Table For Tu
Excerpt from upcoming book of the same title (Pre-edit version)
“Do you ever think about putting it in my butt?” Robin blurted, seemingly from nowhere.
“What?” Tu’s shock was real. He wasn’t just acting shocked to buy time while he thought of the right answer. Robin once more had managed to throw him for a loop. Not an easy task after a year of sinful cohabitation and nonstop, no holds barred conversations.
“You know, when you’re fantasizing and stuff. You do fantasize about me right?”
Robin paused from dutifully rubbing Tu’s flat, hairless chest just long enough to look directly at him and await an answer.
“Well, yeah, of course, I mean, yes, yes, I fantasize about you. All the time”
“So?” Now he was stalling for time to think of the right answer.
Now Robin was sitting completely upright on the couch. She had spun around to face Tu. This wasn’t one that was going to blow away.
“So what do you fantasize about doing?”
“Well,..stuff,…all…sorts of stuff,” Tu bungled along nervously, hoping that the conversation would soon end. Deep down inside he knew better.
“Why don’t you want to tell me?” Robin pleaded, her soft voice now taking on an almost whiny intonation as she tried in vain to guilt an answer out of her boyfriend…of sorts.
“Because you don’t talk about fantasies” Tu calmly replied, confident that he had hit on a gem of a defense.
“Because then they won’t come true”
“That’s wishes” Robin countered flatly.
“Yes they are.” Tu’s anxiety about the initial topic at hand had all but completely disappeared. In light of recent submissions to the conversation, he was confident that he could carefully and deftly steer Robin from her question. He was actually a little proud of himself. “So what’s a fantasy then?” He asked smugly, pressing home his point.
“It’s, It’s…It’s an idea, an imaginary event or something that you…that…” Robin stumbled around, fighting not to fall into an obvious trap.
“That you never did but wonder what it would be like” Robin closed her sentence chirpily, a wicked smile now returning to her face. She was going to win this fight.
“So could you possibly have fought any harder to avoid using the word want?” Tu asked, conceding defeat.
“Probably” Robin chirped “didn’t need to though…what?” Robin asked abruptly, startling Tu out of his gaze. Looking down, she followed the trajectory of Tu’s eyes to the tips of her breast where her nipples pointed almost accusingly at him. “Oh my gosh, you were staring at my nipples!” Robin shouted exaggeratedly, pulling the sheets up to her neck, pretending to be perturbed.
“No, no, I wasn’t” Tu defended, his pale face now turning red as he stammered out his answer.
“So what were you looking at then?”
“I… I… ahm, ‘cause, I wasn’t, it’s just that they…no, I mean you…”
Tu lifted his eyes back up to see Robin fighting to maintain composure as the silent laughter began to rack her slim, naked body. “It’s okay,” she managed to force out between now uncontrollable peals of laughter, “I’d be worried if you didn’t look at my breasts”
“I’m in the shower” Tu grunted.
Watching her boyfriend march silently off to the shower, a slight twinge of guilt tickled Robin causing her to wonder if maybe she had gone a bit too far this time. A few minutes passed before she heard the water begin to cascade. Quickly, she slid out of bed, threw on her “Betty Boop” dressing gown and chipped across to the shower where she knew Tu was now trapped. She was sure that he’d left the door open, just in case she wanted to use to the bathroom . So thoughtful that Tu, so predictably sweet. Robin slid through the bathroom door, pulled down the toilet bowl cover, pulled up a seat, lapped her legs and made herself comfortable for the interrogation.
“You didn’t answer me” she shouted above the sound of spraying, splashing water.
Robin endured the silence for a few seconds before taking more affirmative action. Tu finished rinsing the soap from his face and opened his eyes in time to see the shower curtain being yanked to a side, courtesy of an annoyed red woman.
“Are you ignoring me?” Robin demanded.
After a few seconds of fighting unsuccessfully to regain control of the curtain Tu surrendered. “I said we’re not talking about it.”
“Well we’re not talking about it”
Robin’s grip slackened allowing the curtain to be snatched and pulled back into place.
“Because I don’t want to talk about it. Because fantasies are private, and you keep them to yourself and wish they come true and if they do then you’re happy and if they don’t then you don’t care because it was a fantasy, it wasn’t anything real and you didn’t expect anything in the first place.”
Tu’s tirade ended abruptly leaving a sudden and uncomfortable silence, broken only by the sound of running water. Soon that would be gone too.
Breathless and drained from his unexplained display of emotion, Tu struggled to pull himself back together so that his next words would be calm and unaffected, almost as if the last few seconds never took place.
“Now please excuse me I need to change, I need to get to work, I need to leave.”
“That’s not a very good reason.” came Robin’s reply, deliberately oblivious to Tu’s outburst.
Words attempted to form and jostled for first chance to escape Tu’s now beet red face. Finally enough of them came together to form a sentence.
“What do you mean it’s not a good reason?!?”
“It just isn’t. It’s like something you made up because you wanted to get back to watching TV or something.”
“You know why it’s not a good reason?” a deceptively calm voice called from behind the curtain.
“Why?” Robin demanded still slightly perplexed by where her innocent question had led them.
“Because you don’t like it. Because it isn’t what you want to hear, so you won’t even listen to it. Because…because the only thing you want to hear is if I want to butt fuck you or not and you don’t give a damn if I don’t want to talk about it.” Tu’s voice had steadily risen until he was now shouting. An argument had officially begun.
“Where the hell is all of this coming from?” Robin screamed back. “I just asked you a simple question” Robin screamed. Tired of gesticulating to a montage of cartoon characters which now seemed to mock her with their smiling faces and rosy cheeks, she ripped back the shower curtain one last time and prepared to confront Tu, face to face.
To her shock, Tu sat crumpled on the bathroom floor, his knees drawn up to his chest in an almost foetal pose. His head rested limp against the back wall of the bath. Two cloudy eyes which Robin barely recognised stared expressionlessly in her direction.
“It’s not a simple question.” Tu’s voice was flat, broken and cold.
Robin paused for a moment as shock and guilt vied for dominance in her mind. Quietly she pushed the shower curtain back in to place, turned around and walked outside, closing the door gently behind her.
“You know this one is all your fault.” Raven stated before taking another slurp from her oversized straw.
“What? You can’t be serious. How do you figure that one?” Robin protested.
“You serious? Or you just pretending to be daft?”
“I’m very serious and I’m not daft. I asked my boyfriend a simple question and …”
“ So he’s your boyfriend now?” Raven interrupted, grinning broadly, once more abandoning her thick smoothie-filled straw.
Robin paused for a few seconds to replay her last few words in her mind while watching Raven’s straw change from a rich grass green to cloudy/clear as its contents crawled back down to where it came from. A few more seconds and she figured out what to say.
“What the hell are you drinking anyway?”
Raven took the bait. Like an aspiring actress starring in an infomercial, she leaned and began to extol the virtues of her spirulina smoothie.
“That’s how I managed to lose all that weight.” Raven added animatedly, holding her hands up and twisting to the side to show off her imaginary runway physique.
“But you haven’t lost any weight.” Robin countered, her voice underscoring how unimpressed she was with her friend’s pitch.
“Yeah, I know.” Raven admitted, her voice returning to normal as she came reluctantly back to reality. “…but I will and when I do, it’ll be thanks to these guys.” Raven smiled, shaking her half empty cup for effect.
“So, he’s your boyfriend now?” Maybe Raven hadn’t taken the bait after all. Maybe she just nibbled it a bit to pass the time before getting back to where they left off.
“Oh my gosh, don’t you let anything go?” Robin protested a little shocked at how big a failure her diversion had been. “We left that like ages ago.”
“Not really you know. You never answered, just kind of skirted around and tried to change the subject. Sorta like how you did when he asked you to go on a cruise with him. Did you ever…?”
Quickly, Robin interrupted, pre-emptying Raven’s next, predictable round of questions. “I guess so.”
“You guess?” Raven queried, raising a doubtful eyebrow.
“I see. So does Tu know he’s your kind of boyfriend or was that too complicated for him to understand?”
“You know what? I don’t see what the big deal is about if he’s my boyfriend or not? It’s just a word. A word we’re quite happy without, may I add. The point is that I asked him a simple question and he just went totally berserk on me.”
“And you don’t understand why?”
“Nope it was like totally out of the blue.”
“Robin!” Raven could play the game no longer. “You asked him if he’d rather be having sex with a guy. Exactly how did you expect him to react?”
“I did not!” Robin shot back in a semi-whisper, looking around to make sure no one else had heard Raven’s outburst.
“Well that’s what it sounded like to me and I’m sure as hell that’s what it sounded like to him.”
“But that’s not what I meant, I just wondered.”
“And why do you want him to stick it in your butt anyhow? Look honey, I don’t care what they say; those romance novels are full of…”
“I didn’t read anything about it.” Robin interjected in what seemed to have become a conversation of unfinished sentences.
“So you just sat down one day and thought hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to get it through the backdoor?” Raven continued, unyielding in her interrogation.
“I DO NOT want it back there, I just wondered if he did!” Robin pounded the table with her fists to emphasize her point. For a moment she forgot that she was out in public and allowed her voice the volume it needed to confront Raven’s verbal assault.
Now it was Raven’s turn to be conscious of her surroundings, including an elderly tourist couple that now sat smirking at the table adjacent to them. Slowly turning her face away from the couple and back towards Robin, Raven quietly and deliberately tried to pick back up from where they had left off. In her mind she comforted herself with the possibility that they probably thought she and Robin were just talking about moving furniture around the house or something.
“So, just so that we’re clear; your somewhat boyfriend, unlike your ex-husband, doesn’t cheat, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t even pick his nose, am I going good so far?”
“I guess so.” Robin conceded sheepishly.
“He’s willing to try anything you want but he doesn’t ask you to do anything weird right?”
“Yeah.” was Robin’s matter-of-fact reply.
“But he doesn’t want to talk about something you don’t want to do anyhow; and this is a problem how?”
A loud sign of exasperation betrayed how draining this conversation was becoming. For a split second Robin admitted to herself that she now understood how Tu must have felt this morning. Leaning forward, she tried once again to explain to her friend turned prosecutor what she was now only beginning to understand herself… barely. “It isn’t a problem.”
“It isn’t?” Raven voice was unapologetically sarcastic.
“So you argued about it because?”
“Because I wanted to know what he was thinking about.”
A blank stare and a raised eyebrow from Raven spoke silent volumes about how confused she must have sounded just now. More explanation was clearly needed in order to win this one and hence….
“I just wanted to know if ….” Robin’s hands made silent circles of confusion as she searched in vain for a way to make what she wanted to say sound how she wanted it to sound.
“If he preferred what he was doing before to what he’s doing now.” Raven finally inserted, bringing the circles to an abrupt halt.
“Yes” Robin blurted out immediately before thinking about what she had just admitted to. A second later she would be trying to back- pedal furiously. “No, no, I mean, it’s not like that.”
Robin’s loud sigh once more conceded defeat. “Yeah it is”
“Not really you know. I actually like Tu, more than that jerk you married.”
Robin rolled her eyes and braced for the possibility that her best friend was about to step on to forbidden territory.
Fortunately her fears would prove unfounded today as Raven ambled along with her monologue.
“Really and truly, I’m looking forward to some light-skinned, pretty hair God-children. It’s y’all that’s weird.” Pointing to Robin’s short spiky red hair, Raven elaborated further, “This whole good girl gone bad with your used- to- be- gay, sort of boyfriend. It’s weird.”
“No, it’s not.” Robin whimpered.
“Yes, it is!” Raven’s voice was firm and resolute, almost serious.
A minute of comfortable silence passed as Raven finished her shake leaving Robin staring aimlessly outside, alone with her thoughts. Eventually the sounds of loud slurping would unceremoniously slap her back to reality. A sixth sense told Raven to break from sucking up the last remnants of spirulina goodness in the bottom of her cup, that’s when she saw Robin staring at her with sad ‘droopy’ dog eyes.
“What’s wrong honey?” She asked, trying her best to be gentle.
“You know it is. If it wasn’t, we’d be talking about shoes or hair or how big he is.” Raven paused momentarily before trying to matter-of-factly swap in. “…by the way, is it true what they say about Chi…”
Robin raised her palm and cut Raven off mid-sentence. “We are not having this conversation!”
“Fine… but I would have told you.” Raven mumbled.
“I wouldn’t have asked.” Robin quickly rebutted.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” The droopy dog eyes had returned and Robin now looked like a woman contemplating the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe.
“Robin…” Raven paused, realising that her friend needed more than humour for this one. This time she would have to reach deep inside herself to a place she rarely visited. This time, she’d have to somewhat connect with the doubt and confusion that was written all over Robin’s face and coax her gently back to the land of optimism from which she came. Now that was going to be tough, especially the gently part. Raven wasn’t very good at gentle.
“Robin, have you guys ever thought about seeing a counsellor?”
“Huh?” Robin queried, trying to pull herself back from the land of worries where her mind now was.
“A counsellor,” Raven reiterated, “a psychologist, a shrink, you know, feet up, lie down in couch, talk about yourself and the pony you never got as a child and how it ruined your life.”
“Tu doesn’t like psychologist. He says he doesn’t believe in complaining about his problems to a total stranger.” Robin admitted sadly.
“Sigh… men, they’re all the same. Even the…” Raven cleared her throat animatedly while searching for the right word to describe Tu, finally coming up with, “the ones that are a bit different.”
“Maybe, I can go by myself.” Robin’s eyes lit up as the light bulb going off in her head shone through her mouth almost instantaneously. “You think if I went, he would eventually start coming with me?” She asked excitedly.
Maintaining her composure despite Robin’s almost bipolar mood change, Raven answered calmly. “Well darling, he followed you over to the other side of the river so there aint no telling where else you can get him to go.”
“Really?” Robin asked, trawling for one last bit of confirmation.
“Really. Anyway, unlike certain people that are fortunate enough to be living off the generosity of the state, I have to get back to work.”
Watching Raven search in her handbag, Robin interrupted to assure her. “Hey don’t worry about that, I’ve got the bill this time.”
“Aww that’s sweet… considering it’s your turn and all,” pulling her hand out of her bag finally, Raven produced a slightly crumpled, somewhat white business card that had clearly seen brighter days. “So if you do decide to try it, you can give him a call,” in an excited whisper, Raven added, “use my name.”
“Dr. Kamal Booker? Oookay… thanks.” Raven replied hesitantly, unable to disguise her shock at the fact that Raven was walking around with a psychologist’s number in her bag. As she fumbled to unlock her phone to save the number, a hand suddenly appeared, blocking the screen. It was Raven’s.
“Don’t worry about that, you can keep the card, I know the number by heart.”
Following Raven’s lead and instruction, Robin began to pack her bag away, phone first, card carefully second.
“So, like how often do you call this guy that you know his number by heart?”
“Girl, you know you ask a lot of questions? I now see what that poor man is going through.”
“It was just a simple question.”
“Uh huh… and do you see me getting all up in your business with a bunch of simple questions?” Raven continued her parting shot as she slung her pink, patent leather handbag over her shoulder and pushed in her chair.
“You asked me if my boyfriend’s penis is small!” Robin protested, following suit with her chair and preparing to make her departure as well.
“Well you wanted to, so that’s just as bad.”
“Well the point is I didn’t, so there! Look, make sure you pay the people! Don’t pretend you trying to sneak out and then I can’t come back in here for my smoothies. Go pay the people!” Raven joked loudly, causing Robin to blush and laugh all at once.
“Goodbye Raven.” Robin managed to get out in between her laughter.
“Bye sweetie, kiss Tu for me when you get home.”
“I will, and Raven,” Robin’s voice turned serious once more, causing Raven to stop dead in her tracks, wondering if she would have to take another late lunch in order to talk her friend back to happiness. Silently she said a little thank you when the next words to come from Robin were a quiet “thank you,” followed by a reassuring smile. Forgetting herself for a few seconds, Raven smiled back. Her friend was alright again and all was well in the world, at least for now. It would take more than that to make her go all soft, however and therefore, her carefully chosen response would be…
“Uh huh… and stop asking the man so many damn questions. You feel you is a reporter?” before blowing her a kiss and finally disappearing through the glass door and back in to the bustling streets of Bridgetown.
Robin smiled to herself as she strolled to the cashier before exiting.
The cashier was a pleasant dark skinned, young lady probably in her mid-twenties. She and Robin had developed a ‘frequent customer’ bond and so, a few lines of pleasant dialogue was the norm between them.
“Yeah. Well his second name actually, his first name’s Christopher, but everybody just calls him Tu.” Robin explained.
“Tu as in T-U, but yeah, same pronunciation.”
“Safe. So today you left he out and had a girls day out?” She queried as her slender fingers quickly grabbed change from the cash register and handed it to Robin.
“Ahm… something like it, yeah.”
“Well, thanks for spending it with us. Hope you had a good time.”
“All the time.” Robin quipped sorting her bills so that the faces lined up before stashing them neatly in her bag.
“Enjoy the rest of the day, and tell Tu,” the cashier paused and smiled for a second as she listened to herself calling Tu’s name, “I looking for him next time.”
“No problem at all.” With that, Robin turned and marched towards the door. Her stride would be cut short by a plastic cup falling loudly a few paces in front of her. It was from the table of the elderly, tourist couple that had been sitting not too far from Robin and Raven who were still stationed at their seats, soaking in the air conditioning, dreading the thought of venturing back out in to the blistering midday heat.
Instinctively, Robin leaned over to recover the cup before all of its meagre remaining contents could spill out on to the floor. To her surprise, her hand was intersected by a deceptively frail-looking, white hand which gripped hers firmly and pulled her close to the old lady who was now, leaning near to the ground as well. Robin was rendered completely speechless when ‘gran’ whispered in her ear, “Don’t worry sweetheart, they all want to try it in the back some time or the other. Relax; it’s not as bad as you think.” A sly wink from ‘granny’ and Robin’s hand was free once more.
Gently she placed the cup back on the table and mumbled a barely audible, “you’re welcome” in response to a loud, perfectly innocent sounding “thank you Deary, you take care now!” Straight- faced and thoroughly distured, Robin made a bee-line to the exit, trying in vain to fight back images of grandma and grandpa getting down to some freaky, midday, bedroom bashment.
“Who’s Ja-lisa?” Tu queried, emerging from the bedroom with a greeting card in his hand.
Robin peeped across from the kitchen to see Tu engrossed in reading its contents. “Hey, suppose that was something confidential?” She protested.
“Then you wouldn’t have left it just lying around on the bed,” Tu calmly rebutted, head still down.
“Well, maybe I was so traumatized after reading it that I just dropped it there.”
“And decided to suffocate your sorrows in some macaroni pie?”
“It could happen.” Robin asserted, moving her attention back to the oven she was about to open when Tu interrupted.
“Suure,” he drawled disbelievingly. “So how come I’ve never met this Jalisa?”
“You’ve never met most of my friends, Tu.”
“Yours.” Robin replied swiftly as she donned two large, puffy oven mitts. A second later, it was almost as if she had disappeared in to the oven. Tu waited patiently for her to surface once more before asking his next question.
“And how is it my fault that you don’t introduce me to your friends but keep me here hidden away like Harry Potter under the stairs?” Tu crouched down and shot furtive glances from one end of the room to another to illustrate his last point. He managed to get a chuckle out of Robin but little more. She wasn’t about to be distracted from the business at hand, dinner was late enough already.
“You don’t like my friends Tu. Robin continued calmly as she emerged from the oven bearing gifts.
“You did, so I really don’t understand why we’re having this conversation.”
“I never said I didn’t like your friends.” Tu protested.
Robin placed the flat, aluminium pan of macaroni pie on the kitchen counter and faced Tu. “So what he’d the last time we went out with my friends?”
Slightly startled at having Robin’s undivided attention, Tu stuttered a bit as he tried to think of what to say next.
“Ahm, you, you mean that time when all of us amm…”
“Old year’s night” Robin interrupted, taking off her mitts and throwing them on the counter. “So you remember old year’s night?” Robin folded her arms as she began her inquisition.
“Of course I remember Old year’s night. It was our first time out with your friends and it was our first new year together!” Tu answered defiantly, raising his index finger in the air to dramatize his last statement before leaning forward and in a voice that bordered on mocking, asked, “Don’t you remember Old year’s night?”
“I remember love. I remember only too well. I remember driving to the club with you complaining all the way about how you don’t do crowds and whining about why we have to go out clubbing with a bunch of people you don’t know and how we should be starting the year together doing something quiet and boring.”
“Romantic, I’m sure my words were romantic,” Tu interjected.
Refusing to be distracted or sidetracked, Robin continued. “And I remember you spending the first part of the night acting all constipated and looking like I had brought you to a Tampon convention.”
“And THEN, every time somebody tried to talk to you, you did this sort of grumble/mumble thing like you were one of these feral children that was raised by wolves and didn’t know how to interact with people yet.”
“Now you’re just being mean,” Tu’s voice began to rise as he defended himself from Robin’s onslaught. “I didn’t know anybody there. Nobody…at all…except maybe Raven, and even then, it’s not like we were friends or anything, we had barely met a couple of times. So you carry me to this place I’ve never been, to do something I don’t ever do and then drop me in the middle of a bunch of strangers. Exactly what did you expect me to do?” Tu’s hands were raised in the air, his exasperated tone of voice and deeply creased brow completed the picture of a man genuinely seeking an answer to his pointed question.
“Tu….” Robin’s voice softened as she momentarily changed the course of her dialogue to respond to what seemed to have been Tu’s heartfelt plea. “When we started talking, you said that you wanted to do new things, and that you were tired of living in a box, living to please someone else, doing the same thing day in, day out.
Tu was silent. A slight nod was all the answer he could give before looking away from Robin’s unwavering stare. It was the only acknowledgement needed to continue.
“You said all your parents did was work and that you didn’t want that to be you.” Robin stepped closer to Tu so that she could turn his face to hers. “That’s why I wanted us to go clubbing. It was my first time doing anything other than going to church for midnight mass on old year’s night. I wanted to try something new, something fun, like we kept saying we wanted to, and I wanted to do it with you.”
“We did have fun didn’t we?” Tu asked, his face brightening up once more.
“We had a blast! Two shots of Patron and you were the life of the party.”
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