Nasty (15 page)

When Ophelia’s mother, Dr. Victoria Rhodes, visited and discovered how her precious daughter lived, she went on a fierce campaign to destroy Eli and Ophelia’s relationship. Her attempts were all in vain. The more she tried to lure her with cars, fancy clothing and trips abroad, the more Ophelia clung to Eli.

At the end of her sophomore year, Ophelia got pregnant with Tarik. Eli begged and pleaded against an abortion. He was convinced it would be a sin to kill God’s tribute to their love. Her friends, who thought Eli was a loser with a capital “L,” begged her to get rid of both the baby and the baby’s daddy. Against Ophelia’s better judgment, she sided with Eli, and decided to go ahead with the pregnancy.

Rising up off the couch, feeling toasty and warm, Ophelia
raised her empty glass. Tipsy, she spoke to Eli as if he were there. “That’s when your fine ass started to drift away, old boy. Couldn’t handle the responsibility of being a daddy. And all that…that pot, too. All it did was make you trifling; never finishing shit!”

She found her way to the bar. Emptying the bottle of Harvey’s into the glass, she made a toast. “Here’s to you, Eli… love of my life…” Carrying the drink with extra care, she went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down in her rocking chair. She rocked herself back down memory lane.

When her parents had discovered that she was pregnant, they’d thought they had leverage. They’d proposed to care for Ophelia during the pregnancy back home in Tennessee until the baby was born. She would then leave the baby behind and finish the last two years at Hampton. When Ophelia tried to integrate Eli into the plan, both parents refused. They thought he was bad news, and felt the time apart would make her see things their way.

Eli, who had finally figured out that he was not the kind of daddy that Ophelia wanted him to be, tried to convince her to take her parents’ deal. It was real. He wasn’t. He could never give what they could. He wanted to be with Ophelia but since she was with child, he now understood that she needed more than just his loving ways. She needed things. Things a struggling artist couldn’t really provide.

She had refused her parents’ offer and, instead, she had chosen love.

Ophelia insisted they marry. Eli was not impressed by paper, but since she was his queen, he acquiesced. After a quick no frills ceremony at the courthouse, Mr. and Mrs. Griffith happily moved to Brooklyn, New York, with Eli’s favorite relative, Aunt
May. Fortunately for them, she had a recently vacated attic apartment. Their plan was that he’d transfer to a New York City school, finish his masters degree and work at nights. She’d work and go to school part-time until the baby came.

Pregnancy changed Ophelia. She became a responsible disciplined woman. Intent on not accepting any help from family, she saved like a miser, knowing that her contribution to the income stream would dry up in the first few months of the baby’s life.

Eli maintained his Bohemian ways. He hooked up with the artist community right away. Aunt May was strict, so they couldn’t entertain like they had in Virginia. He often partied alone in the city. He never enrolled in school; he didn’t see the point. He tried to convince Ophelia that a true artist didn’t need paper to confirm his talent. No problem, except Ophelia realized that without the structure of an academic environment, Eli never finished a project. He also didn’t like working and couldn’t hold down a job. She knew he loved her and the baby that was coming, but just as her mother had predicted, he was useless as a breadwinner.

So, when their beautiful son, Tarik, was born, they agreed to shift roles. He stayed home with the baby while she worked and finished school.

It actually worked well for a whole year. He took better care of the baby than she did and was a better cook and housekeeper as well. Ophelia liked her job and loved coming home to a clean baby and house and whatever new delicious concoction Eli had conjured up in the kitchen. When the baby turned six months, Eli started painting seriously again. Some of his work was even beginning to sell at the smaller galleries. He was so proud that he could contribute a few coins from the sale of his
artwork. He loved his wife and son. Times were happy for both of them then. Their arrangement worked.

The honeymoon ended when her ultra-bourgeois mother, took a month away from a busy medical practice to “see the grandbaby.” She caused sheer havoc in their household. She criticized everything Eli did or didn’t do. She went out of her way to provoke him, hoping to unleash the tyrant she felt lurked deep in his persona. It was futile. There was no ogre hiding within Eli. Just more love. He never showed anger. He always thought it was a waste of creative energy.

This only irritated Ophelia’s mother even more, for she interpreted his non-confrontational behavior as additional proof of his weakness. She engaged a vicious campaign to convince Ophelia that there was something very wrong with a wife being the major breadwinner while the husband sat home on his ass doing “nothing but coloring with his crayons,” as she referred to Eli’s craft.

When the month-long visit was over, Ophelia insisted that Eli go out and get a real job. Reluctantly, he agreed that they needed more money and he had to be the one to bring it in. Aunt May took care of Tarik while Ophelia quit her job and attended nursing school.

Regular work had never agreed with poor, artistic Eli. He didn’t have that kind of discipline. He smoked, drank more, and hung out with his artistic friends. He spent less time with his family and eventually, no time at work. Seeing their paltry savings evaporate, Ophelia had to take on a graveyard shift at nearby Kings County Hospital.

The burden of school, the job, and raising the baby when she could…grew. Eli was driving her mad. She loved him, but she needed him to be a man; whatever that was. They had awful fights. Or rather she had awful fights. She spent endless hours
verbally castrating him, hoping it would shame him into working harder.

He never yelled back. He took it all in and left the house. He wouldn’t come back for days. When he did return, he tried to cheer his queen with flowers. Ophelia loved yellow roses. It would soothe the beast within for a bit and she’d forget anger and remember that Eli was the light of her life. They’d make long luxurious passionate love for hours. But somehow, the magic the flowers brought to their relationship always wore off and she’d resume her monologues about his joblessness and worthlessness.

Desperate and frustrated, he could see their love dying. He couldn’t pull it together and do what she wanted him to do: conform to the regular world. He wanted it to be like it was before her mother had visited and destroyed their peace. But it wasn’t ever to happen like that for them again.

In a desperate attempt to please Ophelia the only way he knew how, he started an abstract painting of a bowl of yellow roses. She fell in love with the piece as he worked on it a little each day. Ophelia was convinced it would be a masterpiece as it represented his best work. She prayed that it would reinvigorate his passion for art and their lives together. She was confident that times would be good again.

At work, she had grown quite attached to an infant whose psychotic mother had brutally abused her at birth. Ophelia was part of the team that had revived the little girl in the emergency room. She immediately bonded with the baby and never missed an opportunity to visit with her during three months of repeated grueling and painful surgeries. The operations repaired damage caused when the insane mother shoved an object down the infant’s throat.

Ophelia even brought Eli around to visit on several occasions.
The little girl with the almost hypnotic, sparkling brown eyes, whose life had started in such a tragic twisted way, had captured both of their hearts.

So when Eli started the yellow roses painting, Ophelia was convinced things were turning the corner for them and they could become the little girl’s foster family. They had applied and sailed through the interviews with flying colors. On the day she had received word that they had been accepted, she had almost skipped the entire way home. She was happy she had ignored her mother’s warning about not marrying Eli. Though they were probably never going to know the kind of wealth she had grown up in, there would always be more than enough love for her, Eli, Tarik, the new baby girl and whoever else joined their brood in the future. The thought of having or adopting more children had made her smile widen. Growing up as an only child, Ophelia had always wanted a big family.

On that same day, as luck would have it, while Ophelia celebrated her good news…Eli was hosting a celebration of his own. While caring for Tarik, some of his artist friends had stopped by to see the new work he was always bragging about. One of his buddies had brought some drugs and the party got started. He was so happy that his friends had agreed that it was his best work, that he had done the one thing that he swore he would never do: get high around Tarik. A little bit of grass had led to a tab of acid, a line of coke and whatever else his friends had in their portable pharmacies. It didn’t take long for Eli to totally forget that Tarik was unattended.

Eli and his friends were completely stoned when the toddler woke up from his nap and crawled off the daybed that Eli, in his negligence, had let him sleep on. Walking freely around without supervision, Tarik sampled the loose drugs that were all within his reach.
Eli, totally out of it, had seen Tarik stumble around the living room. He’d laughed out loud at his son’s clumsiness as he kept falling down. He’d picked Tarik up, put him into the crib, and resumed his drug taking. He’d never checked on his son again.

Two hours after the party had been in full swing, Ophelia walked up the stairs to their apartment. The stench of marijuana greeted her so strongly, she almost got a contact high. A cold chill went through her. As she grabbed the knob, she hesitated…because Ophelia knew what was waiting for her on the other side of that door.

Entering, she heard an old scratched-up Isaac Hayes record, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” skip over and over again. Cocaine, acid and weed were all over the coffee table. Eli and three of his buddies were in a drug-induced slumber. Almost paralyzed, afraid of what she was looking at, she rushed into Tarik’s room. Her baby. Her beautiful baby boy. She screamed for what seemed like hours, when she found her beloved son in a coma. Dialing 9-1-1, her fingers moved around the keypad as if they were attached to lead weights.

Disoriented, Eli could not comprehend why police and paramedics were in his house. As far as he was concerned, Tarik was just taking a little nap. It didn’t take authorities long to figure out what had happened. There were drugs in full sight when they entered the apartment. The police arrested both Eli and Ophelia for possession of narcotics and child endangerment. Paramedics rushed Tarik to the hospital where a team of doctors and nurses successfully resuscitated him. After a short stay, he made a complete recovery.

Ophelia’s parents took Tarik home when they discharged him from the hospital. They retained a cracker-jack attorney that got their daughter out of jail and successfully cleared her of all
charges. Eli’s confession of guilt made it easy for the lawyer to convince the prosecution that Ophelia was innocent. He and his cronies were sentenced to a maximum of five years in jail.

She never forgave Eli for the hell he put her through, and he never forgave himself. He signed divorce papers, and it was over. Ophelia went on with life—without Eli. All the dreams they shared were flushed down the toilet. The same toilet the drugs should have gone in the first place. They would never be foster parents to the beautiful little infant girl she and Eli had grown so attached to. Fortunately, a family from upstate New York adopted the baby.

When the young, now divorced woman returned from the lawyer’s office, the first thing she saw when she rummaged through closets, trying to discard all traces of Eli’s existence, was the yellow rose painting. She couldn’t throw it away. As much as she wanted to break free of their relationship by eliminating all reminders of him, she didn’t have the heart to let go of his artwork. It captured what had been really good about Eli: beautiful-looking; a generous, vulnerable soul, but totally lacking discipline. Hence, it being unfinished. So she had framed it and had always carried it everywhere she had moved.

Six months after the divorce was final, she met a man twenty years her senior. A good old soul, Richard Singleton. He was an architect who owned a very successful firm. Tarik was crazy about him. Pops, as she always called him, was crazy about the both of them. He intuitively knew she’d never love him as much as he loved her, but he was confident that he had enough love for the both of them. They married and like Pops predicted, they lived happily together.

Pops adopted Tarik. On the day Eli signed the papers surrendering parental rights, he tried to hang himself in jail. A guard found him just in time. His first thought when he was revived
was disappointment that he couldn’t even handle a simple suicide, let alone something complicated like fatherhood.

Ophelia and her new husband bought a brownstone in the Stuyvesant Heights section of Brooklyn. Pops turned the house into a showcase. It was always the highlight of the annual brownstone tour. He was proud of his handiwork and the supportive wife he’d found in Ophelia.

On Tarik’s seventh birthday, Eli had been free and out of jail a few years when Ophelia finally allowed him to see their son. Against her better judgment, she let the ex-con attend the birthday party. Crippling anxiety visited with him the day of the event. He took a little hit of this and a little swig of that to give him the courage to make it through. He arrived disheveled and slightly inebriated.

When he first laid eyes on his son, Eli forced himself to sober up. Big crocodile tears tumbled out of his eyes when he realized how magnificent his boy was and how stupidity had kept him away. He wanted to hug him like he did when he was small. He reached out at him. Tarik could smell the liquor on him and immediately recoiled and yelled out, “Mama, a wino tried to touch me, MAMA!”