Commitment

by Forrester, Nia

  “But have you ever listened to it?” he demanded. “Not the beat, but the lyrics.”

  Brittany finally shook her head. “No, I guess not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  “So, no I don’t feel like you put me on the spot. But I do think your question wasn’t very informed.”

  “I certainly hope you aren’t picking on my students, Shawn,” Lorna called from a few feet away. “Because it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

  Riley stood and came to stand next to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Mom. Stop. Shawn doesn’t know you well enough to understand that you’re kidding.”

  Lorna sighed. “Is that what I’m doing?”

  Shawn waited until the three students said their goodbyes then went upstairs, lying across the bed in Riley’s teenage bedroom, staring up at the ceiling. There was still so much they didn’t know about each other. But none of their differences would have mattered for shit when all he could think about was getting her to marry him. Even when they were standing in City Hall, he’d felt like he was holding his breath until she said the words, “I will.” And every moment since then had been a new life – one where he was constantly surprised that he had found her, the woman he hadn’t known he needed, who he damn sure hadn’t been looking for, and whom he now could not imagine living without.

  He remembered his conversation with Tiny that night when he’d flown to New York to reassure Riley about the tabloid photo, when he’d been amazed to hear how sure Tiny was that he was married to the right woman. As much as he’d wanted Riley then, he couldn’t have said he was sure she was right for him. He just knew what he wanted. But now? Now he was certain. The problem was that everyone else hadn’t arrived at the same conclusion just yet. Lorna Terry being the most immediate example.

  Later when Riley was asleep next to him under the covers, Shawn sat up and fumbled through the dark, finding his bag and retrieving from it the blunt he had known for sure he would need this weekend. He opened the door and made his way quietly down the stairs and out through the kitchen into the backyard. It was bracingly cold and he hunched his shoulders, lighting the tip of the cigar taking a deep drag and exhaling slowly, eyes closed.

  Somewhere to his left, someone cleared their throat and he jumped. It was Lorna, sitting on a lawn chair, barely visible, smoking. In her case though, it was merely tobacco. He could just make out that she was wearing a robe of some kind, and that her hair was pulled back. Her face was completely obscured by the darkness but if he squinted, he could see the glowing embers of her cigarette.

  “Sit down,” she said. It sounded more like an order than an invitation.

  Shawn hesitated, not knowing what to do about the fat marijuana cigar in his hand.

  “Don’t worry about the weed,” she said dismissively. “You’d be surprised to know how much of that crap I smoked in my day.”

  Shawn sat in the chair opposite hers, but could not bring himself to continue smoking bud in front of his mother-in-law, and put it out in the ashtray on the table between them.

  “Riley gave me hell for the way I acted at dinner,” she said conversationally.

  “I asked her not to.”

  “Well. She isn’t one to listen to what people tell her. Least of all me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Shawn said.

  “Well I told her not to marry you.”

  He said nothing.

  “But I can see now why she did.” Lorna paused as though expecting him to react, but he didn’t. “I don’t think she could help herself, frankly. She’s very much in love with you.”

  “You say that like you’re surprised.”

  “I don’t mean it to sound that way. Every parent – well most anyway – thinks their child is remarkable. But I know my child is remarkable. And talented. And beautiful. And I have high hopes for her. So when she said she was marrying a rapper, naturally I was disappointed.”

  “Why ‘naturally’?” Shawn asked, stung.

  “Because Riley is so full of ideas. And you have to admit, there’s hardly a rapper out there with an original idea in his head these days. No offense.” Lorna took a deep pull on the remains of her cigarette and then stubbed it out. “You may well be the exception. I don’t know. Riley certainly seems to think so. And I’ve decided to trust her. I’ve always been able to trust her so I see no reason not to in this instance.”

  “Thank you,” Shawn said, not sure whether he wouldn’t rather tell her to go fuck herself.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” Lorna stood, her chair making a scraping sound. “Just try to be the man she thinks you are.”

  She went inside, and Shawn sat motionless. After a moment, he picked up the blunt and lit it again, pulling in the harsh, pungent smoke, impatient for its calming effect.

  g

  Chapter Nine

  “How’s this?”

  Riley looked up. Tracy was holding a pink calico strapless dress.

  “It would be great on you for the party. With pink sandals.”

  “First of all, I wouldn’t be caught dead in pink sandals. And it’s kind of too cutesy for me.”

  “You are so hard to shop with!” Tracy exhaled sharply.

  “And how much is it?” Riley added.

  Tracy heaved an exaggerated sigh. “You can afford it, I assure you.”

  “How much? I’m not spending a month’s salary on a dress, Tracy.”

  Especially since they had already blown a few grand on the other stuff she’d bought this afternoon. Tracy looked inside for the price tag and Riley saw the barely perceptible lift of her eyebrows.

  “Not that much. Just gimme the card. You are wearing this dress to the party.”

  “Lemme see it first.” Riley wrenched the hanger from her hand and peeked at the tag. She looked up, smiling. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to spend nine-hundred dollars on a dress. A cotton Lycra dress, at that.”

  “It’s Anna Sui.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But it’s so cute,” Tracy said taking it back and replacing it on the rack. “And you have to look the part. It’s a premiere.”

  “For a music video. I didn’t even know they had premiere parties for music videos.”

  “You know rappers,” Tracy teased. “Excess, excess, excess.”

  “Well if it weren’t for the fact that he’s going back to L.A. for three weeks after this, I wouldn’t even bother going. I just don’t want him leaving annoyed at me.”

  “So what’s that going to be like? Three weeks without your man.”

  Riley shrugged. “I’m used to it.” Honestly, she wasn’t so sure anymore. She had grown accustomed to having Shawn home and the idea of him being gone for weeks was tolerable only because she avoided thinking about it.

  She picked up a Diane Von Furstenberg classic ‘70’s silk wrap dress and laughed when Tracy promptly grabbed it and put it back.

  “That looks like something my mother would wear, so no.”

  It was the first of Shawn’s events Tracy had agreed to go to and that was only because she was curious about Chris Scaife and wanted to take a voyeuristic look into the inner sanctum of hip-hop.

  “How’s this?” Riley jokingly held up a barely-there yellow Rebecca Dannenberg slip dress. If she was lucky, it would just about cover her butt cheeks.

  “Perfect!” Tracy grabbed it.

  “If I sit in that thing, the whole world will be able to see up my crotch. That’s if it doesn’t freeze off first.”

  “Stop exaggerating. It’s sexy, but not slutty. Shawn is going to rip this thing right off you. And best part is it satisfies your inclination to be cheap. Only a hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Sold.” Riley took the dress back and headed for checkout.

  Afterwards in Harambe, they ordered lattés and cheesecake, sitting in one of the overstuffed dark brown sofas in the back where Riley used to make out with Brian when t
hey’d just started dating. Now she could enter the coffeehouse and look around at the sienna and yellow walls, and waitresses in Kenté-print miniskirts with a complete lack of nostalgia. She hadn’t seen or heard from Brian in weeks, not since they’d met for dinner at Luke’s. Something told her his silence wasn’t a matter of being too busy at school, or too preoccupied at work. He was drifting away, along with all the other remnants of her old life.

  “So did you go watch the shoot?” Tracy was asking.

  Riley looked at her blankly for a moment then realized she was talking about Shawn’s music video. “Oh. No, I didn’t.”

  “They did it in New York didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, uptown somewhere.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “They’ll play it at the party.”

  “But you could get him to bring you a DVD,” Tracy said. “Jesus Riley, for someone who’s super-sensitive about her own work, you sure don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about his.”

  Riley blinked. “Is that what you think?”

  Tracy sipped her coffee and shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Sure it is. You’re a snob. Like that editor of yours. Rap is for the masses, right? Not for one of the talented tenth like you.”

  “I’ve never seen you rush out to buy the latest Snoop Dogg CD either, Tracy.”

  “Yeah but I’m not married to a rapper,” Tracy pointed out. “Besides, now that it’s kind of your job to be writing about stuff like this, I would try to manufacture some interest if I were you.”

  Tracy was right on that point at least. The only thing that had been saving her at work was that she had to tighten up a few outstanding issues with the slumlord piece. But Greg was determined to start her new column soon and she hadn’t a clue what to write about.

  “And the funny thing is,” Tracy continued. “If you had to pick someone out there whose stuff was a little deeper than the average performer’s, it would be Shawn.”

  “I know that,” Riley snapped.

  “Riley. Shawn is high-maintenance. You knew that before you married him. He wanted to have one hundred percent of your attention, one hundred percent of the time. And now all of a sudden you think things are different?”

  “Yes they’re different. Of course they’re different. We live together, sleep together just about every night, see each other just about every day.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he feels appreciated.”

  Riley rolled her eyes. “Is this where I learn How to Keep My Man?”

  Tracy took a small bite of cheesecake. “Okay, laugh if you want. But out there, at every single event he goes to, are hordes of women - beautiful women - who are willing to do what it takes to get and keep a man like Shawn. And the fact that he’s married to you doesn’t deter them. Not even a little bit.”

  “If Shawn wants to be taken in by one of those women then he’s welcome to her. And she to him.”

  “You say that now, but I know if you thought for a minute that you might lose him . . .”

  “Well fortunately I don’t think that.”

  “Okay. Just some food for thought, that’s all. I mean, Riley, taking care of your relationship doesn’t make you anti-feminist or something.”

  “Okay, Tracy. I hear you. Can we drop it now?”

  “Fine. But you need to stop allowing Lorna to crawl around inside your head, and think for yourself.”

  On the way home, Riley stopped in on one of those places that advertised $12 haircuts. She told herself it was just to browse, but who ‘browsed’ in a hair cuttery? Of course, she got a haircut. She watched in the mirror as the stylist meticulously chopped off all the curls and leaving her with barely an inch of length. Hopefully it made her look a little more sophisticated, a little more chic. Things she hadn’t even thought about before Tracy’s little cautionary talk this afternoon, she realized resentfully.

  g

  Shawn was in the living room with Chris, Mike and Darryl when she got home, carrying her shopping bags and sporting her new haircut. As she walked in, Mike and Darryl hastily removed their feet from the coffee table and began gathering empty beer bottles and food cartons and taking the trash into the kitchen. Chris just sat there, watching her. Even before they met, she hadn’t liked Chris Scaife, multimillionaire producer or not. But she did have a certain grudging respect for him. Partly because despite his success, there was nothing about his demeanor to betray that he had million-dollar homes, fleets of cars and ran several extremely lucrative companies. He wore baseball caps – always New York Yankees – turned backwards and pants so baggy they appeared in perpetual danger of falling about his ankles; and no matter what the occasion, a white t-shirt covered by an assortment of plaid shirts, tail out.

  He’d been profiled in magazines ranging from Rolling Stone to Forbes which had labeled him the “New Breed of American Entrepreneur” and had both mainstream recognition and the support of the hip-hop community, something that was pretty tough to pull off. If you took him at face value, he represented so many of the stereotypes about young Black men – profane, materialistic and reckless – but he also contradicted them with his undeniable success. She knew there had to be more if you could just get beneath the surface but even though he’d been interviewed perhaps hundreds of times, no one had.

  She leaned over the back of Shawn’s chair, conscious of Chris’ eyes still on her, and kissed him on the side of the neck.

  “Oh shit, what happened to your hair?” he pulled her around to sit on his lap, turning her head right and left to get a better look.

  “You don’t like it?” Riley ran a hand over her head.

  “It’s . . . short,” Shawn said uncertainly.

  “It’s sexy,” Chris said unexpectedly.

  He was lighting up a cigarette, casually as though he had every right to do so, even though he was in someone else’s home. Shawn ran a hand over her head in the same way she had.

  “You just have to get used to it,” Riley said getting up and heading for the bedroom. “I love it.”

  She took a shower to wash away the prickly remnants of hair that had fallen on her shoulders and neck during the cut, staying in the shower a little longer than was necessary, hoping Chris and the crew would be gone when she got out. But when she was toweling off in the bedroom, she could still hear them in the living room, laughing at some joke. She listened to the cadence, words and tone of Shawn’s voice as he talked to his friends and marveled at how different he was when he was with them, how much like a . . . rapper. She blushed at the thought, wondering whether Tracy was right, and she was a snob.

  Riley stretched across the bed and reached for the phone, dialing Brian’s number. He was working part-time at a firm downtown, close enough to Power to the People for them to meet for lunch every day if they wanted to. But still he hadn’t called, and she only knew about the new gig through Tracy. No one answered at his apartment, and Riley waited through the greeting on his answering machine but hung up without leaving a message.

  She reached for the bag with her new dress and shed her towel, rolling naked to the edge of the bed and sitting up to pull it over her head. It was light and silky, like gossamer against her skin. It made her feel less like the tomboy she’d always been, and more feminine – the way Tracy always managed to look effortlessly. She stood and smoothed the skirt down, checking her backside to make sure it didn’t show too much. It was a little short, falling only to her mid-thigh and when she sat, it did expose a little more than she was used to. But she liked it, and she liked herself wearing it. Riley shrugged the garment over her head and changed into a tank and tights, waiting for sounds of Shawn’s guests’ departure.

  When finally they were gone, she joined him in the living-room where he was looking through story-boards. In L.A. he would be shooting yet another music video and appearing on a late-night talk show to perform the most popular single from his CD. As the numbers held s
trong, the record label poured more resources into capitalizing on its success which meant more and more time away from home. Riley gently pulled the board he was holding from his fingers and positioned herself astride him. Shawn looked up at her expectantly.

  “How come you never brought home a DVD of your music video for me to see before the release party?”

  “Did you want to see it?”

  “I didn’t think of it,” she admitted.

  Shawn shrugged. “Me neither.”

  “So you don’t think that makes me selfish or anything? Like I don’t care about your work?”

  Shawn smiled as he might at a child asking a silly question.

  “I’m serious, Shawn.”

  He laughed. “I know you are. That’s what’s so cute.” He reached for the storyboard she’d taken out of his hand. “If you want to show me you care about my work, you’ll let me do it.”

  “Fine.”

  She slid off his lap and headed back to the bedroom, reminding herself that besides Lorna, it was probably wise not to allow Tracy to crawl around inside her head either.

  g

  Riley took a little more time than she usually did with make-up for the party, put on the two-carat diamond earrings Shawn had given her as a wedding present and used gel to smooth what was left of her hair. When she’d pulled the dress over her head and stepped into a pair of silver high-heeled sandals, the expression on Shawn’s face told her everything she needed to know about how she looked.

  He looked pretty darn good himself in a stark white Dolce & Gabbana ribbed tee and chinos with brown boots. Shortly after they were dressed, Brendan and Tracy showed up. Tracy was stunning, wearing a beige calfskin halter, chocolate capris and sky-high stilettos that made her legs look even longer. By any measure, she was incredible-looking, but Shawn didn’t seem to notice, even though Brendan clearly did. Before leaving for the club, they all sat in the living room with the shades open, looking out at the skyline, drinking champagne. There were worse things in the world than living like this.