Native Speaker (4 page)

“You agreed.”

“Of course.”

I put the frame down, turning it back to face him. We were eating a lunch of ordered-in sandwiches at his desk, grilled Reubens, corn chips, pickles, hot coffee, fried honey cakes. The daily killing of ourselves. Jack, as always, had peeled open a tin of shriveled purple olives. We were building a pile of the pits on a file photo of one of his former subjects, a South American woman with a magnificently crooked nose. Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, an exquisite embassy wife, was very former, I knew, because Jack hadn't been on outside assignment in several years at least. Hoagland had retired him, plain and simple, after Jack requested a quiet exit. He'd had enough of our life. Normally that meant a two-week debriefing at the firm's house upstate in Greene County, a modest send-off here in the office (a few bottles of whiskey, some laughs) and then a good pension check every month, but Jack was an old salt if there was one, too observant, too wise—he'd taught Hoagland most everything—and he was too valuable for them to let go completely.

While Jack was on leave taking care of Sophie, Hoagland told me how Jack had been abducted in Cyprus by a red insurgent faction in ‘sixty-four. At the time he was working piecemeal for the CIA. In Cyprus, Hoagland said, Jack's captors decided they were going to break every bone in his body with a small hammer, from the toes up. Then they would put a bullet in his brain. They started on the job but stopped when someone crashed a donkey cart into the bottom of the house. The way Hoagland tells it, when they went down to deal with the ruckus, Jack struggled with his guard, shot and killed him, then dragged himself onto the roof and flagged down a policeman from a prone position. But then you felt everything Hoagland said was apocryphal, always questionable. If it happened at all, Jack never mentioned it. Our mode at the firm was always to resist history, at least our own.

The floor was quiet while we ate our lunch; no one else was in the office this week, except for Candace, Hoagland's secretary. You could see the whole floor at once, because here there were no walls, not even those carpet-lined partitions many offices will use. Just the appropriate number of desks arranged more or less pentagonally about the floor with the secretaries positioned in the center. Only Hoagland had a private office, on the north side of the floor, and even that was walled by clear soundproof glass, so that you saw him pacing around in there during the day, gesturing wildly as he spoke on the telephone, nervously jiggling handfuls of red Yahtzee dice like a cache of jewels. Hoagland wasn't in there now, though he was around, as always, lurking about, snooping somewhere on the grounds. He often took constitutionals with his dog, Spiro, an old gray-and-white shepherd mix that limped devotedly behind him on stiff arthritic hips. Or he could be just outside the door. You never knew. I always checked if he was in his office, kept one eye in his direction.

Our building was a five-story professional office, trapezoidal, contemporary, with smoked windows and a blush-red granite facade, the structure nestled in among other office buildings in a large, well-wooded corporate park in Purchase, New York, fifteen or so miles north of the city.

We occupied the top floor, under the name of Glimmer & Company. If you pushed us on it, if you were insistent, if you caught us alone in an elevator or on the back of an airplane or in a motel-bar lounge, we were consultants of ambient lighting to military installations. We said it exactly like that. And on the floors below us, in order of descent, were three small firms of computer dealers, attorneys, and real estate brokers. On the ground floor were two physicians' offices, a podiatrist and a psychiatrist. They enjoyed most of the building's traffic. You were always holding open doors for people either hobbling or hunched over, heads in their hands.

When you got out on the fifth floor you faced a flat cream-colored wall broken only by a metal security door with the company logo in plain block lettering. Beside the door was a mirror and a wooden table on which was placed a bouquet of artificial flowers. Orchids. No lobby, no receptionist. A camera had been installed behind the mirror. Hoagland always denied that it was his idea. Candace monitored a video screen on her desk. She had a button for the door by her foot.

Of course, no one had ever shown up unexpectedly.

“Did you always give Sophie what she wanted, Jack?” I said, picking through the olives.

Jack swallowed, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand.

“You have to, Parky,” he insisted, his voice low, rumbling. “It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.”

“Tell me when this happens.”

“Always too late,” he said, settling back in his chair. He put his hands to his temples, as always. “Just tread lightly, Parky. Lelia will do the right thing. This is the time to let her think.”

“What the hell were the islands for?”

“To run,” he answered. Jack had a quieting directness.

“Right,” I said. “I guess I know that.”

“Knowledge is the least of your problems.”

He lifted Sophie's picture and kept turning it, his eyes darting back and forth, as if he might steal something new from the shape of her face, another profile, an unwitnessed angle. I knew there had been lovers since Sophie, one of them Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, the embassy wife, whose husband found out about her infidelity and had her quickly dispatched back to Montevideo.

“Have you begun the workup of Kwang?” Jack asked me now. Hoagland had officially made him my wingman, to keep an eye on me, given my fiasco with Emile Luzan.

“Just a little bit. Jimmy's put together a sketch file but I haven't looked at it too closely. Why, what has Dennis said?”

“Nothing,” Jack muttered, scratching his moustache. “I wondered if you were spending too much time on it but I guess not. That is good. John Kwang is not the end of the world.”

“Dennis is acting otherwise.”

“He is just softening you up. Just do your job, boy.”

I always forgot that Jack had a certain inappropriateness in his expressions and gestures, as if he had learned them from an illustrated text. His parents came from a slum in Athens, no place near those magnificent columns of chalky rock, and I could imagine that his mother and father were just like him, thick-fingered people of the earth, human weeds, hardened and sad and always ready to burst from the drab husks of their lives with great quaking fits of emotion.

A person like my mother would have found it difficult to sit in the same room with them. They might have frightened her with their big bellying laughter and hot tears and full bear hugs. I could see Jack's mother attempting to embrace my mother in an act of solidarity. My mother would have stiffened and politely allowed her small body to be enfolded in those fleshy arms. She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.

“But of course Dennis is a sick man. We know this. To him, information only has value if he has sole ownership. I wouldn't be surprised if there were small slips of paper with facts scribbled on them all locked away inside his safe.”

“I didn't know he kept a safe.”

“Beneath his desk. I only found out a few weeks ago. Candace accidently let it out.” Jack now waved to her at the far end of the floor. She tilted her head to the side and made a sour face back.

“I bet he keeps little silver bullets in there,” I said.

“Monkeys' thumbs,” Jack added. “The dick of a hummingbird.”

I nodded. “A first dub of the Zapruder film. One of a kind.”

“Lady Bird Johnson's silk panties, circa 1969.”

“An autographed picture from Rudy Giuliani,” I said.

Jack liked that one. He said, “File photos of Sharon Tate, Squeaky Fromm. You will note the attached locks of hair.”

“Long-lens photos of all of us,” I said. “Grainy and flat.”

“All in the buff,” Jack said.

“With our women,” I said.

“Them alone,” Jack said.

Right. I pictured Lelia coming out of the shower in Molly's apartment, walking in front of the windows in a towel.

“Lelia has her own ideas about Hoagland,” I told him.

“Lelia's the thing right now,” he answered. “Does she know what you're working on?”

“No. I'm not going to bring this place up in conversation anymore.”

Jack nodded. “I know she has never been comfortable with us.”

“She adores you,” I said. “Actually, she likes most everyone here, except for Hoagland.”

“We're all very personable people.” Jack laughed. “Not Dennis, of course. Dennis is a troublesome one.”

“Dennis is a freak of man,” I said, glancing down the floor to the empty office.

“That's right,” Jack answered, chuckling. “Freak of man. But it's good you came in today. You ought to talk to him soon. Assure him. He is a worrier. You have become a subject for him. This is no good. I can see in his face that he thinks of you often. Here, take some of these to him later. Tell him I said olives are a Greek remedy for stress. Take them all and tell him.”

He handed me the tub of olives, shooing them on me with his large brown hands. I sat back in the swivel chair and poked through the remainder. Jack was sliding the pits off the photo into his wastepaper basket. Then, after the briefest pause, he let go of the photo itself, the image of the woman still compelling, though smeared and oily. It had been a closed file for some time now, but I thought that even an old hand like Jack must have trouble with what he'd done in the past. I had begun to think that each of us was leading the life of a career criminal, in which the commission of acts was not by a single man but a series of men. One Jack killed the boy guard in Cyprus, another Jack seduced Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, and so on. Our work is but a string of serial identity. But then who was the Jack that loved and buried Sophie; was he just another version in the schema, or the true soul, or could he have been both?

I knew Lelia adored Jack because she always said so whenever he came up in our conversation. She always seemed to be hugging him throughout our get-togethers. At first her attention slightly annoyed me. I wondered what she found interesting enough that she always had to play it out, or where she might be leading with it. Hoagland, the human black cloud, had noticed this too, mentioned it sometimes as indicative of our good camaraderie. Then, and only recently, while she was gone in the islands, did it occur to me that her fondness for Jack might have something to do with me, a hope for what I did for a living. When I traveled to other cities on firm business for several days or a week, I called her nightly from where I was staying and we talked about everything but the very reason I was speaking to her on the telephone from another unspoken place. It didn't seem to matter then. We talked plenty anyway, talked her work, and other things, talked friends, did our talk of family, the talk of how much we missed each other, even the queer ironical talk of when I was coming back home.

“God,” she would sigh deeply on the other end of the line, “I'm intensely horny. Will you do something?”

“What?” I'd say.

“Just say you're coming back soon. Say you're moving this way.”

“I'm moving your way.”

“Again, but just the moving part.”

“I'm moving,” I'd low, “moving, moving.”

I could hear the driving tone to her voice. She was always surging ahead of where we were, never staying with one notion for too long, and I willingly followed her wherever she needed to go, off the real subject, maybe pushed her there myself.

But at some point you begin to see that you both come with open hands to this kind of practice, this mutual circling of speech. The movement is not so difficult. You updraft, you float. The urgency is gone. Somehow you've gotten onto the idea of conserving energy whenever possible. Asking after her is a drain; answering her is even harder. And it is only when you are willing, finally, to fly down and pick through the bones that you can check if the marriage is actually dead.

But with Jack we were fine. In summer days, Lelia and Mitt and I would go up to Jack's house and find him sweating in the garden in denim overalls, hoe in hand, wearing a huge sun hat of straw with a bright red band, one wide, sandaled foot resting up on a grass-plumed pile of overturned sod. He seemed happy enough. He told us about the sauce he was making, a
putanesca
, how he had prepared it the way Sophie taught him, shot full of capers, anchovies, olives, garlic, hot peppers. Jack would ladle it over your buttered linguine, your rounds of fresh bread. Then his Caesar salad, yolky, garlicky, rich. Everything with wine.

Jack's house was a classic split-level, the kind of house I knew best, the one immigrants must dream about, with a downstairs family room, another room called a den, cool linoleum floors, a double oven, two porches—the house laid out so that you and your new wife would sleep in a master bedroom built directly over the garage, the kids safely down the hall.

The neighborhood, Jack told us, was full of New York City cops, most of them retired. Their yards were small and well kept, landscaped with sprays of chipped bark and whitewashed trellises of huge yellow and pink roses. These burly red-faced men would see us on the deck and heartily shout “Jack-O!” or “Jack-Attack!” up to him, wave wide and furious like the marooned with their power shears and their Weedwhackers, flick them on with a zing or whirr whenever Lelia waved back.