God Ain't Blind (34 page)

Even though my marriage was back on the right track, Pee Wee and I still had a long way to go. He had made love to me several times since he’d revealed his medical condition to me. It was still not as good as it used to be, but I was thankful that it was getting there. Therefore, Louis’s services were still necessary. Besides, the way he fawned all over me every single time I saw him still did wonders for my morale and recovering ego. With Pee Wee back on the right track, I felt like I had the best of both worlds. What woman who had been neglected by her husband wouldn’t want to be in my position?

I knew that my affair was not going to be as ongoing as Rhoda’s with Bully; it had to end eventually. I told myself that as soon as I regained my comfort level with my husband, I’d start weaning myself off Louis. In the meantime, I would see him every chance I could.

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What I said and what I did were two different things. Before I realized it, my affair with Louis was out of control. It felt like I was trapped on a runaway train and I couldn’t get off. But the thing that scared me the most was the fact that I wasn’t ready to get off, anyway. I was enjoying the ride on Louis’s train. And speaking of trains, that was one of several words he used when he referred to his penis. It sounded a lot better than poker. Now that was a word that I had never heard anybody else use in a sexual way, not down South or anywhere else.

Since Rhoda was not that available for the bowling date ruse until further notice, I had to get more creative. I spent time with Louis during the day, when my coworkers thought I was attending staff meetings at the main office. But that was an excuse I couldn’t run into the ground, for obvious reasons. I didn’t want some busy-body like Gloria to get too suspicious of my actions and call up the main office to check up on me, so I claimed I had doctor’s appointments, too. That was the only excuse I didn’t like to use. Not because somebody could check up on it, but because it was the excuse that Pee Wee had used—which turned out not to be an excuse after all. I used it only a few times. In addition to that, I started saying I had to leave the office for a couple of hours to go meet with my lawyer, then my banker, and once even a fictitious old friend from school.

One night when I got an overwhelming urge to see Louis, I told Pee Wee that I needed to go out to pick up something from the Grab and Go convenience store. He insisted on going for me until I told him that I needed to purchase tampons, douche powder, and butt spray.

“Eeyow! I ain’t about to go up in that store to buy all them gruesome female doodads,” he said with a grimace and a shudder. “You know how I feel about all that mess.”

“All right. Are you sure you don’t want to think about it some more?” I asked, knowing damn well he didn’t want to go. But I had to make it look good, for his sake as well as mine. I had my car keys in my hand. I did have to pick up everything I had mentioned, but the main reason I had to visit the convenience store was to pick up some more condoms for Louis to use with me.

Pee Wee didn’t even bother to answer my last question. He just 256

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gave me an exasperated look and waved me toward the door before he plopped down in his La-Z-Boy.

I knew that Louis was still struggling to make his business succeed, so his finances were not as stable as mine. Before I knew it, I was the one paying for motel visits when we didn’t want to go to his apartment. I was also paying for gas for his van and for dinner in out-of-the-way places. I didn’t mind, because it was worth it to me.

As a matter of fact, Louis never asked me to pay for anything; I always did it on my own. Mainly because had I not, I would not have been able to see him as often as I wanted to.

Despite my eagerness to be so generous, there was one situation that made me curious about Louis. The oven in his restaurant had stopped working all of a sudden. For every hour that it didn’t work, his business lost a hell of a lot of money. He adamantly “refused”

the three-thousand-dollar loan I offered him to get the oven repaired or replaced. I didn’t know anything about the price of a restaurant oven, but three thousand dollars to get it fixed or replaced seemed like a lot to me, but it was an amount I could manage. “I wasn’t raised to take handouts,” he’d claimed, slapping my hand when I pulled my checkbook out of my purse. “Besides that, I wouldn’t want to put you in a financial bind.” The man was as noble as King James. I admired him for that.

I couldn’t stand to look at his long puppy-dog face during the days he was scrambling around, trying to get loans from various banks. That was why I approached the situation from a different angle. Since he wouldn’t let me help with the oven, because he thought it would be a financial hardship for me, I proposed an offer that he could not refuse. I decided to dummy up a bogus invoice to make it look like he had catered another event at my office, in addition to our regular Monday luncheons. I decided that a “performance recognition” event that included myself and some process servers—who didn’t exist—sounded good in the comments section on the invoice. Since I had been so hands-on in setting up my original deal with Louis, he and I were the only ones who kept copies of his invoices. Under these circumstances, he accepted my offer to help him replace his oven without hesitation.

And he was more concerned about me getting caught than I was.

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“Baby, I’d die if you got in trouble with your boss for something you did for me,” he told me. I assured him that there was nothing to worry about. When I handed him the check for the bogus service, his hand was shaking, and he was so hesitant to accept it, I had to slap the damn check into his hand and close his fingers around it.

C H A P T E R 5 1

“You stupid bitch!” That was what Rhoda screamed at me when I told her about all the money that I’d invested in my relationship with Louis.

“What do you mean?” I asked stupidly.

“Girl, what’s wrong with you? Have you lost your fuckin’ mind?”

she hollered. It was a Thursday, and we were having lunch at a pizza parlor not far from my office. “What good is a lover if you’ve got to pay him for his time? I have nothin’ against gigolos, but if a paid lover was the best I could do, I’d service myself. Lord have mercy.” Rhoda had to fan her face with her napkin.

“Gigolo? If Louis Baines is a gigolo, I’m the happy hooker. It’s nothing like that,” I wailed. “Louis wants to be with me. He’s the one who initiated this affair. He has
never
asked me for any financial assistance. As a matter of fact, I practically had to make him take the check to get his oven taken care of.”

“And that’s another thing! Don’t you think that three thousand dollars sounds like a lot to replace an oven?”

“I did think that that was a lot for an oven,” I replied, giving Rhoda a thoughtful look. “But there must be some that cost that much.”

“Well, maybe that’s what an oven would cost in the White House or Buckingham Palace. But we’re talkin’ about an oven in a pooh-GOD AIN’ T BLIND

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butt restaurant in Richland, Ohio, that serves baked chicken gizzards!”

“Look, Rhoda, the man said it cost three thousand, and I didn’t question him.”

“You should have! You should have asked him to show you where he was gettin’ an oven from that cost that much.”

“Why, Rhoda? Like I said, he didn’t ask me for the money, and I practically had to make him take it,” I said, knowing that my defense was weak.

“Why? His problems are not your problems. Listen to me. Havin’

an affair is one thing. It could cause a lot of trouble, and a lot of people could get hurt. That’s why it’s so important to keep it in perspective.”

“I don’t want a little thing like a busted oven to keep us apart.

When that damn thing fizzled out, he was too distraught to see me, even though he wanted to. I went to his apartment one night, and he couldn’t even get a hard-on. I just went through that impotence shit with my husband. I’ll be damn if I go through it with my lover, too.”

For a moment, I forgot where I was. I glanced around to make sure that none of the other patrons in the pizza parlor were listening to my conversation with Rhoda. The slice of pizza on my plate had gotten cold. I had only nibbled on it since we sat down. I still had not completely regained my passion for pizza, thanks to Jade.

It had been three weeks since Jade had come home from the hospital. This was the first time that Rhoda had been able to leave the house. Even though Lizel and Wyrita had everything under control. Not only were they running Rhoda’s child-care facility, but they were tending to Jade’s numerous needs, too.

“Well, it’s your life. I can’t tell you how to live it,” Rhoda said with a thoroughly disgusted look. “I’m just glad you’re happy.” She pressed her lips together and looked at me for a long time.

“Rhoda, I’ve never been like this before in my life,” I said evenly.

“Like what?” she asked, giving me a look that I could not interpret.

“Doing all this crazy shit with and for Louis. It must be my midlife crisis, huh?”

“Midlife crisis, my ass. You’re just a damn fool. That’s all this is.”

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“As my best friend, I expect a little more compassion from you,”

I said, pouting. “You don’t have to sound so coarse with me, Rhoda.

This is a very confusing time for me. My marriage is on the rocks and a hard place. My parents both have one foot in the grave. And, my damn menopause must have kicked in, because I’ve been experiencing hot flashes all week, not to mention periods that are no longer regular.”

“Please don’t go there. I’m goin’ through the same thing.”

“It explains a few things. I’ve been doing a lot of stupid shit lately.”

“Tell me about it. And that’s just my point. You’ve been doin’ a whole lot of stupid shit lately. I just don’t want you to get yourself into somethin’ you’ll regret,” Rhoda told me. “And since you brought up the subject of a midlife crisis, that’s an excuse we can both use, I guess. I mean, why else would upstandin’, well-respected women in the community like us risk our marriages?”

I didn’t bother to remind Rhoda that she’d been with her lover for most of her married life. “Since when did
you
need an excuse to justify your actions?” I asked with a sneer. “Especially one like menopause.”

Rhoda wet her lips with her tongue and rolled her eyes at me.

Then she gave me a dismissive wave. “Did Pee Wee take you to that bed-and-breakfast yet?”

I shook my head and chuckled. “No, he has not even mentioned it again. Why?”

“Lord knows, I need a break after all I’ve been through.” Rhoda pushed her plate away and took a drink from her Diet Pepsi. She cleared her throat and sat up straighter in her chair. “Bully has to go back to London again next week to wrap up the sale of another one of his buildings. He’ll be gone for a whole week. We’re goin’

to spend this weekend together before he goes, though.”

“And?”

“Bully really likes you. And I was thinkin’ how nice it would be if we all spent the weekend together—at a different bed-and-breakfast, of course. I know a place in Cleveland.”

I gave Rhoda one of the most incredulous looks I could manage.

“What about your husband? What are you going to tell him?”

“The same thing you’re goin’ to tell yours. We’ll tell them that we’re goin’ to a spa in Cleveland.”

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I gasped. “You want me to bring Louis?”

Rhoda gasped back at me. “I know damn well you didn’t think I was talkin’ about a romantic weekend getaway with our
husbands.
”

Rhoda laughed.

I tried not to laugh myself, but I did, anyway. Because under the circumstances, spending a romantic weekend with our husbands was ludicrous. We both wanted to have some fun, and we knew that that would not be the case with our husbands. Otis hadn’t made love to Rhoda in years. And Pee Wee, well, he still had to get back up to speed for me to enjoy having sex with him again. Why waste a weekend at a bed-and-breakfast with two duds like our husbands?

I prayed that it really was menopause that was making me act like such a fool. And I prayed that it would end soon. I really didn’t like the woman that I had become. . . .

I looked around the restaurant and lowered my voice before I spoke again. “Rhoda, you told Bully about me and Louis?”

“So?”

“So what if he gets drunk and blabs to Otis? Otis is one of Pee Wee’s closest friends.”

“Get a grip, woman. Do you think Bully and I would still be hittin’ it after all these years if he was the kind of man to shoot off his mouth?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know if Louis can get away on such short notice. He’s going to be very busy trying to get caught up now that he has a new oven to work with. I’ll call him up when I get back to the office,” I declared.

“Well, I need to know by noon tomorrow. We have to confirm our reservations by then. And, by the way, it’s nine hundred a night per couple. Plus gratuities.”

“Nine hundred a night?”

“You get what you pay for. Donald Trump spends money like that for things like this all the time.”

“Well, he’s Donald Trump. We’re not. And you had the nerve to question a three-thousand-dollar oven.”

Rhoda released an impatient sigh and gave me a look that let me know that she was annoyed with me. “Look, if you can’t afford it, it’ll be my treat!”

“You don’t need to pay for me to be with Louis,” I protested.

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“I’m just tryin’ to help,” she said, softening before my eyes. “It’s just that we haven’t done anything like that together in a while.”

I held my hand up to her face. “Shut up. I’ll go. I can use my American Express. The one Pee Wee doesn’t know I have. The money is no problem for me,” I said, knowing damn well that if Louis and I went, the money would come from my pocketbook.

Since I’d only agree to do this once, it didn’t seem so bad. I eased my guilt by reminding myself that I knew a lot of women who had done things much worse than what I was doing now. And, it helped for me to convince myself that as long as my husband didn’t know, it wouldn’t hurt him.