by Susan Choi
“I hope you have a very merry Christmas, Mr. Lee.” For the first time, he was aware of a flicker of curiosity, even of cautious fellow feeling, on her part—from one solitaire to another. But of course she wasn’t truly alone; she had a sister to go to. Perhaps realizing this, she didn’t take it any further. She didn’t ask him, as she never had before, what faraway land he came from, where his family was. He was relieved.
“You, too, Mrs. Winnick. Merry Christmas.”
When she was gone, he was finally interested in knowing what day it was, to keep track of the time he had until she came back. He had not minded her presence in the house because he’d never imagined her leaving. Now he felt a frank thrill, as if Christmas were a holiday for him after all.
Downstairs, he opened the door off the front hallway and entered her parlor, for only the third time in the year and a half he had lived here. The first time, he had been admitted to sign a tenants’ agreement (it stipulated, among other things, that he was barred from her rooms of the house). The second time had been just last month, when he’d received Aileen’s sister’s phone call, about the birth of the child.
In her kitchen he saw she’d unplugged her toaster and left the faucet dripping in case of a freeze. He’d imagined the radio here, but it was back in the parlor, a decades-old Gothic hulk he hadn’t even recognized as a radio his first time through the room. He turned it on and sat down in her old widow’s armchair, with its antimacassars and its ruptures of stuffing, to wait. He was surprised by how easy it was to invade someone’s home; he didn’t feel the least out of place, or even curious, among all the strange objects. Still, he didn’t consider retuning the radio to a more businesslike station; he didn’t trust he would ever locate her station again. It played only big-band standards, the music speckled by static as if in some aural way moth-eaten; it seemed to be broadcasting not across space but from years in the past. Between songs an announcer barked out the titles too quickly; this was the human noise that from his room he’d mistaken for anger. Finally the date was referred to, in the same frantic tone: “It’s Tuesday, December twenty-second—just three days until Christmas!!” It crossed Lee’s mind that the voice might have spoken these words in 1945. Was it Tuesday, December 22, in 1964? Again perceiving belatedly, he stood up and returned to the kitchen: there was a calendar here. And here the temporal mystery was decisively solved. December 22 was indeed a Tuesday, and in its square Mrs. Winnick had shakily written, To Elsie’s. In Sunday’s square, the twenty-seventh, the same hand declared, Home.
Back upstairs, Lee was distracted from returning to his work by the fact that he didn’t own a calendar, or a radio, or any other means by which he could keep himself tied to the passage of time. He didn’t even want to be tied to the passage of time; he only wanted an alarm clock to go off Sunday morning, warning him that his sublime isolation had come to an end. He could make chicken marks on the wall like a prisoner, one a day for six days, but on any of those days he might forget to make the mark, or forget he had already made it. The absorbing triviality of the problem annoyed him more and more; the flawless peace he’d envisioned with Mrs. Winnick’s departure already seemed tainted. He would simply have to leave his room once in a while to buy the newspaper, but he didn’t want to leave his room and didn’t want the newspaper. For weeks he’d lived perfectly balanced between desire and fulfillment. Now the petty obligation of timekeeping weighed on him, though he’d meant to keep time in the service of his own peace of mind.
He’d forcibly dismissed the issue more than once when the harsh bleat of the front bell startled him. He was doubly startled to realize that only he was there to answer the door. He sat very still, his heart banging, as if the downstairs caller might hear his quick breathing, scent the alarmed perspiration that had sprung up at his temples. It was the postman, he told himself, a Christmas package from a Winnick relation, it would be left on the porch—but when the bell rang again, more importunate somehow, he jerked upright and went down the stairs. Through the center of the three small, high-set panels of glass in the door, he saw the crown of a head: a pale crescent of brow slightly fringed by the very fine hairs that could not be drawn back, and the drawn-back hair itself, just its uppermost gloss. This was Aileen; he would have known her by the pad of a finger, a kneecap. He didn’t know if he realized this then or sometime afterward: that the peace of this autumn alone had been a fragile hiatus, not a new scheme of life. He felt it collapse as he opened the door, its almost noiseless downsifting, a weakness giving way, like the sighings of pulverized plaster within the walls of the house he heard on very late nights when only he was awake. There was wild combativeness in her expression, although she didn’t say anything; but her eyes glittered, as if she were ill. And he noticed a change in her skin: around the line of her jaw, it had softened, gone slack, the throat skin of a much older woman. A stain of fatigue doubled each of her eyes. He was overwhelmed by his longing for her, whether in spite of or because of these changes, he didn’t bother to wonder. Her pre-pregnancy slimness had not been restored but somehow overshot. She was severe in her thinness. Her hair was much longer. Behind her it had started to snow.
Gaither returned from his week of Christmas no less inexorable. He appeared not the least bit undone by his one-man encounter with the harrowing needs of a six-week-old child. The boy himself was apparently plumper, well rested, entirely clean, and encased head to toe in unfamiliar, ingeniously miniaturized winter gear that would have suited him fine in the arctic. The hand-me-down sleepers and buntings (from Nora’s Michael), soft and pilled, with their arctically useless appliqué work of duckies and bunnies, had been laundered and dismissively packed in a brown grocery bag.
The custody arrangement that Gaither proposed was exhaustive and, like all legal documents, absurdly anticipatory, embracing contingencies it was hard to imagine someone having imagined. But at its core it consisted of one very simple exchange: sole custody of John Gaither for a discreet, uncontested divorce. Aileen would not be summoned to court, her distasteful infidelities would not be publicized, and the assets with which she had entered the marriage would be returned to her in their entirety. But perhaps the most compelling aspects of the arrangement had been those not translated into impenetrable legalese but conveyed to Aileen vocally, by Gaither and his lawyer, in those lengthy, unimaginable sessions from which Lee had been gladly excluded—and which Nora had not witnessed either, as she’d been caring for John. Those sessions—or rather “conversations”—Aileen had endured without her own lawyer present, because she didn’t have one and wasn’t sure how to get one, and in any case the conversations were supposed to be prefatory—Gaither’s lawyer very nicely suggesting they simply “converse,” in a noncombat setting, with the fine aim of maybe avoiding the combat completely. Aileen emerged from these conversations in the way the frilled, superfluous margin of a fresh-molded plastic object emerges from the pressure between the two plates: the actual thing remained hidden from view, and what could be seen revealed nothing of the shape the thing took. To Nora, Aileen wept hollowly and left her son sleeping across Nora’s lap. To Lee she disclosed even less—but it was true that he hadn’t pressed her, hadn’t made the demands for disclosure that a real ally would.
Aileen also emerged from those sessions at the end of the process—not, as she’d thought, just a short way from the start. Gaither and his lawyer made it compellingly, doubtlessly clear that she stood a far worse chance in court. If she refused Gaither’s offer and fought, of course Gaither would have to fight back, and it was likely Aileen would not even get visitation. Gaither offered her all the visitation she desired. This was not spelled out in the agreement; spelling out visitation would limit it, to what was spelled, to the literal letter: every other weekend and every fourth week, for example. Gaither had no desire to do that. Aileen was John’s mother: that was a sacred condition that nothing would change. When she wanted to see John, she need merely call Gaither, and the thing would be done. If all went we
ll, Aileen could have John overnight, even for many nights running, even for a week, for a month, for a summer—so long as she established a stable and wholesome domestic environment. Clearly such an environment was in Aileen’s interest as well and would be no trouble at all to achieve with the significant funds that she stood to receive when she signed the agreement. Everyone knew that Aileen wanted to get back on her feet, to stop living with Warren and Nora, to perhaps find an interesting job at the university, which she’d do easily, as the ugly details of her affair and divorce would remain under wraps. Gaither insisted on full custody only to obtain full control of John’s religious upbringing, and this was a point Gaither knew that Aileen wouldn’t dispute. After all, she was an atheist, as she’d never hesitated to inform the other congregants at Gaither’s church. And going to court for the right to impose atheism on a six-week-old child was a battle Aileen would certainly lose, with even worse repercussions.
What Aileen wasn’t told, and what she wouldn’t learn until after she had signed the agreement (her signature barely hers: the jagged EKG line of a faltering heart), was that Gaither’s lawyer was a congregant, too, a church member from a neighboring state. And Gaither’s new suits had been bought with church money, and little John’s arctic gear, and every other thing Gaither required to start a new life. Aileen learned all this later: ten months later, in October 1965, after her divorce, uncontested and discreet, became final. After she and Lee, bristling like cats in their new too-close quarters, booked University Chapel for the first Saturday in December and then learned from one of the Byrons, all of whom Lee invited—they’d had almost no one to ask—that Gaither and Ruth had been married at their church, in a packed-to-the-rafters service, the very week the divorce was announced in the “notices” section at the back of the newspaper. After Aileen understood that it must have been Ruth who fed John his bottles for that week of Christmas. After Aileen married Lee without John in attendance, because Gaither and Ruth felt that Lee was an unwholesome element, and after Aileen realized that without visitation written formally into her agreement, in fact she was not guaranteed visitation at all. After Aileen’s union with Lee, faltering even before its strained solemnization, began faltering more violently and after Aileen finally hired her own expensive attorney, with her own regained funds—not to get rid of Lee but to get back her son, no matter how little her new husband might want him.
Throughout all this, Lee had been at best passive, as if Aileen’s loss of her son were the sort of arcane her-side-of-things situation, like a great-aunt’s estate, that a husband can comfortably view as no problem of his. At worst he’d been openly hostile. If he wanted a child at all, it was a child of his own. How could she possibly think he should raise Gaither’s son? Gaither cherished the boy, and, what seemed no less compelling, he paid for all the boy’s needs; to Lee this was lucky, for Aileen just as much as himself. He actually said this to her; for a man who had never imagined himself married, let alone cherished lofty illusions about the marital state, he was receiving a swift education in the effortless viciousness to which that state could give rise. But for all that, he was no less amazed by the other dark fortune he’d realized was his: Aileen actually loved him. He’d become indispensable to her. He had the power to force her to choose, between himself and her son, and insofar as he declined to assist her, encourage her, comfort her in her grief, he did this. Less with action than with the absence of action.
Might he have risked an appearance of sympathy with her, had he known that the stifled arrangement—Aileen three times a week permitted into the house she’d once lived in herself, to kiss and dandle her son, bottle-feed him and change him, shed her tears onto him while he napped, while her former husband taught classes and his homely new wife, the pious, self-righteous prig whom Aileen had so scorned did the cleaning or yard work, or read a book in the kitchen, but never left, never left them alone—was destined, as a result of her efforts, to come to an end? Gaither and Ruth did not want Lee in contact with John, and this suited Lee fine. Gaither and Ruth seemed to not trust Aileen; Lee didn’t think it was business of his. His wife, the woman he’d scolded for being married already, the first time they’d met, hated him, saw his traitorousness in its component parts (selfishness, cowardice) yet was still in love with him, and now also completely dependent—he was all she had left. And so he did not even give her the comfort of mistakenly thinking he hoped she’d succeed.
She hired the lawyer, who deeply regretted her signature on the agreement, as well as the year she’d let pass before she’d had “second thoughts.” But he was guardedly optimistic and sent a letter to Gaither’s lawyer stating that the agreement would now be contested. On her usual Tuesday, Aileen drove to her son’s, proud and frightened; the letter had been put in the mail on the previous Friday. There was a chance Gaither’s lawyer hadn’t gotten it yet or, if he had, hadn’t yet informed Gaither. By what signs would she know? Would Ruth be different, as she let Aileen in, would she not as she always did open the door without words or eye contact, promptly turning her back, as if Aileen were the maid? Or would Gaither be there instead, having canceled his classes, so he could lash her with Yahweh-like fury for her awful transgression?
She must have mounted the two steps to the porch in her usual roil of anger and dread and deep longing, to see her baby, to hold him, all this heightened, made even more clamorous, by her new sense of coming combat. This time she was ready. She pressed the bell, and as it rang through the house, she remembered herself, her pregnancy just beginning, sunk like a secretive stone in the house’s deep shadows, the drapes drawn against the blinding sunlight. If someone came to the door, she stayed still; no slit in the drapes for a caller to peer through, no danger that she might be discerned. The steps would retreat down the walk, and she’d again be alone.
Even before she’d noticed that the drapes were gone from the windows, she’d felt the tone of the bell hurtling somehow differently—unrestrained—through the house. She put her face to the window so quickly she smacked her brow on the glass. Inside was as dim as always, but she could see it was empty.
Lee had known then that the battle was won. Not because Gaither and Ruth had absconded with John, but because, once Aileen was back home and had sobbed several hours on the phone to Nora, she then sat in the kitchen for several more hours and sobbed all alone. She did not bring her grief to her husband. She had realized she shouldn’t.
13.
ON HIS WAY BACK FROM THE PARK, LEE’S ENTRAILS churned with mortification. After having so easily vanished three decades ago, why would Gaither allow Lee to pounce on him now? The return address on Gaither’s letter hadn’t been the careless oversight of an old man finally losing his cunning. The only old man who was losing his cunning, if he’d ever had any, was Lee. He had the confused sense that his letter to Gaither had been opened and read and laughed at before being resealed and returned. At a stoplight he almost tore it open, as if by doing so very quickly he might glimpse the trailing edge of Gaither’s tall, ambling body as it slipped once again out the door of the years, the face hidden, perhaps just the hem of a cardigan sweater or the beveled-down heel of a worn walking shoe indicating the vanishing owner, like the tip of a tail. But behind him an impatient car honked: the red light was somehow turning yellow again. He lurched through the intersection, the letter untouched on the seat beside him, and it was still there when he turned very slowly through the faux-pillared entrance into his subdivision and then off the winding main road and onto his street.
He had moved into this subdivision more than ten years before, his house one of the first to be built, although it looked more as if it had been dropped ready-made off the back of a truck. In the time since, for all the gasping labor he’d put in, a man deep in his sixties still stubbornly rolling out sod, hacking conical holes for frail shrubs, tipping wood chips from a forty-pound sack, his yard had never taken root in the earth, and his house had never taken root in his yard. There was a misbegotten, Frankens
teinian quality to his failed landscaping that made his heart sink whenever he rounded the bland curve of Fearrington Way and his house came into view. His neighbors hired landscaping companies so that their houses were afloat amid clouds of forsythia or azalea or holly depending on the season of the year, but Lee had always loved caring for plants, with the contrary result that his yard appeared neglected and derelict because he continued to tend it himself. And after a decade he still knew none of his neighbors to invite them inside, where they would have seen his wildly thriving indoor plants, which were on the point of taking over his kitchen. He solaced himself with this thought as he rounded the curve and his yellow scrawny yard became visible, and with it an unfamiliar sedan sitting in his driveway.
It was considerately parked to one side, so that Lee was able to pull up beside it and, if he’d wanted to, push the button on his garage-door opener and continue inside. Instead he turned off the engine and emerged, aware of his letter to Gaither, left behind on the seat. Apart from the post-office ink, there should be nothing so different, as the result of its circular journey, about the thin envelope Lee had sealed with such grim resolution and put in the mail just a few days before. It was a feint in the dark that had failed to connect, and nobody—not even Gaither, Lee reminded himself—had seen Lee lose his balance from making the lunge. And yet he was trembling as if the envelope held Gaither’s scalding riposte; his hands could hardly hold his keys, and his heart felt overworked in his chest. The strain of this nonconfrontation with his old nemesis wrecked his feeble defenses against last night’s insomnia, and his vision was filled with fatigue spots again. Through their spreading stains, he could see that the driver of the other car, now emerging also with an overbroad smile like the work of an earthquake across the solemn landscape of his face, was the FBI agent from the mail room, Jim Morrison. There was a passenger, a woman, perhaps in her late thirties, wearing a belted shirtdress and sunglasses, which she pushed onto the top of her head as she also emerged. From the far side of both vehicles, she seemed to gaze at Lee in the chill, confirming manner of a doctor turning eyes on a patient after grimly perusing his chart, and Lee was startled into an awareness of how he must look, an old man stumbling forth from the tomb of regrets with their cobwebs all over his clothes. In the foreground Jim Morrison was amiably bearing down on Lee with a long arm extended again, as if their encounter a few hours before had made them old friends, and in the beat before their palms were reunited, Lee tried to will his unperspiring and steady. It didn’t help that any conjunction of law enforcement with his home tended to bring out an obsequious, stammering side of himself, even if he had summoned the policemen himself. He could never seem to lay hold of the easy self-righteousness with which his neighbors demanded the arrests of teen Halloween egg throwers or drivers who sped past the Child at Play sign.
