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THIS MONTH I GOT LUCKY: three women. As the fortieth anniversary of my existence on this big ball of mud loomed on the horizon, I felt ready for the challenge. Each of the women I was going to meet was everything I looked for in a wife – or so I imagined anyway: gorgeous as a supermodel, with the brain of a rocket scientist and the personality of a UN goodwill ambassador. But life had a way of mocking a man who was getting increasingly hopeless in his quest to end his solitary existence, as I was to learn one more time.
“What has gotten into you?” Rie asked. “All of a sudden you’re wanting to meet all of these women.” Her big, brown eyes bulged as their sockets struggled to contain them. Her generous lips remained parted showing off her crooked teeth when I told her about my imminent amorous adventures. If I took the time to analyze it, I would say that Rie is probably the best female friend I have, but I had stopped over-analyzing my life a long time before. At my age I was cynical and things like “best friends” were just convenient labels – quickly removed and re-applied to someone else as the earth continued to spin on its axis, spinning people across and away from my path, some for a longer season than others.
But Rie is a sweetheart. Everybody says so and I happen to agree with them. She is easy to talk with, an attentive listener, loves a wild prank and is good at keeping secrets. Plus, she likes me. Her parents like me. Her father thinks that I am the finest breathing young man to grace the planet ever since he gave up the title more than thirty years before. Her mother thinks I am a saint in the making – a reputation that Rie is mischievously trying to tarnish with her pranks – like the time she told her mother that I was doing a documentary on alternative sexual practices in this country when, in fact, I was doing research on the growing child sex trade.
Rie is happily married with two teenage children. Her husband is quiet and he seems to tolerate me; it’s hard to tell with his phlegmatic personality. He is in his element at his public servant job buried in a dark hole behind stacks of paper on the ground floor of a government building. We are civil with each other; he trusts me with his wife and children. Rie is my true friend and I am the best friend that I could be to her.
“But it’s not like I’m doing anything with them,” I said in my defense. “We’re just going out.” It was true. We were just going out for a meal and a chance to see if we connected. There were not going to be any leisurely walks or nightcaps. I would not spend the night, so how I liked my eggs or whether I preferred orange juice to coffee was not going to be an issue. I was a soldier on a reconnaissance mission.
I guess now is a good time to explain what I meant when I said I got lucky. Well, I’m a single man and I am slowly realizing that it is way past time for me to start nailing my future down. I don’t really meet many women outside my job and the way I see it is that if there is a lonely soul who wants the benefit of my company for a few hours, then why not? It might lead to something permanent. I do want to see my grandchildren from this side of heaven and I figure that it is about time I started putting some seed into the ground if I wanted to see the fruit.
“Still,” Rie protested, “that does not sound like you, Clay.”
I guess it was a big sister kind of feeling Rie had towards me. She was only two years older but had decades more experience. She did not want to see me do anything she considered foolish. She never got over the revelation that I was chatting on the Internet with a woman from Egypt, and she had threatened to do the same with a man. How would you feel about that, she had asked. Then she proceeded to relate some story about a German man who had been arrested for meeting a thirteen-year-old Italian girl with whom he had been chatting on the Internet. They had agreed to rendezvous in France. The man later claimed that the girl was not thirteen when he chatted with her.
“And what if it’s not really a woman?” Rie had asked about my online friend. That thought had never entered my mind. My dear, sweet, Egyptian princess certainly did not write to me like any man. She was tender and caring and I loved her broken English. No way. There was a greater chance of the stars going out than of my Egyptian princess turning out to be an Egyptian prince. Or was I too glad for the attention to even notice?
“I’ll tell you all about the date, Rie. I’ll be fine.”
She shook her head. “I will hear about you. Good luck,” she said without meaning it.
I do not think that I’m the kind of man who turns heads when I walk into a room. I’m not bad-looking, just average. I have chiseled features, but they do not all seem to fit right: my eyes are too big and round for the button of a nose that I have and my lips are uncharacteristically thin for a black man. My complexion is dark brown; my ears are rather small for my larger-than-average head. I would say I inherited my father’s lean genes; unkind folks say I’m skinny, a good candidate for the World Health Organization’s famine relief efforts. But I’m tall – six two – and I’m proud of that. Taken all together, I would say that I’m a good package, but when I stand in front of the mirror dissecting myself, I can understand why more heads do not turn in my direction when I walk by.
I am at the point in my life where I will do anything to change that – anything within reason. I work out at my home gym and I’m seeing some progress – infinitesimal though it may be. My biceps and triceps are beginning to rise and my pectoral muscles are now decent enough to not cause me embarrassment when I take off my shirt at the beach. I have heard it said that most women like a man with a tight butt so I’m squatting two hundred pounds to help lift my posterior.
I’m dressing trendy too, a bit metrosexual but not too much lest I attract the wrong gender. I’m going to buy a new car instead of driving around in the dull grey sedan that is ten years old now. It serves me faithfully but somehow women only notice men driving new cars – sporty new cars. I’m even thinking of changing my hairstyle since it seems like the guys with dreadlocks are the ones getting all the girls. But my hair is thick and difficult to dry so dreadlocks would be a pain to maintain. I think that, for now, I will keep my hair short like an army recruit’s as has been my habit for all of my adult life. A short haircut will also keep the grays hidden; dyeing would just kill me.
As far back as I can remember, I was never the one to get the girls – at least not first pick of them. During my final year of primary school I witnessed, from the peripheries, an array of blossoming romances between the boys at my Catholic school and their Catholic sisters from the school next door. Damien, the boy with the golden hair, was the most popular and one of the Alfred twins was his girlfriend. She was the envy of all the girls in her year. Rusheed, an Indian boy, had the other half of the twin as his love interest. I often wondered how they could tell the girls apart. Then we all witnessed Jeffrey romping in the grass at the school bazaar with a wildcat named Antoinette who later went on to do some questionable photographs for a local entertainment magazine which shocked us all in our little not-so-religious community. The rugged Winston had Sally, and on and on the list of couples went.
Me? I was a nerd. A good-looking boy, my class teacher had said, but I was a nerd all the same. I had liked my teacher’s daughter, Alicia, but her father did not approve. He told her that boys and books did not mix well. So, along with the rest of nerds, I just sat back and talked about how much trouble all the other boys would get into and how glad we were that we were focused on our school work. After all, we would move on to the most prestigious secondary schools and they would not. But secretly I wished a girl had chosen me too.
One ordinary day, when the only thing I had to look forward to was a test on decimals, I got a note from Rusheed, who had gotten it from his girlfriend who had gotten it from one of the girls in her class. I was crushed when I saw who the sender was – twist-teeth Tammy. It was like being taken to the height of a rollercoaster and then left to freefall so that when your body hit the earth, all your insides splatter all over the place. Tammy was a skinny, pale girl whom everyone knew was not too bright. She wanted to go to the school dance with me. What an insult! And she wanted to start walking home with me. How could I be seen in public with that girl? I had my pride and my dignity so I did what any eleven-year-old boy in my position would do: I accepted.
We went to the dance. Rather, I met her there in my best outfit: a turquoise long-sleeve shirt with what looked like two plaits stitched from the shoulder to the pockets. I wore it with black pants and thought that I looked hot, but I never got a compliment that evening, not even from Tammy. We spent the evening just looking at each other and smiling fake smiles the whole time. We had no chemistry. My heart was not into it and I was not one to lie about it. So I said to her, “Tammy, I hate to say this to you, but I don’t think this will work out.”
“Why is that, Clay?” Her crooked smile revealed her equally crooked teeth and I felt a rush of pity since I had heard the jokes circulating about her. I wanted a girl I could be proud of, a girl I would be proud to have on my arm when I was with my friends.
“My Mom says I can’t have a girlfriend now. I have to focus on my books.” When did I learn to lie? My mother would have been more disappointed that I had lied than she would have been if I had encouraged a relationship with twist-teeth Tammy.
“All right.” She kept on smiling. Something is seriously wrong with this girl, I thought. And I was glad that I was getting away from her – fast.
“You’ll be okay?” My ego was bruised that she did not even try to make a scene, disappointed that she did not even try to force me to stay by tempting me with her goodies. But she just nodded as I walked away and left her to find her own way home after the dance.
It was then I knew that I had to be crazy over a girl to give myself to her.
At home, I was learning lessons of a different kind and these lessons convinced me that sex was something I should not hurry into since it came with such dire consequences.
Rose, one of my older sisters, barely out of her teens, became pregnant. I heard whispers about how her appearance had changed and so my mother had taken her to the doctor who confirmed my mother’s suspicions. Mom was livid and she beat my sister so badly with a leather belt that I felt that the child living in Rose was going to die. Mom claimed that she was trying to find out the name of the child’s father but I knew better.
The truth was my mother – a single woman trying to raise eight children in a neighborhood where people found pleasure gossiping with one another about someone else’s misfortune – was ashamed. The neighbors gloated when people did not accomplish much with their lives, so that they were all on the same level. “Crab in barrel mentality,” Mom had called it since crabs never let another crab climb out the bucket in which they were placed. They only tore each other down.
What I was witnessing in my home was so different from what I was seeing on television. In the movies, everybody enjoyed steamy, passionate sex. No one ever got pregnant. When babies came, both parents were usually there to welcome the infant. That was the way I had always thought it was, but Rose’s ordeal taught me that if I gave a woman a child, a callous expression for pregnancy that was often bandied about, I would be responsible for somebody else’s unhappiness and I hated to see people, particularly women, unhappy. I had hurt enough for my Mom when, three years earlier, my father had left her for another woman – a “jagabat” my mother had referred to her contemptuously – but when I checked the dictionary I could not find that word.
Gradually, Mom accepted the fact that she was going to be a grandmother and things got quiet – at least for a while. We were learning to walk through our neighborhood with our heads high once again when I learned to dread two words: venereal diseases.
My older brother, whom I considered a pompous jackass anyway for he always allowed his good looks to go to his head, became HIV positive. Before he got sick, his good looks and buffed body were reason enough for others to treat him like a god: he did no chores and did not contribute in any significant way to household bills in spite of his fat salary from the oil company. There was not a woman who did not know him and that was the sole reason for his existence on this planet. My mother indulged his narcissism but she always admonished him about the endless parade of women we saw at our home on weekends.
The disease took its toll quickly. At the time, little was known about AIDS and the possibility of treatment and recovery was small. It ravaged his body and in the end he was a putrid mess that I kept clear of. When I saw what sex had done to him, I reaffirmed my commitment to keep my underwear on – at least until marriage.
