Secondhand World Read online

  “Have you read Lady Chatterley's Lover?’ I asked.

  “Oh, yes.” He blushed.

  I wasn't sure how to proceed from there, having run out of Lawrence books I remembered, but there was something so eager in the young man's face, so avid in his appreciation of this British novelist, that I felt I couldn't just take my chapchae and walk away.

  “For a scientist, you're very well read,” I said.

  He smiled and nodded, but I wasn't sure he'd understood what I said. “My name is Lee Nam Ho,” he said. “You are … Sohn Myung Hee?”

  “Isa,” I said. “My father's the only one who calls me that.”

  He gave me a quizzical look.

  “I'm not sure why,” I said. “My mother insisted on naming me Isadora—after Isadora Duncan, the modern dancer.”

  This time I was quite sure he was lost. He smiled vacantly and let his hair stay hanging in his eyes.

  “You … ?” His thin face turned red. “You have boyfriend?”

  I laughed. “No. Why?”

  His face went from red to purple. “Dr. Sohn … um … your father …” he said.

  “Yes?”

  The young man seemed not to possess the English vocabulary to proceed. He swept his hair from his eyes and smiled at me, clearly embarrassed.

  “You are beautiful,” he finally managed.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said. I was beginning to understand. It was then I noticed that the young man with the baby face looked a bit like my father in the old photographs I'd seen of him as a young second lieutenant during the war. His hair was much longer, of course, and his face lacked the severity of my father's, but there was a resemblance I found unsettling.

  “Sillye-homnida” I said. Excuse me. “I have to go.”

  “I saw you talking with Mr. Lee last night,” my father said casually the next day at dinner.

  “Yeah, what exactly was that about?” I said.

  My father shrugged. “You don't get to meet Korean boys,” he said. “Mr. Lee is excellent student, from good family. He's a bright guy. You don't think he's handsome?”

  “ Yeobor my mother said in a cautionary tone.

  “Dad, are you matchmaking?” I said.

  My father frowned. “These American boys,” he said. “That soccer player … You can have light fun with such boys, but in the end it is what you have in common that makes marriage last.”

  “Yeobo, geureojimar my mother tried again. “Isa doesn't have to worry yet what makes marriage last.”

  “Dad, I'm only seventeen. I'm not planning on marrying anyone,” I said. “And I have more in common with most American boys than I do with Korean guys who barely speak English.”

  My father put his hand up. “I did not say you should marry,” he said. “But you need to start thinking about future, and heritage is important. A shared heritage. Maybe not someone like Mr. Lee. I agree. He is from Korea, different culture will be a problem. But there are many Korean Americans like you.”

  “Dad, there isn't another Korean in my entire school!” I said. “If it matters to you so much suddenly that I marry a Korean, why don't we live in New York City or someplace?”

  My father shook his head. “At the university, there are a few,” he said. “What I'm saying …” He looked me in the eye, and I was startled by the obstinacy I read in his expression. “I would have difficulty accepting if you married Caucasian man. You're born here, but you are Korean.”

  “What about a black man?” I said.

  My father smashed his fist down on the table. “This is not a joke, Myung Hee-ya” he said. “You think it's funny? If you marry someone I do not approve, you will no longer be my daughter!”

  My mother started yelling at my father in Korean, her words so rushed I couldn't identify a single one. My father yelled back, their words overlapping, growing louder.

  “Michin-nyeon!” I heard my father say. Crazy bitch.

  My mother ran crying from the room, and my father followed after her. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the sound of their voices, sharp at first, then gradually calm enough that I lost reception. What had that been about? Since when had my father started worrying about the purity of his ancestral line?

  A little too late, I thought, thinking of Lee Nam Ho with his too-long bangs and flat features. He hadn't been bad-looking; he was actually sort of attractive in a gangling sort of way, but something inside me cringed at the notion of being paired with a Korean boy, his features matching my own like dominoes—the same narrow eyes, flat nose, and sallow complexion. I tried to imagine going to bed with him, our thin yellow bodies pressed together in perfect reciprocity, an incestuous twinning. I thought of Hero, of his strange pearl-like pallor, and I wanted to weep.

  My mother apologized for my father's strange outburst the next morning. She was off to class, and my father had already left for the day. I had a sore throat and had decided not to go to school. “Your father thinks marrying a Korean will make your life easier,” she said. “He means well, Isa. It's just his way.”

  “You always say that.”

  My mother sighed. “You think it's easy to live with your father?” she said. “He had difficult life—his father dying so young, then his mother and sister…. He gets angry, so angry sometimes because of these things he has lived. …” She didn't seem to be talking to me anymore. “Korean men are not taught to be tender,” she said. “It's hard for them to show feelings on outside. That doesn't mean they aren't there.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of excuses to me,” I said. “‘Korean men aren't taught to be tender….’ They can't show their feelings…. “What you're saying is that he never has to change.”

  My mother looked at me and adjusted the strap on the book bag on her shoulder. She seemed tired. “I'm saying he never will,” she said.

  I had senioritis badly that spring. I wasn't excited about going to SUNY-Albany in the fall, but at least it was settled, and I would be getting away. We had an open campus at the high school, which meant that seniors could sign out during free periods. I would leave school at midday and walk home using the shortcut behind the Episcopal church.

  Sometime after returning from Salt Lake I had developed a mild smoking habit. I would sit on a white birch stump in a small clearing off the path behind the church and light up, looking up at the sky and trying to train my eyes to find birds in the higher branches of the trees. Hero was remarkably good at this. He would locate birds by the sounds they made, mapping their location with alarming accuracy. “See that dead branch on the right ofthat pine? Just left and up, below that triangular space of sky,” he would say, and like magic, I would suddenly see the bird resting there, as though he had conjured it with his words. I never understood how he did this, blind as he was to so much of the world, but he had unerring vision when it came to birds. He knew their names, too. Nuthatch and chickadee, purple martin and red-winged blackbird. Nothing very exotic. But I loved that he could name them. Like Adam in the Garden.

  I tried not to think of Hero, but it was like not thinking about the elephant in the living room. He was huge in my mind still. That it had all turned bitter seemed only to have solidified him in my thoughts, to make me replay in my head the film reel of our love affair—all the passionate, exciting moments—and freeze it at the moment where it all went wrong, to see if this time I could analyze the precise thing I'd said or done, the mistake I'd made, the place where his heart had turned against me.

  My father was in California again. The two research teams were going back and forth at regular intervals now. I imagined Lee Nam Ho awaiting my dad's arrival, contemplating D.H.

  Lawrences swooning passion even as his mind occupied itself with the fine mathematical calculations of the quantifiable world.

  I started rereading Women in Love, which in truth I found a little too neat, a little too two-and-two. I'd read that Lawrence once said the problem with relations between the same gender is that there cannot be sex and the problem with relations
between men and women is that there must be. At seventeen, I'd formulated the theory that it didn't matter whether you were male or female, having sex or not; the problem with relations between people was that the range of passion and disquiet was infinite in its variety, and none of us could escape the cell and the blessing of our own solitude. When I read Lawrence, I smelled a setup, ideas masquerading as characters, and I balked. Despite Lawrence's modern view of relationships and all that swooning, I thought it was, after all, right up Lee Nam Ho's alley.

  One night when my mother was about to go off to an evening class, I asked her what she thought about love, and to my surprise, she blushed.

  “Do you think it lasts?” I said. “I mean, with you and Dad … I know he's difficult, but he clearly loves you.”

  My mother closed her eyes. “Love changes,” she said slowly. “Comes and goes. Not fixed, you know. Not like a mountain, more like ocean.”

  I nodded. “But after all these years, you and Dad still love each other, right?” My mother didn't answer right away. She was searching through her book bag looking for something. She brought up the chapbook I recognized from her poetry professor. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “ ‘Ask not of love,’” she quoted, “ ‘for it will not answer.’”

  I pondered this. My mother was smiling beatifically at me, as though she had not only trumped my question but taken all the tricks in the rubber. Did she mean, “Don't ask because I won't tell you”? or “Don't ask because the answer is no”? I held a dim view of her professor's poetry. I hadn't been asking of love, but about it, and it seemed to me that his syntax was off.

  “I'm late,” my mother said, glancing at the clock. She kissed me on the cheek. “Don't worry about love, Isa,” she said. “It will find you.”

  It already had, but I didn't tell her that, and what I'd really been asking was, What do you do when it leaves?

  She'd left her professor's chapbook on the counter, and I sat in the kitchen and read through Unspeakable Acts by William R. Moulten. I say I “read through,” but really I skimmed it, or not so much skimmed as let my eyes land on a phrase or two. “Her hair falls/across the streambed of her eyes/like a shot horse;/the water grows bitter.” These particular lines were underlined in black pen, as were the lines my mother had read out loud, “Ask not of love/for it will not answer.” On the flyleaf, in a scrunched vertical hand, was written:

  To Hae Kyoung, who inhabits poetry like most people dwell in prose. All the way from Seoul, Korea, to Schenectady, New York—a propitious meeting and fond friendship.

  Yrs, Bill.

  If I had been asked to write, as Dorothy Parker had been many times, a pithy review to sum up the contents of the professor's small book, it would have been this: “Unspeakable Acts is itself an unspeakable act, and certainly one which the reader wishes had also remained unwritten.”

  Was it my mother's simple lack of fluency that made her esteem his poetry so highly? It was possible. As a girl in Korea she was partial to sentimental poems that she was made to read in English class, poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But she was also the woman who claimed “Fern Hill” was her favorite poem, and she'd once asked me to read aloud to her “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” and had been moved to tears.

  Poetry, unlike science, was a subjective thing, I reasoned. One person's sublime was another person's ridiculous. In this my father was right. Who was I to criticize William R. Moulten? Still, there was something about him I didn't like. It wasn't just that I thought his poetry was bad, or that he revered Whitman, or that he taught at a community college; it was the inscription on the flyleaf of my mother's book. She'd said he had given a copy to each of his students. Had he also inscribed such personal notes on every one?

  My mother's own poems were lovely, I thought, but now I wondered what they really meant. I'd helped her with one she'd written about kimjang in Korea, the season when the women make kimchi to store for the winter, the red peppers spread out on mats to dry on the roofs of the houses and in the dirt courtyards. It seemed vivid and evocative to me, though I had only seen the process in photographs. The last lines were “Salt and spice to heat the tongue/after a long winter's burial.”

  Espionage

  Two nights before my father was due back from California, my mother didn't return from her evening class. I was worried because she usually got back by nine, nine thirty at the latest, and I thought she would call if she'd been detained. More like my parents than I liked to imagine, I was filled with visions of her car wrapped around a telephone pole, or some lurid murderer dragging her off into a deserted alley.

  Earlier that evening my father had called, his telephone voice curt and efficient.

  “Myung Hee, things all right there?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is your mother home?”

  “Tonight's her class.”

  “Oh, I forgot. Tell her I will be home Saturday night at nine thirty. Do you have a pencil?”

  I got one. I wrote, Saturday 9:30 p.m. Dad home.

  “Good. Don't forget to give her message.”

  Click. No “Good-bye,” no “See you Saturday.” Having reached the end of the information he wished to impart, he'd simply hung up.

  I wondered if I should call him now. I had his hotel number in California. But what could he do so far away except worry? It was after eleven and I was already in my pajamas, having watched some terrible TV movie about a woman being terrorized by an ex-lover. It consisted of lots of long shots down dark corridors, the woman walking barefoot along the wooden floor, music thumping, the man lunging out from behind a house-plant to strangle her with piano wire.

  I could call the police, I supposed, though it seemed a bit premature. There was always the possibility that class had gone over, that a few students had decided to continue discussion in some late-night coffee shop. She could have stopped at the A & P— open twenty-four hours—to pick up groceries. This seemed like my mother, that she would enjoy cruising the grocery aisles at eleven p.m., choosing carefully between Sanka and Maxwell House, in no hurry since my father was not waiting for her.

  Even as I was thinking these things, I heard the garage door open and my mother's car, with its high idle, enter and then die. She came up the stairs from the basement with a light step (no groceries, then) and opened the door quietly, as though she expected I'd be asleep.

  “Oh, Isa,” she said.

  “It's after eleven, Mom. Where've you been?” I said. “I was worried.”

  My mother put down her book bag and her purse and took off her jacket. She walked past me into the kitchen and started clearing dishes I'd left on the table.

  “I'm sorry I'm late,” she said in a bright, false voice. “Class went over and then Professor Moulten—Bill—asked some of us to come to his office to see his first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass.” She ran a sponge under warm water and started to wipe the counters, her back to me. “Walt Whitman,” she said.

  “Mom, I know who wrote Leaves of Grass” I said.

  “Yes, of course you do,” she said. “I like it very much. ‘Song of Myself”

  “It's okay” I said, feeling contentious. “I mean, if you like folksy, self-indulgent windbags—”

  My mother turned around. “He's Professor Moulten's favorite,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I'm not sure Professor Moulten is that good a judge, to be honest,” I said. “I read his book the other day. It's terrible.”

  It was as though I'd struck my mother in the face. Her cheeks actually reddened. She'd always trusted my opinions on literature, but here I was criticizing her guru, Professor Moulten—Bill. The unspeakable man. I felt a sudden desire to rip him to shreds before her eyes, to expose the sham of his poetic posturing and his great-man airs, his pompous self-importance so very at odds with the sparseness of his talents.

  “Bill is very good poet,” my mother said, slowly, carefully, as though she wanted me to memoriz
e each word. “And he is great teacher.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so,” I said. “Oh, by the way,” I called over my shoulder. I'd turned away from her and was walking up the stairs to my room. “Dad called.”

  I lay in bed and listened to the routine patter of my mother's nighttime ritual, running water in the kitchen sink and washing the dishes (I did not feel at all guilty for having left them there), opening and closing the refrigerator door, her footsteps coming up the stairs, pausing outside my door but not entering. She went into the bathroom, and I heard the sounds of her ablutions, the soft motor of the Water Pik, the toilet's flush, water splashing in the sink.

  It was a long time before I got to sleep.

  My father returned from the West Coast without incident. The two of us, my mother and me, were solicitous toward him and watchful of one another. Together we asked questions about his California experiments, listening raptly to the answers, fetching his coffee and just-popped toast. My mother's poetry books, which had once spilled out along the kitchen counters, were suddenly removed. She began to talk most often of her biology class, which was difficult for her, and my father was delighted when she asked him for help.

  None of this fooled me. I found a piece of Auden stuck into the zipped inner pocket of her purse, a line from Whitman folded into the back of her wallet. I snuck into her bedroom and found Moulten's chapbook stashed in the back of her bottom dresser drawer. The lines “Her hair falls across the streambed of her eyes /like a shot horse,” were copied out across the inside cover, opposite Professor Moulten's inscription, in what appeared to be my mother's hand.

  The next time my father went to California, I drove him to the airport. Dropping him off, I watched him grab his suitcases from the car. I pushed the trunk closed and we stood for a moment on the curb. My father's hair was thinning on top, a mottled swath of scalp beginning to widen along his part. It seemed too intimate a thing for a daughter to witness, and I turned away.