Abide with Me (3 page)

But there was no reason for shots to be fired. Mobile, unlike many other cities in Alabama in the sixties, took the high road when it came to race relations. Blacks and whites were distant, but respectful of each
other’s space. Sure, Donald was pushed around and kicked downstairs, but he stood firm. He had a dream and purpose. Today, Dr. Donald Jackson Walters teaches at the medical school at the University of Florida. Trent still adores his focused and determined cousin.

It was Donald who one Christmas gave Trent a set of Lego’s and showed him how to build things. Trent loved the colorful toys and took them everywhere he went, including his first dorm room at the University of Alabama, where he received a degree in architecture. The Lego’s even found a place in the Queen Anne Hill area of Seattle, an enclave of dignified, spacious, high-ceiling homes. The three-story, cedar-sided home is one of his most treasured designs. Trent, who as a child managed to find his own space in a three-bedroom clapboard house with twelve other people, is now designing houses and buildings where everyone who enters finds his or her own space.

The midtown apartment was quiet. There was no furniture, except for a couple of barstools, a television, and a queen-sized bed. It looked like the apartment of a struggling actor or a newly wed couple.

It was a little past noon as Nicole Marie Springer studied the face of her husband of four years, Jared Stovall, who sat at the bar with his left hand cupping his chin.

Nicole started to remove the deli sandwiches they had picked at for the last half hour, but instead she remained still. She gazed at her ruggedly handsome husband, a confident, biscuit-brown man, who at six foot three and 220 pounds looked exactly like the man she had fallen in love with some six years ago.

After a moment of pensive silence, she asked, “So you think I should take the job?”

Jared looked at his wife and said, “It sounds like they really want you. But what do you want?”

“Yeah, I mean I didn’t even have to audition. And it’s not like
people have been beating down my door. I told you once you leave New York, people forget about you,” Nicole said.

Jared removed himself from the barstool, took a few steps, and gently placed his arms around his wife’s waist. He kissed her softly on the lips and then said, “Nicole, you know I support you. It’s just the thought of not having you here with me … well, it makes me sad. But we moved here for your career and we’ll just deal with it,” Jared said firmly.

Nicole gave Jared a quick kiss and smiled. “Remember, Jared, it’s only six weeks on the road and I’ll be home before you know it.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m going to miss you less,” Jared said with a sweet boyish smile. Jared Taylor Stovall would do anything for his wife. He had given up his hopes that being a wife and hopefully one day a mother would keep Nicole totally satisfied. When the aggressive real estate agent sold their house in Atlanta, with a nice profit after one showing, Jared knew he was headed to New York City. He couldn’t resist his wife. He actually felt he loved her more each day. He knew he sounded corny and whipped, but he loved her more than the first time he saw her. He was in New York City, visiting his best friend, Raymond, when Raymond and Nicole’s friend Kyle was dying of AIDS. The first time she walked into Kyle’s bedroom and smiled, Jared knew it was all over. He loved her more than when he proposed to her in a Little Rock hotel, and more than the day he married her in an opulent wedding that people in Little Rock were still talking about.

The job in question was the starring role in a revival of
Dreamgirls
, a Broadway musical Nicole had been in almost a decade before. A role she had once turned down for the first national tour because she was in love with Raymond Tyler.

When she was first approached to take the role of Dena Jones, a role she had once understudied, Nicole was hesitant. The show was heading across the country for a bus and truck tour, but the producers were confident they would be back on Broadway the moment a suitable
theater opened up. The producers were so interested in having Nicole in the role that they had promised she’d only have to be on the road the last six weeks, and only when they were certain a Broadway theater had been secured. When Nicole told them she didn’t really want to do a role made famous by another woman, the talented Sheryl Lee Ralph, the producers told Nicole about the new, young, and soon-to-be-hot director they had hired. He was going to make additions to the show and make it all fresh: new costumes, a new choreographer, and even some minor changes that would make the role of Dena Jones even bigger.

And as she said, it wasn’t like there were other acting opportunities for Nicole. She had been back in New York for almost three months and had only auditioned for three shows and a few workshops. Only one had called her back for a second audition, the workshop for
Dottie
, a musical planned on the life of African-American actress Dorothy Dandridge. Nicole had rushed out and purchased a copy of Donald Bogle’s biography of the first black female superstar and had read it in two days. When she turned the final page, Nicole was in tears and knew she had to be a part of this production. A few days after her callback, Nicole got the word from her agent that the workshop had been canceled indefinitely, due to lack of funds. She realized not much had changed since she’d married and decided to follow her husband south to Atlanta, where he had a promising career as an investment banker. Money and race still ruled Broadway, the Great White Way.

Opportunities for acting were few and far between in Atlanta, and especially for a dark-skinned, African-American actress, so Nicole had concentrated on being a good wife. For a while she was happy with her new role, even though she resisted invitations from some of her Spelman sisters to become active in organizations like the Links and Junior League. The only organization she made time for was her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and even that was on a limited basis.

To keep in touch with her craft, she had taken a part-time job as an instructor in the drama department at her alma mater, Spelman College. She enjoyed teaching, but really missed being in front of the camera or on a stage. With the exception of Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, there were few opportunities. Whenever an opening for work on a film or a shoot for a commercial appeared, she would audition, but only if the schedule allowed Nicole to sleep in her own bed at night. Sometimes she ventured from Atlanta, like the time she went to North Carolina to audition for the Oprah Winfrey production of
The Wedding
. The producers and director loved Nicole, but since she was too young to play the role of Rachel, they could only offer her the role of a maid, or as they put it, “the dark-skinned nurse.” Nicole had vowed to never play a maid, and she wasn’t about to play a nurse who had just five lines.

It was only after a call from a New York agent telling her about the
Dottie
workshop that Nicole felt she was missing a big part of her life, the Broadway stage. Nicole Springer realized she wanted to live her dream life twice.

Nicole walked slowly to the window, gazing at the sun that poured like champagne over West Forty-ninth Street, and then walked back near Jared. She put her hand delicately on his, but with a slight hesitation. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” she asked.

“Baby, you know I’m cool with this. But it was you who said people forget about you when you leave. Right?” He removed his hand from under Nicole’s and placed his strong one on top of the softness of hers and rubbed it affectionately.

“Yeah, I know, but this is different. I mean, when the show comes back to Broadway, even if it’s for a short run, it might bring work.”

“Look, this might be for the best. I’m going to be spending a lot of time at the office, finding out who’s who and what’s what. I’ve got to hire an executive assistant I can trust. You might as well do something you love.”

Nicole smiled at Jared. What he said made a lot of sense. And what would she do while Jared kept long hours getting adjusted to his new position as a senior vice-president at Morgan Stanley? Both Nicole and Jared knew it was a good sign when Jared requested a transfer to New York and received a promotion and raise with the deal. They both still wanted children desperately, even though after two miscarriages, adoption seemed more likely. Nicole’s mother was against her daughter moving back to New York, had told her she should be concentrating on having children. Nicole did not want to give her mother an opportunity to tell her once again that it was time to grow up and be a full-time wife and mother and leave acting behind.

“So when are you going to call the producers and tell them you’re going to do it?” Jared asked.

Nicole looked first at her husband and then at the phone and said, “I guess there’s no time like the present.”

John Basil Henderson, ex-college and pro football star, had been seeing the therapist on the Upper West Side for almost three months. Yet it still took him several minutes before he broke the awkward silence of each meeting. The first three sessions, Basil, as he preferred to be called, hadn’t spoken a word until his time was up, and then only to confirm the date of his next appointment.

Toward the end of the third session Basil finally broke the silence by asking the doctor, “So is this all we do, sit here and look at each other like fools?”

“Why are you here, Mr. Henderson?”

“ ’Cause a whole lot of people been fuckin’ with me. And if I don’t deal with it, then the whole world gonna know when I lose it!”

“What people?”

“Well, we could start with my sick-ass uncle who took my manhood before I was even a man. I had to block the shit out of my head, but it
showed up and caused me to lose a woman I loved and made me obsessed over a man I might have loved.”

“Well, you’ve taken the first step by admitting to yourself that you were abused.”

“So why don’t I feel better?”

“One day you will. This is where the healing begins.”

At the beginning of his fourth session, Basil shocked the doctor when he announced, “I guess we might as well get this over with.” He stood up, seductively and slowly unbuttoned his tight-fitting royal-blue knit shirt, kicked off his loafers, unbuckled his leather belt, and dropped his beige linen pants. “I thought you needed to see what all the hoopla was about,” he said as he stood before the doctor wearing only a black nylon jockstrap that looked more like a male dancer’s belt.

The doctor studied the way Basil stood there practically nude, with his double-barrel chest and an epic ass, a body part all by itself. The features of his perfect body, including a semierect penis, betrayed the marks of a man who knew from an early age the power of being breathtakingly handsome. The doctor’s face was composed and unreadable as he murmured, “I see.” Basil gave him a cocky I-thought-so smile and put his clothes back on. The private strip show forever broke the ice between doctor and patient.

“You know that woman I told you about? The real pretty one that reminded me of Yolanda?” Basil asked as he leaned forward in the brown leather chair.

“Which one?” the doctor asked, peering over his tortoiseshell glasses.

“Beautiful brown-skinned sister. Looks like a model. Damn! I forgot what she did for a living. Anyway, she’s the one I met in front of the locker room at the Knicks game. Said she was there with her sister who dated one of the Knicks. Probably a groupie,” Basil said. “You know what a groupie is, huh, Doc?”

“Yes,” the doctor said, and nodded for Basil to continue.

“Well, I had a date with her a couple of days ago.”

“And how did it go?”

“It didn’t,” Basil said with a sinister smile.

“What happened?”

“I had given her my digits so she could call me. I don’t call them first, you know.” Basil settled back into the chair, feeling a little more sure of himself. He stretched his long legs in front of him and continued.

“She called once, twice, three times. I said to myself, ‘This might be interesting.’ I let the bitch call one more time and then I called her back. Well, I knew she lived way up in Harlem or some-fucking-where, so I invited her to dinner and made reservations at Cafe Luxembourg here on the Upper West Side. I told her to meet me there. ’Cause I figured, if she wanted to get with me, she’d find her way there. The woman said yes before I even got the address out of my mouth.” Basil laughed, but the doctor just maintained a professional and distant look.