SALON

Saturday, Feb 12, 2011 4:01 PM UTC

No. 4: Chang-rae Lee’s “The Surrendered”

In the fourth-best sex scene of the year, a teenager crawls into bed with a beautiful missionary wife

By

Topics: Good Sex Awards, Books,

No. 4: Chang-rae Lee's

Their rhythm ticked loose and various until suddenly it unjumbled, clicked in. All the while June, tightly crouched in the peerless dark between the wall and a kerosene barrel, was suppressing her own breath, her lungs aching for release, the gleaming painting of their lovemaking begun to screen in her mind. Strangely only her belly felt alive, this yawning breaking emptiness that pushed low and hot while the rest of her went heavy, dead, and it was only when they were finally done and surely fallen asleep that she dared move, her hands and feet tingling and shaking enough that she had to crawl on her elbows from the storeroom.

The following day, having returned to the orphanage, Reverend Tanner sat down next to her during the evening meal. June sat alone now, having agreed not to monopolize Sylvie’s company. She had completely forgotten about her conversation with Tanner on awaking that morning, her throat parched, her head fogged and aching, as if, like Hector, she had been drinking all night.

“How goes it, June? Is everything fine?” he asked. Sylvie was at a far table eating with the younger children. Hector was not present, being likely out in the field.

She could merely nod, not yet ready for his questioning. “You don’t seem terribly certain,” he said, though almost jocularly, as though he didn’t in fact wish to hear anything else.

Her memory of the previous night was a stilled curtain but its music now rose up in her chest and brought the skin of her neck to life, her cheeks feeling as though they were suddenly flushed. She thought Tanner would take her aside for an interrogation but all he did was brood a moment with a half-expectant, half-wary gaze and say brightly, “Well, I must be going. Good day, June.”

For days afterward she tried to determine what to do. All her considerations foretold only trouble if they should continue, and yet she found herself hoping for Reverend Tanner to spend an evening away again. It was like the hunger she didn’t suffer anymore, this grave sensation so resident that it took on its own life, its own existence, was the body within her body that now drew all her energies.

At fourteen her figure was at last changing, after being stunted during the war; since living at the orphanage she’d put on more than eight kilos, mostly on her thighs and hips and on her chest, which the older boys glanced at, but warily, fearing she might catch them and take it as a provocation to fight. She noticed this and sometimes she’d sit back wherever she was and make a show of closing her eyes, letting them look at her for as long as they wanted. She might even press her shoulders back, to accentuate the new fullness. Her doing so wasn’t in vanity or pride, or from the slightest interest in any of them; it was pure experimentation, a trial to determine how it felt to be an object of desire, and she found that the more she felt their stares the more her own desire fired, trebled, eventually took on its own reason.

So she stayed silent when in the ensuing weeks Tanner departed on his various trips, and waited for Sylvie to emerge from her cottage in the middle of the night. Whenever she and Hector let the oil lamp burn, June could see them glide over each other with a patience and tenderness that was the opposite of the jerky, horrid couplings she’d had to witness during the war. And though she was startled by the broad, taut ropes of his body, her eye kept resting upon Sylvie’s calf, her knee, the way her belly would grow shallow under his kisses and dip far enough below the spur of her hip that she appeared starved herself. She had the loveliest glow, the light seemed to stream from her eyes, from her half-opened mouth; nor did the illumination dissipate until well after they were done, when June saw her open a small black kit and remove a needle from its velvet-lined well. Hector did not take it himself but he helped her, binding her calf with the rubber cord and tapping her heel and then shooting her with the medicine that made her shiver and then go slack, turn a ghostly bone-blue.

When Reverend Tanner was present June would sometimes stay late with Sylvie in the back room. He allowed it enough times that after a while her presence after the generator went out became almost customary. They would all be reading, Sylvie and June in the narrow bed, Tanner in his own out in the front sitting room. He always retired earlier than they, and they took turns whisper-reading aloud by the oil lamp books from the army base library, children’s books but also others that Sylvie had chosen for her, “Little Women” and “Great Expectations” and “The Good Earth.” Sometimes June would ask Sylvie to read “A Memory of Solferino” to her and she’d refuse at first but always eventually yield, the passages entering them, June thought, with both pain and bliss like the medicine in the kit, and making them cling more tightly to each other.

One night June fell asleep there, and when morning came she awoke to find herself wearing one of Sylvie’s nightgowns and tucked in the spoon of her slumbering body. She carefully turned into her and took in the warm, round scent of her hair, the sour-sweeter one of her neck, and masked her eyes in the scant damp of her nightgown; then on succeeding nights she would pretend to fall asleep and then watch Sylvie slip outside to the chair in back with her kit, feel her when she returned, her weight seeming to have doubled as she fell against June’s chest. It was then that June waited, sometimes hours, for the measure between Sylvie’s breaths to lengthen, for her to descend further into deepest sleep. This happened almost nightly: she would turn, lie on her back. Her lips would soften and ease. If there was starlight or moonlight her face and long throat gleamed with its luminance, this woman an ashen statue, only half alive. Here was the only beauty in the world. And then one night June could not help herself; she pulled back the blanket as if it were the frail leaf of an antique book. Her hands crept to Sylvie’s throat, where her nightgown opened, and undid the mother-of-pearl buttons that ran down to the hem; she took them one by one, the near half of the nightgown falling away, exposing the whole length of Sylvie now to the cold night air. June touched the belly, grazed the lowest rib, the small, flattish breast no fuller than one of her own. The nipple pushed up between her fingers, as dense as clay, and without knowing what she was doing she put her mouth over it, closing her eyes. She couldn’t breathe again, her heart as if collapsed in her chest, this tiny leaden node, poised for Sylvie to protest, to stir. But she did not. Nor did she when June’s hand slid down and nestled in the burning cup of her long legs, not moving, nor stirring, neither wanting the other to wake.

Excerpt courtesy of Chang-rae Lee/Riverhead.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of “Native Speaker,” winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; “A Gesture Life”; and “Aloft.”  “The Surrendered” is his most recent novel. It will be available on paperback March 1.

More Chang-rae Lee.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 2 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

We're thrilled to announce Salon's first-ever Good Sex Awards, recognizing the best sex writing in fiction from the past year. We've convened a panel of literary star judges -- Walter Kirn, Maud Newton, Louis Bayard and Salon's own Laura Miller -- to reward the best-written, most

interesting and most convincing piece of sex writing published in a novel in 2010. We'll be rolling out excerpts from the finalists starting on Thursday, Feb. 10, and announcing our winner on Valentine's Day. We hope to make the Good Sex Award an annual event, so, over the next 12 months, we invite Salon readers to send their nominations for our 2012 awards to salongoodsex@salon.com.

Continue Reading

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations