“Whatever happened to what attracted you to us in the first place: politics, race, music, art, last summer’s bestseller… fucking?” Lena snaps and watches Randall’s eyebrows arc in dismay at the same time that the doorbell chimes.
“That must be Sharon.” Randall grimaces and shoves his chair back from the table. “I told her to drop by for dessert.”
“Why?” Lena asks.
He looks at Charles. “You’ll get a kick out of her. She’s sharp.”
Lena brushes crumbs from her now crumpled outfit and watches Randall guide Sharon into the dining room by the elbow and make introductions. Randall has told Lena on more than one occasion that in corporate America, like other places, black folks have to look out for one another—Sharon needs a mentor, and he needs someone to keep him abreast of what goes on in middle management. The not so subtle hints that Lena has watched Sharon toss in his direction for the three years she has been with TIDA are not the kind of loyalty Lena appreciates.
“Why, don’t you look cute.” Sharon bends to greet Lena with a hug. The skinny spaghetti straps of her sleek black cocktail dress have fallen off her angular shoulders and she looks Lena over again. “That’s the same get-up Randall gave his secretary. I told him I’d have to teach him a thing or two about presents. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, I think he does quite well.” Lena fingers her diamond. “When he sets his mind to it.”
Randall squeezes an extra chair in the space between him and Charles and immediately launches into a recap of how he fired his associate. Sharon chimes in. Together, the two make the dismissal seem like a lively event.
“You should have seen Thompson’s face.” Sharon pantomimes a dejected look. “When he came to clean out his office, he never looked me in the eye. He was in and out so fast that he left a picture of his kids and dog on his desk.”
“Mess with me once you’re on my shit list,” Randall says. “Twice, and you’re out. You were great, Sharon. I won’t forget that.” Randall lifts his glass. “To Sharon.”
“And thank you for letting me barge in.” Sharon clinks her glass against Randall’s.
“I bought three chunks each of Novo, Quadra, and IntelligNT.” Randall changes the subject. “Got them all for a steal when they split.” His voice drops when he reveals the stiff three-figure price per share. Lena watches Sharon’s eyes grow wider every time his chest puffs higher and higher with each stock description. Lena has told him a thousand times that the men don’t like to hear him brag. They suffer from financial penis envy, his portfolio is bigger than theirs, but right now she is unsure for whose benefit the boasts are.
For the second time in less than ten days, Lena has an attack of fantasy violence. This time Sharon is the object of her desire, only unlike Candace’s comical recovery, Lena imagines Randall would push her away and gallantly rush to Sharon’s side. If she had the guts to be a bad girl, Lena thinks, she might loosen this damn, scratchy tunic, drop the baggy pants to the floor, unhook her bra with one hand, and push her lacy bikinis down her legs to get her husband’s attention. She could sidle up to Randall, press herself against him, moan until he apologized for inviting Sharon.
“You’re a better woman than I am. I wouldn’t have let her in my house.” Candace’s look says you better show that woman whose man Randall is. “What’s the matter with you? Why did Randall invite her? What was he thinking when he gave you that outfit?”
“He meant for her to have it.” Lena wonders if this is the expensive meal he promised Sharon.
“Randall says you’re quite the decorator, Lena.” Sharon redirects sections of her chocolate dessert to the edge of her plate. “I’d love a tour of the house. Maybe you can give me a few pointers. I don’t have an eye for that sort of thing.” She pats Randall’s arm. “And this one keeps me busy.”
“Show her my office and the master bedroom. Take the ladies with you. She just finished redecorating.” Randall rises from the table and holds an invisible cigar to his mouth—his signal for a smoke on the front porch.
“I think we’ll skip the tour and go into the sunroom. Upstairs is a mess,” Lena lies.
“In that case, I think I’ll join the boys on the porch. I’m sure Randall won’t mind.” Sharon glances at the front door, and her smile conveys more than friendliness or amusement.
“I’m sure I have a cigarillo you could handle,” Randall says.
“Oh, I can handle that, and more,” Sharon says, standing to follow Randall to the porch.
Lena knows Sharon isn’t the first woman at TIDA to hit on Randall. The CFO’s second wife cornered him at last year’s Christmas party and told him in no uncertain terms, which Lena could plainly hear, that she always wanted to fuck a powerful, sexy black man. That woman was not this determined.
With two measured steps, Candace puts herself between Randall and Sharon, separating them with her wide designer skirt and the woody-amber scent of Hermès perfume. Lena watches her take Sharon’s arm in a firm girlfriend grip, and with that one motion she forgives Candace for each and every bragging word, for each and every bit of raunchy gossip; this one action endears Candace to Lena forever.
“Let the boys tell their dirty jokes and smoke their stinky cigars. It’s the one vice we wives allow.” Candace steers Sharon to the sunroom, leaving Lena and Charles alone beside the table.
“Is she fucking him?”
“Ask him. But Randall’s no fool. You don’t mess around in your own backyard, especially when you’re trying to be the head of your company.” Charles feigns a slight bow. “I, on the other hand, wouldn’t let my head be turned by some overambitious twit. If you weren’t married to my best friend, I’d seduce you into having a torrid affair with me and fuck you all over the kitchen between all the lovely meals you’d cook for me.”
“Drop dead, Charles. If Randall is your best friend, why do you say things like that to his wife?” Lena empties the last of a bottle of aged cabernet into her glass. “Why don’t you go fuck Sharon? She seems to want to give it up pretty badly, and you’ve got enough money.”
“Because you know I’m not serious. Because she’s not my type. Because everyone knows you’d never leave the son of a bitch.” Charles winks and saunters to the porch.
The hint of cigar smoke wafts between the threshold and the door as Lena walks past. Tonight the smell does not remind her of John Henry or the night Randall gave her the yellow diamond. It reminds her that Randall has his own agenda. That once she shared that agenda with him. As she nears the sunroom the bimbette’s shrill voice reaches Lena before she sets foot there.
“Does she always go to this much trouble? I mean, that meal was fabulous.”
“For what you ate of it, dear,” Lynne says, her back to the sunroom’s double doors. “We call Lena the black Martha Stewart. She got away with that off-the-wall comment, though. I thought Randall was going to lose it.”
“Randall? He’s a big, cuddly bear,” Sharon says.
“Yeah, a grizzly,” Lynne retorts.
“Got to give the girl credit,” Candace says. “She is talented.”
“Would Lena be nearly as inspired without Randall’s… resources?” Sharon asks.
“Look at these orchids. And who uses their best dishes and silverware, and those tiny veggie dealies, for a casual ‘get together’? Please.” In one soundless step, Lena traverses the sunroom’s threshold before Lynne realizes her hostess is in the room. “She’s such a hypocrite. You see that diamond? For all she complains about being tired of material stuff, she flaunts the hell out of it and everything else. Lena married well.”
“And what the hell does that mean?” Lena’s voice is hard, her enunciation perfect. She knows that Randall can take down a company, make managers tremble with a simple request, control millions of dollars; he reeks of power—apparently, she is just the woman attached to the powerful man. “If this is what you say when you think I’m not around, what do you say when I’m not?”
The bimbet
te slinks through the side door. Lena gives the young woman credit for having more smarts than she thought. Unlike Sharon, who approaches Lena, arms extended, with concern that her face does not show.
“And you. I have no idea why you’re here.” Lena sways—from wine or words, it makes no difference to her—the wineglass slips from her hand, sending teardrops of red wine onto the now wrinkled sabuk and across the tiled floor.
“I’m here because Randall asked me, Lena. I had no idea you’d object.”
“You need to leave. Now.” Lena points to the door through which Lynne and the bimbette exited seconds before and watches Sharon take her time to collect her purse and pashmina and strut out of the room.
“Don’t mind her,” Candace says. Lena is unsure which her she refers to. “And don’t be a fool. Follow her, and I mean Sharon, and act like nothing happened. I’m telling you.” Candace pushes a lacy handkerchief into Lena’s balled fist. “She’ll tell Randall that you asked her to leave. If you stay here, she wins.”
f f f
The “everything is okay” smile disappears from Lena’s lips after she pays the housekeeper and turns off the lights. Within five minutes of closing the door on their last guest, Randall lounges on the cushy chaise beyond their bed. He takes up the entire space wide and deep enough for two. One leg stretches onto the dark hardwood floor and the Persian rug with a provenance. He pokes between the cushions for the remote control while Lena paces, full of the energy she needed earlier.
“I told you I didn’t want to have a stupid party.”
“Lynne is too dense to have been serious. She’s jealous. More importantly, you embarrassed me in front of our friends and my colleague.”
“I embarrassed you, Randall? You invite that… woman to my home. You don’t bother to tell me. She shows up looking like she’s ready to eat you while I’m dressed in this”—Lena waves her hands up and down her body—“this clown suit, and you’re embarrassed?”
“You were crude. You told Sharon to leave. You owe her an apology.” Randall’s expression is somber and without a hint of sympathy. He curls his fingers beneath his chin and looks at her in a way that says no further discussion is necessary.
“You get Charles drunk. I have to put up with his lechery. You toast someone I suspect you’re having an affair with, and you want me to apologize?” Lena stands in front of Randall, looking at him looking at her like she is crazy. His eyes say he doesn’t get it, doesn’t get her.
The only way Lena had been able to fend off her tears was with the handkerchief Candace thrust into her hand. Now, Lena twists that handkerchief into a tight, skinny spiral and marches into the walk-in closet big enough to be another bedroom. Gucci, Vuitton, Prada, Armani, and more surround her. She grabs on to the built-in dresser to balance herself and gasps for air. Left foot then right, she kicks off her high heels and slips into her fuzzy slippers. Eyes blurry, she feels for the corner shelf full of carry-on totes and yanks at a black travel bag. She needs panties; one pair goes in. She needs a bra; five go in. The charger for her cell phone, a candle, jogging bra, sweats, jasmine perfume, a sweater, a cocktail dress Randall gave her two years ago.
Lena emerges from the closet wrapped in a wool coat better suited to a winter freeze than this spring night. Her lipstick is smeared, her face wrenched as tightly as the handkerchief she still holds on to. “I would expect that my husband would side with me, not with his colleague.” She avoids Randall’s eyes, his seeming nonchalance when she crosses in front of him and snatches Tina’s book from the nightstand drawer. “How can I sleep beside someone who won’t stand up for me? Who gives me an ultimatum that could change my life but doesn’t even bother to ask what I decided?”
“I take it the fancy gym bag means you’ve decided.” This is the icy tone that makes Randall the great businessman sought after by corporations looking for more than just a black face to fill some arbitrary affirmative action slot. Lena shivers in the doorway, her back to Randall. Stay. That is all he has to say, and she will put down her bag. Get up from the chair and hold her tight is all he has to do, and she will stay.
“I’d think twice if I were you, Lena. You’re the one who’s got everything to lose.”
“Maybe it all stops here.”
“Maybe it all stops. Period.”
Lena prays that her keys are in her purse, her purse in the kitchen so that she does not have to go back into that room or look at Randall. She pauses, then sets one foot ahead of the other in the same thoughtful way she did when John Henry walked her down the aisle, all the way down the stairs and to the garage to give Randall time to act. Night camouflages her car while she watches her bedroom window from the driveway. After ten minutes the bedroom lights darken, and Lena drives away.
Chapter 9
At the grand hotel on the Oakland-Berkeley border a rosemary bush hedges the front of the building and releases its savory fragrance when Lena brushes up against it. Fresh rosemary is the herb she loves most, a pleasure for the tongue and the nose. Sure she looks like a hooker, all dolled up with no place to go, she hands the night clerk her platinum credit card and demands a room. He examines her from head to toe, this young man ensconced behind the well-oiled, wood-paneled counter in a pin-striped suit and gold badge, his name and place of birth engraved on it in two lines: Ali from Kenya. His eyes are shadowed by a furrowed brow as if she should be ashamed of checking in to his high-ceilinged, Oriental-carpeted hotel by herself at midnight, as if she should be ashamed of her fuzzy slippers, the pooled mascara under her light brown eyes, and her thousand-dollar designer tote.
Lena grunts from the doubt that cramps her insides; she has no place to go. She has no plan—her tote is evidence of that. Whether she charges this hotel for one night or a thousand, she cannot pay the bill. She has no real money. Snatching her upscale credit card back from Ali, Lena turns around and stalks out the lobby; her back dares him to say one more word to her so that she can scream, “Fuck you and Randall, too.”
When the valet hands Lena her keys, she sits in the car under the poorly lit portico until he goes back into his little booth. Lena picks through her bag and pulls out her book and lets it fall open to a random page for guidance.
“Some of these people read cards, some read the stars… Some of them weren’t for real but others gave me something to hold on to, some insight into what was going on in my life.”
Tina visited readers, psychics, for a hint that a better life was in her future. Images crowd into Lena’s head of places she has seen without seeing when she is out and about. There is a reader on Piedmont Avenue, a familiar street where Lena gets her nails done, does her banking, and lunches on Kung Pao beef. The words Psychic Healer & Palm Reader Always Open are pasted in careful strips of preformed block letters on the sandwich board in front of the small house. She has walked by the sign a hundred times, more fearful than curious to drop in.
By the time she gets to Piedmont Avenue, the streets are still crowded. Who are the rest of these night-owl drivers, she wonders? Nurses on late-night duty, philanderers and bar-hoppers, singles on their way back home reluctant to spend the night in a lover’s messy bed? Other wishy-washy women who cannot make up their minds what to do with their lives?
She swerves into the short driveway beside the clapboard house. Clay pots full of red and white geraniums line the four stairs and lead to the glow-in-the-dark stripes painted on the wooden porch. Tiny moths dance around the pale overhead light, drunk, perhaps, on the geraniums’ grassy perfume. Lena presses the doorbell; the scratch of soft soles against a hardwood floor follows the strident buzz. A short, bald man opens the door; his complexion is swarthy, but clear. The line between the top of his upper lip and his neatly clipped mustache reminds her of old military pictures of her father. Lena steps away from the door.
“Come on in; I won’t bite.” His husky voice reassures. The older man extends a sunburned hand and introduces himself as Vernon Withers. Like the southern gentleman his drawl makes him
out to be, Vernon leaves the front door open as if the geraniums, crickets, and fluttering moths could offer help, if she needed any.
“I’m Lena.” Her mind hesitates where her feet do not as she approaches the front room where low flames crackle in the sooty fireplace.
“Chamomile tea, Lena?”
Her left, then right eyebrow arches at this first hint of Vernon’s insight. Chamomile is the tea she loves to drink when she is tired or stressed.
“I know, you’re wondering, ‘Now how in the hell does he know that’s the tea I like?’” Vernon winks at Lena and waddles toward the kitchen looking more like a rascally elf than a man who is supposed to know about the future. “No need to answer, dahlin’, just accept.”
Unsure of the psychic process, Lena accepts Vernon’s offer of tea and walks to a small wood-paneled area beyond the living room where two brocade-covered chairs face one another, a small round table between them. The room’s walls are the soft yellow of fading daffodils; the house smells like lavender sachet and old people. Water splashes, the microwave beeps.
“You have questions?” Vernon sets a cup and saucer painted with red-lipped geishas by her left hand. “Ask the first thing that comes into your head.”
“I’m only here because…” Lena figures if Vernon is true to his title he should know why she’s here and what her questions are. “I’m here because a friend recommended I see a reader.”
“Reader is confusing. I prefer psychic, like my sign outside says, it’s more… specific. So?”
Questions are not her problem; they frolic like curious monkeys in her head. It’s answers that have her stuck. When she entered the house, she didn’t bother to check it out or ask if there was anyone else present. Lena squirms under Vernon’s expectant stare and glances back at the door. He spreads her palms open, then rests his on hers. His touch fills her with a peace she hasn’t felt in a long time. He stares at her eyes, in almost the same way John Henry did when she misbehaved as a child, then examines the jagged, interlaced lines across her palms.
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