Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  It was Dennis Hoagland. The grand never-knocker. He was wearing a red rain slicker and a canvas fishing hat pinned with wet flies and nymphs. As usual, Hoagland had waited to come at us from an unseeable angle. His dog, Spiro, unleashed, heeled behind him and yelped once in pain as he lowered himself to the floor.

  “It’s nice to see someone working around here,” Hoagland said, rubbing warmth into his hands. He never seemed to address anyone in particular. “I can’t do any work myself. February is the gloomiest month. It’s never been this cloudy, never. The fucking sun must have died. Do you remember a time as dark and damp as this, Jack?”

  “It’s always sunny where I live.”

  “Damn, Jack.” He stepped forward uneasily, then held his position on the threshold. “That sounds right. You live upstate. I live down here near the city, too close to the harbor. The water. It’s like a lake effect.”

  “I know nothing about it, boss.”

  “Ha! Young Harry of the City knows. Did I tell you where we’ve got you placed?”

  “I thought it was public relations.”

  “That too. We’ve gotten lucky. They’re opening a new office in Flushing next week and they need volunteers. Everyone’s talking about taking on the mayor. My opinion—Kwang will get squashed. Old man De Roos is too slick. Anyway, you’ll do some phone work for John Kwang’s second.”

  “How did you hook me?”

  “Temp agency. Totally legit.”

  Jack said, “This is cake, Parky.”

  “No problemo,” Hoagland pitched in. “Anyway, she handles the PR and media. Her name is Sherrie Chin-Watt.”

  Jack snorted. Sitting up straight in the chair with his thick legs bowed, he looked like a Cossack dancer. He was mincing the floor with his feet. “Even a councilman has a PR man. Or woman.”

  “We all need one,” Hoagland said. “My wife, Martha, is mine. She sends out weekly flyers to the neighbors that remind them that I’m a quantity. She includes the slightest hints that I’m an unstable personality. How I am an insomniac. That I still sometimes wet the bed.”

  “Is it working?” Jack asked.

  “Damn right. No more dog shit on my lawn. It’s clean. No more Girl Scouts at the door, either. No more Scientologists. We live in peace.”

  “Who is the woman?” I asked Hoagland, half-recognizing her name.

  Hoagland did the drill on her, calling it out with a straight voice.

  “Sherrie Chin-Watt. Chinese American, born in San Francisco. Berkeley B.A. Did her law degree at Boalt. Law Review. Her parents run a small wig shop. Nothing special. She’s around your age, Harry, thirty-three or thirty-four. Was married last year to your garden-variety investment banker, corporate finance. Her first marriage, his second. He works too much, sixty, sixty-five hours a week. Headed for the grave. Again nothing special, no real angle there for us. They own a co-op on Central Park West and a bungalow out in East Hampton. No children as yet. She suffers from endometriosis.”

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “I’m friendly with a prominent gynecologist. Coincidence.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She had a successful laser surgery last year, though she’s not pregnant yet. They sleep in separate rooms because he snores. Other items. They went to Morocco for their honeymoon. They usually eat out, though not together. She lettered in volleyball in high school. Solid setter. She still calls home twice a week. What else? Before signing on with Kwang last year, she was an attorney for the ACLU office in Los Angeles. She made a name for herself then. If you’ll recall, she defended that Indonesian crank in Santa Monica who trained his goat to fart into a portable mike at political rallies.”

  “Free speech,” Jack said.

  “Sure, sure. The guy was saying they were only being silenced at Republican events.”

  “Republicans have the technology,” Jack said.

  Hoagland sneered at him. “But Kwang knew her even before that. Apparently she met him while she was in law school, after some talk he’d given there. She’s been with him less than a year now, but things are heating up fast. What, the election’s in two years? They’re not involved yet. Big yet.”

  “I’m sure you would know,” I said.

  “Oh, I do,” Hoagland belched out. He grimaced, knuckling the back of his thumb into his upper stomach. The doorway held him up. He quickly peeled away the foil wrapping from a roll of antacids.

  “I know every rotten shit fucking thing going down in this hemisphere,” he said.

  “I keep forgetting.”

  “Ha!” He coughed. “You don’t forget anything. That’s why I love you so much, remember? Anyway, you’re going to do Kwang right. Jack will be with you all the way. Do the full workup, certainly. We don’t need anything unusual. Most of it you can do from here. Have you done any prep this week?”

  Jack told him, “You’re looking at it, boss.”

  “Fine.”

  Hoagland then motioned to me to walk with him back to his office. His way of telling you something was to stare at you for three seconds and then grin nervously like you’ve misunderstood each other. Spiro was trying to raise himself. When we got inside Hoagland’s office he closed the glass door. Outside on the floor I saw Jack leave the microfiche room and walk back to his desk. Hoagland shed his slicker and hat. Spiro was waiting outside, whimpering. I sat down in the only other seat, a high metal stool on the other side of his desk.

  “I take it you’ve been working things through with your wife. She’s still your wife, right?”

  “I think so,” I said. I didn’t want to give him anything. “We’re still legal.”

  “Sure thing. We all love that girl, Harry. I know Jack does. Don’t lose her. Martha, she’s been nursing me toward sanity for a million years now. She’s saved my sorry life more than a few times.”

  I said, “I guess that’s their job.”

  “Damn right,” he replied, pouring a carafe of cloudy water into the top of his coffeemaker. “That’s job one.”

  He switched on the coffeemaker and lighted the butt of an old cigarette as he sat down. “Listen. I need you to work carefully through your legend with Jack before you come back to me with it. I’ve told him what I thought your angle might be. It’s just a recommendation, you can take it or leave it. In fact, I want this to be left to you as much as possible. You’re coming off a tough loss with that shrink and we’re all pulling for you.”

  I told him I was hearing the cheers.

  “You should. No one’s sleeping at night because of you.” He quickly finished the butt and was tapping out a fresh one. He was ignoring Jack’s half tub of olives. Instead his fingers were jittering on the lighter. He was getting himself worked up, wanting to say something inspirational. He was the kind driven by the visions of certain men who’d come to occupy mythic sites in his life, scratchy visions of Rockne, Lombardi, visions of LBJ, Nixon. Then, the darker visions of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover. Our American Hitlers.

  “What happened to you has happened to all of us once. That shrink only got to you because he believed in you so fully. You were giving a fantastic performance. You were never better than in those sessions. You were a genius, Harry, you had that fat fuck squirming on his own couch. He was ready to ooze. You were in perfect position to stick him. He would have told you everything.”

  “If he had had anything.”

  “Immaterial. Anyway, we couldn’t have known that.”

  “So I stuck myself.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he growled. “You were there, in position. That’s what counts. I listened to those tapes, Harry. You were fucking magnificent! I always knew you had it. Christ, I even wanted to help you with your problems. I kept forgetting why you were there. You were brilliant. Tony, Emmy, Academy-fucking-Award.”

  “He was a decent man,” I said to him.
/>   “The hell with that,” Hoagland groaned.

  I could see him, Luzan, sitting there in his brown suit and square black-framed glasses. He was a primary organizer of small New York–based Filipino American movement for Ferdinand Marcos’s return to the homeland; he collected money for press notices, pro-Marcos picnics, anti-Aquino rallies. Nothing violent. This before Marcos finally died in Hawaii. I learned that Luzan himself had died, too, soon afterward, while attending a professional conference in the Caribbean. I didn’t think Hoagland knew I had, but of course he did, keeping a bug even after he was dead, the s.o.b. I had called Luzan’s office to apologize for suddenly quitting our sessions and disappearing as I did. I knew I shouldn’t have. I was simply going to tell him that I was sorry for the breakoff, that he’d been helpful in what he had to say about my life, but his wife answered and told me he had drowned in a boating accident off St. Thomas. She was cleaning out his office when I called. At the last moment she had decided not to go with him. And I thought, Lucky for you. She wept a little, wheezing like she was sick in the chest, and thanked me for my concern. I could almost hear Luzan’s bird-high voice, a bizarre pitch that like much else about him was a little silly, a dress of maudlin order on a man of such girth and weight. He could have been a bit player on a Saturday morning children’s show. He kept his black hair damp and oily and combed straight down to his eyes. As a kid I would have said his was a fresh-off-the-boat look. Luzan smelled of milk and ground pepper and lemons. Over the seven weeks of sessions I grew fond of him. Once, he offered me macaroons his daughter had baked.

  “Take one, my friend,” he squeaked to me. “We shouldn’t submit to the traditional doctor-patient relationship. It’s not our psychology, anyway. Let them have their problems. We can share our own.”

  Hoagland said, “The doctor was veal, Harry, one huge medallion of sweet-ass veal. You were the wolf. You fed him cream, you fed him honey. You were holding the knife.”

  “No more knives,” I said. “I swear, I’ll bolt.”

  “Not a one,” he assured me, his gaze and body now forward and bearing down on me. “This thing with Kwang should be quick and clean. This is a hands-off deal. I see you with his office for three, four weeks tops. All I want is that you do this right again, like I know you can.”

  He rose from his chair and stepped to the coffeemaker, pouring out a silty cup for me, and then one for himself.

  He went on, different again, his voice calmer. “Remember how I taught you. Just stay in the background. Be unapparent and flat. Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will think twice about who you are. The key is to make them think just once. No more, no less. I can see that this thing with your wife keeps you self-occupied. That’s fucking great! Really! It happens. It’s life. I just want you to write out a good legend for this and stick with it. When Jack had that awful thing with Sophie he decided to leave for a while. That’s not the best course for you, in my opinion. I think you need to stay close.”

  “Jack’s saying different,” I told him.

  Hoagland guffawed. “Don’t listen to him. Jack’s a romantic. What he means is protect what you’ve got. My view—your wife will leave you and come back and leave you for the rest of your natural life. It will go on and on. It’s the bald-assed truth. It’s nothing against her or you. Honest. I ought to know. Ask the last three generations of Hoaglands. We know the secret. Marriage is a traveling circus. We’re the performers. Some of us, unfortunately, are more like freak acts. Maybe she likes certain towns, maybe you prefer others. She’ll drop off somewhere every once in a while and stay for a bit. So what. She’ll bore, she’ll catch up, she’ll be back.”

  I didn’t answer him. I just kept thinking of his wife, Martha, nearly-poignant-if-not-for-her-feeble-will Martha, forever pale and small-shouldered and smiling, pulling uncomfortably at the strap of her sequined body suit, her tightrope fifty feet up in the air; Hoagland was down on the ground, in a cage, wielding a chair in one hand, a bullwhip in the other. Where’s the beast? Crack. So it followed—I must be the Wolf-Boy. Lelia, the Tattooed Lady. Behold, their impossible love. We shared a wall between our sideshow tents, venally baring ourselves to the curious and craven. This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn’t: a mutual spectacle of imagination.

  “Harry,” he said, “just do me one favor, will you?”

  “What?”

  “Promise me this—no, wait. I don’t need promises.”

  “Dennis.”

  “Okay,” he said, righting himself. He stole a sip of his coffee. “Don’t mess your pants on this one. I mean it. Don’t fuck this up. It won’t be appreciated.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Back off, son. And give me a break. It’s just good clean advice. Your scratch with Luzan cost us, and not just money. People are talking.”

  “It’s good Luzan’s not.”

  “Come on! I just read the notices in the paper,” he said. He collected himself. “You ought to as well. That’s all. People drown, politically involved fat analysts included. A bad thing can happen in the world. We do what we’re paid for and then who can tell what it means? I flush a big one down the dumper and next week some kid in Costa Rica gets a rash. What the fuck am I supposed to do? And then everyone asks, who’s to blame?”

  “Go to hell,” I said to him, getting up to leave.

  “Don’t be sore,” he replied. “If it makes you feel any better, I probably will. You won’t—you’ll get to heaven, no problem. I just thought you knew the facts.”

  “I know enough.”

  He said, “Then you know that no matter how smart you are, no one is smart enough to see the whole world. There’s always a picture too big to see. No one is safe, Harry, not in some fucking pleasure boat in the Caribbean, not even in lovely Long Island or Queens. There’s no real evil in the world. It’s just the world. Full of people like us. Your immigrant mother and father taught you that, I hope. Mine did. My pop owned three swell pubs but he still died broke and drunk. The Jews squeezed him first, then the wops, then people like you. Am I sore? No way. It doesn’t matter how much you have. You can own every fucking Laundromat or falafel cart in New York, but someone is always bigger than you. If they want, they’ll shut you up. They’ll bring you down.”

  “Fuck you, Dennis,” I said, closing his glass door on him.

  But I could still hear him as I walked away, the hard twang of his answer, almost joyous, When and where, Harry, when and where.

  My father would not have believed in the possibility of sub-rosa vocations. He would have scoffed at the notion. He knew nothing of the mystical and neurotic. It wasn’t part of his makeup. He would have thought Hoagland was typically American, crazy, self-indulgent, too rich in time and money. For him, the world—and by that I must mean this very land, his chosen nation—operated on a determined set of procedures, certain rules of engagement. These were the inalienable rights of the immigrant.

  I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church. You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.

  My low master. He died a year and a half after Mitt did. Massive global stroke. It was the third one that finally killed him. Lelia and I were going up on the weekends to help—it was practically the only thing we were doing together. We had retained a nurse to be there during the week.

 
He died during the night. In the morning I went to wake him and his jaw was locked open, his teeth bared, cursing the end to its face. He was still gripping the knob of the brass bedpost, which he had bent at the joint all the way down to four o’clock. He was going to jerk the whole house over his head. Gritty mule. I thought he was never going to die. Even after the first stroke, when he had trouble walking and urinating and brushing his teeth, I would see him as a kind of aging soldier of this life, a squat, stocky-torsoed warrior, bitter, never self-pitying, fearful, stubborn, world-fucking heroic.

  He hated when I helped him, especially in the bathroom. I remember how we used to shower together when I was young, how he would scrub my head so hard I thought he wanted my scalp, how he would rub his wide thumb against the skin of my forearms until the dirt would magically appear in tiny black rolls, how he would growl and hoot beneath the streaming water, how the dark hair between his legs would get soapy and white and make his genitals look like a soiled and drunken Santa Claus.

  Now, when he needed cleaning after the strokes, he would let Lelia bathe him, let her shampoo the coarse hair of his dense unmagical head, wash his blue prick, but only if I were around. He said (my jaundiced translation of his Korean) that he didn’t want me becoming an anxious boy, as if he knew all of my panic buttons, that craphound, inveterate sucker-puncher, that damned machine.

  The second stroke, just a week before the last one, took away his ability to move or speak. He sat up in bed with those worn black eyes and had to listen to me talk. I don’t think he ever heard so much from my mouth. I talked straight through the night, and he silently took my confessions, maledictions, as though he were some font of blessing at which I might leave a final belated tithe. I spoke at him, this propped-up father figure, half-intending an emotional torture. I ticked through the whole long register of my disaffections, hit all the ready categories. In truth, Lelia’s own eventual list was probably just karmic justice for what I made him endure those final nights, which was my berating him for the way he had conducted his life with my mother, and then his housekeeper, and his businesses and beliefs, to speak once and for all the less than holy versions of who he was.