by Jung Yun
“Gillian deserves better than me. I think we all understand that. So I’m going to let her get on with her life, and you’re going to let me get on with mine.” Kyung slowly tilts his seat back up and begins to stand. “I’m sorry, Connie. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but there’s no fixing what happened with Gillian. I made sure of that. Maybe—” He stops, realizing there is no maybe. “You were right about me from the start.”
He takes a step toward the door, then another and another, but as he lifts his hand to reach for Tim’s jacket, Connie brings his chair upright.
“Sit down,” he says.
Kyung doesn’t move.
“Sit your ass down.”
“You’re not my father-in-law anymore. You don’t need to be responsible for me.”
“You and my daughter have a kid together, so even though you’re a miserable little shit, I’m not going to let you run off and do something you can’t take back. My grandson’s not going to spend his weekends visiting you in prison. Now sit down.”
“But he needs to pay for what he did, Connie.”
“Sit down and shut the fuck up. You don’t want to know what’s going to happen if I have to get out of this chair.”
Kyung waits, listening for Vivi or Tim to stumble out of their beds. Connie spared no volume, which was meant to intimidate him, to make him behave. He realizes how different he must have sounded when he told Jin not to hit Mae again. He can almost hear his weak, frightened voice, just trying to spit out the words. Connie spoke with the kind of force that Kyung didn’t possess as a teenager, leaving no room for doubt about the consequences of his decision. If he doesn’t sit down again, he’s going to suffer. Kyung is terrified now, terrified and desperate and filled with an overwhelming desire to make his father feel exactly as he does, if only Connie would let him. He rests his hand on a table, and the idea comes to him quickly, so quickly that he doesn’t stop to think before he acts. He picks up a candle and swings, hearing the hard strike of bone against glass. Connie slumps forward in his chair, dropping his arms to the floor.
The room is suddenly quiet. Nothing, no one—not even Kyung—moves. He holds the jar in his outstretched hand, counting the seconds as they pass. Five, ten … He’s never hit a man before; he thinks he hit him much harder than he meant to. Connie remains folded over his lap, his back rising and falling with each breath. Fifteen, twenty … As Kyung returns the candle to the table, a single word begins to beat through his head like a drum. Run. The longer he waits, the louder he hears it, but he inches toward Connie’s chair instead.
“Are you … are you okay?” he whispers, pushing him upright.
Connie slowly opens his eyes at the sound of Kyung’s voice, blinking like someone waking from a heavy sleep.
“What”—he reaches up, wincing as he touches the back of his head—“what happened?”
He stares at Kyung, his expression confused. Dazed, almost. And then there’s a flicker—a bright, angry flicker in which Connie appears to remember exactly what happened. “Idiot,” he says hoarsely. “You stupid … stupid…” He shifts in his seat, about to get up, but standing seems to require more strength than he has. He winces again as he leans against the headrest. Then his chin rolls forward and he passes out.
The word continues to beat, even louder and faster than it did before. Run. And this time, Kyung has to listen. Every muscle in his body is awake now, vibrating with the horror of what he’s done and what he knows he has to do next.
* * *
There’s a single lamp glowing in the living room window, a single figure sitting on the sofa inside. The front door is unlocked, as if Jin is expecting him. There’s no use trying to deny it now. He and his father share the same mind. Jin knew what Kyung would learn at the police station, so he returned to his house in the Heights to spare Ethan, to prevent him from witnessing what Kyung had so many times as a child. His choice to come here is the closest thing to an acknowledgment of his wrongdoing, an invitation to end this where it all began.
Kyung makes no effort to enter the house quietly. He announces himself by throwing his keys on the floor. It’s not the element of surprise that he’s after. What he wants to incite most is dread. He remembers it so clearly from his childhood—hearing something as innocent as a plate or glass break and then the awful wait, wondering when the screaming would start, wondering how long he’d have to count before it stopped. No wall was thick enough, no door closed tightly enough to keep the words from reaching him. Ha ji mah! Ah pa. “Don’t! It hurts.” There was no such thing as mercy then. No mercy, no pity, no god, no grace. Only open palms and closed fists and the seed of this moment planting somewhere deep inside him.
Jin remains seated on the sofa when Kyung enters the living room. He doesn’t seem alarmed, or even worried to see him. He just sits there with his elbow propped up on a pillow, drinking a bourbon or Scotch. He empties what’s left of his glass and refills it, three fingers high, from a bottle on the end table. Kyung walks past the sofa, saying nothing as he pours himself a whiskey from the bar.
“You saw him at the police station?” Jin asks.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Was he sorry?” He clears his throat. “About what he did to us?”
Kyung thinks for a moment as he settles into the armchair across from Jin. The word “sorry” never crossed Nat Perry’s lips. “No, he wasn’t. Not at all. Are you sorry?”
“Would it matter to you if I was?”
Kyung thinks about this too. “No.”
“Then there’s no reason to say that I am.”
They sip their drinks, and it all seems strangely civilized. A father and son, sharing a round of cocktails as the night ticks slowly toward dawn. Kyung was hoping for this, this last window of quiet when he could ask the things he’s always wanted to know.
“You got mad at Mom for something when I was ten. Something that happened at a party, I think. You ended up knocking out one of her teeth.” He pauses, trying to erase the image of the bloody, broken tooth, an incisor that he later found under the edge of a rug. “What made you mad enough to do that?”
“Is this really what you want to talk about right now?”
Mae was more traumatized by the loss of her tooth than by any bruise or black eye she’d ever received. She cried about it for days, probably because it was something she couldn’t hide under her makeup or clothes. Kyung remembers trying to comfort her when they were alone, wrapping his arms around her shoulders as she sat on the bathroom floor. For his efforts, he limped away with a backhand to the face.
“Yes, this is exactly what I want to talk about.”
“It was the price tag,” Jin says, staring into his drink. “My department, they had a reception for everyone who got tenure that year. All the wives were invited. I didn’t want your mother to come—the men and women used to socialize separately in those days—but it would have been strange for her not to be there.” He crosses his legs, frowning as he flicks a stray piece of grass from his shoe. “I told her to buy a new outfit, an expensive one. I even gave her a list of things the other wives would be interested in, so it’d be easier for her to make conversation. But during the reception, I noticed some of the women laughing at her, talking about her behind her back, and then some of the husbands too. It kept getting worse and worse. So there I was, trying to feel proud of what I’d done. I’d finally gotten tenure after six years of people whispering about whether I was good enough, whether my research even mattered. I’d put up with my idiot students trying to correct my English and having colleagues pick me apart in meetings because they knew I wouldn’t challenge them. I’d survived all these things, and it was like none of it even mattered that night because of her.”
The thought of people talking down to his father or complaining about his work is completely at odds with Kyung’s understanding of him. In Korea, everyone openly admired Jin. Their neighbors and relatives called h
im “professor” long before he even finished his degree. They treated him like someone to be reckoned with, so to come to a place where the opposite was true—Kyung can imagine the shock of it. He can see why his father always held himself to such impossibly high standards. Jin thought he had to be perfect. And Mae and Kyung and the house, they had to be perfect too. They were his extensions into the world, the things by which he was judged, and to hear it now, Kyung understands that people sometimes weren’t kind. It makes sense, then, why the smallest things often mattered to Jin, why a burnt dinner or sullen expression or innocent mistake were all cause for a reaction. It makes sense that when the valve opened even slightly, the pressure building up inside needed a form of release. But why take his anger out on his wife instead of the people who mistreated them? This is where everything seizes up for Kyung, where his mind simply narrows and no amount of empathy can squeeze through to the other side.
“I don’t understand what a price tag had to do with anything.”
“Your mother was wearing it—she forgot to cut it off. That’s why they were laughing at her.” Jin winces, as if his embarrassment is days old, not decades. “The worst part was, she wasn’t comfortable spending money back then, so instead of doing what I told her to do, she went out and bought something on sale. Her dress had been marked down so many times, there were bright orange stickers all over the tag.”
“That’s the worst thing you can think of? The stickers?” Kyung clutches the armrests of his chair. “That’s the worst part of this story for you?”
“You don’t know what it was like back then.”
“But I was there, remember? Maybe not in the same room, but I was there. I heard what you did to her.”
“No.” Jin frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m talking about the university, the town. It wasn’t always like this, with blacks and Asians and Hispanics everywhere. Not in the ’70s, it wasn’t. I was the only one on campus for years, and people never let me forget that. They went out of their way to make me feel like nothing.”
Kyung tries to imagine his father as a young man, a newly minted Ph.D. coming to America with a woman he didn’t want to marry, a woman whose parents simply outbid the family of the other girl he wanted more. He’s willing to accept the possibility that life was as hard as Jin claims, being the only nonwhite person to walk into a classroom or an office building. He has memories of his own to confirm this, faded memories of stares and snickers and nicknames that he didn’t want, fights in the school yard that he could never win. He never mentioned these indignities to his parents; he assumed he suffered them alone. Kyung knows that he and his mother were a burden to Jin, especially during those early years when they relied on him for everything. What he doesn’t understand is who blinked first—if his father was cruel to Mae because she couldn’t help him cope, or if she didn’t try to help because he was cruel.
“So are you done with your questions now?”
“No, not yet. Tell me about Mom’s cousin. The one you actually wanted to marry.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know if things would have been different with her.”
Jin stirs his drink with his finger. “She died young. In her forties, I think. Cancer.”
“I’m not asking what would have been different. I’m asking if you would have been different.”
“You have a Ph.D.,” Jin says, lobbing the first grenade. “Act like you earned it. Say what you really want to say.”
Kyung nods. “Fine, then. If you’d married this other woman, do you think you would have hit her too?”
The expression on Jin’s face is smug at first. Then it settles into something that almost resembles a smile. “I probably would have hit her more.”
It’s not the response Kyung expected. He wanted Jin to say that things would have turned out differently, that the absence of love in their present was caused by an absence of love from the start. To hear him admit that nothing would have changed erases any last trace of doubt. There’s no alternate version of history in which he and his family live happily, untouched by violence. They were always going to end up this way because of Jin. Until now, Kyung was able to sit calmly in his seat and just listen, but Jin’s expression continues to taunt him.
“You’re proud of hitting women?” he asks, drawing his hands into fists. “You think this is funny?”
“No. I’m not proud at all. I’m just being honest. You asked me a question, so I answered it. Your mother’s cousin was a beautiful girl, but the people she came from … they were farmers. Look how much trouble your mother gave me, and she supposedly came from a good family.” He tries to make quotation marks with his fingers as he says “good,” spilling some of his drink on the sofa. “Your mother couldn’t even read a book for the first three years we lived here. She was always trying to steal your schoolbooks to look at the pictures, as if reading and looking were the same thing. Do you know what it was like, taking my illiterate wife to dinner at my dean’s house, praying that no one would notice how stupid she was?”
The second grenade. Something isn’t right here. It hasn’t felt right for a while. Jin rarely talks this much, and now it seems like he’s saying the most hateful things he can, whether he means them or not. Kyung feels like he’s being baited, forced to react before he’s ready.
“I was hard on your mother. Too hard in the beginning. I understand that. And then you turned on me and told the reverend our secrets. You took her side.”
“I took the right side.”
“You took her side,” he repeats. “So I tried to make it up to her. I did exactly what Reverend Sung told me to do. I put my wife on a pedestal. I worked day and night to give her this house and the kind of life we came to this country for. Anything she laid her eyes on, I gave it to her. Art, jewelry, a house at the beach. If she wanted to remodel the bathroom a year after she’d just remodeled it, I kept my mouth shut and opened my wallet. I let her spend entire paychecks on those antiques of hers. And you know what she finally said to me after thirty-six years of marriage, after I’d spent nearly half of them trying to make up for what I did? She said she was leaving. She was going to work—ha!—she was going to work for that friend of hers. She was planning to give up this house to live in a storeroom, a storeroom, somewhere in Connecticut, and she never wanted to see me again.”
Jin looks increasingly bewildered as he tells this story, as if he still doesn’t understand why Mae would want to leave.
“I made my mistakes a long time ago. Almost twenty years ago. And I did everything I could to be a better husband after that. I even went to church, and she sat right next to me every damn week, nodding while the reverend talked about forgiveness and compassion, as if she even understood what those things were.” Jin waves his glass in the air, dousing the rug with his drink. “You know what she actually said to me that day? She said she never forgave me for any of it. Never.”
“So you heard that and just went back to doing the exact same thing she couldn’t forgive in the first place? Do you even understand what happened because of you?”
Jin exhales, and his face collapses like an old jack-o’-lantern. Tears squeeze out from his eyes as he shakes his head. “I never meant … those men…”
He’s only seen his father cry once before, on the night that Reverend Sung came to their house. He felt no more pity for him then than he does now. Kyung’s hands are about to break, clenched purple at the thought of what’s missing from all of this.
“What about me?” he asks. “You never tried to make it up to me. Not once did you ever try. All this time, I’ve been watching you with Ethan, wondering why you seem like a completely different person with him.”
“You know what it’s like spending your entire life trying to make up for something you can’t take back?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I was different with Ethan because he let me be.”
“I would have let you.”
“You.” Jin swats the air with his hand. “You were a lost cause. I saw the way you looked at me. You were never going to forgive me for any of it. You had hate in your eyes when you were a boy, and you still have hate in your eyes now.” He slams his glass on the table and gets down on his knees, stretching his arms out to the sides. “So just do it already. Do what you came here to do. Hit me. Kill me. I don’t care anymore.” He strikes himself on the side of the head. “Make this go away.” He strikes himself again, harder this time. “Make me stop seeing it. Make me stop seeing what they did to her.”
Kyung gets out of his chair as Jin reaches for his leg. He stands in front of the fireplace, his hands shaking as he scans the objects on the mantel. There was once a globe on the left, a heavy marble globe attached to an iron pedestal. He studied it so often as a teenager that he eventually forgot to look for it, assuming his weapon of choice would be there when the time finally came. He didn’t notice it was gone until now, replaced by an antique clock.
“Please make it stop.”
In the mirror above the mantel, he sees Jin kneeling on the rug behind him, still begging to be hit. Kyung sizes up the clock, estimating the weight of its metal guts and case. As he reaches for it, he imagines what it would feel like to release all of his rage at once. It would only take one swing, one perfect swing, to end this. He inches his fingers closer, steeling himself to do what he came here to do, what his father keeps screaming at him to do. But as he touches the edge of the clock, he hears it again. The crack of the jar as it lands on the back of Connie’s head. He flinches at the sound of it, like the sharp thwack of a bat connecting with a ball. The act of raising a hand to someone, it’s the worst thing Kyung has ever done, the worst thing he’s ever felt. And the power that surged through him in that moment—it made him feel like he had some semblance of control, but it lasted no longer than an instant before he lost it again. What if he hits his father and the rage inside him doesn’t go away? Or what if it does go, only to be replaced by something else he can’t live with?