Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele

Author:asha bandele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, I was able to maneuver a meeting between Amir and one of the most famous and respected men in finance. It was a coup. In a downtown office, the two men talked for an hour and a half while I wandered in and out of cheap stores in lower Manhattan, the ones that sell dresses for ten dollars a pop. When finally my cell phone rang and it was Amir saying he was leaving the building and I needed to come back around the corner and meet him, I nearly floated there. An hour and a half? Who has meetings that long? I was certain something would happen and that a new picture-framed life, a life that had been shunted by the prisons, was coming into focus. We glided through the rest of the day, picked up Nisa, went out to dinner, toasted our future, made love through the night, made love the next morning. For much of the rest of the summer, we lived like this: squinting down the road to see where hope was waiting.

If you were to hear him tell it, it was me who screwed it all up that August. Here’s what went down: I asked him if he’d ever written a thank-you note to my mentor, the one who’d set up the meeting.

“Why would I do that,” Amir growled, six weeks—perhaps a lifetime—of fury shooting forward at me. “I didn’t get a damn job!”

“I know,” I countered, trying to calm him down, “but she couldn’t guarantee you a job. She did everything she said she would. She made the calls and set up the meeting. And you got the meeting. The thank-you note is for that.”

“You’re such an ass-kisser. No wonder everyone loves you.”

He said this.

And that was it. We were off and fighting. We’d been in his car driving out of the city for the day, a late summer retreat. But before we’d made it out of Brooklyn, he was turning the car around and he was speeding back toward my apartment, and then I was home, stomping up the stairs and through my front door. For the rest of the afternoon, in between crying jags, I called him, alternately cursing him and then asking, Why would you treat someone who loves you like this? He told me to stop. Said if I didn’t, he would make me.

“Make me then, motherfucker,” I said, all Brooklyn-girl defiance in my voice.

And he did. He came over that night. Nisa was asleep. When my doorbell rang and I knew it was Amir, I assumed we would argue but then we would make up. I assumed we would fall into bed together, proclaim our love once more, make it all better. I mean, isn’t that how it goes? Isn’t that what it is between people who love each other? And wasn’t that our pattern? So no, no I didn’t think about the names he’d called me for months, for years, accusing me of the very behaviors he was engaging in.

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