Native Speaker

by Chang-Rae Lee

  Our private room has two leather love seats and a smoked-glass coffee table. The walls are paneled with paper screens lighted from behind. On the table is a bottle of vodka and a bottle of scotch and lowball glasses and four cans of Sprite. John sits with Sherrie. A young woman soon enters with a tray of ornately sliced fruit and a bucket of ice. She carefully prepares the drinks, whiskey on the rocks for the men, vodka and soda for Sherrie. She bows slightly as she presents each drink, the dark eyes held down.

  I can smell her perfume. It’s the kind pre-teenage girls wear, that ultrasweet, virginal scent. She is exceedingly pretty, exceedingly young. Her hair is pulled up in a French twist, and her body shows clearly through her silken dress, her breasts more like fleshy rises than mounds, her hips framed low, feet and hands of a pixie. I could crack her finger bones with a handshake, dislocate her shoulder with a stiff pull.

  She picks up the tray and bows before leaving. I watch her go out. I’m tired, too, like Sherrie, and my concentration flags. It settles on sights like the girl. Her shape is easy, uncomplicated. Watching John and Sherrie work toward each other in my presence is more difficult, not for their awkwardness but for how lonely they seem.

  After a few minutes the girl reappears in the doorway. She’s changed. She’s let her hair down and her new dress is loose like a slip, short, the color matte black. She looks me in the eyes. She asks John something in Korean slang, something about “being okay,” and he grunts back. The girl sits down with me. Pours herself a big drink.

  John has energy. He wants to talk, but Sherrie just drinks and broods against his shoulder, slumped like a young girl in the backseat of the family wagon. We sit and drink for a while, not talking, and I watch them. I know from Janice that Sherrie’s husband is away most of the time, he’s in Tokyo right now working on bridge financing for an industrial complex in Bangladesh. Janice says he’s a looker, tall and lean and impressive, that he speaks fluent German and Japanese, and that he hasn’t slept with his wife for more than a year. I ask how she knows and she says, “Take a good look at Sherrie when someone mentions him. All dried up and dead.” I push her and she admits Sherrie told her, too.

  Now I realize that Kwang has contrived that the girl is here for me.

  “Ah-ggah-shih,” he calls her, his talking slowed, an octave lowered. Then he says, Young lady, please earn your money tonight.

  She tips her brow. She takes her drink in several deep gulps and motions for me to pour more for her. I do. She touches my hand, plucks at the skin of my wrist. She can’t be any older than seventeen. She obviously speaks no English, and although my Korean is lacking I know the accents enough to know that hers isn’t educated. Her speech is unclipped and loose, full of attitude even when speaking to John in the formal constructions.

  I ask her where she’s from and she answers with practice a certain fancy neighborhood in Seoul, and then offers other facts I might want to hear: she’s twenty-two, a college graduate, a good cook. I’m waiting for her to say she’s not yet an American citizen. She begins to steal closer to me, pulling her legs onto the sofa. She’s not wearing hose. She calls me Ah-juh-shih and rests her head on my shoulder. I look over and see John and Sherrie embracing.

  The girl begins massaging my neck, then curls her cool fingers about my ear. John starts talking, but only in English: he is narrating what he sees, in the tone of a reporter. He tells of me, the girl. My stiffness. “The young man of integrity,” he says. “Look at the clear principle, the control. He reminds me of another Asian figure in city politics we used to know and love. Where is he now? How I wish I could recall his name. But see here, how it begins.”

  The girl lifts herself and straddles one of my legs. She starts moving. She dips down and rubs herself on my knee and thigh. The pressure and length of her strokes steadily increase with his talk, which is now Korean. It sounds as if he’s berating her, but he’s telling the girl what to do. I don’t hold her back. He wants it this way. I am just flesh for this room. She holds me with a hand to the back of my neck, the other on my free leg. I’m waiting for her to kiss me, show me her tongue, slip her tiny hand between my legs. But finally she’s chaste, or, better, she treats me as if I am. This is her service to us, her honoring.

  “Tell her that’s enough, John,” Sherrie says, pulling away from him. “John, he’s not Eddy. He doesn’t like it.”

  “Quiet!”

  “This is making me sick,” she answers, putting down her drink. “I don’t get you two. Is this Korean? You’re so brutal. Why don’t you just ask the manager for a knife and then see how much of your blood you can offer each other?” Now she glares at me. “What are you doing here?” she screams. “What the hell are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “Enough!” John shouts, slamming his open palm on the table. The girl stops what she’s doing and holds on to me. He stares at Sherrie, his cheeks mottled red with anger.

  “Maybe you will leave the room for a while!” He’s yelling at the top of his voice. His accent is somehow broken, it comes out strained, too loud. “Maybe you leave! Take the goddamn car key! Park Byong-ho shih, it will please me if you will drive her home, right now!”

  “Forget it, I’m taking a cab,” Sherrie says, scrambling for her purse so she can get to the door. She almost stumbles as she rises, steadying herself on the corner of the coffee table. She tries the knob but it’s locked from the outside. She slaps at the panels. John swiftly goes to her, his hands raised. He wraps her from behind.

  “Someone open this fucking door!” she yells, pushing him away. But John makes her stop. He takes her by the forearm and pulls her toward me on the sofa but she’s resisting, leaning away from him. They tug-of-war for a moment. He’s only toying with her, using just one hand and a dug-in foot, almost taunting her with his strength, and Sherrie’s starting to cry and get angry. She’s about to scream. She starts chopping at his grip. He slaps her hard and she crumples. The girl beside me is half-crying now. She has slid off me and sits on the floor with her legs still on the sofa, trying to crawl away. Now John lifts Sherrie by the elbow and raises his hand to slap her again.

  I tackle him beneath one shoulder and pin him against the wall. The whole room shakes. His expression when he turns is full of contempt, as if any of this business is mine. I shout at him to stop. He tries to push me off but I stay with him. A waiter suddenly opens the door and Sherrie is able to get up on her feet and run out. This angers him, and he wants to follow her, but I hold him by hooking my arms around his front, though he drags us out to the doorway. His strength surprises me. Sherrie is wobbily descending the stairs to the street. John yells after her in Korean, calling her something I don’t understand. The waiter tells him to calm down and John shouts for him to leave his sight. He finally shakes me loose and wheels and pushes me hard with his knuckles against my breastbone.

  “Who do you think you are?” he shouts, his voice louder than I’ve ever heard it. “Get your mind in order! Don’t you ever get in my way!”

  “You were hurting her,” I answer.

  He shakes his head in disbelief. “That woman? She has been hurting me! Do you know that? She and that dog Jenkins would have me bow down before every cheat and beggar in this city. Who is left? You? Should I get on my knees to you, too?”

  He throws up his hands. The manager is here and asks if Master Kwang needs anything. John curses at him to leave us alone, going to the table to pour himself another full glass of whiskey. The manager calls to the girl but John tells him she will stay. She is slumped into the corner with her knees up against her chest, crying a little, too drunk to move.

  “Have some drink,” he says to me, short of breath.

  I stay clear of him.

  “Do what you want,” he gasps, drinking swiftly, swallowing it all down. “You have a chance, Henry Park. Stay with me for a while. The rest are becoming nothing to me. They don’t know who I am. Even Eduardo. Ed
uardo. He didn’t understand what we are doing. But then I misjudged him, too.”

  “He was stealing,” I say.

  “What? Of course not!” he shouts, incredulous. “You think he could get away with that? You think I would allow him to cheat me that way?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But the apartment.”

  “I didn’t give him any money!” he yells, slamming his glass on the table. “How many times do I have to repeat myself? He worked for me for nothing, the same as you. For nothing, except for what I might show him about our life, what is possible for people like us. I thought this is what he wanted. Was I crazy? I would have given him anything in my power. But he was betraying us, Henry. Betraying everything we were doing. To De Roos, I must think! Reports! You see, there is horror in your face. Think of mine when I found him out. I loved him, Henry, I grieve for him, but he was disloyal, the most terrible thing, a traitor. I left it to Han and his gang. I didn’t know it would happen like that, and with Helda. You are the only one who knows now. You are the world. I am telling you so the world can know. I would bring him back if I could. Bring him back right now. Say the world knows this. Say it knows, Henry, for me.”

  I won’t speak for him now, not a breath or a word.

  He tells me, “Then you can go to hell.”

  He leans over and lifts the girl by her underarms onto the sofa. She speaks, apologizing to him. She says she is very sorry, that he must know she usually works afternoons and is not accustomed to the liquor and then the lateness of the hour. He tells her she does not need his forgiveness. She parts her lips. He strums her hair with the back of his hand until she smiles again. She clutches him around the neck. The size of her hands and wrists makes his head and back look giant. He brushes her cheek. He waits a second, and then he kisses her gently on the mouth. He holds her beneath her thigh. The girl glances up at me. He sees this, but doesn’t move an inch. My presence won’t concern him. I leave his car keys on the arm of the sofa and go out of this place. He believes I am a necessary phantom in his house. I am a lantern to him, constant, unwinking. But I am gone.

  I am to meet with Grace and Pete.

  I keep making false sightings of them through the day. In one, they appear to me in baby form, wrapped in saris of pearl-hued silk and winged. They hover about the downtown streets of Flushing, spying out usable souls. All the while Pete keeps trying to rub up against Grace when she isn’t looking, but he is an infant and he doesn’t have the equipment yet and ends up just peeing on her leg and her wing. She pats him on the head, kisses his cheek. One way or another, Pete always gets what he wants.

  Lelia swears she does not see them. I nod toward the end of the street, across the subway platform. She strains to look, but of course it’s strangers, just another couple combing their way through the city. We move on. There is enough to worry us in the real world, she says. She knows that tonight I will be handing over the member listing of the ggeh, my remaining official duty before I leave them all forever: Hoagland, and Jack, and even John Kwang.

  I don’t tell Lelia who is behind the bombing. In another time, if I felt it unavoidable, I would have presented the fact solely to mitigate the ill sweep of my own activities. Perhaps I will tell her in a future day, but presently this is dangerous knowledge, capital material, which can only serve to place her within the reach of hazard, even more than she is now. In exchange for the list and—if necessary—myself as sacrifice, I have already made Jack and Hoagland agree to keep her clear of any action or trouble. In the old narratives that Dennis practices, he might well involve a wife or lover to use against a troublesome operative; but with me he understands that he can forever count on my Confucian upbringing, press it to my brow like a tribal lodestone, a signet of the culture, which he knows can burn deeper than even love or fear.

  But Dennis, I have promised myself, will not learn of the crime from me. This is my final honoring to Kwang, my last offering, which is the sole way of giving I have known in my life: an omission, solemn and prone. So let Dennis hear the words from someone else. Let another mole push up blind from the depths and speak. I have always known it possible that he could have many minions and pawns surrounding a case, a swarm invisible even to the spy. How else could Dennis have tolerated my writing almost nothing in the weeks before the bombing? Or given me any assignment after my debacle with Luzan, much less one with a man like John Kwang, with whom I might so easily identify? I could regard events in such a way as to see that Dennis has been patiently availing me of the elements with which I might effect my own undoing, all along contriving to witness and test my discipline and loyalty. As if his design were to watch me steadily unravel from the inside out, to record in my fraying mesh of self the hidden hazard of all traitors and spies. For even Dennis Hoagland understands that in every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal, which brings you that much closer to a reckoning.

  * * *

  It is raining tonight, again. The springtime won’t end. Queens has minor flooding. Some of the sewers are clogged, spitting up refuse from the grates. The air is almost tropical. I think the soaked concrete of the borough must smell a little of Venice, or what I imagine of Venice, a redolence consumptive, intestinal. I go anyway through the ankle-deep water of flooded street corners, the brown pools slicked with spectral emulsions of engine oil and cooking grease, soot and sweat.

  The Korean noodle shop is near 41st and Parsons. I am to meet them here sometime after midnight. We don’t have to be exact. The restaurant is part of a whole block of Korean businesses lodged in converted row apartments dating from the fifties, when the population was still Italian and Irish and Jewish. Now the signs are all in Korean. The only English words in the windows are SALE and DISCOUNT and SHOPLIFTERS BEWARE. The walls of the restaurant are papered with legal-sized sheets with the house specials in Korean characters. The woman with the kindly face brings me a glass of water, a spoon, and chopsticks. I come here enough that she recognizes me. She thinks I am Chinese or Japanese because I always order in English or by number or by pointing to what I want on another table.

  There are other regulars here tonight, sitting in their customary places. There is the vegetable store worker in the fatigue jacket, the call car driver, the delivery men. Everyone eats alone. The waitress brings me a bonus: two silver-dollar patties of beef and pork, dipped in egg and fried. “Korean ham-bah-gah,” she says, smiling, offering it with a small bowl of flavored soy. “Sauce-su.” She seems to want to stay and watch me taste it but she hurries back to her work in the open kitchen preparing the bahn-chahn, the savory half dishes of vegetables and fish. She peers over the stainless-steel counter. I bow my head low to her. I want to thank her, too, with a surprise of saying something in our language, but there is nothing in my throat to call up. I am half afraid of disappointing her with some fumble of poorly accented words. If I had the sentence, the right words, I would ask her about her family and she could tell me about her daughter and her son. If I were able with my speech, maybe her feeling would turn and she could confide in hushed tones that her husband who brought them here too late in his life died one morning of a heart attack and was simply gone, that that’s why she was here and not at home, sound asleep near her good children.

  Grace and Pete arrive, shaking the rain from their coats in the doorway. The woman greets them in English and Pete immediately points and answers in fine Korean that they’ll sit with me. She smiles at him. He is a prodigy with languages. He orders two bowls of on myun and some barley tea and asks for the bathroom. Grace comes over and kisses me on the cheek.

  “Harry! Long time no see!”

  “You look healthy,” I say.

  “Do I?” she answers, sitting across from me, squeezing the water from her dark hair. “I’ve been working too much.”

  “You’re tan.”

  She looks slyly around for signs of an enemy. She whispers, “The Bahamas. The story is this. We’re buyers of preci
ous stones. Pete’s the Japanese dealer, I’m his translator. The client wants a who’s who of the island’s middlemen and suppliers. You know, we make the list, check it twice. As usual, nothing special. But you don’t really want to know, do you?”

  “No,” I say. “What I want to know is how you fended off Pete.”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “But I’m asking.”

  “Badly,” she answers.

  “You’re kidding.”

  She looks at me like the dead. “Okay. Very badly.”

  Pete sits down next to her, having heard everything.

  “Hiya, Harry.”

  “I’ve never seen you this dark,” I tell him. For some reason I want him to feel vulnerable, laid open, though I know it will be completely useless. I say to him anyway, “You do well in the sun. It’s nice. Now you’re almost the color of concrete.”

  “He doesn’t tan,” Grace says. “He tarnishes.”

  “What color do you get?” Pete says to me, whittling off fine splinters from the ends of his chopsticks.

  “I turn splotchy,” I say. “Banana.”

  Pete laughs appreciatively, everything tight and from the throat, his grin still familiar to me, shit-eating, larcenous. He picks at the kimchee as though it might leap up at him, but then lifts a rolled bunch into his mouth.

  “I don’t know how you eat that,” Grace says. “I think it’s pure torture.”

  “So do I,” Peter answers as he chews, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Slide me some of your water, Harry, quick. Good, good. This kimchee is fine, very fine. Nothing is better than this. Nothing better in the whole world.”