by Josh Emmons
He rolled down the passenger side window and pointed to a long, body-sized object wrapped in a white bedsheet jutting halfway out of her hatchback trunk. “What’s that?”
“My statue from Leon Meed.”
“What statue?”
“The one he did of me. Yours is still there.”
Joon-sup raised his voice: “Mine?”
“Didn’t you get the letter from Mr. Rasmussen? Leon left you a statue in his will. It’s being held in the estate holdings room of Rasmussen & Somebody law offices. That’s where I was coming from when my tire blew.”
He got out of his car and walked to Eve’s trunk to examine what looked like a rigid white ghost. “We both inherited statues from Leon?”
“Yes,” said Eve, standing up and rolling a spare tire to his car. “Do you mind lifting this into your backseat? I torqued my back a little when I jacked up my car and took the tire off. Actually, maybe it’s too heavy for you. We could lift it together.”
“I can do it.” Joon-sup wedged the small tire into his backseat crowded with boxes and kiosk materials.
“It probably doesn’t matter what garage we go to. They all charge the same.”
“You going to leave the trunk open like that?”
“There’s nothing worth stealing but the statue, and that’s too big. It’ll be okay.”
They got in Joon-sup’s car, and Eve looked elegant and why would the government give them statues instead of kidnap them? He turned his key in the ignition and looked behind him to see if any cars were coming before pulling onto the road. Beside him Eve buckled her seat belt and his heart beat faster seeing her right hand fumble with the strap. The surface story—that Leon had died and left them gifts, and that a young reporter wanted to write a newspaper article about the event—was, surprisingly, turning out to be true. Eve looked worried and melancholy.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything serious at home,” she said. “You sounded edgy.”
“Don’t worry about it. Justine and I were arguing.”
“About what?”
Joon-sup downshifted into third gear for no reason. “You name it.”
Eve stared straight ahead and rubbed her nose violently. Her fingers were red and swollen, probably from unscrewing lug nuts. She shifted in her seat but didn’t seem able to find a comfortable position, so Joon-sup looked in the backseat to see if he had any clothing she could ball up and use as support for her lower back. She said, “Just remember that you guys will move past this.”
Finding nothing, he faced forward—really the best thing for their safety—and said, “Justine stopped taking birth control. She’s been trying to get pregnant without telling me.”
“She has?”
“I noticed her birth control packet was empty last week, and when I checked yesterday she hadn’t replaced it.”
“Maybe she’s on her period.”
“Nope.”
Eve hyperextended her back and twisted to the left and right and then curled forward slightly. “You shouldn’t blame her.”
“Who else would I blame if she got pregnant?”
“She knows that if she’s ever going to have a baby, it has to be now.”
Joon-sup said, “Then she should go to a sperm bank or find someone who wants to be a father. She betrayed me.”
“But she did it out of love for you.”
“Why are you defending her?”
“I told you. I like her and she’s good for you, especially now.”
“Why do you act like now is an important time for me, like I’m vulnerable and without her my life will be over? She hates you and attacks you every chance she gets; you shouldn’t take her side. Maybe you’re turning the other cheek, but I’m telling you that’s unnecessary.”
“Justine hates me?”
Joon-sup pretended to concentrate on the stoplight in front of them, muttering about how long it was stuck on red, and a minute later said, “Is Wonder Brothers over there okay?” He pointed to an open three-car garage across the street and signaled left.
“It’s fine. Why does she hate me?”
He shrugged and avoided her eyes and said, “She’s crazy. What exactly are we doing here?”
“I’m going to have the spare fixed so I can put it on my car and then drive back to have the real tire fixed.”
“Why didn’t you bring the real one directly and cut out the middleman?”
“I didn’t think of that,” Eve said. “Do you talk bad about me to Justine?”
“No. Just the opposite.” Joon-sup cut off the engine and might have made connections then had not a tall, willowy man in his early sixties with oil-stained rags stuffed into his two torn breast pockets, and with a chrome-gray handlebar mustache, approached the car and asked how he could help them.
After the spare was fixed and Eve paid for it, they headed back to the park. Along the way Joon-sup said, “I’m sorry for calling you a nun the other day.”
“That’s okay.”
“I don’t think that about you.”
“I know.”
Joon-sup’s heartbeat began racing again and he had a hard time controlling his voice when he said, “Ryan’s death was a tragedy.”
“Yes.”
“But I think—I think it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fall in love again.”
“Thank you; I appreciate the concern. You’ve always been the dearest friend to me and I know I get controlling sometimes. I’m the one who should apologize.”
Joon-sup couldn’t say anything.
“You’re going through a lot right now with—” said Eve, hesitating, “with Justine, and I want you to think of me as purely supportive. Even if she doesn’t like me I know the two of you are good for each other, and I’ll do what I can to help you stay together.”
Joon-sup felt an almost physical repulsion at Eve’s offer and didn’t talk until they arrived at her car, when he asked if she needed help attaching the spare. She said she’d be fine. He insisted it would be no trouble and she more forcefully insisted that she had it under control. To end the argument she took his hand, thanked him for the ride, kissed his cheek, and hoisted herself out of the car with a grimace. Good-bye, they both said, she loudly and he softly. Good-bye.
Steve stood outside the Rasmussen & Wei Legal Services building on Fourth Street at three that afternoon, shivering in a long-sleeved dress shirt and blue jeans faded white at the knees. He no more wanted to go inside than he wanted to leave, but as the temperature was too low for much deliberation, he opened the door and entered a blue-carpeted reception area. A young man seated at a long, skinny desk with nothing on it but a clipboard and stack of business cards, took his name, and ten seconds later, Mort Rasmussen, slightly shorter than Steve but in a tailored pinstriped suit that made him appear taller, came in to shake his hand.
“You got our letter about Leon Meed’s estate.”
“Yes,” Steve said.
“He signed his release forms already?” Mort asked the man behind the desk.
“Not yet,” the man replied. “I haven’t put them together.”
“Do it while I take him to holdings.” Mort turned and touched Steve on the shoulder. “You play racquetball at CalCourts, don’t you?”
Steve nodded.
“I’ve seen you play Bill Peterson. Your serve is dynamite, but then you don’t fall back quickly enough. You lose a lot of advantage on the court by hesitating. Come on and I’ll show you your inheritance.” Mort led him through a maze of cubicles, a door, a courtyard furnished like an arboretum, and finally down a wide hallway ending at a door marked Estate Holdings. “How well did you know Leon?”
“Not very well. I saw him for a knee injury a few times.”
“I myself only met him once, to write up his will, but he seemed like a decent guy.” Mort removed a large bundle of keys from his pocket and flipped through them. “I’ve never seen your name on the Boys in the Wood racquetball tournament roster at CalCourts. You should enter nex
t year’s competition, once your postserve positioning improves.” When he got the door open, they walked into a twelve-hundred-square-foot room with green plastic cafeteria-issue tables, on each of which were boxes wrapped in identification labels. “There you are,” said Mort, pointing to a group of wooden figures lined up along one wall. “That’s yours.”
“All those statues?”
“Just the one of you.”
Steve walked slowly, his armpits itchy with sweat despite his still being cold, and soon confronted a tawny chiseled version of himself in slacks and an unbuttoned sports coat. The left arm of his statue was raised in salute like a preperestroika Lenin monument, and his varnished hands were as cold and smooth as polished marble. The real Steve ran his fingers over his double’s arms and neck, the smooth contours of his cheeks and forehead and hair, the eyes so intense they seemed to be shrinking. Examining the statue was like halting time; in contrast to looking at a mirror, where no matter how controlled your expression minor alterations were inevitable, this was him perfectly still and himself, superior to a photograph in its size and depth and tangibility. But what could it mean? What purpose could Leon have had in sculpting it and leaving it to him? Steve felt a twinge of the depression from his drive along Elk River Road the week before, when he’d almost prayed for Leon to come back and, as had happened with Anne, facilitate his belief that he would be okay despite Elaine’s leaving him. Except that now the depression abated almost as soon as he felt it, in the way that pain from an old injury will subside, once the awkward movement that triggered it is abandoned.
“Do you have a truck or an SUV?” Mort asked. “That’d make it easier to transport home.” His cell phone rang. “If you’ll excuse me.” He pivoted away to answer and spoke in loud monosyllables. “Someone else is here to collect his statue,” he said to Steve after hanging up. “My assistant’s bringing him over.”
Steve again touched the raised left hand of his statue. The gesture looked less like a salute than it had before. Perhaps it was a farewell. But to whom was he waving? To himself? His ex-wife? Leon? Maybe the outstretched hand meant “Stop,” or “Slow down,” or “Go away.” Steve stared at the statue until the door opened and a familiar-looking Korean American entered, accompanied by the man from the front desk.
“June Soup Kim,” Mort said, beckoning the newcomer to them as the assistant withdrew. “It’s good to meet you. I’m Mort Rasmussen and this is Steve Baker.”
“How do you do?” said Joon-sup, looking at each in turn and vaguely recognizing Steve. He had just come from dropping off Eve and felt fear mixed with desire to see what Leon had left him.
“As you might have guessed,” said Mort, pointing to one of the statues, “that’s yours.”
Joon-sup took a few steps closer to a burl depiction of him with dreadlocks, wearing a skein of necklaces, a flowery sweatshirt, overlarge drawstring trousers, and sturdy hiking boots. His statue’s eyebrows were knit together to suggest scorn or disapprobation or confusion, and Joon-sup’s first thought was to wonder if this was how Leon had always pictured him.
“I know how you feel,” Mort said. “My wife brought out one of our high school yearbooks recently. Made me wonder not just about myself, but about my friends who let me look like that.”
This was Joon-sup’s complete Americanization. A man so determined not to appear or sound Korean that he’d immersed himself in an obscure California subculture and mimicked the accent of television actors. There were wooden peace bracelets around his wooden wrists like planetary rings, the diamond-shaped stud in his nose suggesting a birthmark. He, the flesh-and-blood Joon-sup, had long since removed the nose ring and cut his hair and worn inconspicuous clothes. He’d changed. But the truth was that he didn’t appear any less American now; he merely appeared grown up. More responsible. More conventional. At that moment he felt a hot flash and overall discomfort, as if the room, despite its airiness, had closed in around him. Ten years ago he’d been free to go to tree-sits and on monthlong road trips. Ten years ago he’d had untamed hair and guiltless access to a variety of beautiful women. There’d been no home responsibilities. There’d been no threat of children. Ten years ago he hadn’t yet met Eve or Justine.
“I was just asking Steve,” Mort said, “if he had a vehicle that could carry his statue home, and I should ask you the same question.”
“I don’t,” said Joon-sup, “but I could maybe borrow one.”
“Excellent,” Mort said, looking with satisfaction at the two quiet men beside him, both staring with uneasy fascination at their wooden doppelgangers, drifting slightly out of earshot. “Excellent.”
The statue of Barry stood in the corner of his apartment. There was no note, no instructions, no explanation. Just the statue. An exact replica of Barry as he’d been at age twenty-four, improbably beautiful, with fine, symmetrical features. Barry walked around it, seeing himself from every angle, and then looked in the mirror and saw one hundred and twenty months of decay. 3,650 days. That’s forgetting leap years. Perfect statue, imperfect flesh. As though The Picture of Dorian Gray were just a fantasy and in the real world you couldn’t disguise your sins or transfer their effects onto attic-bound works of art.
Barry sat on a velour couch in his living room and turned on a KHSU rebroadcast of his Live from Somewhere show from two weeks earlier, when his guest had been Charles Giaccone, the Eureka City superintendent of schools. Giaccone was saying that K–3 education in the city faced a serious threat in the budget negotiations going on in Sacramento, because legislators’ commitment to education depended on their reelection prospects and their districts’ receptivity to the necessary tax increases, so that they called schools inefficient and bloated one day, and their primary concern the next. Giaccone said he understood the political tightrope that had to be walked by state lawmakers, but he couldn’t condone further cuts in a budget already chopped off at the knees; children’s needs shouldn’t, he said, be sacrificed in order to safeguard politicians’ approval ratings.
“Yes,” Barry heard himself say, “but how do you answer charges coming to light that you’ve sexually harassed area teachers and administrators during your time as an educator in Humboldt?” In what had been a serious discussion of how schools are underserved and scapegoated, Barry had gone for the jugular.
He shut off the radio and kicked his cat’s alarmingly lifelike toy mouse into a corner. It was five thirty and he wasn’t gay. He was sad. There were such major flaws in his character. Rilke had once written, “You must change your life.” Brooding accomplished nothing. Barry stood at a five-foot remove from his statue, which in another time and place might have sparked in him a vain nostalgia, but which now called for but couldn’t produce hot tears for a lost innocence. You must change your life. The phone rang and he crossed the room to answer it.
“I want you to know,” a woman said, “that you are your own worst punishment.”
“Is this Lillith Fielding?”
“People like you think others enjoy being used so you can sound smart, as if we were dumb masochists, but—”
“I don’t think that.”
“You’re not a public service; you’re just an ego looking for applause. Everything you say is calculated to show that you’re wiser than everyone else, but you’re just one of those people who can’t create anything yourself.”
“That’s a little unfair.”
“Your behavior is unfair.”
“People like to hear conflict. It’s what hooks listeners; I’m just doing my job and I have no intention of—”
“Your job is to be an asshole?”
“I try to put on an entertaining program.”
“Exactly like all the other talk show terrorists.”
“I’m not a terrorist.”
“Yes, you are. You didn’t let me mention the festival—that was the whole reason for me going on your show.”
“You’re the one who went off about fairies and harpies and then stormed out of the stud
io early. If talking about the festival was important, you should have done it. Don’t blame me just because you were too dumb to follow your agenda.”
Barry stopped chastising what had become a dial tone. His cat was acting standoffish and a pair of wooden eyes coldly examined him, their censure resolute. They were redwood and ancient and right.
At seven p.m., Prentiss heard a knock on his door and rose from his bath, dried off, and walked lightly down the hallway so as not to disturb a weak floorboard that he feared would split apart if stepped on carelessly. Steve must have left without his key that morning. Bare-chested and towel-waisted, with vein-stained eyes from a penetrating new shampoo, Prentiss pulled open the door and saw his houseguest’s wife standing in the yellow haze of his porch light.
“Prentiss,” said Elaine. “You were in the shower—I’m sorry. I would’ve called first but I was in the neighborhood.”
He inched left to hide behind the door. “It’s all right. I was starting to get wrinkly anyway.”
“Is Steve here?”
“He’s out somewhere, maybe at work, but come in and wait if you like.” He closed the door behind her and led the way to the living room and removed a stack of pet catalogues from the fauteuil. “Give me a minute and I’ll put on something less comfortable.” Prentiss went to his bedroom and then emerged in slacks and a Fortuna rodeo T-shirt, penny loafers, the glasses he wore at night. Elaine stood at his red oak bookcase examining pictures of Ferdinand and of Prentiss’s mother, and there was a deliberateness to her expression, a focus so total he hesitated to break it.
“That’s my mother,” he said.
“She’s beautiful.”