The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (29 page)

Thursday was great at talking to people she didn’t know. And since Caleb had dumped her, in the surprise move of the year, she now had even more time to go to a bunch of things with me—especially if they were free. To accommodate Thursday’s financial situation, I had started hitting up art gallery openings and pay-what-you-can nights, and the next thing I knew, I was booked up every night of the week. No time to take on extra projects at work.

At one point, John Worthington, the only black partner in my firm, called me into his office. “You should decide if you want to have a social life or if you want to be partner.”

John had been nice to me from the start, taking me under his wing when I got hired and not seeming to hold it against me that I was younger and smarter, so I answered him straight. “I’m reevaluating if I need to be partner. I like being a senior accountant, but my social life hasn’t
been going nearly as well as my career. So I’m concentrating on that right now.”

John stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “I’ve been at this firm for over twenty years. I’ve given that career-versus-social-life advice more times than I can remember, and I’ve never had an accountant pick ‘social life.’” He nodded thoughtfully. “Good for you. Wish I’d been smart enough to pick social life when I was your age. Maybe things would have turned out different.”

It was common knowledge around the office that John’s wife, Dorothea, had served him with divorce papers. He had two daughters, but they were both in college, so, much like me, John had been sleeping in an empty bed every night.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you want to have a drink with me after work?”

I had always had what Risa called an “optimism problem” when it came to guys. Every time a guy showed an interest in me, I got struck with a vision of our potential future together. I’d see us walking down the aisle after getting married or envision what our children would look like. I’d say things to my friends like, “He’s got these soft brown eyes. I could see how pretty they’d be on a little girl.”

So when John asked me out and I got zapped with a vision of my future with him, that wasn’t unexpected. What surprised the bejeezus out of me was what the vision contained: I saw myself going out with John, enjoying the company of a man who was both old enough to be my father and wise enough to teach me a few things. I’d agree to a longer dinner date. Then eventually we’d go to bed. He’d talk about us getting married after his divorce was finalized. We’d discuss the possibility of more children.

But the divorce would never get finalized. At first it would be because divorces take time. But then Dorothea would decide that she no longer wanted a divorce, and though he would insist he had stopped loving her when he started loving me, he would claim to feel bad about abandoning her and suddenly he’d have moved back in with his wife, just for a little while.

Four years. That’s how long it would take for me to realize that John was never going to leave his wife and marry me. And at the end of those four years, I would be extremely bitter that I had wasted so much time on this man who had never loved me as much as he said he did. I saw all of this in the few seconds after John asked me out. It was like a crystal ball had opened up in my mind. And it felt real, like God was whispering my future in my ear.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said to John. Handsome, successful, black man John. I said, “Workplace romances can get weird.”

John suddenly became very interested in his computer. “Understood,” he said, and started typing. Which I guessed meant I was dismissed.

I got up and left. And I wouldn’t have thought so much about that unusual vision, except it kept on happening. A few weeks later, I bumped into Marcus after coming back into the office after a lunchtime walk. Usually, we avoided eye contact when we crossed paths, but he must have been feeling romantic that day, because he said, “Hey, Sharita.”

“Hi,” I answered.

He thrust out his brown signing box at me. “Rhonda’s not here again.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, taking the stylus and signing for the many large envelopes he had placed in Rhonda’s mail basket.

Then he said, “I’ve been meaning to apologize for how things ended with us.”

That was all he said, but another vision hit me with a zap of mental electricity. His apology would be followed by a dinner invitation. We’d go out a few more times, he’d even agree to meet my friends, but then … the exact same thing would happen. He would start accusing me of being uppity whenever I asked him to do anything he didn’t want to do, and when I dared to ask where he saw our relationship going, he would dump me again. Six months. This latest resurrection of our relationship would last six months, with him getting a half year’s worth of sex, cooking, and laundry and me getting … nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“You’re a nurture digger,” I realized out loud.

“What?” he said, screwing up his face.

“You know how guys are always accusing women of being gold diggers? You, Marcus, are a nurture digger. You want all the benefits of dating a woman who knows how to take care of her man, but you don’t want to do anything for her in return.” I thought about this for a second. “What you might want to do is start using your discretionary income on a maid. That way you wouldn’t have to do your own domestic work, and then you could just hire hookers for sex.”

“What?” he said again.

“Isn’t that what you want? Somebody to have sex with and do all the domestic stuff, without you having to give her anything in return? Your problem is that you’re looking for all of that in one woman. What you need to do is outsource your domestic and your sex separately.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t have to pay for sex.”

“See, Marcus, that’s where you go wrong. Being a black man with a job doesn’t mean you qualify for some type of entitlement program. Nothing is free. You either have to pay a monetary cost or an emotional cost to get what you really want. But you’ve got to pay.”

Marcus’s handsome face had been so smooth and affable when he said hello, but now it was contorted into the cruel lines that I remembered from their last encounter. “You a crazy bitch,” he said. “Fuck you.”

I handed him back his brown box. “Outsourcing is definitely the way to go for you. Remember I said that when you’re fifty and alone.”

“I ain’t the one who need to be worried about being old and alone. You fat, you black, you crazy—ain’t nobody going to want your ass. And I got bitches coming at me ALL DAY.”

I shrugged. “I also seem to have bitches coming at me all day. But the thing is, I’m not trying to get with a bitch like you. So good-bye, Marcus.”

I turned and left, with Marcus cussing me every which way. But I just waved over my head and said it again, this time in a jaunty singsong. “Good-bye, Marcus.”

And the Crystal Ball didn’t stop there. The next few weeks brought run-ins with guys at events. I met a light-skinned guy with dreadlocks and dreams of becoming a progressive-rock star at a gallery show. The Crystal Ball told me that he would date me until his parents threatened to cut him off unless he got rid of his dreads, dumped his girlfriend, and came back east to work for his father’s company. And there was a Latino IT guy I met while in line for an action movie who was really affable. But the Crystal Ball told me we had nothing in common. He liked watching UFC fights while I liked watching
Dr. Who
. Neither of us had ever seen even one episode of what the other liked the most. And it would make for two very awkward dates. I ended up turning both guys down.

The Crystal Ball also showed up at one of my co-worker’s birthday parties. A tall brother from New Orleans introduced himself to me. He was fine and had that same Southern gentleman quality that I admired in James Farrell, not to mention the fact that he was a tax attorney, which meant he had to be making at least six figures a year. When I took his card, I suddenly saw us hitting it off, getting married, having children. But then the vision turned sour. He’d seem like the perfect husband, but he would keep a mistress on the side. His father had a mistress, as did his grandfather and the grandfather before that. That was what the men in his family did; it could almost be qualified as a tradition. Except he wouldn’t tell me about this tradition until after I found the secret credit card bill with all of the gifts he had bought for his other woman.

The rest of his life. That’s how long that relationship would last. First I wouldn’t leave him because of the kids. Then I wouldn’t leave him because I was too scared to be alone. Either way, he would die happy, and then I would die several years later feeling like I had wasted my life with the last in a long line of men who didn’t truly love me.

This was when the Crystal Ball Visions began to feel a little crazy. John, Marcus, the light-skinned guy, and the Latino guy were one thing, but this was a fine successful brother, who had graduated from law school and he was asking for my card.

“Did your father have a mistress?” I asked him, feeling stupid.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“It’s just something I have to know before I give you my card,” I said.

He shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why does my father’s mistress matter?”

His Southern accent was so sexy, I wanted to slap myself and these stupid visions I’d been having lately. But I had always been a believer, and something inside me believed in the new version of the Crystal Ball one hundred percent. “So he does have a mistress,” I said.

“Yes, but …” The tax attorney looked comically baffled now. “What does it matter?”

I sighed. “You know, you should be upfront about that with whoever you marry. You should tell her from the get-go that you plan to keep a mistress. It’s only fair.”

I had expected him to deny his intention to acquire a mistress after getting married, but instead he looked shaken. “Are you—?” He started and stopped, but then started again. “You see, I’m from New Orleans, so I have to wonder, are you some kind of seer?”

“I’m thinking I might have become one.” I pressed his business card back into his hand. “At least when it involves seeing through guys that want to date me.”

THURSDAY

S
itting on the steps outside my ex-boyfriend’s apartment, I thought for sure that October would go down as the worst month of 2011 for me. But, as it turned out, October had nothing on November. The messiest chapter in the soap opera that had become my life began with Mike Barker showing up on the metal stairs that led up to my soon-to-be-former apartment.

“Hey, you used to be a drug dealer or something, right?” I asked when I saw him standing there at the bottom of the stairs. “Do you know how to pick a lock?”

Without even asking how I had managed to lock myself out of my apartment, he jogged up the stairs, inspected the door and said, “Yeah, this is easy.”

Then he’d reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone. “Mrs. Murphy,” he said a few seconds later. “This is Mike. Can you send a locksmith ASAP to this address?” He gave her the loft’s address and hung up. “He should be here within the hour.”

“Thanks,” I said. Then thinking about my small bank account, which would no longer be subsidized by Caleb, I asked, “Just how much does a locksmith that comes within the hour cost?”

“I got it,” he said. “Part of my apology.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Your apology?”

Mike ran a hand over the back of his neck. “Yeah, Davie thinks that maybe I overreacted to your feedback and she’s been encouraging me to make some sort of atonement with you. She’s big on atonement, but you never called me back, so I had to ambush you. Again.”

I nearly forgot about my newly broke-and-boyfriendless state, I was so amused by Mike’s apology. “First of all,
maybe
you overreacted? You left me on the dock. Second of all, what are you? Like, forty? Does it bother you
even a little that somebody else has to tell you when your behavior sucks? It’s like you don’t have any agency of your own. Third of all, you didn’t have to ambush me. Nobody has to show up anyplace unannounced. You chose to come over here.”

My point made, I sat back down on the stairs to wait for Mike’s locksmith.

Mike came to sit down beside me on the stairs. “Okay, fine, I’m sorry for leaving you at the dock. That was uncalled for. You’re obviously not as enlightened or as much of an adult as I am, so I should have taken the high road with you.”

I looked over at him. “Wait, are you calling me a child?”

“Yes, yes, I am,” he said. Then, before I could respond to that: “And, by the way, it’s not that I don’t have my own agency, it’s that I don’t necessarily trust my own agency, because it’s let me down in the past. Recovering addicts don’t have the luxury of trusting themselves all the time. So, yes, I touch base with Davie every month. You can make fun of me for that if you want to, but it’s kept me off the table now for three years and counting.”

Well, that shut me up. “I’m not making fun of you,” I said after a few mortified seconds. “I’m glad you were able to get your life together. Really I’m jealous that you can afford a really good life coach. I could totally use one of those right now.”