Читать книгу The Company We Keep - Mary Monroe - Страница 10

Teri didn’t know that it had started to rain until she drove out of the enclosed garage beneath the building she lived in. But minutes after she’d pulled out onto the street, it stopped. She was glad she didn’t have to haul an umbrella around with her, too. She felt like she was dragging enough already. But it had been a productive year for her, and she had to admit that ending it at one of the most anticipated parties of the year, an invitation-only party at that, suited her just fine. She had already begun to perk up.

It had been a while since she had attended a party. And even longer since she’d attended one on her own. Well, she was not exactly going to the party alone. The engraved invitation that she had received by messenger a week ago had indicated that she could bring a guest. Other than her secretary, Nicole—or executive assistant as Nicole liked to be called (as the metal nameplate on her desk said)—she couldn’t think of anybody else whom she could tolerate socially to invite to another one of these music people parties.

Teri picked up Nicole about twenty minutes past eleven o’clock. When Teri saw Nicole exit her apartment building dressed in black from head to toe, she did a double take. The black turban wasn’t so bad. But the black woolen poncho, the black leather pants, and black boots were a little too much. Teri had on a simple green silk dress, matching green earrings shaped like four-leaf clovers, and a pair of low-heeled black pumps. A pale beige shawl lay across her shoulders.

“You spent hours on end trying to decide what to wear and that’s the best you could come up with?” Teri teased as Nicole climbed into the front passenger seat of her BMW. Nobody would have guessed that Teri was Nicole’s boss. The truth of the matter was, they’d been best friends for more than twenty years.

“What’s wrong with what I have on? A lot of people wear black all the time,” Nicole protested.

“Yeah, and that’s fine if your name is Johnny Cash. But we are going to a party, not a wake. Black is too depressing for a party.”

“But it goes with everything,” Nicole whined as she brushed lint off the front of her poncho.

“So does white.”

“Well, all my bedsheets were dirty.” Nicole gave Teri a playful tap alongside her head and laughed. “Let’s roll. I hope you didn’t forget to bring that contract to give to Rahim,” Nicole said, looking at Teri’s small black suede purse on the armrest.

“I didn’t. If I didn’t want to get this damn thing signed so badly, I’d be on my sofa with a glass of wine and a bowl of popcorn.”

“Well, I’m glad you decided to come out tonight, Grandma. I know I sure needed to get out tonight. Even if it is just with you…”

“Well, you don’t need to pout about it,” Teri said, glancing at Nicole. “You didn’t have to break your date with what’s his name. I didn’t beg you to come with me tonight.”

“It’s not that,” Nicole admitted.

“Oh. I forgot Greg was coming by to pick up Chris. Was he in a good mood?”

“Yes, if you can call acting like a rabid rottweiler being in a good mood. I tell you, Teri, men are such chameleons. Don’t you wish we had other options?”

“We do. But licking another woman’s pussy doesn’t quite appeal to me,” Teri said with a shiver.

It was a smooth twenty-five minute ride. The streets were wet and slick so Teri had to drive carefully and more slowly than she normally did when tooling around L.A.

She kept her eyes on the road and bobbed her head along with the music on a jazz radio station she had discovered by mistake one night.

Nicole was tired. It was hard for her to keep her eyes open. Dealing with her ex-husband had worn her out. But she was not about to let that stop her from enjoying herself tonight. She leaned back, glad that she had a turban on her head. It hid her hair, which was in desperate need of a touch-up and some tightening up assistance.

Teri’s silver BMW, a year old but still exuding that new car smell, moved through an intersection in the direction of an exclusive neighborhood near the Hollywood Hills. One that also happened to be predominantly white. Nicole could always tell a white neighborhood from a black or Hispanic neighborhood. White neighborhoods had yogurt shops and delicatessens and quaint little churches all over the place. The black and Hispanic neighborhoods had their share of churches, too, for all the good it did them. But the liquor stores, the overextended funeral parlors, and the pawn shops ruled the minority neighborhoods. Nicole glanced from one side of the street to the other, admiring the expensive homes.

“Now this is what I call my kind of neighborhood,” Nicole said in an eager tone of voice and a look of envy and awe on her face as she scanned the neighborhood.

“I am definitely hearing that, girl,” Teri agreed with a vigorous nod. “I wouldn’t mind living in this zip code myself.”

“Well, you’re a lot closer to it than I am,” Nicole reminded with a loud, exaggerated sigh. There was a bail bondsman’s office on the ground floor of her building with a steady stream of losers in and out every day. There was a garishly decorated Korean nail shop, the same one that Kim Loo was working in when she stole Greg from her, on one side of her building. There was an open-all-night, dollar-a-load Laundromat on the other. It also served as a makeshift motel for some of the homeless people who patrolled the block. A deserted school bus with no wheels squatted near the corner of a vacant lot across the street. Homeless people avoided the bus because it wasn’t as clean and warm as the Laundromat.

“Being close to it and being in it are two different things. But socially, these folks have their own ’hood problems. Did you see that derelict stretched out on the ground a couple of blocks back? Or those well-dressed white kids huddled in a corner in front of that office building sharing a joint?” Teri asked.

“No, I didn’t. I was too busy admiring all these gorgeous homes,” Nicole replied, still looking out the window with the wide-eyed awe of a child. “So what’s your point?”

“My point is, this is still a small world. No matter where we live, or who we are, we’ve all got some of the same problems on some level.”

The party was in full swing by the time Teri and Nicole arrived at the rapper’s house. Handsome young black and Hispanic valets were parking cars and greeting guests. They all wore stiff red jackets and sharply creased black pants. Fake smiles were plastered on their faces. They knew that the friendlier they were, or appeared to be, the bigger the tip. The scene outside was a media frenzy with ambitious reporters hopping around like rabbits and rude paparazzi waving cameras like weapons.

The only things missing from this frantic scene were a red carpet and Joan Rivers. Nicole took all this in with a stunned expression on her face. From her body language, you would have thought that she didn’t know which way to turn.

“Smile for the cameras and stop drooling. You’ve been to these things before,” Teri reminded Nicole, something she’d done on dozens of similar occasions.

“Yeah, but each time seems like the first time. I just saw two of the world’s biggest stars going inside!” Nicole stopped talking long enough to whip out her compact to check her makeup. “I don’t know if I will ever get used to all this,” she admitted.

“Well, you’d better. It is part of your job,” Teri warned Nicole in a low voice as they walked up onto the front porch of Young Rahim’s eighteen-room white mansion. It was as outlandish as it could be. A large Greek-looking statue of a naked woman holding a bowl of fruit stood on one side of the double doors. On the other side was a life-size ceramic lion with his mouth opened in a menacing yawn. The white draperies covering the front windows displayed large, green dollar signs. “People who can afford to live like this are no better than you or me,” Teri added.

A scowling, portly man dressed like a penguin opened the door and waved them in without a word. He ignored the invitation Teri held out to him. Shaking her head, she slid it back into her purse, wondering why Young Rahim’s assistant had advised to bring it in the first place.

“No better than you or me? That’s easy for you to say. But if I were you, I wouldn’t let them hear that,” Nicole replied, looking around the spacious living room, trying to price the expensive furnishings. On one wall there was a large cheesy painting of a man who looked like James Brown but was supposed to be an illustration of a black Jesus in dreadlocks and silver earrings. Nicole had a cheaper and much smaller version of the same picture on her living room wall that she had picked up at a flea market in San Jose when she visited her aunt Bertha last year. Who needed three couches in the same room? And they were the loudest colors in the spectrum: one red, one orange with green leaves jumping out, and one yellow. Each had clawlike feet and arms wide enough to hold a large baby. Had she not already known that this all belonged to a black man, she would have guessed it anyway. She had learned a long time ago that when black folks got their hands on some money, they made sure everybody in the world knew about it. Then they spent it as if it grew on vines in a backyard garden, buying ten or twelve of everything they didn’t need or appreciate. She gasped at an antique vase sitting in the middle of a brass leg glass-top coffee table. What did an ignoramus like Young Rahim know about antique vases? Other than his music, what did he know about anything else?

Young Rahim moved about the party room, strutting and looking more like a peacock than a rapper in his red suit jacket, yellow silk pants, and white Panama hat. He was not a bad-looking brother by anybody’s standards. As a matter of fact, except for the shoulder-length dreadlocks, he looked like a younger version of Denzel Washington. He had nice white teeth, capped no doubt. But at least there wasn’t a gold one among them. That pleased Teri and Nicole. In their business, they saw enough gold teeth to replenish Fort Knox. If nothing else, Teri found these glorified dog-and-pony shows entertaining, to say the least. She was glad she had come.