by Susan Choi
He was so detached, the field of his vision, despite the rich scene, so empty, that he did not notice Donald Whitehead walking toward him until he was only a few yards away. Whitehead was wearing a rumpled green and gold houndstooth jacket that was slightly too large but that somehow, for this flaw, was more flattering. And he’d gotten a haircut; his deep-set eyes were still shadowed beneath the shelf of his brow, but his square forehead and jaw and his strong nose stood out handsomely. He was shorter than Gaither, Lee’s height, but more classically built, Lee decided; he entirely lacked Gaither’s gentle effeminacy. His eyes sparked with an interest now that Lee had not seen before. “Mishima?” Whitehead said, coming to a halt just in front of him, so that their two afternoon shadows stretched out side by side, pointing east, toward the clock tower.
A few months before, Lee would have been flattered, even quietly excited, by this attention from Whitehead. Now he found it burdensome—not because it was Whitehead but because it was anyone. “I like him,” Lee managed to say, tepidly.
“You’re reading him in Japanese. That’s impressive.”
“Not really. I knew Japanese before I knew English. It’s just easier for me.”
“Wata kusimo sukosi hanasemasu,” Whitehead offered, with a pretense at self-deprecation Lee could see was masked pride.
“Sukosi ja naide sho,” Lee answered. “I didn’t know that you spoke Japanese.”
“Hardly. I’ve taken a semester or two, but I’ve probably just showed you all that I know. If you ever feel like more work, I could use a tutor. But it would have to be charitable, or we’d have to barter, and I doubt I’ve got anything that you’d want. I’m tragically impoverished this semester.”
Lee doubted it, looking at the old but well-pedigreed jacket. He’d never found something like that at the secondhand store. The word “charitable” made him think of Gaither and the vile words he had spat at Gaither on the day of their break, and though he’d meant to tell Whitehead he’d be happy to tutor for free, a beat passed, and then another, in which he didn’t speak at all. But Whitehead did not seem deterred. “All right if I sit for a minute?” he asked. Lee moved his textbook, and Whitehead sat down.
“Looks like you and Gaither had a falling-out,” Whitehead said, as if reading Lee’s mind. Lee’s heart lurched in his chest, and he felt his palms tingle with mortification, but outwardly he was sure he showed nothing. So the rift had been noticed. He shouldn’t feel surprised; theirs was a small, claustrophobic department in which little happened.
“I wouldn’t say a falling-out. We’re all busy this term. We just don’t see each other so much.”
“For a while there you seemed thick as thieves.”
“I don’t know about that.” Lee was aware of a stirring of gratification, that Whitehead had observed this. Perhaps Whitehead had wished he were as thick with Lee. Or with Gaither.
“It’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help asking. I wondered if it had something to do with his saintliness. I can’t tolerate religious men, personally. I can’t tolerate religion. To me it’s the most offensive form of so-called thinking there is. A pile of ludicrous irrationality that actually tries to dress itself up in rational arguments. Religion and mathematics shouldn’t get within miles of each other. I’m not saying Gaither’s not a mathematician, but I wonder about his work. I hope I’m not offending you. I’ve never had pretty manners.”
“Not at all. I don’t believe in any god.”
“It’s the rare mathematician who does.”
After a while Whitehead added, in a musing tone, “So it was his religion. I’ll admit I thought so. I wondered how long you’d be able to stand it.”
Lee’s gratification at Whitehead’s abrupt interest in him was giving way, very slightly, to annoyance. There was something impersonal and condescending about Whitehead’s observations, as if he were watching Lee not out of interest in Lee but out of interest in his own infallible deduction. Whitehead’s manner was arrogant, even godly. Perhaps this was to be expected from a man who, like Lee, claimed he did not believe in God.
“His religion has nothing to do with it,” Lee said, also arrogantly. “I’m in love with his wife.”
As soon as he said this, he felt enormous relief, at the guarantee that his private misery would now be consequential. But Whitehead only laughed. “I think Gaither’s married to Christ.”
“No, he’s married to Aileen,” Lee said, and his tone must have made Whitehead realize he wasn’t joking.
“And you’ve met this Aileen?”
Lee inadvertently paused, so that his reply took on excessive, almost comical gravity. “Yes,” he said at last. Whitehead raised his eyebrows. All at once Lee felt frantically vulnerable. What had he done, confessing to this strange, golden-haired man? He envisioned Whitehead at the College Road Tavern, his beautiful jacket tossed carelessly over a chair, ankle propped on his knee, reenacting the scene for the Byrons as they convulsed with laughter. And I asked if he’d met her, and he said—and here Whitehead would mimic Lee’s stern, downturned mouth, his “Oriental’s” humorlessness—“YES.” The absurd ostentation of it! The Byrons shriek, beg for mercy, pantingly lift their mugs when their laughter subsides. Oh, my God, the Oriental Don Juan. Don Juan Lee. That’s a gas. Lee pictured this humiliation so vividly he did not notice that Whitehead had flushed, as if he’d realized he’d entered a realm in which he was a stranger, where not even a Japanese phrase could reconfirm his authority. Whitehead sat back on the bench and pushed his natty blond cowlick away from his face, running his palm quickly over his skull.
“So—tell me about her,” he said.
But Lee’s sense that he was in danger had blinded him to the flush and deafened him to the tentative tone. He was already gathering his calf briefcase and his heavy math text and his paperback Mishima onto his lap. “I’m late,” he said, although he had nowhere to go and Whitehead probably knew this.
Whitehead also stood up. “I’ll walk with you.”
“That’s okay. I really need to get going. I’ll see you sometime,” Lee dismissed him, staring at the deepening blush on the other man’s face. His rudeness might have embarrassed him equally, if his desire to escape hadn’t shouldered past everything else.
“Don’t forget about Japanese lessons,” Whitehead said, almost meekly. “As I confessed, it would have to be barter, but I have decent German, if you’re interested.”
“I’ll see,” Lee said, turning away.
“Lee!” Whitehead called. Of course he had to have the last word—his persistence in the face of repulse was its own kind of rudeness. Lee looked at him with undisguised impatience.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“Love is even less rational than religion. You can’t mix it with serious math. And you’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve always seemed so to me.”
He’d had nothing to say to this. He couldn’t guess what the comment implied: jealousy? condescension? He’d only known that in confessing his feelings for Aileen to Whitehead, he’d handed a stranger a powerful weapon. Departing brusquely, without a gesture of farewell, he’d felt Whitehead’s gaze, whether contemptuous or baffled or longing, like a fire at his back. When he finally passed between the bell tower and the library, leaving the quad, he glanced over his shoulder, but Whitehead was no longer in sight.
5.
WHEN AILEEN HAD DIED, THE YEAR THAT ESTHER turned fourteen and that Aileen, given two more months, would have turned forty, Lee had imagined that it would be not just painful but perhaps impossible for him to ever revisit all those places indelibly hers. Then, as now, he’d still lived in the town of their domesticity and parenthood, if not their greatest happiness, and for a short time it seemed he could not set foot outside his home. Five minutes in the car and here was Klaussen’s deli, looking seedy and dilapidated now, where she’d loyally shopped; once it had been the only place in town she could find decent lunch meat, sour pickles, and bread that had not been presliced. Turn
a corner and there was the Y, where she’d insisted on teaching Esther to swim in a class for toddlers who couldn’t even yet walk. To this day as uneasy in open water as at towering heights, Lee saluted her wisdom, although at the time he’d accused her of the callous desire to expose their child to certain death by drowning. The farmers’ market in summer, the A&P all year round; Aileen had left Lee, and the town, years before she’d died, but only after her death did she threaten to haunt all those places she’d been while alive. And yet Lee instead found that his town’s very smallness, which he’d feared would press unwanted memory on him, somehow gave him relief from the past at those very same sites where the past would seem most concentrated. This was the freedom of severe limitation, like passing a lifetime in one set of rooms; no single scent could remain in the air; no single occasion could claim the backdrop. The A&P was Aileen’s at inexplicable moments, but for the most part it remained the drab store where Lee purchased his dinner.
It was the same with the shell-shocked campus, in the first days after Hendley was bombed. Lee knew that for many of those who’d spent less time on campus than he, the bomb blew a permanent hole in their sense of the place. The bomb had arrived just two days before the start of spring break, and the excuse to abscond had been seized with relief by everybody who could. But Lee felt he had long since grown used to his palimpsest world. Bomb or no, spring break or no, he drove to campus again, as was his decades-old habit.
Aileen’s ghost had once made him want to avoid the old Mathematical Science Building, but now he enjoyed passing by it and even felt affection for its pebbled exterior and its rusting I-beams, considered avant-garde in 1972. Lee often missed his old ground-floor office in this building, with the slender floor-to-ceiling pane of glass by the door so that privacy was impossible, although at least then he’d been spared his current fastidiousness about the angle at which he propped open his door. That old office also had a floor-to-ceiling window in its rear wall, and because he had been on the ground floor, the grass seemed to grow right to the pane. Esther would sit cross-legged on the floor, staring out at the squirrels. There had been a time, when Esther was six or seven, that Lee had taught an evening class three times a week, and Aileen had bought a hot plate for his office, and then every evening at six she and Esther arrived with a pot of something, Irish stew or goulash, and after reheating they all ate together off Tupperware plates. That had been happiness, he knew now, the three of them cross-legged in an intimate circle, Esther in some sort of plaid jumper that Aileen had sewn and thick cable-knit tights, thoughtlessly talking away, thrilled to be in his office. As a younger child, she had even been happy to sit in his calculus class, in the back, with a coloring book. He had probably never thanked Aileen, perhaps never even noticed her tenacity in maintaining a family meal. At the time he had probably thought it was only her duty.
Now his old building housed the Department of Romance Languages; Mathematical Science had moved to its new building, or “facility,” in 1987. The new building, called contemporary by the school administrators, to the naked eye shockingly cheap, with curved hallways in colors like “shell pink” and “mint green” and strange, unnecessary circular and triangular holes cut into second-story walls to look down on the cold “atrium” full of shivering, leaf-shedding ficuses, had been built around a vast computer center at its core and intended as the strongest manifestation of the school’s new commitment to computer science. In truth the building had loomed like a folly, by the minute growing grimier and less used and more dated, until the fresh windfall of alumni funding that had enabled the triumphant hiring of Hendley, in 1993. Then the building’s shabbiness and laborious whimsy had been reconstituted as the appropriate background tribute to Hendley’s good-humored self-sacrifice, in consenting to join the department. Lee had never been comfortable in the building, beneath the incessant harsh whine of its arctic fluorescents, along its right-angleless halls, in which, at least for the first year, he was constantly lost. Doors to the outdoors and to restrooms opened only with the swipe of a magnetized card that Lee always forgot in his desk, as if the Mathematical Science Building were top secret, vulnerable to dark espionage. Lee’s new office, where he eventually shared his left-hand wall with Hendley, had an untethered quality to it, each surface seeming not solid but more like the taut skin of a drum. When large delivery trucks passed the building, he would feel his floor tremble.
It startled him to see a policeman stationed at the door to Hendley’s office, although he understood it must be to prevent any tampering with the crime scene. Now that he was inside his building, he felt less placid than he had while outdoors. As he passed down the pink hallway, an octagonal window at the far end framed the crown of a tree. Outdoors, spring had been sweetly indifferent to the disasters of man, but from this vantage the budding branches Lee saw appeared frozen in postures of horror. It must be the youth of this building, Lee thought; not enough had transpired here for the palimpsest theory to work. From its cold lobby tile to its dirty skylights, the place was all about Hendley.
Perhaps Lee would just check his mail and then return home. He let himself into the departmental mail room, that claustrophobically windowless chamber, barely more than a truncated hall, with a door at one end to the corridor and a door at the other to the cubicled space of the departmental office, today deserted, a graveyard of inert monitors and cold copy machines. He did not really expect to find anything; the usual ream of irrelevant memos would not have been issued in the two school days after the bomb. He was surprised, then, not just to find he had mail but to find that it was actual mail, an envelope stamped and postmarked and addressed to himself. Instinctively he tore the envelope open and read where he stood.
Dear Lee,
What a bittersweet pleasure to see your face after all of these years, even if through the mesh of newsprint. You are still a handsome man. “Princely,” I believe, was the word sometimes used around campus for you. I know that you, like me, are rational, and that you won’t be offended when I say that the sight of my grad school colleague almost seventy years (is that right?) from his start in this life, was a bracing reminder to one of his peers as to how many years of his own life have passed. Let me compensate for the great gaffe of mentioning age by asserting you wear it admirably well, a lot better than I do. I wonder if you would agree that there is some relief, in becoming old men. What poet wrote “tender youth, all a-bruise”? I can admit that you bruised me, that last time we met.
Lee’s horror was intense and imprecise; like helpless prey, he felt himself the narrow focus of amorphous scrutiny; he was the paralyzed deer in the woods, hub to eyes and gun sights. He felt his bowels loosen. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured. He straightened and looked around himself quickly, his heart pounding away at the door of his ribs. Of course he was alone. All morning he’d thought about ghosts, and yet here was one to blindside him he had not even deigned to imagine.
The rest of the letter was absorbed in an unremembered instant, during which he also burst out of the mail room and traveled back down the hall toward his office, almost tripping over the feet of the watchful policeman.
“Good morning,” Lee exclaimed.
The policeman nodded to him with brusque courtesy. “How’re you feeling, Professor?”
“Just fine,” Lee replied, attempting to sound stoic and warm and forgetting all about going into his office. He hurried out of the building, back into the sun, and took a left down the concrete pathway, toward University Station.
The letter must have been delivered either yesterday—Monday—or today. The postal service kept on implacably regardless of spring breaks or of what deadly freight it might ferry. Its vast, branching, impersonal systematicity revolted him suddenly. Like a poisonous river, it had brought Hendley that bomb, spewed it out on the banks of his life without the least word of warning. Now it had brought Lee this letter. He still held the single sheet of white typewriter paper, bent against the twin folds that had thirded it by the surpr
ising pressure of his hand, which had now left a rippled damp spot in the margin. This proof of his own physical contact with the letter made Lee feel somehow compromised. He refolded the letter quickly and slid it back into the envelope. The envelope was as characterless as the paper: white, business-size, cheap, with no watermark. It was addressed—snidely, Lee felt—to Dr. Lee. The italics were Lee’s own, in angry echo of his correspondent. So Gaither had never finished his degree, as Lee had predicted he wouldn’t—this was what the sour fastidiousness of Dr. Lee clearly betrayed, if unintentionally. Lee knew Gaither well enough to see through his fraudulent courtesies. The painful and intoxicating brew of shock and fear, of uncertainty and certainty, and of guilt, was now making room for plain anger as well. Dr. Lee, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, all entirely correct down to the esoteric plus-four of the zip code. The return address was 14 Maple Lane, Woodmont, WA, but the letter was postmarked from Spokane. Gaither could as easily have put it in the mail during a layover between Bangkok and Boston.
Of course I was laughably innocent then, of the workings of human relations. But I am not a sentimental man—nor are you, I’ve long assumed and admired. I only press on the point (on the bruise!) to impress how I’d like to revive faded fellowship now. Now you are probably angry with me, as I once was with you. Please don’t be. There’s a reason my arrow grazed you. I can learn what my long-ago colleague has done in the long years since we last had contact.
My long-ago colleague. Long assumed and admired.
