A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  “Oh, Aileen,” Nora said, not chidingly but as if her worst fears for Aileen were confirmed. No one in Aileen’s family had been particularly enthusiastic about her marriage to Gaither, although no one had been less than polite. They were not the kind of family to intervene forcefully in one another’s affairs. But Aileen had been aware at the time that they all thought she was too young, that she was marrying Gaither out of a craving for direction, perhaps even constriction—that her rebelliousness was now taking the form of a precipitate rush toward conventional life. And now she was aware that this assessment had been largely correct.

  “He’s a good man,” Nora said tepidly, gazing through the window. The pyramid of charcoal flared up, then went out.

  “Oh, I know,” Aileen snarled. “I know!”

  The conversation hadn’t gone any further; she hadn’t told Nora then that her marriage to Gaither, for her part, was already over. She had only grown more certain of this since the day she’d walked out on her porch; every day the conviction gained strength, in a way she persistently linked to the wonderful, palpable increase in strength of her child. Perhaps it was for this reason—that the as-yet-unborn child already seemed to be not just an actor in the unfolding drama but the chief co-conspirator—that Lee began to feel coldness and even hostility for him. Yes, him: another fact of which Aileen was certain. In the kitchen with Nora, Aileen felt the child kick, pedal, brusquely invert himself searching for room; these outbursts were always sustained, they made her think of tantrums, and if she was alone when they happened, she yelped with laughter. She hoarded these movements from Gaither; she never mentioned them to him. She couldn’t bear the idea of sharing them. But now she seized Nora’s hand eagerly and pressed it hard to herself, and the two of them laughed together.

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” Nora said when the thrashing subsided.

  “I never thought I’d say something like this, but I think it’s the most wonderful thing in the world.”

  “A strong little critter,” Nora said.

  “A strong boy,” Aileen corrected her.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. Weren’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Both times I think I changed my mind every few days.”

  “Well, I’m sure,” Aileen said.

  That summer Gaither had been determined to solve a problem one of the department professors had presented in the spring, and once Aileen was on her feet again, she encouraged him to make up for time lost tending her, which he finally, reluctantly, started to do. He would rise very early, as had always been his habit, and by the time she herself rolled clumsily out of bed and zipped up her housedress, she would know he’d been in the library for almost two hours. Nights she packed him a sandwich to take the next day so that he wouldn’t have to come home for his lunch; and when he came home in the evening for dinner, she had it ready for him and the table set and tumblers already full, so that he could sit down immediately and as quickly retreat upstairs afterward to his little home study. It interested her that these methods she’d found to minimize their contact coincided with those that seemed to make her an exemplary wife. The only fault of her system emerged when Gaither leaned toward her gratefully to wet her face with a kiss, and she would force herself to sit very still and receive it as the earth receives rain—she would tell herself this—with no outward show of resistance.

  She thought of Lee more and more, as these everyday scenes from her marriage seemed to shift into frozen tableaux, memory dioramas she would view from a distant future. She missed him; sometimes thinking of him abruptly derailed her calm regime of housekeeping, and she would find herself sprawled on the couch, in the dusk of closed curtains, clumsily making love to herself, achieving at best an imperfect release that was more like implosion, because she felt truly depraved to be doing such things with the baby inside her. She swore it off and then found that both Lee and her own unpregnant, lascivious body had come to plague her in dreams. In her dreams she would climax and then suddenly wake to see Gaither’s oblivious face on the pillow beside her. Just as after the times on the couch, her limbs would quiver and flop like rubber, unable to obey her. Struggling to get out of bed, to get away, she’d wake Gaither as she hadn’t before. She could never believe that these dreams failed to wake him; they felt as real as if she and her lover were committing their wailing contortions only inches from where Gaither lay snoring in his pale blue pajamas. “Are you okay, Aileen?” Gaither would mumble as she fought with the sheets.

  “I just have to use the bathroom.” Immediately his breathing would deepen again.

  Sometimes she sat up until dawn, in an old armchair in the small living room she almost never used during the day, as if the journey she was about to embark on demanded she first know—memorize—every aspect of the life she was leaving behind. This first and last home of her marriage to Gaither, at dawn. The geriatric couches and chairs and bookshelves it had come furnished with, mute witnesses to her sins. She wondered how many mundane revelations, humiliations to the pride we take in knowing ourselves, had occurred in these rooms. She was twenty-one years old, six months pregnant, the wife of a man she had wanted to save her from something. From her own indifference, perhaps, to herself, and to securing conditions for her own happiness. Gaither, when she met him, had exuded such ease, the confidence of a child of God. Now she watched as he made this impression on others, who didn’t yet see the need this demeanor concealed. Though Lee saw it; he’d seen it that night at the church gathering, and he’d ruthlessly seized his advantage.

  The fall semester always began late, the third week of September, and as August came to an end, a sense of meaningless limbo pervaded their house. She assumed that Gaither wasn’t succeeding in solving the problem. “I’m sorry, Aileen,” he said more than once. “I’m so absorbed in my work. I guess that’s my way of feathering the nest. It would really help my career, and help us, if I could get my first real publication.” She wondered if the extreme cordiality that marked all their relations had ever seemed fraudulent to him. To her they were both marking time, until the semester began and the separation of spheres was again ratified by Gaither’s busy course schedule. She remembered this waiting from last year: they’d moved to town, at Gaither’s insistence, in late July, “to get their bearings” and then had been left to wait—purposeless, scrupulously cordial with each other. They had bought the old car and new maps and driven the hushed country roads, stopping off at farm stands to load up on sweet corn and peaches. In the evenings Aileen would make pie, her hands quick, her mind fearfully empty, while Gaither pored over the department’s course offerings as he’d done countless times. They must have seemed like any young married couple, to the farmers they approached with linked hands, to new neighbors like Mrs. Cahill, to Gaither himself, who had been a virgin when they’d first slept together. She had not. He hadn’t known how to tell.

  Then, she’d been waiting to feel it, too. The sweet solace of marriage. Always waiting: for school to start, for their real lives to start, for confidence in her marriage to start. A year later she was waiting again, but this waiting was different.

  It was almost the last day of the month when, hearing the flag on their mailbox hinge down, she went out and found in place of the bills she had posted an envelope from Gaither’s mother. It wasn’t the outsize envelope of a card, those envelopes that for all their opacity exude inconsequence. This was a stationery envelope, rectangular and of heavy cream stock, and it seemed to contain more than one thickness of paper. Standing in the heat, on the baking sidewalk, she felt a thrill of cold sweat prickling over her skin. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Gaither wouldn’t be home until six. Back inside, she propped the letter on the entranceway table and felt it like a beam of light cast on her movements the rest of the day.

  When he got home that evening, Gaither didn’t slice the envelope open with a disproportionate show of interest and then read the contents aloud while Aileen filled their
plates. He sat sideways on his chair, his long legs crossed at the ankles, and read the letter in silence. Their cold tuna salad, their wedged tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs, all sat ready for him. When he was finished, he slid the letter half under his plate and began on his food.

  “What does she say?” Aileen finally asked.

  “She’d very much like us to visit for Labor Day weekend,” Gaither said, as if the fact of an invitation, extended to them both, weren’t completely unprecedented.

  “That’s just six days away,” Aileen said stupidly. She was aware of the need to frame an objection that was calm, logical, but she felt herself flailing around in her mental closet, knocking things off the shelves.

  “It is, but we can get there in five without having to rush. We could leave tomorrow. We haven’t got any obligations until September nineteenth.”

  “Leave tomorrow and just drive across the country? What about your work?”

  “I think I could use a breather from my work. And you could use one, too. Before the baby comes.”

  At this the rising heat of their conversation, the longest conversation she felt they’d had in weeks, was snatched away, as if the sealed hothouse in which they’d thus far kept their marriage, urging it to sprout rootlets, to unfurl even one wrinkled leaf, had been swiftly unzippered. She felt the wash of cold sweat again, under her dress. “We just visited Nora,” she pointed out, stalling.

  “Aileen,” he said, laying his fork carefully on his plate. “My parents have wronged you. We both know it. And perhaps you think I’ve wronged you, too, for not breaking with them. But what you have to understand is that I’d be giving you less of myself if I just cut them out of our lives. They’re not disappointed in you, they’re disappointed in me. They have a wrong idea about me I’ve been trying to change, for all of our sakes. It’s the slow road to travel, but it’s the right one. I have to ask you to accept this.”

  “Lewis,” she began.

  “No, I have to ask you to bear with me here. Please let me finish, Aileen. Many months ago I wrote my mother and father to tell them we were going to be blessed with a baby. Maybe you thought that I hadn’t, because I hadn’t yet mentioned it to you. Of course I told them. It’s the most important event of my life, apart from marrying you. I knew I had to extend to my parents the opportunity to reconcile with us, before the baby is born. They’re old, Aileen. And they’re set in their ways. They have a lot of fears, about the modern world, about change—”

  “Lewis,” she broke in again. “I don’t give a goddamn about your parents. I don’t mean to waste an ounce of my energy in relations with them.”

  “You don’t only marry a man,” he said evenly, although he’d grown very pale. “You marry into a family.”

  “Oh, my God,” she cried. “Listen to you! Do you even see me? Do you hear me? Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “You’re a woman who doesn’t share my convictions about family. But you have to respect them.”

  “I’m not talking about family, I’m talking about us.”

  “We’re a family, too,” Gaither said.

  “No, we’re not.”

  She found she was standing away from the table, her fork in her hand. She threw it into the sink. The kitchen window was open, as were all their windows, because of the heat. She thought of Mrs. Cahill, as still as a statue, at her own kitchen window a few feet away. Mrs. Cahill would carefully stretch out an arm, turn the kitchen light off, then creep closer, one hand on the sill. Her excited breath trapped in her throat as she strained to listen. “I’m not your wife,” Aileen said. It just came out like that, and then the truth of the statement amazed her. “I don’t want to be married to you. And you shouldn’t want to be married to me.”

  “And why is that?” Gaither said. He was still seated, but with a terrible gaze trained on her, like a biblical judge. So he did have a mean streak, which she’d always suspected. If only he’d shown it much sooner than now.

  “Because I’m a whore.” All at once his chair tumbled beneath him, and he’d crossed the short distance and slapped her hard into the wall. Good, she thought. Good, it’s real.

  Gaither had easily guessed it was Lee. Lee’s strange, abrupt break from their friendship, the trumped-up insults about Gaither’s religion. If not for the baby, Aileen thought, Gaither would have gone on beating her within an inch of her life. There was that much compressed anger, and knowledge, in him. All the gleamingly obvious facets of his wife’s betrayal, which until then he’d kept airborne and separate, the same juggling act he’d applied to his parents, his faith, and his science, now fell like knives on a target. From here the story became cursory: everything that Lee felt concerned him, the disposition of actual persons in the physical world, Aileen glossed without interest. She was a scientist, too: obsessively interested in her own narrow field, the evolution and efflorescence of her will to leave Gaither. The rest was secondary, or inevitable, or fell outside her purview. Gaither had gone to stay somewhere, she didn’t know where, until she had packed and been picked up by Nora. She would live with Nora until things were settled. “Things”: Lee didn’t understand precisely what this meant, though he could see that she’d brought herself to him, meant to give herself to him, this fierce and reckless young woman who still feared being left on her own. Or who’d never been on her own in her life and so perhaps didn’t realize that it was an option.

  “She’s waiting in the car for me now,” Aileen said, and Lee realized with a shock that cogs and gears were in motion, that a machine for disposing of fates was performing its work, and he was somehow inside it.

  “You told Gaither without warning me first,” he said, finally putting the thought into words that sounded frigid, efficient, which was not how he felt.

  “He had to find out eventually! I didn’t have time to warn you—”

  “You should have warned me first,” Lee repeated. “This doesn’t just concern you.”

  She looked at him unflinchingly, but he could see she was frightened. “You dump your conscience, and then you get out of town!” Lee’s arm had flown out from his side; a lamp crashed to the floor. “Why!” he shouted. “And now you leave, and we stay—”

  “Why?” Aileen repeated. “What do you mean, why? I’ve told you why—”

  “He’s my colleague.”

  “You didn’t seem to care about that when you came on to me.” Belatedly, an urgent thumping arose from downstairs, chastisement for the lamp. The thought that they’d been overheard drained their anger from the room instantly, leaving them only cold and bewildered, as they stared at each other.

  “What about the baby? His baby,” Lee said finally, his throat feeling gummed with mucus.

  “My baby,” Aileen corrected, in a preliminary tone, but then she didn’t say anything else. In the moment that followed, a moment of frankly terrified silence, Lee felt close to her for the first time since she had appeared at his door. Like him she was afraid, overwhelmed, and incapable; they stood side by side in the face of a rushing disaster that neither of them would know how to avert. He was stunned by pity; he wanted to fold this idea of her in his arms. But the actual woman beside him he wasn’t able to touch.

  She crossed the distance herself, tipping her face forward onto his shoulder. Then she remained very still, as if she were resting against a bench or a tree and didn’t expect any gesture or word in return. Lee’s hand fluttered tentatively; it settled on the back of her head. They held this pose, and Lee saw every object in his spare, squalid bachelor’s apartment without turning his head and remembered the number of times he had daydreamed of pinioning her to this couch, the pale S of her body, her sharp gasps as he harshly erased her. Those visions, which had agonized him all the weeks of this summer, seemed like insane desecrations of the distant human lightly propped on him now. Three points of contact: her forehead on his shoulder, his palm on her crown, his left knee and her right pressed together. Almost all of this, bone against bone. Her swollen front, me
rcifully out of range of his vision, for the moment banished from the room. He only felt heat rising out of her hair. The summer heat in the room drowned out everything else. After some time, he did not know how long, they heard a distant car horn.

  “I’ve kept Nora waiting too long,” she said into his shoulder, and slowly sat up.

  They stood at his desk and exchanged their addresses—Lee did not have a phone—he would have to call her from the pay phone booths at the library. And all too quickly she was back in the doorway, at the top of the improvised stairs to his floor of the house, with the intricate globe of the massive oak tree as her backdrop, as if she were floating twelve feet off the ground; this was how he had seen her when he’d opened the door to her knock, rising uncomprehendingly off his couch where he’d lain webbed in sweat-stained T-shirt, unwashed slacks, sour wine from the night before staining his tongue, dreams of her. Then he’d opened the door and she’d been there, clean and straight in her flared summer dress.

  They kissed very briefly and chastely. The kiss seemed not empty but provisional, its meaning not yet clear. Then Lee stood inside the doorway and listened as she carefully went down the stairs. A beat later, the sound of a car driving off.

  In the two weeks that remained before the start of the term, he had a haircut, bought a used summer suit, and then went to his adviser and lobbied aggressively for a semester off from classwork to pursue independent research. By every measure he was months too late to make such a request, but he persisted. He was a coward, he knew. “I’d like to take on the Dieckmann problem,” he explained. “I’ve had an insight. I think I can solve it.” Of course, this was a lie.

  “Mr. Gaither has also been working on it,” his adviser remarked. Lee absorbed this expressionlessly.

  “Well, may the best mathematician prevail,” his adviser said finally, signing the forms.

  PART II