Free Choose Me by Xenia Ruiz Page B

walk. The porch crowd burst out laughing.
     When people first met Simone, they thought she was phony, but she was really a good person with a lot of displaced love.
    Despite Maya’s request that I not confront Simone, I had called her anyway and demanded that she come clean about the man
     she was presumably setting me up with. She denied it so vehemently that I almost believed her. I eyed her suspiciously all
     night, waiting for the loser to approach me. But no one stepped up or made inquiries. Earlier, when I was waiting in one of
     the bathroom lines, the guy in front of me offered to let me cut in and struck up a conversation. I thought he was Simone’s
     set-up guy since no one had so much as asked my name. Simone had designated a bathroom for each of the sexes, but no one paid
     attention to the homemade computer-generated gender signs on the doors.
    “So, what’s your name?” Mr. Model-Actor asked after I stepped in front of him.
    “Eve,” I answered, giving the short Anglicized version I had used during my clubbing days.
    “Eve, huh? Like the ‘Garden of Eden’ Eve?” Even heathens knew the story about the fall of man.
    I rolled my eyes and didn’t bother to acknowledge his comment. He didn’t say anything for a while and as I was surveying the
     scene around me, I caught him looking down my blouse. Although nothing was showing, I crossed my arms.
    “You here alone?” he asked.
    “I’m celibate,” I told him, a comment that always threw men off.
    “Huh?”
    I turned toward him. “I’m celibate. I don’t have sex.”
    He held up his hands. “Okay, whatever. I didn’t ask.”
    After that incident, I stopped being so defensive and tried to enjoy myself. Maya and I attempted to mingle with the
Two Many Men
clique but failed, since they were so self-absorbed. We returned to the porch crowd just as it began to drizzle; the temperature
     was dropping, normal for Chicago’s late-summer nights. The gusts of mist that intermittently blew my way felt good after the
     sweltering summer day.
    The front door, located in the middle of the apartment, opened and everyone on the porch glanced curiously through the open
     kitchen window at the two men who walked in. Maya jumped up excitedly and I knew one of them was the infamous Luciano. I felt
     nervous, like I was meeting my son’s girlfriend for the first time.
    “This is Luciano, everybody,” Maya said, hanging on to the arm of the dark-haired one. “My
friend
” she stressed. Because some people who knew Maya knew she was married, there were a few awkward glances, and muffled “hellos.”
     He was olive skinned and striking, with wavy black hair slicked back with gel or mousse, and a killer, crooked smile that
     read:
That’s right, we’re together and we’re both married, and I don’t care who knows it.
I was surprised because Luciano did not look like her type, and knowing her all my life, I knew her type. And pale, pretty-boys
     were not her type. Like me, Maya had always been attracted to Black men. Alex was biracial, but he identified more with his
     African American side because he had more contact with them.
    The other man had been accosted by Simone’s co-star, an anorexic woman wearing a feathered Farrah Fawcett wig. Through the
     window, I saw her slip him a card, which he glanced at briefly before sticking it in his back pants pocket.
    “And this is Adam,” Maya introduced the other man. “His friend.”
    Adam stepped onto the porch half smiling, half waving, and squinting through the darkness at all of us from behind amber shades.
     I guess someone forgot to tell him that the sun had set several hours earlier. Under better light, on another day, he might
     have been good looking. It was hard to tell what he looked like through his five o’clock shadow and goatee. Long, thin, golden-brown
     dreadlocks poked out from under a crocheted cap in the colors of the African American flag. He looked like a ganja-smoking
     Rastafarian, the