A Person of Interest (6 page)

In his homeland the ocean had never been more than an hour away, and although looking at it had involved a rattling bus ride and then standing on the land side of a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire, he had made the trip often for reasons he understood only now, in this spring of his American heartbreak. The pure texture of ocean ruined by the grid of the fence, and the rough, slimy beach out of reach, and watchtowers within sight in either direction with armed sentries inside, poised for signs of invasion, had not bothered him as much as the solitude and the noise of the ocean and the far horizon had solaced him. He recalled those days as always windy and gray, neither winter nor summer. He would cross his arms high on the fence, lean his forehead against them, and stare out through the links at the waves for as long as an hour. Once he had finally turned to walk back down the rutted dirt road to the regional highway, the fret-fulness that had seemed to constrict him like vines, and his many-chambered anxieties, and his silted-up lungs, would all seem to dilate and collapse. He’d feel open and empty. Only when the ride home was over would he feel those pains rising to claim him again.

At the time it had felt like impoverished contemplation, if indis-pensable to him. Now, stranded in the Midwest, he was homesick for that route to the ocean, however grim it had been. The town was small, the campus even smaller, fitted snugly like a gift inside its box; the town existed to serve the school and held no dark pockets in which Lee could get lost. Seated tensely on a bench on the quad, he felt like a caged cat.

The cherry trees had exploded like fireworks and left their pink litter all over the ground. The lilacs had bloomed and begun to wither, bunched in pendants like grapes, and their dizzy perfume, slightly tainted by vegetable rot, was still suspended in motionless patches like invisible fog; Lee would pass through one and involuntarily turn his head, seeking the source. Everywhere Lee went, he felt stripped and exposed to the flagrancy of the season, to its blunt smell of sex, as if he had never understood the raw basis for fertility legends and rites and agriculture’s rhythms and poetry’s worst clichés, and at the same time he felt uniquely dead to it, as if the sexual world, which he had just woken to, was defined by his absence from it. He was dangling, redundant.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 33

His break with Gaither had not gone unnoticed by their fellow students, which made him realize that their brief friendship had been noticed as well. One afternoon he was sitting on what had become his usual bench, not because he was comfortable there but because, once he had managed to sit there a first time, he’d felt unable to pioneer another spot; it was the same paralysis that kept him from obtaining a map of the region, a bus schedule, from seeking any escape from the confines that made him so unhappy. It was almost five o’clock, an hour when friends sought each other out and the lonely wandered, looking for company; the air was the warmest it had been the whole month, and the quad’s rich triangular patches of grass, outlined by flagstone footpaths, were crowded with small groups sitting and talking and smoking or lying on their coats with eyes closed and their faces turned up toward the sun. But Lee shared his bench with no one, and no one was near enough to him that he could hear conversation.

The shadows of the large trees were long and exquisitely detailed in the intense slanting light; every once in a while, Lee would see a group shift, to escape a shadow’s encroachment. Sunny days and sunny dispositions. Lee had met Aileen at the start of April, and the cruel month had only just ended. There was still one more week of classes; then exams, and release. Lee had one of his texts next to him but was not looking at it. The crystalline beauty of mathematics was no longer apparent to him. He had the unfinished Mishima, also of no interest, tented on his knee.

He was so detached, the field of his vision, despite the rich scene, so empty, that he did not notice Donald Whitehead walking toward him until he was only a few yards away. Whitehead was wearing a rumpled green and gold houndstooth jacket that was slightly too large but that somehow, for this flaw, was more flattering. And he’d gotten a haircut; his deep-set eyes were still shadowed beneath the shelf of his brow, but his square forehead and jaw and his strong nose stood out handsomely. He was shorter than Gaither, Lee’s height, but more classically built, Lee decided; he entirely lacked Gaither’s gentle ef-feminacy. His eyes sparked with an interest now that Lee had not seen before. “Mishima?” Whitehead said, coming to a halt just in front of him, so that their two afternoon shadows stretched out side by side, pointing east, toward the clock tower.

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A few months before, Lee would have been flattered, even quietly excited, by this attention from Whitehead. Now he found it burden-some—not because it was Whitehead but because it was anyone. “I like him,” Lee managed to say, tepidly.

“You’re reading him in Japanese. That’s impressive.”

“Not really. I knew Japanese before I knew English. It’s just easier for me.”

“Wata kusimo sukosi hanasemasu,”
Whitehead offered, with a pre-tense at self-deprecation Lee could see was masked pride.

“Sukosi ja naide sho,”
Lee answered. “I didn’t know that you spoke Japanese.”

“Hardly. I’ve taken a semester or two, but I’ve probably just showed you all that I know. If you ever feel like more work, I could use a tutor.

But it would have to be charitable, or we’d have to barter, and I doubt I’ve got anything that you’d want. I’m tragically impoverished this semester.”

Lee doubted it, looking at the old but well-pedigreed jacket. He’d never found something like that at the secondhand store. The word

“charitable” made him think of Gaither and the vile words he had spat at Gaither on the day of their break, and though he’d meant to tell Whitehead he’d be happy to tutor for free, a beat passed, and then another, in which he didn’t speak at all. But Whitehead did not seem deterred. “All right if I sit for a minute?” he asked. Lee moved his textbook, and Whitehead sat down.

“Looks like you and Gaither had a falling-out,” Whitehead said, as if reading Lee’s mind. Lee’s heart lurched in his chest, and he felt his palms tingle with mortification, but outwardly he was sure he showed nothing. So the rift had been noticed. He shouldn’t feel surprised; theirs was a small, claustrophobic department in which little happened.

“I wouldn’t say a falling-out. We’re all busy this term. We just don’t see each other so much.”

“For a while there you seemed thick as thieves.”

“I don’t know about that.” Lee was aware of a stirring of gratifi cation, that Whitehead had observed this. Perhaps Whitehead had wished he were as thick with Lee. Or with Gaither.

“It’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help asking. I wondered if it had something to do with his saintliness. I can’t tolerate religious
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 35

men, personally. I can’t tolerate religion. To me it’s the most offensive form of so-called thinking there is. A pile of ludicrous irrationality that actually tries to dress itself up in rational arguments. Religion and mathematics shouldn’t get within miles of each other. I’m not saying Gaither’s not a mathematician, but I wonder about his work. I hope I’m not offending you. I’ve never had pretty manners.”

“Not at all. I don’t believe in any god.”

“It’s the rare mathematician who does.”

After a while Whitehead added, in a musing tone, “So it was his religion. I’ll admit I thought so. I wondered how long you’d be able to stand it.”

Lee’s gratifi cation at Whitehead’s abrupt interest in him was giving way, very slightly, to annoyance. There was something impersonal and condescending about Whitehead’s observations, as if he were watching Lee not out of interest in Lee but out of interest in his own infallible deduction. Whitehead’s manner was arrogant, even godly.

Perhaps this was to be expected from a man who, like Lee, claimed he did not believe in God.

“His religion has nothing to do with it,” Lee said, also arrogantly.

“I’m in love with his wife.”

As soon as he said this, he felt enormous relief, at the guarantee that his private misery would now be consequential. But Whitehead only laughed. “I think Gaither’s married to Christ.”

“No, he’s married to Aileen,” Lee said, and his tone must have made Whitehead realize he wasn’t joking.

“And you’ve met this Aileen?”

Lee inadvertently paused, so that his reply took on excessive, almost comical gravity. “Yes,” he said at last. Whitehead raised his eyebrows. All at once Lee felt frantically vulnerable. What had he done, confessing to this strange, golden-haired man? He envisioned Whitehead at the College Road Tavern, his beautiful jacket tossed carelessly over a chair, ankle propped on his knee, reenacting the scene for the Byrons as they convulsed with laughter.
And I asked if
he’d met her, and he said
—and here Whitehead would mimic Lee’s stern, downturned mouth, his “Oriental’s” humorlessness—
“YES.”
The absurd ostentation of it! The Byrons shriek, beg for mercy, pantingly lift their mugs when their laughter subsides.
Oh, my God, the Oriental
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Don Juan. Don Juan Lee. That’s a gas.
Lee pictured this humiliation so vividly he did not notice that Whitehead had flushed, as if he’d realized he’d entered a realm in which he was a stranger, where not even a Japanese phrase could reconfi rm his authority. Whitehead sat back on the bench and pushed his natty blond cowlick away from his face, running his palm quickly over his skull.

“So—tell me about her,” he said.

But Lee’s sense that he was in danger had blinded him to the fl ush and deafened him to the tentative tone. He was already gathering his calf briefcase and his heavy math text and his paperback Mishima onto his lap. “I’m late,” he said, although he had nowhere to go and Whitehead probably knew this.

Whitehead also stood up. “I’ll walk with you.”

“That’s okay. I really need to get going. I’ll see you sometime,” Lee dismissed him, staring at the deepening blush on the other man’s face.

His rudeness might have embarrassed him equally, if his desire to escape hadn’t shouldered past everything else.

“Don’t forget about Japanese lessons,” Whitehead said, almost meekly. “As I confessed, it would have to be barter, but I have decent German, if you’re interested.”

“I’ll see,” Lee said, turning away.

“Lee!” Whitehead called. Of course he had to have the last word—

his persistence in the face of repulse was its own kind of rudeness. Lee looked at him with undisguised impatience.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Love is even less rational than religion. You can’t mix it with serious math. And you’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve always seemed so to me.”

He’d had nothing to say to this. He couldn’t guess what the comment implied: jealousy? condescension? He’d only known that in confessing his feelings for Aileen to Whitehead, he’d handed a stranger a powerful weapon. Departing brusquely, without a gesture of farewell, he’d felt Whitehead’s gaze, whether contemptuous or baffled or longing, like a fire at his back. When he finally passed between the bell tower and the library, leaving the quad, he glanced over his shoulder, but Whitehead was no longer in sight.

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 37

5.

WHEN AILEEN HAD DIED, THE YEAR THAT ESTHER

turned fourteen and that Aileen, given two more months, would have turned forty, Lee had imagined that it would be not just painful but perhaps impossible for him to ever revisit all those places indelibly hers. Then, as now, he’d still lived in the town of their domesticity and parenthood, if not their greatest happiness, and for a short time it seemed he could not set foot outside his home. Five minutes in the car and here was Klaussen’s deli, looking seedy and dilapidated now, where she’d loyally shopped; once it had been the only place in town she could find decent lunch meat, sour pickles, and bread that had not been presliced. Turn a corner and there was the Y, where she’d insisted on teaching Esther to swim in a class for toddlers who couldn’t even yet walk. To this day as uneasy in open water as at towering heights, Lee saluted her wisdom, although at the time he’d accused her of the callous desire to expose their child to certain death by drowning. The farmers’ market in summer, the A&P all year round; Aileen had left Lee, and the town, years before she’d died, but only after her death did she threaten to haunt all those places she’d been while alive. And yet Lee instead found that his town’s very smallness, which he’d feared would press unwanted memory on him, somehow gave him relief from the past at those very same sites where the past would seem most concentrated. This was the freedom of severe limitation, like passing a lifetime in one set of rooms; no single scent could remain in the air; no single occasion could claim the backdrop. The A&P was Aileen’s at inexplicable moments, but for the most part it remained the drab store where Lee purchased his dinner.

It was the same with the shell-shocked campus, in the fi rst days after Hendley was bombed. Lee knew that for many of those who’d spent less time on campus than he, the bomb blew a permanent hole in their sense of the place. The bomb had arrived just two days before the start of spring break, and the excuse to abscond had been seized with relief by everybody who could. But Lee felt he had long since
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grown used to his palimpsest world. Bomb or no, spring break or no, he drove to campus again, as was his decades-old habit.

Aileen’s ghost had once made him want to avoid the old Mathematical Science Building, but now he enjoyed passing by it and even felt affection for its pebbled exterior and its rusting I-beams, considered avant-garde in 1972. Lee often missed his old ground-fl oor office in this building, with the slender floor-to-ceiling pane of glass by the door so that privacy was impossible, although at least then he’d been spared his current fastidiousness about the angle at which he propped open his door. That old offi ce also had a fl oor-to-ceiling window in its rear wall, and because he had been on the ground floor, the grass seemed to grow right to the pane. Esther would sit cross-legged on the floor, staring out at the squirrels. There had been a time, when Esther was six or seven, that Lee had taught an evening class three times a week, and Aileen had bought a hot plate for his office, and then every evening at six she and Esther arrived with a pot of something, Irish stew or goulash, and after reheating they all ate together off Tupperware plates. That had been happiness, he knew now, the three of them cross-legged in an intimate circle, Esther in some sort of plaid jumper that Aileen had sewn and thick cable-knit tights, thoughtlessly talking away, thrilled to be in his office. As a younger child, she had even been happy to sit in his calculus class, in the back, with a coloring book. He had probably never thanked Aileen, perhaps never even noticed her tenacity in maintaining a family meal. At the time he had probably thought it was only her duty.