The Cheating Curve

by Paula T. Renfroe

  “I’m sorry I can’t be home on Thanksgiving, Sean. I really am. I’m still plotting my next move. You know? Figuring things out….” Her voice trailed off a bit.

  “Plotting?” Sean asked, surprised. “You’re thinking about leaving Fame?”

  “I’m thinking about me and my needs, for a change. Not my husband’s, not my children’s, my future and whether it includes my husband. And if it does, under what clear and concise terms.”

  “Good for you, Aminah,” Sean said, meaning it. “Wish I could be there, too.”

  “Uh-oh, something’s wrong,” Aminah detected. “You love holiday gatherings almost as much as basketball. What’s going on with you?”

  Sean paused to figure out how he should ask Aminah if she had any idea who his wife was phone sexing. Who she was seeing later. Correction—who she couldn’t wait to see later.

  “Listen, Aminah, I need to ask you something that…” He paused again.

  “What is it, Sean?”

  Sean rubbed his stomach. The nausea was returning, and Alia was walking toward him with her hand extended. He was running out of time.

  “Who is my wife fucking around with?” Sean whispered through clenched teeth.

  “Uncle Sean, lemme speak to Mommy. It’s my turn.”

  “Listen, Alia’s here to speak with you,” Sean said, lowering his voice and turning away from Alia. “But we need to talk in person. Can I see you tomorrow?”

  Aminah cleared her throat. “Uh, yeah, sure, sure.”

  “Where? There?”

  “Let me think about that. Maybe we can go somewhere to eat around here. I’ll call you on your cell around oneish.”

  “Cool,” Sean said, swiveling around to face his goddaughter with a smile. “Well, here’s Alia, and Happy Thanksgiving, gorgeous.”

  Alia assured her mother that she was being the lady of the house and explained to her that Grandma Glo did a lot of things different from what they were used to—“good different,” mostly.

  “Has your Grandmother Lenora gotten there yet?” Aminah asked.

  “Yes,” Alia responded. “Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweetie.”

  “I think it’s nice that you’re taking care of your friend Nia, but when are you coming home?”

  “Real soon. Definitely in time for Christmas. Nia’s recovery is coming along nicely, but Daddy is doing a good job filling in for me, right?”

  “Um, he’s doing a good job for Daddy, just not as good as you.” Alia laughed, recalling her father’s “lame” attempt at helping her shop for an outfit for “Dress-Down Day” at school.

  Aminah laughed at her daughter’s candor. “Okay, well, that’s good enough. Would you get him for me, please?”

  Fame took the call upstairs in their bedroom.

  “Minah, baby, I’m so glad you called,” he said, sounding as nervous as he was relieved. “I was getting real worried about you, baby. Where are you? How long before you get here?”

  Aminah said nothing.

  “Minah, baby, you there?”

  “I’m here, Fame,” Aminah said flatly.

  “Where are you exactly? Everbody’s here. We’re just waitin’ on you.”

  “Actually, that’s why I called.” Aminah paused to clear her throat. “I didn’t want to be rude and hold up dinner. Listen, I’m not coming home, Fame.”

  This time Fame said nothing.

  “Fame, you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Fame said, holding his head down and rubbing his forehead.

  Neither said anything for a whole minute. Fame wrestled between feeling angry and being hurt. He settled on frustrated.

  “Minah, baby, I can’t. I can’t do this without you.” Fame’s voice cracked. “Please, baby, come home. Please. Whatever it is you want me to do, need me to do, I’ll do it. Just don’t leave me, baby. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Don’t make me have to spend Thanksgiving without you. All of our family is here, baby, but it just ain’t family without you. Please, baby, I’m begging you. Come home, Minah. I miss you. I miss you more than the children do. Shit, they’re fine. I’m the one who’s falling apart over here. I can’t make music. I can’t, Minah. I can’t do this without you. You want me to give up the studio, Minah? Huh? I’ll do it. I’ll do it. Just say you’ll come home to me.”

  Aminah swallowed back the tears but said nothing. She refused to cry. She’d done more than enough of that. Concentrate on the healing. On the solution…on what you want, Aminah. She replayed her mother’s advice.

  “You’re willing to throw away all that we have, all that we built, over some bullshit, Aminah?”

  “I’m not the one putting our marriage in jeopardy time and time again, Fame,” Aminah responded, incensed at Fame’s audacity. “You did that all by yourself. Don’t you dare try to flip this on me.”

  Fame sighed.

  “We barely spent enough time together as a couple or a family,” she continued. “How is it that you have the nerve to find time for an affair?”

  “Let’s be clear on something, Minah,” Fame said angrily. “I have never had an affair. Never had a relationship with any other woman. Relations in the Clintonian sense of the word, okay, well, yeah. But no affair. No relationship.”

  “I gotta go, Fame,” Aminah said before slamming down the phone.

  “Shit. Minah, baby, I’m sorry,” Fame said to the dial tone. “Damn it!” Fame threw the cordless phone across the room.

  As more family and friends arrived, it eased the tension between the mothers-in-law, but not the curiosity regarding Aminah’s whereabouts. Everyone knew how much Aminah loved holidays and family gatherings. But Fame had no answers for them. Neither did Lang. Nor did Miss Lenora.

  At the pumpkin table Sean sat next to Amir. Diagonally across from him, Lang sat next to Alia. Sean hadn’t uttered as much as a syllable in Lang’s direction since they’d arrived, yet no one noticed except, well, Lang. Aminah’s absence overshadowed everything. Somehow Fame managed to bless the food, his family, his friends, and his wife, who regrettably couldn’t be there. Amen.

  Chapter 20

  “…it was so much easier for me to blame the other women because I didn’t want to vilify my husband.”

  Aminah probably would’ve slept well past three if it hadn’t been for the incessant ringing of her cell phone.

  Black Friday found her slumbering through all the early-bird shopping specials. Regardless, Aminah had crossed the last item off her Christmas gift list before the first trick-or-treater had ever buzzed the intercom at her security gate. The only exception this year was Fame’s Aire Traveler watch, but receiving his gift hand-delivered from the designer himself was well worth the delay. Though, at this point, Aminah wasn’t sure what she was doing with that opulent timepiece. Fame certainly wasn’t worthy of it.

  She glanced at the caller ID through a half-opened eye.

  “Sean?” she answered groggily.

  “Hey, gorgeous. You said oneish, so…”

  “What time is it?” she asked after clearing her throat.

  “One-oh-five. I’ve been redialing your number for the past five minutes straight. You okay over there? I was getting worried.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Aminah yawned. “Are you okay?”

  Sean swallowed the lump in his throat. “Uh, nah, not really, Minah,” he admitted. “I think I’m losin’ it. Listen, you still wanna grab something to eat? I really need to talk to you. Like, sooner than later.”

  “Oh, man, Sean, I haven’t showered or anything,” Aminah revealed, sitting up in the plush bed. She pointed and flexed her toes underneath the soft Egyptian cotton sateen sheets. “You mind coming to the hotel? I’ll order room service,” she said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.

  “Bet, but don’t bother getting me anything. I’m not hungry.”

  Aminah requested housekeeping to straighten up while she showered, but not before ordering a baby spinach salad with shaved Bosc pears along
with the roasted red snapper. She ordered Sean a pot of tea, ginger ale, and the brick-pressed marinated chicken just in case he changed his mind.

  As Aminah faced the full blast of hot water from the showerhead and lathered in the Bulgari shower gel, she wondered if her best friend had lied to her about ending her thing with Dante. Lang had been so confident—cocky, in fact—about Sean never finding out, and now here she was about to defend or deny her best friend’s affair she had so vehemently and personally deplored.

  Great, Aminah thought as she toweled off. I don’t have room in my head or my life for guilt. I won’t do it. I’ll listen, but I won’t lie. Don’t need that kind of negative energy circling or hindering me. Nope, not gon’ be able to do it.

  Once Sean arrived at the hotel room, they started talking about the dinner the night before and laughed about Amir, Alia, and the pumpkin table.

  “All things considered, I have to admit your boy, Fame, handled Thanksgiving dinner pretty damn well,” Sean confessed between sips of peppermint tea. The chicken might as well have been the second runner-up in a beauty pageant.

  “Good. Glad to hear it,” Aminah said after savoring her pinot grigio. “I wouldn’t’ve wanted it any other way.”

  Sean watched Aminah push the yellow corn sauce and red snapper onto her fork as he wrestled with the sequence of images replaying in his head. Since last Saturday he’d mentally rewound, paused, and fast-forwarded the images—so fast that sometimes they got all distorted, challenging him to decipher which parts he’d imagined and which had actually occurred. Most times he turned down the volume till he got to the part where she said she couldn’t wait to see him. He amplified “CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU EITHER!” in surround sound.

  This might not just be phone sex, Sean reasoned or unreasoned. Clearly, my wife is seeing him. And didn’t she say something about her pussy being his? Hadn’t she even called him Daddy? Sean let out a soft grunt. It was his stomach again.

  He got up from the table and walked over to the window, revealing an impressive view of Lady Liberty. She reminded him of his wife. Tall. Proud. Alluring. A beacon to guide free men toward her….

  “So tell me, Aminah, who is this dude?” Sean asked, turning away from the suddenly disturbing view.

  “What dude, Sean?” Aminah asked, swallowing a piece of her tender fish a bit too fast. She coughed a few times and then gulped down the rest of the pinot in her glass. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about.”

  “Gorgeous, I know Langston is your absolute best friend in the whole wide world. But you know how much I love that woman. How long I’ve been waiting to start our family. How I’ve supported her career in spite of all that.” Sean sat back down in his chair next to Aminah and put his face in his hands.

  “And I mean, really, when you think about it,” he said rubbing his temples, “I mean, really, really think about it, she’s probably been using her fucking career as some kind of stalling tactic, some sort of shield to prevent her from giving me my baby, my family.”

  Aminah pulled Sean’s hands down and held them. “Sean, honey, you’re confusing me. I’m really trying to follow you. Is this about some dude or about Lang being ready to have children? Because just the other day she told me she was getting Merrick ready to—”

  “Lies,” Sean spat, releasing her hands. “She’s lying, Aminah. The only thing Lang is getting ready to do is get herself killed,” he said, pounding on the table, rattling the cold poultry on his plate.

  “Okay Sean, calm down,” Aminah said, getting up from her seat to rub his back. “First of all, where’s all this coming from? Did Langston say something to you specifically about not wanting children or something?”

  “She didn’t have to, Aminah. She’s fucking another man. She’s not thinking about me and my kids. She’s thinking about the next time she can fuck him. Can you believe that shit?”

  How in the hell could Lang be so careless? Aminah wondered as she continued rubbing Sean’s back. And exactly when did her best friend start lying to her? Aminah shook her head. She didn’t even want to go there right now.

  “So this is all speculation,” Aminah asked, hoping that it was, believing that it wasn’t.

  “Fuck, no, this ain’t speculation,” Sean said, looking at Aminah sideways.

  “So how do you know she’s sleeping with someone else, Sean?”

  “Not you, too, gorgeous?” he asked incredulously, shrugging her hand off his back. “Now you tryna play me?”

  “No, Sean, not at all. I’m sorry, sweetie. I can’t…” She paused to stop herself from lying. “I—I just don’t want to believe all this.”

  Sean got up from the table, walked over to the window, glared at Lady Liberty, and then sat down on the couch. He wrung his hands together and reasoned that maybe, just maybe, because Lang had hidden the affair from him, perhaps she hadn’t been so forthcoming with Aminah either. After all, Lang did share with him that she and Aminah hadn’t been as close lately and that she really missed her.

  “You know your girl’s a freak, right?” Sean asked Aminah seemingly out of nowhere.

  Aminah raised her left eyebrow and then nodded. She braced herself for a detailed description of Dante bending her best friend over in some ghetto Kama Sutra position she’d never even fathomed.

  “And I don’t have a problem with that,” Sean continued. “I love it, in fact. So with my wife being a freak and all, I think nothing of it when I hear her moaning from behind our bedroom door. All I’m thinking is, ‘Damn, Lang has got the most insatiable pussy on the planet,’ but—”

  “Wait,” Aminah said, holding up her right hand. “I’m gonna need more wine.” She brought both her glass and the bottle over to coffee table in front of the sofa. Sean watched anxiously as she poured another glass and then took a sip.

  “Okay, continue.”

  “Yeah, so as I was saying, Lang’s got this insatiable pussy, but that’s okay because I put in work. She does tell you I put in work, right?”

  Aminah smirked, nodded, and took another sip.

  “So last Saturday I’m in such a rush to get to this basketball game that I forget my lucky sports watch. So I turn around to go get it, ’cause, you know, I’m just that superstitious. Anyway, I run up the stairs, get right outside our bedroom door, and I hear Lang moaning and masturbating like she’s getting fucked, which, hey, if you know Lang is not surprising. But what is shocking for a man like me, who, you know, puts in work, is finding out that she’s not alone in our bedroom.”

  Aminah spit out her pinot.

  “You all right, Minah?” Sean asked, patting her on the back.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “What do you mean she wasn’t alone in your bedroom?”

  “She was on the phone with another man, Aminah,” Sean said, shaking his head in disbelief. He nobly fought back tears. “Moaning for him on our bed. Rubbing my clit for him. Having his orgasm on our bed, Aminah. Fuck me for loving her!”

  Sean dropped his head. It was as unforgettable for him as the day of their wedding. He wept.

  It pained Aminah to see Sean agonizing so. She wondered if Fame was hurting. She had hoped he was, though not like this. Tiny pin pricks to his heart? Yes. Tortured mental anguish? Well, no, not quite.

  “You’re not wrong for loving your wife,” Aminah said, wiping his face.

  “No? Then why do I feel so stupid?” Sean asked, his voice cracking. “Why do I feel like the last four years have not only been a lie but a waste of my time, my life? Don’t you know I coulda had children by now, Aminah? The family I’ve always wanted, waiting on Langston’s ass. And what did all that patience and being a good husband get me, huh? My wife giving my pussy away over the phone.”

  “Wait, so he wasn’t actually there with her in the bedroom?” Aminah clarified.

  “Fuck, no, Aminah,” Sean said, looking at her like she was certified. “Then you’d be visiting me in jail for a double homicid
e.”

  Aminah cleared her throat. “Sean, have you asked Langston about the phone sex?”

  He hadn’t. He couldn’t. He needed information, facts, and ammunition when he confronted Langston. He knew she’d not only deny it, but she’d shred his accusations to ticker tape without physical proof, so he wanted to step to her with facts and reasons, not assumptions and emotions.

  But that was only part of it. The first couple of days Sean had struggled, deciding if phone sex was enough of an indiscretion to threaten his marriage. It tore him apart knowing that someone else had gotten inside his wife’s head. That she’d allowed another man into the most intimate part of herself, the space she knew he treasured most, and on top of all that, Sean truly believed they’d sexed.

  “Aminah, do you know who this motherfucker is? Where she met him? How long they’ve been seeing each other?”

  Aminah didn’t know how to answer Sean without selling out Lang.

  “You know, it was so much easier for me to blame the other women because I didn’t want to vilify my husband,” Aminah explained. “Ultimately, though, I had to realize that my trust wasn’t with them. My trust was in him. Those women didn’t destroy my trust. Fame did that all by himself. You need to talk to Langston. It really has nothing to do with some guy.”

  Sean realized at that moment that even if Aminah knew everything, she wasn’t going to violate her best friend’s confidence. He respected that. And maybe she was right. She certainly had more experience in relationship turmoil than he did. She also had more tolerance for bullshit.

  “I know what I gotta do,” Sean said, kissing Aminah on her forehead and then brushing the side of her face with the back of his hand. “You are gorgeous, and Fame doesn’t deserve you.”

  He kissed her forehead again. This time he held his cool lips to her warm forehead for a few seconds longer. Aminah closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around his waist. His warm body felt good to her. Sean, reluctant to release her, cupped Aminah’s face in his hands before bringing it to his chest. Aminah could feel his heart racing. She placed her hand on his chest. He rested his chin on top of her head and let his hand slide from her waist to her hips to her ass.