“Hoskins,” said Robert.
The joker froze.
There was a delicate silence. The faces before Robert displayed a range of expressions. Merry or avid or cringing or aghast, each revealed the personality of its owner. All but one. One face was completely without expression, neutral in an unstudied, unmanufactured way. Like a bus passenger, looking at nothing.
“Sir,” said the man, turning, ashen-faced.
Robert smiled around the group as if he had seen nothing, made small talk with them while at his side Hoskins festered with uncertainty. Before he went on his way, Robert nodded at the stolid face—its owner was earmarked now, better things in her future, while Hoskins would be given tasks that amplified his faults, not unlike the jiujitsu principle Robert had heard about, an opponent’s inertia used against him. Two years after that day, Robert had gained near-total control of his tics and compulsions and could suppress them when necessary, Hoskins’s career was puddled around his ankles like fallen knickers, and the bus-rider woman who had been given graduated responsibility had done very well indeed.
* * *
There is a sudden mechanical ululation by Robert’s ear. Is someone coming to help? A hot tear streams from the corner of one eye.
* * *
He sometimes wondered what he and Genevieve might have become without the stain of sorrow seeping across their union, tainting and bonding them, sticking them down in place. The unsullied Robert and Genevieve might have been swept up into the current of the changed American culture, its irreverence and self-gratification. Instead, they’d indulged only in small changes. Robert laid in a new supply of wide ties in adventuresome colors, and let his hair grow out a little bit. Genevieve had her own hair sheared off to a pixie cut that made her eyes look enormous.
The girls, on the other hand, had plunged right in. They backchatted, they agitated to be given things: record albums, pocket money, trendy ugly shoes to wear with their school uniforms. Robert gave in more often than he should have; Genevieve was usually the one to say no. When she was present to say it. Sometimes Robert wanted to blame her absence for the girls’ metamorphosis, but he suspected that no disciplinary measures could have held them back. They were young women plunged into a new world, riding the back of a wave of upheaval, the crest of which they’d missed.
Women were different in the new America, braless and shameless and more overtly sexual. Some were forward enough to make overtures to Robert, what he would have called making a pass at, what was now called coming on to. He’d been too startled at first to find them tempting, their hair worn wild and down, their tight blue jeans defining their buttocks. There was nowhere safe to look: hemlines brushed underpants, breasts with nipples like gumdrops floated under diaphanous blouses. Eventually, rebuffed by his wife, he’d yielded. Sometimes for a night or two, sometimes for several months. He didn’t lie to them, but they didn’t care that he didn’t offer permanence; they didn’t want that from him. To his surprise, they merely wanted sex, enjoyed it in a way he didn’t know that women could. The most recent, and longest, affair had been with an upbeat freckled blonde named Mary, about whom Robert occasionally had the thought, If only we’d met before. But of course that wouldn’t have been possible. When he’d married Genevieve, cheerful Mary was in primary school. That sort of mathematics was always ill-advised.
Mary had reassured him when he worried about leaving Laura alone so much, Bea at college and Noi working and Genevieve so often out of the country. “Teenagers do not want parents around,” Mary had said. “If you were home, she’d be in her room with the door closed.” But I’d be home, he thought. She’d know I was there. “Your wife is the one who should stay home,” said Mary. “A good mother would be with her children.” He’d felt cold toward Mary all of that evening.
And Laura wasn’t always in her room. Just the other day he’d spotted her in Georgetown, sitting cross-legged on a low stone wall, in intense conversation with a person he didn’t know. He’d had to look closely to be sure it was Laura, so unexpected was the sighting. Robert had been stopped in a long rail of traffic waiting for the light on M Street, and he’d looked out his window idly, seen the girl with sand-colored hair wearing the blouse Laura had been given for her last birthday. The girl put her hand to her lips in an unmistakable gesture: she was smoking. She inhaled, didn’t cough; this was a habit, not bravado.
Robert rolled down his window to call to her, but then she put her head back and laughed, showing her throat. He’d never seen any Genevieve in Laura, but there it was, unmistakable. Fifteen years old. She’d soon be a woman. Or was she already? Watching her from the car, he’d been gripped by certainty: No, she was not a woman, she was his baby daughter and she should not be with a bearded stranger, inhaling poisonous chemicals into her tender lungs. Again he almost called to her, but again he stopped himself. He didn’t want to see what would happen when she saw him. She’d stiffen and scowl and slouch, pull her hair forward over her shoulders as if trying to hide herself with it. It was nice to see her like this, happy and open, even if it was like this, with a cigarette and an older man, during hours when she should be at school.
That evening at dinner, he tried to talk to her about it obliquely, saying “You know smoking is very addictive,” while she blinked at him wide-eyed, I know, Daddy. “It causes cancer and heart disease,” he said. “I had a terrible time quitting. You should never start.” She’d nodded.
He’d retreated, galled at her ability to lie. On how many other occasions had she lied to him, and about what? He planned to speak to Genevieve, although who knew what she might say: she sometimes shrugged off things now that in the past would have incensed her. She had drifted away from all of them, each time she returned from her travels a little less recognizable as the woman he’d married. She barely wore makeup anymore, and the tailored clothing was gone. She dressed in a way that deemphasized her bosom, the lines of her body merely suggested through the cloth. Her hair was grown out from that pixie into a soft bob. He was more attracted to her than ever.
* * *
It feels as though a person is sitting on Robert’s chest. His fingers and toes are tingling; he’s gulping open-mouthed like a fish. For some reason what enters his mind at this moment is Bardin, the redheaded coworker he hasn’t seen since Bangkok, and his story about the woman with the burst aorta. At the time, Robert had dismissed it as meaningless palaver, a tactic to distract Robert so Bardin could peek at the documents on his desk. But since that day the story had cropped up in his mind again and again like a never-solved riddle, along with Bardin’s smug I’m sure you’ll figure it out. People told tales on themselves without meaning to; even their lies carried truth. Robert had finally decided that the story was about futility, and destiny. The woman had carried her own end within her, ticking away like a bomb. All of that good behavior, eating properly and exercising and crossing only on the green, had not mattered; her end was long foretold. That’s what Robert would have said to Bardin, if they’d ever met again.
But now, dying on the floor like the woman in the story, Robert sees that that answer is wrong. The woman had had a good life until it ended—she wouldn’t have changed a thing. That was the real point of the riddle: It didn’t matter how she died. It mattered only how she had lived.
And how had Robert lived?
He hadn’t remembered to collect Philip that day; he’d left him to the mercy of that driver. But his failure hadn’t started there. The thread that ended with the loss of Philip meandered back through events. He had known Philip was unhappy. Robert’s own boarding school years had been miserable; perhaps he should have shared that with his son. Instead, he’d told stories of victory, intending Philip to understand that If I could get through it, you can too. He’d meant I believe in you. What he’d said was Buck up. The sacking of the old driver was an act that could be laid at Genevieve’s door, but Robert had made the decision before that to let Philip take judo lessons, over Genevieve’s objections. Violenc
e is not the answer, Genevieve had said, and Robert had responded, Sometimes it is. Then the rest unfolding from there.
But the germ of the disaster wasn’t any of that. It was Robert sitting at his desk, the Slinky in the drawer, letting himself be seduced by the unobtrusive man. Driven by boredom, selfishness, ego, by the nagging thought I’m made for more important things, by his fear that his potential had been spent. The potential that had barely been touched upon, as it turned out. Robert was put into recruitment when they got home, and he’d blossomed. He was able to speak to others’ secret hearts, their frightened-rabbit hearts, their miserable ashamed hearts. He ferreted out the nooks inside them where the frail hope of redemption lingered, he convinced them that they were still capable of good. He’d become the unobtrusive man.
And yet, despite all that intuitive power, he had not understood his wife. He’d thought Genevieve hard and selfish, how she wrapped herself up in her grief and held herself apart from him and the girls. But he sees now that she had invited him in. When she had said Why don’t you come with me? he’d said One of us has to be sensible instead of Why are you going? When she had told him I can’t be trusted to care for the girls, he’d replied That’s ridiculous, you’re their mother. Instead of We can care for them together. He’d been the one to rebuff her. And she’d made something of her grief, while he buried his.
He remembers her packing to go to Bangkok, chattering to the children about the adventure, smiling at Robert as she folded the going-home sweaters. Trusting his word that it would be only a year, twelve months of summer, of paradise and pineapple, and that no harm would come to them.
Guilt was a coiling snake with its tail in its mouth, no beginning and no end.
* * *
Hands balled up against his chest, clammy with sweat, Robert admits the truth: he hadn’t done any of it for his country, not any of it, and not for his family, but solely for himself. His whim had carried them to the place they’d come apart.
With that thought, the pain roars up, the one he has long gauzed over and diminished and turned away from, in order to carry on. At last he allows himself to feel it: the full loss of Philip. All that he’s felt and thought before has been but a preamble, a dithering, like a fly buzzing and buzzing before finally settling down to the meat, stepping its feet delicately into the rot and the blood.
* * *
Drifting in his body now, no longer feeling pain or suffocation, arms dropped by his sides, Robert’s mind clears of thought like a windowpane wiped of fog. What surfaces in the emptiness is not more regret, or sorrow, or self-recrimination. Not worry for his daughters nor anguish for his lost son, nor longing for his wife, who is also lost to him. Instead, what comes into his mind is the little dog he had as a child.
As fully as if it is happening right now, he is experiencing the day his parents surprised him with the animal. While Robert lies on the floor of his office with his heart muscle whitening and stiffening and his pulse slipping from its rhythm, syncopating and then uncoordinating until his ventricle is at a quivering standstill, he is with the dog in the moment they met. Kneeling on the ground with his hands curling into its white soft coat as it leaps its nose up to his lips again and again, its tail slapping its own flanks. Robert can’t stop laughing. He tells his mother and father, Thank you, thank you. He’s there again, nine years old on the best day of his life, as though he never left that day, as though his whole complex, inscrutable life has been just a path looping out from that moment, in order to loop back to it so that it will shimmer once more, all of its beauty and power fresh forever. Thank you, thank you.
He dies with a heart full of joy.
1972–2019
Chapter Forty-Seven
THE FARANG funeral was solemn and brief, Master in a closed box in the church that was then buried in the ground. Very soon afterward everything went back to normal. Bea returned to college, and Laura to school; Madame left on a plane again. So easily did the master slip from this life. Noi felt sad and shocked at the disgrace of it, but while she prayed for him, she too resumed her life.
* * *
When they arrived in America, at first it had seemed that Daeng might be right: there was no mention of school. There was a lot of cleaning. Noi didn’t do it alone. A thirtyish woman named Birgita came to live in the other attic bedroom; she was difficult to understand but friendly. She showed Noi how to manage the growling hole in the kitchen sink basin. Use a wooden spoon, Birgita said, never your fingers, guiding food scraps into the hole. She flicked the switch on the wall to start the growling, water sputtering back up between the toothlike rubber flaps as if some animal were eating, deep inside the house.
It got progressively colder during that first month, a chill unlike anything Noi had known, wetter than air-conditioning and more aggressive, reaching into her bones through coat and scarf and hat and mittens, through the quilts piled on her bed in her room at the top of the Preston house. Her bedroom window revealed a slanted woods of backyard, and she watched the trees go bright colors, then shed their leaves, revealing between their naked branches a rough twinkling of water in the distance. Snow fell in a broken blanket of white over the dead landscape.
Once Christmas was past—a somber holiday by comparison with years before, the tree and presents and holiday visitors not enough to overcome the sad fact of two stockings on the mantel instead of three—Madame sat down with Noi in the kitchen.
“I’ve found you a school,” she said. “It teaches reading and writing En-glish to adults from other countries.” Madame was blade thin those days, taut with energy; she’d cut her hair very short. “It teaches other things too, but that’s a place to start.”
The journey to school, two afternoons a week, was both easy and difficult. The easy part: the walk to the bus stop, a brisk fifteen minutes, Noi’s breath fogging in front of her like cigarette smoke, and then the bus ride ten stops to the front of the school building. She memorized the pattern of coins that she needed to drop into the glass receptacle at the front of the bus, the fattest silver coin the least valuable.
The difficult part of going to school was the men. They were everywhere—on the street, at the bus stop, on the bus, in the hallways of the school. Some of them followed Noi and said things to her; she didn’t understand all of the words, but the gist was obvious. On the bus they stood very close even when there was plenty of room, and leaned over her when she was sitting. She tried to make herself as small as possible in her seat, turned her face away from their hovering bellies. “Please,” she said, when she was standing and they rested their weight against her body from behind. She considered telling Madame that she did not want to go to school anymore; she dreaded every day. Until one morning on a crowded bus, Noi standing and holding the looped metal handhold on the back of a seat for balance (she was too short to reach the overhead straps), when a man leaned against her from behind. She tried to squirm away, but the crowd was solid on both sides. He pressed harder, until she was bowed forward, nearly touching the seated passenger, whose eyes were strenuously averted. Noi’s eyes filled with tears. Please, she whispered, but it came out in Thai.
Suddenly the man’s heat was gone, the pressure gone. Noi straightened up and turned, to see him staggering. The standing bodies that would not move for her drew aside and allowed him to fall to his knees, one hand at his crotch and the other flat on the dirty ridged bus floor.
“Far cough,” said a cool voice. It came from a blond woman not much taller than Noi, who stood looking down at the man. “Bastard.” She stepped deliberately onto the hand on the bus floor and ground her heel. The man moaned.
The bus driver called from the front, “What’s going on back there?”
“We have a dirty motherfucker,” the blond girl called back.
“Language,” said the driver. The bus stopped with a wheeze of brakes, and the back door clacked open. Not at a bus stop, not even at the curb. The man got to his feet and stumbled down the steps, still clutching hi
s groin, hobbling toward the sidewalk.
“Pig,” the blond girl called after the disappearing figure. The door flaps slapped closed again and the bus jerked back into motion. The girl gave Noi a brilliant grin; Noi smiled tentatively back. “We use what we have,” said the girl. “I have good sharp knees.” A few stops later, she rang the bell and was gone.
Far cough. Whatever it meant, it worked. Noi never had to use her own sharp knees. She knew that words would not suffice in all situations—not if she was alone or on a dark street, for example—but when she tried these, they were magic. Far cough grated in a deep voice out of Noi’s chest made the men’s eyes widen; they’d withdraw as if she’d spat poison at them. It was a powerful weapon and Noi hoped to see the blond girl again on the bus sometime so she could thank her, but she never did.
* * *
“You’ve done very well,” Genevieve said to Noi at the end of two years. “From here, you have some choices. You could work toward a high school equivalency exam, and after that, maybe college.” Madame looked tired. The night before, Noi had heard her and the master arguing. Sound came up from the big bedroom into the attic through the vents. It’s just not reasonable from Master. Then, Sweetheart, and a muffled noise. Then No in Madame’s voice, the syllable like stone.
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