Chang-rae Lee - The surrendered

“You’re not sorry at all,” she told him, as always. “Please don’t say that.”

“Then what am I? Why do you keep coming here? You could be going out with any boy in your school.”

“I’m not interested in any of them,” she said, which was true. The boys were nice enough and certainly interested in her but she found them all too keen and bristling, like frantically spawning fish. But she didn’t answer Jim, either, for although she would have liked to say that she was here because he was thoroughly kind (which he was, without any effort, to her and to everyone he met), it was in fact because he was also frail, if not somehow wrecked, that she was drawn to him. He was overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn’t a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it off.

What he sipped along with his root beer was a tincture of opium, which he had been given many years earlier for dysentery while hospitalized in France at the end of the Great War. He always had some now and although she kept asking him if she could try it he refused, saying it was dangerous medicine, but one night when he left her for five minutes to make his rounds she dug in his coat pocket and took a small swallow, and then another. The thick, sweetly fragrant syrup instantly coated her entire insides, the sensation the exact opposite, it would turn out, of the precipitous detachment she would later suffer, hotly fusing her to herself in a manner that made her feel whole again, even if she were no more substantial than ether and light. Years later, married to Ames Tanner, she would seek out that feeling again, though it would come in the form of a vial and needle, procured in the service alley behind the city hospital by a person met, again, through a mission, though this one a client.

When Jim returned he could tell something was different and immediately smelled the tincture on her breath but before he could get cross she kissed him again. He balked at first but then melted into her as he had not allowed himself previously, the sudden force of his arms momentarily alarming her but then just as swiftly firing her desire to make love to him. She was not saving herself for any reason or person-for what propriety, what realm, would she be doing so?-and as such there was nothing stopping her from being with him now, in this oddly, lovingly enrobed little room. She tugged at his belt to unbuckle it but he twisted away and when she clutched at it again he held on to her hands.

“Please turn off the light,” he said.

She rose and flicked it off and the room went completely black. She didn’t know if it was the perfect dark or his medicine but she floated back to him on a silken wing and when they began kissing again she felt a wonderful new ache flooding her limbs, filling her torso. She slipped off her underpants. Then he was busy kissing her and caressing her hair and she found his belt again and undid his trousers. Her long skirt had ridden up and he lay atop her but there was nothing but his bare thighs against hers and she kept waiting for the pushing that didn’t come. She reached down to touch him and when she found him he was hardly there, not tiny but empty, more skin than blood, and beneath it there was almost nothing there at all, just a node seamed by a hardened, smooth line of a scar in the flesh.

“I’m no good,” he whispered to her in the dark. He was crying. “I’ve been useless since the war.”

“You’re not useless,” she said to him. She guided his wet face to her chest, the way she’d once seen her mother do to her father as she peered at them through a hole in the rice paper screen. She guided him lower still, feeling the cooling trail of his tears on her belly, her hip, the crook of her thigh, but he stopped before he went any lower.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You can keep going, if you want.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Yes you do. Just kiss me.”

“How?”

“However you want to.”

“Just kiss you?”

“Yes.”

And when he did she was surprised by them both, their shared ignorance in the act an object lesson in how experience only mattered if one let it, his mapping of her with the gentlest, humblest fervor innocently building her up before smashing her in the darkness, exquisitely obliterating her again.

The pattern of the evening was reprised each time she visited him, once a week throughout that winter, Sylvie staying with him until five, when the first buses began running; she’d ride back up through the fogged-in hills to her aunt’s house with her mind similarly sodden and obscured but her body still bounding and alive with his hands and his lips and then soon enough the taste of the tincture, craving it not in her own mouth but in her bones. Each time she’d take a little more, Jim warning her to be careful and that it was not meant for a healthy young woman, but she knew she wasn’t a tenth as sturdy as she appeared to Jim or to her aunt or to everyone else who saw her as a beautiful, somewhat aloof, scholarly girl who had so quickly righted herself after such a lamentable family tragedy, whose good long years spanned out freely before her. But the recent past was a well-rutted road, still the only way she knew to get back and forth to the present, and as she went to her classes at the college, attended church with Aunt Lizzie, a part of her couldn’t help but wish to run to Jim and the pitch-black room at the factory, drink in the potion and transmogrify, be anything but her mortal self.

It was soon after she was introduced to Ames Tanner, by a deacon of the church whose family was a longtime acquaintance of her parents, that she decided to stop seeing Jim. Ames hadn’t even asked her out yet that but she knew, he would imminently and that if he was truly as he appeared, she would be with him always. She loved seeing Jim and loved his gentleness and modesty but it was really a love of cloistering and smallness and her own physical pleasure, all of which she already understood were signs of her ugly narcissism, her insoluble weakness.

Ames Tanner, by contrast, would compel her into the wider world: he was freshly ordained, and a pediatrician as well, and he had great plans for his new church, not only for its congregation but for the charitable works he would urge it to pursue in the wider community. He had the same incandescence in his eyes that her parents had, that cool flame that seemed an uncanny reincarnation of them both, and he had asked her right away, as they sat for tea and cookies in the warm basement of the church, if she would come to his congregation and recount her parents’ dedication to improving the circumstances of the poor and powerless. Like everyone else, he knew generally what had happened to them, but he was one of the few who didn’t shy away from mentioning them.

So it was with foreknowledge that it would be the last time that she went to Jim. But once there, she couldn’t bear to say anything; he had brought her a bouquet of dried flowers that night, in addition to the root beer and of course the half-pint bottle, its glass the color of dark caramels. He’d tacked different fabrics on the walls. For the first time in many weeks she declined to take her sips (he’d had to buy extra bottles from his friend at the hospital), and as he slowly twisted the cap back on, his expression was that of a prisoner being led down into an isolation hole, regarding her as the man might check the sky. She thanked him for the flowers and hugged and kissed him and he hugged her back stiffly.

“Should I turn off the light?” she asked him.

“Okay.”

But in the customary dark she had some trouble finding him. “Over here,” he said, from the far corner. When they touched it was a minor collision, the crown of her head against his chin. He was sitting up rather than lying on the curtain he had spread out, and before she could apologize he took her shoulders and pinned her hard enough that she could feel the points of her shoulder blades grating against the floor. He took off her clothes. He wasn’t kissing her this time but using his hands, searching her out as if he had only a few scant moments to get to know her and pinching her nape, her nipples, rooting his thumbnail into her belly button until she thought it might have begun to bleed. And yet she willed herself not to tense under his hands; she laid herself open. She wanted to show him that it was all fine, that it was all welcome, that no matter what his compulsion or need she would try to take pleasure now, genuinely and not in spite, for she knew he could only feel any sexual pleasure through her. It was a surprise, then, when he tugged down his trousers and got between her legs, began driving into her, though there was nothing but a rubbing and the spurs of his own narrow hips knocking into her own; he kept on and she urged him, gripping his buttocks to pull him to the right rhythm, and when he matched it with his own fingers in her mouth and in her rear, simultaneously reaching as if he were going to clasp her in the middle, she lost herself as she never had before.