Love Love (5 page)

“Just perfect,” she said as she yanked down on her shorts for maybe the hundredth time, to keep them from riding up the crack of her ass.

Hearing her reply, he thought of Alice, who always wore white cotton panties with little printed flowers except on their last anniversary, when she wore a black silky thong small enough to be an eye patch. She'd also tortured herself with a pair of four-inch heels, not so much walking but tottering to their restaurant, clutching onto his arm for balance. Once they were seated, she squirmed every so often to keep the string of her exotic underwear from digging into her delicate parts.

“Comfy?”

“Oh yeah,” she'd said. “Just like the little tag said,
All you feel is naked.
”

“Maybe you should've tried it on for a while, you know, before doing it for real.”

Is that what he'd actually said? Did he not even thank her for her self-inflicted agony? Probably not, but it wasn't fair for him to take on all the blame. That was near the end, when nothing went right. No matter what he or Alice tried to do to make their relationship work, it turned into an argument. Goodness, those fights, they'd go on all night, the two of them lying in bed like two dry boards, waiting for something to save them, waiting for the words that neither of them were capable of uttering.

After Roy finished his lesson, Kevin called his father. He was usually up by ten in the morning, so he'd waited until eleven to be on the safe side.

Soo answered the phone on the first ring. “He sleeping.”

“Is he okay?”

“Very tired. Hospital yesterday and very tired.”

“I'll come by tonight,” Kevin said.

“Dinner?”

He didn't want to, but it was already too late. Soo spoke rapidly with the giddiness of a teenager. “Daddy sick, I cook no salt, no pepper, boring. For you I cook! Eat very small lunch!”

He told her he wouldn't eat lunch at all, which was a joke, but she didn't get it. Soo wasn't exactly famous for her smarts, but she was a sweetheart, and Kevin was glad his father had company after
his mother's passing. It was true his father and Soo had gotten close during his mother's sickness, but Kevin had learned to forgive. Their relationship was an unfortunate by-product of a husband and his wife's best friend taking care of a woman they both loved, their shared grief turning into something more. Kevin's sister, on the other hand, would always consider it another mark against their father, a weakness he'd given into. Judy's stubbornness was as strong and immovable as their father's, the two of them connected by blood, while Kevin stood on the outer edge of that sanguine circle.

“Kevin?”

He was sitting on the bench where Mrs. McDougall continually taunted her fat boy Roy, and when he looked up, he saw Alexa standing before him, her legs bronzed and her ponytail blond from the sun, her racquet resting on one shoulder, her smile curious.

“Hey,” he said.

“Didn't you hear me walk in?”

“Guess not.”

She sat down next to him and bounced her racquet face lightly against her knees. Her peachy perfume was as light as summer. “What's going on?”

“Nothing,” he said.

The hurt of her expression was unmistakable. “You don't want to tell me?”

“No, it's not that, it's just . . .” He didn't know what to say. Silence divided them like a stranger squeezing into the middle seat.

Alexa looked down at her feet. She wore size 6 ½, sneakers he'd helped her pick out at the pro shop. “We're friends, aren't we, Kevin?”

As he heard her serious words and saw concern in her little face, the real reason he didn't want to tell Bill became as obvious as the calluses on his hands, and it worried him. Like an actor who wanted to keep his material fresh, he wanted his first and most emotional performance to be in front of Alexa.

When he was done recounting his story, she said nothing, just stared at him.

“That's
so
fucked up,” she finally said; then anger flared into her voice. “But I mean it's so like parents to do something so stupid, isn't it?”

He agreed with her in mind but not in his heart. He wished he were sixteen again, because news like this deserved the unbridled, irrational rage of adolescence.

“All right,” Kevin said, getting up. “Let's smash some balls.”

Kevin cranked his forehands down both lines; Alexa returned his shots with bullets of her own. Her crosscourt backhands from the corners were lethal, but Kevin was ready for them, mixing up his returns with heavy topspins and off-speed slices. After half an hour, they were both completely out of breath and laughing. Near the end of their session, they were at the net, trading volleys with robotic rapidity until Alexa nailed him in the stomach. Kevin acted as if it were a gunshot, holding on to his stomach and falling to the surface of the court and lying flat on his back.

“You got me,” he said, and he closed his eyes, loving every pump of his beating heart. He felt so completely real—and then a set of lips pressed onto his own, and he didn't care that they weren't a woman's but a girl's. Eyes still closed, he felt her lie on top of him, her body hard and soft, foreign in ways that were both thrilling and intimidating.

It seemed as if neither of them broke the kiss. It ceased on its own, a creature coming to the end of its natural lifespan. He opened his eyes and found her brown ones staring into his. Sweat dripped down from her nose and chin like tears, and Kevin turned away.

“Look at me,” she said, and when he didn't, she said it again.

“I can't,” he said, eyed clenched shut.

“If you don't, I'm going to cry.”

So he looked. Her face was so young, her cheeks rosy and porcelain, her nostrils quivering. He felt like a monster, but then she smiled so genuinely that he momentarily forgot his shame.

Then she leaped up and retrieved her tennis bag and walked to the back door of the court.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, but there was uncertainty in her voice.

He sat up. “Okay.”

Kevin knew he should get going. His juniors were minutes away from invading four courts, but instead, his fingertips found their way to his lips. He traced the surface of the delicate skin, tried to feel his way to some sort of understanding—and failed. He remembered his first girlfriend, a shy redhead, Shirley, seventh grade. She was the first girl he'd kissed, at a pool party. She'd tasted like chlorinated water. He supposed he did, too. Before Kevin could fall any deeper into reverie, his kids arrived, racquets in hand, stomping toward him like an invading army.

5

B
y four o'clock, Judy could hardly move. She'd spent the whole day cleaning up her apartment, even dusting the top of the painting that hung on the living room wall, the one that depicted the back of a girl's head as she looked out through the half-open window and into the yard. It was her first effort using egg tempera, the view from her old bedroom, and it wasn't bad, especially the perspective and the use of shadows. At one point, Judy had thought it would be her calling, to be a painter of portraits and landscapes and whatever else. To the right of the painting was the door to her closet, and behind that door, languishing in darkness, was an easel, a palette, and half-squeezed tubes of paint in a wooden rack. All she had to do was get them out, set herself up, and start again. Maybe this weekend she'd do it. Probably not.

The last time the living room looked this nice was probably the week after she and Brian had moved in, three years ago. The last item she'd unwrapped from the last box was the white ceramic vase that had been handed down to her from three generations of her mother's side of the family. When Judy tried to give it back, her mother knew exactly what her daughter had been thinking.

“You won't break it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this has been through two world wars and it'll certainly outlast you.”

It was the best housewarming gift she received. She bought a round wooden stand that fit the bottom lip of the vase, and it was Brian's idea to display the ensemble at the top of the entertainment center so they'd always see it whenever they turned on the television. How infinite and generous her life seemed then, to watch her husband
delicately set down the vase. It was the beginning of their future together, and she felt as solid as a tank, her happiness indestructible.

The vase was plain and pedestrian, a foot high with a slender flaring neck and a thick globular bottom, something you could probably find at a discount store for twenty bucks. But this particular vase went back a hundred years to a little rustic village in Korea, where it had first sat in the corner of her great-grandmother's room. Later, when Judy's mother went into hospice care, the vase was one of the objects she'd requested, so it was placed on her nightstand, where it would be the last thing she saw before going to sleep and the first thing she saw when she awoke.

“Her husband,” her mother had said, “that's your great-grandfather Min Ho, he would place a new sunflower in that vase every morning for his wife.”

“That's great,” Judy said. She didn't know what else to say to this woman, who no longer resembled her mother but a translucent, skeletal representation of her.

“Like you, Min Ho was a painter, so in wintertime, he painted her a new sunflower every day, every single day.”

A month before her death, her mother had told her all sorts of strange stories like this, and Judy couldn't decide whether they were true or spurious effects of heavy painkillers, but in the end it didn't matter. Later she would wish she'd either copied the words down in a notebook or, better yet, recorded them on tape, but she ended up doing neither of those things. When it became inevitable that her mother was actually going to die, the last thing Judy wanted to do was have hard evidence of those days and nights. It was really something to see a person go this way, to watch her life force slowly ebb away, like the gradual dimming of a light bulb until it blinked out altogether. It made you want to take a knife to a beautiful flower and lop its head off, shove it into a garbage disposal and obliterate its existence.

Now, as Judy stared at the vase sitting on the middle shelf of her wall unit, the afternoon sun catching the faint blue glaze, she thought of all the misery this contiguous piece of ceramic had witnessed in its lifetime, all the sadness and hardship and death of her family over two centuries on two continents, the wails and whimpers sliding down its narrow throat and settling down its wide, hungry base. Her eyes moved from the vase to a single index card on the coffee table. On it were three sentences:

                  
I miss you.

                  
I'll always miss you.

                  
Where are you now?

It was in blue ink and it was her handwriting, though Judy didn't remember writing it. She'd found it during her mass cleanup, the note stuck between the pages of an abandoned mystery novel. The piece of paper may have initially acted as a bookmark, but at some point during her reading, its purpose shifted from being a keeper of pages to a beholder of her psyche.

She picked it up and looked at it inches away from her eyes, reading the letters one at a time until they became words. She could have written them for her mother. They could've been for Brian. But Judy knew who these were for.

When the little oval on the pregnancy test stick had shown a pair of pink lines, she immediately opened another one and did it again. As she washed her hands in the bathroom sink, she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror and accepted the inevitability that she'd be alone in whatever decision she would make. She and Brian had been together for just three months, and she couldn't fathom a scenario where this could go well. From the outside, he looked like a solid guy, standing six feet tall with a friendly paunch, but he was fragile inside, both mentally and physically. In his youth he'd spent a summer at a sanitarium for an attempted suicide, and under stress his stomach ulcers bled. Father material he was not, and she was no mother, either, which was why she'd been on the pill for her entire adult life. And yet somehow a statistical miracle occurred, and now she had to deal with it.

He was at work when she rang him, his sales job at Best Buy. Thursdays were his off days, but she'd forgotten he'd swapped with a coworker that week. She didn't want to tell him then, but he knew something was up, and the concern in his voice was unmistakable.

“I'm pregnant,” Judy said.

She imagined him at that moment, his slouchy posture frozen in front of the grid of widescreen televisions, all broadcasting the same vivid animated feature, the screens dancing in perfect unison as Brian clutched his tiny phone in his hand. She listened to the background noise of the electronics megastore, beeps and dings interspersing a steady drone of a pop tune with its incessant beats.

“Really?” he said, so quietly that she almost didn't catch it.

“Yes,” Judy said. He'd said only one word and said it so mysteriously that all she could do was repeat it. “Really.”