“What can I live with?” Aminah asked herself as she drove through one of the E-ZPass lanes outside the Midtown Tunnel, recalling a conversation she’d had with Lang.
With spittle dripping down the front of his face, Fame told his staff to go home. He washed his face and called Aminah. No answer. He two-wayed her. No response. Aminah turned off her phone and her Sidekick. This time she didn’t care about a lecture. She just wanted to go home.
Chapter 17
“It’s yours.”
“Baby, you have to see this,” Sean said, pulling his wife down the stairs and into his entertainment room. He’d TiVo’d last night’s basketball brawl between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons. She’d been too tired to watch it the night before, and Sean didn’t have the patience to wait for Lang to finish cleaning the entire house.
“Did that guy just throw his drink into that player’s face?” Lang asked, holding her rubber cleaning gloves within inches of her mouth. “Oh, that’s not right. After he’d calmed down. He was just chillin’ on the table like that. I woulda whopped his ass, too.”
Sean laughed. “I gotta burn this onto a DVD. That was some historic shit.”
“Damn, so, who won the fight—I mean, the game?” Lang asked, laughing and heading back upstairs to finish cleaning, but not before yelling down to Sean to vacuum the runner down the middle of the staircase.
Once their brownstone was clean by Lang’s standards, Sean showered and headed over to Basketball City to play in his Saturday-afternoon basketball league. He’d just made a left turn onto Myrtle Avenue when he realized he left his good-luck Nike sports watch on the nightstand. He had just enough time to go back for it. He turned around.
Sean unlocked the front door and then the parlor door. Lang had a hair appointment, so it surprised him to still see her boots by the front door. Before he could bolt up the stairs to retrieve his watch, Lang’s moaning slowed him down.
He crept up the stairs quietly and then peered into their slightly cracked bedroom door from the second-to-last step. He rubbed his neatly trimmed goatee and grinned.
Lang was moaning and touching herself. The liquid movement of her sculpted copper body against their dark chocolate faux suede comforter held Sean spellbound. His eyes were fixed on the speed and intensity of her right index and middle fingers circling between her legs.
“Uh, right there,” Lang said out loud.
Sean moved up quietly, just outside their bedroom door, not wanting to disturb her groove.
“Right there, right there, right there,” Lang panted.
Sean smiled, knowing his wife was about to come.
Then Lang murmured something else that Sean couldn’t quite make out, but what he could now see quite clearly was her tiny Motorola cell phone pressed up against her left ear.
“It’s yours,” she said breathlessly into the phone with her eyes closed. Her long legs collapsed into the folds of the comforter.
Sean felt woozy. His vision blurred as he steadied himself against the wall.
She giggled. Sean couldn’t figure out if that was her sexy giggle or the devious one, but at that moment he couldn’t decide anything. His head hurt too much.
“Can’t wait to see you either,” she said. Though he couldn’t see it, Sean could hear her smile.
His stomach bubbled. Churned. Flipped. He needed air.
Sean swiftly took three steps at a time and hurried out the door with the agility and silence of a cat in heat on a mission, leaving his good-luck watch right there on the nightstand. He didn’t need it after all. He’d just lost a game he didn’t even know he was playing.
Chapter 18
“There’s no such thing as a powerful monogamous man.”
Aminah had spent the last seven days resting in her childhood bedroom at her parents’ Victorian home in Hempstead. Ever since she’d graduated from high school, Aminah’s mother had redecorated her P.I.P. (Pretty in Pink) room every few years. Miss Lenora—as she introduced herself to everyone at least ten years younger than she—wanted the P.I.P. room to mature with Aminah. Three springs ago Miss Lenora had found this elaborate carnation-pink tulle at a fabric shop on Main Street in Sag Harbor and draped it over Aminah’s king-size dark Peruvian walnut four-poster bed, creating a billowy cotton-candy canopy. She’d littered the borders around the room with these enormous cocoa-colored floor pillows and scattered satin, fringed magenta pillows on top of them. She’d also had the oak wood floors stained dark espresso and the walls painted in a soft, barely there, hardly detectable pink.
Aminah had wanted to stay at their Sag Harbor summer home, but her mother couldn’t tolerate the arctic breeze off the water that time of year. “It’s too treacherous for my bones,” she’d say whenever Aminah brought up spending the holidays out there.
Aminah’s mother was a lady’s lady. She dressed for everything—bed, gardening, grocery shopping and church. It didn’t matter. Rather, it always mattered. Miss Lenora was old-fashioned, so to speak, the type of woman who still wore hat and gloves to Sunday service—winter, spring, summer, and fall—and usually wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a tight chignon at the nape of her neck or in a neat bun on top of her head, always accentuating her high cheekbones. She was a handsome woman. She’d release the pinned-up bun and let her thick, bushy hair free to swell over her shoulders and down her back on holidays and at the request of her husband.
Aminah had inherited her mother’s shapely hips and her paternal grandmother’s full breasts. Where Aminah was an undeniable hourglass, Miss Lenora was a ripe, respectable pear. She didn’t understand this new generation’s obsession with “working out.”
“A lady maintains her figure simply by eating three square meals a day, cleaning her home and tending her garden, never indulging anything in excess, taking a nice, leisurely stroll after dinner, and dancing at least once a week.” She was Aminah’s role model.
Miss Lenora’s homes were neat yet warm and welcoming. Magically, something always seemed to baking in her oven, anticipating impromptu and expected guests alike. She was the consummate hostess. Her houseguests always left with parting gifts—bath soaps and gels, bottles of wine, candles and oils, or freshly baked goods—and a strong desire to return sooner rather than later.
For seven days Miss Lenora fussily nursed her only child back to full emotional health while Aminah’s father quietly visited the P.I.P. room daily—pulling down her covers, kissing his baby girl on the cheek, telling her he loved her, reminding her that she and his grandchildren would always have a home to live in and money to burn, and then pulling the covers back over her head, leaving his wife to “woman’s work.”
Miss Lenora had let Aminah cry for a whole week without any shame, chastisement, or persecution. Made her soak daily in bath-water as hot as she could stand until it was too cold for her to sit in. Seven days of cleansing. Everyone was entitled to that. After that Miss Lenora said the healing process must begin. No wallowing. No self-loathing. Focus on the solution and not the problem. Shift from mourning to healing. Besides, no one had actually died, and her grandchildren needed their mother.
Aminah wasn’t quite so sure. While she fully embraced her mother’s emotional-cleansing and healing ritual, she thought that perhaps she’d really been grieving because it surely felt like her marriage was dying, if it was not dead already.
Aminah hated ambiguity and indecisiveness, yet she couldn’t figure out whether her marriage was worth reviving or resurrecting anymore or if she should just go ahead and arrange its funeral services.
While Aminah refused to speak to Fame, Miss Lenora was in daily contact with him. Every day she’d ask him to put Alia and Amir on the phone and then pass it to Aminah, but not before warning him that if he attempted to speak to Aminah while the children were on the line, Aminah would hang up immediately. Fame couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t spoken to his wife since the night she’d spat on him in the studio.
Aminah told the children she was out of town h
elping one of her college girlfriends who’d had some sort of last-minute emergency surgery. Fame reluctantly co-signed her story.
He’d met Lang for dinner at a diner near her office a couple days after the spitting incident, hoping to find some sort of clarity as to his wife’s state of mind and being. Lang and Fame frequently wound up hanging and laughing together at various industry functions, though most times they arrived there separately. However, a shared meal together between the childhood friends occurred more often at their respective homes than at popular eateries.
Anticipating Fame’s standard twenty-minutes-late arrival, Lang strutted into the crowded diner with her laptop as her companion. But to her genuine surprise, Fame was already seated and apparently on his second Hennessy and Coke.
“What’s up, playboy?” Lang asked before giving Fame a concerned hug and kissing him on both cheeks.
“Everything, man. I think I really fucked up this time, Lang,” Fame admitted, shaking the four cubes of melting ice in his empty glass. “I know she told you what happened in the studio, and now she won’t even talk to me. It’s been two days already, and she’s still not taking my calls.”
“Taking your calls?” Lang asked, confused. “Where the hell is Aminah?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know that she left me with the children to stay with her parents. C’mon, Lang. You always keep it real with me. That’s how we do. Please don’t start bullshittin’ me now.”
Lang explained to Fame that since she and Aminah had had “a little falling out” over her decision not to have a baby right now, they’d been speaking a little less frequently and with a bit less detail.
None of that made sense to Fame. Plus, Lang was twirling her hair, so he knew something was wrong with or missing from her story. Didn’t matter though. He needed Lang’s advice on getting his wife speaking to him and back home where she belonged.
“Honestly, Fame, Aminah’s been fed up for a minute now,” Lang said after ordering a turkey cheeseburger and salad. Fame got another Hennessy and Coke. “And your carelessness is beyond ridiculous, man. You’ve got a leak somewhere, and you need to permanently plug that bitch.”
“A leak?”
“Fame, you haven’t noticed how more and more detailed the information is about you lately?” Lang asked, wagging her finger in admonishment.
“Nah, I pay that shit no mind,” Fame said, rubbing his forehead. “Not till Aminah brings it up, of course.”
“Well, you should homey, especially this last one. Why does the entire tristate area know you paid cash for this chick’s car service after she gave you head in your studio last week? She must be bragging to her girls or something.”
“Nah, nah, she’s an old reliable. Plus, she has a man. So it can’t be her.”
“Who else was it then? Who else was in the studio? Or maybe old reliable was talking about you on her cell phone, and the driver leaked it.”
Fame thought about it. He was certain the driver couldn’t care less about anything except making his money and getting a good tip, so he immediately eliminated him. He took a sip of his fresh drink, wondering who else besides his wife cared who and where he got head.
“That bitch Daisha,” Fame said, slamming down his glass. “Damn. How’d I miss that?”
“You were too busy getting done to notice who was doing you,” Lang said before biting into her juicy burger. “That’s how.”
“She’s nothing. I’ll handle her. She’s dead to me. And if she costs me my wife, I mean that literally. Now tell me how to get my wife home, Lang.”
Lang wiped the corner of her mouth before answering. She actually felt bad for him. She missed sharing practically every detail of her life with her best friend. If she and Aminah were on better terms, she’d call Aminah immediately and tell her that Fame was finally showing more vulnerability than ego. But they were on worse terms than they’d ever been. It still hurt her that Aminah had sought Sean out instead of her. Hurt her even more that she still felt a twinge of jealousy just thinking about her husband stroking Aminah’s head in his lap.
“Space and time, Fame,” Lang said, shaking her head. “That’s what I’ve been giving her.”
They parted ways, with Lang heading back to the office and Fame going home. She needed to get work done, and he just couldn’t.
Both Fame’s mother and mother-in-law told him to just focus on the children and that Aminah would surely come around by Thanksgiving. He’d been patient. She had three more days to get it together, and he was certain of only one thing—his wife had better drive through their monogrammed gates come Thursday morning, or he was gonna lose his damn mind.
Miss Lenora suggested that Fame hire a nanny to help out with Alia and Amir while WillieMae, the housekeeper, focused on getting the home together for the holiday dinner. Glo, however, insisted on staying with her son instead. “Why pay for someone to babysit your kids when they have not one but two grandmothers who don’t work?” his mother said. “Boy, please.”
Gloria woke Alia and Amir up an hour and a half earlier and made them breakfast, now that Fame was dropping them both off at school. Nights in the studio were becoming a waste of time. Nothing sounded good. No hits were being made. He left the studio early every night. He was exhausted, more emotionally spent than anything else. He missed his wife terribly and sought no solace in other women, found no comfort in his music.
His Master Actualization Plan was not working without his wife. If he’d ever doubted it before, Fame knew now more than ever that Aminah was a core component to his M.A.P.—to his life, period.
On her daughter’s eighth day of recovery, Miss Lenora brought Aminah a hot cup of peppermint tea with thick, swirling ribbons of golden honey.
“Let me comb out your hair while you sip on this tea,” Miss Lenora said, placing the teacup and saucer on Aminah’s vanity table in the dressing area of her walk-in closet.
Aminah took her seat in front of the mirror. Miss Lenora leaned her daughter’s head forward and carefully parted her disheveled hair from ear to ear. She gently and methodically brushed out her daughter’s matted hair, detangling her thick, long black tresses by working the wooden paddle brush from the ends up to the roots.
“Aminah, sweetheart, sometimes I’ve wondered if I’ve set a good or a bad example for you by staying with your father all these years,” Miss Lenora admitted.
“Mother, how could you say that?” Aminah questioned, turning her head slightly.
“Now, don’t misunderstand me,” Miss Lenora replied, adjusting her daughter’s head back to face the mirror. “I don’t apologize for my choices. There’s certainly no shame in standing by your husband and honoring your vows. There’s no dishonor in keeping your family intact regardless of whom or what comes before you.”
She paused to make another neat part, separating the tangled bales of hair from the smooth, combed-through mane with a plastic butterfly clip.
“But, Aminah, let’s be realistic about something,” Miss Lenora continued. “There’s no such thing as a powerful monogamous man. Simply no such thing. And that I didn’t make that blatantly clear to you before you married Aaron is how I think I may have misrepresented the institution of marriage to you.”
“Muh-thurrr,” Aminah whined like she always did when she respectfully disagreed with Miss Lenora.
“Stop that whining, Aminah,” Miss Lenora said, playfully popping her daughter with the parting comb. “In all seriousness, Aminah, just look back through history. No, don’t even bother to go that far, look at all the current affairs—”
“I know,” Aminah interrupted, touching her mother’s arm. “But you, Mother, have set a fine example. You haven’t misrepresented anything.”
“I don’t know, Aminah. I think I made it look a lot easier than it truly is. That’s misrepresentation. But I still don’t know. At what point does a mother show her daughter…” She paused to gather her thoughts and make another neat horizontal part. “At what point does she
tell her daughter about the hardships of marriage, about the humiliation of an affair, about the difficulty of choosing to stay, to stand by your husband publicly while despising him privately at times? If I’d had the power to shield you from your father’s indiscretions, I would have,” Miss Lenora admitted.
“But you couldn’t,” Aminah replied softly. “The rumors of Daddy’s affair followed me all through junior high school, and I played dumb to them for as long as I could, but by the time I reached high school…” She paused, remembering.
There was this group of girls from the projects who’d accused Aminah of thinking she was too cute and too good to hang around them because her father was a dentist.
“That’s why your daddy is sleeping with his secretary.”
“Keep acting stuck-up—see what it got your mother.”
“Didn’t I see your father coming outta 4B this mornin’? Was Daddy home for breakfast, Ah-Mee-Nuh?”
He wasn’t—not that morning anyway.
It was one of the worst days of Aminah’s life, her worst childhood memory in fact. She still vividly remembered coming home from school to the smell of burned chocolate-chip cookies and her mother’s muffled sobs coming out of her aunt’s skirted lap. Miss Lenora never overcooked anything.
Nick Philips was indeed having an affair with his secretary (there was, however, no project chick—but a wheelchair-bound childhood friend he bought groceries for every Monday morning did reside in 4B).
Miss Lenora told her to ignore those little heifers. They were just jealous of Aminah—who she was and what she had. While that may have been true, so was what the project girls and the rest of the village were saying.
Aminah’s father was Hempstead’s most prominent dentist. He was very popular with everyone, from the street corner and barber-shops to the local lodges and town hall. Nicholas Philips—a strong man who met any and all adversity head-on yet laughed so easily in the company of good humor—was difficult not to like. Men and women alike were drawn to him.
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