The Loved Ones

by Sonya Chung

  Charles was there on a fluke: he and Dennis had been walking down the street with Kang, a KATUSA in their company, when Kang stopped suddenly, frozen in front of the window of the club. Smoke just about came out of his ears and nostrils, as Charles told it. He was mumbling and hissing in Korean.

  Kang had seen his sister through the window; she’d run away from home, a small town outside Incheon, six months before. He’d feared this very thing, that she’d taken up work as a hostess in a club. Their father was a respected teacher of mathematics in their hometown; the girl had rebelled because she wanted to be an actress, which their father deemed disgraceful and forbade. “Charles, you have to go in. You have to go in and bring her out. My sister. I cannot go; the owner, he knows me. His wife is from Incheon. He knows my family. I cannot.” Charles had looked to Dennis, who held up his hands and backed off like a man pleading innocent to a crime not yet committed; then he looked at Kang, who was desperate, near tears. Charles scanned the streets to see if there was anyone he recognized, a white private from their company. There was no one. Then he stepped up to the window and looked inside: he saw someone he knew, Sanders, a Private First Class who lived down the hall in the barracks. He was a quiet guy from Oregon, not exactly friendly, but not unfriendly either. He was the guy who told the other guys to clean the fuck up after themselves in the bathroom.

  Alice understands better now, the risk Charles had taken—what it was like, for the black enlisted men, even among the higher ranks. She’d heard about the riots at Camp Humphreys; and there were smaller incidents on and around base that she now paid attention to. At the school, there were only a few black students, and it was understood that their being at the school at all meant their fathers outranked the other students’ fathers. They were never harassed or mistreated; the children perceived rank better than anyone. Alice understands too that Charles’s friendship with Kang is an oddity: the KATUSAs were ignored by the other soldiers at best, taunted at worst, though they came from families of stature and education. But Charles was drawn to Kang’s interest in history and books and what was going on in the larger world. He and Charles talked about things; Charles was learning the language from Kang, phrases other than “big dick” and “how much for a blowjob.” Alice found that admirable.

  They’d met for dinner a few times before Charles told her the real reason he’d decided to go into the club that night. When Kang pointed out his sister through the window, he could see that she was probably no older than fifteen, sixteen at most. Alice brought that night back into her mind and realized that he was right, and she was mortified: she’d nearly assaulted that teenage girl for taking her purse. Charles saw her embarrassment and smiled. He said, “Good thing you were smashed; your aim was pretty far off.”

  It wasn’t until they’d spent the night together on South Post for the first time that he told her the rest. “Dennis and I had been going to this place, The Lotus, pretty regularly. We went mostly just to hang out, you know; it was what there was, it was one of the mellower places where we were allowed. Sometimes, though, things would get outta hand, and at that point we would leave. Anyway, one night, I don’t know, it had been a bad week: one of our buddies had gotten into a fight with a KATUSA out on the street, and the MPs got into it, and everyone was a mess afterward; Dennis had just gotten word that his father had passed. I guess we were coming up on a full year, and it was like, what the hell were we doing here. The madam at The Lotus knew me by then, she called me chakhan gagman—basically sweet nigger—because I left the girls alone. But she saw that I was looking pretty low, so she said Here, go upstairs to room four, a special treat for you, and handed me a key, all smiles. So I went. I opened the door, and there was this girl, lying on a dingy mattress, on her stomach, naked. When she heard me come in, she didn’t look up, or turn around to see who it was, she just got up on her hands and knees and stuck out her ass. That’s what she was told to do, I assumed, by the madam.” Charles paused then. They were lying in Alice’s bed, it was the middle of the night. He’d said too much. He was talking like someone who just needed to talk; like a ghost caught between this world and the next.

  But Alice whispered, “And what happened?”

  Charles took a deep breath. He’d stopped wanting to tell this story, but Alice wanted the rest. “We’d smoked some weed. I was pretty out of it. I unbuckled my pants and went for her. It wasn’t like … it wasn’t really human or anything. It was just. It wasn’t real. It was a nightmare. When I got up on top of her it scared her, and she turned her head, made this noise like a small wild animal. I looked at her face. She had all this makeup on, and she smelled like cheap perfume, but Christ … she was maybe thirteen or fourteen.”

  They were both quiet then. Alice was sleepy, and the story made her feel hard and cold inside. There was a feeling of having been passed an anvil to carry. There was a feeling of curling up with it and wanting just to sleep. Three AM was the hour of absolute quiet on the base; in an hour the officers would rise, the recruits shortly after, and at five the day’s activity would begin; the sins of the night before would be buried and all but forgotten. Charles slipped out at five after five, and Alice slept another hour. After school the next day, Alice found a note in her staff mailbox: Not all my stories are that sad.—Charles

  He hadn’t told her the ending. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But she did wonder what had happened to Kang’s sister.

  A few days later, he told her. “After your friends picked you up and got you outta there, the owner threw us out—me, the girl, Sanders. Kang laid into the girl, right there on the street, slapped her a couple of times, put her on a bus back home.” It was Saturday, Alice played hooky from Korean class, and she and Charles were off post—their first time, together—hiking in the mountains north of Seoul. Alice hiked in front, he let her set the pace, which was brisk, and they were both winded. They paused at a lookout point—the leaves were aflame in gold and red and orange. Alice and Charles beheld the sight as if they weren’t also in it, as if there wasn’t another pair, on the other mountain, beholding them. Alice did not pause for long; she led them on, up and up, more steeply as they trekked higher and higher.

  Charles still had not finished his story. The last thing he said about Kang’s sister was, “She went missing again, last week. This time she packed everything, didn’t leave a trace. Probably someone helped her, with her getaway. Maybe there was a john, or a GI. Who knows? But it was predictable, I’d say. A girl like that, if you lock her up like a prisoner, all she’s thinking about is how to escape. A girl like that wants to be free; free and hungry and hooking is better than locked up and well-fed.” Alice kept going, up and up. Her heart was big and pounding in her chest, the cool air sharp in her lungs.

  Neither of them liked the story. Charles reported what had happened. There were no heroes, but no real villains either. It was a sad story with a bad ending. Alice wanted to argue—on behalf of the girl, on behalf of all women and girls. But she felt cornered somehow and didn’t know what to say, how to win. Alice also felt ashamed. About the purse. She wanted to find Kang’s sister, give her the damn purse.

  Neither of them goes home for Christmas that year; what was there to go home to. Agnew had resigned, Nixon was dirty; it was just a matter of time before a man with a funny voice, whom no one elected, became President. Dennis’s cousin, who went to Vietnam, wrote in letters about coming home, about people holding “Saigon Puppet” signs and shouting at them when they got off the plane.

  Alice and Charles have the house to themselves. They stay in, mostly, go out a couple of times for groceries. When they aren’t making love or cooking or eating, Charles reads the paper, listens to sports on the Army broadcast station, reads his The American Story textbook to get a jumpstart on the US history course he is taking next term. Alice helps him prepare for his math placement test— quadratic equations, geometry. Charles wants to finish his degree sooner rather than later. He wants to go home with it. Alice likes helpi
ng Charles, and Charles welcomes it.

  Charles shows Alice the essays he wrote for his writing class: a profile of J. Edgar Hoover, a memoir about being a pallbearer at his mother’s funeral, an analysis of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant.” Alice tells him he is a good writer, and that he has a lot to say. She means it, but somehow it sounds false when she says it out loud, like she is trying to buck him up.

  Alice asks Charles what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Charles says he thinks he can make NCO by the time he is thirty-five. Alice asks, Is that what you really want? Charles says he doesn’t know. Then he says, “Don’t laugh, but … when I was a kid my mother made me help out at the church on Saturdays. Someone donated a box full of spy novels. I stashed them and read all the Bond books, then I got really into Matt Helm, and then Ludlum. I always thought … I’d make a good spy.”

  Alice does laugh; they both do.

  Charles says, “What about you?”

  “I was supposed to be a doctor.”

  “Supposed to be.”

  “Yes. Lots of supposed-tos. My father. My mother, too. I mean, she would have wanted me to be independent. Professional.”

  “What do you want?”

  She pauses. “Don’t laugh.”

  “You bet I will; it’s my turn.”

  “Fair enough.” She wraps cut-up potatoes in a dish towel and squeezes; they are making fries. “I want to make the world better.” She lays the towel down on the counter. When she looks up, Charles is not laughing, not even in his expression. He looks genuinely confused. “What? Don’t you think America, the world, it’s all going to hell? Don’t you think we should try to …” She doesn’t have the words; aren’t they self-evident?

  “Try to …”

  “Try to …” Alice waves her hands, grasping.

  “Save it?”

  “Well … and why not?” She girds herself. Mentally, she has her fists up. So far, Charles has dominated whenever they talk about serious things. He always has the last word.

  “Depends on your definition of ‘better’.”

  “What does that mean?” Alice dumps the potatoes into the hot oil, too quickly, and it splashes her cheek. “Ow!” She jumps back from the stove. Charles calmly runs a towel under cold water and dabs her face. Alice holds still, trying to catch Charles’s eye, but he is focused, tending exclusively to the burn.

  Charles tosses the towel into the sink. “Think about Kang’s sister. He was ‘saving’ her, right? Her life was supposed to be ‘better’ if she was back home.”

  “Maybe it would have been.”

  “But maybe isn’t enough, is it? If you’re going to go to all that trouble. Of ‘saving’ someone. Are we making Korea ‘better’ by being here? Well, maybe you are. Me, the guys in my company. It’s a toss-up at best. And Vietnam, I mean c’mon. You gotta ask yourself; see the big picture. You gotta be smart about the savior business.”

  “And you want to be an officer in the United States military?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Right.” Alice sighs and laughs. Defeated again. She could tell Charles about Curfeo, about Laila, and the tree farms and the Mapuche cooperatives; but she hesitates. She told him that she was in the Peace Corps, but didn’t go into details when she saw the way he smiled and nodded, as if she had told him she liked puppies. She waits to see if he’ll ask about it now. He doesn’t. Alice ladles the fries out of the oil, lays them on a paper-toweled dish; lets them cool before the second fry. Charles makes perfect plump patties out of the ground chuck he picked up from the PX, along with beer and wine, a head of lettuce, a tub of mayonnaise, Tabasco, and sesame seed buns. Oreos for dessert.

  Charles is a fast eater, no nonsense. They don’t talk anymore about saving the world, or about the Army, or about Kang’s sister. They quiz each other on American presidents and laugh when they get to the thirteenth and Charles has to look it up in his textbook (Millard Fillmore). It is strange how comfortable it is, like they are an old married couple. In the evening, Charles reads on the sofa wearing just his boxers, shouts at the radio when his team is flagging. Neither of them thinks about the fact that there is no one else around, that it is just the two of them, inside the walls of this neat little ranch house (nor does Alice think how differently Charles acts, and talks, for instance, when Dennis is around).

  At the end of the week Alice begins to think about the future. How long will she stay in Korea. What will things be like between her and Charles after this week is over. After the school year is over. After Charles’s tour is over.

  The future comes fast. In February, Alice is four days late. One night, over kalbi-tang in their favorite hole-in-the-wall kalbi-jib, Alice says she can’t eat, tells Charles she doesn’t feel well, and prepares to tell him why. But then, she doesn’t. She can’t. Alice does not want to have this conversation with Charles, with anyone. She does not want to hear about “options.” She does not even want to be told it’s “her choice.” Because it’s not for anyone to tell her that. Saying it implies there is some question. There was no question the first time. She told no one but Gideon Roth. It was private; is private. Charles still drives their discussions, he thinks faster on his feet. He controls the silences. Not even knowing what Charles will say, Alice decides she won’t have it, his reasoned viewpoints, his calm authority. Not this time. She has a nightmare one night, Charles and Pauline wearing black capes, both shouting at her about being naïve, about considering the realities. Alice does not tell either Pauline or Suzanne. She wants to tell Laila, but it’s too much for a letter.

  What does she really want to do with her life? It’s clearer than it’s ever been. This. This child. Mother. Don’t laugh, Alice tells herself. Vaguely she is aware of the notion of karma, and she wants some part of it, another chance, the universe offering up redemption. It is not rational, but it is also unquestionable. This is what she will do with her life. With or without Charles.

  Charles is called down to Pusan for a month of training in March. In April for the spring holiday, Alice and Pauline and Suzanne decide to go to Kyoto. When they return, Alice decides it is time, she will tell him. They see each other for the first time in over a month, and both of them recognize that something is different. Charles is at once solicitous and distracted. Alice thinks, He’s been with a whore. Or two, or three. She thinks, I will do this alone. That’s how it will be. Charles says, What’s wrong? Are you all right? Alice is pale and fidgety and fierce, like she wants to start a fight.

  When she interrogates him about not calling from Pusan, Charles doesn’t play her game. “What is it? If you have something to say …” He drags it out of her. Alice breaks down, weeps in Charles’s arms. “It’s all right,” Charles says. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Six months later, when Alice goes into labor, Charles is on night duty at the stadium. Alice calls the security office, calls a taxi, and off she goes to Providence Hospital. When the pain comes, she cannot believe it; but her scream is silent, the taxi driver undisturbed. Alice is sure she will die before this child comes into the world. If she lives, how in God’s name will she be able to love something that has caused her this indescribable pain.

  6.

  Saturday is long in coming. Chong-ho smokes, pages through Young-shik’s old newspapers piled by the TV. On Friday morning Chong-ho goes for a long walk alone. Soon-mi rises early to help her host with kitchen chores and laundry; the rest of the day she stares out the bedroom window and naps at odd hours, alongside Hannah. James keeps his nose in a sketchbook, looks up to ask whomever will listen for something to drink, do they have any colored pencils. He finds bori-cha in the refrigerator, and Soon-mi makes a weak effort to find pencils but tells him he’ll have to wait for Yoo-na to come in from the yard.

  Young-shik is gone to town where he works at the post office; Yoo-na tends to the chickens and pigs. When Soon-mi wakes from one of her fitful naps and looks out the window to see Yoo-na wading in pig slop, she thinks:
I should go out and help. But weariness and revulsion overcome her, and she lays her head back down, pushing her cheek into the dense mat that separates her from the hard floor. She drifts off again, and in the moist warmth of half-sleep thinks, That woman will be rewarded in this life and the next, for her goodness; I, on the other hand …

  Hannah wakes at two in the afternoon, toddles into the main room, where James is reading a comic book, the one he’s read three times already.

  “Are you hungry?” James asks. Hannah nods. She has dragged along the bedsheet, which trails behind her like a veil. “Gimme that,” James says, and takes the sheet from her sticky hands, rolls it into a ball and looks around for where to put it. The clean laundry is hanging on the line outside. James tucks the sheet into a corner of the sofa. “Here,” he says, ladling out some green liquid from a pot on the stove into a silver bowl. “It’s still warm.” James sits Hannah on his lap at the table and hands her a spoon. “Don’t make a mess.” Hannah reaches with a wobbly hand, dribbles seaweed pieces and broth into her lap and James’s, but manages to get most of it into her mouth. The garlic taste is strong, and she likes it.

  “Hurry up, my leg’s falling asleep,” James says. He reaches around her and lifts the bowl with both hands, tips it into her mouth. Hannah slurps. “You can do it. Here. Both hands.” He puts her hands on the sides of the bowl one at a time, and just as he pulls away, a deep, muffled voice sounds from outside the kitchen window. Hannah drops the bowl, which crashes onto the hard wood. “Jesus!” James hisses, shoving Hannah off his lap and jumping up out of the chair. Hannah looks down at the slimy green-black seaweed bits clinging to the tops of her feet and spreads her toes wide.

  “What’s happening?” Soon-mi bounds into the main room, face flushed, hair flattened on one side. James doesn’t answer. He bends down to pick up the bowl and spoon and seaweed and beef bits. Then, the deep voice again. All three turn toward the window. There are two voices now, similar in timbre; it is unclear whether they sound angry.