Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  As he walked toward the entrance, he pictured where Alice would be, sitting in one of the myriad white and gray cubicles of the human resources department. Often someone like Kevin, someone who’d never worked in an office or for a corporation, would proclaim how terrible it was that so many people made a living in such bland, stifling conditions, but Kevin felt otherwise. Sitting in a cubicle all day would never be his thing, but how nice it would be to be a nameless cog in the machine of an enormous company. Maybe it was just a condition of wanting what he didn’t have, but in his job, he always had to be on.

  The security guard eyed Kevin as he approached the desk.

  “Good morning, John McEnroe,” he said.

  “You can’t be serious!” Kevin said.

  The guard pushed the sign-in clipboard toward him. “That might be the worst McEnroe impression I’ve ever heard.”

  “Hence, my day job,” Kevin said, signing the ledger.

  He was glad he told the guard where he was headed, because the entire HR department had moved up from the second to the fourth floor. As he entered the elevator and watched doctors and nurses file in, Kevin recalled being here for Alice’s fortieth birthday, a small surprise party her friend and coworker Eileen had set up. There weren’t many fond memories from last year, but this was one of them, the conference room decorated with red roses, pink streamers, and yellow balloons, and Alice was genuinely surprised and happy to see Kevin there beside the chocolate cake ablaze with candles. He whispered “Happy birthday” into her ear as he took her in his arms, and she’d hugged back with such vigor, as if to try to force their bodies to merge. “Thank you,” she responded in kind with a whisper of her own, her lips close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath.

  If only he could stop the video of his mind right there, but that wasn’t possible, because on the very next day, Alice said she was moving out. Kevin hated the way these two memories were conjoined, how their embrace of love spoiled into an embrace of good-bye.

  On the fourth floor of the main wing, Kevin followed the signs for HR and tried not to think of what Alice told him that night before she left, but of course he did. She said he wanted so much, more than she was capable of giving. So much of what? What was it that he wanted? What was it that she wasn’t able to give?

  Her answer: Everything.

  He asked: Was it possible for her to be just a tad more specific?

  Instead of engaging him in another useless argument, Alice turned silent. So that was the last word she’d spoken to him as his wife, Everything, which was ironic, because to him, it meant absolutely nothing. Nothing and everything; without one, there couldn’t be the other, so maybe it did make sense in some twisted way.

  He found himself in front of her office, bold black letters on a clean white oval sign announcing human resources. There was no door, just an opening, so he hugged the wall as surreptitiously as he could, peeking around the corner. He looked and waited and, oddly enough, didn’t see a single person.

  Even though HR was now on a new floor, the layout didn’t seem any different to Kevin, a fact he cherished. It was good to see Alice’s cube still behind Eileen’s. A glance at a computer monitor opened to a calendar showed him why the place was deserted: There was a department-wide meeting going on in the fifth-floor conference room for another half hour.

  He fingered the name plate stuck on the outer wall of Alice’s cube, glad to see she hadn’t reverted to her maiden name. Did that mean anything, or was it because she just hated the last name she was born with? It was a joke she liked to tell people, that she married Kevin because she couldn’t stand another day as Alice Cooper, but even in jokes, wasn’t there a sliver of truth?

  This was the sort of thing that drove her nuts, his inability to leave molehills as molehills. Everything was a mountain with him, and no one enjoyed climbing it more than he did.

  Kevin sat down in her chair and was immediately struck by her perfume, a flowery, baby-powdery scent she’d worn for as long as he could remember. Alice was a couple of inches shorter than he was, but the height of her seat fit him nicely.

  This was her desk, but in truth it could’ve been anyone’s. There wasn’t a single photograph to be found anywhere. A stack of color-coded hanging folders were filed meticulously in alphabetical order on the shelf above while to the left of her keyboard sat an unruly pile of office paraphernalia: Post-It notes, paper clips, binder clips, all of them mingling together on a plastic dish that plainly offered separate compartments for each.

  Her desk was half neat and half messy, which was the way she had been at home, her threshold of chaos much higher than his. He never thought he’d miss picking up a castaway sock off the floor or straightening up her wooden bin of magazines, but it was these kinds of menial tasks that reminded him of her absence as well as her physical body. It was what she did and how she lived that defined who she was. Kevin supposed that was the way it was with everyone, but he never quite realized it until Alice disappeared.

  He couldn’t resist any longer. He grabbed the plastic dish on her desk to sort it properly, and in reaching for it, he nudged the mouse of her computer to bring her monitor out of standby.

  Actually, he’d been wrong. There was no mistaking whose cube this was, because there was a photograph centered on the computer’s desktop.

  From the way it looked, it was most likely taken with a cell phone, the length and angle of a selfie. There was Alice, giving the camera her best smile against the sky and the ocean, probably somewhere along the Jersey shore. And standing next to her was a man with an equally effusive smile, his cheek almost touching hers, a man he’d never seen before.

  Who the fuck was this?

  “Kevin?”

  He’d been peering at the screen so intently that he hadn’t noticed Eileen.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She pushed up her eyeglasses and crossed her arms, waiting for him to continue.

  “I know I shouldn’t be here.”

  “For a number of reasons,” she said.

  He rose out of the chair and tucked it underneath the desk.

  “I thought everyone was at the departmental meeting.”

  She walked over to her cube and searched through her filing cabinet. “I needed to get something for my presentation.”

  The man in the picture was blond with blue eyes that managed to sparkle even in this washed-out snapshot. Kevin had wondered who the next guy in Alice’s life would be, and now that he was confronted with this image, he didn’t know what to think. Would he have felt better if she’d gotten together with another Korean man like himself? Or would that have made her into some sort of an Asian fetishist? What did it mean now that she was with someone so different? Had he been such a rotten husband that she’d given up on Korean men in general? Or could this be interpreted as something perversely positive, that because Alice ran so far in the other direction, it meant she still held feelings for him?

  It was all stupid. People were just people, and he felt like a dope for even thinking along such petty lines, but it couldn’t be helped. These were unavoidable issues that bubbled up in an interracial relationship.

  At least in the way he looked, this man was Kevin’s opposite, and he was no doubt different in the way he talked, the way he thought, the way he touched. He figured Alice would find someone else, but to see actual evidence of it plummeted him to the basement of misery.

  Eileen, a blue folder now in her hand, cleared her throat.

  “I should be leaving,” he said.

  They walked to the bank of elevators together, sidestepping a caravan of bald little kids in wheelchairs. Hearing their animated voices as they rolled by, Kevin felt ashamed for even thinking his life sucked.

  “Alice is doing fine?” he asked.

  Eileen took in a breath and expelled a heavy sigh.

  “I feel like I’m betraying her, Kevin, just talking to you. Not that she forbade me to talk to you or anything like that, but you came here u
ninvited, and if I didn’t know you, I would’ve called security. Just step back for a second and look at yourself, right here. See you from someone else’s point of view.”

  Eileen pointed to the shiny elevator doors, and Kevin stared at his reflection. Wearing his tennis outfit, he looked especially ridiculous in this corporate office, maybe borderline crazy.

  She pressed the button to go up. He pressed the button to go down.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I had things to say. At least I thought I did.”

  The left elevator was coming down from the seventh floor while the right was coming up from the lobby.

  “She’s doing fine,” Eileen said, then added, “without you.”

  Seven, six . . . two, three. It was a race, and Kevin wished the numbers would hurry the hell up. He wanted to tell Eileen that she’d known only the miserable Alice and not the bright light at the beginning of their courtship, but what was the point? There was no use in convincing Eileen of anything. What he needed more than anything else was to convince himself that his time with his wife, his ex-wife, had run out. The credits had rolled, and he had to get up and leave the theater of his old life once and for all.

  This is it, he told himself. I’m done.

  “Do me a favor?” he asked as both elevators opened up simultaneously. “Don’t tell her I was here?”

  Eileen was about to nod in assent, but then she caught the person walking out of the left elevator.

  “Your PowerPoint’s up,” Alice said to her. “Everyone’s waiting.”

  He saw her; she saw him. Human traffic streamed by them as if flowing around a pair of islands, and for the next few seconds, Kevin saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing as his world filled with the presence of his ex-wife. He swam in the blue of her eyes, lost himself in the forest of her hair, curled up against the curve of her neck.

  He wanted to tell her about everything—his parents who weren’t his parents, flying to San Francisco, the new tiles in the bathroom. And something else he now knew with absolute certainty: that today would be his last day at the tennis club. In her presence, as he always did, he found clarity.

  Except he couldn’t say any of this to her, because when he assembled the various parts of her face together, they formed an expression that wasn’t so endearing. In fact, it was like seeing a piece of paper crumple.

  “Oh my God, what is that?” he said, jabbing a finger at a point left of her. When Alice turned, he leaped toward the closing doors of the right elevator like Indiana Jones, his athleticism somehow adding grace to his desperate gesture of immaturity.

  After the door closed, a pair of kids giggled as the elevator headed down.

  “Man, I haven’t seen the ‘look over there’ gag in, what, like since elementary school?”

  “I think I’ve only seen it on TV!”

  They held up their hands and he high-fived them, and for a moment he felt as though he got away with it, whatever it was. But then the other two people in the elevator, two old ladies huddled in the corner away from them, looked at Kevin with motherly disapproval, and he felt like the heel that he was. As he leaned against the brass railing and felt the cold metal touch his body, he wished this ride would last forever, pitch him down to the very center of the earth, sink him into the molten lava and melt him down to an organic puddle.

  He looked at his watch and saw it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. This day, his last day of the life he knew, was just beginning.

  Micah Braun. As soon as he gave up trying to remember, the name popped up as if it’d been there all along.

  “Kevin? Did you see it?”

  He had, and he hadn’t. Kevin caught the spin of the ball and its subsequent bounce, but he’d missed which side of the line it had landed.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said to Dinesh, a spindly boy of ten, who slapped the face of his racquet in frustration.

  “Man, it was so in!” yelled the boy on the other side of the net.

  “It looked out to me,” Dinesh said. He looked at Kevin again, his face full of accusation. “You were right there.”

  Kevin held up his excuse, the final draw of the junior tournament to be held next weekend, which he was half-assedly filling out.

  “If you think it’s out, it’s out. You’re your own linesman. Them’s the rules.”

  “I know,” Dinesh said. “I’m just not sure. But he is.”

  Dinesh, being the gentleman, gave the point to his opponent, and soon the two boys were attempting to out-topspin each other with their lasso-whip forehands. Kevin moved away to the empty court, where he sat on the bench and scribbled the names of his kids above the empty lines in the draw. He wouldn’t be here to see any of these matches. On one of the lines, he mistakenly wrote Micah Braun. Now that the name was out, he couldn’t get away from it.

  They’d both been twelve at the time, almost three decades ago. The winner of their match was two victories away from advancing to the National Spring Championship in Florida, where the top 256 kids of their age group would be competing. The ones who made it far in the tournament got noticed.

  Micah was an older twelve, his birthday in January, while Kevin’s was in December, so Micah had half a foot on him and probably a good ten pounds. But Kevin wasn’t worried, because he had what Micah didn’t: control.

  Ultimately, that’s how this game was won, to control the ball enough to create that space necessary to put the shot out of the opponent’s reach. Spin, pace, and angle: Those were the tools, and Kevin’s coach at the time taught him how to gain control by loving it. To love was to want, and to want was to have.

  Kevin had always craved control, even as a boy. His favorite childhood toy had been a Pinocchio marionette; he spent uncounted hours making it do what he wanted. He always felt the safest when he had plans, when he had an itinerary, when there were lists to follow.

  For this match against Micah, Kevin’s parents were in attendance, and so was Judy, his family sitting with Coach Jimmy in the bleachers. Kevin wanted to make them proud, he wanted to win this match, but more than anything, he wanted control.

  He had it in spurts. In the first set, for three consecutive games, it was almost as if he did have strings over Micah, pulling him in whatever direction he wished. His tennis racquet was like a giant, swinging remote control, every strike of the ball a click to place Micah in an untenable position. But then the remote swapped owners, and it was Kevin who became the puppet, his breath ragged from sprinting between the lines, scrambling backward and missing a lob by an inch.

  Almost two hours later, Kevin won the match, but the final score or the celebration was not what he remembered now. They were tied a set a piece and deep into the third. Kevin dictated the point with precision, the ball cracking off the strings like an angry bullet. He thought he had won when he fired a shot down the right line, except Micah ran it down, untwisted his torso, flicked his wrist, and launched a crosscourt forehand aiming for the opposite corner, and now it was Kevin on the defensive, hurrying to catch up to this ungodly yellow blur from Micah; there was no way his opponent should’ve been able to hit the ball with that kind of depth from his awkward position—

  Even now, Kevin could see it, the ball bouncing close to but grazing the line, and even now, he could hear it, his voice exploding, “Out!”

  It happened so fast. He looked up to his dad, who had the angle to see the play, and Kevin braced for the frown of disappointment his father often saved for his sister. If he’d seen his son’s lie, he didn’t show it. In fact, he rose up and clapped, and now they were all up, not only his family and coach but everyone on the bleachers, the applause thunderous. Kevin raised his racquet in appreciation, then walked back to his ready position at the baseline, surprised at his poise and at the curious lack of guilt he felt.

  He’d never forgotten that lie, and until today, until this very moment, he didn’t know why he’d done it, or why he’d felt justified afterward. Of course: control. This act was t
he ultimate embracing of control, to forcibly change the rules, to own it. He would never steal an unwarranted point from another opponent again as a junior, but he wouldn’t need to. Because after this match, he’d mastered this dark art to win games, to win people, to win a wife. Alice had always admired his sense of organization, his meticulous care over every facet of everything he did. Early in their relationship, he must’ve seemed like a capable person to her, able to shrink the macro world down to his micro, except she hadn’t yet realized his insatiable hunger for control could also be an impediment to forward progress. A tennis match was a flow, one player finding his groove while the other withstood the onslaught, until there was some turning point—like a sure winner clipping the net cord or missing an easy overhead that a blind man would’ve hit in. The key was to wait for that moment instead of trying to force every point, and yet Kevin couldn’t stop himself. Three coaches tried to teach him to let go. He wished he could, but even now, he’d failed. Look where he was this morning, standing in front of Alice like a knucklehead, making an ass of himself.

  Micah Braun. What if Kevin hadn’t called that ball out? He was certain he would’ve lost the match. The two following turned out to be cupcakes, straight set wins for him. He flew to Florida and reached the semifinals, the beginning of his professional tennis career.

  Kevin left the court and walked up to the club’s lounge, where the big-screen TV was showing a classic tennis match, Björn Borg against Jimmy Connors in their tiny white ’70s shorts on the green grass of Wimbledon. There was no one on the guest Internet-connected computer in the corner, so he sat down to search the fate of his old opponent. A few clicks later, he found a photo of a man in a business suit accepting a golden plaque for some innovation in project management. Kevin imagined his own face up there, the red necktie tight around his neck, a fake smile for the photographer. If Kevin had called the ball in, would they have changed places, changed lives?

  For all he knew, this wasn’t even Micah, just some guy who shared his name. Feeling as if he’d wasted not only the last fifteen minutes but also the entirety of his life, Kevin closed the browser, pushed off the desk, and headed for the pro shop to gather his things.