grew tired of being ridiculed in his small town. A man who lost it, then called the police, and sat waiting for them to come take him away, tears in his eyes, his dead wife in his arms being rocked and sung to, his every word telling her how much he loved her, how she had made him do something bad.
No matter how I have tried, Genevieve refuses to let me into her past. That leaves me feeling shut out in that part of her life. She only gives me part of herself. Thus, my needs are beyond those of the loins. My need is to feel complete. To not have this glass wall between us.
Genevieve’s desires are flowcharted, every move thought out like a chess player willing to sacrifice her queen in order to slay her opponent’s king. Every move from Odenville to undergrad at Spellman to grad school at UCLA to PhD from Pepperdine University in Malibu, everything that she has accomplished or plans to accomplish is on light green poster-sized engineering grid paper, laminated and framed, hung at eye level on the west wall of her office, facing due east. Like a prayer. Her ambitions hang on the wall facing east for another reason as well. That way her map to total domination of the free world will be brought to life and highlighted with every sunrise.
The light of my life, the fire in my loins.
LaKeisha Shauna Smith no longer.
Now Genevieve Forbes.
When we married, she kept her last name, the one she had decided would be hers from the first time she picked up a magazine with that title, the new one that sang of richness and power and old money, the name she crowned herself with.
Genevieve.
Not Gen. Not Vee. Not “JEH-nee-veev.”
Genevieve. “ZHAWN-vee-EHV.”
Write her name in soft italics; cross the ocean and learn to speak it in its native language.
Let it roll off the tongue. Allow it to melt like warm butter.
Genevieve.
I love her because she is an intellectual. Brilliance is an aphrodisiac.
I despise her for the same reason.
3
“Tell her Willie done passed.”
“Willie? Who is he?”
“Willie Esther Savage, her grandmomma.”
It starts with a phone call. The caller ID shows area code 256, one that I was not familiar with at the time. It was a call coming in from the Birmingham area, the Pittsburgh of the South. The voice on the other end sounded like that of an old man who took his Jim Beam over ice, his tone Southern and rooted in both poverty and ancestral slavery, a raspy-voiced smoker who had—based on the way he punctuated every other word with a cough—seen his better years: I’m not a doctor, but a deaf man could hear emphysema and bronchitis dancing around inside his frame. When I had answered he had asked for Shauna Smith, a name I was not used to hearing. I told him he had the wrong number. Before I could hang up, he changed and asked for Jennifer. Then tried again, asked for Jenny Vee. Struggled with that name, my guess being that was the closest he could get to the pronunciation of Genevieve. He did not know her as Genevieve.
Cough. “The name she was borned with was LaKeisha Shauna Smith.”
He has my attention. “Yes.”
“I think she calls herself Jenny Vee something-another now she done moved away.”
I say, “I think you mean Genevieve, not Jenny Vee.”
He pauses, then answers, “I reckon so.”
My chest tightens as I lean back from my desk, away from the notes I’m looking over, notes regarding the breakdown of the infected enzymes in semen and drugs we’ve developed, and my eyes go to the clock. It’s after eight, close to the time she usually gets in. Genevieve is off work, leaves at five on the dot, but today is Tuesday. Tuesday and Thursday are her Pilates days. Wednesday is an African dance class in Leimert Park; then from time to time she walks across the street and watches poetry at World Stage. She writes poetry but is not one to perform her work. Those are the evenings she gives herself time to do something in the name of self.
I lean forward and ask, “May I ask who is calling?”
Cough. “What was that?”
“Who is this? Who are you?”
Cough. Cough. “Grandpa Fred. Mister Fred Smith Junior. I’m her granddaddy on her daddy side. Need to get her the word her grandmomma on her momma side done passed early this morning. Willie Esther was gone before the cry of the crow.”