A Person of Interest Page 4

  “So you and Lewis,” Aileen began lamely, after moments of silence. Lee interrupted her.

  “If you were my woman,” he heard himself saying, “I wouldn’t bring you to garbage like this.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t?” she said, as if she’d expected an outburst.

  “And I wouldn’t give a damn about God,” he concluded, feeling suddenly dizzy.

  “You don’t give a damn about God anyway,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Again: obviously.”

  “Why are you married?” Lee said, with exasperation, and he never could have explained why he felt familiar enough with a woman he’d known barely an hour to ask such a thing.

  Aileen laughed a compact, brittle laugh. “That’s a pretty rude question.”

  “I don’t care about being rude,” Lee said, putting his empty plate down.

  “That must be why he likes you.”

  “Who?”

  “Who! That’s terrific. My husband. Your friend. He must like you because you don’t care if you’re rude. I think that’s why he likes me.”

  “Why do you like him?”

  “Because he’s a good man,” she said vehemently, but her vehemence did not seem aimed at Lee. “You are rude. You’re not much of a friend.”

  Lee didn’t dispute this. It was a realization that would have pierced him if it had occurred just an hour before.

  After a moment Aileen said, “I’m going to rudely suggest we go back to the shindig.” There was finality to her statement, but there wasn’t rebuke. Whether this was the end of that evening’s conversation, or of all conversations, Lee couldn’t have said, but the sense of finality was as absolute to him as it must have been to her; without another word they both stood and walked back to the pavilion, more quickly this time, because guided by its lights. They found Gaither backward on a folding chair, deep in conversation, but his face was unrestrainedly, unsuspiciously glad when he saw them approaching. Lee felt nothing at the sight of that face, no remorse whatsoever.

  “Hello,” Aileen said to her husband, and she bent down to kiss him. Then she stood behind him and held his hand, clasped against his large shoulder, as he continued to talk.

  The drive back late that night was just as silent and even colder, but this time it seemed over in minutes. No one told Ruth to put up the window. The stars made white streaks in the sky. Aileen was a shadowed, unreachable presence on the seat beside him, a stone sunk in the depths of a lake. And there was something exquisite in this, in her distance from him, and in measuring it, and in weighing how little he needed to bridge it—and then all the newly strange familiarities of their small town, its still streets and empty porches and shuttered storefronts, were upon them, and the weak pinkish light of the streetlamps bled into the car. They dropped Ruth off first, at a plain wooden two-story boardinghouse that in its drabness resembled her, and then although Lee’s boardinghouse was just a few blocks away Aileen got out of the backseat, requiring Gaither to leave the driver’s seat and hold the seat forward for her, so she could sit in the front. Then they were at Lee’s, and Aileen got out again, to release him. “I’ll walk Mr. Lee up,” she told Gaither, and Gaither, as he had done at the start of the evening, leaned across the front seat and waved.

  “Good night, Lee,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming along. I hope you had a fine time.”

  “I did,” Lee said. “Thank you.”

  He and Aileen mounted the steps together, and although Lee was certain Gaither was gazing straight ahead out the windshield, his eyes dazzled with stars, his spirit sated by fellowship, Lee still felt a gaze of some kind, branding him. He already had his key in his hand, and there was nothing to wait for; Aileen offered her hand, and he shook it, hardly looking at her.

  “Come over for coffee sometime,” she said. He scarcely managed to answer; she was already turning away to go back down the steps.

  “When?” he said.

  “Sunday morning,” she said. “At nine-thirty.”

  4.

  LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER LEE BEGAN HIS AFFAIR WITH Aileen, she told him she was pregnant. “His, not yours,” she said, before he’d been able to speak.

  “How do you know?” he gasped then, feeling the words, with his breath, sucked from him too quickly, as if by a powerful vacuum.

  “Because I’m almost ten weeks,” she said. “And I was only sleeping with one of you ten weeks ago.”

  They would have been whispering, almost hissing at each other, in the drab, cluttered office of the professor of urban statistics whose papers it was one of Aileen’s jobs to refile, while the professor was in Rome on a working sabbatical. The office was, apart from being drab and cluttered, cold both in temperature and in overall atmosphere. A single fluorescent panel hung from the ceiling, which they tried to leave off. The single window, which looked out on the building’s parking lot from the height of only the third floor, was dressed with a dusty venetian blind, which they kept lowered and closed. The desk was university-issue gunmetal gray, as were the laden bookshelves. The absent professor’s papers were kept for the most part in overtaxed cardboard boxes, splitting at their seams, squeezed precariously on the bookshelves or stacked three or four high on the floor; the stench of dust and dry mold filled the room. There was a broken couch, also covered with boxes, which squeaked, and an Amish rag rug on the black tile floor. Aileen had brought the rug from her home. It looked as out of place as it was, although for all its inappropriate implications of handcrafted domestic contentment, it wasn’t comfortable either. It consisted entirely of knots; it was meant for shod feet, not bare flesh. Lee would feel the rug taking vengeance for Gaither as it bit harsh red dents in his elbows and knees and, he knew, as it steadily scoured Aileen’s spine. In his feverish lust Lee would see, through the too-wide crack at the base of the door, the constant detached clicking shoe soles of passersby in the hallway outside. These were her co-workers, the heavyset, decades-married, full-time secretaries who snubbed Aileen for her part-timer status, her efforts to earn a degree, her superior mind—the department chair favored her and gave her special assignments and privileges, like the refiling project, and her key to this office—and for her handsome young husband, who picked her up at the end of the day when his schedule allowed and happily squired her home, with the nimbus of adulterous sex still swagged over her limbs like a fine length of scent-soaked chiffon.

  It had been a three-week period during which Lee trysted with her almost daily, with the reckless bloodlust of a soldier in battle and the fastidiousness of a prodigy finally meeting his ideal instrument. She climaxed so crashingly, with such wails of remorseful abandon, she brought a towel to the office that Lee stuffed in her mouth when he felt her convulsions beginning. The rug’s riot of colors had to increasingly hide the dried, crackling laminate stains they deposited on it. After the first time, he had never gone to her and Gaither’s home again on a Sunday morning; they had left a rout of slime and semen and uprooted hair on her living-room floor to which, she said afterward, her lousy housekeeping skills were unequal, her voice shaking when she said it, though she’d attempted to joke. So that from then on, they met on her lunch hour, and again in the early evenings if Gaither had an undergraduate section to lead, and every Sunday morning, always in the office, the key of which Aileen copied for him, so that he could arrive early and, when the hallway was empty, let himself in to wait in the dark. And then after three weeks, or rather twenty-three days, she told him she was pregnant. “I should have known,” she whispered, perched beside him, not touching him, on the squeaky couch, on which they scarcely dared breathe. “I’ve been so sick, so nauseated. That Sunday after you came to the house, I couldn’t stop vomiting. I hardly eat anymore.”

  “You’re never sick when I see you,” he hissed. Her evidence seemed dishonest, contrived just to thwart him.

  “I am, it’s just other things…drown it out.”

  He stared at her, her face obs
cure to him in the darkened office. They had not touched each other at all; when she’d slipped through the door and he’d risen to meet her, she’d recoiled visibly. “No,” she’d said. She was ruining him, perversely, with no regard for the consequences. He had an urge to strike her, to beat and kill Gaither; his body felt like a jar full of blood being violently shaken. The unprecedented complication of the situation, the terror of having come to feel so exclusively in possession of a body within which, all the while, another man’s child lived, would not make itself felt until later. For now he only felt she was killing him, trivially. He hardly knew her; he was not even sure what her face would look like if he turned on the light.

  “I can’t believe I’ve wanted sex at all, all this time,” she murmured.

  “Get out of here,” Lee said.

  “It’s my office.”

  “Get out.”

  After a moment she rose, and the couch groaned, letting go of her weight. He heard her crushing her keys in her hand. “You’ll let yourself out without being seen,” she said coldly. He didn’t reply.

  “I can’t see you again,” she said. “Ever.”

  He had not meant to speak. “You’re a whore!” he spat.

  “You’re a coward,” Aileen told him, much later. “You’ll say anything to make yourself feel less weak.”

  Aileen also would later say to him, “If only I hadn’t goddamn gotten pregnant. Our affair would have run through to its natural end, pretty quickly. Instead there had to be a big break, and that felt like romance. What a dummy I was.” Aileen had a way of saying juvenile words like “dummy” with a chilling contempt that struck Lee to the quick. Her cruelty possessed a devastating stealth, while Lee’s was obvious, clumsy.

  He sat in the darkness a long time after she had gone. Grief had not begun yet. Finally, the hallway entirely silent, he let himself out and kicked his copy of the key back under the door. He also left the tawdry rug and the towel, for her housekeeping skills.

  As finale, April unleashed tumultuous weather. Two days after Aileen broke with Lee, as the redbud blossoms erupted down the lengths of the boughs like tufts of purple piñata tissue, and bright yellow strings of forsythia hung in the yards, and the daffodils opened, a whistling spring blizzard left three feet of snow on the ground. Lee tried to read Mishima’s Spring Snow while contemplating suicide, for the first time in earnest. It was the agonizing passage of time that made him want to die. He heard every slow tick of the second hand on his Seiko. He would will himself to read, read, read, to not look at his watch until eons had passed, and when he finally broke down and looked, it would be five, or just three, minutes later. He could hardly pull himself through the shoals from daybreak, when he woke from a jangled, unnourishing sleep, to sunset, when he let himself go back to bed. He broke with Gaither in turn because he couldn’t maintain a façade. He tried, for a day, but when Gaither walked into their seminar, he felt himself redden to the roots of his hair. With his brown skin in that room of pale men, he must have blazed like a mythical savage. He felt the curious eyes of Whitehead and the Byrons on him, sensed their professor give him wide, baffled berth, but it was Gaither, seated beside him out of habit, who scorched him. Gaither leaned toward him and murmured a question when their professor had turned to write on the blackboard, and Lee sat transfixed, empty-lunged, not even able to shrug Gaither off. “Lee?” Gaither asked, in his siftingly soft southern voice. “Are you feeling all right?”

  When class ended, Lee steamed from the room, but Gaither’s long stride caught up easily. “What’s bothering you?” he asked quickly. “I can see something’s wrong.”

  “Leave me the hell alone,” Lee said.

  “Was it the church function? Because I thought that you had a good time, but if you didn’t, that’s fine. I never meant to offend you. I respect your beliefs, and I know you respect mine. I have no interest in making you share them. Aileen doesn’t share my beliefs, and I’m married to her—”

  “I don’t respect your beliefs,” Lee corrected him, stopping and looking at him finally—at his lean, handsome face and his long, rangy arms and his bulky, sincere spectacles. His stupidity and worthlessness were so glaring that Lee felt he could have been conversing with a talented mule or steer. “Your religion’s a joke. If your wife doesn’t believe in that”—and here he’d struggled for an erudite insult, something far more fatal than a mere expletive, but his excellent English, over which he’d so toiled, now completely failed him—“in that fairytale stuff, it’s not because you haven’t tried. I could feel you parade me around at that thing like your”—he’d struggled again, but recovered more quickly—“your coolie. Your little pagan whose lost soul you’re going to save.”

  “That is unjust,” Gaither said frigidly. Now he seemed as Lee had been only moments before, paralyzed by shock. But Lee had warmed to his task.

  “You even fight like a preacher,” Lee said. “I don’t need your Christian handouts. Like I said, from now on leave me alone.”

  He might not have endured it if the academic year hadn’t been almost over. Continuing to sit around a table in classes, to stand at colloquia with a teacup and a cookie, to walk out of their departmental building, always a few yards ahead of or in the wake of Gaither, Lee almost felt it was Gaither with whom he’d shared a passion that had now been destroyed. Gaither’s humiliation and anger, and most of all his complete confusion as to the cause of the breach, roiled Lee with remorse and even with compassion. But this last feeling was so incompatible with the roots of his quandary, his desire for Aileen, that he shoved it away until he felt it transformed into rigid contempt. Above all, he shunned Gaither from fear. He was afraid not only of seeing Aileen but of the sound of her name or any other slim evidence she still existed. He wanted to think she’d dissolved from the face of the earth, that no one saw her finely drawn, cynical mouth or her thin, boyish shoulders or the place where her hips flared surprisingly from her small waist. Her pregnancy he completely erased from his mind, as only a man could, and only a man reared in an affluent household in which a pregnant wife and mother could be hidden away from her children and even her husband by a phalanx of servants until her condition had passed and her beauty returned. Lee knew nothing of pregnancy, Aileen’s or anyone’s, and so he banished the thought, simply wouldn’t believe it.

  In his homeland the ocean had never been more than an hour away, and although looking at it had involved a rattling bus ride and then standing on the land side of a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, he had made the trip often for reasons he understood only now, in this spring of his American heartbreak. The pure texture of ocean ruined by the grid of the fence, and the rough, slimy beach out of reach, and watchtowers within sight in either direction with armed sentries inside, poised for signs of invasion, had not bothered him as much as the solitude and the noise of the ocean and the far horizon had solaced him. He recalled those days as always windy and gray, neither winter nor summer. He would cross his arms high on the fence, lean his forehead against them, and stare out through the links at the waves for as long as an hour. Once he had finally turned to walk back down the rutted dirt road to the regional highway, the fretfulness that had seemed to constrict him like vines, and his many-chambered anxieties, and his silted-up lungs, would all seem to dilate and collapse. He’d feel open and empty. Only when the ride home was over would he feel those pains rising to claim him again.

  At the time it had felt like impoverished contemplation, if indispensable to him. Now, stranded in the Midwest, he was homesick for that route to the ocean, however grim it had been. The town was small, the campus even smaller, fitted snugly like a gift inside its box; the town existed to serve the school and held no dark pockets in which Lee could get lost. Seated tensely on a bench on the quad, he felt like a caged cat. The cherry trees had exploded like fireworks and left their pink litter all over the ground. The lilacs had bloomed and begun to wither, bunched in pendants like grapes, and their dizzy perfume, sligh
tly tainted by vegetable rot, was still suspended in motionless patches like invisible fog; Lee would pass through one and involuntarily turn his head, seeking the source. Everywhere Lee went, he felt stripped and exposed to the flagrancy of the season, to its blunt smell of sex, as if he had never understood the raw basis for fertility legends and rites and agriculture’s rhythms and poetry’s worst clichés, and at the same time he felt uniquely dead to it, as if the sexual world, which he had just woken to, was defined by his absence from it. He was dangling, redundant.

  His break with Gaither had not gone unnoticed by their fellow students, which made him realize that their brief friendship had been noticed as well. One afternoon he was sitting on what had become his usual bench, not because he was comfortable there but because, once he had managed to sit there a first time, he’d felt unable to pioneer another spot; it was the same paralysis that kept him from obtaining a map of the region, a bus schedule, from seeking any escape from the confines that made him so unhappy. It was almost five o’clock, an hour when friends sought each other out and the lonely wandered, looking for company; the air was the warmest it had been the whole month, and the quad’s rich triangular patches of grass, outlined by flagstone footpaths, were crowded with small groups sitting and talking and smoking or lying on their coats with eyes closed and their faces turned up toward the sun. But Lee shared his bench with no one, and no one was near enough to him that he could hear conversation. The shadows of the large trees were long and exquisitely detailed in the intense slanting light; every once in a while, Lee would see a group shift, to escape a shadow’s encroachment. Sunny days and sunny dispositions. Lee had met Aileen at the start of April, and the cruel month had only just ended. There was still one more week of classes; then exams, and release. Lee had one of his texts next to him but was not looking at it. The crystalline beauty of mathematics was no longer apparent to him. He had the unfinished Mishima, also of no interest, tented on his knee.