Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker

He asked after Lelia, how the two of us were doing. I told him we were meeting often, almost twice a week. There were lunches, mid-evening drinks. We sat closer to each other now. We had gone to a few parties together. She even slept at our apartment one night — on the sofa — after a late dinner I’d made.

“Candles and wine?” Jack asked.

“A little of each,” I said, pulling over a chair. “I kept the lights on high. I didn’t want to make her nervous.”

“It sounds like you are doing right.”

“Am I? I’m not running on instinct.”

“Yes you are,” he said, tapping on the laptop in front of him. “You just don’t know it.”

“What are the signs?” I asked him.

“Fear and confusion.”

“What else?”

“You need more than that?” he said, coughing again.

“I guess not.”

“Parky,” he said, leaning forward. “I have no worries about you and Lee. Twice a week you meet already! What more can you ask? Tell me, you touch each other?”

“Hellos and goodbyes.”

“Naturally. Nothing else?”

“We’re working up to something,” I said. “But I don’t think either of us is too keen on being the first to make a move. We’ve planned to go up next week to my father’s house. We’re going to spend the weekend finally cleaning it out. Maybe something will happen. Somehow, though, the consequences seem awesome. I realize it’s pure junior high. I’m beginning to think we need Seven Minutes in Heaven.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said, knitting his brow.

“Don’t bother,” I told him, waving it off. “I always forget you’re not American.”

“I don’t see how,” he replied, spreading his arms wide. His moustache twitched. His big voice suddenly came back. “Great are the gods I’m not. If I were American, there would be much hell to pay. I would have strangled Dennis many times over. That I can view him as a curiosity has saved both of us.”

“That’s your excuse,” I said. “Your heart’s just too big.”

“My Greek heart is too big. My American one is still composed of delicate halves. They call them gonads .”

I said, “My hearts must be about to burst.”

He bellowed in his way. He told me, “Just keep on meeting her. Don’t try too hard. You have time. Don’t think otherwise. She is your wife and she still loves you. At least Lelia’s the easy one. She’s not half the trouble you are.”

“I try to be easy,” I said.

“Naturally,” Jack answered. “You were well raised. You have a keen sense of accommodation. This is clear. You understand respect and distance and separateness. Fine things. But someplace in your life you let them go too far. Too far for any more good to come of them. The result is foregone.”

“You see the trail?”

“I don’t know.” He got up and paced. “Maybe this. This . Why you find yourself here in this silly room with a man like me, rather than at home in bed with your beautiful wife. Why you are one of us. I look at you and see someone who could have done whatever he wished in life. Any career.”

“Yet I’m here.”

“Yet you’re here.”

“Stuck.”

“Yes. Maybe yes.” Jack leaned on the blacked-out window, trying to scratch it with his thumb. “You have made your bed, as they say.”

When Dennis Hoagland and I first met, outside the career services office of my alma mater, I thought it would be a brief affair. I was a few years out of school and beginning to think I ought to do some graduate study, though in what I didn’t know. I was running out of money. But I had promised my father I’d look into serious work first, a career, and I drove to the campus to see what was being offered. It was the boom time, and the Wall Street banks and management consultants and insurance conglomerates were crowding the bulletin boards looking for talent.

I was looking at the various flyers and notices when he approached me. He wore a moustache then. He looked like one of those consumptive snooker players on cable. He said he was with a “research services firm.” They were hiring new analysts. Competitive salaries, excellent benefits. We spoke for a few minutes, and because I wasn’t really seriously considering a job, I was loose, sarcastic. He seemed to like me and said I should come to Westchester the next week to talk with his associates. I told him I didn’t know. He said what could I lose? They would even pay me a stipend for my time. A simple interview. No strings. I asked what his company researched. “The one thing worth researching,” he casually replied. “People.”

I now asked Jack why he was in our line.

“I have good reasons,” he said. “My excuse is that I was poor and dumb but hardy as an ox. I was not you. I needed any job that would have me. One day in Athens an American talks to me on the street. He says I look like a strong boy and he will give me fifty dollars to remove some papers from an office. No problem. The next week I get a hundred and fifty for setting fire to the same building. I drive a truck of coffins filled with rifles and grenades to the Albanian border. Next I help kidnap a man. Then another. One man I kidnap tells me that I work for the asshole CIA. I beat him badly for that. But why should I care? Soon I traveled the world doing dirty deeds. Who needed to like it? Who cared who employed me? I have done more or less the same for thirty years. This is where I will retire. I have only two months to finish. Then Dennis will give me my full pension. This firm was by far the easiest. But then I had Sophie to make right what I had done. Sophie was my life. I thought she was forgiveness for not doing those things anymore. She was to be God’s gift to me, a blessing for having changed my ways.”

“She’s still a blessing.”

“No no. She is gone.”

Jack lightly rapped the glass with his knuckles. “You are kind. But you know a blessing so beautiful should not die. You and Lelia know this. Your boy. Your boy was a perfection. Was his life so that you might taste true wonder and happiness? Could it be that arbitrary? Please, no. Sometimes I suspect of us living that we are marred. The unspoiled must take leave of the world. I think they must bear the ills of their loved ones. I am not speaking as a Christian here. You know how I am not a Christian. But in my heart I fear they are the vessels for our failures. We make it impossible for them to live in this place. One day they fill up. Then they sink. They disappear.”

He hacked into his fist and pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his hand and his mouth. I asked him if he wanted some tea. He nodded. I put on water. When I came out he was sitting inside one of the bays, examining its laptop computer. He was trying to figure out how the screen opened. I folded it out and he made play of typing, his index fingers too big and thick for the cramped keyboard. He typed too hard, as if the keys were manual. I turned it on for him and brought up a program in which he could draw pictures. I showed him the mouse. The kettle was whistling and when I called back to ask what flavor he wanted he said something about my register .

I let it pass for a moment. I didn’t answer him immediately and let his tea steep. I brought him his mug. Now he wanted to get to the place in the computer where he could type a message for Dennis. I switched him over. Then he asked me how often I was sending word.

I said to him, “What is Dennis saying? I don’t think about these things anymore, so you better tell me.”

“You know it, my friend,” he spoke grimly. “I don’t have to.”

“What am I doing?” I said. “Why are you here, Jack?”

“My friend.”