Genevieve Read online

  “I’ll have her call you. Let me write down your number.”

  “She know the number. Same number we done had since nineteen-sixty.”

  Grandpa Fred falls into a coughing fit.

  The phone goes dead on his end.

  My heart worries for Genevieve’s loss. I look at my wedding ring. Her loss is my loss. This phone call has left me the bearer of bad news, a task I do not want.

  The phone screams in my ear, lets me know that it is time I hang up.

  His call leaves me feeling prickly, the smell of both mystery and death in the air.

  Genevieve has spoken of tragedies in her family, reluctantly. Of her murdered mother and incarcerated father. Only mentioned them once. Never gave any details.

  I remember my mother. I remember her dying. Remember living with my grandparents. Remember feeling lost and alone. Remember not being able to attach to anyone for the fear of death separating us and leaving me emotionally stranded.

  I remember losing unconditional love.

  Now I search for the remedy to my inner pain, bask in pleasure to dull its sting.

  Grandpa Fred’s voice fades as I put my work to the side and look at the television. The Lover, the adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novel, is on Showtime. What I see makes me pause. She is beautiful and naked, in one of her erotic scenes with her North China Lover, on top of him, her face sweaty, in the throes of passion. She relishes him as he does her.

  I envy them, the sensuality they have for each other, their love.

  On the television, the lovers love on, endless pleasure and exploration. She is a teenager, still in boarding school, young and inexperienced. He is in his thirties, a playboy, a master lover. Both characters are nameless. Names, those labels do not matter in the end.

  I try to get back to my work, but I cannot.

  I smile in appreciation and continue to sigh in envy.

  But in the end, the erotic moments are not why I watch.

  It’s what is said at the end.

  That is what I wait for, the words I wait to hear at the dimming of their day.

  I watch to see how she answers the phone, now her body aged and worn, and his voice is on the other end, listen to hear how he tells her that despite them parting ways, despite their separate marriages, despite the grandchildren, despite all the irreplaceable years that have gone by on the breath of time, he loves her still, loves her now as he did then, and will always love her.

  That is when my face gets hot, when my throat tightens.

  That is what I want. That is all I want. Love eternal.

  They loved each other to a depth that they could not comprehend.

  Yet their affair was doomed.

  All love is doomed.

  FOUR

  I WAS BORN IN PASADENA, NOT THE ONE THAT IS DECORATED WITH PALM trees and Hollywood-adjacent, but the one in Texas, the Strawberry Capital of the South. All I really know about Pasadena, all I remember is that I lived down by Spencer Highway and Westside Drive, not far from where they filmed Urban Cowboy, where humidity was king and mosquitoes were queen.

  Time to time I try to remember but all I can see in my mind is a lot of used-car dealers, fast-food places, and flea markets up and down Spencer Highway, most of the signs in Spanish. I suppose it is now as it was then, white and Mexican, the latter outnumbering the former.

  My momma hated Pasadena.

  At sunrise Momma inhaled and called it Stinkadena. At dusk she closed her blinds and called it Klansville, U.S.A. To me, from demographics to culture, Pasadena was just like Fresno.

  I was still in elementary school, fourth grade. That was years after Timothy O’Bryan poisoned his son with cyanide and earned the nickname “The Man Who Killed Halloween,” but long before Enron and cellular phones and I-pagers and high-speed Internet access.

  Momma rode that shopworn strip that would become home to secondrate places like Whataburger and Alamo Thrift Store and Fiesta grocery store. There was a special store down at Allen Genoe, a place near the haven of topless dancers at Fantasy Cabaret. She called the store the boutique. I don’t remember the real name of the store, only that eros was in its neon sign.

  It was raining that day.

  I remember the rain.

  So much water falling from the sky that it seemed there shouldn’t be any more teardrops left in heaven. Neither rain nor racism ever kept Momma in the house, not for long. A small town left a big-city woman feeling antsy. Not having a babysitter never kept her restless soul from doing what she wanted to do. That rainy day Momma made me stay in the car while she took some cash from her purse and hurried inside the boutique. Said she had to run in the boutique to pick up a special order. She left me in the backseat, comic book in hand, Tonka truck in my lap. Her umbrella was held high, shawl over her shoulders, a scarf around her face.

  When she came out she had a bag tucked under her arm. She laughed and tiptoed through the rain, hurried back to the car, dark glasses on even though the skies were gray. She had on capri pants, the same kind that Laura Petrie wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  As soon as she got in she put her merchandise in the glove compartment, locked it up.

  “What you buy at the boutique, Momma?”

  “A girl’s best friend.”

  “A dog?”

  “That’s a man’s best friend.”

  She laughed, pulled out of the lot like she had robbed a bank.

  She took her shades off and lit a cigarette, moved her seat belt out of the way. She hated the way it wrinkled her clothes.

  I remember that day.

  Momma was a horrible driver, most of the time too busy singing and dancing to Motown tunes to pay attention to the road. She squinted to see signs. Even when her glasses were in arm’s reach, she wouldn’t put them on, not in public. When I look back and think about it, anything that diminished her sex appeal scared her. Refused to wear her prescription glasses because she didn’t like the way they made her look. The dents and dings in our old yellow and red Ford told the world to beware of her. She cut people off and blew her horn like a madwoman.

  The rain. Sometimes driving in the rain paralyzes me.

  Her windshield wipers were working overtime, losing a battle with Mother Nature.

  I held on, my eyes on the rain, and asked, “We going home?”

  “Let’s see. Last week we went to Galveston. Hmmm. Can’t let a little rain keep us locked up in the house. Beach ain’t happening. Parks are out. Let’s be adventurous. This week I think we’ll take you to the Buffalo Soldiers Museum. Let’s have fun and learn some history.”

  That was at least twenty miles away. That meant we were leaving the floods of Pasadena and driving toward the tall buildings, toward all the things a kid loved to see.

  I asked, “We’re getting on the highway?”

  Momma mumbled, “Guess we’ll take 45 North into town. It’s prettier than that old 225.”

  “Where are the buffaloes?”

  “Buffalo Soldiers, not buffaloes.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “We’re going to a museum.”

  “Like on a field trip?”

  “Like on a field trip. Shouldn’t be crowded on a day like today.”

  “What are we going to do after that?”

  “There’s a Family Dollar Store and a Walgreens right across the street from the museum so I can get some batteries for my… my toy. And we can look for some school clothes.”

  “We’re going shopping?”

  “Mr. Roy loaned me some money to buy you a few things.”

  Mr. Roy was the principal at Sam Houston High. Mr. Roy was married, had his own family out in League City, six kids, but came by every now and then, always late on a Friday night. The scent of marijuana and tequila would cover up the smell of her divorce and loneliness. My momma was a schoolteacher. Articulate with no Southern accent and the prettiest woman in the world. Slender, dark, wavy hair, green eyes, looked more like she was from India than Memphis. Never
wore a dress that came above her knees or a blouse with sleeves that stopped above her elbow. The most rebellious thing anybody ever saw her do was chain-smoke.

  But that scent of marijuana, it still takes me back to Pasadena, back to my momma.

  Momma was too beautiful for a place like Pasadena. Too free-spirited. She was meant to be in places like Berkeley or Harlem, someplace where she could rule women like her.

  “Think I can go see my daddy for Christmas?”

  She snapped, “I wish you’d stop asking me about that mother… Lord, hold my tongue.”

  That killed the singing, stopped the car-dancing. Daddy had ended the relationship, stolen her power when he did that. Women like my mother have to be the one to leave. I’d never see him again. My daddy was gone off to that distant land that daddies go to when they don’t want to be a daddy anymore, a land with no phones, no pencil or paper to write letters, no stamps to mail them even if they did. A place where daddies no longer had to be daddies.

  “You crying, Momma?”

  “God, what has my life changed into?”

  “Don’t cry, Momma.”

  “He’s gone . . with that. . and… and I’m buying… buying… goddamn toys… like I’m some sort of a… whore… shit… can’t… fucking Roy… and Charles… lonely and… using damn toys.”

  Momma was human. Momma was a woman.

  We were on 45, downtown Houston coming into view. Momma wiped her eyes, dropped her cigarette, swerved into the next lane, almost ran a family of Mexicans off the road, then adjusted and swerved to the right, almost hit another car, it too filled with Mexicans.

  Momma cursed, so much panic in her voice.

  Fear had stolen mine.

  The rain. I remember the rain. Remember the day it became my enemy.

  I remember hydroplaning, the back end of the car feeling like it was rising and floating, sliding across the interstate like we were on ice, Momma screaming for God to help her, fighting with the steering wheel, slamming on the brakes, then us spinning toward the wall.

  FIVE

  THE SECURITY SYSTEM BEEPS, INTERRUPTING MY THOUGHTS. IN A SOFT voice the system announces that the basement door is opening. Genevieve comes up the stairs wearing a black-and-white sweatsuit. When she left this morning she had on a fitted gray skirt, sleeveless pink shirt, black heels, and a low-rise pink thong with a red star on the front, the kind of thing a woman thinks is cute. Her legs are beautiful, flow into her waist. When she puts on a tight dress, with her frame, with her wonderful breasts, it overrules all learned behavior.

  My lust for my wife cannot be intellectualized.

  My lust for her is not reciprocated, not on the level it should be.

  Still, one glance at her and my heart sings.

  She has a gym bag over her shoulder, two smoothies, one in each hand, her cellular phone clamped on her hip, her earpiece flashing telling me that her cellular phone is on. Genevieve is chatting away, alternating between laughing and sounding businesslike and serious.

  “You don’t have any international investments.” Genevieve is in the hallway. “Look at all the international products we use in this country. Your cell phone is Samsung. You shop at 7-Eleven and that’s a Swiss-owned company. Right. Well, don’t feel bad. Not a lot of people know that.”

  She tells her client the things she told me when we first met. I’m good at making money, not good at what to do with it after the check clears. She is the financial guru in this home.

  “Yes, use non-U.S. stock as a diversifies I’d add between ten and twenty percent international, whatever your comfort level is. Your portfolio is too moderate. Diversification is the key, but you have to have it put together… right… you’re catching on. Performance is the key.”

  Her conversation, her astuteness, set fire to a man’s loins. I am a man stimulated by intelligence, jazz, lattes, and warm conversations. But intellect is the key. Intelligence rises as beauty fades, time giving the former wings to soar while it whittles away at the latter.

  Plato knew what he was talking about when he wrote Symposium because it’s right along those lines, the dialogue showing Socrates’ conviction that it is the things not seen which are eternal.

  She drops her gym bag outside the bedroom door then leans in and smiles at me. My heart runs hot, has since the first time I saw her sitting across the table. I’m sitting on our bed, naked, white sheet up to my waist, my computer in my lap. I return her smile.

  Her skin has a wonderful glow. She looks happy. This moment is beautiful.

  I hate the news I have to give.

  She whispers, “Brought you a present.”

  She sets the mango-and-pineapple smoothie on the nightstand, within my reach, takes the banana smoothie and sips her paradise. I snap my fingers to get her attention, then motion at the nightstand, at the note I have left for her, red ink on yellow legal paper.

  It only says that her Grandpa Fred has called. When she is ready, the rest of the news will come from my mouth. Death is not to be written down. I have never heard of Grandpa Fred. I have never heard of Willie Esther. I don’t know how important they can be if she has never mentioned them. But Grandpa Fred’s phone call also told me that I am an unknown as well. If her family does not know about me, then maybe I should ask myself how important am I to Genevieve. What Grandpa Fred said about Genevieve keeping her own last name, it stings.

  Still I don’t want to be insensitive in this moment. I choose to follow her emotional lead.

  Genevieve keeps talking on her cellular as she reads the message.

  I watch her. I read the body language of the Taurean woman who never comes unglued.

  Her expression changes. Her professional laughter dissipates, but not all at once. What she reads has the effect of a stun gun set on high.

  “Your goal is… is… highest probable consistent rate of return. No guarantees, but… minimize risk. That’s why you… you… you pick mutual funds that complement each other.”

  She rereads the name, stares at each of the words as if she wants them to change.

  Her hair is short, wavy, salt-and-pepper with a distinguished and mature appeal. It has more pepper than salt, but the salt will overtake the pepper in the years to come. Soft breasts that fill out a C-cup. Skin the color of natural honey. Round face with a pointy chin. Dimples live in her soft cheeks, the kind of dimples that make her harshest face seem a little bit pleasant.

  She tells her client, “I. Have. To. Go.”

  She clicks off the phone, stares at me.

  Wordless.

  Genevieve is seldom wordless.

  I tell her what she has already read. “A man who said he was Grandpa Fred called you.”

  She continues to stare, her mouth barely moving. “You… you actually talked to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  I put my laptop to the side, swing my body around, put my bare feet on the wooden floor.

  She asks, “What, they called to ask for money?”

  “He said your grandmother died. Your mother’s mother. Willie Esther.”

  “Willie Esther.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry”

  “When?”

  “Today.”

  She puts her hand over her stomach as if her pain’s center is there, then goes blank.

  I say, “Genevieve?”

  She remains unfocused, eyes flicker, like her thoughts are white noise.

  I ask, “Are you having another attack? Genevieve?”

  I’m tentative, standing up now, still waiting to see how she will respond, if tears will come, if her knees will buckle, if she will fall into hysterics. I don’t know how she embraces death.

  Genevieve turns and walks down the hallway. Steps slow and heavy. The sensor beeps three times, then the audio part of the house alarm announces that the door to the patio is open.

  I pull on my jeans, walk to the end of the hall, look out the window. The darkness gives me back my own image. Genevieve tells me I’m like the boy next
door. That my thin frame makes me more like Jimmy Stewart than Denzel Washington. If that comparison is true, then her being an enigma, her ability to become icy, that makes her more Kim Novak than Sanaa Lathan. Both of us have cute, trustworthy, collegiate features. I run my hand down my narrow face until my fingers get to my goatee. I stare at myself. Don’t •see that commonplace image in my own rugged reflection. We never see ourselves with the eyes of others.