Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  I rolled my eyes at Tamika’s speech and looked back over my shoulder at King. A new woman was standing in my old space, and he was smiling at her.

  “So, what are you going to do?” Heather asked.

  “Go home and get some fucking sleep,” I said, getting up from my stool.

  “Oh, don’t be like that. Don’t go,” Heather begged. Tamika rolled her eyes at me.

  “It’s cool.” I cut my eyes at Tamika as I hugged Heather good-bye. “I’m not mad. I have a doctor’s appointment in the morning.”

  “Okay,” Heather said.

  “Whatever,” Tamika jumped in, getting off of her stool, too, but I don’t remember what she did after. “You just remember what I said.”

  “Right. I’ll do that.”

  As I walked out of Damaged Goods, I could feel King looking at me. His eyes on my entire body so hard, I struggled to swallow. I heard his laugh, and at one point I thought I heard him call “Queen.” I didn’t turn around though. Something in me couldn’t.

  “Let me walk you out,” Tamika said, grabbing my arm. “You stumbling.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling away. “I’m just getting into a cab. I’ll be fine.”

  Chapter 5

  Thursday morning I was in Dr. Davis’s office describing my pain.

  He sat back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, exposing some ugly orange and teal argyle socks I could tell he thought were cute, because he kept looking down at them with a little smug smile as he asked me questions.

  “So, when do you start feeling pain—like, what time of day?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s before I get out of bed,” I answered, sitting in a chair on the other side of the desk.

  He grinned at his socks poking out from under his frat-boy khakis and shook his head in a way that was neither approving nor disapproving—more a confirmation that he could hear what I was saying.

  “Before you get out of bed? Every morning?” he asked.

  “Yes. Early. Every day.” I felt like it was the hundredth time I’d said that since he’d been treating me.

  After another quick head shake, peek at his socks, and grin, Dr. Davis asked, “Are you sitting up or lying down when you feel the pain?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?” I asked. “I just feel it. That’s what’s important.”

  “Well, actually, when you feel the pain is important.”

  “To whom?”

  “To me.”

  Dr. Davis turned on his polite voice to talk to me about my pain, how I should describe it, and why he was volunteering to listen. Sometimes I felt like my little descriptions were pointless, just every doctor’s way of making patients pay before getting their prescriptions. And that was because really the prescription was the bottom line. It was why we were both there.

  I looked around his office as he spoke. Everything was cream and red and expensive. A nautical theme with seashells and charcoal sketches of sharks Dr. Davis had done himself. He even had one of those sound spa ports that played a continuous loop of ocean waves crashing.

  He said it was supposed to be relaxing.

  After my accident, I wanted to find a black doctor near the office, and one of my old classmates suggested I give him a try. Hearing his name, Dr. Delroy Davis, I was sure I’d meet some gray-haired Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable wannabe the first time I visited his office. But in he walked, big and black and so in shape, I thought he was gay. And then I saw the ugly argyle socks—that day they were red and blue—and I was sure he was gay. But then, in the examination, he had me stand in front of a chair as he ran his fingers up my spine from behind. As he palpated each vertebra, telling me to relax, my spine began to loosen and I lost my balance, falling back into his chest. He tried to hold me up, but it was too late, and quickly we were on the floor, me on top of him. In my scramble to get to my feet, I noted the big bulge in his pants. Erect and new and pointed toward me. Neither of us said anything. There was just an odd look and awkward smile. Ever since, I always thought he wanted to ask me out, but he never said anything. Just smiles and grins.

  “Kimberly? Kimberly? Can you hear me?” Dr. Davis called from the other side of his desk.

  “What?”

  “I just asked you a question,” Dr. Davis said.

  “What?”

  “Do you feel the pain when you’re asleep?”

  “Asleep? What? How would I know that?” I replied.

  “Well, you just said that you feel it when you wake up.”

  “Okay. Fine, Dr. Davis,” I said, sounding dramatically defeated by his questions. “I feel it in my sleep. Okay? Is that all?”

  “All? What do you mean ‘all’?” He shifted his feet off the desk and looked at me.

  “Like for the prescription. Is that all you want to hear for me to get the prescription? I feel it in my sleep. When I wake up. When I’m in the shower. Walking down the street. All day. Okay? So now can you give me the prescription?” I raised my voice with each sentence. I didn’t know how else I was supposed to communicate my urgency. I had to take two shots of the Jameson I bought on the way home from Damaged Goods just to get out of bed to make it to the appointment. The ibuprofen did nothing for my pain.

  “Slow down!” Dr. Davis held up his hands, and his eyes softened on me in concern.

  I repositioned myself in the seat, looked off at a sketch of a hammerhead, and took a deep breath. The pain was ticking up my back again, jabbing through each muscle and bone like an ice pick.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.” A tear escaped my right eye.

  He pushed his cream-colored tissue box toward me.

  “I don’t need it,” I said, and then after taking another deep breath during a silence where Dr. Davis eyed me like I was nearly suicidal, I asked, “Look, can I just get the prescription? I have to get to work.”

  “Well, that’s why I wanted you to come in today,” he said, getting up from his desk and walking around to sit in the chair beside me.

  “Why?”

  “I’m not giving you another prescription,” he said.

  “What?” I laughed to let him know that if he was joking, I’d gotten it and we could move on.

  “I think you’re done with that part of your treatment.”

  “Done? What are you talking about? I’m still in pain. I need the prescription. I need to take those pills. It’s so much pain. I hurt,” I said, feeling a few more tears slide from my eyes. My heart was beating so fast, and my hands started to clam up.

  “I don’t think you do. See, I started you on placebos a few weeks ago.”

  “Placebos?”

  “Yes,” he said, and then he reminded me of a pilot program I’d agreed to take part in on my first visit. They were testing the efficacy of standard medications. They wouldn’t switch my medication or try new ones on me, just play with the dosage to see how much each person needed at each point during treatment. I thought it sounded pretty interesting a year ago, but I’d forgotten all about it. “We didn’t say what we were looking for in terms of dosage. The real focus of the test was patient overuse.”

  “Overuse?” I laughed uneasily. “Are you joking? Overuse. . . .  ​You . . .  ​you make it sound like I’m—”

  “No. Nothing like that,” Dr. Davis said, placing his hand on my arm. “We were just interested in your recovery time and the number of pills you seem to take.”

  “And.”

  “All of the pills in your last dosage were placebos—sugar pills,” he said.

  “I know what a placebo is—and those pills, they weren’t sugar pills. They made me feel better,” I explained.

  “Maybe they did,” Dr. Davis said.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said, feeling more agitated with him sitting beside me and placing his hand on my arm. “And stop. Don’t patronize me. I know what I feel and I know what those pills did.”

  “The only way those pills could work to relieve
your pain is if your pain isn’t real. If it’s . . . ​in your head.”

  I hadn’t realized I was crying again until Dr. Davis reached over to his desk for the box of tissues and placed it in my lap.

  “You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened. They’re getting married.”

  “Who’s getting married, Kimberly? Can you tell me? Maybe you should talk to someone about . . .”

  Dr. Davis was talking about a lot of nothing. I couldn’t believe he was making light of my pain. Of the kicking in my back. Every day, every night, I felt like I was cracking wide open, and he wanted to talk about some damn placebos and suggest that I needed to talk to someone?

  I stood up and looked down on him. He was making it sound like there was something wrong with me and not him for shirking his duty. I mean, I was having chronic pain. My accident had caused me chronic pain, and there was only one way to deal with it. But there he was acting like Dr. Oz.

  “Is this about what happened here at my first office visit?” I asked, cutting off his silly suggestion that I see one of his psychiatrist friends in Chelsea.

  “What?” he asked, trying to look surprised.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s just be honest. Ever since I started coming here, you’ve been, you know, checking me out.”

  He got up from his seat and looked at me in mock distress, like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Really? So, you’re going to keep on with that?” I chuckled as I stood before him. “Well, if you want to play like that, I’ll say this: We both know who you are and who I am. Right?” He shook his head in agreement. “And we both know that sexual harassment is a very serious charge. One I don’t take lightly. Do you understand that?”

  “I wasn’t . . .  ​I-I—”

  “You what?”

  “I wasn’t trying to do anything to you.” He reached over to his desk and picked up a photo frame that had been facing away from me. He turned it to me, and there he was standing on a beach with a white girl and a little mixed toddler with a blond Afro. “I’ve been in a committed relationship for seven years.” He tried to hand me the little cream-colored frame.

  I held up my hands and backed away.

  “Really?” I said, grabbing my purse. “That’s your defense. You know how many men who are actually married still try to abuse their power? Whatever.” I started walking out.

  “Please don’t leave, Kimberly,” Dr. Davis said in this fake, plastic voice that sounded like he was about to do something really lame like call security.

  “I’m getting another doctor. You don’t want to manage my pain? Someone else will. Good day!”

  He began to follow me out of the office, apologizing and begging me to contact his friend in Chelsea, but when we got into the waiting room and it was filled with people trying to get his attention, he stopped.

  “I’ll call you to set up a meeting,” he said to my back. “You call me back. Call me back if you need anything!”

  I kept walking right out into the street, where the high morning sun stung my eyes. There was no way I’d make it through the rest of the day without something. The Jameson and ibuprofen were wearing off, and already my lower back was stinging.

  On the way to the office I figured I’d leave early to get into bed and come up with a plan before things got too bad, but once the elevator dinged open on my floor, Carol was in position waiting for me, arms extended, face all red.

  “Oh, you’re here!” she said before stepping off the elevator.

  “Could you just wait until I get to my office?” I snapped. “Get in the door?”

  “But it’s important,” she said, holding her hands out in front of me to stop me.

  “Isn’t it always important? Every day? Welcome to my life. Everything is important.”

  “We need to talk,” she said, her voice thin and conciliatory. And even with my aggravation at Dr. Davis for leaving me hanging and Carol attacking me upon entry and my back pain and everything else, I knew I needed to stop and listen to her. “Bernard Richard is dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Bernard Richard. The witness. The one in the Christopher Street meth-lab case.” She pulled me to the back of the elevator bank as two of my colleagues walked past looking at me with the accusatory stares.

  “But he was just here. Dead?” I said, remembering him sitting across from me in the conference room. His scared eyes. The black car he described outside his window. “What happened?”

  “Well, the gossip is that Alvarez put a hit out on him. Final report isn’t back yet from downtown, but the word is that someone was waiting for him in the apartment when he got home last night—now that’s what people are saying. But, you know—”

  “Fuck. Fuck. How’d that happen? I sent an officer out there with him,” I said, and then whispered. “He had protection. You know that. Right? So if that’s what people are saying—that he didn’t have protection—they’re wrong.”

  Two more ADAs, one who’d started at the DA’s office with me, walked by with their fake smiles and whispers. When they were gone, I looked at Carol and her still-red cheeks. “Get Chief Elliot on the phone. This won’t go on un—”

  “Kimberly—” Carol cut in.

  “We can’t have this. That man was serving the state. We can’t let it get out that he died under our protect—”

  “Kimberly!” Carol nearly shouted. “Listen to me.”

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t under our protection. Remember?”

  “What? I sent him home with an officer.”

  “Yes, you did,” she offered, returning to her conciliatory tone. “But . . . ” She paused.

  “What?”

  She whispered sharply, “You didn’t order full protection. He only had an escort home. That’s all.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I laughed nervously at Carol’s confusion. “I ordered protection for him. I listened to him in there.” I pointed down the hallway toward the conference room. “I heard him. I told him—”

  Carol cut me off. “You told him not to worry. You sent him home. I’ve been reading the transcripts.”

  “I—” Pieces of a blurry conversation with Bernard flashed in my mind. I remembered him looking at the bookshelves, asking for a smoke. The fear in his eyes. The story of the woman with the yellow eyes and cheese grater on her back.

  I started walking toward my office again without saying anything to Carol, but she was up on my heels and still talking.

  “I’ll clear this up,” I said over her, but it was a fool’s statement. We both knew what the situation was adding up to. Where the fault would fall. And God, if the press got word.

  “I think it might be too late,” Carol said in a low voice, so that an assistant walking past with arms filled with folders couldn’t hear her.

  “What? Why do you say that?” I asked. “Is there something else? Anything else I need to know?”

  “Paul.”

  “What? Fuck! He knows? Of course he does,” I said. “Now wait. Calm down,” I said to Carol. “No need to panic. I just need to sit down . . .  ​in my office to figure this out. To get in front of it. I can do this. I can explain everything. You saw Bernard, right? You know he was high. You said it yourself. We just need to get the story straight.”

  “We’re going to need to. And faster than you think.” Carol pointed to my open office door. “Paul is in there with Chief Elliot. They’re waiting for you.”

  “In my office? For what?”

  “A meeting. They called it this morning when the word got out about Bernard.”

  “A meeting?” I looked down at my clothes for some reason. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I called you a couple of times—even though you told me not to. I left a message,” Carol said. “Kimberly, I think this is serious.”

  “Did you hear anything?” I asked. “What they’ve been saying?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. O
kay,” I said, rolling through what they could want, what I had to say, what I needed to say. I handed Carol my purse, shoulder bag, and cell phone.

  We stood eye to eye for a second as I adjusted my skirt and broke off to walk at top pace toward my office.

  “Hold all calls,” I instructed her. “And print those transcripts from the meeting.”

  “Yes.”

  When I got to my office, Easter Summer, an ADA who was always in my business with Paul, was walking toward me with her laptop in her arms. She’d started two years behind me but was fast becoming a prospective shoe-in for joining my team. And I could never figure out why. She was second-string material at best. Didn’t seem to have a mind of her own and was mostly good at taking and following direction.

  “Oh. I’m not too late,” she said, smiling with her red lips. She was black Latin. Had skin the color of sand and black freckles on her forehead.

  “Late?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, walking into my office in front of me. “For the meeting.”

  Paul and Chief Elliot stood when we walked in. Elliot was a “tough on drug” hire the police commissioner put in office. One name on a short list of black police chiefs in New York’s history, Elliot made sure to keep a spotless record. But he was an old-school male chauvinist whose dingy dealings with female officers and subordinates remained the talk. The Daily News once quoted him saying, “I’m in no way saying female officers shouldn’t have guns, but I am saying that I’m sure if they did a study to compare misfires between males and female officers, the more fair sex would come out on top.” Still, Paul doted on Elliot like he was the Superman of the city. He may have been a jerk, but that only gave him more credibility in a system that saw chauvinism as a part of the culture. Paul claimed he didn’t like it when I pointed out the most obvious offenses to him, but then Elliot gave Paul his very own man-sized toy car in the form of a police wagon he could drive around Manhattan, running lights and acting a fool wherever he wanted, and they became thick as thieves.

  Paul smiled at Easter and gestured for her to sit in one of three chairs they’d pulled in from the conference room.

  “Good morning,” I said, trying so hard to sound light. “I didn’t know we were meeting today, so excuse my lateness.”