The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

  “No,” Holly assured me, or maybe she was trying to convince herself that she wasn’t somehow complicit in an attempted murder-by-nicotine.

  “She lives in mortal fear of death,” I said, knowing the truth as it came out of my mouth. “Dread like that has no room for half measures.”

  “And what are you going to do now?” the pretty, chubby, and young mocha-brown office gofer asked.

  “I’m told that I have a fully matured life policy with BI and a settlement of one hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars for my retirement fund. I want to go to Rome in the next month or so. Would you like to come with me?”

  I was thumping down hard on the mattress when remembering the question.

  “Like your girlfriend?”

  “Like anything you want to be. I just need the company.”

  “And you’d pay?”

  “Of course.”

  “How long?”

  “You tell me that. I don’t even know how long I’ll be there.”

  “Sure, I’ll go,” Holly said. “I might even like you enough to stay.”

  I groaned in expectation of the orgasm; that groan turned into a shout. I could hear Marge’s footfalls on the stairs, but the door was closed and I knew she wouldn’t come in. I was sweating and so happy that a young woman would fly with me across the ocean to the site of an ancient empire that once conquered a world.

  “Jare!” Marguerite shouted through the closed door.

  “Don’t come in!”

  “What’s happening in there?”

  “Don’t come in, Marguerite,” I said again. “I’m just getting used to what’s happened.”

  All that was seven years ago. The divorce was civil if not amicable, because I agreed to share all of my money and Marguerite finally consented to buying me out of the house.

  I live in a studio apartment in downtown LA and work for myself. I incorporated under the name Big Bad Investments (BBI) and, doing business in that name, bought e-mail lists from BI and a dozen other insurance companies. I then sent out a broad blast to every policyholder saying that I was an expert on the devious ways in which insurance companies refuse to pay. I charge between two and five hundred dollars to review a policy before the claim is made, one thousand dollars plus expenses to dispute any refusal of payment.

  I take a long walk every morning. Last week my left knee began to hurt halfway through the constitutional. This pain is new, and I pay close attention, as it catches on every other step.

  My children with Marguerite have shunned me, but I still mark their birthdays and call them on Christmas.

  Holly got pregnant on the Riviera under a crescent moon. She lives walking distance from my studio, 1,727 little stitches of pain away.

  Our daughter is named Roma, and she entered first grade last week.

  Holly has a boyfriend named Henry. He doesn’t like me, but I think he’s a fine young man.

  Marguerite had a relapse of the cancer two years after we parted. I stayed with her for three weeks because our children were living too far away and she’s the only daughter of parents who were both only children. She blamed that cigarette for her condition. I accepted that. We didn’t talk much, and I stayed in Alexander’s room. Late at night I could hear her come to our son’s door, sniffing the air. She was still searching for a whiff of my infidelity, proof that everything she believed was justified.

  Leading from

  the Affair

  “Come in,” the graying blond woman said, after we made our introductions at the threshold. “Have a seat.”

  Three padded blue chairs around a low triangular table made up the furnishings of the small office. No desk. No bookcase. The blinds were pulled down over the window. A nonintrusive tan and blue carpet covered the floor from wall to wall. The sounds of traffic could be heard quite clearly, as Dr. Quarterly’s room was on the first floor facing onto East Eighty-First Street.

  Noting the hiss of tires racing on the wet streets outside, I took the chair set off a little to the right. She remained standing a moment.

  Dr. Agnes Quarterly was maybe five eight and slender. In her late forties, she seemed older but not worn or unattractive. There was a gravitas to her bearing, in spite of the smile.

  She wore a dark blue dress suit and a white blouse that buttoned up like a man’s shirt. Her shoes were dark, dark red with one-inch heels, the leather hard and shiny—almost like plastic.

  She sat across from me, her spine erect, not resting against the back of the chair. This caused me to sit up a little straighter.

  “So,” she began, “Mr. Lassiter, you’re looking for a therapist.”

  “Yeah . . . uh, yes, I am.”

  Her salt-and-butter hair was combed but only just. It wasn’t coiffed or done. There was a slight indentation on the bridge of her nose. I wondered where the glasses were and also where was the book or papers that she’d been reading before I’d arrived.

  “Have you been in psychotherapy before?”

  “No. Never.”

  “So, what makes you feel you need it now?” She was watching my eyes, looking, I believed, for signs of depravity.

  “It’s . . .” I said and then hesitated.

  “Yes?” Her voice was mild, not commanding or insistent.

  “I’m stuck.”

  Slightest insinuation of a smile appeared on her lips.

  “How are you stuck?”

  “I . . .” My heart was beating fast, and I could feel my ears getting hot. I hadn’t expected this reaction. For a moment I thought I might be experiencing the beginnings of a heart attack.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. It’s just that, I guess I’m a little nervous.”

  “There’s no need. Everything we say in this room is confidential. You are free to speak your mind.”

  “And can I keep my secrets too?”

  “You only need say what you feel comfortable saying,” she said. “And what you did say was that you feel stuck. In what way?”

  “It’s like,” I said, falling into an old, familiar groove, “everybody in the world was standing at a line at the start. Millions and millions of people preparing to get on with their lives. A signal was given, and we all began to move forward. Almost everybody was traveling at the rate of ten miles a year. That’s like the normal rate.”

  I realized that I was looking at the floor, so I raised my head. Dr. Quarterly was gazing at me with what I can only call intense passivity.

  “Everybody but me,” I continued. “Me, I’m racing ahead at fifty miles a year, but at the same time I’m going backward at forty-nine point nine miles. And so at the end of each year, almost everyone around me has traveled ahead ten miles, while I’ve gone ten times that but am only a tenth of a mile farther from the starting line.”

  I could see in the therapist’s expression that she was impressed with the explanation. She had no idea that I was a fraud.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Lassiter?”

  “I’m a copy editor for about a dozen online magazines run by the Din-Pro Consortium.”

  “What kind of magazines?”

  “Everything from political news reports to sex stories,” I said. “Sometimes the magazines morph into different kinds of content. It sounds technological, very twenty-first century, but it’s not. I just do what copy editors have been doing for the past two hundred years.”

  “Do they pay you well?”

  “I know your fee,” I said. “I can pay.”

  “I’m not asking that. I’m wondering why you feel that you’re not making headway. I mean there must be others around you who would love to have a job like yours. So many people are unemployed nowadays.”

  “It’s not my job,” I said. “Somebody else might love doing what I’m doing. That person would be traveling at a normal rate. A
nother person might have just gotten fired, but he has a wife who tells him that it’s OK and maybe a child, so he sees hope for the future.

  “I have a job I don’t care for and a studio apartment with a TV and a computer, a girlfriend who I think is looking for a better relationship, and no way out.”

  “You feel lost,” she said, and I had to clench my jaw to keep from crying.

  “Yes.”

  We talked about my father, who is dead; and my mother, who no longer recognizes me; my age, which is near sixty; and my girlfriend, whose name is Jool.

  “Does Jool live with you?” Quarterly asked.

  “No. She owns a condo in downtown Brooklyn. She’s very good with money . . .”

  I got home at 4:17 by the big digital clock that I have framed and mounted on the wall like a painting. I sat next to the window, with its light-and-dark-gray frame, gazing onto Lexington Avenue. Snow was dancing in the breeze, undecided, it seemed, whether it was falling or maybe just hanging there, twirling.

  Night was almost come; the darkness was filtering into my brain.

  “Hello?” I said, answering the phone on the first ring.

  It was dark outside, and the same flakes still seemed to be spinning, now in lamplight, like some Einsteinian law made manifest through slapdash serendipity.

  “I called this afternoon, but you weren’t there,” Jool said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven forty-five.”

  “I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

  “You didn’t call back.”

  “I wasn’t here.”

  “I left a message.”

  “I didn’t listen to the messages.”

  “What’s wrong, Frank?” Jool asked.

  We were lying side by side, not touching, in my queen-size bed. We’d had sex, showered, and then brushed our teeth, side by side.

  “I’m stuck,” I said.

  “You’ve been telling me that for nine years.”

  “Then why do you keep asking?”

  “Doesn’t your therapist help at all?” she asked.

  Jool put her dark hand upon my darker chest. Her baby finger tickled my nipple by mistake. I shivered.

  “He tries to help me,” I said. “One time, a long time ago, he changed my life. Back then I was lost.”

  “Maybe you need a new therapist,” she suggested.

  “No. Dr. Aguilera knows me better than anyone.”

  “Then maybe he could give you some kind of antidepressant or something.”

  “Did you kiss him?”

  “Who?” Jool asked.

  “J Silver.”

  She sat straight up in the bed. At forty-four, Jool still had a youthful figure. Her skin was young, and her eyes always in focus.

  “Did you look in my e-mails?”

  “Did you suck his dick?”

  She shoved back away from me, and for a moment I thought that she was falling out of the bed. But then she stood up and gathered her clothes from the stuffed chair in the corner.

  I watched her getting dressed. It was always the same order: panties, bra, blouse, skirt. Then she stepped into her Uggs and picked up her bag.

  “It’s three in the morning,” I said.

  She had to put down the shoulder bag to don her gray nylon down coat.

  “You never talk to me,” she said, once she was ready to go.

  “I’m talking now.”

  “You have no right,” she said.

  “Let me make us some coffee,” I pleaded. “We can at least wait till the sun comes up.”

  She didn’t wait, didn’t say another word, just stormed out, taking the last ort of passion from the room along with her.

  “She just left you in the middle of the night?” Christian Aguilera asked me three days later. His office was on the far East Side, overlooking the river.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We were talking in bed, and I asked her about J Silver. It just came out.”

  “How long ago did you find out about him?”

  “Ten months.”

  “Why didn’t you ever mention it in here?”

  “I don’t know. I thought if I talked about it, I’d get mad and then Jool would leave.”

  “And is she still seeing him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why spring it on her in the middle of the night?”

  “She . . . she was asking me why I feel so, so disassociated, and then she wondered what good you were doing. She wanted me to take antidepressants.”

  “And that made you angry?”

  “I guess.”

  “Angrier than her affair with J Silver?”

  I couldn’t find a way into that question. I’d never met J Silver. I didn’t even know what he was—what color or religion. It was hard to be angry at a man without a face or identity.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last.

  “Then why didn’t you just say to Jool that you didn’t want her telling you what drugs to take?”

  “Hi, Mr. Lassiter,” Kara Gunderson said.

  Kara was a counter waitress at the Bebop Diner on West Fifty-Seventh. She always took my order.

  “Hi, Kara. How are you?”

  “Did you finish editing that nasty article?” she asked.

  “Which one?”

  “The one about the ad exec having sex with her dog.”

  “Yeah. She withdrew the piece though.”

  “Too embarrassed?”

  “She sent an e-mail calling me a Nazi censor because I cut out a few of the details that she repeated over and over.”

  “I guess she just didn’t want to be corrected.”

  “No one does. Do you want my order?”

  “Has it changed?”

  “No.”

  Kara’s smile was beautiful. The olive-gold skin and lush almond-shaped eyes marked her Asian features with a sculptural quality.

  “Which one of your parents is Swedish?” I asked on a whim.

  “Neither,” she said. “I’m adopted.”

  At 2:57 a.m. by the framed clock the phone rang.

  I was sitting at the window holding the tiny slip of paper that had Kara’s phone number on it. From early evening until about eleven I was thinking about making the call, but my mind kept going in circles: She was too young or I was too old. What did younger women want with older men except for security and then marriage? What did I want from her that I didn’t already get three afternoons a week at the lunch counter? What would we talk about? How could I touch her?

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  “What do you care what I did or didn’t do with Jim?” Jool asked.

  “Jim?”

  “Jim Silver.”

  “Um . . . I guess maybe I don’t care.”

  She hung up.

  I didn’t wonder about the call. We hadn’t spoken at all since she’d left. Instead I worried about waiting too long and not calling Kara in time. I worried that if I didn’t call her, I wouldn’t be able to show my face at the diner again.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “How long have you known?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “At least nine months.”

  “And in all that time you didn’t say anything?”

  The answer was obvious, so I didn’t reply.

  “You didn’t act like you knew,” Jool said, now a bit calmer. “If anything you were nicer, more loving.”

  “I guess.”

  “I haven’t seen Jim in six months. Why ask me now?”

  “Because you were telling me to take drugs.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I was trying to help you.”

  For a long while we were both silent.<
br />
  “Frank.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “No.”

  “So we’re through?”

  “It’s late.”

  “Why haven’t you called me?”

  “You’re the one who walked out.”

  “And so how have you been, Mr. Lassiter?” Dr. Quarterly asked.

  I was sitting in the same blue chair. She didn’t have that little indentation on the bridge of her nose that day.

  Her dress suit was gray.

  “I broke up with my girlfriend.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

  I told her about the late-night talk.

  “She thinks that I should prescribe antidepressants for you after just one meeting?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “You seem to be somewhat unhappy, but I won’t know how to proceed until we’ve had at least a few more meetings.”

  I sighed, feeling relieved of something I could not have put into words.

  “Why did you mention her lover so long after the affair was over?” she asked.

  I said something, but afterward I couldn’t remember what it was.

  “You’re very quiet today, Frank,” Dr. Aguilera said.

  He’s a beefy man, much larger than I. Size aside, his dark eyes have always been his most imposing quality.

  “Do you think I’m depressed?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “About what you think?”

  Aguilera smiled, then grinned.

  “What’s wrong, Frank?”

  “I realized that I’ve been coming to see you for thirty-one years next week,” I said. “And I don’t even know if you’re married, have kids, or where you live.”

  “You’ve never asked.”

  “I was living in a shelter when I first came here,” I said, as some kind of retort.

  “But you didn’t tell me about it until you’d found an apartment a year later.”

  “Back then I changed very fast,” I said, performing a ritual. “Because of you, I went to school and became a journalist. I made something out of myself.”