Anything Can Happen

IGOT BACK TO MY ROOM and was surprised to see Judi still sound asleep in bed. I wondered if she had felt my absence at all. That disturbed me. How could she not miss me at all? So I climbed back into the king-size bed with a ruffle of the sheets to make sure she knew I was there. Judi readjusted her head on the pillows and remained at rest. But when the sun came up in the morning, and it was time for me to rise and shine for work, she awoke and asked me, “Where did you go last night?”

I smiled. She still cared about me.

“I just had to take a walk.”

She nodded. “Okay.” And that was it.

I TOOK CARE of my modeling business at Miami Beach, hung out for another sexless night on the town with Judi, and arrived back in Atlanta the next afternoon. I never did hook back up with Rachel. I saw no point in it. I had to admit that Judi was right, senseless sex meant nothing.

There were countless times where I chose to relax without sex while dating Andrea. But I rarely gave that option to new women. Either we were fucking or there was no sense in me even knowing them. And there were plenty of women I would meet on a whim while traveling. But that didn’t mean I had to stay in touch with them all. And I didn’t.

That was my life: meet them, treat them, and leave them.

Once I arrived back home in Atlanta, I dialed up my phone message service and found that I had seventeen messages. Three of them were from my mother. She was complaining about not being able to catch me on my cell phone. That’s because I had to turn it off a lot. The last thing in the world a model needs is a hot line while trying to take hundreds of pictures. It screws up everyone’s concentration. So when we hit the shoot, the cell phones are off or on mute. And after a while, you get used to not answering them at all.

I couldn’t relax for two minutes at my place before the phone rang again. I read the caller ID, and it was my mother calling for a fourth time.

I answered the phone and asked her, “So what’s the urgency, Mother?”

I loved being playful with my mother. She had such a great sense of humor. She had spoiled me something terrible, too. I had her partially to blame for my free-flowing attitude with everything. My mother had even been the one to push me into modeling. And of course, no woman was good enough for her only boy. However, she did like Andrea. I always wondered how much that had to do in the symmetry of their names. My mother’s name was Adrienne.

She said, “If I died yesterday, you would never know it, would you? Have you ever stopped to think about that?”