by Paul Yoon
He thought of how sometimes on the weekends Isun left for a meeting at the hotel. He would go to her and say, “Goodbye, see you soon,” and she would say, “See you,” and then he would shut the door and cross the room and press his forehead against the windowpane. There he waited. And although spotting her from so high was, he knew, impossible, he attempted to always. He imagined the route she took, crossing the street and heading several blocks west and then another block south. He imagined her raising her arm to push the revolving door of the hotel entrance and then crossing the marble-floored hallway, greeting the receptionists, and taking another elevator up to the twentieth floor where she walked into a conference room with a wall of windows facing him. And then, picturing this, Taeho waved.
Their years had been constant and steady. He used to think they always would be.
In their early days they were shy. They undressed in the dark. He would close his eyes in that dark and press his palms against her chest, her hand guiding his. He wanted to concentrate on her skin, to know how she felt before he saw her; he would touch her and imagine what she looked like. The first time he saw her in the light, she stood framed within their bedroom door. She had flicked the switch on impulse. He covered himself then flung the sheet away. She said to him, “Well, now you know all there is to know.” She placed a hand on her hip and her finger pointed to a mole on the ride side of her waist as if that were her secret. He had never noticed it before.
He remembered a sense of sadness coming to him then. Not because of her or her body but the fact that his hands hadn’t discovered this raised dark circle, this small coin. He had not touched her completely. He had tried. Yet there were still places he missed. She approached him and lay down on top of the red duvet and took his hand. She kissed him and the sadness lifted and he loved her and she said, “Here,” and, “There,” and her skin was warm and trembling.
In the afternoon they met on the boardwalk. She couldn’t stay long, she told him. From a sea woman she chose a platter of abalone. Taeho, from the neighboring stall, ordered Udon noodles, served in a large ceramic bowl. Many of the benches were already occupied by tourists and the businessmen who worked nearby. Some even stood by the stalls, eating and talking to one another. The day was clear and bright and the winds were calm. At the wharf, men were loading and unloading cargo from the ships. Two men in suits left a bench and Taeho, balancing the noodle bowl in his hands, hurried to take it.
They sat facing the city, the ocean behind them. Behind the brick row houses, scattered among the three-story buildings, stood the towering panels of the Lotte Hotel, their apartment complex, and a few others not yet finished, the bright cranes beside them lifting steel. It was said in Solla you could judge a building’s age by its height. The modern ones were no shorter than ten stories. Spaces were bought; buildings were demolished, new ones were built. It was a city at once shrinking and growing. It was most evident during the day, when the colors of the architecture defined themselves against the blue sky. At night, the colors were of lights, a great ocean of them, and where one building ended and another began was not as distinct.
Isun, between bites of her abalone, pointed her chin at a man sitting a few benches away, facing the sea. “He’s new,” she said. “Started a few days ago. I feel old when I see him.” The man wore a pin-striped suit and a gold-colored tie. With his jacket unbuttoned he hunched forward, eating a sandwich. He was handsome, Taeho admitted, and wondered if that was what Isun had meant. A group of women passed the man and he glanced up at them. “Shall we have him over for dinner sometime?” she asked. “He just moved here. From Seoul. I think he’s lost.” She smiled, brushing her hands together and standing. She always felt obliged to host a dinner for the new employees. They did so often.
“All right,” Taeho said, looking up at her. He handed her his empty bowl, the chopsticks placed inside. “Return this, too?”
She carried their dishes to the vendors, handing hers over to the sea woman and then the bowl to the noodle maker. The young man, who, upon seeing her, quickly stood, bits of his sandwich falling from his shirt as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and bowed. Isun, whenever she laughed, brought her hands together as though in prayer and Taeho watched her do this now, thinking that standing beside the man she did in fact seem older. Perhaps it was the way she stood there, her posture not as straight as it once was. She had also gained weight in the hips. He watched her lips move. She was too far away for him to be able to discern what she was saying, although it was easy to guess. She was formal and courteous. She pointed at Taeho and the man nodded with eagerness.
It was a good match, both their parents had said, during their courtship. They—the parents—had been referring to their children’s careers and a sense of stability that they themselves had struggled for during the war and the years after. Throughout the ceremony, he caught their looks of approval and relief and felt the pride of a son and began to see a life unfolding in the way he had promised them. He imagined a future when he would be someone others looked toward and envied.
She went on talking, or the young man did, but Taeho’s attention was diverted to the stalls where the sea woman raised her voice at the noodle maker. He couldn’t hear exactly their words, something about the trawlers and their nets, and the noodle maker laughed and responded and she frowned and fell silent. She draped a towel around her hand and placed a fresh oyster on it. She picked up a small knife and inserted it near the hinge of the shell. She worked quickly until she had opened a dozen. The noodle maker, as if unsure whether he had won the argument, lost interest in the woman and dropped wheat noodles into a pot of boiling water.
“Hello.” He heard Isun’s voice and looked around to see her standing in front him. The young man stood beside her, bowing. Taeho asked if Isun had heard the argument. She introduced her coworker. “We’ll have dinner next week,” she said. A family passed behind them and took photographs of the shoreline and the ocean. “And no. I didn’t hear an argument. We were speaking of airplanes. He likes to fly.”
“I couldn’t hear it either,” Taeho said. “I wonder what it was about.”
“Taeho.” She leaned down and pressed her hand against his. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
The man bowed again and told them both he was looking forward to their evening. He then excused himself and returned to his bench. Isun, watching him, tapped a finger against her watch. She took Taeho’s arm and, with a slight persistence, led him down the boardwalk. They passed the stalls and Taeho glanced back again at the sea woman selling the oysters she had shucked to a mother and her daughter. The lines on her face were as deep as chasms. Her eyes met his and, surprising him, she grinned as if they were old friends, and he looked away.
Crossing the street, he matched the rhythm of his wife’s steps. The sun reflected off glass windows. Isun raised a hand over her eyes. “You said nothing to him,” she said. “Not a thing.” And then she left, heading to the hotel. Taeho returned to the offices. The rest of the day passed without event, without effort.
That evening, on his way home, he visited the Thai restaurant. The sun was setting, the sky bold and cloudless. On the street two teenagers honked the horns of their mopeds and raced through traffic. He paused by the restaurant windows and looked inside at the warm lights hanging from the ceiling, at the bar where a few customers had gathered. In the back of the dining area a waitress placed two plates on a table. He was too far away to see if it was her.
He kept recalling the event. He did not know why. It both frustrated him and pleased him. He thought of her flat lips, her thin arms pale as sun-bleached stones. And the more he did so, the more her words to him seemed like a hint, some kind of suggestion, as if she had briefly shown him a room that overwhelmed him with familiarity, a certainty that he had once spent time there.
He should have said something else. Or something more. He kept thinking of that as well. When the girl said, “You look just like him,” he could have asked her
if she had been referring to a specific part of him.
He and Isun used to describe each other. A game they played. It would begin with the question of how their faces differed from one another’s, from everyone’s. Taeho’s eyes were in the shape of small shells. Isun’s lips were arched slightly, like the curve of wings. Her cheekbones, like blades. Like protection.
“Tell me more,” he could have said to the waitress as well, and she would recall a life and he would listen. She would tell him what sort of life that was. What sort of work the man did. The clothes he wore. Whether he was kind or stubborn or inconsiderate or violent. “And how did you come here?” he could ask her. He imagined their conversation as though it had already occurred, as though it were his memory. But he had said nothing to the girl. Instead, he avoided her, focusing his attention on the white tablecloth and the weaves there. He rubbed his fingertips against the cloth and thought of mountain ranges and canyons and islands. And his heart, percussive, sped, as though across a body of water.
It did so again as he entered the restaurant. The city noises faded, taken over by music from the speakers above the bar and the clanking of glasses. The hostess, short with her long hair tied up into a bun and held together by a chopstick, greeted him. “Only you tonight?” she said.
“There was a waitress here,” he said, describing her—her height, the cut of her hair, her eyes. “Last week. She served us dinner. Young.”
“Yes?”
“Is she in tonight?”
The hostess frowned. She took him aside, to the wall where the diners hung their coats. “Is there a problem? Are you missing something?”
Taeho looked past her, at the waitresses he could see. “Problem? No. No, I’m not missing anything. I wanted to speak to her. She served our table last week, yes? You remember? She said I looked like someone she once knew. She was upset. Do you remember?” The hostess shook her head. “I was sorry,” he went on. “I wanted to tell her that, you see. I never did. I wanted to tell her that I am sorry.”
“Sir, she isn’t here.”
“When will she be in?”
The door opened and a couple entered. The hostess bowed to them, went to retrieve a pair of menus, and ushered them to a window seat. She returned and spoke quietly. She told Taeho that the girl no longer worked at the restaurant, that they had let her go.
“Let her go?”
The girl had taken money from the register. The bartender witnessed it. They found a roll of bills folded inside the waistband of her pants. They checked the register. It was missing money. She left and they never saw her again.
Taeho did not respond. He stood there and it was as though he were still hearing the hostess speak. She apologized to him, bowing.
“And the police?” he asked.
She looked about the room for a moment before meeting his eyes. “No trouble here,” she said. “No trouble. Nothing, in the end, was stolen.”
A family appeared. The hostess led them to the booth where he sat with Isun a few days before. A waitress took their orders. Her hair was braided and she laughed at something the father said.
Taeho returned outside. The air was cold. Linden trees swayed beside the streetlamps. He felt the lights of cars brush his arms and his legs. The shops were busy, their windows filled with mannequins in various positions, showcasing the latest fashions. At the corner of the street a crowd had gathered to watch a magician dressed in a tuxedo and wearing white gloves shuffle overturned cups on a table. The man was humming and when a girl pointed at a cup he lifted it with flourish and the crowd cheered.
He had been wrong. He pitied her. Yes, he thought. It had been a fancy.
He checked his watch. He hurried. Perhaps Isun was home already. He would cook for her tonight. It would be his apology for this afternoon. She would accept it, as she always did.
In recollection Taeho could say that he had felt an unease which he could not articulate and he had walked away. What that unease was he never identified. But it no longer seemed to matter. For Taeho, the restaurant and the woman now lasted in his mind for a single instant, compressed, as though he had taken her photograph and nothing else. He thought how insignificant it was in duration compared to the rest of his life and his years with Isun.
They took their routine walks. The weather grew colder but they grew accustomed to it. They invited guests to their apartment and hosted dinner parties for their coworkers. They went to the movies and the restaurants. They attended gallery openings and university lectures. They read aloud to each other newspaper articles about the shift to a visa-free international city, a lost fishing boat, territorial disputes with the Japanese, and updates from the mainland. In this way every morning, beside the window of their apartment with its view of the city, they felt aware of this island and its place in the Pacific and even farther, toward the continent of Europe and the coasts of America.
On some days, however, it was as if they spoke of these things out of a forced will. To say something. There was a pretense there, a lack of comfort, as if they knew not what they spoke of, their words drifting. But this observation never grew into a concern and he dismissed it quickly.
All was as it had always been.
The months passed into winter. Taeho celebrated a birthday, his thirty-fifth. They took a week-long holiday and went to the southern coast, to a hotel that faced the East China Sea. It was where they had gone on their honeymoon and they had not returned since. They spent their days being tourists, as they had done before. They went to the caves and hiked the trails. They visited waterfalls. It was a reminder of who they were and who they had become and what they had earned and gained and all the time in between.
He was happy, he said to himself many times during their trip. He said it to her as well and took her hand but what he felt surprised him. It was the feeling of dreams, the ones he used to have before they married. He would find himself someplace, anyplace, his childhood home, a department store, the beach, and he would have a sudden desire to run. But he never could. As though something were pushing against him. “I can never run in dreams,” he once told her, and she looked at him with patience.
One afternoon they went to the old watchtower at the crest of the hill town. The day was cold but the clouds parted on occasion, revealing the sun that reflected off the tiled rooftops of the houses along the slope. He recalled the tower’s history from their first visit, the failed revolt against the Japanese sentinels during the occupation, and later, the Allied bombings that nearly destroyed the outpost. It was a museum now and had been renovated years ago to resemble how it once was. The walls were made of pale stones and on the peak of the wooden roof stood a copper weathervane. A small lamp hung in the gallery. Seabirds perched on the railings, clustered around a pair of binoculars that Taeho did not remember from before.
Some distance away from the tower, across the ridge, lay the barracks. It was made of the same type of stones, half of which was a replica of where the watchmen lived, the other half having been converted into a gift shop. Inside, a young woman sat behind a counter with a hand under her chin, reading. On occasion she spun a rack of postcards beside her.
When Isun began to walk into the shop, Taeho told her his stomach was bothering him. He would wait, he said, and she shrugged and after purchasing a ticket from the woman she crossed the hillcrest and entered the tower, the birds swiftly departing.
Taeho approached the barracks and looked through a window. It was a single long room, divided by rope, and on the other side of the shop he could see tatami mats, pads of paper, tin cups, a spyglass, and a bucket. On the far wall there was a gray uniform on a hook. Below that a pair of boots and a rifle. He moved to another window and his shadow fell on the young woman who suddenly stood up, startled, placing a hand on her chest. Then she laughed. She had long straight hair and wore a dress that was slightly too large for her. Her bracelets had slipped to her elbows. Taeho raised a hand in apology and stepped back.
The town descended gra
dually to the coast. The wind moved with a heaviness and he flipped up the collar of his coat. He watched his breath leave him. Clouds coursed overhead and he imagined the men who once lived here in these confines and he saw that they were boys and he saw them rise from their beds and carry the paraffin every evening at sundown, a long line of them walking the ridgeline. He saw them ascend the tower, their spyglasses swiveling over a sea that resembled a wide field of ash, waiting for ships.
Minutes later he spotted Isun above, circling the gallery, her body as small as a star. She waved and he returned it. The sun reflected off her fingers, a small point, and he saw her slip a coin into the binoculars. Leaning forward, her hair caught in the wind like some old flag, she swiveled the lens over the hill town, at all the stores they had browsed through when they had been married for less than forty-eight hours, at the same body of water they walked beside every day, and it all seemed to him then so purposeless.
How long she was up there he didn’t know. It seemed to last for hours and yet when she returned it seemed she had just left. She asked whether he was feeling better and he said, “Yes, better,” and they drove back through the town. She questioned how far the lamp of the tower could be seen in those days. “Not far,” he said.
