A Person of Interest (11 page)

“Because I’m a whore.” All at once his chair tumbled beneath him, and he’d crossed the short distance and slapped her hard into the wall.

Good,
she thought.
Good, it’s real.

Gaither had easily guessed it was Lee. Lee’s strange, abrupt break from their friendship, the trumped-up insults about Gaither’s religion. If not for the baby, Aileen thought, Gaither would have gone on beating her within an inch of her life. There was that much compressed anger, and knowledge, in him. All the gleamingly obvious facets of his wife’s betrayal, which until then he’d kept airborne and separate, the same juggling act he’d applied to his parents, his faith, and his science, now fell like knives on a target. From here the story became cursory: everything that Lee felt concerned him, the disposition of actual persons in the physical world, Aileen glossed without interest. She was a scientist, too: obsessively interested in her own narrow field, the evolution and efflorescence of her will to leave Gaither. The rest was secondary, or inevitable, or fell outside her purview. Gaither had gone to stay somewhere, she didn’t know where, until she had packed and been picked up by Nora. She would live with Nora until things were settled.

“Things”: Lee didn’t understand precisely what this meant, though he could see that she’d brought herself to him, meant to give herself to him, this fierce and reckless young woman who still feared being left on her own. Or who’d never been on her own in her life and so perhaps didn’t realize that it was an option.

“She’s waiting in the car for me now,” Aileen said, and Lee realized with a shock that cogs and gears were in motion, that a machine for disposing of fates was performing its work, and he was somehow inside it.

64 S U S A N C H O I

“You told Gaither without warning me first,” he said, fi nally putting the thought into words that sounded frigid, effi cient, which was not how he felt.

“He had to find out eventually! I didn’t have time to warn you—”

“You should have warned me first,” Lee repeated. “This doesn’t just concern you.”

She looked at him unflinchingly, but he could see she was frightened. “You dump your conscience, and then you get out of town!” Lee’s arm had flown out from his side; a lamp crashed to the fl oor.

“Why!” he shouted. “And now you leave, and we stay—”

“Why?” Aileen repeated. “What do you mean, why? I’ve told you why—”

“He’s my colleague.”

“You didn’t seem to care about that when you came on to me.” Belatedly, an urgent thumping arose from downstairs, chastisement for the lamp. The thought that they’d been overheard drained their anger from the room instantly, leaving them only cold and bewildered, as they stared at each other.

“What about the baby? His baby,” Lee said finally, his throat feeling gummed with mucus.

“My baby,” Aileen corrected, in a preliminary tone, but then she didn’t say anything else. In the moment that followed, a moment of frankly terrified silence, Lee felt close to her for the first time since she had appeared at his door. Like him she was afraid, overwhelmed, and incapable; they stood side by side in the face of a rushing disaster that neither of them would know how to avert. He was stunned by pity; he wanted to fold this idea of her in his arms. But the actual woman beside him he wasn’t able to touch.

She crossed the distance herself, tipping her face forward onto his shoulder. Then she remained very still, as if she were resting against a bench or a tree and didn’t expect any gesture or word in return. Lee’s hand fluttered tentatively; it settled on the back of her head. They held this pose, and Lee saw every object in his spare, squalid bachelor’s apartment without turning his head and remembered the number of times he had daydreamed of pinioning her to this couch, the pale S of her body, her sharp gasps as he harshly erased her. Those visions, which had agonized him all the weeks of this summer, seemed like insane
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 65

desecrations of the distant human lightly propped on him now. Three points of contact: her forehead on his shoulder, his palm on her crown, his left knee and her right pressed together. Almost all of this, bone against bone. Her swollen front, mercifully out of range of his vision, for the moment banished from the room. He only felt heat rising out of her hair. The summer heat in the room drowned out everything else. After some time, he did not know how long, they heard a distant car horn.

“I’ve kept Nora waiting too long,” she said into his shoulder, and slowly sat up.

They stood at his desk and exchanged their addresses—Lee did not have a phone—he would have to call her from the pay phone booths at the library. And all too quickly she was back in the doorway, at the top of the improvised stairs to his floor of the house, with the intricate globe of the massive oak tree as her backdrop, as if she were floating twelve feet off the ground; this was how he had seen her when he’d opened the door to her knock, rising uncomprehendingly off his couch where he’d lain webbed in sweat-stained T-shirt, unwashed slacks, sour wine from the night before staining his tongue, dreams of her. Then he’d opened the door and she’d been there, clean and straight in her flared summer dress.

They kissed very briefly and chastely. The kiss seemed not empty but provisional, its meaning not yet clear. Then Lee stood inside the doorway and listened as she carefully went down the stairs. A beat later, the sound of a car driving off.

In the two weeks that remained before the start of the term, he had a haircut, bought a used summer suit, and then went to his adviser and lobbied aggressively for a semester off from classwork to pursue independent research. By every measure he was months too late to make such a request, but he persisted. He was a coward, he knew. “I’d like to take on the Dieckmann problem,” he explained. “I’ve had an insight. I think I can solve it.” Of course, this was a lie.

“Mr. Gaither has also been working on it,” his adviser remarked.

Lee absorbed this expressionlessly.

“Well, may the best mathematician prevail,” his adviser said finally, signing the forms.

PART II

7.

LEE SPENT SPRING BREAK IMITATING SERENE SOLITUDE,
mounting the stairs to his desk every morning and not going back down except for his meals, but finally accomplishing nothing, because his mind couldn’t stop pawing over the letter from Gaither. The mailbox at the end of his driveway suggested a sequel, and so he didn’t set foot out of doors. His desk had conspired in his shamefully feeble reply, and so he sat glaring angrily at it without reading or writing.

The telephone commemorated his failure to get Gaither’s address from the operator, and so day after day he did not even call back Fasano, the pleasure of whose conversation was coming to seem like an unde-served gift. But on the last Friday before spring break was over—

nineteen days after the bomb—Lee had a respectably studious late afternoon and then sat with a beer while he watched the dusk deepening outside his kitchen. He was actually watching himself, for the more the sky faded, the more sharply emerged his reflection in the sliding glass door, a full-color man in his full-color home, layered over the looming black cones of the five Douglas firs in his yard. The fi ve firs, planted along the property line between his backyard and that of his neighbor at what had once been quite wide intervals, had now grown so tremendously upward and outward that they formed a thick wall that blocked even his neighbor’s house lights. Lee and the neighbor had divided the cost of the trees almost ten years ago, when they’d both bought their homes, and it was one of the very few schemes in
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his life that had actually worked. He felt a privacy and security in the rear-facing rooms of his house, where he left the curtains open for the sake of his plants, that he never felt in the front rooms or even upstairs—from those vantages he was always aware of his neighbors, power-walking past his neglected front lawn with censure or perhaps even sadness for him in their eyes.

Now night had fallen completely; above the five great serrations of his Douglas-fir wall, he could see the pure blazing pinpoints of stars, and in contrast to them diffuse lamplight had spilled out his windows to spread raggedly over the grass. His stove’s clock read 6:43; that meant 4:43 where Fasano was, in California. Lee was feeling authentically tranquil for the first time in days, perhaps weeks, and this pleasure in being alone made him want conversation.

Fasano answered on the second ring—“Fa
sa
no,” he said, nasally—

and Lee was certain that Fasano’s not answering on the first ring had been an act of self-restraint. Fasano, too, must spend his days and nights alone. When his phone rang, like Lee he forced himself to stay his hand until it rang again. When his office door opened, he forced himself not to leap to his feet.

“Frank?” Lee said, his voice sounding reluctant to him. But Fasano recognized him at once.

“Lee! Jesus Christ, I was starting to think the goddamn psycho
had
gotten you. How in the hell are you? Start with bodily harm, we’ll get to intangibles later. Still got all your fingers and toes?”

“Yes, yes,” Lee said, laughing.

“Thank God for life’s little pleasures. And what about the other guy?” Now Fasano’s voice changed. “He gonna make it?”

“They think so,” Lee heard himself saying, realizing as he did that he actually had no idea how Hendley was doing.

“Thank God,” Fasano repeated, but for all the joyous garrulity that had just been their reunion, they fell awkwardly silent. Lee was afraid that Fasano could sense Lee’s neglect of his injured colleague. Lee could almost imagine Fasano, at the other end of the line, still in daylight, subsiding in disappointment.

But the awkward silence didn’t last. It was soon over, and then Lee had the thought that he and Fasano had counted it out together,
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each instinctively holding his breath for a requisite number of beats, as if they were veterans of the same army and possessed all the same rituals.

When Fasano started speaking again, he was audibly relieved to be past the formalities, and both Lee and Fasano were delighted, almost giddy, to be conversing again. Fasano, too, had remarried and redi-vorced; Fasano, too, invoked Zeno’s paradox when explaining the never-quite-complete state of his book. Fasano, as Lee had guessed, lived alone now, was resisting retirement—“You hate teaching your whole lousy career, you just want to be alone with your books, and when you’re finally old enough to cash in on the Double-A-Cref, you discover if you don’t have a classroom, you die. Left alone with your books—it’s like death”—but all the same was appalled by the state of his students. Couldn’t read! Couldn’t add! And why go on—but there were one or two great ones, two precisely, in fact, they were both foreign students, of course, and each was worth all the rest put together.

“I tell them, ‘When you go back to your countries, you’re going to be, what? President? Chief justice? Head of whatever research institution you have over there? How’re you going to choose?’ And they’re both like,
‘What?
Go back to our countries, no way!’ ”

“They want to stay here, of course,” Lee put in, taking a sip of his beer. “What opportunity do they have where they come from?”

“Not so much, I suppose. They’re both black Africans. One’s from Ghana and one’s from Nigeria. But they remind me of you, Lee.

So bright they seem radioactive. Maybe they’re Kryptonite People from Krypton. And yeah, they want to stay here, like a goddamn free gift to this country, and they’re in danger of losing their visas.

Feds treat them like hustlers who want a free ride. It’s unbelievable, Lee. Another reason I haven’t retired. I write letters, get mad. It won’t help. It’s not the same golden welcoming land that it was when you came.”

“I don’t know about that. There were problems then, too.” But he was only dimly aware of having said this; it was a rote response that might have emerged at the touch of a button. His voice had dropped and grown thick, and he needed to swallow but couldn’t—his throat walls were too stiff, or too dry. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
They remind me of you, Lee. So bright.
That kindness of Fasano’s
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had been so unexpected and at the same time so desperately craved; he was newly and unhappily aware of a longing for just such charitable donations to his dwindling self-regard, and for a panicked moment his gratitude to Fasano was erased by the suspicion that Fasano was pitying him. Fasano had left the department two decades earlier for a job at Cornell, had left there for UCLA; Lee had watched him disappear into the upper echelons of reputation as he’d watched every colleague he’d ever admired, while remaining, himself, where he was.

And yet, even bearing the imprint of UCLA, Fasano now seemed to float at Lee’s same unremarkable level, both of them neither the stars they’d aspired to be nor the failures they’d feared they’d become. And Fasano was still talking, as if his vision of Lee as
so bright
had not been charitably contrived. And just as important, Lee realized, Fasano was uninjured. Alive.

“Frank,” he interrupted. Fasano had been cheerfully detailing the disappointments endured at the hands of his daughters—one was an aspiring-actress waitress and the other was gay and played drums in a band. “Our fault,” said Fasano, “for being such high-minded, defensive elitists that we sent them to crap public schools.”

“Frank,” Lee repeated. “You said you’d had a bombing at UCLA like the one we had here. Who was it? Was it one person in particular targeted, like Hendley, or was it just one person who happened to get hurt?”

“It was one person hurt, but they don’t know if it was one person targeted or, if it was, if it was
that
person targeted. Your guy’s came in the mail, to him, right? This was different. The guy’s name is Sorin Illich, a colleague of mine, but I don’t even pretend I understand what he works on. He’d only been in the department a semester when this happened; we’d lured him with big money from MIT. He walks out to his car, which is parked in the faculty lot, and sees what he later described as a piece of wood lying behind his front tire, on the driver’s side, where he’d have to roll over it when he backed out. I don’t know what kind of piece of wood, how big, if it really was wood. Apparently it looked enough like any old piece of wood that he picks it up to toss it out of his way, and it explodes in his hand.”