Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

“I said I was sorry.”

I could see she was willing. It was there in her face like an invitation. A different kind of opening. But suddenly I felt the urge to make something else of the moment.

“At least you still write letters.”

“Sure,” she said, pulling on the covers. “Letters being letters.”

“Easy come easy go,” I said.

She looked unsettled. “Are you saying something?”

“I wish you would write me a letter sometime.”

“Why should I? We talk between every meal, remember? That’s what we do. The premise of the movie about us is that we spontaneously combust if we don’t talk every six hours.”

“We still have too many gaps,” I said. “Absolutely nothing about the last couple months.”

Lelia was shaking her head. “I’ll give you a story for your gaps. Girl is married to boy. Boy makes girl crazy. Girl also makes girl crazy, so girl leaves for a while. Girl goes to island in the sun. Girl returns shiny and new.”

I rolled off the bed. “What makes the girl shiny and new?”

“You want me to say it?”

“I want you to say it.”

She rubbed at her temples with the insides of her wrists. That familiar exercise of hers, half rumination, half anxiety.

She said, “I take it back. I’m not saying anything.”

“Give me a name.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I need to know.”

“No,” she insisted, kneeling up to face me. Her voice was strong. “You don’t need to know! What would you do with his name anyway? Would you run a background check? Find out if he’s planted bombs for the Red Brigades? You could get a list of the books he has out from the library. Maybe you could nail him for something good.”

“Sleeping with another man’s wife.”

“I think here we must use ‘wife’ technically.”

“Then let’s. Did he please the wife?”

She laughed. “God, I’d forgotten how much I love your language. I’m not answering your question except to say he isn’t important. Not to us, anyway.”

“I’m noting the present tense. Letters being letters.”

She hissed, “That’s the Henry I know!”

“Fine. What did you say about us?”

Lelia looked around for a cigarette but couldn’t find one. She was anxious herself. Beneath that amazingly capable, resilient shell I knew she was reeling, completely sick inside. Once, we got into a fairly serious car accident going to her mother’s house. I was too dazed to do much except sit on the side of the road with Mitt; Lelia was fine, and she was doing all the right things, setting up a flare, rerouting traffic, getting names and addresses of drivers and witnesses. But as we started driving away in the towman’s truck she asked him calmly to pull over. She threw open the door and ran to the bushes and vomited until she dry-heaved. We had to stop two more times before we got to the garage.

Now she said, “I told him we were separated. He thought I meant divorce but I said that wasn’t it. I told him how I still felt love, but that I didn’t trust you anymore. That I didn’t know how you really felt about anything, our marriage. Me. You. I realized one day that I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on inside your head. Sometimes I think you’re not even here, with the rest of us, you know, engaged, present. I don’t know anymore why you do things. What you really want from me. I don’t know what you need in life. For example, do you need your job?”

“I’m not understanding what you mean by need .”

“See what I mean?” she shouted. “You know, I really honestly thought about it for the first time in Corsica, I mean really thought about what you do up there with your friends.”

“We’ve talked about this.”

“We haven’t talked about anything. Maybe it doesn’t matter to me anymore that we talk about it. I just see it as something not good . It’s as simple as that. I’m not going to invent things anymore for what you do. You think you can leave in the morning and play camera obscura all day and then come home and get into bed and say you’re glad to see me. Well, buster, people aren’t like that. I hope to high heaven you’re not really like that. You just can’t do that, turn it on and off. Not forever.”

“This job isn’t forever.”

“Fine. I don’t even think I’m asking you to quit. I’m not sure that your quitting tomorrow would make things different anyway. Maybe it’s a condition with you. I just know you have parts to you that I can’t touch. Maybe I figured out I didn’t want to get to them anymore. Or shouldn’t bother.”

I tried to answer but I couldn’t. I wanted to explain myself, smartly, irrefutably. But once again I had nothing to offer. I had always thought that I could be anyone, perhaps several anyones at once. Dennis Hoagland and his private firm had conveniently appeared at the right time, offering the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished. For that I felt indebted to him for life. I found a sanction from our work, for I thought I had finally found my truest place in the culture.

Lelia got up and checked the drawers of a desk. This time she found a cigarette. She got back into bed and lit the cigarette and took a quick, red-hot inhale. She’d been a pack-a-week smoker since high school, never more, never less. She stopped smoking while she was pregnant with Mitt and then until he started nursery school. I tried once or twice to pick up the habit, in sympathy with my wife, so we could sit together by the windows in the heat and not talk and not always have to look at one another, to have those tranquil moments true smokers seem to share and secretly count on. But I never could master it, I was overconscious of this thing burning down between my fingers, of its spew of smoke, the way Lelia would hunch over her knees with the butt in her right hand cast up by her head, and I simply ended up making her nervous.

It was in those moments that you might have heard the first scant formalities arising between us, that careful polite mildly acidic phrasing Lelia grew up with and that I so naturally adopted, maybe even took advantage of, the kind of things Stew and Alice must have plied each other with, the I’m sure I don’t know what you mean , or the I must not have heard you correctly, darling .

How similar it was with me, with my father in our house. Even the most minor speech seemed trying. To tell him I loved him, I studied far into the night. I read my entire children’s encyclopedia, drilling from aardvark to zymurgy. I never made an error at shortstop. I spit-shined and brushed his shoes every Sunday morning. Later, to tell him something else, I’d place a larger bouquet than his on my mother’s grave. I drove only used, beat-up cars. I never asked him for his money. I spoke volumes to him this way, speak to him still, those same volumes he spoke with me.

I said, “You’re the only one for me. You know that’s what I want.”

“I’m not sure,” she answered softly. “Sometimes I think you just do things to get what you want. Tonight, for example, you listened to the tapes. Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“It ought to be,” she answered. “But it’s not obvious, not to me. When you asked me for the tapes, I almost didn’t want to think about it. I wasn’t sure why you really wanted them.”

“Christ, Lee, you must think I’m a real shit.”

She didn’t answer. Then, “Just think about it. You haven’t said his name more than four or five times since it happened. You haven’t said his name tonight. Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you say his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was.”