The Sea & Us

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  ‘Wow! Have you done all this, man?’

  We deposit the mattress and I nod. He walks around looking at the room as if it were an empty art gallery waiting for paintings. His lopsided smile breaks into words.

  ‘Are you a painter?’

  ‘No, my grandmother taught me.’

  ‘Your grandmother!’

  ‘Yep, she whitewashed farm buildings for the Communists.’

  ‘Was she forced to?’

  ‘Yeah, she had no choice. She was a portrait painter, so they got her to paint barns and fences instead.’

  He looks at me thoughtfully. I can feel the past in him. There is something about his shoulders I can’t explain to myself, as if the very shape of him carries a story, and I realise we don’t consist only of ourselves but of all those others, those we miss and those who seem to whisper their secret identities from behind foggy windows. I know I’m staring at him. I wish I could switch myself off, but my mind’s on a turntable, turning so slow that I’m straining to hear the words in my head – while those on the outside seem to have acquired a furry quality.

  Ben brandishes a hand and rests it lightly on my shoulder.

  ‘You right, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. And I can’t even say I’m jet-lagged. I’ve come from one hour behind this time zone.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘In Seoul. Shall we get the bed frame?’

  ‘Sure. Then you can have a kip.’

  ‘I haven’t heard that word for a long time.’

  ‘South Korea, eh? How long did you stay?’

  ‘Eighteen years.’

  ‘Wow. Really? That is a time warp. You deserve a kip!’

  All that time might have been an invisible, unpassable corridor between us – but it isn’t. Ben seems relieved, as if any off-key differences make him feel more, rather than less, at home. His big, almost cumbersome hand rests delicately on my arm this time. The touch is so light, it holds no intention, just a kind of gentle trust.

  ‘I’ve never been to South Korea,’ he confides. ‘Only India, Ireland, Canada – and New Zealand, of course, but I’m a Kiwi, so that doesn’t count.’

  I had forgotten Australians’ intimate connection to other countries, as if they were talking of past lovers or future dates.

  ‘I’ve never been to New Zealand.’

  ‘You should go … Lakes, mountains, islands, and air, lots of air …’

  ‘Were you born there?’

  He nods.

  Again I have the feeling I had with Placido: something in common. But this time I don’t know what it is – always a plus.

  We leave the white, white room, and are down the stairs and on the footpath before I know it. It feels easy to stride along with Ben. The shops on Lygon Street are starting to slot into familiar positions. The Brotherhood’s gigantic fan has stopped churning. It was probably on by mistake. It’s hardly even spring, after all.

  We grab the bed frame and I wave to the woman I bought it from. She has her back to me but turns around and waves too. Sometimes you’ve got to wonder if people see with the tops of their heads or if extrasensory perception is just rife. Three people are waiting at the counter, one buying a parasol, another a stool and the third a pile of books. She jokes with them, and is pleasantly, unthreateningly sexy.

  Then we are out in the street again. As we retrace our steps, I ask him if he’s a student. He’s silent and then answers sluggishly.

  ‘I was doing an Arts degree and I dropped out. I just hate universities.’

  I ask him if he’s read Stoner by John Williams.

  This startles him.

  ‘I loved that book!’

  Before I can pat myself on the back, a beautiful girl on a bicycle has Ben dropping the bed frame on my foot, but she sails off, her skirt flapping in the breeze, her short black bob shining in the sunlight and her helmet hanging from one of her handlebars. Ben shoots me a look as if he were on the verge of having a seizure. I realise how slow I am – I, who can only think of Ha-yoon.

  We soldier on with the bed frame in the girl’s wake, Ben still clearly weak at the knees. When we get back the shop is open and Verity is alone with her shop assistant, a ferocious-looking student who never says a word to anyone. His parents are from Poland and he studies engineering. He seems to be having a hard time of it. His frown, his very dark hair and his very pale Polish skin all seem to attest to his discontent. But I soon discover that it’s his normal expression. Verity chuckles with him as if he dispenses jokes on a regular basis, but I’m yet to hear anything mildly amusing pass his lips. One wonders how he ever manages to sell a fish, or even a part of a fish. He appears to operate from a private tribunal, frowning at customers as if they were in an audition. His name, suitably, is Bernard, and he does most of the cooking, as if the boiling, roiling, spitting oil soothes him.

  We stop to catch our breath in front of Verity.

  ‘A bed! Grand. Are you going to sleep here tonight, then?’

  ‘That’s the plan, Verity. Meet Ben. Ben, this is Verity.’

  With one of its irretrievable gestures, Verity’s hand shoots out towards Ben. Bernard and Ben are then solemnly introduced. Bernard lifts his gloved palm with a kind of jerky Hitler salute in response to Ben’s friendliness, and returns to his cooking. He then turns around and smiles in a bewildered kind of way.

  It becomes obvious to me that everyone likes Ben. I hear a bird outside. I could be in Prague, where I have never been. At this minute, I know the shape of its clouds and the sound of its birds. I feel I come from there, even if it’s a place I know little about. I’m realising that here’s an Irishwoman, a Kiwi, a Pole of grumpy extraction and a Czech. None of us are from here. Strangely, it’s being from elsewhere that makes us belong.

  Verity proposes some fish and chips. Ben’s eyes light up, sublimely unconscious of Bernard’s frown. Bernard is more than just a foil for Verity – he’s also a fierce defender of her best interests, and fights a losing battle against her generosity.

  ‘You can eat them when you come down or take them home. It’ll be crowded here in a minute anyway. This fellow here,’ she points to me, ‘can take a scoop whenever he wants.’

  Ben swivels around to me and then looks to Verity.

  ‘Hey, this seems like a good place to shack up!’

  ‘There is another room …’

  ‘Aw, thanks, Verity, but I’m sorted. I’m in a share house just round the corner with friends. How long have you been here?’

  Verity’s expression becomes stony or scared, as if it had dropped two flights of stairs. Ben looks down at his chips and fishes one out. The moment has me wondering about Verity. Mystery and no-nonsense are knitted in her so tight that there’s no thread left for making assumptions. She does answer eventually.

  ‘Been here a fair bit of time …’

  We heave the bed frame up the stairs, avoiding the walls again. Ben steadies it while I fish out my key. And then we’re back with the smell of whitewash. Ben pushes my stuff aside with his foot, we lower the bed onto the floorboards, rip the plastic off the mattress and settle it onto the frame.

  Sorted. I’m sorted. It looks like this raft is becoming seaworthy.

  On his way out Ben is heavily laden with fish and chips.

  ‘Do you want me to help you carry them back?’

  He laughs.

  ‘It’s my lunchbreak. How about a beer?’

  I accept my second offer of a beer this morning. Ben makes lengthy farewells to Verity and tosses a warm ‘Cheers, man’ to Bernard’s back, which only seems to respond with a slight tightening of its shoulder blades. At the door, Ben looks back and wags a chip in the air.

  ‘Haven’t tasted chips this good since …’

  ‘Since the war?’ suggests Verity.

  ‘That’s right!’

  As I listen to their parting banter, I see Sung-ki on the kerb just outside my Seoul flat, so wrinkled he seems to be on the point of vanishing. It always looked
as if he were waiting there just for me, day or night, even if he wasn’t. It was his nature to give you that impression. He’ll float away if I’m not careful. Lygon Street, Ben, the beer I’ll soon be drinking and each new day might gradually take charge of that. But for now, he’s there. I can see his pupils through the cobweb of his face, his nearly transparent eyelids, as fine as a baby’s, and his hands folding over themselves as if they were the gates of his being.

  I grab my notebook and write Sung-ki’s name in it. He won’t vanish. No. Vůbec ne.

  2

  Ha-yoon

  AS I THINK of my two Seoul mates, Sung-ki and Marylou, I realise that nearly all the time I spent with them was on the streets, below my room. Sung-ki would be crouching, arms around his knees, leaning into the sunlight, leaning into the moonlight, his face lighting up a thousand wrinkles, calling: ‘Arold, Arold!’ Marylou would be on the footpath in the low glow of lamps and the high brightness of coloured neon signage, chatting with me while she waited for her clients.

  Most of the time I spent with Ha-yoon was in my room. But thinking of her, next to Sung-ki and Marylou, shows me how compartmentalised my life was in Seoul. A regimen slipped into my days without me even noticing it. Or is it that simply being with a woman does that to you? I wonder if liking a place is all about habits, or about something else. For me the last three years of being in South Korea were all about Ha-yoon. She was the strangeness and the habits all in one. She was why I stayed on in Seoul teaching English. She was why I left.

  When we weren’t in my room, Ha-yoon and I would sit on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon Stream of the unpronounceable name. When I close my eyes I can still feel the cool of the stream and see our four feet dangling in the water alongside other pairs of pale fishes dotted here and there – the feet of children, women, factory workers, men in suits, all sorts with their pants hitched up to their knees. I’m not touching any part of the woman at my side, except through the medium of the stream – a watery belonging.

  There was always a pen in Ha-yoon’s bag, which would find itself in her fingers. After whipping out crisp, square pieces of white paper, she would bend over and inscribe in perfect letters any quotation I asked. She would then hand them over to me with a bland expression on her face – a blandness that I learned how to read. Word by word, I would learn her calligraphy. I still have every piece of paper. One day I will frame them or burn every last one.

  The wind would wander round us, a light wind, which seemed to flow from the water and make the night cool, as if in Ha-yoon’s presence it dared not blow too hard. Sometimes there was a snatch of Korean music, or the Beatles. Once I heard ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ by Brian Ferry. Ha-yoon would put her hand in the water, and when I did too it felt like we were a couple. Or she’d sit with her palms joined between her thighs, looking like a young girl, while her beauty, sitting wisely on her shoulders, made you wait for what it was she had to say. Then, one day, what she said changed everything.

  ‘Do-yun likes you.’

  The words came out prudently, as if the other half of her was wary of them.

  ‘He wants me to invite you to dinner. He has given me your phone number.’

  ‘Why did he ask you? And why did he give you my phone number? You have it already.’

  ‘Because he is my husband.’

  Some words are just words and I receive them as I would a loaf of bread or a glass of water. Their contents pass into me without a blink, assimilated organically. But those five words remained on the shop counter of my brain, unprocessed, unpacked, unfathomable.

  Do-yun was the master potter I had studied with for three years.

  We were sitting with the other discreet sitters, half swallowed by twilight, dotted along the quay. Ha-yoon’s feet, small and slim, seemed poised even in the water. We sat with the soft wind, the river, the shimmering buildings. I felt more bewildered than surprised or angry. Sometimes, and this was one of the times, things just seem to make no sense. Then I spoke in a low voice, without looking at her.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Ha-yoon?’

  She pivoted in my direction as an afterthought, as if what she had just imparted was the last thing on her mind.

  ‘You didn’t ask. He didn’t ask. It went to sleep.’

  ‘What about your three children? What about them?’

  I was thinking, How can you have three kids with a seventy-year-old husband?

  ‘There are no children.’

  Again, these were unintelligible words in their stark packaging of sound. All I could comprehend were our bodies, the sky, the faint smell of the stream. All I heard was the soft blur of voices, people talking quietly in Korean, dealing with their sadnesses, their joys, their mournings, their regrets, their hopes, near the water. The only other place I had seen people do that was in Byron Bay when I was a kid. The whole town comes out at dusk and settles on the rocks to see the sun set. There’s not much talk, just soft exchanges, a leave-taking, a letting go of the day. I realised I had been staring at her.

  ‘Why did you lie?’

  ‘Lie.’ She breathed as if it were a concept for which she had no corresponding thought.

  ‘Yes, tell me a fairytale about having three small children. Why not two or five? Why three? Yeah, I want to know why you chose that number.’

  Clown, joke that I was, a fumbling bitterness filled me, a turmoil of incompetent despair. I remember feeling like a cuckold in a play, with those three phantom kids running round me in circles chanting an English nursery rhyme: Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down!

  ‘For almost three years, Ha-yoon, what kind of …’

  ‘It seemed the only way.’

  She pulled her hands out from between her thighs and they stayed in the air. They looked like a pair of wings without a bird, soapy fingers above a sink or a surgeon’s wrists aloft while a nurse ties up his mask. They reminded me of the hands of Pontius Pilate. In that moment, a man might not have been sacrificed to a mob; men might not have been pushed out of two Prague towers starting the Hussite Wars and the Thirty Years’ War. In that moment, I might not have become Ha-yoon’s lover – as if an opportunity were re-presenting itself and providing us with a new chance to avoid it.

  ‘Would you have liked to have children, Ha-yoon?’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  A thought propelled its adrenaline through me. Maybe that was it. I was to provide her with kids. She’d never let me use a condom, even at the start. When I’d questioned her, she’d told me that after her three kids she had been sterilised.

  Her silence rid me of my presence, obliterated it, emptied nearly three years of their marrow.

  ‘And why did you tell me about Do-yun’s pottery workshop the first time I met you?’

  ‘You had been working at pottery for years on your own. You were looking for a Korean master potter. I knew such a potter. I just avoided telling you that particular potter was my husband. At the time you didn’t even know I was married. It was instinctive. I did not think.’

  ‘You always think. Why didn’t you tell me afterwards that he was your husband? I mean … I see him six days a week!’

  She bent her head, her hands diving between her thighs again. I stopped probing.

  Instead she asked, ‘So, will you come?’

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘To dinner, with Do-yun and me.’

  ‘We know the answer to that, don’t we?’

  Suddenly she quivered.

  ‘What shall I tell him?’

  ‘Tell him I’m allergic to Korean food.’

  ‘What if he then proposes just a drink of soju or flower wine?’

  ‘Tell him I don’t drink. And why doesn’t he ask me himself ? He sees me all the time, for Christ’s sake.’

  She looked down at her imprisoned hands, as if they were holding her silence. The Seoul night continued pressing itself all around, imprisoning us in a dark bedroom of silence that said: Well, what are you going to do now? Being with Ha-yoon was
like being with a ghost half the time, my own private ghost, beautiful, sexy, considerate, elusive, and married.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Ha-yoon, I’ll never meet Do-yun with you. Sick is what it is. Sick to even consider it.’

  Her feet, which were moving slightly, stopped swaying. I felt her whole body stiffen without my touching her.

  ‘I study with him six days a week, Ha-yoon. I like him. I like him very much. I respect and admire him. Too much to …’

  ‘To fuck his wife?’

  It was the first time I’d heard her use the word. I had imagined her husband as a businessman of the kind some films are about: busy, overly masculine, swaggering in designer suits, always looking at his watch, patting heads before rushing off to a meeting, leaving wife and children in his wake. But no, Do-yun was her husband, Do-yun …

  I once saw a video of a man extending his hand to a shape in the sea, and a whale raising itself up to him. Two irreconcilable, distinct realities, yet slowly and softly, the immense greyness, the underwater continent, the huge brain, comes out of the water and into the air. The man touches the knobbly, motley, brown back. Do-yun was that whale for me: only visible in the workshop, in the silent prayer of clay.

  And here he was now, surfacing on the banks of the Cheonggyecheon Stream. Ha-yoon had no children, only an elderly husband, and that husband was Do-yun. He’d been part of Ha-yoon all that time, submerged, residing in that ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing’.

  ‘So, Do-yun is your husband …’ I repeated, despairingly, as she sat there with me and without me.