Chang-rae Lee - The surrendered

WHEN THE DAWN BROKE Dora was still fast asleep and he left her a note about locking the door behind her, though nothing about whether he would see her tonight. No doubt he would, whether he wished to or not. But he was quite sure he did. He made his way to work through the scatter of the Sunday-morning streets, already caught by a keen urge to turn back and not so gently rouse Dora from her slumber. A surprisingly clean, waxen scent from her wreathed him, a pleasing note in itself but also a contrast to his own aroma, long indiscernible to him but which he was suddenly aware of now in the already bolting warmth of the late-September day, this stubborn rime of lye and bad meat, a consequence of his job, no doubt, though by any measure it was in fact a much deeper insinuation. He wondered if Dora had noticed anything. He was thinking, too, that if he was going to have the regular company of a woman again, maybe it ought to be one like her, even if it meant a more scrupulous regimen of self-hygiene. In a store window he caught a glimpse of himself and paused; he looked murky, watery, either half eroded or half formed. The image aligned with what he had been thinking of himself even before the birthday celebration at the bar, the crux of the matter being that he was a man not yet fixed into his own life.

Jackie Brennan would always say that that was the mark of success, not how large a house a man owned or the model of car he drove but how firmly one was rooted in his family, his neighborhood, his work. Hector had arrived at this point in his life by his own design, and anyone could marvel now at the extent of his feat: he had neither money nor status nor prospects, which was okay by him, even if respectable people might classify him to be a lowlife. But in truth he knew his near-indigence was also easy cover, a way to hide and be freed from responsibility for anything in the least vital or important, which in effect was to be freed from the present, and the foreseeable future, if never quite the past.

For with the bright daylight the past reared up, the name of June its unexpected summons. June, from the war. He almost wished now that Tick had gotten the best of him, put him in the emergency room at Hackensack. He’d have to forget all over again. The last time he’d seen June she was only nineteen years old, this fierce, sharp-cornered girl he’d married for her convenience only, despite how miserable and guilty her presence made him. He brought her over to the States and they had lived together (if not as husband and wife) for five months, until it seemed clear enough she could make her own way, and for what seemed an eternity he’d not heard a word of her, neither of them much caring whether the other was even alive.

He walked faster now, as if he might outpace the visitation. A sweat broke out on his back and chest and he was glad that the good aura of Dora was still clinging to him; he breathed it in, to etherize himself. He was thirsty. He knew there was a pub around the corner, and luckily the owner was just opening up, nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was his kind of place (or, more aptly, a place for his kind), and amid the stools still perched upside down on top of the bar he stood and quickly drank three draft beers and by the end of the fourth he felt cooled enough to get going again, his thoughts quelled and lingering once more on Dora.

He should think only of Dora. He was honestly looking forward to seeing her tonight. The last time he was with a woman-a long while now, as it had been cold and wet, March or April-he had encountered that most alarming of troubles and despite the woman’s patience and valiant efforts he had remained as inert as a day-old balloon. He could not be coaxed. It had never happened before but it didn’t surprise him-for some years now he had been sensing a steady depletion in that area, the feeling that what had always seemed his vast reserves of desire were being drawn down at a rate too quick for anything save an eventual exhaustion.

Sometimes he thought maybe he was spent because he had been sexual too early, just as he reached puberty: he was not quite twelve years old when two crazy girlfriends of his crazy older sister took him down to an abandoned boathouse on the Erie Canal and showed him how to play doctor and probe every facet and fold of their wild-blooming bodies and they’d do magical things to him with their tongues and soon enough they would be trysting in all manners like the hobo couples they sometimes spied on in the reeds. When his mother overheard him tell his friends what the three of them were doing she banned the older girls from visiting his sister and threatened to drag them to the police station, but even back then Hector could not imagine any better initiation, Jeanne and Jenny and him playing with one another with the same pure delight as if they were at the big carnival fair in Herkimer, where, naturally, they’d done fanciful stuff, too, high up in the Ferris wheel gondola.

In Ilion, people would tell him he ought to be a film actor, and during World War II a local committee asked him to model for a war-bonds poster that would feature a handsome family, he being the boy bursting with pride as he gazed up at his uniformed older brother. For the poster the artist had to render him a bit more wholesome than he was, recasting the set of his eyes and diminishing his full mouth in a mold less shadowed and sexualized. The poster went out all across the country and was seen locally as well, though in Ilion it was perhaps unnecessary, for the town had already been awarded the “T Flag” from the Treasury office in Washington for having one of the highest participation rates of war-bond buying in the country; its sons would enlist in the services in record measures as well, returning home maimed or dead in corresponding proportions, a mostly uncomplicated point of pride in the city that was the birthplace of Remington Arms, manufacturer of the famed Berthier, Enfield, and Springfield rifles, carried on killing fields from the Marne to Iwo Jima. History is made by what is made in Ilion , Hector’s father used to croon darkly, most all of Hector’s uncles and cousins either in the employ of the company or bearing its arms into battle, or both. Hector turned sixteen a week before Hiroshima was leveled and like most of his friends he was ready to take the bus to Albany where no one knew them and enlist, of course by lying about his age. He’d had to wait until a place called Korea erupted in war five years later to take his turn.

Certain grown women were always asking him if he would do some yard work or painting for them, and when he was a sophomore in high school he took to the forlorn beds of young wives in the neighborhood whose husbands were away in the Pacific. Of course, given the smallness of his neighborhood, of his town, he well knew the young men, a few of whom would never return. Among those was James Cahill, a Navy lieutenant, who had been an all-county halfback and track star and the youngest floor boss ever at Remington Arms, his wife, Patricia, of the ebony tresses and the hueless glowing skin the one who, that fateful night, shamefully and miserably wept after she and Hector finally coupled. But she had not let him leave right afterward, instead reaching down while she was straddling him and tightly squeezing the weary root of him to sustain another congress until she was almost faint with soreness. She had uttered his name as though he were harming her and he tried to twist away but she held him down by pressing on his shoulders with all her weight. When she finally released her grip, he was unsure if she had come but he let himself go in a violent, near-blinding acceleration that he would rarely achieve afterward, that hot push behind the eyes.

He now wondered if he could have that same push with Dora, but, really, what would he do if he ever felt so vibrantly alive again? Maybe it would be better to count himself as among the creeping, living dead. His worry now was whether Dora might suddenly be inspired beyond his ability to please her; he imagined her now padding about the two dim rooms of his existence in her pale, florid nakedness and thinking that he was not such a dreadful sort at all, certainly sufferable, even suitable, a man with whom she might do things other than drink and share a tumble in the bed. Of course he was not a suitable man, and if in the past he never bothered to alert the relevant parties of said truth, he thought he should do so for Dora, in case she was similarly mistaken.