Hold Me in Contempt (9 page)

Immediately after she gave me the number, I hung up and dialed Dr. Davis. I don't know if she got to him first or if he'd been sitting right there while she was on the phone with me, but Dr. Davis repeated everything Jessica had said and just as smugly, just smug enough to make me and my complaining sound ridiculous.

“I could call in a prescription for ibuprofen, but you can get that yourself over the counter. Take three if you feel any pain. We'll get back to it on Thursday morning. First thing,” he said firmly, and there was really nothing I could say after that but okay—or curse him out and find a new doctor. I decided to go with the former option.

For some reason, Tamika made it her mission in life to get me to come to Wind Down Wednesday. She called Carol and had her put it on my calendar, sent me text messages Wednesday morning to remind me to wear something “sexy to work that could easily translate to after-work activity,” and called me three times on Wednesday afternoon.

In addition to the fact that I personally thought most of her friends were desperate, sex-crazed lunatics, my list of reasons for not being excited about a hump-day night out included that there was nothing happy about a happy hour that included an all-you-can-eat buffet of fried shrimp and French fries, divorced men with fat bellies and huge egos, and listening to sad stories fueled by watered-down well drinks. It was just a reminder that thirty was not the new twenty. In fact, being single and in my thirties was like being fifty and barren. If I went home and got into my bed, there'd be no one there to ask me if I was “seeing” anyone new, remind me that I “needed” someone to hold me at night, and force me to lament that it wasn't happening. I'd tried. I'd failed.

But I couldn't say no to Tamika's pushing, so on Wednesday night I left the office super late and took a local train to Brooklyn, to a hole-in-the-wall bar with a name that knew irony too well: Damaged Goods,

The dark bar was fairly full, with an unfair mix of many women and few men organized in circles reminiscent of high school dances. The brave sat at the bar or did a two-step on the tiny dance floor. Biggie Smalls was playing so loud, it rattled the speakers. Tamika and her friends were sitting at a high-top toward the back of the bar, the table littered with martini glasses filled with neon-green alcohol and plates of fried shrimp. Everyone looked so happy to see me that it was clear they were already drunk.

“My cousin is here, you guys!” Tamika hollered happily. “She's late, as usual, but she's here!”

I hugged everyone at the table and pulled a chair into an empty space between Heather and Tamika. Tamika had been hanging out with Heather and Monique since grade school. They met up every single week and vacationed together in Curaçao and the Bahamas. I'd never been that good at keeping track of people, so I mostly maintained my friendships on social media.

“I see you guys are way ahead of me,” I said, surveying the mess on the table up close.

“Well, we've been here for over an hour,” Monique pointed out. She was the pretty girl in the group. She looked like Vanessa Williams on her best day, and most men who approached her made sure to let her know. “You know who you look like, pretty eyes?” they'd ask, as if whatever they were about to say was original.

“And they have five-dollar apple martinis! I believe in taking advantage of what's available to me,” Tamika said. “It's my right as an American black citizen girl lady!” She high-fived Heather over the table.

Heather was Tamika's best friend. She was a little nerdy and maybe more reserved than the other two, but just as crass. She was also the reason Leah never hung out with them. New Year's Day after Heather's divorce, they woke up together in a hotel room in Jersey City. They could've kept the rendezvous a secret if they hadn't been posting pictures of their boozy love affair on Instagram throughout the night. While the caption of the last pic of them embracing in a shower read, “This is forever,” it wasn't, and the pictures were taken down after two weeks. Heather returned to men and we never spoke of it again.

I asked the waitress for a glass of white wine, but Tamika insisted that I gulp down the last of her apple martini as I waited.

“You need to catch the fuck up!” she said. “We're over here talking some grade-A classified
bit
ness, and the law requires that you are intoxicated for that.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said, and then of course I finished her drink.

“Good work, my dear!” Tamika said, using a comical British accent. “You have completed the mission. Now, let us continue. Monique here was sharing details of her most ratchet love affair with her new boo-thang.”

“He is not my ‘boo-thang,' ” Monique said, looking at me. “He's technically my therapist.”

“You're sleeping with your therapist?” I asked, taking my wine from the waitress. Tamika's martini tasted more like gasoline than an apple martini, and I wanted to wash it down quickly.

“He's not her therapist anymore—more like a fuck buddy,” Heather joked.

“He's not a fuck buddy! He's a professional,” Monique argued.

Tamika laughed and threw a cherry at Monique, adding, “A professional with his dick in your mouth.”

“Well, damn,” I said, feeling the mixture of cheap wine and green gasoline setting in. “What happened? I have to know.”

“Well, after C.J. and I broke up, I decided I needed to see someone. A professional,” Monique explained, referring to her last boyfriend, who had slept with, like, four women in her apartment building while they dated. He actually got caught one evening when he claimed he was going to take out the trash; after thirty minutes and no C.J., Monique used a GPS app she'd secretly installed on his phone to track him to a woman's apartment two doors down. “He said he was cheating because I wasn't having enough sex with him.”

“How often were y'all having sex?” I asked.

“Like, three times a week,” Monique said.

“Shit, I would've cheated on your weak ass, too,” Heather jumped in.

“Whatever, Heather. I get tired. Between work and taking these online classes, once I get into my bed, all I want is sleep. You know?” Monique fingered the rim of her martini glass. “Plus, C.J. wasn't acting right. Who wants to have sex with someone who lies in front of the couch all night drinking Guinness and watching football?”

“I do!” Heather raised her hand jokingly.

Tamika chimed in. “See, that's the thing. Like I told you before, I don't think the issue was with you not wanting sex. I think the problem was that you two had nothing in common and that nigga was just Jim Jones grimy. Period.”

“I thought we had plenty of sex. Three times a week is good,” Monique said, and everyone looked at her like she was a frog with pigtails. “Please. You all are having more sex than that?” She looked at me. “What about you, Kim. How much sex are you having?”

“None right now,” I said, feeling like my response was some kind of self-indictment.

“Not now. I mean, you know, when you were in a relationship,” Monique said cautiously.

The mood at the table shifted to something mournful, delicate.

“I don't really remember,” I said, trying to wave away the waitress's suggestion for another drink, but Tamika requested a round of apple martinis.

“Yes you do, ho,” Tamika said. “Dig deeper.”

I rolled my eyes at her for putting me on the spot. It wasn't because Heather and Monique were technically her friends and I didn't want them in my business. I knew how cool they were and that nothing I said to them would ever leave the table. It was that I knew the response my answer would get—and Tamika knew it, too.

“Well, maybe it was like three times . . .  ,” I muttered, anticipating the verbal judgment that was coming.

“See, she's like me,” Monique said, nodding toward me. “Three times a week. It's enough. We're both working women, and—”

“No! Wrong,” Tamika interjected. “That's not three times per week.”

“What?” Heather and Monique said together.

Heather added hopefully, “Three times per day?”

“Per month,” I mumbled, my voice lower than before.

The three of them went silent and looked down at their empty glasses. I wished the waitress would come back with the apple martini I didn't want.

“Ronald was very busy. It's stressful building your own practice.” I hated how it sounded. “I was busy, too. Tired from work, and I also was having some . . . ”

Everyone was still averting their eyes, so I just stopped talking.

“Y'all heifers can kiss my black ass,” I said hotly.

And they all broke out in giggles.

“We'll kiss it,” Tamika said. “Someone should've been. You know that's crazy? No grown-ass man in the world can survive a whole month only having sex three times—not if he has good pussy at home.”

“No woman either,” Heather said. “I mean, if she has
dick
at home—not
pussy
.”

Monique and Tamika looked at Heather suspiciously. There were always new rumors that she was team switching at night.

A group of young guys walked into the bar, and Tamika nearly broke her neck to get a look at every single one of them. I tried to be more nonchalant, but the fresh crop was a sun rising in darkness. I'd done a full inspection of every man in the room, and most of them looked like somebody's uncle trying to reclaim his youth. One who'd been eyeing Monique from the bar all night looked like Jermaine Jackson—complete with the saucy waves in his hair and the slick skin.

All five of the youngsters looked like they were in their mid-twenties. They were actually pretty handsome, and they were clean-shaven and dressed in business attire, which made me wonder if they were lost. Hanging toward the back was the only white boy, who looked like maybe he was Dominican or Italian. He had sharp features, a light beard that looked more like a five o'clock shadow, and skin the color of the flesh of a lemon.

Tamika turned back to the table smiling like a kid waking up on Christmas morning.

“Lookie heah nah,” she said. “Seems like the Lord has blessed the church with some real material.”

“Yeah, us and every other thirsty chick in this room,” Heather pointed out, and we looked around to see that every table of women was turned toward the group. Two voluptuous women in skimpy minidresses and those tacky Timberland stilettos got up and took new seats at the bar, where the guys had migrated. “Just desperate. A damn shame.”

“Whatever,” I said. “I don't care. I didn't come here to pick up a youngun.”

“You might need one. Get you past your drought. Get your numbers up,” Tamika joked.

“You suck. Anyway, this isn't about me and my alleged drought. We were talking about Monique and . . .  ​what's his name?”

“Brother to the Night,” Monique said.

“What? Like in
Love Jones
? Please tell me your therapist's name wasn't Brother to the Night. Please say it ain't so,” I said.

“It's his thing. His professional name,” Monique explained.

“Okay. Maybe I am not hearing you correctly. He's a sex therapist? And you're seeing him because you're not having enough sex? I thought people saw sex therapists when they were having too much sex.”

“He works to teach women to be more active in the bedroom,” Monique said.

“Yeah, more active in
his
bedroom,” Heather added.

“He specializes in opening the seven chakras and helping us raise the kundalini,” Monique said, using terms I'd heard too many times at bad poetry readings.

“Hilarious,” I said, laughing. “Where did you meet this guy?”

“In the Village,” she said, referring to Greenwich Village.

“Sounds about right.”

“No. He's very professional.”

“If he's so professional, how did you end up sleeping with him?” Tamika asked.

“Well, he was trying to teach me about a tantric sex move I should try with my next partner to achieve a more spiritual orgasm, and I told him he could probably show me better than he could teach me. I'm a slow learner.”

We laughed at Monique's comical confession.

She got up from her stool and started demonstrating the position, and our laughter grew raucous. She had her back to the table, pretending to be Brother to the Night as she hunched over her in what she called “the Flower Press,” when one of the guys from the bar, the cutest one, with dimples I could see from across the room, walked over to our table and joined in our laughter.

When she turned around and looked completely embarrassed, he crossed his arms over his chest and smiled at her the way most men did before they pretended the rest of us weren't there and asked for her phone number.

“You know who you look like?” he asked.

“Who?” Monique replied, trying to sound coy.

“Vanessa Williams!”

“Really?” Monique sat down and leaned into the table toward him. “You think so? I've never heard that before.”

The rest of us struggled so hard not to laugh.

I searched inside my glass for an escape from the ridiculous scene and discovered that I'd finished my petrol-infused martini.

“Got those pretty eyes and that golden skin,” I heard our visitor add as I jumped off my stool to leave his swooning and get a more suitable drink.

After weaving around the body sandwich the women in the slutty dresses and skanky shoes were making with one of the younguns in front of the bar, I slid into a small opening between two of the older men.

“Jameson on the rocks,” I hollered, trying to get the bartender's attention over the music and talking. She was all the way at the other end of the bar and she didn't bother to walk over.

“What? A Jack knife?” she called. She had a waist so tiny that it had to have been held in with one of those Body Magic girdles, and breasts that poured out over her V-neck T-shirt with Tupac's face printed on the front.