Genevieve

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  We’re back to where we were. Back to pretending nothing is wrong.

  She lets up the armrest, puts on her headset, listens to her Angie Stone CD while reading an Andrew Klavan novel. Man and Wife. She doesn’t read books sold by Black Expressions, nor does she do Chick Lit. She listens to R&B, only the singers who aren’t accompanied by rappers. When it comes to books, her literature-shopping list is published in the New York Times, and she will only read the top five, the Harry Potter series included. But no Chick Lit. Too contrived.

  I fire up my laptop, pop in a DVD, Chappelle’s Show, first season.

  She looks at my screen, sees Chappelle in beaded braids, smoking a joint, licking the side of a white woman’s face, and Genevieve tsks, a brusque sound that tells me what she sees is offensive. I ignore her, laugh, watch Dave Chappelle and Charlie Murphy satire Rick James.

  Genevieve runs her hand over her salt-and-pepper mane, its curls so sweet and sensual, leans against me, her head on my shoulder. Her hair smells fresh. I’m aroused by her touch.

  Arousal. The weakness of man. So easily achieved by the stimulation of the senses, sight being the most prevalent. One glance and a chemical reaction makes us rise.

  I whisper, “That headache you have…”

  “Stress.”

  “It’s a scientific fact that an orgasm can alleviate that.”

  “Pervert.”

  “When I’m eating your pussy you don’t think so.”

  “Hate it when you talk like that.”

  “I want to fuck you until fucking goes out of style.”

  “Stop talking like that.”

  “You don’t like the way I fuck you?”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a slut. I’m not a whore.”

  “When I take you from the back and you can hear my balls slapping against your ass?”

  She stares me down. Defiant, I lick my lips like I have her ass in my hands and I’m feasting on her clitoris, or like I’m on my back with her kneeling over my face, my tongue moving in and out of her vagina, tracing the edges of her goodness. My wife frowns, but her eyes tighten.

  Talking dirty makes her uneasy, but I want to believe it excites her at the same time. There are a lot of things I want to believe that at the end of the day I know will never be true.

  She says, “People see you as the epitome of an urbane gentleman: meticulously groomed, faultlessly polite, always poised and gracious in every situation.”

  “How do you see me?”

  “As my husband. The king. The nabob of this marriage.”

  I back down, modify the language of Mars to fit the need of Venus.

  I say, “Do you think we have enough intimacy in our marriage?”

  She shifts, her stern expression telling me to cease and desist.

  I wait.

  “I think we make love enough.” There is a decent pause, she purses her lips, shifts, opens and closes her novel. “Considering our schedules, how long our days are, yes. So far as other married couples, we’re on track.”

  My truth is restless as I wait for her to ask me for my opinion. I want to tell her that we do not, that I want to make love to her until my lingam is tender and my tongue is swollen, until we collapse into each other’s arms and slip into a coma, warriors at the end of a wonderful and erotic battle, one that leaves bites and scratches, but no losers. Then wake, eat, and battle again.

  And that the intimacy I seek goes beyond the bedroom. Yes I desire that. I am built that way. But I also need a deeper connection, the kind that comes from wanting to know about her. That is why I am on this plane. That is why I’m going to meet her past.

  She goes back to Andrew Klavan.

  Genevieve asks, “Would you make love to the flight attendant?”

  “I don’t love her.”

  “Would you engage in congress with her?”

  I answer, “Only if we did it together.”

  “You keep staring at her. Maybe I’ll just go up and ask her for her damn number. She could be your whore. Would you like that? If I went out and brought us back a whore?”

  “I wasn’t staring at her.”

  “You were transfixed. Licked your lips and made that sound.”

  I ask, “What sound?”

  “That sound you make.”

  “She has nice breasts.”

  She asks, “Nicer than mine?”

  “Nobody has breasts nicer than yours.”

  “You like mine?”

  “Love yours.” I nod. “Go ahead. Get her number. It would be fun.”

  She tsks and frowns. “Sometimes I look at you and I just want to scream.”

  “Feeling’s mutual.”

  She shifts, her lips tight and defensive. “Could you handle me being with a man and a woman at the same time?”

  I ask, “Have you ever been with a woman?”

  “You’ve asked me that before.”

  “You never answered.”

  She asks, “Have you ever been with a man?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Did that upset you?”

  I say, “I’m not upset.”

  She chuckles, shakes her head. “This is so fascinating to me.”

  I ask, “What is?”

  “How it’s so easy for men to dialogue about girl-on-girl sex. Amazing how it’s become this sexual ideal. Almost another rite of passage. Yet men—straight men—always blow their stack if women press them to imagine which men they could picture themselves with.”

  I laugh.

  She doesn’t.

  She asks, “Is that what your Ecuadorian whore was into? Group sex?”

  “Don’t go there, Genevieve. All I’m saying is that it’s normal.”

  “Normal? Since when?”

  “Women—professional women—have those kind of fantasies.”

  “Well, all I know is I’ve never heard a guy go ‘I’d love to get head from Boris Kodjoe.”“

  I tell her, “I don’t appreciate that image.”

  “I don’t hear men saying they’d want to experience Enrique Iglesias because he’s exotic.”

  “You’re upset.”

  She makes another disgusted sound. “You’re sickening. Sometimes I hate that I married you. Of all the men I met that night, you were the one I dated and fell in love with. I hate that.”

  That stops me. I look in her eyes to see if that is her truth.

  She says, “How would you feel if I insisted that you fuck one of my male friends?”

  “This conversation is over.”

  “Or if I kept suggesting that we went someplace and found a man?”

  “I’ve never suggested that.”

  “What if I insisted you let him shove it up your butt because that was my fantasy?”

  “I’d say you were insane.”

  “What if I just used my vibrator? You’re always trying to coax me into doing anal, maybe we could trade sodomy for sodomy. Fair exchange is no robbery.”

  My hands open and close, then I rub away the tension that is building in my eyes.

  She says, “Oh, now you don’t have anything to say.” I push her too far and she attacks me. She attacks me and the part of me that is ruled by Cancer knots up, withdraws, starts moving side to side and fleeing like a true crab.

  She is a true Taurus woman. No games. No fantasies. No false modesty.

  I am a Cancer. Born to be an emotional and hopeless romantic fool.

  I get up and walk away, pace the plane, anger cruising my veins like an open freeway.

  I don’t pace for long. Can’t because we hit turbulence and the seat-belt sign comes on.

  I have to hold on to seat after seat as I go back.

  Genevieve has the face of a scared little girl, her knuckles turning white.

  As soon as I sit, I take her sweaty hand. She shivers.

  The plane dips and rocks. People are troubled. Silence means horror. Genevieve holds my hand, her grip as strong as her fear of dying like this.

 
We cling to each other. It doesn’t show, but I am afraid and powerless too.

  When the turbulence wanes, she takes a deep breath.

  I wipe my damp palms on my pants.

  I loosen my grip. She keeps her hand on mine.

  Genevieve says, “I’m sorry. What I said, I’m sorry.”

  No response from me.

  She shifts awhile before she whispers, “Angelina Jolie or Salma Hayek. It would have to be one of them. She’d have to be exotic. Not Penelope Cruz. Too skinny. Not a black woman.”

  At times Genevieve becomes someone else, a person both electrifying and terrifying.

  I ask, “Genevieve?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m your wife.”

  She goes back to Andrew Klavan. I go back to Dave Chappelle.

  We touch each other but at the same time we fall into our separate worlds.

  SEVEN

  ALMOST THREE YEARS AGO. WHEN I STARTED DATING DOCTOR GENEVIEVE Forbes.

  Before I knew that she used to be someone else. Before I knew about the attacks.

  I was planning to go see the Fresno State Bulldogs battle the Grand Canyon Antelopes on the basketball courts. Genevieve had never been to Fresno. I doubt if Fresno was on her list of top one thousand cities to visit. I asked her if she wanted to ride with me.

  She said yes. I drove her three hours north to see Fresno and its en-nothing. Drove her places she had never been, beyond the tumbleweeds in Bakersfield and the raisins in Selma.

  There is a Selma in California, just as there is one in Alabama, Ours with the present of brown-skinned men picking raisins, theirs with the history of dark-skinned men picking cotton.

  I was nervous. I was in my car with Doctor Genevieve Forbes. A woman who had let places like Paris and Jamaica become her playground. And Fresno wasn’t a real city, just a small town.

  She said, “I grew up in a small town.”

  I said, “People joke that if you take away Cal State Fresno, Fresno is Bakersfield North.”

  She laughed at my lame attempt at humor. She always did. Always so kind and sparing of my feelings. The roads leading to my old town were agricultural, cows and horses, cotton fields and strawberry patches, trailer homes and dilapidated structures with clotheslines in the backyard. Turn on the radio and clear reception came from either country music or gospel. Integration was legal but segregation was practiced. Whites lived in the northern part of the town, blacks huddled in the west, Mexicans on the east side, and the Asians were in the south.

  Genevieve said, “What you do is impressive. Not a lot of black people go into research.”

  “I could have gone to medical school, but I was burned out, it was expensive, and I could make the same amount of money in pharmaceutical and drug discoveries, if not more.”

  “I heard that.”

  “So here I am. It’s always good to start in academia and then go private.”

  She asked, “What have you been up to at work?”

  “Things are pretty cool. I’m working on getting a two-point-five-million-dollar AIDS training grant and they’re trying to kill me. Hard work, but we’re doing some excellent research. I’ve been busy proofreading the application. I have a lab assistant testing a drug we’ve developed. If the test comes back okay, we will inject the drug into the infected mouse and wait for the results. You have to come down and tour our laboratory sometime.”

  She shook her head. “I have a disdain for needles.”

  “So do the mice.”

  We both laughed. I realized I was being long-winded. Being with her did that to me.

  I told her, “This is different. Very nice.”

  “How so?”

  “Usually when I start talking about my job, when I mention neurodegenerative diseases and genetics, women look at me like I’m talking in Spanish mixed with Swahili.”

  She laughed again. “Since you brought it up, do you date a lot?”

  “Nah. Not at all. That’s the only setback in research; you never have time to do anything but study and work. Sometimes I feel like I want to quit and get a regular job. I need a life.”

  “You’re doing something important. I admire that. You have ambitions.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll be famous one day.”

  “Afraid not. We develop the drugs but don’t get any credit.”

  “Really?”

  “It all goes to the principal investigator of our lab.”

  “No credit whatsoever?”

  “None. We have to sign a statement stating that anything we develop in the lab, they get all royalties. So if I find a cure for AIDS, I’ll be assed out. Unless I develop it in my garage.”

  “That’s pretty crazy.” She shook her head in disbelief. “But it’s still important.”

  I nodded and sighed. “That’s the only thing that keeps me there.”

  “Too many black women are dying. It’s disturbing. Has to feel good knowing that you are trying to develop a drug that could cure a lot of sick people. It requires total dedication. I understand that. You must have a goal in life. We all should have goals. Or we are lost.”

  I nodded. “My goals have taken me a long way from Fresno.”

  We were on highway 99, Fresno County, coming up on Selma, The Raisin Capital of the World. A barren town. Two-star hotels at best. Genevieve stared around at all the nothingness.

  Genevieve asked, “You said your grandfather was a truck driver?”

  “Sure was. Drove an eighteen-wheeler cross-country.”

  “And your grandmother?”

  “Worked at hotels. Food service. And when she had a day off she spent most of her time out at Table Mountain Casino or Chukchansi gambling away my college tuition.”

  “Gambling?”

  “On sacred Indian grounds. She’d run three slot machines at the same time.”

  “Good Lord. That could be a problem.”

  “It was. Grandparents always fought tooth-and-nail about the finances.”

  “Physical fights?”

  “Time to time. Mostly screaming. They slept in separate bedrooms. Doors locked.”

  “So you were alone a lot.”

  “Pretty much. Nobody cared if I was there or not.”

  She chuckled. “That’s how you and your Ecuadorian lover were able to hook up.”

  “I was a latchkey kid. Grew up over by the intersection of Fresno Street and California Boulevard, not too far from Maxey Park, over where the homeless and transients congregate on that strip of grass they call a recreational area and play dominoes all day. Surprised I didn’t end up in a gang. Or dead.”

  She whispered, “Or in jail.”

  “I was one of the fortunate ones.”

  I wanted to ask her what it was like having a mother and a father. Every parental figure in my world was dead or missing in action. I didn’t want to resurrect ghosts. Just remembered my own mother.

  Us in Texas. Riding through Third Ward, Fifth Ward, Acre Homes, riding with the radio up loud and the windows down low. Eating catfish and spaghetti in the summertime.

  We checked into the Radisson, next to the Fresno Convention Center, the only hotel in the area that had more than a three-star rating. A woman like Genevieve, you couldn’t take her to a three-star hotel. The way she took slow steps into the room let me know that our room was borderline. She went to the bed, pulled back the sheets, inspected, didn’t like what she saw, called housekeeping and requested they change the sheets and clean the room again.

  She was critical, inspecting the bathrooms, commenting on the smallness of the tub, the furniture in the sitting area, vented that she could hear people in the next room or above us taking a shower, pretty much disliked everything, ranted, “And these sheets are thin. Would think they would have better quality sheets at a four-star hotel. Especially in the executive suite.”

  The way she called downstairs and complained I found it hard to believe that she was a Southern-b
orn woman who grew up on biscuits and molasses and ate buttermilk and corn bread.