“It’s not just my dream.” Randall sucked in a deep breath and tried to hold on to his train of thought while Lena’s fingers massaged his legs and thighs. “It’s our future.”
She rubbed him, stroked him, tasted him until he moaned. “But,” she said, letting her hair drop over her face and onto his shoulders, “I don’t want to lose my dream.” Before he lost his concentration, she quieted and let him release, let the feel of him run from her thighs to her breasts, let it sing in her head.
Afterward, she cuddled into him. “I don’t want to be a stereotype. The man makes the money, while the little woman takes care of the house and the kids.” They had had this discussion before: black people changing stereotypes, breaking the barriers, creating a new norm. “So, I’ll accept the diamond; if you agree that I’ll get back to my plan after one year.”
He admitted with all of the changes he wanted to implement at TIDA, it would take at least eighteen months to two years to gain full acceptance. “Two. For me.”
Lena thought of partnership and sacrifice, the two words John Henry had stressed before he walked her down the aisle. The biggest question in her mind as Randall ran his fingers over her body, the diamond above her breasts, was what would stop Randall, once the two years were over, from another promotion, another big deal, another giant career step to becoming the black king of the world. What would his sacrifice be in this partnership? She pressed two fingers to his mouth.
“Deal.”
His smile was easy to hear in the dark. He took her fingers into his mouth and sucked. Lena pointed to her diamond with her free hand. “Then, we’ll renegotiate.”
The allure of Randall’s promise was seductive. Lena substituted being the successful woman for being the supportive woman behind the successful man. By the end of Randall’s second year at TIDA he’d been given more responsibility, and she slipped deeper into her cashmere cocoon.
f f f
Randall whips out his PDA and punches the screen with the metal stylus. “Let’s schedule all of the sessions now.” Every one will be the same: a single step forward, two or three back.
“You are not in charge here.” Lena snaps. “And don’t use that tone with me.” In this instant, she leers at Randall and assumes his expression mirrors hers. They are, after all, an old married couple. No stranger, not even Mr. Meyers, knowing full well their circumstances, would ever have guessed these two people had once been giddy lovers or shared a bed or parented two children or lived together for twenty-three years.
“Mr. and Mrs. Spencer! Please leave the hostility outside.” In every meeting from this first one to their ninth, Lena and Randall will pout and argue unconcerned about the mediator’s cautions and his piling, un-piling and re-piling of the items around him, until their lawyers attend the sessions and assist in settling who gets what and the amount of permanent spousal support that Randall will pay Lena until she remarries, cohabitates, or dies.
Mr. Meyers presses a finger to a lone droplet on his left temple. He glances at his watch and suggests they stop here. Lena sympathizes with the man; her own armpits are damp. She stares at Randall and wonders if, underneath what looks like a cool, poker face, he is straining to hold back his own sweat. She wonders if he has another compartment, called cool, that helps him maintain this demeanor. Probably. Someday, if they can ever sit together calmly again, she will ask him about that ability and perhaps he will teach her how to do the same.
“We will begin the division of assets in our next session,” the mediator says.
There is a clue, Lena thinks, an intimation in his tone that suggests that Mr. Meyers is no more looking forward to it than she is.
f f f
Angela Bassett spins and lip-synchs on TV. Pink Slippers is right: the violence is hard to take. Lena concentrates on Angela Bassett’s biceps, her forceful performance—her angst, the slow trust in self, a Buddhist chant: nam myo ho renge kyo. Bottom line, the movie is depressing. Every time Larry Fishburne fake-pops Angela, Lena cringes. But thankfully, with one click of the remote she can skip those scenes and focus on the message, not the violence.
Tina’s message is about getting away. Anywhere. Far. Fast.
Lena picks up the autobiography, leaves where it opens to fate:… that trip changed my whole life. I felt like I had come home—like I had never known my real home… I loved France—loved the ambience of it… on that first trip to France, that’s when I began to feel, deep down inside, that maybe I was French, too.
France!
Lena skips to the computer. Connects to the official Tina Turner website. Tina lives in the south of France. It was one of those places that Randall and Lena planned to visit when they talked about the world and seeing as much of it as they could. They promised to lie nude on the beach, to learn French, to extend their trip westward and sip Bordeaux in Bordeaux.
A performance schedule for this year and the next is imposed over pictures of Tina and international celebrities. Lena selects “concerts” from the top left margin. One, two, three clicks. Lena scrolls through dates and places and stops on the final entry: October 8th. Nice, France.
Moving to the computer once again, she selects a travel website and dials Bobbie.
“I have to meet Tina!” Lena shouts, happy that her sister can pick up a conversation in the middle of her slumber. One day she will thank Bobbie with more than words for talking to her, listening to her any time of the day or night.
“Go for it.”
“Tina loves France. She lives in the south of France. We…” Lena swallows hard. “I mean I always wanted to go to the south of France.”
“As long as you’re going for the right reasons. Seeking, not running away.”
“I want to meet Tina. I want her to sign my book.” Yes, that’s what she wants. She thumbs the pages of Tina’s story like a deck of cards. “And I’m going to take pictures, hundreds of pictures.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“Randall demanded, and the mediator acceded, that I find work. Which I’ll do, with Cheryl’s help. But, he has approval over any large expenditures I make until the final division of property.” Lena accepted the condition with an exception to the furniture she needs for her apartment. “… And what about Lulu?”
“Why does he get to call the shots?”
Lesson number four: let Randall think he has the upper hand.
Bobbie puffs on her cigarette. “As for Lulu…”
Lena holds her breath and waits for Bobbie to say she’ll take care of Lulu, to say she’ll come home and change light bulbs, lift the heavy packages from Lulu’s car to the house, balance her checkbook, drag the trash to the curb, say she’ll listen to Lulu’s endless parables.
“You’ve got to live your life… that’s what I’m doing. Lulu and I are fine on the phone,” Bobbie says. “In person, that’s a different story. She can’t cope with my life… and I’m not going to keep trying to explain it away. Anyway this is about you, not Lulu.”
Lena gets out of the bed and heads for the window. An airplane, well on its route to a faraway destination, blinks the only illumination in the dark sky. She presses her ear to the glass, straining to hear the engine’s distant rumble. “I listened to Tina all evening long. I forgot how much I used to like her.”
“It’s like you’re obsessed with an assignment: write an essay on why you like Tina Turner,” Bobbie says.
“We have intersecting emotional points. Her birthday is November twenty-sixth, too.”
“Is this why you woke me up?”
Lena knows that it doesn’t matter what time it is or what day, her sister will always stop, listen, and love.
“When you were eleven you thought you had something in common with aliens. You spent hours at the library researching life on Venus.” Bobbie chuckles.
“This is not the same. She got past her fear, and this is what I know: there’s a little Tina Turner in all of us. Call it pep, audacity, or a look that camouflages the pain
. We do what we have to do—be on stage or be who everyone else wants us to be—and finally come to the conclusion that nothing will work, unless we’re true to self.” Lena stops, breathes in and out slowly. “I’m just searching for the Tina in me.”
“Well, don’t wear your hair like Tina’s.” Bobbie’s wit is sharp even at this hour. “I don’t think blond is your color.”
Chapter 20
The months since Lena walked out of that corporate apartment, the door refusing to close behind her, have flown much like summer does for a school-bound youngster—with speed and the inability to distinguish one day from the next. Mediation sessions. Body-numbing depression. Drizzling spring rain. Camille’s graduation celebration; Lena entering through the front door feeling like a stranger in the house she made a home; mother and children like strangers until she gathered them both in her arms. Juicy peaches have given way to bushels of tart green apples at the farmers’ market, where now she looks, but doesn’t buy. Foggy mornings, the threat of drought. September breezes blow warm across Oakland and the Bay Area even as New England leaves redden and the Midwest prepares for winter’s blanket of snow. Awake at six, Lena sports a light jacket this cool morning ready, like everyone else in the Bay Area, for Indian summer—another round of flip-flops, shorts, and weekends of sunshine.
This morning’s exercise around the 3.5-mile perimeter of Lake Merritt is her march of tears: because Kendrick is back in Chicago and rarely responds to her emails or phone calls, because Camille lives with Randall and chooses to have him drop her off at Columbia—a decision made a day after her eighteenth birthday one month ago. When Camille visited two days after graduation—and what turned out to be a civil and joyous celebration—she slumped onto the couch and absentmindedly jangled the extra set of keys Lena gave her. “All my stuff is at home.”
Lena sat, holding herself, and her tongue, in hopes that Camille would recognize her disappointment by her body language. Then Camille came up with what Lena supposed was a peace offering.
“Come to New York for Thanksgiving.”
“Well, Camille,” Lena said, not bothering to argue with her daughter’s decision or fight back the tears at her offhanded dismissal. “That’s not quite the holiday I envisioned, but Bobbie will be excited, and maybe I can get Lulu to come, too.” Only four at the dinner table for Thanksgiving, not the twenty or so—cousins, Lulu, Randall’s father, friends without local family—she always included. No days and days of planning, shopping, cooking. No thrill of turning disconnected items into mouthwatering dishes everyone stuffs themselves with. That thought hurt then. It hurts now past her heart, and if asked her, she could not describe the pain.
After today she will no longer cry.
f f f
Mr. Meyers prefaced each of their sessions with a rolling summary: credit card debt divided 70 percent him, 30 percent her; equal division of savings and stocks; Randall kept his beloved Raiders sky box; Lena the Berkeley Repertory Theater seats; fifty-fifty split of the SF Jazz season tickets.
At the end of the ninth, and final, session and with the help of their lawyers, they reached final agreement. Randall insisted—if Lena wanted Camille and Kendrick to stay with her—that she had to keep the house.
“Or else what?”
Elizabeth warned that Randall would more than likely use the house as a bargaining tool. Lena stopped his momentum with a deliberate bathroom break and collected herself in the cold lavatory. She stood in one of the three stalls and blew her nose, wiped her tears on the coarse toilet paper, then returned to the conference room twenty minutes later as if nothing more than her biological urge had been taken care of. Randall picked up the conversation as if she never left the room.
“I’ve worked hard for what I have,” he said.
“So now it’s all yours, huh?” Lena leaned against her leather-backed chair, looked straight into Randall’s tight, brown eyes, and reminded him: “I worked hard, too. For us. You. Keep. The house.” She gathered her papers and stuffed them into her portfolio. Her hands trembled. The papers shook, and she didn’t hide them. She slipped her purse onto her shoulder, left it to the lawyers to balance the house’s appreciation with Randall’s retirement fund, bonuses, the TIDA stock options, and walked out of the office, into the elevator, and held her tears until she got to her car.
f f f
Her tears flow freely now and wash away all emotion, so that by the time she faces Randall later this morning to sign their finalized agreement, she will not cry at all. His face has been so stern, the crease in his forehead so deep through each of the mediation sessions and the nasty correspondence in between. She cannot help but question his motives when his behavior is so aloof. Which compartment has she been relegated to? Where did he put that man who could never remember the punch line to a joke but made up his own, who held her when John Henry died and worried about how Lulu would get along, who cradled each of their children on the day of their birth and marveled at the miracle of their perfect fingers and toes, who rode with her in that fancy new car as excited as she was?
Back in her apartment, Lena steps into the living room and beams. It has taken three months to make this apartment feel like home. Furniture and flowers, walls covered with her photographs—rusty wrought iron fences entwined with weeds, aged doors from the decaying West Oakland train station, junkyard capitals atop Corinthian columns, abandoned cars, and a homeless man preaching to a garbage can. She cannot deny that the absence of playful shouting, the smell of food in the oven, hugs, and no one to say good morning or good night makes her feel sad.
The phone rings as Lena strips off her sweaty clothes.
“That Randall. I’m so disappointed.” Through the phone Lulu’s noisy slurping reassures Lena that the world is normal.
Lena snickers. If only Lulu knew. If only Lena had a dollar for each time Randall has scratched a red marker across Mr. Meyers’s drafts or told Lena she couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t do one thing or another with his money, his kids, his house, his season tickets, his schedule, his job, his friends, his life.
“Want me to come with you?”
The thought of Lulu at her side—outfitted in fuchsia or sunflower yellow, complete with coordinating fingernails and toenails— in the mediator’s office with Randall and their very proper lawyers is enough to make her chuckle.
“I love you, Lulu.” Outside the window and fourteen floors below, a single rowboat, its crewmembers tiny dots, skids across the lake’s glassy surface. Sections of the path she walked this morning, will walk again for many days to come, are easy to see. “After all these weeks, I believe I can handle it on my own.”
“I love you, Lena. You get your strength from my side of the family, you know.” From the shallow sound of her sips, Lena can tell that Lulu’s coffee cup is almost empty. “Dress sexy, and do whatever it takes to soften him up.”
“Sexy,” Lena says, “won’t do me any good anymore with this man. I’m invisible to him; a parasitic harpy he believes wants to bleed him dry.” She settles on the bed and laughs until more tears come into her eyes. Flick.
“That’s my baby girl!” Lulu laughs, too. “Always the drama queen.”
In the shower, the hard, hot water blends with the last of Lena’s tears, sprays over her cheeks, back, and thighs. If, all those years ago, Randall could go back to his first ex, the gold digger, could he come back to her, and would she want him if he did? Could the lilt of her laugh make Randall regret this decision, make him change his mind? Months of sitting across from him at the mediator’s table have changed hers. He no longer looks familiar. Lena is amazed at how callous Randall has been. Is he surprised by how tough and prepared she has been?
Lena takes her time to dress in a conservative, body-hugging, taupe pantsuit (that’s just a bit sexy) and admires herself in the mirror above the sink. The whites of her light brown eyes are clear, the stress acne is gone, the hair is growing back in the tiny worry-patch above her right temple.
The g
lass top of the small bottle of jasmine essence on the bathroom counter is shaped like a flower. Randall never told her how much it cost, preferring to keep her supplied himself, but the cut crystal bottle and the gold filigree hint at its price. This bottle is nearly full of the delicate perfume. She rubs jasmine on her neck and wrists and behind her knees, then turns the bottle upside down and lets the rest run into the sink and down the drain. In this new place there is no room for old memories.
She stuffs I, Tina into her purse like she has before every other session. Out the door, down the elevator, and into the car. Ready. Set. Go.
f f f
Mr. Meyers pats the papers stacked before him and explains that both parties will sign this master document, copies to be distributed once it is filed with the court and finalized at the beginning of next year. The document is a half inch thick. For all the time, arguments, and concessions, the fluorescent light makes the black marks on the crisp white paper appear insignificant.
Across the table, Randall’s broad face avoids hers. He is Kendrick Randall Spencer now. Businessman. Formal and distant. Some other woman will soon be the beneficiary of his attention. The grin she loved, loves, hides behind his tight lips, nevermore to expose itself to her. Randall’s smile has been removed from community property, not included in the division of their assets.
“And so it is done,” Lena says, her tone so formal it surprises her, and she glances around as if someone else speaks with her singsong voice. She wants to tell a joke, maybe a parable like Lulu would if she were here: A man and woman find each other again after many years apart, many loves in between. They get married and live in a lovely house with a picket fence and tulips that bloom in the spring. Their son is handsome, their daughter beautiful; both kids are smart. They are blessed. One day, they lose themselves in the fantasy of it all and let it go without really understanding why, without taking the time to make it work when the going got rough.
Punch line: life is too short. Ha. Ha.
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