Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee Read Free Book Online

Hoagland.”
    â€œWe’re all very personable people.” Jack laughed. “Not Dennis, of course. Dennis is a troublesome one.”
    â€œDennis is a freak of man,” I said, glancing down the floor to the empty office.
    â€œThat’s right,” Jack answered, chuckling. “Freak of man. But it’s good you came in today. You ought to talk to him soon. Assure him. He is a worrier. You have become a subject for him. This is no good. I can see in his face that he thinks of you often. Here, take some of these to him later. Tell him I said olives are a Greek remedy for stress. Take them all and tell him.”
    He handed me the tub of olives, shooing them on me with his large brown hands. I sat back in the swivel chair and poked through the remainder. Jack was sliding the pits off the photo into his wastepaper basket. Then, after the briefest pause, he let go of the photo itself, the image of the woman still compelling, though smeared and oily. It had been a closed file for some time now, but I thought that even an old hand like Jack must have trouble with what he’d done in the past. I had begun to think that each of us was leading the life of a career criminal, in which the commission of acts was not by a single man but a series of men. One Jack killed the boy guard in Cyprus, another Jack seduced Mrs. Ochoa-Perez, and so on. Our work is but a string of serial identity. But then who was the Jack that loved and buried Sophie; was he just another version in the schema, or the true soul, or could he have been both?
    I knew Lelia adored Jack because she always said so whenever he came up in our conversation. She always seemed to be hugging him throughout our get-togethers. At first her attention slightly annoyed me. I wondered what she found interesting enough that she always had to play it out, or where she might be leading with it. Hoagland, the human black cloud, had noticed this too, mentioned it sometimes as indicative of our good camaraderie. Then, and only recently, while she was gone in the islands, did it occur to me that her fondness for Jack might have something to do with me, a hope for what I did for a living. When I traveled to other cities on firm business for several days or a week, I called her nightly from where I was staying and we talked about everything but the very reason I was speaking to her on the telephone from another unspoken place. It didn’t seem to matter then. We talked plenty anyway, talked her work, and other things, talked friends, did our talk of family, the talk of how much we missed each other, even the queer ironical talk of when I was coming back home.
    â€œGod,” she would sigh deeply on the other end of the line, “I’m intensely horny. Will you do something?”
    â€œWhat?” I’d say.
    â€œJust say you’re coming back soon. Say you’re moving this way.”
    â€œI’m moving your way.”
    â€œAgain, but just the moving part.”
    â€œI’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