The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  EIGHT

  AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH DAY, for a few hours or so, Sylvie could believe she was herself. She would arise just before Ames and fill the coffeepot with grounds and then get fresh water from the pump outside and balance it on the single-burner field stove while she set out the tin mugs on the table. Soon enough they would eat breakfast with the rest of the orphanage, but, as was their habit back home, they’d have coffee before doing anything else. Sitting in their nightclothes, the brief, wordless slip of time as they gradually came awake was as unburdened as any moments of their marriage. It was as though each understood the other was as blank of feelings or thoughts as himself, or herself, not yet angling on a purpose for the day, or on any previous emotions or feeling between them, comfortable in the simple animal appreciation of nearness, if not togetherness. It was almost as if they were back in Seattle, in their small, upright house in Laurelhurst, time graced by a merciful repose. But soon enough the spell would be broken by Ames getting up and dressing himself for the day, the final punctuation the heavy scrape of his shoes against the floorboards as he pulled them out from beneath the bed, and Sylvie would feel the first tiny tears under her skin, as though the flesh were being loosed from beneath, pulled down toward a core that she knew had no bottom.

  By ten o’clock, an unmooring seemed imminent. She would be teaching an English conversation class to the younger children, asking questions of each one in turn: “Would you like another glass of milk?” or “Which is your favorite kind of candy?” or “What is the date of your birth?” And while the child gamely answered, she would be certain that the rest of them could somehow sense the growing rime of hollowness developing inside her, even if none showed anything but the usual enthusiasms; the disparity only made her more self-conscious, and, just as she thought her mother might counsel her, she regained a hold and girded herself and matched their brightness and zeal, and this carried her through to the midday meal, where she would make the motions of eating. Although she had from the first day found the soups and vegetables the aunties prepared to be flavorful and often delicious, especially considering the meager budget they had, her body no longer craved the food. Now that she was on the high slow horse again she consumed just enough to sustain her until the next meal, spark enough of her blood so that she wouldn’t grow dizzy or faint. She was trying to convince herself as much as everyone else. She had begun to feel again that she no longer had an understanding of hunger, a bowl full of barley rice as significant to her as if it were mounded with pebbles.

  Her habit was as casual as was possible, and had been so since the beginning. It was why she could almost believe it was not a habit, and never would be. Like someone else who loved eating chocolate a little too much and from time to time decided chocolate didn’t exist and never had, blotting it from her visceral memory with a thoroughness that was itself a serial compulsion. She would go for many months-once even a year and a half, in the period following her swift marriage to Ames and their first attempts to have a child-and not feel the smallest prickle for that cool, sweet burning, that glimmering river, if anything marveling at the fullness of her distance from it, her perfect liberty. And yet what would spur a change was not some unhappy memory or incident or a physical need but rather a sudden, panicked thought that this free state could not possibly go on. In this sense her lapses were predicated upon what could only be seen as an evaporation of faith. Her thoughts would branch and multiply, and it was inevitable then that certain remembrances would take over, or maybe it would be her feelings of shame and guilt before Ames. He had little idea of the woman he had married, and treated her only with adoring, deep respect for her abilities and her mind; he had encouraged her plans to attend medical school, even after she became a mother, and they’d talked about her restarting his pediatric practice as he continued with his ministries.

  He couldn’t know how she had passed her adolescence after she returned from China, how in her second year of college she befriended a fellow volunteer named Jim while working at a mission soup kitchen. He was a middle-aged man, in his early forties. She had pursued him, always initiating their conversations and even asking him to get a coffee at the diner around the corner. He worked as the night watchman at a textile factory, and after her aunt went to sleep she crept out of their bungalow, holding her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other, trying not to breathe, and ran down the hill to catch the night bus that would take her toward downtown. Jim was gentle and soft-spoken and obviously bighearted, but there was something ruined about him and it was this that she always saw in his face when he opened the alley door, his expression pleased but with the shattered eyes of a man who could see perhaps only the drenching sadness in beauty. He never talked about his life or anything further removed than a few weeks in the past, and they would sit together in a tiny office, drinking the root beer he’d brought for them. Jim had a youthful face with a white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his ear, the top of which was gone. They talked about books and sang songs and eventually he apologized for being the worst kind of depraved, awful man who would have a schoolgirl as a drinking friend, and it was then that she would lightly kiss him, on the mouth, to quell his conscience. He kissed her back with his dry hard lips and she had to hold him tight, for otherwise he’d push away, and then they wrapped their arms around each other while lying down on the wood floor on which he had spread a thick bolt of surplus velvet curtain, worthless because of the malformed pattern of its brocade. He’d lined the walls, too, with other, mismatched, defectively manufactured curtains and bedspreads, and the effect beneath the dim electric light was of a carnival funhouse owner’s idea of a bordello. But to Sylvie it was simply Jim’s attempt to make her feel comfortable. He suffered from a severely bad back and the floor gave him some relief from the constant pain, but it was the sips he took from a dark brown bottle that finally seemed to transport him. His voice grew husky and the suddenly huge discs of his eyes took on the same shade of the bottle glass and he clung to her tightly, telling her again how ashamed he felt that she should be wasting time with such a sorry man. Of course he knew something had to be wrong with her, too, by virtue of her presence.

  “You’re not sorry at all,” she told him, as always. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Then what am I? Why do you keep coming here? You could be going out with any boy in your school.”

  “I’m not interested in any of them,” she said, which was true. The boys were nice enough and certainly interested in her but she found them all too keen and bristling, like frantically spawning fish. But she didn’t answer Jim, either, for although she would have liked to say that she was here because he was thoroughly kind (which he was, without any effort, to her and to everyone he met), it was in fact because he was also frail, if not somehow wrecked, that she was drawn to him. He was overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn’t a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it off.

  What he sipped along with his root beer was a tincture of opium, which he had been given many years earlier for dysentery while hospitalized in France at the end of the Great War. He always had some now and although she kept asking him if she could try it he refused, saying it was dangerous medicine, but one night when he left her for five minutes to make his rounds she dug in his coat pocket and took a small swallow, and then another. The thick, sweetly fragrant syrup instantly coated her entire insides, the sensation the exact opposite, it would turn out, of the precipitous detachment she would later suffer, hotly fusing her to herself in a manner that made her feel whole again, even if she were no more substantial than ether and light. Years later, married to Ames Tanner, she would seek out that feeling again, though it would come in the form of a vial and needle, procured in the service alley behind the city hospital by a person met, again, through a mission, though this one a client.

  When Jim returned he could tell so
mething was different and immediately smelled the tincture on her breath but before he could get cross she kissed him again. He balked at first but then melted into her as he had not allowed himself previously, the sudden force of his arms momentarily alarming her but then just as swiftly firing her desire to make love to him. She was not saving herself for any reason or person-for what propriety, what realm, would she be doing so?-and as such there was nothing stopping her from being with him now, in this oddly, lovingly enrobed little room. She tugged at his belt to unbuckle it but he twisted away and when she clutched at it again he held on to her hands.

  “Please turn off the light,” he said.

  She rose and flicked it off and the room went completely black. She didn’t know if it was the perfect dark or his medicine but she floated back to him on a silken wing and when they began kissing again she felt a wonderful new ache flooding her limbs, filling her torso. She slipped off her underpants. Then he was busy kissing her and caressing her hair and she found his belt again and undid his trousers. Her long skirt had ridden up and he lay atop her but there was nothing but his bare thighs against hers and she kept waiting for the pushing that didn’t come. She reached down to touch him and when she found him he was hardly there, not tiny but empty, more skin than blood, and beneath it there was almost nothing there at all, just a node seamed by a hardened, smooth line of a scar in the flesh.

  “I’m no good,” he whispered to her in the dark. He was crying. “I’ve been useless since the war.”

  “You’re not useless,” she said to him. She guided his wet face to her chest, the way she’d once seen her mother do to her father as she peered at them through a hole in the rice paper screen. She guided him lower still, feeling the cooling trail of his tears on her belly, her hip, the crook of her thigh, but he stopped before he went any lower.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You can keep going, if you want.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Yes you do. Just kiss me.”

  “How?”

  “However you want to.”

  “Just kiss you?”

  “Yes.”

  And when he did she was surprised by them both, their shared ignorance in the act an object lesson in how experience only mattered if one let it, his mapping of her with the gentlest, humblest fervor innocently building her up before smashing her in the darkness, exquisitely obliterating her again.

  The pattern of the evening was reprised each time she visited him, once a week throughout that winter, Sylvie staying with him until five, when the first buses began running; she’d ride back up through the fogged-in hills to her aunt’s house with her mind similarly sodden and obscured but her body still bounding and alive with his hands and his lips and then soon enough the taste of the tincture, craving it not in her own mouth but in her bones. Each time she’d take a little more, Jim warning her to be careful and that it was not meant for a healthy young woman, but she knew she wasn’t a tenth as sturdy as she appeared to Jim or to her aunt or to everyone else who saw her as a beautiful, somewhat aloof, scholarly girl who had so quickly righted herself after such a lamentable family tragedy, whose good long years spanned out freely before her. But the recent past was a well-rutted road, still the only way she knew to get back and forth to the present, and as she went to her classes at the college, attended church with Aunt Lizzie, a part of her couldn’t help but wish to run to Jim and the pitch-black room at the factory, drink in the potion and transmogrify, be anything but her mortal self.

  It was soon after she was introduced to Ames Tanner, by a deacon of the church whose family was a longtime acquaintance of her parents, that she decided to stop seeing Jim. Ames hadn’t even asked her out yet that but she knew, he would imminently and that if he was truly as he appeared, she would be with him always. She loved seeing Jim and loved his gentleness and modesty but it was really a love of cloistering and smallness and her own physical pleasure, all of which she already understood were signs of her ugly narcissism, her insoluble weakness.

  Ames Tanner, by contrast, would compel her into the wider world: he was freshly ordained, and a pediatrician as well, and he had great plans for his new church, not only for its congregation but for the charitable works he would urge it to pursue in the wider community. He had the same incandescence in his eyes that her parents had, that cool flame that seemed an uncanny reincarnation of them both, and he had asked her right away, as they sat for tea and cookies in the warm basement of the church, if she would come to his congregation and recount her parents’ dedication to improving the circumstances of the poor and powerless. Like everyone else, he knew generally what had happened to them, but he was one of the few who didn’t shy away from mentioning them.

  So it was with foreknowledge that it would be the last time that she went to Jim. But once there, she couldn’t bear to say anything; he had brought her a bouquet of dried flowers that night, in addition to the root beer and of course the half-pint bottle, its glass the color of dark caramels. He’d tacked different fabrics on the walls. For the first time in many weeks she declined to take her sips (he’d had to buy extra bottles from his friend at the hospital), and as he slowly twisted the cap back on, his expression was that of a prisoner being led down into an isolation hole, regarding her as the man might check the sky. She thanked him for the flowers and hugged and kissed him and he hugged her back stiffly.

  “Should I turn off the light?” she asked him.

  “Okay.”

  But in the customary dark she had some trouble finding him. “Over here,” he said, from the far corner. When they touched it was a minor collision, the crown of her head against his chin. He was sitting up rather than lying on the curtain he had spread out, and before she could apologize he took her shoulders and pinned her hard enough that she could feel the points of her shoulder blades grating against the floor. He took off her clothes. He wasn’t kissing her this time but using his hands, searching her out as if he had only a few scant moments to get to know her and pinching her nape, her nipples, rooting his thumbnail into her belly button until she thought it might have begun to bleed. And yet she willed herself not to tense under his hands; she laid herself open. She wanted to show him that it was all fine, that it was all welcome, that no matter what his compulsion or need she would try to take pleasure now, genuinely and not in spite, for she knew he could only feel any sexual pleasure through her. It was a surprise, then, when he tugged down his trousers and got between her legs, began driving into her, though there was nothing but a rubbing and the spurs of his own narrow hips knocking into her own; he kept on and she urged him, gripping his buttocks to pull him to the right rhythm, and when he matched it with his own fingers in her mouth and in her rear, simultaneously reaching as if he were going to clasp her in the middle, she lost herself as she never had before.

  She waited to leave until he thought she was asleep and had gone on his rounds. It was cowardly of her, but he hadn’t said a word to her after their lovemaking and she thought it would be a mercy for them both if she simply disappeared. But it was still an hour before the buses began running, and she walked all the way home in the steady, chilly March rain, wholly accepting the misery of being soaked to her bones. It took her an hour to climb the long road up the hill. The next two days she was fever-wracked and shaky, her aunt feeding her soda crackers and beef tea in bed, wondering aloud how her skirt and sweater could have gotten so wet, then telling her in the next breath that Ames Tanner had dropped by while she was asleep, leaving a note card that he’d inscribed in the cleanest, upright hand: “Will you give me the honor of learning more about your experiences? I am eager for your wisdom! Faithfully yours, A.T.”

  Ames took her to lunch the following week, and to the movie theater and dinner the week after, not making any small talk but rather asking about her family’s travels in Africa and China, about the conditions they encountered and how her parents set up the ministries and schooling at each of the missions, about the other
kinds of projects they instituted, in mercantilism and agriculture and disease control. He wanted to know how they had gone about learning the local languages, or if it was difficult to work with other missionaries, particularly the Catholic ones. He didn’t ask about the circumstances of her parents’ deaths, nor in fact speak of them as if they were even gone. She was glad to talk about them this way, for he made her feel as if they were not just alive but still out in the world somewhere, still setting up missions, still aiding and organizing and teaching, and she found herself recounting their activities of those last years in more detail than she had offered anyone else, including her aunt. He’d have her celebrate them, shout their praises if she would, make them gleam again by their brightest light.

  He did ask, however, as he drove her back to her aunt’s house in his Packard sedan (his family was wealthy, being prominent in the timber business), whether she’d had serious boyfriends in her life, or any present suitors, and she immediately said no, though flashing on Jim. Ames nodded, still quite serious but obviously pleased. She hadn’t volunteered again at that particular soup kitchen, but she couldn’t help but think about Jim sitting in the dim factory office, the various curtains still tacked on the walls, nursing his bottle of the tincture. At certain moments late at night she craved the taste of it terribly, and longed for him as well, and she found she could master both impulses by kneading herself raw with the back of her thumb until the sensation was only, solely, painful; she would make her body quell its own urges with an even sharper reality. For she knew she must not hide out any longer. She must climb out from every cave of her making. Ames ’s presence in her life and his interest in her parents was in fact a blessing; he would bring her forth, even if her memories of those last hours might be fully rekindled.