Native Speaker

Henry and Lelia’s son, Mitt, died at the age of seven. He had a close relationship with Henry’s father, who was patient and attentive to him. Mitt had a good time with the old man each summer, when the family would travel north of the city to live for the hottest months of the year. When the other children in the neighborhood called Mitt racist names, Henry and his father went around to their houses and spoke to their parents.

This experience reminded Henry of what happened when he was a kid and other boys called him racist names: his father went around to the houses of the boys who called Henry names, but he acquiesced to their parents and quickly accepted their apologies. When the same happened to Mitt, though, Henry’s father lost his temper and started yelling on the doorstep of one boy’s house. As he was shouting in Korean, Henry wanted him to stop—but he didn’t interfere, wanting to let his father do this for Mitt’s sake.

Despite the initial problems with the other children in Ardsley, Mitt soon became friends with everyone in the neighborhood. The accident happened at a birthday party—Henry had just come back from the store with more candy and soda, and there was a terrible commotion. He ran to the backyard and found Lelia cradling Mitt’s head. Apparently, there had been a dog pile, with the kids all jumping on one another and having fun until they realized Mitt had been crushed at the very bottom. Mitt was already dead.

After Mitt’s death, Henry would stay up late. When he’d finally go to bed, he would pull Lelia on top of him, feeling her body weight pressing down. They’d often have sex like that, but in the morning they would go their separate ways. Lelia would leave before he woke up, and then he’d spend the morning in deep thought. 

Mitt used to play with a tape recorder from Henry’s work. He liked saying things and playing them back, but he also liked catching snippets of life. Henry knows Lelia still has the tapes of Mitt’s voice. She’s back from Italy, so he calls her at their mutual friend’s apartment (where she’s been staying). They’ve already planned to meet the following week, so Lelia tells him he can fetch the tapes while she’s not there, not wanting to deviate from their original plan. He agrees and spends the day listening to the tapes. Most of the recordings are of conversations between Lelia and Mitt. One, however, is a recording Mitt and Lelia made for Henry on his birthday. They each say “I love you,” causing Henry to think about how he himself has never been comfortable declaring his love. 

That night, Henry goes to the apartment of his and Lelia’s mutual friend. He stands outside the window until Lelia opens it and tells him to come up. It’s late, but their friend isn’t back yet from a date—in fact, it looks like she won’t be back at all. Lelia chastises Henry for not sticking to their original plan of meeting the following week. He’s always catching her off guard, she says, accusing him of doing so intentionally. Whenever he calls, for instance, she has always just walked in the door. But she forgives him. She has recently cut her own hair, and though he insists that it looks good, she knows he’s lying—it looks terrible. 

Henry tells Lelia that he has listened to the tapes of Mitt. She herself hasn’t listened to them for a while, since doing so always means she has to lie down for days on end, unable to do anything. But it used to be worse. She used to sit on the windowsill with her legs dangling in the air, not caring if she looked like she was going to jump. Henry admits that this always terrified him, but Lelia just laughs—he should have seen what she was like when he wasn’t home. He was lucky, in that way, since he had something to do. He could always escape and spend time with Jack.

Lelia and Henry start drinking. They’re still talking about Mitt, but in roundabout ways. Lelia feels bad about how she treated the people in her life after their son’s death, but Henry says she was just in pain—and so was he, he adds. Lelia, however, points out that he hid his pain very well. He kept calm and always assured people that they were doing fine. Meanwhile, Lelia was unraveling with grief. 

The conversation slowly shifts to other matters, as Henry asks how Lelia’s parents are doing. Her mother lives alone and is something of a shut-in. Her father, Stew, is an alcoholic businessman who has known great success. Early in Henry and Lelia’s marriage, he told Henry that he didn’t approve of their relationship at first because of the fact that Henry is Korean. But he insisted that he’d changed his mind, saying that he liked Henry and urging him to have babies with Lelia very soon. He said he didn’t care what the kids would look like—he just wanted grandchildren.

It’s now two in the morning. Henry and Lelia are lying next to each other, but they’re not touching. He asks if she has been writing, and she says that she’s only been composing letters—a comment that sparks some tension, as Henry desperately wants to know who, exactly, she’s communicating with. The conversation snakes its way toward her time in Italy, with Henry begging her to tell him the name of the man she surely became involved with in Italy. But she refuses. It won’t do any good. Plus, she insists, the other man is unimportant, at least to their relationship.

Henry presses Lelia for more details. He wants to know what she told the other man about him, so she explains that she said she was separated. The man assumed this meant she was divorced, and she didn’t correct him. She also told him that she never knew how Henry felt about anything. She still never knows what goes on in his head. She also doesn’t know what he needs out of life. She spent a lot of time in Italy thinking about his job and all of the things she doesn’t know about his professional life.

The secrecy surrounding Henry’s job still troubles Lelia. She doesn’t like that he can spend the day pretending to be someone else and then casually come home and act like he’s simply reentering his actual life. It makes her feel cut off from important parts of him, and that causes her to question who he really is. As she explains this, Henry isn’t sure what to say. The truth is, he feels deeply grateful for Dennis Hoagland, who recruited him for a job that has allowed him to find his “truest place in the culture” of the United States.

Henry insists that the only thing Lelia needs to know about him is that he wants to be with her. She is his real life. But she isn’t so sure. She’s disoriented by the fact that Henry never says Mitt’s name and never talks about what happened. He says that what happened to Mitt was nothing more than a horrible accident, but she objects—it was so much more than that. It couldn’t have been an “accident,” because, as she puts it, “when your baby dies it’s never an accident.” She’s crying now, but Henry doesn’t touch her. Instead, he lies next to her and experiences what it feels like to be so close that he can feel the heat of his own skin reflecting back at him from hers.