A Person of Interest by Susan Choi Page A

this—with no outward show of resistance.
    She thought of Lee more and more, as these everyday scenes from her marriage seemed to shift into frozen tableaux, memory dioramas she would view from a distant future. She missed him; sometimes thinking of him abruptly derailed her calm regime of housekeeping, and she would find herself sprawled on the couch, in the dusk of closed curtains, clumsily making love to herself, achieving at best an imperfect release that was more like implosion, because she felt truly depraved to be doing such things with the baby inside her. She swore it off and then found that both Lee and her own unpregnant, lascivious body had come to plague her in dreams. In her dreams she would climax and then suddenly wake to see Gaither’s oblivious face on the pillow beside her. Just as after the times on the couch, her limbs would quiver and fl op like rubber, unable to obey her. Struggling to get out of bed, to get away, she’d wake Gaither as she hadn’t before. She could never believe that these dreams failed to wake him; they felt as real as if she and her lover were committing their wailing contortions only inches from where Gaither lay snoring in his pale blue pajamas. “Are you okay, Aileen?” Gaither would mumble as she fought with the sheets.
    “I just have to use the bathroom.” Immediately his breathing would deepen again.
    Sometimes she sat up until dawn, in an old armchair in the small living room she almost never used during the day, as if the journey she was about to embark on demanded she fi rst know—memorize—
    every aspect of the life she was leaving behind. This first and last home of her marriage to Gaither, at dawn. The geriatric couches and chairs 60 S U S A N C H O I
    and bookshelves it had come furnished with, mute witnesses to her sins. She wondered how many mundane revelations, humiliations to the pride we take in knowing ourselves, had occurred in these rooms.
    She was twenty-one years old, six months pregnant, the wife of a man she had wanted to save her from something. From her own indifference, perhaps, to herself, and to securing conditions for her own happiness. Gaither, when she met him, had exuded such ease, the confidence of a child of God. Now she watched as he made this impression on others, who didn’t yet see the need this demeanor concealed.
    Though Lee saw it; he’d seen it that night at the church gathering, and he’d ruthlessly seized his advantage.
    The fall semester always began late, the third week of September, and as August came to an end, a sense of meaningless limbo pervaded their house. She assumed that Gaither wasn’t succeeding in solving the problem. “I’m sorry, Aileen,” he said more than once. “I’m so absorbed in my work. I guess that’s my way of feathering the nest. It would really help my career, and help us, if I could get my fi rst real publication.” She wondered if the extreme cordiality that marked all their relations had ever seemed fraudulent to him. To her they were both marking time, until the semester began and the separation of spheres was again ratified by Gaither’s busy course schedule. She remembered this waiting from last year: they’d moved to town, at Gaither’s insistence, in late July, “to get their bearings” and then had been left to wait—purposeless, scrupulously cordial with each other. They had bought the old car and new maps and driven the hushed country roads, stopping off at farm stands to load up on sweet corn and peaches. In the evenings Aileen would make pie, her hands quick, her mind fearfully empty, while Gaither pored over the department’s course offerings as he’d done countless times. They must have seemed like any young married couple, to the farmers they approached with linked hands, to new neighbors like Mrs. Cahill, to Gaither himself, who had been a virgin when they’d first slept together. She had not.
    He hadn’t known how to tell.
    Then, she’d been waiting to feel it,