The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories

by Simon Van Booy

  It had been an evening of near misses and Lenny felt grateful for everything he had seen and felt.

  Driving up from Albany, Carolin thought they should turn back on account of the weather. But everyone was hungry, so when Lenny saw lights he pulled off, hoping the blizzard would lessen as they ate.

  The diner had aluminum sides and a neon sign. Inside it was bright. There were people in groups of two or three. The waitress put them in a booth with a torn seat. At the next table, an old man and woman were feeding their granddaughter. The girl’s brother colored a dinosaur with crayons from a washed-out sour cream tub. A TV above the counter played Wheel of Fortune. The other patrons reminded Lenny of his people out west. The laughing and drinking beer, tattoos, and faded shop hats. There was an old man in the booth behind them. When he moved, Lenny felt the weight of his body. He was sitting by himself. Laughing at the things he saw on television.

  Then Jane laughed because they thought there was a rooster in the kitchen, but it was a squeaky door. When Jane tried to mimic the sound, a man with missing teeth turned from the counter to look at her. But not in a mean way. He just wanted to be in on the joke.

  Outside the snow was piling up and drifting.

  Carolin wanted something sweet to finish off. She ordered a slab of coconut pie, which Jane said had marshmallow in the frosting. The fork in Jane’s hand looked big.

  Years ago, Carolin and Lenny fed her with a plastic spoon that changed color if the food was too hot. Jane used to open her mouth when it was almost to her lips. It had amazed Lenny in the diner to think that every person who ever lived on this planet once opened their mouths to receive a little pool of something good.

  In the background, Lenny could hear the wheel of fortune turning, and people shouting, trying to speed it up or slow it down.

  An hour or so after leaving the diner they had a close call. The meal had put Carolin right to sleep and Jane was almost asleep.

  On a dark road thirty miles north of where they had stopped to eat, the back end of the truck kept trying to slide. Lenny cursed himself for not loading blocks or sandbags over the wheel wells.

  It was hard to see because the headlights were frosted over. Then suddenly a bright light in the distance. At first Lenny thought it was a helicopter or some mountain light on a tower. It was just so high up.

  But then it was closer and brighter, almost blinding.

  Lenny couldn’t understand it. Carolin was still sleeping and Jane was asleep too. The light was coming right toward them as if wanting to swallow them whole. Lenny gripped the steering wheel hard but didn’t know which way to turn it. The light was everywhere and everything.

  The next moment they were at the side of the road. Nothing moved but the tiny skeletons of snow breaking on the windshield. The light was gone. And there was no sound, except a faint ticking from the engine.

  Lenny could feel his heart high up in his body making sharp, quick beats. Carolin was still sleeping, but Jane’s eyes were open.

  Dad, she said, my daddy.

  That reminded him of when she was a baby. When she was helpless and he held her like a prize.

  26.

  Before going upstairs to bed, there was one more thing Lenny wanted to do. So he put all his clothes on and went to the front door, for his coat and boots. Sometimes in Albany, he liked to go outside and look at their pink house, his wife and daughter inside, sleeping, eating, or watching television.

  It made him feel like a ghost. Filled him with peace to know that while they thought they were alone—he was watching, following shadows on the wall or catching the tail of their laughter.

  He walked to the far end of the property, into darkness where the road was. He stopped and looked back at the house. There was moonlight on the snow, and the trees cast moving shadows.

  Suddenly, a perfect square of bright yellow.

  Lenny stopped breathing. Someone was in the bathroom.

  Then with a pinprick of sound, it was gone . . .

  . . . the idea that happiness, more than happiness, a whole life could be measured by the turning on of a light.

  It was the perfect embodiment of all that is good.

  27.

  Soon the black would drain slowly away.

  He knew that, and wanted to go upstairs. Be with them. But for some time, Lenny had known that he could not go there—could not be with them in that way.

  It was snowing then.

  Flakes tumbled from the sky and broke apart. Lenny closed his eyes and lay down on the ice that covered the road. The truck was stiff because the engine had been off since dark. He was not far from the truck, lying on the ice, but he could not touch it. Could not touch anything.

  It didn’t matter anymore if the world was ending.

  He had found two people where there had once been nothing.

  So much of his life had been good.

  That there was good in the world for everybody made him feel that God was just good and did not have a face, or a body, or a will, with rules and punishment.

  God was laughter. God was sliding on ice. God was a flat tire. A blue tarp. A lake in summer. Destiny glimpsed through coincidence. The certainty of nothing.

  28.

  For many hours the surgeons couldn’t figure out why the man on the operating table was not dying. Hard to believe with the state he was found in. Head-on collision with a state salt truck on Mountain Road.

  Paramedics discovered the body in a halo of red snow. But somehow the heart had kept on. There was a woman inside the vehicle, unconscious and pinned under the engine.

  The third victim, a child, was sniffed out by a rescue dog fifty yards from the crash, where she lay facedown with broken femurs and a shattered pelvis.

  One of the volunteer firefighters found a doll in the wreckage. It had a dress and ice skates. He took it back to the station and washed it carefully in a sink.

  After what they’d seen, the other men were not ready to go home either. So they changed clothes and drove to the hospital in their trucks.

  Some of the men believed in God, and some of them didn’t. The girl was in surgery, so they waited outside, taking turns to hold the doll.

  The Saddest Case of True Love

  Last week I received a postcard from Italy. At first I thought it was a mistake. The message was short but very personal. The sender’s father had “died peacefully” at a care facility in Seoul. The postcard was signed in black ink with a name I didn’t immediately recognize. But later on the memory came back. An evening I had spent with Soyeon several years ago in Florence. She had told me about her father then, and the things he had done.

  Days passed and I forgot about it. Then one evening, I was sitting by the pool, watching a helicopter circle the canyon. My wife appeared with a tray of drinks.

  “Are the girls back from school?”

  “Volleyball and band,” she said. “I thought we might have a cocktail before they get home.”

  On the tray next to the glasses was the postcard from Italy. My wife pointed at it by nodding her head. “Who is Soyeon? Someone you met in Europe?”

  “One of Teddy’s friends.”

  “From Florence? Man or woman?”

  “Woman.”

  “Why would she want you to know her father was dead? Did you meet him when you were there?”

  “No, she told me about him.”

  My wife made herself comfortable on a lounge chair and drank slowly. She was wearing the red platform espadrilles I had bought her in the Florence duty-free.

  I had only been there for an afternoon and a night. Enough time to visit a few churches, I’d thought, get the smell of incense in my clothes, stand before a few paintings and statues, the Annunciation or Birth of Venus. Teddy, my wife’s friend who resided there full-time, would be in Brooklyn meeting his new gallerist, which meant I could use
his apartment.

  I didn’t know anything about Florence itself—but had seen some illustrations in a history book on my wife’s desk. There must have been other pictures, but I only remember the executions. Stacks of flaming wood with the body of a heretic tied up on a pole. Another showed platforms constructed for some drawn-out form of public torture.

  Teddy was an American painter who had purposely moved to an Italian city where modern art was not possible, and so he felt no pressure when making it. His apartment was in the center of town. He had described in an email the ancient front door with blunt spikes embedded in the wood, a small stand nearby for food and newspapers—even a Florentine barber, with brushed steel chairs and bottles of green aftershave in the window. The apartment took up the second floor in a fifteenth-century building above a Chanel boutique that was once a medieval stable. Purses and bags now hung in place of bridles.

  The keys had been left with one of the girls in the shop. When I arrived in the early afternoon, there was a line of tourists waiting to go in. I talked to the guard and he asked me to wait inside the door. Soyeon was with a customer, but eventually finished her sale and came over with the key. The barrel was long and uncomplicated. A smooth, rusted brown. There was a key chain with it. A red patent leather heart. Soyeon’s nails were red too. When she smiled, I noticed a few of her teeth were crooked.

  She was finishing early that night and wanted to walk me up to Piazzale Michelangelo. To really experience Florence, she told me, you had to leave the city altogether. I had never enjoyed grand views or sunsets, preferring the small beauty of a leaf, or the strangeness of a puddle. But before I could think of an excuse, she had moved silently back across the carpet, toward a wall of jeweled purses, where there were people waiting. She had straight black hair and white skin with freckles around her nose. Soyeon’s clothes were tight on her body. She wore black heels with a pearl on each toe.

  Teddy’s apartment had stone floors and the walls were cold to the touch. The ceilings were fifteen feet high. Cobwebs fringed wooden beams. Over the centuries people had died and been born within a few feet of where I was standing. The two main rooms were taken up by enormous squares of canvas on dark wood easels. The rooms smelled of linseed oil and the paintings were hung with sheets, as though signifying death in the absence of their creator.

  I took a cold shower, then went outside. The markets were bustling with people. I stopped to buy tin cases of chocolate almonds for my daughters, and stood listening at the edge of tour groups. Some shops sold lace collars, and I bought three. They came flat, folded in pink tissue.

  Before returning to the apartment, I picked up half a loaf of bread and some tomatoes wrapped in newspaper. The apartment was dark now with the shutters closed. It felt quiet after my long walk, and I wanted to sleep again. I removed my shoes and socks and let my feet cool on the stone tiles. Then I went into the kitchen and ran cold water from the faucet into my cupped hands. After a few mouthfuls, I ate the bread and tomatoes with some black pepper on the patio. The furniture out there was plastic and faded. A few of the chairs were on their backs. One had a broken leg. I imagined drunken laughter as bodies sprawled. There were a few empty bottles, and ashtrays with floating cigarette ends.

  After the food and cold water I was content to sit and read. But then I remembered Soyeon, so I brushed my teeth quickly and went outside. The shop was closed but the lights were still on. Soyeon was waiting by the door. She had changed into other clothes and was wearing plain, flat shoes. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and would have looked like a student, if not for a silk Chanel scarf tied around her neck.

  When we started walking, my legs felt tired and I wanted to give up and find a restaurant. It was going to be a long march in the evening heat with a steep climb. But I felt powerless to stop what was now happening, as though it would have taken more energy not to go along with Soyeon’s plan.

  After crossing the Arno River, she began to ask questions. How did I meet my wife. How old were my two daughters. Did I have any pets. I answered in a friendly way, but was too tired to give details.

  Then she started talking. First about the shop. Working for Chanel. Her boss from Rome. Dressing the mannequins. A Christmas card every year from Karl Lagerfeld. Then she told me about her mother and growing up in Korea. The crowd on the street had thinned by this time, and we could stroll side by side, like people who had known each other for a long time and had real things to say.

  She came from a suburb of Seoul, a place I couldn’t imagine. Their home was a two-room apartment that overlooked a main highway. The kitchen was full of plants. Some of the plants grew leaves you could eat. She told me there were tower blocks all around, and Laundromats—and that from her window you could see the edge of a golf course.

  Her mother was eighteen when Soyeon was conceived. She was a small woman who cleaned offices, and in the evening watched soap operas on the couch with her feet tucked neatly under her body. Orphaned through war when she was three, her heart had long searched for a place to drop anchor.

  Soyeon’s father was much older. A businessman. A golfer. He often worked late and wore a gray suit with thin white stripes. Out of all the people in the office building, hundreds of workers, he had chosen her, Soyeon’s mother.

  At first it was just looks. Then a few words of greeting. After that, he unscrewed her cleaning bottles to put flowers in. Left notes with the opposite weather forecast to make her laugh. She saved his cubicle for last, making him work even later if he wanted to see her. Emptying his trash can of papers and tea cans was something Soyeon’s mother looked forward to. She was young then, and wanted to keep everything her businessman had ever touched.

  If no one was around, his hand sometimes touched hers. She felt her body waking from a long, impenetrable slumber. This romance went on privately for a good while because the businessman lived outside Seoul in a house with his wife, teenage daughters, and a gray kitten.

  Soyeon’s mother knew from soap operas that happiness often comes at a price; that once lives are tangled up, they can never be untangled. Pain is proof of something worthwhile.

  Then one day he appeared at her door. It was dark out. His tie had been loosened. She wanted him to come inside.

  When it was over they held hands, listening to voices from the television. The blinds were open and they could see all the lights of the city.

  By the time Soyeon was born, her mother had left the office complex and was cleaning in a small factory. There was more dirt, but also more money. She missed seeing her businessman, but other workers had realized there was something going on.

  He was not there for Soyeon’s actual birth, but paid for a new apartment in the same building. It was another very small home. Only big enough for two. But at night they could hear each other being tossed around by dreams.

  Soyeon met her father for the first time when she was three. He came to their house and ate noodles with imitation crab. After, he sat on the couch and looked at Soyeon. He asked questions but all she wanted was to play. She attended kindergarten then, in a tower block near the factory where her mother was employed.

  Soyeon remembers how much she liked her father. But their laughter led only to the sadness of being apart.

  One day, they all went to the zoo. Soyeon ran from cage to cage. Her parents walked behind holding hands. Soyeon thought it was the beginning of something, but it was the end.

  A week later, her mother came to get her from school with a bruise on her face. Her lip had swollen so it was easier to nod when the teachers asked if she was okay. Soyeon rubbed her mother’s feet. Brought her green tea. Watered the plants and wiped the windows. Soyeon’s father did not visit for many months. During this time her mother sometimes put on perfume and slipped away when Soyeon was in bed. Later there would be talking and muffled laughter. A man’s voice, but not her father’s.

  During the winter it happ
ened again. He was waiting for her in a parking lot, his body shaking with jealousy and rage. Soyeon’s mother told everyone she slipped on ice. A cracked rib kept her awake. Shallowed her breathing. One eye seemed like it might never open again.

  The boss of the factory called her into his office. He gave her coffee from a machine. It was just plain coffee in those days that came through a nozzle into a brown cup. His hair was already gray and the staff called him “grandfather” behind his back. The boss listened to her story, then went into another room to call his wife. She told him to let the girl and her daughter live at the factory for a week. Maybe the abuser would think they had run away and give up trying to find them.

  Above the factory floor was an elevated glass office where the boss liked to watch operations and entertain visitors. The lights were always on, and you reached it by metal staircase. At the very back of the factory was a row of big rooms. Some of the rooms had purple carpet and filing cabinets, while others contained enormous cupboards with spare toilet paper and cleaning supplies. The biggest room had beds and a shower. It was for technicians who came from China to fix the machines. Sometimes it took many days if a part was ordered. The technicians weren’t supposed to smoke in the room. They joked with the factory staff, and showed pictures of their families.

  Soyeon’s mother was given the day off and told to return in the evening with a bag of things they would need to stay. An elaborate plan of coming and going was worked out so the other workers wouldn’t know she was sleeping in the apartment for Chinese technicians. Each day, she would take Soyeon to day care early, then sit in the park until it was safe to arrive at work at the normal time.

  In the evening, she would collect her daughter, then, after a walk and something to eat, would return to the factory after eight. Soyeon remembered the wooden sign outside day care with children’s faces drawn on it. She had thought one of the faces was hers. But it was everybody and at the same time not a single person.