Like Wind Against Rock: A Novel

by Nancy Kim

  She was standing in a sundress that came to well above her knees. She was wearing strappy sandals and a bracelet around her ankle. She wore lots of silver bangles and several necklaces with crystal pendants. She sparkled and jangled and tapped her foot impatiently, and when I looked up apologetically, she smiled. She opened her lips and bared her teeth, and I understood then that her impatience was not so that she could use the phone. She was waiting for me.

  Crystal River told me that she forgot who she needed to call when she saw me.

  “I didn’t know you were Korean at first,” she said later. “Your clothes looked too American—I thought you were probably Japanese. But when you looked at me, I could tell. By the expression on your face.”

  It was a queer thing to say. But I didn’t think to ask her anything more about it. Everything she said was puzzling. She was living at Venice Beach, on the beach, in a sleeping bag. There were others like her who slept on beaches, who talked about freedom. It was 1969, and all the rules were breaking. She said she loved to see the stars at night. I had never even noticed the stars. The beaches in California were so different from what I was used to at home. They didn’t seem much like beaches at all. They were strangely devoid of vegetation, crowded and noisy. The water wasn’t blue but a grayish-green, like the sky.

  I found out later that while Crystal River may have loved the stars, the main reason she slept on the beach was that she had run out of money. She had traveled from Sand Point, Idaho, to Boulder, Colorado, to Taos, New Mexico, to Los Angeles. I heard a complicated story of a man and then another man, but I didn’t get into details. I had enough sense even then to know that it wasn’t about a man but her need to move around, to see new things and experience life. As a child, her parents had moved around a lot. They were educated, devoutly religious, true believers. They dragged their only daughter around the world and back again. She told me that she had always longed for a place to call home, a big house with a wraparound porch, friends with whom she could celebrate more than one birthday. But as soon as she became old enough to break from her parents, Crystal River hit the road. It was what she had grown used to. “The world is my home,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling and her dimples deepening, pulling me toward her like Earth’s very core.

  Crystal River was complex and exotic, which is what she thought of me. But she was wrong. I was simple in desires and plain in upbringing. I had come from a family of farmers, barefoot for most of my childhood, cocooned by lush vegetation and temperate weather. Where I came from, I was ordinary. The most remarkable thing about me was that I managed to complete my degree on the mainland. Ironically, that was the thing that Crystal River found most plain. She wanted me to teach martial arts, do yoga, carve wood, sculpt pots—make something with my hands, with my body—but I stubbornly refused. It was the only way that I could resist dissolving, the only way I could cling to the scrap that was left of who I was. She could bend and twist reality out of shape with her strange brand of illogic. But my Confucian beliefs were deeply embedded into my cells, and even Crystal River couldn’t change the one thing that I knew for sure—that knowledge reigned supreme over impulse and feeling, that the brain ruled the body. Except when it came to her. We married that summer, before I even told my parents that she existed.

  She told me that she had grown up with parents who were faithful believers in Christ, in spirits, in hell and heaven. She smiled wryly when she said this, and her nose crinkled as though she had smelled something foul. She didn’t like to talk about her parents, and she hinted that bad things had happened to her that had made her lose faith in religion. What she believed in most was what she could touch, what she could feel. With her hands and with her heart. And when she no longer felt me in her heart, she found another body to touch.

  She was as improbable as her name, and she corrected anyone who tried to call her Crys or Crystal. “A crystal river is a different thing altogether,” she’d insist. Of course, Crystal River wasn’t her true name. Like much else about her, it was constructed, her attempt to control her destiny. An irony, given her belief in fate, in the inability to control her passions. Everything was the result of the planets and the stars aligning a certain way, she proclaimed, exerting a gravitational pull on all living creatures, who were full of magnetic energy. Crystal River was full of that sort of baloney. Yet I loved her for all of that, her illogic, her contradictions, her beauty. I loved the way her ankles curved into her feet, and the way she set her mouth so firmly when she was angry. I loved her for the history that we shared and the son that we made and the drama that she imbued into my life. My life had been nice before then. My path was clear. She promised to make the journey much more exciting. I didn’t know then that she would not accompany me to the end.

  I was drawn to her vitality. She had so much passion for life when we first met. That was what I missed the most as time passed. She seemed to grow quieter, smaller, shrinking with each passing day. She seemed to disappear, even before she left.

  Were there warning signs? That is the question everyone wants to ask but doesn’t dare. Because of course, there always are. The phone calls and the hang-ups. The unexplained crying jags. I assumed she was depressed and suggested that she see a psychiatrist since analysis was much in vogue at the time. She refused, saying it would do no good, and I didn’t push the matter. Then, much later, there were the absences, the drinking, the pills that appeared in prescription bottles that she stashed in the refrigerator and underneath the sofa cushions. She forgot things—dinner dates, birthdays, anniversaries, her car keys. She didn’t remember the nightmares that made her cry out in her sleep, that made her angry and weepy the next morning. But what was there to do about any of it? What is there ever to do? In the end, there is nothing to do but prepare, which is why it is so much easier to cling to the belief that things will return to the way they used to be and to transform the mythological past into some magical future reality. But like a mirage, that future, just as we draw near, disappears.

  Crystal River had lived in Hawaii when she was a teenager. She loved the way the breeze felt on her skin and the smell of flowers and the sea. She imagined that, marrying me, we would live in a hale on the beach, forever barefoot and suntanned and untroubled by reality. Against my better judgment, I took her home with me, to my family, as my wife. Perhaps it was because I had married her without obtaining my parents’ approval. Perhaps it was because she was white. Perhaps it was because Sunny, my old girlfriend, was like a member of the family. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was simply because my mother sensed, the way that mothers do, that Crystal River would never make me a suitable wife. Maybe she could tell, by the way Crystal River wore her hair loose around her shoulders, the way she walked, with hips that swung, the way she laughed, with her mouth wide open as though she wanted to swallow the world whole. Maybe it was her name, which was meant to conjure the natural world but was entirely fabricated. My mother knew that she would never be happy on an island, that she would always be gazing out at the wide expanse of blue sea.

  Our first visit to my family was also our last. There was drama, yes. Things I don’t wish to remember. Accusations, compromising situations, a gaze held too long with a distant cousin, an embrace interrupted. Voices were raised. Someone threw a glass. Crystal River shook it all off, and I refused to see, faulting others for the commotion she caused. My mother begged me to leave her, warned me that she was trouble, cried because I had disappointed her. My father threatened to disown me, told me that I would be sorry, that I was ruining my life, that I would regret this moment. I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I was rude and reckless and bold. For the first time, I was actually alive, or so Crystal River told me, and I believed her. How could I not believe her when her cheeks were flushed with life, her eyes so bright? How could I not believe her when she loved me so much, and I loved her more than I had ever thought I could love anything or anyone?

  So we fled. We left Maui for Kona, where we e
njoyed a real honeymoon. Although I had lived most of my life in Hawaii, I had never visited Kona, which is so different from where I grew up. Black ridges curved in circles the way water marks the sand on a beach, the result of heat melting the earth and marking it in patterns like waves, leaving it blackened and hardened. Crystal River and I swam in the warm waters with the sea turtles and the colorful fish. She was fascinated by the black lava rocks that jutted from the ground, rough as sandpaper. She picked one up that was the size of a pineapple.

  “I want to take this back with us.”

  “It won’t fit in our luggage.”

  “I’ll carry it on in my bag.”

  “It’s bad luck.”

  This interested her.

  “How?”

  “Legend has it that bad luck will follow anyone who takes lava off the island.”

  Crystal River smiled and shrugged her shoulders mischievously. She was fascinated by folklore and magic. When I told her that the royal family often wed brothers and sisters, believing that doing so would produce genetically superior offspring, her eyes widened with interest, and she tilted her head forward. Crystal River picked and chose her beliefs, unlike the locals, who had no choice but to believe. Against my better judgment, I let her take the rock, ashamed that I still felt the pull of such primitive superstitions. At night we made love as we listened to the rush of wind, the tropical breeze that sounded just like falling rain.

  We returned to California, eventually settling in Orange County. Crystal River used the lava rock to decorate our front stoop. I left it there even after she moved out, hoping that she might return and that she would notice if it were missing. When she died, I placed it underneath the bed in Victor’s room. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, for it was still a memory that had significance. Anyway, doing so would not undo the bad luck that I was sure it had brought into our household. For I was still a Hawaiian boy inside, despite my leather shoes and my many years on the mainland, and I often wondered whether the problems that befell us were the result of this black rock. I remember once mentioning that to Crystal River, and suggesting that we return to Kona to take back the rock. But she merely laughed and said something about life’s rhythms and the ebb and flow of good and bad experiences. So the rock stayed, even longer than the woman who’d brought it.

  Were there warning signs? Yes, of course there were warning signs. A decent woman does not approach a stranger the way she approached me the first time we met, as though we already knew each other. She was so open and vulnerable that for the first time, I felt I could be strong. She made me want to rescue her from whatever she was fleeing from. She made me think that I—the boring son, the one who never made my mother worry—could be a hero, her courageous knight in shining armor. But in the end, I could not save her from her demons. I could only lose myself.

  She told me very little about her family or her itinerant childhood, but not because she was trying to hide anything. She told me she had been pregnant before, when she was a teenager, only fifteen, but she gave me few details, and I didn’t pry. I had assumed it was when she was in Hawaii, where her family had lived when she was a teenager. When her parents insisted that she tell them who the father was, she refused.

  “But I did tell them one thing,” she said. “That he was Asian.” She had believed that her parents, devout Christians, would have no alternative but to let her have the baby. But they didn’t want a half-Asian grandkid. They packed their bags that very day and left on the first flight to New York City, where her condition was cured by a visit to an unmarked office down a narrow alley. The doctor had dirty fingernails and wore a surgical mask over his mouth at all times. Her parents waited in the car at the curb, as though making sure she would not escape.

  “They didn’t get out to help me into the car when it was over. They didn’t say a word to me during the ride home or for a long time afterward.”

  She smiled sadly, and my heart swelled.

  She left out the details—that she had been living in Korea, not Hawaii, that her parents had been missionaries and not simply religious fanatics—not to conceal the truth, but because it was too painful to remember. She simply wanted to forget, to escape the damage that had been done to her. She thought she could run away and reinvent herself, spin a life that was free from her troubled childhood. I understood this and did not pry or press for the specifics. They didn’t matter, we told ourselves. What mattered was the present and that we were together. She did not intend to deceive me, not then, not yet. But in the end, we were unable to escape from her past.

  I’ve often wondered whether it was me that she truly loved, or whether I was just a substitute for the one that she couldn’t have. I tried to convince myself that what happened before we met didn’t matter. I loved her—I love her still—and I loved the girl she was before we met, when she was a scared fifteen-year-old named Shulamite Smith.

  She had told me her real name so long ago that I had nearly forgotten it. Her religious parents had named her after a biblical figure, a woman who inspired great passion in King Solomon. Shulamite might mean “peace” in Hebrew, but it would also mean being teased and bullied on the playground. She would have adopted a nickname, one that allowed her to fit in with her schoolmates. Instead of Shulamite, she would have gone by something more familiar. Like Shirley. She never told me about her nickname because by the time I met her, she had discarded it in favor of a new name, one of her own creation—Crystal River, after her favorite place in the mountains.

  Of course, she did keep secrets from me, even if her name was not one of them. After so many years of trying without luck, why didn’t I suspect that the child she carried wasn’t mine? For we were never meant to be, Crystal River and me. Our DNA did not combine to form the perfect child, a child she delivered into my eagerly waiting arms. Yet, I cared for him as though he were mine, because I wanted to believe it. I could see in his face my features. I understand now it is only because her beloved looked like me—or, rather, that I looked like him. The realization pains me more than anything I have ever felt before.

  She became increasingly erratic as the years passed. Now I wonder if it was because Victor’s resemblance to his biological father grew as he got older. Did they look and act alike? Did their similarities increase with time? Did Victor develop the same voice, the same mannerisms and expressions? When Crystal River looked at our son, did she remember her betrayal of me—or her passion for her ex-lover? Was she tormented by guilt or by longing?

  I knew she had affairs, but I ignored them. She was restless, seeking something that I could not explain. Even if she didn’t come home at night, she eventually returned to care for her only child. But children grow up and leave, and then it was just the two of us. Her mood changed considerably when Victor left for college and worsened in the years that followed. She sat on the couch all day and watched television. She disappeared mysteriously for hours, even days, at a time.

  Then, one day, she was gone for good. I didn’t call the police. I wasn’t worried by her absence in that way. I was saddened, but not worried. She called me two weeks after she’d left. She had moved into an apartment in Los Angeles, but she wouldn’t say where, declining even to give me her phone number. We continued to share our joint bank account. I continued to pay her credit card bill. We never divorced. When she was found dead in her apartment, the police called me first because I was still her husband and she was still my wife. I will never forget the day I received the call: January 10, 2010. They said she had probably been dead two days.

  A thought occurs to me. I turn to the first page of the notebook. The date is clearly marked in the upper-right-hand corner. January 8, 2010. The first person my wife wanted to see in the afterlife was not me or her son. It was her ex-lover.

  March 27, 2010

  She is much more vivid now, more so than ever. She looms before me, as bright as the sun, as luminous as the moon.

  “Why don’t you join me?”

  If
only I could . . .

  “It’s time.”

  But how?

  Shirley smiles. She beckons me to her. I reach my arms out to her, but it is not Shirley that I feel. It is my wife. I apologize, tell her that it was only a dream. She murmurs understandingly and goes back to sleep.

  March 30, 2010

  My heart is much lighter today than it has been for the past few days. Shirley’s visit felt so real last night—more than ever before. Instead of floating above me, or in front of me, she was sitting on the edge of my bed! She was beautiful. Her blonde hair was silvery gray, and she was smiling. I sat up and looked at her—I couldn’t take my eyes off her! She just sat there and smiled. She did not speak this time. I reached my hand out to touch her, to feel her in my arms, but as I did so, my wife stirred. I looked over at her in alarm, and when I looked back, Shirley had disappeared.

  Was she angry? Was she jealous?

  Perhaps I should feel concerned, but I cannot. The way she was looking at me—with so much love!

  March 31, 2010

  A very disturbing thing happened to me this afternoon. I was coming back from lunch when I felt a tightening in my chest, as though a noose had been fastened around my ribs and my back. It lasted about two minutes, and then it stopped. I became very dizzy and had to sit down. I was so shaken that I had to cancel the rest of my appointments for the day. A longtime customer, Mr. Renton, was very upset. I will have to offer him a free cleaning, and do it myself.