Native Speaker (9 page)

“
In-jeh!
” he yelled.
Now!

I had to pull with both hands on the trigger, and I almost lost hold of the nozzle from the backforce of the water and sprayed wildly at whatever I could hit. He yelled at me to stop after a few seconds so he could inspect our work; he did this so that he could make a big deal of bending over in front of me, trying to coax his small boy to shoot his behind. When I finally figured it out I shot him; he wheeled about with his face all red storm and theater and shook his fists at me with comic menace. He skulked back to a safe position with his suspecting eyes fixed on me and commanded that I fire again. He shouted for me to stop and he went again and bent over the screens; again I shot him, this time hitting him square on the rump and back, and he yelled louder, his cheeks and jaw wrenched maudlin with rage. I threw down the hose and sprinted for the back door but he caught me from behind and swung me up in what seemed one motion and plunked me down hard on his soaked shoulders. My mother stuck her head out the second-floor kitchen window just then and said to him,
You be careful with that bad boy
.

My father grunted back in that low way of his, the vibrato from his neck tickling my thighs, his voice all raw meat and stones, and my mother just answered him,
Come up right now and eat some lunch
. He marched around the side of the house with me hanging from his back by my ankles and then bounded up the front stairs, inside, and up to the kitchen table, where she had set out bowls of noodles in broth with half-moon slices of pink and white fish cake and minced scallions. And as we sat down, my mother cracked two eggs into my father's bowl, one into mine, and then took her seat between us at the table before her spartan plate of last night's rice and kimchee and cold mackerel (she only ate leftovers at lunch), and then we shut our eyes and clasped our hands, my mother always holding mine extra tight, and I could taste on my face the rich steam of soup and the call of my hungry father offering up his most patient prayers to his God.

None of us even dreamed that she would be dead six years later from a cancer in her liver. She never even drank or smoked. I have trouble remembering the details of her illness because she and my father kept it from me until they couldn't hide it any longer. She was buried in a Korean ceremony two days afterward, and for me it was more a disappearance than a death. During her illness they said her regular outings on Saturday mornings were to go to “meetings” with her old school friends who were living down in the city. They said her constant weariness and tears were from her concern over my mediocre studies. They said, so calmly, that the rotten pumpkin color of her face and neck and the patchiness of her once rich hair were due to a skin condition that would get worse before it became better. They finally said, with hard pride, that she was afflicted with a “Korean fever” that no doctor in America was able to cure.

A few months after her death I would come home from school and smell the fishy salty broth of those same noodles. There was the woman, Ahjuhma, stirring a beaten egg into the pot with long chopsticks; she was wearing the yellow-piped white apron that my mother had once sewn and prettily embroidered with daisies. I ran straight up the stairs to my room on the second floor of the new house, and Ahjuhma called after me in her dialect, “Come, there is enough for you.” I slammed the door as hard as I could. After a half hour there was a knock and I yelled back in English, “Leave me alone!” I opened the door hours later when I heard my father come in, and the bowl of soup was at my feet, sitting cold and misplaced.

After that we didn't bother much with each other.

I still remember certain things about the woman: she wore white rubber Korean slippers that were shaped exactly like miniature canoes. She had bad teeth that plagued her. My father sent her to the dentist, who fitted her with gold crowns. Afterward, she seemed to yawn for people, as if to show them off. She balled up her hair and held it with a wooden chopstick. She prepared fish and soup every night; meat or pork every other; at least four kinds of
namool
, prepared vegetables, and then always something fried.

She carefully dusted the photographs of my mother the first thing every morning, and then vacuumed the entire house.

For years I had no idea what she did on her day off; she'd go walking somewhere, maybe the two miles into town though I couldn't imagine what she did there because she never learned three words of English. Finally, one dull summer before I left for college, a friend and I secretly followed her. We trailed her on the road into the center of the town, into the village of Ardsley. She went into Rocky's Corner newsstand and bought a glossy teen magazine and a red Popsicle. She flipped through the pages, obviously looking only at the pictures. She ate the Popsicle like it was a hot dog, in three large bites.

“She's a total alien,” my friend said. “She's completely bizarre.”

She got up and peered into some store windows, talked to no one, and then she started on the long walk back to our house.

She didn't drive. I don't know if she didn't wish to or whether my father prohibited it. He would take her shopping once a week, first to the grocery and then maybe to the drugstore, if she needed something for herself. Once in a while he would take her to the mall and buy her some clothes or shoes. I think out of respect and ignorance she let him pick them out. Normally around the house she simply wore sweatpants and old blouses. I saw her dressed up only once, the day I graduated from high school. She put on an iridescent dress with nubbly flecks in the material, which somehow matched her silvery heels. She looked like a huge trout. My father had horrible taste.

Once, when I was back from college over spring break, I heard steps in the night on the back stairwell, up and then down. The next night I heard them coming up again and I stepped out into the hall. I caught the woman about to turn the knob of my father's door. She had a cup of tea in her hands. Her hair was down and she wore a white cotton shift and in the weak glow of the hallway night-light her skin looked almost smooth. I was surprised by the pretty shape of her face.

“Your papa is thirsty,” she whispered in Korean, “go back to sleep.”

The next day I went out to the garage, up to the nook behind the closet, to read some old novels. I had a bunch of them there from high school. I picked one to read over again and then crawled out through the closet to turn on the stereo; when I got back in I stood up for a moment and I saw them outside through the tiny oval window.

They were working together in the garden, loosening and turning over the packed soil of the beds. They must have thought I was off with friends, not because they did anything, or even spoke to one another, but because they were simply together and seemed to want it that way. In the house nothing between them had been any different. I watched them as they moved in tandem on their knees up and down the rows, passing a small hand shovel and a three-fingered claw between them. When they were finished my father stood up and stretched his back in his familiar way and then motioned to her to do the same.

She got up from her knees and turned her torso after him in slow circles, her hands on her hips. Like that, I thought she suddenly looked like someone else, like someone standing for real before her own life. They laughed lightly at something. For a few weeks I feared that my father might marry her, but nothing happened between them that way, then or ever.

The woman died sometime before my father did, of complications from pneumonia. It took all of us by surprise. He wasn't too well himself after his first mild stroke, and Lelia and I, despite our discord, were mutually grateful that the woman had been taking good care of him. At the time, this was something we could talk about without getting ourselves deeper into our troubles of what we were for one another, who we were, and we even took turns going up there on weekends to drive the woman to the grocery store and to the mall. We talked best when either she or I called from the big house, from the kitchen phone, my father and his housekeeper sitting quietly together somewhere in the house.

After his rehabilitation, my father didn't need us shuttling back and forth anymore. That's when she died. Apparently, she didn't bother telling him that she was feeling sick. One night she was carrying a tray of food to his bed when she collapsed on the back stairwell. Against her wishes my father took her to the hospital but somehow it was too late and she died four days later. When he called me up he sounded weary and spent. I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine.

I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek.

“Good boy,” he muttered.

I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers. Maybe the kind of food she would make. As I was cleaning up after we ate, I asked whether he had buried her, and if he did, where.

“No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “Not that.”

The woman had begged him not to. She didn't want to be buried here in America. Her last wish, he said, was to be burned. He did that for her. I imagined him there in the hospital room, leaning stiffly over her face, above her wracked lips, to listen to her speak. I wondered if she could ever say what he had meant to her. Or say his true name. Or request that he speak hers. Perhaps he did then, with sorrow and love.

I didn't ask him of these things. I knew already that he was there when she died. I knew he had suffered in his own unspeakable and shadowy way. I knew, by his custom, that he had her body moved to a local mortuary to be washed and then cremated, and that he had mailed the ashes back to Korea in a solid gold coffer finely etched with classical Chinese characters.

Our gift to her grieving blood.

I
went to him this way:

Take the uptown number 2 train to Times Square. Get off. Switch, by descending the stairs to the very bottom of the station, to the number 7 trains, those shabby heaving brick-colored cars that seem to scratch and bore beneath the East River out of Manhattan before breaking ground again in Queens. They rise up on the elevated track, snaking their way northeast to the farthest end of the county. The last stop, mine.

Main Street, Flushing.

I liked the provincial pace of the local train. I could see the play of human movements on the streets below the track. I watched as people struggled to shift themselves forward in the bare morning light, gearing up for the work ahead of them, their ghostly forms drifting in and out of the cluttered maws of the storefronts and garages and warehouses.

The people were thin, even when they looked almost fat they were thin, drawn as they were about their necks and faces. Even this early they were smoking cigarettes and cigars. The steam of fumes, other fires. Breathing it in. They were always loading and unloading the light trucks and cube vans of stapled wooden crates and burlap sacks, the bulging bags of produce like turnips or jicama as heavy on their sloping shoulders as the bodies of their children still asleep at home. They were of all kinds, these streaming and working and dealing, these various platoons of Koreans, Indians, Vietnamese, Haitians, Colombians, Nigerians, these brown and yellow whatevers, whoevers, countless unheard nobodies, each offering to the marketplace their gross of kimchee, lichee, plantain, black bean, soy milk, coconut milk, ginger, grouper, ahi, yellow curry, cuchifrito, jalapeño, their everything, selling anything to each other and to themselves, every day of the year, and every minute.

John Kwang's people.

They must have loved him. Those first days I walked the streets of Flushing, I saw his name everywhere on stickers and posters, the red, white, and blue graphics plastered on the windows of every other shop and car along Kissena, Roosevelt, and Main. Downtown, near a subway entrance, sat a semipermanent wooden booth decorated with bunting and pennants and flags manned by neatly dressed youth volunteers in paper hats. They passed out flyers, pamphlets—
A Message from City Councilman John Kwang
—buttons, ballpoint pens, key chains, lapel pins, every last piece of it stamped with his perfectly angled script, simply signed,
John
.

The sight of his picture was equally evident. Those I saw were mostly modest five-by-sevens (I later learned they were gifts for contributions to his first campaign), plainly framed black-and-white portraits of him, often hung in a kind of sacred paper altar that mom-and-pop businesses tape up on the wall beside the cash register: John Kwang hung there with the first tilled bills of each denomination, a son's Ivy League diploma, a tattered letter of U.S. citizenship from the county clerk of Queens. You saw his face on the walls of restaurants, large-format color pictures of him standing arm in arm with the owners, the captured mood always joyous, celebratory.

One of his longtime staffers, an extremely tall, bitter-faced man named Cameron Jenkins, told us volunteers in a welcome meeting that it was decided the night he won the election that they would run a “permanent” campaign during the term.

“So we've only won the half of it yet,” he shouted to us.

Now, Kwang's political machinery was just beginning to market him in the other quarters of the city. The local television stations never would have followed any candidate as much as they did John Kwang, out of fairness and protocol, but the election was more than two years off, and Kwang was denying at every instance his interest in running for mayor.

“But I wouldn't mind being the mayor,” he would joke in interviews.

The news directors must have sensed that their viewers liked Kwang's youthful face, his grinning eyes, the tiny, new wrinkles.

Queens had seen a drop in violent crime since his election. The latest school test scores were up. You could think wise John Kwang was responsible. Sherrie Chin-Watt understood this and put him where the viewership wanted him, even outside of Queens. So you saw Kwang in news spots talking with Hispanic youths at a boys' club in Washington Heights, amongst the revelers in black tie at a plush Manhattan hotel party, playing miniature golf with union bosses in Staten Island, walking the streets with black church leaders in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Everywhere he went, what the staffers called a “mini-rally” seemed to develop, impromptu phalanges of citizens and reporters gathering about him on three sides, the fourth always kept open and clear for what the staffers called the “visuals.”

This was the first of my jobs for John Kwang. I had been with the campaign for two full weeks and I wasn't getting near him. I was answering phones, photocopying, distributing newsletters on the street. I hadn't even actually met him yet, and had spoken just once in passing to Sherrie Chin-Watt. It was only after I had mollified a rowdy assemblage of twenty or so Peruvians who worked for Korean greengrocers (they were protesting low wages and poor working conditions) that Jenkins and some others identified me as being capable and motivated.

The Peruvians showed up outside the door of the converted storefront of the new office with their tall skinny drums and guitars and handmade placards that read: “Koreans Unfair.” No permanent staffers were around to handle them. Sherrie was in Manhattan, Jenkins out of town. The group was becoming boisterous enough to attract attention on the street. I knew that someone in the neighborhood would eventually call a news crew, if they hadn't already. So I invited the men inside and showed them around the offices. I told them that Kwang didn't come in every day, but that when he did I would see that he was fully informed of their grievances. My face, perhaps appearing to them a little like his, seemed to assure them. I said he had some influence with the Korean businesspeople in the community, that he believed in fairness in pay and hard work, but that he could only do so much. What he could do was speak to the grocers in his next address before their business association.

The Peruvians seemed to accept this, if somewhat somberly. One of them, a very short older man with the squarest, broadest face of orange-brown I'd ever seen, said something to them and they all began leaving. At the door I handed each of them Kwang trinkets and souvenirs from a box labeled “Premiums.”

Outside, a young reporter and her cameraman were waiting on the sidewalk, ready to capture a provocative scene, but all they got were pictures of the workers exiting the district office carrying
John
-inscribed pennants and bumper stickers, oven mitts and disposable lighters. The camera was running, and some of the Peruvians saw this and began to wave. The small crowd that had gathered in the street joined in, jumping at the lens. Encores of flags. Fingers saying
numero uno
.

The following Monday Jenkins informed me that some of my hours were being reassigned and that I was to work on a media advance team. We went straight out to the streets. The leader of the team was Sherrie's protégé, another bright young civil attorney out of Boalt, Janice Pawlowsky. Janice was originally from Chicago, sharp-tongued, abrasive, ambitious, and sexy—you maybe thought—like your best friend's mean older sister. About fifteen pounds overweight, a bob of reddish, golden hair. She liked to wear a well-worn thrift-shop leather aviator jacket and black jeans, otherwise, smart dark suits tailored to make her look leaner than she was. All the hungrier. She would tell me in her maniacal west-side-of-Chicago accent that she
really liked
me.

I stayed out of her way.

“Henry!” she yelled to me that morning (Jack and I had decided it was safe to use my own first name). “Stay with me!”

It was raining on us hard, loud. Only Janice had thought to bring an umbrella.

“Don't take your eyes off me! I'm only doing this once, goddamnit!”

Janice Pawlowsky was the scheduling manager. It was one of her many jobs. Her mission in this one was to fill every moment of Kwang's waking time with events and meetings and meals. Get him out there at all costs. For a public appearance, she would take me and the other man, a squat, burly college student named Eduardo Fermin, to scout out the area the day before. For the Bedford-Stuyvesant gathering, Janice had already confirmed her plans with church representatives as well as the local Democratic district chairman, who would be on hand to “host” the gathering.

We were practicing a walk-through of the exact paces Kwang would take the next day. For his half-block “tour” of the neighborhood, Janice began on the steps leading up from the subway, her umbrella madly spilling rainwater, and then counted out the twenty seconds that Kwang would stand there and converse with the ministers. She tried to measure all his talking and stops in that same interval, so if they ran a clip of him on the news they'd be pressed to play the whole thing. If she let him talk for minutes and minutes whenever he wanted they'd just pick and choose quotes to suit their story, and not necessarily his. She made him speak in lines that were difficult to sound-bite, discrete units of ideas, notions. You have to control the raw material, she said, or they'll make you into a clown.

Now she stepped down to street level and turned east, moving down the exact middle of the sidewalk. She chose east because there were tidy storefronts and an elementary school playground in that direction, and in the far background—if you were looking head-on at Kwang, as the cameras would—the shape of the Manhattan skyline. She paused after fifteen paces; they would stop here for ten seconds, in front of a Turk-owned deli, enough time for Kwang to make a comment about ethnic fellowship and shake the proprietor's hand. Then they would move on to the end of the block.

Eduardo and I had a simple task: don't let anything or anyone get between Kwang and the cameras. As she walked his steps, Janice indicated places of potential complication, points where foot traffic might impede the track of the small parade, checking to make sure of enough space for the newspeople covering the event. This was free advertising, and although there was a danger in having little or no control over the coverage or commentary, Janice could at least set up the shots by making them striking and obvious for the cameramen.

“TV people are lazy!” she shouted to us over the rain from beneath her umbrella. “You gotta help them out!” Eduardo and I both nodded, our hands shielding our heads.

Janice bought us breakfast in a coffee shop across the street. We sat in a window booth. After the rain stopped we'd do the drill a few more times. Eduardo ordered eight links of sausage and buttered toast, spraying all of it with hot sauce. He sat next to Janice, eating methodically. He looked older than twenty-three. He wore brand-new horn-rimmed glasses and he adjusted them at the corners after each swallow. He was studying political science at St. John's at night, working afternoons for a caterer and volunteering whenever he could for John Kwang. He wanted to go to law school. Janice had obviously chosen him for his bulk; our job, I soon learned, required the ability and willingness to push around bodies, even shove some. Direct the traffic. He'd worked for her nearly a year. He was ideal for the job, centered low as he was in his fireplug body, a plow of well-muscled forearms in front of him, a pulling guard for a sweeping Kwang.

I wasn't as apt as he. My glory years as a physical, athletic presence were at least twenty years behind me, when, in the seventh grade, I was generally the same height and weight as everyone else; I had excelled in football, basketball, baseball, tennis. I eventually grew, but grew skinny. I realized at some point that only my head could compete. I'd always wondered what might have been had I grown to six-foot-three and two hundred pounds. Now, I had been given to Janice's advance team by Jenkins, an ex-basketball star at CUNY, once the kind of kid I could dribble circles around before he grew ten inches and wised up enough to realize he didn't have to chase me, he could hang back near the basket and wait for my approach. Jenkins thought I might prove effective as a kind of herald for John Kwang. Calm the crowd with my amenable Asian face.

At breakfast, Janice wanted to know what I did for money. In the rest of my life. “You seem a little old for this,” she said, sculling out spoons of flesh from her half melon. “You don't seem to be one of those I'll-take-the-bullet types.”

“You never know.”

“Doesn't look that way to me. I'm sure. So what's your deal?” she asked. “What do you really do?”

I cracked the lid of my legend.

“I'm a freelance writer,” I said to her. Eduardo glanced up from his plate. “I write for magazines.”

“Yeah?”

I picked at the scrambled eggs. “Nothing too exciting. My aim is to do profiles. This is the first big one.”

“Yeah, yeah, but there's something else, right?” she said, aiming her spoon at me. I looked straight at her and didn't say anything. There was almost an ugly pause. I raised the corners of my mouth, the way Hoagland taught me. The confidence grin. Then she said: “You're doing something on the side, right?”

I didn't answer.

“You're writing a book or something. A true-crime novel.”

“Sort of.”

“Of course you are. This is a city of novelists. What's it about?” she said, sitting up in the booth seat. “Wait, I know, it's about John. I mean, it's about someone like John, an ambitious politician.”

“I thought John Kwang wasn't ambitious.”

“He doesn't want to be the fucking President,” Janice sneered. “But then neither do I.”

“That surprises me,” I said to her.

“Did that surprise you?” she asked Eduardo. She put her arm around his back. “I mean come on, Eddy, was I such a hard-driving bitch right off?”

“I thought you were going for Czar,” Eduardo answered. He ordered us more coffee.