“I see you have some things on your mind, sweetheart,” Val heard from behind.
She didn’t move, though. Took two breaths before glancing over the wrong shoulder purposefully.
“I’m over here, dear,” the voice called in her right ear, sounding surprised at the slow and incorrect reaction. This was a game of patience and anticipation.
“I know where you are,” Val said, trying to sound aggravated, annoyed. “I was looking to see if you were maybe talking to someone else. I hoped you were.”
Across from Val’s seat at the white lacquer bar that looked like it was shipped from some closing nightclub in Miami, was a table filled with white women. She studied them hard to see their reaction to whoever was sitting beside her. One glanced over and then whispered something to her friend, who then glanced over and then whispered something to the woman on her other side. This chain went on until all eyes were on Val’s neighbor, each dragging behind them a sliver of thirst and unmistakable interest in the inhabitant. Val knew one of two things must be true about him without even looking: He was either very rich or very famous. She could tell from his voice that he was black. As such, fortune and fame would stand as the only reasons a table full of white women would be looking at him.
“Oh, shit,” he joked. “All the women in this club, and I come up to the one who’s going through a breakup! Just my luck.”
“Please, I haven’t been through a breakup since I was sixteen and had Raisinets for tits. Now, I’m full grown. I just cut my losses and move on,” Val said, rather seductively.
“Guess my luck is finally paying off, then. I’m Chuck.” A light brown hand slid right into Val’s point of view, begging for attention and connection.
Val laughed at how easy this game always was and ignored the gesture. Instead, she turned over her right shoulder for a first glance.
Her heart nearly stopped at what she was seeing. That brown hand was connected to a brown body in a blue, moderately priced and poorly tailored suit. The man was handsome, though. The face was familiar. Too familiar.
“What, girl? You’re looking at me like I’m a dead man walking,” Chuck said, looking perplexed, but entertained, by Val’s reaction.
Val wasn’t exactly looking at a dead man walking: It was the DA walking, as in the district attorney walking, as in Charles Brown, who was sitting beside her, calling himself Chuck.
Her eyes were wide as she tried to figure out why he was talking to her. Surely, he knew who she was. They’d been in each other’s company on too many occasions for him not to—when she was married to the mayor and after. She was about to smile and call him by his proper name to make it clear that they both knew who they were running into at the bar, in a hidden lounge when folks their age were at home avoiding sex with their spouses and praying their children didn’t wake up before their favorite reality show went off, but then Chuck grinned and looked into her eyes like he was meeting someone new.
“I’m not trying to scare you. I only want to make you smile. Maybe we should begin again.” He held out his hand and Val noticed him kind of step back on one heel a bit, almost falling. “I’m Chuck,” he slurred out that time.
Val shook his hand and felt a wobbly grip. She glanced at his empty drink glass on the bar.
“And you are?” he pushed. He wouldn’t let go of Val’s hand and peered down at it like he was about to lick it.
“I’m—” Val looked into his eyes and searched for any recognition. There was nothing there. Just drunken commotion. “I’m Cinnamon,” she let out, though she wasn’t yet sure why she was lying or where she’d go with the lie. What she did know was that the man leering down at her through glassy eyes was a known drunk and skirt chaser, who’d divorced his first black wife after she gained a limp following a stroke and then married the state attorney general’s blond, blue-eyed daughter to secure his selection for district attorney. All of that and he was the main man behind the machine keeping Kerry behind bars. And, together, that made Val mad as hell. She felt something wicked needling her thoughts.
“Cinnamon?” Chuck laughed a little too loud and the bartender came over to gather his empty glass from the bar. “That’s not a name, baby; that’s a flavor.”
“Actually, it’s a spice,” Val said.
“Okay! So, you’re telling me your mama named you after a spice? Like that’s your real name? ’Cause if it is, I love it.” He whispered his last line in Val’s ear and his breath reeked of cheap cognac and maybe a little marijuana.
“She sure did,” Val said confidently. She looked at the table of white women and they seemed to be following their exchange and whispered to each other as they guessed at what was happening.
“Hmm . . . I think I need to see some ID to prove that.” He shot Val a sharp, accusatory side eye.
“ID? Why would I show you my ID? You could be a secret agent, working for the government, or just a thief,” Val said. “You a thief?”
“No, Cinnamon. I’m just a hardworking brother out here looking for a queen to spoil.”
“Really? What a coincidence. I’m out here looking for a king to spoil me. Can you spoil me, Chuck?” Val licked her lips and looked right into Chuck’s eyes without saying a word for fifteen seconds. She saw the blood flush out of his face as it flooded down to his private parts.
She knew his type well. Probably came from an upper-middle-class family. Grew up in a neighborhood where azaleas framed manicured lawns and bikes cluttered the sidewalks. She could look at his thick neck and tell he was likely chubby then. The scars on his cheeks were from bad teenage acne. Those straight teeth were the result of years in thick, complicated braces. Nothing had been cute about him. But he was smart. Always smart. Maybe too smart and in his head, because he couldn’t get any girls and only had two good friends who were just as unattractive and nerdy as he. He masturbated right through high school. Went to Morehouse. Lost a little weight. Got the braces off and hormones took care of the acne. And then he became the man—the ladies’ man. He probably only went to law school to keep the attention coming. To get the girls. And when he got the one he married, she was so beautiful he felt lucky. Then she had a stroke at thirty-five and a limp that reminded him of his past.
An hour or so later and Val had used this catalog of inklings to draw her male suitor to a cozy, make-out couch at the back of the lounge. It was after one AM and the place was clearing out, as the reality of work in the morning made ghosts of the would-be partygoers who’d long ago accepted defeat and willingly walked to their cars to head home. The only folks left in corners and tucked-away in the place were either new couples who were negotiating an evening of casual sex or drunks waiting for their alcohol to wear off. The DJ had switched the nineties hip-hop music to techno drivel that sent inebriated minds swirling.
Chuck was whispering every bad line Val had ever heard in her ear. It was actually laughable. He’d mentioned wanting to get married. And planning his “next” trip to Dubai. He’d dropped some hints at his salary and even threw in how “Magnum Trojan condoms were too small” for him. These were all things that were supposed to matter to Val. She was supposed to imagine that she was the wife he was seeking, dream of her trip with him to Dubai, imagine what he could buy her with that salary, and what he could do to her with his big old penis.
All of this wore Val out psychologically, as she wondered how he’d ever gotten any women with his weak games, but still, she smiled at him, played with the fat at the back of his neck seductively, and let her spandex dress inch up a little bit more each time she crossed, uncrossed, and re-crossed her legs.
He placed his hand on her thigh and licked her ear.
At one point Chuck laughed and said he knew who Val was. He’d seen her somewhere. He knew who she was. Her name “wasn’t no Cinnamon!” He took a sip from a new cup of alcohol that promised there was no way he’d be driving himself home that night.
Val couldn’t tell if he was serious, playing, or just drunk.
&
nbsp; She was ready to come clean and curse him out for feeling her up, but then he said, “You used to work at the Pink Pony. Baddest sister in the strip club. Knew I recognized you.” He looked at her waistline. “Got those butterflies tattooed around your waist. I’ll never forget that shit. I remember you.”
Val laughed and nodded along, though she’d never danced at the Pink Pony and despised the contradictions in butterfly tattoos.
Chuck leaned into her. “Can you show me those tattoos?” he asked softly.
Sitting there with his hot breath and sweaty hands on her, Val just couldn’t believe this was the man who was in charge of prosecuting the city’s criminals. He was just a man. Fragile like any other. Stupid. Blind. Troubled. Maybe like her.
Val put her head back on the couch and let him slide his hand between her thighs. Her drinks were wearing off. She wondered what time it was. If Mama Fee was up in the window, waiting for her to come home. Then Val remembered why she was there. What drove her out of the house, same as it had on so many other nights.
Chuck was saying something stupid, so she looked at him and smiled again.
She wondered what had driven him out that night too. And how in the world God saw fit for the two of them to be out that night together. What were the odds that this drunken man—of all of the drunken men in the city—would come chirping in her ear? Mama Fee would call it àyànmô, saying it was both of their destinies or fate to be there at that exact time and in that place together. But why? The drunk and high DA who was so wasted he couldn’t recognize the dead mayor’s ex-wife as he tried to fondle her vagina? And who was Val? What was her role? The dead mayor’s ex-wife, who was trying to get his first wife out of jail and had the DA’s hand locked between her thighs . . . literally?
Val heard a weak voice that sounded something like a little girl inside of her say no. But it was barely audible, just barely. Val knew what she was supposed to do then. She quieted the little girl and told herself this was what she had to do. What she’d always done.
“You taking me home, Daddy?” she purred in Chuck’s ear so sensuously he blushed and stuttered out a response that made him sound like a teenage boy preparing for his first orgasm with a pretty girl. Val loved that reaction. It reminded her of how every man she ever met used to respond to her. Blushing and stuttering. Jamison had been that way once too when she had her stiletto in his mouth.
“Ho—ho—ho—home?”
“Yes, Daddy?” She looked into his eyes. “I’m kind of tired of this scene.”
“Ho—home. O-o-o-kay. I need to come clean about something right now,” Chuck said, starting a rehearsed excuse as to why he couldn’t have a woman at his place—and not one bit included the fact that there was a petite blonde with his last name waiting inside.
He asked if they could go to “Cinnamon’s” place and she came up with her own list of excuses that included a busted pipe and dead cat. Then there was talk of a hotel. Chuck said he’d need to go to the ATM to get some cash to pay for a room. He asked if they could go someplace outside of the city, outside of the perimeter. Val laughed and said, “I’ll go anywhere with you, Daddy.”
The sex was uneventful. There was probably a better word to describe it, but even taking the time to think up one would give the sad series of bedroom fumbles too much energy. Suffice it to say, it was at every possibility a waste of gas, money, hotel-room time, and even the walk of shame through the hotel lobby to get to the room.
First, Chuck couldn’t get out of his pants. Val laid on the bed in bright-red lace crotchless panties, spread-eagle and watching this man stumble to get down to his boxers, which were some cheap, checkered Walmart discount undies that made him look fifty pounds overweight.
Then he tiptoed to the bed, making promises about everything he was going to do to Val—where he was going to put his penis and how he was going to “pound” it into her and make her scream for “mercy.” And he did put it here and there and pound it all around.
And Val responded with the requisite “Give it to me, Daddy” and “Harder” and “Oh, baby, yeah.”
When it was done, when Chuck was done flipping Val all around and pretending he was a porn star, he put her on her back and hunched over her like they were their most primitive selves, having sex in a cave with animal sketches on a wall. He heaved and thrust, dug his knuckles into the sheet and then just suddenly fell into Val’s legs, wrapped around so hard he could’ve broken them both off.
That was it.
Val as Cinnamon laid there in the middle of the bed with bleached, white sheets strewn all around for no good reason and the district attorney already passed out between her legs. His stinking spit oozed out onto her breasts as he fell into a deep, coma-like sleep.
Val peered up at the dusty chandelier that looked maybe too grand to be in the dank hotel room Chuck drove right to out by the airport. Those cries of no from the soft voice inside were growing louder and sounding so sad, hurt, betrayed.
“Just do it,” she said to herself. “Get it over with.”
Val laid there for a minute until Chuck started snoring and talking in his sleep, then she dragged herself from beneath his body and stood over him, looking. She held her cell phone in her hand with the camera focus pointed at his naked, pimpled black behind. She left the hotel room with fifty self-styled pictures presenting various levels of incrimination. That and the platinum wedding band she found in his pants pocket.
When Val pulled into the driveway in the back of the house that always made her remember Jamison, she was shaking and a crying mess. While the little excitement she’d felt capturing the DA in some act that would have him ready to do anything she requested, made her feel like she’d really done something special as she strutted out to her car in the hotel parking lot, by the time she made it to the highway to head home, she regretted something. Not necessarily that she’d slept with him. But something. Like that she could do it. That people could expect that from her. That it was her part.
She went back to the question she’d asked herself on the couch before she’d went to the hotel. Who was she? Who was Val? And why was she always in this position?
Those tears came out so easily with no one other than her to see them. Then, sobbing like a baby pulled from her mother’s breasts just when she was about to fall asleep, Val banged on the steering wheel and cried out, “Why?”
There was no black truck waiting in the driveway. No mother snooping in the window.
Val looked at both empty places and felt the despair of loneliness. Nothing seemed attached to her in any way. Not even her own hands on the steering wheel. She looked at them. They were removed. Away. Disconnected. Just not there for her. Then she sensed that maybe she wasn’t real. Maybe none of this was. It was all a dream. She wanted it to just go away. All of it. And herself too. Go away with her baby into the dark night.
More tears were falling and Val was about to scream out for anyone to hear her when two lights pulled into the driveway of the little mansion. They glowed like stars hanging down so close on the Earth.
These were the headlights on that black truck.
Val jumped out of her car. She ran to the truck. When Ernest got out, her arms were reaching toward him.
“What is it? What?” Ernest asked. He opened his arms and let Val and her worries crash into his massive covering. And he held her.
“I’m here. I’m here, baby. I’m here,” he assured Val, though she hadn’t said a word. “I got you. I told I’m going to be here, right? You don’t have to cry.”
He rocked her in his arms and repeated his soothing words.
“Where were you?” Val asked through crying, like he’d always been there and she hadn’t just banished him hours ago.
“I was thirsty. I went to get a slurpee. Had some onion rings too,” Ernest said nonchanclantly, but Val could tell he said it to make her laugh.
In his arms, she looked up at him.
“You’re crazy,” she said, laughing a little
.
“Yes. I am. I was crazy thirsty sitting here waiting for you to show up with another one of your busters,” Ernest said.
His Last Wife Page 12
