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.