“What happened to the prince’s brother?” Sweat was pouring down his forehead.
“He went to France. Shouldn’t I go ask someone to give you a painkiller?”
He shook his head. Without his glasses, his eyes looked soft and milky, the eyes of a ruminant animal. Until he got sick, she had never known that his eyelashes were longer than hers. It seemed the most intimate thing she had ever discovered about him.
“I don’t see why you’re torturing yourself like this.”
“Don’t you?” he said mildly. “Well, I’d like to cling to the remnants of my mind just a little longer.” He had listened to a program on QXR that morning, he told her, his breath coming in gasps, about old people in the city whose rents were taking up most of their Social Security checks. The reporter said some of them were living on cat food. From there they got onto the subject of health insurance.
That same evening Khim arrived back unexpectedly at the office, very formal in a dark overcoat and a pale gray silk scarf. “Silly man did not show up,” he said crossly.
“I’m almost at the last chapter of the Seng manuscript,” she told him, but he ignored this.
“You have been crying.”
“A little.”
“More than a little. You visited your father today?”
“Yes.”
“Come into my office. I give you something to drink.” She followed him in, and he gestured toward the velvet couch. “Please be seated.” He hung up his overcoat and scarf in the closet before going to the lacquered cabinet and taking out the Scotch. Even for him, the tie he wore was exceptionally beautiful: lush-looking white silk, with a pattern of deep pink peonies and dark leaves. Some woman gave him that, she thought.
He handed her a heavy crystal tumbler and sat in the carved chair opposite with an identical glass. She noticed how his upper lip curled over the rim, seeming to grip it, as he drank.
“Your father had the radiation?”
“Yes.”
“And how is he now?”
“He’s not very well.”
“What did you speak about with him?”
“About the literacy rate in Cambodia in the fifties. And the prince’s brother.”
“Surely this is not his main interest.”
She shrugged. “No. We talked about the homeless too, and old people eating cat food. He said it was tragic that the richest country in the world can’t manage to provide health care for its citizens.”
“And this is always how you talk?”
“Yes. We used to talk about Watergate a lot. He was fascinated by the hearings.”
Khim gave a sharp nod of approval. “I too. To me they seemed the best of America, not only worst. Showing is true democracy after all.”
“That’s what my father said.”
“Good. Americans must recognize this more. Not just the corruption, but that they expose it.”
“My father isn’t exactly an American. I mean, he is now, but he was born in Germany. He came in the thirties.”
“Ah. An immigrant, like me.” He laughed, a harsh cawing sound. “Maybe I could understand him better than you.”
“Maybe,” she said sullenly, looking down at her glass.
“You hardly drink anything.”
“I don’t really drink very much.”
He nodded in satisfaction. “That seems to be true of many Jews, I have noticed. Correct?”
“I think so.”
“You see, I did not know that you were Jewish, until you said your father was coming from Germany in thirties. Then I assume it. I did not think that Jews had this color of hair. Auburn, yes?”
“Yes. I inherited it from my mother.”
“Is your mother as well Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“So this must be why you hardly sip at your drink. Or maybe it is because you are alone here with me.”
“Of course not,” she said. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“No? It would be only natural, after all.” He stood up. “Shall I take you to supper? Your crying will have made you hungry.”
They went to a small French restaurant on Twelfth Street, where the headwaiter bowed and greeted him by name. “Are there no Cambodian restaurants?” she asked, when they were seated.
He gave her an ironic look. “Not enough of us here yet. In later years, maybe.”
“All those things Mr. Nimol wrote in his book … the cadres of sixteen-year-olds marching into villages and killing the women and children, the training camps in the jungle … that’s all true?”
“Yes. Too many eyewitnesses now to say it’s lies. People who escaped.”
“But you got out before all that?”
“I am like Mayflower immigrant, for Cambodian. Came five years ago.” He took a sip of his water and leaned back, watching her closely. “When they kill my father.” Then he snapped his fingers expertly at the waiter, who came hurrying over. After that he became very merry, teasing her for what he claimed was her air of noblesse oblige. “When you came to my office that day, I say to myself, this woman thinks of work as moral obligation, not for money. Something for the greater good.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, stung. “I absolutely need the money.”
“It is nonetheless how you appeared. Nothing wrong with that.” He too had studied philosophy, he told her, when he was at the Sorbonne; he too had abandoned his graduate studies, and returned to Cambodia. Why had he quit? she asked him. “Because it was gobbledygook. I was like you, wanting to know the nature of good. I supposed my professors would be gods of enlightenment, showing me true path. Imagine!” He blew on his soup. “They were little monkeys, those men, only posturing. But real disillusionment was with myself, for thinking such questions were important. Good does not matter. Has no power.”
“But it survives,” she said. “It may not win, it may never win, but it can’t be killed, either. Not completely.”
He looked at her expressionlessly for a moment. “Maybe you are right. Maybe you are quite wise after all.” Some giddiness of sorrow seemed to fill the space between them, that felt remarkably like happiness. Then he leaned across the table and brushed a crumb of coquilles St. Jacques from her upper lip.
Later he walked her back to her apartment. As they crossed Astor Place and headed east, he stopped, frowning around him at the sagging storefronts and the grimy-looking people on the pavement, vaguely Dickensian in their tattered clothing and long greasy hair. Two sunken-chested men in bright bell-bottomed trousers edged them out of the way, springing along on their skinny legs, laughing the high manic laugh of speed freaks. “Your father would not like you to live in such a neighborhood,” Khim said sternly, the first of what would be many references, over the next few months, to her father’s wishes as he divined them: her father would want her to wear pretty dresses, he wanted her to achieve something with her life, he would not approve of her swearing. When they turned onto her block, a bum who sometimes slept in the vestibule of her building, a grizzled man with many filthy scarves wound around his neck, veered toward them and asked her accusingly what she was doing with a Jap. She felt Khim stiffen by her side, and when she turned to look at him his face was stonier than ever. Then she pushed open the door to her building, and he followed her up the dingy stairs.
When he stepped toward her, inside the apartment, she had a moment of panic: she had never planned on this, never wanted it, she must not allow it to happen. The bed was right opposite the door, a few steps, which they took clumsily, in lockstep. He was squeezing her too hard. And then suddenly it was exactly what she wanted, the only thing, as though her body had been waiting for him all her life. They stood apart to shed their clothes, and when they lay down images tumbled through her head, of a river, trees, some place left behind a long time ago, long forgotten; the current gathered force; the sounds coming from her were not her own. By the end there was not a single bone in her body, only blind heat, and his breath moving through her.
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br /> Afterward she wanted to go on touching him, when she stroked his skin the pleasure was so acute she had to shut her eyes, but he moved away and lay silent, his arms folded under his head. She withdrew her hand as though he’d slapped her.
“Don’t be expecting too much,” he said after a minute.
“What do you mean?” But she knew very well what he meant.
“You must not rely on me too much.” You might have mentioned that before, she wanted to say, in a sudden flare of anger. Or even, which he would mind more, you seem to have mastered the New York clichés. But she didn’t trust her voice. A moment later the sound of his breathing told her he was asleep.
It was the only time he came to her apartment. After that they always went to the handsome, clean, boxlike room, high above the city, that he had furnished almost as a replica of his office: here again there was a carved chair, a gray velvet couch, a lacquered cabinet, a massive desk; but there was a table too, with two spindly French-looking chairs. The bed was a platform with a thin pad on it. The walls were painted a dull gold—the color, he told her, of the mud walls in the peasant villages of Cambodia. Windows ran all along one wall, but no sound entered from the junction of Broadway and Columbus below, the apartment was too high up for that.
Sometimes he would cook rice and dried fish for their supper and tell her stories of his childhood. His father had brought his mother a wristwatch from Phnom Penh, and Khim, never having seen such a thing before, had taken it apart to see how it worked and could not put it together again. It was the only time his father ever hit him. A young monk had fallen in love with his sister, and written her poems. Where is your sister now? she asked. The muscles of his face tightened; she thought he was going to say she was dead. But no. She was in Laos, he told her, and stood up from the table.
“Tell me about your father,” she said.
“He was enlightened man, reformer, quite well known in region for this. So Communists try to get him on their side. When he refused, they kill him. End of story.”
When he bit off his words like that, when his voice grew clipped and flat, she knew not to trespass further, she knew she was risking his anger. But it was at those times that his grief became a living presence to her; the whole atmosphere of the room seemed charged with it. It was as though he was carrying an overfull glass, holding it upright with immense vigilance, to keep its contents from spilling. Only she must not mention it, she must go on pretending not to notice, though she thought her heart would burst.
The other time he grew angry was when she criticized America. “This is merely the stupid fashion for your generation. You are only spoiled.”
“For God’s sake. Look at the horrors America has inflicted on your country. The illegal bombings. The destruction. The murders. How can you possibly defend it?”
All that had nothing to do with her, he said, over her protests. “You must be grateful for your own good fortune in being born here.” He told her the story of a Latvian woman, newly arrived in New York, whom he had once taken to Macy’s.
“But why you? How did you know her?” she interrupted, and he waved the question away. It seemed the woman from Riga, when she saw a dress she liked, meant to take it without trying it on; it had not occurred to her that the dress would come in more than one size.
“But that’s just capitalism you’re talking about,” she said. “The glories of the capitalist system.”
He scowled at her, folding his arms across his chest. “Is more than capitalism. More significant. Is choice, freedom.”
And he reverted often to the subject of her father—his philanthropies, his plans for the liaison between the local hospital and Yale, his opinions on welfare reform and the missile defense—just as her father, on her visits to the hospital, went on inquiring respectfully about Mr. Eath’s views on the situation in Southeast Asia or the latest debate in the UN.
Each of them nodded with evident satisfaction at what she told him, as though gratified to find his high opinion of the other confirmed. At such moments she felt a flush of pride at having brought them together, however incorporeally, however much she seemed to be excluded from their communion. On the train to Connecticut she sometimes imagined telling her father that she was in love with Mr. Eath, but when she got there he was so stately, so grave and majestic, that she could not drag the conversation down to the level of her personal life. Or her stepmother was cracking jokes with the nurse, or one of the doctors had dropped by with an article from the New England Journal of Medicine. In the end, through all her visits, she never told him about the room on Sixty-fifth Street, the gray velvet couch, the rice and dried fish. She never said that three, four, five times now Mr. Eath had called out in his sleep as she lay next to him, the same indecipherable words over and over, a hoarse cry that gave way to a scream.
She would seize him by the shoulders and shake him, terror making her rougher than she meant to be, and then he would turn to face the wall, lying rigid. A few minutes later, though, still without turning around, he might raise an objection to something she had said earlier in the evening: she was wrong about Fantastik, it had a very unpleasant odor. It wasn’t strictly true that Wit of Silesia, back in the Middle Ages, had prefigured the ideas of the German transcendentalists. He would sit up in bed and point out some crucial distinction she had overlooked; she would sit up also, fighting back tears, longing to touch him but not daring to. He would speak about Fichte for a while, or Bishop Berkeley, until he turned grumpy and declared himself too tired to think—sounding accusing, as though she had woken him from a sound slumber to argue philosophical points.
One night when he had lain back down, and she was drifting off to sleep herself, he said, “Your father is not an American. You must not expect him always to speak out loud how he feels.”
“I don’t expect it.”
“Yet you seem angry at him for speaking of homeless and Watergate. You are wanting confessions from him, like a sentimental film. You must arrive at forgiveness. He has suffered extremely.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know. You should wear a dress when you visit him.”
“Because of his suffering?”
“Because he will like it very much.”
And she had done it, she had worn the gray Quaker dress on her very next visit, with a gauzy green scarf, and her father had told her how nice she looked, though she could not bring herself to report that to Khim. There were almost as many things she kept from Khim as from her father: that when she was alone in her apartment, for example, the thought of her father’s death grew so huge that terror drove her into the streets in the middle of the night, to stride about crazily among the crazies until it was light; that the thought of Never was splitting open her skull.
She’d been going to tell him; she might have tried the night her father phoned to report the cancer in his stump. But by that time Khim was gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was exactly a week since he’d disappeared. She had gone to the office as usual that Monday morning, having left his apartment at noon on Sunday to meet an old graduate school classmate at the Met, a sharp-faced Wittgensteinian now teaching at a college in Minnesota. As they wandered through the Impressionist collection Phyllis talked about the perfidy of her department chairman, who had urged her to propose a new multidisciplinary major and then, when the others objected, sided with them against her. “And wouldn’t you know it, he teaches metaphysics. Metaphysicians never stick up for their principles. None of the analytical philosophers became Fascists; did you ever think of that?” She cocked her head at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife. “So now of course everyone’s against me, I’m going to have to fight like hell to get my contract renewed. The bastard. I could kill that bastard.”
Her voice, made loud by agitation, echoed back from the marble walls; several people scowled at them. Emma suggested they walk in the park instead, it was such a nice day, and after they had stopped and bought pretzels and ice cre
am she told Phyllis about Khim. “You make him sound like Heathcliff or something,” Phyllis said scornfully. Later they ate pizza on Bleecker Street and went to a Sibelius concert at NYU, for which Phyllis had complimentary tickets; when they parted, neither of them mentioned anything about staying in touch. She’d been intending to imitate Phyllis for Khim in the office the next day.
He’d never kept strictly regular hours, but he always arrived by ten. At ten past, Mr. Seng phoned and was outraged at not finding Khim there. She phoned him at home, and when there was no answer decided he must be on his way. By eleven, when she dialed his number for the sixth time, letting the phone ring and ring, she was imagining him felled by a knife, a gun, bound with rope, paralyzed by a stroke. At 11:05 she was driven to the expedient of phoning Mr. Seng, and asking him whether they had talked the day before. But Mr. Seng hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday.
At 11:30, after letting the phone ring forty times, she concentrated on remembering—as though she were being interrogated by the police—if there had been anything unusual in his behavior the morning before. Had he seemed preoccupied, distressed, had he alluded to trouble of any kind? No, he had not. He had not even had a nightmare. He had made her tea, and they had listened to an Englishman on the radio who had written a book about the Second World War. He had told her how, when he first came to America, he had said jolly good, not knowing it was British.
At 11:52 she locked the office and headed for the subway. If he were simply ill, if he had unplugged the phone to get some sleep, then he would be angry at her for interfering, and angrier still because she would have to get the doorman, or the super, or the managing agent, to accompany her: he had never given her a key to his apartment. If they burst in to find him in his pajamas, throwing up, he would never forgive her. But surely if he had been ill, he would have phoned her.
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