by Susan Choi
Gaither made the first overtures, and here again there was much that Lee sought to revise once the friendship was over. Lee was canny enough to realize that Gaither’s early, easy interest in him, Gaither’s falling into step with him outside of class, the uncondescending manner in which Gaither filled in missing words, early on, when Lee’s English still faltered, arose from a mixture of genuine kindness and the other strong motive of Gaither’s religion. Lee was clear-eyed about his nonlofty status, enough aware that the depth of his loneliness exerted a force that repelled, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it. Lee modeled himself on the Byronic octet, not without some success; his ink-dark, almost mirrorlike hair grew to fall in a cowlick that hid his forehead; he found a battered calf briefcase, like a WASPy, neglected heirloom, in a secondhand store. He knew that the younger departmental secretaries saw him as an exotic prince of the Far East, a Yul Brynner with hair, and he would feel them staring after his tweed-covered back—the secondhand store again—as he left the office. But Gaither, perhaps because he was older, saw through to Lee’s yearning; or was yearning, himself, for a friend; or was intent on a mission. Lee was aware of all three possibilities and stressed the second while the friendship endured and the third when it ended. Lee’s mother, in the late and unhappiest years of her life, had been aggressively plied by a Protestant missionary and at long last turned into a Christian, and by contrast with that person Lee found Gaither admirably subtle. Their conversations scarcely touched upon religion; it was the friendship itself that would reel Lee in. But as aware as Lee felt of all this, he wasn’t willing to admit what a prisoner he was of his loneliness and that he would have accepted Gaither’s friendship even if it consisted entirely of the desire to make a new convert. Lee told himself, in his early encounters with Gaither, that he, too, was indulging one weaker; Gaither’s need to convert was a flaw, toward which Lee could be kind.
It was in this spirit of wary but willing friendship with Gaither that Lee met Aileen. Lee knew that Aileen was Gaither’s wife of less than a year; they had married the July before Gaither entered grad school, about six months after they’d met. Aileen had a secretarial job in another department and took the occasional class toward a B.A. degree; she and Gaither did not yet have children. Lee assumed, because Gaither had not said otherwise, that Aileen must be a Christian also, and he imagined her unremarkably, pinkishly pale and smooth-featured and plump. Perhaps she had lusterless, heavy brown hair in a matronly clip at the back of her neck and wore dowdy plaid skirts and support hose and practical shoes. Perhaps she was tranquilly faithful, like Gaither, but lacking his brains; though for the most part, until he met her, Lee did not think of Aileen at all.
One evening after their seminar, as they walked the flagstone quad path to the gate where they usually parted, Lee to his rooming house four blocks off campus, Gaither to the bus that took him several miles to wherever he lived with Aileen, Gaither said, “There’s a shindig this weekend at the park outside town. A statewide church event. I know you’re not in the market to pick up religion, but I’d like it if you met my friends. My church friends. And Aileen. It would make a nice outing. When’s the last time you saw hills and trees? They must have had those things back in your country.” Gaither’s peculiarly gentle, ironical manner of speech was his most signal asset, the winking blade that allowed for his faith to be tolerable. His voice was slowed by a very slight drawl from a boyhood in Texas, but this was entwined with pedantic enunciativeness, which was then overlaid by self-mockery. Gaither used words like “shindig” to acknowledge he was just the sort of stay-at-home stick who should never say “shindig.” And his reference to Lee’s foreignness somehow worked as a reference to all those who saw Lee that way, among whom Gaither wasn’t included: their peers in the program, who effortlessly shunned them both.
“Shindig?” Lee said, smiling wryly. This was one of many moments at which his awareness of Gaither’s attempt to convert him was outweighed by his pleasure at having the man as his friend.
“An evening cookout, in a tent, with some singing and talking and milling around. You won’t be preached at, I promise. The folks we don’t know will assume you’re a Christian already, and my friends will know better than to give you an earful. They already tried that with Aileen. She got them trained pretty quick.” This was the first indication Lee had that Aileen was not as he’d thought. Gaither winked, and they parted, agreeing that Gaither would pick Lee up Friday evening at six on that corner.
This had been early April, their first spring in graduate school. In that part of the Midwest, April was even more variable than it is in New England; the week of Gaither’s invitation, the daffodils and the tulips had started to open in the long, geometrical beds that outlined campus buildings, but it happened almost every year and was endlessly discussed by the locals that after a week of exquisite, damp days the temperature fell and brought with it several feet of spring snow. That the statewide federation of Gaither’s coreligionists had planned their open-air shindig for this time of the year poignantly indicated their faith, Lee reflected, as he turned up the collar of his thin black suit jacket and pulled the lapels closed across his sternum. The afternoon was already cold, although it was perfectly clear; the declining sun stained the drab campus buildings as if they’d been hosed down with wine. The wind was increasingly strong; Lee watched the tulips, already grown to full height and with their leaves raised like arms, flinging themselves supplicatingly onto the ground. It might have been his discomfort at the prospect of the evening ahead, but the wind-lashed flowers looked like penitents to him, prostrating themselves in abased ecstasy. Lee had inherited godlessness from his father, and it was one of his few characteristics about which he felt no concern. His discomfort arose not from suspicion that he did long for God but from the fragility of his belief that it was he and not Gaither who held the balance of power, that it was Gaither, in his desire for a convert, who was the real supplicant. By the time the car, a battered two-door sedan, pulled up at the bus stop with Gaither at the wheel, Lee felt his mood souring and detected in himself the first stirrings of resentment. Until now he and Gaither had never conducted their friendship entirely outside the classroom; even when they had sat in the campus tavern, where Gaither drank ginger ale or orange juice while Lee had a beer, their encounter had been framed by their status as equals within their department, both academically and socially. In meeting on a Friday night for reasons entirely unconnected to school, in driving together in Gaither’s car to a meeting of Gaither’s fellow Christians, in the company of Gaither’s friends and Gaither’s wife, Lee felt that Gaither had led him over a border on the far side of which they were vastly unequal. The front passenger door swung open, and Lee crossed his arms across his chest, as much in an unconscious effort to repel the car as because he was cold. A woman—small, brown-haired, with a stern, unremarkable, un-made-up face and in a brown blazer and long plaid skirt and loafers—got out of the car without so much as a glance at Lee, while Gaither leaned across the front seat and waved. “D’you mind riding in the back, Lee?” he called. “Ruth gets carsick.” The small brown woman wrestled with the front seat until it hinged forward and then stood aside silently so that Lee could climb into the back. “It’s my pleasure to meet you, Aileen,” he said, holding out a stiff hand. He was aware of a feeling of triumph, on finding that Gaither’s wife was as plain as he’d thought and, on top of that, rude.
“I’m not Aileen, I’m Ruth,” the woman said, affronted. “Aileen’s in the back because I get carsick.”
Clambering, then, clumsily into the car, ducking his head underneath the low roof, feeling the too-long hair that hung over his forehead sticking into his eyes, hoping not to split the knees of his pants in the awkward position, because the pants were very old and overwashed and the knees had worn thin, Lee was doubly embarrassed, not merely because he had failed to hear Gaither name Ruth and had so made a gaffe. The woman in the backseat, whom he had not even noticed as the car had pulle
d up, seemed to exude such an air of intense disengagement, such a desire to be left alone, that Lee felt he’d been pushed through a window into her boudoir. As he struggled to insert himself into the seat beside her, she dropped a newspaper she’d been reading onto her lap and watched him, with indifference. She was shatteringly beautiful and as obviously bored.
“Hello,” she said, when he’d settled himself. “I’m Aileen.”
“It’s my pleasure to meet you,” he managed, in an unsteady sweat as if he’d sprinted to get into the car.
“Likewise,” she said, without the slightest attempt at sincerity. She picked up her newspaper again.
However her carsickness manifested itself, Ruth was stoic about it. She sat motionless and erect in her seat, the mousy brown top of her head barely visible over the headrest. Lee guessed that her sickness was in part claustrophobia. She had rolled down her window all the way to the sill, and as they left town and pulled onto the country highway, a roar of cold wind filled the car and the air seemed to turn to a mass and pin them where they sat. Then it was too loud, and the cold was too numbing, to speak. Aileen’s newspaper snapped angrily and was torn in so many directions she couldn’t fold it; Lee held on to one edge, and together they tried until Aileen mashed it into a ball and put it under her feet. Then they went back to staring ahead in silence. Lee couldn’t see Gaither’s face in the narrow rearview, but Gaither drove through the howl of gelatinous wind in the dying daylight with the loose motions and confident shoulders of a man at the helm of his yacht. He seemed to smile beatifically with the back of his head. Lee twisted away and gazed out his window. He hadn’t been outside the confines of their small college town since the late August afternoon eight months before when he’d arrived on a bus from the nearest big city, ninety minutes away—the same city to which Gaither and Ruth, he’d soon learn, commuted each Sunday by the same bus to go to their church.
The drive seemed to last hours, but when Gaither turned off the road into trees at a sign for the Corn Creek State Park, Lee was startled to see by his Seiko that it had not been even thirty minutes since they’d picked him up at the bus stop. The two-lane highway had left town for flat, stubbled cornfields that reached off endlessly; then the land had grown very slightly uneven, like a rumpled bedsheet, and unremarkable trees lined the sides of the road. Lee glimpsed a magnolia that had formed fuzzy buds; all the rest of the branches were still bare. Leaving the highway, they had dropped onto a drab gravel road that for no topographical reason pursued a meandering path through the scraggly woods; the occasional burnt-wood sign pointed on to a parking lot, picnic meadow, and lake. But the sun was now setting between the tops of the trees and the ground, pouring its blaze sideways into the car; in spite of the wind, Lee felt it hot against his cheek, and when he glanced at Aileen, he saw her skin illumined with reflected sunlight. The gathering had been planned, with permission from the park manager, to coincide with the park’s closing time, so that the lakeside pavilion and its tables and barbecue grills could be had privately. Coming around a last bend, they could see, through the bare trees, the homely “pavilion,” a sort of large shingled roof up on poles, already glowing blue underneath from its flyspecked fluorescents, and with a small stage set up. Lee thought he sensed Aileen recoil; perhaps she was embarrassed by the gathering’s scrappy sincerity, its dowdy religiousness. And these were not even mainstream American Christians, they were marginal evangelicals—but as the car arrived in the parking lot, Lee saw that the lot was almost a third full and that men and women and children were ambling to greet each other on the blacktop, clasping hands beneath the afterglow sky. Gaither switched off the engine and turned around to the backseat. “We’re here!” he said. The wind had matted his thinning brown hair, and Lee realized that in this context—in his shirtsleeves in the open air, outside a classroom, but most of all in the midst of his own beloved people—Gaither was a very handsome man. He had a strong-boned but delicate face, rangy arms, at least half a head’s more height than Lee. Lee looked again at Aileen. She was pulling a comb through her hair, without vanity; he winced when he saw her yank hard on a tangle. For an instant the combing exposed shell-like ears and large metal triangular earrings that set off the finely sculpted planes of her face. They struck Lee as an admirably brazen choice for a church gathering. Aileen thrust her comb back in her purse, removed a lipstick, and retraced her mouth quickly in red. Lee realized he was staring, from a distance of inches. Ruth had climbed out of the car without waiting for Gaither, who was standing at the driver’s side with the seat pulled forward, in readiness for his wife.
“You can get out now,” Ruth told Lee. “The car’s stopped.”
As the four of them crossed the parking lot toward the pavilion in the waning twilight, Lee might have been afraid of Gaither’s making him conspicuous, of Gaither with a proprietary arm around his shoulders, gently but firmly propelling him toward introductions, telegraphing Lee’s vulnerable foreign godlessness to this church brother and that. But in the same way that Lee’s preoccupations had altered radically once he’d climbed into the car, Gaither’s manner toward Lee now was very different from what Lee had expected. As Gaither and Ruth encountered one group of comrades after another, their formation on foot, which had begun with Gaither and Aileen side by side, quickly reshuffled itself so that they were walking the same way they’d sat in the car. Gaither introduced Aileen to those church members she’d never met, let her exchange her wan greetings with those that she knew, but with the formality past she dropped slightly behind and gazed off at the distant horizon; and of course Ruth shared devout fellowship with each one of the people Aileen quietly snubbed. Soon Aileen and Lee had fallen so many paces behind that Gaither did not even attempt to include Aileen in his conversations; and the farther they penetrated the crowd, the less he seemed to recall she was there. Lee also had weathered an early round of brief introductions and also felt himself, to his relief, increasingly forgotten. Ahead of them Gaither seemed ever taller and lighter of step, while beside him stern, humorless Ruth also clasped hands and nodded intently and then spoke with great feeling, about what, Lee was too far to hear. By the time they had reached the pavilion, where, they now perceived, a little band was sawing away on banjo and fiddle without amplification, Lee almost dared to believe that Gaither had brought him not as fodder for proselytizers but to squire Aileen. Then suddenly Gaither was with them again, a large palm flat on each of their shoulders. “I hope you’re both meeting people,” he effused. “Are you hungry? Aileen?”
“I’m all right,” Aileen said.
“Lee?”
“I’d take something,” Lee said cautiously.
“Good! Come on over here. Where those lanterns are hanging there’s a whole barbecue, with soft drinks and salads and pie. Our church is the nearest to here, so we’re hosts for this evening. I can promise that the food committee will amaze with their efforts. We’re hosting church members tonight from all over the region. There are even folks here from Ohio. Later on there will be just a few prayers and talks, and then we’ll have some square dancing. Oh, come on now”—with a smile at Aileen—“it’s not such an ordeal. George and Shirley are around here somewhere, you like dancing with them. Aileen claims she hates dancing,” Gaither told Lee in tones of amazement.
“I don’t do it either,” Lee said.
They finally lost Gaither for good near the barbecue grills. There was, as promised, a tantalizing array of fruit and three-bean and potato salads, and pyramids of charred little burgers taken fresh off the coals and blown immediately cold by the late-April wind. Lee discovered he was ravenous, perhaps as ravenous as he’d been in his life. Forgetting caution and self-consciousness, emboldened by Aileen’s presence to completely ignore the curious and encouraging smiles of the food-committee members with their barbecue tongs who were uttering platitudes at him—“Welcome!” “We’re so glad to have you with us tonight!”—Lee piled his paper plate with the cold little burgers, with mayonnaised potat
oes and cubed cantaloupe and peanut butter and oatmeal cookies. Aileen lagged along with him vaguely, but he could feel the precise contour of her presence, and he could tell that as much as she behaved like a stranger to the people around her, she was known to at least some of them. The food committee was composed of members of Gaither’s congregation; there was an almost audible quality to the quiet that surrounded Aileen, amid a sea of gregariousness, as she followed Lee down the length of the food table, taking only a cookie. The barbecue grills were just outside the shelter of the pavilion’s roof but still within the glare of its blinding fluorescence; when they left the food table and strode just a few paces farther away, the night returned startlingly, tall and cold and the color of blue ink in the bottle, not yet flat black as it would be in an hour. With the pavilion light at his back, out of his eyes, Lee was dazzled by stars; the smear of them was doubled in the round little lake, which in darkness, denoted only by what it reflected, possessed a mysterious dignified beauty entirely absent from the brown pond they’d glimpsed through the trees as they drove up. As his eyes adjusted, Lee made out the shapes of picnic tables like black nebulae against the shimmering lake, a few of them occupied by stargazing or less sociable Christians, but most of them empty. “You want to sit?” he asked Aileen, and his voice seemed awkward, and too loud. She led him to a table, both of them walking unsteadily although the ground was level, because of how little they saw. Then they sat down on the tabletop, with their feet on the bench to stay clear of the chill evening dew, facing back toward the pavilion, which glowed garishly like a UFO just touching down. Lee ate fiercely, almost vengefully, and as his plate emptied, he somehow grew more angry, more affronted, not less.
