Choose Me (29 page)

“You think maybe we should just be …?”

He groaned and leaned his head back on the sofa. “Please don’t say ‘friends.’”

It took everything within me not to run my hand over his hair, to reach down and kiss his lips one last time. He was wearing
an army shirt, buttoned down to reveal his smooth chest and his scar, ripped jeans, and Doc Martens boots. He might as well
have been wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.

“I wasn’t going to say ‘friends,’” I said. “I was going to say ‘
amistades.
’”

“What’s that?”

“‘Friends’ in Spanish.”

“You’re a regular stand-up comedienne, you know that?” He reached for me and struggled to get to his feet at the same time,
while I tried to evade his grasp. We landed on the sofa, side-by-side awkwardly, laughing, our faces just inches apart. He
wrapped his arms around me but I kept my arms at my sides, my eyes lowered.

“Eva, Eva,” he whispered with disappointment, as if I were going to regret my decision, like it was all my fault.
Did he have to keep saying my name?
“How do you say ‘look at me’ in Spanish?”

“Let me up first,” I commanded, attempting to free myself.

He held me down. “No. Tell me first.”

“Mirame.”

“Mee-rah-may?”

“MEE-rrrah-meh, accent on the first syllable, roll the ‘r.’ Mirame—”

Even before he dived in for another kiss, I anticipated him, so I turned my head just in time, glancing down at my watch.
“I really got to go. I told Maya I’d drop by before I went home.”

He sighed with resignation and finally got up, helping me to my feet. “This late?”

“She’s still bummed out about Luciano. I told you, it’s harder for women to move on.” I walked toward the door, reaching for
my calf-length leather on the coat rack.

“You don’t look like you’re having any difficulties,” he said, helping me with my coat, “moving on.”

“Well, I’m not like other women,” I joked.

“No,” he said, leaning against the door as I put my Kangol on my head, “No, you’re not.” He adjusted my cap so that it was
backward. “I like it better that way.”

As I dug around my pockets for my car keys, he reached his hands into my pockets and pulled me toward him. “Do you really
want to be
‘amistades’?
”

His breathless voice in my ear gave me what my mother used to call
calor frio,
roughly translated, a hot-cold feeling from my head to my feet. I shuddered.
Stay strong,
the voice within me encouraged.

“Adam, don’t make this harder than it already is. Please,” I said, trying to make my voice kind, but instead it sounded like
it belonged to a cold-hearted witch, a woman who didn’t need anything from anybody—Evileen.

“Okay, Eva, my frrriend,” he said in an exaggerated Spanish accent, like Al Pacino whenever he tried to play a Hispanic. “Goo’
nigh’, my frrriend.” He took his hands out of my pockets and unlocked the door.

“Oooh, that’s so wrong,” I said, pretending to be offended.

He walked me to the elevator, leaving the front door open so he could keep an ear out for his niece and nephew. As we waited,
we talked about ordinary things like the changing weather, the upcoming holidays—things strangers talked about when they were
stuck waiting in line. When I got on the elevator, he reached in and kissed me lightly and quickly on the cheek, pulling back
before I had a chance to kiss him back.

At Maya’s house, Alex answered the door just as I knocked. He had a dismal look on his face and it was apparent he couldn’t
wait to escape.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with your sister,” he said, brushing past me as I walked in. “But I’m tired of trying to figure
her out.”

“Where is she?”

“In her so-called sanctuary downstairs. She won’t talk to me. I’m going to pick up the boys from my brother’s. I’ll see you
later.”

I heard Sade’s “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” blasting before I reached the basement stairs. During her post-depression days,
when she was trying to forgive Alex, Maya had hopped from one home-improvement project to another—tearing down walls, sandpapering,
and renovating the entire house in an effort to bury her pain, hurting Alex where it mattered: his wallet.

I found Maya in the refurbished basement, her last and most expensive project, which she had to fight Alex for, tooth and
nail. I had envied the stone and brick walls, mosaic floors, and track lighting at its inauguration at their twenty-first
anniversary party. But I could see Maya was discovering that no amount of renovation was going to compensate for her pain.
Obscured amid the pillows on the sofa, Maya didn’t even acknowledge my presence. In her hands, she held a book,
The Power of a Praying Wife,
but she wasn’t reading. I turned down the music and sat next to her. As I recounted my evening with Adam, her eyes remained
unfocused, as if she hadn’t heard a word I said. Ordinarily, I would’ve been angry that she wasn’t paying attention to my
plight, but at that moment her mood seemed more important than my relationship with Adam.

“I can’t stop thinking about him,” she said, when I stopped talking, though I hadn’t told her everything—how Adam had mimicked
Pacino, how he had kissed me hastily as we departed.

“Forget about him. He’s not thinking about you,” I told her firmly. “He’s with his
wife.
You should be with your husband.” I hated that someone like Luciano had such a hold on my sister, and even worse that she
was allowing it.

“I don’t want to be with my husband,” she retorted. “He bores me. And I don’t want to be with Luciano. But I can’t stop thinking
about him.”

“Maya,” I began, scooting closer to her, wondering what I could say that would make a difference. I had never been with a
man long enough to be bored. Six years of marriage did not qualify me to advise her. What was it people called the turning
point of marriage? The seven-year itch. At thirty-nine, she had been married more than half her life. I waited for some words
of wisdom to come to me, to make her feel better, to offer her some hope.

“Maya, I don’t know what it’s like to be married for twenty-one years,” I told her, as I snuggled against her just like when
we were little and one of us had been hurt. “But I think God is trying to tell you something. He’s taken Luciano out of the
way. He’s giving you a chance to make things right. You always say you envy me for being celibate. But I envy you for staying
married this long.”

She didn’t say anything for a while and we listened to Sade’s words in silence.
If love was stronger than pride, why was the world so messed up?
I silently asked Sade. When Alex first cheated, Maya first wanted to die, then kill him. After she got saved and forgave
him, she said no one would ever make her feel that way. She made me promise that if she ever mentioned suicide or murder again,
I was to smack her until she came to her senses. I waited for her to speak so I could gauge her state of mind.

“So?” she said, turning to me. “ ‘
Amistades’
Think you’ll be able to handle that?”

ANY MAN WHO
has ever tried to become, or remain, friends with a woman he has feelings for, or has been intimate with, knows
what an impossible feat it can be. I had never had a woman as a friend and I didn’t know if I could now. It just didn’t seem
to be the nature of things.

But for the next several weeks, Eva kept me in check, determined to prove that being friends with a woman was the most natural
thing. She made sure we were never alone, like she was following some protocol for “Celibate Living,” or she had attended
some motivational relationship seminar. We did platonic, safe things, like couple-dating with Maya and her husband, Alex,
who were trying to work things out, or with Simone and Zephyr, or Ian, depending on which one she was in the mood for. We
went to an Afro-Caribbean sculpture exhibit, a debate about affirmative action at her university, and musical performances
and plays. Every week, Eva invited me to church and/or Bible study, but I begged off each time. I didn’t lie or make up excuses,
just reminded her that church was not my thing. She didn’t persist or make me feel guilty, which made me even more suspicious.
Once, she teased me by saying that God still loved me. I replied that that line hadn’t worked for my mother so far.

Then the Thanksgiving holiday rolled around and she invited me to her house for dinner. She didn’t specifically say it was
to meet her family, but I knew her sons would be there; maybe even her father. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to meet them,
so I deliberated the request carefully, because the implications of such a move meant I had to acknowledge that our relationship
was moving toward something serious, way beyond friendship. My feelings for Eva were intensifying, but it was hard to make
sense of them all since being in an abstinent relationship was something foreign to me. Things were moving too fast in one
direction, but not enough in the other. On the one hand, I was willing to do whatever it took to be a part of her life, but
on the other, it was becoming more of a challenge than I thought. But one thing was becoming more apparent, I did not want
to be
amistades.
And I was pretty sure Eva didn’t either. Why I was so drawn to her and unable to walk away, was a mystery I had been trying
to figure out from the start.

Then something my mother said once came back to me.
Men always want what they can’t have.

Jade was seventeen, apparently still a virgin, and in love with an eighteen-year-old piece of crap who, whenever he picked
up Jade, according to my mother, walked around the house like he was in the market to buy it. I had long since moved out,
but Mama asked me to come by and have a talk with him since my father wasn’t around to do it. As Jade was getting ready in
her bedroom, I overheard my mother tell her, “You can let him kiss you, you can hold hands, and you can flirt with him, but
don’t tease him. Just let him get an idea of how good it could be, but under no circumstances, sleep with him. Once you sleep
with him, he’s got you. Men always want what they can’t have.”

“But what if he breaks up with me?” Jade cried. “What if he finds some other girl that’ll give him what I won’t?”

“Then he’s not worth it. He doesn’t deserve you.”

I walked into the living room and sat down real close to the skinny, arrogant lowlife whose short-term goal was to get into
my sister’s underpants. Without even looking at him, I whispered, “You know, if you mess with my sister, I’m going to have
to kill you.” At twenty-three, I was a menacing sight with my matted corn-rowed braids and low-budget disheveled clothing
style. I looked more like a disturbed street person than a gangbanger, capable of cracking his head in half just for the heck
of it.

Years later, Jade confessed that he had been her first. So much for my mother’s advice and my paternal tendencies.

Still, there was some element of truth in my mother’s statement that men wanted what they couldn’t have. The chase, the courtship,
was what made it all worth it. Who wanted a meal out of a box, quick and easy, when a home-cooked feast tasted much better?
But usually, the reward came at some point. With Eva, I wasn’t sure there was ever going to be a reward. And while it was
a little crass to think of sex as a “reward,” there had to be something more than what we were doing, some middle ground between
kissing and marriage.

Secretly, I was smoking again in an attempt to gain some control in one aspect of my life. Afterward, I would go to great
lengths to disguise the smell on my breath and my clothes if I knew I was going to see Eva. The last time I bought a pack
of cigarettes at the drugstore, I picked up some condoms, something I hadn’t purchased in months. It was an impulse buy since
I didn’t have a definite time frame about moving our relationship to that level. Although I believed Eva when she said she
hadn’t been with anyone for five years, I wasn’t going to take any chances. Whether that uncertainty implied that there was
still a question of trust was beside the point. One never knows what was lying dormant within, on either of our parts.

“I don’t know if I’ll have time to stop by,” I initially told Eva over the phone when she called me with the invitation. I
was at work, smoking my third cigarette of the day. On my schedule, I had one more client, three home visits to go, and two
juvey visits at Merriville, the downstate juvenile detention center—a four-hour round trip. I was in no mood for haggling.

As always, since Mama’s journey to veggie-land, we were expected at Jade’s for Thanksgiving. “My sister lives in Carol Stream,
and she’s a slow cook. Her dinners drag on forever,” I continued, aware that my explanation sounded over-compensatory. It
was the truth; my sister was a meticulous cook, and she especially wanted everything to be perfect with Akil and his parents
coming.

“Well, we don’t really celebrate the customary American Thanksgiving but ‘a day of thanks,’” Eva explained. “We don’t watch
football games or do any of the so-called traditional things. My boys are home and they’re cooking this year.”

“What, you need guinea pigs?” Humor was my next delay tactic.

“Silly, it’s not their first time cooking. I taught them how to cook when they were young so they could be self-sufficient.”

“And ’cause you hate cooking so much.”

“I don’t really hate it. I just don’t like it very much.”

“Same thing.” We were beginning to know each other well enough so that we were able to decipher lapses in conversation or
pick up hidden messages in veiled words. Still, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Who’s coming?” I asked, still stalling.

“My father and a couple of cousins who still live here, though my father most likely won’t show; he’s kind of anti-social.
I also invited one of my students from my church youth group. Oh, my pastor might drop by, but he received so many invitations,
I doubt he’ll make it.”

“How’re your headaches?” I asked, switching topics.