His Third Wife

Somehow Jamison had thought that being mayor might slow this tick to something more meaningful. Something that mattered. That he could take stock of. Make the blur of moments in his week seem so eloquent, so necessary like they did in all the black and white pictures he’d seen of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eating dinner with his family, or speaking at a church with brown babies in the front or meeting with Abernathy and Jackson, Hosea and Lewis in a dark back room clouded overhead with cigarette smoke and dim lighting.

But now he was thinking that maybe time had been the same way to Martin and maybe Malcolm, too. That their time was just them moving between here and there and those old black and whites that meant so much to any person who wanted to be as great as those men were just impressions of fast time caught standing still. If Martin was like him, when he was at dinner, he was already late for the speech at the church and when he was at the church, he was thinking about what the people in the back room would say afterwards.

Where was the time? Friday at midnight? What about all the things he wanted to do? Get that pothole fixed on Lee Street. Sit down and have the simple conversation he needed to have with Val. Visit his father’s grave. Cut his own grass. Sleep. Make a change. Change himself. Time was up. Friday. Midnight.

Jamison went to sleep on Friday night at midnight and rose on Saturday morning having forgotten everything he promised himself he’d do as soon as he got up—all the things he hadn’t done that week. Instead, he was rushing. There were reminders and text messages and missed calls on his phone. Everyone already had a plan for him.

Val was hiding in the bathroom. She’d started spending most of her time in there. Jamison pretended not to notice these extended visits to the boudoir, where he could hear her talking on the phone, clicking away on her laptop, or watching television. He told himself she’d be all right in there. The bathroom was nearly the same size as the bedroom. There was a couch and ottoman in the closet and even a refrigerator/microwave combo. Plus, he knew what Val was hiding from.

It had been just six days since his mother had moved into the guest room and as Jamison already knew, her presence was a cup of oil poured into a thimble of vinegar. In six days, his mother and Val hadn’t had a single verbal altercation or physical fight—both of which seemed highly likely and overly imminent—but Jamison knew that wars between women were seldom fought that way. It was about what they weren’t saying and weren’t doing. When they didn’t complain. When they did turn the other cheek. For women it could be World War II and most men would never know—not until the bomb was dropped and radioactive waste was seeping into the earth.

What Jamison could see was that the women were staying out of each other’s way. His mother was in her room. His wife was in her condo/bathroom. Maybe it was peace-talks time and things could actually get better. He wanted to believe this, but each time he saw Lorna—the official secretary of state of the house who had to carry messages between the bedroom and bathroom as she cleaned the house—frowning at him, he knew the time of peace would soon blow over. And he had to do something. Lorna was sending him not so subtle signs of her limitations, letting him know she had signed up to clean up after one man and she wasn’t a “carrier pigeon” or cook or best friend. But what was he supposed to do? Any talk about Val with his mother would lead to more questions about the baby and reminders about how that “Memphis trash” had trapped her baby boy. Talks about his mother with Val would lead to her hollering again about why he’d let his mother move in anyway when he knew his mother hated her and knew she hated his mother. And that was the one thing he could really care less about doing anything about.

Concerning his mother, Val was sounding more and more like Kerry. Resentful and suspicious. And maybe they had a point. His mother had put the first nail in the coffin of his first marriage by basically setting him up with Coreen, and every time he saw her eyes on Val, he knew she was trying to find the right nail for that situation, too.

He knew that everyone thought he was a mama’s boy. And that his mother was a big, pecking hen. And, yes, he knew she was no sweet angel. But she was his mama. And just on that alone, she came before anyone. None of them had seen how life had pecked her. Neither Kerry nor Val had seen his mother wake up before the sun and get ready to take three buses just so she coul

d go across the city to clean old white people’s houses. Her feet so swollen she bought shoes two sizes too big. Her hands bleached so white from scrubbing floors he could barely see the cuts to pour the iodine on when she had passed out on the living room couch. None of them had heard her wails, so loud and sharp and mournful the morning his father died in their bedroom. She’d sounded like she’d found out everything in the world was a lie. And then she looked over at him and said, “You’re my baby boy—all I got now.” Almost everything he ever wanted to be, to do in his life, was to make up for what she had been forced to do, made to lose. What had pecked the hen.

So, so be it. And so be the silence.

Jamison knocked on the bathroom door and Val let him in to take a shower.

She sat on the side of the tub and watched him in the water.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“What?”

“I asked where you’re going,” Val repeated, raising her voice so he could hear her over the water.

“To Yates,” Jamison said. “Tyrian has a tee-off.”

“Ohh.” Val looked down to think before she would ask to go, knowing it would just lead to an argument about Kerry and then Jamison storming out of the house. He’d just started talking softly to her again and she didn’t want to turn that fate. But she was bored and didn’t want to be stuck in the house avoiding Mrs. Taylor for another day.

“That’ll just be for a few hours though and then I’m meeting with the president of the Urban League,” Jamison said, and then he remembered something he’d promised himself he’d do before he’d gone to bed at midnight. “Hey, you free for dinner?”

“Dinner?” Val repeated the noun like it was in another language. She and Jamison hadn’t been out to dinner since—well, since she’d realized she was pregnant.

“Yes. I was thinking we could talk. Like you asked.”

“Where? When?”

“I was thinking Paschal’s. At like 8 or so. I’ll have Leaf make the reservation.”

“Paschal’s?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s so . . . so, like public,” Val said. The only time Jamison had ever taken her to a place like Paschal’s, where Atlanta’s own black heads of state gathered just to say they’d been there, was when she was still holding on as his assistant, and then she’d had to sit two chairs away from him and keep her legs uncrossed.

“We’re married. We should be seen in public together. Why don’t you put on something nice?”

This sounded like the tape-recorded voice of his publicist. Just an hour after Val had left Jamison at the hospital on Sunday, pictures of her stomach and middle finger had been all over the Internet and on the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Muriel went into full spin mode and had Jamison release a statement complaining about the nurses at the hospital not respecting his space as he was dealing with his sick mother and that his wife was so stressed out she’d had no choice but to act when she saw that the illegal pictures were being taken. She’d advised them not to fight back against the pictures of the baby bump and pregnancy rumors. They’d let it sink in, all the while acting like newlyweds that had each other’s back, and then release their own statement. In the meantime, they had to be that perfect couple. Suddenly, Jamison’s simple date idea sounded like a media move.

“Oh, I see,” Val said, each single-syllable word loaded with a hidden response.

“So, no Paschal’s?” Jamison went right for the easiest interpretation of her words.