Native Speaker (16 page)

When they came out, he stood on the rise of the church steps among the four enrobed ministers. He didn't look nervous. A line of microphones was set up. Eduardo and I were on either side of the group, a few steps down, half-facing the crowd. The men were all smiling and shaking hands with each other. The lead minister, the Reverend Benjamin Shavers, hushed the crowd. He spoke for a few minutes about the tragedy of strife between the communities. The reverend then asked John Kwang to speak.

John stepped forward into the tightening space of the steps. The sky was clear. He wore a dark wool topcoat over his suit and white shirt and tie. He held no speaking notes or cards.

“My friends,” he said, his accents on the syllables of his words unlikely, melodic. “I have something to tell you today. An incredible bit of news. Black and Korean children, as some in this city would have you believe, aren't yet boycotting one another's corner lemonade stands.”

There was scattered laughter in the throng.

“It's true, it's true,” he answered. “I have this from reliable sources. You know how my people have been roaming the boroughs.”

“Where are the mayor's people?” a voice yelled from the back. I thought it sounded like Janice's.

“Oh please, please,” Kwang pleaded in her direction. “Let us show compassion for the mayor's position in this. He just found out what's on this side of the East River.”

A chorus of cheers went up. The crowd had been steadily growing and was now spilling back out into the street. Police were setting up barricades blocking one whole lane of cars.

“But let us not think about the mayor today. Let us not think about the inaction of his administration in the face of what he says is a ‘touchy situation.' When he casually tells the newspapers that ‘it's getting wild out there in Queens and Brooklyn,' let's not simply nod and agree. Let's not accept that kind of imagery. Let's think instead of what we have to bear together.

“A young black mother of two, Saranda Harlans, is dead. Shot in the back by a Korean shopkeeper. Charles Kim, a Korean American college student, is also dead. He was overcome by fumes trying to save merchandise in the firebombed store of his family. I was in the hospital room when he died. I attended Miss Harlans' funeral. And I say that though they may lie beneath the earth, they are not buried.

“So let's think together in a different way. Today, here, now. Let us think that for the moment it is not a Korean problem. That it is not a black problem or a brown and yellow problem, that it is not a problem of our peoples, that it is not even ultimately a problem of our mistrust or our ignorance. Let us think it is the problem of a self-hate.

“Yes,” he said, starting to sing the words. “Let us think that. Think of this, my friends: when a Korean merchant haunts an old black gentleman strolling through the aisles of his grocery store, does he hold even the smallest hope that the man will not steal from him? Or when a group of black girls takes turns spitting in the face and hair of the new student from Korea, as happened to my friend's daughter, whose muck of hate do they ball up on their tongues? Who is the girl the girls are seeing? Who is the man who appears to be stealing? Who are they, those who know no justice, no fairness; do you know them? Are they familiar?”

There were random calls from the crowd. Then a man heckled something but was immediately shouted down. There was a brief scuffle and the heckler cursed them and slipped away.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Let us think differently today. The problem is our acceptance of what we loathe and fear in ourselves. Not in the other, not in the person standing next to you, not in the one living outside in this your street, in this your city, not in the one who drives your bus or who mops the floors of your child's school, not in the one who cleans your shirts and presses your suits, not in the one who sells books and watches on the corner. No! No, no!”

He started pointing, gesturing about the crowd, picking out people. “This person, this person, she, that person, he, that person, they, those, them, they're like us, they are us, they're just like you! They want to live with dignity and respect! They want a fair day of work. They want a chance to own something for themselves, be it a store or a cart. They want to show compassion to the less fortunate. They want happiness for their children. They want enough heat in the winter so they can sleep, they want a clean park in the summer so they can play. They want to love like sweet life this city in which they live, not just to exist, not just to get by, not just to survive this day and go home tonight and tend fresh wounds. Think of yourself, think of your close ones, whom no one else loves, and then you will be thinking of them, whom you believe to be the other, the enemy, the cause of the problems in your life. Those who are a different dark color. Who may seem strange. Who cannot speak your language just yet. Who cannot seem to understand the first thing about who you are. Who must certainly hate you, you are thinking, because of the constant frustration of your own heart turning hard against them.

“If you are listening to me now and you are Korean, and you pridefully own your own store, your
yah-cheh-ga-geh
that you have built up from nothing, know these facts. Know that the blacks who spend money in your store and help put food on your table and send your children to college cannot open their own stores. Why? Why can't they? Why don't they even try? Because banks will not lend to them because they are black. Because these neighborhoods are
troubled, high risk
. Because if they did open stores, no one would insure them. And if they do not have the same strong community you enjoy, the one you brought with you from Korea, which can pool money and efforts for its members—it is because this community has been broken and dissolved through history.

“We Koreans know something of this tragedy. Recall the days over fifty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us.

“I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. Remember, or now know, how Koreans were cast as the dogs of Asia, remember the way our children could not speak their own language in school, remember how they called each other by the Japanese names forced upon them, remember the public executions of patriots and the shadowy murders of collaborators, remember our feelings of disgrace and penury and shame, remember most of all the struggle to survive with one's own identity still strong and alive.

“I ask that you remember these things, or know them now. Know that what we have in common, the sadness and pain and injustice, will always be stronger than our differences. I respect and honor you deeply.”

Kwang then bowed and thanked the crowd and they applauded loudly as he hugged each minister in turn. I was pushed toward him as they shrank inward to get closer to him. I tried to hold those nearest to me back, but it was useless. I couldn't find Eduardo or Janice. Kwang himself was talking, laughing, pointing, taking every hand he could, slowly roping through the crowd down the church steps toward the street as if carrying himself on a human vine. I could see he wanted to get out, maybe the crowd was getting too fervent. But he was going to move past them by moving through their very heart.

A dull pop went off, followed quickly by another. People ducked where they stood, half crouching, covering their heads. Quiet. Then screaming. They all started to run. I saw Eduardo dive toward John Kwang and grab him hard by the shoulders. He looked all right, but Eduardo had him quickly tucked under his arms. Eduardo saw me and shouted, “Henry! Henry!” He jerked his head desperately toward the car. I understood what he wanted. I hurled myself through the mess of people, shouting as Janice had instructed me, “Aide to Councilman Kwang! Aide to Councilman Kwang!” and I led a path for Eduardo to follow. John was still hidden away, but he was walking down low, keeping up. There was suddenly heavy smoke and we moved through a thick white screen of it, the smell sulfurous, burnt.

Janice appeared, kneeling in her skirt on the trunk of his sedan. She was yelling at a cop and pointing back toward the steps of the church. “Over there!” she screamed. “Over there! There! It's a kid!”

They were holding down somebody to the side of where John had been speaking. Immediately the camera crews were trying to get there. We were still jammed in twenty yards or so from the car by all the people on the wide sidewalk. It was difficult to move. The traffic had stopped in the street. I didn't see any police except for the young cop Janice had berated, who was making his way to the spot she had been pointing to.

Eduardo and now another volunteer from the office were covering Kwang. He motioned for me to take his position and I cuffed John at the elbow, his head still covered beneath Eduardo's outercoat. Eduardo shouted for us to wait and then ran the long way around, halfway down the block and back. He finally got behind the wheel of the car and started it up. He was maneuvering it to and fro, trying to back it onto the sidewalk so that they could get to us. I could see Janice in the backseat urging him to keep moving. I thought they were going to roll over people, crush somebody. But a seam opened and Janice pushed out the door when they neared us. I shielded his head and slid him into the backseat. When Janice saw him she screamed but he assured her in a calm voice, “I'm okay, I'm okay. No worry. I'm okay.” He looked shaken but fine. I shut the door. He looked up at me through the window and gave a weak thumbs-up. His lips said, I was sure in Korean,
Thank you
. There were cameras behind me and I was careful not to turn directly around. I rapped the roof of the car twice and Eduardo moved it slowly through the crowd before squealing off north, through the red lights, for Queens.

J
ack and I spoke regularly. I called him from various pay phones in Flushing or from the flat in Manhattan our firm rented. Sometimes, when we were both in the city, we met there. The apartment was nothing special. It was in the East Thirties, an alley-side studio on the third floor of a shabby rent-controlled building. The tenants were mostly older folks who'd lived there since
before the war
, and then all the illegal subletters. A lot of them were time-sharers like stewardesses or nursing students, or guys running dispatch for gypsy cabs and escort services or telephone rigs like astrology or phone-sex parlors. The kind of people who generally didn't hang out in the halls or make conversation. It was the perfect setup for Dennis Hoagland, who himself had background-checked all thirty-six apartments. He paid the super $50 a month for any changes and names.

“The scared and the scamming,” he liked to say, “always give the best cover.”

You got in with a plastic key, the kind big hotels use. The door had a brushed brass plate with a slot and heavy-duty handle. You inserted the key and heard a plush click. A green pinlight went on. It was fully automated. This way, Hoagland could change the code at will from the Westchester office, then have Candace cut the appropriate keys. He readily admitted it was completely unnecessary. He said he was American and so reserved the right to flagrant displays of technology. Every few weeks he would distribute new keys to us. Jack immediately threw his away.

The place had two windows, a large, many-paned one in the main area that faced the alley, and then another in the bathroom. Both were blacked out with matte spray paint. There was an air conditioner for cooling and ventilation. Hoagland had furnished the place with a three-bay sound partition, each bay fitted with a dedicated phone line and laptop with fax/modem. There was a shared printer and a coffee machine. A blobby gesture at a sofa near the door, and his trademark fake orchids in the corners. The idea, in his words, was for the place to be a kind of “work lounge” for those of us on assignment in the city, or for “associates” of ours having unexpected layovers. Of course, it didn't get much use.

Jack said it was the wet-dream version of the treehouse Hoagland never had as a boy.

“You're all fucking over me,” Dennis answered him. He grinned. “But you're wrong. It's the one I burned down.”

I myself didn't mind the place. I almost liked how cramped and lightless it was, so unlike our windy, too bright apartment. Sometimes I spent nights there after particularly depressing fights with Lelia, which were really more non-fights, those bleak evenings in which we sat crossly at different ends of the loft, smoldering with voodoo.

Lelia couldn't have known where I stayed all those nights, and because she never once asked, I felt I was allowed to let her stew in her imagination. Let her think. An ugly fancy, I thought, might do us both some good, snap us into clarity, though how and when I had no idea. For although I have spent ample hours of my adult life rigorously assessing and figuring all sorts of human calculations, the
flesh math
, as we say, I retain an amazing facility for discharging to hope and dumb chance the things most precious to me.

When real trouble hits, I lock up. I can't work the trusty calculus. I can't speak. I sit there, unmoved. For a person like Lelia, who grew up with hollerers and criers, mine is the worst response. It must look as if I'm not even trying. Unless I drink too much I'll eventually recede. I go into my “father's act,” though she only knows this from what I've told her. It's the one complaint she'll make about him, though she always ends with something fond. And this is the primary gripe she has with me—she's even said as much, despite her list—but with us it's ever urgent, the big one.

I don't have any deep problems with her. I know this must sound spiteful. She has her shortcomings, certainly, but I won't go into them because once you start ticking things off they just keep going until they take on a life of their own, which neither truth nor good intention can withstand.

What will I say? Lelia is mostly wonderful. And lovely. She has a prominent nose that seems just right and slightly off kilter at the same time. Her eyes are wide-set. She doesn't much fuss with her hair. When you hand her a football she instantly spins it to the laces and says, “Go out.” Each morning she rises at 6:30 and stretches in her underwear and makes a good pot of coffee. She always scalds the milk. I go in the kitchen and believe I will never see a more perfect set of hip bones. Or uglier feet. I know how her voice will sound with the first word of the day, not as low as it should be and as spare and clean as light. That effortless pitch. When she play-acts, horses around, she is silly and awkward, completely unconvincing. She must be the worst actor on earth.

And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can't hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?

When I asked her to marry me we'd been together for only three months, the entire time she had been in the city since moving from El Paso. Although she had her own apartment we were pretty much sharing house (she'd already moved over most of her clothes), and I knew we were heading for something serious when we stopped by her place to use the bathroom and I didn't even see a toothbrush.

One evening I took us both by surprise. I hadn't thought at all about the literal act, the moment of asking, though of course the idea of being married to her was something I'd considered since the beginning. I had gone over the trodden middle-class ground, moving through the necessary business, how our
personalities
complemented each other, what our sex life was like (and might become), our money situation, what our fathers would say, the fact that she was white and I was Asian (was this one question, or two?) and then what our children might be like. Look like. Ironically, these were all the things that my father forever wanted me to consider, and to what as a teenager I had disingenously cried, “What about love?”

Old artificer, undead old man.

Before me, Lelia had come off a string of men who made her feel steadily sorry and confused and burgled. Each relationship was ending up a net loss. It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman—though she said maybe she should be fair and just speak for herself—relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well. One night in bed she said, “The men I've been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy's polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I'm supposed to come out precious and sparkling again.”

“Does it work?”

“They seem to think so.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“A little smaller.”

Among other things, I took this as complimentary. The implication, of course, was that I wasn't trying the same number on her. This was true enough. I have no business improving others, much less buffing up Lelia, who has it over me in spades. Perhaps part of our trouble was that in the course of time there arose moments when I should have taken measures, done something, if only for what the actions would have said about my feelings for her.

I never envisioned myself in that kind of white hat, though, astride some fine horse, galloping into the main street of town. I mostly come by the midnight coach. If I may say this, I have always only ventured where I was invited or otherwise welcomed. When I was a boy, I wouldn't join any school club or organization before a member first approached me. I wouldn't eat or sleep at a friend's house if it weren't prearranged. I never assumed anyone would be generous to me, or in any way helpful. I never considered it my right to expect approval or sanction no matter what good I had done. My father always reminded me that neither he nor the world owed me a penny or a prayer, though he left me many millions of one and braying echoes of the other. So call me what you will. An assimilist, a lackey. A duteous foreign-faced boy. I have already been whatever you can say or imagine, every version of the newcomer who is always fearing and bitter and sad.

It's my brand of sloth, surely, that I could fail my wife so miserably but seem to provide all the necessary objects and affections. On paper, by any known standard, I was an impeccable mate. I did everything well enough. I cooked well enough, cleaned enough, was romantic and sensitive and silly enough, I made love enough, was paternal, big brotherly, just a good friend enough, father-to-my-son enough, forlorn enough, and then even bull-headed and dull and macho enough, to make it all seamless. For ten years she hadn't realized the breadth of what I had accomplished with my exacting competence, the daily
work
I did, which unto itself became an unassailable body of cover. And the surest testament to the magnificent and horrifying level of my virtuosity was that neither had I.

* * *

When I got to the flat Jack was waiting inside. He was set deep in the sofa, reading one of the magazines Hoagland had on subscription for us. We periodically told him not to bother but he didn't listen. Hoagland said it was part of our job to keep up with current issues, though none of us could figure out what he was getting at with the selections:
Redbook, Guns & Ammo, Town & Country
, some airline magazines, and then a few sundry
zines
, including a softcore glossy called
Dirt World Nation
, which was what Jack was reading. When he saw me he removed his delicate half-glasses from his bridgeless boxer's nose.

“I didn't see you outside so I came up,” I said, shutting the door behind me. “How did you get in?”

“Grace gave me her key,” he said.

“She doesn't need it?”

“She's off somewhere with Pete.”

“Not for fun?”

“Those two? No way, Parky. All business, all business.”

“Everything's
all business
,” I said. “Even with us.”

“I know,” he answered, putting down the magazine. He held out his big hands. “Now I can finally get out of this damn couch. You better pull.”

It was his first real visit. He'd seen schematics Hoagland had drawn up, pictures he'd taken. I showed him around the flat. I turned on all the lights for him, ran the shower in the bathroom until it was hot, opened the doors of the refrigerator and the microwave. I showed him the listening devices Hoagland had installed in the drop ceiling. I could cut power to them whenever I wanted. I did it now. He was unimpressed but he didn't seem to mind.

He seemed a little tired. He kept coughing and complaining about the rainy weather. It was the end of March, he figured, so the rains would stay at least one more month. I noticed he was a bit slow in his talk. A place like this should have seemed too small for him, like a shallow hole in the ground, but he sat in a desk chair in one of the carpet-lined cubbies and listened while I harshly joked and grab-assed. Hoagland was the target, always the mode Jack and I favored.

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.”