by Susan Choi
“It’s been a pleasure to know you, Professor.”
“Please, just Lee,” Lee reminded him, finding his voice, as they shook a last time.
Driving again, his restlessness wasn’t the sort that he usually suffered while on the road, of thinking constantly about when to stop for a stretch or to use the toilet. An effervescent agitation bubbled up from his gut, constricting his rib cage in such a close imitation of fear it took a while to realize he in fact felt unbearable eagerness, straining him forward. The past five weeks kept returning to him in a fractured kaleidoscope form; he saw Emma Stiles recoiling, and Peter Littell’s shifty gaze of distaste, Sondra’s injured coldness, his neighbor with the baby on her hip and contempt in her eyes. And somehow this took him, by way of a shudder of realized negligence, to his house and its punctured window. He had felt that his place in the world was unsteady and worthless, a perch best abandoned and, more than that, not even his. But a peculiar sensation of ownership was overtaking him now, that was directed toward not just his vandalized house, but his life.
He still couldn’t break the speed limit, but haste imbued all of his actions, and back in the limbo of a rest-stop McDonald’s he even tried to wolf down his burger, without much success. All her life Esther had been a fast eater, dispatching her meals in a fraction of the time that Lee took, not from gluttony but a chilly efficiency that let her push back from the family table as soon as she could. Esther’s manner of eating had horrified Lee. “Slow down, honey,” he had implored. “No one’s going to take it away from you!”
“The way you eat makes Daddy feel like we’re poor,” Aileen commented once.
“Bullshit!” Lee replied angrily, surprising his aged reflection in his car’s dirty windshield. As had been the case years before, the observation angered him in direct proportion to its accuracy. The burger was thrust back into its bag, only halfway consumed.
Perhaps love can’t surrender to loss, but at least in that tireless rebellion it recognizes itself. Before losing Aileen, Lee had not understood that her merciless knowledge of him was a rare antidote to aloneness that he would only be privileged with once. Since her death he’d grown more and more able to cherish the aspects of their marriage he had once found intolerable, and he couldn’t help but wonder, as if she were not only still alive but still married to him, if she wasn’t having the same change of heart. Whether or not, he found her wonderfully willing to restage their old arguments, as he crawled across their daughter’s Colorado and then nobody’s Kansas and even blander Missouri, hardly aware of how long the drive took, or how little the landscape varied, now that all the topographic events of the West were behind him. He knew that the refreshed vividness of her ghost was the product of different infusions, but mostly the absence of Gaither—his having been slain, finally, in Lee’s mind. Lee was able to admit, with a dread that was bracing, because brave, that the failure of his marriage to Aileen hadn’t been Gaither’s doing. It was Lee’s fault alone.
Because he’d felt so companioned while driving, at first it didn’t seem completely strange, as he cautiously pulled up in front of his house in the gathering twilight, to see that his front window had been closed with a sheet of plywood. Aileen had always been good at rough practical things, like constructing a trellis or unclogging the toilet. But Aileen was also dead, Lee reminded himself, as with a rush of trepidation he turned in to his driveway and returned to the sullied remains of his life.
The inside of his garage, with its exposed two-by-fours and plasterboard and the Mower of the Ages against the back wall, was almost poignant in its ignorant sameness. But when Lee entered the actual house, pushing off his shoes by habit to leave on the mat, he was conscious of difference. He smelled a persistence of cigarette smoke.
Otherwise there was a baffling cleanness, to surfaces and the carpet. Lee’s telephone notepad was turned to a fresh page and centered on the kitchen table:
I came as soon as I could: got some adjunct to proctor my finals, got here in time to stop your local hoodlums from turning your place into their private clubhouse. And who got the ticket for trespassing? ME. Cleaned up what I could, patched your window. Hope to God you’re all right. At the Holiday Inn next to campus.—FF
An arrow bisected the rest of the page, pointing toward where a picture postcard lay in careful alignment just offshore of the notepad. The photograph showed a hideous bird. Chicken-beaked and baldheaded, with parched ridges of flesh dangling down where a chin might have been, and a small, cunning eye. The distressing head poked from what looked like a white ermine collar. The rest of the bird wore Grim Reaper attire, a dusty black enrobement like a funeral hot-air balloon around the implied skeleton hanging down from that head, the full effect reminiscent of portraits of Elizabeth I. He was thinking all this—ugly bird, Queen Elizabeth choked by that huge wheel of lace—and also digesting the words printed under the picture—ANDEAN CONDORlargest flying bird in the world—but really he was hesitating at a perilous threshold, hand extended, heart stilled in his chest, both lungs empty and limp like the condor’s weird wattles, because he knew he couldn’t bear the disappointment if it wasn’t from her.
He wanted a beer, to give strength, but this was so pitiful that with a reckless exertion of fingers he flipped the card over.
Dear Daddy
Lee dropped into a chair and devoured the postcard. He read with such greed he’d seen all of the words several times before having any idea what they said.
Dear Daddy,
You’ll never believe where I am: Patagonia. We are saving the condor, I’ll explain it all later. A tourist came here with a copy of TIME and I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. When the tour leaves I’ll get a ride out, then a bus, flight from Santiago, layovers Houston & Chicago, I should be there 5:30 pm 6/14 pick me up if you can but if not it’s ok.
She’d been running out of space, but she managed
I love you,
Esther
When he telephoned the Holiday Inn, tears were cresting the rims of his eyes. “Frank?” he said. “Frank, I’m home.”
“I got your mailbox back up just in time,” said Fasano. “You saw the card, right? She’s a good kid, Esther. But half Gypsy, not sure how that happened. Christ, say you’re hungry. I came all the way here, and I’m still eating dinner all by my damn self.”
When he and Fasano went for sentimental, tough steaks and cheap purple wine at the Wagon Wheel, the bartender momentarily paused in his labors and gave Lee a long stare, as if to say to everyone who was watching that he wasn’t going to make a big scene, but that he hadn’t been fooled. The waitress who served them was tight-lipped and carelessly hostile with glasses and plates, and kept her gaze slanted away. The other patrons were momentarily paralyzed and then fervid in conversation with one another, putting their heads close together. But no one came to their table with squared shoulders and hot coals for eyes, as the young mother had come to Lee’s door, and beneath the superficial opprobrium was a sense of excitement, as if everyone hoped Lee would stay a long time, and drink heavily, and do something bizarre, so that the story would be even more singular when told to a person who hadn’t been there.
So this is notoriety, Lee thought. He’d become untouchable in every sense of the word. Not just at the Wagon Wheel but everywhere in town he was shunned—looked away from as if his face were a male Medusa’s, while at the same time cold gazes were flung at his back—and surrounded by a sphere of silence, so that even in the loquacious grocery line all the shoppers for ten yards around were struck mute. But to the same extent that people found him repulsive, they left him alone. Whitehead’s arrest hadn’t dispelled the suspicion that hung around Lee, but the suspicion had altered in texture. Every assertion that Lee must have been “somehow mixed up” in the Brain Bomber’s crimes was countered by the uncertain notion of Lee’s having been somehow mixed up in his capture. Had Lee turned state’s evidence, winning immunity for his share of the guilt? Or had Lee been undercover on the FBI side all along? W
hatever the answer, to his neighbors and his fellow townspeople and even some of his colleagues, Lee was now a completely ambiguous person, and if no one felt able to judge him, no one wanted to absolve him either.
He told himself he didn’t care: he was far too old to start caring now about what people thought. He was tenured, wasn’t he? So there was no reason to fret if his colleagues shunned him. He had citizenship, didn’t he? So it wasn’t important if readers of Newsweek and Time thought his foreignness made him a threat. He was a sane man—it wasn’t his problem if the world was crazy. But he was aware of a theatrical swagger to such sentiments and was also aware that he didn’t feel them, so much as he tried to collect them. He might be rehearsing, for Esther; the prospect of comforting her, of reassuring her that his ordeal had done no real damage and that in any event it was over, was the most comforting, reassuring prospect that he had. But there was nothing pretended about his avoidance of the handful of reporters who still wanted his story. These few insisted to him they were different, and indeed they behaved differently. Instead of camping on his lawn, they left hopeful and courteous messages; instead of asking an FBI agent for damning details about him, they asked him to help them in damning the whole FBI. There was an appealing intentness to them; they seemed more like young scientists on the verge of a breakthrough than like the mob that had eagerly watched as his house was dismantled. All the same, he declined; he said “Thank you” and “No comment” and “I’m sorry” and hung up the phone.
Apart from the stubborn reporters, there was one other surprising exception to the rule that Lee now was persona non grata: his summer-school class, made up, as it was every year, of precocious high-school students and particularly stupid undergraduates. Reclaiming the class had been the opposite of a satisfying self-vindication; no sooner had Lee appeared than Littell thrust the class at him and fled, the way a nurse might thrust gauze at a leper. Littell saw him now with even greater dislike, as the possible source of a lawsuit, and though Lee had never cared for Littell, that man’s desire to do whatever it took to get away from Lee quickly was initially so demoralizing that Lee wandered into the classroom in a fog of depression, failing to notice the responsive alertness of some of his students. Finally one of the high-schoolers, an actually bright boy camouflaged as some kind of vandal, in a slashed T-shirt depicting an A in a circle that Lee intuited wasn’t a reference to grades, raised his hand and smirked, with an air that everyone, including Lee, must now want to dispense with formalities. Variations on the smirk appeared throughout the classroom, on a spectrum from eager to gigglingly anxious.
“So, Professor,” the vandal began. “We’re all dying to know what that guy Donald Whitehead was like. I mean, you know him, right? You, like, were his friend from a long time ago?”
“I don’t know who’s saying that,” Lee exclaimed, flustered by the idea, which seemed to him just as far from the truth as everything else people seemed to believe.
“But you thought he had a point, didn’t you?” asked a blond girl, also high school and also quite bright, but as tidily groomed as the vandal was aggressively unkempt. “I mean, in terms of his beliefs?”
“No joke he had a point,” cut in someone else. Now everyone was talking at once. In their eagerness to state their opinions, they all seemed to have forgotten they’d solicited Lee’s.
“This world is completely diseased. You don’t need to go to med school to figure that out.”
“I thought a lot of what he was saying, like about technology and the breakdown of society, was right on,” announced one of the stupid undergraduates, who wore a tiny tape deck and a pair of headphones into class every day, and who was there because he’d failed calculus in the spring. “I agree it was totally uncool and insane that he killed Dr. Hendley. But history is full of visionaries and messiahs and things who were pretty insane.”
“Blowing people up is like: we go to the Middle East and blow, like, tons of people up so we can get gas for our cars, but then this guy blows up a few people and it’s a total double standard,” the vandal observed.
Lee needed a few moments to locate his footing. He was actually dizzy, he would have liked to say in response to the groundless ideas he was hearing, but it wasn’t quite that. He realized, with a tinge of dismay, that his heart had grown light on the wings of classroom badinage.
“One of the excellent things about life in this country,” he began carefully, “is your freedom to say things like that. In the country I came from, if you said things like that, you’d get thrown into prison.”
They all burst out laughing, but Lee wasn’t insulted. “Oh, I’m not kidding,” he rebuked mildly as they went back to calculus.
For all his discomfort and unhappiness, he knew that the misplaced admiration of his students was still a consolation, and not the only one he enjoyed. There was Esther’s impending arrival, and Fasano, who’d put off his departure. They were both aging men in whom difficulties of the body had been recently added to historic difficulties of temperament, and so Lee had invited Fasano to stay at his house rightfully confident that Fasano preferred the hotel, and Fasano had said so with no less accurate confidence that Lee would not be offended. They both knew that this didn’t mean their esteem for each other was flawed. And they hardly spent less time together than if they’d been roommates, that enjoyable week, eschewing the Wagon Wheel to cook steak with green peppers and Fasano’s Italianish bachelor food, and drinking cans of light beer and talking, with inexhaustible fluency. There had been nothing that Lee misremembered about their friendship, and if he was amazed that they’d both let it drop for almost twenty years, he could also reflect that this further revealed their alikeness. There were no false conceptions or deluded projections of one toward the other, not even those small conversational gaps that the friendliest duos will need to locate a fresh subject. Lee and Fasano enjoyed a shared context and similar personal lives, and at the same time each lacked knowledge of all of the other’s compelling details. The result was a festive companionship very unlike the intense rapprochement Lee had felt with Aileen as he’d been driving home.
Under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that Lee told Fasano much more about his marriage to Aileen, and her marriage to Gaither, than he’d ever told anyone else. “So Aileen’s son would be about thirty?” Fasano observed. “Wonder how he turned out.”
“I hope not like his father,” said Lee, having made the full circle and come back to his original, sensible dislike of Gaither, on the grounds of his self-righteousness.
“It’s pretty hard to imagine Aileen with a Bible-thumper,” Fasano said, laughing. He had met her on a few occasions, at the very beginning of his time as Lee’s colleague, which had also been the very end of Lee’s time as her husband. Lee was aware, without wanting to dwell on it much, that no small part of the solace of Fasano was the fact that Fasano remembered Aileen, “vividly,” as Fasano had said, and with admiration.
“She was very young when she married him,” Lee pointed out. “And very angry with her family. And they were Unitarians. To them an evangelizing Christian like Gaither was almost as bad as a black man.”
“Or an Asian,” Fasano said, laughing again.
“She was young even when we got married,” Lee said. “Still making youthful mistakes.” He didn’t want Fasano to insult him by protesting this, and Fasano did not.
“And very young when she died,” Fasano said instead.
Perhaps there were, after all, a few conversational gaps. They sat with Aileen’s death, her absence, between them. Lee drained the rest of the beer from his can. “When I got here and saw the fixed window, I thought that she’d done it,” he said.
“Even I’m a better carpenter than a dead woman,” Fasano replied.
Another gap, which Lee filled with his sadness, both heavy and light, like those ground fogs that sometimes appear at dusk, filling the ditches.
Fasano said, “You still own running shoes?”
“Oh, my
God.” Lee waved off the implicit suggestion.
“What? You don’t look so decrepit to me.”
“Then your eyesight’s as bad as my feet. I have shoes. And I have tendinitis and bad knees and ankles and pains in my shins and my back. And my toes.”
“Christ, you sound like my mother. Where’s your shoes?”
“I guess I wouldn’t mind a little run on the riverside path,” Lee said when they’d found them. “For old times’ sake.”
“I was thinking right here in your neighborhood. Right through these streets.”
“Forget it,” Lee said, for the first time annoyed with his guest.
“You went to the Wagon Wheel. You went back to campus.”
“And you see what I got,” Lee said, pulling the tab off a fresh beer.
“Don’t do it with me and you’ll never do it.”
“I quit jogging years ago, Frank.”
“I’m going back to the Holiday Inn,” Fasano said. “For my shorts and my shoes. I’ll be back at eight. Perfect time for a jog. Nice and cool.”
Lee sat drinking his beer when Fasano had gone, watching the minutes tick by on the clock. The emptiness of his house was unbearable to him. He wondered, for the first time, if Esther really would come. And if she did, was it only from pity? And was that why Fasano was here?
By seven-twenty he had finished his beer, urinated, and changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. He lifted his foot toward his buttocks, seizing hold of his heel, almost losing his balance. He caught sight of himself in the sliding glass door, twigs for limbs and a mop of white hair, the opposite of Fasano, whom age had thickened and depilated.
Hamstrings groaning, he laced up his shoes.
By the time Fasano returned, night had descended on Fearrington Way, revealing the suburban constellation of streetlights and porch lights. They might have risked meeting more people on the riverside path, but then it wouldn’t have felt as it did—audacious—more as if they were teenagers streaking and shouting Up yours! than unsteady men huffing, in yoked spheres of effort, heads reeling, pains blooming, toes cramping, conferring pared down to harsh nods, nothing seen but Fasano’s form hunched alongside, nothing heard but the thunder of blood. They went farther than Lee could conceive, past the no-man’s-land trees among which he’d once hidden his car, through the neighborhood portal, down streets whose inhabitants might have winced with disgust if they’d seen Lee pass by. He didn’t care—no, he truly did not!—because there was power in this willed self-destruction, which was how the run felt when they’d flung themselves back through his door. He sank onto a chair, his bones smashed in the sack of his skin, his large muscles dead, while small spasms surprised him all over, as if they were being dispersed by his veins. They couldn’t speak. After some time Fasano limped into the kitchen, to get them fresh beers.
