The Choir Director 2 (14 page)

“No! No! No!” Jackson was obviously frustrated with me. “How many times do I have to tell you? You have to put more passion into it. If I can't feel your commitment to the piece, how the hell do you expect the audience to?”

“I'm trying, Jackson. I'm really trying.” The last thing I wanted was to mess up my big chance; however, it looked like my words were falling on deaf ears.

“Well, you're not trying hard enough.” He picked up his suit jacket from the chair beside the couch where we were sitting. “Time is money, and you're starting to waste my time.”

“One more time, please, Jackson. I'll do better. I promise.” I grabbed his arm, my eyes pleading with him for another chance.

“You don't understand. You're getting ready to audition in front of one of the biggest and most important casting directors in the industry. I pulled a lot of strings to get you this audition. I won't risk my reputation by sending you in there like this, all uptight and stiff. You'll never get another shot, and my reputation is too—”

My phone rang in the middle of his tirade. Jackson shook his head and tossed his hands into the air. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“It's TK,” I said. This was the tenth time he'd called. “He never blows me up like this.”

His body language screamed,
I don't give a damn
!

“You here to work or to talk to your husband on the phone?” he barked. “This is taking up my valuable time, so if you're not really interested in this opportunity, then I need to know now.”

Taking a deep breath that didn't help relieve my anxiety, I shut off the phone and placed it in my purse. I knew it would cause problems with TK later, but this opportunity was too important. I'd have to call my husband as soon as I was done, but right now I couldn't risk Jackson thinking that I wasn't taking this seriously.

“I'm ready,” I told him.

Jackson sat back down on the couch facing me. “Listen to me. This is very important. You just have to engross yourself in the character. You're not Monique Wilson right now; you're Lana Washington, a middle-aged sex kitten who knows what she wants and isn't willing to take no for an answer. She's the hunter, not the prey. You got it.”

You can do this, Monique.
You can be a star
, my internal voice coached.

“Oh, I can be the hunter when I want to,” I said in my best sex-kitten voice.

“The question is: Can you be one for the camera?” he asked. “Can you make the audience believe it?”

I nodded, and he said, “Action!”

I cleared my thoughts and got into character, staring at Jackson hungrily.

“Why are you running away from me?” I began.

“Because you're a married woman and your husband's my best friend.”

“My husband's asleep, but you have awakened something in me I've never felt before. Can't you feel it?” I picked up Jackson's hand and placed it over my heart.

“Yes, but we can't act on it,” he said, looking not into my eyes, but down at the place where his hand rested. I wondered if he could feel my heart pounding as I prepared for the part of the scene that was hardest for me.

“Why not?” I leaned in close, committed to giving it my all. Pulling him to me, I pressed my lips against his. Jackson got into the part, too, wrapping his arms tightly around my waist and resting his hands on the small of my back. I knew I'd finally convinced him that I was good enough to go to the audition.

I was feeling so good about my performance that I abandoned any inhibition and slipped my tongue into his mouth, pushing him backward on the sofa. Suddenly I was really getting into the part, becoming my character—and I have to admit that he made things much easier because he was one hell of a kisser. By this point, we were so engrossed in the scene that neither of us heard the door to his office open.

“Monique!” The booming voice startled me. I jumped back to find my husband standing in the doorway with a look of distress on his face. That was quickly replaced by a dark cloud of rage.

“You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!” TK stormed over to Jackson, a harried assistant on his heels. Next thing I knew, my husband's hands were clenched around Jackson's neck like a vise grip, shaking him as he gasped for breath. Jackson was struggling to break free. My husband had become a madman.

The assistant was trying to pull TK off, and I jumped in to help. TK had him in such a death grip that I knew if we didn't stop him soon, he would kill Jackson. “Please, TK! Please stop!”

“I don't know who the hell you think you are, but that's not some cheap whore you're trying to bed. That's my fucking wife!” I'd never seen or heard TK act like this. It scared the hell out of me—but it also turned me on.

Finally, we managed to pry TK's hands from around Jackson's neck. Jackson took a few deep breaths as he staggered away, but he didn't get far enough. TK lunged at him again. This time, without thinking, I reared back and slapped him as hard as I could.

“Stop it!” I yelled. TK froze, glaring at me, and a wave of fear rushed through me. I wrapped my arms around his, hoping to restrain another attack.

Jackson managed to recover enough to scurry away to the other side of the sofa. “That bastard is crazy!” he said, rubbing his neck.

“You haven't seen crazy yet,” TK spit. I held on to my husband as he seethed, his body heaving as he tried to regain his breath.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Young. He just forced his way in,” his assistant apologized. She was standing between Jackson and TK like a sentry. “Would you like me to call the police?”

Jackson smoothly shook off the attack, straightening his tie and regaining his composure as if nothing had happened. “I don't know. Maybe we should let the first lady decide.”

“No, we'll leave,” I said.

“Stay the hell away from my wife. This isn't over!” TK raged. He broke away from me, trying to take a step toward Jackson. The assistant's question stopped him momentarily.

“Should I call the cops, Mr. Young?” the assistant asked again, but Jackson stood there smirking, completely calm now. Watching his amused expression, I understood that this was a man who thoroughly enjoyed the circus.

“No worries, Lynn. Bishop Wilson won't be a problem anymore.” Jackson waved her away. “Not unless he wants his mug shot on the front page of the
Post
.”

“No, he doesn't,” I answered for my husband.

“Good.” Jackson turned to his assistant. “Can you give us a moment?”

She shot him a look of protest.

“Don't worry. I got this,” he said.

She shrugged then got the hell out of there, closing the door behind her. She was smart to avoid the drama fest. Believe me, I wished I could have gone with her.

“TK, it's not what it looks like,” I started, wanting desperately for him to believe me. Catching me making out with anyone was bad, of course, but I knew the fact that it was Jackson made it so much worse in TK's eyes. TK had felt disrespected by Jackson at their first meeting, and nothing I had said since then could change his mind about the man. That's why I had chosen not to tell TK about my meeting with Jackson as I prepared for my first audition. I'd always believed that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, but I was rethinking that philosophy now that my husband had tried to kill a man.

“It's not what it looks like? Really? Because to me it looks like I should kill this motherfucker.” He clenched his fist, shaking it at Jackson.

“TK, your hand!” I shouted. It was grossly swollen. He didn't bother to even acknowledge me. I cringed when I noticed the veins in his neck were bulging. I'd only witnessed it once before in our relationship, and I swore I never wanted to see it again. His anger was about to blow out of control.

“No, you have to believe me,” I said, feeling close to panic. I reached out and touched his arm, hoping the physical contact might bring him down from the edge. “It's not what it looks like.”

He shoved my hand away. “What it looks like is that my wife is lying to me.”

“I'm not lying!”

It was obvious nothing I said was making a difference. Jackson tried to come to my defense. “You have a very honorable wife.”

“Don't you dare try and talk to me about my wife! I know exactly why you brought her up here, and it wasn't to talk about her imaginary acting career.”

“Honey, it's not imaginary. We were practicing for an audition. Reading our lines.” I grabbed the pages off the table and tried to show him. “Look, this is the scene.”

He pushed the pages away. “Auditioning for what? Some porno? Because his tongue down your throat was not PG-rated!”

As much as I wanted to, I couldn't protest—first because I had been the one to initiate that tongue-kiss, and second because Jackson really had gotten into it. I guess he was doing what they call “method acting.” Either way, I knew it looked bad to my husband.

I tried a different approach: Steer the topic away from the kiss. “Jackson got me an audition. It's a really big movie. It's starring Angela Bassett.”

TK's look told me he didn't give a shit.

“You have to believe me,” I begged. “Have some faith in me and in our marriage. I'm not about to risk everything.”

“You already have!”

“Honey, please just listen to—”

“Get in your car. We'll talk about it at home,” he said.

I couldn't believe that he was treating me like a child in front of the man I was trying to build a working relationship with.

“Why are you not supporting her?” Jackson took a protective step closer to me, and for a second I felt a sense of satisfaction.
How dare TK order me around like that?

Then I caught a look of sheer rage on TK's face, and I took a step away from Jackson. If he had actually put a hand on me at that moment, anything could have happened, and none of it would have been good. I tried one more time to calm him down.

“Honey, we were just practicing a scene so I can go to this audition. I have to be able to play a romantic lead in the movie.”

He remained unmoved. “You are not an actress, and you need to get that through your head. You are my wife, and you have a full-time position, which you neglected today to come here and do God knows what behind my back with this guy.”

He sneered at Jackson, who didn't look like he was bothered at all by the drama in front of him. Working in show business, he was probably used to clients acting a fool all the time.

“Jackson, will you please tell him that's all we were doing?”

“Man, she's got real potential. Women like your wife don't come along every day. Believe me when I say that Aaron's not the only star at First Jamaica Ministries.” I was pleased by his praise, but he hadn't directly said that the kiss meant nothing. TK was unmoved.

“This whole thing is over,” he said to Jackson. “You need to get yourself another actress. My wife is no longer available for this mess.”

“Don't you think your wife can make her own decisions?”

“I don't need you filling my wife's head with this nonsense,” TK shot back. They were like two vicious pit bulls fighting over a bone.

“Oh, so since you don't approve, it has to be nonsense? You don't have to be threatened by her dreams.” Jackson looked at me as if he pitied me.

TK looked at me as if he wanted to punish me. “I am not having this conversation in front of this goddamn liar. Now, get in your car and we will discuss this at home.”

“Hey, man,” Jackson said, actually sounding amused by his power struggle with TK. “I'm just here to support her dreams. That's my job. I'm a dream maker. But if you really want to hold her back…”

I felt my dream slipping away from me. My husband was going to ruin my career before it even got started.

“You stay the hell away from my wife, or I
will
be on the front page of the
Post
—and you'll be six feet under.” His words were not hollow. He meant them. He grabbed ahold of me and shoved me toward the door. “Monique, you are finished here.”

After my incident with Clifford White, I decided it was for the best that I let go of everybody connected with First Jamaica Ministries, including Monique. Being around her made me think of the church, and more specifically of Aaron, and that's not what I needed right now. So, I packed up all my stuff and moved out of Monique's house.

With all of my things crammed into my trunk, I got onto the expressway and headed east to a university on Long Island. I'd never been to the campus before, so I had to ask a student for directions to the library, where I hoped to find the information necessary to continue my mission. The library was packed with students—some studying, some simply hanging out, and others sleeping at their workstations—and the atmosphere brought me back to my own college days, before my life went horribly wrong. Anger rose inside of me as I faced the image of yet one more part of my youth that my rapists had poisoned. My life, and all of my memories, would be forever distorted through the lens of “before the rape” or “after the rape.”

Glancing around, I noticed a black woman pushing a cart full of books to be put back on the shelves. She looked young enough to be a student, probably working in the library to help pay tuition. I approached her.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?” She smiled at me, extra bubbly. Her nametag told me that her name was Niecy.

“Does your library have a collection of past yearbooks? I'm looking for a former student.”

Her face didn't register any suspicion, but I still felt the need to explain why I would be seeking a former student.

“Well, actually,” I said, putting on my best impression of embarrassment, “I'm looking for this guy I had a one-night stand with in college. He was really, really hot.”

“Hot? Damn, girl. Why didn't you tell me?” Niecy gushed, losing the bookish persona and letting her sista-girl surface. “I am so sick of looking for textbooks on the theory of this and research articles on the theory of that and blah, blah, blah. A hot guy with a good dick sounds like the kinda research I can get behind.”

“Did I say he had a good dick?” I felt like vomiting. If this girl only knew that he had the kind of dick that deserved to be chopped off.

“Honey, if you came all the way to this library to find him, trust he had a good dick,” she said with a laugh.

“Yeah, you got me,” I said weakly.

“These days I have to get mine vicariously. I'm heading into finals, so there's no time to play, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded silently, hoping this girl would get the hint and drop the subject when I didn't play along with her sexual banter.

“Follow me,” she said as she headed toward a row of computers in the back.

As we passed by a row of windows overlooking a parking lot, I noticed a burgundy-colored sedan parked near the curb. It hadn't been there when I arrived.

“Shit!” The word escaped my lips before I could stop it.

Niecy whirled around and stopped in her tracks. “Is everything okay?”

My eyes were still on the suspect ride outside. “You ever get the feeling that you're being followed?”

“Yeah, every day. These forty-four triple Ds are like a homing device,” she said, looking down at her oversize breasts. “Somebody is always trying to follow me home.” Something about how comfortable she was with herself put me at ease. In another time, I was certain that we would have been friends.

“Maybe I'm just imagining it,” I said, trying to shake off my worry. “I could swear I've seen that same car for the last couple of days. Everywhere I go, it shows up.”

She turned around and kept walking, chattering the whole time. “Isn't it like when you get a new car and suddenly all you see is that car? I got a Prius, and now I can't go anywhere without seeing a million. And don't let me in a parking lot. I'll spend hours looking for my car. All I was trying to do was save gas, and now I can barely find my car.”

“Yeah, you're probably right. Thanks,” I agreed, feeling relieved.

We arrived at a table with a row of desktop computers. “These computers house the college archives,” she said. “A lot of the old yearbooks have been scanned. If you tell me what year you're looking for, I can see if it's in the system.”

I took a seat in front of one of the computers and leaned to the side so she could type her password in to access the archives. “I'm thinking he was probably a senior sometime between 2006 and 2009,” I said.

She entered the dates, and a few files popped up on the screen. “Here you go. I'll check back on you in a while to see if you need anything else. Happy searching,” she said, then went back to her cart full of books.

My search would certainly not be happy, but I sure hoped it would be fruitful. From their Facebook profiles, I had learned that Vinnie and Clifford both attended this college. The dates were a guess, based on the fact that I was twenty-one at the time of my rape, and Michael and his roommates looked like they were around that age too. Since they were all roommates, I was making the assumption that they had met at college. It was a shot in the dark, but I was determined to do whatever it took to track down the men who had ruined my life, and this was the best lead I had right now.

I opened the first file and started scrolling through pages until I came to the head shots of that year's senior class. That's when I realized what a big job I had in front of me. There were pages and pages of faces to look at, and after a while, my eyes were so tired that everyone started looking the same. I pushed on, determined to find the person I'd come looking for. I would not rest until each one of them had paid for their crime against me.

Deep into the second book, I stopped scrolling for a moment when I found Vinnie Taylor's photo. He was all smiles in his cap and gown. The photo looked, for lack of a better word, typical. In it, he seemed like every other proud college grad on those pages. Except I knew what evil lurked behind his eyes.

But it wasn't Vinnie I was looking for. Now I was certain I'd found the right year, and I would look at every single photo, hopefully to find the last monster I was seeking. I scrolled more slowly, scrutinizing the features of every male student's face. My heart was pounding with anxiety. I didn't want to see this man's face ever again, but I also longed desperately to find him so I could get closure.

Somewhere near the end of the set of senior portraits, I was beginning to think Vinnie was the only one of my rapists who had graduated in that year. Then I came across Clifford White's picture. The sight of him made me sick, but I did get some small satisfaction from a memory of the fear I witnessed as he was crying and begging for my forgiveness the other day. It was a far cry from the prideful smile he displayed for the camera in his senior portrait.

“May you rot in hell, you bastard,” I whispered.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin when Niecy approached me from behind. Scrolling down the page to get Clifford's face off the screen, I turned around and tried to keep a neutral expression on my face.

“Uh, no, not yet. I found a few of his friends that I recognized from the club, but not the guy I'm looking for.”

She glanced down at the screen and suggested, “Maybe he wasn't a senior like his friends. Why don't you try a year later?” Then she turned around and wheeled her cart down another aisle to put more books back on the shelves.

Taking her advice, I moved on to the next year's set of seniors with a renewed sense of determination. It turned out Niecy's suggestion was the right one. It didn't take me long to find his picture among the crop of smiling seniors from that year. Looking beneath the photo, I saw a different name than the one he'd given me at the club, but I was positive it was him, the man who had introduced himself as Michael.

“Got you, Mark King, you pig,” I whispered to the photo staring back at me.

I closed the file and got up from the computer. My smile had brightened considerably as I sailed past Niecy.

“Girl, you look like you found what you were looking for,” she said with a conspiratorial wink. “I bet he's going to be happy to hear from you.”

“We'll see about that.” I waved good-bye and continued on my way to wreck someone's day.