Native Speaker (6 page)

“Take one, my friend,” he squeaked to me. “We shouldn't submit to the traditional doctor-patient relationship. It's not our psychology, anyway. Let them have their problems. We can share our own.”

Hoagland said, “The doctor was veal, Harry, one huge medallion of sweet-ass veal. You were the wolf. You fed him cream, you fed him honey. You were holding the knife.”

“No more knives,” I said. “I swear, I'll bolt.”

“Not a one,” he assured me, his gaze and body now forward and bearing down on me. “This thing with Kwang should be quick and clean. This is a hands-off deal. I see you with his office for three, four weeks tops. All I want is that you do this right again, like I know you can.”

He rose from his chair and stepped to the coffeemaker, pouring out a silty cup for me, and then one for himself.

He went on, different again, his voice calmer. “Remember how I taught you. Just stay in the background. Be unapparent and flat. Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will think twice about who you are. The key is to make them think just once. No more, no less. I can see that this thing with your wife keeps you self-occupied. That's fucking great! Really! It happens. It's life. I just want you to write out a good legend for this and stick with it. When Jack had that awful thing with Sophie he decided to leave for a while. That's not the best course for you, in my opinion. I think you need to stay close.”

“Jack's saying different,” I told him.

Hoagland guffawed. “Don't listen to him. Jack's a romantic. What he means is protect what you've got. My view—your wife will leave you and come back and leave you for the rest of your natural life. It will go on and on. It's the bald-assed truth. It's nothing against her or you. Honest. I ought to know. Ask the last three generations of Hoaglands. We know the secret. Marriage is a traveling circus. We're the performers. Some of us, unfortunately, are more like freak acts. Maybe she likes certain towns, maybe you prefer others. She'll drop off somewhere every once in a while and stay for a bit. So what. She'll bore, she'll catch up, she'll be back.”

I didn't answer him. I just kept thinking of his wife, Martha, nearly-poignant-if-not-for-her-feeble-will Martha, forever pale and small-shouldered and smiling, pulling uncomfortably at the strap of her sequined body suit, her tightrope fifty feet up in the air; Hoagland was down on the ground, in a cage, wielding a chair in one hand, a bullwhip in the other. Where's the beast? Crack. So it followed—I must be the Wolf-Boy. Lelia, the Tattooed Lady. Behold, their impossible love. We shared a wall between our sideshow tents, venally baring ourselves to the curious and craven. This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn't: a mutual spectacle of imagination.

“Harry,” he said, “just do me one favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Promise me this—no, wait. I don't need promises.”

“Dennis.”

“Okay,” he said, righting himself. He stole a sip of his coffee. “Don't mess your pants on this one. I mean it. Don't fuck this up. It won't be appreciated.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Back off, son. And give me a break. It's just good clean advice. Your scratch with Luzan cost us, and not just money. People are talking.”

“It's good Luzan's not.”

“Come on! I just read the notices in the paper,” he said. He collected himself. “You ought to as well. That's all. People drown, politically involved fat analysts included. A bad thing can happen in the world. We do what we're paid for and then who can tell what it means? I flush a big one down the dumper and next week some kid in Costa Rica gets a rash. What the fuck am I supposed to do? And then everyone asks, who's to blame?”

“Go to hell,” I said to him, getting up to leave.

“Don't be sore,” he replied. “If it makes you feel any better, I probably will. You won't—you'll get to heaven, no problem. I just thought you knew the facts.”

“I know enough.”

He said, “Then you know that no matter how smart you are, no one is smart enough to see the whole world. There's always a picture too big to see. No one is safe, Harry, not in some fucking pleasure boat in the Caribbean, not even in lovely Long Island or Queens. There's no real evil in the world. It's just the world. Full of people like us. Your immigrant mother and father taught you that, I hope. Mine did. My pop owned three swell pubs but he still died broke and drunk. The Jews squeezed him first, then the wops, then people like you. Am I sore? No way. It doesn't matter how much you have. You can own every fucking Laundromat or falafel cart in New York, but someone is always bigger than you. If they want, they'll shut you up. They'll bring you down.”

“Fuck you, Dennis,” I said, closing his glass door on him.

But I could still hear him as I walked away, the hard twang of his answer, almost joyous,
When and where, Harry, when and where
.

M
y father would not have believed in the possibility of sub-rosa vocations. He would have scoffed at the notion. He knew nothing of the mystical and neurotic. It wasn't part of his makeup. He would have thought Hoagland was typically American, crazy, self-indulgent, too rich in time and money. For him, the world—and by that I must mean this very land, his chosen nation—operated on a determined set of procedures, certain rules of engagement. These were the inalienable rights of the immigrant.

I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church. You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.

My low master. He died a year and a half after Mitt did. Massive global stroke. It was the third one that finally killed him. Lelia and I were going up on the weekends to help—it was practically the only thing we were doing together. We had retained a nurse to be there during the week.

He died during the night. In the morning I went to wake him and his jaw was locked open, his teeth bared, cursing the end to its face. He was still gripping the knob of the brass bedpost, which he had bent at the joint all the way down to four o'clock. He was going to jerk the whole house over his head. Gritty mule. I thought he was never going to die. Even after the first stroke, when he had trouble walking and urinating and brushing his teeth, I would see him as a kind of aging soldier of this life, a squat, stocky-torsoed warrior, bitter, never self-pitying, fearful, stubborn, world-fucking heroic.

He hated when I helped him, especially in the bathroom. I remember how we used to shower together when I was young, how he would scrub my head so hard I thought he wanted my scalp, how he would rub his wide thumb against the skin of my forearms until the dirt would magically appear in tiny black rolls, how he would growl and hoot beneath the streaming water, how the dark hair between his legs would get soapy and white and make his genitals look like a soiled and drunken Santa Claus.

Now, when he needed cleaning after the strokes, he would let Lelia bathe him, let her shampoo the coarse hair of his dense unmagical head, wash his blue prick, but only if I were around. He said (my jaundiced translation of his Korean) that he didn't want me becoming
an anxious boy
, as if he knew all of my panic buttons, that craphound, inveterate sucker-puncher, that damned machine.

The second stroke, just a week before the last one, took away his ability to move or speak. He sat up in bed with those worn black eyes and had to listen to me talk. I don't think he ever heard so much from my mouth. I talked straight through the night, and he silently took my confessions, maledictions, as though he were some font of blessing at which I might leave a final belated tithe. I spoke at him, this propped-up father figure, half-intending an emotional torture. I ticked through the whole long register of my disaffections, hit all the ready categories. In truth, Lelia's own eventual list was probably just karmic justice for what I made him endure those final nights, which was my berating him for the way he had conducted his life with my mother, and then his housekeeper, and his businesses and beliefs, to speak once and for all the less than holy versions of who he was.

I thought he would be an easy mark, being stiff, paralyzed, but of course the agony was mine. He was unmovable. I thought, too, that he was mocking me with his mouth, which lay slack, agape. Nothing I said seemed to penetrate him. But then what was my speech? He had raised me in a foreign land, put me through college, witnessed my marriage for my long-buried mother, even left me enough money that I could do the same for my children without the expense of his kind of struggle; his duties, uncomplex, were by all accounts complete. And the single-minded determination that had propelled him through twenty-five years of green-grocering in a famous ghetto of America would serve him a few last days, and through any of my meager execrations.

* * *

I thought his life was all about money. He drew much energy and pride from his ability to make it almost at will. He was some kind of human annuity. He had no real cleverness or secrets for good business; he simply refused to fail, leaving absolutely nothing to luck or chance or someone else. Of course, in his personal lore he would have said that he started with $200 in his pocket and a wife and baby and just a few words of English. Knowing what every native loves to hear, he would have offered the classic immigrant story, casting himself as the heroic newcomer, self-sufficient, resourceful.

The truth, though, is that my father got his first infusion of capital from a
ggeh
, a Korean “money club” in which members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis. Each week you gave the specified amount; and then one week in the cycle, all the money was yours.

His first
ggeh
was formed from a couple dozen storekeepers who knew each other through a fledgling Korean American business association. In those early days he would take me to their meetings down in the city, a third-floor office in midtown, 32nd Street between Fifth and Broadway, where the first few Korean businesses opened in Manhattan in the mid-1960s. On the block then were just one grocery, two small restaurants, a custom tailor, and a bar. At the meetings the men would be smoking, talking loudly, almost shouting their opinions. There were arguments but only a few, mostly it was just all the hope and excitement. I remember my father as the funny one, he'd make them all laugh with an old Korean joke or his impressions of Americans who came into his store, doing their stiff nasal tone, their petty annoyances and complaints.

In the summers we'd all get together, these men and their families, drive up to Westchester to some park in Mount Kisco or Rye. In the high heat the men would set up cones and play a match of soccer, and even then I couldn't believe how hard they tried and how competitive they were, my father especially, who wasn't so skilled as ferocious, especially on defense. He'd tackle his good friend Mr. Oh so hard that I thought a fight might start, but then Mr. Oh was gentle, and quick on his feet, and he'd pull up my father and just keep working to the goal.

Sometimes they would group up and play a team of Hispanic men who were also picnicking with their families. Once, they even played some black men, though my father pointed out to us in the car home that they were
African
blacks. Somehow there were rarely white people in the park, never groups of their families, just young couples, if anything. After some iced barley tea and a quick snack my father and his friends would set up a volleyball net and start all over again. The mothers and us younger ones would sit and watch, the older kids playing their own games, and when the athletics were done the mothers would set up the food and grill the ribs and the meat, and we'd eat and run and play until dark. And only when my father dumped the water from the cooler was it the final sign that we would go home.

I know over the years my father and his friends got together less and less. Certainly, after my mother died, he didn't seem to want to go to the gatherings anymore. But it wasn't just him. They all got busier and wealthier and lived farther and farther apart. Like us, their families moved to big houses with big yards to tend on weekends, they owned fancy cars that needed washing and waxing. They joined their own neighborhood pool and tennis clubs and were making drinking friends with Americans. Some of them, too, were already dead, like Mr. Oh, who had a heart attack after being held up at his store in Hell's Kitchen. And in the end my father no longer belonged to any
ggeh
, he complained about all the disgraceful troubles that were now cropping up, people not paying on time or leaving too soon after their turn getting the money. In America, he said, it's even hard to stay Korean.

I wonder if my father, if given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he had just one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends who they met at church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.

* * *

I know he never felt fully comfortable in his fine house in Ardsley. Though he was sometimes forward and forceful with some of his neighbors, he mostly operated as if the town were just barely tolerating our presence. The only time he'd come out in public was because of me. He would steal late and unnoticed into the gym where I was playing kiddie basketball and stand by the far side of the bleachers with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, tapping it nervously against his thigh as he watched the action, craning to see me shoot the ball but never shouting or urging like the other fathers and mothers did.

My mother, too, was even worse, and she would gladly ruin a birthday cake rather than bearing the tiniest of shames in asking her next-door neighbor and friend for the needed egg she'd run out of, the child's pinch of baking powder.

I remember thinking of her,
What's she afraid of
, what could be so bad that we had to be that careful of what people thought of us, as if we ought to mince delicately about in pained feet through our immaculate neighborhood, we silent partners of the bordering WASPs and Jews, never rubbing them except with a smile, as if everything with us were always all right, in our great sham of propriety, as if nothing could touch us or wreak anger or sadness upon us. That we believed in anything American, in impressing Americans, in making money, polishing apples in the dead of night, perfectly pressed pants, perfect credit, being perfect, shooting black people, watching our stores and offices burn down to the ground.

Then, inevitably, if I asked hard questions of myself, of the one who should know, what might I come up with?

What belief did I ever hold in my father, whose daily life I so often ridiculed and looked upon with such abject shame? The summer before I started high school he made me go with him to one of the new stores on Sunday afternoons to help restock the shelves and the bins. I hated going. My friends—suddenly including some girls—were always playing tennis or going to the pool club then. I never gave the reason why I always declined, and they eventually stopped asking. Later I found out from one of them, my first girlfriend, that they simply thought I was religious. When I was working for him I wore a white apron over my slacks and dress shirt and tie. The store was on Madison Avenue in the Eighties and my father made all the employees dress up for the blue-haired matrons, and the fancy dogs, and the sensible young mothers pushing antique velvet-draped prams, and their most quiet of infants, and the banker fathers brooding about annoyed and aloof and humorless.

My father, thinking that it might be good for business, urged me to show them how well I spoke English, to make a display of it, to casually recite “some Shakespeare words.”

I, his princely Hal. Instead, and only in part to spite him, I grunted my best Korean to the other men. I saw that if I just kept speaking the language of our work the customers didn't seem to see me. I wasn't there. They didn't look at me. I was a comely shadow who didn't threaten them. I could even catch a rich old woman whose tight strand of pearls pinched in the sags of her neck whispering to her friend right behind me, “Oriental Jews.”

I never retaliated the way I felt I could or said anything smart, like, “Does madam need help?” I kept on stacking the hothouse tomatoes and Bosc pears. That same woman came in the store every day; once, I saw her take a small bite of an apple and then put it back with its copper-mouthed wound facing down. I started over to her not knowing what I might say when my father intercepted me and said smiling in Korean, as if he were complimenting me, “She's a steady customer.” He nudged me back to my station. I had to wait until she left to replace the ruined apple with a fresh one.

Mostly, though, I threw all my frustration into building those perfect, truncated pyramids of fruit. The other two workers seemed to have even more bottled up inside them, their worries of money and family. They marched through the work of the store as if they wanted to deplete themselves of every last bit of energy. Every means and source of struggle. They peeled and sorted and bunched and sprayed and cleaned and stacked and shelved and swept; my father put them to anything for which they didn't have to speak. They both had college degrees and knew no one in the country and spoke little English. The men, whom I knew as Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, were both recent immigrants in their thirties with wives and young children. They worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals and all the fruit and vegetables we couldn't or wouldn't sell; it was the typical arrangement. My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own.

“This is way I learn business, this is way they learn business.”

And although I knew he gave them a $100 bonus every now and then I never let on that I felt he was anything but cruel to his workers. I still imagine Mr. Kim's and Mr. Yoon's children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought home to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, these exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyful fruit now too soft and too sweet for those who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans.