by Min Jin Lee
There was silence on his end, and Delia felt bad, understanding that what she had predicted was true. His wife would never trust him again. And no doubt the bedroom door was closed. What else could a woman do to restore her dignity after her husband screwed another woman? If she wasn’t the kind who’d have an affair herself, then how else would she feel better? Two wrongs didn’t make a right, but when there was a wrong, it was near impossible to be right-minded.
“Ella wouldn’t—” Ted began to say.
“She’ll never trust you again, and she shouldn’t,” Delia interrupted him, her voice suddenly full of bitterness. “You were falling in love with me. I saw it. I can always tell. It wasn’t just sex for you. And just think, you will have a sexless marriage for the rest of your natural life.” She couldn’t believe her own meanness, but she would not let him talk well of his wife on her clock. He’d never mentioned how great his wife was when he was trying to take off Delia’s clothes. “So, congratulations, Ted Kim. Hopefully, you can find someone else to screw on your part-time. Good luck. Gotta go.”
Ted felt as if he were talking to the devil himself, but he didn’t believe in men in red suits.
“Wait,” he said.
“What the hell do you want now?” Delia’s voice grew quiet. It wasn’t like her to be so cruel, and the effort had exhausted her.
“I didn’t tell Casey to stop speaking to you.”
“Casey? She wouldn’t listen to you even if you paid her. She can’t stand you. She’s just being loyal to Ella, which I understand. But how dare you call me at my office—” Delia started to cry suddenly, and in her anger, she realized that he had never explained himself, never called her about walking in on her with Santo at her place, never told her that it meant something to him when it had. He had been jealous, and you weren’t jealous unless you cared. Those six weeks had meant something to her. She had liked him. All these Wall Street hot shots, they acted as if they thought with just their trousers, but she could tell how they wanted to talk, to caress her, and so many of them had even said they loved her. But she never wanted to break up families. That wasn’t what she wanted. So when she refused to commit to them, they left. One day, she wanted to meet someone to fall in love with. She had never been in love, thought it sounded like some sort of trick. After all, all the married men who had chased her so hard had said they loved their wives. What the hell did that mean, anyway, if they could love their wives and want her, too? So true love didn’t exist as far as she was concerned. And what made Delia angry was that she had never asked for anything. Didn’t want anything from them. The only thing she wanted was a baby. And for that reason alone, she had not used a condom with Ted, because even though she didn’t expect him to stick around, she figured he was fertile and he really did seem like a good guy. A smart guy, but who like all the others assumed that she was on the pill. Someone who could at least biologically father her child.
“Can we talk tonight?” His assistant was standing at his door now. He’d been ignoring her beeps.
“There’s nothing to say.”
“May I please take you to dinner? Anywhere you want.”
“Did I ever ask you for a meal? Do you think I could care about something like that?”
Ted shook his head no. It was true. Delia wasn’t impressed by money. “I need to see you.”
“No, Ted. I don’t think so.”
“I am sorry.” He found himself apologizing to her, and it wasn’t like him to do so.
“For what?” Again, her voice grew quiet.
“I’m sorry that it ended like this. You’re a wonderful girl, and I miss talking to you. You tell funny stories.” He didn’t elaborate on how she always made him smile, and when he was with her, his shoulders and neck muscles relaxed. When he went home, he didn’t feel that way. From the beginning, he had needed to impress Ella, to prove that he was winning or something like that—she hadn’t asked him to do this, but something about her had made him feel less. With Delia, it felt different; she didn’t seem to care about his performance.
“Hey—Delia, please?”
Delia’s office was still empty. Her office mates were all at a food tasting at the Marriott. The door was closed, and she felt grateful for the privacy—so different from the trading floor. The truth was that she’d picked up his call because she wanted to hear his voice again.
“I gotta go.”
“Delia, please. Let me see you again.”
Delia bit her lower lip. She could hear the feeling in his voice. Men were always so much more romantic than women. She counted to ten in her head.
“You can come over tonight at eight.”
“Your place?” Ted inhaled, growing worried.
“Don’t flatter yourself. It’s just easier for me because I’m going to the gym after work. Would you prefer that I go to your place?”
“No, no. That’s fine. I’ll see you there.” Ted hung up after she did.
When Delia let him in, she was still wearing her gym clothes. Lycra running pants and a large hooded sweatshirt over her jog bra. She had run for an hour on the treadmill. She had just enough time to wash her face, but no shower. She waved her bottle of Gatorade toward him.
“No, thank you,” Ted said, smiling. He sat on the sofa. “I missed you,” he said.
Delia swallowed. She’d missed him, too, but didn’t feel like saying it.
“I was thinking about what you said.”
Delia raised her eyebrows.
“About being in a sexless marriage. For the rest of my natural life.” He widened his eyes in a kind of sober fear.
“I’m sorry I said that.” Delia made a face of regret. “Sometimes I can be so mean. I don’t really know how these things truly play out. I just know some of the things I hear about right after the fact. You know. Don’t listen to me. I was angry that Casey knew about us. That was private. Maybe you and your wife will work everything out. Just forget what I said.” Delia wanted to take back what she’d said. Casey had said that Ella was a kind of saint. And Delia wanted to say that she herself was no saint. Far, far from it. She had done so little good in her life. “Anyway, good luck to you.” Delia didn’t want to talk about him and his wife anymore. She didn’t even know why she’d let him come. But she’d felt guilty somehow that he had to face the music by himself with his wife.
“How are you doing?” Ted asked. He wanted to stay with her.
Delia shrugged. The only thing she thought about lately was how she couldn’t get pregnant. For four years she had tried with Santo to get knocked up. Santo didn’t know that she was trying to get pregnant with him. And Ted hadn’t known, either. The doctors had said everything looked fine for her. She was thirty-four years old, and it seemed that for no apparent reason she could not conceive. At her age, her mother had already had three kids.
“Do you want some dinner?” he asked. “I could go out and pick something up for us.”
Delia studied him. What could she say? He was lonesome. He still wanted to be with her.
“Take the key. I’m going to take a shower. We can eat after. Okay?” she said.
Ted reached for the keys on the table. “What do you want? Are you hungry?”
“Surprise me, Ted.” And what she wanted was to believe in him again.
Delia went to the bathroom to wash her hair. Ted went to buy their dinner.
9 CUSTOMS
EUROPEAN CLEANERS I WAS LOCATED on First Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets. It was a large dry-cleaning store of its kind—that is, a Manhattan drop shop where dirty clothes were brought, sent to a plant in Brooklyn to be cleaned, then delivered to the customers’ homes. A drop shop shouldn’t have been a thousand square feet of Sutton Place real estate, yet its size was justified by the volume of work handled through there. It was the flagship store of a sixteen-location chain strung across Manhattan and Brooklyn—all owned by an aging Korean immigrant, Seung Ho Kang, who lived in a Georgian brick mansion in Alpine, New Jer
sey. The flagship and the crown jewel of the European Cleaners dynasty was managed ably by Joseph and Leah Han.
Years ago, Mr. Kang, a war refugee with dyed black hair and a barrel waist bisected by a Pierre Cardin belt, confided to Joseph that his sons were all good boys but with shit for brains. “Well,” he said, “that’s what you get for marrying a pretty face with perfect legs—stupid sons.” Mr. Kang possessed a sense of humor about the world and history. “Oh well, what can you do?” He giggled loudly, as if he were getting another one of God’s private jokes. “You’re a blessed man, Han jang-no,” addressing Joseph by his church title as elder, for Mr. Kang was a man who’d found the gospel late in his life but now bought the good news wholesale. “You’ve got a pretty wife and two smart daughters who went to real colleges.” Only one of Mr. Kang’s sons had finished community college, and three had gone straight into their father’s business after high school. Mr. Kang also owned car washes and coin-operated Laundromats in Philadelphia and Bergen County. Mr. Kang’s favorite mottoes were “Everybody loves clean” and “No money, no honey.”
Joseph liked Mr. Kang, and the feelings were mutual. Joseph and Leah Han were the highest-paid nonrelative employees in his company. Joseph earned a thousand dollars a week (four hundred of it was reported, and the rest he was paid in cash), and Leah made five hundred (two hundred fifty was reported), though she worked as both cashier and seamstress. Mr. Kang would never pay the wife the same as the husband, though he always paid widows more than wives for the same work. Like most Korean businesses, European Cleaners offered no health insurance or paid vacations, but for Tina’s wedding present, Mr. Kang had sent Joseph five thousand dollars, which Tina had asked be used for her medical school tuition. For Christmas bonuses, they got two weeks’ additional pay and a large smoked ham. By paying them so well and treating their families with high regard, Mr. Kang ensured that his best managers would never be tempted to strike out on their own. “A full belly is hard to give up”—that was another of Mr. Kang’s epigrams.
It was closing time—six o’clock on a Friday evening—and the delivery boy had already parked the van in the lot before going home. The young women from St. Lucia who sorted clothes in the back room had also left for the evening. Joseph shut down the cash register and went to lock the front door. He wore a two-button gray suit with side vents, a white dress shirt with French cuffs, and a red-and-blue repp tie. He’d borrowed his customer’s, Mr. Walton’s, gold cuff links. Mr. Walton habitually forgot to remove his cuff links from his bespoke French shirts when he sent them to the cleaners. Every week, Joseph returned them without fail in a small Ziploc bag taped to the receipt, and every Christmas, Mr. Walton rewarded his honesty by enclosing a crisp five-dollar bill in his engraved Christmas card, which always made for a good laugh between him and Leah about rich people’s idea of generosity. Tonight, when he’d changed into his new suit in the store bathroom, Joseph realized that he’d forgotten his cuff links, and he didn’t hesitate to wear Mr. Walton’s.
Leah noticed him doing this but said nothing. She was busy checking off the guest list for Tina’s wedding. She sat behind the black marble counter, her small head craned over her slips of paper. On the floor behind her were two shopping bags filled with gifts for Chul and the Baek family, including a stainless-steel Cartier watch for the groom that cost two thousand dollars. These gifts should’ve been exchanged during the engagement dinner back in early December, but since that had been their first meeting as families, it would’ve been too awkward, and though they’d meant to have another meal between the engagement and the rehearsal dinner, Chul’s family had put it off. That the families were meeting for only the second time before the actual wedding day and that the family wedding gifts were being presented during the rehearsal dinner was unusual as far as Leah knew, but she hadn’t known how to influence the outcome any other way. Chul’s mother had been exceedingly charming on the phone the three times they’d spoken but evasive on any of the substantive issues. Tina said his mother was sort of like that—friendly but impossible to commit. Chul said his mom, a radiologist, wasn’t the kind to bring cupcakes for the class on your birthday. Joseph refused to comment on the matter, recognizing the slight, but for the rehearsal dinner, he did buy a new Italian suit and an English necktie from the luxury Korean department store on Thirty-second Street.
Leah had sewn herself a new dress: a blue light-wool shift with three-quarter-length sleeves. The illustration on the Vogue pattern had shown a short-haired brunette resembling the young Elizabeth Taylor. It was a dress in the 1950s style, a dress for a modest young woman—something a professional girl who typed in the secretary pool might have worn on an important date. The dress was shown in a red wool, but Leah bought a cornflower blue fabric, never having worn red herself. It had crossed her mind to make a suit, something older—after all, she was forty-two years old, no longer a young woman—but she’d found herself irresistibly drawn to the pictures of pretty dresses in the neglected pattern bin located in the back of Steinler’s Dressmaker’s Shop. Her black Bandolino pumps with the two-inch heels were also brand new. This was the first pair of shoes she’d ever bought at full retail price—nearly one hundred dollars.
The store was quiet. Neither Joseph nor Leah was a great talker. At work, they didn’t speak much. When they weren’t with customers, they preferred to listen to sermon tapes or choral music on the tape deck. When Joseph had a free moment, he read any available Korean newspaper. Even so, Leah noticed that since Joseph’s building had burned down, a different kind of silence had fallen between them like a dry mist of starch. Joseph really seemed to have nothing to say anymore, as though the fate of the building were like everything else in his life, subject to total loss. Elder Kong said the insurance money would be more than enough for the down payment of another small building, but Joseph didn’t seem interested in trying again. And though he said Chul was a nice boy, Tina’s marriage didn’t appear to please him much. Sometimes Joseph stared at the newspaper, not turning the pages. Leah found herself missing his tut-tutting the bad news invariably found in the papers. Last Wednesday, when she came home from choir rehearsal, she found him sleeping through his favorite program on WKBS. Asleep, he looked older, and it made Leah feel afraid.
Leah lifted her head when she heard the rapping against the glass. Tina was standing outside the paneled door. Joseph got up from his metal stool to let her in.
“Hello,” Tina said shyly. She’d just come from the Korean beauty parlor on Forty-first Street that specialized in weddings. Her black hair was swept up in three cylindrical rolls on top of her head, and a few tendrils hung from the side of her face. She was wearing the ivory-colored silk suit that Casey had found for her at Sabine’s—a gift from Sabine herself. Tina could’ve been one of the pretty reporters on the television news. Leah felt a streak of pride at her daughter’s beauty.
“Wah,” Leah exclaimed proudly. “Tina, you look like a TV star!”
Joseph nodded, smiling.
Tina blushed deeply. She’d never cared about her appearance or what she wore. The girlie things Casey cared about so much had always seemed like a vast waste of time. All this fuss about hair and clothes. Seeing there was nowhere to sit, Tina went to the back of the store and grabbed two folding chairs. Casey would be there soon. She’d promised. Casey hadn’t seen their parents in over two years. Her mother occasionally let it slip to Tina that Casey could be hard-hearted to stay away even for the holidays. Casey’s constant excuse was work, but that didn’t make sense on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Her father didn’t bother to mention her name anymore. He had thrown Casey out of his home, but he had been confident that she’d ultimately apologize. And he would have forgiven her. Casey phoned their mother on the first Sunday of the month when their father would be at Edgewater checking on his building; Tina got a call every two weeks.
“How are you, Dad?” Tina asked brightly, hoping her cheer would dispel some of his unhappiness. Her father hated socializing. He
wanted to be left alone, and with her wedding, there was nowhere for him to hide.
Joseph nodded, trying to smile for his daughter. She was his wise child.
Tina deserved a nice wedding, yet he couldn’t help but want this evening to be over as soon as possible. What did his boss, Mr. Kang, always say? A—SAP—yes, that was a good New York saying. His customers said it, too. “I need my shirts ASAP,” they’d bark after dumping off a load of wash. The other saying was “I needed it yesterday.”
In half an hour, they’d meet everyone at Mr. Chan’s. Howie Chan was his longtime customer who owned the famous Shanghainese restaurant on Fifty-seventh Street where rich Americans paid top dollar for General Tso’s chicken and beef and broccoli—dishes the Chinese would not touch. When Howie heard Joseph’s younger daughter was getting married, right away he’d offered to arrange the best twelve-course wedding banquet for the rehearsal dinner. Howie, who was the same age as Joseph, had already married off all three of his daughters. “Girls are very, very expensive,” Howie would exclaim. “But they come back home. When boys get married, you never see them again.”
From the opposite side of the street, obscured by a diseased elm tree and two blue mailboxes, Casey could see her parents and Tina. Her family looked so attractive and well dressed that it almost took her breath away. If she were playing her roof game of choosing a life behind a window, she’d have paused for a long time at this one. Why was this prosperous-looking, beautiful family wearing their fine clothing and sitting on metal folding chairs at a dry-cleaning shop after closing hours?
They were waiting for her. The last time she’d seen them was at Ella’s wedding. Since then, she’d spoken to her mother on the first of the month and holidays and birthdays, sending gifts and cards by mail with brief, almost cheery notes. Her alibi for staying away was work, but it wasn’t as if they were asking to see her, either. Casey felt terrified to walk the thirty feet across the street to meet them.
