Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

“Here we go, huh?” she said, stuffing her folded clothes into the white plastic basket.

“Yes, here we go,” I answered, following her out and into the kitchen. She sat down at the table, the basket at her feet, almost waiting for my lecturing. This was often her stance, not slamming her door on me or departing the house, but rather defiantly sitting there and half-submitting, too, as if taking medicine from a doctor whose diagnosis she didn’t quite believe.

“I’m happy that you decided on your own to stop living at that house. But you should have come to that decision earlier, certainly, or never gone there in the first place. Your willfulness will get you hurt someday. I think you know this, and yet you persist.”

“I persist,” she said darkly.

“Please don’t mock me. You are eighteen years old and you can show adult comportment and respect, the same I have always tried to show to you, even when you’ve been so troublesome.”

“I’ve been more trouble to myself than to you, but I know you can’t believe that.”

“I do believe that!” I said, my errant loudness surprising both of us. “This is my point precisely. You persist in behavior, despite your own knowledge of what is good for you and what is not. You must have known what leaving here and staying at that house would result in.”

“You don’t know the half of it….” she said sharply, the color falling from her face.

“I know enough!” I replied. “I know, for example, that you were often the only female in that entire place. I know what kind of men frequented there. Officer Como and her colleagues have records on a good number of them. When I heard of James Gizzi getting stabbed, I was almost sure that you had been hurt as well. Luckily, this wasn’t so, but your fortune cannot last for long. This path is reckless, and doomed.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. I’m out of there, and tomorrow I’ll be out of here. I’ll be on my way.”

“Is that man hiding down in the city? This Lincoln Evans? Are you going to meet him?”

She seemed surprised that I would know his name. She said, “It’s none of your business. And I wouldn’t tell you if I was going to see him. You’d just tell Officer Como, anyway.”

“That man is a fugitive! He’s an attempted murderer.”

“It wasn’t his fault!” Sunny shouted.

“How can stabbing someone in the belly not be his fault? How is this possible?”

She turned away in her chair and for a moment did not speak. Suddenly I felt afraid for her, and she said, “He was protecting me.”

“From James Gizzi? Why?”

“Just forget it.”

I said, “This is what happens when you offer yourself so freely.”

“I never gave myself to that shit,” she said, her voice breaking. “Never. And don’t you say I did. It was his house, but I never wanted anything from him. I never let him touch me. He’s disgusting.”

“What was Gizzi doing to you? Please, you should tell me.”

“It was in the morning,” she said, not looking at me. “Lincoln was out getting breakfast. I woke up, and he was holding down my arms.”

“What are you saying? You didn’t say anything to the police. There was no mention of anything like this.”

“Why would I bother?” she rasped. “Your cop friends all think I’m a whore, and they’d do anything to get their hands on Lincoln. They don’t want to hear that he was helping me.”

“Did Gizzi…did he hurt you?” I asked her. “I’ll alert Officer Como, if this is true.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said, picking up the laundry basket. “It’s over. Nothing like that is ever going to happen to me again. I’ll kill myself before it does, I swear.”

She stood up and hefted the basket and went upstairs. I would have suggested something then, that she stay a little longer before moving on, that I’d be happy to close the store for the weekend if she wished to do some shopping for clothes or other things I might provide for her, but she spoke those last words with such a finality and resolve — like a grown woman, in fact, charged and righteous — that there didn’t seem the appropriate moment and space in which to offer anything myself. I was simply shocked and outraged by what she had implied, but even more, if I’m to reflect fully, I felt the drug of fear course through me, and with it the revisitation of a long-stored memory of another young woman who once spoke nearly the same words.

Sunny stayed that night at the house, though not in her bedroom. I hadn’t touched or disturbed a thing in there, not her many hairbrushes, not her books or records or her posters, in fact I hadn’t even cleaned or vacuumed, as I thought I should wait for her return. But instead of her own bed she chose to pull down from the closet some old quilts to make up a floorbed, spreading them three high in the family room in front of the fireplace. I sat in one of the wing chairs, somewhat to the side of her. She lighted a fire, which she always liked to do, and sat down before the small flame, blowing on it and feeding it with newspaper and kindling. When she was young, she would ask me nightly if we could light one, even when the weather wasn’t cold enough to do so, and often I would oblige her. She could spend hours in front of it, letting her face and limbs grow hot to the touch, and I would have to ask that she move back, for fear of her getting burned. She never wanted to use the fireplace screen because it dulled the heat, and that night of her brief return to the house, she pushed it aside as well. I used to lecture her on the dangers of flying sparks, reminding her that even one fiery mote could set a house ablaze, but she never seemed to hear me, only propping the screen to one side, happy to shield but a small corner of the room.

It is ironic, of course, that I should have been the one who caused a near-conflagration, and put my beloved house in danger. But as with everything else, I have begun to appreciate — perhaps like my old friend Fujimori — the odd aspects of things, unsettling as they may be. Take this pool, for instance. I’ve always esteemed the dark stone inlay, not the painted blue surround that one sees so clearly from the sky when landing in most any American city, the azure rectangles and circles beside the dotted houses. The water in mine appears nearly lightless, whether in bright sun or dusk, and the feeling sometimes is that you are not swimming in water at all, in something material and true, but rather pulling yourself blindly through a mysterious resistance whose properties are slowly revealing themselves beneath you, in flame-like roils and tendrils, the black fires of the past.

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, I didn’t seek out the pleasure of women. At least not like my comrades in arms, who in their every spare moment seemed ravenous for any part of a woman, in any form, whether in photographs or songs or recounted stories, and of course, whenever possible, in the flesh. Pictures were most favored, being easy. I remember a corporal who in his radio code book kept illicit slides of disrobed maidens, a sheaf of which he had salvaged from a bombed-out colonial mansion in Indonesia. Whenever I walked by the communications tent he would call out in a most proper voice, “Lieutenant Kurohata, sir, may I receive an opinion from you please.”

The women in his pictures were Western, I think French or Dutch, and caught by the camera in compromising positions, like bending over to pick up a dropped book, or being attended in the bath by another nude woman, or reclined in bed and pulling up a furry scarf between the legs. The corporal had perhaps a score of these, each featuring a different scene, replete with detailed settings and whatever scant costume, and he slowly shuffled through them with an unswerving awe and reverence that made me believe he was a Christian. Of course I shouldn’t have allowed him to address me so familiarly, but we were from the same province and hometown and he was exuberantly innocent and youthful and he never called to me if others were within earshot. I knew at the time that he had never been with a real woman, but he seemed to know their intimacies, as if in going through his photos he had become privy to the secrets of lovemaking, the positions and special methods and the favored styles of the moment.