Waiting to Exhale (4 page)

"Looking for somebody?" he asked.

"No. I thought I saw somebody I knew, but I didn't."

"You sure look beautiful tonight," he said, and I thought I would go right through the floor. I blushed and said the softest thank you known to mankind.

"Would you like to join me at my table?"

"Sure," I said, and followed him. There were a few more obvious couples and three empty chairs. We sat down, and I put my purse in my lap and let it lean up against my stomach, then I crossed my arms in front of it.

"So," he said. "How long have you been in Denver?"

"Three years."

"Do you like it here?"

"It's okay, but I'm moving to Phoenix at the end of February."

"Phoenix? Why Phoenix?"

"Well, I got a better job offer."

"What kind of work do you do?"

"For the last three years I've been doing PR for the gas company, and technically I'll be doing the same thing, except at a television station."

"Interesting," he said, while nodding his head in slow motion. "Not many of us out there, is it?"

"Not many of us in Denver, either, but that didn't stop us from coming, right?"

"You've got a point. Well, I hear Arizona's beautiful. You sure you can take that heat?"

"Let me put it this way. I'd rather be too hot than too cold any day."

He started laughing. I didn't think that what I'd just said was all that funny, but I started laughing too, like a fool. I was about to ask Lionel exactly what he did for a living, since he had mentioned something about starting some new business ventures, but I decided to wait. I hate asking men that question right off the bat, because I'm sure they're probably thinking that you're just trying to figure out how much money they make, not that it doesn't matter. The main reason I usually ask is because what a person does for a living tells me something about them.

"So did you make your New Year's resolution?" he asked.

"I did," I said, and took a sip of my wine.

"Are you gonna keep it?"

"I'm working on one of them right now," I said.

"Are you giving up something?"

"It depends."

Then both of us started laughing.

"How about you?" I asked. "Did you make one?"

"I make affirmations," he said. "Every single day."

Just then, Billy Ocean's "Caribbean Queen" came on. I used to love to dance to that song.

"Would you like to dance?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, and got up. We squeezed our way onto the dance floor, and for forty-one, this man could still dance. His movements were strong and smooth, fluid, and I kept looking at those athletic hips and thighs, imagining how hairy and tight they probably were, and what a dream he must be in bed. He smiled at me through three more songs and looked me in the eye until I thought mine were just about ready to cross. When I heard "If Only for One Night" by Luther Vandross come on, I was just about to head off the floor, when he reached for my hand and said, "One more. Please?"

Thank you, Jesus, I thought. Lionel put his arms around me and held me close, so close that to keep from getting lipstick on his shirt I had to turn my head to the side, and what else could I do but rest it on his chest, which was firm and hot? His hands circled my back, and I heard him say, "You sure feel good."

I lifted my head and looked up at him. "You don't feel too bad yourself," I said. He sort of laughed and pressed my head back down. That's when I went ahead and closed my eyes, feeling the run run down my leg, but I didn't care. I exhaled and pretended that this man was mine. That he was everything I'd ever dreamed of, that he was the one I'd been waiting for all my life.

When the record ended, Lionel walked and I floated back to his table, but now the other empty seat was filled with the woman who had given me the compliment in the bathroom.

"Savannah, I want you to meet a good friend of mine. Denise, Savannah."

She smiled at me and said, "We've sort of already met."

"Hello again," I said, and didn't know if I should sit down or not. But I sat down.

Lionel looked a little bewildered. Then Denise scooted her chair as close to his as it would go, put her arms around him, and said, "You haven't danced with me all night, Lionel." She got up and stood directly in front of him and took him by the hands. He got up and looked at me as if he was apologizing. I gave him what I thought to be an understanding look and tried not to stare at them as they headed out to the dance floor. I couldn't even hear the song, because I was hypnotized watching him hold her the way he had just held me. Before I knew it, I had reached into my purse and lit a cigarette and forced myself to look in the other direction, because I couldn't stand this. When I went to uncross my legs and the run zipped down to my ankle and I felt my heel pop through the hole and stick to the lining of my shoe, that was my cue. I put out my cigarette, picked my purse up off the table, and headed for the coatroom. If I was lucky, I could still catch Dick Clark.

Chapter
2

Right after Bernadine's husband told her he was leaving her for a white girl, she stood in the kitchen doorway, snatched the eighteen hot rollers out of her hair, and threw every last one of them at him. A few loose curls fell over her eyes and into her mouth, so she pulled them behind her ears.

'Tm sorry," John said, and finished the last of his coffee. "You can have the house, but I want the condo."

"House?" she said. "Condo?" Bernadine tried to look directly into John's eyes in order to figure out if this was some kind of joke, bu
t f
or some reason her vision was blurred. He was out of focus, and she couldn't tell if the expression on his face was fear or relief. They had both known for over a year that everything between them was wrong. There weren't any more excuses, apologies, or explanations for his not coming home. Intimacy was out of the question. Neither desired the other. And when they did sleep in the same bed, their backs barely brushed.

Rows of perspiration had trickled down the nape of her neck into her hair and soaked through the top of her nightgown. A lone stream was making its way down her spine. But Bernadine didn't care. She squinted, hoping to get a closer look at John. It was indifference she saw all over his face. His shoulders were so erect when he popped a Pop-Tart into the toaster that she knew he didn't really give a damn how she felt or what her reaction to his announcement would be. She couldn't decide what else his face carried. Now she was trying to remember just how he'd said it. It seemed as if he'd told her with the same tone he used when he'd say, "I'm going to the store, do you want something?" or, "Is anything good on HBO tonight?" But then again, Bernadine really couldn't be sure, because she felt stoned, as if she'd smoked a good joint. But she hadn't. Still, something was pushing her shoulders down, while what felt like helium was escaping inside her head. She couldn't move. She was sinking and floating. Felt heavy, then light. And this scared her.

She tried to get her feet to move, to turn and walk down the hallway, but they were paralyzed. She tried to raise her arms, to dismiss this whole thing, but now they were frozen too. She couldn't even move her fingers. And then, for no apparent reason, Bernadine remembered feeling helpless like this before. It was the time she had almost drowned.

She had swum out into the middle of the lake to a raft with a girlfriend who was six months pregnant. Being a pack-a-day smoker and not a very good swimmer, Bernadine was so out of breath she was panting by the time she climbed up and collapsed on the wooden slats. The sun was turning orange behind her closed lids, and she was just getting comfortable, when she heard a voice say, "Ready?" She opened her eyes and saw a big belly hovering over her. "Race you back," her girlfriend said, and dove back in. Bernadine sat up slowly and tumbled over the side of the raft. She cut through the water without grace. She could see her girlfriend up ahead. For five or six yards, Bernadine did the crawl stroke, but when she went to pull her right arm up over her shoulder, she had no strength. She tried treading water but had no strength to do that, either. She tried twisting over on her back to float, but the thought itself tired her even more, and finally she gave in and let her body sink. With her eyes open, Bernadine dropped down, watching the golden water swirl in front of her, thousands of bubbles engulfing her, and she felt as if she was flying. She went ahead and surrendered, gave in to what felt like complete grace, as close to peace as she had ever come, when suddenly it occurred to her that she was in fact drowning. She panicked. Took water into her lungs and was coughing, when her feet touched the bottom of the lake. Bernadine pushed down hard, forcing her body to jet up through what seemed like miles of water, where she was surprised to learn that she could now stand. The water barely covered her shoulders. She stood there for a few minutes, long enough to catch her breath, then started walking to shore, the water pulling at her breasts, thighs, and calves. She didn't bother telling her friend, who was waiting on the blanket, that she had almost given herself permission to die.

Now she looked over at her husband, thinking she had wanted to be rid of him, had been trying to conjure up the courage, the nerve, the guts, to tell him to leave, but she didn't have that much courage yet. All she wanted to do was repossess her life. To feel that sense of relief when the single most contributing factor to her uttermost source of misery was gone. But he beat her to the punch. Not only was he leaving her. Not only was he leaving her for another woman. He was leaving her for a white woman. Bernadine hadn't expected this kind of betrayal, this kind of insult. John knew this would hurt me,-she thought, as she tried to will the tears rolling down her cheeks to evaporate. And he'd chosen the safest route. A white woman was about the only one who'd probably tolerate his ass. Make him king. She's probably flattered to death that such a handsome, successful black man would want to take care of her, make her not need anything except him. She'll worship him, Bernadine thought, just like I did in the beginning, until the spell wore off. Hell, / was his white girl for eleven years.

It's sad, she thought, as she stared at specks of what had to be
Kathleen's dandruff on the lapels of John's black suit, that when you finally come to understand the man you love, that's when you realize you don't love him anymore. As a matter of fact, she couldn't stand John. It had taken years for her to see that he was nothing but an event junkie: marriage had been an event; the business had been an event; and the kids had been events too.

And just as he'd promised, he had conquered the American dream: built a dream house in a picture-perfect neighborhood and filled it with picture-perfect furnishings. Since they lived in the desert, John wanted the yard to look like one, so he spent a fortune on mature palm trees, ten-foot saguaro and ocotillo and mesquite trees and almost every other form of desert vegetation the landscaper had shown him. Neither of them played tennis, but there was room for a court, so he put one in. And a lap pool, which he'd been in maybe three or four times. Since the time she had almost drowned, Bernadine was scared of water and had never done more than put her feet on the steps in the shallow end. And John just had to have what Bernadine thought of as Hollywood cars: he had bought her a BMW, a Porsche for himself, and the Cherokee for hauling the kids around.

Only private school was good enough for the Harris children, even though they lived in one of the best school districts in Scottsdale. And there were only four black kids in the whole school, but that's the way John wanted it. "They'll get a solid education and be exposed to all the right things. And we won't have to worry about them being badly influenced," he'd said.

Over the last five or six years, it became apparent to her that John was doing nothing but imitating the white folks he'd seen on TV or read about in Money magazine. At first he thought he was J
. R
. Ewing, then a black clone of Donald Trump, and finally he settled on Cliff Huxtable. And he was good at it. He loved to entertain. At least once a month they had a dull dinner party, where Bernadine, who had long since transformed herself into Martha Stewart, would spend hours preparing exotic meals she had memorized from countless gourmet cookbooks. He had a vintage wine collection stored in the underground bin that he'd had specially built. But John didn't drink.

Of course John was also a shrewd businessman. He believed that money should make money. For that reason, he'd always handle
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heir financial affairs. They had liquid accounts with Lehman Brothers and Prudential Bache; CDs and IRAs and zero coupon bonds, and savings bonds for the kids. What Bernadine didn't know about were the two hundred acres of farmland John owned in California or that he was a fifty percent owner of a vineyard in Arizona. She had no idea how much stock he owned, because she wasn't allowed to open his mail. She didn't have a clue about the three-week time share in Lake Tahoe or the apartment building he'd just bought in Scottsdale. If Bernadine hadn't trusted John all these years, she'd have known about his Subway franchise and the brownstone he owned back in Philadelphia, both of which were in his mother's name. If she hadn't trusted him all these years, never doing anything more than signing their joint tax returns-because what was the point; they always had to pay up the ass anyway-she would've known about all these enterprises. If she hadn't trusted John all these years, she would've known that he'd just sold his half of the software company to his partner for a mere three hundred thousand dollars, even though its market value was well over three million. But John's partner was also his friend, and although John was now just a salaried employee, his partner had agreed to "take care of him" down the road, once Bernadine was out of the picture. However, John still had use of an unlimited expense account. If Bernadine hadn't trusted him all these years, she'd have known that all of this had been carefully planned and calculated. Now-on paper-John's income would drop from four hundred thousand dollars a year to eighty. But Bernadine had trusted him all these years, and she had no idea how much it was going to cost her.