The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories

by Simon Van Booy

  * * *

  • • •

  As we neared the top of Piazzale Michelangelo, sunlight filled the streets like gold fabric.

  The part Soyeon said she remembered most was being allowed to ride her tricycle up and down the factory floor. It was quiet with the machines down. She felt good there. She remembers the smoothness of the floor. How easy it was to build up speed. The smell of cardboard and oil in one corridor. Hot plastic in another. The factory made toys. It was really a dream come true, Soyeon told me, except the room they slept in smelled like cigarettes.

  Near the small cafeteria with its chilled cabinets of salad and cans of green tea, there was an unlocked room where all the broken toys went. Soyeon wanted to explore that room more than anything, and although her mother had forbidden it—after a week in the factory she got her chance, because Soyeon’s father had found out where they were.

  It was the middle of the night, but he was outside screaming and rattling the doors of the main entrance.

  Soyeon’s mother jumped out of bed and ran with her daughter to the room of defective toys. The toys were in giant boxes. They would bury themselves in broken dolls until he went away. Soyeon was lifted into one. Then her mother got in. The smell of plastic was very strong. Soyeon wanted to play but was supposed to keep her hands still.

  After a while their heads popped out and they listened. Soyeon said she remembered it now like a scary cartoon. The shouting had stopped. No more rattling of the doors. Just to be certain, they stayed a bit longer, went through the toys one by one to pass the time, inspecting each doll, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and why they were in there.

  When it got late they found the cafeteria and shared green tea mousse. Soyeon’s mother stacked coins in place of the container. The food made them cheerful, so they walked around the factory holding hands, and singing songs they knew from television. Then suddenly he was standing in front of them. His gray suit was ripped and his shirttail hung out like a white tongue. He rushed forward and grabbed Soyeon’s mother’s wrists.

  “Go to the toy room!” she screamed to her daughter.

  But Soyeon hid behind a machine, watching as her mother broke free, then ran up the metal staircase to the raised office. Soyeon’s father chased after her, as though it were a game they were playing, as though everything that was happening had been decided upon long before.

  Once inside the glass room, Soyeon’s mother locked the door, while her father said her name over and over. Then he stopped speaking and pulled savagely on the handle. Then he tried kicking the door but it wouldn’t open. Soyeon’s mother was like a fish in a bowl. Then he pounded on the door and both his hands went through as the glass shattered. As he unlocked it from inside, Soyeon’s mother ran backward into a corner, raising her arms to protect herself. But instead of hitting her, the businessman went calmly to an office chair and sat down before a computer, as though he were at work.

  Without knowing why, Soyeon said she left her hiding place and went up the metal stairs to the glass office. She knew there was an orange metal box with a red cross on it. She had seen it before. They had the same one at her school. It was full of medicine and white ribbon. When Soyeon got to the top of the stairs, the office was very bright, and there was glass on the floor.

  Her mother was slumped over, sobbing. Then she saw her daughter standing there. “Go play,” she said weakly.

  Sitting in the office chair bleeding was Soyeon’s father. The man who’d held her mother’s hand at the zoo. Who had fed Soyeon imitation crab as she played on the carpet. There was also blood on his cheeks and on the white collar of his shirt. But mostly it dripped to the floor and onto his black shoes.

  Soyeon got the orange box and took the lid off. She did not feel afraid. She took out two rolls of bandage and went to her father. She could see his eyes clearly. The expression in them made her feel good. Soyeon took the bandage and went round and round. Her only concern was to get it straight. She had wrapped dolls before, but this man was not a doll. At first the blood came through in dots like eyes watching. Then the bandage stayed white. Soyeon’s mother stood up and was looking. Her father could not use his hands for anything, so kept them in the air like he was surprised at everything that had happened in the toy factory.

  By this point Soyeon and I had reached the summit, a tiny square bustling with tourists and souvenir stands. The sun had almost completely sunk. It was no longer shimmering in the river, nor golden in the streets.

  Soyeon said she never saw her father again after that night. But nineteen years later her mother called her apartment in Florence to say he had collapsed at his workplace. The cleaning lady found him lying on the carpet by his desk. He was alive, but unable to talk or move one side of his body.

  Over the next several years, Soyeon’s mother visited him at the rehabilitation hospital. She had not seen her businessman for almost two decades, but admitted there had been letters exchanged.

  At first she went to the hospital once every two weeks. Then once per week, then twice. She read romance books to him aloud. Touched his hands and rubbed his arms, trying to arouse feeling in the parts of his body where there was nothing. She told him stories about their daughter in Europe, and showed pictures of her growing up. His other family didn’t visit much. But if she was caught, Soyeon’s mother planned to say she was his best school friend’s younger sister.

  Soyeon said she was sure her mother would meet the other family one day, but it never happened.

  After visiting, she got home in time for her soap operas. So much had taken place since she’d begun following each show—so many ruined lives redeemed.

  Sometimes she took all the postcards her daughter had sent from Italy and laid them out on the table beside his hospital bed. The nurses said he could see and he could hear. Soyeon’s mother had even sent her a photograph of them together at the hospital. It was in a frame beside her bed where she could look at it.

  On the steps down, Soyeon took my arm for balance and asked if it wasn’t the saddest case of true love I had ever heard?

  That was how she saw it.

  When we got back to town, the streets were packed with tourists strolling after dinner. Some parents had let their children run ahead to the souvenir shops. The cafés were full of people talking and drinking from tiny cups.

  Soyeon didn’t live in the center of Florence and had to take a bus home. I waited with her at the stop. When we saw lights, she asked if I would like to see where she lived.

  * * *

  • • •

  On my long walk back to Teddy’s apartment, I imagined her face at the bus window. The silence when she got home. She would put her bag down, pull off her shoes, and go soundlessly through the place where she lived, completely alone, but all around—the voices and faces of memory, hovering like unquenched fires.

  I pictured us together on the steps at dusk.

  The feeling when she touched my arm.

  The moon about to rise.

  The wrapping of her father’s hands in white ribbon.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the morning I locked the keys inside the apartment as I was instructed. Then I went to the Museo Ferragamo on Piazza Santa Trinità. There were paintings from his home, and photographs of Salvatore as a young designer. One wall was a display of wooden shoe lasts, with names written on the wood: Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, the Duchess of Windsor . . .

  In a dark corner at the back of the museum was a projection of some classic Hollywood film. Young women in sequined dresses and red lipstick. One of the actors was Marilyn Monroe. She had white hair and perfect eyebrows.

  Soyeon had said her mother was as beautiful as a teenage girl.

  That was why her father had fallen for her.

  That was how she had caught the attention of such an important businessman in the office buildi
ng where she cleaned.

  My wife picked up the postcard and read aloud the part Soyeon had written about her father dying peacefully, at the care facility in Korea. I hadn’t thought so before, but now we both agreed, it was the saddest case of true love we had ever heard.

  The Doorman

  Sophie is in the front row of a downtown jazz club. It’s almost three in the morning, but she wears sunglasses to hide the fact that she is blind. For a few moments, an old man near the stage imagines she is here to meet a younger version of himself.

  When the musicians stop playing and people stand to applaud, Sophie rises in a cloud of cigarette smoke and walks so slowly people think she is drunk. There is no hope she will find the steps and so tilts her body onto the stage using elbows and knees.

  The musicians have melted into the crowd. The only sound comes from smoky bursts of laughter, shuffling feet as people leave their seats for the bar.

  Sophie is onstage trying to find the piano without knocking over a microphone stand. Her hands move from side to side, as though she is conducting. She brushes the edge of a double bass, the pebbled roof of an amplifier. Then a stool leg connects with the leather curve of her ballet flat. People are looking now, curious, but also waiting for someone to bring her down from the stage.

  It’s an old piano. Sophie can tell from the way it smells. The tone will be dry because the hammers are worn. She is too nervous to adjust the seat, and sizes the keyboard by spreading her fingers. The notes are steps that must be taken in a precise order. When she starts, it’s soft, unexpected. People listen.

  Then a face appears at the corner of the stage. The quartet leader. He has heard this song before. He knows the pressure of these fingers. The other musicians approach, but he puts out his arm to stop them. Nothing moves now but the hands of this lone pianist and the stirring of smoke over tables and chairs. Her blond hair is pinned up to reveal a neck as white as the keys.

  Ray Wong steps out onstage, leans into the mic.

  “I remember you,” he says.

  The blind girl bites her lip. Blinks under her sunglasses. The audience thinks it’s funny. Ray Wong lifts his trumpet from the stand. The people watching believe it’s part of the show.

  The other musicians stand there. Poised for a signal to come onstage. But the trumpet player holds them back with a stare, then raises the instrument to his lips.

  The bartenders watch with their hands buried in ice. Nothing like this has ever happened, not with someone from the audience—a woman people thought was drunk.

  The man with the trumpet is a jazz legend. His concerts in Japan and Germany sell out months in advance. People say he can control your emotion with his breath. They say he learned music before words—that he never left Chinatown until he was twenty—that he lived above an illegal pet shop in an alley and played for the animals—that his first trumpet was found in the trash.

  The truth is that Ray Wong was born in a hot room above a Laundromat off Canal Street. It was October 15, 1981. His mother didn’t think she could push him out all the way. The pain was so great she convinced herself they would both die. After, she lay and couldn’t speak. Empty but full. Her shaking body drenched with sweat.

  Ray’s father carried their son to the window in search of a breeze. He raised the blinds and described to his newborn son how there were people outside in sunglasses. Cars parked up and down both sides of the street. Tables in the vegetable market, heaped with leafy bundles and basins of turtles and frogs.

  “One day,” he told his son, “we will go there together and choose things to eat.”

  Their apartment consisted of two rooms. One for cooking and one for sleeping. Ray’s parents worked in a kitchen at Wo Lee’s Late-Night Restaurant.

  The Laundromat below their apartment was owned by Mrs. Fang. She watched baby Ray in the afternoons when his parents left for work. She put him in a basket of towels where he could see clothes turning in the machines. When he was able to crawl, Ray liked to slap his hands against the warm glass doors. The Laundromat smelled of soap in the morning and fish soup at night. It was always bright, with people in canvas shoes folding things from the dryers. The floor was a grid of black and yellow tiles, and there was a folding table for mah-jongg.

  After shutting down the machines, sweeping up, and lowering a grate over the front window of the shop, Mrs. Fang carried Ray upstairs and fed him dinner. When she sang songs, Ray pulled at his diaper. When she set him in his crib, he touched his feet in the darkness and listened for the knock of her broom in corners.

  On warm nights, Ray lay with his eyes open, feeling things he could not articulate. Then the hushed chatter of his parents coming. The smell of food and smoke in their clothes.

  On the street below, opposite the Laundromat was a bar where musicians often met after concerts to drink and play the pieces only musicians like to hear.

  In August, when it was hot, they would sit on the steps to smoke. Sometimes they brought their instruments outside. The Chinese American baby in the upstairs apartment, listening through an open window, would never meet a single one of these men or women, never learn their names, never see their faces, nor follow their hands prancing over strings and keys. Yet into his small body went all they gave. All they had seen and done. All they had once wished for.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Sophie was born four miles north on January 14, 1987, her parents didn’t know what to do about her blindness. They saw many doctors who said different things. For her, childhood was the sensation of sound, the anticipation of hands, the joy of foods she liked in her mouth. The pain and humiliation of having her teeth brushed.

  After school, Sophie would sit with her nanny in Central Park beside the lake, listening to the footsteps of children chasing toy boats. She knew everything had a shape, a temperature, and a feeling—but color was something unimaginable. Sometimes she was taken onto a meadow for something to eat.

  To the delight of her parents, Sophie was liked at school. People helped her in the lunchroom—carried her tray and read the names of foods. She was allowed to sit out of certain sports but got to wear a gym uniform anyway. But she was never invited to birthdays at the puppet theater in Central Park, nor on weekend trips to the Hamptons. In high school, she had tried to organize slumber parties, but other girls were always so busy.

  Sophie’s best friends were her parents. They watched television together in the evenings, filling in details over the silence of an onscreen kiss. But so much of what was happening Sophie could tell from the music.

  One summer she went to Paris for three weeks. Her parents bought her a dress of dotted swiss from a boutique on Avenue Montaigne. She had dreamed of meeting a boy in France. Wearing the dress and being touched in it.

  When Sophie was fifteen, her father was cutting an apple and the knife slipped. There must have been blood, because she found him sitting on the floor with paper towels on his hand.

  When the paramedics came, Sophie stood listening to the unfamiliar sounds of Velcro and plastic seals being ripped. Then she stood on Fifth Avenue with Stan the doorman as the ambulance doors closed and her father was taken away.

  Stan had been head doorman since 1983. He took a bus from Harlem each morning, and a bus home each night when his shift was over.

  Stan found Sophie a chair in his office and made her some coffee. There was music on the radio, and she asked Stan what it was. He turned up the volume.

  “You ain’t never heard jazz before, Miss Wilkins?”

  “I’ve never had coffee before either,” she said.

  The name of the song on the radio was “Stairway to the Stars.” When the music ended, Stan said that it had been recorded in Paris on May 23, 1963. Then the radio announcer said the very same thing. Stan ordered a pizza, which they ate together waiting for Sophie’s mother to come home.

  A week later, Sophi
e was getting into the elevator with her nanny when Stan caught the doors and handed her a compact disc.

  “Here’s something,” he said. “It’s not coffee but still good.”

  Two weeks after that, she was getting out of a taxi with her parents, when Stan opened the door asked what she thought of the music.

  “What music?” her father said.

  Stan half expected the girl to have lost the disc. Put it down somewhere and forgotten. But Sophie went toward him and reached out her arms in a way that meant she wanted to hug.

  “If I keep playing it,” Sophie admitted, “I’m going to break the machine.”

  “Oh, it’s meant to be played,” Stan told her. “And loud too.”

  On the bus home that night, Stan realized how fond he had grown of the blind girl. How much he liked doing things for her.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Ray Wong was a teenager, he spent most of his free time in thrift stores, searching for vinyl nobody else thought was important. His family had moved to a bigger apartment in Queens when he was five. On Sundays, his parents took him to a park in Flushing. His mother spread a blanket on the grass and they ate dumplings from plastic bowls. Old people sang and played games. Ray used to take off his shoes and chase birds.

  Mr. and Mrs. Wong forced him to work hard at school, and hoped he might be the first Wong to attend university. They bought a cheap car for trips to the beach with Mrs. Fang—who was now old and lived with them.

  By the time Ray was a teenager, he had saved up enough money to buy the trumpet he wanted, a 1964 Olds Special.

  He had learned to read music at seven, and taught himself to play piano on the old upright at the Chinese-American Community Center. His teachers handed him scores by Mozart and Schubert. Tried to involve him in concerts and orchestras, but to Ray this was music that belonged inside a jewelry box.