A Gesture Life

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “Fortunately, Lieutenant, not for you,” I said. My crisp tone seemed to convince him, and he bowed hesitantly as I walked down the hall and to the wing where they had quartered the new girls.

  There was a group of six standing in the short hallway, which was almost a vestibule for the larger run of the wing. I strode past without incident. Typically, officers would have the privilege of spending hours and sometimes whole evenings with a woman, but in this instance a special rationing had been instituted. It seemed the men were all too familiar with the offerings of the professional aunties, and the arrival of these girls had most everyone edgy and expectant. General Yamashita, one presumed, had been first to take his enjoyment when they came in. It was said the four girls were shipped all the way from Shimonoseki, via the Philippines, and that in fact two others had been “lost” during the lengthy sea passage. Now there were three, though it was known that other new, young women would be arriving imminently, and in numbers that would be satisfactory for all.

  But I didn’t really care for these kinds of activities. It was true that I had visited the welcoming house a few times since being stationed in Singapore, but I wasn’t enamored of the milieu, the transactional circumstances and such. Like any man, I sometimes had that piercing, wrecking want, and in moments I allowed it to propel me to frequent one of the women, Madam Itsuda. As noted, I did this discreetly. She must have been forty at the time, nearly twice my age, and I can’t say I held deep feelings for her (as that would have been ludicrous). I appreciated her gentle, laconic manner and understanding mien toward my youth and naivety. She was never belittling, nor did she pretend that I was special, and I can still remember her smoothing her somehow always tidy floorbed, the sheets invitingly turned down.

  Why I was going to the new girls, then, I couldn’t exactly say. I was naturally disturbed by the earlier events, but the fact that I would be concerned in particular about them, even think an iota about their circumstance, confused and irked me. I kept imagining the three of them, one to a room, the lights unchastely left on. At the head of the west wing, it was strangely quiet. English-style houses were, if monstrous, at least sturdily built. One of the doors suddenly opened and a girl ran out, crying. She was naked, and there was a faint smudge of blood staining the inside of her legs. She tried to run past me but I automatically caught her, not knowing what else to do.

  “Please,” she said, her eyes frantic. “Let me go, please, let me go!”

  “There’s no place to go,” I said, unthinking. “You must stay in the house.”

  She looked surprised at my words, staring at me as if I were someone she knew.

  “Please,” she said, crying even harder now. “I beg you.”

  A stout officer with a towel around his waist came stumbling out of the room. He was the group captain who’d come on the same transport as I. “There she is! I’m grateful to you, Lieutenant. We wouldn’t want another leaper, would we?”

  “I beg you, O-ppah, let me go!”

  “She’s a pretty one, isn’t she?” he said, taking her from me. He slapped her once in the face, quite hard. She fell quiet. “She goes on a little, though. Say, what was that you were saying to her?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “I thought I heard you say something, in her tongue.”

  “No sir, I didn’t.”

  He looked confused for a moment, but then shrugged. “Ah, what does it matter? We’re all here for relaxation tonight, right? And don’t look so concerned. We won’t be much longer. There’ll be plenty left, for you and your mates.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  He led her back down the hall to the open door. She followed him, in limp half-steps. Before they reached the room, the girl looked back at me, the side of her face raised red from the blow. I thought she was going to say something again, maybe O-ppah, how a girl would address her older brother or other male, but she just gazed at me instead, ashen-faced, as if in wonder whether I had uttered the words to her at all.

  * * *

  I WAS THINKING of that girl as I walked around the side of the Gizzi house and its waist-high weeds and saplings; I wondered if she had survived the war and was still living now, in Singapore or Korea or perhaps even here in this country. Or whether like Lieutenant Enchi she had been killed soon thereafter, by whatever circumstance, and been cheated of (or spared) the endless complications and questionings of a life duly spent. And what would she or Enchi think of me, an old man loitering in the shadows of a party house in America, peering into private rooms?

  As I turned onto the front yard, the two young men who had first greeted me were still on the sofa, the skinny one passed out over the edge of the wide arm. His largish companion was sitting up, however, simply looking out at the night and laughing softly to himself. I thought he had gone mad. But as I crossed his field of vision he said something, whispering to me in a little boy’s voice.

  “What?” I said to him. “Excuse me? I can’t hear you.”

  “She’s up there,” he was saying, his face screwed up in what I took to be mock fear. He repeated, “Up there.”

  He tipped his head toward the dormer over the garage. There, in the window, a seam of light shone through a break in the heavy curtain.

  “You know my daughter, Sunny?”

  “Don’t tell him I told you,” he answered more fearfully, getting up to walk away. He was already heading down the street, holding the neck of the big bottle between two fingers. “Don’t say anything, okay?”

  I ascended the flight of wooden stairs attached to the side of the house. The steep treads were spongy and rotting, and with each step it seemed the whole thing might collapse beneath me. At the landing I had to stop to catch my breath. The door was a half-window with a lacy curtain on the other side of the dingy glass.

  And there she was. She was standing in the middle of the squarish room, her figure in profile. She had on only a gray tank-top and her underwear. She was dancing, slowly, by herself. Her jeans and her sweater were splayed on the floor in front of her. I looked to the side and saw her audience, two men sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed. They were calling and toasting her with bottles of beer. One was a young black man wearing a worn baseball cap; the other, I thought, was Jimmy Gizzi, whom I’d seen once or twice around town. A hand-sized mirror lay between them on the carpet, sprays of bright white powder salting the glass.

  She wasn’t playing anything up for them, performing. She was simply there, moving without music, hardly looking at them as she swayed and twirled and pushed out her hips, her chest. I kept myself far enough from the window to remain hidden. I could hardly bear to watch the scene, much less allow it to go on. And yet each time Sunny turned my way I stepped back and quieted myself and hoped the darkness would camouflage me.

  I had never seen her move in such a way. I knew what her body was like, of course, from when she was a young girl, and later, too, when she’d swim or sunbathe at the house in a bikini, which was hardly a covering at all. She was always lithe and strong and sturdy-limbed, never too skinny or too softly feminine. I saw her as I believe any good father would, with pride and wonder and the most innocent (if impossible) measure of longing, an aching hope that she stay forever pristine, unsoiled.

  But to gaze upon her like this. She was running her hands over herself, pressing across the skimpy shirting and down her naked thighs and up again. The two men were laughing still, but there was a new attention in their faces; they were sitting up a bit more, as if riding higher on the worn carpeting. The man I assumed was Gizzi was watching her intently, enough so that he picked up the mirror without looking and, wiping it with his finger, rubbed the stuff all over his mouth and gums. I could see the foul light of his teeth. The other man was nursing his beer, his face mostly hidden beneath the brim of his hat. But I could tell he was stirred now, too, his fingers anxiously tapping at the bottle. Gizzi was calling her names like baby and sugar and sweet thing, though she didn’t respond, she didn’t look or smile
or even acknowledge him. But there was no coldness from her, either, no front of unwelcoming or remonstrance. I didn’t wish to think that it was she who had initiated this moment but there was nothing to indicate otherwise. They weren’t forcing her, or even goading her, or doing anything to coerce. She was moving and dancing with every suggestion, and then finally she was touching herself in places no decent woman would wish men to think about, much less see.

  The other man finished his beer and let it fall to the side. He pushed off his hat and pulled off his shirt and approached her on his knees, his fluffy Afro matted in a ring. He took Sunny by the hips and with a palpable and surprising gentleness kissed her on the belly. She ceased her moving. She stroked his hair and pulled him tightly against her by his neck. Jimmy Gizzi was watching them, too, and he was already unbuckling his belt as he stumbled up toward them. Jimmy Gizzi said something and they ignored him, and when he tried to touch her the man reached and held him roughly by the shoulder and neck and said, “You sit awhile, okay, Giz?”

  “All right, man, all right…” Jimmy mumbled weakly, a pained wince on his haggard face.

  The man half-threw him back toward the bed, though Jimmy didn’t lose his feet. He didn’t look in the least shocked or upset. Instead he crouched down on the floor and cleaned up the mirror with his hand, licking and mouthing his fingers and palm.

  “She’s all yours, Linc. Eat her up, man,” Jimmy Gizzi said, grinning and nodding. “Eat her up.”

  They ignored him again, and the man called Linc resumed kissing Sunny on the belly and down her sides, to the points of her lips. He was kissing her steadily, completely, as if he were simply there to mark her, above all else. Her body seemed tense, expectant. And then she leaned into him, hard, pressing herself into his face and hair. He bent and lifted her from the thighs, Sunny holding a standing position. She rose up as if nothing. He buried his face in the dip of her legs. Jimmy Gizzi had undone his pants and begun lazily stroking himself, and Sunny began laughing at him, first in chortles and then maniacally, in a dusky tone that seemed as illiberal and vile as what he was compelling on himself. And it was then that I wished she were just another girl or woman to me, no longer my kin or my daughter or even my charge, and I made no sound as I grimly descended, my blood already trying to forget, growing cold.

  7

  IT IS THE MORNING of my leaving and who should arrive to pick me up, bouqueted with lilies, but my friend and realtor and the likely future executor of my estate, Ms. Olivia Crawford, C.R.S. She tells me someone from the hospital left a message on her machine last night, to alert her that I was to be discharged today. She is almost certain that Renny Banerjee was the caller, though of course working through a third party, some nurse or assistant with a crowingly high-pitched nasal voice.

  I don’t inform Liv that it was in fact I who asked that someone to call—that someone being Nurse Dolly, who is one of those people who can seem insulted by any query whatsoever, and is thus naturally excellent at keeping secrets—not because I’m bashful for having requested her help, but because Liv herself looks deliciously intrigued by the idea that Renny Banerjee might be coming around again, perhaps finally regretting his decision to change every last one of his door locks. I don’t wish to dissuade her from this suspicion, as Renny himself, stopping in on his way home last night, all but admitted to me that he’s been driving by Liv’s office at odd hours, as well as her condominium, to check whether someone else’s car might regularly be there.

  Matchmaker I’m not, and yet it gives me a shimmering, pearly gleam of joy to think of the two of them together again. Renny with his flashing, wicked grin and disarming bouts of tenderness, and Liv, of course, just being herself, a one-woman corporation and salvage crew and instant remodeling service, all in one.

  “Now, Doc,” she says, setting the immense bouquet on the rolling tray at the foot of the bed. “I brought this up solely for the purpose of letting everyone know how completely recovered you are. I don’t believe in flowers only when you enter the hospital. You need even more lovely arrangements on getting out.”

  “From the grand looks of that bouquet, it may seem that I am ‘getting out’ forever.”

  “Doc!” she gasps, as if the idea were some awful, blaspheming joke. “You’re always making it seem that I want you gone. Really. You’re so awful these days! And cruel.”

  “It’s the hospital, I think.”

  “Well, it’s great timing, then, that I’ve come for you.” As she flutters about like a hotel maid, and not looking the least bit odd in her slimming Italian blazer and silk scarf with the stirrup pattern, I realize what it is about her that I have always revered. Liv Crawford is helplessly, perhaps even morbidly industrious. She has already tidied up the room and made the bed, placing my hospital gowns in the plastic hamper in the bathroom and wiping down the surfaces with the used towels. All this because it is there to do, the same way she entered the ruined family room of my house and saw what was needed and lighted up the touchpad of her cellular phone, to call forth restorative good order. She’s come with pictures of the renovations, all disarmingly, exactingly right. In a few minutes she will escort me out and drive me back swiftly to Bedley Run and show me the door to my prime vintage home, every last tint and scent of offending smoke steam-cleaned from the carpets, from the drapes, from the antiqued upholstery of the chairs, the place in showcase, immaculate, pristine and classic condition, appearing just as though I have not lived there every day for the last thirty years of my life.

  And I think how strange (as well as lucky) it is that Liv Crawford is also the only person I could have called for such a task, whether I wished to or not.

  “Hey, Doc, are these take-home slippers?” she now asks me, lifting a flattened baby-blue terry pair from beneath the bed.

  “Whatever you think.”

  “They’re sweet, in a downmarket sort of way. You can use them outside, before and after your swims.”

  “Yes, I can. Dr. Weil, however, is afraid my shingles will worsen with the chemicals.”

  “That’s his malpractice premium talking. He’s not a dermatologist, so what does he know?”

  “Physicians must all have broad, sound training.”

  “Maybe you do, Doc, but I’m not so sure about Larry Weil.”

  “He’s told me he’s a graduate of the Yale Medical School.”

  “So what!” Liv cries. “The man plays golf four times a week. Two handicap, or so Renny used to tell me. Now how good a doctor can he really be?”

  “He’s perfectly fine,” I say, feeling as though I’ve been his only defender. The nurses have also been harsh critics, as was Renny Banerjee the other day. And yet I’ve witnessed nothing to suggest that he’s anything but a competent, knowledgeable physician. He is a good doctor, I am sure, but not what they call gung-ho, or else inspirational, in the way some are. What is obvious, unfortunately for him, is his somewhat stereotypical physician’s mien, the stiff brush of his manner, the prickly tongue, that put-out-ness that is rarely endearing in a man so young, all of which is no doubt due to his frustration (as he’s often expressed) that he works in this sleepy upcountry hospital instead of in a big-city research and teaching institution with his own lab assistants and grant writers and ambitions of scientific glory.

  I remember how I was when I was his age, heady with the quiet arrogance of a newly minted officer, feeling wise and capable and in command of any contingencies. Though not a true physician, I had been fully trained in field and emergency medicine in order to aid and sustain my comrades, to save them whenever possible, fulfilling my duty for Nation and Emperor. And while I was grateful for being part of what we all considered the greater destiny and the mandate of our people, I had hoped, too, that my preparation and training would be tested and confirmed by live experiences, however difficult and horrible; and more specifically, that my truest mettle would show itself in the crucible of the battlefield, and so prove to anyone who might suspect otherwise the worthiness of
raising me away from the lowly quarters of my kin and reveal the essential, inner spirit that is within us all. And yet still I have always wondered if training or rearing tells more than the simple earth and ash and blood from which we come, or whether these social inurements eventually fall away, like the moldering garments of the dead, to reveal the underlying bones.

  Liv Crawford, I have a feeling, would contend that neither is the case; it is what one does, right now, in the very fact of the act, that she champions. I like to hope that this is not simply the realtor modality. And the right now for her, thank goodness, is the business of getting me home.

  “Ready, Doc?”

  “Yes, Liv, I think so. Liv?”

  “What, Doc?”

  “I want to thank you for your efforts on my behalf. I am truly grateful.”

  “Don’t start like this, Doc, or you’ll get me misty.”

  “But I must tell you. Dousing the fire, helping to pull me out, the house renovations. Your coming today. I could not have asked a blood relative to do any of these things.”

  “The office head put me up to it,” she says lamely, trying not to look at me. “She wants the exclusive someday. She’s already written on the board that it’ll be the listing of the year.”

  “But you must know that the house would be no one’s but yours to sell.”

  Liv smiles, almost shyly, obviously having difficulty with self-admissions of generosity and kindness. Of course she’s known. But she too much likes—and depends on—the blustery cover of commerce.

  “You know me, Doc. I never take anything for granted. Not until closing. And even then, I make sure to read everyone’s signature and date. Make sure it’s right on the line.”

  “Perhaps I ought to leave it in my will, that you’re to sell my house.”

  “You’re being morbid again, Doc. But you know, it’s not a bad idea,” she says, perking up to her old self. She’s able to eye me now. “Of course I don’t have to say that I wish you would live forever. But”—and she pauses—“I do think I’ve made it clear that I believe I’m the agent to list your beautiful home someday, and I hope all the time that I’m that lucky woman. But there’s not a bone in my body that wishes that day to come any sooner than never.”