* * *
Now I spend my days helping Lelia with her speech kids, then nap for a few hours after an early dinner until I leave at nine for the nightly work with John Kwang. Lelia seems to understand. Before I leave she makes certain to pull on my arms, pull on my ears like she used to do to Mitt before he would go outside. I take her tugs as little warnings, reminders that she is here, staying in our life, and choosing to let me go to his house in Woodside. Sometimes, she’ll crawl up next to me on the sofa after dinner, interrupt my brief sleep with a garlicky mouth pressed down around my nose. Throttling my breath. Then I’ll struggle, she’ll lean into me with all her weight, press her flesh, and then somehow the clothes start coming off. The world skips into rhythm.
My strange hours are somehow revamping our sexual life. We hit-and-run each other at odd junctures, off hours. There is a sense of our stalking each other through the day and the night, each of us waiting for the other to fall asleep, to step out of the shower, hold a hot pan at the range, not expecting a touch. It’s the first second of contact that sets her off, that almost criminal moment. For me, it’s the idea that she’s been considering us through her day, circling the notion of an act, picturing something while I’ve been away sorting through Kwang’s papers, filing, adding figures. At home I turn the corner and suddenly there she is, lurking in some old crepe de chine. Here, she will say, a little story complete in her head, are you ready. So please let’s go.
At other times we’re on the move. It seems to us right now that if we stop moving, we die. We take the subway to parts of the city we’ve never been to and walk the neighborhoods for hours, combing through the sidewalk clearance bins for important pieces, amulets, future totems of the city. What we cherish most are the specialty items from far away, what the people have brought with them or are bringing in now, to sell to the natives: Honduran back scratchers, Polish mothballs, flip-flops from every nation in the Pacific Rim, Statuettes of Liberty (earrings and pendants), made in Mexico City.
Yesterday we’re in Ozone Park. We’re talking the whole way on the train, talky talk, chattering at each other across the aisle of the swaying car like edgy ball players. At a deli we buy stuffed grape leaves and hot wings and Burmese beer and eat quickly with our hands on someone’s overheated stoop. Half the time venturing down the streets is dangerous, certifiable behavior, and at least once each day I wish for the gun I always thought I should buy for living here; but there’s something about the two of us that puts off the hoodlums and muggers. We’re too unlikely a sight to be harmless, pluckable; it’s Lelia’s deadly-looking elbows and knees, it’s my special street face (learned working with my father) looking already cheated and intolerant, and in a pinch we do instant run-throughs of her speech lessons, the most bending diphthongs, to ward off the especially hostile and brave.
Lelia grabs my hand and we run.
From Ozone Park we head to Flushing. She wants to go back to the places we used to explore, with Mitt on one of our backs or swinging between us like a monkey, back to certain streets where you can look down the block and see nothing but Koreans working the storefronts, speaking their language like it’s the only one in the world. Lelia used to say that this must be like the old country, this is how it must be there, but one day in front of his store my father explained to her how if she looked carefully at the people she’d see the extra spring in their steps, the little boost everyone had, just by the idea of where they were. “Look, look,” he implored her, crouched, slapping the pavement with both hands. “This is an American street.”
Lelia said that she did see. I thought she was just romancing him, kindly playing to his mostly self-promoting immigrant lore, but later she’d showed Mitt, too, kneeling down beside him to watch the men and women busy in the street. They’re just like you, she’d whisper.
Now I realize we’re near the burned-out office. In a past day I might say anything to steer us in the other direction, but I walk us by the ruined building. There’s fresh litter in the entrance, cola cups and newspaper. The metal frame of the once-lighted sign of his name has melted, and it sags down limply over where the big front windows used to be. We stand in the street, as close as the police tape lets us.
“Where did you work?” she asks.
“In back, by the alley.”
“I think I need to see.”
We duck under the tape and walk around to the side door. The opening has been boarded up with a piece of plywood, but someone has already kicked it in; in this city, every fire means a shelter. We step through the debris of charred cabinets and chair legs used as firewood, and move through the offices skylighted by gaping holes punched through the ceiling and roof by the firefighters. The major beams have all held, but whole walls have crumbled. We can still reach the war room, which is stripped but mostly intact. I walk to the small, windowless office where Eduardo and Helda were found, half expecting to see the ashen outline of their bodies, but nothing is there. Lelia calls and asks me who I am here and I don’t understand.
“Your name,” she says, not ironical. “Who do they think you are?”
I’m not sure how to answer. Then I say a man named Henry Park.
“What else do they know about him?” she says.
“He has a wife named Lelia,” I tell her. “They once had a beautiful boy.”
She is quiet, her arms snugly crossed. “Are they still happy?”
“Yes,” I say. “But not as much as they want.”
She turns around and stands before the blackboard, examining what’s left. It’s still somehow scribbled with target numbers and dates, Janice’s writing, Sherrie’s. For a moment I think Lelia is trying to map out for herself what might have gone on here, to imagine a version of me and what I would do on a particular day, and I begin to think this is a terrible mistake, a horrible conflation. Now, with a piece of chalk, Lelia starts writing out my name, over and over, as if she’s kept herself after school to work a lesson into her head. She starts in the corner and writes steadily across, my name and my name traversing everything else.
At home, she makes other signs. For the last week now I’ve been taking the green-colored pills again, honoring our longtime agreement that when she is on the Pill, I will take the fourth week of placebos, out of fair play and sympathy for her and womankind. I forget to take a pill one morning and she peppers me with comments about my preternatural plotting to burden our life. These days, trading places is our necessary mode. Then I wonder aloud that perhaps I shouldn’t take the pills anymore, and Lelia knows I mean another thing entirely. She doesn’t jump, she doesn’t stop. Later, at dinner, she laments the fact that she’ll be thirty-five in a couple of months. She says her hair is drying out, her skin and nails, she shows me all over how she’s dying on the vine.
Implications, again.
There’s some desperation, of course. Worry and fear. Would we be trying to fill myriad holes in our life? Was that our attempt the first time? No, I think, but even if it were, it turned out to be Mitt, some wondrous thing, who will forever annul any of our regret. But he is gone, I have to keep telling myself. Eternally lost.