Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

“Take one, my friend,” he squeaked to me. “We shouldn’t submit to the traditional doctor-patient relationship. It’s not our psychology, anyway. Let them have their problems. We can share our own.”

Hoagland said, “The doctor was veal, Harry, one huge medallion of sweet-ass veal. You were the wolf. You fed him cream, you fed him honey. You were holding the knife.”

“No more knives,” I said. “I swear, I’ll bolt.”

“Not a one,” he assured me, his gaze and body now forward and bearing down on me. “This thing with Kwang should be quick and clean. This is a hands-off deal. I see you with his office for three, four weeks tops. All I want is that you do this right again, like I know you can.”

He rose from his chair and stepped to the coffeemaker, pouring out a silty cup for me, and then one for himself.

He went on, different again, his voice calmer. “Remember how I taught you. Just stay in the background. Be unapparent and flat. Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will think twice about who you are. The key is to make them think just once. No more, no less. I can see that this thing with your wife keeps you self-occupied. That’s fucking great! Really! It happens. It’s life. I just want you to write out a good legend for this and stick with it. When Jack had that awful thing with Sophie he decided to leave for a while. That’s not the best course for you, in my opinion. I think you need to stay close.”

“Jack’s saying different,” I told him.

Hoagland guffawed. “Don’t listen to him. Jack’s a romantic. What he means is protect what you’ve got. My view — your wife will leave you and come back and leave you for the rest of your natural life. It will go on and on. It’s the bald-assed truth. It’s nothing against her or you. Honest. I ought to know. Ask the last three generations of Hoaglands. We know the secret. Marriage is a traveling circus. We’re the performers. Some of us, unfortunately, are more like freak acts. Maybe she likes certain towns, maybe you prefer others. She’ll drop off somewhere every once in a while and stay for a bit. So what. She’ll bore, she’ll catch up, she’ll be back.”

I didn’t answer him. I just kept thinking of his wife, Martha, nearly-poignant-if-not-for-her-feeble-will Martha, forever pale and small-shouldered and smiling, pulling uncomfortably at the strap of her sequined body suit, her tightrope fifty feet up in the air; Hoagland was down on the ground, in a cage, wielding a chair in one hand, a bullwhip in the other. Where’s the beast? Crack. So it followed — I must be the Wolf-Boy. Lelia, the Tattooed Lady. Behold, their impossible love. We shared a wall between our sideshow tents, venally baring ourselves to the curious and craven. This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn’t: a mutual spectacle of imagination.

“Harry,” he said, “just do me one favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Promise me this — no, wait. I don’t need promises.”

“Dennis.”

“Okay,” he said, righting himself. He stole a sip of his coffee. “Don’t mess your pants on this one. I mean it. Don’t fuck this up. It won’t be appreciated.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Back off, son. And give me a break. It’s just good clean advice. Your scratch with Luzan cost us, and not just money. People are talking.”

“It’s good Luzan’s not.”

“Come on! I just read the notices in the paper,” he said. He collected himself. “You ought to as well. That’s all. People drown, politically involved fat analysts included. A bad thing can happen in the world. We do what we’re paid for and then who can tell what it means? I flush a big one down the dumper and next week some kid in Costa Rica gets a rash. What the fuck am I supposed to do? And then everyone asks, who’s to blame?”

“Go to hell,” I said to him, getting up to leave.

“Don’t be sore,” he replied. “If it makes you feel any better, I probably will. You won’t — you’ll get to heaven, no problem. I just thought you knew the facts.”

“I know enough.”

He said, “Then you know that no matter how smart you are, no one is smart enough to see the whole world. There’s always a picture too big to see. No one is safe, Harry, not in some fucking pleasure boat in the Caribbean, not even in lovely Long Island or Queens. There’s no real evil in the world. It’s just the world. Full of people like us. Your immigrant mother and father taught you that, I hope. Mine did. My pop owned three swell pubs but he still died broke and drunk. The Jews squeezed him first, then the wops, then people like you. Am I sore? No way. It doesn’t matter how much you have. You can own every fucking Laundromat or falafel cart in New York, but someone is always bigger than you. If they want, they’ll shut you up. They’ll bring you down.”

“Fuck you, Dennis,” I said, closing his glass door on him.

But I could still hear him as I walked away, the hard twang of his answer, almost joyous, When and where, Harry, when and where .

My father would not have believed in the possibility of sub-rosa vocations. He would have scoffed at the notion. He knew nothing of the mystical and neurotic. It wasn’t part of his makeup. He would have thought Hoagland was typically American, crazy, self-indulgent, too rich in time and money. For him, the world — and by that I must mean this very land, his chosen nation — operated on a determined set of procedures, certain rules of engagement. These were the inalienable rights of the immigrant.

I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church. You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.

My low master. He died a year and a half after Mitt did. Massive global stroke. It was the third one that finally killed him. Lelia and I were going up on the weekends to help — it was practically the only thing we were doing together. We had retained a nurse to be there during the week.

He died during the night. In the morning I went to wake him and his jaw was locked open, his teeth bared, cursing the end to its face. He was still gripping the knob of the brass bedpost, which he had bent at the joint all the way down to four o’clock. He was going to jerk the whole house over his head. Gritty mule. I thought he was never going to die. Even after the first stroke, when he had trouble walking and urinating and brushing his teeth, I would see him as a kind of aging soldier of this life, a squat, stocky-torsoed warrior, bitter, never self-pitying, fearful, stubborn, world-fucking heroic.

He hated when I helped him, especially in the bathroom. I remember how we used to shower together when I was young, how he would scrub my head so hard I thought he wanted my scalp, how he would rub his wide thumb against the skin of my forearms until the dirt would magically appear in tiny black rolls, how he would growl and hoot beneath the streaming water, how the dark hair between his legs would get soapy and white and make his genitals look like a soiled and drunken Santa Claus.

Now, when he needed cleaning after the strokes, he would let Lelia bathe him, let her shampoo the coarse hair of his dense unmagical head, wash his blue prick, but only if I were around. He said (my jaundiced translation of his Korean) that he didn’t want me becoming an anxious boy , as if he knew all of my panic buttons, that craphound, inveterate sucker-puncher, that damned machine.