Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  I stepped out into the hall to go to the fountain and standing there in business suits were Jack and Jimmy Baptiste. Jimmy said hiya and put out his cigarette.

  “Let us go now, Parky,” Jack said, his arm curling around my shoulders. “It is time.”

  I looked back at Luzan’s door and started to speak but Jimmy swiftly approached from the side and pressed a bandanna around my mouth and nose. The cloth was laced with something like ether, though weakly, so that I wouldn’t fully lose consciousness, and they walked me out of the building affably telling people and security that it was my birthday and I was drunk. From the back of the car I desperately searched the windows of the three-story building, my thoughts clouded, somehow joyous, perverse, thinking of a moment long past when my mother and father both rode with me on a carnival ride of cups and saucers, and in my vision I thought I spotted him up there, everything twirling but him, his fleshy face, the old-style glasses, the greasy cut mop of hair, and then his roundish hand, bluntly pressed against the glass, more like a paw than an instrument, happily fingerless, bidding me goodbye.

  And now I have Kwang. There are scores and scores of his versions scattered about the room, myriad trunks of him, thistling branches, specied and catalogued, a thousand stills of him from every possible angle.

  But there is one more version I want to write for Hoagland, for the client, for the entire business of our research. The greater lore that I can now see. I want to tell them that what they have here is a man named John Kwang, born in Seoul before the last world war, a boy during the Korean one, his family not mercifully sundered or refugeed but obliterated, the coordinates of his home village twice removed from the maps. That he stole away to America as the houseboy of a retiring two-star general. Where he saved enough money to leave the general’s house in Ohio and go to New York. Where he named himself John. Where he was beaten nearly to death and robbed of all his savings. Where he worked in a Chinatown noodle shop and slept outside next to the steam vent and awoke one morning to see that his feet had turned almost black with the cold. Where he knew hunger again, that unforgettable taste of his other country. Where, desperate as he was, he took to stealing from others, one of them a young priest who saw something to salvage and took him to a Catholic orphanage. Where he first went to a real school and learned to read and write and speak his new home language. And where he began to think of America as a part of him, maybe even his, and this for me was the crucial leap of his character, deep flaw or not, the leap of his identity no one in our work would find valuable but me.

  So I followed him. I wrote what I could. He knew I was near. I believed he wished me so. For how do you trail someone who keeps you so close? How do you write of one who tells you more stories than you need to know? Where do you begin, and where are you able to end?

  Lelia came in on the 5:13 at the Ardsley station. I got there early, or the train was late, and I watched her as she stepped from the doors. It was raining lightly, and she wore a red silk scarf. Everywhere else was gray. This will always be the color of Westchester for me, that wan gray, the kind of gray that speaks of an impenetrable wealth, never too fancy. What my father so belittled and envied. You see it in the slate gray of a pristine Mercedes-Benz, the gray-white fumes funneling out the back, the gray mop of hair of the unsmiling woman at the wheel. Lines all over her face, her hands. She’s always driving alone.

  The platform was nearly empty as it was Sunday and she looked around for me until she spotted our car across the tracks. I flashed the high beams. She didn’t wave, but just started walking, taking her time, marching up the stairs to the overpass and then back down to the street. As she approached the car I leaned over and pushed the door out to her. She angled herself in.

  “It wasn’t raining in the city?” I said to her, my grand greeting.

  “I guess it was,” she said, pulling the scarf off her head. “Why?”

  “No umbrella.”

  “Shit!” she said, her hand wiping the fogged window. The train was already rolling north. “My third this week!”

  I started driving. “Was it a good one?”

  She sighed lightly. “I don’t know. It cost two dollars. I’ve been buying them like candy from those guys on Broadway, you know, the ones who suddenly appear on the corner with huge boxes of umbrellas at the first drop of rain.”

  “The Nigerians?” I said.

  “I guess so.” Then she was quiet, as though taking care in her head. “Not that it matters. But does it even rain in Nigeria?”

  “In certain parts, I think. I think a lot. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “I guess it makes sense,” she said, relaxing now.

  I looked at her.

  “Desert peoples being sensitive to rain,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  Two hours later she was stirring a pot of her lamb stew. I sat at the kitchen table, which I had set with my mother’s good service and cloth napkins and glasses for water and wine. Lelia took her usual care preparing the dish, parboiling the meat first and then adding chopped vegetables to its simmering stock, and then dropping a clove of garlic in the pot and then one more clove after some deliberation, then the herbs, the aromatics, and then letting the whole thing stew, at first covered, later not. The soup was on from the moment we arrived at the house—she called ahead so that I could buy the ingredients—and now she tippled in a final splash of sherry, a few drops of Worcestershire, and then took a taste of the gravy from a wooden spoon.

  “Not bad,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  It was my favorite dish. She made it often when we first were married. We even got into a habit of making love toward the end of its cooking so that when we were done and spent and a little famished it stirred thick enough to ladle into deep bowls and eat at the foot of the bed. My crotch smelled salty and sharp with her and bleached with me, and the rich pungent meat of the lamb was an offering passing between us. Somehow the tastes held an inner logic. Then, we fed each other with big spoons; somehow hers always tasted different from my own. When we finished we crawled back into bed and belched and joked and curled up and slept it off. Lelia always worried that in ten years we would be fat and dull and maybe by then even have a big-screen TV. I remember telling her no, there would be a kid or two or three to keep us slender, jumping forever.

  Lelia said she was working out again with Molly. With her sleeves pulled up I saw the new bands in her arms as she chopped and minced. I noticed the muscles running along her forearms and the tightness in the tendons of her hands. She kept unkinking her neck like it was stiff. She and Molly went to one of those health clubs down in the financial district, the rooftop of a glass-and-steel number, where the bankers and lawyers went at lunchtime to sweat off breakfast and look for that night’s action at the juice bar. It’s for my heart, they would say, unstrapping sopped Rolexes from their hairy wrists. I could see Lelia and Molly humoring one of them until he suggested the three of them go somewhere; then they might work him over before he even knew what happened and he had to go back to the speed bag with a malice to figure it all out.

  With all the chopping and peeling we weren’t talking much yet, but it didn’t seem to bother her. The stew was almost done and there was nothing left to do so I opened the bottle of burgundy and started pouring.

  “Not too much for me,” she said from the sink, her long back sort of slow-dancing. “I’ve been getting headaches lately. I think it’s those sulfites.”

  “You never had a problem before,” I answered, giving her a little more than half a glass.

  “I didn’t know about sulfites before,” she said, looking back and grinning. “Molly has literature on it.”

  She wiped her hands in a dish towel and sat down next to me. “Besides, we’ve got a lot of work to do tonight.”

  “Tonight? We’ve got all tomorrow off.”

  “I want to get starte
d, Henry. You know me.”

  “Okay, but let’s not get crazy.”

  “We won’t get crazy.” She carefully sipped her wine.

  The house had lain pretty much fallow since my father died. Lelia had already worked on the house once, this a while ago, after his funeral, so we could sell off the things we didn’t want or need. We were actually planning to move up there for good, to leave the city, which neither of us was actually enjoying much anymore, if we ever truly had. But then the strangeness between us began, the feelings of oddness and misplacement, and our move never happened. If we still had had Mitt, of course, we probably would have moved anyway, so he could go to a better public school, have some grass to play on, and we’d have figured out our problems later. Or maybe another baby might have helped us. Another try. Of course, that’s the worst reason to have a child, anyone on the street can tell you that, because no one can handle being an attempt at something from the very start.

  I couldn’t help her with the house that first time. I was on assignment in Miami and had to return there immediately after his funeral. I asked Lelia to take care of the place—I didn’t think I could do it anyway—and she said sure, she’d do it, she could live there for the week and commute to work until I got back. In truth, she didn’t like staying for too long in our apartment alone. The place was too breezy, had too many echoes.

  In my father’s house she felt safe. I think the place reminded her of her childhood home in Brookline, Massachusetts, though that one was much more expansive than my father’s house, to a point palatial, with separate living wings for her mother Alice and Stew. Lelia’s parents needed that kind of space. They fought a lot; Alice wasn’t so afraid of things then. They’d start hollering somewhere in the middle of the house, assail each other furiously, then retire to their corners and start drinking.

  Lelia liked houses that you could go all the way up and hide yourself in, high stretching houses with garrets, widow’s peaks, secret attics. That’s why she loved our garage so much, with its secret room. It didn’t matter to her if the rest of a house were empty and creaky and dark as long as she was lodged above it all, in a nook with a pitched ceiling and a lamp, her books and a writing pad ready on a table. In the same spirit she liked to climb trees, could still ramble up the bark of one with complete ease and confidence, though she had a deep, running scar on her lower back from falling through the branches of an oak tree when she was nine.

  And just last week, on one of our brief visits together, while we were picnicking in Central Park, I made her angry with some stupid comment about Stew or Mitt or something, and after we fought a little she got up without saying anything and climbed the tree we were sitting under. I wanted to go up after her, grab her in the branches and shake her, I was burning to drag her back down, tussle and overcome her, but then I could never bring myself to climb beyond that first large branch, not from the height, but somehow I could never abide the subtle sway of living limbs, stake anything on their pliant strength. I just watched her until she reached the smallest branch that would bear her weight. She gazed straight down at me from almost twenty feet, unquivering, wordless, her hair rubbing against the branches, hanging those narrow bare feet out into the air.

  The week after my father’s funeral Lelia slept in the room Mitt occupied his last summer, when he decided he was old enough to live by himself in the big house. My father—who could display amazing properties of emotional recovery—had long before cleared it of any signs of our boy, removing not just his few toys and summer clothes but all the furniture and wall hangings. He’d even painted the room, from its sky blue to a barren, optic white. Now done, I can still hear him thinking.

  Lelia immediately dragged a mattress and a floor lamp in there and went to work on the rest of the house. The place had become overfurnished and cluttered since my mother’s death. My father habitually bought sundry pieces of furniture whenever he stepped into a store; he showed little judgment in his choices. Much of the furniture in our house was garish and oddly colored and overpriced. His penchant was for textured synthetic fabrics, often featuring some geometric design like diamonds or pentagons. He would ask Ahjuhma to place each new piece, despite the fact that she would generally leave it where the delivery men happened to put it down, just making sure the new chair or side table was kept clean for him and in good condition. From this stuff Lelia separated what we would keep and what we would sell or donate to Goodwill.

  I remember a poem she wrote about a woman who cleans out her father-in-law’s house after his death, dispatching his possessions and effects with only her imagination to guide her in what she will keep or discard. As she moves through the house in the poem, the speaker begins to realize how few of her father-in-law’s possessions are actually personal, intimate in nature, and she feels as though she’s sifting through the material of a time-share bungalow, a house strangely unpossessed. She wonders, in turn, if this dead immigrant had ever reconsidered the generic still life of apples he’d hung in the upstairs hall, had ever touched again the bouquet of wooden roses placed on the tank of his toilet, had ever comfortably worn the reams of clothes in his closet, the rack filled with the suits and shoes he would buy on his days off but never wore anywhere. There are a few things that tell of his mortal presence: in his bedroom, the woman carefully bundles his dark socks and underwear in an old yellow raincoat; she finds a pornographic magazine in a drawer of his night table, from April 1978, and a few odd condoms; she smells his toothbrush—peppermint and dust; she discovers in the attic a brick-sized wad of $20 bills rubber banded inside a shoe box, probably the first large sum of cash he salted away from the IRS in the beginning years of greengrocering, money that he’d long forgotten about and never needed; and she finds faded sheets of lined notebook paper in his desk, completely written over with the American name (I had once told her) he’d given himself but never once used: George Washington Park.

  He was practicing the writing of his signature.

  And then, the woman begins to shift her consciousness from the dead father to the absent son, her husband. Is it the coldness of objects, she wonders, that persists? She considers her own apartment, the bed she shares with her husband; she tries to think of the things there that might signify him, call his real name. A certain paperback book, an old comb with broken teeth. And then she considers herself, wonders if a stranger could understand who her husband was by looking at her, imagines the scrolls the stranger might read on her face and body, what that writing would say: Are you at all in love? What was it then between you, in the first place? What’s left now?

  After we finished dinner I took out the chocolate mousse cake with mocha icing that I’d bought from Patisserie Lind, a fancy sweetshop near the station, Lelia’s and Mitt’s favorite old place. I’d buy treats there for Mitt for being good on the train ride up. He liked best the dark chocolate hazelnut truffles, and didn’t seem to mind the slight bitterness of the hard chocolate shell. He’d put a whole one in his mouth and sit quietly and deal with it for the next quarter hour, his tongue wrestling the sticky orb. Lelia taught him not to bite through it: a good lesson in restraint. Sometimes it dropped out and he’d just pick up the slimy mass from wherever it was and mouth it again. We still have stains all over the backseat of my father’s car. When Mitt finally dissolved the outside and got to the soft center he’d mumble, “Oooh baby” to me and Lelia, and we’d oooh baby back, and then he’d mash it between his tongue and palate and stretch his messy mouth open and show us the sweet whipped guts.

  As Lelia cleared the table I cut her a big slice and a smaller one for myself. Then I made the coffee, like I always used to after dinner, throwing in an extra scoop of grounds tonight for the work ahead of us. It’s the routines you follow and count on when you start something again, the way of simply doing an activity together. I used to think you ought to have sex after trouble; I got Lelia to believe this, get right back and all over each other, reaffirm your pres
ence immediately and directly. But now I think the best way to resolve a fight is to clean the house or cook together, do something simple like that, take the energy out on a mutual project that you can share and look at when you’re done and not have to wonder what else has gone on.

  When we were ready we carried the cake and mugs of coffee to my father’s study. There we found the entirety of the pictures of my family in the same cabinet where my father kept the liquor. Lelia removed the dozen or so shoe boxes of pictures from the top shelves and lined them up between us on the white shag carpet. Many of the pictures had been sent to us over the years from relatives in Korea, many of these very old, and no one had ever organized them or placed them in albums. Even my mother, who was obsessive about order and neatness in her house, chose to let the photographs of the two families get commingled and confused. When she received a photo with a letter she would immediately go and slip it inside one of the boxes, as if she didn’t want any images or faces of her old country haunting about the house.

  “These are wonderful pictures,” Lelia said, shuffling a stack above her face as she lay on her back. She was wearing old jeans and a loose black zip-up turtleneck. Her long shape lurking beneath. “Look at these. I think they’re silver prints. I think it’s your mother as a little girl.”

  “How do you know?” I said, sitting back against the foot of the sofa. I was looking through some shots of my father during his military service. He was startlingly smooth of face and slim and handsome, so much so that it looked as though he would always be that way, like you might have thought of a young Sinatra.