by Mary Monroe
“His name is Louis,” I said flatly. “And I doubt very seriously if he’s gay,” I added with conviction. “People used to accuse you of being gay when we were kids, remember?”
“Well, if anybody knows that ain’t true and never was, it’s you.” Pee Wee laughed and muttered a few obscenities under his breath. “I’ll tell your favorite caterer you said hello, anyway. Oh! Do you want me to get a plate for you, too? He got anything you want?”
“No,” I said quickly and stiffly.
“That’s a damn shame. On account of you doin’ business with him, I bet he’d give me a plate for you half price if I told him I was married to you.”
“No, don’t do that. I want to keep my relationship with Louis on a professional level. I don’t like to get too personal with my business associates.”
Pee Wee let out a loud breath. “If you’re on a first-name basis with Louis already, it sounds like your relationship with him done already got personal to me. I got clients that I’ve been dealin’ with for twenty years, and they still call me Mr. Davis. I want to keep it that way.”
“Uh, it was his idea. He wants to be addressed by his first name. He’s from down South.”
“I see. That figures. It’s a Southern thing. I don’t want to touch that one with a stick, with my Pennsylvania-born self. The South is another planet, if you ask me. No wonder we Northerners call it Bigfoot country.” He laughed again. “Now I got to get off this phone and get back to work.”
CHAPTER 12
I didn’t waste any time addressing the second issue on my mind. I called Louis at his work. I was on hold for five minutes before he came on the line.
“Louis, are you still going to see me this evening?” I asked, wrapping the telephone cord around my finger.
“I hope so. Unless you can’t make it.”
“I just talked to my husband. He’s going to pick up one of your meat-loaf dinners on his way home from work this evening,” I stated, forcing the difficult words out of my mouth like an extracted tooth.
“Oh?”
“Yes, and it sounds like he’s going to become a regular customer,” I said in a nervous voice. “Like everybody else, he likes good cooking.”
“Good. I’ll fix his plate today with my own two hands. If there’s anybody I want to keep happy, it’s him. As long as he’s happy, we’ll be happy. You sure he doesn’t suspect anything? I am sure that if he was smart enough to get a woman like you, he’s not so stupid that he won’t get suspicious if you give him a reason.”
“My husband has no reason in the world to think that I’m up to no good. I haven’t done a damn thing to make him suspicious, which is more than I can say about him.”
A long silence followed. I didn’t want to be the one to break it, because I didn’t know what else to say on the subject. But I was willing to respond to his comments and concerns.
“Annette, I don’t think it’s my place to get nosy about what goes on in your personal life, but if you want to talk to me about something, please feel free to do so.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“I mean it. I want you to know now that I am here for you, day or night. If you are willing to talk to me about your problems or concerns, even if it’s a problem with your husband, I am willing to listen.”
“Louis, let’s confine our relationship to just you and me for now. If we don’t have to bring my husband into our conversations, we won’t.”
“But if your husband is going to be a problem for us, I need to know.”
“My husband is not going to be a problem. My marriage is not a problem.”
“Well, there’s a problem somewhere, baby. There must be! I can hear it in your voice. The man sleeps in the same bed with a juicy-butt woman like you and has not made love to you in almost a year. You told me that yourself. If that’s not a problem, I don’t know what is.”
“I’ll call you just before I leave work, and don’t worry about anything I just said. It’s nothing that I can’t handle by myself,” I assured Louis. But it was. As soon as I hung up with him, I called Rhoda back.
“He lied like a rug,” I said as soon as she answered.
“Who?” she asked with a snort.
“Pee Wee. I called him up and gave him every chance in the world to tell me he’s been seeing a doctor.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want you to know. Maybe he’s goin’ for somethin’ that’s too embarrassin’ for him to discuss with you. Like excessive gas.”
“Rhoda, if my husband was farting all over the place, I’d know about it,” I snapped.
“It could be somethin’ else then. Like one of those things that men don’t like to talk about because they think it’s too embarrassin’.”
“I’m his wife!” I hollered. “If he can’t share something embarrassing with me, who can he share it with?”
“He must not think that if he told his apprentice he’s seein’ a doctor, but he didn’t tell you. It could be somethin’ a man will discuss only with another man. What’s that new drug they got now for men to use when they need a little help in the bedroom? Viagra, I think they call it, right?”
“If my husband is seeing a doctor, it’s certainly not for Viagra. I could, and do, parade around in front of him naked. All he does is tell me to put on some clothes before I catch a cold or to move from in front of the TV.”
Rhoda laughed.
“You think this is funny?”
“Hell yeah,” she said and snickered.
“I’m not laughing, Rhoda.”
“I’m sorry,” she managed, snickering some more.
“Pee Wee is not going to a doctor to get Viagra. If he is, he’s wasting his money and time, because it’s not working for him. There’s more action going on in a hospital bed than in ours.”
“Annette, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but…maybe it’s not for you,” Rhoda said gently.
“What do you mean by that? Like I just said, I am his wife!”
“And this is the real world. His old ass went out and bought a Firebird, and a red one at that. That’s one of the most popular chick magnets in the geriatric community. For males. We women have to use a lot more props to attract attention. But I don’t want to go into that right now.”
As soon as Rhoda paused, I jumped in. “I don’t want to go into this shit right now, either.”
“Just let me finish. If Pee Wee’s with some other woman, I can assure you she’s not some douche bag our age that he can satisfy by playin’ with her titties and a few half-ass thrusts—”
I cut her off in midsentence. “Rhoda, speak for yourself. It takes more than a few thrusts and playing with my titties for a man to satisfy me!”
“You’re missin’ the point—”
I cut her off again. “I’m his age. You’re his age. What does that say about us?”
“Annette, you know as well as I do that men our age rarely cheat on us with women our age. To them, there’s no more sugar left in a woman’s bowl by the time she reaches middle age.”
“Louis is only thirty, and I can assure you that he doesn’t think my bowl has run out of sugar.”
“Now that’s a horse of a different color. Men his age don’t know any better. To them, tail is tail.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Dr. Rhoda?”
“When a man Louis’s age wants a woman your age, it’s for a different reason than a man our age.”
“I’m not following you at all,” I complained. “And to tell you the truth, we can end this conversation right now, because wherever it’s going, I don’t want to go.”
“I told you to let me finish. Anyway, men our age eventually stop seeing women our age as sexual options. We’ve become too convenient, too familiar to them. And in some cases, too flabby and worn out. It’s sad but true. But they still like us enough to keep us around. Like beer or their favorite tool or somethin’. I bet if somebody offered Pee Wee a brand-new easy chair to lounge around in like a lizard, he’d
grab it so fast, it would make your head spin. But, he still wouldn’t dispose of that damn old, faithful La-Z-Boy of his, which annoys you so much.”
“Then explain to me why Louis finds me so sexy and irresistible?”
“I just told you, men his age don’t know any better. Maybe his mama weaned him too soon, and now he’s got a mama complex.”
“Rhoda, if I were you, I’d stop while I was ahead. This conversation is wreaking havoc on my ego. If I keep listening to your theories, you’ll have me convinced that my life is no longer worth living.”
“I’m only tryin’ to help,” Rhoda said sharply.
“Well, you’re helping me all right. Helping me lose what little dignity I have left. Because of what you’ve said so far, I’m already tempted to go throw my old, used-up ass off that bridge over the Mahoning River.” As grim as this conversation was, I still had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. But I got serious again right away. “What about you and Bully? You’re forty-six, and he’s almost fifty,” I reminded her.
“Well, Bully and I are exceptions to the rule. We’ve been together almost as long as I’ve been with my husband. You know that.”
“Rhoda, do you think that Pee Wee is seeing a doctor, and do you think that he’s spending time with some woman every Friday, like I thought in the first place?”
“Both. But if I had to choose one, I’d pick the woman. It makes the most sense. He’s at that age when men start foolin’ around. And like we both know, your husband would rather get a whuppin’ than go to a doctor.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Are you goin’ to confront him?”
“Why should I? All he’ll do is lie about it. Remember last year, when I thought he was having an affair with—”
“Yes, I do. And you thought it was with my daughter.”
“I didn’t suspect it was your daughter when I first got suspicious.”
I didn’t like the silence that followed.
“Anyway, he denied he was having an affair with anybody then, too,” I said.
“He was tellin’ the truth.”
“How do we know that for sure? The only thing that we know for sure now is that he was telling the truth about not being involved with the women I accused him of seeing. He could have been fucking five other women, for all we know.”
“So what if he was? Annette, you’ve already fucked another man and lied to your husband. You don’t need to justify it now. And certainly not to me. This is the real world, and you can’t change it to suit you, so you may as well go with the flow like the rest of us, like I’ve already advised you to. If Pee Wee is screwin’ somebody else, you can’t stop him.”
“I know that, Rhoda. And I’m not going to try and stop him,” I snapped.
I didn’t bother to mention to Rhoda the time that she had violently ended an affair her husband had drifted into years ago. When she had found out the woman’s name and address, she’d paid her a visit and attacked her. But fighting over a man was one thing that I felt women our age were above. However, I could only speak for myself.
“I’m glad to hear you say that. You’ve done your job, and if he can’t appreciate it, that’s his problem. In my opinion, you’d be a fool to get in his face about another woman—unless you want to give him up altogether. Besides, Louis is in the picture now.”
“I don’t want a divorce,” I whined. “And I don’t want to grow old by myself. I like Louis, but I don’t know if I could live with him. Besides, he’s still a young man. He’ll want children someday.”
“Who the hell said anything about divorce? If Pee Wee drops dead tomorrow, you’ll be alone, anyway. And as far as you movin’ in with Louis and havin’ his babies, I don’t think you have anything to worry about in that area.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Feelings of insecurities that I thought I’d laid to rest crept up on me like armed muggers.
“Girl, Louis is not stupid or naive. That man can see that you are not anybody’s spring chicken. I am sure he knows that Mother Nature has put your baby-related equipment in the attic and left you nothin’ but a playpen. All he wants is to join you in that playpen for a while. And as fine as he is, he could pick and choose. So if you don’t want him, he won’t have any trouble findin’ a woman who does.”
“Pee Wee and I have been through so much together. He’s as much a part of my past as you are. I can’t dismiss any of that.”
“Who said you had to? Look, this is your life now. Enjoy it while you can. Let me get off this phone. I need to go make myself beautiful for my man, and my husband. You should be doin’ the same thing for yours.”
“I will,” I replied. I was already reaching for my compact and lipstick.
“And stop thinkin’ about the past!” Rhoda ordered. “You can’t do a damn thing to change it.”
CHAPTER 13
The Wizard of Oz couldn’t change my past, so I knew I couldn’t. Hell, I didn’t even like to think about it. And I was glad that I had forgotten a lot of it, anyway. But there were some things from my past that entered my mind almost every day. Things that most people experienced only in bad dreams or bad movies.
One was the fact that I’d been sexually abused by one of my mother’s oldest and dearest men friends throughout my childhood. He was the man who had fathered the child that Rhoda had helped me abort when I was sixteen.
I could hardly remember a lot of the details of my abuse. But I could never forget how Rhoda had ended my nightmare. She had smothered my elderly abuser to death with a pillow as he slept in the bed in the room he’d rented in the house I now owned.
That low-down, funky, child-raping, horny-ass old Mr. Boatwright’s murder had become a blur in my mind, and Rhoda hadn’t mentioned it in years. Nor had she mentioned the four others she’d committed that I knew about. I could barely remember the other people she’d killed—and never been held accountable for—but I could remember that they’d all got what they deserved. Those traumatic events still haunted me, but not nearly as much as the one that I’d endured last year.
For several months, I had been viciously harassed by an anonymous enemy. Not only had I received hate mail and a visit from a male prostitute at my home, but I’d received vile packages at my office. I had also received threatening phone calls at home and at work, and once even at my mother’s house. My perpetrator had wanted me out of the way so she could be with my husband.
That was why I’d suspected Pee Wee was having an affair back then. That brazen bitch had known things only a woman as close to him as I was could have known. She’d even mailed me a pair of his shorts that were still funky with his body odor. One of the packages that had been sent by FedEx to my office had contained a pile of horseshit.
Throughout that ominous episode, the only thing that kept me from going completely to pieces was the support of Rhoda and her teenage look-alike daughter, Jade.
“Annette, you know I have always had your back, and I always will,” Rhoda had told me. Knowing what I knew about my best friend, like how she’d had no problem killing the man who had taken my innocence, I knew that if anybody could “protect” me, it was Rhoda.
“And I’m right behind her, Auntie,” Jade had said. The girl had always been a little too grown, vain, sneaky, self-centered, and big for her britches. But so had most of her friends, so none of those character flaws seemed out of the ordinary. I had loved her despite her many flaws, and she’d had me convinced that she loved me, too. Every time she saw me, she bombarded me with so many hugs and kisses, it often annoyed me. But I never complained.
I had been Jade’s play auntie, and I had trusted her so much, she had a key to my house. She’d come and gone as she pleased. I’d stood by like a damn fool and let that little hussy walk all over me like I was a doormat. I hadn’t realized that she was making a fool out of me at the time, because I was getting what I needed from her and Rhoda. And that was the emotional support I felt I couldn’t get from anybody e
lse. I hadn’t had the nerve to tell my elderly parents or husband about everything that was going on. But Rhoda and Jade had known every little detail. They had read most of the vicious letters and notes and had seen the contents of most of the disgusting packages.
Not only had Rhoda and Jade been particularly anxious to comfort me after I had received an exceptionally vicious call or letter, they had even offered to help me apprehend and chastise my tormentor. “Auntie, my mama and I can take care of this bitch if you want us to. Real good,” Jade had told me. I certainly hadn’t wanted Rhoda to kill another person on my account. And once she’d assured me that she wouldn’t let it go that far, I agreed to let her and Jade “straighten out” the culprit as soon as we identified her.
We’d zeroed in on Betty Jean Spool, one of my husband’s exes. But when she died in a drug-related incident and the threats continued and got even more vicious, I knew I’d accused the wrong person.
I’d been so close to a nervous breakdown, my flesh crawled when I thought about it now. But it had got worse. A threat had arrived in the mail that was directed toward my daughter. It was a picture of her that had been cut and trimmed into the shape of a coffin. My only child meant the world to me. I would have gone up against Satan himself to protect her, and in a way I did.
The perpetrator, the person who wanted me completely out of the picture, even if it meant my death, had turned out to be the last person on earth that I would have suspected: Rhoda’s daughter, Jade. I had treated and loved that child like she was my own, but she had convinced her foolish self that my husband was in love with her and the only thing standing in the way was me.
Jade’s elaborate stunt had almost destroyed me and my relationship with Rhoda and my husband. And even after that little heifer came clean and “apologized,” things were never the same again.
I had never felt so betrayed in my life. That girl had caused me more grief than Mr. Boatwright, and he had raped me for ten years. But I had got over that. I had eventually touched base with others who had experienced sexual abuse on some level. To my horror, I’d realized that that taboo was common and as old as time. But to this day, I didn’t know of anybody else who had gone through something like what I’d gone through with Jade.
