The Awkward Black Man

Leading from the Affair

“Come in,” the graying blond woman said, after we made our introductions at the threshold. “Have a seat.”

Three padded blue chairs around a low triangular table made up the furnishings of the small office. No desk. No bookcase. The blinds were pulled down over the window. A nonintrusive tan and blue carpet covered the floor from wall to wall. The sounds of traffic could be heard quite clearly, as Dr. Quarterly’s room was on the first floor facing onto East Eighty-First Street.

Noting the hiss of tires racing on the wet streets outside, I took the chair set off a little to the right. She remained standing a moment.

Dr. Agnes Quarterly was maybe five eight and slender. In her late forties, she seemed older but not worn or unattractive. There was a gravitas to her bearing, in spite of the smile.

She wore a dark blue dress suit and a white blouse that buttoned up like a man’s shirt. Her shoes were dark, dark red with one-inch heels, the leather hard and shiny — almost like plastic.

She sat across from me, her spine erect, not resting against the back of the chair. This caused me to sit up a little straighter.

“So,” she began, “Mr. Lassiter, you’re looking for a therapist.”

“Yeah... uh, yes, I am.”

Her salt-and-butter hair was combed but only just. It wasn’t coiffed or done. There was a slight indentation on the bridge of her nose. I wondered where the glasses were and also where was the book or papers that she’d been reading before I’d arrived.

“Have you been in psychotherapy before?”

“No. Never.”

“So, what makes you feel you need it now?” She was watching my eyes, looking, I believed, for signs of depravity.

“It’s...” I said and then hesitated.

“Yes?” Her voice was mild, not commanding or insistent.

“I’m stuck.”

Slightest insinuation of a smile appeared on her lips.

“How are you stuck?”

“I...” My heart was beating fast, and I could feel my ears getting hot. I hadn’t expected this reaction. For a moment I thought I might be experiencing the beginnings of a heart attack.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. It’s just that, I guess I’m a little nervous.”

“There’s no need. Everything we say in this room is confidential. You are free to speak your mind.”

“And can I keep my secrets too?”

“You only need say what you feel comfortable saying,” she said. “And what you did say was that you feel stuck. In what way?”

“It’s like,” I said, falling into an old, familiar groove, “everybody in the world was standing at a line at the start. Millions and millions of people preparing to get on with their lives. A signal was given, and we all began to move forward. Almost everybody was traveling at the rate of ten miles a year. That’s like the normal rate.”

I realized that I was looking at the floor, so I raised my head. Dr. Quarterly was gazing at me with what I can only call intense passivity.

“Everybody but me,” I continued. “Me, I’m racing ahead at fifty miles a year, but at the same time I’m going backward at forty-nine point nine miles. And so at the end of each year, almost everyone around me has traveled ahead ten miles, while I’ve gone ten times that but am only a tenth of a mile farther from the starting line.”

I could see in the therapist’s expression that she was impressed with the explanation. She had no idea that I was a fraud.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Lassiter?”

“I’m a copy editor for about a dozen online magazines run by the Din-Pro Consortium.”

“What kind of magazines?”

“Everything from political news reports to sex stories,” I said. “Sometimes the magazines morph into different kinds of content. It sounds technological, very twenty-first century, but it’s not. I just do what copy editors have been doing for the past two hundred years.”

“Do they pay you well?”

“I know your fee,” I said. “I can pay.”

“I’m not asking that. I’m wondering why you feel that you’re not making headway. I mean there must be others around you who would love to have a job like yours. So many people are unemployed nowadays.”

“It’s not my job,” I said. “Somebody else might love doing what I’m doing. That person would be traveling at a normal rate. Another person might have just gotten fired, but he has a wife who tells him that it’s OK and maybe a child, so he sees hope for the future.

“I have a job I don’t care for and a studio apartment with a TV and a computer, a girlfriend who I think is looking for a better relationship, and no way out.”

“You feel lost,” she said, and I had to clench my jaw to keep from crying.

“Yes.”

We talked about my father, who is dead; and my mother, who no longer recognizes me; my age, which is near sixty; and my girlfriend, whose name is Jool.

“Does Jool live with you?” Quarterly asked.

“No. She owns a condo in downtown Brooklyn. She’s very good with money...”

I got home at 4:17 by the big digital clock that I have framed and mounted on the wall like a painting. I sat next to the window, with its light-and-dark-gray frame, gazing onto Lexington Avenue. Snow was dancing in the breeze, undecided, it seemed, whether it was falling or maybe just hanging there, twirling.

Night was almost come; the darkness was filtering into my brain.

“Hello?” I said, answering the phone on the first ring.

It was dark outside, and the same flakes still seemed to be spinning, now in lamplight, like some Einsteinian law made manifest through slapdash serendipity.

“I called this afternoon, but you weren’t there,” Jool said.

“What time is it?”

“Seven forty-five.”

“I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

“You didn’t call back.”

“I wasn’t here.”

“I left a message.”

“I didn’t listen to the messages.”

“What’s wrong, Frank?” Jool asked.

We were lying side by side, not touching, in my queen-size bed. We’d had sex, showered, and then brushed our teeth, side by side.

“I’m stuck,” I said.

“You’ve been telling me that for nine years.”

“Then why do you keep asking?”

“Doesn’t your therapist help at all?” she asked.

Jool put her dark hand upon my darker chest. Her baby finger tickled my nipple by mistake. I shivered.

“He tries to help me,” I said. “One time, a long time ago, he changed my life. Back then I was lost.”

“Maybe you need a new therapist,” she suggested.

“No. Dr. Aguilera knows me better than anyone.”

“Then maybe he could give you some kind of antidepressant or something.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“Who?” Jool asked.

“J Silver.”

She sat straight up in the bed. At forty-four, Jool still had a youthful figure. Her skin was young, and her eyes always in focus.

“Did you look in my e-mails?”

“Did you suck his dick?”

She shoved back away from me, and for a moment I thought that she was falling out of the bed. But then she stood up and gathered her clothes from the stuffed chair in the corner.

I watched her getting dressed. It was always the same order: panties, bra, blouse, skirt. Then she stepped into her Uggs and picked up her bag.

“It’s three in the morning,” I said.

She had to put down the shoulder bag to don her gray nylon down coat.

“You never talk to me,” she said, once she was ready to go.

“I’m talking now.”

“You have no right,” she said.

“Let me make us some coffee,” I pleaded. “We can at least wait till the sun comes up.”

She didn’t wait, didn’t say another word, just stormed out, taking the last ort of passion from the room along with her.

“She just left you in the middle of the night?” Christian Aguilera asked me three days later. His office was on the far East Side, overlooking the river.

“Yeah,” I said. “We were talking in bed, and I asked her about J Silver. It just came out.”

“How long ago did you find out about him?”

“Ten months.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention it in here?”

“I don’t know. I thought if I talked about it, I’d get mad and then Jool would leave.”

“And is she still seeing him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why spring it on her in the middle of the night?”

“She... she was asking me why I feel so, so disassociated, and then she wondered what good you were doing. She wanted me to take antidepressants.”

“And that made you angry?”

“I guess.”

“Angrier than her affair with J Silver?”

I couldn’t find a way into that question. I’d never met J Silver. I didn’t even know what he was — what color or religion. It was hard to be angry at a man without a face or identity.

“I don’t know,” I said at last.

“Then why didn’t you just say to Jool that you didn’t want her telling you what drugs to take?”

“Hi, Mr. Lassiter,” Kara Gunderson said.

Kara was a counter waitress at the Bebop Diner on West Fifty-Seventh. She always took my order.

“Hi, Kara. How are you?”

“Did you finish editing that nasty article?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“The one about the ad exec having sex with her dog.”

“Yeah. She withdrew the piece though.”

“Too embarrassed?”

“She sent an e-mail calling me a Nazi censor because I cut out a few of the details that she repeated over and over.”

“I guess she just didn’t want to be corrected.”

“No one does. Do you want my order?”

“Has it changed?”

“No.”

Kara’s smile was beautiful. The olive-gold skin and lush almond-shaped eyes marked her Asian features with a sculptural quality.

“Which one of your parents is Swedish?” I asked on a whim.

“Neither,” she said. “I’m adopted.”

At 2:57 a.m. by the framed clock the phone rang.

I was sitting at the window holding the tiny slip of paper that had Kara’s phone number on it. From early evening until about eleven I was thinking about making the call, but my mind kept going in circles: She was too young or I was too old. What did younger women want with older men except for security and then marriage? What did I want from her that I didn’t already get three afternoons a week at the lunch counter? What would we talk about? How could I touch her?

“Hello?” I said into the phone.

“What do you care what I did or didn’t do with Jim?” Jool asked.

“Jim?”

“Jim Silver.”

“Um... I guess maybe I don’t care.”

She hung up.

I didn’t wonder about the call. We hadn’t spoken at all since she’d left. Instead I worried about waiting too long and not calling Kara in time. I worried that if I didn’t call her, I wouldn’t be able to show my face at the diner again.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“How long have you known?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “At least nine months.”

“And in all that time you didn’t say anything?”

The answer was obvious, so I didn’t reply.

“You didn’t act like you knew,” Jool said, now a bit calmer. “If anything you were nicer, more loving.”

“I guess.”

“I haven’t seen Jim in six months. Why ask me now?”

“Because you were telling me to take drugs.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. I was trying to help you.”

For a long while we were both silent.

“Frank.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“No.”

“So we’re through?”

“It’s late.”

“Why haven’t you called me?”

“You’re the one who walked out.”

“And so how have you been, Mr. Lassiter?” Dr. Quarterly asked.

I was sitting in the same blue chair. She didn’t have that little indentation on the bridge of her nose that day.

Her dress suit was gray.

“I broke up with my girlfriend.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

I told her about the late-night talk.

“She thinks that I should prescribe antidepressants for you after just one meeting?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You seem to be somewhat unhappy, but I won’t know how to proceed until we’ve had at least a few more meetings.”

I sighed, feeling relieved of something I could not have put into words.

“Why did you mention her lover so long after the affair was over?” she asked.

I said something, but afterward I couldn’t remember what it was.

“You’re very quiet today, Frank,” Dr. Aguilera said.

He’s a beefy man, much larger than I. Size aside, his dark eyes have always been his most imposing quality.

“Do you think I’m depressed?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

“About what you think?”

Aguilera smiled, then grinned.

“What’s wrong, Frank?”

“I realized that I’ve been coming to see you for thirty-one years next week,” I said. “And I don’t even know if you’re married, have kids, or where you live.”

“You’ve never asked.”

“I was living in a shelter when I first came here,” I said, as some kind of retort.

“But you didn’t tell me about it until you’d found an apartment a year later.”

“Back then I changed very fast,” I said, performing a ritual. “Because of you, I went to school and became a journalist. I made something out of myself.”

“Yes, you did.”

“But now I’m stuck again. Jool left me but calls every night. She says that she wants to come over.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to see Jool?”

“I don’t want anything... nothing. All I want is for it all to be over or for it to change into something... I don’t know, unexpected.”

“What does that mean?” Aguilera asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should discuss medication again.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to do drugs.”

“Hi, Mr. Lassiter,” Kara said that afternoon at the Bebop.

“How are you, Kara?”

“I was worried that you wouldn’t come back after I gave you my number and you didn’t call.”

“We should have dinner together.”

“When?” Her answer was light and friendly.

“Tonight.”

Two nights later I was lying awake thinking about the brief good-night kiss that Kara had given me. We’d had dinner two nights in a row.

“I like talking to you because you don’t seem like a New Yorker,” she’d said at the end of the second date. We were standing at the subway entrance near Broadway and Houston. “I mean, you seem interested in things outside the city and, and outside you.”

That’s when she kissed my cheek, a big smile on her luminescent face.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Where were you the last two nights?” Jool asked.

“Where were you?”

After a brief pause she said, “I guess I deserve that. I mean, I’m the one who walked out and, and who cheated.”

I was thinking about the double “and” from both Kara and Jool. This united them in my mind, making me feel like there was a blood-knot in my head.

“It’s late, Jool,” I said.

“We should get together and talk.”

“We don’t talk so well,” I said.

“I’ll answer any question you have.”

I asked her about Jim and when they’d met and what they’d done. She answered my questions, in great detail, even though I think we both knew I didn’t want to hear most of it.

“Then why open yourself up for something that hurts?” Dr. Agnes Quarterly asked.

“At least that way I’m feeling something,” I said.

“And is that worth it?”

“It is, just before she starts talking.”

“What does that mean?”

“I want to ask,” I said, “and I want her to be willing to answer. It’s just that once she starts talking, what she says hurts me.”

The look on the therapist’s face was intent and quizzical, like that of a mathematician staring at a convoluted, inexplicably erroneous equation.

“Maybe we should try you out on an antidepressant. There’s a new one called Lessenin-60. We can start you on a low dosage.”

“OK.”

There were things that Jool had refused to do with Jim Silver. They’d had safe sex, and she’d interrogated him about his health before they had sex the first time.

I filled the prescription for the antidepressant but never took the blue-and-pink capsules.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” twenty-nine-year-old Kara Gunderson told me at a falafel bar in Times Square. “I mean, I don’t want kids, and what other reason is there for getting married?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You get old and you want company and somebody to share the load.”

“Everybody breaks up,” she said. “You can’t count on them staying with you.”

I buzzed Jool’s apartment at a little past midnight. Kara and I had made out for a while in a doorway on West Forty-Eighth. She’d disengaged from the embrace, telling me that she didn’t want to move too fast.

“Hello?” my ex-girlfriend said through the speaker.

“Hi.”

“Frank?”

“Yeah.”

It was at least a full minute before she said anything else.

“You, you can’t come up now, honey,” she said, pitying me.

When I was a few steps away, I heard her say something else but couldn’t make out the words.

The next afternoon the phone rang, and I was surprised to hear Bob Brandt on the line.

Bob was the head editor at Din-Pro Consortium. We almost always communicated through e-mails.

“Hi, Frank,” he said. “How are you?”

“OK. I mean, I guess I could complain, but nobody listens, right?”

“Yeah. You got that right.”

“How come you’re calling?” I asked.

“Din-Pro’s cutting back, Frank. They’ve taken a big hit in advertising revenue, and I’m going to have to take half your editing load.”

“Oh.”

“And they’re cutting your rate by ten percent. They wanted to cut it by fifteen, but I talked them out of it.”

“Oh. Wow. Thanks, Bob.”

Thanks, Bob.

Both Aguilera and Quarterly allowed me to reduce my payments by fifty percent. I kept seeing them — her on Monday mornings and him on Thursday afternoons.

I asked Christian what the effects of Lessenin-60 were and translated that into the experiences that Agnes expected.

Kara got me a part-time dishwashing job at the Bebop. We got more serious, and she stayed over once or twice a week.

A few weeks later, when I was alone, the phone rang a little after midnight.

“Hello?”

“Are you alone?” Jool asked.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Can I come up?”

“Where are you?”

“Across the street.”

That was the best sex I’d ever had. Something had been building up ever since we’d separated. I would sit in bed at night thinking of all the things she’d told me, that I’d asked her, about Jim Silver.

“Have you been seeing him again?” I asked, when we were spent, in the early hours of the morning.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Are you in love?”

“It might be that,” she said. “But more it’s like I have to do something. You’re always saying how you’re stuck or whatever, and I’m just getting older. Jim wants to move in with me and maybe get more serious. And you wouldn’t even let me come over.”

“You always said that you liked living alone,” I said, “that you had gotten used to your ways.”

“That was before you asked me if I had kissed Jim.”

“Not when she first met him?” Dr. Quarterly asked.

“No. She’d met him at a design conference and, she says, just kind of fell into a sexual thing. But then when I asked her about it, she started to wonder about why I’d be jealous when our lives were so separate. I guess she realized how lonely she was.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“It hurts when I see her, and it hurts when I don’t.”

Jool and I saw each other every night for a week, and then it was over. She called and said that she couldn’t do it anymore.

“But things have been so strong,” I said, almost arguing.

“We’re acting like kids,” she said. “I’m not sleeping, and sometimes when I’m at your house I’m afraid of the way you look at me.”

“It’s just that I feel, I don’t know, desperate for you.”

“That’s not what I need from a man.”

“Can’t we get together and talk about it?”

“No. It’s over. I’m not seeing you anymore.”

I was sitting on the bed when Jool was breaking up with me for the second time. I felt relieved. Our relationship had run off the road, and that was that.

Sixteen minutes after Jool and I hung up, the phone rang.

I was hoping that it was her calling back and also that she had not changed her mind. I wanted to talk more about getting back together but not to change what had already been decided.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Frank.” It was Kara.

“Hey.”

“You haven’t really been sick have you?”

“No. I’ve had some, um, some personal problems.”

“I don’t want to see you anymore, Frank. It’s just not working. I mean... we’re too different. You’re too old.”

Those last three, or maybe four, words hurt me, not because of my age but because I could tell that Kara was trying to hurt me. Her intention was its own end.

“I’ve been seeing another therapist,” I said to Dr. Aguilera that Thursday at the end of our session.

“What do you mean?”

“For the past two months I’ve been going to another therapist.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m stuck, and everything’s falling apart around me.”

“I’m surprised that another doctor would see you knowing that you were already in a therapeutic relationship.”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“I don’t understand, Frank. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I can’t explain it very well. I’ve needed to move on, and I didn’t know how. Every day is just like the last. I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m asleep and can’t wake up.”

“We should discuss this at length,” he said. “Not at the end of our time.”

“Now let me get this straight,” Dr. Quarterly said that Friday, at a special time she made available for me. “You have another therapist and have been in treatment with him for the past thirty years.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve chosen you.”

“You said that you hadn’t been in therapy before.”

“Because I wanted to start on a clean slate, to be sure that I could make some advancement with you.”

“But you lied.”

“Those were the secrets I told you about in our first meeting.”

“No, Mr. Lassiter. The basic expectation in therapy is that the patient and the doctor maintain as much honesty as they are capable of.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

Both Aguilera and Quarterly ended therapeutic relations with me. Three months later I received an invitation to the after-ceremony wedding reception of Jool Lanscome and James Silver.

Kara moved back to Minnesota to her pseudo-Scandinavian roots.

When Bob Brandt cut my editing down to three online publications, I moved into a rooming house in Staten Island and started an online publication of my own, called Broken Hearts Monthly, which has been wildly successful. It started out as a blog telling my own stupid story. But I got so many responses that, with Bob’s help, I organized a virtual publication that presents confessionals, artwork, poems, short stories, and also a dating service.

I work so hard at the magazine that I have little time for any kind of social life. But I’ve been slowly thinking of getting back into therapy. Nowadays I’ve become so popular that I’m often invited as an expert on love and relationships. The anxiety this notoriety produces is sublime and, at the same time, almost unbearable.