A few minutes later, Tanya got another call from Chris. “Do you know that you are endangering my job right now, Chris?” she demanded.
“Listen to me, Tanya,” Chris’ voice was hard. “You know I can afford to keep you well, you know I got the money, and you know I have never asked you to work. But that’s not why I called. Just what is going on between you and this Ray guy? I have seen photos and they don’t look like a normal gym session to me. Why is a gym instructor’s knee pressed against my wife’s back? And are there massage sessions in gyms these days?”
And that evening after one violent argument he had said to her: “You know what? You can have Ray. I am going to destroy every evidence that we have been married these five months. And I mean every evidence. Fortunately nothing had been legalized.”
She had told Lavida that story a thousand times. She had also told her that when this happened, she was three months pregnant with Lavida.
“I was not cheating on that insecure bastard. So the next time you ask me who your Daddy is or where he went to, you should know that he’s dead to me, and I don’t care where or who he is. He’s nothing but a faint, dirty spot in my memory.”
*
Tina pressed the TV mute button and sprang to her feet.
Julia gaped at her.
“What’s wrong with you? You scared the hell out of me,” she said with disapproval. “You did that deliberately. You need to grow up, Tina. At least you can relax. Malcolm is in town till ten P.M.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you and Malcolm were doing it. Like you did with Matt.”
“Oh, Matt. He was a loser but knew how to please me...pleased you too, didn’t he? He would take his time and play around, you know, undress me slowly, suck my nipples, grab my twat and find his way around the forest down there and suck away and play with my clit and put two fingers inside and finger-fuck me till I came, begging for mercy. Then he would move to what I call the dick stage and would just fuck like a rabbit till I came again. There was this night I sucked his dick and he moaned till he came in my face like a white shower. I certainly wasn’t expecting that. And that was just when I wanted him to put it inside. I just told him he had to suck me till I came. Never been so wet.”
“You are the most dirty-minded cook that ever lived, Julia,” Tina laughed, shaking her head.
“Oh, please! You had two guys taking you in your own room. I’m sure your Dad is still trying to get over the shock. All his effort to keep you away from marauding predators blew up in his face.”
“Please don’t talk about it. I’ll never get over the embarrassment,” Tina closed her eyes.
There was silence for a while.
It was two P.M.
“I don’t care where Malcolm is. He’s just Dad’s puppet in ruling every inch of my life. What is uncle up to?” Tina spoke as if she had not heard the cook. “Did you hear that sound? I think it came from Uncle’s lab.”
Tina’s Uncle regarded himself as a scientist and her Dad had allowed him to use a former garage attached to the house as a lab, as long as “you don’t blow the house up.”
Tina had said that that was extremely likely, as her faith in her uncle’s scientific powers was extremely little.
“Dad, are you serious about this? I think it’s extremely dangerous, Dad.”
“Oh, come on, your uncle is usually around only one month a year, so we have only one in twelve chances in a year to be blown up. And the lab is not noisy, unlike my studio.”
Her Dad was an award-winning R&B artiste, and they lived in Bel-Air. Her Dad also disapproved of her boyfriends so far, who seemed to be rather rough around the edges and rather below her class. She seemed to prefer the ghetto or gangsta kind of hoods who probably wanted just to slam her on a bed and pull her shorts off before you could say Hip and Hop.
“Oh, really? You have great ears, Julia. I can’t tell what sound comes from the TV and what comes from the lab. Can we have the TV volume on again now, seeing that I never miss that breakfast show? You know very well that is one of my top TV morning shows and you have just cost me two minutes of it. And don’t use this as an excuse to leave your breakfast unfinished. I always walk on eggshells around here, always expecting your uncle to do something wild or create a malicious robot that might attack me when I’m cooking. Or create a bomb and blow the lab and the house into oblivion. He will probably feel honored for giving his life to science but I am of a different opinion and I’d rather stay alive and science can go hang, thank you very much.”
“Uncle would be very offended to hear you right now,” Julia said. “No need to worry, Uncle is too good a scientist to blow himself up.”
“I’m not worried about him blowing himself up; I’m worried about him blowing me or you up. According to him, science comes first but according to me, science comes twenty-seventh on my list of important things.”