Chang-Rae Lee: Native Speaker

Of course, no one had ever shown up unexpectedly.

“Did you always give Sophie what she wanted, Jack?” I said, picking through the olives.

Jack swallowed, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand.

“You have to, Parky,” he insisted, his voice low, rumbling. “It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.”

“Tell me when this happens.”

“Always too late,” he said, settling back in his chair. He put his hands to his temples, as always. “Just tread lightly, Parky. Lelia will do the right thing. This is the time to let her think.”

“What the hell were the islands for?”

“To run,” he answered. Jack had a quieting directness.

“Right,” I said. “I guess I know that.”

“Knowledge is the least of your problems.”

He lifted Sophie’s picture and kept turning it, his eyes darting back and forth, as if he might steal something new from the shape of her face, another profile, an unwitnessed angle. I knew there had been lovers since Sophie, one of them Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, the embassy wife, whose husband found out about her infidelity and had her quickly dispatched back to Montevideo.

“Have you begun the workup of Kwang?” Jack asked me now. Hoagland had officially made him my wingman, to keep an eye on me, given my fiasco with Emile Luzan.

“Just a little bit. Jimmy’s put together a sketch file but I haven’t looked at it too closely. Why, what has Dennis said?”

“Nothing,” Jack muttered, scratching his moustache. “I wondered if you were spending too much time on it but I guess not. That is good. John Kwang is not the end of the world.”

“Dennis is acting otherwise.”

“He is just softening you up. Just do your job, boy.”

I always forgot that Jack had a certain inappropriateness in his expressions and gestures, as if he had learned them from an illustrated text. His parents came from a slum in Athens, no place near those magnificent columns of chalky rock, and I could imagine that his mother and father were just like him, thick-fingered people of the earth, human weeds, hardened and sad and always ready to burst from the drab husks of their lives with great quaking fits of emotion.

A person like my mother would have found it difficult to sit in the same room with them. They might have frightened her with their big bellying laughter and hot tears and full bear hugs. I could see Jack’s mother attempting to embrace my mother in an act of solidarity. My mother would have stiffened and politely allowed her small body to be enfolded in those fleshy arms. She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.

“But of course Dennis is a sick man. We know this. To him, information only has value if he has sole ownership. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were small slips of paper with facts scribbled on them all locked away inside his safe.”

“I didn’t know he kept a safe.”

“Beneath his desk. I only found out a few weeks ago. Candace accidently let it out.” Jack now waved to her at the far end of the floor. She tilted her head to the side and made a sour face back.

“I bet he keeps little silver bullets in there,” I said.

“Monkeys’ thumbs,” Jack added. “The dick of a hummingbird.”

I nodded. “A first dub of the Zapruder film. One of a kind.”

“Lady Bird Johnson’s silk panties, circa 1969.”

“An autographed picture from Rudy Giuliani,” I said.

Jack liked that one. He said, “File photos of Sharon Tate, Squeaky Fromm. You will note the attached locks of hair.”

“Long-lens photos of all of us,” I said. “Grainy and flat.”

“All in the buff,” Jack said.

“With our women,” I said.

“Them alone,” Jack said.

Right. I pictured Lelia coming out of the shower in Molly’s apartment, walking in front of the windows in a towel.

“Lelia has her own ideas about Hoagland,” I told him.

“Lelia’s the thing right now,” he answered. “Does she know what you’re working on?”

“No. I’m not going to bring this place up in conversation anymore.”

Jack nodded. “I know she has never been comfortable with us.”

“She adores you,” I said. “Actually, she likes most everyone here, except for Hoagland.”

“We’re all very personable people.” Jack laughed. “Not Dennis, of course. Dennis is a troublesome one.”

“Dennis is a freak of man,” I said, glancing down the floor to the empty office.

“That’s right,” Jack answered, chuckling. “Freak of man. But it’s good you came in today. You ought to talk to him soon. Assure him. He is a worrier. You have become a subject for him. This is no good. I can see in his face that he thinks of you often. Here, take some of these to him later. Tell him I said olives are a Greek remedy for stress. Take them all and tell him.”

He handed me the tub of olives, shooing them on me with his large brown hands. I sat back in the swivel chair and poked through the remainder. Jack was sliding the pits off the photo into his wastepaper basket. Then, after the briefest pause, he let go of the photo itself, the image of the woman still compelling, though smeared and oily. It had been a closed file for some time now, but I thought that even an old hand like Jack must have trouble with what he’d done in the past. I had begun to think that each of us was leading the life of a career criminal, in which the commission of acts was not by a single man but a series of men. One Jack killed the boy guard in Cyprus, another Jack seduced Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, and so on. Our work is but a string of serial identity. But then who was the Jack that loved and buried Sophie; was he just another version in the schema, or the true soul, or could he have been both?

I knew Lelia adored Jack because she always said so whenever he came up in our conversation. She always seemed to be hugging him throughout our get-togethers. At first her attention slightly annoyed me. I wondered what she found interesting enough that she always had to play it out, or where she might be leading with it. Hoagland, the human black cloud, had noticed this too, mentioned it sometimes as indicative of our good camaraderie. Then, and only recently, while she was gone in the islands, did it occur to me that her fondness for Jack might have something to do with me, a hope for what I did for a living. When I traveled to other cities on firm business for several days or a week, I called her nightly from where I was staying and we talked about everything but the very reason I was speaking to her on the telephone from another unspoken place. It didn’t seem to matter then. We talked plenty anyway, talked her work, and other things, talked friends, did our talk of family, the talk of how much we missed each other, even the queer ironical talk of when I was coming back home.

“God,” she would sigh deeply on the other end of the line, “I’m intensely horny. Will you do something?”

“What?” I’d say.

“Just say you’re coming back soon. Say you’re moving this way.”

“I’m moving your way.”

“Again, but just the moving part.”