Dirty Old Men [And Other Stories] (Zane Presents) (41 page)

Tony looked away from her and couldn’t bring himself to accuse her in person. But he knew that she was out there running around on him. He loved the woman’s company too much to press the issue. What if, after being discovered, she decided to divorce him and leave? He would be left heart-broken and lonely again. And at his age, a piece of a beautiful woman was better than none. So he backed down from his wife’s heated glare.

BLOOM!

The heavy door shut behind her as she walked into the garage and over to her black Mercedes. The garage door raised with a push of her automatic
remote, and out she drove into the night for another rendezvous in Boston from her cozy home in the Brookline suburbs.

Imagine crossing the border of a million-dollar, five- and six-bedroom home community, and driving into the heart of the seedy, project apartments of Boston’s infamous Roxbury, where the crime, despair, hard living and tough breaks of poverty still ran rampant?

Suzanne Smith-Greene had talked herself into doing exactly that. Her fetish with Roxbury had become her hard dose of reality, to reclaim the edge she felt she had lost in her relationship with a good man in the suburbs. She had lost her feelings of urgency there, and the vital rush of passion. There wasn’t enough excitement in her college professor husband, Harvard tenure or not. The university luncheons, dinners and events that she had attended with him in her mid-twenties had become the exciting stuff of yesterday, where soft men spoke of soft issues and the cerebral world of ideas and academics. However, Suzanne still desired the active lives of real
men,
the hard hands, hard bodies, hard work, and the sweaty funk of physical exertion. She desired their brazen forwardness and lustful stares. She longed for a man’s unapologetic ruggedness, and a forceful, bedroom appetite. And she had found it all in Roxbury.

As soon as she arrived at the familiar sights of Washington Street from Arbor Way, she made her usual right turn and headed farther south, passing an engaged police cruiser to her left.

WHURRPP! WHURRPP! WHURRPP!

The police cruiser’s loud, short chirps warned the traffic to move out of its path, while the illuminated car accelerated up the street in the opposite direction.

“Something is
always
going on over here,” Suzanne mumbled. But the commotion of the ’hood had never fazed her. In fact, she
liked
it. The everyday drama there reminded her that she was still alive and a part of a much bigger, imperfect world.

She made another right turn into the Chesterfield Homes Apartments complex and spotted a busy mother with a beautiful young daughter, walking hand-in-hand. The little girl of nine looked Suzanne right in her face from the sidewalk, with twinkling, expressive eyes. She didn’t seem concerned about the poverty there in the projects at all.

“Awwww, isn’t she
adorable,
” Suzanne cooed from the safety of her car.

The mother noticed the stare and shook her daughter gently to stop it.

“Cut it, girl, we don’t know her. She might be out here trying to kidnap you,” the mother warned her daughter. “Them rich people do that to little girls, you know. They try to make you into their little dollbabies.”

Suzanne noticed the heavy-set mother jerk her daughter’s attention away from her car, while giving the little girl a verbal reprimand. Suzanne continued to watch them from her rearview mirror as she headed toward her destination.

She was a young, reprimanded daughter herself years ago, while growing up in the Bronx, New York, where her half-Dominican mother warned her never to trust anyone who smiled at her too hard.

“You are a very pretty girl, Suzanne. So you must watch out for people who are too nice to you. A lot of them will try to take advantage of you and think that you are weak because you’re so pretty.”

Suzanne believed her mother and learned to fear everyone, right up until graduation from Boston College, where she studied psychology. She then began to make her own assessments, form her own rules, and devise her own loyalties and beliefs, while going on to study law. And in the middle of finishing up her law school degree, she met Professor Antonio Greene at an intellectual property discussion at M.I.T. in Cambridge. She was smitten by his decency and his dedication to intellectual pursuits. But now that seemed
ages
ago.

I need more in my life than that academic shit now,
she mused distastefully.

Although her mother had learned to love and respect her daughter’s husband, after an initial leeriness over their age difference, Suzanne began to despise his impotence. He had been robbed of his ability to reproduce, and with it, he had been depleted of any swagger. Adding insult to injury, Antonio had put off any real actions toward artificial insemination to sire children. Talking about researching a sperm bank, and actually going to one, were two different things. So his young and unsatisfied wife began to stray in the inner-city terrain of Boston, finding herself a much younger man who
was
active with his words.

To take her mind off the hard realities of her past, she called to alert her destination on her cell phone.

“Hello,” a gruff voice answered.

“Hey, I’m about to pull up now. Sorry I took a minute. My husband started acting up with the questions again.”

“And what’s up with the panties and bra? You came how I told you to come?”

She smiled.
Now that’s a man!
she declared to herself. “You’ll see.”

“Aw’ight, well, the door’ll be open for you.”

And that was it. The man hung up the phone and left her to her thoughts.

Suzanne clicked off the line and couldn’t wait to see him, with no panties or bra under her gray, women’s business suit, just like he liked it.

She pulled into an open parking spot outside of his building and eyed the young convicts-in-training, who often congregated near the entrance of the apartments. They were all in their late teens and early twenties, wearing the national hip-hop gear of winter jackets, hats and hoodies, designer sneakers and boots, and oversized blue jeans. Knowing who she was there to see, they nodded to her respectfully and created a crease for her to walk by.

After she had entered the building, one of the young men commented on her frequent visits to the projects. “Yo, that bitch is crazy, man.”

“The man just got
game
like that, player,” another guy disputed with a chuckle.

“Shit, ain’t that much
game
in the world. That bitch just
crazy,
” the first guy insisted.

“Yeah, crazy for that
dick
,” a third young man joked. They all shared a hearty laugh, fascinated that such an established, married woman would stoop so low for obvious lust.

“I mean, that’s just an experiment for that ho, man. You know how it is with them educated hoes. I had a few of ’em like that myself; white ones, too,” one of the oldest of the group added. “You know, they’ll fuck you and give you a few dollars for a minute. Then they’ll go back to their regular lives when the experiment’s over.”

His final assessment seemed to appease them all.

“Yup, that’s how that shit is. You got it right there.”

Oblivious to their conversations about her, Suzanne ascended the apartment stairs to the third floor, and every step on the hollow floors sounded amplified, like the surround sound of a state-of-the-art movie theater.

CLIP-CLOP, CLIP-CLOP, CLIP-CLOP
…her heels sounded up the steps.

Why are these steps and floors so damn LOUD in this place?
she questioned.
They need some carpeting, better wood, more insulation or something!
But it still beat taking the elevators. She didn’t trust the elevators at all; the long wait, the slow mechanics, the overall safety, or the stench. So she would rather walk up.

When she arrived at the door, she took a deep breath before she grabbed the doorknob to let herself inside.

Well, here we go again, Suzanne,
she told herself.

She walked into the overheated, two-bedroom apartment and double-locked the door with the latch and chain, like he had always told her to. Then she walked into a spaghetti and meatball meal inside the kitchen.

Raymond “Big Ray” Cummings sat at his small kitchen table, wearing oversized blue jeans and an ultra-clean wife beater.

“You hungry?”

He was an extra-chocolate black man with a low haircut and the body size of a hulking football player. He had played defensive line in high school, but he never applied himself enough in his classes to attend college.

Suzanne shook her head and turned down his offer of spaghetti.

“I just finished eating at home before I left out.” She didn’t like that
he
was still eating either. It would only slow down the process of what she was there for.

Big Ray shrugged and continued to eat his spaghetti and meatballs. He had a half roll of Italian garlic bread and a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, with a tall glass of ice on the table.

“So, your old man asked you where you were going again?” he asked with a smile.

Big Ray was only twenty-five years old, but he had a commanding quality about him, with the poise and authority of a man of forty.

Suzanne took off her long coat and set it across the back of one of his kitchen chairs.

“He always asks me extra questions when he gets in those funky little moods of his.”

“I would
too
if my wife was running out on me to fuck somebody once a week,” Ray admitted. The young and boastful man was so frank that Suzanne
was no longer shocked or offended by it. His delivery was always raw. But he gave her the honesty that she wanted.

“So, did you plan to feed me earlier, or did you just decide to eat because you didn’t know the exact time that I would arrive here tonight?”

“Yeah,” Ray answered vaguely.

Suzanne looked confused. “Yeah, what?”

“I was hungry from waiting, so I cooked something to eat. I was about to run out somewhere, but since you said you was coming…”

“Again, I apologize. But I never really know sometimes when he’s about to act up.”

“What about when you go back home late? What does he ask you
then?
”

Suzanne took a breath and paused. She didn’t feel like playing a game of a hundred questions with him either. She was there to be serviced sexually and that was it. But Big Ray didn’t seem to be cooperating, or at least not on her urgent time schedule.

“You need me to, ah, make a run and come back when you’re ready?”

Ray stopped eating his spaghetti and looked at her with a hard grill. “Everything is about
you,
hunh? You want what you want right now. Some people say the same thing about me,” he told her. “My baby’s momma says it.”

Suzanne looked at his muscular biceps and viewed the tattoos he had of his two daughters, one on each arm. Every time she looked at them, she imagined having daughters of her own, but only under the right circumstances. And those circumstances seemed to be passing her by.

“So, you want me to go right into it and stop eating and everything, right?” he asked her.

“Well, like I said, I can go grab a drink and come back.”

“And how long would that take you?” Ray continued to stuff his mouth with food while he asked her. He was nearly finished with his plate now.

“I mean, twenty, thirty minutes.”

The hulking young man stood up and shook his head. He grabbed his finished plate and took it to the sink, while munching down his garlic bread.

“Naw,” he told her. “I’m done.” Then he walked to wash his hands at the sink.

Big Ray worked in construction now, so he was rarely without work. But
he claimed to like living in Roxbury’s projects for the same reason that
she
liked coming there to visit him. It felt like a real slice of life there. And after his girlfriend and baby’s momma began to act a little too demanding in their new place in Hyde Park, Ray moved out and returned to Roxbury on his own.

“Nobody fucks with me like that. I give you a better life, and then you try and turn around and become the
boss
on me. Fuck that,” he had explained to her. “We only got
two kids
and I’m not the fucking
third.
”

After he finished washing his hands at the sink, he walked back over to the table to finish off his large glass of Mountain Dew with ice.

“You gon’ get what you need,” he promised.

“Are you certain your food’s all digested?” she quizzed him. She wasn’t so sure about sexing him so early after finishing his food.

“What you think, I’ma take a shit by accident while we fucking?”

His unabashed candor was simply humorous to her. Her husband would
never
say anything like that, even if he was thinking it. That’s what made Raymond so interesting to her. He was a man of uncommon truth in a world of lies. And as a practicing lawyer, she had heard them all.

She grinned and asked, “Have you always said anything that comes to your mind?”

“That’s why I keep a job,” he answered. “These construction bosses know they can count on me to say what the hell I need to say to the other guys on the site,
and
to them. So I keep everybody in check. And they know that’s important to get shit done. Somebody gotta do it.”

He wiped a clean spot on his kitchen counter and grabbed her by her hips to sit her there.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m setting you on the counter.”

“
Here?
”

“Yeah, we fucked everywhere else in here already; the bathroom, living room, bedroom, the hallway. So I came up with this idea while I was sitting here waiting for you. At first I was gon’ fuck you up against the doorway as soon as you walked in.”

His rawness never failed to raise her libido. Maybe it had something to
do with her strong Spanish blood from the Bronx. But his barbaric mentality turned her on. It had been the same way since she had first met him downtown at the Green Room Bar, nearly a year ago.

He then attacked her right earlobe with his tongue.