The Awkward Black Man

Starting Over

As I do almost every day, I’m starting over again, again. Now that I’ve passed the sixty-year mark, it seems as if each day is a new passage, a more deeply felt loss, or some unexpected plateau achieved.

When I was younger, life was a self-contained ebb and flow, as predictable as the tides under Luna. Breakfast and a drive, work from nine to five, the children as they became enthralled with one activity and then moved on without warning to new interests. Back then their lives changed daily, while Marguerite and I remained the same for them, even when we were lying, even when we feigned feelings and interest. She loved the children, and they her and me, and I loved the kids and her too. My feelings in the early days did not waver, not even when Marguerite and Gary Knowles ran away together and she was gone for twenty-three days while I was left alone to care for Juan, Alexander, and Trish.

I told the kids that Marguerite had gone back east because her mother was sick. The sanatorium, I said, was in a place where telephones didn’t work. I didn’t know that Gary had left Marguerite a week into their flight. He just needed somebody to help him out of the jam of his life: his alcoholic wife, their angry children, and the mounds of debt. He didn’t know that he was using my wife, and she couldn’t see past the euphoria of a world without whining children and a commonplace husband plucked off the rack.

“Jared?” she said, on that first call after she’d left me and he’d left her.

I was surprised, not about her call but because the only emotion I felt was relief.

“Yeah, Marge?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to be. My mother is staying with us, and the kids think that your mom is sick.”

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too.” It wasn’t really a lie. Marguerite’s departure left a crease like the misshapen dents in my fatty thigh when I sit too long on a wrinkled sofa. When I was young those crinkles used to smooth out in a few minutes, but as I have gotten older I find that they last, sometimes for hours.

“Can I come home?” she asked.

“It’s your home too.”

“You should know that we used protection,” she said.

This pedestrian vow made me think about insurance. I wondered if I could start a business that would insure a person’s life to remain as it was after having been violated by betrayal or, worse, a simple loss of faith.

“Come on home, Marguerite,” I told my closest friend. “The children will be so happy that we’ll probably have to take them to the zoo or something.”

That was a long time ago, before we broke up for good.

The final rupture came years later. Juan and Trish were out of college by then, and Alexander was slogging his way through his sophomore year. He never made it to the halfway point, but I didn’t see any problem with that. Alex liked to fish and got a job on a boat up in Alaska for a summer. He was the only black man on that boat or in the little coastal village where he’d met Solla, a Native woman who bore my first grandchild, Senta.

Well before Senta was born, Marguerite and I had decided to end our union.

I remember the evening our dissolution began. I was lighting a cigarette on the back porch, and Marguerite came out to ask me a question.

“Jared?” she called, opening the back door and catching me with the first cigarette that I’d smoked in twenty years.

Holly Martins, the office intern, had given it to me.

That morning Holly had said, for no particular reason that I could tell, “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.”

She was dropping off client files I had asked for. Holly didn’t know that it was my fifty-third birthday or that Marguerite and I had been arguing for the past four mornings about her quitting her management position at Rae, Wheeler, Johns, and Picket Financial Advisors. I only wanted her to work for seven more months, so we could take a trip to Rome before tightening our belts.

“I never wanted to go to Italy,” Marguerite had said that morning. “And I can’t take one more day of those sexist assholes.”

“Do you smoke?” I asked Holly later that day, a few hours after her unasked-for existentialist sound bite on the general failure of humankind.

“Yes,” she said. “Gitanes. They’re French.”

“Can I have one?”

She was wearing a flimsy, brown and pink dress that was both too short and too tight for proper office attire, but Mr. Angelo, our supervisor, was afraid to tell her that because it might be construed as sexual harassment.

She ran out of my cubicle, came back in less than a minute, and laid a nearly full pack of the French cigarettes before me. She smiled and stared into my eyes.

Holly was a pretty young woman in her twenties, rounded in ways that made me think of a comfortable sofa in a room full of hard chairs.

I had no idea that her unsolicited pronouncement, the cigarettes, and the faraway architectural vestiges of the Caesars would bring about such deep changes in me and my world.

For months after that day I thought that ideas sometimes worked like viruses, that if you heard even just one word at the right moment, dozens of lives, maybe hundreds, could be deeply impacted by a kind of mental contagion.

“What are you doing?” Marguerite asked that evening when I had just lit my first stubby little Gitane.

“Somebody...” I said and paused. I was thinking that if she had come out a minute before, I wouldn’t have been caught. “Somebody dared me, and I’m trying to win the bet.”

“By killing me?”

Marguerite had been treated for breast cancer six years earlier. They caught the few cells at a very early stage. That particular cancer was the least virulent variety, but it scared us both, and she, ever since then, had been on guard against carcinogens of all types. We no longer ate bacon, used aerosols, or allowed smoking anywhere nearby. Marge started meditating and exercised every morning for at least forty-five minutes. We never ate sweets, red meats, white flour, or starchy vegetables. She wouldn’t allow cell-phone use in the house and harried our congresswoman with a barrage of letters urging a ban on the use of microwaves near schools and hospitals and, for that matter, in any neighborhood that didn’t want the dangerous radiation pulsing through its inhabitants’ flesh.

“That’s why I’m doing it outside,” I said, taking a drag of the harsh smoke. Even after twenty years I felt that nicotine rush as if I had last savored it only yesterday.

“You won’t even put it out when I’m standing right here?”

“I’ll blow the smoke out the screen.”

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “One molecule of that poison could start my cancer all over. That’s why so many people who have never smoked die of lung cancer every year.”

People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.

I took another drag, and Marguerite hurried back into the house, slamming the door and throwing the bolt.

I was in my boxers and T-shirt on the screened-in porch, smoking that cigarette and loving every poisonous breath.

I rang the doorbell for an hour before breaking the living room window and climbing in that way. Marguerite ran out wild-eyed and indignant.

“What the hell are you trying to do?” she shouted.

“It was cold outside. What were you trying to do locking me out?”

“I was protecting my life,” she said as a pronouncement. “How can I trust a man who wants to fill my air with poison?”

“I’ll fix the window in the morning,” I replied. “Right now I’m going to bed.”

“Not my bed.”

“No,” I said, “mine. If you don’t want to get contact cancer from me, you can go sleep on the couch or in some motel that has smoke-free anti-allergen rooms.”

When I came downstairs in the morning, Marguerite was sitting at the dinette table drinking tea. Her eyes were both tired and troubled.

“Did you sleep?” I asked, going about the motions of making my French-press coffee.

“This is the end, you know.”

“Like existence,” I agreed, reminded of a phrase that Mrs. Anthony used in high school physics.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Marguerite had never before cursed in my presence.

“I know that it is,” I said, quoting my science teacher, “but I don’t know why.”

Marguerite stood up so violently that her cedar chair fell on its back. She held her teacup up high by its ear and, with subdued but elegant flair, let it drop. The china shattered under a spray of glittering amber liquid. She stormed out of the dinette. A few seconds later I could hear her footsteps overhead, marching into our bedroom.

When my coffee was finished, I told myself to go up there and apologize for something I didn’t quite understand. Child-rearing had taught me that understanding often comes after the apology, but even so I couldn’t make that climb.

Instead I made another cup of bitter coffee and remembered a story my father, Bill Thistle, used to tell about himself and his friend Emir Rolf.

“When we lived in Cincinnati,” Dad would say, “Rolfie worked the midnight shift at Westerly Fabrications, and I worked for a glove maker in the afternoon. I’d get home at eleven and wake him up. He’d get out of the bed, and I’d jump in.”

I loved that story. Something about the burly men and that one bed that did double duty seemed like snugly tied shoes or tucked-in sheets. Their life was balanced and trusting.

“But what if one of you got sick?” I would always ask my dad.

“We never did,” he’d say.

Marguerite always made more money than I did. She used her degree to climb the rungs of finance, whereas I worked on the flat plane of insurance claims. It was my assignment to prove that as many claims as possible fell outside the range of my company’s, and its shareholders’, liability.

That day was the beginning of a new pattern of actions in my life. I didn’t buy coffee from the cart downstairs, and though I got in the elevator, I went to the sixth floor instead of the sixteenth.

Melanie Farr of the Belasco Insurance human-resources department greeted me with a smile.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

“My name is Thistle,” I said, and she smiled as many do when they hear the lisp folded into my name.

“How can I help you, Mr. Thistle?”

“I’ve worked here at BI for thirty-one years, Ms. Farr,” I said. I was standing before her desk with my hands held together in front of me as if I were being modest. “I started out as a file clerk, but after I graduated from college I was offered a position in claims. I was good at finding little flaws and clauses that helped justify our responses, but I didn’t have management qualities and so I’ve stayed in the same job most of that time.”

As I spoke, the smile slowly faded from Ms. Farr’s wide, oddly beautiful face. She was in her early forties, I figured, a decade younger than I. She was beginning to worry that I’d be a problem. I supposed that her job was like mine in some ways; people would come to her with issues, and she’d try to resolve them in such a way as to cause the least trouble for BI, its officers, and its shareholders.

“And what is your problem, Mr. Thistle?” She was typing on the keyboard of her computer, as I did whenever a claim crossed my blotter.

“No problem, Ms. Farr. It’s just that I need to leave this job.”

“You’re resigning?”

“Yes.”

“As of when?”

“Today. I know people usually give two weeks’ notice, but I have an urgent issue that needs to be addressed, and after I’m done with that I wouldn’t be coming back anyway.”

“Have you told your supervisor?”

“I’d rather you do that. Mr. Mallory doesn’t have much patience when people need time off. I’m certain that he’d send me up here if I told him that I’m—”

“You’ve worked for the company over thirty years,” Ms. Farr said, interrupting my explanation. She was reading my personal data off her computer screen.

“Yes. I told you that,” I said.

“You have built up quite a large retirement account with us.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t know?”

“I never really thought about retirement. It just seemed like I’d be at that desk until I died one day. Statistics say that I’d probably die at home or in a hospital, but I suppose I could fall dead of a heart attack anywhere — even at my desk.”

The woman’s broad face suddenly turned sympathetic.

“You haven’t considered early retirement?”

“No,” I said.

“At fifty-three,” she said, rolling her eyes upward to look at the general figures in her head, “with more than twenty-five years, you could get about thirty-two percent of your current salary.”

“OK.”

“In order to get that you’ll have to go through the early-retirement process. That would take about three months.”

“But today is my last day,” I said, with a certainty I’d rarely felt.

“That’s silly, Mr. Thistle,” she lisped. “If you leave today you would only receive the face value of the account.”

“What are you doing?” Holly Martins asked as I was putting my belongings into an empty Xerox-paper box that I got from the copy room. The sum total of my work life fit in the space it took to hold eight reams of impossibly white paper.

“Packing,” I said to the young philosopher.

She was wearing a red dress and no hose. The flesh of her arms and legs there in that otherwise sexless atmosphere made me happy.

“You moving offices?” she asked.

“Have you ever been to Italy?”

“No,” she said, giving the word one and a half syllables.

“When are you having lunch?”

“In twenty-seven minutes.”

When I got home, there were still shards of broken china on the kitchen floor. Splinters of shattered teacup were plastered in place by dried honeyed tea. When I went out on the screened-in back porch, the first thing I thought of was smoking.

I had smoked another Gitane on the walk to Samba Sam’s Jamaican Delights with Holly. I wanted another one now, but Marguerite was in the backyard, wearing a coral blouse, turquoise pants, and yellow flip-flops. She was watering the hundred or more potted plants with the long-spouted copper watering can. The terra-cotta pots were set on tiered shelving that looked like miniature bleachers at the back wall of the yard.

Seeing my wife at the zenith of her domestic bliss, I realized why she needed to quit working. She had loved her job, whereas I had never really cared about mine. Her advancement had been a source of pride for her before, and after, the desertion with Gary Knowles.

She loved her job, but as the years rolled by that relationship had gone cool. She still hoped for that early passion, but new bosses and different needs pushed her to the side, left her unsatisfied. Now all she had was a backyard that would respond and flower to her touch.

I knew for a fact that Marguerite needed to rest and heal in the safety of that footprint of terra-cotta and green. My empathy, however, was tempered by events earlier in the day. On the way to Samba Sam’s, I remembered that I didn’t have much cash, and so I went to the ATM machine to find that our joint checking account had a balance of only three dollars. Both savings accounts had been emptied and closed that morning.

Holly had to pay for our lunch.

I’d arrived home at three minutes past three.

Marguerite turned, wiping her brow, and saw me standing there.

“Jare,” she mouthed.

I tried to remember anything important that had happened in the last twenty years.

There were the children, of course, but their lives were their own now. There was the house, but I’d soon be moving out of there, with no expectation of nostalgia or feeling of loss.

Marguerite walked up to the bottom stair of the porch and smiled at me. It was a stranger’s expectant acknowledgment.

“You’re home early,” she said.

“You are too.”

“I never went in,” she replied. “I was too tired, and so I slept until just an hour ago.”

“I came home to apologize,” I said, matching her lie for lie.

“Are you going to fix the window?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” I said, thinking, When you clean the fucking kitchen floor.

“Why don’t we sit down?”

Marguerite waved at two fiberglass lawn chairs that I’d bought eleven years before. The skeletal-looking seats had been bright red when they were new, but the years outside had faded them to a pink-tinted gray. While I went to work day after day, their luster had succumbed to sunlight.

“Sure,” I said, and we sat at a forty-five-degree angle to each other, the convergence of our stares meeting at the screen door where our marriage had finally failed.

“Are you still smoking?”

“No. That was just a bet.”

“Stupid bet.”

“Yeah. I guess it was.”

“You really scared me breaking the window like that,” she said with no real emotion.

“I got a splinter of your china cup in my eye,” I replied. Lying to her was becoming... second nature. “Had to go down to the company nurse to have her take it out.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” was her apology.

I felt the stirrings of an erection. That and the lying brought about a thrumming in my heart. I turned to look at my wife. She was a new person, a whole Otherness, in the yard that I had never, ever sat in before.

“What?” she asked of my expression.

“My dick is hard,” I said in wonder.

“I hope you don’t think that I’m going to do anything about that.”

“Of course not,” I said, in a falsely reassuring tone. “You asked, and I’m telling you that my dick is hard.”

“Stop saying that.”

I stood up in front of the mother of my children, my pants displaying the outline of the modest erection. Marguerite stared in wonder. I was sure that she’d thought I was lying. Seeing it, a confused look twisted its way across her face.

“I’m going upstairs to jack off,” I said.

I rolled against my marital mattress thinking not of sex, not exactly, but of the conversation Holly and I had at lunch.

“You broke the window?” she asked, interrupting the long and somewhat banal tale.

“She wouldn’t let me in.”

“And that was just because I gave you that cigarette?”

“No,” I said again, as I pressed my groin down against the thick wadding of the mattress. “It was because you said that thing about people not living their lives. You said it about everybody else, but I was thinking about me. I am not living my life. I needed that cigarette to live, and Marguerite blew up without even asking why. She thought I was trying to kill her, not save myself.”

“No,” Holly assured me, or maybe she was trying to convince herself that she wasn’t somehow complicit in an attempted murder-by-nicotine.

“She lives in mortal fear of death,” I said, knowing the truth as it came out of my mouth. “Dread like that has no room for half measures.”

“And what are you going to do now?” the pretty, chubby, and young mocha-brown office gofer asked.

“I’m told that I have a fully matured life policy with BI and a settlement of one hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars for my retirement fund. I want to go to Rome in the next month or so. Would you like to come with me?”

I was thumping down hard on the mattress when remembering the question.

“Like your girlfriend?”

“Like anything you want to be. I just need the company.”

“And you’d pay?”

“Of course.”

“How long?”

“You tell me that. I don’t even know how long I’ll be there.”

“Sure, I’ll go,” Holly said. “I might even like you enough to stay.”

I groaned in expectation of the orgasm; that groan turned into a shout. I could hear Marge’s footfalls on the stairs, but the door was closed and I knew she wouldn’t come in. I was sweating and so happy that a young woman would fly with me across the ocean to the site of an ancient empire that once conquered a world.

“Jare!” Marguerite shouted through the closed door.

“Don’t come in!”

“What’s happening in there?”

“Don’t come in, Marguerite,” I said again. “I’m just getting used to what’s happened.”

All that was seven years ago. The divorce was civil if not amicable, because I agreed to share all of my money and Marguerite finally consented to buying me out of the house.

I live in a studio apartment in downtown LA and work for myself. I incorporated under the name Big Bad Investments (BBI) and, doing business in that name, bought e-mail lists from BI and a dozen other insurance companies. I then sent out a broad blast to every policyholder saying that I was an expert on the devious ways in which insurance companies refuse to pay. I charge between two and five hundred dollars to review a policy before the claim is made, one thousand dollars plus expenses to dispute any refusal of payment.

I take a long walk every morning. Last week my left knee began to hurt halfway through the constitutional. This pain is new, and I pay close attention, as it catches on every other step.

My children with Marguerite have shunned me, but I still mark their birthdays and call them on Christmas.

Holly got pregnant on the Riviera under a crescent moon. She lives walking distance from my studio, 1,727 little stitches of pain away.

Our daughter is named Roma, and she entered first grade last week.

Holly has a boyfriend named Henry. He doesn’t like me, but I think he’s a fine young man.

Marguerite had a relapse of the cancer two years after we parted. I stayed with her for three weeks because our children were living too far away and she’s the only daughter of parents who were both only children. She blamed that cigarette for her condition. I accepted that. We didn’t talk much, and I stayed in Alexander’s room. Late at night I could hear her come to our son’s door, sniffing the air. She was still searching for a whiff of my infidelity, proof that everything she believed was justified.