American Woman: A Novel Read online

  Dedication

  — FOR PETE WELLS —

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Choi

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to the Ucross Foundation, Ledig House, and the National Endowment for the Arts for having given me money and time while I was writing this book. I also owe great thanks to Francisco Goldman, Chris Harris, and Hilary Liftin for their enthusiastic support.

  And for their indispensable and tireless assistance, which nothing, I fear, can repay, I am enormously grateful to Semi Chellas, Bill Clegg, Terry Karten, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kenna Lee-Ribas, Andrew Proctor, Adam Schnitzer, Steven Stern, and Pete Wells.

  Part One

  1.

  Red Hook is little more than the junction of a couple of roads, with a farm store, a church and graveyard, a diner. And the post office, a small square cement building with RED HOOK NY 12571 spelled out in metal letters across the flat gray façade. He keeps flying through this sparse nexus of structures, first along the south-north road, then, when he finally manages to slow down and make the turn, along the east-west. He has the idea that the rest of the town must lie just farther on, and that the diner and farm store and church and post office are a far-flung outpost, but he keeps ending up twenty-odd miles away in front of a sign welcoming him to a new town, and so he keeps turning back and retracing his route. He doesn’t even see houses in Red Hook, just fence lines along the roads, a dirt drive sometimes winding away. Some of the fences contain fields and some just grass and grazing animals, but everywhere there are smooth humps of hills and distant darknesses of untouched woodland, interesting vistas to the harried urban man. He’s enjoying tearing up and down these roads, like swinging hard through the same arc again and again, and catching the same glimpse of the sorry little huddle at the center point, and he keeps at it for a while pointlessly, up down, zoom zoom, but finally he’s forced to conclude that he’s not missing anything. At the post office he parks and goes in to take a look at her box. If there were a tiny window in the little metal door he would stoop and peer in, but there isn’t. At the diner he orders coffee and a jelly donut and tries to figure out where all the people live. A man in overalls asks another man at the counter how to get somewhere. “I’m from over-river,” he explains. Back in his car Frazer studies the map. The Hudson lies west of here, about a ten-minute drive on these roads. Might be pretty. Frazer knows he is possessed of the skills to solve such problems as the one that lies before him. He can recognize, for example, that right now he is looking too hard at the wrong thing, and missing the point. He needs to do something else, maybe even give up for the day, find a bar and a motel, and start fresh in the morning. He should have realized that she wouldn’t live here; she wouldn’t want to be too near the post office. Yet she wouldn’t want to travel too far. This is the sort of zero-sum compromise she makes all the time; Frazer knows this about her, having been subjected to the same flawed formulation. Trust Frazer or spurn him? A little of both? He notices, thinking of the man in overalls from over-river, that there aren’t so many bridges: just four in the 150-mile stretch from the city to Albany. One lies due west of here, but Frazer’s willing to bet that Jenny wouldn’t cross the river for her mail. Too much traffic concentration, too confined; there’s no good exit from a bridge. He puts an X on Red Hook, then estimates a half hour’s driving distance and draws a circle around Red Hook with that radius. He does this mostly to amuse himself, but also because he believes in the inflexibility, predictability, knowability of people. They never stray far from their familiar realms of being. The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture. No one is ever “out of character.” That idea just makes Frazer laugh.

  The next morning he rises early and nearly pulls the room down in the course of his exercise. He usually travels with a pair of very small, very heavy barbells, but when he finds himself without them he does other things. Five hundred jumping jacks. One-armed push-ups. He’ll stand on his head for a while, and feel the pressure of the blood in his skull and the fumes of last night’s alcohol steaming out of his pores. On this day he’s well into the spirit of things when he grabs the bathroom door frame and pulls himself into the air, legs thrust forward a little because he’s tall and the door frame is small. Then the molding around the frame—after holding him for a beat during which he does nothing but hang there, blinking confusedly, as if sensing what’s coming—peels away with a terrible shriek of nails extracting from wood. Although the disaster is preceded by that beat, when it happens it happens all at once, before he can think or find his legs, and he lands heavily on his ass like a sack of grain. There is abrupt, alarming pain. He keels over sideways and lies there curled up, half of him on one side of the door and half of him on the other. He has the yellowish linoleum of the bathroom floor against his ear, and his face is contorted, partly an effort to keep the tears that have filled his eyes from streaming down his cheeks, but they do anyway.

  He gives up and cries a little, quietly. In truth, sacrosanct as his exercise is, he is a little embarrassed by it—perhaps because it is so sacrosanct. He remembers being surprised once by Mike Sorsa, in the apartment they’d shared in North Berkeley. He’d always waited until Sorsa left for class, and he’d heard the door slam downstairs and Sorsa’s footsteps cross the creaking wood porch and drop onto the sidewalk, but on this morning, almost an hour after Sorsa had left, he’d unexpectedly come home. Frazer had been so deeply enveloped in his routine and in the music he’d put on to accompany himself he hadn’t heard anything until Sorsa was standing there in the doorway. Sorsa had just stared for a long minute before saying, “Hey, man,” and continuing down the hall to his room, but Frazer had glimpsed the expression on his face, one that mingled slight embarrassment with incompletely concealed contempt, as if Frazer had been masturbating frantically into the couch cushions rather than simply standing with his feet apart and his head bowed, curling the barbell and counting off repetitions. Frazer’s body had been silver, he imagined, with coursing sweat, and his smell—a sharp but sweet smell, not like the smell of unwashed socks or underwear—had probably filled the small room. And he had been humiliated, though he had not stopped, nor had the feeling of humiliation surprised him. He knows he is a person misperceived as a caricature. The contour of his impression on the world has always been dominated by an enlargement of his physicality, the way a hunchback is dominated by his hump, or a goitrous man by his goiter. And so Frazer, in the circles he moves in, is sometimes viewed as a clown.

  But what has never occurred to these people, the ones who consider him “just a jock,” or, better, “just a dumb jock,” is that he doesn’t hang out just with jocks. If he were “just a jock,” that’s just what he’d do, and he doesn’t.

  This thought makes him feel better. He gets to his feet and begins testing things. Head turns, knee bends. Everything basically works but it makes him sweat bullets. He’s really landed on his coccyx, not his ass. The vestigial tail: a segmented pile of calcium, like something weird ants would construct. Now it’s been dented or crushed, or maybe snapped clean off the rest of his skeleton. Well, there’s nothing he can do about that. For him, this is as good as Problem Sol
ved. He lumbers Frankenstein-style to his bag and eats a handful of pills so that he won’t, scrunched up with pain, do anything to hurt himself further. Let the healing begin.

  When he starts feeling better he tries to reattach the molding to the door frame, but the nails have bent too much, and the door frame is too splintered. He ends up using the piece of molding to knock down the big dangling slivers. Then he starts packing, but unhappy confusion has overtaken him. He’s scooted right past feeling physically better into feeling good enough to notice he feels bad in some less tangible way. He is a little too upset about breaking the door frame, because he meant to keep this room, in the eventuality he found her today. They’ll need a place to talk. He could put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, but there doesn’t seem to be such a sign. He could drop by the office and ask the woman not to clean, although this is just what he wants to avoid: seeming strange. The night before it had made him feel very good, very safe, to find this motel, an anonymous cinder-block box lying off to one side of the state highway that ran north out of Red Hook. The woman at the desk had been so gray-skinned and blank-eyed and vague, so obviously distracted by the demands of the small children screaming in the back room, so clearly unable to spare any amount of mental energy on her rare customers, that Frazer had known the motel was a true sanctuary; he’d paid her in cash for one night but had already decided, at that point, to stay for two. Now he feels skinless and broken. He wonders if all his efforts to think like Jenny are making him into a Jennylike person. But that isn’t fair; she’s not foolish or helpless. Far from it. Frazer thinks of her eyes. He used to answer that self-defining male question, What part of the woman most matters to you? (Tits, ass, hair; for some disturbing men, feet.) Eyes, without hesitation. Eyes, because the eyes are intelligence and because Frazer knows, now, that he is only a fairly intelligent man, intelligent enough for vast ambition, perhaps not intelligent enough to achieve it. He remembers the period of his life during which he recognized this, the period during which he was courting Carol, in the face of what you’d have to call resistance. No—rejection. You’d have to call it rejection. Against which he’d kept swimming, head down, fins paddling. Not free of the persistent question: Why? When there were other women—on the bus, in his classes, on the sidelines and waggling pom-poms. Other women who liked him. But he’d come to understand, perhaps landing on the sidewalk in front of Carol’s building at the hands of her then-live-in-boyfriend, perhaps contracting pneumonia while hitchhiking cross-country one Christmas to surprise Carol at the home of her parents, that there was no why, there was no choice, there was only the body’s non-negotiable instinct for self-preservation. He’d needed Carol, because she was the smartest girl he’d met then, at the tender age of twenty. And he hadn’t been wrong, then, although the subsequent decade has taught him and changed him.

  It was a motel room like this that he and Jenny had stayed in. No, that’s not true. He only wants the bridge to the thought, so he might seem to come upon it accidentally. Apart from both being motel rooms, the two places could not be less similar. Outside the window, past the roof of his car, he sees the same undulating, untouched pastureland and woodland he drove through for hours yesterday. The rare car passing by on the road seems no louder than his own exhalation. That other room had sat across the highway from Kennedy Airport, shaken by the thunder of planes, awash all night in orange light that had leaked around the edges of the curtains and streamed like fingers down the walls and on the bed. It had been so unendingly loud, like a war zone, that they could hardly hear each other, but they had argued uncontrollably anyway, as if they both had a death wish, and longed to be overheard by their neighbors. It would have taken a lot more than their fighting to attract someone’s attention in that place; that was why he had chosen it. In the morning he had jerked awake with the gray dawn, only a few hours after going to sleep. He had watched her strange face. Not beautiful. But disabling. He had felt brand-new longing, as if they were back at the beginning, but with everything else sheared away, all other persons, objects, events.

  Wake up, he’d said, closing his hand carefully on her shoulder. Then he’d shaken it, in a quick, utilitarian way, and her eyes had flown open. The mortification he’d seen there was like death.

  He stands up, plowing straight through the pain in his back, and strides out of the room. In the office he pays the woman for a second night and hands her the molding. “It fell off,” he begins, but she just shrugs and drops it into her wastebasket.

  June 4, 1974. This does not turn out to be the day he sees her, but it is the day he finds her. The simplicity of it amazes him. For all her precautions, all her veils upon veils dropped over her acts, he can still see the shape of them perfectly. She’s like a Boy Scout who thinks he’s an Indian; he imagines her walking backwards, sweeping out her footprints as she goes, leaving clear arcs in the dust. The same hieroglyphic again and again: I’M AFRAID.

  He starts with the motel proprietress: He’s an architecture buff. Any nice big old houses around here?

  She looks at him blankly, or maybe it’s searchingly. He can almost see her detaching the far-flung tentacles of her overtaxed brain from their many deep worries, slowly reeling them in, to assist him.

  Maybe over-river? he adds, wanting to sound native.

  Oh no, she says quickly. No, the rich folks, they all lived on this side.

  Ah.

  You could try in Rhinebeck, she offers hopefully.

  Is that where the rich folks lived? Rhinebeck?

  Um, no, she’s shaking her head.

  But I could try asking somebody there, he says, watching her nod.

  Although he leaves the motel office sighing, he is suddenly full of the intimation that he could not go wrong now if he wanted to. He’s looking for a Japanese girl, after all, in a lily-white corner of upstate New York. The course of events won’t contain any more random padding. In Rhinebeck he is assaulted all at once by incredible hunger, and he stops short of going into the public library and instead enters the coffee shop and takes a booth by the window. He eats with his eyes on his watch, both impatient and reluctant. Yesterday, the errand felt like a game, with its pleasant outfield intervals of waiting. Today the outcome is clear, and he’s stalling. He’s surprised by the possibility that he doesn’t want to see her. No: He’s surprised by the fact she provokes any feeling at all. For years she’s been marginal, right? Even before that, she was nothing important. She’s like a job he once had that he’s finished with. He’s sometimes been vaguely offended by how far out of her way she went to show she’d never wanted his help, but beneath this affronted feeling he’s very rarely wondered where she was. He’s certainly never cared.

  After breakfast he takes a walk around town before he visits the library, but even then, and even after sitting through the eager disquisitions of the local librarian, small and gray and darting as a mouse, he’s on time for the ten-thirty tour. He sits awkwardly in a cheap folding chair on the narrow sun porch, hands between his knees. He feels large and crude; though elaborate with colored trim, shutters, shingles, and finely wrought lengths of cast-iron lace, the house is neither huge nor grand but eccentric, delicate, badly deteriorating and slightly sunken in the overgrown grass, as if adrift on a pale yellow sea. It’s called Wildmoor, which seems very appropriate, though he guesses it was named in better days. He had approached it with legs of rubber. Just his coccyx injury, he thinks angrily. Fists balled to conceal wet palms. Now that he’s here, he can’t believe this is it. He can’t imagine her here. The librarian had told him about two other area mansions in addition to this that give tours, and countless more that are private, gated and guarded. He knows she’s in one of these fortresses, gold-leafing the fireplace or restaining the sideboard or whatever it is that she does, but he can’t believe it’s this place, where anybody can pay to walk in. And yet he has a wrenched-up, anxious gut, growing worse every minute. In the off-chance he has to be ready. He knows that she’ll know better than to scre
am and run off when she sees him. She’s a wreck, but she’s a tough wreck, and good at thinking on her feet. They’ll improvise something, a stage play, and then they’ll exit unobserved into the wings. They’ll talk. In an artificial dusk of velvet drapes.

  His only companions on the tour are an elderly retired couple from Kingston. They introduce themselves and smile brightly until he’s forced to converse. “I’m a carpenter,” he says, wondering whether he can get away with this. He used to go out on big house-painting jobs with Sorsa, and he learned fancy words: oriel, pediment. He can never remember what they mean.

  “You build houses?” the woman asks.

  “Yes.”

  “This is a fascinating house! It’s almost one hundred years old.”

  “Sort of a busman’s holiday for you, isn’t it,” her husband says heartily.

  Frazer wonders what the hell the man means by this. He feels himself sweating. He keeps wanting to look around for Jenny, but he’s aware that his eyes are darting like a freak’s, and he wills them to stop. “Yes,” he says, and the couple both laugh. He can’t tell if they’re laughing at him or “with him.” He’s always despised that expression.

  The tour is led by an excited lady with a nimbus of reddish hair and a pair of cat’s-eye glasses on a chain. She and the couple turn out to be kindred spirits, adept in the same obscure language—porte cochere, rococo. The situation worsens for Frazer, because the threesome, elated by their companionship, feel guilty and strive to include him. “Mr. Jones,” the wife inquires, again and again, giving him a start the first time because he’s forgotten saying this is his name. “What do you think of these gables? Would you do them this way? Do any persons these days still like fish-scale shingles? Where on earth have you found them available?” It turns out that the last surviving member of the family, a lady named Dolly, still lives in the house, “but in her wonderful generosity, because she has always been such a good friend to this community, has opened the house to the public, for tours twice a week.” Frazer knows what this means. The woman ran out of money. The tour cost three dollars, “to contribute to upkeep,” the guide had said, seeming faintly embarrassed as she took the bills from them. But it doesn’t look as if there’s much upkeep. Frazer would bet that the money buys groceries.