Half an hour later, the drinks had been served to the short white man and his much taller black guest.
“This is very good,” Laertes agreed after his second sip.
“They use bourbon instead of rye, and the vermouth they got isn’t nearly as sweet as most.”
“So,” Laertes said, hoping to prime the explanation of why they were there.
“You know the cards are stacked against just about everybody in America,” Sansome said instead of complying.
“You including all of North and South America, or do you just mean the United States?” Laertes couldn’t help himself.
“So, is that your thing, Jackson?” the pickup host asked. “You need to argue with every word the bosses or their representatives say?”
“No, not at all.”
“You told Ms. Rodriguez that you weren’t African-American,” Sansome offered.
“Is she Mexican?” Laertes asked. “Either that or any other kind of New World so-called Hispanic?”
Howard Sansome downed his drink and gestured at the bartender, a sallow woman of middle age who had the look of having lived hard. He told her to bring two more.
Then the man turned to Laertes and said, “No.”
“No to what?”
“Rodriguez is not any kind of New World anything. Her people are French, but her ex-husband was Puerto Rican.”
“So it just happens that she’s Triple-M’s drive for integration?”
“I doubt it.”
The drinks came, and Howard asked the haggard mixologist to keep them coming.
“So it’s like a, like a capitalist conspiracy,” Laertes said. “They put somebody there who will represent their needs and fuck mine.”
Sansome sipped and thought. After a minute or so he almost said something but then decided to drink a little more.
Finally he said, “I believe that the head of HR thinks that Rahlina really is Puerto Rican. The only thing that matters to Mr. Hawthorne is that all the employees dance to the same beat. So it’s kind of like a conspiracy, but one that nobody is quite aware of.”
Laertes felt as if a light had been turned on in his chest, casting a brilliance that traveled everywhere.
“That’s what I mean when I say that I’m not arguing with everything the bosses say,” Laertes averred. “If you told me that the sky was blue or that this drink was good, I wouldn’t argue. But if you tell me that the word American only meant US citizens or that I am in any way the cultural outcome of the continent of Africa, that I’m African-American before I’m Slave-American, well then, I’d have to argue.”
Two more drinks came.
“So,” Sansome said. “You’re on a quest for justice and not a job.”
“Not justice,” Laertes said, and then he downed the cocktail in one swallow. “Not justice, no. Uh-uh. The expectation of justice would be like waiting for the Second Coming. It would be like thinking I could absolve myself of all the pain that is the true inheritance of my ancestral history.”
Laertes could see that his answer was unexpected. Sansome had thought that he understood why Laertes said the things he did. But now he could see that he’d been wrong.
“If not justice then what?” the vice president in charge of trouble asked.
There was yet another Manhattan before Laertes.
“I would just like,” the bank teller said, “for the words people say to have some modicum of truth to them. I’d like it for people to see that some folks are named after countries and cultures, whereas others are ill-defined by race and continent. That’s all.”
Having told his truth about truth, Laertes downed his fifth cocktail.
“Your records say that you only have a high school diploma,” Howard Sansome said.
“Education is simply the process of thought being applied to knowledge,” the bank teller said. “Thought . . . applied to knowledge. Most people just say things having never thought about what what they say means. You got presidents do that.”
Sansome turned on his barstool so that he was facing Laertes.
He said, “So you’re saying that you bollixed up your interview because the woman was white with a Spanish name and she called you African-American.”
“I’m saying that the words I hear and the words I speak should make sense. You can’t live a life in terms that are wrong—not a good life.”
“And are you living a good life?” Howard Sansome asked.
Laertes felt the full force of the five cocktails upon hearing that question. He blinked and shook his head, trying to find an answer that he felt should be second nature.
“I’ll be in touch, Mr. Jackson,” Sansome said.
Watching the short man in the dark red suit walk from the bar, Laertes felt that the room was tilted to the right. This impossibility made him smile.
3.
Weeks later Laertes’s life had changed in small ways that promised to be large. Are you living a good life? The question resonated at the back of his mind, through every activity, and even in his sleep. There was certainly goodness in his life. Medea was a beautiful child, and she loved him even though she called another man father. Things had been good with Bonita before her ambition cast its gaze on him. He was good at his job, rarely had other than a zero balance. His rent had gone up twelve percent in the last three years, and another hike would necessitate a move. He needed more money but didn’t want an officer’s position, because he felt that they misrepresented the value of the accounts and loans they pushed on customers.
He hadn’t been on a date in six years—since the divorce. So now he bought his first computer and start trawling dating sites for companionship. His explanation of who he was and what he wanted was seventeen pages long, and his photograph was of a dark-skinned man who wasn’t smiling and seemed confused by and leery of the camera.
The few responses he had online were tentative but interested.
Agnes327 wrote, “Your profile was so serious, Laertes8, what do you do to have fun?”
“I read the Times,” Laertes wrote, “and take each story apart, imaging how what they say happened could have happened. Then I write responses when I feel that I’ve struck upon a contradiction.”
Lucy!! asked, if he could change the world he found so problematic, how would that look?
Laertes wrote a sixty-two-page response over a three-day period in which he addressed the economic system, the problems of a standardized education, medical care, the environment, the misconceptions of race and gender, and the waste of human potential on distractions created to keep human passion limited.
Laertes got only sixteen responses to his dating-site profile. After answering all of them he got only one second response. This was from Mona_Loa_Love. She had asked him where he’d retire when he could. He replied that the notion of retirement in the animal kingdom was tantamount to exile and not something one should pursue.
“I believe that when we age we lose our physical edge but gain wisdom and patience. I’d like to become an advisor to younger members of our nation; that and maybe I’d like to tend a flock of sheep.”
Mona_Loa_Love had written to Laertes in the second week after Howard Sansome had asked his devastating question. He used a facility on the site to allow her to read his answers to the other fifteen conversations. By the fifth week she had crafted an intricate reply.
Dear Laertes8,
It intrigues me that you included a photograph of yourself but refused to identify by gender, race or age. There’s something genius in that. I love the long, well thought out answers you gave to the others who responded. And I can understand why they didn’t answer. These women are looking for something they’ve already seen and don’t want to be challenged but rather loved—and cared for in various ways.
I am not interested in dating you. As a matter of fact I can see no rea
son in our meeting. But I am deeply moved by your convictions and your resolute inability to compromise. I hope that we can have an epistolary relationship over this medium, or maybe you’d like to send me your email address. I could use your wisdom and, I believe, you might have some use for my understanding.
Mona_Loa_Love
Laertes was devastated by Mona_Loa_Love’s response; your resolute inability to compromise was the most painful phrase. She saw something in him that he had not seen himself. As a matter of fact, even though he saw the truth of her words, still he did not understand how to leave, or live with, them.
Laertes did not go on the dating site for a week after this last response. He went to work, visited his mother and estranged family, and read the Times but did not perform his usual exegeses on its articles. On that Saturday, around midnight, he felt very much alone in his studio apartment on the third floor, next to a woman whose hound dog howled every evening from six to just about seven. The bank teller felt the urge for a Manhattan cocktail. He took a shower and put on his medium-gray suit. He buttoned the white shirt up to the throat but forwent a tie. He took sixty dollars from a manila envelope in his writing desk, pocketed the house key, and went to the door.
His hand was not yet on the knob when the landline rang. He rubbed his fingers together, and the second volley of sound pealed. He turned to look at the phone he had no intention of answering. This would be the third and last ring. After that the automated answering service would take over.
The fourth ring surprised him, as did the fifth, sixth and seventh. By the eleventh ring Laertes was certain that the world he’d known, and despised, had fallen off its axis.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Jackson? Laertes Jackson?” a woman’s soothing voice asked.
“How come my phone didn’t send you to voice mail?”
“Our technology sidesteps that process,” she said. “Mr. Jackson?”
“Yes. I’m Jackson.”
“So pleased to meet you, sir. You have been on my mind for quite a while now.”
“And who are you?”
“My name is Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz, CEO of Triple-M.”
“It’s Saturday night, Ms. Pomerantz. Most people are taking it easy around now.”
“Money never sleeps.”
“My little bit of change been nappin’ my whole life.”
“Exactly.”
Laertes felt that there was deep meaning in the words they shared, but he still hankered after a well-made, not-too-sweet Manhattan.
“Ma’am, I was just about to go out. So if you want something, just ask, and I will try to answer.”
“Monday morning, seven forty-five, seventy-ninth floor,” she said. “Number two Broadway.”
“What are you talking about?” Laertes asked.
“I wish to discuss your job interview at Triple-M.”
“I’ll be there.”
Laertes didn’t remember much about the rest of that Saturday night. There was a bartender and a woman named Briance. He bought quite a few drinks, and someone might have helped him up the stairs. His sixty dollars were gone, but that was all, and in two days, on Monday morning, he had a meeting set with the CEO of Triple-M.
The hangover kept him from seeing his mother the following day. He wondered if Helena Havelock-Jackson would miss her husband’s weekly visit.
Laertes arrived at number two Broadway at 6:10 Monday morning. The security guard let him in after verifying his identity and looking his name up on the computerized schedule.
Howard Sansome sat at the receptionist’s desk on the seventy-ninth floor.
“Hey there, Laertes,” the squat, powerful vice president greeted him.
“This your job too?”
“Ms. Pomerantz wanted to make sure that it would be you who came.”
“Who else could it be?” Laertes asked.
“You got any listening or recording devices on you?”
“No, sir,” Laertes said.
The VP in charge of trouble grinned, then took a device from his pocket. It looked somewhat like an extra-thick cell phone.
“I’m just gonna run this around you to make sure,” Sansome said.
When he was finished, he asked Laertes if he wanted coffee “or something stronger.”
“No. I’ll just sit here and compose my thoughts.”
“Suit yourself.”
Sansome gave Laertes a nod and then departed through a doorway that had no door.
Laertes expected the man to return, but he didn’t.
Later the bank teller would see that brief space in time, the moments between Sansome’s departure and his interview with Millerton-Pomerantz, as the most important span of his life. He wasn’t concerned with a future job. What he thought about was Mona_Loa_Love and her, if indeed it was a woman, deep understanding, in simple language, of the thought processes he’d been swaddled in for so many years that he could no longer separate the bondage from the man.
I am my own prison, he thought. The truths I’ve wielded have hidden that fact from me. Whatever I do from this moment on will derive from those unassailable facts.
“Mr. Jackson,” a strong and yet melodious voice pronounced.
She had soft red hair and eyes the color of pale blue diamonds. Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz was tall and Laertes’s age but much younger-looking. She was slender like him, and there was a smile on her lips letting him know that she had been anticipating this meeting. She wore a blue and white woman’s business suit that might have been made from silk or maybe, Laertes thought, some space-age material.
“Yes,” Laertes said.
“So happy to meet you,” she replied, holding out both hands.
He rose and took those hands as he had his mother’s on Sundays over the past seven years.
“Would you like to go to my office or meet here at the front desk?” Winsome asked. “I gave everyone else but Howard the day off.”
“I leave it up to you, ma’am. This is your fief.”
The CEO grinned and said, “Follow me.”
Laertes remembered walking but not the spaces through which he traveled. His mind was on the topic of his imprisonment and the unlikely meeting with a woman of both beauty and power.
Ultimately they came to an office, the outer wall of which was a single pane of glass. From there one could see the entire panorama of Lower Manhattan and beyond.
“Let’s sit on the sofa,” Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz said.
It was a yellow divan upholstered in fabric that reminded Laertes of velvet-like pigskin. It seemed to hug him, to pull him in.
Winsome turned toward her guest and said, “Before we begin, do you have any questions?”
“Rahlina Rodriguez asked me that. Is that a prescribed beginning around here?”
The CEO smiled and shook her head, no.
“Then could you tell me how I got here?”
“Would you like me to start with the Jesus of Lübeck?”
It was Laertes turn to grin. He knew about the slave ship from 1564.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m just interested in why a major firm like yours would have me followed, questioned, and brought to this amazing place. I thought I’d been rejected by Ms. Rodriguez.”
“You would have been,” Millerton-Pomerantz said simply. “But when you announced to our recording devices that you wanted a copy of what had transpired, our lawyers got nervous.”
“Nervous about what?”
“We’ve spent more than fifty million on suits and settlements, lawyers’ fees, and golden parachutes. Our legal team has been trying to stem that flow.”
“So I’m here because you’re worried that I’ll sue?”
“No.” Her smile was lovely. “I sent Mr. Sansome to talk to you, and by the time he’d finish
ed, the legal team said that there was nothing we had to worry about.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Howard likes to make full reports. He was, in his way, very impressed by your mind. He told me that almost everything you said surprised him and that you might be a valuable asset to our firm.”
“I don’t know what he means by that. I’ve been a bank teller for two and a half decades. The only promotion I ever got was from entry teller to senior cashier. Your boy told me how I didn’t have but a high school diploma.”
“He said that you told him that education was merely the process of applying thought to knowledge.”
“He remembered that?” Laertes asked.
“You are a unique individual, Mr. Jackson. You understand a world that most others don’t even suspect.”
“I can hardly walk a straight line without tripping over my own feet.”
“I believe that. Genius, true human genius, has no patience for the mundane.”
Laertes was suddenly aware of his heart beating. There was sweat on his hands, and his hands had never perspired before.
“Would you like some water, sir?”
“Are you telling me that you don’t think I can be a normal person?” he replied.
“Yes.”
“How come you know about the first slave ship?”
“I studied world history at Sarah Lawrence. I met a man from a wealthy family named Jared Pomerantz. We married, he died, and I assumed the mantle that he’d left behind. We are cut from similar cloth, Mr. Jackson. The only difference is that I’ve been lucky with money.”
“Not with love?”
“Jared was a pig. It shamed me that I was happy that he died.”
“OK, then,” Laertes Jackson said.
“OK what?”
“If you got a job for me I’ll consider it.”
4.
Dear Mona_Loa_Love,
I got your e-mail and it nearly broke my heart. I always thought that it was my choice not to compromise, but when you said it was my inability I knew it was true. I was never going to reach out to you again but then something happened . . .
The Awkward Black Man Page 28