My relationship with Conspiracy was starting to unravel, like a crocheted blanket when a five-year-old yanks on a loose thread. Little incidents I would have overlooked before now stood out as blazing neon warning signs.
Like the time a girlfriend asked me to hang out with her, and Conspiracy commented in a half-joking way that he wished he could go. You can't let me hang out with one friend for one night? I thought incredulously, realizing that somewhere along the way, I had stopped hanging out with my friends to stay home with him.
Or the day my middle-aged Jamaican hairdresser started a hypothetical conversation about young girls who got with old men who controlled their every move, but were too blind and stupid to see it. I was, in fact, too blind and stupid to realize that she was talking to me, about me, in a roundabout, third-person way. Then the lightbulb clicked on. Conspiracy doesn't do that to me, I thought ... but then I realized that he did.
Or the time Conspiracy and I went to the New Haven Green to watch a summer concert and got into a screaming match on the sidewalk. I shouted at the top of my lungs that I was tired of taking his abuse – and realized for the first time that abuse was exactly the right word.
Conspiracy was embarrassed by my outburst. He asked me not to argue with him in public like that. It provided gist for the rumor mill, and he didn't want "them" to know that we were having problems.
We were already an item that inspired both town and gown gossip.
In the town of New Haven, where Conspiracy was something of a local celebrity, his age group couldn't get enough of us. I would attend his young daughter's dance recitals, and catch glances and glares from his ex-wife and her friends. Once, when I gained about 15 pounds, the old biddies started a rumor that Conspiracy had gotten that young girl from Yale pregnant.
On campus, the rumors flew, too. A few months into our relationship, I walked past a group of black students. I heard an upperclassman exclaim, "She's living with Conspiracy!" Everyone snickered.
But the gossip from others was nothing like the gossip from Conspiracy's own mouth.
I learned – from Tragic of all people – that Conspiracy was talking major sh*t about me. She had crashed spectacularly after her brief recovery from crack addiction, and now she was back panhandling. One night, when Conspiracy refused to give her money, they exchanged nasty comments. She turned to me and said, "You should hear the stuff he says about you."
Conspiracy quickly whisked me away.
"What was she referring to?" I asked.
"She's just making stuff up."
But I knew she wasn't.
Conspiracy was an incessant gossip, and a mean-spirited one at that. He talked sh*t about celebrities and political figures. He talked sh*t about his ex-wife and even more sh*t about his (white) ex-girlfriend, who he now believed was a spy masquerading as a leftie political activist.
I could only imagine the contents of his nasty, character-tarnishing rant about me. What a lying, cheating whore I was; how I was a book-smart, street-foolish girl, the kind who got pimped; how he had done this and that for me, and gotten so little return for his investment.
I never found out exactly what he said, but I didn't need to. The fact that I knew he said it was enough.
