by Susan Choi
“Whoa!” Morrison said with a laugh, reaching out for Lee’s elbow. “Take it easy there, Lee. Did you turn your ankle?” Shenkman closed the door behind them, pulled a file from her bag, and without waiting strode past Lee toward his kitchen, as if toward her own office.
Soon they were seated around his kitchen table again, although this time Lee didn’t make tea. His consciousness of something wrong—particularly, inexplicably wrong, in their eyes, with him—warred bewilderingly with his consciousness that he might be wrong, ridiculously mistaken, no better than a paranoid patient in a mental asylum. In this state of internal division, he could no more meet their eyes than perform hostly gestures. He could barely sit still. But Morrison was as cheerfully calm as he’d been when he came to see Lee on his own, while Shenkman was as cold and withdrawn as the first time Lee had met her.
“Lee, I’m glad you were home, because I think we can straighten this out very quickly,” Morrison had begun. “Remember when you and I were talking just the other day, we went over that letter. That letter that says it’s from 14 Maple Lane in Woodmont, Washington.”
The interior battle had been decided; he was not deluded, which perhaps was a comfort. But he was mortifyingly foolish. Lee cursed his vanity, his exquisitely bruisable ego—it had landed him where he would otherwise never have been. “Agent,” he interrupted Morrison, and he deliberately chose not to be familiar, not to use “Jim,” to signal that if he’d proceeded in a fuzzy way before—if he’d committed the sin of omission—he would not any longer. “I think I know what this confusion is about. I want to tell you something more about that letter. I didn’t tell you about it before, because I honestly thought it would not interest you, and also, it embarrasses me. But I should have told you everything, to prevent this confusion.”
Now even Shenkman had set down her magical phone.
“Go on,” Morrison said.
“I told you before that my friend must have made a mistake when he wrote his address. But the truth is, I don’t think he made a mistake at all. I think he wrote a false address on purpose, so that I couldn’t find him. Because the truth is also that this person, Lewis Gaither, is not my friend. He would probably tell you that I am his worst enemy. We were friends long ago. That I said, and that’s true. But our friendship had a very bad ending. And I think…well, he would have every reason to despise me, and I don’t care for him. So I think he wrote that fake address to taunt me. I know this must sound ridiculous, an old grudge between very old men. I hope you can see why I didn’t go into the whole thing before.” Even in his limited experience with Shenkman, Lee knew better than to search for a lifting of clouds, a frank smile of relief, in her face. Instead he focused on Morrison—but the other man seemed only to be carefully taking in what had been said.
“So this individual, the person who wrote you this letter, he considers you an enemy. He intensely dislikes you. Is that what you’re saying, Professor?”
Lee noticed that Morrison, too, had returned to a more formal mode of address. “Yes,” he answered.
“Can you explain why that is?”
Now his desire to have it all straightened out, which already was daring to feel like relief, came up short against an upsurge of loathing, that he had to disclose such an intimate thing to these strangers. Especially Shenkman. But he girded himself and, hoping it would suffice, said at last, “It was over a woman.”
Morrison seemed to weigh, for a moment, whether this would suffice or not. Then he said, “Of course, it wouldn’t be possible for us to look at the letter. You’ve thrown it away.”
“No,” Lee said, feeling real relief here—this small misjudgment could be cleared up, too. “No, I didn’t, in fact. I was just feeling embarrassed that you would see that this man is not actually friendly to me. I didn’t want to go into these personal things. But I shouldn’t have caused this confusion and wasted your time. I know you have to confirm all these pieces of mail. I’ll just get it for you.” And lighter already from the purgative of his confession, Lee sprang up to retrieve his briefcase and the letter within, while the two agents waited in silence. It was interesting, Lee thought, how the act of handing the dread correspondence to Morrison seemed to transmute it into something else—it was leached free of its sad history, folded into a bland inventory of envelopes mailed and received, so that Lee could almost forget that Gaither ever had touched it. He should have given it to the two agents the first time they asked.
Morrison took the envelope by its edges and, seeming scarcely to touch it, extracted the single sheet, gingerly unfolded, and regarded the typewritten contents. His face had grown strangely opaque. Lee watched Morrison’s eyes linger over Dear Lee; he urged the agent on the unpleasant journey to a bracing reminder to one of his peers as to how many years of his own life have passed. Without another glance at the writing himself, Lee could easily accompany the agent, through the haughty understatement of I can admit that you bruised me, that last time we met; past the fraudulent camaraderie of I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. By the time they had finally reached Now you are probably angry with me, as I once was with you, Lee was mentally dragging the laggardly agent toward the blessed conclusion of the illegible bramble that passed as a signature. All his mortification and fury, all the pains he had suffered since Gaither had sent him this dart threatened to reemerge, but he held strong against them by riveting his attention on Morrison’s face. Morrison, for his part, was still riveted to the letter. Abruptly he refolded it and, without returning it to the envelope, handed both pieces of paper to Shenkman, who dropped them into a clear plastic bag, stood up from the table, and walked out of the room—the entire transaction seemed contained between serial beats of Lee’s heart. Lee heard his front door being opened and shut. “You’re keeping it?” he belatedly said.
“Lee,” Morrison said, looking up at him again, and instead of the warmth Lee expected, as thanks for his clarifications, Morrison’s face had grown yet more opaque and a little bit harder, like wax that had cooled. “There’s nothing on that sheet of paper that tells me a man named Lewis Gaither, spelling ‘Lewis’ E-W and ‘Gaither’ A-I, is the author. That signature at the bottom could say anything. Why should I believe that this letter is from Lewis Gaither?”
“Why should you believe it?” For all the brevity of their acquaintanceship and all the formality of the past several minutes, Lee felt as ambushed and stung as he’d felt with Sondra. “Why wouldn’t you believe it? It’s my letter. I’m telling you who it comes from. I can’t help that he has bad handwriting.”
“You’re telling me,” Morrison mused. “You’re telling me, and I should believe you, and last week you told me you’d thrown it away, and you still had it in your briefcase.”
“Jim,” Lee said, in his rising confusion laying hold once again of the other man’s name. “I’m very sorry I said that. I was just so embarrassed. It doesn’t mean that I’m lying to you.”
“You must see why it’s hard to believe that. Lee, it’s hard to believe that you’re being completely forthcoming, when you’ve just changed your story since the last time we met.”
“Changed my story?” Lee repeated, amazed. “But it’s only a personal letter. It’s just so you can dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s, as you said,” and with a sideways glance in the direction in which Agent Shenkman had vanished, he tried to recapture his and Morrison’s camaraderie of a few days before. “It’s not important—”
“Lee,” Morrison interrupted, “let’s start over, all right? Let’s do this all over again, as if this is the very first time that we’ve talked about it. Did you receive a letter with the return address on it of 14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, Washington?”
“Yes, you know that I did—”
“Starting all over, Lee. Turn back the clock. And were you aware that this address was false, that it doesn’t exist?”
“I realized it must be, after getting my letter—”
�
��And who sent you this letter?”
“Lewis Gaither—”
“Write it down,” Morrison said, pushing a pen and his small notebook, turned to a blank page, across the table.
Lee did, in his careful block letters: L-E-W-I-S G-A-I-T-H-E-R. Morrison took back the notebook and scrutinized it with what looked like displeasure. “And who is this person?” Morrison recommenced. “The other day you said he’s an old friend, very worried about you. Then you said he’s somebody you hardly know, you haven’t seen him in years. Now you say he hates you, that you’ve had issues over a woman. So which is it?”
“Jim,” Lee implored. “I’m not being dishonest. I just don’t see why it’s important—”
“Please let me decide what’s important. Who is Lewis Gaither? What can you tell me about him?”
Agent Shenkman had still not returned. “He was my wife’s husband,” Lee managed. He felt his gorge rising—it was a panic reaction, he knew, but he was suddenly sure he would vomit. Morrison rose and took a glass from the cupboard, filled it at the tap, and set it near Lee on the table. Lee drank. “I stole his wife,” Lee whispered, looking up gratefully. “We were friends. Then his wife left him for me.”
“Where did you meet?”
“We were classmates. In graduate school.”
After this they both sat in silence, as if by these very few words Lee had unfurled around them the full tapestry of his past. Lee felt certain he had. Sadness pierced him. His eyes had grown damp.
Lee did not know how many minutes had passed when Morrison finally spoke. “I’d really like to believe, at this point, that you’re disclosing everything that there is to disclose, about this piece of mail.”
“I am,” Lee said passionately.
“But it’s hard,” Morrison continued, “given that, in effect, you’ve lied to us. About the nature of your relationship with this person, Lewis Gaither. About having disposed of the letter.”
“I wasn’t lying!” Lee cried, bewailing the inadvertent confusion he’d caused.
“Lee, you have to understand what it looks like to me. I really want to believe you.”
“You should!”
“As far as Agent Shenkman is concerned, while I can’t speak for her, I wouldn’t be far off base if I said that she wouldn’t be sorry to find that you’re lying. But I would be. I like you, Lee, and I’d like to believe you.”
“You both should believe me!” Lee was only remotely aware that his temples were streaming with sweat—his mind was cornered and panicked, as it had sometimes been in the worst of his fights with Aileen, when, after an originating spark he could never recall and a swift escalation he could hardly perceive, he found himself howling with her on a precipice, hearing that she would leave him and he declaring the same. He no longer knew how he’d gotten here or what sense it made, only that his survival relied on persuading this obdurate man. “I’m telling you the truth—”
“If that’s the case, then would you like to take a polygraph?” Morrison said.
The howl in Lee’s ears ebbed away, like the tide rushing out. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “A lie-detector test?” he asked tentatively, afraid Morrison might burst out laughing.
But the other man’s face showed no tending toward humor. “At this point, if you’re disclosing everything, the polygraph can only serve you well.”
“A lie-detector test implies the person being tested is suspect,” Lee said after a moment. Despite being on the defensive, he spoke to Morrison admonishingly. He felt offended to his core. At the same time, he still was a prisoner of panic. The panic interfered with his indignation: it would soon deplete it.
“The test itself implies nothing. Only the results are meaningful. If you’re telling me the truth, the polygraph shouldn’t be any problem for you.”
“It isn’t,” Lee heard himself saying. “Of course it’s no problem.”
“You consent?”
“If it will resolve this confusion, yes, of course,” Lee said, with what he hoped was calm dignity, but as he rose from the table, he was aware he was trembling—he never had eaten lunch nor, for that matter, breakfast this morning, and he found himself, like a frightened child longing for bed, picturing the warm meal he would make for himself, then the bath he would take and the beer he would drink, and the sated, self-confident man he would be when the test, which he assumed would be scheduled, like a cholesterol test at the doctor’s, was in some hazy future administered—
“If you’ll follow us, then, unless you’d rather not bring your own car. But you’re free to, of course.” And with that the remote, swift-moving, palpably malcontent man who had only a few days before begged to just be called “Jim” was replacing his notebook and pen in his pocket and departing, while Lee stumbled half blind in his wake.
16.
FOLLOWING THE FAMILIAR SEDAN, HE HAD TO STRUGGLE to keep up when Agent Shenkman exceeded the speed limit, but even as his car plodded, his heart was a riot. He’d absorbed from somewhere that polygraphs measured heart rate and breathing, but he lacked all concrete sense of how that might work. Surely the accelerated heartbeat of a man in the grip of confusion and fear, if subjected to polygraph measurement, wouldn’t point to that man as a liar? Most racing hearts, ardent or fearful, were entirely innocent hearts. The machine would know that, wouldn’t it? By the time he was trying to follow the sedan into the parking lot of a Motel 6 he had never noticed at the intersection of old Route 19 with the interstate highway, Lee had difficulty turning the wheel with his petrified hands. Could the machine tell the wild pulse of terror apart from mendacity? Morrison waved him into a space, and then he was following the two agents through a tiny generic lobby, past tall plastic sentinel plants, down a dim, Windex-smelling hallway lined with black numbered doors.
He didn’t notice the number of the door that swung open to Morrison’s knock, and once shuffled into the cramped entry space between the room’s closet and the door to its bathroom, he felt scarcely able to digest his surroundings, although at the same time he saw it was just a motel room, squalid in its stark, hygienic cheapness, its mustard-toned drapes drawn to shut out the sun, a suitcase frankly open trailing trousers and socks on the nearer of two made-up beds, and a sprouting apparatus on the other, seemingly just escaped from its box, probing the motel bedspread with a half dozen suction cups.
The chair to the small writing desk had been pulled out and rotated to face the farther bed, but apart from this innovation, and the presence of suitcase and machine, the room showed no traces of occupancy, as if they had all—Lee, Morrison, Shenkman, the pale balding man who had opened the door and who looked like an insurance adjuster or an uncharismatic shoe salesman—tumbled into the room at that moment. The pale man might have been interrupted in changing his clothes after arduous travel. A pair of loafers were kicked off near the window. “Right now?” he inquired. He went padding to the machine, in his socks, and bent down to heft it from the bed to the writing desk. Tendrils trailed and were almost tripped over.
“Need a hand?” Morrison asked.
“No, no.” Once the machine had been heaved onto the desk, the pale man stood with his back to them, disentangling its many extrusions. “As discussed?” he asked over his shoulder.
“As discussed. Give a knock on the wall when you’re finished. I’ll be right next door.”
“You’re not staying?” Lee exclaimed, turning back toward the door. Morrison was departing; Agent Shenkman was already gone. “How will you know…How can I tell you I’m telling the truth—”
“Gerry knows what to ask. And I’ll follow up, if necessary.” Morrison closed the door.
Lee felt his heart bounding and shuddering. After they’d been alone for an agonizing moment, Gerry tweaking and tuning, Lee could not stop himself from asking, “Are you doing this to lots of people?”
“You should probably leave all the questions to me,” Gerry said, although not unkindly.
Once Gerry had made his adju
stments, he ushered Lee into the desk chair. “And untuck your shirt, please, and undo the buttons….”
The machine had a sort of large bladder appendage that Gerry fitted around Lee’s torso like an oversize blood-pressure cuff. With deft, impassive fingers, Gerry affixed suction cups, wire ends, indescribable chill antennae to Lee’s skin with first-aid tape. The room was stuffy, but Lee felt himself goose-pimpling, his surface recoiling in fear and revulsion; the same defensive mental absence he employed whenever at the doctor’s office tried to armor him now, but it was interfered with by rogue cogitations, almost all in the key of self-justification. He had misrepresented the letter from Gaither only to save Morrison time; why would Morrison want to meander through Lee’s sordid past? And he’d pretended he’d thrown out the letter only to cover the fact that he’d misdescribed it; and once he had seen that it mattered, he’d told the whole truth. And, come to think of it, skipping Hendley’s memorial didn’t mean he was happy that Hendley was dead. He wasn’t so self-dramatizing as to engage in hysterics like Sondra, but he was certainly sorry, and startled, and he condemned senseless murder—who didn’t? He was an honest man, honest to a fault, in fact: witness his skipping the service because he just couldn’t stomach the pageant. His perpetual crime was the failure to keep up appearances, to even notice the masks he’d do better to don; he should have gone to the service and wrung a few tears. Maybe he should have praised the “self-knowledge” that helped Esther drop out of college. Should have raised Aileen’s son by Gaither and said things like, “You’re no less my child than Esther!” He certainly should have hired professional landscapers to deal with his lawn, should have replaced the antiques Michiko took with cheap pieces from Macy’s, should have learned, at the very least, how not to wear his every failing and humiliation embroidered and badged on his sleeve, and certainly shouldn’t be sitting in a cheap motel room, sleeves pushed up as if donating blood, to allow the suspicious machine to encoil his arms. And yet he’d consented to do this precisely to keep up appearances, to show, with serene dignity, he had nothing to hide. Why then did he feel shamefaced and degraded already?