American Woman

by Susan Choi

  “What?” said Sandy sharply.

  “What?” Frazer answered, turning, with raised eyebrows, to look at her.

  “What do you mean? She’s with you, isn’t she?”

  Frazer laughed. “Did she say that?”

  “Say that? She left here with you! You were taking care of her.”

  “I still am. I set her up in a great situation, but you know how independent she is. She doesn’t need me to hold her hand every second. Lately we’ve just fallen out of touch. That’s the way it is in New York. She’s a real New Yorker now.”

  “But she’s not even in the city. That’s what she says in her letters.”

  “No, of course, right, but she’s in New York State.” Frazer’s heart had sped up.

  “I guess. I thought she might be in New Jersey or something. She lives near a river.”

  “The Hudson?” Frazer said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the postmark of her letters?”

  “I don’t know. They’re for William. She sends them to Dana in Boulder and Dana recopies them and sends them to William. But the last time I talked to Dana she said Jenny sounded real good. Doing well. I can’t believe you’re not in touch with her.”

  “That’s the way it goes when people leave the city—it’s really hard to stay in touch. Does Dana have her address?”

  “Yeah. When William writes he sends the letters to Dana and they do the same thing going backwards. She sends them to Jenny.”

  Frazer turned away again and stared at the aquarium. Many of the smooth rocks turned out, on close examination, to be turtles. “I guess William writes her a lot,” he said after a minute.

  “God, yeah,” Sandy said.

  “How is William?” Frazer heard himself say, though he suddenly felt the same way Tom had sounded: concussed.

  “Oh,” Sandy sighed. “Every time I go see him I cry. I don’t think it cheers him up much.”

  A sound came from the end of the hall and Sandy leaped up and ran out of the room. A moment later she was back.

  “They want to talk to you again,” she told Frazer.

  Things were much as he’d left them. The recent lunch detritus had been incorporated into the rest of the trash on the floor and the threesome were in their half-moon formation, guns on their laps.

  “We’ve made a decision,” Juan said. “We accept your offer, on, um, some conditions.”

  “Of course,” Frazer said encouragingly.

  “We’re not moving to the East or anything—we’re just holing up there for a while, like you said, to lie low and regroup. And get funds.”

  “Completely understood. That means you’ll do the book, to get the funds.”

  Juan shrugged wearily. “I guess so.” Frazer saw Yvonne clandestinely poke Juan in the thigh. “And we’re really grateful,” Juan added. “I hope we haven’t seemed unappreciative. We can see you’re a genuine brother. It’s just—these have been some bad days.” Yvonne and Pauline had been watching Juan intently, even promptingly, during this speech. Now the two girls looked anxiously at Frazer. Juan was looking at his boots.

  “This is great,” said Frazer, calmly and commandingly. “I have a couple of conditions of my own. They’re all for your safety. Number one is, while we’re traveling, you have to do what I tell you. It’s going to be dangerous, and I don’t want us wasting time arguing. If you’re going to trust me with your lives, you’ve got to go all the way. Or I’ll withdraw my support.”

  They were staring at him with one face again. Juan said, coldly, “What’s number two?”

  “No guns on the road. You’ve got to leave your weapons here.”

  “No fucking way!” Juan leaped to his feet again, gripping his gun; though it had been lying untouched on his lap it arrived in his hands right-side-up and front-forward. Frazer felt his palms go wet instantly, as if he’d dipped them in water.

  “Juan!” Yvonne screamed.

  “I’m sorry,” Juan said, with a terrible calm that dismantled Frazer’s own calm completely, “but we are in a state of war, and we cannot be defenseless. There’s no fucking way we’re giving up our guns.”

  “He’s just afraid of us,” said one of the girls. Frazer gaped; it was Pauline.

  “That’s not true!” he said.

  “You’re asking us to trust you but you don’t trust us,” she said coolly.

  Frazer felt his jaw working like a piece of stuck machinery. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We might get pulled over, you’ll be in disguise but you can’t disguise a gun. We can’t drive across the country with guns!”

  “So how do we get our guns over there?” Juan demanded.

  “What? Get them—you don’t need to. I’ll get you new ones,” Frazer heard himself saying. “My God, is that what you thought—I was saying you shouldn’t have guns? I—wow. Misunderstanding,” he said, with a strangled sort of laugh. His T-shirt felt glued to him.

  Suddenly, Juan laughed as well: a short, barking laugh. “Fuck, man. You got me going. I thought you were telling us to give up our guns.”

  “Yeah, no, I know,” Frazer said, grinning weakly. “Not at all. I mean, what have we got here, these are, uh—”

  “This is a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun—modified, obviously,” said Pauline.

  Frazer blinked at her. “Uh, yeah. I can replace that on the other end. Of course.”

  “I’d rather have a fully automatic,” she said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Juan repeated. “I’m doing the talking, remember?”

  For the rest of that afternoon, as the sunlight faded behind the brown blankets, and fresh shelves of cigarette smoke filled the air, and the jug of wine rapidly emptied, they’d hashed out—never far from a hair-trigger moment, but never at one again, thankfully—the complex arrangements that had then unfolded, over the next several days, just as Frazer had said that they would. The tedious but uneventful car shuttlings, one by one, first of Pauline, then Yvonne, lastly Juan. The renting by Carol of a foolproof new safe house, an old farm an hour’s drive from Manhattan. And finally, the storage of the numerous guns among Frazer’s old friends until their owners could someday reclaim them. Frazer had put Tom in charge of the gun-storing task, which Tom seemed to accept as an improvement over storing the fugitives. By now the guns are presumably scattered throughout the Bay Area, a secret set of coordinates mapping the world Frazer and Jenny once shared. Their once large, loyal circle: is it loyal at all anymore? It’s hard for him to know. He’s been in New York too long to have any measure of what those people feel for him, let alone for each other. Sandy had called him when the fugitives washed up at her door, and later Dana had given him Jenny’s post office box number. But Sandy and Dana have always been at the farthest edges of his awareness, mere acquaintances. Acquaintanceships don’t seem to change over time; they are never substantial enough to accrue more mass, like planets in formation, or to blow apart like oversized stars. He doesn’t know if he can say the same of his link to the woman in front of him. They’ve gone up the little road out of Rhinecliff and into the country. He is right about her not liking bridges, but now thinks he’s wrong. Taking the left turn onto the bridge road with his car sliding briefly from the frame of her rearview, she can’t see his eyebrows lift in surprise, and carefully following her, blinker on, he can’t see the fine vein in her neck jumping slightly. Once on the far side of the river she leads him nearly five miles along the dead-level two-lane roads that run haphazardly through open farmland and empty fields like paint stripes laid down by a drunkard. She’s changing roads as often as there’s a new road to change to; he’s beginning to think that she’s trying to lose him. Again. Except for the fact that she’s flawlessly toeing the speed limit. Trees close in and their road begins to climb; a forested abyss opens to the left, and after they have climbed and climbed, hugging rockface on their right—at every turn she slows to a crawl, and he hears her honk lightly, before creeping around—he can see, far below, a
creek lying as noiseless and still as a string on the floor of the canyon.

  And then they are out in the open again, but high up—he feels the elevation in the cool bite of the air pouring in through his window. She changes roads again, and again, and the shadows of their cars lengthen out in front of them. They’re pointed east now, back in the direction they came from. At a sign for Twin Lakes Camp she turns onto a dirt road and they bounce past picnic tables and fire pits, a tent or camper van every fourth or fifth site. It’s midweek and, being barely June, still somewhat early in the season. Not many people. Out of the corner of one eye Frazer sees a girl sitting hunched beneath the frame of her backpack while the guy she’s with yanks at her shoulder straps. Blond and bored, faintly scornful expression. She’s grimacing; then she’s gone behind a bend in the road. Glimpsing such a girl so briefly, you might almost think it was Pauline. Frazer wonders how many people across the land are having that experience this very instant.

  The road ends in a lot by a lake. The lake has a thumbnail of gravel-strewn beach, an old lifeguard’s chair lying toppled across it. There’s one other car in the lot. Jenny parks as far away as possible from it and then takes off up a well-worn trail leading away from the lake. Frazer follows her. After just a few hundred yards of gentle climb and thin trees the trail opens onto a field of grass that then vanishes over a cliff. The entire river valley lies beneath them; in the middle distance, through shimmering afternoon haze, Frazer sees the river itself, a thin silver line. Beyond that, a rumpled greenish-gray obscurity of mountains and compounded haze and smog. Before them is the farmland they’ve driven through, miniaturized. The fields are green, yellow, black scored with green lines; the air is gold. The day seems to have been drained of all but the smallest sounds, which rise toward them from the valley with weird precision; Frazer hears a dog barking, perhaps miles away, and the thin mosquito buzz of a motorcycle. The field is large enough for football; at the farther end of it are several middle-aged-looking people in bright clothes taking pictures of each other. For all their relative nearness they’re inaudible, gesturing excitedly and silently, like mimes. Jenny walks to the very edge of the cliff and sits down. From here it’s possible to see that this cliff isn’t a sheer bald wall like the ones in cartoons but a confused descent of crumbling dirt and treetops, but Frazer still feels his stomach turn over. He sits down next to her—not right beside her, not touching her, but not more than a foot from her shoulder. Intimately near. He would like to be sitting opposite her, studying the ways in which two years have changed her. Instead he stares out at the valley, feeling her angry curiosity moving over him quickly and lightly, as sensible as touch. She wants him to speak first but he’s not going to. She pulls her smokes out of her jeans pocket, a pouch and papers, and raises her knees against the slight breeze to roll the cigarette. With her hands busy she doesn’t manage to beat him to the match although she tries, this small fact about him coming upon her less as a memory than as a reflex in her body. The last, pleasurably dilated action of smoothing the cigarette’s seam interrupted suddenly by an instinct to grab for her matches before Frazer has struck one and leaned close to her, the insistent bald dome of his head nearly brushing her bangs, his cupped hands near her mouth. She has avoided thinking of him for so long that her uncomfortably exhaustive knowledge of his particularities is returning too late. He has already struck the match, his hands cupped to protect the small flame against the currents of the air but also to smuggle more of his body into the exchange, under cover of courtesy. Frazer always cups his hands around the flame and leans near, even when indoors in a place with no drafts. Some men embrace all the retrograde aspects of gallantry because they’ve intuited that to be gallant is to take sexual hold of a woman, however obliquely. She thinks Frazer is one of these men. She’s always thought so, since their very first meeting. One of these men with the terrible instinct and energy for approaching any woman from every angle. Perhaps not any woman. The flame touches the tip of her cigarette and she inhales sharply and sees the ash form and glow; when she glances up Frazer is there, filling her vision, looking back at her intently. She feels herself flush. He keeps her gaze another beat and then sits back again, shaking the match out, and the valley and the river and the sky, which he briefly blotted out, reappear.

  Two years have taught him patience. That surprises her. He’s generally frenetic with speech and not much of a listener, which means that once you get him talking he’ll betray himself five different ways within minutes, but he’s resolved to force her to speak first, and he isn’t giving way. He’s practically erupting with impatience, but he isn’t giving way. She finishes her cigarette in what seems like one continuous inhale, flips it away, and rolls another.

  Finally she says, “You alone?”

  “Yes. What do you think, that I’m here with the posse? Come on, Jenny.”

  He sees her start a little at the sound of her own given name. “You never know.”

  “Of course I’m alone.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Why’d you make me?” He shoots another look at her as he says this, and thinks he sees her flinch. Such a delicate thing. Like the spider’s work: spin one thread and give it a test. Sidle up and down its length with an eye toward the next one. “I talked to Dick and Helen, the night you took off.”

  “I had to, Rob. They were getting suspicious. They didn’t like having me there.”

  “They didn’t act like they didn’t like having you.”

  “Of course they didn’t, to you. They’re your friends. They didn’t want to admit they were scared.”

  “They only sounded scared after you left. They went to work in the morning and when they got back that night you were gone. No note. If you were afraid they were getting suspicious, then you did the worst possible thing.”

  “I’m sorry, Rob.”

  “And left me holding the bag.”

  “I’m sorry, Rob.”

  “And trying to come up with some plausible explanation for why you spooked and ran that didn’t have to do with their darkest suspicions, which they were certainly having, but only after you left.”

  “I’m sorry, Rob,” she says again, refusing to fight with him. To even really look at him.

  “And you never contacted me,” he concludes. Saying this, he feels a peculiar sensation of tightness, almost itch, in his throat. From the thin air up here, probably. She says nothing to this, so that the truth of it is left to hang, even longer, between them.

  “How’d you find me?” she repeats, finally.

  “It wasn’t hard. Your pen pal talked to me about your new job. And your go-between gave me your post office box. They both thought I’d just lost track of the info, because I’m such a busy guy. They never dreamed you’d try to shake me. Because we’re all friends, remember?”

  She flushes again, and he knows this time it’s not because of him. Seeing her at the train station, being so beautifully, perfectly surprised by her, the old sensations, in their return, had been transfigured—for a moment, he’d hovered with her in a new medium, derived exclusively from their pairing, charged in the old way but purged of the old taint. Now the old taint is back, with its unwanted passengers. Her hand, at “your pen pal,” has literally flown toward her throat, although she’s halted it short of its target and taken hold of her T-shirt. “You talked with Will?” she says, her voice just a half-tone too high.

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, you saw him?”

  “Sure. I told you. I said he was fine.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d seen him.”

  “He’s entitled to visitors.”This sounds surly, but he can tell that the idea of his, Frazer’s, recent physical proximity to her snatched-away lover is peerlessly horrible to her, though she tries not to show it.

  “How is he?” she persists.

  “He’s fine, like I said. He’s not so nuts about the food. Don’t you get lots of letters from him?”

  “Of course
, but not directly. Dana forwards them to me, so it’s slow. Maybe one every month.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nods.

  “You’d think he’d write more,” he says. Hating himself.

  “It’s that we both send our letters through Dana. That takes time.”

  Ah, he hates himself. If you’re going to be cruel, be cruel! Stick with it! But he can’t. He says, “I’m just kidding around. He was itching to talk about you when I saw him. He couldn’t, you know, but he sent his signal. He was itching to talk.”

  “What did he say?” Then the hand flies up again, this time over her eyes, just like at the train station. “Oh, shit,” she whispers.

  “Sweetheart.” He hasn’t called her this in a very long time. Saying it, he feels a hole blown in his chest. He tries to take her hand from her eyes but she shrugs away from him.

  “Anything?” she says, still blindfolding herself with her hand.

  “Of course. Um, he said, ‘I hear soldier’s got a new line of work.’ Grinning the way he does. When he mentions you.” She nods, eyes still concealed. He casts about wildly for a phrase or two more. “He said, ‘Keep watching over things for me.’ Things means you. He doesn’t know you took off without telling me. He thinks we’ve been in touch all this time. Because he wants me protecting you. Because he loves you. Sweetheart. Please. Uncover your face.” He should have been an actor. Or at least, the one living an alternate life. Because, now as in the past, once the terrible pain of reassuring this woman of another man’s love is commenced—once his throat, with its thickened walls of flesh and its central hard knot, has miraculously formed the first words, he could go on and on. He could smile and mug and retell anecdotes of this other man’s devotion as if it means nothing to him, although he does retain for himself the fraudulently casual use of endearments. Sweetheart. He gets a charge out of this, though he knows she dislikes it. Now he says, “I would have been fucked if he knew I’d lost track of you. Because he counts on me to make sure that you’re safe. I know you think you can take care of yourself, but that’s not enough for him. I vowed to him I’d take care of you.” Then she takes her hand away from her eyes and looks at him through tears, and he feels stricken mute. She puts her face on her knees, and a small bell of solitude settles around her. Frazer’s left at the lip of the cliff, staring out at the void.