The Business of Lovers

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  She said, “After the baby is born, if we’re not married, I’m filing with the courts.”

  “You’re putting me in court?”

  “To keep things clean and fair. I don’t want you to be surprised when you’re served.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up. When should I expect that love letter?”

  “As soon as the baby is born, if nothing between us has changed.”

  “If we’re not married.”

  “Don’t take it as a threat. Just doing what I have to do to protect my baby.”

  “You tried to file already.”

  “I thought I could file while I was pregnant. This is my first time.”

  “Baby has to be born first.”

  “Are we getting married?”

  “You’re already married.”

  “With your baby in my belly.”

  She was married when I met her, and I had a girlfriend, but that didn’t stop us from traveling with the show and living like husband and wife. She stood in the mirror combing her hair and fought back the tears. She walked to me with her head low. I reached to wipe the tears from her eyes. She intercepted my hand.

  “Chicago. You get to move on to another production and be Billy Flynn.”

  “Role of a lifetime, Frenchie. It can put me back on the A-list.”

  “You’ll be on the road a year. At least. People have been on the road for twenty years with some productions. You could be one of those people. Touring is in your blood.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there when my child is born.”

  “Dwayne, I’ve had to cancel all of my work. Not a lot of parts for a pregnant woman.”

  “Voice-over work? Can you move into that arena for now?”

  “I’m here for Broadway and films. If I don’t stick to that, next thing I know I’ll be a singing waitress.”

  “Studio singing?”

  “I burned that bridge a long time ago. No one cares about a one-hit wonder.”

  “You had a hit record. That’s more than most.”

  “No one remembers me.”

  She took my hand and held it. I felt her flesh, captured the softness.

  She said, “I don’t want to be pregnant and not married.”

  “You are pregnant and married.”

  “Not funny.”

  We walked down the long corridor, to the elevator, across the parking lot to her rental car.

  We stood outside of her car. The sunlight was almost gone.

  “I love you, Frenchie.”

  “Onstage. When you were in character. Now I see the real you. The great pretender.”

  “I love you offstage.”

  “I love you more. Always have. I don’t see the barriers you see. People called me a wigger. I ignored it, but you couldn’t. In this age, I was called a nigger lover by a theatergoer when they realized we were lovers in real life. The word got out. Guess it’s different for us off the road in the real world. On the road, we lived in a microcosm. We were safe from the rest of the world. This is hard. This is wrong. But I love you. I was your biggest fan, Dwayne Duquesne, had a crush on you when you were a child star, loved you before I met you. Loved you more when I met you. Too much. But I guess it’s not enough, not when a baby is involved, not in the kind of world we live in.”

  Tears flowed from her.

  “Maybe, sometime in the future, after the baby is born, if you’re not too busy being a superstar, maybe we can get together and get a cappuccino and talk about it, try to understand how we got here.”

  “Frenchie, you’re going to be a star too.”

  “Pregnancy impacts a woman’s career, not a man’s. There is no color line on misogyny.”

  I didn’t know what to say. There was no way to undo what had been done. People had been hurt.

  She said, “Now that you’re free of me, will you be going back to your girlfriend?”

  “I told her about us. It wasn’t easy to do. But I told her, so she left me.”

  “She’s why you won’t marry me.”

  “This has all but destroyed her, Frenchie.”

  “Now you care about her.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “She won’t. She’s knows you’re pregnant. It got ugly. She’s taking a cruise-ship show now. Will be working it for the next year, to get over me, to deal with this the only way she knows how.”

  “Wish I could do the same. My happy place is onstage. That stage has been taken away.”

  “Frenchie.”

  “She wants to get away from you. Same as it is with my husband with me. He hates me now.”

  “Frenchie. We made a mess of things. I didn’t want to cause you to get a divorce.”

  “I’ll get nothing. My marriage had a prenup. I cheated. I’m pregnant by another man, and you’ll be gone in more ways than one, so I have to go through this, through divorce and pregnancy and childbirth, alone.”

  “Frenchie. I have to work. The show. I have to pay for a baby now. I have to work my ass off.”

  “Chicago.”

  “You should understand this lifestyle more than anyone. It’s a hard lifestyle and you know that.”

  She shook her head and gave me the final hug, the last kiss.

  “I’ll call you from the road. Will call you from rehearsal.”

  “We used to talk every day. Now, when I need you every day, I get this. I get what you gave your girlfriend when you were cheating on her; I get what I gave my husband when I was being unfaithful to him.”

  A moment rested, and what she wanted to tell me bubbled to the surface.

  She said, “Full disclosure, my attorney will need to know how to get in contact with you.”

  “You will always know where I am. I’ll always take your calls.”

  “Fellow thespian; use a condom while you’re out there in Groupie City. Use one every time. Don’t end up like Bobby Brown and have baby mommas at every cardinal stop.”

  “I don’t want you to leave angry.”

  “I’m angry, but I guess I have to move on. We’re not getting married; I see that now. It’s fine. I’ll survive. I have to focus on the new star of the show. I have to be prepared for opening night. And every night after.”

  When our affair had started, from that first kiss, we had made love almost every night; that had kept us feeling high. This was a one-eighty. Lots of thespians on tour were daytime friends and became nighttime lovers. Our story was nothing new in the land of Broadway stories with Hollywood dreams, and neither was the hard outcome.

  I watched her drive away like we were at the end of that classic film. I expected to see movie credits creep by in front of my eyes, all while I heard Al Green in my head, singing, asking how to mend a broken heart.

  Two days before Frenchie had come, my now ex-girlfriend, another Broadway actress, was in my leased condo going off on me and collecting her things. My ex was beautiful, tall, willowy, and as dark as Eigengrau, the color a man saw when he opened his eyes in a pitch-black room. That was what everyone called her: Eigengrau.

  When I was forced to admit my infidelity, as Frenchie had been forced to admit hers, Eigengrau was upset with a fire that rivaled hell. She had shouted, “You just had to sleep with that bitch, didn’t you? I knew something was up. Bet you fucked her city after city. I came to your whack show, met the whack cast, and you and that whack bitch pretended nothing was between you. The whack bitch smiled in my goddamn face and sucked your dick when I left. You got the whack ho pregnant. A whack-ass white-ass slut. All y’all whack niggas just alike. Soon as you make some cabbage, you become fucking whack-ass Miss-Ann-chasing motherfuckers porque yo sé que tenía el alma of a whack-ass blanca. Motherfucking whack-ass sellout. I hope she takes all your goddamn money, your whack ass.”
r />   Eigengrau pointed two fingers at me like snakes and cursed me to poverty, and the Dominican queen did it in in a way that shook me to my soul. I’d been in love with one woman, then fell deeper in love with another. Then lost both. There was nothing that could justify my irresponsibility. Frenchie was married and pregnant by me. Eigengrau loved me and was devastated, now living with the knowledge that someone else had had something that should have been hers and only hers. I was sure that Frenchie’s husband felt no better and was having sleepless nights.

  Frenchie had come for closure, to close this wound before the new one burst open. I had needed resolution, and it became emotional, and we ended up in bed, used intimacy to salve our emotional pain. She had left distressed, crying like her life had fallen apart. Our lives were converted by the life growing in her belly. We were to have our affair, our fling; then she was to go back to her husband, and my girlfriend would have never been the wiser. But we fell in love, got careless. I was in so much fuckin’ pain. Felt like I was being pulled in a dozen directions.

  After New Jersey, I went back to California and told my brothers that I had a baby on the way by a girl I was in the show with, and not my Dominican girlfriend. I took them to Gladstones to break the news. They were happy for me. Then I drove down Slauson and went to the car wash, went to Tres Dwaynes to tell my daddy the same, that I had a baby on the way and he’d become a grandfather within a few months, Lord willing.

  He sat at his cluttered desk wearing an Adidas tracksuit. A young Brazilian girl came in, made him a cup of coffee, didn’t offer me one, then kissed him on his cheek and left us to have our conversation.

  He sipped his brew. “Nigga went and got a white girl pregnant.”

  “Look, I just wanted to let you know.”

  “What happened to the singing-and-acting pretty black girl with the ugly name?”

  “Eigengrau.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  It hurt my heart to say it, but I manned up, nodded. “We had to break up because of this.”

  “That’s the one you should’ve knocked up. You fucked up across the board.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “Don’t come in my office and start no shit.”

  “Wanted you to know you’d finally be a grandfather.”

  “Was that on my wish list?”

  “Should be.”

  “Won’t be my bill to pay.”

  “I know.”

  “Have to set precedence. Have to let you know that there is a line you can’t cross.”

  “I’m not here to ask for money.”

  “You in a trick bag. What you gonna do?”

  “She wants to get married. I love her, and I think I should marry her as soon as the baby comes.”

  “Where she from?”

  “Vermont. East Montpelier.”

  “Oh, that snow bunny real white. Only thing scarier than down-south white is up-north white.”

  “No whiter than other white folks.”

  “She rich?”

  “That’s not the point. We’re going to have a baby. We should get married for the kid.”

  “Don’t do that. You’re gonna lose enough paying child support for eighteen years. You gonna feel that mistake at the first of every month. Like I felt it. Nigga like you famous, so you can’t run and hide and make money under the table. She got you, and she got you good. Don’t marry her, not unless she rich. Trust me. Marriage don’t benefit a man. You’ll end up paying child support and alimony and in ten years lose everything you worked for.”

  “She’s not like that.”

  He laughed. “You gonna learn. You done lost your control. You should’ve kept your pecker in a condom and invested with me. I’m about to get those two properties across the street and expand my business, gonna open another set of businesses. You’ll be in the poorhouse. You’ll be down here begging for a job before you know it.”

  I’d been stressed and turned to him for advice, maybe had tried to bond, needed him because even though I was a grown man, I was afraid, and I was a son who needed his father, but he smirked and took joy in my misery.

  Tears ran from my eyes.

  I said, “God gave me a nigga for a daddy. The nigga of all niggas. Momma didn’t deserve you.”

  “Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my goddamn office.”

  “Nigga Daddy.”

  “You’ll need me before I need you.”

  “I don’t fucking need you. Never have.”

  That was the last time I saw him.

  I hated all he had said, but it stuck with me, fucked me. His words were a seed planted in my brain.

  I never should have gone to see Nigga Daddy. I should’ve just bought a wedding ring and run to Frenchie.

  The next time I saw Frenchie was in court. She was a different woman, a mother who’d come to do battle.

  After New Jersey she refused my calls, never replied to an e-mail or a text message. But she made sure I was there when Fela was born, to sign the birth certificate.

  She was no longer the girl I’d been in love with. I didn’t know her anymore.

  The nasty things she said about me, the lies in the court papers, cut into my heart. She made me out to be some kind of a monster. I don’t know how much of it came from her lawyer. A woman could say anything in court papers, and it didn’t have to be the truth. Men could assassinate a woman’s character in black and white, but I didn’t say anything, told my three-hundred-dollars-an-hour attorney to not respond to anything Frenchie had said. She made me sound untrustworthy, manipulative, worthless. She left out the fact that she was married when we met, only said I’d promised her marriage, then abandoned her while she was pregnant, and now she wanted to recoup every dime she had spent on health care during that nine-month period. Her husband had divorced her before the baby came, and that was a strategic move, done in a hurry because if he was married to her when the baby came, he could be legally responsible for my son. He was embarrassed enough being a cuckold and refused to end up a white man with a white wife and a black child he’d be forced to pay for. That was left out too. Frenchie had said career-damaging things out of spite, and it all became part of the public record. Frenchie thought I was richer than I was, and I thought the same about her. She had grown up in Vermont in a big house and skied every winter. White people were poor too, but she wasn’t one. She claimed zero income and zero savings. I knew that was bullshit. She had stopped working and had hidden her money, whatever she’d saved. She claimed any residuals from her one hit were insignificant by then. My attorney told me I’d have to pay an accountant to do forensics to prove she was lying, but I let it go, let her lie stand and kept it moving. There was no way I could do the same. All of my numbers were on the table, furnished by tax papers. I left there feeling like Emmanuel Eboué, the man who lost everything to his first wife, including his three kids, his mansion, his automobiles, and their first house in North London, when he was ordered by a UK court to surrender ownership of everything he had worked for. It wasn’t as bad, back then, when the order was handed down; it just felt that way. I’d wanted to kick over a car. Like Nigga Daddy had predicted, the new Frenchie would be in my pockets deeper than lint for the next eighteen years. I’d left court with so much animosity the world had become a shade of red. It was what it was. It became a paycheck relationship.

  Money changes things and people, and not always for the best, but I got an amazing son out of the deal. My million-dollar kid. I would’ve paid ten times that if I’d had it.

  I had been blessed with a son I loved more than anything. A son I worried about night and day.

  CHAPTER 14

  BRICK

  I HANDED DWAYNE back the ninety-page script. The table where the woman in the Tesla masquerading as an Uber for one had been had a set of new Nubians having a meeting there. Every chair in Hot and
Cool was taken.

  “Well, Brick?” Dwayne asked, finishing the last of the avocado toast. “How does that read to you?”

  “Most films are community theater. This is Stanislavski level. The ambiguous ending is brilliant but will be wasted on an audience used to being spoon-fed every aspect of a story line.”

  “Oh ye who hates like the best of the hating haters, line up the backhanded compliments.”

  “Change it to white characters, Dwayne. Give Hollywood what Hollywood wants. Hollywood will force something this good to be just another forgettable urban movie. And a movie with a white lead gets a bigger budget.”

  “Brick, I’m not changing my script to accommodate racism.”

  “Create some green, pay some bills, then come back with that cash in hand so you can be your own producer and stop begging people to finance your shit. Then you can focus on the black aesthetic.”

  “I could get this made for under four million. Could probably do it with two.”

  “Then do it. Round up the usual suspects and have them finance it.”

  “Can’t do shit on that level yet, not until I have control of my money. I have a script but need capital. Don’t want to end up a passenger on my own project. I wrote this screenplay as a vehicle for my big comeback.”

  We headed outside, moved into the sunshine and desert air.

  When he took a breath, I asked, “Seen Nephew?”

  “Frenchie has me blocked out. Can’t see my own son until court.”

  “Until then, what you going to be up to?”

  “Going to pitch this Stanislavski-level screenplay and see if I can get some auditions.”

  I tapped the manuscript. “How long you worked on this screenplay?”

  “Two years.”

  “It shows. Great job.” I took a sip of my chai latte. “So, what else is going on?”

  He said, “Plane ticket left me a little short on cash.”

  I opened my wallet, slid him two hundred bucks. Another loan that would never be repaid.

  He asked, “Can you loan me some frequent-flier miles? In case I get an audition in New York.”