After The Dance

by Lori D. Johnson

  HIM

  I was sitting at my desk at work, thinking about where I wanted to go for lunch, when she called and was like, “Hey, it’s me. Is this a good time?”

  I leaned back in my chair and told her, “Girl, you know when it comes to you, I’m willing to make any time a good time. Now go on and tell Papa just what it is you need.”

  She chuckled and said, “Well, I was just calling to thank you for the basketful of strawberry goodies. That was cute. I would have never guessed you to be such a hardcore romantic.”

  I said, “So how come you didn’t bother to bring your butt over and tell me that last night?”

  She said, “Oh, I think you know why, all right. Missing service this past Sunday was bad enough. I’m not about to let you start making me late for work, too.”

  I grinned and told her, “Yeah, girl, my whip appeal will straight-cold knock a sister out, won’t it?”

  She laughed again and said, “Anyway, like I said, I just wanted to let you know that I got it and I’ve been enjoying it and I thought it was a really sweet gesture.”

  I was like, “Uh-huh. So are you still thinking on what we talked about, or are you ready to give me an answer?”

  She kind of hesitated before she said, “I thought you weren’t going to pressure me.”

  I said, “What? Is that what you think I’m doing? No. Not me. Never.” Then I got real and told her, “I’m just saying, baby, how difficult of a decision could it be? Either you want to do this thing with me or you don’t. I mean, if the answer is no, Faye, that’s cool, just tell me. I’m not gonna be mad. Maybe a little hurt. But I’m a big boy. I’ll get over it.”

  She turned around and said, “Carl, if it were that simple—”

  But before she could commence to ruffling any of my feathers, I cut her off. I said, “It is that simple, Faye, believe me. But hey, I’m not trying to argue with you about it. If the end of the week is what you want, then the end of the week is what I’m going to give you. Bottom line is, I just want you to be happy. All right?”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Before she could hang up I told her, “You know, Faye, either way it goes, I’d still like to have that third time at bat.”

  And check this out, man, her noncommittal response to that was, “Okay, okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  HER

  Yeah, the house and the book party turned out to be something else, girl. Nora was right there with me, just like in the end I knew she would be, along with that fool boyfriend of hers, Ray-Ray, who for reasons known only to him had decided to come dressed like he was fixing to audition for that Will Smith/Kool Moe Dee Wild, Wild West video that came out umpteen-some years ago. For real, girl, I’m talking cowboy hat, leather chaps, boots, spurs, everything but the durn horse and saddle, though in Ray-Ray’s case, a jackass would have been more his speed.

  Anyway, as soon as we arrived, a proud and beaming Scoobie grabbed me by the arm and whisked me from one exquisitely decorated room to the next. Yeah, I was impressed. The place was laid. Marble and granite counter-tops, hardwood floors so shiny you could eat off them, original African and European artwork, and space! Girl, the brother has so many rooms he’s pretty much designated one to his every fancy. I’m talking a full-scale library, a gym, a game room, a music room, a film room that’s hooked up like a miniature movie theater. He’s even got a cozy little setup with a fountain that he calls his “Prayer and Meditation” room.

  To tell the truth, there wasn’t a whole lot Scoobie got wrong at the party that night. He was incredibly attentive, to the point of treating me like I was the Queen of Sheba or somebody, and he seemed to get a particular kick out of introducing me to all of his friends and associates as “Dr. Abrahams.” The talk he gave was short, eloquent, and chock-full of praise to all those who’d helped him along the way. The food, which showcased several of the recipes from his book, like braised short ribs and blackened catfish, was absolutely fabulous. The jazz quartet he’d hired to help set the proper mood jammed something fierce throughout the evening. And as far as I could tell, the guests, who’d turned out in droves, seemed both impressed and thoroughly entertained.

  Besides Ray-Ray passing out business cards and telling folks he was available on an hourly basis for either clean or X-rated shake-’em-up shows, the only incident of any real significance occurred shortly after Scoobie had introduced me to the man he proudly claimed as his mentor, an older white gentleman by the name of Frank Dumas, and his lovely Black American Princess of a wife, Tina.

  I’d met Ms. Thang briefly that night Scoobie had taken me by his workplace. She was a tall, slender, reasonably attractive sister, probably ’round ’bout my age. Even though the first time we’d met, I’d been able to tell in a glance that she was all about the bourgie, she’d seemed pleasant enough. But on this particular evening, girlfriend went all out of her way to show her durn drawers.

  Now, you know as bad as I talk about Ray-Ray, even I’ve got better sense and upbringing than to ever deliberately say anything to the man’s face that might hurt his or Nora’s feelings. But this cow, Tina, the first thing out of her mouth after Scoobie had introduced her to Nora and Ray was “Oh, so these must be some more of your hood friends.”

  I mean, come on, thinking something ugly is one thing, but saying it to folks’ face is quite another. Then she had the nerve to make like she was going to clean it up. “Oh, dear me, did I misspeak? Ha, ha. I meant to say, friends from the hood.”

  Misspoke, my behind. Just minutes after that bit of clawing, girlfriend was up in my face talking about, “Darling, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but in front of people like these, it might behoove you to drop the Scoobie bit and address our dear friend by his given name—Venard.”

  People like these?! Honey, please. I gave Lady T one of my “get thee away from me” looks and then, in the most countrified voice I could muster, I yelled across the room, “Scoobie! Oooh Scoo-oo-bay!” I sure did. Girlfriend was not finna worry me.

  If anybody should have been concerned about appearances or impressions, by all rights, it should have been her silly behind. For starters, she’s the one with nearly five inches of height, not to mention more than a couple feet worth of fake hair on her barely four-nine, sixty-some-year-old, Caucasian, combover-sporting husband. And that’s not to take anything away from Mr. Dumas, who in spite of his obvious bad taste in women, seems like a really nice guy.

  Somebody needs to tell girlfriend that before she starts endeavoring to get other folks straight, she needs to first make sure her own priorities are in order. And at the very top of her list ought to be her and Frank’s four-year-old son, Evan, whom they’d somehow seen fit to drag along to the party and turn loose to do as he durn well pleased. You know how it is for most children that age, especially spoiledrotten ones—the whole world is their playground. So quite naturally Evan was running around whooping and hollering it up like some warthog, skirting all between folks’ legs and snatching food from people’s plates, like he didn’t have home training the first.

  Now if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed about Scoobie, it’s his heightened level of discomfort around kids, particularly those under the age of ten. In light of the situation, I was just about to compliment homeboy on the polite manner in which he seemed to be handling the antics of his rambunctious guest, when I heard the crash.

  I didn’t see what happened, but according to Nora’s eyewitness account, it was no accident. According to her, little Mr. Dumas snatched the vase from its pedestal and slammed it to the floor like it was a football. I will say the child was definitely in the throes of what had all the makings of a victory dance when I turned around.

  “Son-of-a-bitch, son-of-a-bitch” is what I heard Scoobie say under his breath as he rushed over to inspect the damage.

  At least Frank had the decency to come over and apologize. He told Scoobie to send him the bill and he’d see that it was taken care o
f. But that grinning, fake-hair-slinging wife of his didn’t budge so much as an inch from the spot where she’d been busy holding court on the other side of the room.

  Poor Scoobie was still muttering what sounded like profanities under his breath when I bent down to help him clean up the mess. I could understand him being upset. Not only had he lost a beautiful, and no doubt expensive, vase, but he’d cut his finger on one of the shards and was dripping blood all over the place.

  Still, I told him, “Try to keep in mind, he’s just a baby. A mere four years is all he’s been in the world.”

  Scoobie held his tongue until we’d finished gathering the broken pieces of the vase and were on our way into the kitchen. That’s when he wondered aloud how much time he’d get for whacking the kid on the bottom one good time and strangling the mess out of his wench of a mama. My advice was to bypass the kid altogether and go straight for the mama.

  I asked him, “What’s with her, anyway? Her weave too tight or something?”

  He chuckled and stepped inside this little bathroom off the kitchen. While rummaging through the medicine cabinet for something to put on his cut, he told me girlfriend used to have a thing for him when she first started at Morris-Morgan.

  I was like, “You two worked together?” I told him it was kind of hard for me to imagine Lady T sweating up in somebody’s kitchen.

  He told me she’d come on board in some secretarial position. He made it sound like she’d seen in him a rising star and had tried to latch on for the ride. Spotting an opening, I just had to ask him, “And just how far up did you take her?”

  Some of the devilish Scoobie of old spilled out as he smirked and said, “Isn’t what you really want to know is how low did I let her go?” He sucked on his cut finger and said, “I’m not going to lie—I humped her first chance I got and every other time she was willing thereafter.”

  “My, how gentlemanly of you,” I said, while cleaning and bandaging his cut as roughly as I could get away with.

  He shrugged like it wasn’t any big deal and said, “She had her agenda, and at the time, I had mine. After she got wise to the fact that I was strictly a solo act, she reset her sights and to her credit managed to snag my man Frank, a dude whose pockets run deeper than mine probably ever will.”

  I told him that for someone who was supposedly so sanctified he had to pray and meditate five times a day, he sounded awfully impressed with girlfriend’s game.

  He said, “Hey, if the girl can swing more bucks for the bang, who am I to judge her? At least she’s getting something worthwhile out the deal—which, pardon me for saying it, is a lot more than whatever it is you call yourself doing with that chump-change friend of yours from next door.”

  I’d been wondering when he was going to get back around to talking bad about Carl. I batted my eyes at him and said, “The idea that I might actually like him just irks you to death, doesn’t it?”

  Rather than answer, Scoobie smiled, wagged his bandaged finger in my face, and said, “I bet a little kiss would really make this feel a whole lot better.”

  I laughed and told him, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to come on to me.”

  HIM

  Picture this now—I’m laid up on the couch, in my drawers, eyes half-closed, most of my brain cells spent from having blown close to an hour entertaining thoughts of me, Faye, and various fruity combinations, when one of those news stories touting some native son who’s done good snares my attention. In a loud, animated voice, the news announcer goes into this big to-do about Chef So-and-so, and how he’d recently gotten a book of recipes published, and how he’d thrown this grand hoedown at his home to celebrate that fact, and how all the local la-de-da-dees and wannabe-somebodies had turned out hoping to be seen …

  You know, it was one of those upbeat “this here brother has got it going on” sort of pieces meant to inspire, if not make envious, those of us who ain’t quite there yet. So, never one to deny some hardworking dog his props, when the newsfolk finally flashed the visuals, I glanced over, intending to give dude a quick thumbs-up, only to find myself sitting straight up and thinking to myself, “Say, I know this guy—”

  Before I could even fully form the thought, the camera angle shifted ever so slightly and the sister at dude’s side, who just so happened to be my good neighbor and occasional bed buddy, Margaret Faye Abrahams, burst into clear view.

  Yeah, she was looking quite the picture of contentment, cuddled all up against dude, while the two of them conversed with some other fake-looking couple.

  Both my head and my heart started pounding something fierce as the real of why Faye hadn’t gotten back with me yet slowly sank in. Besides having access to a brother who owned more than his share of good looks and had obviously come into some serious bank, ol’ girl was far too busy hobnobbing with the upper crust to want to be bothered with the likes of some ol’ stale, tired, broke, regular-crust brother like me.

  And who could blame her? It wasn’t like I had anything particularly special to offer Faye outside of infrequent companionship, a whole lot of talk, and an occasional good time in bed.

  Yeah, man, I know. I’m supposed to play it hard, like I really don’t give a serious f—-. Like there’s plenty more coochie out there where that came from. But on the real money, no brother who’s got any kind of pride about himself ever wants to get caught coming in second—especially to some dude who underneath all the fancy wrapping ain’t nothin’ but a jerk.

  Not wanting to add insult to injury by letting dude torment me in my own damn house, I clicked off the tube just as the a-hole was getting ready to deliver his well-rehearsed response to some supposedly off-the-cuff question. Afterward, man, I rolled over right there on the couch and fell asleep, only to wake up a few minutes later in the middle of a nightmare—a nightmare about that fool laying up in my bed with my girl Faye, straight working her body into a frenzy with some of my doggone strawberries. If that in and of itself wasn’t bad enough, who do you think was standing up there next to the bed holding an empty fruit basket and looking right stupid?

  HER

  After the party, girl, is when things really got interesting. I’d planned to leave the same way I’d come, bumming a ride in the backseat of Ray-Ray’s rim-spinning pimp mobile. But when Scoobie noticed me following Nora’s lead as she got ready to go, he pulled me aside and was like, “What’s your hurry? I was sort of looking forward to sitting down and talking with you after everyone had left.”

  So I asked him, “Does that mean you’re planning on driving me home later or do you intend for me to stay the night?”

  He assured me that all he wanted to do was talk and as far as anything else was concerned, according to him, we’d just play it by ear. Yeah, I know, girl, lame, huh?

  And it wasn’t like he had me totally convinced of anything at that point. I just let curiosity get the best of me. I couldn’t help but want to see at what point he’d drop the good-guy masquerade and revert back to the hustling, hedonistic, “hurry up and give me some” Scoobie I knew and had grown to hate. The way I had it figured out, the sooner I gave homeboy an opportunity to really muck up, the sooner I could give him one last good cussing out for ol’ times’ sake and be on my merry little way.

  When I peeped Nora to my plan to hang out with the brother just a little while longer, she had the nerve to frown all up and say, “Why in the hell do you keep setting yourself up like this? You get a kick out of letting him play you or something?”

  I told her to chill. I could handle it. I knew exactly what I was doing.

  She was like, “Fine, but when your ass realizes otherwise, don’t come running to me for help, hear?” Girl, I was too intent on trying to uncover flaws in this new and improved Scoobie to be studying Nora.

  Shortly after he saw his last guest out, Scoobie strolled over to the bar and poured us both a drink before joining me on the couch. On sitting down, he pulled this remote out of a small case on the table in fron
t of us and with a series of clicks, dimmed the lights, switched on the gas-log fireplace, and activated the stereo.

  And get this, after adjusting the volume on the Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. set he had crooning in the background, dude clinked his glass against mine and said, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me, babe.”

  Rather than tell the brother I was going to need something a whole lot stronger than the high-priced sparkling spring water he’d poured into my glass if he was going to have me sweating in front of some durn fireplace, listening to the likes of Sammy, Dean, and Frank all night long, I just smiled and said, “Yes, I guess it is.”

  He slid an arm around me, gave me a peck on the lips, then said, “You have a good time tonight?”

  I told him the truth. “You did a nice job. Seriously, everything from the little talk you gave about your book, the food, the music, even the decor—deserved at least three stars.”

  “Only three?” he said, pretending to be insulted. “And what could I have possibly done to have earned a fourth star in your book?”

  Ignoring the swelling of the brother’s already big head—and I do mean the one on his shoulders—I said, “Well, for one, you could have been just a tad more understanding about your young guest’s mishap with the vase. And two, you know how you were going out of your way to introduce me to everyone tonight as Dr. Abrahams? Well, I kind of prefer to just leave my title at the hospital. Really, when I’m not on the j-o-b, plain ol’ simple ‘Faye from around the way’ works best for me.”