“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.”