Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  “Do you feel like going to a tennis court?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Roger said. “It’s not like we have anything else to do.”

  They found a pair of courts at the corner of Tenth and Union in Wareham, by a set of swings in the elementary school playground. Only one was in use, two young mothers dressed the part but barely able to dink the ball back to each other. Off to the side were two baby carriages, their hoods down to protect the kids from errant balls. It was like watching the Special Olympics, but the women were nonetheless delighted to be out here in the wide-open October air, the breeze as light as a fleeting touch.

  Judy took a seat on the bleachers and listened to the women chatter as she considered her surroundings. After sketching Kevin and his flower-serve, she had the idea to see if she might draw inspiration from the sights and sounds of the game. Many years ago, when she’d been the most productive, she’d immerse herself in whatever subject she had chosen, and she desperately hoped it would work again, though sitting here, what she felt was a whole lot of stupid.

  “I wish I had a talent for something,” Roger said.

  “This is my talent, right here,” Judy said, pointing to the spotless pad.

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “My mother used to say that.”

  He sat down next to her and offered her a hunk of bread.

  “Challah? You brought a loaf of challah with you?”

  He held up the clear bag. “I like the taste.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “You and your bread.”

  He shrugged and took a bite, then washed it down with a sip of bottled water. “See? This is what having money does to a person. They end up bringing challah everywhere they go.”

  Judy stared at her marker, its black cap so shiny that it looked liquid. She knew the last thing Roger wanted was for her to feel guilty, but it was hard not to. “Are you sure this is what you want, to be here?”

  “I want to be where you are,” he said.

  It sounded sincere, and Judy knew Roger’s intentions were good, but what of his heart? If a person had never experienced pleasure, then why did he do anything at all? The other day, she read up on his condition on the Internet, anhedonia, personal anecdotes from people who suffered from the disease. Some couldn’t feel happiness, but there were others who felt nothing at all, their lives just one continuous numbness. There was no cure.

  The women took a break to sip their lime-green bottles of Gatorade and tend to their babies. From this distance, Judy couldn’t tell if the babies were boys or girls, but as she watched the mothers pick up their respective children and heft them into the air and bring them down for coos and kisses, what was certain was the outpouring of joy in these four faces, an almost embarrassing amount of it.

  “You okay?” Roger asked.

  For a while it’d hurt too much to even look at mothers with their babies, but now it wasn’t so bad. There was so much Roger didn’t know about her. Once he did, once she did reveal all there was to know about her, what then?

  “We don’t have to be here,” Judy said.

  “I know.”

  She placed the sketch pad next to her and capped her pen.

  “I’m not an easy person to be with. I’m moody. I complain. Sometimes I hate myself so much that I want to hate other people. That other person might be you, probably already has been you.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay?”

  Roger spun the bag of challah and watched it wind and rewind. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t understand why I’m here, with you. Why you put up with me.”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “It’s not the same. I’m at your place, in your mansion of a house. I don’t understand why I’m here.”

  “You said that already.”

  Judy placed her face in her hands and crouched. She knew she was making no sense, but the confusion she felt was so omnipresent that it was as if she were dipped in it.

  “I love you . . . ?”

  She sat up and opened her eyes and laughed. Those three words were just that, words, and as Judy well knew, their proclamation could be broken at any future moment. But they were still nice to hear.

  “Perhaps I should have said that with more conviction,” Roger said.

  “No,” Judy said. “Doubt is good.”

  One of the women was walking over with her baby in her arms.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “But are you an artist?”

  Judy didn’t know what to say, the question so filled with implications. The answer was more like a pronouncement than a job. An engineer built bridges, an architect built houses, a doctor cared for patients, but an artist?

  “She is,” Roger said.

  “Oh, that’s great! Could I . . . ?”

  Judy flipped her pad to her work from the morning and showed it to the lady. Her fingernails were painted pink and black, split in a diagonal zigzag from one corner to another, and her long, thick eyelashes were like a set of shelves hanging over her eyes.

  “Oh my God, you’re amazing! I was wondering—would you consider doing us? We’ll pay you whatever you want.”

  “Whatever I want?” Judy asked.

  The woman giggled. “Well, you know, within reason. Like two hundred dollars? I know I have that much with me in cash. It’s my girlfriend’s birthday, and it would be so cool.”

  “It might take an hour or more,” Judy said. She looked at Roger. “You’re okay?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, and he smiled, except there was nothing behind that smile; it was an act. But then again, who didn’t put on an act? Only toddlers reacted truthfully with their emotions, like the baby that the other woman was trying to calm with a bottle of formula. His anguished cries diminished now that he was receiving what he wanted.

  “I’ll do it for a hundred,” Judy said, “so you can take her out for a nice dinner.”

  “You’re so awesome!” she said, and Judy and Roger watched her skip back to the bench.

  “Can you give us like ten minutes?” she yelled from across the court. “I’m gonna feed my baby, too.”

  Judy told them to take their time. Two women cradling their babies and feeding them, their legs crossed neatly, their pleated white skirts fanned out like a pair of moons: instead of a pen, Judy wished she had a camera. She did the next best thing, which was to close her eyes and take a picture in her mind, except her mind saw it with a twist: Instead of babies, the women were each holding a large tennis ball, about the size of a basketball, swaddled in a blanket. And then the picture in her mind further transformed, with the women breastfeeding the balls, but their breasts were vaguely tennis-ball shaped and there was a connective goo that ran between the baby and the mother, elongated like a stretched piece of rubber.

  She’d never been a fan of Salvador Dali, finding most of his stuff more frightening than strange, but she had to admit, these ideas seemed very much in his mode. In her mind, the two women were biting tennis balls, biting them hard enough that they looked ready to burst. She’d never been a fabulist illustrator, always sticking with what was in front of her. This was new.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” she asked, not hearing what Roger had said.

  “It’s nice of you to do this, I said.”

  “If I was really nice, I’d do it for free.”

  “A girl’s gotta eat.”

  She snatched the bag of challah from him and pinched a piece herself. It was sweeter than she’d expected, not sugary but a gentle sweetness, like that of a semiripe banana.

  “This is really good,” she said.

  “What did you see, just now? I know you saw something because it was like you weren’t here.”

  “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” she said. “But I know what I’ll be doing when we get back home.”

  He stared at her face as if he was searching for something.

  “You’re happy
,” he said.

  It might have been the saddest thing she’d ever heard.

  “I am,” she said, “thanks to you.”

  •••

  The sketching took less than an hour because it was nothing more than transferring what her eyes saw to the paper underneath her hands. Roger played the role of her assistant. He made sure the women kept their poses, and when one of the babies started crying, he rocked it in its cradle until it quieted down.

  “You looked like you knew what you were doing there,” Judy told him later, when they’d returned home from their outing and were sitting out on the front porch. Snaps lay on her side, her back paws bicycling lazily, as if dreaming of a slow-motion chase. This was Judy’s favorite part of the day, the late afternoon sun casting golden beams of light over the water and the coast of Bassetts Island beyond. Roger was flipping through the day’s paper, gazing at the photos and headlines, while she was in the middle of her odd sketch of the two women and their tennis ball babies. It was turning out just the way she’d imagined.

  “I was a nanny for a while,” he said.

  A cardinal flew onto the giant bird feeder hanging off the railing, its feathers the color of red chalk. Inside the house, Momo jumped up to the window ledge and pawed at the glass, but the bird knew it was safe, leisurely pecking at the seeds, almost taunting the cat.

  “A nanny?”

  “I was trying . . . stuff, I guess. I don’t know. I was a little lost.”

  It seemed to Judy that every day, she found out something new about Roger. What she knew so far was that he had no one left. Both of his parents passed away before he turned eighteen, his mother from a brain tumor and his father in a car accident just a few months later. He was an only child. Neither of his parents had siblings, either, and his grandparents were long gone. There had always been someone there for Judy, no matter how much she craved to be alone. If Roger got hit by a truck, who would mourn? He had no close friends she could see, his lawyer being the only person she’d heard him talk to on the phone since they’d been at the Cape.

  His father’s death messed him up more than anything. At least with his mother, the path of her disease was telegraphed, but when his father failed to come home one night, when Roger saw the police cruiser glide up to the curb, he knew he was alone. Orphaned and with a mound of cash from his father’s inheritance, he left New Jersey for Japan and joined the yakuza.

  That sounded crazy but actually wasn’t all that different than applying for a new job. Because unlike the mafia, the yakuza had offices out in the open. The Yamaguchi-gumi family was the largest yakuza in Japan, and because their newest boss was promoting an expansionist policy, when Roger walked through the doors and wanted in, they didn’t ask many questions.

  “But why would you do something like this?” Judy asked him. “I’ve heard of people joining the army or the navy to jump start or change their lives, but the mob?”

  “It’s not anything I planned. It was a dark period of my life, literally—I slept during the day and lived for the night, content to stay in my Eastern Time Zone, you could say. I rode the train from city to city, ate dinner when I should’ve been eating breakfast. I couldn’t stay in the States after losing both of my parents. I grew up in Japan until I was ten, so it was still a sort of home for me, and as a kid, I looked up to these sunglass-wearing, tattooed men. They were so unlike everyone else, walking around Tokyo like they owned it, and it wasn’t as if they were all hardened criminals. Remember those terrible earthquakes in Kobe back in ’95? The city was too slow to react, and it was the Yamaguchi-gumi clan who lent a hand for disaster relief, distributing food and supplies to the afflicted. So one late night in Sapporo, I was walking by an old canning warehouse, and there was a wooden sign hanging off a rusty loop of chain with the family’s insignia, a samurai sword inside a diamond. I went in and joined.”

  They asked only one question, the biggest of all, why—why he was here, why he wanted to join—and Roger told his shatei gashira, the local boss of his gang, the truth.

  “Satoru was his name,” Roger said. “Smart guy. I think he could’ve done a lot of other things than run a gang, but it was just how it turned out. I told him that my parents were dead and I didn’t know what to do. My situation wasn’t that far off from the rest of the members there, actually—many of them were either orphans or exiled from their families in some way. Satoru patted my hand and said, ‘You’re here because you want to hurt the world.’ Pretty simple, right? I did want to hurt the thing that hurt me.”

  In the basement office of their headquarters building, he and Satoru drank from the same sake cup, and he was now a yakuza, though he didn’t feel any different.

  “Tattoo,” Judy said.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Because money wasn’t an issue, Roger found the best tattoo artist in the city, and the man was fast. Still, it took a week to complete his dragon design, and another week for Roger to be able to move normally.

  Of his month as a member of the yakuza, Roger spent a quarter of it filing paperwork in the office. And after he’d recovered from his tattoo, his only responsibility was to go to the horse track each morning and make various bets for Satoru.

  “It was no different than any other brainless job,” Roger said. “Almost like a corporation, the way they held meetings where they talked about the current budget and upcoming financial forecasts and whatnot. I had as much chance as a worker at Apple running into Steve Jobs as meeting Yoshinori Watanabe, who was then the oyabun, the head boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi. I never even saw a picture of him.”

  “I thought you joined the yakuza for life. Like the only exit is inside a coffin.”

  He laughed, then dropped his voice down a notch, emulating the baritone of the movie previews voiceover, “In the sinister world of the yakuza, there is only one way out. But Roger Nakamura has a different plan.”

  “Roger, that’s pretty good! If you ever run out of money, I think you’ve found your calling.”

  “Thank you. Maybe if I’d been some higher-up guy, they would’ve flinched, but I was nobody. Satoru felt sorry for me, and I think he was actually glad to see me leave. I still talk to him about once a month.”

  “Was that the phone call you received on our first date?”

  Roger nodded. “He invests some of my money. Not in anything illegal—like I said, he’s a real smart guy, and he’s done well for himself in the Nikkei exchange, which is really saying something considering how terrible the Japanese economy has been for the last twenty years.”

  After his underwhelming stint in the Japanese underworld, Roger returned to the States, no better off than when he’d left, but not any worse, either, and if he had an ally, it was the passing of time. He knew he would never get over the loss of his parents at such a young age, but every day was a new day, and money was something he’d never have to worry about. At the urging of his lawyer, Roger got himself a trio of help: a cook, a maid, and a psychiatrist, all of whom he’d employed throughout his twenties. But the year he turned thirty, he let them go.

  “Why?” Judy asked.

  “I got better. I wanted to live the life of a normal person, and I’m still here, so I guess it worked out.”

  And this was the Roger of now, this man sitting across from her with his feet up on the wicker table, his ankles loosely crossed, leafing through the sales circulars in the Sunday paper. What a strange life he’d led, and now she was a part of it, a part of that strangeness. Where was he going? Where was she headed? She had no idea where or why or how. Maybe some of Roger’s indifference was rubbing off, because she was okay with the not knowing, at least so far.

  20

  Saturday night, September 1988. Kevin couldn’t remember the exact date, but it was the first day of the Summer Olympics in Seoul, which for some odd reason was held in the fall of that year. Kevin was excited because for the first time in more than six decades, tennis was officially included as part of the games, but that wasn�
�t the only reason why he’d been looking forward to this day.

  “He’s your older brother?” he’d asked his mother.

  “By two years,” she’d told him. “Just like you and Judy.”

  His name was Myung Hoon, and he was flying in from Korea for business. Kevin had never met him before, and he could hardly wait for him to arrive. After vacuuming the carpet and mopping the floors, he and Judy showered, then dressed to impress, Kevin putting on his argyle vest over his ironed shirt. His sister wore a black dress to go with her black nail polish, her color of choice now that she was fifteen and grumpy.

  “You forgot your bow tie, Poindexter,” she said when they reconvened in the living room.

  “And how many funerals will you be attending today?”

  “Just stop smiling for a minute. I mean he’s just her brother, not fucking Santa Claus.”

  “You’re not even a little curious?”

  Judy shrugged, plopped onto the couch, then turned on the television. When he saw she was about to change the channel, Kevin snatched the remote out of her hand.

  “The VCR is recording that,” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  She crossed her arms and watched the massive procession of Olympians walking slowly around the stadium track and waving at the cheering crowd. It was Sweden’s turn to be on camera, its blue and yellow flag flying high, and Kevin caught a glimpse of his favorite tennis player, Stefan Edberg, his spiky blond hair turning silver every time a flash popped.

  Underneath Judy’s disaffected demeanor, Kevin was sure she was just as intrigued as he was to meet Uncle Myung. Theirs being a nuclear immigrant family, visits from the extended Lees were as rare as a comet sighting. The last time was so long ago that Kevin could hardly recall his grandmother, not that he even wanted to. All he could remember from her brief stay was her demand that he massage her legs, so he did, feeling as if he were performing some strange custom as he kneaded her tissue-thin skin.