The Accidental Diva Read online

The model/waitress came by to clear the table. Vida and Renee ordered café au laits, and Billie asked for a double espresso. She hadn’t slept a wink the night before—there was too much to do.

  “Renee,” enthused Vida. “Good call with Jay Lane. He was incredible. That’s a talented man—and fine. Oh my God.”

  Billie needed smelling salts.

  “I know, I know!” said Renee. “In that article in the Voice he was so vague. But he has, I don’t know, that thing. And he already has a manuscript written. It’s a compilation of his monologues from Nutz & Boltz, plus tons of other ones. All I have to do is edit it.”

  “No!” exclaimed Vida.

  “It’s crazy. An easy A.” Renee was hyper-animated. “Crawford & Collier’s gonna sign him, I know it. There’s nothing like an intelligent brother with street cred. It’s like he was sent from heaven. We need his voice out there, girls.”

  “I know, right? And he has such a crush on you,” Vida said to Billie. “Did you see the way he was looking at you? With those eyes?”

  Billie felt faint. “No, I know. I know. Ladies, I have something to show you.” Discreetly, she raised her knee-length denim skirt. On the upper reaches of her thigh was a trail of hickeys.

  Vida and Billie screamed in the middle of Chez Oskar.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “Not Jay. Not Jay!”

  Billie beamed, turned bright red, and hid behind her hands.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” She was bursting at the seams. “Oh my God…you don’t understand…”

  “Honey, breathe,” coached Vida. “When, where, and how did this debauchery begin?”

  Billie told them about the theater, and the bookstore, and the cab, and her apartment. She told them about his hands and his brain and how they were with each other. When she was finished, Vida and Renee were gazing at her all dreamy-eyed.

  “This is a beautiful thing,” breathed Renee, as mushy as she gets.

  “Look at our baby all grown up,” Vida said proudly.

  Billie hugged herself with glee. Then she got serious all of a sudden. “I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s like, he left this morning and I was devastated. I don’t want to be without him. I’m completely out of my mind.”

  “Good!” exclaimed Vida. “It’s about time you’re outta your mind.”

  “But, and…” Billie struggled to find the words. “I feel so relieved. I know I’ve only known him for five minutes. But I feel like I’ve been waiting for him forever and now he’s here and I’m just so grateful.” She was aware she was gushing and felt ridiculous. “What, did I just win an Oscar? And I’d like to thank the Academy…”

  “Girl, but that’s how it feels when it’s good,” said Vida.

  Renee looked sad. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt grateful to know Moses.”

  “Oh, stop,” said Vida. “Moses is your man. You’ve just been together too long for you to remember this part. Ya’ll are like the Ropers.”

  “Thanks,” said Renee.

  Billie took a deep breath. “I think I love him.”

  Her friends looked at each other, eyebrows raised.

  Vida gently placed her hand over Billie’s. “Honey, try not to let him know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Billie got back to her apartment, the first thing she did was check her messages. She pressed the red button, and her mother’s moonlight-and-magnolias voice swept through the room.

  “Bey! It’s Mama. Your handsome daddy and me are throwin’ a soiree this evenin’ for ya aunt Colette. She just came in from Nwahlins for a visit, and she don’t know that I invited her out so she could meet your daddy’s friend, that handsome, um, what kinda doctor is he, bey?” Billie heard her father’s muffled voice in the background. “Billie darlin’, are you there? Your daddy says he practices midwifery, which is what you do when you’re a midwife. Ain’t that a clevah word? Midwifery. It sounds like perfume. Anyway, he’s got salt-and-peppa hair? Colette wanted to say hi to ya, darlin’, but look like ya ain’t home. I’ma go, bey, cuz your daddy’s got a thousand hands on me…”

  Billie smiled. Her mother was crazy. There was another message. It was him.

  “Billie? It’s Jay. Uh, Jay Lane? I think I forgot my bag of perfume at your crib. Can I come get it?”

  She burst out laughing and called her man.

  5.

  i’m your pusher

  Jay was on his way to Tammy’s. He’d just finished having lunch with Renee at Michael’s, the time-honored publishing haunt in the East Fifties. Actually, he’d eaten while Renee went on about how over the moon she was about his work. He also thought she did a fine job of pretending not to know about him and Billie. After calling Billie to tell her the news (and to play off how excited he was), he took the N crosstown to Port Authority and caught the NJ Transit. Fresh Hair was closed on Mondays, and that’s when Tammy did his cornrows.

  He stood in his best friend’s doorway, grinning like an idiot.

  “What are you all happy about?”

  “Many things. Sup, baby?” He came in, kissed her on the cheek, and sprawled out on her love seat. She looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He remembered the rules, and took off his boots. Over the years, Tammy had dealt with her issues by adapting a very Zen way of life. She’d read about feng shui and immediately hired a professional to reorganize each of her rooms in the healthiest way possible. She was familiar with the state of her chakras at every given moment. She did yoga and daily meditations. She was extremely spiritual, and treated Susan Taylor’s “In the Spirit” column in Essence magazine as gospel. Twice a month, she visited a color therapist. And her apartment was filled with tiny, tinkering things like wind chimes and those dripping Japanese waterfall jobs. Jay found these things profoundly irritating, but hey. Whatever works.

  Plus, he knew that despite her “centered” persona, she’d cuss you out in a second.

  “You want some tea?” She headed for the kitchen.

  “You ever known me to drink tea?” Why was everyone offering him tea?

  Tammy returned to the living room with a steaming cup of chamomile/lemongrass blend. She set it on the marble coffee table in the dead center of the room (very balancing) and inhaled the aroma for a couple of seconds. Then, she gently edged him off the love seat and onto the floor, where he sat between her legs. Tammy began unbraiding his perfect cornrows.

  “So, what are these many things you so happy about?”

  “I met a book editor at the show last week.”

  “For real?”

  “For real. I just had lunch with her, and she’s tryin’ to publish my shit.”

  “Word? For real?”

  “She’s got a meeting tomorrow. I mean, you never know what’s gonna happen. But she got a mothafucker’s back. I don’t know.”

  “Jay! That’s so beautiful!” Tammy wrapped her tiny arms around his neck and almost choked him to death. She was fiercely proud of him—she always had been. “She black?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even better.”

  “I mean, I don’t know.” He was bashful.

  “Shutup. You know you don’t do anything halfway. If you want it, you always make it happen. Period. You’re a Leo.”

  Jay changed the subject. “How’d your fashion show go? Ow! Fuck!” Tammy didn’t know her own strength.

  “Sorry. The show was hot, the models looked sexy as shit. And I got a really good reception. I had editors approaching me and, like, celebrities taking my card. It was mad exciting, but it’s a blur now. It all happened so fast.”

  “Look at you!” Jay was happy for her. “About to be famous and shit. Ain’t got no choice with a name like Pandora.”

  “Naw, it ain’t even about fame. It’s about the
hair.”

  “You lyin’.”

  “I know.”

  They both laughed and then were quiet for a while. Jay thought about Billie. What was it about her? It felt really…urgent. He had to be near her. He had to be inside her. He had to get in her head. Like it wasn’t even his choice. It was baffling.

  “So I met this really positive chick,” Tammy said, making light conversation. “A black magazine editor. At Du Jour, no less.”

  Jay had been sort of zoning out, but then he snapped back to the present. “What?”

  “At the show. Hello?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, trying to sound nonchalant. “So, uh, you were talking to her?”

  “Uh-huh. She was really inspiring, you know? And she wants to put me in an article. Can you imagine?”

  “That’s…that’s some hot shit. Um…what’d you say her name was?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Billie. Why?”

  “No reason. I thought…well, I met a black girl who works for a magazine the other day, a friend of a friend, but that ain’t her.” His stomach was tied up in knots—why was he lying?

  “Oh. So what else happened?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said you were happy about many things. You got an editor and what else?”

  “Oh.” He wasn’t sure how to approach this. And he certainly wasn’t prepared for them to already have met. When—and if—they met, he wanted it to be on his terms. He so wasn’t ready to explain Tammy to Billie. And now, once he was faced with it, he realized he felt a little sensitive and weird telling Tammy how in love with Billie he was. He’d never had this conversation with her before. He’d never had this conversation with anybody before. And now he’d started with a lie. Fuck. “Um. I think I met my baby’s mama.”

  “What?”

  “I met a girl. I met a girl.”

  “Where?”

  “After my show.” He was short.

  “You trippin’ off her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s she look like?” Tammy was finished, and she massaged her fingers. She was a fast worker.

  “She’s, um.” He exhaled. “Fly, you know? She’s beautiful. But she don’t act like it. I don’t think she knows it.”

  “So why she got you trippin’? Did you fuck her?” Tammy was blunt. It was the only way she knew how to be with him. Over the years, she’d dealt with all his girls the same way. She always demanded the cold, hard facts. She wanted to hear about them like they were nothing more than a piece of ass. She wanted to know what they looked like, how they fucked, where he took them, everything. To Tammy, as long as she had every detail, she had power over them—they were just sex objects. She was his confi-dante, in a way that they would never be; no woman could understand him the way she did. Who could last three rounds in a “real” relationship with Jay? He was difficult, moody, self-absorbed, and inconsistent. He had a habit of disappearing for months, then popping back into her life like a day hadn’t passed. And she always accepted him. He was irresistible.

  Unbeknownst to Jay, Tammy was in love with him. He was everything to her—father, brother, best friend, protector. In her head, try as she might to push the thought away, he was her man. The thing was, Tammy didn’t know how she’d react if she ever felt that Jay was really, really serious about one of his girls.

  They’d never had a romantic relationship. Sometimes they slept together, but she knew Jay just considered this an extension of their friendship. So she was careful not to stop her life for him. She even had a boyfriend. His name was Pete, and he was a corporate lawyer at a high-post firm downtown. He was a respectful, up-standing, stable man who bored her to tears. He was constantly traveling, so she only saw him about once a week, which was fine with her. He wasn’t Jay.

  It was simple—Jay had saved her. When he was just a boy. Whenever she’d long for him, or cry for him, she’d tell herself that he was just sowing his oats, and one day he’d realize what he already had. It was worth the wait.

  Maybe she was just a masochist.

  Whatever Tammy was, she’d never heard Jay this hesitant to divulge details about one of his hoes, and that was definitely not cool.

  “Hello? Did you fuck her?”

  “Yeah, I fucked her.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s dope.” He didn’t want to talk about Billie anymore. He didn’t like Tammy’s tone. Usually her little interrogations were harmless; it was like locker room talk. Tammy was his nigga. But he couldn’t talk about Billie like that.

  “How many times did you fuck her?”

  Jay didn’t say anything.

  “You brought this girl up and now you don’t wanna talk about her?” She was beginning to panic.

  “What do you want me to say? I fucked the shit outta her. I’m ’bout to go fuck her again. Damn. Why don’t you go get you some?”

  “Mothafucker,” said Tammy. “Get the fuck outta my house.”

  “What?

  “I said get. The fuck. Out. Who you talkin’ to like that?”

  “Like what? What you grillin’ me for?”

  “Get outta my house!” She was yelling and hurt and didn’t want to be found out.

  “I’m gone. But let’s be clear about whose house this is.”

  She flinched. The door slammed and he was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, Billie met Jay in the East Village after his show, and they’d had soul food at Mekka. Afterward, they were jonesing for ice cream, so they started walking down to Little Italy for Italian ice. But then, one jones outweighed the other, and they ended up at her place. On the floor, in the kitchen, and finally, in the bed. Now, they were marinating in a fragrant bath custom-made by the beauty expert. She’d added ginger bath salts, rosemary bath beads, and a splash of lavender bath oil. Initially, the aroma assortment had given Jay a violent sneezing attack, but now he seemed to be doing better.

  It was a jarring thing, being so instantly adored. Neither one of them could imagine why the other needed them so much. It was fascinating. They spent a lot of their time poking around inside this, trying to figure it out. All Billie and Jay knew was that they were addicted. They were vital to each other. Who were they before two days ago? Billie and Jay wanted to be experts on each other.

  There was one problem, though: Billie thought her life was crushingly bland. She didn’t want to break the spell with shout-outs from suburbia. And Jay thought his was a little too spicy. He didn’t want to be some ghetto novelty to her, and, even more, he couldn’t take pity.

  So there they lay, squeezed in the tub, facing each other. They were going to get to the bottom of things. Somebody was going to talk. And Jay had rolled the blunt that would spark the conversation.

  “I’m not smoking that.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Noooo.”

  “You ever smoked before?”

  “Never in my life.”

  “The fuck outta here.”

  “My parents smoked weed in the basement the entire time I was growing up.”

  “Word?”

  “I hated it. Parents aren’t supposed to smoke weed.”

  “Maybe in your neighborhood.”

  “But they’d get high and have sex in my mother’s garden. It was unseemly.”

  “That ain’t unseemly. That’s some Wordsworth shit, right there. Smoke a tree, fuck in the grass…”

  “But these are parents. Who wants to see their parents having sex when they’re eight?”

  “I ain’t saying it’s a pleasant visual. But what’s it got to do with us?”

  “I’m not smoking.”

  “Yes, you are. Come here, baby. I’m your pusher.”

  Bil
lie couldn’t resist him. With a lot of splashing and readjusting, she stood up, turned around, and lay against his back. Jay lit the blunt and took a drag. Then he popped it in her mouth and gave her instructions on inhaling. She followed them, and coughed till she retched. She tried it a couple more times, and it got a little easier.

  Then it got reeaaallly easy. Billie began to find herself very interesting. In between puffs, she told him every story she could think of. She told him about athlete Shawn and gay Grant. She told him about Vida, Renee, and herself in college. She told him about her dashing parents. What it was like growing up with a beautiful, sexy mother that everybody fell madly in love with.

  “Everybody?” asked Jay.

  “Everybody. Men, women, toddlers, Chihuahuas…”

  Jay puffed and passed to Billie. “You ain’t your mom, Billie.”

  “I’ve been choking on it for years.”

  “What I mean is, you ain’t gotta be nobody but you. You’re good, you’re all you need.”

  “But do you think my hair looks like cellophane?”

  “Cellophane? No.” He fingered her hair. It had gone from straight to a wild mountain of ringlets in the steamy bathroom. “I do think it’s gone on home, though.”

  Billie puffed, passed, and giggled hysterically. And giggled, and giggled.

  They were hazy, and blissful, and perfect. Jay’s strong arms were around her, and she felt like she’d been born there. She curled into him and gave a contented sigh.

  “I feel like I’m in utero.”

  Jay kissed her ear. “The Amniotic Woman.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about you. Wanna know everything.”

  He took the last drag, and exhaled. Well, here it was.

  “Like what?”

  She rolled her head to the right and traced her finger along the KJ tattoo on his arm. “Is this a girl? Did…do you love her?”

  “No, it ain’t a girl.”

  “What about the scar on your cheek?”

  He paused. “I’ll tell you everything. But you gotta know that we ain’t from the same place.”