Native Speaker (23 page)

She asked if it was locked up out there.

I shook my head. We'd never locked the garage. Even my father, who safeguarded his possessions with a military order and zeal, never bothered with it, considering it a colony of junk that was mine. I looked around for something to put on my feet but I didn't see anything. I started for the front door where I'd left my shoes.

“Just take off your socks,” Lelia said, already undoing her feet in kind.

I did what she said. She slid open the glass door and we walked out gingerly onto the slick deck and down steps to the slate-stone path leading to the garage. It was raining hard enough that we were already wet to the skin by the time we reached the side door to the apartment. I was shivering. When we got upstairs Lelia stripped me of my clothes and then she stripped herself. She walked naked to the far wall and knelt and turned the dial on the baseboard heater. She stood up. I watched the straightness of her as she moved, her long belly, the dark collapse below that. I felt a melancholy before her nakedness. She gripped at my breast and collarbone and tore me down to the carpet.

I had forgotten how to make love to my wife.

Five months, since I had seen her body, maybe eight or nine since I'd really touched her. My low and narrow hips wanted to be lost in her width, the chute of her sternum my sole guide to the one place where we came in the same basic size and shape and flavor: that good piece, the mouth.

We were always oral. We were forever biting, we bit hard, we spit and shined each other, we licked each other, we slobbered, we gorged, we made elaborate meals of ourselves, we made holiday feasts Scotch and Korean, the cold strange meal of tongue, of ankle, of toe, we made a mess. She was given to anything vampiric, went wild for Blacula, Christopher Lee, Lugosi, bats, Venus's-flytraps, and she said it was the best way, to use your mouth, that this was it, this was the thing that made us human. Not the thumb but the mouth.

“Hey,” she said, gripping me, breathing like there wasn't enough air. “Hold me now.”

“Okay.”

She fell back on the floor and winged her arms wide. I asked her if she wanted to get on the couch. She shook her head.

I rolled on top of her and grabbed her at the wrists. The old carpet was threadbare against her back, my knees were scraping the rope webbing. I kissed her, and she nibbled at my lips as I pulled away. I pushed her hands together above her head and held them there tightly with one hand, my free one searching the scallops of her ribs, her taut neck, now unfolding inside her needy mouth. She was tasting herself on my fingers and wet nose and my chin. The room was still freezing. She kept eating. I kept eating, too, wanting every last fold of her, the taste brand new to me, or, at least, a reconfection of what I knew.

She wanted me to push down on her harder. I couldn't, so then she turned us around and pushed down on me, the slightest grimace stealing across her face. Her body yawed above me, buoyed and restless. I held on by her flat hips, angling her and helping her to let me in. Mixed-up memory, hunger. It was like lonesome old dogs, all wags and tongues and worn eyes. This was the woman I promised to love. This is my wife.

W
e live again in our loft on Jane Street. I help Lelia move back in. An untidy suitcase of clothes, a carton of books. Not much else. Molly waves goodbye to us from the window of her apartment as we flag a cab. She wears dark sunglasses, she tells us, to cover her tears of joy.

We have to leave moving to my father's house in Ardsley for later. When later is we're not certain. Soon, perhaps. We've cleaned up there as much as we could, held a garage sale, given away much of the rest, and the house stands nearly empty. The house is ready for us. But we decide—or more, understand—that what we need is to live together again before moving off anywhere else. The apartment is where the trouble started, and like most couples we gravitate toward our private sites of pleasure and pain. It's like you're looking at a serious wound scarring over, wondering how it ever actually happened, that you survived, that it even hurt you as much as it did although you know damn well it nearly killed.

Lelia is working again, but now only freelancing. I'm at home two days during the week, working the weekends because Kwang and Janice Pawlowsky need me for the trips, for the talks and luncheons, for meeting the press. If Lelia's busy in the studio with a student I'll answer phones for her and schedule appointments and make lunches of soup and sandwiches for all of us.

Children visit us daily. They're young, ages three and up, and on the whole they're funny in the face, not so much in proportion as in use. Or ill use. The little chins, the lips, the eyes, they're tentative organs on these kids, almost as if they're optional equipment. Lelia greets them at the door and they shuffle in on the legs of their mothers, and then they quickly walk to the speech studio Lelia's set up at the alley end of the loft, where there's a soundproofed sliding wall to push back.

Lelia decorates the studio with colored butcher paper and animal posters and cutouts her students make. You see her hand-drawn illustrations of the human mouth, the tongue, the upper and lower palates, the uvula. Her strokes are broad and gentle, the colors muted; Lelia says anatomically correct pictures give the kids nightmares.

Maws, I say. She says don't let them hear you joke and pinches me, but she knows my own history with speech therapists. She knows how I was raised by language experts, saved from the wild.

Lelia has cookies and juice ready for the kids and coffee for the adults, who usually leave after five minutes. They'll return in an hour and a half. The children remain. Sometimes, when the door shuts, I hear some of them cry. They can all do that.

Presently three of her dozen or so students are Asian. One has a problem with her ears. Her words come out all blunted, edgeless. She sounds as if she's speaking behind a wall of water.
Mahler
, she will say, meaning something else we can't figure out.

The other two are Laotian boys who as far as anyone can tell are perfectly fine. They come today, their fathers bringing them this time. The public school has to farm them out to Lelia because it doesn't have enough staff. The boys seem happy. They keep slapping each other about the head, pinching noses, pulling ears and eyebrows. They speak a rudimentary English—
milk, pee-pee, cookie
—but have trouble with words like onion and union. They don't seem to care. They want to play. Lelia recognizes this, too, and they all gallop on broomsticks while they recite an old nursery rhyme. Maybe this will work, Lelia says to me, hopping in her turn. Sing, she tells them, let's all sing the song.

Will they remember the verse? I still know the one that ancient chalk-white woman taught me with a polished fruitwood stick. Mrs. Albrecht was her name, her bony hands smelling of diapers.

“Henry Park,” her voice would quiver. “Please recite our favorite verse.” I'd choke, stumble inside myself. And this was her therapy, struck in sublime meter on my palms and the backs of my calves:

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to ocean, I float down, around,

Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound
 . . .

Peanut Butter Shelley, I'd murmur beneath my breath, unable to remember all the poet's womanly names. It was my first year of school, my first days away from the private realm of our house and tongue. I thought English would be simply a version of our Korean. Like another kind of coat you could wear. I didn't know what a difference in language meant then. Or how my tongue would tie in the initial attempts, stiffen so, struggle like an animal booby-trapped and dying inside my head. Native speakers may not fully know this, but English is a scabrous mouthful. In Korean, there are no separate sounds for L and R, the sound is singular and without a baroque Spanish trill or roll. There is no B and V for us, no P and F. I always thought someone must have invented certain words to torture us.
Frivolous. Barbarian
. I remember my father saying, Your eyes all
led
, staring at me after I'd smoked pot the first time, and I went to my room and laughed until I wept.

I will always make bad errors of speech. I remind myself of my mother and father, fumbling in front of strangers. Lelia says there are certain mental pathways of speaking that can never be unlearned. Sometimes I'll still say
riddle
for
little
, or
bent
for
vent
, though without any accent and so whoever's present just thinks I've momentarily lost my train of thought. But I always hear myself displacing the two languages, conflating them—maybe conflagrating them—for there's so much rubbing and friction, a fire always threatens to blow up between the tongues. Friction, affliction. In kindergarten, kids would call me “Marble Mouth” because I spoke in a garbled voice, my bound tongue wrenching itself to move in the right ways.

“Yo, China boy,” the older black kids would yell at me across the blacktop, “what you doin' there, practicin'?”

Of course I was. I would rewhisper all the words and sounds I had messed up earlier that morning, trying to invoke how the one girl who always wore a baby-blue cardigan would speak.

“Thus flies foul our fearless night owl,” she might say, the words forming so punctiliously on her lips, her head raised and neck straight and her eyes fixed on our teacher. Alice Eckles. I adored and despised her height and beauty and the oniony sheen of her skin. I knew she looked just like her parents—lanky, washed-out, lipless—and that when she spoke to them they answered her in the same even, lowing rhythm of ennui and supremacy she lorded over us.

Alice used to sneer at me when I left our class for my special daily period upstairs. The class was Remedial Speech, and I accepted my own presence there if only because of the very trouble I had pronouncing it. The other students were misfits, they all seemed to have dirty hair and oversized mouths and shrunken foreheads and in my estimation were as dumb as the dead. By association, though, so was I. We were the school retards, the mentals, the losers who stuttered or could explode in rage or wet their pants or who just couldn't say the words.

In truth, the fact that you were in the class likely meant you came from a difficult background, homes where parents fought or took drugs or beat their kids or maybe spoke a foreign language. A few had genuine problems with their mouths or their ears, but the rest of us, we were sent there by the grace of either too much institutional frustration or goodwill.

The teacher was a young woman in her early twenties, straight brown hair, freckles, with a name like Miss Haven or Havishaw. She never struck us like Mrs. Albrecht did, she was actually very quiet, seemingly shoeless, unmatronly, vigilant, gentle. She'd give each of us a small hand mirror so that we might examine our mouths as we spoke, and then she'd come around and practice with us. She would go from one student to the next, sit herself squarely before him or her, and say,
Now put your hand on my throat
. She wanted us to understand the vibration certain sounds required. If the kid wouldn't do it—most of us would automatically reach for her neck—she'd take the hand and move it up there herself and say something deep and thrilling like
vampire
, and you thought, this is a teacher, a person who can show, her mottled milky skin still damp with the sweat of other palms, her breath sweet.

The boys' names are Ouboume and Bouhoaume. Such beautiful names. I think Laotian should be our Esperanto. After some more romping Lelia sits them down with picture books. They keep gazing over at me through the break in the wall, maybe thinking I'm next. Lelia never likes to close the sliding door and so she gives them headphones, and then puts one on herself. She waves me over anyway so they won't stare off and I get up and join them. They listen to a tape of consonant sounds, and then practice what they hear for ten minutes. It sounds like a rookery. Lelia has them drill with their mouths like they're playing scales on the piano. Finally she clicks off the tape. They remove the headgear.

“Press your lips together,” she now tells them, squeezing her own between her fingers. “We're going to do the sound for P again. This time so we can hear ourselves. Remember P. For P, blow through your lips, like a puff of smoke.”

They repeat after her, as do I:
Papa, pickle, paint, peep, pool
.

“Great. Let's do F now.” She uses a rubberized half-section model of the mouth. She pushes the white upper teeth against the inside flesh of the lower lip.

“Do it this way,” she says, helping Ouboume. I show Bouhoaume. She tells us: “Now push air through and say after me.”

Father, finger, food, fun, fang
.

We sing the words in unison and then take our turns. Bouhoaume has trouble. He uses his fingers to make himself work like the model, and he tries so hard a slick of drool icicles from his mouth. Ouboume shrieks with delight. Lelia regards him crossly, and he gently pats Bouhoaume on the back. We all try again. We move on to V, which is similar to F, except that you hum a vibrato, which the boys enjoy.

They eat their sandwiches without talking. Egg salad with diced celery. The Asian and Hispanic kids rarely complain about what we give them; the black kids and white kids often do, they act entitled, though in different ways. I don't know what this means, maybe something about the force of fathers, or the Catholic God.

As I look at the boys I keep thinking of Romulus and Remus, wayward children, what they might say now about their magnificent city of Rome and its citizenry. At their height, the Romans lived among all their conquered, the outer peoples brought to the city as ambassadors, lovers, soldiers, slaves. And these carried with them their native spice and fabric, rites, contagion. Then language. Ancient Rome was the first true Babel. New York City must be the second. No doubt the last will be Los Angeles. Still, to enter this resplendent place, the new ones must learn the primary Latin. Quell the old tongue, loosen the lips. Listen, the hawk and cry of the American city.

The boys are first cousins by way of their fathers, who run a dry-goods business from the back of a beat-up Ford van. When they return to pick up their children, they enter and remove their mesh baseball caps. They are bearing gifts for us. Lelia gets a miniature wooden rack for earrings and rings; a striped silk tie for me. Lelia gets the boys ready to leave. I ask if this is their business and they somehow understand and gesture for me to come down and take a look. Ouboume's father unlocks the back doors and shows me their rolling stock. They sell off-brand cassette tapes and ladies' scarves and 99¢ hardcover books and a dozen other items. They keep trying to give me whatever I look at, and finally I accept a celebrity cookbook. The boys are jostling for a seat inside. When I take out my wallet the two men start hollering excitedly in some dialect and push my money away.

As he shuts the van doors Ouboume's father takes a long look at me.

“Japan? Japan?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Korea? Korea?”

I nod. He smiles wide and gives me two thumbs-up.

“I like Korea,” he says, I think meaning Koreans. “Tough tough. Hard work.” He points upstairs. “You wife?”

“Yes,” I answer.

“No Korea!”

“No Korea!” I say.

“Ha!”

My answer seems to confirm something for him. Bouhoaume's father calls him from the front seat.

“You like
Kwan?
” he says, moving around to the front.

“What?”

“
Kwan, Kwan
.”

“Kwan,” I say.

He stands erect, as if stepping into a stature. “Big man,
Kwan
. Big man, big man!”

“Yes,” I tell him. “Big man. I like
Kwan
.”

He hops in shotgun and flips thumbs-up again. The boys do the same from the back. They lean against a gross of cigarette cartons. Winstons, Marlboros. Gray-market goods. They'll drive around the city—there won't be any more schooling today—and search the ordered blocks for a good spot in the stream of people, and then set up for a few hours, or until an inspector asks to see their license to sell. One of the fathers will stall in broken English while the others hastily pack the merchandise into the van.
No trouble, no trouble
, he'll say, shouting it, bowing, shaking his hands, seeming to beg, and as the van starts rolling away he'll slip in the passenger door and all four of them will call it, breathing it out like a necessary song:
No trouble
. The boys know it, too, they've learned this well, and they'll all wave goodbye with it, stridently, strong-armed, father-son, with the bombast of Americans, not yet knowing that this is the last language they will share.

* * *

Upstairs Lelia is cleaning the mess the boys leave in her studio. No speech until Monday. I restack picture books and place the toys back in wooden bins while she sweeps for cookie crumbs, egg splots, cracklings of hard candy.

“Little-boy droppings,” she says, examining whatever is stuck to her broom.