realized that she should be the one dead and not her Toi.

  When Asha came back to Chicago, she didn’t go to work for another week. She barely spoke to me outside crying on my shoulder when she felt the need, which seemed like always. Every morning during that week when I would check on her, all the way into the evening when I’d come back from work, Asha would be there in her apartment in the same place, staring at the wall, leaving me uncertain as to whether she had moved an inch in all those hours.

  Then came that one evening when I walked in, and she wasn’t sitting in front of that wall. I smiled thinking that she was up and about, but when I called for her, she didn’t answer, and when I searched most of her apartment, I couldn’t find her. I went into the bathroom and saw nothing but one of her legs dangling over the rim of the tub. I stood there in the doorway, afraid to take a single step further. When I finally forced myself to move into the room, look down into the tub, I saw that she had slit both her wrists, blood everywhere, splattered across the walls of the tub, covering the tub’s floor, and slowly seeping down the drain. The white T-shirt she was wearing was, in some places, soaked dark red with her blood as she lay there barely breathing.

  The guilt was so bad that she took a razor blade to both her wrists, telling herself that she was no more deserving of life than her sister.

  Yeah, I remembered this picture, I thought, as I continued to look down on it, and I remembered all we’d gone through to get past that, and here I was rummaging through her shit like she was no one to me, like she meant nothing. Yeah, she had lied to me, but that was something that I needed to talk to her about face-to-face. Bottom line, this was wrong. I needed to clean up the mess I’d made of her room, and get out of here, pick this up with her later, the right way.

  So I closed the photo album, placed it back on the shelf, and turned around to walk out of the closet. But as I did, Asha was just walking into her bedroom. She looked at me, shocked, as though she had never seen me before. She looked at her dresser, all the drawers pulled out, clothes hanging over the sides of them. She looked at the shoes and purses that I had thrown out of her closet, then she looked back up at me, and said with more disappointment than anger, “What are you doing in my damn bedroom?”

  I couldn’t answer because I was caught off guard at first. I just stood there, busted, this stupid look on my face, waiting for her to say something else, because I knew I wouldn’t.

  “Jayson, I said, what the hell are you doing in my damn bedroom?” she said again, but this time anger was apparent in her voice.

  Still I said nothing.

  “You’re going through my shit? You’re going through my shit!” She said it twice, as if she couldn’t believe it the first time.

  “I cannot believe this. You of all people, always saying that you wouldn’t come down here unless I allowed you, and here you are, my shit all over the place,” she said, looking over the mess on the floor again with disgust. “Just what the fuck are you looking for, Jayson? Maybe I can help you. That is, if you haven’t already found it,” she said, angrily kicking one of her shoes.

  Still I didn’t respond.

  “Did you hear me? Are you deaf?” She continued ranting. “Tell me one thing. Is this the first time,
Jayson? Or do you come down here every week, every couple of days, and tear through my shit? Hunh, Jayson?”

  I stood there frozen, still too ashamed to utter the slightest sound.

  “Answer me, you lying motherfucker!”

  And then it seemed as though my shame all of a sudden just disappeared. “What did you call me?”

  “I called you a liar. This is my private shit. I pay rent to you, and you said you’d …”

  “I’m a liar, Asha?” I said, really starting to get angry, remembering all that I’d seen last night, forgetting all that I’d just seen in the photo album.

  “In all the time I’ve known you, all the time I’ve been dealing with you, I’ve never lied to you once,” I said, taking a step toward her.

  “Because we meant more to each other than that, I thought. Our relationship, and our friendship. But obviously I was the only one who felt that way.”

  “What are you talking about, Jayson? I never lied to you.”

  “Never, Asha?”

  “No, never, Jayson. And what the fuck does that have to do with you tearing up my shit?” Asha said, her hands on her hips.

  “Where were you last night?”

  All of a sudden Asha was dead quiet.

  “I asked a simple question, Asha. Where were you last night, and don’t try to lie about it, because it’ll only prove what I’m saying now is right. And it wouldn’t do you any good anyway, because I know, Asha. I fucking know,” I said, now standing right over her, right up in her face.

  “I was out.”

  “Out with who?” I asked.

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “Yes it is if you’re out sucking face with some woman when we’re trying to get back together.”

  Asha looked like she had been physically assaulted with the comment I had just made, then she said, “Get back together? We’re not trying to get back together. We had sex last week because you were trying to get Faith and that damn tape off your mind. You were in need of that, and to tell you the truth, so was I, but I wasn’t trying to get back together with you.”

  “That wasn’t just sex we were having, Asha. We were making love.”

  “That’s because I love you, Jayson. That’s why I did it. But I don’t love you like that anymore. And you no longer love me like that, because you still love Faith.”

  I was silent for a moment, had to think about what she had just said. It couldn’t have been true after all that Faith had done to me, but I wasn’t sure, because I never considered it. Every time I thought of her, the only emotion that I would allow myself to feel was anger and betrayal. I’d never thought about whether or not there was still love in me for her.

  “But you still lied to me,” I said. “I saw you downstairs last night kissing some woman, and don’t say she was just a friend, because friends don’t kiss like that. Not even woman friends.”

  She looked at me, guilt written all over her face.

  “When did that start?” I asked her. “All the time you were with Gill? All the time you were with me?”

  “Yes, dammit. Yes! Is that what you want to hear? All the time I was with you, but I never cheated on you, and I never lied to you.”

  “All those years you had that going on in your life and you never came to me, never told me. It’s like all those years we were together, I never really knew you. It’s like I barely know you now,” I said.

  “That was my personal life,” Asha defended. “You didn’t need to know about that then, and you didn’t need to be sneaking in my fucking apartment, going through my shit to find out about it now,” Asha said, snatching the purse I’d thrown on the floor from the carpet.

  “You don’t like it?” I said, spinning around, fed up with the entire argument.

  “No, I don’t like it,” Asha said. “So get the hell out of my apartment.”

  “Naw. How about this? Why don’t you get out?” Asha’s face went blank, because she knew exactly what I was suggesting.

  “What did you just say, Jayson?”

  “You heard what I said. You feel you don’t have to be on the up and up with me, then you need to pack up all your shit and leave.”

  Asha looked as though she was considering a thousand different combinations of words to say to me, but settled on, “Okay. All right, if that’s what you want. But I need to the end of the month.”

  “Fine. You have fifteen days.”

  30

  Asha couldn’t believe what just happened. She couldn’t believe that she’d left her apartment just to go down the street to get some coffee to try and get rid of the massive hangover she had, and had come back to find her best friend ripping through her personal belongings.

  It was a good thing she’d called in sick today, because if she hadn’t, she would never have found Jayson down there, she thought. She would’ve never known that he had known about her and Angie until he confronted her about it, and she wouldn’t have had any idea when that confrontation would come.

  Asha sat on the edge of her bed, a purse in one hand, one of her slips that had been hanging out of one of the dresser drawers in another, feeling violated. She thought about what Jayson said, that she’d lied to him all the years that they’d known each other, that he really didn’t know her, and she had to admit that there was some truth to that. But did this have to be the punishment for that, she thought, looking over the mess he made of her place.

  For a brief moment, Asha thought about going upstairs and apologizing to Jayson, and demanding an apology from him in return. But why would she try to communicate with that man when he told her that he wanted her gone. He didn’t want to talk. And by the look in his eyes, it seemed he never wanted to see her face again. And now that Asha thought about it, hell, it was probably for the best. Her heart was breaking that their friendship had to come to an end this way, and the thought of never seeing Jayson, never speaking to him again, just didn’t seem real. But she was about to enter a new phase of her life now, and maybe just as Angie was supposed to be a part of that new life, Jayson wasn’t supposed to be.

  Asha remembered her mother telling her that people come into other people’s lives for a reason, a season, or for life. She didn’t know which of the first two Jayson was there for, but she knew now it wasn’t for life.

  She would have to go to the hardware store and get some boxes, start packing if she was really going to be getting out of there. Then she would have to find a place. She had no idea where to start looking, and thought for a moment, that it would be so nice if Angie offered to allow her to live with her. But Asha had no idea what Angie’s living situation was like, and Asha didn’t even want to mention the fact that she was being kicked out, because Angie would probably think she was giving her that information hoping that she would invite Asha to stay with her.

  She wouldn’t say a thing, but Asha did go to the phone and dial Angie’s number. She was feeling bad, and she knew just hearing Angie’s voice would make her feel just a little better.

  “Hello,” Asha said, after Angie picked up the phone.

  “How’s your head, baby? You were messed up pretty bad last night,” Angie said, a smile in her voice.

  “It ain’t that bad, but I called in sick today because it ain’t that good, either,” Asha said, placing a hand on her forehead. “And I also didn’t feel like dealing with Big Butch at work.”

  “Well, like I said, don’t worry about that. I’m working on it, and we’ll take care of it, one way or another,” Angie said, confidently.

  “Can you tell me in what way?”

  “I’m working on it, Asha.”

  “Well, will all the work be done by tomorrow, because I told you, tomorrow she’ll be going to my supervisor and …”

  “Asha.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t I say I got you on this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then stop worrying, okay?”

  Asha paused, attempting to forget about all her worr
ies that very moment. “All right.”

  There was silence over the phone for a few seconds, then Angie said, “Are you all right? You don’t sound that good.”

  Asha wanted to tell Angie all that had just happened, wanted to tell her that she had just lost her best friend, lost her place, and felt like she was in the process of even losing herself, but she didn’t. There would be sobbing and tears. She would appear helpless and needy, and it would all be too much for Angie.

  “No, everything’s fine. It’s just the hangover.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, positive. But I gotta go. I got a lot of things to take care of. So will I talk to you tomorrow?”

  “You’ll see me tomorrow. I’ll come up there, and we’ll handle this little situation with Big Les. I promise.”

  When they’d hung up, Asha thought about all the things she had to do, and there were a hell of a lot of them. But the most pressing of all was dealing with Gill. Again, all that Jayson accused her of, echoed in her head.

  “So was this going on all the time you were seeing me, all the time you were seeing Gill?”

  It was wrong, and she’d always known, but in the past, she felt she had options, and she felt she had something to cover up. Now, since Jayson knew, her secret was out, and she realized that marrying Gill wasn’t even an option anymore.

  She picked up the phone and dialed Gill’s direct number at work.

  “Hello,” Gill answered.

  “Gill, it’s me.”

  Gill paused for a moment, then said, “You calling me back to apologize for throwing me out of your place last time?”

  “Yeah, I am. I’m sorry about that, Gill. That was wrong of me. But I also think we should get together tonight around eight.”