Lurkers

by Sandi Tan

  Church volunteers returned all the personal effects from Mr. Park’s office, and Mrs. Park told them that neither she nor her girls would show their faces at All-Friends again. Going back there would only remind her of her husband’s lack of peace with God even as he pretended to serve Him. How could she look any one of the parishioners in the eye? Her husband had betrayed all of them by simply giving up.

  There was one saving grace. His body was not interred at All-Friends, which didn’t have the right building codes, but in the mausoleum beneath the biggest Korean church in Orange County, fifty miles away. This meant she had an excuse not to visit as often as a widow should.

  As the period of mourning faded away, Mrs. Park’s concerns sharpened. How would they buy groceries? She couldn’t drive. How would they make the money to buy groceries? She had nothing but a high school diploma, from a provincial school near the North Korean border. The Koreans she knew in America had never heard of her district, let alone her high school’s excellent cheerleading program.

  For the first few weeks, she walked to the nearest mini-mart where she picked up milk, bread, ramen and peanut butter. It was three-quarters of a mile away, not a difficult walk on a cool spring day, but it would be far less pleasant in the fast-approaching summer. Once a week, her husband’s Koreatown relatives would bring her tofu and surplus produce such as cabbage, lettuce and spring onions, and she tried to make these last. But she knew this arrangement couldn’t go on forever. These distant cousins weren’t generous people—they were acting out of duty, and duty, unlike charity, had a limited hold on the American mind. She learned to take the bus to a supermarket three miles away. But the interminable wait at the bus stop, often with suspicious-looking types, made her fear carpal tunnel from gripping her purse so tight.

  Once, she waited twenty minutes with a frail, white-haired black woman in a security guard’s uniform who tried to put her at ease with friendly conversation. But she was nervous about her poor English and didn’t say anything back. Later, she regretted her unfriendliness and thought about how melancholy the woman had made her feel—a woman that age shouldn’t have had to work, let alone wait for the bus home after a twelve-hour shift watching a vacant lot. That said, the old woman had a job, which put her in a better position than Mrs. Park herself. All she had was a 2003 Camry with a full tank of gas sitting in her driveway, not going anywhere at all.

  Her husband had left behind the modest bank account of a decent, naïve minister. His poor financial planning was, she knew, partly her own fault. Five years before, she hadn’t let him spend $500 to take part in a regional church seminar on money management. As it turned out, all the younger, more ambitious Korean ministers in LA and Orange Counties attended and, according to the church circulars, gleaned inspiration about fund-raising and business development, while Mr. Park lagged farther behind.

  The mortgage payment was $1,200 a month, and they had seventeen years to go. If they lived very frugally, with both girls maintaining good enough grades to remain in their schools’ scholarship programs, Mrs. Park reckoned that they could survive for two years on her husband’s savings. But that would mean absolutely no meals out, no movies, no overnight excursions to Ojai with the Girl Scouts.

  Mr. Park’s cousin, whose tofu restaurant had become so successful that they opened three branches outside Koreatown, dutifully offered Mrs. Park a job waiting tables at his Alhambra outpost. He rescinded the offer as soon as she accepted, saying her English might not be good enough for his clientele—young American-born Koreans.

  Mrs. Park talked to her girls about planting their own vegetables—eggplants, tomatoes, maybe even bok choy. Rosemary kept her dismay to herself and said she would take Driver’s Ed as soon as the course was offered at school. Mira, the truth-teller, spelled it out to their mother: “This is America. You have to drive. And you have to have a job. Or else you might as well forget it.”

  Her words bruised Mrs. Park. There was no way around it, she had to find a solution. For the first time in over a decade, she prayed.

  Rosemary was eating a bowl of ramen and watching the news in the den. Not long after her father’s death, she began following a story she’d found personally appealing: a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from New Jersey had gone missing. Five weeks later, the saga was still unfolding.

  The story gripped her because this was the first time in her memory that the news media had ever picked up on a missing-teenager story where the girl wasn’t blond and blue-eyed. This time, she was a silky Eurasian Rosemary’s own age, a scholastic all-rounder who was in the Girl Scouts as well as her school’s math decathlon team. She went to a chichi girls’ school. Her father was a therapist and her mother was a professor at one of those picture-perfect Seven Sisters colleges that Rosemary dreamed of attending.

  She felt a surge of abstract pride whenever pictures of the missing girl flashed on the screen. She liked the fact that there was rarely any mention of the girl’s ethnicity, except on the Fox News network where she was continually misdescribed as “Japanese teenager Brittany Ann Yamasato.”

  The Yamasato family was holding a “live” news conference just then. While the girl’s father wept in the background, the mother, a tall brunette who resembled the actress Sigourney Weaver, announced gravely that FBI agents had finally broken into her daughter’s computer and found that she’d been communicating via AOL Instant Messenger with a sophomore from a West Coast university. From the salvaged message fragments, the authorities had reason to believe that Brittany had run away with this boy, after a series of coffee shop rendezvous. As if on cue, the mother broke down, pleading for any leads surrounding the young man who went by the name Paul. Sobbing, she confessed that she and her husband had “no idea” that their daughter had been “so unhappy.” When the news conference ended, CNN brought on a dour panel of educators to pontificate dryly on Alienation in the Honor Roll League.

  Mrs. Park walked into the den and clicked off the TV.

  “Ma!”

  Then she walked over to the windows and shut them, muffling the rock music pounding from the Mystery Boom Box.

  “Ma! What’re you doing? I finished my homework!”

  Mrs. Park sat herself down on the sofa, and stared at her calloused hands.

  “Baby, today I clean closet, I find something was your Dad’s.”

  “Was it money? . . . A gun?”

  “It is paper . . .” Mrs. Park looked up at Rosemary, smiling, but her eyes brimmed with tears. “He write many story! But was secret. He never tell me! I not know!”

  “Really? Dad was a writer? Since when?”

  “I not know.”

  “Can I see them? Where are they?”

  “They still in closet.”

  “Well, did you read them? Are they any good?”

  “I not know.”

  “What do you mean? Didn’t you read them?”

  “No. They in English.”

  Mrs. Park placed the stack of stories on Rosemary’s desk. They were hand-written on letterhead from All-Friends Worship and numbered in total about sixty pages. She ordered a Domino’s pizza (Hawaiian, busting the week’s budget) and made hot cocoa in preparation for the girls’ reading.

  There was a lightness in Mrs. Park’s step but the girls had a sick feeling about the stories when they spotted titles like “The Dancing Banana Woman” and “Child Toucher.”

  “We make book to sell, yes?” Mrs. Park backed out of Rosemary’s room, nodding and bowing like an innkeeper in an old samurai flick. Once the door was closed, the girls looked at each other and made faces.

  They divided the stories into roughly two equal piles and started reading, quickly trading the pages they’d finished. Their father’s handwriting was neat and square, and he rarely made any corrections.

  The story “Cheater Man” began: The lawyer Harvey Finkelstein was down to his last pack of cigarettes when he
remembered his dear old father. It had been over a year since he had paid the old boy a visit. Perhaps Father would be dying soon and he would will the entire lot of his remaining wealth to me, thought Harvey. As he approached his father’s mansion, he was surprised and delighted to see the undertaker’s van parked in front of the house . . .

  The Harvey Finkelstein character was forever saying things like, “Another day, another dollar!” and always seemed to have a pastrami sandwich or bagel stuffed into his pocket. As the story went on, Harvey got mixed up with heroin smugglers who lived in peach-colored condos facing the water. Mr. Park’s gangster underworld sounded like something dreamed up by a child after Adderall and Vice City. At the end of ten pages, all the characters perished in a terrorist attack on Miami Beach.

  “Wow,” said Rosemary, passing the pages to her sister. “You certainly can’t accuse him of being formulaic.”

  “Wait till you read this one,” Mira said. “It’s almost avant-garde.” She handed over the story “Child Toucher.”

  Rosemary’s eyes widened. She read, “‘In fact, he scoffed at people who were occasionally hauled into court for acts of peepism . . .’ Peepism?” She cast the story aside and squealed. And Mira squealed, too, for good measure.

  The girls could have stopped here but there was something morbidly enticing about reading such bizarrely bad writing—by somebody so close to them, and so dead.

  “The Dancing Banana Woman” the girls saved for last because of its title. It had to be savored. They read this one out loud together: Venus Washington loves to dance cha-cha. Never mind that she is not terribly good at it and woe betide the man or woman who is silly enough to tell her the truth. She is cushioned by false praise from her dancehall partners, and the adoration of her husband Leroy, who brings a new dimension to the word “wimp” . . .

  The girls groaned, but read on all the same. There were questionable spots of fluidity: The wrinkles on her thighs which used to dissipate after an afternoon at the spa now seemed reluctant to desert her and Leroy moved at a pace thought not possible for someone as corpulent as he. They pointed out sentences like these to each other with mounting suspicion that he might have plagiarized them. Rosemary, in particular, found it hard to picture her white-haired father sitting at his desk, writing the final line of the story: As he lived, so he died, in the most fitting manner and in the most appropriate place—in a brothel.

  “This feels like the first one he wrote,” said Rosemary. “It’s got a beginning, middle and end. Like, structure. Before he felt confident enough to break free and, like”—her fingers crooked into scare quotes—“experiment.”

  “Isn’t it weird that Dad wrote all this stuff and yet he wouldn’t let us read Harry Potter because it’s got wizards?”

  “He was always a hypocrite.”

  As they gathered up the pages, they wondered why the story was called “The Dancing Banana Woman.” Bananas did not figure in the least, except perhaps as a crude sexual metaphor. Then Rosemary’s cheeks burned with mortal embarrassment. It hit her—Venus Washington was African American.

  “We have to burn these,” she whispered. “We can’t ever let anyone see them.”

  They stared at the papers on Rosemary’s pink coverlet, chilled with the awareness that these were their father’s most personal items of legacy.

  “If this was how he saw the world, no wonder he was so unhappy,” Rosemary said.

  “Hot damn!” Mira exclaimed.

  “Hot damn,” Rosemary echoed.

  Rosemary watched her mother sink deeper into the sofa.

  “I’m sorry, Ma. But they’re, like, slightly disappointing.”

  “Don’t backpedal, Stinky,” Mira cut in. She plopped herself down on the sofa and grabbed her mother’s arm. “Ma, the truth is they’re truly, deeply bad. He really shouldn’t have bothered. I mean, honestly, man.”

  Mrs. Park gripped the pile of stories to her chest, not saying a word.

  Mira sighed dramatically. “Look, if you can’t, like, face up to reality, then I don’t know what else to say to you!” She stomped to her room and slammed the door. A second later, her head popped out to glower at her sister. “Rosie, tell her! She obviously doesn’t believe me. Don’t be a freakin’ two-face, alright?” The door banged shut again.

  Mrs. Park was staring at a stain on the carpet three feet away. Rosemary reached for her mother’s arm but her mother pulled away. “Ma . . .”

  Mrs. Park got up and headed to the front door with the stories. She kicked off her “inside” slippers and shoved her sullen feet into her “outside” slippers (which were the same exact slippers except not stained and frayed).

  “Where are you going, Ma?”

  “You only child, you not know anything!”

  “Ma, we can’t let—”

  But the door slammed shut.

  – 2 –

  THE CRAFTSMAN

  Raymond van der Holt pondered the catalog. Would a seven-candle chandelier bring the front room into balance? The twelve-candle model that came with the house was excessive. He’d been thinking of downsizing for months and the Restoration Hardware sale had come to the rescue. Then again, if he could just wait it out, there was the discount weekend in December . . .

  This was how Raymond had been spending the past five or six years. Pondering catalogs, being selective about what he wanted, and being even more selective about what he actually bought. He couldn’t spend as giddily as he used to—the royalties and movie options would dry up, and he’d be left with only his 1924 Craftsman house and the beautiful, pedigree-free objects within it. (He never antiqued—germs!)

  At fifty-five, he kept himself smooth-skinned with a panoply of Kiehl’s ointments. He retained a full head of hair, which was a source of pride because his father had gone bald at thirty-nine, and he combed this silver nest before answering the door, no matter who rang, mailman or Jehovah’s Witness. He was not vain, per se; he just had an old-fashioned sense of decorum, and he liked what he liked: grownupness. During times of distress, he perked himself up by channeling Cary Grant gliding down the stairs with a highball. There was an original Batchelder-tile fireplace in his living room, muted and mellow with rabbits and pinecones. Gazing at it also calmed him, but Cary Grant had better dimples.

  Many years ago, as a Midwestern man of twenty-seven, he’d churned out a grisly trio of novels, the Deathwatch cycle. Within two years, all three had become international bestsellers. By the time he was thirty, he’d been anointed a savant on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention Japan, where his most ardent (and terrifying) fans lived.

  His subjects were grave robbers, necromancers, zombies and—his favorite—vampires. Part of his success lay in his resistance to the term “horror” and his refusal to play the schlock-meister; he preferred that reviewers and fans alike refer to his works as “blood epics.” He found it gratifying, for example, when the New York Times described his books as “chilling chronicles of necromania,” tying him more to Lovecraft and Poe than to Stephen King. Although his characters were fantastical, he steeped his tales in truthful emotions—real wants and real fears, the other components of his winning formula. His zombie stories were allegories of xenophobia and race hate, and his vampire saga contained his own anxieties about aging. He never had mummies leaping out of the wardrobe just to say boo.

  After a successful run of ten books, Raymond decided he had nothing more to say. It became tiresome to keep up with shifting expectations. Worse, he found himself too frequently invited to soirees with other practitioners of the genre. It wasn’t the competition he dreaded, it was the homework. Having to thumb through multivolume sagas so there’d be something to discuss—writers of this type were notoriously solipsistic and couldn’t handle conversation outside of their own invented realms. Anyway, their stories were never as vigorous and heartfelt as his, and there were few things more unbearable tha
n an insincere werewolf epic.

  Then, there were the fans. The disturbing ones, who sent him dead animals and decomposed body parts, lived in Japan, and he found them easy enough to ignore. But his target audience, the people for whom he started writing his books in the first place, were nowhere to be found.

  In his naïveté, he’d hoped that his writing would draw in legions of tousle-haired, doe-eyed teenagers he could lure into his bed, ruby-lipped androgynes who wore Mom’s pantyhose late at night while listening to jazz or Terry Riley’s In C. Boys with faces like angels, and minds like devils. But instead, Raymond found—to his genuine horror—that the great majority of his readers were suburban housewives. These denim-wrapped females formed book clubs and organized role-playing weekends around his books; they invited him to inaugurate picnics and autograph raffle tickets. They squealed freely at his book signings, and too frequently, the chubby ones came dressed as sirens from his zombie cycle. He shuddered thinking about the way they bumbled around, jibberingly exchanging homemade business cards and Wiccan greetings. Whenever he read at a Barnes & Noble in the suburbs, he smelled the strip mall tacos on their breath.

  Male children didn’t read books anymore. It broke his heart to see in the news how children now went on the Internet to broker friendships with strange, older men. He believed in Headloin Love, massive acts of spontaneity propelled by a lightness in the head and a fire in the groin. Being in the moment, being in the flesh. How he missed the boys who’d cover his face in kisses when he brought them ice cream and silk dresses. Modern boys wanted cold, hard cash—or gift cards from Blockbuster or Best Buy. He recoiled at their bluntness, their unabashed declarations that “I’m in it for this, I’m not really a fag.” The boys he loved best from the old days never had the time for grotesque words; they kept their heads down and their knees bent.

  Dismayed, he channeled his energies into his house. Moving west from New York in the mid-nineties, Raymond had been in search of his own castle. But with new Hollywood money eating up most of old Los Angeles housing, he never managed to find a compound that was comfortable enough, stylish enough, yet affordable enough. Finally, his realtor sold him on the Craftsman aesthetic, a harmonious beam-exposing, grain-deifying style that was popularized at the turn of the twentieth century by a Wisconsin builder named Gustav Stickley. Classic Craftsman houses were chockablock in Alta Vista, a foothill area as yet undiscovered by the media throng; Raymond was instantly seduced by their shaded porches, shingled roofs and aw-shucks charm. He bought one on Santa Claus Lane, in cash.