Stephanie and Dwayne Ch. 03

There was a time when Dwayne had seemed particularly ardent, poking me three times—twice in my pussy and once in my mouth—with a passion even beyond the norm. In spite of the chilly weather outside, we were drenched in sweat, lying flat on our backs and staring unseeing at the ceiling. After catching my breath, I sidled over to him and held his arm between my breasts; his hand was in the general vicinity of my sex, but he didn't make any attempt to stimulate me further. I was glad of that—I'd already had four climaxes of my own—because I had things to discuss. Well, one thing in particular.

Dwayne's eyes were now closed, and I got even closer to him and whispered in his ear: "Dwayne, can we think about getting married?"

It seemed to me that that question was innocuous enough. I mean, I didn't come out and say, "Goddammit, Dwayne, you marry me this instant or else!" I was just suggesting that we think about the possibility—maybe yes, maybe no. We'd been together for four months—four of the most physically and emotionally intense months of my whole life. I can't speak definitively for Dwayne, but I like to think he'd not had a relationship like this either. So what was the harm in just tossing around the possibility of a (more or less) permanent union?

His eyes popped open, suddenly filled with fear. It was as if he had sensed the presence of a serial killer in the house. His mouth opened, but no words came out; instead, a strange sort of choking sound emerged from deep in his throat. I had no idea what that meant, but it wasn't a good sign.

"Dwayne, come on," I whined. "Can't we just talk about this? You're not going to tell me the thought has never crossed your mind."

I now began to sense that the thought had in fact never crossed his mind, and my heart sank even further.

"Dwayne?" I said softly. "Don't you have anything to say?"

After what seemed like an infinity of silence, he finally said: "It wouldn't be right."

I confess that struck me as an odd way of putting it. He could have said, "No, it's not a good idea"—or, more harshly, "No, I don't want to." But he seemed to be suggesting that there was some sort of moral unsoundness in what I was proposing.

"Dwayne, why not? Don't you love me?"

He had in fact been saying "I love you" for a few weeks, many weeks after I'd first said it (and kept saying it over and over to him). Usually, however, whenever I said "I love you, Dwayne," he'd come back with the lame "Me too." I took that as just the standard male inability to express emotions, but at least it was something.

Now I began to wonder if there were limitations to his feelings for me. I couldn't believe he wanted me just for sex; he could have had any woman for that purpose, and he clearly enjoyed my company and had formed an emotional bond with me. But what was the extent of that bond? How far did it go? And was there something about the prospect of marrying me that somehow violated his sense of decorum?

There was, of course, one thought I refused even to contemplate: It's surely not because I'm a white woman, is it?

Dwayne's features twisted in obvious pain. He managed to say, "'Course I love you, Stef." He seemed on the brink of saying more, but somehow couldn't get it out.

"Then why—?" I began.

He cut me off: "Stef, we don't live in the same world."

"What on earth do you mean?" I said, baffled.

He now turned his body on its side to face me, taking my shoulders in his hands. "Stef, I don't belong in your world. You live in a world where people drink wine and talk about politics and art and get fancy degrees and live in fancy houses and go to the opera and the symphony and do all that kind of stuff. I live in a world where people drink beer and talk about sports and have babies and try to figure out where the grocery money is going to come from. Our worlds don't mix together."

That was probably the longest single utterance he had ever spoken to me, and every sentence was like a knife thrust into my abdomen. He wasn't quite coming out and saying, I am a black person and you are a white person, but the implication was there. Maybe he was talking more about cultural than racial differences, but even that was bad enough.

"Dwayne," I said, tears filling my eyes, "when two people get together and fall in love, they're supposed to live in each other's worlds. Your world becomes mine, and my world becomes yours. I won't say that there's going to be a perfect mix, but both of us have to make the effort. I think I've tried to make the effort; I'm not so sure about you. You don't have to feel inferior to my family or my friends or my house or my salary; you've accomplished a lot on your own and have everything to be proud of. Your family is a lot more loving and tightly knit than mine is, but that doesn't mean that my family hasn't embraced you or hoped that we can be together always.

"And if it's babies you want, well, I'll be proud to have them with you."

I meant every word I said, even about the babies. But he just shook his head as if I was proposing to fly to the moon in a kite.

"It won't work, Stef," he said lugubriously.

"Tell me why not?" I said, getting confrontational. "Anyway, what does it matter if our 'worlds' don't mix very well? Isn't our love for each other the most important thing?"

He almost sneered at me. "That only works in books."

Now I was getting angry. "Don't you have any faith? Faith in us? Doesn't our love count for anything? Or do you just think I'm a reasonably good lay?"

That last comment really crossed a line. I could have bit my tongue off after saying it. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had flown into a rage, although I never had the slightest fear that he would do anything physical to me. But instead of getting angry, he just seemed to get sad. Now his eyes filled with tears. He let go of me and crawled out of bed.

I was appalled at what I had done. How could I have been so cruel and stupid? But as I saw him slowly start getting dressed, I felt another little surge of anger and frustration. Once more, he was trying to dodge something unpleasant by merely bolting from the scene. A lot of men do that, but somehow I'd hoped he was different.

I got up stiffly from the bed and stood naked over him as he was on one knee, putting a sock on.

"Dwayne," I said, "please don't go."

He just looked up at me with the most pitiful expression I'd ever seen.

"Dwayne," I somehow said through the tears raining down my face, "please. Please don't go."

He was looking down at the floor in front of my feet. For several seconds he was motionless; then, with an anguished cry, he suddenly flung his arms around my midsection and buried his face in my groin.

He was crying like a little boy, loudly and unashamed. His arms had now slipped to my bottom and were squeezing it quite painfully, as he held on in a kind of resigned desperation. His tears were bedewing my pubic hair; I could actually feel one drop slipping down over my clitoris and onto my labia.

I just held his head to my groin, saying nothing.

As his tears subsided, he said, "I love you, Stef. I love you so much."

"I love you too, Dwayne," I said.

Then I pulled him up by the shoulders so that he was standing in front of me. I wiped the tears away from his face, and he did the same to me.

"Let's go back to bed," I said, starting to unbutton his shirt. "If you don't want to get married, that's okay. We won't talk about it again. I'm sorry I upset you. We'll just go on as before—that's just fine with me. All I want is to have you in my life."

I got him naked, and we slipped back into bed. We didn't have any more sex, but just held each other for a long time. I think I fell asleep on his chest.

*

I didn't keep my word, however.

Even though I said I wouldn't bring up the subject again, I did—and in ways that were both sneaky and snide. Whenever I had some of my married friends over for dinner, I would say after they'd left, "Don't they make a lovely couple?" When we saw two people holding hands, I would say, "There's something about the way married people hold hands. You can tell." It was all a crock: I had no idea whether that particular couple was married or not. It went on like that for at least another month.

Well, apparently I wore him down. After another bout of almost ferocious lovemaking, I blurted out afterwards, "God, Dwayne, I wish we could be married!"

Almost inaudibly he said, "Okay."

I wasn't sure whether I'd heard correctly—or whether I even understood what exactly he was saying. Was he just agreeing with me (Yeah, I know you wish to be married) or was he actually saying, Yeah, okay, let's get married.

I looked up at him almost apprehensively and said like an idiot, "What?"

He gave me that patented crooked smile of his.

"Dwayne," I said, climbing up on top of him and looking down severely at him, "what do you mean? What are you saying?"

"You wanna get married?" he said with almost insulting casualness.

"You know I do!" I said hotly.

"Okay, then," he said in that same casual tone, "let's do it."

I think I let out a high-pitched scream. "You mean it, Dwayne? You really mean it?"

"Yeah, sure," he said blandly.

"Oh, you dear, sweet, wonderful man!" I cried, hugging him tight and kissing him all over his face and neck and chest and shoulders. I was almost going to go down and give him a blowjob as a kind of reward, but some residual sense of dignity prevented me. But I let him know, by word and deed, that he'd fulfilled my most fervent desire.

The next morning I got in touch with both my mom and his. They too were ecstatic, and I sensed that Shirley in particular had been prodding Dwayne on the subject also. We at once plunged into wedding plans. This was going to be a big show: my parents would of course foot the bill, but Shirley would be intimately involved, and we were happy to yield to her request that the ceremony take place in her church.

In order to do that, of course, I would have to get baptised.

That event proved to be pretty inconsequential, at least as far as I was concerned, although it obviously meant the world to Shirley—and to Dwayne. As the two of them looked on, their minister droned some words in front of the altar as I knelt down before it, and then he dipped his finger in a bowl of holy water and traced a cross on my forehead. The whole thing was over in about ten minutes, but I could see Shirley in particular breathe an immense sigh of relief afterwards.

Dwayne's sisters, especially the lively Kamesha, also got involved in the festivities, helping with the planning of the reception and a lot of other things. The wedding was set for mid-April, and there were so many details to take care of that the weeks passed in a blur. Dwayne still stubbornly refused to move in with me, although that was clearly the plan after we'd gotten married. But if he wanted to hold on to his last remaining days of bachelor freedom, I wasn't about to begrudge them to him.

As the big day approached, I began to get more and more nervous. I mean, here I was, thirty-two years old and never married! I'd attended more of my friends' weddings as a solitary person—someone without even a boyfriend to drag along to the event—than I cared to remember. And the idea of being the star of the show (for of course the bride is the star, the groom being merely an inconsequential if necessary ornament) was a bit intimidating.

The night before the wedding, Dwayne said he felt he should be at his own place, because it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride ahead of time. Well and good; I found it rather charming that he subscribed to that silly superstition. But I had not failed to notice that he himself had seemed to become more troubled and withdrawn as the day approached. I put it off to mere nerves: this was, after all, his first wedding also.

So I got up that morning, had a simple breakfast, and made my way to the church.

Everyone was already there, and Shirley and my mom whisked me away to a private room so that I could get into my huge and lavish wedding dress. A sense of unreality overcame me as my mom, my future mother-in-law, my two future sisters-in-law, and my own sister made a fuss over every particular of my dress, my makeup, and other things. I almost felt like a life-size doll that was being decorated for some incomprehensible purpose.

But at one point—indeed, close to the time when the ceremony was to have begun—there was a knock on the door. It was Walter; and although he was not allowed into the room, he did gesture over to his wife and had her come over to him for a harried colloquy. Shirley's eyes widened, and she closed the door in Walter's face and turned to me.

"Shirley," I said, a shiver of apprehension going through me, "is something the matter?"

It took her a long time to speak. At last she said: "Nothing to worry about dear . . . but Dwayne hasn't shown up yet."

It was as if someone had kicked me in the stomach. "Wh-what?" I whispered.

"He's just a little late, that's all," she temporized.

"A little late!" Kamesha cried. "He's very late! It's ten minutes to two, Mom!"

That was pretty late. The service was to start at two, and Dwayne needed to get into his tux, which we had rented for the occasion. That tux was sitting in another private room, where Walter and other male members of his family were to tend to him.

"He's just delayed," Shirley said frantically.

"Do you know that?" Kamesha said almost accusingly. "Has anyone talked to him?"

"Well, no," Shirley admitted. "No one can seem to reach him."

I took matters into my own hands. With shaking fingers I dialed his number on my cellphone. It rang and rang and rang, and finally went to voicemail. I hung up.

"I can't reach him," I said in a hollow voice. Then I dropped to the floor and burst into tears.

At once several of the women gathered around me, cooing at me and saying everything would be all right. But of course everything wasn't all right, and wouldn't be. Oh, there was certainly the possibility that he was horribly delayed, or—worse—that he had gotten into some kind of accident. But I knew in my heart that none of that had happened.

He just didn't want to marry me.

The saving grace was that I wasn't actually standing alone in front of the altar when we all decided that Dwayne simply wasn't going to show up. The women kept me in that room as, bathed in tears, I almost tore the wedding dress off of me and got back into my regular clothes. Ignoring the pleas of Shirley and my mother, I simply left the room and drove away. I later heard that Shirley had to make the supremely embarrassing announcement to the assembled guests that no wedding was going to take place that day.

I came home and threw myself into bed. I made no further effort to contact Dwayne, either by phone or in person.

And I haven't seen or heard from him in the three years since then.