The Awkward Black Man

Pet Fly

Lana Donelli works at the third-floor reception desk of the Landsend mortgaging department of Carter’s Home Insurance Company. Her sister, Mona, is somewhere on five. They’re both quite pretty. I guess if one was pretty the other would have to be, seeing that they’re identical twins. But they’re nothing alike. Mona wears short skirts and giggles a lot. She’s not serious at all. When silly Mona comes in in the morning, she says hello and asks how you are, but before you get a chance to answer she’s busy talking about what she saw on TV last night or something funny that happened on the ferry that morning.

Lana and Mona live together in a two-bedroom apartment on Staten Island.

Lana is quieter and much more serious. The reason I even noticed her was because I thought she was her sister. I had seen Mona around since my first day in the interoffice mail room. Mona laughing, Mona complaining about her stiff new shoes or the air-conditioning or her most recent boyfriend refusing to take her where she wanted to go. I would see her at the coffee-break room on the fifth floor or in the hallway — never at a desk.

So when I made a rare delivery to Landsend and saw her sitting there, wearing a beaded white sweater buttoned all the way up to her throat, I was surprised. She was so subdued — not sad but peaceful, looking at the wall in front of her and holding a yellow pencil with the eraser against her chin.

“Air-conditioning too high again?” I asked her, just so she’d know I was alive and that I paid attention to the nonsense she babbled about.

She looked at me, and I got a chill because it didn’t feel like the same person I saw flitting around the office. She gave me a silent and friendly smile, even though her eyes were wondering what my question meant.

I put down the big brown envelope addressed to Landsend and left without saying anything else.

Down in the basement I asked Ernie what was wrong with Mona today.

“Nothing,” he said. “I think she busted up with some guy or something. No, no, I’m a liar. She went out with her boyfriend’s best friend without telling him. Now she doesn’t get why he’s mad. That’s what she said. Bitch. What she think?”

Ernie didn’t suffer fools, as my mother would say. He was an older black man who had moved to New York from Georgia thirty-three years before and had come to work for Carter’s Home three days after he’d arrived. “I would have been here on day one,” he often said, “but my bus only got in on Friday afternoon.”

I’d been at Carter’s Home for only two months. After graduating from Hunter College I didn’t know what to do. Even though I had a BA in poli-sci, I really didn’t have any skills. Couldn’t type or work a computer. I wrote all my papers in longhand and used a typing service. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I had to pay the rent. When I applied to Carter’s Home for a professional trainee position they’d advertised at Hunter, the personnel officer, Reena Worth, said that there was nothing available, but maybe if I took the mail-room position something might open up.

“They hired two white PTs the day after you came,” Ernie told me at the end of the first week. I decided to ignore that though. Maybe they had applied beforehand, or maybe they had skills with computers or something.

I didn’t mind the job. It was easy and I was always on my feet. Junior Rodriguez, Big Linda Washington, and Little Linda Brown worked with me. The Lindas had earphones and listened to music while they wheeled around their canvas mail carts. Big Linda liked rap and Little Linda liked R & B. Junior was cool. He never talked much, but he’d give me a welcoming nod every morning when he came in. He dressed in gray and brown silk shirts that were unbuttoned to his chest. He had a gold chain around his neck and one gold canine. The Lindas didn’t like me, and Junior was in his own world. Everyone working in the interoffice mailroom was one shade or other of brown.

My only friend at work was Ernie. He and I would sit down in the basement and talk for hours sometimes. He told me all about Georgia, where he went on vacation every summer. “Atlanta’s cool,” he’d say. “But you better watch it in the sticks.”

Ernie was proud of his years at Carter’s Home. He liked the job and the company but had no patience for most of the bosses.

“Workin’ for white people is always the same thing,” Ernie would say.

“But Mr. Drew’s black,” I said the first time I heard his perennial complaint. Drew was the supervisor for all postal and interoffice communication.

“Used to be,” Ernie said. “Used to be. But ever since he got promoted he forgot all about that. Now he’s so scared I’m gonna pull him down that he won’t even sit for a minute. Used to be he’d come down here and we’d talk like you ’n’ me doin’. But now he just stands at the door and grin and nod.”

“I don’t get it. How can you like the job and the company if you don’t like the people you work for?” I once asked Ernie.

“It’s a talent,” he replied.

“Why ’ont you tuck in your shirt?” Big Linda Washington said to me on the afternoon that I’d unknowingly met Lana Donelli. The sneer on the young woman’s face spoke of a hatred that I couldn’t understand. “You look like some kinda fool hangin’ all out all over the place.”

Big Linda was taller than I, broader too — and I’m pretty big. Her hair was straightened and frosted with gold at the tips. She wore one-piece dresses of primary colors as a rule. Her skin was mahogany. Her face, unless it was contorted, appraising me, was pretty.

We were in the service elevator going up to the fifth floor. I tucked the white shirt tails into my black jeans.

“At least you could make it even, so the buttons go straight down,” she remarked.

I would have had to open up my pants to do it right, and I didn’t want to get Linda any more upset than she already was.

“Hm!” she grunted and then sucked a tooth.

The elevator came open then, and she rolled her cart out. We had parallel routes, but I went in the opposite direction, deciding to take mail from the bottom of the stack rather than listen to her criticisms of me.

The first person I ran into was Mona. She was wearing a deep red one-piece dress held up by spaghetti straps. Her breasts were free under the thin fabric, and her legs were bare. Mona (Lana too, of course) was short, with thick black hair and green eyes. Her skin had a hint of olive in it but not so deep as Sicilian skin.

“I can see why you were wearing that sweater at your desk,” I said.

“What?” she replied, in an unfriendly tone.

“That white sweater you were wearing,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you? I don’t even own a white sweater.”

She turned abruptly and clicked away on her red high heels. I wondered what had happened. Somehow I kept thinking that it was because of my twisted-up shirt. Maybe that’s what made people treat me badly, maybe it was my appearance.

I continued my route, pulling jackets from the bottom and placing them in the right in-boxes. Everyone had a different in-box system. Some had their in- and out-boxes stacked, while others had them side by side. Rose McMormant had no box at all, just white and black labels set at opposite ends of her desk. White for in and black for out.

“If the boxes ain’t side by side, just drop it anywhere and pick up whatever you want to,” Ernie told me on my first day. “That’s what I do. Mr. Averill put down the rules thirteen years ago, just before they kicked him upstairs.”

Ernie was the interoffice mail-room director. He didn’t make deliveries anymore, so it was easy for him to make pronouncements.

When I’d finished the route I went through the exit door at the far end of the hall to get a drink of water from the refrigerated fountain. I planned to wait in the exit chamber long enough for Big Linda to have gone back down. While I waited, a fly buzzed by my head. It caught my attention because there weren’t many flies that made it into the air-conditioned buildings around the Wall Street area, even in summer.

The fly landed on my hand, then on the cold aluminum bowl of the water fountain. He didn’t have enough time to drink before zooming up to the ceiling. From there he went to a white spot on the door, to the baby fingernail of my left hand, and then to a crumb in the corner. He landed and settled again and again but took no more than a second to enjoy each perch.

“You sure jumpy, Mr. Fly,” I said, as I might have when I was a child. “But you could be a Miss Fly, huh?”

The idea that the neurotic fly could have been a female brought Mona to mind. I hustled my cart toward the elevator, passing Big Linda on the way. She was standing in the hall with another young black woman, talking. The funny thing about them was that they were both holding their hands as if they were smoking, but of course they weren’t, as smoking was forbidden in any office building in New York.

“I got to wait for a special delivery from, um, investigations,” Big Linda explained.

“I got to go see a friend on three,” I replied.

“Oh.” Linda seemed relieved.

I realized that she was afraid I’d tell Ernie that she was idling with her friends. Somehow that stung more than her sneers and insults.

She was still wearing the beaded sweater, but instead of the eraser she had a tiny Wite-Out brush in her hand, held half an inch from a sheet of paper on her violet blotter.

“I bet that blotter used to be blue, huh?”

“What?” She frowned at me.

“That blotter, it looks violet, purple, but that’s because it was once blue but the sun shined on it, from the window.”

Lana turned her upper torso to see the window that I meant. I could see the soft contours of her small breasts against the white fabric.

“Oh,” she said, turning back to me. “I guess.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I notice things like that. My mother says that it’s why I never finish anything. She says that I get distracted all the time and don’t keep my eye on the job.”

“Do you have more mail for me?” Lana Donelli asked.

“No, uh-uh, I was just thinking.”

Lana looked at the drying Wite-Out brush and jammed it back into the small bottle that was in her other hand.

“I was thinking about when I saw you this morning,” I continued. “About when I saw you and asked about the air-conditioning and your sweater and you looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Yes,” she said, “why did you ask that?”

“Because I thought you were Mona Donelli,” I said triumphantly.

“Oh,” she sounded disappointed. “Most people figure out that I’m not Mona because my nameplate says ‘Lana Donelli.’”

“Oh,” I said, completely crushed. I could notice a blotter turning violet but I couldn’t read.

The look on my face brought a smile out of the mortgage receptionist.

“Don’t look so sad,” she said. “I mean, even when they see the name, a lotta people still call me Mona.”

“They do?”

“Yeah. They see the name and think that Mona’s a nickname or something. Isn’t that dumb?”

“I saw your sister on the fifth floor in a red dress, and then I saw a fly who couldn’t sit still, and then I knew that you had to be somebody else,” I said.

“You’re funny,” Lana said, crinkling up her nose as if she were trying to identify a scent. “What’s your name?”

“Rufus Coombs.”

“Hi, Rufus,” she said, holding out a hand.

“Hey,” I said.

My apartment is on 158th Street in Washington Heights. It’s pretty much a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. I don’t know many people, but the rent is all I can afford. My apartment — living room with a kitchen cove, small bedroom, and toilet with a shower — is on the eighth floor and looks out over the Hudson. The $458 a month includes heat and gas, but I pay my own electric. I took it because of the view. There was a three-hundred-dollar unit on the second floor, but it had windows that looked out onto a brick wall.

I don’t own much. I have a single mattress on the floor, an old oak chair that I found on the street, and kitchen shelving that I bought from a liquidator for bookshelves, propped up in the corner. I have a rice pot, a frying pan, and a kettle, and enough cutlery and plates for two, twice as much as I need most days.

I have Rachel, an ex-girlfriend living in the East Village, who will call me back at work if I don’t call her too often. I have two other friends, Eric Chen and Willy Jones. They both live in Brooklyn and still go to school.

That evening I climbed the seven flights up to my apartment because the elevator had stopped working in December. I sat in my chair and looked at the river. It was peaceful, and I relaxed. A fly was buzzing up against the glass, trying to push his way through to the world outside.

I got up to kill him. That’s what I always did when there was a fly in the house, I killed it. But up close I hesitated and watched the frantic insect. His coloring was unusual, a metallic green. The dull red eyes seemed too large for the body, like he was an intelligent mutant fly from some far-flung future on late-night television.

He buzzed up and down against the pane, trying to get away from me. When I returned to my chair, he settled. The red sun was hovering above the cliffs of New Jersey. The green fly watched. I thought of the fly I’d seen at work. That one was black and fairly small, by fly standards. Then I thought about Mona and then Lana. The smallest nudge of an erection stirred. I thought of calling Rachel but didn’t have the heart to walk the three blocks to a phone booth. So I watched the sunset gleaming around the fly, who was now just a black spot on the window.

I guess I fell asleep.

At three a.m. I woke up and made macaroni and cheese from a mix. The fly came into the cooking cove where I stood eating my meal. He lit on the big spoon I used to stir the macaroni and joined me for my late-night supper.

Ernie told me that Landsend mortgaging got most of their mail from the real-mail mail room, that they didn’t get most of the interoffice junk mail.

“Why not?” I asked.

“There’s just a few people up there. Most of their employees are off-site.”

“Well, could you put them on the junk list?”

“She a white girl?”

“So?”

“Nuthin’. But I want you tell me what it’s like if you get some.”

I didn’t answer him.

For the next week I took invitations to office parties, sales-force newsletters, and “Insurance Tips,” penned by Mr. Averill, up to Lana Donelli’s desk. We made small talk for thirty seconds or so, and then she’d pick up the phone to make a call. I always looked back as I rounded the corner to make sure she really had a call to make; she always did.

At the end of the week I bought her a paperweight with the image of a smiling Buddha’s face in it. When I got to her desk, she wasn’t there. I waited around for a while, but she didn’t return, so I wrote her a note, saying “From Rufus to Lana,” and put the heavy glass weight on it.

I went away excited and half-scared. What if she didn’t see my note? What if she did and thought it was stupid? I was so nervous that I didn’t go back to her desk that day.

“I really shouldn’t have sent it, Andy,” I said that night to the green fly. He was perched peacefully at the edge of the center rim of a small saucer. I had filled the inner depression with a honey and water solution. I was eating a triple cheeseburger with bacon from Wendy’s, that and some fries. My pet fly seemed happy with his honey water and only buzzed my sandwich a few times before settling down to drink.

“Maybe she doesn’t like me,” I said. “Maybe it’s just that she’s been nice to me because she feels sorry for me. But how will I know if I don’t try and see if she likes me, right?”

Andrew’s long tubular tongue was too busy drinking to reply.

“Hi,” I said to Lana the next morning.

She was wearing a jean jacket over a white T-shirt. She smiled and nodded. I handed her Mr. Averill’s “Insurance Tips” newsletter.

“Did you see the paperweight?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, without looking me in the eye. “Thanks.” Then she picked up her phone and began pressing buttons. “Hi, Tristan? Lana. I wanted to know if—” She put her hand over the receiver and looked at me. “Can I do something else for you?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. No,” and I wheeled away in a kind of euphoria.

It’s only now when I look back on it that I remember the averted eyes, the quick call, and the rude dismissal. All I heard then was “Thanks.” I even remember a smile. Maybe she did smile for a brief moment, maybe not.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the next week I deposited little presents on her desk. I left them while she was out to lunch. I got her a small box of four Godiva chocolates, a silk rose, and a jar of fancy rose-petal jelly. I didn’t leave any more notes. I was sure that she’d know who it was. During that time I stopped delivering to her desk. I saved up all the junk mail for Friday morning, when I’d deliver it and ask her to go out with me.

Wednesday evening I went to a nursery on the East Side just south of Harlem proper. There I bought a bonsai, a real apple tree, for $347.52. I figured that I’d leave it during her Thursday lunch, and then on Friday, Lana would be so happy that she’d have to have lunch with me no matter what.

I should have suspected that something was wrong when Andrew went missing. I put out his honey water, but he didn’t show up, even when I started eating a beef burrito from Taco Bell. I looked around the apartment, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. There was a spiderweb in the upper corner of the shower, but there was no little bundle up there. I would have killed the spider right then, but he never came out when I was around.

That night I wondered if I could talk to Lana about Andrew. I wondered if she would understand my connection to a fly.

“What’s that?” Ernie asked me the next morning when I came in with the bonsai.

“It’s a tree.”

“Tree for what?”

“My friend Willy wanted me to pick it up for him. He wants it for his new apartment, and the only place where he could get it is up near me. I’m gonna meet him at lunch and give it to him.”

“Uh-huh,” Ernie said.

“You got my cart loaded?” I asked him.

Just then the Lindas came down in the elevator. Big Linda looked at me and shook her head, managing to look both contemptuous and pitying at the same time.

“There’s your carts,” Ernie said to them.

They attached their earphones and rolled back to the service elevator. Little Linda was looking me in the eye as the slatted doors closed. She was still looking at me as the lift brought her up.

“What about me and Junior?”

“Junior’s already gone. That’s all I got right now. Why don’t you sit here with me?”

“OK.” I sat down expecting Ernie to bring up one of his regular topics, either something about Georgia, white bosses, or the horse races, which he followed but never wagered on. But instead of saying anything he just started reading the Post.

After a few minutes I was going to say something, but the swinging door opened. Mr. Drew leaned in. He smiled at Ernie and then pointed at me.

“Rufus Coombs?”

“Yeah?”

“Come with me.”

I followed Leonard Drew through the messy service hall outside the couriers’ room to the passenger elevator that we rarely took. It was a two-man elevator, so Drew and I had to stand very close to one another. He wore too much cologne, but otherwise he was ideal for his supervisory job, wearing a light gray suit with a shirt that only hinted at yellow. The rust tie was perfect, and there was not a wrinkle on the man’s clothes or his face. I knew that he must have been up in his forties, but he might have passed as a graduate student at my school. He was light-skinned and had what my mother called good hair. There were freckles around his eyes.

I could see all of that because Mr. Drew averted his gaze. He wouldn’t engage me in any way, and so I got a small sense of revenge by studying him.

We got out on the second floor and went to his office, which was at the far end of the mail-sorting room. Outside of his office there was a desk for his secretary, Teja Monroe. Her desk sat out in the hall as if it had been an afterthought to give Drew an assistant.

I looked around the room as Drew was entering his office. I saw Mona looking at me from the crevice of a doorway. I knew it was Mona because she was wearing a skimpy dress that could have been worn on a hot date.

I only got a glimpse of her before she ducked away.

“Come on in, Coombs,” Drew said.

The office was tiny. Drew had to actually stand on the tips of his toes to get between the wall and the desk to his chair. There was a stool in front of the desk, not a chair.

By the time he said “sit down,” I had lost my nervousness. I gauged the power of Mr. Leonard Drew by the size of his office.

“You’re in trouble, Rufus,” he said, looking as somber as he could.

“I am?”

He lifted a pink sheet of paper and shook it at me.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked.

“No.”

“This is a sexual harassment complaint form.”

“Yeah?”

“It names you as the offender.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Lana Donelli...” He went on to explain all the things that I had done and felt for the last week as if they were crimes. Going to Lana’s desk, talking to her, leaving gifts. Even remarking on her clothes had sexual innuendo attached. By the time he was finished I was worried about them calling the police.

“Lana says that she’s afraid to come in to work,” Mr. Drew said, his freckles disappearing into angry lines around his eyes.

I wanted to say that I didn’t mean it, but I could see that my intentions didn’t matter, that a small woman like Lana would be afraid of a big sloppy mail clerk hovering over her and leaving notes and presents.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry doesn’t mean much when it’s gotten to this point. If it was up to me I’d send you home right now, today. But first Mr. Averill says that he wants to talk to you.”

“OK,” I said.

I sat there looking at him.

“Well?” he asked after a few moments.

“What?”

“Go back to the mail room and stay down there. Tell Ernie that I don’t want you in the halls. You’re supposed to meet Mr. Averill at one forty-five in his office. I’ve given him my recommendation to let you go. After something like this, there’s really no place for you. But he can still refer the matter to the police. Lana might want a restraining order.”

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him that a restraining order was ridiculous. Then I wanted to go to Lana and tell her the same thing. I wanted to tell her that I bought her roses because she wore rose toilet water, that I bought her the tree because the sun on her blotter could support a plant. I really liked her. But even while I was imagining what I could say, I knew that it didn’t matter what I saw or what I felt.

“Well?” Drew said. “Go.”

Ernie made busywork for us that morning. He told me that he was upset about what had happened, that he’d told Drew to go easy.

“But he just said that I better look after myself,” Ernie said. “Man forget he’s black ’fore you could say Jackie Robinson.”

“Hey, bro’,” Junior said to me at lunchtime. “Come on with me.”

Junior rarely talked to me, much less offered his company. This was an act of rare generosity, and so I took him up on it. The Lindas had ignored me completely. It was obvious that they knew about my troubles before I did but hadn’t seen fit to warn me.

“Where we goin’?” I asked Junior out on Broadway. It was a very crowded street at lunchtime.

“Coupla blocks.”

I got the feeling he was taking me somewhere special. I would have been excited, or at least asked him where we were going, but my mind kept going back to Lana. I wanted to explain to her, to tell her why I wasn’t harassing her.

“There it is,” Junior said.

We had reached the end of Broadway. There was a small concrete island with park benches in the middle of the street. There were lots of young people hanging out and talking there. On one bench, the one Junior was pointing at, sat a muscular ebony-colored man with a bald head wearing a dark blue, thin-strapped tank top. He was just leaning over to kiss a small woman, a white woman — Lana Donelli. I brought my hand to my mouth and made a sound. He pushed his tongue brutally into her mouth, and she brought her fingers to his head as if she were guiding the attack.

I turned away.

“Sorry, bro,” Junior said.

I felt his hand on my shoulder. I nodded and said, “I’m going back up.” I didn’t wait for him to reply; I just started walking.

Lancelot Averill’s office was on the forty-eighth floor of the Carter’s Home building. His secretary’s office was larger by far than Mr. Drew’s cubbyhole. The smiling blond secretary led me into Averill’s airy room. The wall behind him was a giant window looking out over Battery Park, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. I would have been impressed if my heart wasn’t broken.

Averill was on the phone when I was ushered in.

“Sorry, Nick,” he said into the receiver. “My one forty-five is here.”

He stood up, tall and thin. The medium-gray suit looked expensive. His white shirt was crisp and bright, but that was nothing compared to the rainbow of his tie. His hair was gray and combed back, and his mustache was sharp enough to cut bread, as my mother was known to say.

“Sit down, Mr. Coombs.”

He sat also. In front of him were two sheets of paper. At his left hand was the pink harassment form; at his right was a white form. Behind him the Budweiser blimp hovered next to Lady Liberty.

Averill brought his fingertips to just under his nose and gazed at a spot over my head.

“How’s Ernie?” he asked.

“He’s good,” I said. “He’s a great boss.”

“He’s a good man. He likes you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

Averill looked down at his desk. “This does not compute.”

“What?”

He patted the white page. “This says that you’re a college graduate, magna cum laude, in political science, that you came here to be a professional trainee.” He patted the pink sheet. “This says that you’re an interoffice mail courier who harasses secretaries in the mortgage department.”

Averill’s hand reached into his vest pocket and came out with an open package of cigarettes. He offered me one, but I shook my head. He lit up and took a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs a long time before exhaling.

“Why are you in the interoffice mail room?” he asked.

“No PT positions were open when I applied,” I said.

“Nonsense. We don’t have a limit on PTs.”

“But Ms. Worth said—”

“Oh,” Averill held up his hand. “Reena. You know Ernie helped me out when I got here eighteen years ago. I was just a little older than you. They didn’t have the PT program back then, just a few guys like Ernie. He never even finished high school, but he showed me the ropes.”

Averill drummed the fingers of his free hand between the two forms that represented me.

“I know this Lana’s sister,” he said. “Always wearing those cocktail dresses in to work. Her boss is afraid to say anything, otherwise he might get a pink slip too.” He paused to ponder some more. “Twins, huh? They look alike?”

“They don’t dress the same,” I said, wanting somehow to protect Lana from the insinuations that I barely understood.

“How would you like to be a PT floater?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Bump you up to a grade seven and let you move around in the different departments until you find a fit.”

I was a grade 1B.

“I thought you were going to fire me.”

“That’s what Drew suggested, but Ernie says that it’s just a mix-up, that you aren’t perverted or anything. I’ll talk to this Donelli girl, and as long as I have your word that you’ll leave her alone, I’ll forget it. This is personnel’s fault in the first place. You’re an intelligent boy — young man. Of course you’re going to get into trouble if you aren’t challenged.”

Watching the forbidden smoke curl around his head, I imagined that Averill was some kind of devil. When I thanked him and shook his hand, something inside me wanted to scream.

I found six unused crack vials a block from the subway stop near my apartment. I knew they were unused because they still had the little plastic stoppers in them.

When I got upstairs I spent hours searching my place. I looked under the edges of the mattress and behind the toilet, under the radiator, and even down under the burners on the stove. Finally, after midnight, I decided to open the windows.

Andrew had crawled down in the crack between the window frame and the sill in my bedroom. His green body had dried out, which made his eyes look all the larger. He’d gone down there to die, or maybe he was trying to get out of the life I’d kept him in; maybe it was me that killed him, that’s what I thought. Later I found out that flies live for only a few weeks. He probably died of old age.

I took the small dried-out corpse and put him in one of the crack vials. I stoppered him in the tiny glass coffin and buried him among the roots of the bonsai apple.

“So you finally bought something nice for your house,” my mother said, after I told her about the changes in my life. “Maybe next you’ll get a real bed.”