The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  A girl of five or six ran over and crouched behind the low brick wall that marked the border of the patio, theatrically shushing them with a finger to her lips. The seeker ran over to them immediately and found her out and the little girl must have believed herself betrayed because she made a sour face to Hector. He made one back, but with silliness, his eyes crossed, his front teeth bared. The two girls ran off, giggling.

  “We’re like an old married couple,” Dora said, careful to mock the idea in case he took it wrongly. Hector didn’t reply but in fact he had thought it, too, recalling how his folks in their best times would enjoy sitting together on the porch of their house, wryly and good-naturedly commenting on the children’s games and pouring gin-spiked lemonade for each other into tall glasses of chipped ice. Among the children there was a competition to get a sip from Jackie’s glass, which he’d offer to the winner of whatever game they were playing, every now and then letting one of them down the rest of it, which inevitably turned into a competition unto itself. It was an age of such things, when they were all together during the war, his father 4-F, and at least in the private realm of the house at ease in his skin as he never was at the factory or in the pubs. His mother was in her prime beauty then, as lovely as any woman in town, but too young and naïve to know its measure, and she wore her splendor like an ill-fitting crown, half-embarrassed by the effect she’d have on perfect strangers on the street or at the green market.

  “Dinner was real good,” he said to Dora.

  “You’re being charitable. My mother certainly wouldn’t have thought it up to snuff. I bet you have women cooking for you all the time.”

  “Yeah? How many have you seen hanging around here?”

  “Well, you’ve just asked them to be scarce, I’m sure. At least for these couple weeks, right?”

  “I suppose,” Hector said, going along with her. “And maybe next week, too.” And while this clearly pleased her plenty he also immediately wished to take the utterance back. He’d promised himself not to speak with her of anything outside a day in the future, even as he caught himself thinking more and more of times ahead, picturing some nice places they could escape to, some rustic fantasy, how they might drive in her car to a cold clear lake in the woods and hole up in a cabin like a pair of fugitives, eating whatever they could catch, drinking from a stream, feathering their bed with garlands of young ferns.

  She clinked her wineglass to his beer and for a while they drank without talking as evening began to descend. It was an almost gracious feeling, as if they were taking the air in a park, as if he were a decent man and she a more than decent woman and the next day was a prospect they neither feared nor dreaded nor were already trying to forget. Perhaps they were even drinking for the sheer pleasure of it, for the easy communion and ritual, though they had little prior experience and were likely confusing the good feeling with the gentle weather and peachy light that was a world distant from the sorry pit that was Smitty’s.

  In fact, Hector was thinking how they might not go back there for a while; they’d already skipped a couple of nights in the last week, which was noted by the fellows with mentions of how they’d gone AWOL, and also a few unmistakably pitying looks, and it had struck him on entering that being with Dora had reanimated his sense of shame. He could see the old picture of himself at his spot at the bar, vainly stuck in the hard amber of his gruffness, his solitude, his strangely sound physical being, these integuments only momentarily breached whenever he was called out to fight (or, more rarely, fuck). Conversely, it was no surprise that he was feeling a little vulnerable again, as though there were a rent in his chain-mail vest, a newly opened seam along the underbelly that neatly paired with a very real scar of Dora’s, a shiny inset line where she’d torn herself in youth, slipping through a deer fence. Whenever he brushed or touched her there she flinched and somehow he’d feel a nervy tickle of phantom pain and be renewed in his resolve that he would try his best not to bring her any heartache.

  “I was thinking again about that woman,” she said, peering down into the wine in her glass. “You know, the one who sent that man to talk to you at Smitty’s?” She pretended to search her mind for the name. “Was it June? Yes, that’s right, isn’t it? June Singer. What was it that she wanted?”

  He had already had to fib the day after the man first appeared and tell Dora that June was just someone he’d met in the war and later worked for, doing odd jobs and chores, which is what she had asked him to do again.

  “She won’t come around,” he told her now. “I said I wasn’t i nterested.”

  “Seems like she could get anybody to do odd jobs. Why should she ask you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, which he didn’t, though it was only because he had refused to let any part of his mind alight on her. There were entire worlds of reasons for her to have sought him out, the most immense of which was what finally happened at the orphanage, and with Sylvie Tanner. But there was nothing but blackness to go over again. Of course he had been with June even afterward, a very brief and strange period that led to his bringing her over, as his legal bride, though once landed they had just as quickly separated, neither in the least inclined during the past twenty-six years to do anything but wholly forget the other existed.

  “You must have been important to her somehow,” Dora said. “A woman wouldn’t send somebody otherwise. She would have found somebody else. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  She finished what was left in her wineglass and then filled it up again. “It doesn’t matter to me. You don’t have to say any more. I don’t care how many women you’ve had in your life. Past or present.”

  “Present?”

  “I’m just telling you I don’t care at all.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you. You’re not the only one with options, you know. I work with lots of people at the furniture store. Most of them are men.”

  “I’m sure they are.”

  “The manager even asked me out the other day, right out of the blue. I’ve worked with him for years. He said I was looking ‘vivacious’ these days. He’s okay, I guess, but to be polite I said I had to think about it. What do you think about that?”

  “I guess you ought to do what you want.”

  “That’s the question for us, isn’t it?”

  When he didn’t say anything Dora got up and asked him if he would like another slice of pie.

  “Sure,” he said. “But I’ll go get it.”

  “I’m going inside anyway, for my shawl. It’s suddenly getting cooler. Like a storm is coming.”

  “I’ll move everything back inside.”

  “No, I like the air. Let’s stay out here as long as we can. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As she passed him he hooked her thigh with his hand and drew her close, a brackish-sweet air from their earlier exertions filtering through the thin muslin fabric of her skirt. The scent of them was heavy and he breathed it in deep, to let it etherize him, though it worked the opposite effect. He cupped her broad bottom and she responded by pressing his face into her belly, pinching the roots of his dark thick hair between her fingers.

  “I want to stay here with you,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  “You don’t have to say that. I’m a big girl.”

  “I’m not saying anything I don’t want to.”

  She leaned down and pecked him lightly and he kissed her back with a force and fullness that seemed to draw off all her blood and then fill her up again, her cheeks and neck flushed, dewy. His mouth peppered the patches of color on her pale skin, taking in her ear and then her throat, gliding down to the soft flesh above her breastbone and resting there while he guided her leg until she sat straddling him in the rickety chair, which creaked loudly and sharply.

  “We’re going to break it,” Dora said, backing off slightly.

  “You can fall
on me.”

  “Aren’t those children still around?”

  “They all went inside,” he said, but only because there were no more reports of their play. She didn’t look around, either. Her long skirt tented their legs and while kissing him she reached beneath and unbuttoned his trousers and raised herself just enough to shift them down. Her own underclothing was in the way and he tugged at it and she simply pulled it to the side, clearing a way, recalling to him again what he liked best about her, her plain good sense and lack of put-on shame and fundamental ease with her body.

  “Can I tell you something?” she said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I don’t have to. I can shut up.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you know you are a very good-looking man? It’s hard to see it because you don’t wear it easily. But, honestly, you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever seen, much less known. Only the funny-looking ones have ever gone for me. I guess poor Sloan was the last example. And there you were, every night at Smitty’s, with no one to appreciate you. You don’t know any of this, do you?”

  He didn’t answer, because it was always easier not to say that he did know it, and had known so all his life, how he was sorry for the specific misery his appearance had brought him and others, and for what? For the great sum of nothing.

  “Now I’ve killed the mood.”

  “No, you haven’t,” he said, pulling her closer.

  “You like it out in the open air, don’t you, mister?” she whispered, hovering above the now high-angling press of him.

  “Must be your fault.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said, teasing him, slowly spanning him, like a blind, knowing snail.

  “You’re ready yourself,” he said.

  “I was going in for more pie.”

  “You can go.”

  “I will.”

  But she didn’t, nor did Hector stir a hair, both of them content to linger in the half-light. They could not know that their pose from any distance appeared to be as chastely still as sculpture. Desire in Middle Life. And it was in this marble calm that Dora took on a sudden shine, her skin and hair lustrously abloom with the wondrous feed of stopped time, her heart as well as her mind momentarily unburdened of their accreted regrets, self-lashings, those long-ingrained gravities, so that it seemed to Hector that she was thusly gliding above him at a tiny but still measurable remove, which was in fact a blessing; he could handle her quite near, though much closer and he might panic, maybe cut and run. And he didn’t wish anymore to do that.

  Afterward, while Dora slept in the bedroom, he found himself cleaning up the apartment. They had started early and it wasn’t even dark yet, just past eight o’clock. She always dozed a little after sex. Plus, she’d had a whole bottle of wine, and the better half of a second. He’d drunk plenty himself but as usual he remained more lucid than he preferred to be, the beer more like coffee to his system, arresting nothing useful (like memory), and blotting only his already paltry need for sleep.

  He quietly washed the soiled dishes and pots they’d left in their haste to get to the bed, then swept the floors and polished the counters and the stovetop. From his job he had all the supplies one might need, but since living here he had never once bothered to clean the place thoroughly. Once or twice a month he’d make a cursory pass with a sponge and broom. No one had ever visited before, and he wouldn’t have cared anyway, but mostly the apartment was messy because he no longer registered the layers of grime and dust. For if you suspected you were immortal, if you were afraid you might never be extinguished, the evidence of which had accrued enough over the years to convince him to almost believe its truth-the way his wounds, even the seemingly grave ones he’d suffered during the war, healed with a magical swiftness; that he had aged in a way that appeared to the eye as if there were no other time except this one, no prior or future state-the concern for something like cleanliness, strangely enough, receded.

  But Dora, thank goodness, was solely of this world, and for her sake he moved on to the living area, mopping the coffee table with a rag and knocking the seat cushions of dust outside on the patio. In the bathroom he wiped the sink basin and mirror and brushed out the toilet and then vigorously scrubbed the tub twice of its scum, the second time with a fresh rag, for she’d surely enjoy a bath in the morning. He could at least be an attendant, make things serviceable and pleasant for her, if not grand. He did such work at the mall, but there was a satisfaction in doing the same for Dora that made him think his own best usefulness was in these small, unheroic tasks, that his destiny in this realm was to take the form of the most minor of tools, a not solely metaphorical stain scrubber, or hammer, or rag. That contrary to what his father had always fantasized for him in his too proud and envious way, the ideal scale of his labors would be thusly unreported and fleeting, spot-small.

  And the realization left Hector awash in the feeling that he was finally doing something right, something decent, and he quietly donned the clean T-shirt and trousers from on top of the bureau, careful not to disturb Dora from her downy wine-imbued slumber. Let her abide. He now had a good mission; headed for the bodega off Broad, he would buy some things for her, purchase not his usual canned spaghetti and pork and beans and box of saltines but what he thought Dora might fancy when she awoke, some fresh eggs and bacon and Portuguese sweet rolls and tea. He’d buy some jam as well, maybe a couple of flavors, even three. And on the way back he’d stop, too, at the liquor store for a bottle of wine for her and a six-pack of beer for himself, in case another thirst caught them in the middle of the night, or after breakfast. He checked the meager cash in his other trousers (he didn’t own a wallet) and went hunting for bills and coins strewn loosely about the apartment-nearly twenty-two dollars in sum-and went out into the Fort Lee night, his pockets bulging with the scrounged change.

  The skies were clouded over and where the streetlights had burned out it was pitch-dark. In the small brick row houses the older folks were turning in for the evening, their upstairs rooms lamped with bed-table lights or the colder flicker of television, the cast beams striping the tiny front yards and walks as if they were a miniature tabletop landscape, all of them stitched together by the line of mature if stunted trees growing in the median and the parked cars fitting exactly on the block in a serendipitously bespoke measure. It was mostly serene save for the droning air-conditioning units and the hidden cadres of urban locusts, whose competing songs on certain unbearable nights felt more like waves of heat than sound. On the main avenue there was disco music and thumping jungle-like music and the reports of traffic and people calling out of cars toward the grimy storefronts, where neighborhood youth accosted in fair share one another and the indifferent beat cops and the young immigrant couples in love, the bums rooting in the wire trash barrels for the dregs of beers and take-out food, all of them content in the now fast-cooling air. And had they carefully regarded the broad-shouldered man in the white T-shirt and dungarees stepping into the overbright bodega, his scarred, battered hands selecting from the shelves the fruits of this most modest human errand (the kind he’d avoided for decades), they might still have agreed that he was indeed cut from an antiquated cloth, this long-lost bolt of hero blue.

  But of course he wasn’t.

  After he paid for the jams and some fresh hot fried bread he went to the liquor store across the street and spent what was left, and when he stepped outside again, laden with her morning repast, the briefest light rain drifted down. Then it was gone. The warmed, dampened sidewalks reminded him of certain sweet hours of childhood-well before he was much of a man, well before anyone (the neighborhood girls, the married women, the barmen) had found him out-when the summer torrents would interrupt the furious play of the street and they’d have to wait beneath the sagging porches for its sheets to roll past before they skipped back out, the smell of the damp concrete enveloping them in an odor earthen and stony but still creaturely, alive; he would have the sensation that he was on the broad back
of an immense being, as unregistered as any sated flea, and he felt the same way now, virtually bodiless, happily ignored, free to go his unsung way.

  ELEVEN

  A TAP ON THE CAR WINDOW roused June; it was the drawn, dour face of Clines, come back out from the diner. She found herself braced against the throbs sharply echoing through her. The pills were not working. Or maybe she had spit them up; there was a shiny patch on the vinyl upholstery of the door panel. She felt as if someone were walking through the house of her body with a crate of porcelain vases and systematically entering each room and rearing back and smashing them against the walls. Clines got into the driver’s seat and asked what they should do, and through gritted teeth she answered that they would keep going, taking two more pills in the hope that they would give her some relief.

  But before they had any effect Clines informed her that they had turned onto the street where Hector Brennan lived. Twilight had just passed into evening but she could still make out the character of the neighborhood, the rows of squat one-story houses with properties separated by chain-link fencing and narrow driveways. The houses were in generally poor condition and Hector’s apartment complex was even worse, decrepit and badly in need of painting, its front yard peppered with household junk and broken toys. The trees were gnarly and unkempt. A trio of unattended dogs ran about on the sidewalk, garrulously barking at one another. So this was where he lived. She thought of all the elapsed years and the other grubby details that Clines had found out about him and she wondered if this was a life that had befallen him or whether he had sentenced himself to it, as people sometimes do, in punishment right or not.