“God,” she would sigh deeply on the other end of the line, “I’m intensely horny. Will you do something?”
“What?” I’d say.
“Just say you’re coming back soon. Say you’re moving this way.”
“I’m moving your way.”
“Again, but just the moving part.”
“I’m moving,” I’d low, “moving, moving.”
I could hear the driving tone to her voice. She was always surging ahead of where we were, never staying with one notion for too long, and I willingly followed her wherever she needed to go, off the real subject, maybe pushed her there myself.
But at some point you begin to see that you both come with open hands to this kind of practice, this mutual circling of speech. The movement is not so difficult. You updraft, you float. The urgency is gone. Somehow you’ve gotten onto the idea of conserving energy whenever possible. Asking after her is a drain; answering her is even harder. And it is only when you are willing, finally, to fly down and pick through the bones that you can check if the marriage is actually dead.
But with Jack we were fine. In summer days, Lelia and Mitt and I would go up to Jack’s house and find him sweating in the garden in denim overalls, hoe in hand, wearing a huge sun hat of straw with a bright red band, one wide, sandaled foot resting up on a grass-plumed pile of overturned sod. He seemed happy enough. He told us about the sauce he was making, a putanesca, how he had prepared it the way Sophie taught him, shot full of capers, anchovies, olives, garlic, hot peppers. Jack would ladle it over your buttered linguine, your rounds of fresh bread. Then his Caesar salad, yolky, garlicky, rich. Everything with wine.
Jack’s house was a classic split-level, the kind of house I knew best, the one immigrants must dream about, with a downstairs family room, another room called a den, cool linoleum floors, a double oven, two porches — the house laid out so that you and your new wife would sleep in a master bedroom built directly over the garage, the kids safely down the hall.
The neighborhood, Jack told us, was full of New York City cops, most of them retired. Their yards were small and well kept, landscaped with sprays of chipped bark and whitewashed trellises of huge yellow and pink roses. These burly red-faced men would see us on the deck and heartily shout “Jack-O!” or “Jack-Attack!” up to him, wave wide and furious like the marooned with their power shears and their Weedwhackers, flick them on with a zing or whirr whenever Lelia waved back.
Jack would laugh and hoot down something like, “You damn menace, O’Reilly!” and then pour us each another full glass of Barolo, the wine warm, its color deep purple, so that when he smiled you saw his teeth shadowed with its ink. The men below would keep at their work, steadily clipping away until dusk at the overgrowth—“man-a-curing” was Lelia’s reprise — showing no mercy to the thorny shrubs, the crapweeds and wild grasses, the tiny shoots of anything that rose up between the cracks of their meticulously landscaped stones.
I thought Sophie must have despised this place, but Jack always said that she had seemed happy, that she had liked the neighbors, the brightly bedecked husbands and wives, the gregarious, delinquent, wise-ass children of cops who asked her daily to play tag with them after school. I imagined her donning big Jackie O glasses, a silk print scarf, white tennis shoes. She moved probably a little like Jack, a little unapparently, she probably just seemed to get from one place to another, floating majestically through her life until the day the internist informed them otherwise.
When Lelia was away I kept thinking how the same could happen to her. I thought Jack could wonder forever if he had looked at his wife hard enough while she was alive, if he had burned enough into memory of every last sensation of her bearing and presence, the heat of her long roped throat, burned enough her scent, the notes of her mind, burned all the things he needed now. I could see her there, the picture perched obliquely in his thick hands, her unanswered gaze dead on us both. How dark the eyes, how dark the mouth. Indelible, our last clues to a beautiful woman.
* * *
After lunch, Jack and I went to the microfiche room to look up press on John Kwang. Only three months earlier, Kwang had been on the cover of a Sunday magazine. He’d been elected to the city council two years before, on his second attempt, and there was rampant talk of a run against the mayor in the next Democratic primary. Already the mayor was feeling the heat; you could tell, because his surrogates on the council and the boards of Estimate and Education had begun quietly assailing Kwang for his interest in providing tax vouchers for bilingual education, to have English Only in the schools but subsidize native language study outside. The De Roos people were trying to get Hispanics thinking that Kwang wanted to cut the formal Spanish-English programs. They spoke in veiled attacks about his mediation of talks surrounding the black boycotts of Korean businesses across the city. They said Kwang was trying too hard to be all things to all people. Mayor De Roos himself was making a point of half-complimenting Kwang in the media whenever he could, just the week before calling him “a fervent voice in the wide chorus that is New York.”
The mayor was a careerist, a consummate professional, and he knew how the game should be run against an ethnic challenger: marginalize him, isolate him, acknowledge his passion but color it radical, name it zealotry.
“The mayor is no slouch,” Jack said, scanning film beside me. The room was a converted utility closet, with just enough space for two machines and their chairs. “He knows how hot Kwang is running. John Kwang is a media darling, he is untouchable right now, and there is no sense trying to attack him.”
“The polls say the people are against bilingualism,” I said. “They’re against giving anything more to immigrants.”
“They are more against the politicos,” Jack answered. “The big players with interests and connections like the mayor. They love Kwang’s style. He has a homemade sword and he is swinging it as hard as he can. He is the dragon-slayer. It doesn’t hurt to have that expression of his, all wisdom and sincerity. Sometimes I think you’ll look like him, Parky, in fifteen years or so.”
I stopped the microfiche at a photograph in the Amsterdam News. Kwang embracing leaders at an NAACP benefit. “Here he is with his wife, May.”
“What did Joan find on her?” Jack asked.
I flipped through her part of the manila paper file. She hadn’t found much. “Born Kwon So-jung, in Seoul. She’s forty. Ewha Women’s University, degree in English literature. Her father was a founder of one of the industrial conglomerates. He died three years ago. Her mother lives alone in Seoul. May has two brothers and a sister, all alive, all older, all living in Korea. She met Kwang in the States, but where and how we don’t know yet.”
“When did she marry him?” Jack asked.
“Fifteen years ago, the marriage license says in the county of Queens. They have two boys, named Peter and John Jr., ages eight and five. May does volunteer work. The family attends the Korean Presbyterian Church of Flushing. May also leads the children’s Bible study class. Kwang has been an elder of the church for almost twenty years.”
Jack nodded, his puffy lips extended. I could tell he’d already done some of his own work.
He said, “Kwang knows his base. He lives and dies on contributions from grocers and dry cleaners. It’s said the congregation freely hands money to him after the service in envelopes. You’ll have to see for yourself.”
I imagined Kwang in a dark suit and white gloves, his parcels of tribute politely bundled behind him on the dais.