After The Dance

by Lori D. Johnson

  I was standing there biting my lip and trying to decide if I wanted to attempt to erase the incriminating evidence or remove the tape from the machine altogether, when the phone on Scoobie’s desk started ringing. Of course it was him, wanting to know if I’d managed to get into the study all right and if I’d been able to locate the work-related information he’d previously called about.

  It didn’t take me but a few seconds’ worth of shuffling through the basket on his desk to find the particular set of papers he needed. I’d hoped after I’d finished reading him the info, he’d thank me and let me get off the phone so I could hurry up and figure myself a way out of the mess I’d gone and made. Instead, Scoobie up and started telling me about his durn plans for the day.

  But after a few minutes of rambling with little if any response from me, he stopped and said, “Hey, babe, you feeling all right?”

  I was quick to tell him, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  He said, “You sure? ’Cause if you need me to come home sooner rather than later, it can easily be arranged.”

  Girl, my conscience was all but begging me to go ahead and confess. Instead of scheming, just tell it all and be done with it. Besides, it wasn’t like Carl and I had really done anything besides kiss. And even if we had, so what? Scoobie and I were neither married nor even officially engaged.

  But ultimately the coward in me won out and I told him, “It is well after 2 in the morning here. Once I get some shut-eye, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  After Scoobie finally let me go, I got up from behind the desk and had every intention of heading straight to bed when a name on an envelope caught my eye. Dr. Jacob Goldstein.

  I picked up the envelope that was sitting atop a small stack of mail on Scoobie’s desk. On turning it over and finding it already open, I didn’t waste any time in removing the letter and sitting back down to read it. Basically, what the good doctor had sent was the list of dates he’d be available to perform the extreme makeover Scoobie had been trying to convince me to have.

  But that wasn’t even the stunner, girl. No, what got me durn near hot enough to reach for the phone and cuss Scoobie’s conniving ass was when I came across the portion of the letter that dealt with the coordination of all my nip, lift, and tuck procedures with homeboy’s own pending vasectomy.

  I was sitting there mad as all get-out, ranting and raving aloud to myself, when I swear if I didn’t hear what sounded like somebody clearing their throat. Girl, I kid you not, I eased myself up and kind of tipped over to the bookcase, where I thought I’d heard the noise. You know, there wasn’t anything over there besides that durn urn containing Scoobie’s mama’s charred remains and an antique-looking Bible.

  Since I wasn’t about to get caught asking Scoobie’s dead mama if she’d said something, I reached for the Bible with the desperate hope of finding a verse upon which I could draw some much-needed strength and solace. But when I opened the Good Book, what I discovered wedged in the middle of Revelations was anything but the peace of mind I’d sought.

  HIM

  The first thing I did when I saw my ex again was apologize and promise that nothing of the sort would happen ever again, at least not in her and the girls’ presence. Let’s face it, man, wasn’t no sense in me coming at her with a whole bunch of lies and excuses when Bet and I both know that had the script been flipped and it been her out there in front of our kids, doing the freak nasty with some joker, I’da straight been ready to jack somebody.

  And it’s not like I’m crazy enough to think that me and the ex will ever hook up again. She trashed any notion I might have had about that the day she found out about Benjamin. But even after all the mess I’ve put her through, man, not once has Bet ever dogged me out in front of the twins, made it particularly difficult for me to see them, or asked me for so much as a penny over and beyond what the court ordered me to give her and the girls.

  Besides that, man, me and Bet got a history dating all the way back to elementary school. I was her first love and she was mine. Old as I am and as much as we’ve been through together, I’d be a fool not to appreciate the girl. So I’m saying, wasn’t nothing I could do but come correct and give her nothing short of her due.

  She accepted the apology, but not without sharing just a few more of her thoughts on the matter. “You know, Carl, that’s all fine and dandy, as far as me and the girls are concerned,” she said. “But what about Faye? Her feelings were probably hurt more than anyone’s. And I sure as hell would have never invited her had I known you were going to be waltzing up in here with Ms. Butterfly.”

  The swipe at Victoria didn’t bother me in the least, but the mere mention of ol’ girl’s name got me riled and I said, “I don’t mean no harm, but I wouldn’t waste my time worrying about Faye or her feelings. Believe me, if she’s not already over it, she will be.”

  Rather than drop the ball, Bet snatched it up and ran with it. “Does that mean you’ve talked to her since the night of the party?”

  The last thing I wanted to do was share with the ex the full extent to which I’d just been hurt and duped, but knowing better than to attempt an outright dodge, I said, “Look, if you must know I went by Faye’s place after I dropped Victoria off that evening. But as far as the two of us ever hooking up on a regular basis to do some kind of cutesy couples thing, forget it, ’cause I really don’t see that happening.”

  Man, had you seen the snarl Bet aimed in my direction, you’da thought my name was Rover and I’d just gotten caught trying to ride all up on her rear. She said, “I guess not, if the best you can do is sneak by the girl’s place late at night and hit her up for some after-the-party boot-knocking.”

  That’s when I jerked off the kid gloves and hit her with, “For your information, sweetheart, if getting sexed up and slobbed down is all I’d wanted, I’da capped off my evening snuggled beneath the sheets with the woman I came to the party with in the first damn place, rather than drive way out in the boonies somewhere only to get rained on and chumped by a woman who’s repeatedly made it clear that she ain’t hardly trying to hook up for more than a couple of nights with the likes of somebody like me.”

  I fully expected Bet to come flying back at me with some wild combination of flurries. But her counter, when it finally came, struck me as more of a rub than a blow. “So help me out here,” she said. “Should I take that little outburst to mean that you really do care about Faye, or would that just be another bad assumption on my part?”

  I gave it to her straight, man. I said, “Let me put it to you like this—had I known about the party and that you had invited Faye, I wouldn’t have needed a Ms. Vic, a cake, or even any doggone presents, ’cause just Faye’s presence alone would have been gift enough. Hell, yeah, I’ve got feelings for the girl—most nights, I’m up to my neck in ’em.”

  Yeah, man, so I’m a wuss, all right? ’Bout the only thing I didn’t do was come right out and commence to weeping on the woman’s shoulder. But I ain’t gon’ lie, it was straight-up touch-and-go there for a few seconds.

  Extending me more sympathy than I would have ever previously thought possible, my ex said, “She probably just needs some time, Carl. I mean, what sensible woman wouldn’t be somewhat apprehensive about letting herself fall in too deep with a self-confessed knucklehead who’s saddled with three kids, an ex-wife, a baby’s mama, and a long history of infidelity? You want me to talk to her?”

  “No, no, and hell no!” is what I told her. “I think you and Nora both have done enough instigating as it is, don’t you?”

  And speaking of Nora, man, I’ll be dog if her ass ain’t about to make me lose my mind. Ever since the party, she’s been hounding me something awful. I’m saying, if she’s not blowing up my pager, she’s leaving multiple messages on my answering machine at home for me to stop tripping and call her.

  What she needs to do is take that mess on somewhere else, ’cause I’m through. That’s right, I’m through letting her and ol’ girl play me like some kinda su
cker who’s too hard up to know any better. Like that old blues song says, “I can do bad, all by my damn self.”

  HER

  Oh yeah, girl, wait until I tell you what I found locked up in Scoobie’s study, tucked in the pages of his Bible and being guarded by his dead mama’s ashes. It looked like something a child in one of those classes for slow kids had put together. So imagine this if you will: a notebook-size piece of paper with four photocopied head shots of yours truly, plastered onto four different emaciated women’s bodies—and two of them white!

  I’m saying, bad as it was, girl, I might not have been quite as outraged had the body types Scoobie chosen for me been more realistically within my reach. You know, had he gone the big-hip, thick-thighed, Serena Williams or Beyoncé route? But no, apparently this brother was out to mold and shape my big butt into some anorexic, right-sickly looking type of heifer.

  Dying to see just who the bodies belonged to, I peeped under the first head shot only to find the songstress Whitney Houston’s hollow-cheeked mug grinning back at me. And don’t get me wrong, ’cause I don’t have a thing against my girl Whitney. I think she’s both talented and beautiful. I just ain’t trying to look like her skinny ass, is all. And that goes double for the actress Calista Flockhart, who’s pasty, pinched face was the next one to peer up at me when I snatched off the photocopied cover. Hell yeah, girl, horrible barely even comes close to describing what I was feeling and it only got worse from there. I don’t know if it was Mary Kate or Ashley, but one of those durn Olsen twins popped out from under the third version of me. And the fourth one! Girl, don’t you know I was too through when I peeled back that last piece of paper and discovered that Scoobie had taken it upon himself to paste my face on top of that wench Tina’s yak-headed, flat-chested, no-butt body!

  I was so worked up, rather than do any more snooping, I gathered together the bits and pieces of Scoobie’s paper-doll project, stormed out of the study, and took my frazzled nerves to bed. But the very first thing I did upon rising that next morning was to call Nora, who, like me, wasn’t scheduled to be at work until later that afternoon.

  After listening to all I had to say about my venture into Scoobie’s study and having herself a good, long laugh behind it, homegirl didn’t waste any time in coming out to join me. Though she claimed all she wanted to do was take a peek at all the incriminating evidence, I think what she really wanted was to help me edit some of the less than flattering surveillance footage.

  As it turns out, it didn’t matter much what her plans were, because when I punched in the code that Scoobie had previously given me for the door’s lock, the durn thing wouldn’t budge. After double-checking the numbers and reentering them a couple more times, Nora said, “You know what? I bet that sneaky bastard’s got this mug rigged up some kind of way so that you need a different code every time you try to open it.”

  I told her it wasn’t a big deal because when Scoobie got back home I fully intended to tell him that our journey together had come to an end. Even with the possibility of finding our son seemingly so close, there wasn’t any way that a long-term relationship between the two of us could ever really work—not with all the lies and unspoken truths steadily growing between us, and I meant his as well as my own.

  Of course, within seconds of me making the grand announcement, the FedEx package with the new pics of Tariq arrived at the door. Good thing I had Nora there to remind me of all I stood to lose by not letting go of Scoobie—like my dignity, my self-respect, and the opportunity to fix all that I’d messed up with Carl.

  “Don’t you go getting weak on me” is what she’d said on noticing the tremble in my hands as I fumbled through the new glossies of the little boy my arms still longed to hold. “If Scoobie’s sincere about wanting to find this child, he’s gonna do that whether the two of you are together or not. Hell, for all we know, the lying SOB may have known about Tariq and his whereabouts from the git. No, I’m saying, girl, think about it. There might not even be a detective Clarke. It’s not like you’ve ever actually seen or talked to the man. And these pictures—pssst, how do we know they haven’t been in Scoobie’s possession for years now?”

  As far-fetched as it initially sounded, over the next couple of days, I found myself wondering if Nora wasn’t on to something. It was entirely possible that Scoobie had been using my desire to reconnect with our son as a way of getting whatever the hell it was he wanted from me.

  Yeah, I spoke to his jive tail quite a few times after my visit inside his room of horrors. But since I knew a longdistance war of words wouldn’t give me the type of closure I needed, I let him go ahead and think that everything was hunky-dory. I’m telling you, girl, I went so far as to write myself a script and was planning to have Nora rehearse it with me. But as fate would have it, Scoobie’s flight put him back in town much earlier than I anticipated and he was already at the house waiting on me when I stopped by there after work.

  “Are we celebrating something?” I asked on accepting the warm kiss on the lips and the cold glass of champagne he’d met me with at the door.

  “Indeed we are,” he said, grinning at me like he’d already had one glass too many and had bumped his head, to boot. “We’re celebrating us. Me, you, our son, Tariq, and the wonderful life that lies ahead of us.”

  “Umpf,” I said, before downing a couple sips of the bubbly. Just because I understood and fully accepted the necessity of confronting Scoobie on the sorriness of his actions and letting him know it was time he took a flying leap, didn’t make the task of doing so any easier. A part of me had actually wanted things to pan out the way he’d been insisting they eventually would: I’d let go of the past; we’d fall in love; we’d find our son, safe and sound and willing to forgive us for abandoning him; Scoobie and I would go on to get married; and we’d all live happily ever after. But as I sat there on the sofa, swirling the champagne in my glass and trying not to grit my teeth as Scoobie talked about finalizing our plans for Florida, I realized there was no way in hell I was going to spend so much as another hour with this man.

  “So when do you want to do this?” he asked, passing me a calendar with all the dates I’d seen in the doctor’s letter marked off.

  I set the calendar on the coffee table in front of us and looked at Scoobie before I told him point-blank, “I don’t.”

  He was like, “Oh, come on, Faye, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dr. Goldstein is one of the best surgeons in the country. We’ve talked about this a dozen times already.”

  “No, just because you’ve found a way to interject the subject into durn near every conversation we’ve had in the past month or so doesn’t mean we’ve actually talked about it” is what I told him. “So hear me loud and clear,” I said, raising my voice over the durn Sinatra homeboy had crooning in the background. “I’m not the least bit interested in letting any of your surgeon friends meddle with the size of my breasts or suck any of the fat outta my ass, okay?”

  He shot me a look of disgust and said, “Now, why do you have to say it like that? Look, babe, it’s not like I won’t be right there with you every step of the way. Matter of fact, I’m thinking about having some procedures done myself.”

  “Yeah?” I said, surprised to hear him confess even that much. “Like what?”

  He stood up and said, “I don’t know. I could use some tweaking here and there. Maybe a little Botox around the eyes, some collagen for my lips.”

  I said, “Tweaking, huh? Is that what you call a vasec-tomy—just a little tweaking here and there?”

  He frowned and rubbed his forehead. “Is that what this is all about? So what’s the deal—you’re going behind my back and reading my mail now?”

  I pressed my shoulders against the couch and stared at him. “You weren’t going to tell me, were you? You were just going to have this thing done without letting me have a say about it.”

  He stared back at me and was like, “Faye, you’ve always known how I feel about kids. I’ve never wanted a
ny. Never. So don’t act like this suddenly comes as some big surprise to you.”

  “Well, damn it, Scoobie,” I said. “What about what I might want?! Did it ever occur to you that I just might like to have a family one day? And since you’re so adamant about not wanting any kids, where in the hell does that leave poor Tariq?”

  He’d started pacing, but he stopped long enough to say, “I’m not trying to be cruel, Faye, but you made the choice to have Tariq. Had it been left to me, I would have done things differently. But since he’s here now, I plan to see that he’s well taken care of.”

  “Should I assume that the same goes for Evan? Or is that something you’d rather I take up with Tina?”

  “Forgive me,” he said, stepping over to the bar to refill his glass, “but I fail to see what Tina or Evan have to do with you and me and our plans for the future.”

  “Man, damn the future” is what I told him. “What I want to talk about is the here and the now. Are you or are you not Evan’s father?”

  Scoobie grimaced and finished off the champagne in his glass before he looked over at me and said, “I take it you already know the answer to that.”

  I said, “So when were you going to tell me? Before or after you told me about the vasectomy? Face it, Scoobie, you haven’t been completely honest or forthcoming with me about a lot of things, whether it be Evan, the vasec-tomy you were going to have behind my back, or the sick and twisted plan of yours to mold me into some kind of skinny-ass Stepford wife!” Girl, I reached down in my bag, whipped out the paper bearing his bizarre-looking cut-and-paste project, and threw it at him.

  Oh yeah, now that really set him off. Through partially clenched teeth he said, “You accusing me of being deceitful? Now, that’s funny, especially when it’s obvious that you’re still getting some on the side from that crowbar-toting chump with the ten-year-old Corolla. What’s he do for a living anyway, pump gas?”