Drifting House (2 page)

He walked to an orange crate, his table, and poured her a thimble-size glass of the
soju
. She accepted the clear rice wine. She was so close she could see a vein in his neck throbbing, and she found herself wanting his dry lips, his hands tight around her neck. But when he kissed her, his lips were tame, disappointing. His hands stayed limply at his sides.

She turned so his second kiss missed her lips and descended on her cheek.

Immediately after, she patted her lips dry on her sleeve—she would wash before bed. He rubbed furiously at his hair, his eyes looked for somewhere to rest. Then he crawled underneath the Ping-Pong table and fumbled with the cotton
yo
that he now lay on top of, escaping into sleep.

“Sleep will do us good,” she said decisively, and fled upstairs. She locked the door behind her.

The next morning Mrs. Shin disinfected the bathtub with a travel-size spray she always carried with her. She showered, dried her bob into two symmetrical points, and steam-pressed her white linen skirt suit, though she had nowhere to go. When she came downstairs, Mr. Rhee was preparing bean curd stew, dried yellow corvina, and small plates of cooked bracken and balloon flower roots. Mortified to see a man in a kitchen, she tried to wrench the spatula away, then she remembered last night’s scene. This was America, she reasoned, as Mr. Rhee hugged the spatula. Hadn’t she come to live differently?

Over breakfast they were careful and cordial to each other, their eyes converged on the bubbling
ttukbaegi
of stew.

“America’s a dangerous place,” Mr. Rhee warned her.

“I’m not afraid of danger,” she said, unwilling to take advice from a man who slept under Ping-Pong tables.

He told her that to their right sat the Verdugo Mountains, and to their left, a shopping center the size of Seoul’s Olympic Park with a Korean supermarket, video store, and salon specializing in Asian hair. And in a small building rented from the American Methodists was a Korean church, where the community’s business deals were made. A Korean lawyer, a dentist, an optometrist, even a pet stylist, populated the mini-mall. Two cable stations broadcast Korean programs exclusively. She could, he reasoned, comfortably manage by confining herself to this one-mile area.

Mrs. Shin listened, nodded agreeably, and within a week purchased a burgundy-colored Hyundai Excel from a used-car lot.
Its back door didn’t open, she had to hit the driver’s window twice to roll it down, the left signal indicated right, and the right signal indicated left. She inched the car onto the highway toward Koreatown. Her broad forehead beaded with sweat as a truck the size of a small house whizzed by on a curving overpass and sent her car rolling on its axles, but she sang loudly to herself until her car stabilized. The sky outside the window was empty even of clouds, and the mountains were an unfamiliar, vast landscape of desert. She was not certain that Yuri still lived in California; she considered herself without a country. She couldn’t afford to be scared.

Detective Pak was a lean silver-haired man in black slacks, white collar shirt, and wire-frame eyeglasses, an unadorned, efficient costume that matched his straight nose and blunt fingernails. His greeting was crisp and uninflected, unhurried and uninterested. He was a man who cared about details: handpainted bookmarks were stacked neatly at the edge of bookshelves crowded with books of poetry, a greenhouse of plants in descending sizes lined the small office, and, most worrying, an accounting exam certificate with his name, Gilho Pak, stenciled in, and a diploma from Korea’s best university, Seoul National, were displayed in matching cedar frames behind him. She had hoped for a second generation with sloppy Korean, a man raised on hamburgers and fries, someone who might not have crossed the Pacific with his patriarchal ideas intact. Instead she got Detective Pak.

He shut her skinny file. “When you first called me, you claimed your daughter was kidnapped.”

“But in a way, Dr. Pak, she was.”

She always called people doctor when the situation required flattery.

He did not look flattered.

“If she’s been kidnapped, I’m the last Joseon prince. I learned your husband got legal custody when you divorced.” He gazed at her with a coolness she was unused to in men, and she wondered with amusement and worry if she, despite her efforts, now looked her age. He said, “And now you’re remarried?”

So that was what he was thinking. That she was another Korean mother who had abandoned her daughter in order to remarry.

She looked for family photos on Dr. Pak’s desk: for the young son and daughter, a svelte wife in golf shirt and shorts, but there was only a photo of Dr. Pak standing beside a young man with large, despondent eyes. Dr. Pak turned the photo over when he saw her looking. Still, she assumed he called his wife
jip-saram
,
literally
houseperson
. Undoubtedly she made him two hot meals a day, the children would attend Ivy League schools, or at least UCLA or UC Berkeley. Nothing truly terrifying had ever happened to him, which gave her the small comfort of someone who had suffered. The vision of that excruciatingly ordinary life, that bonhomie, made her shudder. She wanted to want it; she loathed it.

He doodled question marks on letterhead stationery.

“It’s a lovely family photo,” she said.

“
Samo-nim
,
why’d you let her go?” he said, his voice and gestures mechanically polite. “Do you know what it means, to lose your kids?”

She sat as erect as a queen. Then smiling, she said, “Dr. Pak,
your job must be so emotionally taxing. I consider myself permanently bound to you.”

“I need the real story.” His gaze was unswerving in its need to understand. “So you gave up and agreed, and now you don’t?”

“You’re paid to be a detective, not a….” She struck the table with her purse. “You don’t know what happened. Dangshin, you know nothing about me!”

He apologized, suddenly confused and upset in a way that made him more human, but she was too furious to stay. She marched out of the office. From the car, she watched pigeons snap at scraps of rotting pickled radish. The trunks of palm trees that she felt an urge to dress swayed precariously. She had lost face. Still, she would not share her secrets: how powerless she had been when her husband had bribed judges and taken Yuri away. How, on their last meeting, he had jammed a fat envelope of bank checks into her hand, saying, “You will start over.” Or how she had refused the money that she needed, refused to retreat in the quietly disgraced way hundreds of divorced Korean women had, to one of the many Koreatowns in America. Only then the unexpected had happened. Within a year her husband and his lover had disappeared with Yuri.

She reknotted her scarf and jiggled her facial muscles loose with her knuckles. Look humbled, look wrong, she told herself, and turned back to his office.

She waited. Between Detective Pak’s rare updates, Mrs. Shin fabricated a paperwork life for the marriage interview and adhered to a punishing productivity. She took brutal hour-long runs at five
in the morning, then attacked the house with an artillery of vacuums, mops, and toothpicks; she negotiated an under-the-table sales job at a Koreatown boutique, which soon enjoyed a twenty percent sales increase. Twirling her ivory sun parasol above her head, she sought out strangers to practice English on, including Jehovah’s Witnesses that Mr. Rhee said were “reliable company.” She charged at her new life, but without hope, because hope was painful, dangerous.

As they amplified their story of marital bliss with new photographs, she learned that Mr. Rhee chewed green tea leaves to clean his teeth and that his nervous hand motions were usually practice swings for upcoming tournaments. That he donated extravagant sums he could not afford to the Los Angeles Mission, that he was intimidated by his English-speaking children attending East Coast universities. He was the retiring type but could not abide the abuse of women or children, which he said was as common as the flu in the immigrant community. Once, when Mr. Rhee stopped a man from spanking his child, the man smashed Mr. Rhee’s eye and might have knocked out his teeth next if Mrs. Shin hadn’t clubbed the man with her Bottega Veneta handbag. He was lonely and wanted her friendship, her company, and more, but she pretended not to notice.

One evening after work, she caught a random bus out of Koreatown, hungry to break up the routine of the days, and finally disembarked in an area called San Julian Park. It was the other America that had Mr. Rhee trembling, but she stepped off the bus so bored, she welcomed disaster. She strolled around the perimeter of the park, wanting the terrible to happen, but a trolling group of teenage boys merely stared at her and left her alone. A few
homeless men crawled out of their cardboard tents and asked her for change, glue, anything you got, they said, their hands patiently held out for the token kindness they did not seem to expect. She tripped over a man with a Jesus beard lying on the grass, his blue eyes wasted, a bloody needle jammed into his emaciated thigh. Only one black boy on a tricycle briskly slapped her buttocks as he blitzed by, giving her a tiny thrill. But that was it.

She wandered until she saw a gas station phone booth lit by a dim streetlight. The foreign, starless sky oppressed her. A woman wearing only white sports socks and a torn trench coat limped across the street without looking left or right as if she no longer valued her life.

Mrs. Shin called after her, “Where am I?”

The woman cackled. “Don’t you know?” And she went on.

She didn’t know what else to do. She called Mr. Rhee.

“Pearl Express!” Mr. Rhee’s foggy voice crackled. “How can I help you?”

“It’s Mrs. Shin.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I must have had a little nap—I have a mat, you see.
Saesang-heh!
It’s nine-thirty! It’s the Sealy mattress, a very comfortable mat.”

Mr. Rhee would spring up from a creaky mattress with his nervous energy. The smells around him would be the clean, honest smells of chemicals and stale coffee grounds, and this comforted her somehow.

“Did you have rice?” she asked, which always meant, Did you eat?

“I had a sandwich,” he said, and they both knew that this meant that he had not truly eaten.

“I’m somewhere near Julian Park—”

“Skid row! Where exactly was the accident?” There were the sounds of panicked preparation. “Don’t move! I’ll find you soon.”

She said, “
Ani,
I’m safe, I think. It’s just that—” She was mortified to find herself crying.

“Our poor Okja!” With genteel, outdated gallantry, he said her name for the first time. “
Saesang-heh!
What has befallen us?”

“Mr. Rhee.” Her body sagged against the cold glass of the telephone booth. She laid her head against the sticky surface left by hundreds of hands, and into the receiver, she whispered, “I lost my daughter. Her name is Yuri.”

Mr. Rhee insisted on visiting Detective Pak on his own, and by the week’s end, Mrs. Shin consented. It was four months into her time in America. Friday after work, time dragged even more than usual while she cleaned. She scoured the immaculate kitchen and bathroom tiles; she furiously dusted the shelves sinking with books. She kept her eyes off the clock. While she polished the plaques that served as bookends, she noticed the engraved names: his name, Moonhyung Rhee, and underneath, Kyunghee Rhee. Doubles in the 1996 Koreatown League Championships. They moved her, those worthless monuments.

Now that the house shone like a trophy, there was nothing to distract her. She flipped through the movie channels, but make-believe stories did not interest her. She paced back and forth, clapping her hands together repeatedly to improve her circulation. Finally, after she had paced through all corners of the house available to her, she entered Mr. Rhee’s bedroom. She strolled around
the Ping-Pong table. Before bed he would place his eyeglasses on the wooden crate printed with
FLORIDA ORANGES
. In the fractured moonlight he would crawl under the table that he and his Mrs. Rhee had prized, unfurl the
yo,
and sleep, and in sleep, return to a past that never quite ended for anyone. She contemplated Mrs. Rhee’s photograph, her salty smile, the brown smudge of a mole on the woman’s chin.

Within a half hour, she rifled through the closet’s woolly sweaters, telling herself that she must help this hopeless man coordinate, though she knew what she wanted. She pushed to the back of the closet and found what had been left behind: churchy floral dresses, ruffled blouses. And though it was inappropriate—no, invasive—she tried on one of the polyester washing-machine-safe dresses. She pinned her hair to the right and smoothed it into place until the mirror gratified her. Finally, she was freed from herself.

The new Mrs. Shin set the robot at a low level, and thrust the paddle at the table. The balls came at her like a relentless argument. She missed, missed, struck. The dress soon cleaved to her like plastic kitchen wrap. After a time the machine spawned only gurgling sounds. Sweat bubbled on her upper lip and hair fused to her cheekbones. Tired but refreshed, she tossed the paddle across the table. It collided with the net.

She traced the table’s crude divisions, one of the good, simple things left from a life that had gone wrong. She, too, understood escape.

“Sleeping under the table,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

Her hand was feeling across her back for the zipper when the
bedroom door clicked open. He had returned earlier than he had said he would.

“You didn’t go to practice,” she said.

“How, how devious,” he stuttered. “How dare you insult me?”

“I had no right to….” With her head bowed, she fell to her knees, one at a time.

He said, “Please, Mrs. Shin. This isn’t the theater….” He walked past, then swiveled back, his fingers twitching. “You wanted to play, let’s play.”

She remained on her knees. “You should slap me,” she said. She offered him her body.

“I would never hurt a woman.”

He wanted to hit her, she could tell; his hands were balled into bony fists.