The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (44 page)

So unlike the clatter and innuendo outside in the corridor. Men can't resist a woman in scrubs, even the ugliest mismatched laundry-room rejects; he certainly never could. That was the one benefit of switching to paramedic in the days after Renée, or, to be honest,
during
and after: the whole parade of them, doe-eyed, fresh RNs, lacy bras and thongs underneath, in spare rooms, in supply closets, in his bed at four
A.M.
after a shift and an hour slamming beers. It's the oldest feeling in the world, or the second oldest, after just plain lust: survivor's guilt. Like all the stockbrokers shacking up after the towers fell. Terror sex, they called it, but it had nothing to do with terror. You look at pain, you gape at it, and then tear yourself away and eat Froot Loops. Pure instinct. A shift of heart attacks and gunshot wounds and eight-year-old girls with fingers burned off and what else could you possibly want? A candy bar, a shot of Jameson, a bacon double cheeseburger, and your face buried in Nicole Scangarello's pussy in the back seat of her Altima pulled over at a rest stop on the way out to Huntington Beach.

He was never particular in those days. You took what came. Hospitals, again: a great equalizer. Sponsor of thousands of mongrel births. He never understood the guys who swore by Bronx Dominicans or Flatbush Chinese or Staten Island Italfans. And the girls: were they aroused by his blackness? Not likely. Not that he ever knew. His body was never so remarkable as to engender much comment. It was a body, it was available, it was alive; that was the coin of the realm. He doesn't miss the sex so much, the messiness of all that grappling, all those unfamiliar shapes beneath the fingers, the odd discoveries, pounding away to get the nut no matter if the sweetness is gone, but he misses the reassurance. And misses being awake so often in the hour of necessity, the hot glare of the streetlights just before dawn.

Hyunjee has his home number. Not just his cell, his business number, which he turns to silent on weekends and the evenings—a substitute for his old answering service—but the old black rotary phone that just rings: no answering machine, no caller ID, no volume control, not even a plug to unhook from the wall. He gave it to her the first day her mother was admitted; it was something about the hapless way she fell into the chair in the waiting room and curled her legs to one side. New Yorkers don't act that way when engaging a service, signing a contract. It unnerved him when he showed her the payment schedule and she barely glanced it over. He flipped over his card and scrawled the number across the back. I'll always be at one of these, he said. Don't worry.

Now he checks his cell messages on a Sunday morning, no less. In case she's too shy to bother him at home. Sweaty, after running, peeling off his shirt and nylon jacket, draping a towel around his shoulders. The way she molds the dirt into little mounds with her fingertips. Her deftness with the metal chopsticks that never click against the side of the bowl. I could use a little pruning. A stupid way to put it. A woman's face creased with quiet anxiety.
Care
, he thinks, I could use someone else's care. I've grown too good at it myself.

Watch yourself, now. As if the world needed a whole new dimension of tired and pathetic. You'd have to wait till after the old woman died, and then what? A phone call two weeks after the funeral?
I thought we might have dinner?

You can't afford it, he thinks, there comes a point in life when every investment is a loss, every additional effort is a mistake. Do yourself a favor. Do yourself a service. The luxury of not waiting out another six months of heartache. He steps into the plastic stall with its long skid mark of rust running from the faucet to the drain, thinking, Do something about that, if you want to do something. And leaves the water on cold for a moment longer than usual, till his teeth are chattering.

When he walked into the classroom on the first day of Korean 110 the teacher covered her mouth, to cover a laugh, or a grimace of horror, perhaps some new fusion of the two she'd never imagined. He wedged himself into a chair between Katrina Lee and Jenny Park and tried his best to follow her explanation of
hangul
, a jumble of little circles and boxes and stick-figure men.

It's a very difficult language, she said to him afterward. Even for them—she indicated the young Korean American women vanishing through the door, zipping backpacks, flipping open their mobile phones. They grow up hearing it and still it takes them years. What makes you interested in learning it?

I have a Korean girlfriend.

He'd been flipping through the course catalog on the toilet—it came in the mail, unbidden, three times a year—meditating on the question of other possible lives. Introduction to Reiki. Advanced Flavors of the Mediterranean. Systems Analysis and the Diversified Portfolio. The listing for the introductory language classes said,
No previous experience necessary, for the absolute beginner.
He liked that phrase, its wishful absurdity. As if there was any such thing as an absolute beginner.

Then she can teach you, yes?

She's shy. Anyway, she doesn't have enough time. I want to learn it properly, from the ground up. Her parents don't speak English.

She crossed her arms and gave a broad, worldly laugh. That's very well-intentioned of you, she said. But the problem might not be the language barrier.

Am I making you uncomfortable?
he was tempted to say. She didn't even bother to disguise the way she moved behind the desk when he came near. Uninhibited fear and discomfort. You could almost respect her for it.

Well, it's my money, he said.

It amazes him now, three months gone, the term nearly finished. Every word he speaks out loud sending ripples of wincing distaste through the room. Teacher Cho has perfected the art of derision by example.
Bol
, she says, flapping her tongue at him to demonstrate the way it should be placed: curled behind the teeth, a little coiled snake. Not
bowl. Bol.
Long after he's gotten it right.
That's you
, Renée used to say,
stubborn as a rock when you've made up your mind.
Meant not entirely as praise. But mostly.

Mul jum kajigo wara
, Mrs. Kang says.

I want some water.

Mul jum kajigo wara.

A sentence flowing at him out of a dream. He stands by the window, scrubbing iodine off the toe of his sneaker. He wipes his fingers on a paper towel and inches his neck around until his head rotates half the distance between them.

Cham gam manyo, mul kajoda deureul kayo?
he asks.

Mul kajoda.

Her eyes shift in his direction: wet drops of onyx, bright as always, brighter than seeing eyes can ever be. Who does she think is speaking? he wonders. She stretches out a palsied finger, pointing at the bathroom door. A tap. A pump. A well. Eventually the disease squeezes out every memory, he knows that, even the earliest: the bottle, the mother's breast. But right now, who am I to her? Son, father, uncle, nurse, servant?

Mul.
He catches himself saying it. The tip of the tongue placed exactly in the middle of the palate.
Mul. Mul.

And here you thought it would never happen, he thinks. You thought it would never click. All that wasted time.

Kevin—

Hyunjee in the doorway, looking from one face to another.

He's forgotten the daughters: their names, their ages, the particular blur of each face. The taller of the two full-grown, shoulder-high on him, the other some indeterminate late-childhood shape, all bright wholesome fabrics and plastic beads. They're uptown for the weekend with their father, but he's thinking, as they walk up Second Avenue from the Thai restaurant back toward her apartment, that he should have something to say on the general subject of children, why he and Renée never had any, the difficulties of being a single mother—being a child of one—the hardships of the New York City schools. A certain widening of the circle of the conversation. He needs to bring things up to date, to gesture toward the immediate past, the impending future. Amy, Elizabeth, Lisa, Allison? Nondescript, easy names, names indicative of compromise, of shying away from the fashionable, not making things more difficult than they would already be.

Though one could hardly say she's given him much of an opening. Come get a bite with me tomorrow, was all she said. Stanley's got the girls for the weekend. I could use some adult conversation. This whole you-studying-Korean thing—she waved her hand, as if to say,
I don't get it, I don't
have
to get it.
I mean, she said, it's strange, isn't it, spending so much time together, never actually getting to know each other. Maybe to you it's not. But you don't have to come if you don't want to. Strictly optional.

And now he's lightheaded, pathetic dateless creature, swinging along the sidewalk as if he owns Manhattan, free-associating through the past, a tour of sedimented longings he hasn't unearthed in years.

There's something I meant to ask you about, she says, after they've walked a block in silence. Next week's her birthday. I was wondering if it would be appropriate to celebrate. In the room, I mean.

He wonders if he should be annoyed; business on a date, isn't that one of those basic rules? Instead he opts for generosity, a light laugh. Of course, you should do anything you want. She's not in a coma, you know. Anything she recognizes helps.

It's also her wedding anniversary.

All the better. A tape recording of your father, maybe? Or a piece of his clothing.

And a bottle of soju. She used to drink herself silly and talk to his picture, every year. Stories from her village. I should have used a tape recorder. Is there some rule against getting the patients drunk?

He laughs so loudly passersby look up from their conversations, startled. She doesn't need it, he says. That's the good side of Alz-heimer's. You're permanently blotto.

She opens the door, drops her keys in a glass bowl in the hallway, opens the refrigerator, and carries a bottle and two glasses across the living room to the sliding door of the balcony, without looking at him, without asking permission. Shucking her mules absent-mindedly halfway across the carpet. A chrome-and-glass coffee table, a pair of black leather couches, an Eames chair, enormous plastic-looking ferns.
His
furniture. Everything you can't afford to replace in a divorce, and the kids want it anyway, no matter how horrible, it's what they've grown into, and the continuity matters.

I'm curious about something, she declares, and I want to be honest about it. No pussyfooting around. I want to know what it was like over there.

It wasn't even a real war. Not like the one they're in now.

That's a poor excuse for an answer.

I'll tell you this much, he says. Sand gets into everything. I had this expensive camera, a Nikon, and it was trashed by the time I left. Sand driven through the seal into the lens. It sticks to your skin. The slightest bit of moisture makes it stick. You get so that it sticks to your dick and keeps you from jerking off.

The wine has a cloying floral bouquet, like sweet perfume; he licks his lips trying to get rid of it. Half my high school signed up, he says. Four tables right outside the main doors starting in April. Like shooting fish in a barrel. They took the kids who graduated two or three years ahead of us, the ones we looked up to, and sent them back as recruiters. It was a goddamned reunion out there every day. Gave them nice watches, good insurance policies, anything they could show off.

So you were manipulated into it.

I was looking for another father. A certain perverted kind of unconditional love. And instead what you get is Daddy slapping you across the face every other minute.

I understand that.

No you don't
, he wants to say, quickly, a splash of cold water across the eyes. But says, instead, It wasn't for me. Some really get into the camaraderie aspect, the brotherhood. It feels good to be needed when you're that age. And, you know, it teaches you to get your shit together. Get up and take a shower in the morning, no complaining. It's a
job.
They say it's the best and worst training for the rest of your life.

He chuckles. As long as we're on unpleasant topics—

He's a lawyer. You might have heard his name. Stanley Pollack. Civil rights stuff, mainly, First Amendment issues. Whistleblower cases. Pretty high profile. He's a commentator on WNYC.

Does that bother you?

What, hearing his voice? Come on. We're on the phone two or three times a week anyway. He's a pretty involved father. Or at least he talks a good game. The divorce was amicable in the end, I guess. We used a mediator. No betrayals, no infidelities. Not that I know of, anyway. Just pain. Ordinary, exhausting, unglamorous pain. We married too young; we got tired. You know the one about the wooden peg in the table?

You mean the round peg in the square hole.

No, no. Say you've got a wooden peg stuck in a table and you want to get it out. The only way is to bang in another peg. You're always back where you started, in other words.

So you throw away the table.

Something like that. I was never good at analogies.

And the girls?

The girls are over there having a grand old time. Takeout sushi and movies on cable till three
A.M.
if they want. He lets them watch
Sex and the City
and they come home talking about cocaine and anal sex. The only rule is they can't leave the apartment. Stan's a paranoid old New Yorker. Still won't walk through Central Park at night.

He'll have a hard time when they get older.

They
are
older. Samantha's having her bat mitzvah in October.

Is that right, he says. Trying to connect the word with a particular age. Is it like confirmation, he wonders, or like a sweet sixteen. Or neither.

I converted before we were married. Not that we ever went to synagogue. But the bat mitzvah's nonnegotiable. His parents are footing the bill.