Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “I’ve been comparing her to ones of you at the same age. It’s pretty incredible.”

  “We’re dead ringers,” I said.

  “Definitely. Look at the eyes, the mouth. The jaw. Anyway, it’s not just your features. I think the expressions are exactly the same. The way you hold your mouths. So straight across and firmly set. It looks as if you’ve both just spoken something awful but true. But the expression isn’t really of sadness.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She paused, holding the photos side by side. “It says, ‘You won’t get to me. Don’t try. I’m immune.’”

  I snorted. “We’re difficult people. My mother was the worst. She was an impossible woman. Of course she was a good mother. I think now she treated it like a job. She wasn’t what you’d call friendly. Never warm.”

  I was sorting quickly through the boxes, making piles of people of my mother’s side of the family, then my father’s and then one of faces I didn’t know, a growing stack of strangers.

  “When I was a teenager,” I said, “I so wanted to be familiar and friendly with my parents like my white friends were with theirs. You know, they’d use curses with each other, make fun of each other at dinner, maybe even get drunk together on holidays.”

  “It’s not so goddamn wonderful, you know,” Lelia said.

  “I know. Of course it’s not. But I wanted just once for my mother and father to relax a little bit with me. Not treat me so much like a son, like a figure in a long line of figures. They treated each other like that, too. Like it was their duty and not their love.”

  Lelia was quiet to this. “It’s incredible, isn’t it,” she then said, “that it’s so clear what we get from them?”

  “Maybe incredible isn’t the word.”

  Lelia handed me a picture.

  “I do have her blood,” I said, looking now at a young girl standing before the gate of a Buddhist temple in a dark velvet suit. My mother’s face.

  Lelia rolled over and rested her head on my leg. “You should watch yourself, those cancers run in families. You told me once how your mother bit down on her lip whenever she was angry, just like you do. It’s crazy.”

  “What are you going to get from Alice and Stew?” I asked her.

  Lelia laughed harshly, turning on her side. “Let’s see,” she said, propping her head up. “Frailness and oversensitivity from my mother. A fat liver from Stew. And all those old rugs.”

  “How are the old people?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Mother seems better. She’s been going out shopping lately with a friend. She’s feeling lonely. Actually, I think it’s a sign of improvement. She won’t admit to me that she’s horny as hell. I reminded her that it’s been four years since her last boyfriend. She said three and a half, and then she broke down crying. I told her to put an ad in the paper but she didn’t want to because she thought all of Boston would know who it was, particularly my father. She finally placed one a few weeks ago, and of course the day it appeared Stew called her out of the blue just to say hello. He can be such a shit.”

  “He saw the ad?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “That’s just my father. He’s lucky that way. He asked about you the last time I spoke to him. He wants you to call him sometime.”

  “I don’t know why,” I answered. “With our troubles.”

  Lelia shook her head. “Don’t worry, he blames me for everything.”

  She tucked down her chin and made a stern face. “‘Henry’s a kind and respectful man,’” she gruffed, doing him from her throat. “‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ I think things haven’t been going well with Katie but he won’t say.”

  “Katie’s the one with the legs?”

  Lelia shook her head. “Katie is the younger woman, the curator. Maybe you haven’t met her. Did you? I don’t know. I like her, actually. She doesn’t go for his captain-of-industry routine. They were both in New York last month and we had dinner. Katie had this one long streak of gray in her hair. She didn’t have it the first time I met her, and I thought, oh shit, Stew’s ruining another good woman.”

  “I never understood that kind of grayness.”

  “It comes from grief,” Lelia said. “When I got her alone I asked if anything was wrong and she said nothing and laughed and said you mean with the hair? She told me she had it done, that she had a streak of color bleached out.”

  “What for?”

  “I guess Stew wanted her to look more distinguished or something at his functions. Less artsy-fartsy. So she decided to go gray.”

  “Bride of Frankenstein.”

  Lelia laughed and said, “Of course Stew hated it. He didn’t say anything, though. I think for the first time in his life he’s afraid of losing a woman.”

  “Your old man isn’t afraid of anything.”

  “It just seems that way,” she said. “He’s getting old. What am I saying? He is old. He’s been old for twenty years.”

  “So what’s different now?” I asked. “Is it Katie?”

  “Mostly,” Lelia said, looking through more photos. “I think he’s finally catching up to my mother. He’s just begun to feel the sadness of growing old, if that’s what it is. Decrepitude, obsolescence. There’s no good cure.”

  “He’s the semi-immortal type,” I said. “A Titan.”

  “Give him a break,” Lelia said. “When you’re sixty-four we’ll see if you’re not feeling a little desperate.”

  I got up to take down more shoe boxes. “We Parks don’t let it get to that,” I told her. “No one in my family actually survives his fifty-fifth birthday anyway.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got to worry about that,” she said. “You’ll make it.”

  I sat back down on the littered floor. “A minute ago you were talking cancer.”

  “I changed my mind. I’ll make sure to take you to the internist twice a year.”

  “I would like that.”

  She stretched her neck and vigorously massaged her head with both hands. “Anyway,” she said, messy-haired, “you don’t work like them. You don’t drive yourself to exhaustion like your father or mother. The problem for them was stress. That’s not the thing that’s going to kill you.”

  “What will kill me?”

  Lelia shifted toward me on her knees. When she touched my cheek with her open hand we got the shock of static she built up from the carpet.

  “You obsess, Henry,” she said, her hand still trembling. “You live in one tiny part of your life at a time.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “How is work going?” she suddenly asked, words I hadn’t heard from her since before Mitt was born.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  She bit her lip, but then said, “Jack didn’t seem to think so.”

  I slowly unlidded the next shoe box.

  “I talked to him a couple days ago,” she said. “Actually, Molly wanted to meet him. She was intrigued by his picture. She loved his big features. I thought what the hell. Jack, as usual, wasn’t sure if he was ready to meet anyone. So we just talked. Then the more we talked the more it seemed that he was worrying about you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He just kept mentioning you. Parky this, Parky that. You were steadily becoming the point of the conversation. Finally I called him on it and he said nothing was wrong but I better talk to you. He knew we were coming up here.”

  “I told him.”

  “I figured,” she said. “Come on, sweetie. What’s going on? You should say. You should tell your only wife. Isn’t that how your father always said it? She is your only wife. I promise not to get angry. Say anything. Promise. It’s most of the reason I came up, you know. Cleaning we can do any old weekend.”


  “You were oddly insistent.”

  She smiled again. “I’ve picked up a few things in ten years with you.”

  I nodded, looking away from her. Then she reached for my cheek, her cool fingertips on my skin. I leaned into them. I took her hand and held it to my face, against my mouth. At that moment I almost wished for something like smothering myself with her.

  “You’re so warm,” she said. “You’re flushed.”

  “It’s the wine,” I said. Then I whispered, “I’m sinking a little, Lee.”

  “Henry,” she said, wrapping her arms around me. She hugged me tightly, her arms shaking. “You better tell me what’s wrong right now, right now, because I have the feeling I may start bleeding internally.”

  “I wish you hadn’t talked to him.”

  “I’m glad I did. He cares, you know.”

  “I’m not sure that he does,” I said. “But I can’t really blame him. I won’t. This is a business, Lee. Research and reports are fine. But if we don’t generate certain material there’s no operation. The thing doesn’t work. It seizes.”

  “What do they want from you?” she asked.

  “Something damning.”

  She let go of me and stood up. She asked, “Do you have something?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell Dennis that. Tell Jack. Look, I’m going to the phone. I’m calling Jack right now. I’m going to tell him and then give him a piece of my mind.”

  “It won’t matter,” I said. “What Jack says doesn’t matter. It’s Dennis. Are you willing to talk to Dennis? He will say it’s the nature of things that you can always find what you need.”

  “Then please quit,” Lelia begged. She was kneeling on the carpet again, stiffly shuffling together the loose photographs.

  I explained to her that I couldn’t quit, at least not until the assignment was done. It was bad form to cut loose in the middle, and then also perhaps hazardous; Jack had once told me no one had ever done that before to Dennis Hoagland. Nobody could say what he might try.

  She stopped what she was doing. “Then give him what he wants.”

  “Someone could get hurt,” I said.

  “Why do you care all of a sudden? Why now when we’re just getting things straight?” She swung her arms back and accidently knocked over the rest of her coffee onto the white rug. “Oh shit! Shit!”

  “It’s okay, just leave it.”

  She tried to mop it with her sleeve but the stain was spreading. Suddenly she looked exhausted, sodden in the face. “As long as you don’t get hurt, I won’t care. I promise, Henry, I promise. I won’t say a word to you. I won’t even think it.”

  She got up and left the room and came back with a hand towel from the hall bath. She carefully blotted the dark patch, staring down at the spill. “Am I an official bad person now?”

  I took her and we lay down on the carpet. Before I could do anything else to stop myself I told her his name. John Kwang. I could almost see her turning the words inside her head. Of course she knew who he was, that he was Korean. He was appearing on the broadcasts almost nightly because of the boycotts. She didn’t say anything, though, and I could see that she was trying her very best to stay quiet, to think around the notion for a moment instead of steaming right through it. Ten years with me and now she was the one with the ready method. She turned into me, eyes shut. Her breath warm like a priest’s. And now her voice brooking in my ear, in a voice I hardly recognized. “You just say what you want. Please say what you want.”

  * * *

  No trace of light outside, the night ink, and suddenly the sky raining hard again. The roof chattering. I lay on the small bed in Mitt’s old summertime room. I had left her downstairs with the pictures. I was absently putting clothes in shopping bags, and I felt tired and lay down for a moment.

  All over the house things were still in piles. The amount of the work was beginning to overwhelm us. Neither of us was much of an organizer. Picture albums, address books, receipt-keeping, these were the happy tasks of people completely staked to one another, so that they could produce a chit on demand, order and reorder their memories for a future day. We used to enjoy those legions of collectibles, and we were glad for them, their happy messes. Bulging photo albums, corks of wines we’d drunk at restaurants in overcoat pockets. Boxes of mostly useless paper. Trails of frayed odd ribbons and precious bits of gift wrap and other junks of the past. Loose tapes of Mitt.

  And if I remember everything now in the form of lists it is that these notions come to me along a floating string of memory, a long and lyric processional that leads me out from the city in which I live, to return me here, back to this place of our ghosts.

  I didn’t notice her come in. She curled in beside me. I began stroking her. Her shoulder down her arm to the rise of her hip, with one hand. I was being slow. I wanted to be slow with her. She wasn’t responding to the graze of my fingers but she wasn’t ignoring it, either, and just as I was about to cease my movement and fall back I heard her breathe, once, heavily, through her mouth. She whispered, Easy. Tucking my face into her hair, I kept going, stroking, holding down my rhythm to the slowest ache I could bear. She broke the seam of her legs and scissored one back and hooked my ankle with her instep, pulling my knee between hers. Rub of old jeans. I smelled her soap on the back of her neck. I kissed there, the lightest way I knew. So she wouldn’t jump or freeze. I kissed her again, this time my lips on the pale soft hairs of her neck, and she craned so that the white skin inched up past the cover of her shirt fabric. Bone white, purple white. I felt a heat anyway. Her mouth was open. She was trying to stay herself and I understood. I was doing the same. I was watching my hand stroking and watching my face closing in against her. I pushed myself up on the bed and tugged her to roll and face me and she did. I kissed her neck and the bone between her breasts and I pressed my face maybe too hard against her belly. She pulled me by a beltloop of my trousers and then I slipped my thumbs into two of hers and the bed suddenly seemed too small and fragile and I started to take her with my head up against the angled ceiling painted dead flat white by my father in a long fit of mourning and she said, No, Sweetie, not here, and she swung her legs to the floor and led us out of the room and then down the back stairs to the kitchen.

  She asked if it was locked up out there.

  I shook my head. We’d never locked the garage. Even my father, who safeguarded his possessions with a military order and zeal, never bothered with it, considering it a colony of junk that was mine. I looked around for something to put on my feet but I didn’t see anything. I started for the front door where I’d left my shoes.

  “Just take off your socks,” Lelia said, already undoing her feet in kind.

  I did what she said. She slid open the glass door and we walked out gingerly onto the slick deck and down steps to the slate-stone path leading to the garage. It was raining hard enough that we were already wet to the skin by the time we reached the side door to the apartment. I was shivering. When we got upstairs Lelia stripped me of my clothes and then she stripped herself. She walked naked to the far wall and knelt and turned the dial on the baseboard heater. She stood up. I watched the straightness of her as she moved, her long belly, the dark collapse below that. I felt a melancholy before her nakedness. She gripped at my breast and collarbone and tore me down to the carpet.

  I had forgotten how to make love to my wife.

  Five months, since I had seen her body, maybe eight or nine since I’d really touched her. My low and narrow hips wanted to be lost in her width, the chute of her sternum my sole guide to the one place where we came in the same basic size and shape and flavor: that good piece, the mouth.

  We were always oral. We were forever biting, we bit hard, we spit and shined each other, we licked each other, we slobbered, we gorged, we made elaborate meals of ourselves, we made holiday feasts Scotch and Korean, the cold strange m
eal of tongue, of ankle, of toe, we made a mess. She was given to anything vampiric, went wild for Blacula, Christopher Lee, Lugosi, bats, Venus’s-flytraps, and she said it was the best way, to use your mouth, that this was it, this was the thing that made us human. Not the thumb but the mouth.

  “Hey,” she said, gripping me, breathing like there wasn’t enough air. “Hold me now.”

  “Okay.”

  She fell back on the floor and winged her arms wide. I asked her if she wanted to get on the couch. She shook her head.

  I rolled on top of her and grabbed her at the wrists. The old carpet was threadbare against her back, my knees were scraping the rope webbing. I kissed her, and she nibbled at my lips as I pulled away. I pushed her hands together above her head and held them there tightly with one hand, my free one searching the scallops of her ribs, her taut neck, now unfolding inside her needy mouth. She was tasting herself on my fingers and wet nose and my chin. The room was still freezing. She kept eating. I kept eating, too, wanting every last fold of her, the taste brand new to me, or, at least, a reconfection of what I knew.

  She wanted me to push down on her harder. I couldn’t, so then she turned us around and pushed down on me, the slightest grimace stealing across her face. Her body yawed above me, buoyed and restless. I held on by her flat hips, angling her and helping her to let me in. Mixed-up memory, hunger. It was like lonesome old dogs, all wags and tongues and worn eyes. This was the woman I promised to love. This is my wife.

  We live again in our loft on Jane Street. I help Lelia move back in. An untidy suitcase of clothes, a carton of books. Not much else. Molly waves goodbye to us from the window of her apartment as we flag a cab. She wears dark sunglasses, she tells us, to cover her tears of joy.

  We have to leave moving to my father’s house in Ardsley for later. When later is we’re not certain. Soon, perhaps. We’ve cleaned up there as much as we could, held a garage sale, given away much of the rest, and the house stands nearly empty. The house is ready for us. But we decide—or more, understand—that what we need is to live together again before moving off anywhere else. The apartment is where the trouble started, and like most couples we gravitate toward our private sites of pleasure and pain. It’s like you’re looking at a serious wound scarring over, wondering how it ever actually happened, that you survived, that it even hurt you as much as it did although you know damn well it nearly killed.