newspaper.
Levi and I only stayed at the crowded Blue Note for about an hour. I was impressed when he walked me to my door, shook my hand, and waited until I had gotten inside and turned on the lights in my apartment. I waved to him from my living-room window.
Levi became another bizarre episode in my life. He loved to eat as much as I did and had gained weight since I first met him but I still outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. In the beginning we ate in a lot of restaurants, and some of our most serious conversations revolved around food. “You seen them great big old beef ribs they serve at the Murphy Eat-A-Rama?” he asked one day on our way back to my apartment from a day at a carnival. “Oh yes. The meat’s falling off the bone,” I said, smacking my lips. He made me laugh without trying, usually at times when he thought he was being serious. Levi didn’t read anything at all unless he had to, and he was not the most intelligent man I’d ever dated. One night he called and asked if there was anything I wanted him to bring me. I requested a large pepperoni pizza with mushrooms on one side. He wanted to know “which side.” In addition to our visits to restaurants, it wasn’t long before I was cooking meals fit for a king two to three times a week. Since I wasn’t that crazy about bars, the Blue Note was the only one we ever went to every other week or so.
We attended a lot of movies, church functions, and parties at Viola’s house. “That Levi would make you a good husband,” she whispered to me at a birthday party for her husband. “He got a good job, he looks clean, he don’t cuss, he’s good to his mama, and he don’t smoke. What more could a woman want?”
“I don’t…love him,” I confessed. Levi was standing in a corner talking to Viola’s docile husband Willie, who had a bibbed apron on over his party attire. Most of Viola’s guests had left, and the few that remained were on the other side of her living room.
“Love ain’t nothin’ but a four-letter word, girl. You think I married Willie ’cause I loved him? I married him ’cause he had everything I needed. And in all the years we been married I ain’t had to whup him but five times.”
“But don’t you feel anything for him?” I asked, surprised.
“I guess I do,” Viola said, shrugging her huge shoulders. She beckoned Willie, and he darted across the room to where we were on the couch holding our plates and drinks. “Willie, I thought I told you to put more chips in them bowls and more ice in that bucket.”
“Oh, I forgot. I’ll do it right away!” Willie said quickly, nodding and backing toward the kitchen.
As soon as he was out of hearing distance I whispered to Viola, “What about…” I didn’t even have to finish my sentence.
“Sex? I let him pester me once a week, and he know better than to complain,” she said with a firm nod.
“Is it…enjoyable?” I asked shyly. Unless there was money involved, I didn’t see any point in having sex if it didn’t feel good.
“It is for him. I just lay there thinkin’ about what I’m gwine to can next, plums or pears.”
Muh’Dear had enrolled in a community college and was studying business administration. Judge Lawson was paying her tuition. I had been dating Levi for two months before I told her about him. “I been tellin’ Scary Mary my girl don’t get involved with the first man come along. I’m glad you took your time findin’ somebody. Now you remember that mess that boy got you into when you was a young’n—make this one use somethin’. Either that or you go get on some pills or somethin’. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I mumbled.
Levi didn’t ask me to have sex with him the first time we did it. He just climbed on top of me on my couch one night after we’d been dating for almost a month. It was quick and pleasant, but I didn’t experience the satisfaction I had with Pee Wee. Levi and I never got fully undressed. When he spent the night with me he had on pajamas and I wore a gown and underwear. He just opened his fly and I lifted my gown high enough for us