Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “The scared and the scamming,” he liked to say, “always give the best cover.”

  You got in with a plastic key, the kind big hotels use. The door had a brushed brass plate with a slot and heavy-duty handle. You inserted the key and heard a plush click. A green pinlight went on. It was fully automated. This way, Hoagland could change the code at will from the Westchester office, then have Candace cut the appropriate keys. He readily admitted it was completely unnecessary. He said he was American and so reserved the right to flagrant displays of technology. Every few weeks he would distribute new keys to us. Jack immediately threw his away.

  The place had two windows, a large, many-paned one in the main area that faced the alley, and then another in the bathroom. Both were blacked out with matte spray paint. There was an air conditioner for cooling and ventilation. Hoagland had furnished the place with a three-bay sound partition, each bay fitted with a dedicated phone line and laptop with fax/modem. There was a shared printer and a coffee machine. A blobby gesture at a sofa near the door, and his trademark fake orchids in the corners. The idea, in his words, was for the place to be a kind of “work lounge” for those of us on assignment in the city, or for “associates” of ours having unexpected layovers. Of course, it didn’t get much use.

  Jack said it was the wet-dream version of the treehouse Hoagland never had as a boy.

  “You’re all fucking over me,” Dennis answered him. He grinned. “But you’re wrong. It’s the one I burned down.”

  I myself didn’t mind the place. I almost liked how cramped and lightless it was, so unlike our windy, too bright apartment. Sometimes I spent nights there after particularly depressing fights with Lelia, which were really more non-fights, those bleak evenings in which we sat crossly at different ends of the loft, smoldering with voodoo.

  Lelia couldn’t have known where I stayed all those nights, and because she never once asked, I felt I was allowed to let her stew in her imagination. Let her think. An ugly fancy, I thought, might do us both some good, snap us into clarity, though how and when I had no idea. For although I have spent ample hours of my adult life rigorously assessing and figuring all sorts of human calculations, the flesh math, as we say, I retain an amazing facility for discharging to hope and dumb chance the things most precious to me.

  When real trouble hits, I lock up. I can’t work the trusty calculus. I can’t speak. I sit there, unmoved. For a person like Lelia, who grew up with hollerers and criers, mine is the worst response. It must look as if I’m not even trying. Unless I drink too much I’ll eventually recede. I go into my “father’s act,” though she only knows this from what I’ve told her. It’s the one complaint she’ll make about him, though she always ends with something fond. And this is the primary gripe she has with me—she’s even said as much, despite her list—but with us it’s ever urgent, the big one.

  I don’t have any deep problems with her. I know this must sound spiteful. She has her shortcomings, certainly, but I won’t go into them because once you start ticking things off they just keep going until they take on a life of their own, which neither truth nor good intention can withstand.

  What will I say? Lelia is mostly wonderful. And lovely. She has a prominent nose that seems just right and slightly off kilter at the same time. Her eyes are wide-set. She doesn’t much fuss with her hair. When you hand her a football she instantly spins it to the laces and says, “Go out.” Each morning she rises at 6:30 and stretches in her underwear and makes a good pot of coffee. She always scalds the milk. I go in the kitchen and believe I will never see a more perfect set of hip bones. Or uglier feet. I know how her voice will sound with the first word of the day, not as low as it should be and as spare and clean as light. That effortless pitch. When she play-acts, horses around, she is silly and awkward, completely unconvincing. She must be the worst actor on earth.

  And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can’t hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?

  When I asked her to marry me we’d been together for only three months, the entire time she had been in the city since moving from El Paso. Although she had her own apartment we were pretty much sharing house (she’d already moved over most of her clothes), and I knew we were heading for something serious when we stopped by her place to use the bathroom and I didn’t even see a toothbrush.

  One evening I took us both by surprise. I hadn’t thought at all about the literal act, the moment of asking, though of course the idea of being married to her was something I’d considered since the beginning. I had gone over the trodden middle-class ground, moving through the necessary business, how our personalities complemented each other, what our sex life was like (and might become), our money situation, what our fathers would say, the fact that she was white and I was Asian (was this one question, or two?) and then what our children might be like. Look like. Ironically, these were all the things that my father forever wanted me to consider, and to what as a teenager I had disingenously cried, “What about love?”

  Old artificer, undead old man.

  Before me, Lelia had come off a string of men who made her feel steadily sorry and confused and burgled. Each relationship was ending up a net loss. It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman—though she said maybe she should be fair and just speak for herself—relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well. One night in bed she said, “The men I’ve been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy’s polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I’m supposed to come out precious and sparkling again.”

  “Does it work?”

  “They seem to think so.”

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “A little smaller.”

  Among other things, I took this as complimentary. The implication, of course, was that I wasn’t trying the same number on her. This was true enough. I have no business improving others, much less buffing up Lelia, who has it over me in spades. Perhaps part of our trouble was that in the course of time there arose moments when I should have taken measures, done something, if only for what the actions would have said about my feelings for her.

  I never envisioned myself in that kind of white hat, though, astride some fine horse, galloping into the main street of town. I mostly come by the midnight coach. If I may say this, I have always only ventured where I was invited or otherwise welcomed. When I was a boy, I wouldn’t join any school club or organization before a member first approached me. I wouldn’t eat or sleep at a friend’s house if it weren’t prearranged. I never assumed anyone would be generous to me, or in any way helpful. I never considered it my right to expect approval or sanction no matter what good I had done. My father always reminded me that neither he nor the world owed me a penny or a prayer, though he left me many millions of one and braying echoes of the other. So call me what you will. An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. I have already been whatever you can say or imagine, every version of the newcomer who is always fearing and bitter and sad.

  It’s my brand of sloth, surely, that I could fail my wife so miserably but seem to provide all the necessary objects and affections. On paper, by any known standard, I was an impeccable mate. I did everything well enough. I cooked well enough, cleaned enough, was romantic and sensitive and silly enough, I made love enough, was paternal, big brotherly, just a good friend enough, father-to-my-son enough, forlorn enough, and then even bull-headed and dull and macho enough, to make it all seamless. For ten years she hadn’t realized the breadth of what I had accomplished with my exacting competence, the daily work I did, which unto itself became an unassailable body of cover. And th
e surest testament to the magnificent and horrifying level of my virtuosity was that neither had I.

  * * *

  When I got to the flat Jack was waiting inside. He was set deep in the sofa, reading one of the magazines Hoagland had on subscription for us. We periodically told him not to bother but he didn’t listen. Hoagland said it was part of our job to keep up with current issues, though none of us could figure out what he was getting at with the selections: Redbook, Guns & Ammo, Town & Country, some airline magazines, and then a few sundry zines, including a softcore glossy called Dirt World Nation, which was what Jack was reading. When he saw me he removed his delicate half-glasses from his bridgeless boxer’s nose.

  “I didn’t see you outside so I came up,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “How did you get in?”

  “Grace gave me her key,” he said.

  “She doesn’t need it?”

  “She’s off somewhere with Pete.”

  “Not for fun?”

  “Those two? No way, Parky. All business, all business.”

  “Everything’s all business,” I said. “Even with us.”

  “I know,” he answered, putting down the magazine. He held out his big hands. “Now I can finally get out of this damn couch. You better pull.”

  It was his first real visit. He’d seen schematics Hoagland had drawn up, pictures he’d taken. I showed him around the flat. I turned on all the lights for him, ran the shower in the bathroom until it was hot, opened the doors of the refrigerator and the microwave. I showed him the listening devices Hoagland had installed in the drop ceiling. I could cut power to them whenever I wanted. I did it now. He was unimpressed but he didn’t seem to mind.

  He seemed a little tired. He kept coughing and complaining about the rainy weather. It was the end of March, he figured, so the rains would stay at least one more month. I noticed he was a bit slow in his talk. A place like this should have seemed too small for him, like a shallow hole in the ground, but he sat in a desk chair in one of the carpet-lined cubbies and listened while I harshly joked and grab-assed. Hoagland was the target, always the mode Jack and I favored.

  He asked after Lelia, how the two of us were doing. I told him we were meeting often, almost twice a week. There were lunches, mid-evening drinks. We sat closer to each other now. We had gone to a few parties together. She even slept at our apartment one night—on the sofa—after a late dinner I’d made.

  “Candles and wine?” Jack asked.

  “A little of each,” I said, pulling over a chair. “I kept the lights on high. I didn’t want to make her nervous.”

  “It sounds like you are doing right.”

  “Am I? I’m not running on instinct.”

  “Yes you are,” he said, tapping on the laptop in front of him. “You just don’t know it.”

  “What are the signs?” I asked him.

  “Fear and confusion.”

  “What else?”

  “You need more than that?” he said, coughing again.

  “I guess not.”

  “Parky,” he said, leaning forward. “I have no worries about you and Lee. Twice a week you meet already! What more can you ask? Tell me, you touch each other?”

  “Hellos and goodbyes.”

  “Naturally. Nothing else?”

  “We’re working up to something,” I said. “But I don’t think either of us is too keen on being the first to make a move. We’ve planned to go up next week to my father’s house. We’re going to spend the weekend finally cleaning it out. Maybe something will happen. Somehow, though, the consequences seem awesome. I realize it’s pure junior high. I’m beginning to think we need Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said, knitting his brow.

  “Don’t bother,” I told him, waving it off. “I always forget you’re not American.”

  “I don’t see how,” he replied, spreading his arms wide. His moustache twitched. His big voice suddenly came back. “Great are the gods I’m not. If I were American, there would be much hell to pay. I would have strangled Dennis many times over. That I can view him as a curiosity has saved both of us.”

  “That’s your excuse,” I said. “Your heart’s just too big.”

  “My Greek heart is too big. My American one is still composed of delicate halves. They call them gonads.”

  I said, “My hearts must be about to burst.”

  He bellowed in his way. He told me, “Just keep on meeting her. Don’t try too hard. You have time. Don’t think otherwise. She is your wife and she still loves you. At least Lelia’s the easy one. She’s not half the trouble you are.”

  “I try to be easy,” I said.

  “Naturally,” Jack answered. “You were well raised. You have a keen sense of accommodation. This is clear. You understand respect and distance and separateness. Fine things. But someplace in your life you let them go too far. Too far for any more good to come of them. The result is foregone.”

  “You see the trail?”

  “I don’t know.” He got up and paced. “Maybe this. This. Why you find yourself here in this silly room with a man like me, rather than at home in bed with your beautiful wife. Why you are one of us. I look at you and see someone who could have done whatever he wished in life. Any career.”

  “Yet I’m here.”

  “Yet you’re here.”

  “Stuck.”

  “Yes. Maybe yes.” Jack leaned on the blacked-out window, trying to scratch it with his thumb. “You have made your bed, as they say.”

  When Dennis Hoagland and I first met, outside the career services office of my alma mater, I thought it would be a brief affair. I was a few years out of school and beginning to think I ought to do some graduate study, though in what I didn’t know. I was running out of money. But I had promised my father I’d look into serious work first, a career, and I drove to the campus to see what was being offered. It was the boom time, and the Wall Street banks and management consultants and insurance conglomerates were crowding the bulletin boards looking for talent.

  I was looking at the various flyers and notices when he approached me. He wore a moustache then. He looked like one of those consumptive snooker players on cable. He said he was with a “research services firm.” They were hiring new analysts. Competitive salaries, excellent benefits. We spoke for a few minutes, and because I wasn’t really seriously considering a job, I was loose, sarcastic. He seemed to like me and said I should come to Westchester the next week to talk with his associates. I told him I didn’t know. He said what could I lose? They would even pay me a stipend for my time. A simple interview. No strings. I asked what his company researched. “The one thing worth researching,” he casually replied. “People.”

  I now asked Jack why he was in our line.

  “I have good reasons,” he said. “My excuse is that I was poor and dumb but hardy as an ox. I was not you. I needed any job that would have me. One day in Athens an American talks to me on the street. He says I look like a strong boy and he will give me fifty dollars to remove some papers from an office. No problem. The next week I get a hundred and fifty for setting fire to the same building. I drive a truck of coffins filled with rifles and grenades to the Albanian border. Next I help kidnap a man. Then another. One man I kidnap tells me that I work for the asshole CIA. I beat him badly for that. But why should I care? Soon I traveled the world doing dirty deeds. Who needed to like it? Who cared who employed me? I have done more or less the same for thirty years. This is where I will retire. I have only two months to finish. Then Dennis will give me my full pension. This firm was by far the easiest. But then I had Sophie to make right what I had done. Sophie was my life. I thought she was forgiveness for not doing those things anymore. She was to be God’s gift to me, a blessing for having changed my ways.”

  “She’s still a blessing.”


  “No no. She is gone.”

  Jack lightly rapped the glass with his knuckles. “You are kind. But you know a blessing so beautiful should not die. You and Lelia know this. Your boy. Your boy was a perfection. Was his life so that you might taste true wonder and happiness? Could it be that arbitrary? Please, no. Sometimes I suspect of us living that we are marred. The unspoiled must take leave of the world. I think they must bear the ills of their loved ones. I am not speaking as a Christian here. You know how I am not a Christian. But in my heart I fear they are the vessels for our failures. We make it impossible for them to live in this place. One day they fill up. Then they sink. They disappear.”

  He hacked into his fist and pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his hand and his mouth. I asked him if he wanted some tea. He nodded. I put on water. When I came out he was sitting inside one of the bays, examining its laptop computer. He was trying to figure out how the screen opened. I folded it out and he made play of typing, his index fingers too big and thick for the cramped keyboard. He typed too hard, as if the keys were manual. I turned it on for him and brought up a program in which he could draw pictures. I showed him the mouse. The kettle was whistling and when I called back to ask what flavor he wanted he said something about my register.

  I let it pass for a moment. I didn’t answer him immediately and let his tea steep. I brought him his mug. Now he wanted to get to the place in the computer where he could type a message for Dennis. I switched him over. Then he asked me how often I was sending word.

  I said to him, “What is Dennis saying? I don’t think about these things anymore, so you better tell me.”

  “You know it, my friend,” he spoke grimly. “I don’t have to.”

  “What am I doing?” I said. “Why are you here, Jack?”

  “My friend.”

  I said, “What am I doing?”

  His shoulders softened. “Dennis wants more word. Simple. He deserves more contact. You could come up to Westchester sometimes.”