Wayne Wardlow, the Carlson Foundation’s executive director, was not a possibility in that department. Though it was Wayne who had inspired Roger.
“Hell yes, I’m tappin’ that ass,” he’d joked. Referring to a woman, a freelance writer Wardlow had met doing an article about socially involved foundations for Los Angeles magazine.
“Okay, P. Diddy,” Roger had remarked to the man whose face should illustrate WASP in the dictionary. They were in the locker room getting dressed after their basketball game and shower.
“I love black pussy-you don’t know what you’re missing, son.” Wardlow knocked him playfully in the shoulder.
“And you have lost your natural cotton-pickin’ mind,” Roger said, slipping into his trousers.
“Rog, getting some on the side at our age is cheaper than buying a sports car, and a damn sight more fun.” He then grabbed his crotch like an oversexed sophomore in high school and bucked his hips.
Okay, it wasn’t really fair to lay this at Wayne Wardlow’s doorstep. Roger was a grown man. He made the decision to kindle a romance with Nanette, who’d flirted with him that day at the Barnes and Noble in the Grove. A pretty woman like her browsing in the Social Science section, able to cite the specific failures of strongman Robert Mugabe’s policies in Zimbabwe, and argue the cultural significance of the late Rick James’s music. How could he not be hooked?
His cell phone rang, and he knew only too well the number on its screen.
“How does it feel to be a geezer who has two women panting to fuck the shit out of you?” Nanette said huskily.
“You have a way with a phrase, have I mentioned that?”
“Are you hard? Or did the old lady drain you?”
“I want you so bad.”
“Me too.”
“Everything ready?”
“Ready and steady.”
He hesitated-should he mention his daughter coming to town?
“What? Worried? Having second thoughts? That’s understandable, this is serious.”
“Don’t I know. Everything’s fine. I can’t wait to see you.” Don’t say anything, don’t put a jinx on this opportunity.
“I’ll be thinking about you all day, Roger. Wish you were here to find out how wet I am.”
“I will soon, baby.”
“You got that right.”
He pressed the cell off and nodded his head. They’d even accounted for this. For the last few months he’d been using disposable cell phones, also carrying his regular one for his wife’s calls.
Outside, Roger sat in his idling car, looking at the house he was not going to see again after today. It was far from a palace, but they’d lived in this two-story Spanish-Mediterranean since Janice had been three. The paint jobs, the patching, the lawn that needed re-seeding, staying here while Claudia took Janice to the Valley during the ’92 riots-a pint of Jack Daniel’s and a revolver he’d never fired, his false fortifications. There had been the hole in the roof beneath the tiles that had ruined their bedroom ceiling, those ornery possums prowling in the bushes in the backyard he’d chased off with a golf club, the time Janice learned to ride her bike up and down the block. The house was the touchstone to a vast chapter in his life.
He backed the car out of the driveway and made a slow tour along Curson, taking it all in as if for the first time-the old timers and the others, the newbies with their walls enclosing their front yards, the redone homes with the Southwest flare replete with landscapes of cacti and native plants-how his neighborhood, his part of Mid-City, had changed in the years they’d lived here.
Roger waved at Dorothy, one of his long-time neighbors, walking her Chow mix. He choked up, but pulled it together and moved on; there was no time for cheap sentimentality. After making a turn at the signal, he picked up speed heading east on Olympic, nearing L.A. High where he’d gone his junior and senior years, lettering in basketball and track. His folks-his dad had worked for the county as a bus dispatcher for the then Rapid Transit District, and his mom a legal secretary-had saved enough to move from what they called the east side in those days, South Central now, and bought a tidy one-story on Norton just south of Pico.
His father had died in ’99 and his mother, still active and working part-time at a senior center, had moved back to Oakland where she was from. How would what he was about to do affect her? Would it age her? Would she hate him? Blame Claudia? Take it out on Janice? No, his mother was a rational, strong woman. She’d probably denounce him from the pulpit of her church and pray for his lost, misguided soul. There’d be a round of “amens” and shaking of heads and comforting their troubled sister by the congregation. She’d done what she could to raise him right, some people are just born to be bad, they’d commiserate.
To get his mind off his mother’s pending disappointment, he turned on the radio. He was pleased to hear that the forecast was sunny and breezy, a typical day in L.A. At Highland, he went north.
At the office he reconciled the inconsistency with the Carlson financials after one phone call and a subsequent fax from his buddy at the County. In deference to his friend Wayne Wardlow, he’d also stolen money from his foundation. If he hadn’t, then Wayne would have come under suspicion and scrutiny. And that might disclose his friend’s continuing relationship with his paramour, and that would surely weigh on Roger’s conscience.
“Happy birthday, Rog.”
“Thanks, Gabe.” The son had stepped into Roger’s office.
“Just want you to know, it’s all downhill from here.” Gabriel Nathanson was twice divorced and fifty-four.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Nathanson clapped him on her shoulder. “I’ll see you over at the Bounty, I’ll buy a round.”
“That’s great, Gabe.”
“I tried to get that drip Marty to come along, but you know how he is.”
Roger dredged up a camaraderie chuckle it had taken him years to perfect. “Yes, I do.” Martin Nathanson’s idea of cutting loose was putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs.
“And next week, let’s you, me, and sourpuss sit down, okay, partner?”
“Sure, Gabe. I look forward to it.”
The son left, whistling.
There it was. Roger was going to betray a firm with a reputation for spotless honesty and forthrightness of, well, of more than sixty years. Would they recover from the taint his theft would smear them with, or sink under a sea of accusations and blame? That and the avalanche of lawsuits sure to come. And though Roger was not much of a standard-bearer for the race, there was that too. A black man, albeit middle class and middle-aged, married for over twenty years to a white woman, but a black man nonetheless, who had gained the trust of his Jewish bosses and in effect stolen from them. What would be the fallout from that? Strenuous finger-pointing at the next CPA convention, for sure.
And what of the betrayal of his wife and daughter? Wasn’t that the biggest crime of all? Running off with a younger black woman, fine as she may be? His stomach gurgled as he admonished himself. This was a time to keep his mind focused, not a time for butterflies and second-guessing. He wanted to call Nanette, wanted so desperately to hear her say how much she loved him, how she’d never felt this way about a man before.
He suppressed the urge and went about his tasks, forcing himself not to watch the clock, not to mentally count down the hours till he started anew. Never again the same old 9-to-5, mortgage-paying, block-club-going Roger. The hours eked by and finally he was sitting in the back room of the Bounty on Wilshire in what was becoming part of the growing Koreatown.
The HMS Bounty was a time warp steak-and-booze emporium left over from the days of pounding down a couple of Scotches over lunch, when cholesterol sounded like the name of a new hair color line. It was where you could find a booth named for L.A. native Jack Webb, and across the street from the ghost of the Ambassador Hotel where presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in 1968. The hotel was no more, and a high school and shops were being built on the grounds.