Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [101]
Back in the States, the pair confronted Ali about Veronica. “I was scared to death,” Aaisha says, “but Belinda sat right down and said, ‘We know about Veronica, and we don’t like it. She’s got to go.’” Ali became enraged. Who did they think they were? To him, they were out of line; Muslim wives were docile, not mouthy snoopers. He was going to make Veronica his wife. No, said Belinda, who knew Muslim law, certainly the one that said that there could be no other wife without the other wife’s consent. She sprung from the chair and pointed, saying: “No!” It would eventually sort out in Manila after Belinda’s angry appearance there. She returned, saying to Aaisha: “If you had any sense, you’ll get out, too. He’s disloyal, not worthy of a good woman.” Aaisha says: “The last I heard…Belinda was working in a check-cashing place in Chicago.”
Ali never thought Belinda would leave him, says Aaisha, “and I missed her sisterhood.” Veronica became pregnant, and Ali was bragging that he was going to have a boy. Aaisha continued to be loyal even after he married Veronica. Because of lupus, pregnancies were high risk for Aaisha. Ali became more and more critical of her. He mocked her height. Why didn’t she have leg implants, so she could be tall and queenly like Veronica? Veronica continually drove herself between Ali and Aaisha. He told her that Aaisha was there before her, and if she left Aaisha would be his wife, so get used to it. “I was batted around like a ball,” says Aaisha, “and then we had a showdown. I’m not the type to be argumentative, but something had to give. To him, I was being disobedient.”
Aaisha said, “Veronica doesn’t love you, all she wants is your fame.”
“That’s what you think,” he said.
“No, that’s what I know,” she said.
“She does love me!” he shouted.
“She’s going to be your downfall. She’s just interested in being a celebrity and an actress.”
Ali said, “She left college for me. That’s more than you did.”
“Oh, I only had to leave high school because I was pregnant with your child. At seventeen!”
“I’ve fed you!” he shouted again. “Put clothes on your back, kept a roof for you. You traveled around the world because of me! You gonna do that on a high school diploma?”
“I ate before I met you,” Aaisha said. “Traveled with my family. Yes, you have taken me around the world—in more ways than one.”
In Japan, Aaisha began to ponder what she had lost, a probable medical future and her lost adolescence. Ali’s leg was battered by the wrestler Inoki in a ludicrous grab for money. When he hit the elevator of the hotel, veins swollen, he collapsed. Aaisha held him in her arms, and the doctor with them gave him a shot to thin his blood. They got him to the hotel room all right, then he passed out on the bed. It was time, Aaisha thought, to put this madness behind her. This wasn’t her world, all this extravagance and peacock living. Could she live without him? “I had to save,” she says now, “what little was left of me.” She stayed on for a while, then one day, with Khaliah, she went back home, leaving everything he had given her in Chicago. His constant warning replayed in her head: “You leave me, you’ll end up a nothin’, a nobody that no one will want. Anybody who’d leave Muhammad Ali is a fool.” Eventually he bought her a little two-room house in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
They would meet a year later in the Edwardian Room at the Plaza in New York. They had agreed that she should start a business, an idea she had for holistic therapy. Ali would fund it. She presented him with sixty pages of research and plans while the two dined. He glanced at then and then ripped them up. “If you really want the business,” he said, “you’ll get it on your own. You don’t want to go to bed with me, why should I make it easy for you?” She says now: “Earlier in the day, I had refused his