She canceled the call and turned off her cell phone. She must have gotten a new number, because she didn’t answer any of my messages for the next two weeks. And I called her at least a dozen times a day.
“You look like you’re losing weight, Frank,” Corrine said, nine days after Donella dropped me.
“They’re changing over to a new system at work and... it’s hard. I keep fucking it up. You know how when I get worried I don’t eat right.”
Corrine looked at me then. It was her suspicious look. I think I must do something noticeable when trying to hide despair with a lie.
“Why would a new system cause you to be that upset?”
“I lost a forty-thousand-dollar sale because I didn’t see a flag that one of the reports put out. Miss Francie blames me.”
This was true. We did have a new system, and I had missed a flag — because I’d spent the afternoon and evening with Donella and then gotten up early in the morning to see her again. I was late for work and missed the deadline indicated by a systems flag that had shown up the afternoon before. On top of the money, we had almost lost the client, Medidine, a medical-equipment distributer based in Kansas City, Kansas. Adeline Francie had given me an official warning comprising a lecture and a pink slip of paper embossed with the red time stamp of the HR office.
I had a bachelor’s degree in political science but worked for Korn/Wills selling orthopedic devices to specialized stores, hospitals, and distributers — all online. KW sells other medical devices, but somehow I ended up running the orthopedic line.
“All you have to do is come in in the morning and log on,” straw-haired Francie told me in her office. “Just look at the left side of the screen and make sure there are no red checks. That’s all. A teenager could do it.”
My supervisor was twenty years my junior. At one time, I suppose I could have argued that she had the job because she was white and I am a black man or, at least, a half-black man. But it was impossible to make that argument, because Ira Flint, Miss Francie’s boss, was black. Ira was also an unapologetic Republican and greatly loved at Korn/Wills. Both of his parents had dark skin, and he had a southern accent too.
“I’m sorry, Miss Francie,” I said.
I didn’t care. I was distraught over losing Donella. It felt like I was dead.
By the morning Corrine left the two blue envelopes on the dinette table I was pretty much over Donella. I had once seen her walking down the street arm in arm with a tall Asian guy; that cost me two nights sleep. I missed another red check and got a second official reprimand, but after that things evened out. I’d been coming in early for nearly three months and had broadened our orthopedic presence on the web by calling second-tier distribution houses and giving them our preferred rates.
I stayed late most nights and kept my lunches down to forty-five minutes, usually at my desk.
I’d lost thirty pounds pining over Donella, and that felt good, so I tried not to eat much lunch. I took care of personal business over a cup of coffee and a Gala apple.
The financial advisors’ envelopes were the same size, but the one addressed to me was very thick. That was our year-end tax statement. Forty-five minutes wouldn’t be nearly enough time to review it, so I decided to read the forms in Corrine’s letter.
I remember glancing out the window as I tore off the top of the large envelope. I was thinking, idly, about dying. Often when I gazed out over Midtown at midday I wondered what impact my death might have. Certainly most of the people who knew me wouldn’t have given it more than five minutes’ thought. The thousands walking up and down the streets would never know, would not want to know, and if they somehow found out, they wouldn’t care.
My father had hung himself in our backyard in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, when I was fourteen. Winslow, my older brother, had found him hanging from a low branch of a fruitless apple tree planted by the previous owners.
“His face was black,” Winslow had told me that night, after the police were gone, along with the coroner’s white station wagon and my father’s corpse. “Much blacker than he was. And his tongue was sticking out. At first I thought it was a joke he was playing on me. I said to stop foolin’ around.”
My brother started crying then, and I ran from the room out the front door and into the street. I needed to get away from that house and my brother and my mother, who never really recovered from the shock.
Standing at the window, thinking about my death and my father’s, I looked at the envelope in my hand and saw that there was a smaller white envelope in the bottom of the blue fold. This letter, also with the return address of Walton, Barth, and Wright, had been sent to Corrine’s studio. But that didn’t matter because they had gotten Corrine’s studio address wrong. That was on Adams Street in Park Slope, but the sender wrote down Adams Avenue. It was a valid address, just not hers. Somewhere in the computer system of WBW they had the wrong address for her office rather than the right one for our home in Brooklyn Heights. Whenever somebody got it wrong, a very nice woman in their mailroom named Dixie would resend the mail.
This was a personal letter. The address was written by hand. It was a stubby little envelope, the kind that someone might use for an invitation to a wedding or bar mitzvah.
I shoved the letter into my pocket, intending to give it to Corrine when I saw her.
At four in the afternoon she called me on my cell. She always used my cell number.
“Hi, honey,” she said and went on, not waiting for me to reply. “Merc called and said that he needs money for a book in his lit class. It costs sixty dollars. I said that you’d transfer the funds over. You might as well send him a hundred.”
“I thought we said we’d talk about these things,” I said.
“Take it out of my account then.”
“It’s not the money.”
“I’m busy, Frank. I don’t have time to discuss the obvious.”
“But we said that we’d talk before sending Mercury any more money.”
Corrine’s parents wanted her to name our son Todd, after her father, who represented the white half of her family. I hated that name. I really hated it. But what could I say, except that he was my son and should be named after my father, Mercury Brown.
It turned out that my dad had killed a man named Simons in a fight that happened over a woman in Houston’s Third Ward. Simons had beaten my father pretty badly, but when he turned away, my father took out a knife and killed his rival. That day he took a bus to LA, and, I guess, he thought he’d gotten away with it. But the police had come around asking for Bernard Lavallier; that was my father’s real name when he killed Simons. After the murder my father went by the alias Mercury Brown.
Regardless of all that, I named my son Mercury.
“OK,” Corrine said, in her reserved and yet exasperated tone. “Call him and tell him that we’re teaching him how to go to school without the books he needs.”
She hung up. It was that one action upon which I hang the dissolution and the inverted-salvation of my life.
In anger, I transferred $1,757, all the money in my checking account, over to our son. I worked until late in the evening sending e-mails to potential clients, offering them the lowest possible preferential rates.
It wasn’t until after nine, when I was on the A train heading back to Brooklyn, that I remembered the little letter that Corrine had gotten from WBW.
Even just thinking about the money managers made me angry. They only kept me on as a client because of Corrine’s growing income.
After finishing college, Corrine went to work for a fashion designer. She’d always wanted to study fashion, but her parents wouldn’t pay for her to go to FIT. I was expecting to go back to college for my master’s so that I could teach at university, but then Mercury was born, and we needed a steady paycheck. Corrine could do her work for the designer at home.