A Person of Interest (56 page)

A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 351

John Allen Gaither—that was right, that was vaguely familiar. The name had always equaled a pang of reproach, a swift wincing-away; sometimes it brought him that day in November when a weirdly hot wind had spun cyclones of garbage across his landlady’s lawn.

But the young man, John, was not pointing to that name, his own, but to the name on the line marked for “mother.”

“Who is this?” John demanded.

“Aileen. That’s your mother.”

“So you’re saying that’s me?” Stabbing now at the other name.

“John. Yes, that’s you.”

“That is
not
my name!” John said. “My parents named me Lewis. I changed it to Mark.”

“Mark,” Lee said readily. A strange intuition had seized him, so strongly he wanted to call it an insight: the changeling had authority here. Like some child lama plucked off the Mongolian steppe, Mark’s self-ignorance was just short of total, yet all power was his. The best Lee could do was provide any service he could. “Come inside, Mark,” he said gently. “Your mother named you John, your father changed it to Lewis, I think, but without even knowing the problem, you’ve found a solution. You’ve named yourself Mark.”

“You’re saying
this
is my mother?” Mark still stabbed the page.

“Who is she? Where is she?”

There was no varnishing this; to attempt it, to hesitate even a handful of seconds with a handful of stammering words, might be just enough time for the onrush of hope, for that phantom who perfectly loves us to shimmer to life.

“She’s dead,” Lee said. And then he was able to lead the boy into the house.

The folder that Morrison had given him, with the letter from Aileen inside, had been on the telephone table in his kitchen ever since he’d come home. He knew that it might have been considered a strange place for something he’d once wanted buried, near at hand but locked up, safe not only from Esther, whose days of possibly coming across it were years in the past, but from himself, and his incurable weakness for self-punishment. Yet lately he’d found in the letter less punishment than a slow revelation. It was possible he’d never read it correctly, back
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when it most mattered to him; that, as with the letter from Whitehead that he’d thought was from Gaither, he’d only glared fearfully at the words through a mesh of defenses. Reading a paragraph here, a page there, while preparing his dinner, he sometimes fell into a trance of enjoyment and reemerged to the pasta water boiled away and the noodles adhered to the pot, or to his steak turned to smoldering charcoal, or his broccoli steamed into pulp. John’s closed eyelids, Aileen wrote,
aren’t a “half-moon” or “fi ngernail” curve or other things people say. As
a mathematician perhaps you know the name of this curve. Almost
straight but the ends turn a little. Like the surface of the water in my
glass where it clings to the sides and lifts up. I’ve just recalled the word
for this: meniscus! But already that’s wrong. Without my even noticing
the curve just transformed, into more a triangular shape, as if something
in his sleep surprised him and his eyeball bulged out.
John’s gaze, when awake,
doesn’t see me, that’s plain. Or doesn’t see me in any clear way
and think “Mother!” and all the special ideas that are supposed to go
with it. But I’m not disappointed or impatient, as Nora says most women
are. It’s as if I’d stowed away on the spaceship of a little Martian, and
he’s speeding along, and I can see all the things that he sees, and I can
tell what he’s thinking somehow, because I’m not really there—
And, with a vehemence in her voice that Lee relished to clearly remember,
This world hasn’t yet taken up his attention, so he still can see backwards, to where he came from. And I don’t mean “Aileen Adams” or

“Lewis Gaither” but some place only he still remembers. And if I don’t
remember it now, how will he ever know?
Once Lee had skittered all over its surface, he went back and read from the beginning, and once he’d finished, he started again, not out of repentance but just because the letter did what she must have intended it to do: it conveyed her to him, thoroughly, without any constraint. It wasn’t tainted with distortions, like their marriage, to satisfy him. The truth was, it scarcely involved him at all. And it was this, once offensive and baffl ing, he found he liked most.

Now, like that miraculous curve of an eyelid, it had subtly but completely transformed into as familiar a household object as its telephone-table companion, the recipe box. Yet after Lee managed to seat the stumbling, mute boy at his kitchen table and place these two items before him, his explanation of the epistolary grew quickly
A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 353

confused, while the culinary sturdily came to his rescue. In preparing for Esther’s arrival, he’d combed the box for her childhood favorites and then bought all the ingredients required for five nights’ worth of dinners, so that it occurred to him now that he could make shrimp jambalaya for the boy—Mark—and himself, because the bag of frozen shrimp was enough for six servings, which left Friday’s planned menu intact. “After Aileen and I divorced,” he told Mark, relieved to the point of garrulity by this plan to make dinner, “I phoned her one day with this terrible craving for this very dish, ‘shrimp jambalaya.’ I had to know how it was made. She didn’t even know what I was talking about. Then she finally remembered—it was just an idea she’d gotten off the shrimp bag. She’d never written it down! She said, ‘Put in some chopped onion and pepper to start,’ and I said, ‘But how much?’ I’m a mathematician, I’ve always been very methodical in my cooking. I can’t improvise.” But he was improvising now, as he spoke to Mark in the tone of a distant relation—an acknowledgment of tie; a careful disregard, for the moment, of bewildering intimacy. Lee spoke as if Mark were a second cousin, visiting from Spain, inquiring after a long-dead great-aunt; perhaps, in a while, Mark would be a first cousin, or from Canada, or the great-aunt only recently dead. Perhaps they’d inch up to each other by little degrees. Lee also thought of death, and all the humble, homely acts in the face of the howling abyss that had seemed so contemptible to him when Aileen had died, the crusty casseroles lined end to end on her kitchen table. Now he knew that such small things were the only things that could be done. Watching Mark slowly empty a bottle of beer, his eyes blankly trained on the patio door leading to the backyard, Lee thought, This boy’s mother has died, and I’m making him dinner. And for the moment that seemed like enough of a plan for them both.

But just before the shrimp was ready, Mark asked for a bathroom where he could wash up. Lee’s week of preparation helped him here, too: there were brand-new towels and bars of soap and an absence of dust in the upstairs bathroom, next to Esther’s bedroom. After Mark had left the kitchen, and climbed with slow steps up the stairs, Lee noticed that the file folder was gone from the table.

Half an hour later, Mark had still not come down. By nine p.m., with the shrimps hard as rubber erasers in their garish red sauce, Lee
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sat down to eat by himself. He had set two places at the kitchen table: two breakproof Corelle plates, two plastic Tupperware tumblers, two forks and two knives—in the pattern of the house of Penney, went the joke of Aileen’s—paired on paper napkins folded into triangles. All the deep memory of the fingers, time-traveling two decades into the past. The ceremony of the family table. He gazed at his symmetric place settings a long time before he finally sat down.

He’d been shifting the last morsel of shrimp across the dirty plate when a sound made him stand up again. Nothing sudden or startling; it had stolen on his senses like the cry of a child in the night as it dredges a parent from sleep. Yet he went with the same urgency he remembered, his heart in his throat, the short distance impossibly long.

Upstairs, Mark lay sobbing upon Esther’s bed, made for her that morning, folded and pleated fastidiously like a gift. Mark was curled as if nursing a wound in his gut, but with his heavy boots carefully hung off the side of the bed, as if even in grief he would not claim much space for himself. The letter lay on the bedside table. Lee felt the piercing return of an instinct unused since Esther’s babyhood, yet he could not presume to stroke this boy on the nape of his neck, or even to sit down next to him on the bed. After a moment Lee removed the austere wooden desk chair from under the desk, turned it around, and sat there, feeling, as he made this indication of patience, true patience come down over him, like a craved sedative. He could wait, he did not know for what; he could wait until he knew.

“I didn’t know I’d lost something,” Mark sobbed. This was all that he said, though he said it again and again, broken into fragments.

Did it solace Mark, to be witnessed like this? Or was Lee an intruder to him? Lee didn’t know, but he tried to trust instinct, which told him to stay. Even after Mark had gone to sleep, Lee remained in the chair.

The airport hadn’t changed much in the three decades that Lee had known it, mostly as a point of collection for the occasional guest professor, shakily dismounting the staircase-on-wheels with a briefcase in hand and an ashen complexion if the plane had endured thunder-storms. It was still, as Agent Morrison had joked, mostly a slab of cracked runway and an egg carton testing the wind. Although it
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occurred to Lee now, as he parked, that for all its bareness and smallness the airport was the opposite of utilitarian; it was entirely devoted to the romance of coming and going. If that wasn’t true, then what was the purpose of the long, low building, a little curved at its ends like a solo parenthesis, the better to obstruct any views, from the parking lot in front, of the platform of arrival behind? Certainly, that building, with its faded linoleum flooring and its single squeaking luggage carousel, its single unmanned rental-car booth and its plastic fl oor plants every once in a while on the unneeded length of walkway, had not been designed for shelter. It was always, even when fl ights came in, almost three-quarters empty. It was there as stage curtains are there, to create ceremony.

“How will I know her?” Mark asked, his voice croaking. Mark had shaved, ineptly, and gougings marred his uncanny face. That morning he had asked for directions to the mall and returned two hours later in a striped shirt, still creased from the package, and a pair of awkward slacks and stiff, cheap-looking loafers; he must have bought the clothes, but they looked borrowed or, rather, donated; it was as if he’d never tucked in a shirt or had to fasten a belt in his life.

“I hope
I’ll
know her,” Lee said honestly. They both stood as alertly as they could at the smudged wall of glass. Black vinyl conjoined seats were behind them, unused. A ponytailed girl, the only other human in evidence, moved purposefully out a door, wearing some kind of ear-muffs; she must be the combination air-traffic controller and unloader of luggage, deliverer of salutations and mopper of floors. They had been very early, as was always Lee’s habit when dealing with travel, whether or not he himself was the traveler involved. He might have sat in the airport all day if it weren’t for Mark’s shopping-mall errand.

But today the high-strung agitation Lee was accustomed to feel—

whenever he saw the twinned words “Arrivals/Departures” let alone on the far rarer occasions he set foot on a plane—while as pressing, was a different sensation. The difference seemed directional; instead of a downpulling dread, there was a reckless uprushing of . . . what?

Perhaps Lee was finally riding the swift wing of travel, though for the moment quite still. He had never felt the excitement of airports before, the joy of a sudden displacement in space, like the jumbled-up logic of dreams. The glaciers appended to jungles, the rooms in his
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home he had not known were there, the dead strewing oranges on blankets to nourish the living. . . .

“Right on time,” Mark burst out, and Lee startled away from the glass, where his forehead had pressed him to brief, gorgeous sleep, like a vitamin shot of renewal. Indeed, other people had been sifting in, a serene scattering of co-greeters, and the drone of propellers had grown in volume at the same time as it lowered in tone, until the loud-est and most guttural tone said the plane had touched down. It was a very tiny plane—they always looked so small as they came careering around on toy wheels, but this time Lee exclaimed in amazement and apprehension. Could she really be in there? And what if she wasn’t?

He felt a stab of sadness for Mark next to him, trembling also.

“Anything might have happened,” he offered. “Coming all that way, from South America. You can miss a connection. . . .” She’d often said she didn’t look like her mother, and Lee had never known if the remark was a complaint or a question, nor had he known if he’d answered correctly in saying, with the pride the fact caused him, “You have your own face, Esther.” Not entirely true: she was perfect Aileen at the jaw. Sometimes she glanced sidelong in scorn and shape-shifted, and Lee’s heart seemed to bleed. As a child she’d accused them of denying that she was a changeling. The children at school, seeing her pale, blue-eyed mother, had explained that she must be adopted, and she had agreed.

As always, a remarkable number of people emerged from the plane. A joke or a miracle: the scant tube kept squeezing them out, eager returnees and uncertain newcomers and perhaps some who had boarded the plane by mistake and now waited to see what new world it was, all making their way down the little staircase with palms shielding their eyes from the sun. When Esther ducked out, not quite last, Lee knew her not by her face but her whole silhouette, her very contour in space; he would know it at the edge of his vision, in motion, in darkness. She knew his as well. Across yards of concrete and through the glare of the glass, she saw the shape of her slight, rumpled father—and someone else, she would soon see him also—and thrust her arm up, to wave.