Love Love

by Sung J. Woo

  “You’re done writing your novel?” Denise said, peeking around Fred.

  “My hand hurts.”

  “You look good. You look alive.”

  She led the way out of the labyrinth, and he thought of absolutely nothing but the steps he was taking, the brush of grass underneath his feet, the sparks in the stones, the fading perfume of the laundry. By the time they were out, it was almost four and noticeably chillier.

  “Now that we’ve detoxified our souls, it’s time for the tour.” She grabbed his hand and took him through what looked like a small loading dock that led to the kitchen.

  It was a large kitchen, big enough to run a small restaurant. But instead of having industrial-size equipment, they had two of everything: two white fridges side by side in the pantry, two gas ranges and ovens, two islands pushed together in the middle of the space. Nothing matched, the appliances most likely donations, but everything was clean and neat.

  “We take turns cooking.” She picked up a crusted pan on the island and added to the mountain of pots in the sink. “We take turns cleaning up. Some are better at it than others.”

  “Ugh, you’re like one of the shoemaker’s elves,” a voice said behind them. Even though she was wearing a baggy, faded Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt, there was no hiding her enormous chest. “Always cleaning up whenever you walk in here.”

  “Angeles, meet Kevin, my brother,” Denise said.

  Although she could pass for a college student, the way she held herself suggested otherwise. Her cool blue eyes shined behind a film of hardness.

  “Are you good or bad?” Angeles asked.

  It was a strange question, but being with Claudia had given him plenty of practice. “Depends on the day.”

  “I like that answer, brother of Denise.”

  Three other women came in soon after, and as soon as Kevin was introduced to each of them, he forgot who was who. Amber and Susan and Stacy were facsimiles of one another, a trio of stacked blondes with big smiles and long legs, each wearing tight shirts and short shorts, as if they’d leaped out of a beer commercial. They were girls, probably barely old enough to legally drink, but even these nubile beauties carried a shadow of fatigued knowledge, like young war veterans who’d come home after their tour of duty. They were here to clean up because it was their turn to do so, according to the chart on the corkboard hanging off the wall. There was a column for kitchen, which included subcolumns for cooking, waiting, dishes, pots and pans, and floor. Then a column labeled bathroom, dividing the duties for the three and a half baths in the house, a footnote attached to each one, referencing a laminated sheet pinned underneath the chart that detailed the required steps to deem the task complete.

  “You did this?” Kevin asked Denise.

  “I’m a woman of many talents.”

  “You should work at my tennis club.” He flipped past the current month’s assignments and compared it to December’s. “Half of my time is taken up formulating lineups for the leagues. People always complain I don’t vary their opponents enough.”

  Denise held the swinging door open for him, which led into the dining room. It looked like a time portal to the ’70s, warped wood veneers on the walls, the trim painted in a psychedelic shade of Yellow Submarine. Like the kitchen, the dining room was a collection of mismatched castaways. Six tables were pushed together into a U shape, and sitting around them were wooden and wrought iron and metal folding chairs of all sizes and shapes and colors. There was even a pair of white plastic patio chairs at the end.

  “It’s a work in progress.” Denise walked down one side and pushed the chairs in to their rightful places. “I’m doing everything I can to raise money, but it’s tough in this economy.”

  Kevin followed her lead and neatened the opposite side. “I imagine it’s not easy, trying to get philanthropists to throw money your way.”

  “Not exactly the sort of business that Bill Gates wants to get involved with. Though I bet you my last dollar that Bill has seen his share of girl-on-girl action.”

  The dining room led to a four-way intersection: a meeting room to the left, a TV room ahead, and stairs to the right. The meeting room must’ve been a library at some point, with built-in bookshelves on all four walls, but now it looked like a place of congregation, with couches along the sides and chairs lined up like a wedding, leading up to the wide, cafeteria-style table beneath the trio of windows that looked out onto the weedy yard. Two men sat at the table, playing cards.

  “Fresh meat?” one of the guys asked Denise.

  His name was Tony, a name he shared with his younger counterpart. They were the only two male residents right now, and neither of them looked like what Kevin imagined porn actors to be. Old Tony was a dead ringer for Jackie Gleason, and Young Tony was so thin that Kevin wondered if he was suffering from an illness.

  “My brother, Kevin,” Denise said.

  Kevin shook their hands. In the next room, laughter erupted like a bomb, so sudden and intense that it sounded like a recording someone had blared out of a set of loudspeakers.

  “Anchorman,” Old Tony said. “The movie. If we hadn’t seen it yesterday, we’d be over there with the ladies.”

  Denise and Kevin let the guys resume their card game and headed over to the TV room. She told him the two Tonys were cameramen taking a week off. “They’re just burned out, making the same movie day after day,” she said. “Nobody gets out of film school thinking they’ll be shooting porn.”

  The TV room was crammed full of people, so many that Denise didn’t bother to introduce him. The TV was one of the older rear-projection units that was as large as an armoire, and as Kevin watched a snippet of the film, Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate fighting like pro wrestlers in the newsroom, Kevin thought about what Denise had said, if she, too, had expected something more from her life. Who wouldn’t? This was the sad truth about anyone working the sex trade: Nobody ever expected to be there. It was an industry built on a foundation of failures, a place of last resort. Some of the folks watching the television were older women, and yet they continued to dress like girls, skin-tight tops fighting to contain surgically ample breasts, their hair platinum blond to wash out the grays. From sexy babes to MILFs and, eventually, hunchbacked octogenarians in nursing homes; it would happen to all of them.

  Denise asked him what he was thinking.

  “Death and decrepitude,” Kevin said.

  “Decrepitude,” she said, and she nodded approvingly. “That’s one of those words that sounds the way it means. Almost like it’s falling apart as you say it.”

  They climbed the stairs to the second floor, wide, imposing red-rugged steps with oak banisters and railings, except half the rungs were missing like fallen-out teeth and most of the rug was frayed, stained, or ripped out entirely.

  “This must’ve been a beautiful house once,” Kevin said, then wished he could take it back. He hadn’t meant it as criticism, but he was afraid it had sounded that way.

  “I wish I could see pictures of the way it used to be,” she said. “I mean I can imagine it, but it would be nice to have a real, visible goal to strive for, the sort of thing I can tape on the wall and show people: This is it, this is what we want to accomplish. Some of the residents aren’t afraid to do a little repair work, and I think it’s just a matter of time.”

  Either Denise was deluding herself or she was the most positive thinker he’d ever met, because from what Kevin could see, this house needed more than a hammer and elbow grease. The plaster on the ceiling was fissured as if by an earthquake; a gap in a window was patched with folded newspaper. He’d toiled enough on his own house to know how much time and skill was required to make even the simplest repairs. If the externals were in this poor shape, it was highly likely that the unseen—the electrical system, the plumbing, the heating—were equally in trouble. His sister was a realist except when it came to this house. But that was love, wasn’t it? Blinding everyone in its wake, making a fool of everyone c
aught in its jet stream.

  There were six bedrooms and three bathrooms on the second floor, all of them spartan, the rooms each furnished with a bed, desk, chair, and lamp. There were no prints on the walls, no photographs encased in frames, one room as anonymous as another. Denise had described the décor of the house as Zen, and now it made sense to Kevin, the barren simplicity of these rooms lending themselves to a quiet, meditative spirit. The larger rooms were divided with bamboo screens to accommodate multiple residents, though they were nothing more than skeletal reeds, easy to see through.

  “They’re more symbolic than actually providing privacy. The girls who come here, they don’t exactly have boundary issues with their bodies.”

  Kevin nodded, but the more he heard about the porn world, the more it seemed like a foreign culture that he would never truly understand. On a bedroom door was a sign that read:

  LIGHTS OUT BY 10 PM

  “You have a curfew?”

  They climbed up another set of curving stairs, one of the steps creaking as if it was about to give way.

  “We voted on it. We run a democracy. We also voted on no sex, which really doesn’t need to be enforced. You can imagine it’s the last thing the residents want to do.”

  “Sort of like having plumbers at a plumbers’ conference put in a sink.”

  “And here we come to the end of our brief but informative tour.”

  The third floor was a wide-open space set up as a dormer, double bunks with white sheets and pillows. It resembled an army barracks. A puffing air freshener was installed near the entrance, filling the room with the scent of lavender.

  “We can accommodate up to eighty people in total, and although it’s rare to have a full house, it happens from time to time.” She sat on one of the beds and tapped the space next to her. When Kevin sat down, he could see the labyrinth through the small round window by the staircase. The Buddha was surrounded by dots of stones, two birds perched on his bald head.

  “So,” she said, “what do you think?”

  “It’s fantastic, all of it,” he said, and he was glad he didn’t have to lie, and even gladder that just a couple of days ago, all he had was a name, and now he had this very real person sitting next to him. She may not have been a lawyer or a doctor, but she was his sibling, and he was glad to know her. “Denise, I think you’re awesome.”

  She clapped her hands and laughed. “Well, I think you’re awesome, too, Kevin.”

  Two sisters. He had two sisters now, and yet they didn’t know each other, but that could change this Saturday at the gallery opening. Kevin knew having Denise there would mean more to him than anyone, but he was the link between his sisters, and it seemed important to bring them together, a sense of opening up and also of closing in, a connecting of the two familial worlds he now inhabited.

  “What are you doing this Saturday evening?” he asked.

  “I’ll check my planner, but I think I’m free. Why?”

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said.

  23

  Right up until they were due to drive back to New Jersey, Judy pushed herself. She sat in front of her drafting table in the study for two six-hour shifts each day. She modified the racquet-and-web drawing to make it more insect-like, then she started and finished one more, a close-up rendering of a tennis ball’s surface in a planetary mode, replacing the fuzz with a dense forest and a rushing river through its curvy, rubbery groove. Then she had the idea of blacking out the sky, as if the drawing were shot from outer space, like those majestic photographs of the Earth from the moon. It was a simple drawing but not exactly easy to complete because she used a fine-point pen to create each tree. Filling up a poster-size sketchpad with tiny trees was work for the mad, but Judy found herself entering a trancelike, meditative state, and as she raised each trunk and grew every branch, she remembered why she loved doing this in the first place.

  She forgot to eat again until Roger tapped her shoulder, her egg salad sandwich on a plate of gold. It was her favorite china of his, a set of dishware coated with gold paint. It made her feel like Cleopatra. This time, she tasted parsley and cucumber, a summer salad in each bite.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she devoured the remains. Thankfully Roger wasn’t watching her eat like an animal; he leaned against the window frame and perused the tranquil bay.

  “I’d like to go with you to your father’s,” he said.

  She pushed her plate away and sighed.

  “Can we discuss this later?”

  “We’re leaving tonight, right?”

  “We already talked about this.”

  “We did,” he said. He turned to face her. “But I’d like to talk about it again, if you don’t mind.”

  She did mind, because what she wanted was to refuse his request, but then again, Roger had never asked anything of her until now. Not that she owed him—he’d made that absolutely clear that she wasn’t beholden to him—but saying it and feeling it were two different things.

  “Why do you want to be there?”

  “Just to meet him,” Roger said. “I’ll be seeing your brother in San Francisco, so this way, I get to meet your whole family.”

  “They’re not that interesting.”

  Roger walked over and wrapped his arms around her from her back, placing his head next to hers. “In case you haven’t noticed, Judy, I like you, and when you like someone, you want to get to know them better.”

  Judy leaned into him, their cheeks touching, appreciating this moment for what it was, this man wanting to get closer to her. It was a romantic gesture, and there was a warmth spreading from within her, as if her sleeping heart was slowly waking up. She’d hoped that this time alone with him would stir something, and now that it was here, she was quietly terrified because here was Brian, butting into her brain. For a little while she’d loved Brian so completely, and what good had it done? She knew Roger was not Brian, far from it, but Roger was still a man and had the capacity to hurt her.

  “I don’t have much in common with my father or my brother,” she said. “It’s not like you’re gonna discover some deep, revelatory connection.”

  Roger disengaged himself from her and kissed the top of her head.

  “But they’ve known you your entire life. That’s enough for me.”

  Judy gazed into her sketch of the tennis planet in front of her, points of stars peeking through the inky darkness of space. At some point, she’d have to give herself to Roger, pry her fingers off the railing of her heart. Maybe it’d already happened. That’s how it always was; by the time you realized you were in love, it was already too late.

  She didn’t want to be angry, but two streets from her father’s house in Princeton, the house of her childhood, she felt the pointy roots of her past dig in.

  Roger drove, and she told him to make a right onto River Road, past the white Victorian on the corner where she used to play with a girl, the one with the birthmark on her cheek whose name now escaped her. They were just a street away, and Judy’s heart thumped.

  “Take the next right,” she said, and the same green street sign was there, Caldwell, shaded by the overhanging branches of red maples that lined the street. Three houses later, they were at the curb, and by this point, all Judy could do was stare at the crooked mailbox. She didn’t dare look at the house itself, because she didn’t want to be reminded of all the things that were no longer there, especially her mother’s garden. How Judy had despised that patch of green, its perimeter cordoned off with wooden posts and chicken wire. In her youth, she used to get so jealous of it, resentful that her mother spent so much time there. It had been the equivalent of a man’s garage, an oasis of tinkering and solitude; even her mother’s fingernails looked like a mechanic’s, so full of dirt that she had to use a toothbrush to clean them out after working the beds. Her favorite plant to grow had been Korean radishes, white oblong root vegetables that she diced and cubed to make kimchi. Judy remembered them as winter harvests, her mo
ther grasping the leafy protrusions like a head of hair, then yanking them out of the ground, her breath a white smoke in the December air as she mooed with each pull. “It’s not a cow,” Judy used to tell her, but her mother still said it, and it soon became a private joke between them. In Korean, that’s what the radish was called, moo.

  But now all that was left of the garden was the chicken wire, a rusty web fallen over the overlapping heap of weeds. Standing over the mess, Judy couldn’t decide whether to be disgusted or impressed by the sheer virility of the unwanted greenery before her.

  “We should get him?” Roger showed her his watch.

  It was the sort of thing that Kevin would’ve said, except Kevin wasn’t here. When had she last visited her father without her brother acting as the human buffer? Maybe the day after her mother’s funeral, when she’d stood at these very front steps, brimming with hate, but that was more than a year ago. She’d been avoiding him, which wasn’t hard. She was supposed to come to that kidney transplant info session last month but hadn’t. And now that she was standing by the red front door, her index finger poised to press the well-worn oval of the doorbell, she thought back to what she’d told him on that awful day they buried her mother.

  “It’s your fault,” she’d said. “That’s why she’s dead.”

  He stared at her with bloodshot eyes. He’d been drinking, she could see it and smell it. “Okay,” he said. “But no change. You scream, I scream, no change.”

  At that moment, she hated him for so many reasons, but more than anything, for being right. His wife, her mother, was gone. She’d given everyone enough time to witness and accept the gradual metric of her permanent departure, but the fact that Judy would never be able to see her, talk to her, be with her again, felt impossible.