The Million Dollar Divorce

by RM Johnson

  Things weren’t going so great for the two of them now, either. Lewis had been barely making enough to pay for his chair rent at the barbershop, let alone bring any decent money home, and Selena didn’t want to start working, because she would have to give up welfare if she did.

  So Lewis was fearful of all of that pushing Selena back to the drug again, because if that happened, he had always warned her, he would leave. But he knew leaving Selena also meant leaving his child, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  6

  “That bastard,” Monica said to Tabatha once things slowed down around the store. “Do you really think he meant what he said about wanting to divorce me?”

  “If you only knew how much of what men say that they don’t really mean. I wouldn’t worry about it. And if he does really want to divorce you, go right ahead, girl. You know how paid you’ll be?”

  “I don’t want his money,” Monica said, sadly.

  “You’re just saying that. You’re entitled to it, you know,” Tabatha said. “You’ve been his wife for four years. You went from living in a South Side one-bedroom apartment to a downtown penthouse. From driving an old Toyota Corolla to that little clown-car thing you drive.”

  “It’s called a MINI Cooper, and it’s not a clown car.”

  “Whatever. What I’m trying to say is, you’ve become accustomed to a much better lifestyle. It’s his responsibility to make sure you don’t fall from that, just because he wants to divorce you for not being able to have kids. That’s not your fault. You couldn’t control that,” Tabatha said. “Don’t let him get out of his commitment with you and send you back to living check-to-check like I’m doing. There’s nothing fun about that.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Monica said, trying to be hopeful about the situation, “because we’re never getting divorced. He’s upset. We’re going through something right now, but we’ll be all right.”

  “Famous last words,” Tabatha said, walking away from Monica to check on a customer. “Famous last words.”

  At home that evening, Monica continued to think about whether there was truly a chance that her husband was considering divorcing her.

  She had set the table, made dinner, served it, and now was sitting down, Nate sitting across from her, not eating, but picking at the food Monica had made for him.

  There was silence, as there always seemed to be now, and she wished she had turned on some music or something so it wouldn’t seem so obvious just how bad things were now between them.

  Monica looked up at Nate.

  He continued staring down at his plate, pushing his food around with the tip of his fork.

  “I didn’t mean what I said last night,” Monica said. She was met with no response.

  She lowered her head, deciding whether to pursue this or not, but realized she had to. “I want things to be the way they used to be. When all we did was laugh and have fun. When, if we had an argument or a disagreement, we’d talk through it, find a solution, and things would be all right.”

  “It can’t be like that again,” Nate said, looking at Monica for the first time since they sat down to dinner.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you lied to me. Because you withheld things from me that I needed to know.”

  “But I told you, I didn’t think that would happen so soon.”

  “Monica,” Nate said, slamming down his fork against his plate. “It wasn’t about just you anymore! That decision affected me too. You know how much I wanted a family. How much I want one still. And you didn’t tell me something as important as that. No,” Nate said, pulling the cloth napkin from his lap, tossing it onto his uneaten food, and standing up from the table. “Things will never just go back to the way they were.”

  He turned, was about to walk away from the table, when Monica said, “So what does that mean?” There was obvious worry in her voice. “Are you saying you really want a divorce?”

  Nate’s back was to Monica, and he just stood there, not saying a word.

  “Nate, please tell me.”

  It took more time, another couple of seconds, as though the question was really something he had to think over.

  “No. I don’t want to divorce you,” he finally said, then headed for the stairs.

  When Monica finally crawled into bed beside her husband, he was soundly sleeping. She was thankful that he really didn’t want a divorce, but she knew there were still problems that they had to work out.

  Monica rolled over on her side, away from him, tried to fall off to sleep, but couldn’t. She flipped onto her back, then her stomach, but she felt wide awake, and she knew what was keeping her that way.

  It had been two weeks since Nate had made love to her. Before all of this happened, they would be together every couple of days.

  She had often thought that having sex again would help them in getting past this problem, but now her thoughts were selfish.

  She needed to have sex; her body demanded it.

  Monica rolled over again, this time facing her husband, thinking about trying to awaken him. She thought better of that, knowing that if she asked him, he would most definitely turn her down. So she would not even get consent from him. She didn’t need him to be awake.

  Monica reached under the blankets for her husband, felt him practically pulsating under his thin pajama bottoms, and she wondered why, if he was in this condition, he had not approached her with it. She would’ve understood if he didn’t want to say a word to her, just allow them to physically satisfy themselves. She would’ve taken care of him, and herself too.

  Monica slid her hand under the elastic waistband of his pajama bottoms, wrapped her fingers around him. She squeezed him firmly, heard a faint moan escape him. She quickly looked up, loosening her hold some, careful not to wake him. If he knew what she was doing, what she was trying to do, he would stop her, jump out of bed, start ranting about her deceiving him yet again.

  But she was careful. She continued stroking him, his soothing groaning letting her know that although he was still sound asleep, he was responsive to her touch. And she felt it too, her body warming all over, the place in between her legs preparing itself to take her husband in.

  Monica managed to get her husband’s pants down below his hips and straddle him without waking him. She grabbed him, and from behind, gently inserted him.

  He slid in, perfectly, almost effortlessly, but with just enough resistance to almost make her orgasm that very moment. She fought it, wanting it to last as long as possible.

  Keeping her eyes on her husband, she slid herself all the way down on him, her eyelids falling closed over her eyes, Monica softly biting the corner of her lip as she felt all the tension from the past two weeks start to melt away from her.

  She felt his body stir, and quickly her eyes popped open. He was still asleep, but she knew he wouldn’t be for long. She wanted him to come, wanted to remind him of how good she felt, remind him of all that he had been missing. But first, she needed to get hers.

  Monica raised up from him some, feeling his tip just inside, and there she narrowed her muscles around him, started up and down, feeling every inch slip and slide into her. With each backward motion, she felt the sensation building, the tingling that her husband seemed to deposit within her starting to spread, envelop her entire body.

  Monica felt her muscles tightening, her lips numbing, the characteristic precursors to an inevitable orgasm, and she welcomed it, tried to hurry it, because it had been so long.

  She shortened the length of her movements, focusing on the spot that gave her the most pleasure, knowing it would come any second now, and just when she felt she was about to—

  “Monica,” she heard. There were fistfuls of bed linen in her grasp, her face was covered with sweat, contorted in a painful, pleasureful snarl, as she quickly opened her eyes, looked up, to find her husband staring back at her.

  “What are you doing?” Nate said, Monica hearing none of the pleasure s
he thought she was was giving him.

  The intensity of the impending orgasm had dropped just slightly, but she could still feel its presence.

  “Please. Let this happen,” Monica struggled to say, still holding the sheets, still concentrating short slides up and down the length of her husband’s penis.

  “Monica, stop it,” Nate said, trying to slide out of his wife. Monica held on tight to him, clamped her legs around him, securing him there.

  “Just let it. I’m almost there, and I want to feel you. I want you to come inside me,” she moaned.

  Now Monica was hopeful, because it looked as though Nate was giving it a second of thought, had seemed to relax his efforts to toss her off him. Then all of a sudden, with no emotion, he said, “Why? What good will it do? Nothing will come of it.”

  It was amazing. All the effort Monica had put in to get that feeling, her husband was able to wipe away with just a few words. The tingling, the numbing, all of it was gone, and she just lay there atop him.

  A tear spilled from her eye, clung to her cheek a moment, then dropped to the bed.

  Monica raised herself up, still straddling her husband, he still inside her, but could feel him quickly shrinking within. More tears came, but she did not bother to wipe them away, just looked down at Nate as they dropped down on his bare chest, making sure that he acknowledged them.

  After testing words in her head, Monica found the courage to speak.

  “I just thought that maybe this would help us.”

  “You were wrong,” Nate said, and then she felt him pulling out of her.

  7

  Classic Clippers was the name of the barbershop Lewis had worked in since he finished barber school six months ago. It was a small shop that housed his chair and six others, where half a dozen other barbers worked. Mirrors lined the walls behind the other barbers’ chairs; snapshots of their babies and their baby’s mamas hung there as well.

  Jet centerfolds from as early as 1980 to the present clung to every wall, and hip-hop music blared from a boom box the size of a compact fridge in the corner of the shop.

  Lewis sat slumped in his chair, wearing his barber smock, staring up at the muted color TV that sat in another corner.

  He had a frown on his face, and in his fists he bent a plastic comb close to the point of breaking it.

  Every moment of the day, it seemed, every other barber had someone in his chair but Lewis. He sat there, looking stupidly, enviously at the other barbers as they tended to their clients, received tips, then brushed off the chair for another patiently waiting client to jump in.

  All the other barbers in Classic Clippers had been there from five to ten years. The old fat guy in the front of the store was the owner. He was named Beasly. He’d been cutting heads from that same chair for thirty years, he always said.

  So when a man walked in the shop and Lewis eagerly jumped out of his chair and asked, “Need a cut, sir?” the man would oftentimes look at him like he was begging for spare change, then say, “Naw, I’m waiting on Tim,” or Ricky, or Kevin, or Mike, or, of course, Beasly.

  The only time that Lewis would get a client was when someone new came in, and all the other chairs were full, and clients were waiting. Then and only then would the newcomer venture into Lewis’s chair, where Lewis did his best to give his client a cut he’d never forget.

  But just like the man that stood up from Lewis’s chair ten minutes ago, after receiving and paying for his cut, many clients did not tip Lewis a dime.

  This happened more times than not, and it was starting to anger him more than he could stand.

  Beasly pulled the drape from around his client, got paid, and Lewis saw the man give him a five-dollar tip.

  “See you same time next week,” the man said to Beasly, a smile on his face, then walked out of the shop.

  Another man quickly jumped in Beasly’s chair. After Beasly had tied the drape around the man’s neck, he looked up across the room at Lewis, as if knowing he had been watched all this time.

  Beasly leaned down, whispered something in the man’s ear, then dragged himself over to Lewis.

  “Come with me, boy,” Beasly said.

  Lewis followed him through a curtain tacked over the doorway that led to the dimly lit break room.

  “Want a pop?” Beasly called out to Lewis, as he stood at the open fridge door.

  “Naw,” Lewis said.

  Beasly sat down on the other side of Lewis, popped the tab on his soda, and said, “It takes time, boy. You a good barber. I seen the heads you cut walk out of here, and you do good work. But you don’t just come straight outta barber school and have folks waiting on you. You gotta develop a client list. People gotta get to know you, feel comfortable, then they start coming back and telling they friends.”

  “I been here six months,” Lewis said.

  “And I been here thirty years, so I know what I’m talking about. Don’t rush so much. It’ll come.”

  “I got a girl. Got bills. Got a daughter. I can’t afford to wait for it to come. If you could only see the way we living. My daughter shouldn’t have to live in conditions like that. All I want to do is make enough to be able to raise her somewhere nice.”

  “How many heads you cut today?”

  “Three,” Lewis said. There was frustration in his voice.

  Beasly looked down at his watch. It was already 6 P.M.

  “Most of the day is gone, and I only cut three heads,” Lewis said.

  “Any of them tip?”

  “Naw.”

  “So you got forty-five dollars in your pocket, which I’m figuring you saving to pay for your chair rent.”

  “Got to.”

  Beasly took a long swig from his soda, got up from his chair, sunk his big hand into his slacks pocket, and pulled out a decent-size wad of bills. He peeled off three twenties and tossed them on the table before Lewis.

  “Handle the stuff at home, and give it back to me when you can.”

  “You know I can’t take this, Beasly.”

  “Then where you gonna get it from? What’s gonna happen with your girl, the bills, and your daughter then?”

  Lewis had no answer.

  “Take it, boy. You got three more hours till closing. I’ll try and send some of my clients your way, and maybe you can make some money before you leave, and you won’t have to take mine. All right?”

  “Thanks, Beasly.”

  “Somebody did the same for me when I first started, so don’t think nothing about it.”

  The last three hours were even less productive than the first six. Beasly said he would try to send some of his clients Lewis’s way, but whenever Lewis saw Beasly pointing them in his direction, they just shook their heads and had a seat, probably saying that they’d rather wait.

  Lewis even went as far as stepping outside like he sometimes did, and when he saw someone with a bush on their head, or just in bad need of a trim, he would ask them if they’d want to step inside for a haircut. He asked ten people, and was turned down by every single one of them.

  After work, Lewis parked in front of Selena’s apartment. He pulled the key from his ignition, thankful that his old, raggedy car had managed to get him home yet another day.

  Lewis got out of the car, thankful that Beasly had given him the sixty bucks. He definitely needed that, and figured he could buy a little food for the house and still have enough to hold him through the rest of the week.

  When Lewis got to the front door, he wondered why all the lights inside were off.

  He thought about the accusation he had made to Selena yesterday. How she stormed out of the house, and when she came back in late that evening, she didn’t have a single word to say to him.

  She had probably turned out all the lights, gone to bed early so as not to have to speak to him again.

  Lewis unlocked the door, pushed it open, and realized he must’ve been all wrong about Selena, and by what he saw before him, figured now that she must’ve been trying to make u
p for some reason.

  Candles were lit all around the living room, and she was sitting on the sofa, looking up at him.

  He was shocked, but so happy that he didn’t have to deal with any of that nonsense from yesterday.

  “Getting romantic, hunh?” Lewis said, smiling, setting down his bag with his supplies in it on the floor. “Got the candles going. This is nice,” he said, moving toward her.

  “I’m glad you like it, because we don’t have no other choice. The lights been cut off.”

  “What! I thought we had—”

  “We ain’t had nothing. I told you we had gotten the last notice last week, and this came today.” Selena handed him the bill that she had been looking at by candlelight.

  “Disactivation Notice,” the pink slip read. “Damn!” Lewis said.

  “And Layla is trying to get sick again. We need to get some more of the pink stuff, and you know how much that cost.”

  “Layla always getting sick,” Lewis spat, starting to feel overwhelmed.

  “You can’t blame Layla if she’s not feeling well.”

  “Who said I’m blaming her?”

  Selena gave Lewis a look that made him sure that she knew what he was trying to imply. “I was clean when I had her. You know that.”

  “And what about now? You never answered my question from yesterday.”

  “Fuck you, Lewis. I ain’t using. I was sweating because it was hot yesterday. Believe it if you want to, or not. I don’t care. But we got other things to take care of. If her fever break by tomorrow, then Layla probably won’t need the medicine. But we got to get the electricity back on, or what little food we got gonna spoil.”

  Lewis looked back down at the bill. “It’s two hundred and forty dollars. We can’t pay that.”

  “We don’t got to pay it all. Just some, and they’ll turn the lights back on.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “Sixty dollars. Do you got that?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Lewis said, and now he was extra grateful for Beasly’s kindness. But as Lewis dug into his pocket, pulled out the three bills, and handed them to Selena, he knew that they could not continue on like this. There had to be a better way. There just had to be.