The Awkward Black Man Read online

  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.

  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.”

&nb
sp; 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.