A Person of Interest (9 page)

“No Gaither at all, sir. G-A-I-T-H-E-R?” she repeated. “No listing under that name at all, sir.”

He returned to his desk and sat gripping the upper right hand of the four curved brass drawer pulls. He was almost relieved, to have this fresh proof of Gaither’s duplicity. So Gaither had changed his name, or had an unlisted number, or had otherwise set up an obstacle, contrived to prod Lee with impunity. Lee should not be surprised; he was not. He found a clean legal pad in the drawer, uncapped his Montblanc, and started to write.

He discarded many vitriolic paragraphs before he was able to achieve the unruffled, arctic tone he desired: not falsely cordial and
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 51

snide like his correspondent, and not shrill and defensive as he knew his correspondent assumed he would be. He felt he was channeling Aileen: her cold, smooth exterior, which he’d never been able to puncture, to demolish and step through, no matter how he had tried.
Dear
Lewis,
he wrote,
as you yourself have pointed out, we are both old men
now. I have no reason to make fresh wounds, and neither should you.

Here Lee paused. Gaither wouldn’t know that Aileen was dead.

Was it Lee’s job to tell him? He paused for such a long time that he finished his beer and went downstairs for another. Even referring to Aileen in this letter would be a defilement. On the way back up, Lee stopped in the bathroom to urinate, closing his eyes, an arm braced on the wall, as the long stream left him. Drink was merely a river, that passed through him. And time, too, was a river, with no beginning or end, passing through him. He was only a vessel. This idea was enormously comforting, suddenly.

I write back not from interest in you, but from my interest in the
people who concern both of us. I think you know who I mean. I’d
like to talk with you directly. I’m not interested in playing a game.

The events of the last few days have brought many figures from out
of my past. I am not surprised or dismayed by your appearance.

Please send me your telephone number, immediately.

He pondered how to close for a long time before he simply signed,
LEE.

6.

CONFESSING HIS LOVE FOR AILEEN TO WHITEHEAD HAD

been the urge of a desperate moment, a valve opened on awful pressure, and the reckless desire, the product of that pressure, to precipitate crisis. But once the confession was made, he’d recoiled in terror.

He saw no reason that Whitehead, with his strange mix of brashness and social ineptitude, wouldn’t casually comment to Gaither, “I hear Lee loves your wife.” He imagined an alliance between Gaither and
52 S U S A N C H O I

Whitehead, based on hatred of him. But all three of them seemed to continue to be solitary. And the eerie, unhealthy limbo that pervades a campus during final exams, when students drift from one place to another in unwashed catatonia and the library stays open all night so its couches and floors become cluttered with splayed-open books and sprawled, unconscious bodies, extended itself into Lee’s summer life, once exams had ended. The hot weather descended on him, and he began to pass days in the same dirty slacks and the same sweat-stained white undershirt, but otherwise he hardly noticed the shift in season.

He slept at the height of the afternoon heat, as if ill, and then lay sleepless all night, hearing his Seiko tick on the nightstand. Sometimes he got dressed and went walking, at three or four in the morning. Sometimes he opened a soup can or book, but he had no recollection of eating or reading. He did drink: this might have been when the habit of drinking alone first came into his life. He didn’t do it to be picturesque but just because he was thirsty, first for cheap cans of beer, then for cheap jugs of wine. Never much more than that—but a good deal of that, enough that he threw out the bottles himself, rolled them into newspaper and then into a bag and slid them into some other house’s garbage on his nocturnal walks, so his old landlady wouldn’t notice.

In the end it wasn’t Whitehead who betrayed him, but Aileen. She had awoken one day in June without needing to vomit, had passed that day with the surreal sensation of the ground squarely under her feet—this after months of dizziness and nausea, as if she were a sea-sick sailor who’d finally gotten shore leave. She had grown so accustomed to the lurching of the world within its frame, to passing hours and even whole days in bed with her face to the wall, simply enduring the horrid sensation, that the vivid stillness of things now was almost too much for her. She dressed, stepped outside into a world that was stunning with color and light. It was June; her child at this point was fifteen weeks grown. She thought of negative numbers: now they were negative twenty-something. Fifteen weeks closer to zero.

Down the gangplank of her ship then, one step at a time. At the bottom she placed her hands on her hips and looked around herself keenly. In her absence everything had come up perfectly in her garden. Marigolds and snapdragons seething with bees, a dense carpet of phlox. Their backyard was almost no yard at all; it was the place where
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 53

the twin concrete tracks ended up at a dangerously sagging garage in which their landlord stored piles of old furniture, although Gaither wouldn’t have dared to park the car in that structure even if it was empty. He was afraid that the roof would fall in. Instead they kept the car parked outdoors, beside the bald patch of yard that spread out from the steps to the back door, and even if that small patch had appealed to Aileen as a garden, the nearness of the car dripping oil would have altered her plans. And so she’d spent much of the fall hacking beds where there had never been any, along the front of the house’s old porch, and then, when she’d created a rubble of clods, planting tulip bulbs for the spring and a mishmash of things for the summer, whatever had looked gaudy and durable on the seed packet. She had never been a gardener in her life; her full education had been a few words exchanged with the man who ran the neighborhood nursery.

But she had badly needed something when she and Gaither fi rst arrived in this town, and she’d found that her initial investment in the gardener’s tools—a narrow hand shovel and a heavy, sharp, three-fingered claw—had returned to her some small measure of the sense of self-control that since her marriage had otherwise left her. The hand shovel’s shape had reminded her of a codpiece, or at least what she thought of when she heard the word “codpiece.” The claw made her feel like a mad murderess, ripping innocent turf into shreds.

Looking more closely at the garden now, she could see the cas-trated stubs where Gaither had cut off the tulips’ stems and leaves with scissors once the fl owers had withered. He’d come into the bedroom to ask her, tenderly, one large palm on the small of her back, what he could do to keep her garden as perfect as she’d made it. She’d told him, “Just cut off whatever looks dead.” She wondered, without much real interest, whether tulip bulbs were supposed to be dug up and reused, and it was in that moment that she realized, in her brief contemplation of another full year in this house, the impossibility of it. The understanding was simply delivered to her, as if, like the garden and the summertime world, it had been patiently waiting for her to get up from her sickbed.

All this was linked to her child, and to her idea that its churning, inchoate potential had finally settled, begun to move in a single direction with quiet momentum. That it was also Gaither’s child in no way
54 S U S A N C H O I

confused her resolve, as if this distillation of Gaither within her had also distilled all her previously contrary feelings about him.

As she spoke, Lee saw clouds of dust whirling in space, asteroids coalescing, the hot lump of a planet accreting more mass. The unthinkable force of Creation. She was seated just inches from him on his room’s threadbare secondhand couch. Arm extended, he might have touched her, but a chasm lay there. Was it the chasm of the summer, now ended, in the duration of which she had metamorphosed? It was early September; he’d last seen her five months before. Twenty weeks, when he had been her lover for only twenty-three days. The smaller number should be canceled by the larger. She should not even register to him. He couldn’t look at her, at the distinct, compact slope of her belly beneath her sleeveless green dress. There was something unnervingly poignant about it, but also off-putting, almost offensive; he felt he had never seen her body before, so crude and exposing seemed the subtle convexity under her clothes.

If Aileen noticed his distress, the nervous darting-away of his gaze, she didn’t indicate it. That day, she went on, she had stood on her front step awash in the newness of everything, agog at it, as if she’d been blind. The dogwood had passed her by, she could see that; the last time she had looked, it had just started pushing out buds, and now the blooms were long gone and it was glossy with great oval leaves. Across the street she could see where their neighbor’s car had bumped off the driveway and onto the grass, a slight depression in the smooth coat of blades. She was still standing there, wasn’t tired and couldn’t imagine being tired; she wasn’t showing yet, and her body felt like a spear some proud native had thrown down, stuck erect in the earth, and at the same time she felt like a skyward eruption of energy. She could have uprooted the trees and devoured them. None of these thoughts turned her indoors again; her new superhumanity had no interest in cleaning or ironing or otherwise putting right Gaither’s hapless attempts at housekeeping while she’d lain in bed. She’d stood there, a proud spear, a fountain, and her loathed next-door neighbor, who had obviously seen her and put on shoes to take advantage of the rare occasion, came hastening out with her hands clasped theatrically. “Oh, Aileen!” she wailed. “Lewis told us your wonderful news. Oh, you darling,” and here the woman’s eyes actually filled with tears as she gazed on her
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 55

neighbor, who had previously only snubbed her. Now Aileen faced this woman serenely and let her keep talking. “Lewis told us you’d been so very sick, you poor thing. But it’s a good sign, you know. It means your body is doing its housekeeping, getting ready for baby. Out with the old, in with the new. And just look at you now! You look beautiful.” Aileen knew that this was true; she was suddenly more beautiful than she’d been in her life. “Out with the old,” she repeated, smiling.

“Won’t you come in, Mrs. Cahill? I’ve been sick for so long, and I’ve missed company. Come inside and I’ll make us some coffee.” For the rest of the summer, it had been this way: a remarkable serenity, patience, and even affection for all the aspects of life that she knew she was leaving, above all her husband. At that time she had not felt dishonest but attuned to a higher, or inner, tempo that proceeded apace. It advised her to no action, yet. Three weeks after the day she had coffee with Mrs. Cahill, she felt the baby’s first movement, like a sly finger trailing an inner wall, beckoning her.

The July Fourth holiday they had spent with one of Aileen’s older sisters in suburban Chicago, making the three-hour drive with Gaither’s knuckles bone white on the wheel. His supreme confidence as a driver, which was one of the things about him she had once found attractive, had been shattered by the awesome new presence of his unborn fi rst child. Now Gaither rode the brake, making the car stutter, and swerved away from imagined dangers. If Aileen hadn’t emerged like the phoe-nix from her morning sickness, Gaither’s driving would have made her throw up. She still found it unbearable, but he had stiffened with righteous horror when she’d offered to drive. “You can’t
drive
,” he had said. “The steering wheel pressing into your stomach!” Since their marriage the summer before, Gaither had not spoken to or seen his parents. He wrote them regular letters, a single neatly penned sheet he composed at the kitchen table, the contents of which Aileen grasped easily as she passed from the sink to the stove.
Dear
Mother and Dad, the weather here continues to be quite a challenge for
Aileen and me. A snow shovel and snow tires are two of our more recent
acquisitions.
As far as Aileen could gather, it took two or three of these letters to garner a response, very often a seasonal card merely signed beneath the preprinted message. The rare notes, as carefully anodyne as the letters to which they responded, Gaither read to Aileen as if they
56 S U S A N C H O I

contained riveting news.
Dear Lewis, thank you for your letter. Dad’s
health continues to be very good, and he is planning a rearrangement of
the trees in the yard. He would like to put in a magnolia.
Gaither’s parents had failed to appear at the very small civil wedding she and Gaither had held, after not so much saying they’d come as not saying they wouldn’t, and since then this cowardly, or perhaps she ought to think it was benevolent, policy of avoiding conflict by avoiding acknowledgment of the marriage had been as scrupulously pursued by the senior Gaithers as if it were a pillar of their religious practice.

Gaither as scrupulously mentioned Aileen in each one of his letters, and it was probably only to do this that he wrote the letters at all, as he’d had little else to report.

But now that she was pregnant, the little dumb show, Gaither’s penning of his letters in the kitchen where she would observe him and his cheerful reading of the paltry responses, had come to an end. It was true that she had mostly been in bed, and that Gaither had gotten the mail from the box when he came home from school, and heated chicken broth in the kitchen, and washed and dried the bowls afterward. But she could easily see him relocating his correspondence from the kitchen to the lamp table next to their bed, perhaps directing a su-perfluous inquiry to her prone form: “Aileen, what was the name of those beautiful flowers you planted? I’d like to tell Mother.” She could easily see him having added the most recent card from his mother to the tray that he brought her each evening and expressively reading his mother’s few words while she struggled to eat. But Gaither had done neither. She knew that for him estrangement from his parents was painful, both for how unwanted a condition it was for himself and for the distress he assumed it caused her. She couldn’t disabuse him of this latter notion without insulting him further, but the truth was that his estrangement from his parents did not upset her at all. It was easier for her than she imagined the opposite would have been: their pious embrace of her as a daughter, correspondence duties of her own, treks to their sterile home on Christian holidays. All of it intensifying unimaginably after a child was born. Gaither had once compared her, with what had seemed to be uneasy admiration, to Athena sprung unsentimentally from Zeus’s thigh, or maybe out of his head: neither of them could exactly remember the story. But Gaither’s meaning had
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 57