A Person of Interest (47 page)

temporal. And perhaps he was still too proud, now, to believe that the man who had ruined his life at a stroke was no genius of vengeance, but only insane.

He realized he was nodding off, drained, when his chin struck his chest. His body seemed lost in his clothes: he had the lap of a little old man.
I wonder if you would agree that there is some relief, in becoming
old men.
There could be, Lee thought, his eyes filling with tears. Perhaps that was all he was seeking—not the revenge of a lifetime, but simple relief.

The interstate highway can be a sweet sanctuary, between towns and in darkness. Making his way westward, Lee was reminded of this. His entire career as an American driver had been one of timorous caution that nevertheless often failed to guarantee safety; at best he prematurely exhausted his brake pads; at worst were the small accidents at low speeds, at least a couple a decade before this most recent one that had officially ushered him into a fugitive’s life. But there was also an alternate history, embedded in the first, as distinct as a patch of bright color on the reverse of the familiar drab cloth. In this history Lee is a long-distance driver at night, and his usual fidgety glancing at mirrors, his nervous pulsing of the brake, his defensive and dangerous jerks of the wheel are as absent as if here confined to the one other car, half an hour and many miles now distant, Lee has seen in the whistling tunnel of night. The car’s sleek hood parts the waters of speed; the pale cones of light probe the void. Distance is conquered, devoured, almost effortlessly. This time of his life feels so lost as to be prehistoric, yet in years it’s not so long ago. Lee isn’t yet driving the Nissan, but one of the Nissan’s isomorphic ancestors, probably the Toyota Corona. Lee isn’t halfway through his sixties, but just in the door of his fi fties, although he was amazed, now, to reinhabit that past self and remember how old he’d felt then: at the outer limit of experience and unwanted wisdom.

Then he’d been driving not west but east, every Thursday night after his last summer class of the week. He would have had an early dinner, begun to drive around seven, only let himself stop for fi tful, unavoidable sleep after daylight in a rest area somewhere in Pennsyl-vania. Almost always the trip that began with such fragile tranquillity,
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himself solitary and swift through the dark, would conclude in a caul-dron of afternoon traffic on the New England Thruway, with the pumping of brakes and the shaking of fi sts and quite often the shedding of tears, all of which was an apt preparation for the weekend ahead.

At that time Aileen and Esther had been living in Providence, Rhode Island, for five years. When she’d left him, Aileen had fi rst taken Esther to Tampa, where Nora was living. But after only six weeks, she’d gone to Providence instead, where she and Nora had grown up. Their parents were dead and Aileen no longer knew anyone, but at least it wasn’t Florida, she’d told Lee on the phone, and Providence was a clannish place, so that she’d gotten a good secretarial job up at Brown—reward for the prodigal daughter—and put Esther in a school with enough nonwhite kids that she might finally get cast as a Pilgrim in the Thanksgiving play.

This informative phone call hadn’t been unusual for them, and it would be some time—well after the time of those nine-hundred-mile weekly drives—before Lee understood that it was unusual at all, that most divorced couples did not speak by phone with a frequency exceeding that of many couples still married. In one sense at least, he had considered that his marriage to Aileen had been improved by divorce. When they spoke by phone, there was a sense of shared en-deavor, as if divorce had been imposed from without and required their joint ingenuity. Of course this was because of Esther—but it remained that for however much they bickered and sniped, a collabora-tive quality underlay their conversations that had been absent from their shared domestic life. It might have proceeded only from the fact that, in all the new arrangements, there was no one else logically to consult. Yet it still felt to Lee like a renaissance, and perhaps he wouldn’t fully understand they were no longer married until she was dead.

Arriving at Providence Hospital after changing his undershirt, rinsing his face, hacking his skin with a razor at the Days Inn motel, the devastating shock he endured undiminished each time came less from Aileen than from Esther. He had seen Esther at spring break or Christmas, and for an endless and uneasy and precious full month in the summer, every year since the marriage had ended. But as if some-A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 297

one meant to ensure the worst conditions imaginable, it was this most recent year, when she’d gone from thirteen to fourteen, that had swept away all continuities. Gone was the child who had placed her small hand inside his. Gone, even, was her hair, to Lee an unparalleled treasure, its rich color like that of a piece of expensive wood brought to a mirrorlike shine. Esther’s long hair had been chopped up at random, producing a dingy, rough plumage that made Lee think of unkempt barnyard chickens (perhaps because “it’s called ‘feathers,’ ” Aileen had explained). In her fi ve years away from the town of her birth, Esther had not just excised all her memories of it but had substituted an imagined contemptible version, a pathetic hicksville that was revealed as the butt of her jokes. She had acquired a “gang,” an assortment of both boys and girls who exhibited insolent stares, strange asexual puffs of dyed hair, sadistic chain mail of bright little buttons with such exhortations as please kill me please down the fronts of their jackets.

And yet they pretended, with what to Lee was insufferable ostentation, to human compassion; they turned up at the hospital, day after day, did not just loiter with Esther in far corners of the grim cafeteria but were presumptuous enough to sit beside Aileen’s bed, to—as it sounded to Lee from the hall—complain to her, burden her with their germy, self-centered concerns. Aileen who, in her rapid descent, seemed not so much saintly to Lee as promiscuous, turning the same smile on her husband that she gave Esther’s friends, who were “wonderful,” whose conversation engrossed her, who seemed to prize her in turn, because she listened to them, for what reason Lee couldn’t discern.

Lee taught only in the first summer session that year. By the time of the break, at the Fourth of July, Aileen’s condition had worsened so much that Lee gave up his late-summer class and lived entirely in the Providence motel. This was the end of his solitary night driving, the end of what had been an inexplicably cherished and tranquil commute. A dilation, he understood much later, of the unfi nished moment; no verdict, no final decision. Illness could not lay its claim, death could not be the answer, so long as one lonesome night in the car must give way to another. He did not fill his pressboard drawers at the Days Inn with his grayed cotton T-shirts and shorts, with his plastic disposable razors, thinking this was a short-term encampment,
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awaiting the end. He was still in his car, all alone. A nimbus of light showed the instant ahead, but beyond that was merciful darkness, in every direction.

He and Aileen spoke of things that did not seem to matter. In her second life in Providence, as an adult and parent, the town had revealed its charms. She described these to him, and he listened, as if they were strangers discussing a place to which random travel had brought them. The stern little houses, the surprisingly nice nearby beach. Rhode Island was the Ocean State, Aileen observed. What a contrast this summer must make to Lee’s summers back home, in the landbound Midwest, amid tedious furrows of corn. Lee had always missed the ocean, hadn’t he, since he’d come to this country? The ocean and the mountains—she remembered him saying he loved those landscapes; what an irony he’d lived for decades exiled from both. When she wasn’t pursuing this train, she was singing the deluded song of praise for Esther’s near-delinquent friends. They were misfits, Aileen said, as if this were something to cherish. All too smart or too creative or too morally distressed—
By what?
Lee thought scornfully.
Hamburgers?
—to get along with the rest of their peers, but this was the miracle of it, that they had all found each other. They were passionately loyal to Esther, the brave tribe to which she belonged. In retrospect Lee would hear the wheedling in Aileen’s voice and cringe, at the portrait of him it suggested. Was he really a person who had to be probed, softened up, caught off guard by sly, slantwise sugges-tions? Could his own wife not speak to him frankly about what she desired? He liked to think that bluntness would have served her well.

It was clear indirection had not. At the time he had only been affronted by every separate proposition—Esther as “misfit,” delinquency as “creativity”—so that he’d entangled them both in his refutations. He hadn’t had any idea what Aileen really wanted until Nora, his unlikely ally in this one particular, told him.

“She wants you to move to Rhode Island, so that Esther can stay with her friends. They’re all supposed to start high school together this fall. She doesn’t want Esther to go somewhere new and start over again. Especially because it’s such a frightening prospect, high school.”

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Lee was too amazed by this idea to grasp its substance; his fi rst objection was peripheral. “She’s not going somewhere new, she’s going home,” he said, as if this latter idea, that Esther was returning to live with him because her mother was going to die, was by contrast a simple idea that provoked no distress. He and Nora were sitting at a corner table in the hospital cafeteria. Beside Lee were the fi nal exams from his one summer class, which he still hadn’t managed to grade.

Nora had been in Providence for two weeks, during which time she and Lee had not bothered to speak to each other, even when they were both seated outside Aileen’s room in the hallway. Aileen’s own relations with Nora had been arctic for the duration of her marriage to Lee, and Nora’s appearance in Providence had been another unnerving reminder to Lee that not only had Aileen left him, but she had altered all aspects of her existence to an extent that not even the phone could reveal. Nora and Aileen were sisters again, and Esther was most definitely Nora’s niece. On entering the cafeteria this afternoon, instead of taking a table by herself as far from Lee as existed, Nora had come straight to him, and he had squared his exams and set them aside, as if he’d known as well as she did that consultation between them was inevitable.

“She’s been here five years. The way it feels to Esther, she was a little girl when they moved here. Providence is her home.”

“Even if I wanted to, it’s impossible,” Lee finally said. “I have tenure. Aileen knows what that means. I can’t just quit there and get a job here.” That it was so beyond his capabilities to get tenure wherever he wanted made him angry at Aileen for underscoring the fact, and his face, he knew, grew unattractively hostile.

Nora didn’t bristle in response. She only said, in a mild tone of correction, “It’s a pipe dream. She wants to think that Esther’s friends are all she needs, so it’s all right that she’s losing her mother.” Without any warning, Nora started to weep, but it was a phenomenon of tears and not sobs, so that their conversation didn’t need to pause. Nora drew a paper napkin over her face, as if wiping at rain.

“What do you think?” Lee asked, and he heard his voice betray the humble fright he thought he’d concealed in his chest. He wanted to cry, too, but he wasn’t capable of such decorous tears.

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“I think,” Nora said carefully, still wiping her face, “that it would be better for Esther to leave here. High school is a big upheaval anyway.

She doesn’t think so, but everything’s going to change. Might as well change the scene. I don’t think her friends here are so wonderful.”

“Neither do I!” Lee exclaimed.

“I won’t tell them if you don’t.” Nora had regained her composure, but now Lee felt that something had shifted between them; she had opened to him; she agreed with him about Esther’s friends. He hadn’t realized how lonely he was for a partner in fear, anyone strapped next to him for the sickening plunge; the disaster was Aileen’s and second-arily Esther’s, and only then was it his, and he couldn’t go begging solace from them when he couldn’t return it. He needed someone very slightly off center in the same way he was, someone neither an imminent corpse nor an imminent motherless child. Now he saw that this person had always and only been Nora. In the space of a moment, he regretted their two weeks, really almost two decades, of frosty reserve, and grandiosely imagined they were already making up for it. He sat forward, eager for more consultation. “Why hasn’t she mentioned it to me herself? This idea I should move to Rhode Island.”

“Afraid of you,” Nora said flatly. Then she added, “As usual.” The reversal was so abrupt it took Lee a beat to realize there had been no reversal at all, but a misprision of his and resulting interior tumult, which he was confident Nora’s obtuseness had kept her from seeing. “Aileen has never been afraid of me,” he said calmly, append-ing, “you dumb bitch.”

“There’s Exhibit A for why she’s frightened of you,” Nora said, also calm. “Your disgusting temper. You control yourself about as well as a two-year-old child.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to treat my wife!” Lee said, turning heads in their direction, though briefly; it was a hospital cafeteria, and there were often scenes of rage or grief playing out at its tables.

“ ‘Your wife’?” Nora echoed primly. “It’s just like she told me. You don’t notice anything. You don’t even notice she left you, fi ve years ago and only ten years too late.”

“Too late for
what
?” Lee snarled, not caring at all, but too caught up in the rapid exchange of hostilities.

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“Oh, for everything!” Nora finally lost her composure as well. “It’s too bad she didn’t leave you before you ever met in the fi rst place!

She’s dying, and she’ll never see her little boy again, she’ll never hold him, she’ll never know who he was.
John
. I don’t suppose you remember. I don’t suppose you remember her child.” He was completely unprepared for this tangent, and for a moment something shifted again; he gazed at Nora’s flushed, contorted face with theoretical sympathy; he thought she might be insane, her habitual reserve a madwoman’s inspired façade. “That was her choice,” he said carefully—taking care not because the idea was fragile and might fail beneath hard scrutiny but because he knew that the idea was a bedrock, in the face of which Nora would likely collapse.