My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  At the next lesson, Lazard said, "Your wife and kids seem very happy here."

  So he knew my secret. It was as though he had heard every word that Alison had said to me. But no. All he had to do was look out of the window and see them frolicking on the apron of the swimming pool. Children never sun themselves or sit by a pool; they are like cats, either active or asleep. I had never seen this little family so happy, and I wanted it to continue.

  "I'd like to share one of my poems with you."

  He was apprehensive, snorting through his nose. He drew a stiff folder out of his briefcase and there, beautifully printed and mounted as though it were especially prized, was a twenty-line poem, about a traveler's inability to communicate with a non-English-speaking person. It was called "Say Something."

  I read it, trying to think of a way of praising it.

  "Be brutal," Lazard said.

  "I like its bluntness," I said. "It's a sort of antipoem. Almost boorish, the way the narrator is making demands on this local guy. Willfully inelegant. Very strong."

  He was smiling admiringly at the poem.

  "I hadn't thought of that," he said. "I think you're right."

  That cheered him up. He showed me another poem in the same folder: "Market" by Harold Lazard.

  It was a clumsy poem, in short lines, listing the sights of a market that was obviously in Southeast Asia: the local fruit—mangoes, rambutans, durians; the cuts of meat, the stacked fish, and swatches of herbs; the bags of rice. It was a list of items.

  "It's good," I said.

  "Go on, criticize it."

  "I love the line 'Dead animals for sale.'"

  It seemed to irritate him that I singled out this line for praise. At first he said nothing, and then, "It was an actual sign at one of the market stalls. I copied it down. That didn't take much work."

  I said, "It's called 'found art.' Driftwood is sometimes found art. It takes a poetic eye to recognize that a sign like that has poetic value."

  "That's very true," he said. "What about its weaknesses. I'm sure it's got some. I just don't see what they are."

  "I have a little problem with 'the dried red peppers strung like firecrackers waiting to go off.'"

  Harry pressed his lips together and compressed his face, making it fierce.

  "I worked hard on that particular line."

  "The 'waiting' firecrackers, is all I meant. Firecrackers don't wait. They don't do anything except explode."

  "These ones looked like they were waiting," Lazard said. "Didn't you ever notice that some fireworks look like that? Like they're just waiting?"

  He had begun to smile in encouragement at me, nodding in a twitchy way. He wanted me to say yes. I heard a child's distant shriek and then a splash, and Alison crying out, "Well done!"

  "I guess so," I said.

  "Sure. You get the idea."

  5

  It was not all misery and submission for me, giving poetry lessons. Harry Lazard did not write many poems. What he seemed to like best was sitting and talking, telling me about his life, his struggles, his success. His father, an immigrant from Odessa, had been a concert violinist, and had never made a decent living. I asked Harry whether he himself played an instrument.

  He said, "I hate music."

  I had an urge to hit him for saying this, but I did not react.

  He said, "Good for you. I told a man that once and he burst into tears."

  It would be bad for me if I made my first million before the age of forty, he said. I told him I was not worried.

  On the subject of politics he often made a statement that defied analysis. Of Lee Kuan Yew, the autocratic prime minister of Singapore, Lazard said, "His main strength is he's a dictator, and his main weakness is he's a dictator." This struck me as baffling, either very wise or very stupid.

  One day he called out from the verandah, "Paul, I've got someone here I want you to meet."

  Seated on one of the wicker chairs was a pale, stoop-shouldered man, seventy or so, soft-spoken, in a rumpled shirt, clearly suffering in the heat.

  "Nate, this is Paul. He's going to be a great writer someday," Harry said. "Nate's written some stuff too."

  "Would I have read it?" I said.

  Smiling sadly—but I took it to be the heat—Nate raised his limp fingers and waved the question away. "I'm here collecting material on leprosy," Nate said.

  "There's none in Singapore," I said.

  "I'm on my way to Johore Bahru. There are some centers there."

  "I worked in a leprosarium in Malawi about six years ago."

  I told him a little bit about the leper colony at Moyo. He became very attentive and patient, as though we had all the time in the world. He asked me specific questions about the treatment, the living conditions, and the morale. I was struck by his interest in me and my experience, and it also struck me that I had rarely met someone so subdued and yet so compassionate. It was his posture and the way he moved; he took up so little space.

  "Where are you from, Nate?"

  He coughed and said, "Chicago originally."

  After Ahmed took him back to his hotel, Harry said with satisfaction, watching my expression, "That was Nathan Leopold, the child murderer. Remember Leopold and Loeb?"

  He was dying of cancer, Harry said, and so they had let him out to pursue his study of leprosy.

  "A guy down at the embassy put me on to him. You'll never forget this day, will you? You could write about it."

  After almost a month of this we developed a rhythm that was simple and undemanding. Except for when Harry was away, we met two or three times a week, always in the late afternoon. We chatted, we drank tea, and after an hour Mr. Loy brought Harry a gin and tonic and me a pint of beer. Usually we discussed poetry, but I realized that Harry had read little and was uncomfortable being asked his opinion about one writer or another. He wanted to be my student and listen to me talk about poetry; he wanted me to listen to him discuss life, women, food, drink, the heat, power, and money. So we took turns being each other's student. He said he found this a pleasant way of passing the time.

  Weekends and most mornings I worked on my novel. When I was done for the day, I swam or played with Alison and the boys. This seemed a wonderful way of living, and being productive—my novel was going well—made me feel secure. Though I was niggled by the thought that we were isolated from the life of Singapore. it was that very isolation that made this life possible.

  There was not much I could do about Lazard's poetry. The man had a shaky grasp of English that was summed up in his own expression "pretty unique." "I'm a published poet," he had told me. I was amazed that this was so, and that two of his poems had appeared in a magazine. His style, if such a word could apply to flat declarative statements, was artless, almost crude, and that gave his poems a simple power that I could praise without being a hypocrite, or at least that was what I told myself.

  About a week after the Nathan Leopold visit I heard Ahmed driving away and, assuming that he had just dropped Harry off at the house, I crossed the lawn and went up to the verandah. Instead of calling out, I listened. The house was very still. I could see through the window into the library, and beyond it to the dining room, and the brightness on the opposite side of the house.

  I stepped to the door. "Hello?"

  I had no name for him. I was uncomfortable calling him by his first name, because the name Harry seemed so intimate; and calling him Mr. Lazard would have made me feel like one of his minions, like Mr. Loy or Ahmed or the Tonkinese chef, Victor.

  "Paul?" I heard a voice say.

  It was Fayette, but I had no name for her either, so I called out, "It's me. For the poetry lesson."

  "Come up."

  But when I got to the top of the stairs, I saw no one, only a long corridor of doors ajar, and I called out "Hello?" because I felt awkward using her name.

  "In here."

  She was in the master bedroom, reclining by the window in her chaise longue, a magazine open on her
lap. Next to her was a lamp with a pink parasol shade, and behind her was a tall antique chest that had been an herbalist's, with a hundred drawers, each one labeled with Chinese characters. She seemed so ignorant and overt. It was all pretense—pretending to be reading, pretending to be resting, pretending my visit was accidental.

  She said, "Sit down."

  The imperious way she said it made me resist.

  "I was just looking for your husband."

  "Harry's on his way to the airport. He won't be back until Friday."

  "That's all right."

  "So it's just the two of us. What are you afraid of?"

  "Who says I'm afraid?"

  "Standing over there like I'm going to bite you."

  I went nearer. She pushed some magazines from the seat of the chair next to her, making it plain that I should sit there. She took my hand and held it, and I could feel her greed trembling in her bony fingers. I knew it was greed from her grip; it was hunger without appetite.

  If Harry had walked in at that moment, he would have had a reason to shoot me, but worse than this was the thought that not far away my wife and children were playing and perhaps one of the boys was saying, "Where's Dad?"

  I primly tried to withdraw my hand. Fayette at first would not let go, and in the little struggle I lost my balance and had to steady myself on her thigh.

  "What's this?"

  She encircled her fingers and framed the little spot that I had touched.

  "You touched me," she said, with a kind of triumph, as though she had trapped me.

  I was so alarmed I stood up and went to the window and realized that I had visibly shuddered.

  She said, "How can you write anything, if you don't know anything?"

  "I do my best."

  "I'll bet you do."

  Now she was moving one propped-up knee back and forth, her pretty sarong slipping down, no panties, and I could see the dark tarantula of her private parts.

  "You pretend to be so innocent," she said.

  In the gutter of the magazine was the carved jade burial mask, the child's face, that I had seen the day I first met her. She picked it up delicately, as though it were an hors d'oeuvre she was about to nibble—she was licking her lips as she examined it.

  "That piece is worth fifty thousand dollars U.S."

  "It's very nice."

  She smiled at me. That was revealing. Her rudeness had told me nothing, her nagging had simply irritated me; but it was obvious in her smile—the cant of her unsteady head, her eyes not quite a matched pair—that she had been drinking.

  "It's stolen," she said. "From a temple." She dangled it again. "They're all thieves."

  Her tone that had been sweet, the coquette's cry of "In here," had sharpened and was now distinctly sour. I had the sense that in a matter of seconds her mood had changed and she was now very angry. In the way that lust or desire can quickly turn violent, she seemed on the verge of screaming or throwing something.

  She leaned over, as though concealing herself to make a covert movement, and snatched open one of the hundred drawers in the herbalist's chest, and—I saw this plainly, she was quite drunk—slipped the jade mask inside and shut it.

  "I have to go," I said.

  "This is your poetry lesson," she said. "You don't have to go anywhere."

  "You just said that Harry was away."

  "But the lesson is all paid for," she said. "What do you think we pay you for?"

  All I could think of was that in the two years I had worked at the University of Singapore, no one had spoken to me in this way. If someone had, I would have screamed back at him. How could I do that now, with my family out enjoying themselves on the lawn of the very woman who was insulting me?

  "Are you trying to cheat us?"

  I was so angry I did not trust myself to reply, but instead glared at her and wondered how I could leave without this woman throwing something at me.

  "Harry's problem is he's always trying to better himself to make up for his lack of education. I tell him, why bother? This was a stupid idea, but he wouldn't listen. People like you are always taking advantage of him."

  I denied it, but lamely, because it troubled me that what this drunken woman said was true. Yet I still had not gotten over her dangling the piece of carved jade (that I had once brought to her from the bottom of her swimming pool) and saying, "It's stolen."

  "I'm giving him poetry lessons. He likes them. He's learning something."

  "That's bullshit," she said. "He's a rotten poet and always will be."

  "He publishes them in magazines."

  "One magazine. He gave the editor a grant. If it weren't for Harry, they'd go broke."

  "I think his poems are pretty good."

  "How dare you patronize my husband."

  "I'm not patronizing him—I'm patronizing you."

  "You touched me. If Harry finds out, he'll castrate you."

  I hated this woman, but what could I do? She was too drunk to listen to anything I said, and she was working herself into a fit of anger.

  "Get out of here," she said. "What are you doing in here? This is my bedroom, sonny!"

  "Is there anything wrong?" Alison said that night, seeing me shuffling in the parlor, watching her give the boys a bath. The sun had set but I had not turned on any lights, and I suppose I seemed pensive, if not anxious, being so silent in that darkness.

  I said no, trying to keep fretfulness out of my voice, yet I knew as soon as I said it that it was a mistake not to open my heart and tell her everything that had happened between Fayette and me. This was the right moment. If I did not tell her now, I could never do it without seeming that I was hiding something.

  She looked so peaceful, leaning over the tub, bathing Will in the sudsy water, supporting his head, protecting his eyes from the soap as she poured water over his hair. Anton watched, another cherub, still pink from his bath, holding his blue Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes he wanted as a bedtime story.

  "This little fish was actually swimming in the pool today," Alison said, and, opening his mouth to smile, Will swallowed water and smacked his lips, still struggling to smile, he was so proud.

  "Dad, will you please read to me?" Anton asked.

  I kissed them all, I read to Anton, I said nothing more to Alison, and I knew it was a mistake.

  "You pretend to be so innocent," Fayette had said. But I was not pretending. I had come to Singapore for its name and its aura. I taught students because I thought they wanted to understand English literature. I moved here to Lazard's house because I thought he wanted poetry lessons, and a month ago, when he had said, "You already passed the hardest test—my wife likes you," I took it as praise. I had believed him when he said the magazine had accepted his poems.

  I was not innocent any longer.

  Lazard returned on Friday, but I did not see him until Monday. I had used the time to work on my Singapore novel. As usual, he did not acknowledge the fact that my job so far had been mainly symbolic; he was in a good mood and seemed glad of my company.

  After we talked for a few minutes—he was bemoaning his airport delays—he said, "Have you been doing some writing?"

  "Working on my novel."

  "That's good."

  "It's going well, thanks to..." I did not know how to finish the sentence: Thanks to your being away. Thanks to this luxurious estate. Thanks to your wife, who hardly speaks to us. Thanks to my nervous anxiety in wanting to finish the book and be solvent.

  "Maybe you could put in a little note or something at the beginning—how we helped you out," Harry said.

  There was not even the slightest undertone of irony in his voice, and his smug, beaky face had never looked more proprietorial. He was serious! And though I objected, and once again wanted to quit, I swallowed hard. I had a family to support. I was his prisoner. I looked at him, hardly believing his hubris, and thought: You wish.

  "Or maybe dedicate it to you," I said.

  I knew he would not accuse me of
mocking him. Someone incapable of expressing irony was equally incapable of hearing it.

  "We wouldn't expect anything as elaborate as that," Harry said. But he seemed to be savoring the idea and liking it. "It would be quite a tribute." Now I could see he was eager for it, and I was pleased that my simple irony had made him greedy. He saw his name and Fayette's on the dedication page of my novel.

  He said, "Fayette told me she had a little chat with you last week."

  What did he know? What had she told him?

  "Yes, I was looking for you. She said you'd already left for the airport."

  He had flipped open his wallet. He pinched out a snapshot of Fayette and passed it to me, and he sounded like a pimp when he said, "You see how lovely she is at forty-eight. Can you imagine what she looked like at twenty-three? She looks so sweet. People never believe me when I tell them that she wears the pants in the family."

  "It's true, she looks absolutely angelic," I said.

  "She's been pretty low these past few days. Remember that carved piece she had, that you rescued from the bottom of the pool?"

  "The jade mask?" I remembered her drunkenly stuffing the exquisite carving into one of the hundred drawers in the Chinese herbalist's chest.

  "That's right. Seems she lost it somewhere."

  "That's terrible. It must have been valuable."

  He was not troubled. He said, "There's more where that came from."

  Of course: it was stolen. Someone would steal another one and Harry would buy it.

  "At her last birthday I says, 'Hey, this will be a first. I never slept with a forty-eight-year-old woman before!'"

  "Was she flattered?"

  "She almost murdered me. She likes you, Paul."

  It was his pimp's voice, he was almost pleading, but I was sure he was only trying to be friendly.

  "You won't believe this, but she has barely a high school education."

  I said nothing. Some remarks were beyond the reach of irony.

  "She's a little sensitive about that," Harry said. "I guess your wife went to college."

  "Cambridge," I said.

  '"Some of the smartest people on earth don't know the basics,' I tell Fayette."