by Susan Choi
Then a small space, a white void of emphasis, below which the note concluded:
Inquire Marjorie, Sippston Idaho Public Library.
Once he’d recovered again from the shock, the audacity, of it, he could not help lingering over “It is fine work, I’m sure, though I will not have time to read it.” Fine work, I’m sure. That was Gaither to the core, that condescension ill-disguised as politesse. Very southern, very “gentlemanly.” He would let the mask slip just enough to help Lee understand he was being insulted, but not so much that Lee could have pointed the slight out to anyone else. The work was fine—read: adequate. Not simply good. I’m sure painted Lee as the supplicant, eager for praise. After more than three decades, Gaither still pulled the strings with his oversize hands; he allowed Lee his few skirmish triumphs, but he still won the war.
Lee’s fingers had stained the little sheet with perspiration. He was no longer the secretive flounder on the floor of the sea, but a cork at its surface. In fatigue his aged body was such a horribly exquisite barometer of shifting conditions. When had he simply been hale, and unaware of his flesh? Now it was past eight at night by both Nissan and Seiko, and suddenly cold; his teeth began to chatter at the slimy, frigid touch of his own sweat as it rolled down his sides. And, what seemed paradoxical to him, the McDonald’s lot had grown more and more crowded. Who were these hundreds of people, on the move after dark? With a twitch from the chill, or from horror, he realized suddenly that Gaither must be among them, as concealed as Lee hoped he himself was. Gaither must drive, on his sinister errands—to plant goading notes, to mail letters and bombs. He couldn’t possibly fly. Or did he opt for the long-distance bus? Lee remembered the interstate bus rides of his earliest days in this country: the dispossessed ridership, the poorest of his new nation’s citizens. Men who had just finished serving in prison and girls who were running away. That faceless milieu was well suited to a killer with a bomb in a box. Perhaps this was why the “Woodmont” envelope was postmarked from Spokane, the “Lumberton” from Pocatello—in each of his postal personas Gaither hoped to appear to be from a small town, but no interstate bus went to such little places, so he settled for something nearby. He was subject to the approximateness of the poor person’s method of transit. Or did he mean to create this impression? Was Gaither dropping false clues, to lure Lee toward erroneous Holmesian thoughts? Lee’s first idea must have been right: Gaither must drive a car. After all, he’d gone to the town he and Lee had once lived in as students, and slid into the library stacks, and sliced open Lee’s book. That was far from approximate.
Now Lee put the little slip away also, and closed his eyes—not to rest, not as salve to his soul, but to rile himself further, by reviewing that first diabolical dart, that had pierced him so many weeks back, and reduced him to where he was now. He remembered it all.
Dear Lee,
What a bittersweet pleasure to see your face after all of these years, even if through the mesh of newsprint. You are still a handsome man. “Princely,” I believe, was the word sometimes used around campus for you. I know that you, like me, are rational, and that you won’t be offended when I say that the sight of my grad school colleague almost seventy years (is that right?) from his start in this life, was a bracing reminder to one of his peers as to how many years of his own life have passed. Let me compensate for the great gaffe of mentioning age by asserting you wear it admirably well, a lot better than I do. I wonder if you would agree that there is some relief, in becoming old men. What poet wrote “tender youth, all a-bruise”? I can admit that you bruised me, that last time we met.
Of course I was laughably innocent then, of the workings of human relations. But I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. I only press on the point (on the bruise!) to impress how I’d like to revive faded fellowship now. Now you are probably angry with me, as I once was with you. Please don’t be. There’s a reason my arrow grazed you. I can learn what my long-ago colleague has done in the long years since we last had contact.
I hope to hear from you soon. Until then I remain,
Your Old Colleague and Friend
He only missed having the actual object when it came to the illegible thicket with which it concluded. He wished he could pore over those slashings and scratchings again, perhaps under a microscope. Morrison hadn’t been able to make “Lewis Gaither,” or anything else, from the tangle; perhaps it actually read “Jesus Christ” or, for that matter, “Brain Bomber.” It occurred to Lee that this might be a fresh affectation. Lee didn’t recall Gaither’s writing as being dramatically bad; he didn’t recall any notable characteristics. Perhaps the new style strove to indicate scholarly brilliance. Or perhaps it was unintended, a sign of deepening madness.
Did it go without saying that Gaither was mad, to have done what he’d done?
For the first time, Lee’s fury at Gaither was laced by a fear that was almost dispassionate. He had been accustomed to viewing Gaither as a combatant, a reviled rival, long before these most recent events. The recent events had disinterred the rivalry, had infused it with blood and then heated that blood to a boil—but they hadn’t fundamentally altered the bristling relation Lee felt toward a man he had not seen in thirty-one years. For all the reluctance with which Lee admitted the fact, rivalry implied an equality, a contest between rational men. One might be malicious and self-righteous, but he couldn’t be mad.
I know that you, like me, are rational.
Lee’s will to conjure the other man was so powerful that for an instant he felt he’d succeeded, though Gaither didn’t appear in the form of a man—who might threaten or be threatened, might crumple the hamburger bag, might revile Lee or cower before Lee’s revilement, might pace the pavement, might weep, might take a piss on the grass—so much as in the form of an assessing intelligence, an observer who passed judgment. But who was judged? Lee? Oh, Lee abhorred Gaither’s precedence!—Gaither who had discovered and married Aileen, had impregnated her with his child, all before the decades-old evening Lee first set eyes on her. Gaither had preceded and created and possessed, and it must mean he knew something, at which Lee was not able to guess; it granted him a power; it loosened the keystones; it had always left Lee feeling less his wife’s husband, despite having won her away. He’d been too proud—too “princely,” as Gaither put it—not to be galled by his second-place status, even if it was only temporal. And perhaps he was still too proud, now, to believe that the man who had ruined his life at a stroke was no genius of vengeance, but only insane.
He realized he was nodding off, drained, when his chin struck his chest. His body seemed lost in his clothes: he had the lap of a little old man. I wonder if you would agree that there is some relief, in becoming old men. There could be, Lee thought, his eyes filling with tears. Perhaps that was all he was seeking—not the revenge of a lifetime, but simple relief.
The interstate highway can be a sweet sanctuary, between towns and in darkness. Making his way westward, Lee was reminded of this. His entire career as an American driver had been one of timorous caution that nevertheless often failed to guarantee safety; at best he prematurely exhausted his brake pads; at worst were the small accidents at low speeds, at least a couple a decade before this most recent one that had officially ushered him into a fugitive’s life. But there was also an alternate history, embedded in the first, as distinct as a patch of bright color on the reverse of the familiar drab cloth. In this history Lee is a long-distance driver at night, and his usual fidgety glancing at mirrors, his nervous pulsing of the brake, his defensive and dangerous jerks of the wheel are as absent as if here confined to the one other car, half an hour and many miles now distant, Lee has seen in the whistling tunnel of night. The car’s sleek hood parts the waters of speed; the pale cones of light probe the void. Distance is conquered, devoured, almost effortlessly. This time of his life feels so lost as to be prehistoric, yet in years it’s not so long ago. Lee isn’t yet driving the Nissan, but one of the Nissan�
�s isomorphic ancestors, probably the Toyota Corona. Lee isn’t halfway through his sixties, but just in the door of his fifties, although he was amazed, now, to reinhabit that past self and remember how old he’d felt then: at the outer limit of experience and unwanted wisdom.
Then he’d been driving not west but east, every Thursday night after his last summer class of the week. He would have had an early dinner, begun to drive around seven, only let himself stop for fitful, unavoidable sleep after daylight in a rest area somewhere in Pennsylvania. Almost always the trip that began with such fragile tranquillity, himself solitary and swift through the dark, would conclude in a cauldron of afternoon traffic on the New England Thruway, with the pumping of brakes and the shaking of fists and quite often the shedding of tears, all of which was an apt preparation for the weekend ahead.
At that time Aileen and Esther had been living in Providence, Rhode Island, for five years. When she’d left him, Aileen had first taken Esther to Tampa, where Nora was living. But after only six weeks, she’d gone to Providence instead, where she and Nora had grown up. Their parents were dead and Aileen no longer knew anyone, but at least it wasn’t Florida, she’d told Lee on the phone, and Providence was a clannish place, so that she’d gotten a good secretarial job up at Brown—reward for the prodigal daughter—and put Esther in a school with enough nonwhite kids that she might finally get cast as a Pilgrim in the Thanksgiving play.
This informative phone call hadn’t been unusual for them, and it would be some time—well after the time of those nine-hundred-mile weekly drives—before Lee understood that it was unusual at all, that most divorced couples did not speak by phone with a frequency exceeding that of many couples still married. In one sense at least, he had considered that his marriage to Aileen had been improved by divorce. When they spoke by phone, there was a sense of shared endeavor, as if divorce had been imposed from without and required their joint ingenuity. Of course this was because of Esther—but it remained that for however much they bickered and sniped, a collaborative quality underlay their conversations that had been absent from their shared domestic life. It might have proceeded only from the fact that, in all the new arrangements, there was no one else logically to consult. Yet it still felt to Lee like a renaissance, and perhaps he wouldn’t fully understand they were no longer married until she was dead.
Arriving at Providence Hospital after changing his undershirt, rinsing his face, hacking his skin with a razor at the Days Inn motel, the devastating shock he endured undiminished each time came less from Aileen than from Esther. He had seen Esther at spring break or Christmas, and for an endless and uneasy and precious full month in the summer, every year since the marriage had ended. But as if someone meant to ensure the worst conditions imaginable, it was this most recent year, when she’d gone from thirteen to fourteen, that had swept away all continuities. Gone was the child who had placed her small hand inside his. Gone, even, was her hair, to Lee an unparalleled treasure, its rich color like that of a piece of expensive wood brought to a mirrorlike shine. Esther’s long hair had been chopped up at random, producing a dingy, rough plumage that made Lee think of unkempt barnyard chickens (perhaps because “it’s called ‘feathers,’” Aileen had explained). In her five years away from the town of her birth, Esther had not just excised all her memories of it but had substituted an imagined contemptible version, a pathetic hicksville that was revealed as the butt of her jokes. She had acquired a “gang,” an assortment of both boys and girls who exhibited insolent stares, strange asexual puffs of dyed hair, sadistic chain mail of bright little buttons with such exhortations as PLEASE KILL ME PLEASE down the fronts of their jackets. And yet they pretended, with what to Lee was insufferable ostentation, to human compassion; they turned up at the hospital, day after day, did not just loiter with Esther in far corners of the grim cafeteria but were presumptuous enough to sit beside Aileen’s bed, to—as it sounded to Lee from the hall—complain to her, burden her with their germy, self-centered concerns. Aileen who, in her rapid descent, seemed not so much saintly to Lee as promiscuous, turning the same smile on her husband that she gave Esther’s friends, who were “wonderful,” whose conversation engrossed her, who seemed to prize her in turn, because she listened to them, for what reason Lee couldn’t discern.
Lee taught only in the first summer session that year. By the time of the break, at the Fourth of July, Aileen’s condition had worsened so much that Lee gave up his late-summer class and lived entirely in the Providence motel. This was the end of his solitary night driving, the end of what had been an inexplicably cherished and tranquil commute. A dilation, he understood much later, of the unfinished moment; no verdict, no final decision. Illness could not lay its claim, death could not be the answer, so long as one lonesome night in the car must give way to another. He did not fill his pressboard drawers at the Days Inn with his grayed cotton T-shirts and shorts, with his plastic disposable razors, thinking this was a short-term encampment, awaiting the end. He was still in his car, all alone. A nimbus of light showed the instant ahead, but beyond that was merciful darkness, in every direction.
He and Aileen spoke of things that did not seem to matter. In her second life in Providence, as an adult and parent, the town had revealed its charms. She described these to him, and he listened, as if they were strangers discussing a place to which random travel had brought them. The stern little houses, the surprisingly nice nearby beach. Rhode Island was the Ocean State, Aileen observed. What a contrast this summer must make to Lee’s summers back home, in the landbound Midwest, amid tedious furrows of corn. Lee had always missed the ocean, hadn’t he, since he’d come to this country? The ocean and the mountains—she remembered him saying he loved those landscapes; what an irony he’d lived for decades exiled from both. When she wasn’t pursuing this train, she was singing the deluded song of praise for Esther’s near-delinquent friends. They were misfits, Aileen said, as if this were something to cherish. All too smart or too creative or too morally distressed—By what? Lee thought scornfully. Hamburgers?—to get along with the rest of their peers, but this was the miracle of it, that they had all found each other. They were passionately loyal to Esther, the brave tribe to which she belonged. In retrospect Lee would hear the wheedling in Aileen’s voice and cringe, at the portrait of him it suggested. Was he really a person who had to be probed, softened up, caught off guard by sly, slantwise suggestions? Could his own wife not speak to him frankly about what she desired? He liked to think that bluntness would have served her well. It was clear indirection had not. At the time he had only been affronted by every separate proposition—Esther as “misfit,” delinquency as “creativity”—so that he’d entangled them both in his refutations. He hadn’t had any idea what Aileen really wanted until Nora, his unlikely ally in this one particular, told him.
“She wants you to move to Rhode Island, so that Esther can stay with her friends. They’re all supposed to start high school together this fall. She doesn’t want Esther to go somewhere new and start over again. Especially because it’s such a frightening prospect, high school.”
Lee was too amazed by this idea to grasp its substance; his first objection was peripheral. “She’s not going somewhere new, she’s going home,” he said, as if this latter idea, that Esther was returning to live with him because her mother was going to die, was by contrast a simple idea that provoked no distress. He and Nora were sitting at a corner table in the hospital cafeteria. Beside Lee were the final exams from his one summer class, which he still hadn’t managed to grade. Nora had been in Providence for two weeks, during which time she and Lee had not bothered to speak to each other, even when they were both seated outside Aileen’s room in the hallway. Aileen’s own relations with Nora had been arctic for the duration of her marriage to Lee, and Nora’s appearance in Providence had been another unnerving reminder to Lee that not only had Aileen left him, but she had altered all aspects of her existence to an extent that not even the phone could reveal. Nora and Aileen
were sisters again, and Esther was most definitely Nora’s niece. On entering the cafeteria this afternoon, instead of taking a table by herself as far from Lee as existed, Nora had come straight to him, and he had squared his exams and set them aside, as if he’d known as well as she did that consultation between them was inevitable.
“She’s been here five years. The way it feels to Esther, she was a little girl when they moved here. Providence is her home.”
“Even if I wanted to, it’s impossible,” Lee finally said. “I have tenure. Aileen knows what that means. I can’t just quit there and get a job here.” That it was so beyond his capabilities to get tenure wherever he wanted made him angry at Aileen for underscoring the fact, and his face, he knew, grew unattractively hostile.
Nora didn’t bristle in response. She only said, in a mild tone of correction, “It’s a pipe dream. She wants to think that Esther’s friends are all she needs, so it’s all right that she’s losing her mother.” Without any warning, Nora started to weep, but it was a phenomenon of tears and not sobs, so that their conversation didn’t need to pause. Nora drew a paper napkin over her face, as if wiping at rain.
“What do you think?” Lee asked, and he heard his voice betray the humble fright he thought he’d concealed in his chest. He wanted to cry, too, but he wasn’t capable of such decorous tears.
“I think,” Nora said carefully, still wiping her face, “that it would be better for Esther to leave here. High school is a big upheaval anyway. She doesn’t think so, but everything’s going to change. Might as well change the scene. I don’t think her friends here are so wonderful.”