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Hong-do showed me how to hold my teacup deferentially in both hands, like a proper Korean lady, and taught me heatedly about Korean history and Confucian philosophy. Railing about the ignorance of the West, he would glare at me unforgivingly as if I were no longer his niece, or even anyone he knew, but a symbol of the entire ‘West’ and its calumny.
Back out on the street I felt chastened, subtly changed by our dinner. The chili of the kimchi and the fire of my uncle’s beliefs began to penetrate the cool skin of my habitual indifference. But I was daunted by what I began to discover. Identity, nationality comprised manifold layers, and I was only just exploring the crude outer surfaces, straining to detect the character of the invisible blood beneath.
One night, after several beers, Hong-do became pleasantly sentimental, and drew the yin-yang circle of the Taegukki – the Korean flag – for me on the tablecloth with his chopstick, explaining its symbolism of integrated opposites. Then, smiling cruelly, he drew a diagram of himself and me, comparing our closeness to two independent circles, overlapping only slightly at the farthest parameters.
I was stung. I wanted to protest that he was being harsh, and that there was more between us; but I could not. Perhaps it was true that only this segment of tablecloth had joined us; perhaps we had never before succeeded in meeting. But if we were not as intimate as some relations, we had come a long, painful way to our present distance. I clung to this small achievement.
Over melon and toothpicks Hong-do listened rapt, but uncomprehending, to my hopes and woes, then smacked my shoulder encouragingly when I’d finished. Perhaps he couldn’t follow the language or my way of seeing things, but somehow it didn’t matter. The smack made me laugh, deflating my worries.
Then my uncle paid the stiff bill grandly, and drove me home to unfashionable West One Hundredth Street in his plush blue Chevrolet Royale, with the amazing shock absorbers. During that nocturnal ride I felt a rare, childish joy; as if no danger or sadness could reach me within that safety of new-found blood kinship, padded vinyl, and electronic locks.
It was not to last.
A couple of months later Hong-do’s trusted business partner vanished in the middle of the night with all the firm’s assets. The investigators could not trace him. Ruined, Hong-do sold his house, and moved his family back to Seoul for good.
On our final evening together before my uncle’s departure I glanced over at him in the driver’s seat on the way home. Neon lights from the Broadway marquees washed over his tired face. He ignored the crowds and the limousines, and focused blankly on the red traffic light ahead. A ghostly feeling emanated from him. I recognized it from years ago when he first came; as if his body had landed but his spirit had remained behind in Korea. There was now a similar emptiness about him, as if his soul were in transit, and had already begun the long journey home.
I wondered if Hong-do had really dreamed of success in America, and if it grieved him to see it eluding him now. Perhaps he was glad to leave; I still had not learned how to read his face. There were many things I did not know about him, and it seemed now that I might never know them. It was too late to ask those questions.
The chance had arrived that winter, ten years ago, when he had come to stay, and I had not taken it. I had neither been kind nor unkind to my uncle, but had saved up knowing him for a future time, when it would be easier. I thought he would always be there to discover, like a locked family treasure chest, too substantial to be moved. I would surely inherit it one day, and be given the key. A sick, black feeling welled up in me, and I realised then that the key had been inside me all along, and I hadn’t known it was there.
The streets flowed quickly past the window, bringing our farewell closer. Through my uncle, Korea had grown nearly real to me. But I suspected that when he left, the floating embryo of coded dynasties, diagrams, religious precepts and war-dates might perish. Korea would exist only in the unfinished, idealized monument my mother’s memory had carved, in the rare, transient taste of kimchi and in random visits to greengrocer immigrants, whose faces, behind the bountiful rows of fruit, were closed with forgetting.
I didn’t see it then, but my uncle was a drawbridge to the destroyed homeland my mother had left. Through him I visited the mansion with the green gates where my mother was born, the Northern estates, and my great-grandfather’s temple on Mount Sorak surrounded by one thousand chestnut trees he had planted for longevity.
Although the Japanese had burned down these Northern estates, and the lands were now divided on the thirty-eighth parallel, I felt I had walked through these places, and breathed them. All of this still lived inside of him, intact, and beyond reach. The drawbridge was now closing.
I forget what we said when we parted. The glare of oncoming headlights numbed me. The car door slammed, a reflection of the street façade obscured his face, and he was gone.
Later, I stood in my apartment and looked down on the myriad changing signals and dim tail-lights below that formed an endless, sweeping canon of arrivals and departures. With pain, I imagined Hong-do at the window of his aeroplane back to Seoul, contemplating the same city.
What would he be thinking of as the brute streets of New York contracted into cool, glittering grids? What would he recall of his years with us? Eating fried egg with his fingers, an afternoon’s serpent-hunting? He’d probably want to forget all that. Perhaps a dinner at Young Bin Kwan.
These incidents were meagre, but I hoped he would remember them. I wanted to be there in the background, and to appear across the table from him, years later. But I couldn’t break into his memories. Too much flesh, and glass, and time sealed them. I had to be content just to picture him thinking, suspended somewhere over the Pacific.
I remember being seven years old and the smell of apples. A boy was twisting my arm behind my back just for fun.
‘Say “Uncle”!’ the boy taunted. A crowd gathered. For some reason, ‘Uncle’ was the word American bullies used then to torture you. I wouldn’t say. it He twisted my arm harder and harder until my shoulder was shooting with pain, and my face was red and sweating.
‘Uncle! Uncle!’ I cried in furious shame.
CHAPTER TWO Cardboard Boxes
After my uncle’s return to Seoul, life in Manhattan resumed its former shape as if he had not been there at all. Buses and taxis ploughed up and down Broadway, the phone rang, mail arrived. Pedestrians poured over crosswalks like columns of ants. The physical vacuum my uncle left was refilled instantly. The hard pavements sealed over my few, precious memories of him with the finality of quicksand.
When I tried to picture Hong-do’s life in Seoul, I could not. Its city smells, noises, and moods were inconceivable to me. Besides, it was too draining to imagine a world beyond New York. It was like living on the floor of an enclosed glass tank with unscalable walls. Only occasional, chastising glimpses of clear blue sky, in the gaps between buildings, reminded me of a remote natural order greater than Manhattan, quite beyond reach.
When I sat down to think of things to tell my uncle – in the letter that I never wrote him – I began to notice how marginal my life was. Days were measured out in so many tea-bags, bus-transfers, tuna sandwiches, cash-withdrawals, and hangovers.
I attempted to keep alive a connection to Hong-do through the occasional trip to Thirty-fourth Street for a Korean meal with friends, but this rather indirect approach failed, and without him the experience felt somewhat hollow. As predicted, my flimsy template of Korean awareness dissolved quickly, and attentions were soon fully reabsorbed in the lowly struggle for financial survival which had occupied my life before Hong-do’s departure. In my efforts to become a painter – and live in Manhattan – my life had become an undignified scramble for dry ground. I spent much of my time collecting cardboard boxes to move house with. Reasons for moving were various and unexciting: rent-hikes, lease-violations, buildings going co-op, and roommates like Ted, at West One Hundredth Street.
Ted was perhaps no better nor worse than you’d expect from a New York roommate. Ted had a honking Connecticut voice, and was a former Fly Club treasurer at Harvard, possessing the strange ability to bounce cheques selectively: rent and utilities cheques failing to clear, while extravagant entertainment and wardrobe bills found deep, instant funds. Ted stole your spaghetti sauce and lowered the tone of the bathroom with his depressing litres of bargain shampoo and generic deodorant. Pip, Alice and I were obliged to take numerous phone messages for Ted from The Hair Club for Men (where, at only twenty-four, he elected to go for weekly hair implants) and then struggle to pretend that we didn’t notice anything strange about the sudden presence of oddly-tinted brown hairs which appeared on his pate on alternate Thursdays. Unfortunately for us, this did not prevent him from attracting a girlfriend called Pierce; a law student with an aggressive laugh, who left items of clothing draped on the living-room furniture to signal her presence like a cat spraying its turf. But Ted’s most challenging habit was his nude sleepwalking. Fully clothed, Ted was irritating enough, but Ted entering my room late at night, buck naked, and climbing into my bed was pretty much the last straw. He would also make regular late-night sojourns into the kitchen when we were talking, and urinate into the refrigerator.
It was unfortunate that Ted’s name was on the lease. Although the unsolved murders of three young women on the rooftop of the building next-door cast an eerie menace over the block, and the peeling mustard-coloured paint, and tumbleweed dustballs in the corridor were slightly dispiriting, the apartment’s high ceilings, parquet floors, and wrought-iron balconies lent my existence a spurious graciousness that I appreciated very much at the time.
Sight unseen, I moved in to my next place on a searing August afternoon during a sanitation-workers’ strike, my belongings fitting into just two checker-cab trips. It was a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, illegally sublet from a vacationing friend’s boyfriend. The strike was a bad omen: an almighty stench of food, cooked and rotting, hit me like a damp wall upon quitting the taxi; great banks of black plastic garbage bags were shored up generously on both sides of the street, shimmering in the heat. Up and down the block, an espresso bar, shish-kebab house, hot-dog-calzone-and-pizza stand, veggie-burger cart, sushi vendor and felafel emporium made MacDougal Street a sort of United Nations of fast food, whose dependence on the city’s sanitation workers was total.
I shared this apartment with Mona, a timid garment-district secretary from Belchertown, Massachusetts, her two neurotic long-haired cats, Mick and Mike, and a medical student, Ethan, who proudly told me on our first meeting that his father was the actor in the famous double-edged razor television commercials during the seventies.
The apartment’s subtly crippled appearance was owed to Delia’s vacationing boyfriend being something of an amateur carpenter. Interior walls were makeshift partitions he had enterprisingly nailed together late at night, apparently under the influence of hard drugs. The sturdiness of his carpentry was such that the cats could – and did – enter my bedroom by hurling themselves against the closed door at a gallop, whereupon they would lie down and moult on my pillow.
As it was summer, one didn’t mind that the frightening-looking gas stove was broken, but the bathroom arrangements were more testing. There was nothing as definite as a door to this bathroom; merely a friendly, cat-hairy, Indian bedspread thumbtacked to the doorframe, adding a certain anxiety to one’s activities therein. The superintendent had pledged to fix the plumbing, but in the meantime, toilet-flushing involved two trips to the kitchen tap with a bucket. Turning on the shower required the assistance of a pair of pliers. Once activated successfully, the exuberant shower-spray kept Mick and Mike’s kitty-litter tray in a continuous state of deliquescence.
When I think of MacDougal Street, I remember the inescapable melancholy of three ill-suited people sharing a small space, and the overwhelming smell of felafel. The airduct of the Middle Eastern restaurant downstairs expelled its kitchen fumes directly outside my bedroom window, which in August had to be permanently thrown open. I awoke in the mornings lightly coated in a dew of congealed felafel exhalation and cat-hair, provoking frequent bad-tempered battles with the shower-pliers.
That August it was too hot to paint in the studio, so sweltering free weekends were spent at friends’ summer places on Fisher’s Island and in Bridgehampton, or eating cherry Italian ices near the spray of the fountain in Washington Square Park, avoiding my flatmates. I spent many evenings at Laura’s, seated directly in the path of her electric fan, drinking cold beer and listening to the sound of other people’s stereos drifting in the stale night air.
I was grateful to my friend Delia for helping me out with a quick sublet, but having exhausted the charms of MacDougal Street, it was now time to move on. Laura, possessing a compassionate nature, agreed to split the rent with me, temporarily, on her studio apartment on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.
Our narrow, sooty tenement was positioned sensitively between a transvestite brothel and a funeral parlour. Laura had a bed in the living room, while I slept on a glorified shelf above a wardrobe, accessible by ladder. Being New York, it wasn’t even cheap. I also had to pay rent on a shared painting studio in the meat-packing district above the Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.
In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.
Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.
Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.
After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.
Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.
Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.
The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any painting at all. The sheer beauty of the books made me lethargic; their gilded embossing, the satin feel of the calf book covers, and their pages’ mysterious, mushroomy smell.
But there was no slacking at Cadogan Books. Despite his considerable personal scattiness, Oliver was a stickler for book-wrapping formalities, hawkishly observing my erasure of extraneous pencil marks and smudges, the strategic insertion of a Cadogan Books compliments slip and invoice, cutting and snug taping of an underwear layer of sheet newsprint, followed by a vest of corrugated cardboard – Exact-O-knifed to precise cover dimensions – folded and taped to the tightest possible fit, and topped with a final overcoat of brown parcel paper, string reinforcement and sticky label: the book-wrapping equivalent of Jermyn Street winter tailoring.
Oliver himself went to the Post Office to mail the books; this being one of the more glamorous of the day’s activities, and a rare chance for people to know that he was wearing a suit. But oddly, if there was an auction to attend at Swann’s or Sotheby’s – dizzyingly social events for us – Oliver would insist that I do the bidding. At first it seemed that he was being generous, varying tasks to minimize staff boredom, but it became apparent, from arch comments he made about rival dealers Ephraim Pastov and John Speed, that he found the openly mercantile aspect of his profession a bit grubby.
While Oliver cut an enviable dash in the Post Office queue, selling books was one of his weaker points. His afternoons were generally spent attending art exhibitions, visiting the dry-cleaners’, lunching with potential clients, and sometimes listening to Puccini and Verdi, jotting down notes in an important hand for pedantic musical studies that he had been fine-tuning for years. Where such a desultory approach might be expected to yield limited results, Oliver was so annoyingly well-connected and clever that the books, however ordinary, and however long they might take to write, would be published by a decent house in England for quite a high fee, with no apparent negotiations undertaken.
One January morning after the arrival of a particularly emasculating credit card demand, Oliver took in the bad news with uncharacteristic silence. He eyed a priceless book of 18th century botanical illustrations with stupendous colour plates.
‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller,’ he said, melodramatically announcing his intended sales target.
‘Do you have to?’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘I suppose so,’ I said, glancing up from a new VISA statement. Perversely, Oliver appeared to hire his assistants for their flightiness and insubordination rather than their competence. My predecessor had been an London brewery heiress who dripped mayonnaise and nail polish onto the book covers, and conducted her intimidating social life on the phone in a particularly loud voice when introverted clients came to call.
Oliver went into the kitchen, and after the usual noise of cascading dirty crockery that accompanied most kitchen visits, emerged with a half-empty bottle of vodka, settled into a cracked brown leather armchair near the telephone, and crossed his legs.
‘What are you doing? It’s only ten-thirty.’ Ignoring this obvious remark, he struggled to remove the cap. ‘She’s terribly pretty, you know, half his age,’ he said, taking a tense swig from the bottle.
‘Who?’
‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller. Airline hostess emeritus; richest wife of the year. Said she might be interested in the book.’
‘Since when are you and Susan Miller having chats?’
‘Yankowitz-Miller. She insists. Saw her at Nonie Warburton’s ghastly bridge evening … If she does bite, that would be a ready eight thousand in the coffers. You’ve got to ring her up for me now.’
I protested.
‘You can. I pay you …’ Oliver handed me the bottle with a bland expression. I took an experimental pull. He passed me the number.
‘Meelair residence,’ said a distant Hispanic voice.
‘Hello, this is Mr Flood’s secretary calling for Mrs Miller.’
‘Mrs Meelair ees not home.’
‘May I please speak with her secretary?’
‘Chust a moment.’
Oliver mouthed something. I waved him away.
‘Avedon Buckley speaking, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s personal assistant, may I help you?’ said a lockjawed, blaring female, as if guarding access to one of the more important Pentagon generals. A protracted and farcical exchange of rude evasions (secretary) and slimy begging (me) ensued, and at last the mighty Mrs Yankowitz-Miller consented to come to the phone, despite having no recollection of having been interested in buying a ‘book’ – a word she pronounced with genuine surprise. Oliver, primed by the Smirnoff, sat on the edge of his chair, knees pressed together in a supplicatory pose, and injected into his voice an oily bonhomie for which he later loathed himself, and which instantly secured him an afternoon’s audience.
After a bloody three-week telephone campaign fought between Cadogan Books and Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s manicurist, masseuse, hairdresser, chiropodist, colonic irrigator, fitness-trainer, voice-coach, personal shopper, florist, caterers, flamenco teacher, and the Save Tibet Foundation, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller duly bought the priceless book, and instructed Rodrigo, her decorator, to cut out the plates to hang in the baby’s bathroom. She also bought twenty-five yards of tooled leather books of no interest whatever to plump out her husband’s library. Cadogan Books was temporarily reprieved.
We celebrated by going to the movies at noon the following day to see Aliens II, and Oliver took me out for a late lunch at the Plaza afterwards. His jutting chin, diplomat-grey hair and dapper suit found an approving audience among the waiters and divorcees, who craned their necks with interest as he entered the room. The attention agreed with him, and he even bothered to pull in his stomach self-consciously as he got up to make a telephone call. As he turned, the vents of his suit seemed to flap deliberately, revealing a scarlet silk lining that flashed like mating plumage.
Oliver ordered an expensive bottle of Mercurey to impress the impudent sommelier, who had sized us up as illicit lovers, and although he was fairly merry at first, by the time coffee had arrived he was in quite a fragile state.
‘I’m thinking of packing it in, you know … Do you think I should pack it in? I’ve already had to sell some furniture.’
I was a bit shocked. ‘I don’t know … Maybe we should both pack it in,’ I said half-joking, emboldened by the wine and false security of multiple waiters.
‘Of course I’m grateful you gave me the job, Oliver, but it’s a bit tricky getting my own stuff done working for you full-time.’
Oliver eyed me critically, annoyed at my candour; he disliked being reminded that I had aspirations beyond Cadogan Books.
‘Come on, Ol. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. What about going back to England?’
‘Clapped-out place. Truth is, I can’t. Too many enemies. Customs & Excise, solicitors, creditors, cheated colleagues, ex-wife nonsense …’
‘Where would you go? Would you stay here? You can’t. You’d turn into an old soak who dines off old ladies,’ I slurred. He looked up sharply.