Love Love (37 page)

Behind the open door stood Soo, drying her hands on her apron. Every time Judy saw this woman, Soo was in the middle of cooking. In every way, Soo was different from her mother, from the tight perm on her head to her ridiculously tiny feet, and yet for some reason, she was her father's second go-around at love. Had Judy expected the new woman to be a copy of her mother? Absolutely not. In fact, that would've been more disturbing. During her mother's sickness, Soo had been a welcome fixture, feeding her father and doting on her mother. But then her mother died, and Soo never left. While Kevin believed her father and Soo got closer because of their mutual love of their mother, to Judy, it always felt as if Soo had crept in, then attached herself to the hull of their lives. Not even six months later, Judy found out from Kevin that Soo and her father had gone to city hall to get married, and the invasion was complete. Now, standing face-to-face with this woman, Judy was glad the bulk of her distaste still remained.

“Good morning,” Soo said. She looked at Judy askance, reminding her of the way Snaps acted when she was caught misbehaving. Judy could see she wanted to know who Roger was, probably salivating at the possibility that she might be able to feed him, but Judy didn't want to give her the satisfaction.

“Father ready?” she asked. “To go?” She pointed to the car.

“Yes, yes,” Soo said, and she scurried away.

“That's your stepmom?” Roger asked.

“So they say,” Judy said.

He asked her if they were going to go in. Even though she'd rather stay out here on the front porch instead of subjecting herself to her past, Roger was here for her to do exactly that. Judy pushed through the door.

“It's a nice house,” Roger said, and it was true. As they ascended the stairs, her left hand tracked the curve of the banister. It felt as it always had, the wooden handrail cold and slightly sticky. She'd lived eighteen years of her life here, longer than any other place, and even though she was a grown woman with her own apartment, when she thought of home, what materialized in her mind's eye was this staircase and the family photos lining the walls. From the landing up, it was like traveling through a time machine, with portraits of Kevin and Judy as infants, Kevin posing with his bat in his Little League uniform, Judy awkwardly airborne in a pink tutu. After a pair of graduations, there was no evidence of the future failure of two marriages, and finally, a shot from some nondescript birthday. Somebody must've given the camera over to the waitress because everybody was there, Kevin and Alice and Judy and Brian and her father and her mother, sitting around a table, their hands clapping, a fireball of a birthday cake burning in the middle. She couldn't remember whose birthday it had been. How many countless other houses displayed a visual path of family history like theirs, the children growing up and living out their lives, only to die themselves and continue the great game of life with their own children?

There was a change to the wall at the top of the staircase, a small portrait of her father and Soo at the dinner table, looking truly happy. Both of their hands were on the table, each holding a shiny knife and fork, ready to dig into a feast, their faces beaming as if they'd just heard the funniest joke in the world. Judy would bet a hundred bucks that Kevin took this picture, he must've asked for them to pose this way, and she felt a pinprick of jealousy. To imagine herself in Kevin's place, camera in hand, composing the shot, then telling her father to grab the utensils and be silly—it was a possibility that was an impossibility. Her photo would've been an error; her father's natural grimace and Soo's simper would have been evident in their unwilling smiles, captured onto the digital grid, the ugliest possible arrangement of their pixels.

“Was this your bedroom?” Roger asked.

Every year of her childhood, she had counted the footsteps it took to walk from her bedroom door to the first step on the staircase. She stopped doing that when she could do it in nine steps, but now, she was able to get there in just five quick strides. How little that child must've been, how utterly unrecognizable from the sullen woman she'd turn
out to be. Judy stood at the border of her adolescence, tentative to cross the threshold, as if breaching this invisible line would mean she'd transform back into the happily helpless, helplessly happy girl.

Her mother had warned her that she was planning to convert Judy's bedroom into her craft room, but it never happened. Some of her mother's stuff had migrated here, the largest of which was her floor loom, looking more like the skeleton of a piano than a machine that created tapestry. Judy's bed was still in the same position, and her desk, too, except instead of her books on the hutched shelves above, spindles of yarns of different colors and shades were crammed tightly between the boards of wood. Judy had been the first one to abandon this room, and now with her mother's departure, this space felt like a tomb.

“Boy George?” Roger pointed at the poster that still hung on her closet door, its edges curled inward like an ancient scroll.

It was a blow-up of Culture Club's first album cover, with a headshot of Boy George in his signature black bowler hat looking pouty, contrasting the neon-bright extensions in his hair and liquid pink lipstick. Three round insets showcased his bandmates in sleeveless T-shirts, the silliness of '80s fashion in full display. Staring at the poster, Judy had trouble believing she'd once been enough of a fan to have gone through the numerous steps it took for this piece of paper to exist in front of her. She had to have asked her father or mother to drive her to the mall, where she handed over babysitting money to the cashier to buy the poster, and then to bring it back home, unroll it, tack it on with enough poster putty for it to still hang here a quarter of a century later? It was exhausting just to think about it.

“The less said,” Judy said, “the better.”

Roger sat on her bed and leaned back against the wall.

“Thank you for doing this for me,” he said. “I know you didn't want to.”

She sat down next to him. “There are some good memories in here. Bad ones, too.” And now that Roger had been here, he, too, joined the cast of previous characters occupying this room, and Judy couldn't help but think which one Roger would be years from now, good or bad? Maudlin lyrics from the old Culture Club hit floated back to her.
Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?

She was living in the present but was preoccupied with the future's past, doing exactly what years of therapy had told her not to do. You
were supposed to live in the moment, because that's all there ever was, and yet it was maybe the hardest thing to do.

From below, she heard her name being called in that inimitable way of Soo's, two dragged syllables ending with an uncertain lilt: “Joo-dee . . . ?”

“Okay,” Judy yelled back.

Roger offered her his hand, and she took it. They rose together.

“It's a nice room,” he said. “I can see you in it.”

She could, too, and so much more: the twin tracks of scuff marks on the floor where she pushed back her chair, the left leg of her bed she'd banged into so many times that she'd wrapped a sock around it, a shadow of the old forest-green paint peeking through the peach-colored walls. Her father had helped her repaint this room. She hadn't asked him, he just came to work with her, and the only words they'd exchanged pertained to the task at hand. She'd been fifteen, and the night before, she was caught shoplifting a skirt at the mall, the stupidest stunt in a series of stupid stunts that summer, and he'd been so angry that her mother had stood between them, turning herself into a shield against his acid words and flailing arms. He screamed that Judy was growing up to be a terrible person, human trash, a person with no moral center. She called him a coward, a drunk, anything else to hurt him.

And yet the next morning he was here, dipping a roller into the paint tray, blotting out the deep dark green with his troublemaker daughter. In retrospect, there was no better antidote after a fight than painting, covering the walls that had absorbed the brunt of their bitterness. With every roll or brushstroke, it was as if they were witnessing the gradual emergence of a brighter future, and they could almost pretend that this would be a new start for them, a peaceful coexistence between father and child. Of course this hardly turned out to be the case, what with driving and sex and alcohol and drugs, all those vices lining up ahead of Judy's high school years, ready to blow up like a series of time bombs, but for that one afternoon, there was enough hope for the both of them to trust the ephemeral congeniality of their shared fiction.

Ever since she tripped and broke her ankle on prom night, Judy made a habit of holding on to the handrail, and she did so now as she descended the staircase. Her brother wasn't here to save her this time if she took a tumble. He was far away in California, and thinking of
Kevin and her drawings gave her a solid, palpable sense of joy, until she saw the man waiting at the landing. She hadn't seen her father in months, and bundled up in a puffy winter coat, he looked far frailer than she'd remembered, the few white curls of his hair as wispy as windswept clouds. She knew she was supposed to feel sympathy, which was what Roger was obviously feeling, the way he laid a kind hand on her shoulder, a gesture of pity and understanding if there ever was one. Judy wished she felt something, but there was nothing there. Was this empty void better than hatred or disgust? She didn't know. Maybe it was an improvement, to see her father as what he was, a task to be performed because her brother asked her to.

“You not have to come,” her father said.

“Yes,” Judy said. “I know.”

“You late.”

The house could be burning down, and she could be carrying him in her arms, jumping over the flames and out the door, and he'd still find something to criticize.

Roger opened the door for Soo.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I'm Roger,” he said, and he bowed to both of them.

Judy's father gave him a once-over. “You Japanese,” he said, not a question.

Roger nodded.

“Okay.”

Judy didn't know what that meant, whether because Roger was from Japan, or that Judy was with a Japanese man, or that her father had guessed correctly. In the end, it didn't matter, because whatever or whomever the word had been bestowed on, it was right.

24

H
idden in the North Beach district of San Francisco was the Hive, Claudia's gallery, which from the outside looked more like a warehouse. There was no sign, just a single metallic sculpture of a beehive and a bee flying toward it, with a tangled squiggle of dotted lines to show its flight path. Inside, it was as if someone had taken a space as tall and wide as a high school gymnasium, filled the room with white paint, and drained it out. Everything, from the ceiling to the floor, was white. Kevin had been here only once before, and the first thing he pointed out was how clean the floor was.

“It's a trick,” Claudia had told him. “There's a full inch of a clear coating on top of the white enamel. So as long as the coating doesn't yellow, which it isn't supposed to, ever, considering how much it cost, I'll always have the snowiest gallery in town.”

The cavernous space had been mostly empty then, but now it was filled with art. According to the sign leaning on the easel by the entrance, there were six artists being showcased. The fourth one down on the alphabetical list was
JUDY YOON LEE
.

“That's your sister, Judy?” Denise asked.

“Your sister, too, in a roundabout way,” he said.

How many times had Judy sat in the bleachers of his tennis matches, under the relentless sun or inside a sweaty tennis club, to cheer him on? Standing here and taking in her name embossed in gold capital letters, he was grateful to be able to pay her back in part for all those hours she'd spent on him. And the woman who was making it possible, Claudia, was at the opposite end of the room, wearing a cerulean bandanna, guiding a worker to relocate a gigantic sculpture shaped like a matchbook. The head of a match was as large as a human head, but the piece was made of some light material because the man had no
problems pushing it into its new place. The matchbook was open with four matches remaining, three clustered together on one side while one stood alone on the other. There was tension in the grouping, the lone match versus the trio, and it probably wasn't a coincidence that the three had yellow bands below their orange heads while the single had a black one. At Penn State, Kevin had taken a course in modern art, and the artist he ended up liking the best was René Magritte, because not only were his paintings really cool to study, but also it seemed as if they took him some time to compose. Someone unfamiliar with art may not understand the cultural or artistic significance of the green apple obscuring the man's face, but Kevin could still appreciate the workmanship. When Claudia looked his way, Kevin waved, and she motioned him toward her.

They met halfway across the room, at another featured artist's work, a head shot of a woman's face that when seen close up was a mosaic of black and white pushpins. The woman's hair was a glittery clump of paper clips, her sweater a collection of curled up Post-It notes. The mixed-media canvas was encased in a clear material like Lucite, but instead of a flat surface, it had waves, as if the material had been put in liquid motion before being flash-frozen in place. It was remarkable, and large, too, a circle about six feet in diameter, and it hung suspended by a cable from the ceiling.