Seung holds her. The shame is his own; he can’t understand why she carries on so. He’s failed. It is the feeling most familiar to him. That sinking down, that scrabbling in the dirt, never finding purchase. The taste of boots and gravel. He had a dog once, never healthy. In a moment of weakness his father bought it at a county fair. It used to vomit on the living room rug until his father insisted it be put down. Before that could happen the addled animal wandered into the road and got hit by a car. A bone, clean as a bone on a dinner plate, stuck out of the dog’s leg at the knee. Seung’s mother drove Seung and his brother and the shrieking dog to the vet, who gave it a shot that took away both pain and life. Seung remembers the feeling of total failure: the failure to comfort, the failure to preserve life, the failure to be a normal American boy with a normal American dog that romped and played and fetched sticks.
Dorota lights another cigarette. She smokes all the time, even in her room, spraying her perfume around afterward.
When Aviva wears Dorota’s sweaters they smell like smoke and Chanel No. 5. They hang long on Aviva, like men’s sweaters; she rolls and rolls the sleeves.
“I think you should tell someone about Marvin,” Aviva says. “I mean, report him.”
The others look at her in amazement.
The light is fading from Seung’s window. Aviva is talking. Words spill out of her, endless. All of her usual grace and self-control are undone: her face is swollen, her voice shrill. She frightens Seung.
You don’t love me, I’m a monster, you don’t really love me, I knew this would happen, do you feel like I don’t love you?, you don’t love me.
“Oh, God,” he pleads.
They fall asleep, exhausted, holding hands.
“Seung, Seung.” She shakes him. “There’s someone at the door.”
Someone is tapping quietly, repeatedly, trying to signal. Seung throws on a shirt and cracks the door.
“It’s a quarter to nine,” Sterne tells him. “Man, you’ve got to get her out of here.”
Years later, Aviva will surely know that it happens so often it’s almost comical: the man wilting at that first approach. A woman is always frightening the first time. Years from now, when a man fails, perhaps she will hold him and tell him it’s all right, it doesn’t matter, there’s no rush . . . And later, things
will
be all right, and he will forget all about that initial humiliation, his fears, his stumble.
Maybe events would have unfolded as they did even if Aviva hadn’t wept and carried on that evening in Seung’s room. Maybe Seung believed, deep down, that if he possessed her, she would grow tired of him and move on to one of the many boys who would have been glad to capture her. Maybe he sensed that he could hold on to her longer by deferring her satisfaction. Or maybe, with his extraordinary instinct, he intuited that intercourse would not be satisfaction for her, that for her the peak had already been reached.
To enter her body would unsettle and eventually anger her. He was protecting Aviva from herself, then? Obviously I can’t know that for sure.
Dak-ho Jung reads both the
New York Times
and the paper from Seoul each day: the news sections, the business sections, the obituaries. The Seoul paper arrives ten days late, so he reads that first. Then he turns to the
Times.
He sits for an hour or more, Wagner playing on the turntable. When his coffee cup grows empty he holds it out, his arm appearing from behind the big vertical sheets. His wife, trained as a doctor in Korea, comes instantly to replenish his drink.
They clasp Aviva’s hand warmly, both of them, but Seung has told her that they will never accept her: they will smile, heap food on her plate, exhaust themselves in errands to make her comfortable, yet they will hate her in their hearts.
Seung’s brother, Chaz (given name Chin-hua), is also home for Thanksgiving. He goes to Cornell. There he started an organization called Friends of Korea. Its members debate Korean politics and raise money for trips to
the divided country. Chaz made the journey for the first time last summer. The cousins he lodged with laughed at his American accent and his inability to keep up with their prodigious drinking.
His parents are proud of Chaz, Seung tells Aviva, as proud as they can be of what they consider a half-breed child, American-born but with dusky skin and Korean eyes. Chaz does fine in school, stays out of trouble—a straighter arrow than Seung. He has a Korean American girlfriend who is at home now with her family in Binghamton. Besides, he is that something you are born as, a Number One Son, the child who can never do an irreparable wrong. Whereas Seung, with his strong grades and his athletic abilities, plucked by his school guidance counselor to apply to Auburn . . . Seung makes a bitter clicking sound.
The house is modest and not well heated. Mrs. Jung wears a thick cardigan (perhaps it is the one Seung purchased from Lands’ End?) and flannel slippers.
“Should we ask if we can help in the kitchen?” Aviva wants to know.
“The last place she wants us is in her kitchen,” says Seung.
They go out walking. The leaves are off the trees but still lie thickly on the ground in places, scarlet and brown. The air is warmish and damp. They pass quiet yards with fathers raking, kids tossing footballs or fooling around on skateboards. Front doors stand open: middle-class trust and leniency lie upon everything. Seung points out the town pool where, during the summers, he has a job as a lifeguard.
He tells Aviva about the time he pulled out a woman who fainted in the water and went down. He was fourteen, and, putting his mouth to hers before the paramedics arrived, he realized for the first time the full force of his desire for women. She was in her midthirties and not a picture in a magazine, not a girl with braces and new breasts. He dreamt of breaking into this woman’s home, touching her jewelry, her hairbrush, her clothes. Aviva grows warm, picturing this erotic burglary, wonders if Seung has told her everything. There are times she feels he tells her, not untruths, exactly. But partial truths. He omits and conceals.
They pass the middle school Seung attended. It is an old-fashioned, comfortable-looking stone building with an ugly concrete addition. Seung has little to say about it. “A holding pen,” is his comment. “A feedlot.” Above the town and the long roads connecting the New Jersey suburbs to Newark lie miles of woods once inhabited by the Lenape Indians. There are rough shelters tucked inside, state campground facilities, a place where Boy Scout troops meet. Yes, Seung was once a Boy Scout.
Now Aviva knows why Seung carried a knapsack with him from the house: he takes from it a thick blanket, spreads it on the ground. They lie on their sides, face to face. He traces her features: the hairline, the small ears, the pointed chin. She smiles, drifting. Their mouths meet. She withdraws from time and space; they will lie here forever. He kisses her neck, unzips her sweater. They pull the ends of the blanket around themselves to stay warm.
A long time later, he says they must start back. His cousins will have arrived for Thanksgiving dinner, and they can set the table.
The transient warmth of bright midday has flown. It’s cold now, 4:00
PM
; the sun hangs behind a gray screen. Seung gives Aviva his knit cap and gloves. He tries to give her his coat, which is heavier than hers, but she refuses.
The Jungs’ living room is lit up with floor and table lamps, busy. Now it’s Schubert that’s playing. The moment a record finishes Mr. Jung jumps up and puts a new one on. A young couple sits on the couch; the man, goateed, cradles a baby over his shoulder, swatting its bottom with affection.
“This is Vincent, my nephew, son of my sister Chan-sook,” says Mr. Jung, but his accent is so thick that Aviva can’t always understand what he’s saying. Mr. Jung pours out sherry for himself, the young father, his elder son, and—with a pretense of disapproval—his younger one. The women, clearly, are expected not to drink. Seung winks at Aviva: he’ll save her some. She doesn’t care anyway. Since the night of the tequila, the tennis courts and the watching eyes, she has lost her taste for alcohol.
At dinner Seung coaxes her to try kimchi, the traditional Korean cabbage pickled in hot spices and garlic. “It’s very hot,” he warns. The family laughs as she cuts a small piece and puts it in her mouth. They are waiting for the inevitable explosion of alarm and disgust. Then they can laugh some more, at the mysterious things that separate some peoples from others. But she loves the cabbage, the heat. She asks
Seung to serve her more. The family cries out with amusement and delight, urges her to have a third helping, a fourth.
“You are an honorary Korean!” cries Mr. Jung. “You are one of us!” He is a bit drunk. Seung shakes his head at her:
Don’t be fooled.
Thoroughly pleased with their guest, this little white girl, Jewish even, they insist on trying to teach her some Korean words.
Bap
is rice;
cha
is tea. Chaz is Seung’s
hyeong,
or elder brother. She can’t make the right sounds. The words have a bark, a snap, in their mouths that she can’t re-create. Chaz tells his parents to stop tormenting the poor girl.
“Aviva’s getting tired,” Seung agrees.
The men retreat with Mr. Jung to the
TV
room to drink some more. Aviva holds the young couple’s sleepy baby, surprised at how heavy an infant can be. She imitates the way his father held him, hoping she isn’t squeezing too hard or otherwise making the baby uncomfortable. She strokes the thick soft tufts on his skull as he jams every finger except for his thumb into his mouth.
“Different drummer,” the baby’s mother says, and smiles, and Aviva realizes that although she’s been silent all evening there is intelligence and mischief in her eyes.
The cousins go home and Aviva and Seung help with the dishes. Mr. Jung dozes in the easy chair. Number One Son listens to National Public Radio. Seung fills the sink, sprays the dishes front and back, scrubs them with expert vigor. Aviva dries, afraid of dropping and breaking something. Mrs. Jung puts things away in the cabinets with old-fashioned glass
panes. She is silent now; something vaguely resentful drifts over to them from her broad turned back.
The guest room is under the eaves, with a slanted roof and one large bed. Aviva is too tired to unpack her suitcase. Seung removes her shoes, massages her feet. “Why can’t we stay together?” she complains.
His look reprimands her. “Because my parents are Korean,” he says.
She thinks it’s stupid; they should put up some resistance. His parents are treating them like children. “Why should we lie about things?” she asks.
“Lying is what Korean sons do,” he tells her.
The next day the family members scatter. Mrs. Jung has shopping to do, Mr. Jung is going to work for a couple of hours. Chaz is meeting some old friends. Now Aviva and Seung lie together in the bed under the eaves. He unbuttons her shirt, wrinkled and smelling of her after a couple of wearings, removes it, and arranges her for a back massage. He knows just how deep to press to produce the small pains that lead, unknotting as they go, to pleasure. He moves down the prominent spine that makes her look so frail to him from this angle, kneads her sides. He will not miss an inch of her. He takes off her jeans and massages her legs, too, and her arms, and then returns to her neck, which is soft now, floppy like a cloth doll’s. He knows how to unlock her.
Later—they are both naked, sweaty, entwined—she asks him again to enter her. He doesn’t answer at first. Then he stirs heavily, frowning. She settles onto her back, already
having decided not to reach for or mention the condoms she brought in her knapsack. She doesn’t want to interrupt their rhythm. Perhaps that was what caused his failure last time. He’ll come in, the great thing will happen, and then she can stop him and get him to put on the protection. It will be all right. Seung prods at her. He is hard, but even in her inexperience she suspects he is not hard enough. The more he pushes at her, the more he seems to melt away from her, the less she can feel him. They move to a new position and for a moment he is revived, but in the end this does no good either. Anger stirs in her: How can he deny her again? Is she not offering herself to him? What is it about her that he refuses to accept? The sheets are moist with the long afternoon of their clinging and effort. A lone bird that Aviva has never and will never be able to name calls outside the window. She rolls away from Seung, her body still involuntarily sealed, undiscovered. He stretches out behind her, holds her around the waist, shaking with dry tears. She cannot spare any kindness for him; the shame feels too deep. It is as if he has denounced her in front of a crowd. She lies stiffly; the fine, fair day is an assault. Seung detaches himself and leaves the room. She hears running water downstairs. A long time. He comes and sits facing her, cross-legged, on the bed. He is wearing faded jeans and a loose white T-shirt. His hair is wet and slicked back.
“Hit me,” he says.
“What?”
“H-hit me. Hit me right in the face.”
He’s crazy; she won’t do such a thing.
“I d-deserve it. I’ll feel better.”
He scares her sometimes. She shakes her head. She thinks of getting up to leave, but where, in this house or out, can she go without him? None of the rooms are familiar, are places where she belongs and has the right to sit, to touch things. The only room that makes sense to her is this room, the only place that feels hers is this bed. Soon Mrs. Jung will return with her packages, Mr. Jung will sit with the paper and pour a drink. They will try to make conversation with her but the conversation will flag, neither side knowing how to keep it going. Aviva digs in her pack and pulls out a book her English teacher, Mr. Salter, mentioned once, praising it so enthusiastically that she had to go out and buy it at the Academy bookstore.
Swann’s Way,
by Marcel Proust. She is washed over with relief at the recollection of this solution, the solution of stories. Proust pulls her along line by line, forcing her to pay the closest attention as he casts his sentences out and reels them back, making them quiver and loop and finally settle. The sentences hold and quiet her. She curls up on her side, opens the book to where she left off.
But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the finest part of the spring.
In a matter of seconds she has both broken with and reattached herself to the sad world; she is free.