The Interpreter Read online

  Interpreting, Suzy finds, is somehow simpler, freer to be exact. The agency calls her when there is a job, and she shows up wherever the deposition happens to take place. Most cases are banal: automobile accidents, slip-and-falls, medical malpractice, basically any misfortune that might generate cash. The details are almost always predictable. The plaintiff wasn’t really hurt at the time of the accident, but now, six months later, cannot move his head. Or the plaintiff had surgery and is now suffering from complications. Suzy never finds out what happens to these cases, whether they actually end up in trial or settle out of court or lead to another set of depositions. Her job is just to show up and translate into English verbatim what the witness testifies in Korean. She often feels like the buxom communication officer in Star Trek, the one who repeats exactly what the computer says. Except Suzy’s role is neither so fleshy nor so comical. The contract, which the agency made her sign, included a clause never to engage in small talk with witnesses. The interpreter is always hired by the law firm on the side opposing the witness. It is they who need the testimony translated. The witness, summoned to testify without any knowledge of English, inevitably views the interpreter as his savior. But the interpreter, as much as her heart might commiserate with her fellow native speaker, is always working for the other side. It is this idiosyncrasy Suzy likes. Both sides need her desperately, but she, in fact, belongs to neither. One of the job requirements was no involvement: Shut up and get the work done. That’s fine with her.

  Except it doesn’t go as smoothly as that. Suzy often finds herself cheating. Sometimes the witness falters and reveals devastating, self-incriminating information. The opposing counsel might ask how much he makes a week, and the witness turns to Suzy and asks what he should say. Should he tell him five hundred dollars, although he usually makes more money on the side? Suzy knows that the immigrant life follows different rules—no taxes, no benefits, sometimes not even Social Security or green cards. And she also knows that he should never tell lawyers that. So she might fudge the answer. She might turn to the lawyer innocently and translate, “My income is private information; approximately five hundred dollars, I would say, but I cannot be exact.” Or the opposing side might try to make a case out of the fact that the plaintiff, when struck by a car, told the police that he was feeling fine and refused an ambulance. “Surely,” the lawyer insists, “the injury must not have been severe if you even refused medical attention!” But Suzy knows that it is a cultural misunderstanding. It is the Korean way always to underplay the situation, to declare one is fine even when suffering from pain or ravenous hunger. This might stem from their Confucian or even Buddhist tradition, but the lawyers don’t care about that. “Why did you say you were fine at the time of the accident if you weren’t? Were you lying then, or are you lying now?” the lawyer presses once more, and Suzy winces, decides that she hates him. The witness gets all nervous and stammers something about how he’s not a liar, and Suzy puts on a steel face to hide her anger and translates, “I was in shock, and the pain was not obvious to me until I got home and collapsed.” Then the lawyer looks stumped and moves on to the next question. Suzy knows it is wrong, to embellish truth according to how she sees fit. In fact, she will be fired on the spot if anyone discovers that her translation harbors a bias. But truth, she has learned, comes in different shades, different languages at times, and lawyers with a propensity for Suzy Wong movies may not always see that. The job comes naturally to her. Neither of her parents had spoken much English. Interpreting is almost a habit.

  Suddenly a light tap on her right shoulder. Suzy turns around to find a man standing there. It is the Korean man from McDonald’s, the one with the freshly polished shoes, with a tired wife and unreachable daughters. “Mr. Kim?” She is delighted at such a coincidence. Breaking into a shy smile, he nods. He looks meek and timid now, no longer the grave man sitting across from her buried in his newspaper. “An-nyung-ha-sae-yo .” She makes a slight bow, the way Koreans do when addressing the elderly. Then he stares at Suzy’s face intently, as he had done earlier this morning, and says in the unfamiliar midregional Korean accent, “You remind me of someone I used to know, a good woman, too young to be killed like that.” Before she can ask what he means, the stenographer and two lawyers charge in as if they have been hanging outside together the whole time. “Shit, a ticket.” The older lawyer shakes his head, waving a piece of paper. The younger one frowns, trying to appear sympathetic. The stenographer ignores both and adjusts the paper into her machine with the efficiency of a pro, turning to Suzy.

  “Raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear that you will translate from Korean to English and from English to Korean to the best of your ability, so help you God?”

  “I do,” Suzy answers, thinking to herself, Yes, please help me, God.

  On the way home, Suzy calls Jen from Grand Central, which is just a few blocks from Jen’s office.

  “Do they always let you out this early?” Jen smiles when she greets Suzy at the Starbucks counter in the north wing of the station, sipping a Frappuccino. She is impressed that Suzy has stuck with interpreting for eight months, but she also makes it clear that she is not fooled.

  “You’re hiding,” Jen says after ordering a chocolate-dipped biscotti with her decaf. “This is your little revenge, to make him find you, but you know Damian’s far too decadent for that.”

  Suzy pretends to not hear and blows the foam on top of her Frappuccino into a little bubble, which makes a perfect round circle for a blinking second, then pops.

  “The witness today said that I looked like someone he knew,” Suzy says almost in passing.

  “Another married asshole with a midlife crisis?” Jen rolls her eyes.

  “No, he looked sad. He reminded me of Dad.”

  “Why, was he …”

  “No, not angry, just sad.”

  “Suzy …”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Suzy says, sucking on the straw to get the last taste of the sugary bit at the bottom. “Michael’s calling me at three.”

  “Where’s he this time?” Jen asks with a smirk, creasing her perfectly powdered face.

  “London. He loves calling me from there. He says that his cell connects clearest from Heathrow. I don’t know. He might be right. Last week, he called from Lisbon and I could barely make out a word.”

  “Why doesn’t the big guy just call you from a regular phone?”

  “Because he thinks anything’s traceable, and at least with his cell, he’s on top of it.”

  They both burst out laughing then, like two coy college girls picking on the cutest boy in the room.

  3.

  THE PHONE CONTINUES for four rings and stops as Suzy reaches the fifth floor and stands at the door looking for the key. It rings again as she inserts the key into the hole, and stops at the fourth ring. Then it begins again. Whoever it is does not want to leave a message. Whoever it is does not know that she never picks up the phone, a habit that started the year she left school and moved in with Damian. He always let the machine take the call. It was from neither arrogance nor aloofness. During the first few months, it was a necessity. There were too many people hot on their trail, acquaintances with too much spare time who would call periodically to alert them to exactly what other people were saying about this “terrible situation,” which they would repeat in a conspiring whisper as though it were not they who thought it “terrible” but everyone else. “New Yorkers aren’t busy,” Damian mused. “They just don’t have enough time for themselves.” Then there was the family. Damian’s one sister lived in Lake Forest, Illinois, and had rarely been in touch over the years; Professor Tamiko would only speak to him through the lawyers. What Suzy feared was hearing her father’s silence on the other end of the line. But it soon became clear that her parents would not try to contact her. Grace left a message a few weeks after the eruption of the scandal: “Suzy, you must get out of there. God will only forgive the ones who forgive themselves.”

  God had become Grace’s answer by then, although she had been the bad one all through their growing up. Grace was the one who got grounded for being found naked with that Keller boy in the back of his dad’s Toyota when she was fourteen. Grace was the one who hid her marijuana pouch inside her tampon case, which she nicknamed her “best friend, Mariana,” and then, to Suzy’s surprise, declared so boldly at the dinner table, “May I be excused? I promised my friend Mariana that we’ll do our homework together.” It had also been Grace who told Suzy that the only reason she applied to Smith College on early decision was that no decent Korean boy would want her now, because everyone knew Smith was for sluts and lesbians. But somehow, during her four years away, God found his way into Grace’s untamable spirit, and Suzy could no longer recognize her older sister, who left such an inappropriate message on her machine, as though salvation lay somewhere on the stoop of a Presbyterian church on Sunday mornings. Suzy began to dread the phone. Damian said that if he could help it he would live without the damn thing. He was distrustful of people anyway. The thought of Damian being stuck on the phone with any of her young friends—although, after a few months, Jen was the only one who called with any consistency—was almost painful.

  When Suzy enters the apartment, the phone begins ringing again. She waits for the click at the fourth ring, but instead the machine takes it.

  “Babe, it’s me, pick up!”

  The voice is cheery and confident.

  “Suzy, I know you’re there.”

  She is not sure why she does not pick up immediately, but there is an unmistakable moment of hesitation. For a second, she is tempted to leave Michael at Heathrow, sliding down the moving sidewalk, shouting into his Motorola. For a second, that seems to be the most obvious thing to do, the only thing to do—to leave
him there.

  “Hi, I just walked in.” The hesitation is over.

  “See, I knew.” Michael is all happy.

  “London?”

  “Yeah, it’s fab, brilliant. Those Brits just ate it up, man. They fucking love the whole crap. They’ve got it all mixed up. They think Java’s some coffee from the Caribbean, and HTML a code name for the newest hip-hop nation. They’re sure I’m their Bill Gates, and I told them, ‘Bill and me, we’re like brothers.’”

  “Good,” Suzy agrees, as she always does when Michael’s had a shot of whiskey or two.

  “I sent Sandy out to Harrods to get you some stuff, some slinky things here and there, for my pretty girl back home, I told her. I’m sure she thinks I’m a pig, so I told her to get some sexy stuff for herself too, although you make sure my girl gets the best of the pile, I said.”

  Suzy smiles, imagining Michael’s curt, crisp, forty-something-and-single secretary lingerie-shopping for her boss’s mistress. Sandy often calls for Michael when he is stuck in a meeting or on the plane. Sandy is efficient and excessively private. Although, Michael has said, the minute she finds a man, she will quit in a flash. He is sticking with her, he has claimed, just to see that happen.

  “Babe, you listening?”

  “Michael, I miss you.” Suzy is surprised at this sudden confession and thinks that it must be true.

  “Meet me in Frankfurt. Sandy will arrange the ticket.”

  “I can’t. I don’t have a passport.” In fact, she has never been out of the country, not since she followed her parents to America as a child. At twenty-nine, Suzy has never been abroad. Partly for fear of flying, and partly because she can no longer leave New York.

  “Suzy, I’m being serious.” Michael does not believe her. Why should he? He knows practically nothing about her.

  “I really can’t. Family business.”

  “What family? Babe, you haven’t got any …” Michael is good at dodging serious conversation. “Except for me,” he adds almost peevishly.

  You’re hiding. That is what Jen said this afternoon.

  “When are you boarding?” Suzy asks, trying to shake off Jen’s voice.

  “Right now. Gotta go, call you tomorrow!”

  Michael is gone before she can ask if it was he who kept hanging up at the fourth ring.

  Suzy’s apartment on St. Marks Place is at the hub of downtown. It was the first place she saw when she moved back to the city five years ago. She had been in such a rush then that she just grabbed the first thing offered, although there had been a few more apartments to check out. Apartment hunters in Manhattan are truly desperate. At 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, they line up outside Astor Place Stationery, where the first batch of The Village Voice is delivered upon printing. That is where the apartment war begins, everyone grabbing the first issue and running to the nearest phone booth to call the handful of landlords who fill the ad space with “No broker, low rent!”

  For three consecutive Tuesdays, Suzy stood in line with no luck. Although she had been worried that such a collective panic would make her so nauseous she would run straight back into Damian’s arms, she actually found it comforting to see that she was not the only one looking for a new home or new life in the streets of New York. Mostly they were college graduates fresh from Middle America who had watched too much MTV and decided to try their luck the minute they could scrape up some money to get to the city. They often appeared even hipper than the city kids. Clad in vintage velvet and leather, they looked everything they said they were. “We need a loft where me and my girlfriend can both paint; our paintings are huge, bigger than the stuff Pollock used to do,” one goateed boy declared, so loudly that everyone in line turned to him, as though he and his girlfriend were the newly crowned postmodern Abstract Expressionist royalty. Then others chimed in competitively: “New York rocks, man. I wrote like two hundred songs about it,” or “I’ll take anything on Avenue A; how could you be a poet and not follow Ginsberg?,” or “This casting agent says that I look just like Monica from Friends, and I’m, like, no way would I ever do TV!” Suzy would listen and wonder how many of them, if any, would attain their dreams, and she would realize that she, in fact, envied them all, these buoyant kids for whom life was just offering its first mysterious glimpse, while she, at twenty-five, had already given up. Then, one day, a boy who stood behind her tapped on her shoulder and asked if she needed a roommate. He was the first true redhead she had seen in a long time, and he wore a sky-blue bowling jacket that had “Vince” stitched above its right pocket. He could not afford to live alone, he said, and did not trust strangers to share an apartment, but she looked nice and he’d always wanted to live in Asia, and perhaps she was the closest thing he’d come to the continent. Then he held out his multi-ringed hand and said, “Hi, I am Caleb, I’m twenty-one, a philosopher and a performance artist.” She tried not to laugh as she shook his hand with “Suzy, twenty-five and unemployed.”

  She liked Caleb. He was honest and surprisingly shy. He also brought her luck, because on that very night they found the apartment on St. Marks Place. She was amazed that it had been so easy, considering that she was unemployed, and as far as she could tell, his day job of working at a vegan restaurant on the Lower East Side did not quite fulfill the criterion of a desirable tenant. Then Caleb told her that his doctor parents who lived in Scarsdale co-signed the lease. When she asked if they knew that the beneficiary of their generosity was an unemployed stranger their son had met outside Astor Place Stationery, Caleb winked. “Darling, I told them that I had a mad crush on you. They would’ve bought the apartment for us if they thought we were actually doing it.”

  The apartment was a typical East Village walk-up railroad, an elongated stretch of three connecting rooms. Suzy had to pass through Caleb’s bedroom to get to the kitchen, which led to the bathroom that was missing a sink. Neither noticed the missing sink until they finally moved in, when Caleb walked out into the kitchen with a seriously distraught look on his face and exclaimed, “There’s no place to put a toothbrush!” Suzy thought it could have been worse. Better a sink than a tub. She could not imagine surviving New York winters without the relief of a hot bath.

  Caleb often brought home leftover tofu pancakes and nondairy crème brûlée from the restaurant. The only edible things there, he explained. The rest tasted so depressingly dull that it was simply cruel to put his taste buds through such an uninspiring challenge. A cleverly concocted diet plan, he claimed. Imagine working at a restaurant where the food is actually good! The philosopher-and-performance-artist bit was hard to figure out, though. Caleb never read books and was certainly too cynical to perform in front of a crowd. When Suzy finally approached the subject without wanting to sound either dismissive or disrespectful, he burst out laughing. “Oh, it’s a private joke with myself. My dad once said that homosexuality is for philosophers or performance artists. How could you grow up in Westchester and end up fucking boys? He wept when I came out at my high-school graduation, really. Imagine this Jewish optometrist in his fifties with tears streaming down his face. He didn’t use the f-word, of course.”