Chang-rae Lee Read online

  TWO NewYork, 1986 HERE WAS THE CITY of her solitude, set afire by the first autumn light. Could a civilization ever be as peerlessly etched as this? The corner windows of her apartment faced north and west onto the stone-and-glass towers of Midtown, and through all the years she lived here she had never quite seen this depth of gleaming or coloration, the low sun sparking every niche of the building faces and lending shape to the sky by lamping the high-floating ribbons of sheerest vapor. June’s work was all but done. How time had accelerated. The apartment was sold the very day it was put on the market, and here she was, a mere six weeks later, peeling off rubber cleaning gloves and tossing them into a black garbage bag. Earlier, the men she regularly employed to deliver items from her antiques shop had carried out the last chair and lamps from the apartment, and by now they were likely finished with their rounds. Rather than hiring an estate service, she had done the job herself, selling everything she owned in grouped lots to dealers she knew around the city. She had practically given the stuff away, strangely delighting in the knowledge that they would do very well with the pieces. One of them actually balked at paying the low price she proposed, insisting that there should be some honor, even among thieves. She told him he had better stop talking about honor or she’d reconsider, and soon enough he relented, to the point of inquiring, before he left, about a Late Federal desk he’d long admired. She undersold that one to him, too. The overwhelming balance, like the nonrare books and records, the kitchen- and cookware, the bath towels and bed linens, she bundled and gave free to a junk dealer friend on the Bowery. For herself, she had set aside only two small suitcases packed with clothes and a zippered tote of toiletries. Just a few basic cosmetics. Vanity had never in the least ruled her. Mostly it was her nature, but there was also the fact that she had never needed to be concerned with her appearance. She had spent her life being not so beautiful as extraordinarily youthful, her wide, oval face ruddy and pure, her skin having an apricot smoothness, the lustrous sheets of her black hair shimmering and thick. To an undiscriminating eye, her sturdy figure might have appeared stocky, but her naturally bolt-straight posture, her shoulders set back like a dancer’s, made her look taller, more athletic, as though she were just about to spring. Only a few months earlier, on her forty-seventh birthday, her favorite waiter at the corner diner brought her a huge slice of carrot cake with candles in the shape of 25 stuck in the white sea of the icing, though of course he could guess her approximate age. He was perhaps slightly younger than she, but he always called her his “lass,” and like most men (and women) of every age who came into her shop or sat beside her on the subway, he was drawn to this freshness, this vitality, this odd but intractable sense that she was someone who might never grow old. Her late husband, David, who had passed unexpectedly two years ago, often said as much, jesting that her eternal youth would rub off on him, as though she were a charm against the dread pull of the years. He would say, “Come here and just lie on me.” “That’s all you want?” “That’s all I need.” “Are you sure?” “Well . . .” How different things would be, if she had such powers. . . . She twist-tied the garbage bag and hauled it out to the two others already slumped outside her door. There was one other apartment across the short hall, but June had never exchanged more than a hello with the occupants, so she hadn’t bothered saying goodbye. They would have to learn of her departure from Habi, or from someone else in the building, or when the new owners moved in, and they likely wouldn’t pause or think more than a second about it, which was perfectly fine by June. The apartment had been David’s, but it suited her just as well; the building was on lower Madison Avenue and tended to attract those who didn’t care that the area lacked services and was deserted at night, who didn’t mind the traffic noise or lack of residential neighbors. They enjoyed the special brand of privacy that comes from living an exquisitely small, circumscribed existence, made exquisitely smaller and more private still when lived in the heart of the immense, bustling city. The elevator bell rang and the door glided open; it was Habi, the young building superintendent. Earlier June had asked him to come up, and he assumed it was to help her with the garbage bags, and he grabbed two by the neck, but she waved him off. “Please, Habi. Come inside. I want to show you something.” He let go of the bags and followed her inside the apartment, which was completely empty and swept clean. He had been in her apartment a half-dozen times, yet each time he entered he behaved as though it were the first, or perhaps he felt he shouldn’t, and he lingered by the kitchen until she guided him to one of the back rooms. Habi was from the Congo and she had come to know him best of anyone in the building, especially after David died. If he was around, he always helped carry her groceries upstairs (there was no doorman), and several times sat long enough to have a cup of tea with her. They didn’t say very much, for whatever reason; she simply enjoyed his presence, which was a kind of perfect temperature, like tropical waters. She admired that he was intelligent and soft-spoken and polite and did his menial and mostly thankless job well and carried himself with unstinting dignity. He was always very respectful. He had a very pleasing and placid face, but for a long, raised scar that ran from the corner of his eye to his jaw. June had noticed that he had a scar on his left palm, too, which aligned exactly with the one on his face whenever he raised up his hand. Once she asked him about it, and rather than answer directly, he simply said he was orphaned when he was young. “It was a very difficult period,” he said, in his heavy French accent. “A tribal conflict.” He had walked for several weeks on his own, hiding out during the days and moving at night, covering hundreds of kilometers on his bare feet. It was then that he asked June what had happened to her hands. His question took her aback, but then she surprised herself by turning them over and showing them to him. Her hands were delicate and petite and perfectly normal in appearance except when she revealed her palms, which was something she shied from doing. The palms and pads of her fingers looked like they were somehow unfinished, being putty-smooth and only faintly lined, like the hands of a mannequin. One of them was more scarred than the other. She told him they were burned in an accident. He’d nodded somberly, but without the cloying concern that others might proffer, and said nothing more. Yet she would have told him (as she would never tell others) that they gave her discomfort sometimes, despite the fact that they were almost completely numb. “There are some things I want you to look at,” she said. They walked to the back bedroom, their footfalls echoing in the empty apartment, and for a moment June pictured them as a couple, shopping for their first home. “I’ve had this furniture for a while, and now that you are married I thought you might like to have it.” The furniture was a child’s solid walnut desk and chair, as well as two matching chests of drawers and a bunk bed with rails and a ladder. All of it was in good condition, but June had spent a couple hours anyway filling and buffing the various scratches and dings, just as she might have in her shop. She then polished each piece until it looked brand new. “But we do not have children,” Habi said. “You will someday, won’t you? It’s high-quality furniture, the kind they don’t make anymore, at least not for children.” She pulled open the desk drawers, showing him the joints, the bottoms, even stepping up one rung on the ladder to give a tug at the bedrails. “I was about to sell it with everything else, but then I realized how stupid I was. I would have shown you last week, but I’ve been so busy.” “I am certain I cannot pay you enough.” “Pay me? You’ll pay me nothing. I’ll have my deliverymen bring it to you tomorrow.” Though she already knew it, she asked him to write down his address. He nodded, offering, “Please, I can take it myself.” “Don’t be silly. It’s their job, and you probably don’t even have a car.” “I do have one,” he said. “But it is small. Two doors.” “It’s a deal, then. But it has to be tomorrow, because that’s the closing. Will your wife be home?” He said yes, this was possible. His wife did alterations for a dry cleaner, work she could bring home. June didn’t know much else about her, except that she was from Sene
gal, and that Habi had met her in a park in central Queens, where they lived. June wished that she could have met her so she could more easily imagine what their children might someday look like, but for now she simply pictured two skinny boys in their pajamas, climbing up and down the bunks, laughing together with wide, watchful eyes like Habi’s. “My wife will be sorry she could not thank you,” he said, as if he had been able to read her thoughts. “Tell her that she is most welcome.” “I will.” He gently pushed in the drawers to align them and said, “I did not know you and Mr. Singer had children.” “Oh, well, yes,” she said, amazed at herself for not anticipating that Habi would of course wonder about who had used the furniture. Yet it was not at all disturbing to answer him. “But not Mr. Singer’s child. Just mine. And only one. A boy.” “I see,” Habi said softly. He was clearly hesitant to inquire further. “Would you like to know his name?” He nodded. “It’s Nicholas.” “Nicholas,” he said, the sound of it mysterious and dashing in his accent. “That is a fine name.” “Yes,” June said. “I’ve always thought so.” After she locked the apartment door she handed the keys to Habi. He was to let in the deliverymen the next morning, and once the new owners or their renters arrived he would give them the keys. She decided she wouldn’t bring up again how her attorney would someday—and perhaps quite soon—contact him in regard to the bequest she had arranged. In the scheme of her finances, ten thousand dollars was not a huge gift, and was just enough, she figured, for him to put toward a down payment on a house, or to open a store, perhaps a dress shop his wife could run. Though it was unlikely that she would ever see him again she didn’t want him to feel beholden to her because of some inordinate sum; she didn’t want him to have to think of her always in gratitude, which turns, too often, to resentment. In fact, he might refuse the gift, when the day did come. He could never care about something like money in the same way she could never care about it; she knew they were alike that way, but she wanted to do something for him, to show him a kindness, and as there was no time left for a deepening friendship, there was little else for her to give him but the furniture, and this. He placed the garbage bags into the elevator and rode down with her to the lobby. When they stepped out, three tenants were waiting for the car. On seeing Habi, they immediately peppered him with requests, June caught in the line of fire as they asked how soon he could unplug a drain, fix a dishwasher, call in the exterminator. While Habi patiently triaged their requests, June sidestepped through them, thinking that it would be best if she simply left right now, adieus never being easy for her. She was about to let herself out through the framed glass door when Habi called out somewhat sharply, “Mrs. Singer!” So she waited. When the tenants were satisfied they would be attended to and settled into the elevator, Habi turned to her and extended his hand. She shook it and let it go. “It is possible that I may not see you here again, Mrs. Singer?” “That’s right.” “You will be going to where, Mrs. Singer? Another city?” “Yes. But I’ll be traveling. To Europe. To Italy.” “I have not been to that country,” Habi said. “They say it is a beautiful place.” “I believe it is.” “You have not been there?” “Not yet.” “You will be there for a long time?” “I think so. Who knows. Maybe a very long time.” He nodded, with an uneasy smile, for she was smiling at him, but he wasn’t looking at her as he always did with his clear-eyed directness. He clutched the ring of keys at his side. And all at once June felt that his interest in her plans masked a grave disappointment. He said, “I am sorry that I could not help you more.” “You’ve always helped me plenty.” “I mean to say, during this difficult time.” “You shouldn’t feel that way,” she said. “And let’s be honest, not everything can be helped.” He assented with a low hum in his throat. She felt a similar thrum in her chest and couldn’t help but say: “I only wish you would let me help you. You must know how pleased I would be if you would accept something.” “Thank you, Mrs. Singer,” he said. “I am doing fine on my own.” “I know you are. But it wouldn’t hurt anyone. Especially me. You should remember that. I have more than I will ever need.” “I am fine, Mrs. Singer, thank you.” “All right. Goodbye, then, Habi. Good luck to you.” “Goodbye, Mrs. Singer.” They shook somewhat formally again until she surprised them both by pulling him in and hugging him. Habi momentarily stiffened but then he embraced her, too, his arms wiry and strong. He smelled faintly of machine oil and something spicy, like cinnamon, and though she breathed in deeply her heart suddenly sagged, as if the air was of great weight. She didn’t want to cry. A loud knock on the heavy glass door separated them. A man stood outside with a white plastic bag in each hand, raising the bags up for them to see. Habi opened the door and a warm autumn draft rushed in along with the sweet, garlicky scent of Chinese food, and while the man kept repeating “10-B, 10-B,” and Habi was buzzing the apartment, June slipped out the door and walked as fast as she could to the street to catch a stopped taxi, Habi’s voice trailing her, his call of Bon voyage like a somber, gentle siren. BON VOYAGE. For several days afterward June tossed about the notion, wondering if such a journey was truly possible for her. But why not? Certainly her affairs were in order: the apartment closing went smoothly, the last of the furniture was delivered to various dealers and to Habi, and the lease on her shop, renewed five years ago, was expiring in a week. The timing was miraculous. For the last month she had been steeling herself for the trip, consciously conserving her energy, and there was no reason it shouldn’t prove to be a good one, kindly to her person, even fulfilling. She had just poured water from the electric kettle for roasted rice tea when there was a knocking at the glasspaneled door of the shop. She had covered the door, as well as the inside of the front window, with white butcher paper, and so she could make out only a large looming shadow against the fading light of the early evening. No doubt it was the investigator-for-hire; no one else would assume there was anyone inside. He had called the shop that morning, saying he had detailed news of her son. For a long moment she sat still in the rickety oak swivel chair, a part of her dreading the creak that would betray her presence: this was her last chance to let it all just be. But then a stouter knock rattled the glass and she rose with what seemed an external propulsion, as if she had been fitted with invisible wings that knew nothing else but to beat. She opened the door to a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a dark suit and striped tie and gray overcoat and holding a bulky briefcase in one hand. He might have been a typical New York businessman were it not for the terrible roughness of the skin on his cheeks, the likely result of a childhood pox. The scarring was severe and, unfairly or not, it made him appear tensed, stricken. “Mrs. Singer? I’m Clines.” She let him into the poorly lit shop. He appeared even taller when he stepped inside, and without being conscious of it she placed herself between him and the door. He had long pale hands and long legs, which ended in narrow, boatlike black shoes. He looked around the rectangular room of the shop, and she wondered if he was calculating the odds of her ability to pay him for his services. So far she’d only sent him a check for five hundred dollars as a retainer, and it was quite clear the sum value of what was left in the near-empty shop wasn’t close to that figure: there was the oak desk chair with its rusty wheels and a chipped glass coffee table topped with prescription bottles that served as a nightstand for the twin-sized mattress and box spring placed on the floor next to it. There was a floor lamp on the other side of the bed and beside that a warped drop-leaf table with an electric hot plate on which the kettle was wheezing ever so softly as the heat of the coils died down. Her clothes were folded and simply stacked in two opened suitcases against the wall, which was unadorned except for the few picture hangers that had been left up and the more numerous holes made by former ones. She could have been a squatter in the store for all he knew, an unstable, destitute woman who had stolen in and invented a dire family scenario. She offered him the desk chair. June herself sat down on the low bed. “I want you to know, Mr. Clines, that I live here because it’s simplest for me, at this moment. This was
my place of business.” “I’m not worried,” he said, setting down his briefcase. He didn’t remove his light overcoat. “I know you’re more than solvent. I know that you’ve been liquidating your inventory. That you sold your apartment. I have to look into these things.” “I understand.” He nodded. “Now to why I’m here.” “Yes. Please.” “Before we start, I have to ask you whether you’re set on wanting to find this person.” “He’s my son,” she replied, disliking his use of “this person.” “But are you sure you want to find him?” he said again. “I have to ask. Sometimes people think they want something when in fact they don’t. We can stop now and all you’ll be responsible to me for is a few hours.” “That’s all right.” “You’re certain?” “Yes.” But June had in fact wondered, when she first contacted Clines, if she was indeed sure. It had been so long. The last time she had seen Nicholas in person was eight years ago, on the day of his high school graduation. He left that very night, for his own self-styled “grand tour.” June was naturally under the impression that he was going to call her regularly from wherever he was. As he stuffed the last clothes and books into his backpack that evening, Nicholas couldn’t tell her his itinerary because he said he didn’t know it himself. He would fly the red-eye to London, as that was the cheapest flight, but then cross the Channel as soon as he could and roam through Europe on his way to Italy, where he would stay, he told her, until his money ran out. What she never imagined was that his tour would be continuous, that it would turn out to be a perpetual series of departures that would never quite lead him back home. For the first year he sent monthly postcards, addressed, oddly, not to the apartment but to the shop, the briefest scrawls about what he was seeing, a job he’d just taken, sometimes the only indication of place being the postmark. He never left an address where she could write him back. The monthlies became bimonthlies, and then seasonal, and by the time they appeared twice a year she had somehow quelled most of the confusion and hurt and rage their arrival brought on in her heart. Eventually, at least during the waking hours, she rarely thought of him, and it was only in her dreams that she encountered him. He would appear to her as gaunt, even skinnier than he always was, wearing the same faded Led Zeppelin concert T-shirt and blue jeans he’d departed in, walking through the anonymous gray terminal of a train station or airport with nothing on his back. He wasn’t hungry or lonely or lost, and for a brief, calming moment before she awoke, June could rest easy in how self-sufficient he appeared, how perfectly needless (if not perfectly contented), which she knew, even inside her dream, was a mirror of her own difficult character. “Please show me what you have, Mr. Clines.” He opened his briefcase and removed a thick manila folder and handed it to her. Inside were faxes, copies of bureaucratic-looking documents with official seals on the letterheads, and then other handwritten or typed pages. Clines described what they were as she went through them; most of them were lists made out for local police, each page in a different language: Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian. The only one in English was from a prominent antiquities dealer in London, whose firm was well known to the New York trade; here again was a list of stolen items, a few small oil paintings, silverware, coins, jewelry, various objets d’art. As he spoke she scanned the pages for mention of her son, but the name Nicholas Han (Han was her family surname) did not appear. The names on the pages rang familiar to her, like people she’d never known but might have read about, or had heard of through others, names varied on themes and notations that she alone could collate and make sense of. There were Stephan Lombardia, Leo Stevens, Leo De Nicole, among others, aliases that clearly came from things she’d once said to him. To know the derivations was almost heartbreaking; Leo had been his pet guinea pig who’d died a week after they brought him home; Stephan was what she’d blurted when Nicholas was old enough to ask about his father, having just noticed the name in the paper that morning. Naturally, he had asked other questions about his father, where he was from, what he had looked like, how he had died, and to all these she’d answer with whatever vague, half-true description or reason she could come up with, careful that they could never lead to an actual man. “How can you be sure it’s my son who’s been doing this?” she said to Clines anyway, wishing none of it were true. There were no images on the faxes, including the cover from an Interpol office in Madrid, where a case agent, according to Clines, had just a few weeks earlier begun collecting and cross-referencing the materials. It was this file that he had received through a contact in Europe. “One of the pages there indicates that the box number you gave me in Rome was rented by Stephan DiNicola.” “Who?” “Stephan DiNicola. The person you last wired money to.” “Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s probably right.” She’d been increasingly forgetful of late, at least of the recent past. She had indeed wired money, having received a typed letter from Nicholas, admittedly brief but marked by a renewed warmth, a casual intimacy that seemed to suggest he would soon be coming home. At the end, in a postscript, he asked if she could wire a thousand dollars to an S. DiNicola, a friend who would hold the funds for him until he reached Rome. It was the most he had ever asked for. Yet she had practically run to the nearest Western Union office, sending two thousand instead. She expected a quick reply, or even a phone call, but for a month now there had been nothing. Nothing at all. “And are you obligated to tell any authorities what you know?” “I’m working for you, Mrs. Singer.” “And if at some point you weren’t?” “I’m always working for someone. And I don’t keep any records after I’m done.” She nodded. “What do you recommend we do?” Clines cleared his throat. “I advise that we find him as soon as possible, before anyone else does. I can get a ticket to Rome for next week. So far he’s committed just petty theft, if on a wide, serial scale. He hasn’t stolen anything big yet. He hasn’t physically assaulted anyone. If he did nothing else from this point on it’s unlikely Interpol or anyone else would pursue him.” “Then we’ll leave next week.” Clines shifted uncomfortably in the seat. He drew in his rough cheeks, eyeing her gravely. “I don’t generally work with my clients, Mrs. Singer. It’s not done.” “Then this will be different.” “He may have left Italy by now. He could have gone anywhere. To Eastern Europe, to Asia. I may have to move around very quickly.” “You’ll move around as quickly as you need. If for some reason I can’t keep up with you, I’ll follow when I can. I don’t want to be more than a half-day behind. It’s not possible any other way. I’m sorry.” Clines scratched at his face. It was a sight she had seen countless times in the shop from buyers and consigners: the tight set of the mouth, the stare cast askance, and finally the yielding to her position, which was what made her business consistently, if never tremendously, profitable. Her talent, her gift, was an instantly patent resolve, so that both longtime acquaintances and strangers like Clines encountered an equally intransigent edifice, this deep-rooted stone. David had simply gone around, rather than attempt to dislodge her; for example, he was uncomfortable with her closing the shop herself, particularly in wintertime, when it was dark by five, and in the end he had simply hired a man to watch her from across the street to make sure she wasn’t mugged. Had Nicholas done the same? Had he gone around her as well, but to an epic degree? He never appeared to be cowed by her, or demoralized. He always seemed happy enough. Aside from his scholarly ability, his teachers always told her in conferences that he was one of the more popular boys. But perhaps in the face of her, the sheer steep wall, he had receded like any child would, measure by imperceptible measure, until one day he must have seen the distance to be startling, and acceptable. “Whenever we do catch up with him,” Clines finally said, “you shouldn’t expect he’ll be pleased to see you.” “I won’t.” “Or that he’ll even agree to meet you. In fact, your being there might undo everything. There’s a reason you’ve hired a third party like me. It’s not only to find him. Sometimes you need an intermediary to settle someone down. Otherwise, he might just run faster.” “He’s not running away from me, Mr. Clines.” Clines nodded severely. �
��As long as you understand what we’re doing here.” “I do.” “Okay,” he said, though clearly he was not satisfied. “Now, about your son.” She brought out the pictures of him Clines had asked her for, as well as the postcards, so he could have examples of Nicholas’s handwriting. She actually didn’t have very many of either. Over the years she had kept the small handful of postcards but had long ago discarded his old schoolwork, including most of the art projects he had made, the paintings and sketchbooks, for which she felt sharply regretful now. But what was shocking was the pathetically small collection of photographs she had of Nicholas. Most of them were the official yearly school portraits, the others being the few snapshots she’d taken through the years. She was never one to take pictures, and owned only the least expensive pocket camera. As Clines looked through the meager stack, she felt compelled to explain herself, to tell him about all the other things she had been doing instead, but she kept silent. Not taking pictures of Nicholas was neither a conscious nor an unconscious choice; it signified nothing, revealing only the fact that she rarely had much time back then for anything but the most basic parenting. She was a young single mother with a fledging shop during a period in New York when the economy was dismal. She worked all the time, and rarely had the energy or inclination to cook or help him with his homework. She was always behind in doing the laundry and cleaning the apartment, which by his middle school years he did for them. For his efforts he got a very large allowance (for a preteen), which he was thrilled with, but they both knew he had to do it, as the basic chores would not otherwise get done. Toward his studies she took the attitude that since he was attending a good private school, on scholarship, his teachers would give him enough challenge and attention, and that as a single parent whose small business was their only means and lifeline she ought to trust their judgment and goodwill. Nicholas was naturally bright and was self-motivated enough, it seemed to June, that she could let him direct his own education. Little by little, though, he had chosen his own way in just about everything, things a boy probably shouldn’t have to be responsible for, like buying his own clothes and ordering takeout. He had even neatly painted his bedroom one weekend while she was away for an auction in Philadelphia, though he chose a too-dark purple that seemed to suck all the light out of their small apartment, leaving everything gothically dimmed and crepuscular. June didn’t worry that she might be somehow depriving him. Like other mothers and sons, they had plenty of good times, for example when she brought him along on a furniture-buying trip when he was eleven and they stopped in Colonial Williamsburg. They churned butter together and made a long swath of rainbow-striped fabric on an old-fashioned loom, and one of the photographs in Clines’s hands was of the two of them locked up in the stocks, both of them beaming with goofy grins, and that evening instead of driving home she decided to spend money she shouldn’t have to stay at a decent motel with an indoor pool, so Nicholas could enjoy a swim before they ate their takeout dinner of burgers and fries. The next spring his class took a trip to Washington, D.C., and he had made her cry when he brought home a large vegetable-and-dip platter with seven interlocking porcelain trays illustrated with famous monuments. He’d bought it with the spending money she had given him, rather than buying his own souvenirs or snacks. “But we don’t throw parties,” she said, her heart rent in her chest. “Now we can!” he said. She used the platter for his next few birthday parties, filling the trays with hard candies and chocolates and bubble gum. Every holiday saw it on their kitchen table. One by one the trays got broken, eventually only the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument remaining intact, and he finally told her he wouldn’t be upset if she threw the platter away, as it looked silly with most of its trays missing. Though she couldn’t recall now, at some point she did. “It seems your son liked the Roman times,” Clines said, flipping through some pictures from various Halloweens. “Yes, he always did,” she said. “But he was drawn to Italy in general.” Clines showed her what he was looking at: there were shots of Nicholas, second grade, costumed in a centurion’s outfit, complete with a plastic bronze breastplate and broom-top helmet. Another shot, a year older, had him as a gladiator, with a dirty, ripped shirt and a sword. Though there weren’t pictures, she remembered him dressing up in middle school as a senator, in toga and sandals, a laurel on his head, and then one year in a beret and the loose, swarthy garb of a nineteenth-century bohemian. She’d asked him who he was and he told her, quite proudly, that he was Camille Corot. In her shop there was a shelf of old art books and one was full of color plates of the artist’s Italian landscape paintings, which Nicholas often leafed through after school. He simply said he liked the soft colors of the houses and trees, so different from the city, but she wondered if it was because she had once falsely and stupidly suggested, after one of his random, out-of-the-blue queries, that she met and briefly lived with his father in Italy. “Where exactly?” Nicholas asked. He was perhaps ten at the time. “In the northern part.” “Show me,” he said, quickly retrieving a large world atlas she also had on the shelf, and which he was always poring over. He certainly knew all of the national capitals, and most of the major cities. “Here,” she said, her finger tapping on a spot, with conviction. “Here, near Mantova.” She found that concrete facts would put him off for a while, even as she knew that such loose improvisations could only lead to trouble. So why had she persisted? She had wanted to keep their world as small as possible, for them to be simply a mother and son, as well as to circumscribe time, make only the present the time that was real. But of course Nicholas, an imaginative and artistic young boy, had begun to reconstruct what he wanted from whatever she said, to build up his own mythologies, until an irresistible mystery had naturally emerged. During his senior year Nicholas told her that he would like to defer his college acceptance and go traveling, and at that point June had no objections, if that’s what he desired. He had savings from his summer jobs and, of course, his household chores, and she didn’t mind in the least offering him an extra thousand dollars so he could extend his travels. He said he didn’t need it, that he preferred to work odd jobs wherever he was so he could actually live in the place, but she ended up stuffing an envelope of cash into his hand before he left. He thanked and kissed her—he had never minded kissing her, even in front of his friends—and scooted into the taxicab and then, to her disappointment, sat back without rolling down the window as the car roared off. June did have worries, as any mother would, about his well-being, though her concern was less about the usual dangers of such a journey than it was about him. His sense of independence should have been reassuring to her, and yet she couldn’t help but wonder if it was a quality of his that was already too evolved. Perhaps he didn’t need to keep going it alone. As his teachers and others often said, he was well liked, and anyone could see he had plenty of friends, but she noticed that he never seemed interested in having a best friend, or even two or three buddies he would get together with regularly. He dated several girls in his junior and senior years, but June never would have said that he appeared to be in love with them, or even to be infatuated. He was enthusiastic with all of them, reliably available to anyone who called or invited him to a party, but June would have to say that he moved on too easily from one friend or set of friends to the next, sailing through the forest of them, from vine to vine like his hero Tarzan in the old movie series he loved to watch on Sunday mornings. Over the years of his travels, the postcards he sent to the shop grew briefer in their messages, the ones he wrote out in pen somehow as cold as typescript, and then even more impersonal in nature, given the messages: Doing fine. N. Okay here. N. Still kicking. N. Later he would simply type out his name, with no message at all. Once he’d neglected to do even that, compelling her to examine her own name and the address of the shop with the focus of a detective, trying to glean some significance in the press of the key strike, the freshness of the ink ribbon. The city or country postmark rarely matched the pictured site, and she thought he might well have bought
a variety pack at an airport kiosk the very first day and posted them back to her whenever the idea struck him that his mother might think he was no longer alive. In fact she had sometimes woken up in a panic, before and during the time she was living with David, certain that Nicholas was seriously injured, or ill, even dead, and David would calm her with an embrace and, at first, ask what was wrong, but she would never tell him. He knew she had a grown son, and, as with everything else in their quite happy but too brief union, he treated her with great solicitousness, never once pushing her to reveal the source of her distress, though he probably had guessed; David was a senior litigator at a prominent Midtown law firm and was as thorough in his work as anyone. Maybe it was because he knew how fragile his heart was from a previous heart attack, but once he came home in the evening he was wholly relieved to be with her, his weariness only softening his spirit, and the first thing he would do was sit her down from whatever she was cooking for them and ask her, like a good father might, what small pleasures had marked her day. Her night panics had, strangely, subsided after David died, as if being alone again had firmed the resolve of her psyche. But they had started again with a phone call last year; the call had roused her well before dawn, an Englishwoman’s voice on the other end, saying that her son was badly injured. June was still mostly asleep and terribly sick, perhaps out of her mind at the time with a third round of treatments, and she’d somehow blurted that she had no son and hung up. It was a monstrous thing to do, but the boy had not written her in more than a year and in her weakened state she couldn’t help but give herself over to the sharpest, cruelest impulse. She felt immediately sickened and so called the operator right away to see if she could dial the caller back, but it was no use. She waited for her phone to ring again but it stayed quiet and she eventually fell asleep and by the morning it seemed it had all been a wicked and terrible nightmare. A couple of weeks later she did in fact receive a postcard from him in the mail, saying that he was writing from a rural hospital because he had broken his leg, and quite badly, while riding a horse at a friend’s country estate. I’m going to be fine, he wrote. Maybe just a little crooked! He didn’t ask for money or anything else and she was happy that nothing had come of her hideous conduct on the phone, and the next time he wrote he didn’t mention the accident, or his leg, only how he was going to continue his travels, now indulging in a slightly more expansive tone. The postcards didn’t actually sound like him, but to her it was a signal that they’d turned a corner, that something new was beginning. He hadn’t asked her for money until recently, when suddenly he began to send postcards with requests for small sums to be wired to post offices in Amsterdam, then Frankfurt, then Nice. They were modest requests, $200 or $300, but that last one, for $1,000 (for which she sent $2,000 and mailed an enthusiastic note about his coming birthday), made her certain they would be reunited soon. She needed it to be soon. But then no word came. Each day afterward she awaited the arrival of the mailman, who soon enough knew what she was looking for and told her each day by the sorrowful hang of his eyes that he had nothing in his bag. It was through the mailman, in fact, that she got the idea of hiring Clines. The mailman was a chatty fellow with an oddly high voice who was a little off in the head, one of those reasonably functional people who was perhaps mildly mentally disabled. He didn’t hesitate in telling her how he’d hired an investigator to follow his wife, as he suspected she was cheating on him. Clines eventually discovered that she was having an affair, but with the mailman’s own brother. This is what Clines had meant when he asked if she truly wanted to find Nicholas: the truth is often more difficult than one might wish to believe. But June was rarely hesitant in her life, and certainly would not be now. She said to Clines, “So it’s good that you found Hector Brennan last week.” Clines nodded, clearing his throat. His face soured, as though he could not agree with her less. “Where does he live, exactly?” “In New Jersey. Fort Lee.” June’s pulse suddenly spiked with the notion; all these years she’d assumed, for no reason, that Hector was still somewhere in the North-west, or maybe in Canada or Mexico, or else gone back to his home-town somewhere in upstate New York. That he was so close, just across the George Washington Bridge, and oddly—or not so oddly—where many Korean immigrants were starting to settle and live, gave her a fresh bloom of optimism. “How long has he been there?” “Apparently, at least ten years,” Clines said. “If not more.” He took out another folder from his briefcase and handed it to her. It was all he had been able to gather on Hector, details of what he had already told her over the phone: a couple of faxed arrest sheets and a list of convictions that went back to soon after he left her, ranging widely from Washington to Texas to Pennsylvania and, in the last ten or so years, New Jersey. All were for minor offenses, possession of stolen goods, assault, resisting arrest. Typical drifter trouble, Clines told her. Hector apparently had no phone, no credit cards, no driver’s license or car registrations, no bank accounts or loans. It had been pure chance that Clines had found an address for him; there was a recent judgment against him in small-claims court in Bergen County, where he was sued by his landlord for back rent and property damage. Clines had gone to the address, and though Hector was not living there anymore, a neighbor mentioned that he frequented a certain bar down by the river. “What did he say?” “Not much,” Clines said. “He didn’t want to talk.” “But you tried to persuade him?” Clines nodded. “Well?” “He wasn’t interested, Mrs. Singer.” “What do you mean?” she said sharply, using the voice she reserved for intransigent antiques dealers, or customers whose checks had bounced. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Clines. You offered him money?” “I did.” “And he still didn’t agree?” “We didn’t get as far as that. Frankly, once he heard your name, he didn’t say another word. He refused to speak to me. His friends told me I should leave.” Her eyes were half blinded with anger and she was about to berate the man but then a square dose of dread cooled her heart. For of course she understood she was perhaps the last person in the world Hector Brennan would choose to see, much less aid. She said, however, “We’ll have to try to convince him again.” “If that’s what you wish,” Clines said, frowning as if the skies had begun to pelt him with rain. “I’ll arrange for a meeting when we return from Italy. If it happens that we’re away longer than I expect, I’ll have someone back here keep track of him.” “You misunderstand,” June said. “I want you to take me to him. He must come with us.” Clines’s brows knit sharply with alarm. “Your coming along is difficult enough. But I can’t have him as well. Especially when he isn’t interested. It can’t work this way.” “I’m sorry. You’ll have to manage.” “Some situations aren’t manageable. This is not some guided tour.” He considered her gravely. “Frankly, Mrs. Singer, you’re much too ill for any of this.” She paused for a moment, hoping that somehow he might not have noticed; it was the reason she had kept the lights of the shop dimmed. She said, “I’ll be fine.” “What do you have? Is it cancer?” “Listen,” she said, gripping his arm. His flesh was malleable through the thin wool of his blazer and she could feel the soft plait of his musculature; she realized that he was quite a bit older than she thought, maybe even in his sixties, and could now see from the lightness near his scalp that he colored his hair. But rather than dishearten her, his lack of sturdiness only focused her, made her want to gain a better hold on the moment. “Listen to me. I promise it won’t be a hardship for you. You’ll be able to do your job. You should know right now that it will be more than worth your time. And we won’t get in your way. Hector can stay back with me, if I’m not feeling well.” “This is a terrible, terrible mistake,” he said. “Especially if you want to find your son. I know you were briefly married to this man, but is he the boy’s father? Is that why you want him to come with us?” “It’s how it has to be,” she answered, explaining nothing else. A little later, she saw Clines out into the street. The early-evening air held a residual warmth from the glorious day but now she clicked with bodily triggers that she had not
known before, and they told her this endeavor had best be finished soon, before the autumn coolness descended for good. Would the cold bury her? She had given Clines another check to cover the next two weeks, and at triple his rate for taking on the extra difficulty. Naturally, she had planned to tell him that Hector was the father of her son. But in that moment she suddenly thought otherwise, deciding that it was a matter between Nicholas and Hector and no one else. That Nicholas was his son would likely mean little to Hector. But she was hopeful it would be meaningful to Nicholas, so that someday, when perhaps he felt differently, he would know that he was not alone in the world. At this point in her life all she could do was to make a temporary bridge. Let them stand on it, if they wished; let them test its span; let them decide to bolster its footings, or else let it tumble. She locked the door and shut off the lights save for the floor lamp beside the mattress. In the tiny bathroom in the back of the shop she brushed her teeth with lukewarm water. Any colder and it was like biting ice. She had to brush them very gently, as she remembered doing for Nicholas when he first got teeth, hers now feeling as if they were made of chalk. The next swipe might wear them right down to the nerve. She gargled and spit and then clipped up her hair to wash her face. It had grown back surprisingly quickly, if a shade grayer than before and not nearly as thick, and she had shocked her stylist by asking him to cut it in a boyish style. From afar, even across a room, she looked as youthful as ever, but up close the vigor was only in her eyes. Her face was more stilled than smooth, as though she had fought and fought and for the moment won but would never quite fight again. Now she lay down on the bed and turned off the light. She felt her body unburden itself, shutting down in stages like an industrial complex. She could help it along: she had pills her doctor had dispatched an intern to deliver to her, including a special black kit fitted with the little syringes and vials, which the intern said she might eventually like to try; she’d even showed June how to do it, filling a syringe and demonstrating on a pillow. June had indeed tried it once already, and liked it plenty. But she refused to give in to the pain. Not tonight, at least. She had worked herself hard the last week, and look how much was accomplished. They were on their way. She wanted to feel her corpus. Her toes and fingers curled up first and then her joints contracted and the blood that had coursed with determination all through her returned to her heart depleted, nearly conquered, making her chest rheumy with its flood. All down her spine there was a serial drone of relief, each segment loosing itself from the next. Only her belly couldn’t rest, unceasing now as always, ever grinding about the original tumor in its futile attempt to consume it. But of course she was the one being consumed, from the inside out, being transformed into something else entirely. It was almost laughably ironic, that the cancer should be in her stomach. That she would die with her belly full. Hadn’t she made that very pact a hundred times, a thousand times, when she was marching on the dismal road? Let me eat until I can’t, let me fill this infinite cave, and I’ll die right here. I’ll surrender. And thus here she was, never to feel anything like hunger again. But she might take it on now, in trade for her life, that clenching weight of famishment. There was no more perverse fancy June could have. She could easily remember the feeling. One afternoon long ago it had overcome her when she happened upon an American soldier. It was one of the final days of the war. She had been on her feet for three days and nights, having eaten nothing but chrysanthemum leaves and wild onions, sleeping a few anxious hours at most in a ruined, roofless cottage, and at the sight of the American down the road, a couple hundred meters away, she managed to leap down off the road and run into the gaseous knee-high muck of the rice fields where he wouldn’t bother to pursue her. She was certainly delirious and half mad with thirst and her vision had been hinging and unhinging for a couple of days and when she looked back to the road he had transformed into a scouting party and turned toward her. The lone man raised his hands to show he was unarmed but she saw him instead as the herald of death, finally come to embrace her. She slipped then and fell and her mouth filled up instantly with the mud and as she tried to raise herself from the muck it only drew her in. She could not die. She was utterly, miserably wretched and her body was acceding to the darkness but she would not now let anyone else have dominion over her. But then she could breathe; he’d plucked her up from the mud by her shirt, ripping a sleeve at the shoulder. She hit him in the chest and tried to scratch his eyes but in a flash he struck her back; when she came to she was lying in the shade of a rusted truck carcass that had been pushed off the road, some thirty meters from where they had been. The side of her face stung. But her shirt was still on, and her trousers were as well, and the American was sitting on the metal frame of the seats, torn out of the truck cab, chewing on a stalk of hay. She began to crawl away and was trying to get up on her feet when he rattled a yellow object in his hand; it was a pack of Chiclets. He tossed it at her feet and before she could open the end fold of the flat box, her mouth watered so fulsomely that she had to cough before she could stuff in all the pieces. Their hard shells cracked and then burst with sweetness. “Take it easy, sister,” he said. He told her his name, and asked hers. She knew English well enough that she could have answered him, but the deliciousness of the mass was so overwhelming she couldn’t help but swallow, the sticky strings of it catching at the back of her throat. She gagged, reaching into her mouth with her fingers, and then finally threw it up. When she picked up the shiny clot from the dirt to try to eat it again, he told her there was food where he was going. Other children, too. It was an orphanage, in fact, ten kilometers ahead. He had risen and stepped up onto the embanked road, his rucksack hitched over his shoulder. She could come with him if she liked. She waited until he was well down the road, a full fifty meters ahead of her, before she began to trail him. She was chewing the gum again, now gristly with dirt. He turned and saw that she was following him and beckoned her forward with a wave as he walked slowly in reverse. She slowed as well to keep her distance, stopping when he stopped. He shook his head and resumed his march. But then a sudden swirling wind kicked up dust into the dry, hot air, swathing him in an obscuring cloud, and for a moment her heart skipped wildly with the fear that he was gone. Or wholly imaginary. But the dust cleared and his form became visible again, and she quickened her stride to follow him.