Like Wind Against Rock: A Novel

by Nancy Kim

  She is a good woman, although not the one I would have chosen if I’d had a choice. She deserves to have a husband who loves her. It is this admission that makes me realize that I do, in fact, love my wife. Differently, of course, from the way I love Shirley. My love for my wife is a different beast altogether.

  March 11, 2010

  Last night, instead of Shirley, a large shaggy dog came to visit me. I recognized that it was the old dog that used to live down the street from me in Korea, the one with arthritic limbs. It was much larger in my dream, the size of two Saint Bernards. It gnawed on its arthritic legs to remove the pain inside, but that only increased the size of the wounds. My wife was patting the dog’s head, even though she dislikes dogs, and I realized that I was the dog, licking my own blood, chewing my own flesh. And then, in the strange manner of dreams, I was the one patting the dog that my wife had become.

  March 15, 2010

  More than fifty years have passed. Half a century. So often during that time, I wondered about Shirley. What was she doing? Where was she? Was she happy? I wish I were magnanimous enough to say that I hoped she was, that I hoped her life was full and complete without me. In my better moments, I wished her the very best. But more often, I hoped that she was dissatisfied with her life and that she thought of me during important times, like when she gave birth to her child or married her husband. I wanted to be there with her, to be in her thoughts. I wanted the memory of me to infiltrate her happiest moments, her milestones. I also wanted the thought of me to comfort her if she felt alone or sad. I hoped that she conjured up my image then, the way I so often do hers.

  March 20, 2010

  Sometimes it is just her voice calling from the darkness.

  “John. Wake up. When will you come to see me? When will we be together?”

  I’ve thought of Shirley often over the years, but the pain of heartbreak dimmed over time, and the memories faded in their intensity. But in the past few weeks, the dreams have awakened constant memories that are much more powerful.

  Shirley has become more real to me during my dreams. No longer is she a vision in white with a golden aura. No longer is she an assemblage of my best and worst fantasies, a blue-eyed dragon one night and a flame-colored butterfly the next. Sometimes she looks just the way she used to. Sometimes she has wrinkles and glasses and gray hair. Sometimes she looks the way she did when I saw her again, wearing high heels and cuff bracelets, her thick hair still long and wavy but now layered. Because, miraculously, I did get another chance.

  I didn’t expect to see her. It was New Year’s Day of 1980, the start of a new decade. There were only a handful of nice Korean restaurants in Southern California at the time. The Korean community was very small, even in the Los Angeles area. I was there with my family. We used to make weekly pilgrimages into Koreatown to buy groceries—things we couldn’t get in the local supermarket in Green Hills, like Chinese cabbage for kimchi and soybean paste for stews and soups. We had ordered chewy rice cakes and dumpling soup to welcome in the new year. My wife was fixing Alice’s hair when I caught a glimpse of the back of a woman’s head across the room. She was sitting with a man who was facing me. He was Korean and about my age. In fact, he looked rather like me. I excused myself and headed for the restroom. I took a path that would lead in an L shape, right past their table and then behind it. I was too nervous to get a good look at the woman as I walked past, but as I turned right, I glanced up and saw that she was looking right at me. Her mouth opened slightly, and for a moment, time froze.

  It had been nearly twenty-five years. A lifetime, but no time at all.

  The man must have said something to her, for she turned back to him and shook her head. I continued walking toward the restrooms and then pretended to use the pay phone. A minute or two later, she appeared. She stood in front of me with her arms crossed. It was difficult for me to look at her face, now that she was within touching distance. What if it wasn’t her? What were the odds? But there was no mistaking the color of her eyes, the shape of her lips, even if she no longer wore a schoolgirl’s uniform or her hair pulled back tightly in two tortoiseshell barrettes. She stood there patiently until I realized that I was still pressing the receiver against my ear.

  “Are you waiting to use the phone?” I asked, thinking that I had been wrong—this wasn’t Shirley at all, just a woman who wanted to use the pay phone.

  “John?”

  I nodded, even though that had never really been my name.

  She didn’t smile, and I couldn’t move. She slipped something into my pants pocket.

  “Please don’t call me after six.” She walked into the ladies’ room. I pulled a matchbook out of my pocket. On the inside cover, she had written ten digits in blue ink. Her number had the same area code as mine.

  There are some things that you don’t want to know, that really shouldn’t happen because they contradict expectation. A starving man should not refuse food. Cats should not chase dogs. A protagonist should not die. But these things happen sometimes, and when they do, we are never prepared. Sometimes this is our own fault. Because even when we see the warning signs, we ignore them. We forge ahead, despite the gnawing dread, not because we are brave or want to know the truth but because we want to prove our feelings wrong. We want to deny what we know in our hearts to be true. This is never a good idea. It is far better to run, to close our eyes, cover our ears, and flee.

  The bad feeling returns. It tells me that I should put the notebook down or, better yet, burn it. But fool that I am, I don’t listen. Instead, I pick it up and continue reading.

  March 24, 2010

  I did not dream last night. Nor the night before. I wonder whether Shirley has stolen away all my dreams. I wonder whether she is still angry, whether my memories of our time in LA have made her remember, too.

  I called her as soon as I could after seeing her at the restaurant, as soon as I got into the office after the holiday. I remember the day so vividly, even though it was nearly thirty years ago. I sent my receptionist on an errand and left the hygienist with my patient while I dialed the numbers that were smudged on the matchbook cover that I clutched so tightly in my hand. The blood rushed through my ears, and I could barely hear anything, even when her voice answered with a wary, “Hello?”

  I wondered whether I should be doing this.

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” I said at last.

  There was silence, and I worried that she might hang up.

  “Hello?”

  She was crying. It was a sound that broke my heart.

  “Where are you?” I said. “I’ll meet you. Anywhere, just tell me where.”

  And so the decision had been made.

  We agreed to meet in a hotel in Beverly Hills. I made reservations at a four-star hotel that I could scarcely afford, but I couldn’t bear the thought of meeting her at a dingy motel or a family-friendly Holiday Inn. We couldn’t take the chance that a nosy neighbor would notice my car parked in front of her house, and meeting at my house was out of the question.

  I took the day off to see her. No explanations for my office staff. Canceled appointments. It was unusual for me. I was typically so responsible.

  We agreed to arrive separately, as Mr. and Mrs. Chang. She liked this, the ability to change identities. She had taken her husband’s last name and changed her first to one that recalled her favorite place in the mountains, with a rushing crystal-clear river. But she would always be Shirley to me.

  I told her that a key would be waiting for her at the front desk if she arrived before I did. When I checked in, the clerk informed me that my wife was already in the room. My heart leaped at the idea—Shirley as my wife! I practically raced to the elevator. Shirley—waiting for me! I wanted to know everything about her, everything that had happened to her during the past twenty-five years. Did she have children? What were their names? Who were her friends? What happened to her after she left Korea? Was she happy? What kind of car did her husband drive? Did she think
of me often?

  Room 894. I knocked once. She opened the door. I had so many questions, but when I saw her, they all disappeared.

  I wish I could say that it was awkward. That we stared at each other, speechless. That we tried to find words to bridge the divide that time had created. I wish there was something that could attest to my conflicted feelings. But I had no guilt, no hesitation. I was a married man with a daughter, yet I felt like a schoolboy.

  She closed the door. It was as if this was something that I did every day. It was as if hours had passed and not years. Why did it feel so familiar? Not comfortable, but familiar. I was overwhelmed with passion, my heart and body bursting with desire. My body remembered, as did hers. We made love in the fluffy bed with the excess pillows and the soft sheets. Our souls were as intertwined as our limbs.

  And so it began. The phone calls and the secret visits. We knew each other so well, yet we still knew nothing about each other. We kept from each other the names of our spouses, where we lived, the day-to-day of our ordinary lives. It was as if we wanted to create our own world where it was just the two of us, the way it had been when we first knew each other. But of course, the joy and the pleasure and the happiness and the ecstasy were possible only through secrets and lies and deception and delusion.

  March 25, 2010

  We maintained our secret life for four years, which were both blissful and tormented. Our love changed the nature of time itself. The moments we stole together were both eternal and fleeting. The days we spent apart were endless, yet the years flew by so quickly.

  And then one stolen afternoon, Shirley greeted me with a look on her face that could only be described as beatific.

  “I’m pregnant.” She enveloped me in her arms. I knew that she didn’t have any children. She had told me that she couldn’t get pregnant, that she and her husband had tried for years without luck. She worried that the abortion that she’d had so many years before had scarred her and made it impossible for her to conceive. But she was wrong.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Three tests,” she said with a laugh. “All positive. At my age! After all this time. It’s a miracle.” She threw back her head and whooped joyously.

  I was alarmed. Why was she so happy?

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. Surely she wasn’t planning to have the baby?

  She looked at me and then smiled slightly, as though she thought I was making an ill-timed attempt at humor.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  “But what would you tell your husband?”

  The smile disappeared, but she didn’t say anything. She just stared at me, looking stunned.

  “Don’t you think he would suspect something?” I asked.

  My question seemed to suck out her spirit. She continued staring at me as though I were a stranger. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “It could be his.” She said this meanly, and my blood chilled as I looked at her luscious mouth flattened into a straight line.

  “But it’s not. You know it’s not.”

  I hadn’t yet realized what Shirley had been thinking—that we would be together at last, that I would leave my wife and daughter, and she would leave her husband. We could start over, a new life, a new family, the way it should have been from the start. That was a scenario that was so foreign to me, so impossible, that I hadn’t conceived of it. I had a duty to my family, and it didn’t matter what my heart wanted. Leaving them was something I could not do, just as I could not fly. What would happen to them if I abandoned them for this . . . Caucasian woman? Not only would I be ostracized from my community, but my wife would be as well. She would be disgraced. She might even commit suicide, as I had heard other abandoned women did. I harbored no ill will toward my wife. She had done nothing to deserve my disloyalty. And my daughter—my daughter’s future would be destroyed. She would never marry. She would never have children. She would be scarred for life.

  It hadn’t yet occurred to me that my wife and daughter might be better off without me, or that my wife might meet somebody better for her than me, somebody who wasn’t in love with someone else. I loved Shirley more than anything, but that was not enough. Love was not greater than obligation.

  Yet why didn’t I see my obligation to Shirley? That question pains my heart still. Why couldn’t I see that she was counting on me—and that I couldn’t disappoint her again? It was a miracle that Shirley had returned to my life. That she would conceive with me—a second time—so many years later, when she couldn’t conceive with her own husband . . . why couldn’t I see that as fate, as destiny? As duty?

  “You think I should tell him the truth?” she asked.

  “If you do, we will never see each other again.”

  My words, imprecisely spoken in a second language, were meant as a fearful prediction of the eventual cost of our actions. Her husband would never let us see each other again if he found out. But I should have known by the way her expression changed that she heard my words as a threat and not as they were intended. How could something as simple as the wrong choice of words, so easily correctable, so irretrievably alter the course of one’s life?

  Shirley’s manner became cool then, and when I put my arms around her, she shrugged me off and told me that she wanted to be alone. When I tried to kiss her goodbye, she turned her head and would not look me in the eyes. I thought I understood why she was upset. After all, she had wanted a baby for so many years. But what could be done about it? She would come around, I thought. She would see that it would be crazy to have this baby. It would destroy our lives. She would see that ending her pregnancy was the best solution for both of us. That it was the only way.

  It wasn’t until I was on the freeway, my foot firmly pressed on the gas pedal, that I started to regret what I had said. Why couldn’t she have this baby—our baby? Why couldn’t we be together? I decided then that I would do whatever she wanted. I would do anything to be with her, damn the consequences!

  Then why did I wait until the next day to call her? Perhaps I wanted the time to be with my family, one last time to eat a meal cooked by my wife, watch television with my daughter, as though nothing had changed. Or maybe I waited simply because I thought I had time.

  I waited until the next morning, when I knew her husband had gone to work and she would be alone. The phone rang and rang as I cradled the receiver to my ear, but there was no answer. I knew exactly what I was going to say: “Let’s have our baby. Let’s live the rest of our lives together!” I thought of those words all afternoon as I examined x-rays and prodded bleeding gums.

  I called her number again from a pay phone before I got on the freeway. I called yet again from a phone booth outside a grocery store near my house. I didn’t call my wife to ask whether I should bring home a carton of eggs or a gallon of milk. My loyalty was to Shirley! My heart beat only for her! Still, there was no answer.

  Then, recklessly, I called her again, this time from home. Against our agreement, I called her in the evening, while my wife was watching television in the next room and my daughter was studying upstairs.

  “Hello?”

  So this is what he sounded like, the man who slept next to the mother of my future child. The man who might even make love to her that evening. I felt suddenly sick to my stomach.

  “Hello?”

  I hung up.

  I called her every day for two weeks from the office, but there was no answer. Then in the evenings. Each time, it was her husband who answered. Why didn’t Shirley answer? Why didn’t she pick up the phone and let me explain? I had lost hold of my senses for just a moment! It was all a misunderstanding. I would spend the rest of my life making amends for my senselessness, if only she would give me a chance! Then one evening, I heard a recorded message that the number I had dialed was no longer in service.

  And that is how I managed to lose the love of my life a second time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE


  My hands are trembling, and though I have only a few pages left to read, I must stop. I should have stopped as soon as I suspected. But I wanted to believe that I was wrong, despite the suspicion that planted its seed as soon as I started to read this cursed notebook. I should have known better. I should have lived with uncertainty rather than have my fears confirmed.

  The mind stores fragments of days, moments lived and tucked away, images and impressions, and sometimes an occurrence—a coincidence, a chance encounter, a random request—draws them together into an epiphany. And then, there is no more hiding from the truth. There is no place left to hide.

  Crystal River was beautiful when we met, but not more beautiful than my Korean-born girlfriend, who was still waiting for me in Hawaii. Was it because she was the first Caucasian woman to show a sexual interest in me? Was it my desire to fit into a society where I did not look like I belonged? Southern California was a different place back then.

  We met in the library. This is remarkable, since I don’t believe she has set foot in another library since that day. She had run in to make a phone call, and I was on the phone. There was only one working pay phone in the entire building. I was making arrangements to fly back home. I had just finished my studies at a small private college in Los Angeles. There was no reason for me to stay on the mainland. I would work for the public library system back home, marry Sunny, and raise full-blooded Korean American Hawaiian children, as my brothers had done, and as I was expected to do.

  In the days before we fell out of love, Crystal River told me that she thought it was fate that we met. Why else would you be on that phone? But she knew that the phone in my apartment wasn’t working, because I had already told her that. I had run out of money and couldn’t pay the phone bill, so they disconnected the service. My mother had arranged to call me at the library at a designated time. I was twenty-six years old, and my mother was still taking care of me, making sure that I was safe, that I had enough money, so that I could return home to her. But neither my mother nor I expected Crystal River.