4.

LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER LEE BEGAN HIS AFFAIR WITH Aileen, she told him she was pregnant. “His, not yours,” she said, before he’d been able to speak.

“How do you know?” he gasped then, feeling the words, with his breath, sucked from him too quickly, as if by a powerful vacuum.

“Because I’m almost ten weeks,” she said. “And I was only sleeping with one of you ten weeks ago.”

They would have been whispering, almost hissing at each other, in the drab, cluttered office of the professor of urban statistics whose papers it was one of Aileen’s jobs to refile, while the professor was in Rome on a working sabbatical. The office was, apart from being drab and cluttered, cold both in temperature and in overall atmosphere. A single fluorescent panel hung from the ceiling, which they tried to leave off. The single window, which looked out on the building’s parking lot from the height of only the third floor, was dressed with a dusty venetian blind, which they kept lowered and closed. The desk was university-issue gunmetal gray, as were the laden bookshelves. The absent professor’s papers were kept for the most part in overtaxed cardboard boxes, splitting at their seams, squeezed precariously on the bookshelves or stacked three or four high on the floor; the stench of dust and dry mold filled the room. There was a broken couch, also covered with boxes, which squeaked, and an Amish rag rug on the black tile floor. Aileen had brought the rug from her home. It looked as out of place as it was, although for all its inappropriate implications of handcrafted domestic contentment, it wasn’t comfortable either. It consisted entirely of knots; it was meant for shod feet, not bare flesh. Lee would feel the rug taking vengeance for Gaither as it bit harsh red dents in his elbows and knees and, he knew, as it steadily scoured Aileen’s spine. In his feverish lust Lee would see, through the too-wide crack at the base of the door, the constant detached clicking shoe soles of passersby in the hallway outside. These were her co-workers, the heavyset, decades-married, full-time secretaries who snubbed Aileen for her part-timer status, her efforts to earn a degree, her superior mind—the department chair favored her and gave her special assignments and privileges, like the refiling project, and her key to this office—and for her handsome young husband, who picked her up at the end of the day when his schedule allowed and happily squired her home, with the nimbus of adulterous sex still swagged over her limbs like a fine length of scent-soaked chiffon.

It had been a three-week period during which Lee trysted with her almost daily, with the reckless bloodlust of a soldier in battle and the fastidiousness of a prodigy finally meeting his ideal instrument. She climaxed so crashingly, with such wails of remorseful abandon, she brought a towel to the office that Lee stuffed in her mouth when he felt her convulsions beginning. The rug’s riot of colors had to increasingly hide the dried, crackling laminate stains they deposited on it. After the first time, he had never gone to her and Gaither’s home again on a Sunday morning; they had left a rout of slime and semen and uprooted hair on her living-room floor to which, she said afterward, her lousy housekeeping skills were unequal, her voice shaking when she said it, though she’d attempted to joke. So that from then on, they met on her lunch hour, and again in the early evenings if Gaither had an undergraduate section to lead, and every Sunday morning, always in the office, the key of which Aileen copied for him, so that he could arrive early and, when the hallway was empty, let himself in to wait in the dark. And then after three weeks, or rather twenty-three days, she told him she was pregnant. “I should have known,” she whispered, perched beside him, not touching him, on the squeaky couch, on which they scarcely dared breathe. “I’ve been so sick, so nauseated. That Sunday after you came to the house, I couldn’t stop vomiting. I hardly eat anymore.”

“You’re never sick when I see you,” he hissed. Her evidence seemed dishonest, contrived just to thwart him.

“I am, it’s just other things…drown it out.”

He stared at her, her face obscure to him in the darkened office. They had not touched each other at all; when she’d slipped through the door and he’d risen to meet her, she’d recoiled visibly. “No,” she’d said. She was ruining him, perversely, with no regard for the consequences. He had an urge to strike her, to beat and kill Gaither; his body felt like a jar full of blood being violently shaken. The unprecedented complication of the situation, the terror of having come to feel so exclusively in possession of a body within which, all the while, another man’s child lived, would not make itself felt until later. For now he only felt she was killing him, trivially. He hardly knew her; he was not even sure what her face would look like if he turned on the light.

“I can’t believe I’ve wanted sex at all, all this time,” she murmured.

“Get out of here,” Lee said.

“It’s my office.”

“Get out.”

After a moment she rose, and the couch groaned, letting go of her weight. He heard her crushing her keys in her hand. “You’ll let yourself out without being seen,” she said coldly. He didn’t reply.

“I can’t see you again,” she said. “Ever.”

He had not meant to speak. “You’re a whore!” he spat.

“You’re a coward,” Aileen told him, much later. “You’ll say anything to make yourself feel less weak.”

Aileen also would later say to him, “If only I hadn’t goddamn gotten pregnant. Our affair would have run through to its natural end, pretty quickly. Instead there had to be a big break, and that felt like romance. What a dummy I was.” Aileen had a way of saying juvenile words like “dummy” with a chilling contempt that struck Lee to the quick. Her cruelty possessed a devastating stealth, while Lee’s was obvious, clumsy.

He sat in the darkness a long time after she had gone. Grief had not begun yet. Finally, the hallway entirely silent, he let himself out and kicked his copy of the key back under the door. He also left the tawdry rug and the towel, for her housekeeping skills.

 

As finale, April unleashed tumultuous weather. Two days after Aileen broke with Lee, as the redbud blossoms erupted down the lengths of the boughs like tufts of purple piñata tissue, and bright yellow strings of forsythia hung in the yards, and the daffodils opened, a whistling spring blizzard left three feet of snow on the ground. Lee tried to read Mishima’s Spring Snow while contemplating suicide, for the first time in earnest. It was the agonizing passage of time that made him want to die. He heard every slow tick of the second hand on his Seiko. He would will himself to read, read, read, to not look at his watch until eons had passed, and when he finally broke down and looked, it would be five, or just three, minutes later. He could hardly pull himself through the shoals from daybreak, when he woke from a jangled, unnourishing sleep, to sunset, when he let himself go back to bed. He broke with Gaither in turn because he couldn’t maintain a façade. He tried, for a day, but when Gaither walked into their seminar, he felt himself redden to the roots of his hair. With his brown skin in that room of pale men, he must have blazed like a mythical savage. He felt the curious eyes of Whitehead and the Byrons on him, sensed their professor give him wide, baffled berth, but it was Gaither, seated beside him out of habit, who scorched him. Gaither leaned toward him and murmured a question when their professor had turned to write on the blackboard, and Lee sat transfixed, empty-lunged, not even able to shrug Gaither off. “Lee?” Gaither asked, in his siftingly soft southern voice. “Are you feeling all right?”

When class ended, Lee steamed from the room, but Gaither’s long stride caught up easily. “What’s bothering you?” he asked quickly. “I can see something’s wrong.”

“Leave me the hell alone,” Lee said.

“Was it the church function? Because I thought that you had a good time, but if you didn’t, that’s fine. I never meant to offend you. I respect your beliefs, and I know you respect mine. I have no interest in making you share them. Aileen doesn’t share my beliefs, and I’m married to her—”

“I don’t respect your beliefs,” Lee corrected him, stopping and looking at him finally—at his lean, handsome face and his long, rangy arms and his bulky, sincere spectacles. His stupidity and worthlessness were so glaring that Lee felt he could have been conversing with a talented mule or steer. “Your religion’s a joke. If your wife doesn’t believe in that”—and here he’d struggled for an erudite insult, something far more fatal than a mere expletive, but his excellent English, over which he’d so toiled, now completely failed him—“in that fairytale stuff, it’s not because you haven’t tried. I could feel you parade me around at that thing like your”—he’d struggled again, but recovered more quickly—“your coolie. Your little pagan whose lost soul you’re going to save.”

“That is unjust,” Gaither said frigidly. Now he seemed as Lee had been only moments before, paralyzed by shock. But Lee had warmed to his task.

“You even fight like a preacher,” Lee said. “I don’t need your Christian handouts. Like I said, from now on leave me alone.”

He might not have endured it if the academic year hadn’t been almost over. Continuing to sit around a table in classes, to stand at colloquia with a teacup and a cookie, to walk out of their departmental building, always a few yards ahead of or in the wake of Gaither, Lee almost felt it was Gaither with whom he’d shared a passion that had now been destroyed. Gaither’s humiliation and anger, and most of all his complete confusion as to the cause of the breach, roiled Lee with remorse and even with compassion. But this last feeling was so incompatible with the roots of his quandary, his desire for Aileen, that he shoved it away until he felt it transformed into rigid contempt. Above all, he shunned Gaither from fear. He was afraid not only of seeing Aileen but of the sound of her name or any other slim evidence she still existed. He wanted to think she’d dissolved from the face of the earth, that no one saw her finely drawn, cynical mouth or her thin, boyish shoulders or the place where her hips flared surprisingly from her small waist. Her pregnancy he completely erased from his mind, as only a man could, and only a man reared in an affluent household in which a pregnant wife and mother could be hidden away from her children and even her husband by a phalanx of servants until her condition had passed and her beauty returned. Lee knew nothing of pregnancy, Aileen’s or anyone’s, and so he banished the thought, simply wouldn’t believe it.

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 fretfulness 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 indispensable 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.

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 effeminacy. 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.

A few months before, Lee would have been flattered, even quietly excited, by this attention from Whitehead. Now he found it burdensome—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 pretense 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 gratification, 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 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 gratification 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 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 reconfirm 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 flush 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.