Commitment (45 page)

On the way home
,
Riley
stopped in on one of those places
t
hat advertised $12 haircuts.
She told herself it was just to browse, but who ‘browsed’
in a hair cuttery?
Of course, she got a haircut.
She watched in the mirror as
the stylist meticulously chopped
off all the curls and leaving her with
barely an inch of length
.
H
opefully
it
made her look a little more soph
isticated, a little more chic
.
Things she hadn’t even thought about before Tracy’s little cautionary talk this afternoon
,
she realized resentfully.

g

Shawn was in the living room with Chris, Mike and Darryl when
she
got home, carrying her shopping bag
s
and sporting her new haircut.
As she walked in, Mike and Darryl
hastily removed
their feet
from
the coffee table and began gathering empty beer bottles and
food cartons
and
taki
ng the trash into the kitchen.
Chris just sat there,
watching
her.
Even before they met, s
he had
n’t
liked Chris Scaife, mul
timillionaire producer or not.
But she did have a certain grudging respect for him. Partly because despite his success, there was nothing about his demeanor to betray that he had
million
-dollar
home
s
, fleets of cars and ran
several extremely lucrative companies
.
He wore baseball caps – always New York Yankees – turned backwards and pants so baggy they appeared in perpetual danger of falling about his ankles; and no matter what the occasion, a white t-shirt covered by an assortment of plaid shirts
, tail out
.

He’d been profiled in magazines ranging from
Rolling Stone
to
Forbes
which
had labeled
him
the
“
New Breed of American
Entrepreneur
”
and
had both mainstream recognition and the support of the hip-hop community
, something that was pretty tough to pull off
.
If you took him at face value,
he
represented
so many of the stereotypes about young Blac
k men – profane, materialistic and
reckless –
but
he also
contradicted
them
with
his
undeniable
success.
She knew there had to be more if you cou
ld just get beneath the surface
but even though he’d been interviewed
perhaps
hundreds of times, no one had. 

She leaned over the back of Shawn’s chair, conscious of Chris’ eyes still on her, and kissed him on the
side of the
neck
.

“Oh shit, what happened to your hair?” he pulled her around to sit on his lap, turning her head right and left to get a better look.

“
You don’t like it?”
Riley
ran a hand over her head.

“It’s . . . short,” Shawn said
uncertainly
.

“It’s
sexy,” Chris said unexpectedly.

He was lighting up a cigarette, casually as though he had every right to do so
, even though he was in someone else’s home
.
Shawn ran a hand over her head in the same way she had.

“You just have to get used to it,”
Riley
said getting up and heading for the bedroom.
“I love it.”

She took a shower to wash away the prickly remnants of hair that had fallen on her shoulders and neck during the cut, staying in the shower a little longer than was necessary, hoping Chris and the crew
would be gone when she got out.
But when she was toweling off in the bedroom, she could
still
hear them in the livi
ng room, laughing at some joke.
She listened to the cadence, words and tone of Shawn’s voice as he talked to his friends and marveled at how different he was when he was with them, how much like a . . . rapper. She blushed at the thought, wondering whether Tracy was right, and she was a snob.

Riley
stretched across the bed and reached for the phone, dialing
Brian’s number.
He
was working
part-time
at a firm downtown, close enough to
Power to the People
for them to meet for lu
nch
every day
if they wanted to.
But still he hadn’t called, and she only knew about the
new gig
through Tr
acy.
No one answered at his apartment, and
Riley
waited through the greeting
on his answering machine
but
hung up without leaving a message
. 

She reached for the bag with her new dress and shed her towel, rolling naked to the edge of the bed and sitting
up to pull it over her head.
It was light and silky,
like gossamer against her skin
.
It made her feel less like the tomboy she’d always been, and more feminine – the way Tracy always managed to look eff
ortlessly.
She stood and
smoothed
the skirt down, checking her backside to make
sure it didn’t show too much.
It was a little short, falling only to her mid-thigh and when she sat, it did expose a li
ttle more than she was used to.
But she liked it, and sh
e liked herself wearing it.
Riley
shrugged
the garment
over her head and
changed into a tank and tights, waiting for sounds of Shawn’s guests’ departure.

When finally they were gone, she joined him in the living-room where he wa
s looking through story-boards.
In L.A. he would be shooting yet another music video
and appearing on a late-night talk show to perform the most popular single from his CD
.
As the numbers held strong, the record label poured more resources into capitalizing on its success
which meant more and more time away from home
.
Riley gently pulled the board he was holding from his fingers and positioned herself
astride him
.
Shawn looked up at her
expectantly
.

“How come you never brought home a DVD of your music video for me to see before
the release party
?”

“Did you want to see it?”

“I didn’t think of it,” she admitted.

Shawn shrugged.
“
Me neither
.”

“So you don’t think tha
t makes me selfish or anything?
Like I don’t care about your work?”

Shawn smiled as he might at a child asking a
silly
question. 

“I’m serious, Shawn.”

He laughed.
“I kn
ow you are. That’s what’s so cute.”
H
e reached for the storyboar
d she’d taken out of his hand.
“If you want to show me you care about my work, you’ll let me do it.”

“Fine.”

S
he slid off his lap and headed back to the bedroom, reminding herself
that besides Lorna, it was probably wise not to allow Tracy to crawl around inside her head either.

g

Riley
took
a little more time than she usually did with make-up for the party, put on the
two-
carat diamond earrings Shawn had given her as a wedding present and
used gel to
smooth
what was left of her hair.
When she’d
pulled
the dress
over her head and stepped into
a pair of
silver
high-heeled
sandals, the expression on Shawn’s face told her everything she needed
to know about how she looked. 

He looked pretty
darn
good himself in a stark white Dolce & Gabbana ribbed tee and chinos
with brown boots.
Shortly after they were dressed,
Brendan and Tracy sho
wed up
.
Tracy
was
stunning
, wearing a beige calfskin halter, chocolate capris and sky-high stilettos that made her legs look even longer
.
By
any measure, she was incredible-looking
, but Shawn didn’t seem to notice
,
even
though
Brendan clearly did.
Before leaving for the club, they all sat in the living room with the
shades
open, looking out
at the
skyline
,
drinking
champagne.
T
here were worse things in the world than living like this.

Xander
was on the East S
ide.
It was the brainchild of Alexander Hausen, a Swedish businessman who had come up with the brilliant idea of opening a string of restaurants and nightclubs that exploited Black culture without the troublesome p
resence of actual Black people.
He had a jazz club in the Vill
age, a down-home
soul food restaura
nt on the Upper West Side, and
Xander
- the toniest hip-hop club in
the tri-state area
.

When it first opened
, Xander’s patrons were almost all white, but
its
creator didn’t count on the growing Black upper-middle
and
upper-class
es
that
barely flinched at his
fifteen-dollar
mixed drinks and
thirty-dollar
appetizers.
And he certainly didn’t count on rap moguls co-opting the hip-hop
Mecca
he had developed with wealthy Manhattan
socialites
in mind.
Now Xander
was solidly a Black establish
ment, even if not Black-owned.
I
t was the logical place to throw a party for a rap superstar’s music video debut.

The club had
t
hree dance floors on two levels
with
transparent floors through which you could just mak
e out schools of tropical fish.
It was loud, and
in
some aspects maybe
even a little
over-the-top
, but
the dark and flashing lights, gave everything
an otherworldly
quality
.
When
they walked in,
heads turned
; a
s many
in her direction
as in Shawn
’s
.

They were
led
to
a table
in a cordoned off area
that overlooked the lower
-
level dance floor and a waiter took their order for drinks
almost immediately
.
The music was loud, and it was hard to see with all the
strobes
but as soon as they
settled in
,
a steady stream of
people started coming over to Shawn, shaking his hand,
leaning in
to speak to him over the music.
No matter who
approached
him, he managed to
give
them
his
undivided
attention even if only for a few moments.

Riley had
forgotten this about him – his uncanny ability to make you feel like no one else existed.
Still, knowing him as she now did,
she
recognized
how deliberate
his focus
was
.
It wasn’t effortless for him, sharing himself with people
this way
, but he was always careful
to
make su
re
no one would feel slighted.
No one
besides
her
and Brendan seemed to notice
this about him.
All they saw was the image, the guy in music videos holding up his too-baggy pants
by the waist-band
as he rhymed.