Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

The first door was half-opened, and when I peered inside a group of a half-dozen or so young people were sitting in a circle, passing around a large pipe. Someone jeered at me and as I didn’t see Sunny among them, I quickly shut the door. I knocked on the other door and announced myself as loudly as I could, but there was no answer. I repeated the action but to no avail. I tried the knob and found it, like everything about the house, unsecured. A stereo was playing its own blaring music. The room was illuminated by a bizarre flowing-liquid bulb of a lamp, the light poor and in a dizzying mix of colors, and in the dim I saw a large bed with high corner posts, a gauzy sheet thrown over as a makeshift canopy. Two figures languidly wrestled within the lair; I called to them, but again could hardly hear my own voice. Then one of them, I thought the man, kneeled up on the bed and lay on the other. The two began then, moving in that clipped, rolling action I dreaded to see. I shuddered with the thought that she was under him. I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me, and I approached the veiled bed. They didn’t see me, being in their own realm. Were I an assassin, they would have been doomed.

I touched the netting at the foot of the bed, and at that moment the music paused and a murmur rose up — she had noticed me. And yet she didn’t rebel. It was hard to see and I called her name and she cooed, and what I could make out finally was that she was beckoning me, darkly, taunting me with the vile display of her carnality. I had with me a small dagger, which I sometimes carried for self-defense, but now I felt its menacing weight in my breast pocket, its leather scabbard hard against my chest. My heart flooded black, and at that moment I wished she were nothing to me, dead or gone or disappeared, so that I might strike out at the bodies with the full force of my rage, tear at them with whatever strength I could muster.

“Hey, man, it’s not like a block party,” a gruff voice said. “You gotta be invited.”

“Sunny,” I said, suddenly unable to speak but weakly. “Sunny…”

“Let him in, sugar,” a softer voice lazily answered. “C’mon. C’mon, sugar, yeah, come inside.”

The record repeated and the woman inside the bed reached out to me. She had turned on a bed lamp. Her fingers were long and thin, and I realized it wasn’t Sunny at all. She had a narrow, drawn expression with sleepy eyes. She smiled faintly, her lips moving, saying something. Her partner had already ceased caring about my presence, and he went back to his business, his hips working their way between her heavy, stippled thighs. But she kept her attention on me, unctuously gesturing, and even as he leaned and bucked into her she held out her open hand to me, as if I should take it when I crept my way inside.

I left the room straightaway, nearly stumbling over the huddled drinkers and smokers in the narrow corridor. All of a sudden the house seemed unbearably small and stifling. Someone was flicking on and off the hall and living room lights, and the effect was maddening and disorienting. Most everyone in the house began to dance, the music having changed from rock songs to the incessant beat of disco music, which was immensely popular at the time. But to me everything seemed a jangle of limbs. I began to feel that this house, these people, the party, were spinning out of control. The living room was transformed into a rank swamp of bodies, and having no path of exit, I stepped outside the back kitchen door as quickly as I could.

It was a great relief. And there, as I stood on the ruined cobble of the patio under a wide starless sky, the reports of music and voices playing off the hidden trees, an image of another time suddenly appeared to me, when I began my first weeks of service in the great Pacific war. I was initially stationed in Singapore, awaiting my orders to whatever front I would be sent to.

One evening, my comrades and I were on our way to a welcoming club, a grand house which was once a prominent British family’s residence but was now used as a semi-official officers’ club, with the usual entertainments. There was no sanctioned establishment as yet, and we young officers were more than grateful for the outpost.

My mates, Lieutenants Enchi and Fujimori, and I had eaten our dinner at a cart stand and were strolling to the club, a yellow two-story colonial structure with a double veranda and white columns. Enchi was already quite drunk, as usual, and Fujimori didn’t have far to go. Drinking was never very alluring to me, but that night I had decided to take a few glasses of rice spirits with dinner. We were to be shipped out to our respective fronts in a matter of days, each of us assigned as medical assistants to bases that would serve the forward units. It was an august time, those first years of the war, and everyone to the man was supremely hopeful of a swift and glorious end to the fighting.

Enchi was talking about the girls that were to be brought to the club that evening. He was excited and speaking quite loudly, his face flushed with drink.

“I heard there are to be local girls there tonight, young ones, perhaps even virgins.”

Fujimori said to him, in his customary dry manner, “You wouldn’t know it if they were, Hideo, you grand masturbator.”

“I certainly would!” Enchi cried, coming up and slinging his arms about us, so that we were a trio. “Your sister isn’t a virgin, let me tell you”

It was an old joke from him, and Fujimori was of course unperturbed. He unhinged himself from us and replied, “Well, let’s see if you can manage your way inside one tonight. The last time, I practically had to aim you. But you don’t remember. You never remember.”

I wasn’t with them on their last “outing,” as I had little interest in pleasure-for-hire, but that evening I thought I would at least accompany them, if only to see if their exploits matched the accounts I’d listened to, which were always extremely colorful.

“My good friend Jiro,” Enchi said to me, lurching us forward with his heavy steps, “why don’t you join us tonight? What is it? Are you not so fond of women? You can tell me.”

“I’m not fond of women who are prostitutes,” I said, though in truth I’d made several of my own visits, in secret. “Besides, they’re all old and probably diseased. Made of face powder and cheap perfume.”

“That’s why you ought to stay around tonight!” Enchi replied, poking me in the chest. I pushed him away and he nearly fell down on the road. Fujimori was up ahead of us, calling in a strange voice after some schoolgirls walking on the other side of the canal. Enchi went on, “These are fresh girls who are coming. You’ll see. They’re not the old Japanese aunties who are shipped in. I’m tired of them, too, you know. It’s like screwing a bag of soybean curds, just all mush and mess.”

“I wonder what they must say of you, Hideo.”

“No matter, no matter,” he said, shaking his large, squarish head. He had the habit of closing his eyes when beginning to speak. Within a month, I would receive a telegram from Fujimori that Enchi had been killed in Borneo, torn apart by a mortar round outside a medical station. “I’m not proud, Jiro. Not proud at all. I’m only looking for a bit of satisfaction. Just a little bit and I’ll die happy.”

As we approached the clubhouse, we saw a crowd of soldiers outside. Fujimori had already reached them. Usually such gatherings would be loud and boisterous, but there was a stillness about the air that seemed unnatural. They were standing in a group at one side of the house, near the front of the wide veranda. Fujimori was ordering them to make way for him, being an officer. When we ran up, there were other officers now coming out from the main entrance, shouting orders at the group on the ground.