Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  I never felt comfortable with the phrase, had a deep trouble with it, all the ways it was said. You could say it in a celebratory sense. For corroboration. In gratitude. To get a point across, to instill guilt in your lover, to defend yourself. You said it after great deliberation, or when you felt reckless. You said it when you meant it and sometimes when you didn’t.

  You somehow always said it when you had to.

  I sorted the tapes and went out in the streets. It was late, warm for February, and I called Molly’s apartment from a pay phone but hung up before anyone could answer.

  Molly was a filmmaker and a performance artist. She was smart, generous, her looks unquestionably homely, queer, egregiously frank, hip to the bones. Her swaddling clothes must have been black. Sometimes I thought she could have been a very beautiful Jimmy Durante. She was becoming mildly famous. She enjoyed a renown in Europe. I saw in a store once some German posters for retrospective festivals of her work. Years before we would go to some blacked-out converted garage or artists’ space to watch her latest show. Now she played places like the Ritz, and her short films were shown at the MOMA and Angelika.

  Molly would sometimes call me from the pay phone outside in the street, to tell me what was going on with my wife. She thought I should know. We both acknowledged how painfully adolescent and insipid we were being with these third-party phone calls—we’d joke harshly about zits, menstruation, jerking off—but then over the line I could hear the street behind her, the din of a thousand hurried movements, my wife maybe becoming just one of them, hidden and indistinguishable.

  I walked a few more blocks and then telephoned again. No one this time. I walked to Molly’s building anyway. She lived on the second floor. When I got there her windows were black. I wondered if they were asleep. I entertained an urge to find a pebble and throw it up against the panes but then there weren’t pebbles in the streets of New York, nothing small enough for anything cute, just hunks of broken brick, quart beer bottles. I would have to effect something in between. I flanked my hands to my mouth and said her name. I was whispering. I said it again, this time loud enough to feel it in my throat. I was ready to say it again, maybe yell it, but a light went on and the window opened and Lelia peered down at me. From her silhouette I could tell she had cut off all of her hair. The naked line of her head and neck reminded me of Mitt.

  “Henry,” she said in a rough, sleepy voice, “is that you?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “God,” she said. “You better come up, then.”

  In the doorway, she was wearing a white cotton nightgown that fell to her thigh. I could see the darkness of her nipples. She looked skinny to me, even gaunt, but I probably thought that because of her hair. Nothing left. The color seemed darker, what had been traces of a reddish hue were now gone, and only her roots were left, the fine nubs rich and brown. I beat down the idea that her cutting of it was a statement intended for me. Women, I know, sometimes have themselves shorn at those watershed moments of their lives, like discarding the memory of a man.

  “I thought we had a plan,” Lelia said, rubbing her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Lelia was sleeping in the sofa bed. On the lamp table were her reading glasses and a high pile of books. She slumped into one of Molly’s leather beanbags. I sat below her on the rug with my feet out. Her knees were bony, white. Now she stretched the nightgown over them.

  “Your hair looks good short,” I said. “It hasn’t been that way since El Paso.”

  “Oh, c’mon, it looks terrible. I cut it myself. Thus I discovered another talent I don’t have.”

  “Why didn’t you let Molly cut it?” Molly always cut our hair.

  “She wanted to. She was watching me and crying the whole time. I told her to go away. I didn’t mean to be cruel.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Nope. On a date. Looks like she won’t be back tonight.”

  She looked for a cigarette, but didn’t find one. I thought for a moment that the tenor of her voice sounded like mine in those many months of our trouble, clipped, almost dead.

  “I listened to the tapes tonight,” I said, trying not to sound sentimental. “I decided to wander over.”

  “I bet,” she said, crossing her arms. “Though I doubt you’ve ever really wandered.”

  “I wander a lot.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she replied. “But only in the place and time of your choosing. The word for that is invasion.”

  “So shoot me.”

  She cocked her thumb and aimed right between my eyes.

  “Pow.”

  I could see she wasn’t in a horrible mood.

  She said, “Anyway, you’re here. I guess I don’t mind, Henry, but you’re always doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What?” she laughed. “You preempt! Our supposed meeting next week, for starters. We had it all planned out, remember? What we’ve been talking about for the last month. Take it slow, gradual. Just like you said we should. I was heeding you.”

  “I know.”

  “Since I’ve been back you’re always calling just as I’m getting into bed, or stepping out of the shower, or just when I’ve locked the door behind me. I rush to the phone and then of course it’s you. Now I wait five seconds before bolting the lock. It’s crazy. You always want to talk when I can’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, please please please cut it out.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “How is Jack? I think I truly miss Jack.”

  “He’s fine. He misses you. He wants to hear about the islands. I want to hear about the islands.”

  Her expression dimmed. I knew the time was wrong. The trip to the islands would be off limits. I was promising myself that I wouldn’t make it painful, whatever she told me. Anything.

  But of course I knew that certain events must have occurred.

  “How did Mitt sound?” she asked, sensing my silence.

  “Great. Really great. It’s amazing.”

  She shifted in the mass, sitting up. She said, “I haven’t listened to the tapes in a long time. I don’t think they would depress me anymore, but I know I still couldn’t do anything afterwards. I’d just stop moving for a few days.”

  “He rings in your ears.”

  “Maybe,” she answered, playing with the tiny pink flowerets at the base of her collar. “I keep remembering how I sat in the window with my feet hanging out and the tape machine between my legs. The volume on high so the people would look up. I didn’t mind looking a little suicidal.”

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  She chuckled. “You only saw me on the weekends. You had a place to go at least. You could hide up there with Jack. You could do what you do. What you still do. Oh my god, do I not want to talk about that now.”

  “Let’s not, then.”

  She let her head fall over the back of the beanbag. “You know I listened to everybody about getting back to my life. Back to my life. As if. I even listened to my mother! You don’t know, but at school I worked those poor kids to the bone. I’d end up yelling all the time. They’d cry and cry. I kept telling myself they were just little grown-ups, that they could handle anything.”

  “It got you through.”

  “Sorry, but I was a low-down bitch.”

  “No you weren’t.”

  “Damn it, Henry!”

  She got up. “Shit. I’m sorry. Do you want a drink? I’m having one.”

  She went into the kitchen and came back with two low-balls of ice and a bottle of scotch. She poured for us. We were silent for a few minutes. She was drinking with both hands around her glass. She was going at it. As usual I was trying to keep up with her, wanting to get to the same page, an
d I was suddenly reminded of the fact that she always drank a little too much and that I never drank enough.

  She finally said, “Where were we?”

  “You were hurting.”

  “There’s a phrase.”

  “So was I,” I offered.

  “You did a great job hiding it,” she said sharply. “I’m sorry, Henry, I don’t want to be no fun but I’m not going to let you step into the middle of my night and start revising our history. History is clear here. You were solemn and dignified. Remember? That’s who you were for about a year. The bowing, the white-glove bit. You’re the one who calmly explained to everyone how well we were doing. Of course I was the mad and stupid one. The crazy white lady in the attic.”

  “I did what I could.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I didn’t?”

  So we’d traveled back to square one.

  “I’m such a dope,” she said, taking a deep sip. “Say I’m a dope.”

  “I’m a dope.”

  “Good,” she said. She was rolling the glass against her cheek. “Why did I ever let you in tonight?”

  “I guess you’re just kind and good.”

  “I am not good,” Lelia said. “Ask Molly.”

  “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Oh, so is she your spy now?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not all the time?”

  I said, “Only when I’m really desperate.”

  That seemed to soften her. She said, “I always knew Molly liked you better. I should have stayed with Mother. I’d be absolutely crazy, of course. I went to Boston last week. You probably know that, right? I should have stayed with Mother. But being there is like having another conscience knocking around. I hate what I hear but I listen. Why is it that when I’m up there I wear lipstick to breakfast and wrap up my used tampons in newspaper? It’s like I’m giving the garbageman a present. And I think she’s getting worse and worse. She’s so frightfully scared of everything and everyone but Lord knows she’s become the most awful snob on earth. I’ve begun to think those conditions are related. Of course, like everyone else, she completely adores you. She says you’re old-style charming, like back in 1957.”

  “My kind didn’t exist for her then.”

  “You should have. I think it’s a crush for life.”

  “I’m her exotic,” I said. “Like a snow leopard. Except I’m not porcelain.”

  “The things she doesn’t know,” Lelia said. She half-titled her glass, in truce. “But maybe she sees something.”

  I made an act of toasting her mother, which made Lelia laugh. I said, “Has she gone outside at all?”

  Lelia shrugged. “Does the sunroom count? Otherwise, no. She’s stopped seeing her therapist. After all these years she’s suddenly scared of him, and I’ll tell you the man looks like Walter Cronkite. Frankly, I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. The house smells like death. Perfume of old-lady-death. Lilacs and cat piss. I never thought my mother’s house would get to this. And she looks so old all of a sudden. What should I do, Henry? I’m sick.”

  “What about Stew?” Stew was her father.

  “His line’s always busy. She won’t call him, anyway. I think out of everything she’s definitely most afraid of Stew. In that way I guess I’m no different.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew that I was afraid of him, too. And what it was about Lelia that I desired and feared came partly through his bloodline running through her, the openness and exuberance and all that hard focus she could sometimes call up. She got the drinking from him, too. Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man.

  He generally liked me, tended to treat me, I thought, as he might some rising young VP in his Boston-based holding company, alternatingly coddling and browbeating me. His talent didn’t necessarily reside in a wisdom for capital and markets but rather in an expert and unflinching opportunism, the hunch for the big kill. I could imagine him regarding a long shiny table of company directors with the savor of some poor bastard’s blood lolling like an unguent in the back of his mouth.

  During the first year of our marriage Lelia and I went up for a month to his beach house in Maine, and I remember how he’d have a glass in hand all day and evening, a lead crystal tumbler of scotch and ice. He possessed a certain grace with the glass in his hand, the way he’d hold himself with it thrust toward the ocean like one man’s saving beacon, the dying yellow light hitting it from behind him and sparking the amber. He drank only scotch, only one brand, and when I went down once to the cellar to fetch us more booze I stumbled on dozens of empty case boxes of it, their sleeves flattened and the bottoms punched out, the cardboard neatly stacked about the cellar like hay piles as high as my thighs. I liked drinking with him partly because it was something I didn’t do with my father, who never learned to enjoy the taste of liquor or the casual slip of conversation that alcohol made possible between people who would never otherwise be friends.

  “I’ll say it right now,” Stew said to me the night we arrived, “when I first found out that Lelia was dating you I didn’t like it one bit. I’m showing my cards here. Put yourself in my place. I’m saying, who in the hell were you? Sure, some bright Oriental kid. And then when she told us you were getting married, I nearly yanked the phone out of the wall. I said some things to her that night I now regret. Did she ever relate them to you?”

  “I think she said you weren’t ‘thrilled.’”

  He let out a shout, his booze spilling over the edge of his glass, now over the salt-bleached wood of the deck. I could see Lelia and Bimma (Stew’s companion at the time) through the small kitchen window, drying and putting away the dishes. He was leaning against the rail. “Typical of her. So I wasn’t so happy. I said some things about you. Heat-of-the-moment variety. But I didn’t know you then.”

  “You hardly know me now.”

  “Of course I do.” He jiggled his drink, as if to reset himself. “I can see you now, and that makes all the difference. Before that you were just a bad idea. I can see now why Lelia chose you. She’s always been a little too unsteady. I like to say she’s a Mack truck on Pinto tires. She needs someone like you. You’re ambitious and serious. You think before you speak. I can see that now. There’s so much that’s admirable in the Oriental culture and mind. You’ve been raised to be circumspect and careful. It’s no wonder we’re getting our heads handed to us. It’s a new world out there. Different players now. Different rules. Say, Lelia tells me your father is a fine businessman.”

  “Absolute best,” I said, taking a long sip.

  “He had to be,” he replied. “No one was going to help him if he failed. I wish I had spoken to him more at the wedding. I saw a man who didn’t have to make a display of himself. You knew he walked every inch to where he is. He owes no one, and he can’t conceive of being owed something. That’s the problem with us right now, it’s that we have a country here of people, both rich and poor, who think they’re entitled to everything good in life. I read a newspaper article about a young couple with two small children. You know the story. Hot-dog gumbo for dinner. Of course, neither of them is working. They’re on welfare and food stamps but they still somehow have enough money for cable and long distance. They tell the reporter they need them.”

  “They probably do.”

  “Balls! We’ve grown into a spoiled culture. Japan, thank God, is going the same way, the first signs are there. I go there a half dozen times a year and I can see things are on a downswing. You Koreans are really doing a number on them, in certain areas. You�
��re kicking some major butt around the world.”

  “I’m not kicking anyone’s butt, Stew.”

  “You’re young,” he said encouragingly, now sitting down next to me. He refilled my glass with two gurgling splashes from the bottle. “Listen. No more bullshit. I know what you do for a living. Wait, wait. Just hold on. Lelia never says anything, she refuses up and down, if you know what I mean, but I know. No shame necessary. I take one look at you and I know. A year ago we had to send a man into our Brussels R and D facility. Someone was leaking a new manufacturing process to a German competitor. The guy did a bang-up job. Deep deep throat. We were able to clean out the whole traitorous mess. Two shitheads are now in the cooler, including the manager of the lab. Even better, we’re still royally screwing the Germans over it. Icing pour moi.”

  “Beaucoup icing ici,” I said. I was officially drunk.

  “So here’s the moral of the story. The mole did the job, is what I’m saying. Truth? I love him. He exposed everyone’s ass. Now the facility is running cleaner and tighter than ever. I’ll tell you, we have plans to send a man into every single business we own.”

  “Someone is always stealing something.”

  “You read my mind,” Stew said, clinking my glass.

  By the end of the evening he grew quiet. “So tell me, Henry, are you two thinking about kids?”

  “We’re still thinking,” I answered. I realized Lelia hadn’t told him that she was already—unexpectedly—pregnant. It had happened almost immediately after the wedding. Our tiny not yet Mitt.

  “If money’s the issue. You know. We don’t have to tell our little girl. Just say you got a big bonus.”

  “Our money’s okay.”

  “Fine then. You know, I’ll admit I’m looking forward to having grandchildren. You never think about it until the opportunity arises. Suddenly, the idea has a true appeal to me. My only child’s children. I’m going to retire in a few years. I don’t golf or fish. Has my ex-wife talked this way?”

  “Not to me,” I told him. “I think we’re going to see her Labor Day weekend. I don’t know what she’s said to Lelia.”