Native Speaker

Lelia has returned from Italy, but she hasn’t moved back into her and Henry’s shared apartment. Not wanting to be away in case she comes home, Henry has been spending less and less time in the office, which is just north of the city. Hoagland doesn’t like his absence, so he calls him at strange hours, ringing him up in the middle of the night to ask how he’s doing. He acts like he cares about Henry’s personal life, insisting that he wants his employees to be happy. In reality, though, Henry knows Hoagland is monitoring him closely because he messed up his last assignment. 

When Lelia was still in Italy, Henry was put on assignment to find out information about a therapist named Emile Luzan. To get close to him, he posed as a client. As with any of his assignments, he’d built up an entire backstory and was using a fake name, claiming to be a businessman dealing with depression for the first time in his life. But Henry found Luzan disarming and kind, and he began mixing his own life into his invented backstory. He started talking to Luzan in earnest about his life, even telling him about his dead son. As he got more and more wrapped up in the therapy sessions, he stopped trying to get information out of Luzan, for whom he developed a legitimate fondness.

Eventually, Hoagland sent Jack to take Henry off the Luzan case. Now, Henry knows, Hoagland is monitoring him because he lost his sense of purpose while working on Luzan. For this reason, Hoagland has given him what’s supposed to be a very simple job monitoring a Korean city councilman named John Kwang. Kwang is a little younger than Henry’s father would be right now if he were alive. He’s rich and “self-made,” and the Democratic Party wants him to run for mayor. The job is supposed to be extremely easy for Henry, but he finds himself putting off the actual work, instead wandering around the apartment in an aimless, haunted fashion. There’s something about the apartment that troubles him—it’s too big, and it’s hard not to think about how he used to live there with Lelia and their son, Mitt.

Henry thinks about what it was like to live in his and Lelia’s large apartment when Mitt was still alive. Mitt used to run around and yell, and they would often bathe him in the large tub they’d inherited from Lelia’s uncle. One time, Mitt slipped on the tiles and smashed his head on the floor. For a moment, his eyes fluttered, and then he started yelling. They took him to the emergency room, but everything was fine by the next day. Now, Henry’s not sure he and Lelia will keep the apartment, though he hasn’t talked to her about it because she has yet to come by—even though she’s back from Italy. He suspects that she’s staying at a friend’s apartment, so he often goes to a coffeeshop nearby and looks for her.

Henry goes to the company’s office in Westchester because he wants to see Jack. He and Lelia used to visit Jack’s house in a wealthy neighborhood north of the city, and Jack would make them beautiful meals while his stunning wife talked to them. Lelia loved Jack and his wife, who died not long ago from cancer. Jack took time off to care for her, and it was during this period that Hoagland told Henry about Jack’s past working for the CIA. He told him a story about how Jack was abducted by insurgents while working in Cyprus in 1964. He was viciously beaten and would have been killed, but then a car crashed into the building and his captors went to see what happened. When they left, Jack managed to kill the young guard still watching over him.

The company Henry works for operates under the name Glimmer & Company. The office is in a nondescript building full of doctors’ offices, and nobody ever visits their floor. The elevator door opens onto a small lobby, in which Hoagland has installed a hidden camera to monitor new arrivals. Today the office is relatively empty, but Henry knows Hoagland must be lurking around somewhere—he’s always likely to turn up when people least expect him.

In the office, Henry sits with Jack and eats olives while talking about Lelia. Jack advises him to give her space, saying that she clearly needs time to think. Henry is inclined to listen to his older colleague, since he had such an admirable relationship with his late wife. Changing the topic, Jack asks about Henry’s progress on the John Kwang case, and Henry admits that he hasn’t spent much time looking over the file in preparation. He senses that Dennis Hoagland has urged Jack to check up on him, wanting to know how he’s coming along. But Jack won’t admit this—he just says that Henry should do his job, since Hoagland has given him an easy task this time around.

Henry thinks about how easy Jack is with his emotions. He can imagine Jack’s Greek parents and their willingness to burst into grand displays of feeling—something that starkly contrasts his own parents’ behavior. Henry’s mother was reticent and thought that showing emotion was akin to revealing some kind of personal failure. His father was similar, though he was also the only person who could elicit a smile or laugh or cry from her.

Henry and Jack talk about work politics, and Henry mentions that Lelia doesn’t trust Hoagland. She does, however, love Jack. In fact, she really doesn’t mind anyone at Henry’s work except for Hoagland, and Jack agrees that this is because all of them are quite likable—other than Hoagland, who is certainly “troublesome.” That said, though, he insists that it’s good Henry came into the office today so that he can put Hoagland’s mind at ease, insisting that their boss has been worrying about him.

As Jack talks, he cleans olive pits off a picture of a woman he once seduced as part of the job. The fact that he still has this picture even though the case has been closed for so long makes Henry wonder about how Jack lives with the things he has done. Even for a seasoned professional like Jack, it must be hard to forget certain things—like, for instance, murdering a young man in Cyprus. But this, Henry thinks, is simply the nature of the job: all of them lead double lives. One version of Jack killed the guard in Cyprus, but another version of him seduced the woman in the picture on his desk. And still another version, it would seem, had a long and rewarding relationship with his beloved wife.

Henry and Jack move into the privacy of the office’s microfiche room to look at various press snippets about John Kwang. He has already been attracting quite a bit of attention as an inspirational figure in the city’s Democratic Party. He’s been on the city council for two years, and everyone is talking about how he should run for mayor, though he himself has denied that this is his intention. Still, the current mayor, De Roos, is clearly nervous about Kwang’s ascendancy, so his associates have been subtly trying to make Kwang look bad by villainizing his interest in giving people tax vouchers to pursue a bilingual education. De Roos’s people want the city’s Latinx constituents to think that Kwang would cut institutionalized bilingual programs from the schools in favor of his new approach.

Kwang is a formidable opponent because he’s so likable. Jack thinks Henry might look like Kwang in 15 years or so. At this point, the councilman is a “media darling” who seems somewhat unbeatable, but the fact remains that Mayor De Roos is an experienced politician who knows how to compete. Because the press likes Kwang so much, De Roos hasn’t been overtly trashing him. Instead, he frequently expresses his admiration for him while adding subtle asides that misconstrue or villainize the councilman’s intentions or beliefs. Henry, for his part, notes that the polls indicate an overall hesitancy to embrace “bilingualism” among New York City constituents—something Henry sees as a sign that people don’t want to give “anything more to immigrants.”

It’s clear to Henry that Jack has already done quite a bit of research on Kwang. Jack shares that Kwang is very closely connected to his core base of constituents, the majority of whom are grocers and dry cleaners who frequently hand him donations in envelopes after seeing him at local church services. Hearing this detail, Henry wonders aloud if his own father ever donated to Kwang. “Let’s hope not,” he hears behind him, turning to see Hoagland standing there and observing him. Hoagland informs him that he will be placed in one of Kwang’s new headquarters, which is opening in Flushing, Queens. He’ll pose as an intern who found the organization through a temp agency. 

Henry will primarily work for Kwang’s head of PR, Sherrie Chin-Watt. Sherrie is a Chinese American lawyer in what seems to be an unhappy marriage to an investment banker. She met Kwang years ago, when she was still in law school, but she has only recently joined his political team. Hoagland says that she’s not yet romantically entangled with Kwang, but he insinuates that this is almost sure to change.

Hoagland motions for Henry to step into his office alone. He then urges him to be diligent as he formulates his backstory for the Kwang case. Everyone, he insists, is rooting for Henry after his unfortunate experience with Emile Luzan. Hoagland claims that everyone has gone through a similar thing as Henry did, but he also tries to make him feel better by suggesting that he had Luzan in the perfect position—he could have squeezed any information he wanted out of him. But Henry’s not so sure Luzan had anything valuable to reveal. He thinks Luzan was a good man, but Hoagland doesn’t care about that.

Henry thinks back to his dealings with Luzan, who was a Filipino-American who supported Ferdinand Marcos (the former president of the Philippines). Luzan’s advocacy for Marcos in the United States attracted negative attention to him, but nothing he did was violent or sinister. Henry learned not long after he left the case that Luzan died shortly thereafter while at a conference in the Caribbean. Henry called his house to offer some kind of explanation for why he suddenly stopped going to therapy, but Luzan’s wife answered and informed him of the news.

Before Henry leaves the office, Hoagland tells him not to mess this assignment up. What happened with Luzan cost the company—“and not just money,” he says, adding that “people are talking.” Henry responds by pointing out that Luzan himself can’t talk, but Hoagland pushes back against his implications: sometimes people simply drown, even people with suspicious ties to secretive political plots. Hoagland insists that evil doesn’t truly exist; the world is just the way it is, and there’s nothing more to it than that. In other words, things happen, and people have to deal with reality as best they can.