It was obvious from the letter that he wanted to be her lover but was willing to settle for less. That was more than I had to offer, much more.
After reading Bell’s letter, I wondered whether I had the right to hold Corrine back from the kind of life that she might have.
“Brown,” a man’s voice said.
I didn’t have to look up to know that it was Ira Flint, my boss’s boss.
“Mr. Flint.”
I kept my eyes on the screen as he lowered into the chair beside my desk, a shadow looming in my peripheral vision. Flint was a tall man. Even sitting down he seemed to tower. He was heavy too, but his weight bore witness to strength, whereas mine was soft and getting softer. And the blackness of his skin made me feel rather pale.
Flint stared at me. I knew this even though I was pretending to be paying attention to something on the screen.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
A glimpse at the bottom line of the computer screen told me that it was 7:17. We were the only ones on the floor.
“I have a problem, Frank,” Ira Flint said.
I looked up then. “Does it have something to do with me?”
The big boss nodded his heavy head.
“I got three complaints on you in three months. The economy is down, and they’re on my ass to adjust the bottom line.”
“It’s only two pink slips I got, Mr. Flint.”
“The third is you giving out discounts like they were Christmas cards.”
“Oh.”
I knew that we had to get permission to give out lower rates. I knew it, though somehow I’d convinced myself that it was more important to bring in the business than to waste time making rate requisitions. But sitting there in front of Flint I knew how wrong I had been.
“Well, Frank?”
“I don’t know, Ira.”
He waited a moment or two. His expression was one of mild confusion.
“Is that all?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“I need something, Frank. Adeline wants to let you go. She’s already got somebody lined up to cover your accounts.”
Ira was warning me, trying to save me. He was reaching out, and all I wanted was to ask him why. Why help me? Why would he care?
“Frank.”
“Let it go, man,” I said and then turned back to my screen.
After a while the heavy presence of the big boss rose like a morning fog, and I was alone in my cubicle.
Corrine tried to talk to me that night, but I said I had a virus and went to bed early.
The next day I was given my notice.
“I’m sorry about this, Frank,” Adeline Francie told me in her office down at the far end of the hall.
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, you just haven’t been carrying your weight.”
“Listen,” I said, in a stern voice that I hadn’t meant to use. “You got me down here with my hat in my hand. You’re letting me go. Don’t you try and make me feel worse.”
I looked into the young manager’s eyes, and we both experienced an animal moment. It was a confrontation. She was invading my territory, and I intended to protect it.
“You have two weeks’ notice,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. Seven minutes later I left the office for good. I didn’t even collect the belongings from my cubicle desk.
From the following day on, I fell into a new routine. In the mornings I’d get up before Corrine and go off to Midtown libraries and museums. I dressed well and ate in good restaurants. I carried Timothy Bell’s letter to Corrine in my wallet. Every few hours I’d take it out and read it.
When the two weeks were up, I applied for unemployment benefits, using a rented mailbox to collect my checks. I went out on job interviews, but no one wanted to hire a fifty-four-year-old man with no real experience in anything but orthopedic online sales.
I didn’t tell Corrine what was going on, and she didn’t notice any difference. I hoped that she would see that there was something very different happening, but she didn’t.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was beautiful. The sadness and melancholy resonated with my feelings. Sometimes I’d sit across the dinner table from Corrine, wishing that she’d bring up the book, that she’d want to talk about anything that would lead me to show her how much that I and my life had changed. But it didn’t happen. And so for four months I wandered the streets of Manhattan and came home to my wife, one stranger to another.
One day I was walking down Fifth Avenue, and someone called my name. I turned, wondering who among all those thousands would know me. She ran up and kissed my cheek.
“How are you?” the woman asked.
It took me a few seconds to realize that I knew the smiling face. She was slight of build, with olive skin and heavy but quite beautiful features.
“Donella.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said. “You’re so skinny.”
I’d lost my appetite months before.
“Went on a diet,” I said, struggling with each word.
“You need a new suit.”
“How are you, Donella?”
“Do you have time?” she asked. “Can we get coffee?”
We took a window table at Dingus and Bob’s Coffee Emporium on Forty-Eighth Street. She held the seats while I bought us lattes.
When I got back to the table she told me a story about her boyfriend, a young Korean man named John Park. They had broken up the day before I had first called her, and that’s why she’d thrown herself so madly into our affair.
“...but then he came back and asked me to marry him,” she was saying, the middle finger of her right hand barely touching my wrist on the tabletop. This hint of a connection felt like a faraway memory in another man’s life. “I said yes, and that’s why I broke up with you. But after a few months I realized that I don’t want to be married. I left John and called you to apologize, but your cell phone was disconnected, and they said you didn’t work at Korn/Wills anymore.”
“I’m taking some time off to reevaluate my life,” I said, realizing that in a way this was the truth.
“What’s wrong?” Donella asked. “Is it because of what I did?”
“No,” I said, “not at all. I hated that job, and I was no good at it either. I needed to get away.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Using the time to think.”
“Would you, would you like us to see each other again?”
The question gave me the feeling of coming to a precipice, the edge of a vast and deep vale. The other side was so far away that it was shrouded in mist.
“No,” I said.
“You hate me.”
“I just can’t do it, Donella. I have enough trouble taking one step after the next. I really have to go.”
“Will you call me?” she asked, as I rose from the wooden chair.
“Yes,” I lied.
That evening I called Corrine on my new pay-as-you-go cell phone. I told her that I was working late. I came home in the early morning and got into the bed so quietly that my wife didn’t even shift in her sleep.
I had not seen my father, Mercury, after his suicide. The police were already there when I got home from baseball practice. My mother had a closed-casket service. I suppose they all thought they were protecting me. But I had in my mind the image of a naked man with a brown body and a black face — his tongue sticking out as if he were taunting the people after him.
My brother hadn’t said he was naked, but that’s the image I had.
That night I dreamed of him. It was a sad reunion.
When Corrine tried to wake me the next morning, I told her that I was taking a personal day, after having worked so hard for so long.