by Tiana Laveen
“I am… so what about you? What stuff should I watch out for?”
“I’m sorry, but I have nothing to report. I’m perfect.” She crossed her legs and dusted off an imaginary piece of dust from her shoulder. “I thought you knew.”
“You are, but even the most perfect diamonds have a hidden, undetectable flaw. Might not be visible to the naked eye, but it’s there.”
“…I’m an emerald.”
“And I’m green with jealousy already. I wanna keep you all to myself…”
The mutual pause was stiff and unyielding as they glared at one another until they moved in unison, reaching across the table to join their hands, fingers intertwined. A burning passion like no other ignited, enveloping them.
“I grind my teeth when I’m stressed out; it caused some pretty nasty dental issues that had to be addressed. I have abandonment issues due to what my mother did to me, but I denied it most of my adult life. I struggle with religion; on the one hand, I believe in God with all of my heart, and on the other, I look at my Aunt Sugar, who I adore, and I’m afraid to pray to the same God she calls Father in Heaven. I talk shit about people under my breath at work, occasionally to their face… I’m not a good cook, just decent, and Aunt Sugar gives me hell about it. My daughter hates me sometimes, yet I can sit here with a straight face and not tell you completely why. She is the only person who makes me feel weak… ’cause I’d do anything for her, but she rejects me all the same.”
“I like how honest you’re being with me. I respect that. Our entire time knowing one another, you’ve been this way. It’s refreshing and like nothing I’ve ever seen on such a consistent basis. I actually need that. I really hate being lied to.”
“I do, too, no matter how much it may hurt.”
“So tell me some problems or flaws you think you might have in regard to friendships,” he said after a small pause. He leaned back in his seat, patiently waiting, looking cool. The music played, soothing her soul. His cigarette rested in an ashtray, the smoldering swirls flowing up and out like smoky angel wings.
“Well I’m not a jealous person, but I am territorial when it comes to people’s feelings, meaning I feel like I’m somehow responsible for how people respond to me or think of me… which is silly, I know. That trait has to do with how I was raised.”
“To try and please others, the golden book to the extreme, right?” He took a slow sip of his wine.
“Yes, my father cared what other people thought of him. He never said this, but his actions showed me the truth.” She contemplated telling all of her business, then thought better of it. “I took the death of my father, whom I was very close to, really hard… for reasons some people would never understand.”
“Try me. I’m interested.” He reached back across the table, giving her hand a gentle squeeze before relaxing again, hands linked and resting on his crossed leg at the knee.
“I… I don’t think…” She shook her head.
“Never mind. You’re not ready. But when you are, I’m here.” After another swallow of his wine, he smiled at her. “So, you’re still here, and so am I… I guess that means we still really like one another despite all these confessions.”
Their laughter wrapped around them, holding on for dear life. The conversation evolved as time wore on. The details of their jobs and relationships with friends were exposed, along with tales from college life, his growing up in Manhattan, and her explaining how she and her brother almost went over a waterfall during a summer camp adventure she’d never forget.
Along the conversational trail they travelled, she grew increasingly melancholic at the realization that eventually, she’d have to go home. Each date she had with Sloan, each conversation and all aspects of the walking myth and legend made the craving within her so strong, and the disappointment so acute when they had to part ways. Her heart began to scribe the letters of his name across it, stained with wine. Who was this man that captivated her so? The one who made her pause and delve into her own psyche, asking herself the question, ‘Why?’
Time went too fast when he was with her. The minutes felt like mere seconds. She was enamored, and feeling soft, almost hazy. A sweet smell lingered in the air, reminding her of her grandmother’s powder puff dipped in rose scented dust. Sloan was not only good company and could make a mean lasagna; he felt like an old comrade, the kind you may only speak to on occasion, but coming together felt always effortless. She fell deeply under his mystifying, lovely spell, knowing all along what was transpiring. The man was taking her down, making her fall apart, making her… fall in love. She did little to stop it… She was simply doing her part.
“So, yeah,” she said. “Remember me talking to you earlier in the week about the drama with my daughter and the whole—”
“Yeah, yeah… what’s going on with that?” He snuffed his cigarette out, then slicked a lighter out of his pocket and laid it on the table.
“Where do I begin?” She rolled her eyes. “My Nikki is coming home soon for a visit but Sugar really has no idea about any of that, you know, what I told you before.” She swallowed and grimaced, her face tight, her nose twitching. Mounting anxiety, dancing on the raised, spiky back of anger, made her want to destroy everything in her damn sight.
“So you think your Aunt Sugar wouldn’t understand? If so, as close as you two are, that’s sad to hear.”
Emerald shook her head. “If I said to that woman Jesus himself told me that he was okay with my child, she still wouldn’t believe me, even with video footage. With things like this, there is just not getting through to her. A large pepperoni pizza and keg of cold, premium beer would have better survival chances in a fraternity house.”
The man burst out laughing, throwing his head back in genuine mirth.
“That response right there is definitely my answer then.” Sliding a cigarette from a carton, he placed it between his lips, lit the thing and blew out curls of smoke. “She’s from a different generation, ya know? They’re stuck in their ways, kind of like my father was up until the day he died.” She nodded in agreement. “Let me ask you something, not to beat a dead horse or anything, but what does your aunt actually think about your daughter in general? Not her as a person, but her orientation?”
“Sloan, Sugar thinks gay people are confused. She thinks it’s hip to be gay, so people are doing it more and more for attention versus anything else. She is one of those people who believes in this whole gay agenda mess. I never felt she had to co-sign or agree with it, but she needed to be respectful and that sure as hell wasn’t going to happen. I knew it for a fact, because she’s said all sorts of things about lesbians and gay men to me and in front of me, even as a child, so when Nikki came out to me in high school, admitted what I already knew about her, there was no way I would have told Sugar. I think Nikki resented me for telling her to not say anything to my aunt about it either…thinking I was ashamed of her.”
“I have my suspicions, but why didn’t you just go ahead and tell her, Emerald?” He shrugged as he held onto his cigarette. “Sometimes we just have to be honest, just as we said before, right? It might upset someone, but that’s too bad. Besides, that’s Sugar’s problem, not Nikki’s and not yours.”
“All of that is true, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Why? You could just say, ‘Sugar, Nikki is gay. Pass the potatoes.’”
That drew a smile from her.
“Because I didn’t want her calling my child and harassing her, Sloan. She’d have her crooked minister on three-way, talking about she needed a demon exorcised from her soul or some mess like that. They’d try to make her say all sorts of prayers and then, before I know it, she’d be mailing me articles about clinics that can take the homosexuality out of someone.” She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “My daughter is not confused.”
“I agree with you completely. Michelle’s best friend is gay,” he said. “Her name is Andrea and I’ve known her practically her entire life.
She and my daughter have been close since they were little kids and when she came out, I don’t believe too many people were surprised. We accepted her as a member of our family, before and after. She was the exact same person, so why would we treat her differently?”
She smiled across the table at the man, pleased to hear his stance on the issue.
“That’s good, because they need a good support system and with my daughter being Black, female and gay, well… there were going to be even more challenges along the way it seems. I won’t even get into what has happened to her in the army because of it.”
The man’s lips drooped and his brows furrowed. “I can only imagine.” He shook his head, clearly disappointed in words unshared.
“We’ve bumped heads as of late because she thought I was ashamed of her.” She sighed. “No, it wasn’t that. I was trying to protect her, Sloan. She just doesn’t get it. I have no reason to want to hide my child or any part of who she is. I just know I’d go to prison if someone hurt her… but she… she just doesn’t get it.” She blinked a few budding tears away as the emotions threatened to wash her face clean. “She thinks because she’s strong, everyone else should be. What Nikki doesn’t understand is that she can be strong because some of us are in the background fightin’ so she is able to stand tall.”
Sloan nodded, admiration and understanding in his eyes.
“Let’s switch gears. This conversation is exhausting me.”
“Hmmm, I definitely don’t want you to grow tired from anything we discuss.”
She looked at him for a spell, certain that a sexual innuendo lay somewhere in between there, or at least she hoped so… “You had mentioned your father a few times in some of our other conversations, and again you brought him up tonight. Can you tell me more about your parents? I’m curious.”
“All right.” He took a deep breath, crossed his arms over his chest and drew quiet, as if trying to find the right words to begin his tale. “My father was very particular, Emerald. He was a perfectionist. That’s not necessarily bad within itself, but it became unmanageable. You see, nothing was ever good enough, and so I worked very hard for his approval, which I seldom received.”
Emerald nodded in understanding, not the least bit surprised by Sloan’s confessions. A man like him didn’t become so tough overnight; that took years of molding.
“Everything I did I worked very hard at, even now, and it’s because of that. He was old fashioned, hypocritical. I guess we all are in some regard. Like, I tell my son all the time not to do certain things, you know? He’s grown, but I still tell him… And I did those things, too.” He placed his cigarette down in the ashtray.
“Like what?” She enjoyed probing the man’s mind, finding out what lay just below surface.
“Like telling him not to smoke weed, but I smoked it practically all through college. I told ’im not to run around with a bunch of women as it would only lead to trouble like unwanted pregnancies and diseases, but I’d done the same thing before I met his mother. In this whole honesty business and getting to know one another, I cannot tell you how many women I’d slept with before meeting my ex-wife, and I’m not proud of that, Emerald. You and I discussed this sort of thing previously, our sexual history, yadda, yadda, yadda.” She nodded. “It upsets me actually that I was being so reckless at his age, but there’s nothin’ I can do about it.” He scratched at the corner of his eyebrow and continued. “I can tell you how many after my divorce, because the number is so small.”
“You stated it was two when we spoke of our sexual conquests on the phone.”
He chuckled. “Glad to see you’re paying attention, but before that… forget about it!”
“Literally.”
They both burst out laughing until he drew serious once again.
“I blame some of that on the wild parties I used to throw before I got married, but anyway, I’m a hypocrite and my kids know it. It makes me feel like shit, quite honestly.” He huffed and hugged his chest again.
“As parents we can use our own mistakes to try and help our children not make the same ones, but it rarely ends up that way. They look at us like, ‘Oh, you had your fun and now you don’t want me to have any.’”
“Exactly.”
“I love Nikki so much, Sloan, and there is no doubt in my mind that you love your children, too. It’s obvious because I asked you about your own parents, but you turned it on yourself, and thought about you as a parent instead.” She placed her fork down onto her place. The zesty, rich flavors of the lasagna lingered in her throat long after she’d enjoyed the final bite. She didn’t mind; the meal had been delicious, but the memories this discussion awakened weren’t. Some were bittersweet, others laced in emotional poison. “Sorry for the interruption. I’d asked you a question then jumped in.” She smiled sheepishly.
He waved her off and resituated himself in his seat. Grabbing his cigarette, he gave it a final puff then smashed it in the ashtray, relinquishing himself of the thing.
“Nah, no problem… it’s called a discussion, not a lecture.” He winked at her, and she winked back. “Any more questions for me? I kinda like this… being interviewed by you.” He grinned seductively and she quickly looked away as a wave of lust overcame her. After a moment or two, she turned back towards him.
“Well… I haven’t heard you mention your mother yet. Is she deceased, too?”
“I don’t know, but my guess is yes.”
Her chest tightened at his answer. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
He shrugged. “I mean just what I said. I honestly don’t know. My mother left my father when I was about four years old.”
Emerald’s mind swarmed with questions, the pressure of them digging into her skull as her heart and mind had lightning fast meetings. The similarities between them were uncanny. Sloan was no longer just boyfriend material; he was so much more… kindred spirit, indeed.
“Do you know why?” she asked, taking a meager swallow of wine.
“I have some idea. She wasn’t a drug addict or anything like that. That’s what you usually hear, you know? Nah, that’s not what happened.” He scratched at the side of his mouth, a vacant look in his eyes, as if he’d removed himself from the pain and simply became a spectator to his own life. “My father said she left us for another man, but her mother, my grandmother, told me before she died that my father was emotionally and verbally abusive to my mother and it had nothin’ to do with another guy at all.” At that moment, a piece of the puzzle inside of her head slipped over and shoved itself into its rightful place in the equation. Their lives had in fact linked, the fabric familiar, stained in the same tears.
“I can’t believe this…” She tossed her napkin off her lap onto the table and shook her head, incredulous.
“What?”
“I told you tonight that I have abandonment issues because of my mother, but I didn’t tell you why. Sloan, my mother left my father and me, too.”
His eyes narrowed on her. He rocked back in his seat, over and over, as if not convinced, or simply trying to make sense of such an odd coincidence that she’d now confirmed. She began to enjoy trying to read his mind… what a perplexing playground it must’ve been.
“That is… that is strange.” Choppy laughter rolled out from his lips… lips she desired to draw close to and press her own against, feel the warmth and smoke all at once.
“It is!” She laughed nervously in return. “Of all the things to have in common, right?”
“Yeah, that’s wild, Emerald. So, what happened?” He seemed to settle down, the color returning to his cheeks.
“Well, she left my father because she was overwhelmed with being a wife and mother, from what she told me years later. It was nothing anyone did to her, per se. My father had told me the same thing—he didn’t embellish or talk bad about her, though I would’ve understood if he had.”
Sloan lowered his head, deep in thought. Before she could ask if he was okay, he looked back at her,
pure sadness on his face.
“My little sister, Bea, had sickle cell. She was quite ill and I think my mother couldn’t take the pressure of that, either. She just wasn’t a strong person. Whenever something went wrong, she’d run. Soon after she left, my sister died. My father was never the same after that.”
“I’m sorry…” He reached back across the table, beckoned for her hand and held it tight.
“It’s all right… Bea was so young. So was I, but I still remember her. Anyway, my mother left her eldest child—my brother who she’d had from her first marriage—me, my sister, and my father…just up and gone one day. No one heard from her in years after she’d disappeared. I didn’t talk to my mother again until I was thirty-six. By then, she was very ill. She reached out to us, my brother and I, tracked us down, and I spent some time with her before she passed.” She drew quiet for a moment, drowning in memories. “You know what always perplexed me throughout this whole thing?”
“What?” He squeezed her hand.
“When I saw her for the first time after all those years, I thought I’d feel a certain way. Like, maybe… happy? Or possibly even angry, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Sloan, I felt nothing at all.” Her shoulders fell limp as she shook her head, disappointed in herself all over again. “I surmised that’s how I’d look when I got older and kept it moving. I didn’t cry, didn’t get upset. I just reached out and hugged her like she was some child who’d dropped their candy on the ground. She was the one who ended up all undone, emotional. I didn’t feel nothin’ for her at all, and I think that’s what scared me the most. I questioned myself, asked myself, ‘What happened to me?’” She pointed at her chest.
“What can cause a woman to be abandoned by her mother, to not see or hear from her and then, when she does, not care about that at all? I consider myself to be a loving person, you know? A good person… I care, I give a damn. But this…” She lowered her head and shook it. “This was nothing like me. But it was all a lie, I guess. I cared so much that I didn’t want to acknowledge it at all. It was then that I realized I had abandonment issues, so I wanted to be the one to do the leaving if things ever looked like they were spiraling out of control—beat people to the punch, so to speak.