Playing Hard To Get Read online

  “How ironic you should bring up a picture,” Venus said, sliding a big brown envelope onto the table.

  “What’s this, crazy?” Tasha picked it up and opened it. “Some silly pictures of the woman Lionel was…” Tasha’s tongue stopped flapping, but her mind was whirling. Between her thumb and index finger was a hazy, black and white eight-by-ten of her snuggled in Lynn’s arms in a couch at the top of the Roosevelt Hotel.

  Not knowing what else to do, she slid the picture back into the envelope and looked at Venus, her eyes tunneling into her frenemy with silver-coated bullets.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I knew Lynn would pull some shit like this.”

  “What do you want?”

  “She can’t just keep it simple—act right.”

  “Is it money?”

  “Always has to test me.”

  “Is it Lionel?”

  “Do you even love her?”

  “What?” Tasha asked, sure she hadn’t heard Venus. “What kind of dumb-ass question is that? I’m not a freaking lesbo. One of those hawks gave me ex and I was tripping.”

  “You expect me to believe that? I have proof right here.” Venus’s voice was strong and scarred like a woman when her heart is being broken.

  “I’m sorry, Venus…. I’m thinking right now that maybe I’m living on another planet or realm than you, because I don’t know what the hell is going on. You just gave me some crazy picture that some crazy person must’ve taken while stalking me. I don’t have to stand for this. I should just call my attorney—maybe even David Letterman’s attorney. This is extortion!” Tasha stood up and pulled out her cell phone.

  “I didn’t say anything about money,” Venus said quickly. “Just sit down…sit down.”

  Tasha stood for a moment and looked at her.

  “I can explain,” Venus added. “I can explain everything.”

  Tasha sat and pushed the envelope back to Venus.

  “Get to talking.”

  Venus exhaled and looked up at the cracked ceiling tiles. What she was about to say was the biggest secret of her big New York life—only her husbands and her girlfriends (not friends who are girls) knew.

  “She’s my lover.”

  

  Kyle smelled it when he walked into the house. It was dinnertime and the scent was burnt pork. Cheap pork. Maybe a canned ham. And he didn’t know what that really meant. But he didn’t really care either. He was tired. A good man beaten down by an all-around bad situation. And he was told it would be this way by so many people he trusted before he married Troy, but always being his own man, he’d felt he had to trust himself first. The woman who burned all the food in his house also had his heart ablaze and he loved that fire. Fever never felt so good as it did with her and it didn’t matter how many easy, great, good, and spiritually equally yoked women who would promise him a life of good times all and everyone were pushed before him. They were fire-retardant to him and he just preferred and longed to sit in the flames with his first love.

  But the terror of time quells the power of even the most wicked forest fire. And terrible times were all around. Worse than the bad that was promised. Though Kyle wasn’t ever worried about his heart smoldering, now his mind and soul were chucked into the fire too. While he’d thought Troy was making an effort to get along with Myrtle, now rumors of fighting were everywhere in the church. Every word of gossip and contention, every threat launched against his wife, made him feel like he was fading to ashes. He didn’t know what to believe. He didn’t know what cards were being played. And that was like a shackle on his neck. The church was God’s house, but he’d given many bricks to build it, formed them with the broken rocks of his soul, and, save his heart, Kyle had put everything he ever had inside into glorifying that mission. First Baptist wasn’t going anywhere, but the idea of fracturing even one of the bricks he’d given to God for the glory of that formidable house made him blame himself for playing with fire and then blame his wife for spreading the blaze.

  “Is that you?” Troy called, hearing footsteps pad through the garage door and up the stairs toward the top floor of the brownstone.

  Kyle didn’t answer. He went into the bedroom, set his bag on the floor, and sat on the bed. Now was the time he was supposed to go into the kitchen to find out why his wife was burning food, what was wrong with her, and patch it all up so he could convince her to order takeout. But he didn’t move. He said he was tired. But really it was because he was the one in need of patching.

  “Kyle?” The call was coming from the bottom of the steps.

  He didn’t say anything. He looked up toward the ceiling, but even as a little boy he could see through ceilings and right into the center of his praying mind.

  “Jesus,” his body called without a known word, “I need you right now. I need a sign. You never led me astray. You never, ever left me. Just whisper in my ear so I know you’re here. So I know I’m on the right path.”

  “Chinese food.” It was a whisper in his ear. But it was too soft, too light to be that of the God he’d heard before. Awakened from his prayer, Kyle jumped and turned to the whisper.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! I scared you?” Troy said. “I thought you saw me walk in. You were looking at the ceiling.”

  “What?”

  “Chinese food. I was telling you I ordered Chinese food,” she said, “from Mr. Stevie Foo. Your favo.”

  “But the food…I smell the food,” Kyle said, looking at his wife like she was a Martian, an extraterrestrial, an angel or saint.

  “Yeah, it was a ham. A canned ham I tried to jazz up with cumin,” Troy said matter-of-factly. “Did you know spices burn in the oven?”

  Kyle couldn’t do anything but nod.

  “Anyway, there was no sense saving the thing, so I just ordered your favo,” Troy said. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to talk.”

  

  Venus Jenkins-Hottentoten-Hoverslagen-Jackson, a black woman with the most ridiculous last name of any woman in the city on account of two failed marriages to Swedish bankers and one mediocre yet standing marriage to a Knicks starting player, was coming out of the closet. A great big old, Queen Elizabeth–Mariah Carey–sized closet. A 5,000-square-foot closet.

  “I can’t believe Lynn’s your lover,” Tasha said after she’d finally convinced Venus that she had no desire to be with Lynn and hadn’t done anything at the hotel but pass out in an accidental drug-induced kirk at the party.

  “We’ve been together for five years,” Venus said sadly.

  “But you’re married,” Tasha said. “And you’re apparently robbing the cradle. That girl’s only twenty-four. What, were you dating her when she was in college?”

  “Yes,” Venus admitted. “I paid for her to go to college—well, my ex-husband did.”

  “Oh, my God, I was joking.” Tasha fanned herself. “This is freaky. This is too freaky for me. And I’m a freak. But not this kind of freak.”

  Venus crumbled onto the table and started to cry.

  “Oh, no.” Tasha looked around at the completely strange faces around her. Luckily she didn’t notice any of them. “Girl, if you don’t get up off of the table…You know they have roaches here!”

  Venus sat up but she was still crying and sniffling.

  “Oh, why do I know I’m going to regret this?” Tasha said. “What happened?”

  “I love her. I really do,” Venus cried. “She doesn’t understand that. She’s always sleeping with other women and out in the street. She doesn’t even respect me. I saw her dancing with those football players at the party. And when I saw her talking to you, I knew she was just trying to sleep with you.”

  “That tag-tucking31 hussy!” Tasha said and Venus began to wail again.

  “Oh, stop it!” Tasha said. “How are you over here complaining about this girl cheating on you when you’re clearly married and cheating on your husband?”

  “We’re both with her.”

  “
With her?”

  “Any man I marry knows Lynn is a part of my life and theirs too,” Venus explained.

  “A part like what? Y’all get together…like, everybody…and get the freak on?”

  “It’s more than that,” Venus said tearfully. “She’s my angel.”

  “Well, she wasn’t an angel the other night. She was a pill-popping devil girl.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that!”

  “Don’t yell at me,” Tasha said. “You’re the one all calling me out here to confront me about your little cheating…I don’t know what to call her.”

  Hearing this, Venus began to cry again.

  “Look, Venus”—Tasha exhaled—“you’re a good…I mean decent…I mean child of God. And you and your little—”

  Venus looked at Tasha.

  “—Lynn are probably giving every lesbian in the world a bad name.”

  “We’re not lesbians. We’re polyamorous.”

  “I don’t know what that means and I don’t want to know.” Tasha threw her hands up. “But what I was saying was that you two probably need to sit down and have a conversation and decide what you’re going to do. Which probably needs to be breaking up.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Venus, you’re having a girl who’s ten years younger than you followed around the city by a detective. Yes, it’s time for you to break up—for all three of you to break up…and you might want to break up with Bobby too.”

  “When a man loves a woman… / She can do no wrong / Turn his back on his best friend / If he put her down.”

  The lyrics of this old Percy Sledge song were alive and kicking in a certain brownstone of a Harlem pastor and his wife. While anyone listening to their story might want Troy’s telling of her troubles to her husband to be a little more difficult, a little more strenuous, that just wasn’t Kyle’s way with this woman. He knew how and what she was—probably better than she did—and as she went over everything she’d been thinking, pulled every pair of shoes from her closet, and cried every tear she had in her body, he just kept thinking that finally she was figuring out what he’d been trying to tell her all along. That the only person she could be, that she needed to be, was herself. And the more she tried to be someone else, the more dangerous their life together would be.

  Yes, he was upset with her for the thing with the money and knew that he would need to smooth this over with many people for many months, and he was sad that there was an obvious lack of communication between him and his bride, but a gift he’d been born with, a gift he’d used to become one of the best preachers, was the gift of knowing a liar from a lost person and a lost person from someone wanting to be found. He worked with these kinds of people day and night and sometimes it meant the difference between saving a soul and saving time. And while in his wife, when he’d left her that very morning, he’d seen the eyes of someone who was lost, sitting beside her on the bed, with shoes and scarves and dresses with tags still attached, he saw the eyes of the latter. Troy was being found.

  “I’m not perfect either,” Kyle said, comforting Troy. “And I don’t ever want to be that. To pretend to be that. It’s dangerous. Yes, you’ve let me down. But the only way Myrtle could even believe that she could come between us is if she thought I might let you down. If she saw a crack she could dig at. If she thought I wouldn’t fight for you. That I wouldn’t pick you up.”

  “Would you?” Troy asked her groom, still crying. “Could you still fight for me even after I’ve done such stupid things?”

  “You know that, baby,” Kyle said seriously. “You don’t even have to ask.”

  The doorbell the two had installed themselves rang and bells chimed throughout the house.

  “You want to answer that?” Troy asked Kyle.

  “Let’s answer her together.”

  Kyle and Troy walked to the front door, the shorter, softer one behind the taller, masculine one, but then they opened the door and when Myrtle looked inside, they were side by side, his arm over her shoulder.

  “I thought maybe you two weren’t home,” Myrtle said, looking at Troy, confused. She tapped the envelope she was holding and looked up at the pastor.

  “Oh, we were just about to sit down to some Chinese food my wife ordered,” Kyle said.

  “Oh.” Myrtle tried to look unmoved. “Well, Troy agreed that I could come by so we could tell you something. Right, Troy?” She looked at Troy.

  “Now, I sure did agree to that.” Troy nodded matter-of-factly.

  “So, maybe I should come in so we can get started.” She tapped the folder again before trying to push her way into the door.

  “Hold up,” Kyle said, standing firm and still holding on to his woman. “Baby, do you still agree to needing Myrtle here for our meeting?”

  Troy looked from Kyle to Myrtle.

  “Nahhhh,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, then, I guess we’re done here. See you at church!”

  Kyle tried to pull back from the door, but Myrtle stuck her foot inside.

  “So you think you’re slick, huh, Troy?” she said. “You think this is going to stop me? This little show? Well, you, no, the both of you, just wait until I go before the board of trustees.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Kyle said unaffectedly. “I already called a meeting with the trustees to discuss my wife’s charges on the credit card. So…basically…you can shove it!” Troy pushed Myrtle’s foot out of the way of the door and Kyle closed it a little more before saying, “But we will see you at church. First Baptist is a place for saints and sinners.”

  When the door was closed and Myrtle was left outside looking bad and sad, Kyle and Troy stayed together, laughing as they headed toward the kitchen.

  “Shove it?” Troy joked. “I can’t believe you said that!”

  “I’m not exactly a cursing man. I don’t have a whole list of foul words at my disposal,” Kyle said.

  “And what about that thing about having called the board of trustees? You couldn’t have done that. I just told you about the credit card.”

  Kyle smiled.

  “You lied, Pastor?” Troy said, shocked. “I can’t believe it!”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” Kyle said. “I’m going to call them right now. And you, my darling, can go and heat up my Chinese dinner. A brother is starving.”

  

  Working late, overtime, aftertime, and/or extra hours was never an issue for Tamia. Even in elementary school, she’d ask her teacher if she could stay behind in the classroom and study or complete her project after the other students jumped up and hustled out of the classroom like fire, death, and destruction were imminent if they didn’t make it to their school buses in the next three seconds.

  While any person who knew her would easily affix this desire to Tamia’s commitment, it was more than that. Working after-hours, working late, gave Tamia more than an edge over the competition. It also gave her vision, understanding, a chance to meditate with her work and consider what her next move might be. When all the other workers had gone home, she could sit in her space and listen to the hum of the vacuum cleaners of the cleaning crew, look out over the empty cubicles, full of ideas, see the expansive hallways and staircases, and smell the leftover bagels in the break room and see her world in a new way.

  Most days, this new way meant something good. But these days in Tamia’s life weren’t like most. And just a few atypical days after her distressing meeting with Baba and Malik, as Tamia sat in her office putting the final touches on Malik’s case, working late was turning into something bad, something dark, something finite.

  Simply put, though the vacuum cleaner was humming, though she could see the papers and reminders and ideas and contracts feathered out over Naudia’s desk like a deck of Vegas cards, though the hallways and staircases were empty, and though there was the smell of bagels—no, muffins—in the break room, something was different. Something had changed. Whatever fire, whatever connection Tamia had
that connected her to her work, to her workplace, seemed less glittery, less inviting than it had just months before. She didn’t believe. After accepting and planning her idea to lose Malik’s case, she thought about how many times this must’ve happened to other people, at other times, within the very walls she was walking. And if that was true, if the law she’d dedicated her life to came down to one man’s mortal decision—if a client was being honest, a lawyer committed, a judge, jury, and justice system free of the burdens of life—then what was she doing? It was all chance. One bad law written by one racist person could put a person away for life. This wasn’t justice. This was cloak and dagger. A magic show. A pipe dream sold from the powerful to the powerless. What place could she possibly have in all of it?

  “Working late?” a voice called from Tamia’s office door. She looked up to see Charleston standing there in a track suit.

  She smiled cordially.

  “Yes. Going to court in the morning.”

  Charleston didn’t ask. He came in and sat down.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I figured I’d be able to catch you. Since I can’t seem to get you any other way.”

  Tamia didn’t say anything. Charleston’s words only presented opportunities for lies or excuses.

  “It’s been over a month.” He said, taking another jab. “Two—going on. I haven’t seen my girlfriend. We work in the same building. You’d think that’s impossible.” Yeah, it was pretty impossible for most people, but Charleston had always been good at keeping himself busy. He only thought of Tamia when he wondered what might be keeping her busy.

  “Well, I guess you should know,” Tamia said. “Your bank account should be about $30K richer. I got the notice from the bank. Thanks for letting me know you weren’t paying anymore.”

  “All you had to do was call me and I would’ve given you the money.”

  “Charleston, I didn’t ask you to pay my mortgage. You offered. I was moving somewhere else and you insisted I move into that building. And you insisted that you pay the mortgage.”

  “And you didn’t want it?” Charleston snickered evilly. “Before you became…this”—he pointed at her clothes, her hair—“you were all about that shit. High class. Everything a 10. You wanted what you deserved. You wanted me to give it to you. And now I’m the bad guy because I don’t want to pay for your dream. What is your dream now anyway?”