“I mean, it doesn’t bother you that you’re black?”
“Oh,” she said, looking very much like me and not. “I didn’t even think about that. Wow.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Sojourner. I’m sittin’ here with a stranger, but I feel so much love that has been lost.”
“Me too. When I read Seth’s letter I, I felt like . . . I don’t know . . . I felt like an old-time explorer on the verge of discovering a new continent.”
“Did he give you my address?”
“Yes,” she said meekly. “I drove by, but I couldn’t make myself stop. I was just so nervous.”
“That’s OK. It’s better that I came to you. A father should be there for his daughter.”
I could see in Sojourner’s eyes that she had been waiting an entire lifetime to call a man Father. I put my big brown hand on her clenched white fists. She relaxed, and I thought that this was how I would have wanted it to be with my own father.
I called Absolute Temps and talked to the receptionist, Tanya Reed. I explained to Tanya exactly what had happened, and she hooked me up with a six-week gig at Leonine Records on Sunset. It was only $16.75 an hour, but that covered the rent and gas.
For the next month Sovie and I saw or talked to each other every day.
She’s a history major, like I was, and has a boyfriend, Chad, whom I met and liked very much. I gave her my blood father’s stack of Fantastic Four comics, saying that it was the only thing of value I owned. She didn’t like comic books but took them anyway. I don’t know why, but giving her those magazines felt like taking a two-ton weight off my skull.
A month later, on a Saturday, I was cleaning my apartment to prepare for her and her roommate, Ashanti Bowles, to come over for dinner the next day.
When the knock came, I didn’t think before opening the door.
Lance Harding was wearing a pink suit with a red shirt and no tie. I wondered then if agents of the FRC had a dress code.
“Mr. Vaness,” he said.
“I’m so glad to see you,” I said, opening the door wide and ushering him in to my clean house. “Come in, come in.”
Sitting in the same chairs as before, we faced each other. Harding crossed his left leg over the right one and nodded.
“I wanted to call you, but I couldn’t find a number for the FRC in the Yellow Pages,” I said. “I planned to get on somebody’s computer and look it up soon.”
“Why were you looking for us?”
“You,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something that I didn’t think of the last time we met.”
“And what was that?”
“You mentioned my real father when we talked before. Do you know when he died?”
When Harding reached into his breast pocket, I was reminded of the fear I had of him the first time he sat at my table.
He came out with a small notepad and flipped through the pages. He stopped for a moment, reading something, and then turned a leaf.
“Nineteen seventy-four,” he said, “when you were two years old. He was found murdered in the home of a young prostitute named Pearl Watson.”
“Do you know if anybody claimed the body?”
“Have you gone to see your daughter?” the FRC agent asked.
“How do you even know to ask that?”
“I’m here with another final request.”
“Another five thousand dollars?”
“Have you visited your daughter?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“Do you love her?”
“I do. But what does that have to do with you?”
Instead of answering, Harding took another ivory envelope from his pocket.
Again he handed me the letter.
Again I hesitated.
When at last I accepted the final request, I expected Harding to leap up and leave, like he did the first time. But he remained seated, staring at me.
“I am supposed to wait for a reply,” he said.
“A reply to a dead man?”
Harding hunched his shoulders, and I tore open the envelope.
Dear Roger,
By now you’ve probably met Sovie and I know because you’re reading this letter you at least say that you love her. I’ve been telling Dearby that I’ve been visiting with Althea because she has cancer and is dying. Althea does have cancer and she is dying but I’ve also been doing my old thing in her house on her phone. Seems like bookies are back in style. I couldn’t tell Dearby because she’d want the money I’m making and I needed that money for Sovie. I also needed to tell you about your daughter and to make sure that you cared for her.
The FRC agent sitting in front of you has a third letter. This one has a legal document saying that the bearer of this letter should be allowed access to my safe deposit box at Concordia Bank in downtown Cincinnati. There’s $137,941.00 in that box.
I saved that money for Sovie but I owe you something too. And so you can either accept the document and help the child with her bills or you can turn the whole thing over to her and let her decide how to handle it.
It’s up to you, Little Brother.
Seth
I folded the note and put it in my pocket.
“I got another question for you, Mr. Harding.”
“Yes?”
“Do you take in trainee agents now and then?”
“Yes.”
“Could I apply for that job?”
“I can make the proper connections. I happen to need an assistant, and your background fits our major criteria.”
“Then you give that letter you got in your pocket to Sojourner Alexander and send me the application form.”
The Letter
My wife, Corrine, and I had the same financial advisors—Walton, Barth, and Wright. The firm uses oversize light blue envelopes with its return address printed in red in the upper left-hand corner. The partners’ names are writ large in block lettering, while the address, in italic print a quarter the size, sits on a single line just below. We had separate accounts with the firm, but I took care of most of the correspondence. Corrine doesn’t have much patience with finances and had been more than happy to let me take care of our accounts, taxes, and monthly bills.
“Just show me where to sign,” she’d say when I tried to explain the forms and requests.
So on that Wednesday morning, when I saw that Corrine had laid two of the WBW blue envelopes on the dinette table in the nook, I picked them up and put them in my briefcase to read at lunchtime.
“Do you have time for breakfast?” I called down the slender hallway.
Corrine stuck her head out from the bathroom while rubbing a tan towel against her head vigorously. Her coppery skin glistened slightly from the moisture of the shower. Dark gold freckles tempered the serious cast of her face.
“I thought you said you were late.”
I could see her right breast. The nipple was a dark rose, a kind of in-between color from her mixed parentage.
“I am, but I thought we could sit together for a bit. We haven’t really talked in a week.”
“I don’t have time to cook,” she said and then ducked back into the bathroom.
“We could have cereal,” I suggested, raising my voice to be sure I was heard.
“I’m watching my carbs.”
“You’re not fat.”
“You don’t have to be fat to be careful about what you’re eating.” She came out from the bathroom with the towel wrapped around her, then went the other way down the hall toward our bedroom.
I wondered what she would do if I ran after her and pushed her down on the bed. Would she resist? Push me away? There was no desire in this idle musing. I didn’t want to have sex with her. We’d been together for nearly twenty years, since she was twenty-one and I thirty-five. We didn�
�t have sex much anymore, and when we did there was usually some red wine and a little blue pill involved.
I hadn’t needed chemical help the three times that I’d had affairs. When I was with a new woman in a secret place, I could do things the way I did when I was in my twenties . . . or at least my thirties.
My last affair had been with a Korean woman, Donella Kim, who had temped in my office for a month or so. I didn’t call her until after she’d left Korn/Wills. After that we rutted like rabbits for almost six weeks.
During that time I fell behind in my work, came home late every night, and never had sex once with Corrine. She noticed, but I blamed a muscle strain, and she seemed to accept the excuse.
In the end it was Donella who broke off the relationship.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Frank,” she said, when I called her from my office, also on a Wednesday.
“But I love you,” I said. My tongue had gone dry, and a dying rodent was keening in my chest.
She hesitated.
I didn’t love her, but I didn’t want to lose her either. She made me feel alive, and life was, to my mind, better than love. Life was a sweet thing no matter how old you got.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Corrine. I didn’t think so on the morning Donella broke up with me—but I was wrong. As bad as I felt about the abrupt break from Donella, Corrine had the power to devastate my heart and not even know it.
“No, you don’t,” Donella said over the phone, three months past. “You just want the sex and the excitement.”
“How can you break up with me and not even talk about it?” I asked. “Don’t you care for me?”
She canceled the call and turned off her cell phone. She must have gotten a new number, because she didn’t answer any of my messages for the next two weeks. And I called her at least a dozen times a day.
“You look like you’re losing weight, Frank,” Corrine said, nine days after Donella dropped me.
“They’re changing over to a new system at work and . . . it’s hard. I keep fucking it up. You know how when I get worried I don’t eat right.”
Corrine looked at me then. It was her suspicious look. I think I must do something noticeable when trying to hide despair with a lie.
“Why would a new system cause you to be that upset?”
“I lost a forty-thousand-dollar sale because I didn’t see a flag that one of the reports put out. Miss Francie blames me.”
This was true. We did have a new system, and I had missed a flag—because I’d spent the afternoon and evening with Donella and then gotten up early in the morning to see her again. I was late for work and missed the deadline indicated by a systems flag that had shown up the afternoon before. On top of the money, we had almost lost the client, Medidine, a medical-equipment distributer based in Kansas City, Kansas. Adeline Francie had given me an official warning comprising a lecture and a pink slip of paper embossed with the red time stamp of the HR office.
I had a bachelor’s degree in political science but worked for Korn/Wills selling orthopedic devices to specialized stores, hospitals, and distributers—all online. KW sells other medical devices, but somehow I ended up running the orthopedic line.
“All you have to do is come in in the morning and log on,” straw-haired Francie told me in her office. “Just look at the left side of the screen and make sure there are no red checks. That’s all. A teenager could do it.”
My supervisor was twenty years my junior. At one time, I suppose I could have argued that she had the job because she was white and I am a black man or, at least, a half-black man. But it was impossible to make that argument, because Ira Flint, Miss Francie’s boss, was black. Ira was also an unapologetic Republican and greatly loved at Korn/Wills. Both of his parents had dark skin, and he had a southern accent too.
“I’m sorry, Miss Francie,” I said.
I didn’t care. I was distraught over losing Donella. It felt like I was dead.
By the morning Corrine left the two blue envelopes on the dinette table I was pretty much over Donella. I had once seen her walking down the street arm in arm with a tall Asian guy; that cost me two nights sleep. I missed another red check and got a second official reprimand, but after that things evened out. I’d been coming in early for nearly three months and had broadened our orthopedic presence on the web by calling second-tier distribution houses and giving them our preferred rates.
I stayed late most nights and kept my lunches down to forty-five minutes, usually at my desk.
I’d lost thirty pounds pining over Donella, and that felt good, so I tried not to eat much lunch. I took care of personal business over a cup of coffee and a Gala apple.
The financial advisors’ envelopes were the same size, but the one addressed to me was very thick. That was our year-end tax statement. Forty-five minutes wouldn’t be nearly enough time to review it, so I decided to read the forms in Corrine’s letter.
I remember glancing out the window as I tore off the top of the large envelope. I was thinking, idly, about dying. Often when I gazed out over Midtown at midday I wondered what impact my death might have. Certainly most of the people who knew me wouldn’t have given it more than five minutes’ thought. The thousands walking up and down the streets would never know, would not want to know, and if they somehow found out, they wouldn’t care.
My father had hung himself in our backyard in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, when I was fourteen. Winslow, my older brother, had found him hanging from a low branch of a fruitless apple tree planted by the previous owners.
“His face was black,” Winslow had told me that night, after the police were gone, along with the coroner’s white station wagon and my father’s corpse. “Much blacker than he was. And his tongue was sticking out. At first I thought it was a joke he was playing on me. I said to stop foolin’ around.”
My brother started crying then, and I ran from the room out the front door and into the street. I needed to get away from that house and my brother and my mother, who never really recovered from the shock.
Standing at the window, thinking about my death and my father’s, I looked at the envelope in my hand and saw that there was a smaller white envelope in the bottom of the blue fold. This letter, also with the return address of Walton, Barth, and Wright, had been sent to Corrine’s studio. But that didn’t matter because they had gotten Corrine’s studio address wrong. That was on Adams Street in Park Slope, but the sender wrote down Adams Avenue. It was a valid address, just not hers. Somewhere in the computer system of WBW they had the wrong address for her office rather than the right one for our home in Brooklyn Heights. Whenever somebody got it wrong, a very nice woman in their mailroom named Dixie would resend the mail.
This was a personal letter. The address was written by hand. It was a stubby little envelope, the kind that someone might use for an invitation to a wedding or bar mitzvah.
I shoved the letter into my pocket, intending to give it to Corrine when I saw her.
At four in the afternoon she called me on my cell. She always used my cell number.
“Hi, honey,” she said and went on, not waiting for me to reply. “Merc called and said that he needs money for a book in his lit class. It costs sixty dollars. I said that you’d transfer the funds over. You might as well send him a hundred.”
“I thought we said we’d talk about these things,” I said.
“Take it out of my account then.”
“It’s not the money.”
“I’m busy, Frank. I don’t have time to discuss the obvious.”
“But we said that we’d talk before sending Mercury any more money.”
Corrine’s parents wanted her to name our son Todd, after her father, who represented the white half of her family. I hated that name. I really hated it. But what could I say, except that he was my son and should be named after my father, Mercury Brown.
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It turned out that my dad had killed a man named Simons in a fight that happened over a woman in Houston’s Third Ward. Simons had beaten my father pretty badly, but when he turned away, my father took out a knife and killed his rival. That day he took a bus to LA, and, I guess, he thought he’d gotten away with it. But the police had come around asking for Bernard Lavallier; that was my father’s real name when he killed Simons. After the murder my father went by the alias Mercury Brown.
Regardless of all that, I named my son Mercury.
“OK,” Corrine said, in her reserved and yet exasperated tone. “Call him and tell him that we’re teaching him how to go to school without the books he needs.”
She hung up. It was that one action upon which I hang the dissolution and the inverted-salvation of my life.
In anger, I transferred $1,757, all the money in my checking account, over to our son. I worked until late in the evening sending e-mails to potential clients, offering them the lowest possible preferential rates.
It wasn’t until after nine, when I was on the A train heading back to Brooklyn, that I remembered the little letter that Corrine had gotten from WBW.
Even just thinking about the money managers made me angry. They only kept me on as a client because of Corrine’s growing income.
After finishing college, Corrine went to work for a fashion designer. She’d always wanted to study fashion, but her parents wouldn’t pay for her to go to FIT. I was expecting to go back to college for my master’s so that I could teach at university, but then Mercury was born, and we needed a steady paycheck. Corrine could do her work for the designer at home.
Her career took off. Within four years she was making more than three times my salary, including the sporadic bonuses, and was welcomed into the minor circles of New York fashion society. She had her own bank account and spoiled our son, whose middle name was Todd.
I tore open the letter. I shouldn’t have. At any other time I wouldn’t have. But I was upset, and the size of the envelope was suspicious. I mean, why would anyone from our money managers’ office be sending a personal note to Corrine’s studio?
Dearest Corrine,
The Awkward Black Man Page 22