War (8 page)

“Winnie, you changed Cadence’s locks?” What the hell!

“Actually Rusty did it. Said he was glad to do it and if I needed any more locks changed I should call him. I went ahead and gave him Danielle’s number.” Malcolm lets out an exhale. “So let’s see…maybe you should go to Nat’s. But then again, you know how Dena is about people who defile marriage. I called her about ten minutes ago and told her that you and Malcolm were Marriage Defilers. So because of it, she guaranteed me that you two have no place in her home or her life. Hmm… Where can you go? Where can you go?  Jasmine and Marlon’s? Maybe Marlon will let you sleep in between them? Ya know, get a proper threesome going on. Trust me, baby, you’re gonna
love
black dick.”

              “Winnie, open the fucking door!”

              “No can do.” And then Beyoncé starts crooning on the other side of the door. God…why me? I turn around to face Mac and see that he’s shaking his head again.

              “The Four Seasons,” I say to him. “We need to camp out there for the night.” I’ve been here before. Winnie will get mad but she’s bound to come around. Technically speaking, Jasmine’s the guilty one here, not me. There’s absolutely no proof that I’ve been sleeping with her. “You ready?” Malcolm drifts his eyes over to me and shakes his head again. He’s tired. He’s worried. He’s sick. “Come on, let’s just try Nat.” Mac shakes his head again. He’s right. Dena’s not fucking with us. Four Seasons it is.

NAT

              I didn’t love Dena.

              That’s not to say that I don’t now, because now, trust me, I do. Right now as I walk through the door of our condo and see her dressed in a long wrap, her hair pinned up in that bun she calls a
chignon
and her pair of diamond studs shining through the backdrop of the candles, I know that I love her. She gives me a worried smile and puts her finger up at me to tell me one moment. She’s on her cell.

              She’s talking to Jasmine.

              I walk over to her and give her a kiss on her lips. They always smell like roses. She has her lipstick imported from Grasse, France, a small town on the French Rivera known for its rose fields. She stands up on her toes, always painted a perfect light pink, and wraps her hand around my neck. I always love when she does that.

              But I didn’t always love
her
.

             
Dena’s family weren’t always the Fletchers, they were
once
the
Ferriers
—
French
colonist
s who came to America to get away from the Catholics.
They
eventually
settled in Acadia and
interbred with
the Natives.
Dena’s near waist-length black hair with its loose waves, and her dark olive skin, usually lead people to ask if she’s Sicilian, the darkest of the Italian bunch. But to me, her cheekbones, which sit high above a set of full rose-scented lips, betray her Native roots.

But she will never, ever admit that.

“Just one second, my love,” she whispers to me as she puts a hand over the receiver of her cell. I can hear Jasmine talking into it now at a near unfathomable rate. “Jasmine is a
mess
.” I nod. She runs a hand over the lapel of my coat and locks eyes with me. I love Dena Fletcher.

Now.

Her family moved from Acadia, since the Catholics were starting to take over the northeast, and relocated
to Paroisse de Saint-Martin
.
Dena’s parents and I secretly travel back to Louisiana each year for the Fletcher family reunion. Well, let me correct that. Our trips
were
a secret until Danielle once overheard Dena speaking Cajun French on the phone to one of her cousins. I happened to be there that day outside our condo building. Danielle said nothing, just looked at Dena as Dena slowly ended the call. See, Danielle speaks Creole casually, but the Rouges are big wigs in Louisiana. They speak formal French or Parisian French in public. That shows their status. Dena’s family doesn’t speak formal French and are flat-out unable to these days. They speak low-grade French and Danielle knew it as soon as she heard Dena talking. Dena’s French dialect is the equivalent of a cabin dwelling, possum hunter, along a dirt road of Mississippi where there isn’t a public school within a hundred and fifty miles. Danielle’s Parisian French is the equivalent of Marie Antoinette, cake eater, heir to the throne, queen of the Republic of France.

Dena and Danielle’s social statuses are miles apart.

The look on Dena’s face, the way her eyes teared up and her hand began to shake when she realized Danielle had heard her speak her version of French, had nearly killed me. I tried to think of something to say, but Danielle beat me to the chase. “Malcolm said he’ll be down in a second,” she said in Dena’s low-grade French, without an ounce of condescension. “He’s on the phone with the governor.” She gave a light smile before standing next to Dena and me and making small talk, in English, about the restaurant we were all getting ready to head to.

Both Danielle and Dena have never mentioned the incident again. But one evening, while Dena and I were preparing dinner together and drinking her favorite red wine, she mentioned that Danielle isn’t “all that bad” and maybe Jasmine’s “a bit too hard on her”.

Dena had always wanted to forget her ancestry and upbringing. Her parents moved to Boston while Dena’s mother was pregnant. They came to Boston for a different lifestyle that didn’t include living in shotgun cabins on dirt roads and killing their food instead of buying it at the local butcher. So, up to Boston they came with their Cajun English accents they’ve since lost, Catholic ways and Southern etiquette. Dena’s parents made their living by running the biggest farm in Cambridge and opening up a bed and breakfast on the grounds. Dena shudders when her parents remind her that she grew up on a farm, but it made the Fletchers a household name. Especially when President Reagan began making the bed and breakfast his respite. Once Reagan came, the bed and breakfast attracted one politico after the next. Soon the Fletchers closed the bed and breakfast to anyone who wasn’t a government official and within a few years it became the go-to spot for governors, presidents, mayors and Senators.

The Fletchers had arrived.

Dena became friends with the daughters of presidents, governors and mayors as they ran around the farm together. She became a debutante, like them. She became a Kappa Chi, like them. She became a member of my circle, like them. Unlike them,
she
became my wife.

              But I didn’t love her. I wanted
them
.

              “Doesn’t matter,” my father said one night. It was the night that Dena and my parents sat us both down and told us that we were to marry within the year. “The Fletchers know
every
fucking body. You marry Dena-Jo, you’re immediately a household name, from the council members on up to the President.” He leaned back in his office chair and puffed smoked out of his cigar. “You’re marrying her.”

              “Listen Dad, I was just thinking I’d marry someone more…or someone less…naive.”

              “Son, every man wants slick pussy. I get that. You can still marry Dena-Jo and have what you want. No big deal.” He smiled and puffed on his cigar again. Malcolm’s father and my father are best friends but when it comes to women, they’re worlds apart. My father discreetly cheats on my mother without her knowing. He likes ‘slick pussy’. Uncle Wynston’s different.
‘You’ve had one pussy, you’ve had ‘em all,’
he told Mac and me one day,
‘Don’t make a big deal out of it. Pussy’ll get you in trouble every time.’
And while I know my father wanted to soften the blow of me having to marry Dena, I wasn’t thrilled about cheating on the woman I was set to marry. It’s just not…me. I don’t have it in me. So, I asked Dena to marry me, realizing that there would be no other woman, ever, besides her.

My father was right; she was good for business.

She and I had an old-time love, to say the least. She was a virgin who left her dorm every Friday to go back home and help her parents around the farm. I’d come out to Cambridge during the weekends and watch her with the horses as she spoke to them in her Cajun French, her waist-length hair in one long black braid tossed over her shoulder. She liked that I was 6’2 ”,  since she was 5’7”. She liked that I knew folk music, since it was secretly her favorite:

              “I love Bob Dylan, but that’s between us,” she said to me one night.

              My grandparents were big into the New York folk scene in the 60’s; I grew up on the sounds of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dena liked that.

She prefers drive-in movie theaters to cinemas, so I’d fly in from Princeton most weekends and take her to one. Afterwards, we’d sit in my car listening to a mix of old and new folk music, outside of her parents bed and breakfast, as governors and presidents laughed loudly inside. We’d be in the comfort of rolling fields of green grass, crickets chirping, stars shining, the moon glaring, the fireflies lightening up the space around us. It would be during those times when I’d look at Dena and think, maybe I
can
do this. Maybe I can love her. No, she wasn’t the stiletto-wearing girls that Mac, Cadence, Jake and I always liked. The three of them were about to marry Laura, Winnie and Lola, the kind of women we all liked: Old Money girls from old families who wore high heels and French perfume. Dena wore shoes she referred to as ballet flats and smelled like lavender and rose oil. But maybe I could give up the idea of the city-slick Boston girl and love Dena-Jo, I thought.

So she and I would sit in my car on the weekends, listening to politicos sing American classics from inside the Fletcher bed and breakfast. Songs like
This Land Is Your Land
and sometimes
Dixieland
if Southern politicos were inside. And then one night, when they were inside singing a round of
Deep in the Heart of Texas
, Dena caught me looking at her. I was taking her in. Her blue plaid shirt. Her strand of pearls, her long thick dark braid that was wrapped around her head like a crown. She gave me an awkward grin and then shifted in her seat.

              “I know…I know what you’re probably thinking and I promise you Nathaniel, I don’t have anything else in me. I’m just…dark. I don’t know why. I guess it’s true, everyone has their griefs to bear.”

              “You’re beautiful, Dena.”

              “It’s just that you’re…you know, light and you have that, you know, auburn hair and hazel brown eyes and I was just thinking that maybe you were worried that your people would-”

              “Dena. You’re beautiful.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. She was a Boston girl but she still had a Southern heart.

              As soon as we became engaged, Dena lost her plaid shirts, pearls and braids and became that stiletto woman that I wanted to marry. The kind of woman all my friends were marrying. Not in temperament, because she was still Dena-Jo, but in style. She acclimated into my world. But still, love didn’t come like a lightning bolt for me; it came like a slow summer rainstorm…slowly and then suddenly, all at once. But, she’s loved me from the first moment we met, she tells me. I tell her that I felt the same, though I didn’t. The fact is that now, in light of everyone else’s marriage and the chaos that they all seem to be in, Dena-Jo Fletcher is a relief. The way she takes care of me, our kids. The way she rolls over at night in bed, when I come in late from work and asks me if I need anything. She’ll then slowly open her legs while pulling down the straps of her silk slip. Even in her exhaustion, she’s always thinking of me.

              I’m grateful every day for Dena-Jo Fletcher.

              I didn’t love her then, but now I can’t imagine living without her. I give her one last kiss on her lips and then watch her smile.

              “I love you,” she whispers as she moves her cell away from her lips.

              “I love you too.” I back away and she lets her hand slide down my chest.

              Now let me head to my office, log into the firm’s phone network and record this call she’s on.