The Oriental Wife (26 page)

He scowled at her, folding his arms across his chest. “Is more than capitalism. More significant. Is choice, freedom.”

And he reverted often to the subject of her father—his philanthropies, his plans for the liaison between the local hospital and Yale, his opinions on welfare reform and the missile defense—just as her father, on her visits to the hospital, went on inquiring respectfully about Mr. Eath’s views on the situation in Southeast Asia or the latest debate in the UN.

Each of them nodded with evident satisfaction at what she told him, as though gratified to find his high opinion of the other confirmed. At such moments she felt a flush of pride at having brought them together, however incorporeally, however much she seemed to be excluded from their communion. On the train to Connecticut she sometimes imagined telling her father that she was in love with Mr. Eath, but when she got there he was so stately, so grave and majestic, that she could not drag the conversation down to the level of her personal life. Or her stepmother was cracking jokes with the nurse, or one of the doctors had dropped by with an article from the
New England Journal of Medicine
. In the end, through all her visits, she never told him about the room on Sixty-fifth Street, the gray velvet couch, the rice and dried fish. She never said that three, four, five times now Mr. Eath had called out in his sleep as she lay next to him, the same indecipherable words over and over, a hoarse cry that gave way to a scream.

She would seize him by the shoulders and shake him, terror making her rougher than she meant to be, and then he
would turn to face the wall, lying rigid. A few minutes later, though, still without turning around, he might raise an objection to something she had said earlier in the evening: she was wrong about Fantastik, it had a very unpleasant odor. It wasn’t strictly true that Wit of Silesia, back in the Middle Ages, had prefigured the ideas of the German transcendentalists. He would sit up in bed and point out some crucial distinction she had overlooked; she would sit up also, fighting back tears, longing to touch him but not daring to. He would speak about Fichte for a while, or Bishop Berkeley, until he turned grumpy and declared himself too tired to think—sounding accusing, as though she had woken him from a sound slumber to argue philosophical points.

One night when he had lain back down, and she was drifting off to sleep herself, he said, “Your father is not an American. You must not expect him always to speak out loud how he feels.”

“I don’t expect it.”

“Yet you seem angry at him for speaking of homeless and Watergate. You are wanting confessions from him, like a sentimental film. You must arrive at forgiveness. He has suffered extremely.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know. You should wear a dress when you visit him.”

“Because of his suffering?”

“Because he will like it very much.”

And she had done it, she had worn the gray Quaker dress on her very next visit, with a gauzy green scarf, and her father had told her how nice she looked, though she could not bring herself to report that to Khim. There were almost as many things she kept from Khim as from her father: that when she
was alone in her apartment, for example, the thought of her father’s death grew so huge that terror drove her into the streets in the middle of the night, to stride about crazily among the crazies until it was light; that the thought of Never was splitting open her skull.

She’d been going to tell him; she might have tried the night her father phoned to report the cancer in his stump. But by that time Khim was gone.

I
t was exactly a week since he’d disappeared. She had gone to the office as usual that Monday morning, having left his apartment at noon on Sunday to meet an old graduate school classmate at the Met, a sharp-faced Wittgensteinian now teaching at a college in Minnesota. As they wandered through the Impressionist collection Phyllis talked about the perfidy of her department chairman, who had urged her to propose a new multidisciplinary major and then, when the others objected, sided with them against her. “And wouldn’t you know it, he teaches metaphysics. Metaphysicians never stick up for their principles. None of the analytical philosophers became Fascists; did you ever think of that?” She cocked her head at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife. “So now of course everyone’s against me, I’m going to have to fight like hell to get my contract renewed. The bastard. I could kill that bastard.”

Her voice, made loud by agitation, echoed back from the marble walls; several people scowled at them. Emma suggested they walk in the park instead, it was such a nice day, and after they had stopped and bought pretzels and ice cream she told Phyllis about Khim. “You make him sound like Heathcliff or something,” Phyllis said scornfully. Later they ate pizza on Bleecker Street and went to a Sibelius concert at NYU, for which Phyllis had complimentary tickets; when
they parted, neither of them mentioned anything about staying in touch. She’d been intending to imitate Phyllis for Khim in the office the next day.

He’d never kept strictly regular hours, but he always arrived by ten. At ten past, Mr. Seng phoned and was outraged at not finding Khim there. She phoned him at home, and when there was no answer decided he must be on his way. By eleven, when she dialed his number for the sixth time, letting the phone ring and ring, she was imagining him felled by a knife, a gun, bound with rope, paralyzed by a stroke. At 11:05 she was driven to the expedient of phoning Mr. Seng, and asking him whether they had talked the day before. But Mr. Seng hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday.

At 11:30, after letting the phone ring forty times, she concentrated on remembering—as though she were being interrogated by the police—if there had been anything unusual in his behavior the morning before. Had he seemed preoccupied, distressed, had he alluded to trouble of any kind? No, he had not. He had not even had a nightmare. He had made her tea, and they had listened to an Englishman on the radio who had written a book about the Second World War. He had told her how, when he first came to America, he had said
jolly good
, not knowing it was British.

At 11:52 she locked the office and headed for the subway. If he were simply ill, if he had unplugged the phone to get some sleep, then he would be angry at her for interfering, and angrier still because she would have to get the doorman, or the super, or the managing agent, to accompany her: he had never given her a key to his apartment. If they burst in to find him in his pajamas, throwing up, he would never forgive her. But surely if he had been ill, he would have phoned her.

When she got to his building, the doorman on duty was complaining about some unnamed person to a skinny, raddled-looking blonde with a dog under her arm; she waited until the woman had walked off before approaching him. This was the middle-aged man who had never acknowledged her in the months she had been going there—the younger ones said, hey, how ya doing, or winked at her as she went in and out. He let her deliver her whole prepared speech: how she worked for Mr. Eath, in 26D, who hadn’t shown up at the office that morning, or called in, who wasn’t answering his phone. “We’re very concerned about him,” she said primly, as though representing a whole army of Mr. Eath’s employees. “We wondered if someone could go check on him.”

“I know who you are,” he said when she was finished, and then, his pale eyes full of malice, “Mr. Eath left for the airport early this morning. I got him a cab.”

She backed away from him without a word; not until she was out on Sixty-fifth Street again, with the sun hot on her back, her jeans sticking to her legs—it was unseasonably warm, seventy-nine degrees and humid—did her brain begin catching up with what he had said. As she turned onto Broadway, she almost ran straight into a skinny boy wheeling a stroller, who yelled at her to watch where she was going. At Sixty-third Street a man on a scaffold shouted out, “How’d you like to sit on my face?” She kept going, kept going, noted green and red lights, stepped off curbs, crossed streets. Dimly, the sound of honking horns came through, and a man’s angry voice; she was standing in the middle of Columbus Circle; she couldn’t tell if the noises had been directed at her, but a middle-aged black man in a checked shirt took her
arm and asked her if she was all right. “I’m fine,” she said automatically.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“No, you ain’t,” he said firmly, and guided her across the street.

In a third-floor window on the corner of Fifty-eighth Street was a large, dirty-looking sign that said Irving Samson, DDS. She could go and pay Dr. Samson to drill her teeth, to silence the screaming in her head. She had not asked the doorman which airport Khim had gone to; it might be that he was only on his way to Rochester, to Montreal.

Or he might be fleeing the agents of the Khmer Rouge, he might have gone to her apartment and be waiting for her, so that she could hide him. She began hurrying, faster, faster, sweat pouring from her. On Fifty-fifth Street she thought she saw him, ducking into a building, in a light-colored suit; on Forty-eighth he was there again, with gleaming hair; on Thirty-third a man with his shoulders and a flat brown face. But none of them had his stony grace.

None of them looked back at her, either. It was the others who kept looking, the pale mad-eyed man in Times Square shouting about Jesus, a man with a cigar and a fat hairy neck in the garment district, a Puerto Rican messenger boy: she could feel their gazes on her face, her breasts, her legs, her hair, and moved faster and faster, skimming the pavement. It seemed to her she had never been the object of so much male attention as she was on that walk, with everything sticking to her: her hair and the crotch of her jeans and her green silk top—grown dark, she knew, with the sweat that dripped from her breasts.

On her final sprint, heading east, she stopped in front of the Strand, where a book on the CIA was propped open in the window, and wondered if Khim could be a spy. If he was, she didn’t know which side he was spying for. She still clung to the thought that he had sought refuge at her apartment; she clung to it even when she reached her building and he wasn’t there, there was nothing in her mailbox, nobody in the vestibule. She wished the bum were hanging around, so she could ask him if anybody had rung her bell, but he had moved outside with the hot weather.

When she could no longer bear looking out the window of her bedroom she headed for the office again, where the phone rang several times, and she grabbed the receiver only to hear someone asking for Mr. Eath. She took three messages, forcing herself to attend, to write the numbers down correctly, so that he would have nothing to blame her for. She went through the Rolodex; she read half a paragraph of a manuscript about the departure of the French from Phnom Penh; finally she went and searched through Khim’s entire desk, but there were only file folders, only contracts and printers’ invoices and pamphlets about educational reform, except for that piece of heavy paper in the top drawer.

On Thursday, after lying on the floor all night with the radio next to her ear, arguing with herself about whether she existed, listening to people talk about their money problems and love problems and problems sleeping—she had discovered that she needed sound at all times—a letter arrived, not from Khim but from the offices of a foundation in Virginia whose name she could not remember hearing before. They regretted to inform her that the activities of the press would be suspended for the time being; she would
be hearing from Mr. Eath himself shortly. In the meantime, they were prepared to give her a month’s salary, with thanks for her services and best wishes for her future. They regretted any inconvenience this termination of employment might cause.

That was the first paragraph. The second one asked her to be at the office at ten on Monday, to meet with a Mr. Johnston, who would appreciate it if she could give him a list of authors to be notified and manuscripts to be returned. At that time, she could also give Mr. Johnston her key to the office. Once she had done so, the check would be sent to her within ten days.

After she had read it several times she dialed Khim’s number again. Then she phoned Mr. Seng, whom she had not spoken to since Monday. She still thought he might know something she did not, that he might have some idea where Khim had gone. She had not considered that she would have to deal with Mr. Seng’s own distress. What would become of him, he wanted to know, what would become of his manuscript, how would he pay the rent on his apartment in Queens?

Surely the Belling Foundation of Virginia would compensate him, she said, she would give him their address, so he could write them, but he was inconsolable. They might pay for the current manuscript, but what of his future, what was he to do, how to pay his rent, he would starve to death, what sort of work would anyone give him? He had been a professor, she remembered, he was an expert on the dancing Shiva, on the cult of Bhadeshvara. You must try the museums, she said desperately, you must try the Asia Society, but he hardly seemed to hear. Nor could she always understand what he was
saying. It was true there were no very good job prospects for Mr. Seng, with his garbled English. He was sixty years old, he told her; he would wind up sweeping the floor in a grocery (at least she thought that was what he’d said). The small matter of a broken heart seemed minor in comparison, but she could not stop herself from asking him where he thought Khim might be. Immediately he broke into a fierce howl of outrage.

“No knowing, no caring. Couldn’t caring less. I be there ten Monday morning.”

On Saturday she went to her mother’s. It was raining out, which cooled the air and would also keep them indoors; she would be spared from making a circuit of the park with Louisa, who tended to slow down, even to stop entirely, for no apparent reason, at various points along the way, as though she had forgotten they were meant to be moving. And then the air itself would seem to hang motionless, closing in.

Mrs. Rafferty ushered her into the front parlor, lowering her voice conspiratorially as she told her that Louisa had hardly been out that week, a recurring theme. But for once she was glad of Mrs. Rafferty’s presence; it was easier, when Louisa had been summoned, to sit back and let Mrs. Rafferty’s words roll over her. All that was demanded of her was an occasional nod, a murmur here and there. Mrs. Rafferty, growing expansive, harked back to her trip to Switzerland with her husband in 1938: how pure the air had been, how spanking clean the houses, and the lovely sound of the bells echoing in the valleys.