But Geoff said nothing about Belle’s new dresses or her hairstyle. Soon, he stopped coming home after the Wednesday meetings, and then he stopped coming home several times a week. He claimed he was studying late at the library. He didn’t want to wake her, so he was sleeping on Zulu’s couch. When she assured him that it was all right to wake her—that she could hold his dinner—Geoff told her, no, but thank you. That was very kind of her. His cold politeness troubled her. Her husband always had been so warm, a fire she could stand next to.
The first night Geoff hadn’t come home—her husband’s first lie—Belle’s guilt over sitting with Zulu had pushed her intuition into the road. Belle’s mother would have told her she knew better. That when she’d opened her door and let Zulu in, she was allowing the Devil into the apartment.
But after several weeks of Geoff’s lies, the truth sidled up to Belle: her husband not only was staying out nights. He was seeing someone else, for he no longer reached for her when he was home. This was the part of marriage that Belle hadn’t been prepared for, despite what she’d seen back home. She’d convinced herself infidelity was only part of country living, brought on by boredom and old-fashioned women who didn’t stand up for themselves. Even when the women in her small town threw hot grits on their husbands in retribution for cheating, that wasn’t a prelude to leaving. That was simply an act of frustration—a sense of rage—that their lives would not change. Now Belle was becoming familiar with that infuriation. She and Geoff weren’t playing house anymore. This was real. Even in the concrete strangeness of her new home, she couldn’t pretend that she had other plans waiting around the corner.
She wondered who her husband was spending his time with. Maybe a girl who’d never had children. Who didn’t have stretch marks on her belly and the sides of her hips. Whose breasts didn’t tilt down, after a year’s worth of nursing. And at the next community meeting, she watched her husband with Evelyn. His warm laughter as he threw back his head.
One rare night, Geoff came home late after a meeting. When he found her with Zulu at the kitchen table, he didn’t complain. He hailed his friend with the usual handshake. Belle put his plate on the table beside his friend’s, but there were no thanks, and when Geoff finished eating, he left his plate on the table, rose, and went to the bedroom.
“Well, I guess it’s time to go,” Zulu said. “Thank you again for the wonderful meal, my dear sister.”
There was no cheek kiss at the door.
In the kitchen Belle wiggled her fingers in the dishwater, thinking of how, if this had been another night, Zulu would have kept her company while she cleaned up the kitchen, and then sat some more on the couch. And Geoff didn’t even seem to notice Zulu was attracted to her. That he appreciated Belle, even if her own husband didn’t.
She put off going into the bedroom. To lie down next to Geoff, who had turned into a stranger, but when she thought about it, she realized she had never really known him to begin with. There had been only a few months of going steady before Geoff had gotten her pregnant and they’d gone down to her hometown courthouse to marry. What had she known then? But she had to lie down, sooner or later, and when she did, Geoff reached for her, wanting. Their rhythms were off and she lay there underneath him, unenthusiastic. Waiting for him to finish.
In the morning, she rose and made breakfast and coffee. When Geoff followed the smell of bacon into the kitchen, she told him he needed to leave the apartment for good. Maybe he could stay with Zulu, like he always did.
*
Belle stopped showing up to community meetings. She was too embarrassed, watching her husband at Evelyn’s side. And she didn’t want Zulu’s three common-law wives tossing their cloth-wrapped heads in her direction. Throwing her triumphant looks, because Belle had thought she’d had a man to herself. But see there? She was no different. And if Zulu’s women had to get with the ways of Africa, so did Belle.
For a week, she waited for her husband to come back, begging. That was the ritual, down where she was from. When a man stepped out on his wife, and she discovered his indiscretion—when grits had been thrown or the tires of his pickup slashed—there always was a husband’s contrition. And then, after the news had traveled through the Black part of town, there was the Sunday where the reunited couple would attend church, and the wife’s triumphant look: what God had joined, let no hussy wearing bright lipstick and a tight-ass dress tear asunder. For it was always the woman’s fault in Belle’s hometown. Nobody really blamed the man; he was part of the weaker sex, one that couldn’t control its urges.