The Awkward Black Man

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.

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?

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 something 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:

I spent three days and two nights in Central Park. The weather was temperate, 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.

“They brought you from the shelter four days ago.”

“Am I going to die?” I whispered.

“That’s why we want to know if you’re insured or if there’s someone who can help.”

When I wasn’t moving or blinking too fast, I felt very warm and secure.

“Can I stay here?” I asked.

“For a week,” she said. “After that we have to move you to a state facility.”

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the Indian doctor was gone.

I felt warm and swaddled. In that bed there were no desires, not even much discomfort. There were beds around me, but I didn’t know who was in them. I didn’t have to eat or get up to go to the bathroom. All I had to do was sleep and awaken now and again. Each period of sleep seemed to have a longer arc. It was as if my consciousness was a skipping stone over placid water that built up speed and power as it went. I was completely satisfied knowing that I’d sleep, open my eyes, and sleep again, until finally one day the sleep would go on, leaving me behind.

“Dad?”

I’d heard the word before in my death-sleep. It was a single note but also a word, a class of men... me.

Mercury was sitting in a pine folding chair next to my bed. His butter-brown face was drawn.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

I looked around and noticed that I was no longer in the crowded infirmary. It was a single room — just for me.

“How do you feel?” my son asked.

I took in a long, deep breath, realizing how shallow my breathing had been.

“Good,” I said. “Better. Where’s your mother?”

“I want you to come home, Dad.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“I took a leave to come back and find you. I’ve been going all over the city to hospitals and shelters, the police and city social workers.”

“Where’s your mother?” I asked again.

“She thought, she thought you might not want to see her.”

There was a lot of information in that stuttered sentence. But it didn’t matter. Mercury my son had done for me what I was unable to do for Mercury my father.

“If I live,” I said.

“What, Dad?”

“If I live, I’ll come home.”