I’m sending you this letter because I can’t think of anything else to do. I know that those lunches we had probably didn’t mean anything to you. I know you just wanted to get a leg up on your finances. I wish I could have found something wrong with the way Frank is handling your money but really he’s following your advisor’s plan perfectly. The market is volatile but he’s kept to the program and has done better than many.
I’m glad you came to me because I treasure those lunches we had. It has been a long time since I’ve had such deep and truly meaningful talks with anyone, man or woman. When you told me about the cancer scare, and how brave you had been not telling anyone, I was moved. And when I found out that you read Márquez I was in heaven. He has always been my favorite author. So I guess this is a kind of selfish note. Corrine, I want to get to know you better. I need to have someone in my life that I can talk to. I’m not asking you for anything except a few hours now and then—to talk and listen.
I know how lonely and yet how committed you are. I’m in the same place in my life and I’d just like to be able to get together now and then.
I’m sending this snail mail to your studio so as not to cause trouble. If you don’t write back I’ll understand. I want you to know that I would never want to upset your life. I only think that maybe we have something we could share that would make our lives, certainly mine, better.
Yours, TB
I missed my stop. The train was twelve stations past High Street when I looked up at a homeless woman staggering into the car.
I had read the letter at least twenty times. I had no idea who TB was, but then again, neither had I known about a cancer scare or that Corrine questioned how I took care of our money. I knew that she loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but we had never talked about it because I couldn’t get past the first page.
She’d met with this guy more than once for lunch, and now he was, in a sly way, trying to build on their . . . intimacies. There was no mistaking his intentions, but I couldn’t blame him. Corrine had obviously sought him out and opened her heart to him.
There’s a small bar a few blocks from our upper-floor brownstone apartment. I stopped there and ordered a cognac. Somewhere after the seventh drink I found myself walking down the street with the same gait as the homeless woman who had made me aware of having missed my stop. She’d worn soiled tan pants, with a thick, dark green skirt over them, had a calico blanket draped around her shoulders, and was carrying at least a dozen plastic bags. She smelled of dust, I remember. That was what brought me out of my stunned reverie.
“Frank, where have you been?” Corrine asked as soon as I was in the door.
She was wrapped in the chiffon pink robe that she loved. It was sheer, and she was naked underneath. Corrine did Pilates and yoga and had a very nice figure at thirty-nine, thank you very much.
Even though I’d lost thirty pounds, I was still another forty overweight.
“Was it that you didn’t want me eating cereal?” I asked her. “You think I’m too fat?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I never go to that bar on Montague,” I said. “I was walking by tonight, and I thought, hey, why not?”
“What’s wrong, Frank?” she asked. Placing her fingertips on both my shoulders, she stared into my eyes with real concern.
“I was thinking on the way here that men must fall in love with you all the time. You’re beautiful and very well known. And here I am a slouch who works in an office where most of the people don’t even know my name.”
“Come sit down, honey,” she said.
She led me to the jade-colored sofa in our den. It was a small room that we rarely used now that Mercury was grown up and off to college.
“Merc said that you wired him over seventeen hundred dollars,” she said, floundering for a way to keep my attention.
“Why don’t you call him Todd?”
“Because his name is Mercury. What’s wrong, Frank?”
“You know, Corr,” I said. “I was thinking that we hardly ever talk. I mean there’s people I see once a week at work who I know more about than I do about you. You work late. I leave early. Sometimes we don’t even eat together for weeks.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. Like, for instance, when was the last time you went to see a doctor?”
“My last checkup.”
“Did your cholesterol rise or maybe your blood pressure? Is that why you’re cutting down on carbs?”
“I’m fine.” She was looking at me as if I were a stranger, a potentially dangerous man she’d just met and had to tread cautiously around until she understood the territory—a man like my father, who might jump up and stab you in the back.
“You see?” I said. “I didn’t know that. You could have had any kind of thing wrong, and I wouldn’t know. And I didn’t ask because we hardly ever talk. I mean, how can you live with a man who doesn’t even ask about your health?”
“Why did you send all that money to Mercury?”
“He’s a good kid. I bet he was glad to get it.”
“I told him to give it back, all but the sixty he asked for.”
I looked right past her words and blinked once or twice.
“I feel kinda sick,” I said. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
In the morning I couldn’t sit up without the room spinning. Getting out of the bed was a comedy of wobbling knees and stiff ankles.
At the kitchen table I was trying to see straight, and Corrine was talking to me, though I missed most of what she said. I did understand that she would call work for me and that she had an appointment in the city. She seemed to be worried about me.
For some reason I resented the nicety.
I got to work at about three in the afternoon. I don’t know why I went in; nowhere else to go, I guess.
On the Walton, Barth, and Wright website, I searched for names that had the initials of a degenerative disease. I found Timothy Bell. Timothy was the vice president in charge of all personal investors. Bell was at least three rungs above our agent, Mark Delaney, the man who told us that Corrine’s income kept us above the cut at WBW. Timothy Bell was a smiling white face on an electronic résumé sheet that each of the vice presidents had. He was thirty-eight and had an MBA from Harvard. He was athletic too, the former captain of a rugby squad—rugby, not Ping-Pong.
I wondered if Corrine was somewhere fucking him right then. The letter had been traveling back and forth for over a month. I could tell that from the postmark. Maybe he called when she didn’t reply, or maybe she broke down and called him. I wasn’t worried about that though. Whether or not Corrine had fallen into Bell’s muscular arms wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that his letter was very convincing. He wanted to talk to her and read what she read. In their meetings, he must have looked into her dark brown eyes and seemed like he really wanted to know what was going on with her. She opened up to him, while we hadn’t really talked in years.
It was obvious from the letter that he wanted to be her lover but was willing to settle for less. That was more than I had to offer, much more.
After reading Bell’s letter, I wondered whether I had the right to hold Corrine back from the kind of life that she might have.
“Brown,” a man’s voice said.
I didn’t have to look up to know that it was Ira Flint, my boss’s boss.
“Mr. Flint.”
I kept my eyes on the screen as he lowered into the chair beside my desk, a shadow looming in my peripheral vision. Flint was a tall man. Even sitting down he seemed to tower. He was heavy too, but his weight bore witness to strength, whereas mine was soft and getting softer. And the blackness of his skin made me feel rather pale.
Flint stared at me. I knew this even though I was pretending to be paying attention to somethi
ng on the screen.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
A glimpse at the bottom line of the computer screen told me that it was 7:17. We were the only ones on the floor.
“I have a problem, Frank,” Ira Flint said.
I looked up then. “Does it have something to do with me?”
The big boss nodded his heavy head.
“I got three complaints on you in three months. The economy is down, and they’re on my ass to adjust the bottom line.”
“It’s only two pink slips I got, Mr. Flint.”
“The third is you giving out discounts like they were Christmas cards.”
“Oh.”
I knew that we had to get permission to give out lower rates. I knew it, though somehow I’d convinced myself that it was more important to bring in the business than to waste time making rate requisitions. But sitting there in front of Flint I knew how wrong I had been.
“Well, Frank?”
“I don’t know, Ira.”
He waited a moment or two. His expression was one of mild confusion.
“Is that all?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“I need something, Frank. Adeline wants to let you go. She’s already got somebody lined up to cover your accounts.”
Ira was warning me, trying to save me. He was reaching out, and all I wanted was to ask him why. Why help me? Why would he care?
“Frank.”
“Let it go, man,” I said and then turned back to my screen.
After a while the heavy presence of the big boss rose like a morning fog, and I was alone in my cubicle.
Corrine tried to talk to me that night, but I said I had a virus and went to bed early.
The next day I was given my notice.
“I’m sorry about this, Frank,” Adeline Francie told me in her office down at the far end of the hall.
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, you just haven’t been carrying your weight.”
“Listen,” I said, in a stern voice that I hadn’t meant to use. “You got me down here with my hat in my hand. You’re letting me go. Don’t you try and make me feel worse.”
I looked into the young manager’s eyes, and we both experienced an animal moment. It was a confrontation. She was invading my territory, and I intended to protect it.
“You have two weeks’ notice,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. Seven minutes later I left the office for good. I didn’t even collect the belongings from my cubicle desk.
From the following day on, I fell into a new routine. In the mornings I’d get up before Corrine and go off to Midtown libraries and museums. I dressed well and ate in good restaurants. I carried Timothy Bell’s letter to Corrine in my wallet. Every few hours I’d take it out and read it.
When the two weeks were up, I applied for unemployment benefits, using a rented mailbox to collect my checks. I went out on job interviews, but no one wanted to hire a fifty-four-year-old man with no real experience in anything but orthopedic online sales.
I didn’t tell Corrine what was going on, and she didn’t notice any difference. I hoped that she would see that there was something very different happening, but she didn’t.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was beautiful. The sadness and melancholy resonated with my feelings. Sometimes I’d sit across the dinner table from Corrine, wishing that she’d bring up the book, that she’d want to talk about anything that would lead me to show her how much that I and my life had changed. But it didn’t happen. And so for four months I wandered the streets of Manhattan and came home to my wife, one stranger to another.
One day I was walking down Fifth Avenue, and someone called my name. I turned, wondering who among all those thousands would know me. She ran up and kissed my cheek.
“How are you?” the woman asked.
It took me a few seconds to realize that I knew the smiling face. She was slight of build, with olive skin and heavy but quite beautiful features.
“Donella.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said. “You’re so skinny.”
I’d lost my appetite months before.
“Went on a diet,” I said, struggling with each word.
“You need a new suit.”
“How are you, Donella?”
“Do you have time?” she asked. “Can we get coffee?”
We took a window table at Dingus and Bob’s Coffee Emporium on Forty-Eighth Street. She held the seats while I bought us lattes.
When I got back to the table she told me a story about her boyfriend, a young Korean man named John Park. They had broken up the day before I had first called her, and that’s why she’d thrown herself so madly into our affair.
“. . . but then he came back and asked me to marry him,” she was saying, the middle finger of her right hand barely touching my wrist on the tabletop. This hint of a connection felt like a faraway memory in another man’s life. “I said yes, and that’s why I broke up with you. But after a few months I realized that I don’t want to be married. I left John and called you to apologize, but your cell phone was disconnected, and they said you didn’t work at Korn/Wills anymore.”
“I’m taking some time off to reevaluate my life,” I said, realizing that in a way this was the truth.
“What’s wrong?” Donella asked. “Is it because of what I did?”
“No,” I said, “not at all. I hated that job, and I was no good at it either. I needed to get away.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Using the time to think.”
“Would you, would you like us to see each other again?”
The question gave me the feeling of coming to a precipice, the edge of a vast and deep vale. The other side was so far away that it was shrouded in mist.
“No,” I said.
“You hate me.”
“I just can’t do it, Donella. I have enough trouble taking one step after the next. I really have to go.”
“Will you call me?” she asked, as I rose from the wooden chair.
“Yes,” I lied.
That evening I called Corrine on my new pay-as-you-go cell phone. I told her that I was working late. I came home in the early morning and got into the bed so quietly that my wife didn’t even shift in her sleep.
I had not seen my father, Mercury, after his suicide. The police were already there when I got home from baseball practice. My mother had a closed-casket service. I suppose they all thought they were protecting me. But I had in my mind the image of a naked man with a brown body and a black face—his tongue sticking out as if he were taunting the people after him.
My brother hadn’t said he was naked, but that’s the image I had.
That night I dreamed of him. It was a sad reunion.
When Corrine tried to wake me the next morning, I told her that I was taking a personal day, after having worked so hard for so long.
At ten I sat down at the dinette table in the breakfast nook and took TB’s letter from my wallet. On the other side I wrote this note:
Corrine,
I’ve been holding this letter for months now. The most important thing it meant to me was that I didn’t get angry about it. I was just sad that we had drifted so far apart. I don’t know if you care for this man or if his feelings for you make any difference. But I do know that you didn’t trust me with our money and that you couldn’t share your fears or joys with me, that you gave these feelings to a stranger because I left you no other choice. I know that whatever feeling we once had packed up and moved out with Mercury. So I’m going to leave. I’m breaking it off in one quick movement because I know that that’s the only good thing I could do for you.
Frank Brown
I spent three days and two nights in Central Park. The weather was tempe
rate, and I slept on a bench. One guy tried to rob me, and I went crazy. I actually picked up a trash can and hit him with it. After that I went to a homeless shelter on the Bowery. My joints were sore, and I realized that my clothes smelled like dust. I had put all my financial papers and important documents into a safe-deposit box at My Bank on Madison. I figured that I could live a life just off the streets for years with what I had. I’d get jobs washing dishes or maybe as a box boy in a local market in Queens. I could read Love in the Time of Cholera and learn to play chess competitively in Washington Square Park. I had been pretty good at chess in high school and later at college.
I dreamed one night that Corrine and I lived in a room. We were on a bed separated by an unbreakable glass wall. We couldn’t hear each other through the thick barrier and so could only communicate through gesture. She pointed with both hands at her eyes and then at her stomach. I didn’t understand. Then she touched her right foot with her right hand and looked beseechingly at me. I hunched my shoulders.
This dream played over and over, like an experimental film on a continuous loop. At one point I realized that the dream wouldn’t stop. I wondered how long I had been asleep. My joints ached. I wanted to wake up but couldn’t.
Finally I was conscious, but I couldn’t open my eyes because they were glued shut by secretions. I tried to lift my hand to open them, but I was too weak, so I concentrated on forcing my eyelids open. After a while they came apart, scraping the sand of sleep across my corneas.
I was in a long hall tenanted by at least a dozen patients on slender hospital beds. A middle-aged Indian woman in a white smock was standing over me.
“What is your name?” she asked. It seemed as if she had asked me that question before.
“Frank Brown.”
“Do you have family?”
I shook my head and the room also shook.
“Health insurance?”
“No.”
“You’re very sick, Mr. Brown,” the doctor said. “You’re suffering from malnutrition and probably walking pneumonia that has given way to full-blown pulmonary disease. Your lungs are a mess, and antibiotics don’t seem to be working.”
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
The Awkward Black Man Page 23