A Person of Interest (3 page)

Stepping away, giving Emma with care to her roommate again, Lee had tried to forget what she’d said raggedly in his ear:
I SAW him
—

Lee watched himself that night on the eleven o’clock news, squirm-ing with not entirely pleasureless discomfort at the strange sight of his own downturned mouth, his own vertical furrow like a knife wound
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between his eyebrows, betrayals of age he could hardly believe he possessed, and the messy white thatch that apparently passed for his hair.

Seeing himself on TV was like seeing a stranger perform a harsh version of him, under the merciless lights, and then hearing his voice, the strong accent that still stained his English despite decades of rigor, was its own agony. Yet his words sounded good. The vain suspicion that had sustained him through unbroken disappointment at every stage of his career—that he was at least a good lecturer, charismatic and bracingly scary—now found new confirmation. He moved from the ottoman—

where he’d been squatting like a true Oriental, elbows on his knees, focused motionlessly on the screen of his blizzard-prone Zenith—into the tattered La-Z-Boy, with his bowl of fried beef and green peppers and rice and his can of Bud Light. At least the second Mrs. Lee, in her rapa-cious divorce settlement, hadn’t wanted this hideous chair, in which he’d probably spent twenty percent of the past twenty years. The chair’s upholstery was some kind of supposedly wearproof, stainproof, punc-tureproof miracle fiber of the mid-1970s. He remembered the mentally unstable salesman at the La-Z-Boy store, leaping onto the chair like a hunter onto a felled elephant and stabbing it again and again with a silver nail file that he gripped in his fist. “See?” the salesman had shouted, panting with effort. “No . . . holes! No . . . holes. . . . The weave of the fiber just bounces right back!” “Oh, my God,” Aileen had said, as Lee pulled Esther behind him protectively. But it had worked, hadn’t it?

They’d purchased the chair, on installment.

Now the chair was worn, and stained, and its hideous black-and-white plaid was dark gray overall. But there weren’t any holes. Instead the coarse weave had grown less and less like a fabric and more and more like a net, barely restraining the chair’s flesh of crumbling foam rubber. A chair after my own heart, Lee thought as he made it recline—and it still reclined effortlessly. Worn down so it looks like garbage, but at least no holes.

The next morning Lee read his remarks in the local paper, the
Herald,
and that afternoon, to his shock, also had them pointed out to him where they appeared in the
New York Times.
The
Times
story was small, from the Associated Press, but seeing himself in its pages gave Lee a more harrowing jolt than had seeing himself on TV. At least his newly discovered ill-feeling for Hendley was not just concealed but
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 15

made to seem inconceivable by his eloquent outrage. And in truth, with the onrush of sympathy and admiration from colleagues and students and even strangers Lee was amazed to find lavished on him in the wake of the bombing—and with Hendley out of sight in the intensive-care ward—Lee was soon able to conceal from himself his own poor sentiments. He could even imagine he loved Hendley, and yearned for his recovery.

3.

JEALOUSY HAD STAINED MUCH OF LEE’S LIFE, YET HE’D

never seen himself as prone to it, perhaps because he’d fi rst become jealous surprisingly late. As a young man, before emigrating, he’d never experienced any of the circumstances that might have aroused that emotion. His had been, initially, an exceptionally privileged family. Then they had fallen, but no one had risen to usurp their place.

The anguish of being a fallen aristocrat, or as much of a fallen aristocrat as your nation can muster, is a very different anguish from that of envying those better off. His family had only their past selves to envy, and envy was not what they felt; they mourned their past selves as if they’d been cut down by death. Lee felt fierce love for the naïve and arrogant young man he’d been, and sometimes, in his immigrant life, this love almost seemed to reanimate that former self, so that to outsiders he seemed both arrogant and remarkably blind to his own circumstances. They thought he believed in himself as an exception, whatever the case, but the truth was exactly the opposite: Lee knew that his exceptional status was irrecoverably lost. If he sometimes resembled the young man he’d been, it wasn’t in defiance to new circumstance but from the painful awareness of how immutable the new circumstance was. He could never have guessed that his past self possessed him like a ghost, sometimes glaring out through his eyes or emitting harsh orders by way of his mouth. Had he known, he might have thought his past self could protect him from the gnawing sensation of inadequacy, and then he would have been disappointed in himself yet again.

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But sometimes these seemingly incompatible sides of himself, his vestigial arrogance and his terrible envy, joined together to effect startling change. It had been in this hybridized manner that he’d won Aileen.

Aileen had been the wife of Lee’s classmate and only real friend in graduate school, a pale, elongated wearer of tortoiseshell spectacles named Lewis Gaither. Like Lee, Gaither had arrived at the graduate level of mathematical study late by comparison with the other grad students. Lee had begun the program at the age of thirty-three, having been unable to start his undergraduate study in the United States until twenty-nine, on account of civil war and upheaval in his native country. Gaither had started the grad program at the even more wizened age of thirty-five, although for reasons very different from Lee’s. After earning his B.A. in math at the standard age of twenty-one, for more than a decade Gaither had served his Lord Jesus Christ on a series of overseas missions, and had only returned to the United States at the behest of his parents, who had been waiting to marry him to a woman who shared his beliefs. Gaither was an evangelical Christian: a serene man whose unostentatious and absolute faith tended to have the most impact on those who had been nonbelievers all their lives until meeting him. Instead of hewing to one of the young women introduced by his parents, Gaither began spending time with the beautiful twenty-year-old who, despite privately professed atheism and reluctant public affi liation with her family’s almost equally godless Unitarian church, sometimes filled in for the organist at the Gaither family’s house of worship. Aileen’s aversion to every sort of religion would survive her marriage to Gaither, by whose faith she was completely unmoved.

Lee’s own decade of marriage to Aileen never satisfactorily revealed to him why she’d married Gaither, or why Gaither had married Aileen.

“It was something to do that summer,” Aileen once said, opaquely. In any case, when Aileen’s marriage to Gaither came apart, it did so like a garment that had been pinned by the seamstress and then never sewn. The rupture was ugly and loud, but afterward, in Lee’s estimation, the two halves were just as they’d been before joined; neither took so much as a thread of the other into the next phase of life.

For the duration of his friendship with Gaither, Lee didn’t like to think it was based on their age; once the friendship was over, he liked
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 17

to think it had no basis beyond that. The other eight students in their year in the Ph.D. program—all men, all white and American-born except Lee—had seemed to Lee like lesser versions of their paragon, a mathematical prodigy if social oddball named Donald Whitehead. Like Whitehead, these eight all were goldenly handsome and brooding in the Byronic vein; all wore their hair distractedly untrimmed, their tweed jackets unmended, their ancient leather loafers unrepaired. All of them were young, well-bred, unapologetic introverts whose lack of cordiality and warmth was admired by professors and women alike as evidence of their genius; although Whitehead, as the acknowledged apotheosis of these qualities, tended to take them too far. Whitehead’s dishabille left the realm of the romantic to verge on the incompetent.

Whitehead’s social disconnection from fellow students sometimes seemed less a proudly elected condition than an exile he was helpless to alter; his lesser, Byronic peers did socialize with each other, if in remote, haughty ways. Whitehead, Lee believed, was always left to himself. All of the ways in which Whitehead was distinct from his clutch of blond shadows both stoked Lee’s desire to befriend him—

only him—and led Lee to realize that this was impossible. Whitehead silently handed Lee class notes a few times on request and as silently—though Lee felt graciously, on what basis he couldn’t have said—received them again with Lee’s thanks, when he had copied them down. But the relationship did not progress, as it did not progress between Whitehead and anyone, and so Lee found himself pairing with Gaither, the other outcast.

Gaither made the first overtures, and here again there was much that Lee sought to revise once the friendship was over. Lee was canny enough to realize that Gaither’s early, easy interest in him, Gaither’s falling into step with him outside of class, the uncondescending manner in which Gaither filled in missing words, early on, when Lee’s English still faltered, arose from a mixture of genuine kindness and the other strong motive of Gaither’s religion. Lee was clear-eyed about his nonlofty status, enough aware that the depth of his loneliness exerted a force that repelled, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it. Lee modeled himself on the Byronic octet, not without some success; his ink-dark, almost mirrorlike hair grew to fall in a cowlick that hid his forehead; he found a battered calf briefcase, like a WASPy,
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neglected heirloom, in a secondhand store. He knew that the younger departmental secretaries saw him as an exotic prince of the Far East, a Yul Brynner with hair, and he would feel them staring after his tweed-covered back—the secondhand store again—as he left the offi ce. But Gaither, perhaps because he was older, saw through to Lee’s yearning; or was yearning, himself, for a friend; or was intent on a mission. Lee was aware of all three possibilities and stressed the second while the friendship endured and the third when it ended. Lee’s mother, in the late and unhappiest years of her life, had been aggressively plied by a Protestant missionary and at long last turned into a Christian, and by contrast with that person Lee found Gaither admirably subtle. Their conversations scarcely touched upon religion; it was the friendship itself that would reel Lee in. But as aware as Lee felt of all this, he wasn’t willing to admit what a prisoner he was of his loneliness and that he would have accepted Gaither’s friendship even if it consisted entirely of the desire to make a new convert. Lee told himself, in his early encounters with Gaither, that he, too, was indulging one weaker; Gaither’s need to convert was a flaw, toward which Lee could be kind.

It was in this spirit of wary but willing friendship with Gaither that Lee met Aileen. Lee knew that Aileen was Gaither’s wife of less than a year; they had married the July before Gaither entered grad school, about six months after they’d met. Aileen had a secretarial job in another department and took the occasional class toward a B.A. degree; she and Gaither did not yet have children. Lee assumed, because Gaither had not said otherwise, that Aileen must be a Christian also, and he imagined her unremarkably, pinkishly pale and smooth-featured and plump. Perhaps she had lusterless, heavy brown hair in a matronly clip at the back of her neck and wore dowdy plaid skirts and support hose and practical shoes. Perhaps she was tranquilly faithful, like Gaither, but lacking his brains; though for the most part, until he met her, Lee did not think of Aileen at all.

One evening after their seminar, as they walked the fl agstone quad path to the gate where they usually parted, Lee to his rooming house four blocks off campus, Gaither to the bus that took him several miles to wherever he lived with Aileen, Gaither said, “There’s a shindig this weekend at the park outside town. A statewide church event. I know you’re not in the market to pick up religion, but I’d like it if you met
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 19

my friends. My church friends. And Aileen. It would make a nice outing. When’s the last time you saw hills and trees? They must have had those things back in your country.” Gaither’s peculiarly gentle, ironical manner of speech was his most signal asset, the winking blade that allowed for his faith to be tolerable. His voice was slowed by a very slight drawl from a boyhood in Texas, but this was entwined with pe-dantic enunciativeness, which was then overlaid by self-mockery.

Gaither used words like “shindig” to acknowledge he was just the sort of stay-at-home stick who should never say “shindig.” And his reference to Lee’s foreignness somehow worked as a reference to all those who saw Lee that way, among whom Gaither wasn’t included: their peers in the program, who effortlessly shunned them both.

“Shindig?” Lee said, smiling wryly. This was one of many moments at which his awareness of Gaither’s attempt to convert him was outweighed by his pleasure at having the man as his friend.

“An evening cookout, in a tent, with some singing and talking and milling around. You won’t be preached at, I promise. The folks we don’t know will assume you’re a Christian already, and my friends will know better than to give you an earful. They already tried that with Aileen. She got them trained pretty quick.” This was the fi rst indication Lee had that Aileen was not as he’d thought. Gaither winked, and they parted, agreeing that Gaither would pick Lee up Friday evening at six on that corner.

This had been early April, their first spring in graduate school. In that part of the Midwest, April was even more variable than it is in New England; the week of Gaither’s invitation, the daffodils and the tulips had started to open in the long, geometrical beds that outlined campus buildings, but it happened almost every year and was endlessly discussed by the locals that after a week of exquisite, damp days the temperature fell and brought with it several feet of spring snow.