May We Be Forgiven

she’s one person inside the house and entirely another outside—an indoor/ outdoor personality.
    She comes out at about nine-thirty, offering herself to me. She stands before me in the lantern light, taking her clothes off, and then, in a panic, thinking she hears something that we can’t see on the monitor, she puts them all back on and goes in to check on her parents.
    In a reversal of the children being checked on by the parents, Amanda keeps thinking something is wrong, something is happening, and goes back inside every ten or fifteen minutes, worried they will fall and break their hips, there will be carbon-monoxide buildup, a gas leak that will cause the house to explode, they will wake up frightened of the dark, they will want a glass of water, a sip of Scotch, a little nightcap.
    Despite my idea that it would be exciting, it’s a lot less erotic than I’d hoped. The AeroBed is squishy, the ground beneath it cold and hard. At around eleven-thirty, when we’ve been going at it on and off with limited success on both sides, we see her father on the grainy black-and-white monitor, leaving his room. Seconds later, we watch him enter the mother’s room, pull down the sleeping woman’s blanket, push up her nightie, and mount her.
    “It looks like he’s hurting her,” Amanda says, shocked.
    “Hard to tell,” I say.
    On the small monitor, it looks like her mother is trying to fight him off in her sleep. She swats at him as though he is an oversized nuisance, an enormous fly, and he is holding her down, forcing himself on her.
    Amanda stares at the small screen; you can see his equipment jutting out of his pajama bottom. “Is my father raping my mother?”
    “Maybe,” I say. “Let’s see how they are in the morning.”
    “I can’t believe how blasé you’re being,” she says
    “I don’t feel blasé, I just don’t know what we should do about it. Go into the house and create a distraction? Do you want to confront them in the act? Maybe this is how they do it, the way they’ve always done it. Remember, you’re spying on them; they may be senior citizens, but they have rights, and at least one of them still has feelings of a certain sort.”
    She is mad at me.
    “If you feel so constantly worried and overburdened, why don’t you put them in a retirement home?” I ask.
    “Why don’t you go to hell,” she says sharply, turning off the monitor, then rolls away from me and feigns sleep.

    I am in the office three days a week. I have my own ID card to get in and out of the building, the office, and the men’s room. I have been given a small office with a narrow window—Ching Lan sits in a cubicle outside. Often I ask her to come into my office and read the stories out loud; she is practicing her English. It’s interesting to hear Nixon’s words with a strong Chinese accent.
    Nine of the stories are in close to finished form. I review them, tease out the narrative thread, trim the digressive dross. For a man who didn’t like a lot of small talk, Nixon was almost verbose in his fiction.
    “What’s the best way for me to contact Mrs. Eisenhower?” I ask Wanda. “There’s a story I’d like her to consider sending to some magazines.”
    “I’ll let her know,” Wanda says. “Which magazines?”
    “ The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair. What the hell, we could even try The Paris Review. ”
    “What about McSweeney’s ? or One Story ?” Wanda asks. “They take risks.”
    “All right, let’s go wide, send it everywhere,” I say, not wanting her to know that I have no idea what she’s talking about.
    “I minored in creative writing,” Wanda says, exiting deftly. “Mrs. E. is on the line,” she says an hour later, when she rings the phone in my office, which never rang before. “Press the blinking light to take your call.”
    “Much thanks.” After a minute of small talk, I make my proposal: “Ultimately, it will be easier to place the collection if a few have been published first. There is one which is ready to go out, but I’m wondering, under what name?”
    “What do you mean?” she says rather aggressively, like she thinks I mean perhaps under my name.
    “Richard Nixon? R. M. Nixon? R. Nixon? It depends on how ‘out there’ you want to be, how obvious or not.”
    “Interesting,” she says. “Let me discuss that with my family and let you know. Can you send me the story?”
    “Of course; do you want just the clean copy or all the