Choose Me (49 page)

“Adam, you’re just …” I started, trying to remove his hands from my face. “You’re feeling this way because you were sick and—”

“Can I finish?” he interrupted, irritated, but he tenderly stroked my cheeks with his thumbs. “What I’m trying to say is …
what did you think? About being together? You and me?”

His hands were making my face sweat. I put my arms on his waist and gently pushed him away from me, but he wouldn’t let go.
I could feel his bottom ribs, jutting out underneath his shirt. He still had a lot of weight to gain in order to reach his
precancerous weight. It had been so long since I touched him.

“What do you think?” he repeated.

I looked up at him, meeting his eyes. “What do I think? I think you probably think you owe me something for being there for
you. You don’t owe me anything. I would’ve done the same thing for my sister or Simone, or my children. God brought you through,
not me. I was just on the sidelines.”

“Spiritually speaking, yes, He did. But emotionally, you were the one.”

“That’s no reason to get back together again.”

“I’m not just talking about us getting back together. I’m talking about getting married.”

I was so astonished, I couldn’t speak, and it was too late to stop the stunned look that took over my face.

“I want us to get married,” he repeated. “I want to marry you.”

“You want to marry
me?
Why?”

Immediately, I found myself analyzing his unorthodox proposal. Compared to what I had experienced in the past, and what I
had witnessed and heard about in my family, it was unconventional. There had been no proposal with Anthony, we had mutually
agreed to get married, shopped for our rings together, and paid for our own wedding. Victor, on the other hand was a hopeless
romantic, and took me to the restaurant where we had our first date and arranged to hide the ring on the dessert tray. When
the waiter came around with the tray, Victor got down on one knee and said,
“Chocolate mousse, flan, or me?”
But the element of surprise was never a part of my previous proposals; they had been expected. Adam’s was not.

He half-scoffed, half-laughed, finally removing his hands from my face. Predictably, he rubbed the back of his neck. “Man,
this isn’t at all what I expected. On TV, women scream, or cry, or throw their arms around the man.”

“This ain’t TV,” I said seriously, but without malice.

“Why do I want to marry you? For that reason right there. Because other women would scream, cry, or throw their arms around
a man who asked for their hand, but not you. You’ve got to give me a hard time.”

“You want to marry me ’cause I give you a hard time?” I asked, confused.

He exhaled, exasperated. “I want to marry you because you are
you.
Because you are a good woman,
woman.
Because you’re a woman of God. Because we were good together. I’ve been missing you since the day we broke up.”

I thought, that day was so long ago—the day after we had sex when I believed I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

“Why now?” I asked him.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

“You said you didn’t want to get married for a long time. What’s changed since then?”

“You have to ask me that?”

He reached into his pocket and I panicked, thinking he was going to produce a ring. Why was he doing this in front of all
these strangers?

“So what do you say?” he asked.

“What do I say?”

“Could you stop repeating my questions?” he said impatiently. “Look, I know it may be hard for you to believe, but I’m a faithful
man. Cheating is not my style. I’m not Anthony or Victor. I will never cheat on you.”

It took everything within me not to say
I’ve heard that before.
How could anyone promise something like that?

When I didn’t respond, he dropped down to his knees and clasped my hands in his. People, who at first had looked at us curiously
but eventually turned away, were now staring more expectantly. A few were smiling, comprehending what was happening, although
I was having a problem grasping the gravity of the situation. In the presence of so many witnesses, I felt deeply embarrassed,
knowing anything other than the affirmative would be emasculating and humiliating to Adam.

“Can we talk in the car? Everybody’s looking,” I whispered through my teeth.

“I don’t care about these people,” he said, without breaking his gaze. “Eva.
‘Come with me, he with me, stay with me. Choose me.’
”

I could feel myself losing strength, my resolve depleting as the words from his poem sunk in and touched the deepest part
of me where I had stored my love for him.
That
part of me wanted to say “yes,” but I was sweating and becoming irritable, and I was stalling for time. I didn’t want to
tell him the painkillers were probably affecting his judgment, that in a couple of months when he was back to normal, he might
feel totally different. In the car with the air conditioning on, he could think more clearly. But more important, I could
turn him down in private. Then another thought came to mind. What if he
was
dying and he wanted to get married because it would be his last chance? Before, marriage had been a distant concept, something
he, like many men, put off until after they had sown their wild oats, until they came face-to-face with their mortality, as
I suspected Adam had. All of sudden, he was ready?

“Are you dying?” I finally asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“What? Why are you asking me that?”

“I don’t think you’re thinking clearly—”

“You think I’d ask you to marry me if I was dying?” He was incredulous, shaking his head in disbelief, and he was getting
loud, oblivious to the people around us. He stood up, loosening his tie frustratingly. “Don’t you want to marry me?”

“I’ve been there.”

“Not with me.”

“Do you know how hard marriage is? How hard it is to live with another person when you’ve been single for so long?”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

“You’ve never been married before, I have. I’m not a traditional wife; I cook when I feel like it, I don’t like cleaning up
after anyone.”

“I don’t plan on being a traditional husband. I cook when
I
feel like it, and I don’t like cleaning up after anyone either.”

“Men start off saying they’ll share the housework, but they always change,” I told him matter-of-factly. “Plus, I don’t think
I want to change my name.”

Adam looked up and spoke to the sky, but loud enough for me and our spectators to hear. “I cannot believe this woman.” Any
minute, I expected him to turn to the audience and say,
“Can you believe she turned me down?”

When he looked back at me, his face was hard, his eyes steely. I could hear someone giggling behind him. “I can’t believe
you’re talking about petty things like housework and not changing your name. What was it you said when I asked you what you
would do if the sex was bad on your wedding night? ‘We’ll work it out. It’s not rocket science.’ Well,
we
can work it out. Housework isn’t rocket science. I’m not so backward that I think a woman should do it all.
Especially
if she works. As far as your name is concerned, keep it if it’s so important to you. It’s just a name.”

“Fine, fine,” I finally said, because I didn’t want to argue anymore, and I was ready to leave. “We’ll get married.”

“Wha—?” he said, then he held up his hands in aggravation. “Nah, nah. I don’t want to marry you if you’re going to be like
that. Like you’re deciding on an entrée. I want you to
want
to marry me.”

I thought about his request, about what it would mean to be a wife, to be his wife. I could see Adam cooking dinner as I cleaned
the house, listening to the news in the background; solving the toilet seat dilemma by putting both the seat and lid down;
dismissing the toothpaste problem as trivial; calling to let me know he’d be home late so I didn’t worry. I thought of coming
home to him after a bad day at the university, listening to him talk about his charges at work, being with him finally as
God had originally mandated, reaching the ultimate passionate connection.
It is better to marry than to burn.
But it wasn’t even about that anymore.

“Can I think about it?” I asked quietly.

He shook his head in disbelief, massaging the back of his neck, then he spun around, his shoes sinking in the sand as he hurried
toward the car. He didn’t look back once to see if I was following him. After I had gathered my dignity, and the hem of my
dress, I started walking slowly over the sand, staring straight ahead and ignoring our audience who were like nosy witnesses
to an ugly car accident, wanting to look away yet needing to see the carnage.

WHEN A MAN
decides to love a woman, he takes all kinds of chances with his emotions, his way of life, even his future. He
begins to understand that loving a woman isn’t something that happens overnight, at first sight. He begins to recognize that
love is equivalent to a baptism. At first, the water is sudden, a splash of light, an awakening. But conversion isn’t instantaneous.
It takes a while before the blood washes out the old soul, gives birth to the new. One day he wakes up and there he is, a
new man.

I didn’t know when the thought of marrying Eva entered my mind. Perhaps when I saw her on the hospital elevator. Or the night
of Eli’s birthday when we were alone and I wanted to ease her fears. Or when I woke up after surgery and saw her by my bed,
before I saw my mother, before I saw Jade. For days, I had mulled over several scenarios for the proposal. The first one involved
waiting for a light rainy day, reminiscent of the night we met, then casually popping the question as we strolled through
the rain. But my timing was always off; either it rained too hard or we could never get together. The second involved taking
her to Coffee Will Make You Black and reciting the poem I had composed, but each time I read it, it didn’t seem adequate,
or good enough, or romantic enough. Then I thought, doing it in front of a crowd seemed pretentious. It should be a private
thing. The last setting involved learning how to say
“Will you marry me?”
in Spanish and asking her at Montrose Harbor, but construction was already in progress and the beach was closed to the public.

And then at Jade’s wedding, I looked at Eva sitting on the pew next to me in her stocking feet, as we took a break in between
pictures, and something just told me that that was the day I would ask her, no frills, no preparation. I figured we could
pick out the ring later.

But there were so many things I left out of the proposal. I wanted to tell her I no longer believed in coincidences, that
it was fate that had brought us together, not Luciano and Maya. It was God who separated us and brought us together again,
that day on the elevator, and everything that happened in between.

Can I think about it?

Eva’s answer dogged me relentlessly in the days following my proposal, until I saw the words suspended in the air around me,
on my computer screens at home, and at work. Can she
think
about it? Those were not the words a man wanted to hear when he asked a woman to marry him. Next to
“It’s okay, it happens,”
and
“The cancer’s back,”
they were the worst words I had heard in my life. Then, on the other hand, she hadn’t said “no.” A negative response would
have hurt but at least I’d know what to do with it; I’d move on. I didn’t know what to do with
“Can I think about it?”

So I waited. I waited and tried to stay busy with work, family, exercise, and church. I waited as I met with my agent about
some last-minute changes to my screenplay prior to production. I waited as I tried to offer some guidance in my clients’ otherwise
directionless lives. I waited as I attended a men’s conference on spiritual restitution to women who had been wronged in the
past. I waited as I ran to the lakefront and back, an activity that was beginning to seem futile.

Akil was the only one I had confided in about asking Eva to marry me since Luciano was in the midst of his third divorce and
had lost faith in marriage. Akil had started working out with me, stating that he wanted to get into running, so I let him
tag along. He was turning out to be a cool brother-in-law; he didn’t talk much, which was a great quality when you didn’t
feel like talking. It didn’t even bother me that he called me “brother,” which he pronounced phonetically instead of colloquially.

A week before his wedding, Akil brought up the topic of Eva. We were several days into our training session at Lake Shore
Beach, sitting on the bench where I had met the college student so long ago.

“So have you asked her yet?” he inquired.

I shook my head, still slightly out of breath. I pulled my collar out and blew puffs of air down my shirt to alleviate the
stinging of sweat on my surgical scar, which was still sensitive to any kind of sensation.

“Why not?”

I shook my head again. “You don’t know her. She’s …”

“Tough? Oh, I know.” He chuckled. “I remember when she first came to TCCC. A couple of the church brothers wanted to ask her
out but they were scared to approach her. She had this aura about her that said ‘Don’t talk to me.’”

I nodded in total understanding and we both laughed.

“But when you get to know her, she’s not like that at all,” Akil continued. “I think she’s changed. She doesn’t seem as hard
since her son’s death.”

I began to feel more comfortable speaking to him about her. “She’s just not the kind who buys romance and ‘I love you’ declarations.
I’m not sure how to propose. She’s not into jewelry. I mean, the woman buys her own flowers. Man, she grows her own flowers.”

Akil laughed. “Well, do you want her?”

“Do I want her?” I repeated. What kind of question was that?
Of course, I wanted her.
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”