“Yes, you did.”
“But now I’m stuck again. Jool left me but calls every night. She says that she wants to come over.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to see Jool?”
“I don’t want anything . . . nothing. All I want is for it all to be over or for it to change into something . . . I don’t know, unexpected.”
“What does that mean?” Aguilera asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should discuss medication again.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to do drugs.”
“Hi, Mr. Lassiter,” Kara said that afternoon at the Bebop.
“How are you, Kara?”
“I was worried that you wouldn’t come back after I gave you my number and you didn’t call.”
“We should have dinner together.”
“When?” Her answer was light and friendly.
“Tonight.”
Two nights later I was lying awake thinking about the brief good-night kiss that Kara had given me. We’d had dinner two nights in a row.
“I like talking to you because you don’t seem like a New Yorker,” she’d said at the end of the second date. We were standing at the subway entrance near Broadway and Houston. “I mean, you seem interested in things outside the city and, and outside you.”
That’s when she kissed my cheek, a big smile on her luminescent face.
The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Where were you the last two nights?” Jool asked.
“Where were you?”
After a brief pause she said, “I guess I deserve that. I mean, I’m the one who walked out and, and who cheated.”
I was thinking about the double “and” from both Kara and Jool. This united them in my mind, making me feel like there was a blood-knot in my head.
“It’s late, Jool,” I said.
“We should get together and talk.”
“We don’t talk so well,” I said.
“I’ll answer any question you have.”
I asked her about Jim and when they’d met and what they’d done. She answered my questions, in great detail, even though I think we both knew I didn’t want to hear most of it.
“Then why open yourself up for something that hurts?” Dr. Agnes Quarterly asked.
“At least that way I’m feeling something,” I said.
“And is that worth it?”
“It is, just before she starts talking.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want to ask,” I said, “and I want her to be willing to answer. It’s just that once she starts talking, what she says hurts me.”
The look on the therapist’s face was intent and quizzical, like that of a mathematician staring at a convoluted, inexplicably erroneous equation.
“Maybe we should try you out on an antidepressant. There’s a new one called Lessenin-60. We can start you on a low dosage.”
“OK.”
There were things that Jool had refused to do with Jim Silver. They’d had safe sex, and she’d interrogated him about his health before they had sex the first time.
I filled the prescription for the antidepressant but never took the blue-and-pink capsules.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” twenty-nine-year-old Kara Gunderson told me at a falafel bar in Times Square. “I mean, I don’t want kids, and what other reason is there for getting married?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You get old and you want company and somebody to share the load.”
“Everybody breaks up,” she said. “You can’t count on them staying with you.”
I buzzed Jool’s apartment at a little past midnight. Kara and I had made out for a while in a doorway on West Forty-Eighth. She’d disengaged from the embrace, telling me that she didn’t want to move too fast.
“Hello?” my ex-girlfriend said through the speaker.
“Hi.”
“Frank?”
“Yeah.”
It was at least a full minute before she said anything else.
“You, you can’t come up now, honey,” she said, pitying me.
When I was a few steps away, I heard her say something else but couldn’t make out the words.
The next afternoon the phone rang, and I was surprised to hear Bob Brandt on the line.
Bob was the head editor at Din-Pro Consortium. We almost always communicated through e-mails.
“Hi, Frank,” he said. “How are you?”
“OK. I mean, I guess I could complain, but nobody listens, right?”
“Yeah. You got that right.”
“How come you’re calling?” I asked.
“Din-Pro’s cutting back, Frank. They’ve taken a big hit in advertising revenue, and I’m going to have to take half your editing load.”
“Oh.”
“And they’re cutting your rate by ten percent. They wanted to cut it by fifteen, but I talked them out of it.”
“Oh. Wow. Thanks, Bob.”
Thanks, Bob.
Both Aguilera and Quarterly allowed me to reduce my payments by fifty percent. I kept seeing them—her on Monday mornings and him on Thursday afternoons.
I asked Christian what the effects of Lessenin-60 were and translated that into the experiences that Agnes expected.
Kara got me a part-time dishwashing job at the Bebop. We got more serious, and she stayed over once or twice a week.
A few weeks later, when I was alone, the phone rang a little after midnight.
“Hello?”
“Are you alone?” Jool asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Can I come up?”
“Where are you?”
“Across the street.”
That was the best sex I’d ever had. Something had been building up ever since we’d separated. I would sit in bed at night thinking of all the things she’d told me, that I’d asked her, about Jim Silver.
“Have you been seeing him again?” I asked, when we were spent, in the early hours of the morning.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Are you in love?”
“It might be that,” she said. “But more it’s like I have to do something. You’re always saying how you’re stuck or whatever, and I’m just getting older. Jim wants to move in with me and maybe get more serious. And you wouldn’t even let me come over.”
“You always said that you liked living alone,” I said, “that you had gotten used to your ways.”
“That was before you asked me if I had kissed Jim.”
“Not when she first met him?” Dr. Quarterly asked.
“No. She’d met him at a design conference and, she says, just kind of fell into a sexual thing. But then when I asked her about it, she started to wonder about why I’d be jealous when our lives were so separate. I guess she realized how lonely she was.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“It hurts when I see her, and it hurts when I don’t.”
Jool and I saw each other every night for a week, and then it was over. She called and said that she couldn’t do it anymore.
“But things have been so strong,” I said, almost arguing.
“We’re acting like kids,” she said. “I’m not sleeping, and sometimes when I’m at your house I’m afraid of the way you look at me.”
“It’s just that I feel, I don’t know, desperate for you.”
“That’s not what I need from a man.”
“Can’t we get together and talk about it?”
“No. It’s over. I’m not seeing you anymore.”
I was sitting on the bed when Jool was breaking up with me for the second time. I felt rel
ieved. Our relationship had run off the road, and that was that.
Sixteen minutes after Jool and I hung up, the phone rang.
I was hoping that it was her calling back and also that she had not changed her mind. I wanted to talk more about getting back together but not to change what had already been decided.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Frank.” It was Kara.
“Hey.”
“You haven’t really been sick have you?”
“No. I’ve had some, um, some personal problems.”
“I don’t want to see you anymore, Frank. It’s just not working. I mean . . . we’re too different. You’re too old.”
Those last three, or maybe four, words hurt me, not because of my age but because I could tell that Kara was trying to hurt me. Her intention was its own end.
“I’ve been seeing another therapist,” I said to Dr. Aguilera that Thursday at the end of our session.
“What do you mean?”
“For the past two months I’ve been going to another therapist.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m stuck, and everything’s falling apart around me.”
“I’m surprised that another doctor would see you knowing that you were already in a therapeutic relationship.”
“I didn’t tell her.”
“I don’t understand, Frank. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I can’t explain it very well. I’ve needed to move on, and I didn’t know how. Every day is just like the last. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m asleep and can’t wake up.”
“We should discuss this at length,” he said. “Not at the end of our time.”
“Now let me get this straight,” Dr. Quarterly said that Friday, at a special time she made available for me. “You have another therapist and have been in treatment with him for the past thirty years.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve chosen you.”
“You said that you hadn’t been in therapy before.”
“Because I wanted to start on a clean slate, to be sure that I could make some advancement with you.”
“But you lied.”
“Those were the secrets I told you about in our first meeting.”
“No, Mr. Lassiter. The basic expectation in therapy is that the patient and the doctor maintain as much honesty as they are capable of.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
Both Aguilera and Quarterly ended therapeutic relations with me. Three months later I received an invitation to the after-ceremony wedding reception of Jool Lanscome and James Silver.
Kara moved back to Minnesota to her pseudo-Scandinavian roots.
When Bob Brandt cut my editing down to three online publications, I moved into a rooming house in Staten Island and started an online publication of my own, called Broken Hearts Monthly, which has been wildly successful. It started out as a blog telling my own stupid story. But I got so many responses that, with Bob’s help, I organized a virtual publication that presents confessionals, artwork, poems, short stories, and also a dating service.
I work so hard at the magazine that I have little time for any kind of social life. But I’ve been slowly thinking of getting back into therapy. Nowadays I’ve become so popular that I’m often invited as an expert on love and relationships. The anxiety this notoriety produces is sublime and, at the same time, almost unbearable.
Cut, Cut, Cut
1.
“There’s a marked difference between brain functions, knowledge, and mental potentials,” Martin Hull said to Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio at Mike’s Steaks on Forty-Seventh Street just east of Grand Central Station. The time was 6:46 p.m. on a clear and bright Tuesday in late May.
This was their first meeting—a blind date, inasmuch as they’d met through the online dating service People for People, provided by one of the few surviving alternative lifestyle magazines from California’s Bay Area, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
The questionnaire provided for subscribers to TRWNBT’s People for People allowed participants to enter gender identity and preference, intellectual endeavors, personal ambitions, and accomplishments in life. The survey did not ask for race, age, income bracket, religious orientation, or physical proportions. One could fudge a few of the banned subjects by surreptitiously including them in the essay-like answers to the questions provided.
Marilee, for instance, had typed in that her most profound political ambition was to one day computerize the voting process in America based on the positive concept of what people wanted and not what they did not want or were afraid of. She added (parenthetically) that she had no patience for people who harbored antidemocratic thoughts.
“In my ideal system,” she told Martin that evening, “people would be voting for what they had in common, not what they hated or feared about each other.”
Martin considered it his greatest personal accomplishment that he had run a half marathon every other week for one year, four years earlier. He did not, could not, mention that he was a dark brown man, descendant of a long line of slaves and sharecroppers from the Mississippi Delta. Marilee was surprised that a black man had filled out the People for People form she’d read. But she decided to go through with the date because of the caveat clause in the PFP e-contract.
PFP was the go-between for first dates and electronically queried the participants within a week of the rendezvous. If it was reported that either party had not shown up, or left before the date actually started, a mark was put in the offender’s file. If any member of PFP got three such marks, he or she was deleted from the service.
The week before, Marilee had been scheduled to meet a man named Joseph Exeter. Joe was a portly man, and Marilee quite small in comparison. Joe’s breathing was loud, and from time to time, a not very pleasant odor wafted from his side of the table at the Midtown sushi bar. When their second drink had not dimmed her olfactory awareness of Exeter, Marilee excused herself to go to the restroom and never returned.
So she would have to sit through this date, because PFP was the best dating service that she’d encountered since her divorce from Paris DeGeorgio, a latent conservative and an outright thief.
Martin Hull was the opposite of both Marilee’s last date and first husband. He was two inches shorter and maybe five pounds lighter than Marilee, who was five seven and 135 pounds. She worked out every day for an hour and a half, so her few extra pounds looked good in the step-class mirror.
“But I thought you were a plastic surgeon,” she said, in response to his pontificating on the contrasting qualities of the human brain.
“That’s my day job,” he said with a smile. His grin, Marilee thought, was both goofy and sincere. “But the neurological sciences are my passion.”
“Why didn’t you become a brain surgeon then?”
“That would be like an abstract artist becoming a house painter.”
“Really?” Marilee said. “I thought that that kind of surgery was the very top of the field.”
“Not really,” Martin said, crinkling his nose and exposing the gap between upper his teeth. “Surgeons all specialize. Cut, cut, cut—that’s their whole life. That’s the way they get so proficient. They do the same procedures day in and day out—thousands of them; might as well be working on a production line.”
“At five million dollars a year,” Marilee added.
“Yeah, I guess. But, you know, I’d need a lot more money than that if I had to do the same thing every day for the rest of my life.”
“Except for sex, food, and good music,” Marilee said. Martin’s size and goofy demeanor gave her the courage to say what was on her mind.
He smiled, half-nodded, and looked down, saying, “I meant one’s working life.”
Marilee felt a twitch in her chest and wondered what kind of sex partner a small, shy man like this mig
ht be.
“So you said that you’re divorced,” Martin prompted.
“Paris DeGeorgio,” she replied, nodding out every other syllable.
“Sounds like a good name for a clothes designer.”
“That wasn’t his birth name. He was born Anastazy Kozubal.”
“Polish, huh?”
“You knew that? Everyone else ends up asking me where the name comes from. The first guess is almost always Russia.”
“That’s because of Anastazy,” Martin said. “Makes it sound like a tsarina. I like to study those parts of language that make humanity a culture as well as a species. The brain, you know.”
“I had a business selling Mexican wheat to various South and Central American nations,” Marilee said.
“Mexican wheat?”
“There are some large farms in the southern highlands. I organized them over the Internet and made a two-percent profit. It was going pretty good, until one day I found out that Paris was skimming my profits and donating to this group called the New Redeemers . . .”
“California archconservatives, right?” Martin asked.
“Only,” Marilee continued, “he had made a kickback deal with the treasurer and was salting half the money away in a Jamaican bank.”
“Wow.”
“Are you ready to order?” a tall waiter in a bright green three-piece suit asked.
Martin gestured for Marilee to go first. It was at that moment she decided to take him home.
2.
“That was amazing,” she said in her own bed, lying next to Martin Hull, a man she had met only six hours before.
“Yeah,” Martin said, unable to suppress his toothful grin.
“I never had a man pay such close attention to my body.”
“Well, you know,” Martin said shyly, “when you’re a little guy with no hidden talents you have to learn to work harder.”
“I’m still trying to catch my breath.”
“Want me to get you some water?” he asked.
“Is that the doctor talking?”
“You know, I liked your idea about online voting,” he said. “The negative side of democracy is that people usually vote either for their pocketbooks or against what they’re afraid of.”
The Awkward Black Man Page 8