Diamond Life

by Aliya S. King

  “Birdie? What are you doing?” Dylan asked.

  Birdie turned around and saw Dylan, standing with Gerald and his driver, all of his luggage neatly arranged. No matter how many flights he got on, he never remembered that Dylan and Gerald always arranged for his things to come off the plane first, so that he wouldn’t have to wait.

  “Aiight fellas,” Birdie said, “I’ll see y’all tonight at the studio.”

  There was a momentary awkwardness. Birdie’s luggage had already been pulled and he had a driver waiting to take him to his new digs. Gerald was nearby, about to hop into his own car service to take him back to the label offices. And Travis, Daryl, and Corey had to wait for their luggage and then share a $75 cab back to their tiny apartments in Brooklyn.

  “Y’all good with the cab and stuff?” Birdie asked. “You need me to—”

  “Nah, we’re good,” said Travis. “Go see your new crib, superstar. We’ll see you tonight.”

  Travis smiled, but it looked forced and strained. Everything had changed after Birdie went off about the party they promoted with his name. Now things were weird wherever they went. Birdie felt a strange vibe when he picked up the tab at expensive restaurants. And he felt something even more strange when he didn’t reach for the bill right away. Travis, Daryl, and Corey were his aces. There was nothing they didn’t know about each other. So why was it so hard to adjust to the new normal?

  Travis and the guys got their luggage and left the terminal for the taxi line. Birdie walked over to Dylan and noticed the commotion back at the carousel. People were pointing and whispering. Some women were smiling. Some men were glaring. They’re looking at me? Birdie thought to himself. No way.

  Birdie nodded while Dylan ran down his press schedule for the next two days. He promised to keep his cell phone nearby and to check his text messages. He raised a hand and swore not to miss his interview with Rolling Stone the next morning. Birdie closed his eyes and shifted from one foot to the other while Dylan droned. Finally, she said her good-byes and got into her own waiting Town Car and pulled off.

  “To New Jersey, Mr. Washington?” the driver asked, picking up Birdie’s bags. Birdie looked behind him at the New York skyline he’d always stared at from Alex’s brownstone.

  “To New Jersey,” he said.

  The driver pulled into the cul-de-sac of the new house, and Birdie’s mouth dropped. The house was much bigger than it had looked on the paperwork he and Alex had faxed and emailed back and forth. None of the pictures had done it justice. The stones laid out on the driveway were so neat and clean that Birdie felt like he could sit down and eat a meal prepared right on the pavers.

  The driver took his bags out of the car and brought them to the front door, as Birdie followed, his eyes wide and his head moving slowly, taking in the property.

  “Long time since you’ve been home, Mr. Washington?” the driver asked.

  “First time I’ve been home,” Birdie said.

  He tipped the driver and then stood at the front door, confused. How was he supposed to get into his own house? Maybe Alex had left keys in the mailbox. He looked around and couldn’t find the mailbox. He turned and looked down the driveway. The mailbox was at the start of the cul-de-sac, at least five hundred feet away.

  Birdie turned back around and knocked on the heavy oak door. The door was double his height, reminding him of the Wizard’s palace in The Wizard of Oz. From far away, he could hear Alex’s voice: “I’m coming!”

  A full minute later, the door creaked open and Alex pulled it back, her face broken into the widest smile Birdie had ever seen.

  “Baby,” Birdie said, wrapping his arms around his wife’s waist and lifting her off the floor. “I missed you.”

  Alex had on Birdie’s favorite outfit, the tank top and basketball shorts. It was comforting to see her in an outfit he was used to seeing on her back in Brooklyn. The strangeness of coming home to a brand-new house definitely needed a shot of familiarity.

  “Well,” Alex said, shrugging her shoulders and gesturing to the house. “Welcome home. What do you think?”

  Birdie’s eyes swept across the rooms he could see. To his left, there was a huge room with a mammoth plasma television mounted on the wall. Straight ahead, there was a carved mahogany staircase. At the top of the stairs, the second floor was open, so that you could look down into the foyer where he stood. To his right, he saw a kitchen that looked like it was ripped right out of a Martha Stewart magazine, down to the copper pots hanging from the ceiling over the stove.

  “We have pots,” Birdie said, realizing immediately how stupid that sounded.

  Alex laughed and put her hands on her hips. “Yes. We have pots. And not just any pots,” she said, taking Birdie’s hand and leading him into the kitchen. “We have the finest pots and pans in all the land.” Alex reached up and took down one of the frying pans from the rack.

  “These are Mauviel pans,” Alex said. She closed her eyes and raised her chin. “Preferred by professional chefs.”

  “Like yourself,” Birdie said.

  “Ha ha,” Alex said. “Very funny. So? What do you think?”

  Birdie blinked. “Everything is so . . . white.”

  It was true. The house had an all-white theme. There were touches of cream and tan in certain places. But for the most part, the house was white white white. Walls, sofas, carpeting, picture frames, artwork—their house looked like it had been blanketed in snow.

  “Where’s all our stuff?” Birdie asked, wandering around the house with Alex close behind.

  “What stuff?”

  “You know, our stuff. Like that picture we used to have over the fireplace in Brooklyn.”

  It was Birdie’s favorite picture—the three of them in the judge’s chambers on their wedding day. Birdie had his arm bent into an L shape over his stomach with his head held comically high and his eyes shut. Alex’s mouth was wide open; she didn’t know how to laugh any other way. And all you could see of Tweet was her chin—her head was thrown back so far that she was facing the ceiling and obviously laughing.

  “It’s still here,” Alex said. “Come.”

  “And why do we have two living rooms?” Birdie asked, passing by an all-white room with a plasma television that looked identical to the one at the front of the house.

  “The first one is a living room, for formal entertaining. The one back here is the family room. For hanging out. See, here’s the picture.”

  Birdie frowned. The photo had been blown up to poster size, converted to black and white, and matted and framed in an oversized white frame.

  “What happened to the old picture?” Birdie asked. “And the frame made out of sticks that Tweet made at summer camp?”

  “It’s in the basement,” Alex said. “With the rest of our embarrassing furnishings that have no place here.”

  “My recliner?”

  Alex scrunched up her nose.

  “That smelly tweed thing? Basement.”

  “Our mini golf set?”

  “Basement.”

  Birdie nodded and flopped down on the overstuffed sofa in white slipcovers.

  “So this is where we live.”

  Alex nodded and sat down next to him.

  “I thought I would miss Brooklyn,” Alex said. “But I could get used to this.”

  “You don’t say?” Birdie asked, pulling his wife closer to him.

  “It reminds me of Ras and Josephine’s place. So grand and formal. I never thought I’d live in a house like this.”

  “Alex. Please. You grew up in a house like this.”

  Alex shook her head.

  “No. We were in Manhattan. Not the same.”

  “Yes, in Manhattan. In a converted church that was featured in a bunch of magazines.”

  “Still. It was quirky and unique with small bedrooms. This is traditional. And huge.”

  “Did you have fun doing all this decorating?”

  Alex hesitated and then laughed out loud.

&nb
sp; “I totally did, Bird,” she said. “At first, I felt weird about buying stuff. Everything was so expensive. And then I just thought, what the hell and I went for it. You like it?”

  Birdie looked around the family room. In the corner was a basket of books. All had been covered with white book covers and the titles were written on the spine.

  “It’s different.”

  “I just went along with whatever the designer suggested,” Alex said.

  “I like it. It’s gonna take some getting used to. I’m used to a little more dust. I’m scared to walk around here. Feel like I might break something.”

  “Come on,” Alex said, pulling Birdie off the sofa and dragging him out of the room. “Let me show you the bedrooms.”

  Birdie followed his wife up the winding staircase, looking back to see the view from the top of the stairs.

  “This is a guest room,” Alex said, pointing to another all-white room with a mounted plasma. “There’s a guest bath in there.”

  “Nice,” Birdie said.

  “Across the hall is another guest bedroom and bathroom,” said Alex. “And here’s Tweet’s room . . .”

  Alex opened a door in the center of the hallway and Birdie was nearly blinded by the sudden burst of color. There were hot-pink walls, yellow window treatments, and colorful vinyl circles behind her four-poster canopy bed.

  “Tweet wasn’t going with the all-white thing,” Alex said plopping onto the little girl’s bed.

  “Obviously,” Birdie said. He chuckled and poked around the room. “When is Jen bringing her over?”

  “Tonight,” Alex said. “Birdie, are you okay?”

  Birdie went out into the hallway and looked both ways.

  “Where’s our bedroom?”

  The bed was way too high. That was the first problem. Birdie liked the extra-thick mattress. Comfortable. But he was certain he could nearly touch the ceiling from their bed. It looked and felt like there were at least eight mattresses piled up.

  “If I fall off this bed, I could break a limb,” Birdie said, as he climbed onto the bed and lay on his back.

  “You’re being silly,” Alex said. “It’s not that high. Maybe it’s the thick carpet that makes it feel like that.”

  “Are you sure this is just one mattress?”

  Alex laughed out loud.

  “Yes, Birdie. And a mattress pad for extra comfort.”

  Birdie stared at the white ceiling and tried to gather his thoughts. He was jet-lagged. So he knew anything he felt would be amplified. What was nagging him? The weirdness of being in his own home for the first time and his clothes already being hung up in closets and folded into drawers? In Birdie’s closet, all two hundred pairs of his sneakers were encased in see-through plastic boxes, stored on an angle so he could see them all clearly. But the only room he really liked was Tweet’s. It had personality. You could tell what kind of child lived there. Every other room felt sterile, like a nursing home or a hospital room.

  “We need to hang our pictures up downstairs. My parents, your parents. That will make this feel more like home . . .”

  Alex shook her head.

  “We can’t do that. Leslie said family photos on the first floor are tacky.”

  “Who’s Leslie?”

  “The designer.”

  “Well, what does she—”

  “He. This Leslie is a he.”

  “Well, what does he know about tacky?”

  “Lots,” Alex said, her eyes wide. “It’s considered grandiose and nouveau riche to have family photos in common areas of the house. Unless you’re descended from royalty or something. Family photos go in personal spaces, like bedrooms.”

  Birdie blinked. He took a long look at his wife and waited for her to break out laughing and tell him how dumb Leslie’s ideas were and help him start hanging the pictures. But Alex just kept staring at Birdie, eyebrows raised.

  “Okay,” Birdie said, turning his body back so that he faced the ceiling. “No photos. What about all of our books?”

  Alex and Birdie had a sick book collection. Signed rare editions of Octavia Butler. First-edition books by Alice Walker and even an original copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a gift from Alex’s agent after Platinum made the best-sellers list.

  “Books are in the basement,” Alex said, her face solemn. “Until we get a library hooked up, maybe in one of the guest bedrooms, they stay there.”

  “Why?” Birdie asked. “We like our books.”

  “Leslie says showing off books anywhere but a library is ostentatious and presumptuous. Like you just want everyone to know what books you’ve read.”

  “It could also mean you like looking at books.”

  Alex shrugged.

  “We’re going for a bare, minimalist theme. Leslie said you would like to come off tour to a house that whispered instead of roared.”

  “Please stop saying ‘Leslie said.’”

  “Sorry.”

  Alex used the footstool to climb onto the bed with Birdie. He heard her breathing deep, until her breaths measured his.

  “What did you get into while I was gone?” Birdie asked.

  “Still working with Z on the book . . .”

  Birdie stiffened and then forced himself to relax.

  “What else?”

  “I’ve been poking myself full of hormones every day.”

  Birdie squeezed Alex’s hand.

  “I know it sucks.”

  “Oh. I went down to Jamaica last weekend to see Josephine,” Alex said, rolling off the bed and walking toward the bedroom.

  “Freeze,” Birdie said.

  Alex kept walking into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “I gotta pee!” she said.

  “Come out here, Alex!”

  “In a minute.”

  “Did you look for Reina’s parents? And don’t lie to me.”

  There was silence from the other side of the door.

  “Alex! Get out here now.”

  Alex slowly opened the bathroom door and slinked out. She sat on the bed and clasped her hands in her lap.

  “I found them. Really young girl from Trelawny Parish.”

  Birdie shook his head.

  “And? Did you find out what Cleo was talking about?”

  “You were right. Cleo was just manufacturing some drama. The girl got pregnant by her boyfriend. I met them both. They decided to put the baby up for adoption and someone told them about Ras and Josephine. They were excited to have their child raised by a celebrity in the States. I even talked to the midwife who was there when the baby was born.”

  Alex shrugged.

  “No mystery there.”

  “Are you happy now?”

  Alex looked over at Birdie as if she’d just realized he was finally home. She climbed onto the bed. And then climbed onto her husband.

  “I’m not completely happy yet. But I’m about to be.”

  Everything about the day felt like it had been done before. Jake woke up early, turned on CNN. Ian brought in the newspaper. He drank a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice (the only nonalcoholic drink he would have for the day) and then he allowed himself to think about Kipenzi for five sober minutes. He showered, dressed, and sat on the edge of his bed, checking his phone for appointments and tasks.

  Someone had sent him a few songs via email from a rap duo named Trip & Step. On a song called “That’s Not Hip-Hop,” they were clowning him for living in TriBeCa with a manservant and wearing flip-flops on the beach. He entertained the idea of heading into the booth and then let it go. Going after them on wax would be a dream come true for their careers.

  It was the exact same thing he’d done the day before that. (Including a dis song from Trip & Step.) Each day ended the same as well. Jake in a hotel lobby, drunk as a skunk, bringing some random chick home. If he was too drunk to kick her out, she stayed the night, getting pushed out of the bed the next morning. If he was somewhat sober, he was kicking her out literally
minutes after peeling off the condom and throwing it away. Jake replayed last night. Which girl was it? Was it Sam again? Was he doubling up now? There was a chick who was singing in his ear at one point . . .

  “Good morning, Jake!”

  An Asian woman with a short haircut peeked around the door of Jake’s bedroom. The memories flooded back and Jake nodded his head and mumbled something neither of them could understand. But he hoped she knew it translated to get out.

  “Nice meeting you,” said the woman. She actually came all the way inside the room with her arm outstretched for a handshake. He’d had her up against the bathroom wall last night. She’d given him a blow job on the stairs. And now she wanted to shake his hand? Jake sighed and extended his hand.

  “Hope to see you again,” she said, a smile on her lips.

  Jake smiled with his mouth closed and leaned back down to look at his phone. He heard Ian ushering the woman out and then coming back up to Jake’s room.

  “Dude,” Jake said, a pained expression on his face. “Why is this chick up in my fucking house? Nobody is supposed to break night up in here. Nobody.”

  “First of all, don’t use profanities with me. I never endured that with Mrs. Giles, and I won’t accept it from you either.”

  Jake stared at the floor for a few seconds. Ian knew that was his version of an apology.

  “Second, if I don’t know you have brought a woman into the house, I cannot dispose of her. I was shocked to see Ms. Liu exiting the guest bedroom this morning.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Sir, not that you asked . . .” Ian said.

  Jake set his jaw and looked up.

  “Your behavior is troubling,” said Ian. “Someone of your stature . . . I would just imagine you’d be more careful. I’m sure a hotel would be just as convenient for a . . . tryst.”