Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

When real trouble hits, I lock up. I can’t work the trusty calculus. I can’t speak. I sit there, unmoved. For a person like Lelia, who grew up with hollerers and criers, mine is the worst response. It must look as if I’m not even trying. Unless I drink too much I’ll eventually recede. I go into my “father’s act,” though she only knows this from what I’ve told her. It’s the one complaint she’ll make about him, though she always ends with something fond. And this is the primary gripe she has with me — she’s even said as much, despite her list — but with us it’s ever urgent, the big one.

I don’t have any deep problems with her. I know this must sound spiteful. She has her shortcomings, certainly, but I won’t go into them because once you start ticking things off they just keep going until they take on a life of their own, which neither truth nor good intention can withstand.

What will I say? Lelia is mostly wonderful. And lovely. She has a prominent nose that seems just right and slightly off kilter at the same time. Her eyes are wide-set. She doesn’t much fuss with her hair. When you hand her a football she instantly spins it to the laces and says, “Go out.” Each morning she rises at 6:30 and stretches in her underwear and makes a good pot of coffee. She always scalds the milk. I go in the kitchen and believe I will never see a more perfect set of hip bones. Or uglier feet. I know how her voice will sound with the first word of the day, not as low as it should be and as spare and clean as light. That effortless pitch. When she play-acts, horses around, she is silly and awkward, completely unconvincing. She must be the worst actor on earth.

And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can’t hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?

When I asked her to marry me we’d been together for only three months, the entire time she had been in the city since moving from El Paso. Although she had her own apartment we were pretty much sharing house (she’d already moved over most of her clothes), and I knew we were heading for something serious when we stopped by her place to use the bathroom and I didn’t even see a toothbrush.

One evening I took us both by surprise. I hadn’t thought at all about the literal act, the moment of asking, though of course the idea of being married to her was something I’d considered since the beginning. I had gone over the trodden middle-class ground, moving through the necessary business, how our personalities complemented each other, what our sex life was like (and might become), our money situation, what our fathers would say, the fact that she was white and I was Asian (was this one question, or two?) and then what our children might be like. Look like. Ironically, these were all the things that my father forever wanted me to consider, and to what as a teenager I had disingenously cried, “What about love?”

Old artificer, undead old man.

Before me, Lelia had come off a string of men who made her feel steadily sorry and confused and burgled. Each relationship was ending up a net loss. It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman — though she said maybe she should be fair and just speak for herself — relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well. One night in bed she said, “The men I’ve been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy’s polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I’m supposed to come out precious and sparkling again.”

“Does it work?”

“They seem to think so.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“A little smaller.”

Among other things, I took this as complimentary. The implication, of course, was that I wasn’t trying the same number on her. This was true enough. I have no business improving others, much less buffing up Lelia, who has it over me in spades. Perhaps part of our trouble was that in the course of time there arose moments when I should have taken measures, done something, if only for what the actions would have said about my feelings for her.

I never envisioned myself in that kind of white hat, though, astride some fine horse, galloping into the main street of town. I mostly come by the midnight coach. If I may say this, I have always only ventured where I was invited or otherwise welcomed. When I was a boy, I wouldn’t join any school club or organization before a member first approached me. I wouldn’t eat or sleep at a friend’s house if it weren’t prearranged. I never assumed anyone would be generous to me, or in any way helpful. I never considered it my right to expect approval or sanction no matter what good I had done. My father always reminded me that neither he nor the world owed me a penny or a prayer, though he left me many millions of one and braying echoes of the other. So call me what you will. An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. I have already been whatever you can say or imagine, every version of the newcomer who is always fearing and bitter and sad.

It’s my brand of sloth, surely, that I could fail my wife so miserably but seem to provide all the necessary objects and affections. On paper, by any known standard, I was an impeccable mate. I did everything well enough. I cooked well enough, cleaned enough, was romantic and sensitive and silly enough, I made love enough, was paternal, big brotherly, just a good friend enough, father-to-my-son enough, forlorn enough, and then even bull-headed and dull and macho enough, to make it all seamless. For ten years she hadn’t realized the breadth of what I had accomplished with my exacting competence, the daily work I did, which unto itself became an unassailable body of cover. And the surest testament to the magnificent and horrifying level of my virtuosity was that neither had I.

* * *

When I got to the flat Jack was waiting inside. He was set deep in the sofa, reading one of the magazines Hoagland had on subscription for us. We periodically told him not to bother but he didn’t listen. Hoagland said it was part of our job to keep up with current issues, though none of us could figure out what he was getting at with the selections: Redbook, Guns & Ammo, Town & Country , some airline magazines, and then a few sundry zines , including a softcore glossy called Dirt World Nation , which was what Jack was reading. When he saw me he removed his delicate half-glasses from his bridgeless boxer’s nose.

“I didn’t see you outside so I came up,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “How did you get in?”

“Grace gave me her key,” he said.

“She doesn’t need it?”

“She’s off somewhere with Pete.”

“Not for fun?”

“Those two? No way, Parky. All business, all business.”

“Everything’s all business ,” I said. “Even with us.”

“I know,” he answered, putting down the magazine. He held out his big hands. “Now I can finally get out of this damn couch. You better pull.”

It was his first real visit. He’d seen schematics Hoagland had drawn up, pictures he’d taken. I showed him around the flat. I turned on all the lights for him, ran the shower in the bathroom until it was hot, opened the doors of the refrigerator and the microwave. I showed him the listening devices Hoagland had installed in the drop ceiling. I could cut power to them whenever I wanted. I did it now. He was unimpressed but he didn’t seem to mind.

He seemed a little tired. He kept coughing and complaining about the rainy weather. It was the end of March, he figured, so the rains would stay at least one more month. I noticed he was a bit slow in his talk. A place like this should have seemed too small for him, like a shallow hole in the ground, but he sat in a desk chair in one of the carpet-lined cubbies and listened while I harshly joked and grab-assed. Hoagland was the target, always the mode Jack and I favored.