From Cape Town with Love (3 page)

Goofy realized that April wasn't a threat, so he raised the cracker with practiced paws and started munching—
Thanks, doll, you got any peanut butter to top this off?

“Ten, look!” April said. “He's so cute! Can you take a picture of us?”

Goofy did not push my Cute button. Every instinct told me to shoo him away.

“That's great!” I said anyway, and snapped the photo.

The other furballs in Goofy's crew renewed their advance, their tiny legs scuttling toward April and her bright orange crackers. A lot of people
would have jumped up to run for cover, but April didn't move from where she knelt in their path. I opened my mouth to warn April to back away, but I was stopped by her grin.

I snapped another photo to try to capture April's face—a barely harnessed joy that you rarely see in adults. A quiet thought surfaced:
April would make a great mother.

Until that day on the mountain, I'd never had that thought about anyone.

When you go to South Africa, don't expect to find Africa right away.

The first time I landed in Johannesburg, the rows of glass-paneled skyscrapers made me think I was back in L.A. Johannesburg is hamburger stands, malls, and movie theaters—more bland than L.A., actually, but you get the idea. Considering my exotic visions of Zulu warriors wrapped in zebra pelts, and lions roaming the savannahs, Jo'burg was a letdown. Cape Town feels eerily like San Francisco at first glance, down to the wineries and nightclubs, but its character feels less American than Jo'burg, more English influenced with colonial B and Bs.

April and I hung out on Long Street, where the Cape-Dutch Victorian buildings and wrought-iron balconies made me feel like I was in Europe, especially the south of France. South Africa offers wealth and poverty with equal zeal, and much of Cape Town is a playground for the rich. Even on Long Street, it's strange how few black faces you see—usually it's white and Indian South Africans, or tourists from the world over. Apartheid might have ended in 1994, but the average black South African remains a long way from the mountaintop.

The past is hard to overcome.

But South Africa was celebrating while April and I were there; in 2010, it would be hosting the first World Cup ever held in Africa. In Soweto, especially, soccer madness had been everywhere, a rainbow of colors for teams like the Swallows and the Pirates. Stadiums were being built in ten South African cities, including Cape Town. The brand-new Green Point Stadium had views of Table Mountain and the ocean, majesty to suit the coming battles among nations.

When Alice took me to Cape Town the first time, it was two years after Nelson Mandela had been elected president after twenty-seven years at nearby Robben Island prison—and the energy felt similar when I returned with April thirteen years later. But there was one major difference: Now, instead of just the colorful South African liberation flag, street vendors sold American flags, too.

“Hey—Obama!” a man called from a passing bicycle that afternoon as April and I walked down Long Street, where black Africans, backpackers, and bohemians congregated. Even in the midst of soccer euphoria, I was a star in my black Barack Obama T-shirt.

Grins flashed at me. Laughing children ran up to me. Women young and old gave me hugs. Strangers honked their horns as they drove past. A vacationing couple from Germany begged me to pose for a picture with them while April and I shared bemused smiles.

It was 2008, only three days after the November election that changed American history. Our American accents triggered excited conversations about American politics. The phrase “president-elect Barack Obama” sounded odd, dreamlike. There was a world party going on, and I felt lucky to witness how important the election was outside America's borders.

Cape Town made us smile a lot, just as I had hoped. My swagger was back.

I was such a good catch, it boggled my mind.

Who else would fly from another
country
to try to win back his girlfriend after the way she'd cut things off? Shit, that girl would be crazy to walk away from me! Bruised or not, my face made most women lose their concentration.

On top of that, I might have at least a quarter-million-dollar settlement waiting for me at home—since an amoral studio exec named Lynda Jewell wanted my sexual harassment suit against her to go away.
And
I could put a few sentences together, too? April had better claim me back while she could, before I was out running wild.

To seal the deal, I chose the Nyoni's Kraal on Long Street.

Kraal
means a small rural village in southern Africa, but in Afrikaans, a kraal is a pen for livestock. That may be all we need to know to understand the history of race relations in the region. The South African brother who owns Nyoni's grew up poor and built his business from
nothing. Now it's one of Cape Town's most popular eateries, with room for hundreds.

Nyoni's Kraal had a faux thatched ceiling, African-inspired brass lamps shaped like masks, and mock crocodiles hanging on warmly colored stone walls. A prominent South African flag bore the black-and-gold triangle and stripes of green, white, red, and blue. The employees wore traditional dashikis. Our round-faced waitress, Nobanzi, wore a thin beaded headband and a wide beaded bracelet with colors that entranced my eyes. Xhosa, I guessed.

I ordered a 1999 Klein Constantia sauvignon blanc, and April couldn't hide how impressed she was by my knowledge of wine. I had my mojo back!

We joked about ordering mopane worms and chicken feet as appetizers, but we ended up with marinated snoek, a long, bony, saltwater fish I thought she would like. For my entrée, I ordered the kingklip, an eellike local fish with firm white meat. April ordered African roast chicken. Heaven. For the first five minutes after our food arrived, we forgot about talking and enjoyed the taste of Africa.

“Mrs. Kunene might have a job for you,” April said.

“A job?” I said, sampling my bread. “She doesn't know me.”

April shrugged. “She asked about you last night, so I told her you're an actor and bodyguard in Hollywood. When I said we were going to Cape Town, she told me her sister-in-law runs an orphanage near here, in a township called . . . Lango?”

“Langa,” I corrected her.

“Langa. An American actress is visiting, but they're worried they might not have reliable security. Mrs. Kunene thought I should ask you, since we would be here.”

I'd been to Cape Town's townships before, including Langa and an even poorer township called Crossroads. Alice took me to see an amazing children's orchestra playing in a shebeen built of drab brick and entombed in razor wire. The area looked like Fallujah. But a music teacher invited neighborhood children to play instruments, and they took up scales instead of trouble. I heard those kids play a blast of Duke Ellington bright enough to light up the block. Anyone who heard it had no choice but to smile. Jazz is everywhere in Cape Town, even in the
'hood. I wondered if the bar was still there, if the band still played its sweet, silky songs.

“We only have a couple days here,” I said. “When's she going?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Who's the actress?”

“Sofia . . . Maitlin?” April said casually, as if she'd never heard of last year's Oscar-winning best supporting actress. “Mrs. Kunene gave me a number for her assistant, or whatever.”

April was downplaying it. For some reason she didn't want me to take the job. When I held out my hand, April reluctantly pulled a slip of paper out of her purse. The name
Rachel Wentz
was written on the scrap she gave me, with the number for the Twelve Apostles Hotel.

Definitely legit. Rachel Wentz was Maitlin's
manager,
not her assistant. A manager is a professional who hobnobs with the upper echelons of Hollywood to manage your career—an assistant gets your coffee. Big difference. Having a license to call Sofia Maitlin's manager was reason enough to take the job. I'm an actor first, and access is everything. After being fired from my series, I was out of circulation.

But I'm no fool. “I came to Cape Town to spend time with you,” I said, slipping the paper in my back pocket. “I didn't come to work.”

“I told her you probably couldn't do it,” April said, relieved. But her face brooded, suddenly dangerous. “You get hurt so much, Ten. Like you're . . . punishing yourself.”

Here it comes,
I thought. April didn't mention Serena's name, but her ghost was suddenly at our table. I first met April after a friend of mine was murdered, and we had recently passed the one-year anniversary of Serena's death. I clamped back the rage and sadness always simmering near the surface; I wanted my thoughts clear for the new tragedy unfolding.

Slowly, April continued, “The lengths you go to when you're on these cases feels . . . self-destructive—like you
want
to hurt yourself. That scares me, Ten. When you took the T. D. Jackson case, I started to think you're chasing something else. That maybe you're looking for something you can't fix by finding the bad guys. Forgiveness, maybe.”

The suspicion that April might be right only made me angrier. “Or, maybe I'm just good at solving fucking cases.”

“I know you're good at it—you're
great
at it—but I think it's about
more than that for you. You put yourself in reckless situations, and then you have trouble moving past them. I see these patterns in your history, Ten.”

April sounded like she had just finished a course on me, with charts and graphs. The phrase
your history
hurt. “Haven't I shown you that I'm not that man anymore?” I said softly.

April was my first monogamous relationship, my first true girlfriend. I literally don't know how many women I've had sex with—I stopped counting long ago, when I passed three hundred. In my twenties and early thirties, when acting work was dry, I spent years as a professional “escort,” servicing wealthy women in Hollywood and overseas. I racked up a big body count.

Not long before I took April to Cape Town, my past mistakes caught up with me. A powerful female studio executive tricked me into a meeting and started taking off her clothes, offering me money for sex. Lynda Jewell knew about my history, and found me through my agent when my face started showing up on TV. She'd offered me a lot of zeroes to forget, but like they say, money can't buy love. The damage between me and April had been done.

April still couldn't look me in the eye. “This isn't about your past.”

“What, then?” I said, my voice rising, as close to shouting as I came. “You've never had your ribs cracked, so you don't know how patronizing it is to say I
like
getting hurt. Did you pull that out of a college psych book? Or is it some
Dr. Phil
bullshit?”

A black African couple at the table beside us glanced over to see what the ruckus was. The moon-faced young woman in sunflower yellow was holding her date's hand, but he looked bored. The woman's forlorn eyes begged us to show a better example of courtship.

“Do we really want to make this harder, Ten?” April's voice flowed like a yoga relaxation tape. She had already started moving on.

I thought of the old Richard Pryor routine where the calmer his woman got, the more he had a fit. I closed my eyes, forcing a deep breath. “I need to understand,” I said, opening my eyes. The lights stabbed my sudden headache. “We were fine before, and now we're not? What changed?”

April stared at her plate of half-eaten food. Our talk should have waited until dessert.

“I've really been praying about this, because I started writing you letters and couldn't find the words. There's a quality you have—riding the chaos wave, seeing where it takes you. It's so beautiful and free and brave, just like you. It's the first thing that attracted me to your spirit. But now . . .” She didn't finish. When April first met me, I was a suspect in Serena's death; I'd been a vote against her better judgment from day one.

April went on. “Some people can handle it—I
know
you'll find someone who can—but I can't anymore. I can't sit around worrying about whether you're going to get killed, or if you'll have to kill somebody. I can't live that way—or raise our kids that way.”

I was about to promise April that I would never take another case, but the phrase
our kids
nearly made me choke on my bread. I tried to recover before she noticed, but I was too late. April gave me a resigned, heartbroken glance she tried to hide by drinking the last of her wine.

“We have kids?” I said. I felt like Rip Van Hardwick. Had I missed something?

“In two years I'll be thirty, Ten. I want to be headed somewhere.”

I don't know how guys feel when they're ready to discuss marriage and kids, but I wasn't there yet. I was too tired to keep talking, so I should have kept my mouth shut—but I thought I knew exactly what to say. What every woman wants to hear.

“All I know is . . . ,” I said, pausing for effect. “I love you, Alice.”

For the first few seconds, I was confused by the horror on April's face.

You called her ALICE,
my memory whispered, and my insides shriveled.

“Shit,” I said, honestly shocked. “Jesus.”

Blasphemy was just for good measure, since April was a church girl. My words were gibberish to me, as if someone had hijacked my mouth. I couldn't think of an apology worthy of the transgression. I suppose my faux pas could have been worse. We could have been in bed.

There's no good way to call your girlfriend by the wrong name—but Alice was a former client from my working days. She was one of my steadiest clients for years, despite an age difference that made her old enough to be my mother—older, really. When she died, she left me her house, and I'd been living there ever since. I'd insisted to April that I'd kept the house only out of convenience; it was worth $2 million even in a recession.