by Susan Choi
Long years.
There was only one kid in the mail room, a fidgety undergraduate with sticky black hair and a pierced ear, the kind of boy who prided himself on never going home to his parents, not even at Christmas. But he was anxious to leave now for his dorm; he’d probably taken the spring-break shifts in the building’s mail room not for lack of friends or activities but to make extra money. “I’m about to take off,” he told Lee. “There’s no afternoon delivery today. All the mail that comes in now, they’re keeping here extra time to go through it. Cops and stuff. So I’m sorry if you got something late, Professor, but I’m giving as fast as I’m getting.”
“Nothing was late,” Lee assured him, raking a hand over his scalp, which had gone slick with sweat. “I just wanted to know where this came from.”
“Postmark says Washington.”
“I mean…well, that’s all right, that’s all right,” Lee said, gesturing in dismissal. What was he asking? This envelope had come to the departmental mail room from where he now stood, University Station; to University Station, via postal circuits unknown to Lee, from Spokane, Washington. And to the mailbox in Spokane from nowhere this boy, or anyone else on this campus, could tell him.
“Cops’re screening everything now,” the boy added, perhaps regretting his smart-aleck tone. “So you don’t need to worry, Professor. I guess they’ve got a machine that can check mail for bombs.”
“I’m not worried,” Lee said. “Although I’m glad to hear that they’re doing their job.” The police might be able to screen mail for bombs, but not for insidious weapons like this.
I hope to hear from you soon. Until then I remain,
Your Old Colleague and Friend
A slashed, crosshatched mark of some kind filled the rest of the page.
By the time he’d returned to his parking space, the letter was interred at the bottom of his ancient calf briefcase, which had grown spider-webbed with dry cracks in the course of the decades because he had never maintained it. The sight of you a bracing reminder of years that have passed. Lee’s silver Nissan the opposite thing, a disposable tool. Lee’s material world was made up of these two categories, the fleeting generic and the eternal and iconic. In the first category, his car and his plasterboard home in a suburb the name of which he had forgotten, a home several times too large for him now that the second Mrs. Lee had departed. In the latter category, his briefcase and the desk in his study, a gigantic oak treasure that had happened to live in his first rooming house in grad school; the green-shaded lamp in his office; the Montblanc pen, a gift from his undergraduate adviser, in the pocket of his cheap Penney’s button-down shirt, a type of shirt he bought three to the package, like his briefs and his socks and his undershirts, like his food—cardboard cases of Bud Light, Valu-Saks of white rice, planks of beef framed on Styrofoam mattes. Gaither, he thought, was correct: he was not a sentimental man. He was pragmatic, and cheap. If he lost the Montblanc, he’d buy a Bic at the drugstore. But somehow he never had lost it, in almost forty years.
In the car he looked at his Seiko, still running, and thought about getting gradually, drowningly drunk on many cans of Bud Light in his La-Z-Boy chair. But he still hadn’t started the engine. He took out the letter again and held it, by its edges: 14 Maple Lane. Dr. Lee. He felt a sob choke his throat, saw a single tear fall on the envelope, rippling it. Another mark that was his. Heat built up in the car from the struggling spring sunshine, but when he rolled down his window, the air came in cool. The most immediate source of his pain was his realization that once again he could not call Aileen. Of course he had thought of her first, when he’d opened the letter. Of calling and the instant she answered, declaring, I’ve found him.
He finally started the car, rolled the window tightly shut again, and pulled out of the parking lot. The letter was buried again in his suitcase. As he drove, his misery plagued him like a murderous passenger, blocking his airways and blurring his vision, but he blinked and took breaths and kept going, an undeterred stoic. Comporting himself admirably. This was precisely what Gaither must want, Lee’s delayed dissolution, after all these long years. Vengeance not in spite of those years but because of them: it was far too late for every kind of reparation. It was too late for Aileen, and it was too late for Lee. Gaither must know this; Gaither always had seen the long view, a circumstance that had united Lee and Aileen in their absolute refusal to, or inability to, do the same. This must have been another gift of Gaither’s religion: his grasp of their acts’ future consequences, as if they lay before him sketched out on a map.
Lee had always treated his drinking as a casual thing, but at his core he knew that it was something more precious: a lofty plateau; a lush table above glowing desert, beneath pristine skies; a space in his life so defined that it was truly a place, and one he relied on returning to regularly. In three decades it had evolved, toward greater cheapness and ease: the twenty-four-can suitcase of Bud Light and the Almaden box. Almost home, he stopped off at the A&P and bought one of each, and broccoli for his dinner, and these mundane transactions almost let him forget about the letter in his briefcase, locked inside his Nissan, like its own kind of slow-acting bomb. The checkout clerk, a heavy, motherly white woman he probably saw every week, smiled sympathetically at him. As she returned his change, she burst out, “You’re Professor Lee, aren’t you? From the university.”
“Yes,” Lee said, trying to smile. He’d been recognized many times, at places like the gas station and in the aisles of this store, since his TV appearance, and he’d always responded with what he was starting to feel was his trademark calm dignity. But now that he’d gotten the letter, this recognition felt somehow menacing, though he knew that it was not.
“I’m so sorry to bother you. I recognized you from your being on TV. Of course you’ve shopped here for years.”
“Yes,” Lee said, feeling strain in his face where his cheeks remained lifted—gruesomely, he was sure—to bare his friendly white teeth.
“Is there any news of that poor man? The other professor?”
With relief, Lee let his face fall, back to its usual sternness. “Not yet,” he said.
“We’re all praying for him.”
With alarm, Lee realized that the clerk was near tears.
“I never thought something like that could happen here,” she said miserably.
“No one did—”
“You spoke so well on TV. Someone like me can’t do much, but I’m praying. I pray that he’ll live.” She pulled a pawlike hand over her face, and it came away wet. “Oh, my goodness. And we’ve started a fund for his care, I don’t know if you knew. On behalf of the store.”
“I…didn’t know,” Lee stammered.
“It’s in the jar by the door. Near the bulletin board. Of course you shouldn’t contribute, Professor. You’ve already been through so much.”
Lee left the store feeling sour acid at the back of his throat. He popped a beer the instant he turned into his driveway, drinking hungrily while he waited for the garage door to slowly grind open.
There was no longer much possibility of a message from Esther, brief and falsely cheerful: “Hi, Dad, it’s me. I’m just calling to say that I’m fine. I’ve been out a lot lately, but next week things should calm down a little, so I’ll give you a call and catch up.” These falsely dutiful messages, which had really been prophylactic, a firm barrier against substantive discourse, had never been followed by the promised catch-up, and in the six years since Esther had dropped out of college they’d trailed off into virtual silence. Esther now lived somewhere in the West, apparently as an unpaid volunteer for a group who were trying to save an endangered eagle of some kind by interfering—benignly, of course—with its reproduction. Esther was dropping shreds of raw meat through long tubes into the nests of eaglets, because the parent birds couldn’t care for them, for some unknown reason. Esther lay all day pressed to the lip of a cliff overlooking a river, the tube’s mouth near her hand, as the eaglets let
out squeaks of distress in their wind-battered nest on the cliff face below. Or at least this was the incomprehensible image she herself had evoked, in a postcard of almost a year ago that represented the sum total of Lee’s understanding of his only child’s life.
Because there was no possibility of a message from Esther there was no reason to play the machine; with four messages, about four times as crowded as it usually was, it would only be more of the stock messages he’d received since the day of the bombing: from old colleagues who’d left town long ago with whom he hadn’t kept up, from current neighbors in his beige subdivision with whom he’d only ever exchanged cordial nods or bits of news about septic-tank problems. There would be messages of concerned inquiry from these people, masking blunt nosiness; they’d want news, more than they got from TV and the papers, about the bombing of Hendley. Perhaps there would be a message from Associate Adjunct So-and-So, denied tenure a decade ago and now calling from the U of Paducah to share the school’s distress. His concerned inquiry would mask schadenfreude. My God, that young Hendley, such an unequaled mind. An inspiration to colleagues, what a loss to us all if he died!
Lee thought of the clerk at the grocery store and her tears. He opened his second beer, pressing the tab into the top of the can with a pop like a gunshot. There was another reason he didn’t want to push “play.” The letter might have a telephoned counterpart, another arrow that would cleanly strike home.
Then he struck “play” anyway in defiance, and promised himself he would change his phone number the first thing in the morning. He would change it, and make it unlisted.
He started the rice cooker and boiled water for his broccoli while he listened. There was a message from Esther’s second-grade teacher, who always asked after Esther—“One of my two or three best students ever”—on the rare occasions, every four or five years, she and Lee crossed paths in town. Lee took down her number, which he probably already had in a leather address book that dated from his years in grad school. Then, on second thought, he threw the number away. He didn’t know how he would explain to Mrs. Frankford what Esther had chosen to do with herself.
But the second message and the third were from an old colleague of Lee’s named Fasano, a man he’d liked enormously. He and Fasano had both been newly divorced, with young daughters, when Fasano had joined the department in the late 1970s. They had gotten into the habit of jogging the riverside trail together and then going to a nearby restaurant called something like the Corral, or perhaps it had been the Chuck Wagon, for steaks and beer afterward. Now this lost period of Lee’s adult life seemed as remarkable and Arcadian to him as certain scenes from his childhood. When Fasano had been offered a much better job at Cornell and had left, Lee had felt the loss keenly. He and Fasano had only been friends—but the very simplicity of that formulation had been painful for Lee, for how rare he had realized it was. Fasano’s two daughters had been two years apart, the younger just about Esther’s age, and he had been an undisguisedly impatient and frustrated weekend father. He’d had a temper, like Lee. “Count your blessings,” he’d said to Lee of Esther, who after the divorce had continued to be a watchful and reserved—perhaps too reserved—child. This had entirely changed in adolescence, but by that time Fasano was gone.
“Lee,” barked Fasano’s wonderfully familiar yet, through the machine, strangely abstracted voice. “I don’t like it when the bullshit doings of sociopaths are responsible for getting me back in touch with my friends, but I don’t deserve to complain. Neither do you, since I don’t think you’ve been in touch either, so let’s call it even and set the clock back to zero. I have to tell you, I could hardly believe it when I saw your face in the paper. First of all, I can hardly believe you’re still stuck in that midwestern shithole. No, I’m honestly kidding. I actually miss it sometimes. But I can hardly believe you still have the same phone number. You’re a sentimental fool, Lee. I’m kidding again, but seriously, be sentimental enough to call me. Obviously, I want to hear how you are and how Esther’s doing, but there’s a more immediate reason. I know you read the papers, too, so I won’t insult you by recapitulating the whole thing, but I’m calling about the incident we had here in Los Angeles, about four years ago. Jesus, you probably think I’m still at Cornell. I’m not, I’m at U—”
Here Lee’s machine had cut Fasano off, but after a beep and a click, Fasano resumed. “Sorry, Lee. These goddamn machines aren’t designed for old Luddites like me who forget that they’re not talking to a sympathetic human. As I was saying, I’m at UCLA. Been here since ’90. And of course, as you must know by now, we had a bombing here in ’91. I wasn’t anywhere near it. Nothing like how near you were to this one. I’m goddamn glad you weren’t closer. Anyway, give me a call and we’ll chew it all over. It’s good to hear your voice, though you sound like some terrified kid in elocution class on your outgoing message. Christ, I’m about to hang up without leaving my number.” He did leave his number, and Lee, grinning, wrote it on his notepad and then drew a crisp rectangle around it and stared in amazement. Fasano.
The fourth message was from the mother of a girl who had briefly been a friend of Esther’s in elementary school. Another tremulous, earnest voice; platitudes. Lee thought he remembered the woman, a famished, chain-smoking churchgoer. He hadn’t cared for the daughter as a playmate for Esther; she’d struck him as stupid, as intellectually developed at nine as she’d be in her life. He was still gazing at Fasano’s phone number; the churchgoing smoker left her number, but he ignored it.
He ate his dinner at his magnificent desk, the only thing of value in the house that Michiko—he winced hearing the name of the second Mrs. Lee in his mind—hadn’t demanded and gotten. She had probably assumed she couldn’t get it down the stairs. The desk had been the captive monarch of his first apartment in graduate school, the two cramped rooms with kitchenette on the second floor of an old widow’s house a few miles from campus. Lee remembered mounting the precarious, jerry-rigged stairs to the apartment’s improvised separate entrance and feeling the usual corrosive disappointment at how diminished and shabby his American life seemed destined to be. He was always ducking his head through too-short, crooked doorways, shrugging his shoulders into undersize secondhand suits. Haughtily carrying the calf briefcase of a man who had thrown it away as too old. All his conditions were improvised, safety-pinned and rubber-banded embarrassments—then he’d entered the low-ceilinged, drab little room and seen that desk staring at him, an enormous, squat-legged oak raja. How did we, you and I, come to be in a hovel like this? the desk seemed to inquire. Lee had felt an immediate kinship with it. It was his, a lost treasure, a diamond in the rough, a pearl cast among swine. It was him.
“My husband’s,” the widow had told him, as he ran his hand around the beveled perimeter. Lee hadn’t even tried to conceal how much he instantly coveted it. It was a desk that seemed to have a large measure of throne in its bloodline, not to mention some grand piano. “I don’t know how he got it up here,” the widow was saying. “That was before we were married—this here is the house he grew up in. Anyone who can get the thing out, they can have it. I worry that one of these days it’ll fall through the floor.”
“I’ll take it,” Lee had said.
“The desk or the apartment?”
“I’ll take both.”
When he worked, he used an old-fashioned blotter, to protect the surface, and now he ate his beef and broccoli and rice with the blotter as place mat. This room, with its wall-to-wall beige carpeting and its gray baseboard heaters, a low ceiling of “textured” white plaster and almost-bare walls except for his calendar, was as inappropriate a setting for his desk as the place where he’d found it, and every place he had lived in since then. Always having to tap fresh reserves of ingenuity and underpaid labor, students and winches and rolling platforms and foam rubber swaddling the legs, to uninstall and reinstall this huge folly that housed his ego. Pulling open the top right-hand drawer, the one most often used, a snooper would fin
d it oddly empty: only a handful of spare change, a few pen cartridges, and a single gray-scuffed white baby shoe. Such a tiny, sturdy shoe! And so carefully made, the cobbler’s art in miniature. This was before the gaudy, Velcro-strapped disposable shoes now secured to toddlers with no sense of ceremony, of the accomplishment of becoming a bipedal human. Esther had taken her first steps toward him, precipitately, her face lit up with wild delight, as if she had jumped off a cliff and found that she could fly. In the top left-hand drawer: a lopsided “dish” made of papier-mâché, on which Esther had drawn the rogue objects, always weighing holes in her father’s pants pockets, which could now be securely deposited in the dish’s confines. Spare change, house keys, paper clips, and a particular off-brand hard peppermint, football-shaped with a red and green stripe, Lee once favored above Starlight mints. Because earnestly used for years, the dish was now badly chipped and crumbling, and so empty. On the vast surface stood just a few lonely landmarks, the grain silos and windmills of Lee’s Great desk Plain: a green-shaded lamp, the twin to the lamp in his office at school, and a photo of Esther at seven, in a faux-stained-glass frame she made from a kit. Lee remembered this project too well. The kit had come with the metal frame, divided into triangular sections, and packets of small plastic crystals that had looked like the sprinkles one used on cupcakes. The frame was placed flat on a cookie sheet and then the sprinkles poured into its separate triangular sections; when baked, the crystals melted and filled the triangles like “glass.” That Aileen was allowing their daughter to melt plastic had almost reduced Lee to tears. Esther might eat the crystals and choke, and melting plastic released toxic chemicals that could stunt a child’s growth, give her cancer, and what the hell kind of stupid bitch let her own child melt plastic? He’d shattered something, a bowl or a plate, hurling it at Aileen, but he had not confiscated the kit, and after he’d left the house for his office, the project had covertly gone forward. Esther had given it to him, with her photo in it, the next week for his birthday. “It was for you all along,” Aileen hissed as he unwrapped the package.