Genevieve - Softcover

Eric Jerome Dickey is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty previous novels as well as a six-issue miniseries of graphic novels featuring Storm (X-Men) and the Black Panther. Originally from Memphis, Dickey now lives on the road and rests in whatever hotel will have him.

I think that mine, like most, started unintentionally. Married or not, it was my first transgression. Iím not malicious, that is not in my nature, hurting someone I love, that is.

My wife. Genevieve.

She is thirty-two. Has been turning thirty-two over and over for the last five years.

Her name has been Genevieve since she turned twenty-one, the day she marched to court and rid herself of the name her mother had given her. In her eyes her birth name was too urban. Too Alabama. A reminder that her ancestors had been slaves and that her family still lived in chains, some physically, some metaphorically, some in the psychological sense.

She is not one of them. Not cut from the cloth of people who name their children after cars and perfumes and possessions they cannot afford, or have a home filled with bastard children, each of those bastard children named after drugs the parents were addicted to at the time. She is not one of the people who took a simple name and bastardized its simplistic spelling to the point that it looked ridiculous on paper and sounded ludicrous as it rolled off the tongue, then pretended the name was that of an unknown king or queen, its origin rooted in Mother Africa.

She is Genevieve.

Genevieve.

She loves her name because to her ear, when spoken correctly, Genevieve sounds intellectual. Not Gen. Not Vee. Not any other variation. She will only respond to her name in total, Genevieve. And she is particular about that. She frowns on the Americanized pronunciation, ìJEH-neh-veev.î She prefers the elegant-in-tone French version, ìZHAWN-vee-EHV.î She will answer to both, but only the French version is accompanied with a smile.

She is a precise woman. She is not five-foot-one; she is five-foot-one-and-one-quarter. I suppose, to a woman, a quarter of an inch could be the difference between pleasure and a night of frustration.

She has come up from poverty and, once again I state, has declared herself an intellectual. Not one that has stumbled out of the womb and continues to stumble through life without meaning or purpose. Not one of the problem children Bill Cosby rants about. She has endless goals. My wife is a planner. A degreed woman who knows what she will be doing for the next twenty years. She has it mapped out, literally.

She says that when she was a teenager, she mapped her escape from a small town called Odenville, from her past, drew a road to her future.

She did that the day her father murdered her mother. Cut her throat. She told me that her mother was a woman who had many lovers. Her father was a man who grew tired of being ridiculed in his small town. A man who lost it, then called the police, and sat waiting for them to come take him away, tears in his eyes, his dead wife in his arms being rocked and sung to, his every word telling her how much he loved her, how she had made him do something bad.

No matter how I have tried, Genevieve refuses to let me into her past. That leaves me feeling shut out in that part of her life. She only gives me part of herself. Thus, my needs are beyond those of the loins. My need is to feel complete. To not have this glass wall between us.

Genevieveís desires are flowcharted, every move thought out like a chess player willing to sacrifice her queen in order to slay her opponentís king. Every move from Odenville to undergrad at Spelman to grad school at UCLA to PhD from Pepperdine University in Malibu, everything that she has accomplished or plans to accomplish is on poster-sized, light-green engineering grid paper, laminated and framed, hung at eye level on the west wall in her office, facing due east. Like a prayer. Her ambitions hang on the wall facing east for another reason as well. That way her map to total domination of the free world will be brought to life and highlighted with every sunrise.

The light of my life, the fire in my loins.

Doctor Genevieve Forbes.

When we married, she kept her last name, the one she had decided would be hers from the first time she picked up a magazine with that title, the new one that sang of richness and power and old money, the name she crowned herself with.

Genevieve.

Not Gen. Not Vee. Not ìJEH-neh-veev.î

Genevieve. ìZHAWN-vee-EHV.î

Write her name in soft italics; cross the ocean and learn to speak it in its native language. Let it roll off the tongue. Allow it to melt like warm butter.

Genevieve.

I love her because she is an intellectual. Brilliance is an aphrodisiac.

I despise her for the same reason.