The Awkward Black Man

The Good News Is

The good news was that after a lifetime of carrying an extra thirty pounds or more, I was finally losing weight. Through middle and high school, into college, and then as a data interpreter for Spanish Bank, I was always bulging at the hip and waist, chest and thigh. Too big for stores that sold regular clothes and not quite fat enough for BGE, the Big Guy Emporium. I wore clothes that were either overly snug or so loose that I needed a belt larger than my waist size that could be altered, as needed, with an awl.

My entire life I avoided looking in mirrors, and felt sure that women who showed any interest in me were the ones who had given up, deciding that they’d never get the kind of man they really wanted.

I married a woman, Blythe Lighnter, because I didn’t think things could get any better. I divorced her over a Frenchman named, predictably, François. He was teaching her how to play cello al fresco in a village outside of Paris while I stayed at home in Greenwich Village watching Terra Heart porn videos and imagining that my penis could one day be as large as Brad Bonaboner Backman’s — Triple-B.

I could afford the alimony and relieve the loneliness because I made four thousand dollars a week freelancing for Fortune 2000 companies that needed their employee-generated software explained to anyone from their CEOs to users, new personnel, and the federal government at tax time.

I lived in Manhattan in a five-thousand-dollar-a-month studio apartment and so did my ex, with François, who was going to get a job as soon as his papers came through.

I had a girlfriend named Lana who told me she loved me but said that her impression of life was that people should live alone, answerable to no one. This, she said, made love a true choice and not a duty that inevitably transmogrified into spite.

At least Lana didn’t play cello, and we would turn out the light before going to bed the one or two nights a week we got together, and so I was emotionally placated... if not truly happy.

I didn’t complain because I liked being alone most nights and days and weekends or when it was raining or snowing or over those fake holidays when New Yorkers were off celebrating Columbus or the presidents or some religious ceremony that most of them couldn’t quite explain.

I wasn’t above seeing prostitutes, but I stopped when I realized that I had to take both Viagra and Ecstasy in order to have sex with a woman I was paying to satisfy my needs. I was the fat guy, and she was the svelte woman who wouldn’t talk to me if we were standing on line, one behind the other, at the Gourmet Garage with our tiny lamb chops and fresh herbs.

But all that began to change when I started to lose weight.

At first I thought it was because of the high-protein/low-carb regimen that I had been so close to perfecting for years. The problem was that it took three days, sometimes even four, to clear the body of carbs in order for the diet to take control, and I’d buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, like clockwork, every other fourth day. That meant that I’d be chemically dieting only for 3.4 days a week, and that wasn’t enough to counteract the glut of calories in my system from the ice cream binges.

But that changed, as I’ve already said. I pinpointed the moment of my transition to when I was at a 7-Eleven near midnight of an alternate fourth day, and I came to find that they were out of Cherry Garcia except for the yogurt version. My favorite flavor not available, I decided to go without. The following Tuesday I took a sideways glance at myself in the mirror and saw that I was — just maybe — a little slimmer. I dared a full-frontal gaze and saw it was true. The high-protein/low-carb diet was making me a candidate, possibly destined for regular-man clothes stores.

That was the best news I’d had in decades.

Blythe getting married to François was second to that. Her marriage gave him papers and also freed me from the alimony treadmill. But really what was important was that after only six weeks sans ice cream I could fit into trousers with a thirty-four-inch waist and shop at any clothes store I wanted.

Lana and I were invited to Blythe and François’s impromptu wedding, held without reservation near the Central Park lake. It was a quasi-Buddhist ceremony conducted by Brother Franklin, an ex-convict Zen monk from upstate.

“Buddhism does not encourage nor does it oppose the institution of marriage,” Franklin informed us. “That way the choice of the union is because of love and not duty.”

Lana nudged me when he said this, but I had already moved on from that relationship. I had been e-mailing with a woman named Rachael Daws. I’d known her for some years, but when we ran into each other at a data-interpretation convention in Boston, she’d commented on how good I looked and said that we should stay in touch.

“You’re looking good, Sammy,” Blythe said, when I walked up to congratulate her after the wedding. “Have you lost weight?”

“Finally figured out that other fourth day.”

“Anyway,” she said. “Thanks for coming... and don’t be a stranger.”

She was probably just being nice, but I liked to think that the new, slimmer me was just so damn attractive that maybe she regretted the cello lessons that she’d taken a month off work for — a month away from me that she promised would make our bond stronger.

For the ceremony I wore a buttermilk-colored single-button two-piece suit with a cobalt shirt and a yellow, red, and black silk tie, the material of which was culled from an antique kimono. I bought those clothes to celebrate myself.

The face in the mirror every morning and night was smiling at me.

I was looking better and feeling more confident, but that wasn’t all of it. My knees, which had bothered me since my first year at Brown, no longer hurt. I still couldn’t jog very well, because I didn’t have the wind, but I took a couple of laps around the block two afternoons a week and was planning on adding a third day.

The only problem was that I was sleeping a lot more. Lana would complain that the days I came over I didn’t want to have sex.

“You fall asleep right after dinner,” she accused.

I didn’t tell her that she had stopped being frisky with me long before, just after the first few months of our relationship. I wanted to say that it was only because I was looking better that she complained, but I didn’t.

“Maybe the diet isn’t giving you enough vitamins,” she suggested.

“Maybe not,” I admitted. “I’ve been sleeping a lot, and I don’t eat sugar anymore. Maybe my body is transitioning.”

“My doctor is a nutritionist. I’m sure I could get you an appointment.”

I didn’t really want to accept her help, because I was feeling mildly guilty. Rachael and I had made electronic plans to go to Miami the following month. I’d told Lana it was another convention.

“OK,” I said. “If you can ask I’d appreciate it.”

“The bad news,” Dr. Lola Bridesmith said, two weeks later, “is that it’s malignant.”

I had gone the next day to see the MD/nutritionist, and she took X-rays because I hadn’t had any in over ten years. These revealed a growth in my abdomen, and so an appointment was made with an oncologist cut-man for the next week.

I called off the tryst with Rachael, because sex and infatuation took a back seat to cancer and possible death.

“The good news is,” Dr. Bridesmith said, “that it doesn’t look like it has spread. After a full-body MRI you’ll have a simple operation, followed by three to five weeks of radiation treatments and then a two-stage regimen of chemotherapy. That approach might very well clear it up completely.”

“I have to have all that?”

“To be sure.”

Lana left me because, while trying to help around the apartment, she came upon the e-mails between Rachael and me. There were a few questionable pictures involved.

Rachael stopped responding after the mention of cancer, and Blythe somehow got it in her head that I had shorted her on the alimony payments and was taking me to court.

The good news was that my various employers had no problem keeping me busy. As long as I could keep awake and focused, they had work for me to do. Brian Jurgens, of de Palma Distributers, did suggest that I wear a wig when I addressed the senior officers of the company.

“You wouldn’t want to make them uncomfortable,” he said. “They might talk about replacing you if you remind them of their own mortality.”

Brian had been a philosophy major at Princeton, and so he gave highly sophisticated explanations for every pedestrian suggestion he made.

I was sleeping thirteen hours a day and working ten; seven days a week, seven days a week.

The MRI had revealed other growths, and so I had to have a few more biopsies. The good news was that the new polyps were, so far, benign. The operation cut out the malign growth. The radiation did nothing against the missing cancer, but a woman on the subway told me how healthy my fake hair looked. The good news was that there were no other malignancies — that they could see.

I lost most of my clients because I was making too many mistakes.

The forensic accountant that the New York State court forced me to hire found that I had shorted Blythe by exactly $549.27. The good news was that I didn’t have to pay it. The bad news was that because the suit had merit, however slim, I was ordered to pay Blythe’s $12,347.92 legal fees.

I’d saved enough money to live as I had been living for maybe three years; that was something.

The only thing good about chemotherapy was Maura O’Reilly. She was beautiful, I think; it’s hard to tell, because my memory was impacted by the disease and, to a greater degree, the cure. Maura was part of the MVNP, the Metro Visiting Nurse Program, and came every Tuesday and Friday to make up for the days that were lost to me in between. She had a lilt to her voice that came with her from Ireland, and there was something about the way she bathed me that made me feel as if I were just starting out — if I didn’t die first.

“What I love about you, Samson Diehl,” Maura said to me one Friday, “is your name and how you’re always trying to see the best in what’s going on.”

“Maura, I love you, but I’m about the most cynical person you’ve ever met.”

“Not at all.”

“How do you figure?”

“Didn’t you tell me that you hated Trump, but he was still the best among the Republicans, even if he wasn’t one himself?”

That made me laugh. I spent Wednesday and Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday waiting for Maura and vomiting. I was waiting for laughter, and she never failed, not once, to deliver.

The poisons I took, the doctors assured me, were wreaking more havoc on the possible cancer than they were on the rest of me. If there was any cancer left, it would be absent by the time I was dead and buried.

I weighed less than I had when I was thirteen.

The last month of the regimen had me bedridden. Maura would drop by most mornings just to see if I had expired in the night. Sometimes I’d come awake and see her folding my clothes and putting them into drawers.

“The good news is that you’re cancer-free,” oncology coordinator Myron Eddlesworth told me on a beautiful spring day. “We’ll have to monitor you for five years, but I’m very optimistic. Going through what you had to endure is like a Dark Ages peasant surviving famine or a war — even the bubonic plague. And here you are, with a full head of hair and a healthy physique.”

Yes, the other good news was that I was still thin. I had been eating Cherry Garcia like it was going out of production, but the cancer had been more ravenous than I.

I walked home from the doctor’s office on Thirty-Fourth Street and took the five flights of stairs to my room. I don’t know what made me think about it, but I searched out my collection of solid-gold coins from ancient Greece. I had purchased them over a twenty-seven-month period when I made triple salary working for a Persian billionaire who sold oil in the East, what people used to call the Orient.

I found the black-velvet box, but it was empty. All seventeen coins — with faces of Athena, Alexander, and even Socrates — were gone. Their value at that time was over two hundred thousand dollars. I was hoping to extend my convalescence with their sale, if that became necessary.

“Hello?” a young woman’s sweet voice said over the phone.

“Hi. My name is Sammy Diehl, and I’m calling to speak to Maura O’Reilly.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Diehl. Maura moved out.”

“Oh. Did she leave a forwarding number or address?”

“She went back to Ireland.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago.”

I had a padded maroon chair sitting by the hallway door. There were always books and papers in the seat and clothes draped along the back. The only time I had ever sat in it was the day I saw it and bought it at the one and only Plantation Furniture outlet store.

I hung up the phone, dumped the clothes, books, and other detritus from the heavy chair, and pulled it over to the window. The wooden legs dragging on the oak floor sounded like an elongated fart. I sat down, thinking that the only good news was that the sun was shining and I could still feel its heat on my skin.

I wasn’t broke or homeless, dying at that particular moment, or fat for the time being. I had time to read, even if I didn’t use it, and to watch movies that had come and gone while I was subjected to a procedure that future ages would compare to medical bloodletting. My eyesight had worsened, but I could still see. Russia had retreated from Syria, for the moment, and data interpretation was still a profession that one could ply, if one so desired.

“Hello,” she said, in that sweet lilt.

“Hey, Maura, it’s Sammy.”

She was silent on the other end of the line, many thousands of miles from my Manhattan patch of sunlight.

“I know this must be a surprise,” I said. “But you’re the only person in the world I know well enough to call. If you don’t talk to me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“How did you get my telephone number?” she asked, attempting an upbeat tone.

I’m sure she figured that I hadn’t looked at my coin collection yet, that I was calling for just the reason I’d stated.

“The Internet told me about the O’Reillys in Derry, and I remembered that your mother’s name was Daimhin. Not so difficult really.”

“Modern marvels.” She could do amazing things with her r’s.

“Why did you leave so suddenly?” I asked, affecting a tone of innocence.

“Me mother was sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. How’s she doing?”

“Fine, but a better question would be, how are you?”

“Cancer-free and unemployed. I have time on this Earth that I wasn’t expecting.”

“I’m so happy for you, Samson.”

I believed her.

“Thank you,” I said. “It was a hard road, but I’m grateful for it.”

“Grateful for all that sufferin’?”

“It started out that I just thought I was losing a little weight. You know, I’ve always been chubby. I blamed everything on that. But the cancer burned away that fat and allowed me to understand what a lucky man I am.”

“That’s really quite wonderful now, isn’t it?” she said.

“Maura...”

“Yes, Samson?”

“Would you consider marrying me?”

Her silence was exquisite. I was completely serious about the proposal. She could lie and say that she hadn’t stolen the coins. Maybe she had let in a plumber or a window washer and had to run downstairs to clean the sheets that I’d vomited and shat upon.

It didn’t matter that she’d robbed me. She had been there with that gorgeous smile that I could almost remember and with that voice that was first cousin to song. I would have died if she hadn’t been there; that much I was sure of.

“That is a beautiful thing to say, Samson. You are kind and gracious to ask. But I don’t think you know me well enough. If we were to marry you might feel differently than you do right now.”

“I know you, Maura, and more than that, I know myself. If you say yes, I will be your husband through all the years, no matter how lean or how fat. I will be your husband, and you will be the mother of our children. And they will have Irish names, and their second tongue will be Gaelic.”

Again the rapture of silence. I could feel her hopes and regrets over the fiber-optic lines.

After a very long pause she said, “Can I think on it?”

“Do you want me to give you my number?”

“I already have it, silly. I was going to call you after your last visit to the doctor.”

“OK,” I said. “I’ll wait for you to answer, but remember, I’m completely serious and absolutely nothing would change how I feel.”

We said our goodbyes and disconnected.

I didn’t leave my apartment for the next two weeks. I ordered in all my meals (even Cherry Garcia) and sat by the window in the displaced chair, next to the phone.

I was waiting for her answer.

I didn’t give a damn about those coins.

After eighteen days I called Maura’s mother’s phone again. The line had been disconnected. There was no forwarding number. There was no Daimhin O’Reilly listed in all Ireland, Wales, or England.

Maura was gone.

Maybe I should have told her not to worry about the money. Maybe I should have said, “You can consider those coins a wedding gift.”

The days went by, and my health improved. I gained back all the weight that the cancer and its treatments took. I went to work as a data interpreter again. Blythe called with a long explanation about how my cancer had upset her so much that she just had to sue me. I didn’t understand the logic but accepted her apology anyway.

Lana called and asked me why I hadn’t told her that I was dissatisfied with our relationship.

For some reason her question brought Maura to mind, Maura and my stolen fortune. I missed that Irish lass the way parents yearn for the days of their children’s cute mispronunciations: “I wuv you.” The love I felt for the nurse while I was dying meant more to me than anything life had to offer. She was what I was looking for even before I understood why the weight was coming off so fast.

“Well?” Lana asked.

I disconnected the call and went down to the 7-Eleven, hoping that they had the regular Cherry Garcia and still hoping, ever so slightly, that when I got back upstairs, Maura would have left a message and a number, a few rolling r’s, and a question that I could answer.