Choose Me (3 page)

“What?!” I answered, irritated.

“What’s wrong with you?” Maya asked.

“Nothing. I fell reaching for the phone,” I said, getting up.

“Dummy. Listen, you’re still going to Simone’s party, right?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. She made me mad today.”

“What did she do now?”

“It’s not even worth talking about.”

Simone had been my best friend first before I introduced her to Maya, who was a year younger than us. Over the years, they
became closer because they always had the topic of men in common. Maya had Alex and Simone was never without male companionship.
Things changed when Maya started cheating on Alex—although Maya didn’t consider it cheating because she had not slept with
her “friend”—yet. Simone thought what Maya was doing was her God-given right since Alex had cheated first. I told Maya she
should divorce Alex if she didn’t want to be married anymore. After all, she had religious grounds and just as she had done
when she first got saved, I quoted the scripture she cited to me after my own ex-husband cheated: Matthew 19:9, which justified
divorce on the grounds of adultery. Although it refers to a husband divorcing his wife, it applies to husbands also, she had
insisted. She and Simone thought I was crazy to suggest that Maya divorce.
Who is going to pay the mortgage and car notes?
Simone asked.
Who is going to raise our two sons, Marcos and Lucas?
Maya demanded. Maya thought divorce was the easy way out for husbands; Simone believed staying married while doing your own
thing was the best revenge. What Maya objected to was Simone’s insinuations that her relationships with her two lovers were
similar to Maya’s relationship with the two men in her life.

“L’s coming,” Maya whispered. Maya referred to Luciano, her friend, as “L” or in feminine pronouns just in case Alex was within
listening range.

“Do you really think that’s smart?”

“She said
she’s
tired of meeting in dark places.”

“Whatever.” I was temporarily distracted by Yolanda Adams singing “The Battle Is The Lord’s” juxtaposed by the TV clips of
the latest suicide bombing in the Middle East.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I have a headache.” I began to sort my bills in one pile, junk mail in another, and the latest issues of
Hispanic, Black Enterprise,
and
Diaspora,
a new Christian lifestyle publication, in a third.

“You’ll be better by Saturday, won’t you? I want you to get to know
her.
”

“I don’t want to get to know him.” So far, all I knew about Luciano was that he was half-Cuban and half-Black. I vaguely remembered
Luciano from high school when they first met, before Maya started dating Alex in her sophomore year. Years later they met
again at a school where Maya was a teacher and he was a security guard. But by then, she was married to Alex and Luciano had
married the first of his three wives. Maya said he treated her like a queen. I told her all men did—in the beginning. But
she insisted he was different, as all women who were in love believed. There was no reasoning with her; her rationality was
gone.

It wasn’t that I sided with my brother-in-law, or that I felt sorry for him, I just didn’t like being an accomplice in Maya’s
tangled web of deceit. After getting over the fact that Alex had seduced my fifteen-year-old sister when he was eighteen,
I thought he was a good man, the kind of guy who would be good to her. But then he cheated, and it was almost like he had
deceived me also. Initially, I took it personally, but I eventually forgave him, partly because it was the Christian thing
to do, partly because he was a good father, but mostly because I didn’t have to live with him.

“If you’re mad at Simone, I better not tell you what she has planned.”

She got my attention. “You better tell me.”

“I can’t—” she said, then stopped and her voice faded away as she turned to speak to someone in the house. “What? I don’t
know where it is. Just look for it, sweetie. That’s what I do when I can’t find stuff.” She turned her attention back to me.
“She told me not to tell.”

“Maya, I am not kidding,” I warned. “Blood is thicker than water.”

We had all married in our teens, within months of each other. Simone and me were nineteen, Maya was eighteen. None of us had
been counseled about going on to higher education since we had worked from the time we were fifteen. We were all anxious to
be on our own, so we made plans to get an apartment together. But at the time, we all had boyfriends we loved, and marriage
seemed like the next best thing.

Although the youngest, Maya married first. While Alex worked at City Hall, she got her bachelor’s and master’s in education.
They were married almost nine years when their twin boys were born. After teaching for several years, she became one of the
youngest principals in the Chicago public school system while Alex became an alderman.

A few months after Maya wed, Simone married her high school sweetheart, Bruce—not because he asked her, but because she wanted
out of her parents’ house. The marriage lasted a year before she decided she wasn’t cut out to be anybody’s wife. Instead,
she decided to pursue a modeling and acting career. Over the years, she appeared in several magazine ads and acted in a few
local plays, even worked as an extra in a couple of big-name movies. In between modeling and acting jobs, she worked as a
manager at an upscale hair salon. She lived rent-free in her father’s apartment building, and always had men who provided
her with almost everything else she needed.

“Okay, okay. She’s going to set you up with a guy at the party.”

“Ooh. She is so dead.” The throbbing got worse in my temple and I began applying pressure with my thumb.

“You’re not supposed to know, so don’t call her, please? She’s just looking out for you.” Again her voice faded away. “Alex,
honey, I’m on the phone,” she said, condescendingly. “I swear every time I get on the phone … ”

“What’s his name? Where did she meet him? Give me details or else. I mean it, Maya.”

“I don’t know. All I know is she seems to think you have a lot in common with him.”

I closed my eyes trying to squelch my anger at Simone while wondering whether my own sister knew more than she was disclosing.
The last time Maya introduced me to a man with whom she thought I had a lot in common, he turned out to be an ex-con who had
found Jesus while incarcerated. Not that I don’t believe in the power of God to transform criminals, but after he beat up
a guy who took his parking spot on our second date, I decided he still needed some more Jesus.

“You never know,” Maya continued, “this could be your Mr. Righteous.”

“Riiigght,”
I said cynically.

THERE IS NOTHING
like a good old-fashioned STD to clear a man’s head. After I got one three years ago, I vowed to be more
careful with my choice of ladies and to wear condoms more consistently. I abstained the required six weeks—which was torture—and
thereafter I did the condom thing—more torture, but the alternative, another STD or a child, would have been worse. After
that, I dated sporadically, never spending the night, or sending the woman I bedded home rather than waking up next to her
with lies or excuses. Not that I had been with that many women. If I thought about it, I could probably count them on the
digits of all my extremities and still have fingers and toes left over. I could even remember their names—well, with the exception
of two.

Sondra was the first and last woman who broke my heart. We had met at an African arts festival, and truth be told, I was attracted
to her looks and body at first. But she manifested into something more, the kind of woman who made a man want to do everything
to defy male stereotypes. We talked about moving in together, but after my first live-in disaster, I was still cautious and
held her at bay. I couldn’t handle the fact that I was falling in love, so we broke up.

A few weeks later, I slipped and slept with a one-night stand without protection. As sadistic as it sounded, having an STD
the second time around was a blessing. Thanks to an overzealous resident who insisted I have an ultrasound, a mass was discovered
on my testicle and eventually diagnosed as cancerous. Subsequently, I was referred to a specialist. Even though the doctors
all assured me it wasn’t related to my sexual partners or the STDs, I became scared enough to put women on the back burner.
The first specialist recommended surgery but I refused and sought a second opinion. The second urologist also stated he couldn’t
treat me without surgery. The fact that the specialists were men who didn’t seem to understand my refusal to part with a vital
part of my manhood made me search for a third opinion. After doing some research on the Internet, I found a doctor, a woman,
who was conducting a study that involved removing the tumor without surgery, using an ultrasound-guided needle. I agreed to
this procedure, which was followed by multiple courses of radiation and chemotherapy, then months of observation and tests.
During the treatments, I was too weak and sick to care about sex, let alone think about it.

After the doctor declared that the cancer was in remission, I also went into an emotional remission. I no longer viewed women
as beautiful creatures or Venuses, nor were they Delilahs or Jezebels. They were just mortals from another dimension to be
treated with extreme caution. Now, whenever I saw a hot lady teasing me with her short skirt or low top, I saw warning lights
blinking on and off:
Danger, Danger! Proceed with Caution!
All I had to do was envision the humiliating examinations, or the life-draining radiation and chemo treatments, and that
would be all she wrote. Most times it wasn’t that hard, since some women were turned off by my grungy appearance and saw me
as a poor brother who wouldn’t be able to wine and dine them like a gentleman should; I let them think that way. There were
some women who thought my clothes and hair were eccentric, but these women bothered me too. I concluded that if a woman judged
me by my outward appearance, in the long run, I was better off without her.

Then in a moment of weakness, I called Sondra and she came back. I professed my love for her; she confessed that she had been
miserable without me. Our attempt to pick up where we left off ended in disaster. I never thought I would hear the words,
“It’s okay, it happens.”
It never happened, not to me. From that point on, the relationship went downhill. Instead of admitting that she was seeing
someone else, she let me catch them together. Nothing dramatic like having sex in my bed, just walking in the rain and holding
hands. Just like the old Oran “Juice” Jones song.

Afterward many of my perspectives about women changed. I had always thought women cheated in retaliation for being cheated
on, but I realized like a lot of misconceptions about women, that one isn’t true. It had happened to me twice—two times too
many.

As I turned my attention to the blurry words on my laptop where I was working on my latest screenplay-in-progress, I tried
to delete Sondra from my mind. The library behind me was full of unfinished scripts, and for the last week I had been working
on a script about two friends on a road trip in search of their fathers. But twenty pages into the manuscript, my characters
still had yet to leave Chicago. I had serious writer’s block. Ever since I had sold my first screenplay, which had won a college
screenwriting competition, to a producer who had in turn totally revised the script, I was determined to make my next one
a success. By the time my screenplay, which had started out as a drama about four Brothers in college, made its appearance
on screen, it had become a comedy about the antics of three friends, with one token Black friend.

“Yo, Ad-
dam
!”

I turned from my computer screen just as Luciano, my closest partner, poked his head over the Japanese room divider that separated
the living room and my office. Last night, after a typical boys’ night out of shooting pool and the bull, I drove him to his
house where he discovered his wife had finally changed the locks, something I had been warning him would happen soon enough
if he kept acting like he was still a bachelor. He pounded on the door of his house yelling Lisa’s name the way Stanley Kowalski
yelled “Stella” in
A Streetcar Named Desire,
until his next-door neighbor threatened to call the cops. The last thing I wanted was to spend the night in jail, a place
I had never been and never wanted to be. I had no choice but to offer the man my sofa bed.

“Don’t lean on that, man,” I told him absentmindedly

“Man, how come you ain’t got no food up in this mug?” Luciano Reed was, for the most part, an articulate, somewhat educated
man, a disciplinarian at an all-boys’ private school, but when we were together, he often lapsed into the old street lingua.
And it was infectious.

“I ain’t been grocery-shopping this month.”

“So, when you going?”

“Don’t worry about it. You won’t be here long enough to find out.” As I looked up at his dejected face, I knew I shouldn’t
have been so hard on him, but it was fun.

He leaned against the divider, then pulled away quickly when he saw my harsh look. “Lisa’s not answering the phone; she turned
off her cell. She won’t even let me in my own house to get some clothes.” Technically, since Lisa got the house in the divorce
settlement from her first husband, it was her house. But I didn’t bring up this fact.

“She better ’cause you ‘cain’t’ stay here too long,” I half-teased.

He ran a hand through his unkempt black hair and dragged himself to the kitchen. I turned back to the computer.

Three years ago, Luciano had married Lisa, a woman with a ready-made family, which included two kids and two dogs. Ever since
his first wife had disappeared with his only son, he had become obsessed with finding another wife and starting a new family.
Lisa was his third wife. He also had a lady on the side, a woman named Maya. He had wanted to marry Maya a long time ago,
but, unfortunately for him, she had married someone else, and, also unfortunately according to him, was still married. I didn’t
approve of his relationship with Maya, although I could understand his attraction to her. She was sexy, intelligent, and funny.
He tried to explain his predicament to me many times, but nothing he said ever convinced me that there was anything right
with what he was doing. Once he told me,
I love Lisa, but I’m in love with Maya.
To which I answered,
What does that mean?