“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.”
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.”