Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “Right. Anyway, I don’t care what they look like. No offense. I thought about it and I don’t really give a damn if they look like a goddamn UNICEF poster, though I think they’ll probably be damn nice to look at. You two think about it. A little baby granddaughter, or grandson. Anyhow, just make some babies, for the old folks. Make some babies for us.”

  * * *

  It was late, past two in the morning, and Lelia and I lay down on the sofa bed. She left the reading light on. Although we weren’t avoiding it, we weren’t touching each other. I was still in my street clothes, on top of the blanket. Somehow she’d slipped beneath the covers. Molly finally called to say she wasn’t coming home, so it would just be us tonight.

  I wasn’t consciously thinking it at the time, but I know that part of me was patiently waiting to get to this point in the evening. We were past the first full sprint of drink and talk and the pace was easing, settling in. Where the runners exchange positions. Hoagland would say that now was the time for playing certain finesses, that in the wake of the activity arose those moments that could be manipulated. Carefully you marked out the openings; then you took one boldly, as if it didn’t matter what people could see. For him even your wife could be a subject.

  “Have you been writing since you’ve been back?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “No poems?” I asked.

  “Nothing besides letters.”

  I had noticed a few blue airmail letters stuck between her books.

  She went on, “Frankly, I’m on the brink of really quitting. I’m sick of it. No more poems, no more reviews, nothing. What do you think?”

  “You’ve tried to do that before.”

  “I’m more sure now,” she said, turning to me. “Believe me, I’ll live. It’s not dire. I decided that I’m not going to be one of those tortured anemic women who despite all signs believes in her micro-talent to the bitter end. It’s all too tacky and righteous, even for me. Is it possible to be resolved about not having much resolve?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Good. I guess I’ll have to stick with teaching speech. Truth is, Henry, I’m a schoolmarm, just like Mother before she exited real life. I’m destined for black knee-highs and pleated skirts. My life will be about hoping against hope for other people’s kids. Maybe my breasts will finally get big.”

  “I think you’ll be writing again soon.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said finally. “Just add it to the list of everything of mine that’s dead.”

  I said, “I’m not keeping lists.”

  She looked at me with some pathos. “I’m sorry. That was very passive-aggressive of me. Very unfair. I’m not proud, Henry. You don’t know how many times I tore it up in my mind.”

  “Before or after you got on the plane?”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  I could see she was willing. It was there in her face like an invitation. A different kind of opening. But suddenly I felt the urge to make something else of the moment.

  “At least you still write letters.”

  “Sure,” she said, pulling on the covers. “Letters being letters.”

  “Easy come easy go,” I said.

  She looked unsettled. “Are you saying something?”

  “I wish you would write me a letter sometime.”

  “Why should I? We talk between every meal, remember? That’s what we do. The premise of the movie about us is that we spontaneously combust if we don’t talk every six hours.”

  “We still have too many gaps,” I said. “Absolutely nothing about the last couple months.”

  Lelia was shaking her head. “I’ll give you a story for your gaps. Girl is married to boy. Boy makes girl crazy. Girl also makes girl crazy, so girl leaves for a while. Girl goes to island in the sun. Girl returns shiny and new.”

  I rolled off the bed. “What makes the girl shiny and new?”

  “You want me to say it?”

  “I want you to say it.”

  She rubbed at her temples with the insides of her wrists. That familiar exercise of hers, half rumination, half anxiety.

  She said, “I take it back. I’m not saying anything.”

  “Give me a name.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I need to know.”

  “No,” she insisted, kneeling up to face me. Her voice was strong. “You don’t need to know! What would you do with his name anyway? Would you run a background check? Find out if he’s planted bombs for the Red Brigades? You could get a list of the books he has out from the library. Maybe you could nail him for something good.”

  “Sleeping with another man’s wife.”

  “I think here we must use ‘wife’ technically.”

  “Then let’s. Did he please the wife?”

  She laughed. “God, I’d forgotten how much I love your language. I’m not answering your question except to say he isn’t important. Not to us, anyway.”

  “I’m noting the present tense. Letters being letters.”

  She hissed, “That’s the Henry I know!”

  “Fine. What did you say about us?”

  Lelia looked around for a cigarette but couldn’t find one. She was anxious herself. Beneath that amazingly capable, resilient shell I knew she was reeling, completely sick inside. Once, we got into a fairly serious car accident going to her mother’s house. I was too dazed to do much except sit on the side of the road with Mitt; Lelia was fine, and she was doing all the right things, setting up a flare, rerouting traffic, getting names and addresses of drivers and witnesses. But as we started driving away in the towman’s truck she asked him calmly to pull over. She threw open the door and ran to the bushes and vomited until she dry-heaved. We had to stop two more times before we got to the garage.

  Now she said, “I told him we were separated. He thought I meant divorce but I said that wasn’t it. I told him how I still felt love, but that I didn’t trust you anymore. That I didn’t know how you really felt about anything, our marriage. Me. You. I realized one day that I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on inside your head. Sometimes I think you’re not even here, with the rest of us, you know, engaged, present. I don’t know anymore why you do things. What you really want from me. I don’t know what you need in life. For example, do you need your job?”

  “I’m not understanding what you mean by need.”

  “See what I mean?” she shouted. “You know, I really honestly thought about it for the first time in Corsica, I mean really thought about what you do up there with your friends.”

  “We’ve talked about this.”

  “We haven’t talked about anything. Maybe it doesn’t matter to me anymore that we talk about it. I just see it as something not good. It’s as simple as that. I’m not going to invent things anymore for what you do. You think you can leave in the morning and play camera obscura all day and then come home and get into bed and say you’re glad to see me. Well, buster, people aren’t like that. I hope to high heaven you’re not really like that. You just can’t do that, turn it on and off. Not forever.”

  “This job isn’t forever.”

  “Fine. I don’t even think I’m asking you to quit. I’m not sure that your quitting tomorrow would make things different anyway. Maybe it’s a condition with you. I just know you have parts to you that I can’t touch. Maybe I figured out I didn’t want to get to them anymore. Or shouldn’t bother.”

  I tried to answer but I couldn’t. I wanted to explain myself, smartly, irrefutably. But once again I had nothing to offer. I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once. Dennis Hoagland and his private firm had conveniently appeared at the right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished. For that I felt
indebted to him for life. I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture.

  Lelia got up and checked the drawers of a desk. This time she found a cigarette. She got back into bed and lit the cigarette and took a quick, red-hot inhale. She’d been a pack-a-week smoker since high school, never more, never less. She stopped smoking while she was pregnant with Mitt and then until he started nursery school. I tried once or twice to pick up the habit, in sympathy with my wife, so we could sit together by the windows in the heat and not talk and not always have to look at one another, to have those tranquil moments true smokers seem to share and secretly count on. But I never could master it, I was overconscious of this thing burning down between my fingers, of its spew of smoke, the way Lelia would hunch over her knees with the butt in her right hand cast up by her head, and I simply ended up making her nervous.

  It was in those moments that you might have heard the first scant formalities arising between us, that careful polite mildly acidic phrasing Lelia grew up with and that I so naturally adopted, maybe even took advantage of, the kind of things Stew and Alice must have plied each other with, the I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, or the I must not have heard you correctly, darling.

  How similar it was with me, with my father in our house. Even the most minor speech seemed trying. To tell him I loved him, I studied far into the night. I read my entire children’s encyclopedia, drilling from aardvark to zymurgy. I never made an error at shortstop. I spit-shined and brushed his shoes every Sunday morning. Later, to tell him something else, I’d place a larger bouquet than his on my mother’s grave. I drove only used, beat-up cars. I never asked him for his money. I spoke volumes to him this way, speak to him still, those same volumes he spoke with me.

  I said, “You’re the only one for me. You know that’s what I want.”

  “I’m not sure,” she answered softly. “Sometimes I think you just do things to get what you want. Tonight, for example, you listened to the tapes. Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “It ought to be,” she answered. “But it’s not obvious, not to me. When you asked me for the tapes, I almost didn’t want to think about it. I wasn’t sure why you really wanted them.”

  “Christ, Lee, you must think I’m a real shit.”

  She didn’t answer. Then, “Just think about it. You haven’t said his name more than four or five times since it happened. You haven’t said his name tonight. Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you say his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was.”

  “What was it?” I said softly, hearing the sudden quiver in her voice.

  “It was the worst thing that ever happened to us,” she said, her fist knuckling down on the bed with each word. “It was the worst thing we ever did together. Our utterly lowest moment. All backward, all wrong. Just so dumb.”

  “It was a terrible accident.”

  “An accident?” She cried, nearly hollering. She covered her mouth. Her voice was breaking. “How can you say it was an accident? We haven’t treated it like one. Not for a second. Look at us. Sweetie, can’t you see, when your baby dies it’s never an accident. I don’t care if a truck hit him or he crawled out a window or he put a live wire in his mouth, it was not an accident. And that’s a word you and I have no business using. Sometimes I think it’s more like some long-turning karma that finally came back for us. Or that we didn’t love each other. We thought our life was good enough. Maybe it’s that Mitt wasn’t all white or all yellow. I go crazy thinking about it. Don’t you? Maybe the world wasn’t ready for him. God. Maybe it’s that he was so damn happy.”

  She was crying a little now, her sobs coming evenly, almost controlled, as though she’d cried enough over the years that this is what was left to her, to both of us, just trickles and weariness.

  We lay down together but we weren’t touching. Her eyes were closed, though just barely, the lids frail and milky and almost transparent in the dim light. The heat of her face, her throat, drew me closer to her and the tiny hairs on my cheeks and brow tingled from the nearness. For it was nearness and not touch that had always compelled me. I have only known proximity. She didn’t move away. I didn’t try to touch her. I knew I shouldn’t. I just closed my eyes, and I slid to her until I could feel the warmth of my own face play back against hers, the reflection like an instant map of heat. I thought I could read every contour of her skin and bone, every relief of her flesh. What it all said. As if I could ever read her mind.

  I finally met Kwang a week after the scouting. I was charting out with Janice his April and May schedules of meetings and speaking engagements in the expansive war room of his Flushing headquarters. His own small office was set in the back of the war room. The activity ceased for a few seconds as people near the door greeted him. He was alone, which I thought peculiar, because I had assumed that there would be someone beside him at all times feeding him information and strategy and advice. He was only a councilman, but as Jenkins told us our efforts were already acquiring the shape of a campaign, a full-blown interborough enterprise. It was usually Sherrie Chin-Watt or Cameron Jenkins who was with him, less often Janice or some underling like Eduardo or me.

  Today he was supposed to be working quietly at home, but here he was, come in for an unexpected visit to his staffers. They seemed to appreciate his presence, which they rightly sensed was solely for them, particularly the younger volunteers, who I could see wanted to say something to him but didn’t and stayed back, nervous and excited.

  But everyone took notice of him. From the moment he stepped into the room, I thought each of us was suddenly oriented toward him. Janice and I were standing at the chalkboard in the middle of the room. She didn’t say anything but smiled and turned to the board casually; I would have thought she was generally accustomed to his entrances, but I noticed that her posture had shifted in acknowledgment of the man approaching at her back. She continued chalking times and places on the slate, but I saw that her eyes weren’t following the motion of her hand. I thought she had it the way everyone else did, the way she was waiting for his touch on her arm or his voicing of her name. It made me think that she was a little in love with him, the same way Eduardo and the other people in the room were. The same way, perhaps, that I would be. Somehow you felt for him a pin-ache of unneeded love on top of the respect and hope and plain like of him, that little bit of extra feeling that must separate even a good man and politician from a natural leader of people.

  I moved toward the channel made by the desks and chairs. He was joking now with Eduardo. The two of them stood close to each other feigning the movements of boxers, their heads weaving, bobbing, tucked tight behind ready hands. Kwang was around my height, maybe five-ten or so, way above Eduardo, but giving away at least thirty pounds to him. Eduardo had been a junior boxer, as had Kwang. They first met at a boys’ club visit of Kwang’s where Eduardo was coaching. Now Kwang reached out and jabbed gently at Eduardo’s temple and Eduardo took a step back as if stunned and then staggered onto the edge of his desk. Kwang leaned into him with a flurry to the midsection. Eduardo doubled over, protecting himself. They were both grimacing, grinning, swinging.

  Janice shouted through her hands, “Someone stop this massacre!”

  A handkerchief landed at their feet. Technical knockout.

  He put his arm around Eduardo. He nodded to Janice. Then he noticed me. I wanted to look away but didn’t dare. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, or worried by what he might somehow be able to see. A beginner thinks this, despite many hours of painstaking preparation. It is unavoidable. For the first few assignments you feel perfectly transparent, as if the man or woman in question can witness every leap of your heart. You think they can sense every false move. But in successive turns you grow an opacity, a pearl
-like glow whose surface can repel all manner of heat and light.

  What I saw now was the face of a recognition, the same face that Emile Luzan offered me that first day, too, in his cluttered third-floor office in Babylon, Long Island. The good doctor from Manila. From the very start he took my hand and said simply that I should not worry. I didn’t know what to make of his gesture save its unorthodoxy, its colloquial and unprofessional tone. I thought immediately that he was treating me differently from his other patients and rather than feign an ignorance that might alert his suspicions I asked if this was his usual method.

  “Certainly it is not,” he said to me, chuckling in his ho-ho way. “But my feeling after speaking with you now for half the session is that perhaps only a small part of your difficulties is attributable to biochemical issues, if at all. I don’t think medication is in order, although you seem to feel it necessary. Were you someone else I’d probably just follow your wishes. I shouldn’t tell you that, but I will. Certainly like all of us you have traditional issues to deal with. Parentage, intimacy, trust.

  “But hand in hand with all that is the larger one of where we live, my friend, and who you are within that place. Or believe yourself to be. We have our multiple roles like everyone else. Now throw in an additional dimension. A cultural one. Cast it all, if you will, in a broad yellow light. Let us see where this leads you and me.”

  For now, I must say to the good doctor, it led to John Kwang.

  Kwang certainly didn’t know who I was but he regarded me as if he were seeing a memory. He seemed to light up as he moved past in his pressed, clean-smelling suit, grazing my shoulders and arms with his. I thought that this was how he moved through a crowded room of his loyal cadre, baring his tiny perfect hands, him looking at each of us at least once, connecting and lighting up.

  “Eduardo!” he said into the air.

  “Yes, boss!”

  “All your work done?”