I sat down on my bed and breathed. And after about an hour or so of thinking on it, I figured out that I was less upset about Nicky cheating on me than I was about him doing it with someone who looked like my complete opposite. She was tall and yellow with a weave that hung to her butt. She looked like a poor man’s Veronica Farrell—that is to say she was pretty, but common. She didn’t make heads turn in L.A.
I had to go right back downstairs and ask him about it.
His pants were back up when I stormed in and demanded, “Why a light-skinned girl? Why did you get with the lightest girl in the club?”
“That’s what you’re going to get mad about?” he asked back when I asked him.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand cheating, but if you loved me . . .”
“I love you,” he insisted. “Me being stupid don’t change that. If you took me back—”
I interrupted him before he could go into the sales pitch. I had semi-lived with Nicky for years, and I knew he had a way of making what he wanted sound like the completely logical conclusion. The man sold the forties to one of the most modern cities in the world, and I bet he could sell heaters in Glass during a Mississippi August. So I wasn’t even going to let him get started down that road.
“Why her?” I repeated.
Nicky shook his head. “Let’s talk about us.” He reached across his desk for my hand, but I snatched it away before he could even touch it.
I wanted him to say that she was the first person that crossed his path after he decided to cheat and that it had had nothing to do with the cocktail waitress and me being at opposite ends of the black melanin spectrum. But as I sat there, I knew I wasn’t going to get a straight answer from him now with our possible breakup hanging over the situation. Maybe not ever.
The next step in Nicky’s sales pitch to get me back was to fire the waitress. It was 2002, but suing for sexual harassment still wasn’t something black people did in large numbers, and almost nobody did it in Los Angeles. So Nicky could get away with firing her for sleeping with the boss, without her putting up too much of a fight. She walked in to start her shift, and walked out about five minutes later after a whispered conversation in the corner of the restaurant. Nicky did it quietly, but out in the open where he knew I could see him.
She looked at me, then back at him. Resigned and heavy-eyed, like she had already guessed this would be coming. Still, she glared at me as she walked out. This might be me projecting, but I don’t think she could quite figure out being passed over for a dark-skinned woman with natural hair.
Nicky came over after she left. “I love you,” he said. He kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry.” Then he went back into his office. We had been together five years, and he still hadn’t learned how to say a proper good-bye.
For about a week I thought and thought on whether to forgive Nicky. He had some stuff going for him, including giving me my first chance, my first apartment, and my first reciprocated love. But he also had some cons.
For one thing, he was always after me to get a perm. And after I had gotten sick of him asking me about it all the time and poured my heart out about my history with the Farrells, he had just said, “Farrell perms ain’t the only ones out there. Get one of them other ones,” which let me know that no matter how close we got, Nicky would never, ever fully get me—another con.
Also, he was still in the habit of telling me what to do all the time—a routine I was starting to get tired of now that I was twenty-six. And he had never been very supportive about me eventually going to college. I had gotten my GED back when I was eighteen, and over the years I had taken enough classes at Los Angeles Community College to apply to a four-year UC school. But Nicky hadn’t exactly been behind me one hundred percent on this.
“I went to college so you wouldn’t have to,” he would say whenever I brought it up, “Trust me, the best way to learn how to run a business is to start it and then run it with all you got. Simple. There’s your college degree right there.”