A Person of Interest

by Susan Choi

  “I’m very sorry to have bothered you about it,” Lee said with embarrassment. The agent was the sort of man with whom conversation was almost too easy. “I got you off track again. You were telling me what brought you here.”

  “It’s a very small thing. But the other day, when you said who that letter was from—who was it again? I’m not sure that I got the name right.”

  “Lewis Gaither,” Lee said, and he was angry to feel, instantly, at the sound of the name on his tongue, a sensation like a very tight band wrapped around his rib cage.

  “Spelling Lewis L-E-W?”

  “Yes. Could it be so important? It’s a personal letter. It has nothing to do with Hendley.”

  “Did you say you still had it?”

  Lee almost faltered and forgot his white lie, but he rescued himself, without, he felt sure, betraying his moment’s confusion. “I’m afraid that I threw it away, like I told you before.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Forgive me. We’re just chasing down so many things.” Morrison reached inside his jacket and produced a pen and a notebook that in his hands appeared comically small. He hunched over it, writing. “And your friend Lewis lives in Woodmont.”

  Lee felt a tingle of warning, an alarm on his scalp. It was the false address Gaither had given—of course this was why they were asking. Yet he couldn’t explain Gaither hated him and would do such a thing just to taunt him—he had already painted Gaither as a caring old friend. “Well, I suppose he does,” Lee began carefully. A partial truth, he reasoned, was not inferior to a complete one, and perhaps it was actually better, because less confusing. Emboldened by this idea, he went on, “But I wrote to him at that address and my letter came back. So perhaps Lewis made some mistake on his own envelope.”

  “You wrote him and you got a ‘returned to sender’? You didn’t tell me about that the first time we talked.”

  “I assumed that you knew,” Lee exclaimed, with all the force of resurgent anxiety as well as conviction—because in retrospect it seemed logical that the agent should have known this and not need to be told, although Lee knew in his heart that he hadn’t thought this at the time.

  But Morrison didn’t seem suspicious, or dismayed; he was making more notes in his notebook. “Oh, I probably do have a record of that letter of yours, if it came back to you,” he remarked as he wrote. “There’s just so many things to chase down. I apologize if I’m belaboring points we’ve gone over before. It just would be such a great help if you’d quickly refresh me about that letter. I can finish these records and seal them up.”

  “But why is it so important?”

  “You’ve said yourself the address doesn’t work. Why wouldn’t your friend use his actual address?”

  “I don’t know. I really have no idea.”

  “Can you tell me a little about him? And it is Gaither, yes? G-A-I—”

  “Like what?” Lee felt himself giving way to inexplicable panic. He couldn’t say that this caring old friend was his ex-wife’s ex-husband. “I really don’t know much about him.”

  “Didn’t you say he was a very old friend?”

  “I meant a friend from a long time ago. Not a friend that I’ve known a long time.” At last Lee had stumbled upon a plain truth that might encompass all the previous statements he’d made. Relief poured through his veins. He and Gaither were very complex, it was true, but their tangles could still be summed up in a way that was simple.

  “L-E-W-I-S G-A-I-T-H-E-R.” Morrison was still toiling over his notebook. At last he sat up and smiled at Lee. “You met Special Agent Shenkman. She likes to have all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. Far be it for me to criticize her work methods, because she’s an outstanding colleague. But just between you and me, her tendency to leave no stone unturned can get a little extreme.”

  “I understand,” Lee said, returning Morrison’s smile gratefully. “Far be it from me,” he added.

  “Sorry?”

  “Far be it from me. That’s the phrase. It’s a common mistake.”

  Morrison grinned. “Don’t be insulted if I compliment your English, Lee. Clearly, it’s better than mine.” They both laughed, and when Morrison stood up from the table with his cup, he also reached for Lee’s, which Lee surrendered without protest. Morrison rinsed both their cups at the sink.

  “Looks like a great day to work in the yard,” Morrison remarked when they were standing at the door. “Are you at home for the rest of the day?”

  “Yes, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Enjoy your afternoon.”

  They shook hands heartily. Morrison raised an arm out his car window while driving away.

  That afternoon Lee changed into old slacks and a T-shirt and wrestled his ancient push mower out into the sun. He hated lawn mowing—it offered none of the pleasures of plant tending and ten times the toil. But he also hated to pay for it, and the infrequency with which he did it had long ago set the lawn on the path of dereliction, so that his reluctance to mow was complicated by guilt, which only made him stall further. Even after resolving to mow, he found much to derail him. There was, for a start, the disgraceful condition of his mower, with its deathbed repertoire of labored drones, its concealed set of loose-nut maracas, its juddering blade, and its dried algal scum of the dead sod of ages gone by. Add the clumsy lashing motion required to yank-start the engine and the geriatric gasping unleashed…and, once the mowing began, the law of contrasts by which a shave for the lawn cast in glaring relief the shagginess of the flowers and shrubs. At least there were few witnesses. The generic children of his nearby neighbors must all still be in school. No scuffed plastic Big Wheels or tasseled tricycles or banana-seat training-wheeled bikes were being pedaled in driveways. The elaborate cedar play fortress of his right-hand neighbor was abandoned, its turrets and drawbridges noiselessly soaking up sun. At the moment no paired female walkers were huffing past, with pert ponytailed hair and clenched fists. Lee sometimes was shown the raised hand or quick smile of the walker whose habit it was to greet all human beings this way. He didn’t know names, nor did he give much thought to these reflexive acknowledgments. They were just part of the life of a smallish American town.

  As he finished the very thin strip to the left of his driveway—which he always did first for the quick, easy sense of accomplishment—the lone howl of his mower was joined by another commotion. His across-the-street neighbor’s small house, the same model as his—just a little too much for an old man entirely alone and just barely enough for a couple with a toddler and baby—briefly quaked, then erupted, some restraint overcome. The resident toddler rushed out the front door, shrieking and naked except for a diaper, and disappeared around the side of the house with the mother and a hip-riding baby in awkward pursuit. Lee did not know the name of the toddler or even its sex, but now that he thought about it, plodding with his slight weight pressed forward against the machine, he recalled that for the past several weeks there was scarcely a day this scene wasn’t enacted. The child must have just learned to walk, or to open the front door, or both. What would that be—fourteen months? That was the age Esther had been when she’d worn her first shoes. The three of them had lived on Sawyer Street then, in a part of town now entirely different, for one thing entirely black. Lee hadn’t been there in years, not even to trawl the now-broken streets for his best memories. But Sawyer Street existed without flaw in his mind: their very first house, their beachhead as a new family. He and Aileen had been married four years, he’d had his doctorate for one, Esther was going on one and a half. They’d had a little metal stroller for Esther that compared with the strollers of today was as crude as a Ford Model T, but Lee had approved of its ungainly weight—perhaps because he was pushing a rolling thing now, leaned at such a sharp angle for progress that he might appear to be walking into a stiff wind, this recollection of pushing Esther overtook him completely. It fell onto him like a cloak, and now the breeze on his bare arms was balmy and sweet, and the sun had dropped off the zenith
and blunted its rays—it was early morning—and his brown hands were wrapped confidently around the twin rubber handles, and he saw his smooth knees and his tan, slender shins and the toes of his leather sandals, always almost stubbed on the stroller’s big wheels—with Esther he also leaned forward, pushed the thing with his body aslant to avoid this annoyance. A posture he dimly realized was in some way female—all the strollers were misdesigned in this way, though at the time no one called it a flaw, it was how strollers were, the handles rising straight from the rear wheels so that you had to lean forward to not stub your toes, and this was the profile of all the neighborhood’s women and it was also Lee’s profile, and he didn’t mind this self-feminization, in fact he secretly liked it. Esther sitting very erect in her low-riding seat, often banging the palm of one hand on the metal restraint bar as if urging a horse to speed up. This gesture was very peremptory; it allowed of no doubt that the order would be promptly obeyed. And Lee always had his gaze trained on the crown of her head, on her very dark yet also wonderfully soft, wispy hair, which curled outward in all directions, in contradictory wavelets. Aileen’s hair was wavy that way but entirely different in color, a very pale brown, while Lee’s hair was typically Asian, the color of Esther’s but straight as a broom, so that Esther’s was a miracle blending of Lee and Aileen.

  “It’s not so astounding,” Aileen once remarked. “All babies have very soft hair. Yours was probably like that.” In other words, Esther’s hair was like Lee’s, and Aileen had no part in it. Why had she said this? And with the slight emphasis on all babies—which carried a meaning Lee chose to ignore.

  Lee pushed harder, surged more powerfully through his forearms, and as if in response to the increase in speed, Esther raised an arm over her head. “Ya ya ya!” Esther yelled.

  The asphalt was smooth, the street recent, all the aluminum-clad little houses proudly tended, still new. In this scene Lee is, as in every scene of his life prior and subsequent, a novelty, but the novelty of his novelty here is how well people like him. They might see him as an anomaly, a suburban Yul Brynner this time with his vague provenance and his careful English, but they also see a devoted father, and they embrace him. Both the women and men, though he sees women more. Lee is the most junior faculty member, the most recent hire, but nevertheless he’s asked for a light load this semester, which means he’s at home all day Tuesday and Thursday and home by three Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while Aileen works from nine until five every day at the library. Either Lee picks up Esther from day care or Lee himself is day care, all day long, and this is one of those days, because they’re having their walk in the morning. Encountering other mothers and children, all of whose names Lee knows, just as they all know his. He talks easily with these women, makes spontaneous plans, turns the stroller off its usual route to accompany Marge Morris and Mikey, Judy Krauss and Samantha and Wendy, to the school playground. His and Aileen’s neighbors: the Boltons, the Strapinskis, the Yelvertons, the Tuttles, the Mieks. There are photographs, of baby birthday parties and joint barbecues, of the black Weber dome on its tripod, of the parched-looking grass and the failing saplings, overtethered with fat ropes and stakes as if they might burst their bonds and escape. No one on Sawyer Street has pretentious ideas about landscaping. Their fences are practical chain-link, with squeaky gates with squeaky horseshoe-shaped latches. Lee wears madras-print shorts, his hair long in the front, so it’s almost obscuring his eyes. Big Beth Strapinski has the complexion of a ham and a stiff blond bouffant; all the various children have mouths gleefully stretched to show off sticky beards of ice cream. In these pictures Esther is a dazzling baby, brown as a nut in her puffy white diaper and sturdy white shoes. Unless it’s actually cold, she can’t stand to wear anything else. Lee, in his own clothing so modest as to risk being priggish, is delighted by Esther’s barbaric disdain for wardrobe. Esther’s perfect happiness at this age is confirmed on all sides: she sleeps soundly, eats like a wolf, and now walks on small, powerful legs. She isn’t yet old enough to perceive the crosscurrents of tension, even of misery, that are already warping the walls of the Sawyer Street house. And maybe Lee isn’t old enough either, though he’s older than all of his neighbors by a decade or more: the father of a toddler, his first child, and he’s already forty! Yet he feels fantastically young—or is it that for the first time in life he feels optimistic? One example: that Gaither and Ruth have absconded with John is to Lee not just apt, but a miracle. An as-good-as-divine intervention—to tip the hat to Gaither—and from the least likely source. Even before it had happened, Lee had tried to make clear to Aileen that their future had no room for John. He’d never said he would leave if Aileen pursued getting John back, but only because such a threat didn’t seem necessary. To Lee, John was less than irrelevant, an unpleasant loose end from their tangled-up past that had been—miraculously—tied off.

  Aileen generally said very little in these conversations. Lee felt she agreed; that she suffered some guilt over John needlessly, but that at her core she agreed.

  It also went without saying that Lee wanted a son of his own, but when Esther was born, this desire for a son was forgotten. Esther, banging her palm on her stroller again—faster, faster! And Lee hurrying up in his gladness—

  He yelped at a terrible noise, something violently hacked, as the handle leaped out of his hands. There was a double instant, Esther’s small, compact weight torn from him. He was practically fainting on top of the mower, the blade fearsomely gnashing, but he’d only run over a branch.

  Once the mower had been turned off and upended and the blade’s path was clear, he was a long time stooped over the starter cord again without rousing the engine. It was almost as hot as a midsummer day. The hair at his temples was glued to his head, and his eyes stung where sweat rivulets reached them from his forehead. It was strange how the salt of sweat stung, while the salt of tears soothed. Or were these stinging tears? Was he crying?

  Finally the mower was chugging again. Lee stood still at its helm a moment, rededicating his mind to the project. He felt a strange misery, very much like remorse, as if in running over the branch he had injured someone.

  He started mowing again carefully, gazing down at his work. The resolute mower devoured; he heard the spray of cut grass in the bag. He wanted to reconjure Esther. He traced a shrinking rectangular spiral, at the same time retracing his thoughts…. Not long after Esther turned four, they had left Sawyer Street, at Lee’s insistence. A new family had moved onto their block, with two girls seven and nine, and a shrill, angry dog Lee immediately hated that strained at a rope in the yard, snapping threateningly. Lee had forbidden Esther to play with those girls in their yard, let alone in their house, but the girls were like sirens to her: both very pale, dingily blond, with something slack and perhaps even mean in their otherwise vacuous eyes. They did strange things that Esther, wide-eyed, not yet capable of the least secretiveness, struggled to describe to her parents: they lit stalks of dried grass and pretended to smoke; they got under the covers together and pantomimed rough grunts and gasps. Lee had gone over to the house to speak sharply to the parents and found bedsheets tacked up for curtains, water glasses for ashtrays; a week later Esther, again disobeying, trotted hopefully into the yard in a little smocked halter and shorts and was knocked to the ground by the dog, somehow freed from its rope. The dog sank its teeth into her stomach, was kicked away like a football by Mr. Strapinski, just then passing by; the emergency room, rabies shots, and Lee storming the bedsheet-curtained house, screaming that he would carve up the dog with a cleaver. Then there had been no question but that Lee was on the side of righteousness. Mieks, Strapinski, and Yelverton had held him back as a show of solidarity with him, not to spare dog and owners. And from then on, the dog’s family had been shunned by the whole neighborhood, the girls subtly and not-so-subtly excluded from neighborhood play.

  Of course, Lee had had other reasons, other nascent dissatisfactions—the good but not excellent school—along with the im
precise sense that it was time for something bigger. But Aileen had accused him of reacting exclusively, and excessively, to the attack by the dog. “We have so many friends here,” she wailed. “It’s just a fucking dog!”

  “You want to stay and let your daughter be bitten by dogs?”

  “I don’t want that. For Christ’s sake! But there’s things we can do besides move. All because of a dog!”

  “The welfare of a child,” Lee seethed, “is more important than anything else.”

  “I guess that depends on which child it is,” Aileen said.

  It also had to be admitted—with no small amount of irony, considering the jaundiced view Lee now took of the American suburb—that something in Lee had badly wanted not just a house of his own but a house built for him; not just a full kitchen but his choice of “avocado” or “chocolate” appliances; his choice of genuine wood floors or wall-to-wall shag; his choice of pedestal sink, of linoleum, of exterior brick, or of shingle; his 1.3 acres of churned clumps of dirt he would seed by himself, so that Esther could squeal when the blades first emerged, like a delicate aura of green. Three full bedrooms: one for Lee and Aileen, one for Esther, and one for Lee’s desk, which on Sawyer had taken up half the front room—but there were also a den and a parlor, and Lee’s desk could migrate to either location, he allowed, since he now had an office at school. It could migrate to either location whenever they felt that they might need that bedroom for some other reason.

  Perhaps it had been Lee’s failing that as he planted poplars at the property line, a dogwood and maple in front, Douglas fir at the sides, all the while fretting over his grass, feeding it fertilizer and watering it and despairing to see its thinness, its bald spots, its great delicacy like so many precise green brushstrokes—all the other homeowners had laid rolls of sod; God, please make my grass grow! he had moaned—perhaps it had been his failing that while doing these things he had never confessed to Aileen that the thought of a second child, just as much as the joy of the first, was what moved him. That the role of father was what made him a manic landscaper. Whether it was Lee’s generalized Asianness or his particular prudishness or the long-standing glaciation of sex with Aileen, Lee couldn’t help feeling that to discuss a second child, to “plan” for it, was to introduce something like agricultural method into the most—perhaps the only—sacred sphere of his life. A child wasn’t schemed for or attempted—a child was bestowed. A child was the world’s only magic, its only half-reasonable argument for the existence of God—Lee found himself thinking such outsize, out-of-character things while he watched Esther play, when he walked with her slim hand in his, when he tucked her in bed—yet somehow these thoughts never touched on the one other child that had impinged on his life, if briefly.