His Third Wife

by Grace Octavia

Mrs. Taylor departed, walking backwards and making promises of vengeance against the reporter with each step.

  When they were gone, Jamison grabbed the reporter by his shoulder and pulled him away from the camera crew.

  “Do we have a problem here?” Jamison asked.

  “No problem. I’m a reporter. I was reporting. Everything I said was fact. Right?” The reporter tried to pull away, but Jamison’s hold was unbreakable.

  “What’s your name?” Jamison knew the man’s face well. He’d answered some of his questions at a press conference about the bursting pipes downtown last winter. Still, he couldn’t recall his name.

  “You don’t know that?” the reporter laughed. “I’ve been following you around for months and you don’t know that?” He seemed insulted, though he knew big dogs like Jamison Taylor seldom remembered the names of street reporters. “I’m Dax. Dax Thomas. Fox Five News.” He put out his hand to shake Jamison’s, but it was left hanging there.

  “How’d you know I was here, Dax?”

  “I didn’t. I sit out here every day and wait for something to happen. It’s my job.”

  “Bullshit. You sit outside the courthouse in Forsyth County?” Jamison would’ve laughed if he hadn’t been the target of Dax’s investigation.

  “Plenty of celebrities come here to—”

  “Man, don’t play games with me,” Jamison said, suddenly sounding more frustrated by Dax’s play. “I don’t have to tell you who I am, what I can do. We both know you weren’t just sitting out here with a full crew for a possibility. You got a lead. Just tell me—who sent you here?”

  “Can’t tell you, man. You know that. I can’t make it in the business if my snitches find out I’m a snitch.”

  “So this is about making it?” Jamison asked. “You come out here to interrogate a man and drudge up some innocent woman’s past so you can make it?”

  “Everything’s about making it. Right? That’s how you got where you’re at. That’s how I’m getting to where I’m going.”

  I was itching something awful waiting in the back of that building for Jamison to come around the corner. The only thing that kept me from going back around to the other side and stabbing that reporter with the eyelash blade I keep in my purse was knowing Jamison knew just how to handle the situation. I’ve been called most anything to my face—bitch ain’t nothing but a common noun in the circles I’ve traveled in. But in those same circles, you have to be prepared for what a bitch is serving back to you if you call her out. I wanted to serve something serious to that reporter. He hadn’t called me a bitch, but that was what he’d meant.

  “Here he comes,” Mrs. Taylor said when Jamison finally came walking toward us. She headed toward him with me and Mama behind her. We were standing in the back of the lot beside my car.

  Jamison was pulling off his tie and already on the phone yelling at someone about what had just happened.

  “Son, who was that reporter? You need to have him fired!” Mrs. Taylor was repeating what she’d already told Mama that Jamison had the power to do when we were waiting for him to meet us in back of the building. “The nerve of him—to disgrace the mayor! And on television! I was about put him over my knee, and I would’ve if my heart could take it! You know I got this bad heart.” She placed a dramatic Southern hand over her heart.

  Jamison didn’t acknowledge his mother. He was still spitting into the phone about a leak and his office putting out an official statement announcing our marriage within the hour. His eyes were cutting through me. I felt the fucking blades.

  Mama and Mrs. Taylor continued begging Jamison for a response until he got off the phone, but I was quiet. This was everything Jamison had been afraid of. Everything any man I’d ever dated had been afraid of. My past.

  Jamison stopped his call and pointed at me. “You’re riding with me,” he ordered.

  “I drove Mama here,” I reminded him, but he didn’t respond. He kissed his mother on the cheek while ignoring her steady questions and smiled politely at my mother before walking off to his car expecting me to follow. Instead, Mrs. Taylor was on his heels with more words and nagging that wouldn’t likely stop until Jamison promised to kill that reporter himself.

  “Mama, I need to meet you back at my house,” I said, trying to hand my mother my key fob for the car.

  “But I can’t drive this car,” she said, looking at the shiny car that was probably the only new car she’d ever been in.

  “It’s fine, Mama. Don’t worry,” I said still holding the fob.

  “But I don’t know where you live.”

  “There’s a GPS system. It’ll take you right to the house. Just press, ‘Home.’ ”

  “But—I—”

  “Mama, this isn’t a game. I need you to do this shit. Jamison needs me—my husband needs me.”

  She wanted to complain some more, but she didn’t. Heavy histrionics aside, I meant what I was saying and she knew it. She took the key fob.

  “I’ll be home right behind you,” I said as Jamison pulled up beside us in his car. “Lorna will let you in.”

  “Val,” Mama started when I turned to get into the car with Jamison.

  I turned back to her.

  “Don’t get in that car,” she said so desperately I actually felt sorry for her.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll meet you at the house. He just wants to talk.”

  I was barely in the car before Jamison pulled away. He’d thrown his suit jacket in the back seat and his shirt was open.

  “You’re sweating,” I pointed out, looking at beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “Val, I need you to answer a question,” Jamison said. The veins on his hands were popping out as he held on to the steering wheel.

  “What?”

  “And don’t lie. Because if you lie, I’ll know you’re lying. And that won’t be good.” Jamison turned around a corner so quickly the butt of his car sputtered loose gravel everywhere behind us.

  “Slow down,” I said.

  Jamison looked at me.

  “I’m just saying, we don’t want to get pulled over, too.”

  “Val!”

  “What? What do you want to know?”

  Jamison jammed the gas pedal and sped through a red light before gliding onto the highway toward Atlanta.

  “Did you call the reporter?” he asked.

  “Call the—? You think I—? Really?”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  “Jamison, you know better than that. Why would I call a reporter?”

  “You’ve been upset about this whole thing. You wanted a big wedding. Wanted it all on the news. You—”

  “I wanted to marry you. I got that. I’m not trying to mess that up on the day I get it.” I couldn’t even believe he was trying to pin the reporter on me. Why would I want that kind of heat? But Jamison wasn’t easy to trust anyone. He’d lost a lot of good friends since he’d entered into politics. Apparently, anyone could be bought. And some of his closest friends had the lowest price tags.

  “Don’t lie to me!” Jamison tapped the gas pedal and we jerked forward as the wheels raced ahead.

  “I’m not lying. I’ve seen that reporter before, but I don’t know him. He’s not exactly my kind of company.”

  Jamison banged the steering wheel.

  “I know how this looks,” I said. “But it’s not me. I’m trying to leave my past behind. Not put it on display in front of my mama in front of a courthouse.”

  “Your past—” Jamison repeated my words in a way that made them sound like a death sentence.

  “I never danced at Magic City,” I said. “You know that. You met me there. I was not a stripper. That reporter just found my name in the permit book and he’s sniffing the wrong pot of piss.”

  “No one’s going to care that you never stripped. They’re just going to care that you were going to and that you’re married to me now,” Jamison said. “I can’t believe I got myself into this shit!”
He banged the steering wheel again.

  “Into what?” I looked down at my belly. “This?”

  “Yes—that. And you. This whole thing. It never should’ve happened. You were my assistant, Val. That’s a fucking cliché. I’m going to be a fucking joke. And I’m trying to get ahead of this, but I can’t seem to keep things in line. Someone’s working against me.”

  “Well, it ain’t me,” I said, feeling my eyes get hot. Every time Jamison looked at my stomach, the regret in his eyes made it seem like he’d do something drastic to get rid of me and the baby. He wasn’t the only one sleeping with one eye open. I was just holding out for things to get better once the baby got here. Jamison loved his son, and if he loved my baby that much he’d know that I had given him a gift and just maybe he could love me for that gift. Just enough. Love me just enough.

  I put my hand on Jamison’s knee and started talking softly about him needing to let go of all of the tension if he was going back to the office to handle the situation with the reporter. He couldn’t go in there angry. He needed to be calm. Relaxed. He resisted me, but then I started moving my hand in closer to his crotch and joking about us needing to consummate the marriage. I reminded him of the time I gave him head in his office just before he had a press conference to discuss plans to launch the city’s first meth addiction hotline. He’d gone to the podium and one of the reporters had immediately pointed out that Jamison’s zipper was open.

  Jamison laughed at the memory and by then my hand was on his hard penis.

  “Pull over,” I whispered in his ear.

  “Where?” he asked with his voice just as soft as mine then.

  “The next exit. I can calm you down.”

  We stopped at the end of a long driveway that led to the back of a thick wooded area behind a farm. I tried to unzip Jamison’s pants in his seat, but he pushed me away and got out of the car before slamming the door so hard the thing shook.

  “What are we doing here?” I looked around.

  “Get out of the fucking car,” he ordered, walking to my door with threatening steps.

  “Get out here? But I thought we were—”

  “Get out of the fucking car!” He pulled the door open and grabbed my arm before I could get my cellphone from my purse.

  “Why here? What are you doing?” I struggled to get away from him, but he managed to get me out of the car and pushed me, chest forward, into the back door. “What are you doing?” I asked and I could hear the fear in my voice.

  He came up behind me and started pulling at my skirt with one hand as the other held me in place by the back of my neck.

  “This is how you’re going to calm me down,” he whispered in my ear as I heard him undoing his pants.

  My skirt was up over my hips then and he tore through my underwear angrily. I could hear birds chirping in the trees around us; the car’s open-door indicator blaring because he’d left it wide open.

  “You think you’re running this shit, Val?” he said after he’d entered me and was squeezing my neck so tightly I couldn’t think of moving. “I control you. You don’t control me.”

  He stroked me in a fight and I panted to control the intense sensations of fear and mysterious pleasure storming through my body.

  “You hear me? You fucking hear me?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” I said in a soft pant.

  “Say that shit louder,” he ordered. “Say it.”

  “Yes.”

  He stopped and pulled me toward the open car door and cocked my right leg up onto the empty seat where I’d been sitting.

  “You’re gonna scream that,” he said, entering me again and stroking harder. His hand went to my hair and he pulled it. “I control you,” he said. “Say that shit.”

  “You . . .”

  “Louder!”

  “You control me!”

  Jamison’s hands fell to my hips and he continued his strokes until his breath sounded like a cry and he shook from his waist to his knees.

  He backed away from me coldly. Pulled up his pants and went back to his side of the car.

  “His First Wife”

  “You can’t make a man do nothing he don’t want to do. Not a thing. You can try. But you can’t make him do it. Mark my words! My mama told me that. Her mama told her that.”

  Kerry was sitting beside Marcy in a hot-pink Adirondack chair. Marcy’s chair was painted neon green. Their children—Kerry’s son, Tyrian, and Marcy’s daughter, Millicent—were steps away in a pool, engaged in a fiercely competitive game of Marco Polo. While six-year-old Tyrian was nearly ten years younger than Millicent, he was a better swimmer and he didn’t mind getting his hair wet.

  “I know that. But it just doesn’t make sense. His assistant? Val?” Kerry responded to Marcy’s declaration before adding in a lowered voice, “She’s a fucking hoodrat, Marce! A fucking hoodrat.”

  “A hoodrat Jamison chose!” Marcy pointed out before Kerry tapped her arm to remind her to lower her voice so Tyrian couldn’t hear them talking about his father.

  “I hear you, but I know what Jamison is capable of. I was married to the man for ten years. This just doesn’t fit. Something’s up.”

  “Humpf,” the two old friends said together, and both took the moment to reflect on what added up to those ten years that Jamison had been Kerry’s and, more importantly, she had been his. Fanning away the summer heat that had them in bikinis and acceptable mommy cover-ups, the women looked up at the behemoth of a house that cast a cooling shadow over the pool. This had once been Jamison’s home too. He’d claimed he wanted to live out the rest of his years with his college sweetheart in that Cascade Tudor. But where was he now? And how had he gotten there?

  “You think she’s pregnant?” Marcy posed the question Kerry had been considering ever since she’d seen the now-infamous news footage of Jamison walking outside of the courthouse with Val beside him in a white suit on their wedding day. It had since gone viral on the Internet, and in days the shotgun interview had been chopped up and bloggers and political gawkers had commented on everything from Mama Fee’s terrible wig to Mrs. Taylor’s jaw dropping to the cement when the reporter had revealed that Val had been a stripper.

  “No,” Kerry said solemnly. “He wouldn’t sleep with her without a condom.” She paused and listened to the children calling “Marco!” and then “Polo!” to one another and then turned to her best friend. “You think he would?”

  “I don’t put shit past a man—not even my own husband,” Marcy said, pulling her sunglasses down beneath her nose and sitting up to look at Kerry. “And you know what happened with that shit. Thank God for late-term abortions and stupid office temps.”

  Kerry laughed uneasily.

  And picking up on her best friend’s discomfort, Marcy added, “I don’t know though. Not Jamison. Not with that girl. Didn’t you say she was damn near illiterate? He likes the smart types. The deep girls.” Marcy sat back in her chair and looked back up at the house with Kerry. She had been there when Jamison and Kerry had met. She’d put them together.

  Kerry Ann Jackson had been Marcy’s roommate at Spelman. The girls had had nothing in common—Marcy being a loud-mouthed, loud-dressed, big-haired New Yorker and the first in her family to go to college when Kerry was a third-generation Spelmanite and heir apparent of a blueblood, old black Atlanta dynasty that dated back to black men who’d passed as white and owned slaves. Kerry Ann was everything Marcy was at Spelman to become. A legacy. Someone who was “in.” Had a good name and good blood. Marcy just needed somewhere to begin. The beautician’s daughter decided to set her course to being and mattering on the traditional route that most new to the Atlanta socialite scene took—get the right clothes, join the right sorority, and marry the right man with the right family name. “Right” wasn’t subjective here. And Marcy had been making all of the right decisions—all the way down to the man of her dreams. Morehouse man of honor and frat boy supreme was Damien Newsome—the spawn of a select bloodline of Atlanta
tradition that crisscrossed both the white and black sides of Peachtree Street. He was bright light beige, had features like a white man, and hair that curled without a curlkit. What the women on campus called a “Good Breed.” Pre-med. Smooth. A ticket to something spectacular. Marcy dug into him and wouldn’t let up. By senior year, she was getting desperate and needed to drag Kerry to the annual Valentine’s ball to act as a decoy to distract Damien’s frat brothers while she got her last chance for romance. Back then, there was a belief that a Spelman girl needed to snag her Morehouse man by graduation. She needed her ring by spring, so she’d be jumping the broom that next summer. If she waited, she could lose him—or worse, go back to New York empty-handed. She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—have that.

  The only problem was that Kerry scarcely went to campus functions, hadn’t pledged the sorority—though she was a legacy, she seemed to have an aversion to any specimen that lived across the street from her sacred Spelman. She was about her books and her future. No man needed.

  But, since Tyrian had been born and was here beating Millicent at Marco Polo in the pool, obviously Kerry had agreed, after much debating, to go to the Valentine’s dance with Marcy senior year. There, as usual, the Spelman girl who’d been given the moniker “Black Barbie” by other coeds due to her long black hair and toasty brown skin, broke the hearts of any man who dared approach her. But then there was Jamison. And a spot of luck. A smile from a frozen heart. A spark. New love.

  Marcy got her man and the machine moved forward to bind Kerry and Jamison. Marcy got pregnant before she got her ring (or got pregnant to get her ring—it depended on who told the story). Jamison popped the question to Kerry before a serenade compliments of his suited fraternity brothers and happily ever after was planned.

  But “ever after” is a long time for two people from different worlds. And in ten years, “ever after” ended.

  “Did you ask him about Val?” Marcy asked, turning to Kerry beside the pool. “Like ask him if they were dating?”

  “There was no need, Marce. It was obvious. The girl couldn’t write a decent sentence and she was making seventy-five-K a year? Where does that happen?”