Midnight and the Meaning of Love

by Sister Souljah

  “It must be hard for you to speak, Ryoshi. Let’s talk after sunset when our fast is finished for the day,” she said, and my heart moved. Was Chiasa actually still fasting?

  “Are you fasting still, Chiasa?” I asked her.

  “You said one month. It hasn’t been one month yet. I always do what I say,” she answered softly. Her words rocked me inside.

  “Let me speak to your wife,” she said.

  “I’ll talk to you tonight. Can I call you late, around eleven?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. I handed Akemi the phone.

  Akemi began speaking to Chiasa while her eyes were analyzing my every gesture and penetrating through my thoughts too, perhaps. They were big, pretty, curious eyes, not filled with accusations.

  * * *

  I took the run alone from the Haeundae to Kwong An Li as the sun began to set. I knew it was an opportunity I had to grab. I wouldn’t be jogging on my Brooklyn blocks or in my new neighborhood in Queens either. Even if I did, I would never get in New York City what I had this moment in Busan, Korea—the blue sea, the gold sand, the scent and sound of the ocean, or especially, the peace.

  The banana vendor greeted me warmly. It was only his third time seeing me, but now it seemed like he expected me to appear at sunset each evening. After breaking fast with fruit and water, I decided to walk back. I had to get my mind right before I spoke to Chiasa. She had taken me by surprise earlier. I wouldn’t let it happen again.

  * * *

  Akemi had a sweet tooth. She stood, wide eyed all green and blue tonight, a blue silk scarf covering her hair, which she had wrapped in a thick bun in the back. It poked out like she was a Rasta girl. She wore blue jeans and a minidress. The army-green dress covered her arms and hips. Her toenails were blue stars covered with a heavy coat of clear polish. They glistened in her sandals.

  She wanted a scoop of everything. I knew she couldn’t eat it all, so I didn’t order none for myself. We sat in the corner. Playfully she dipped a caramel candy square into her cream and smeared it on my lips. When I smiled, she said, “hansamu.” I ate one of her caramel candies and fed her creams too. The way she sucked on the spoon and the soft candy squares, she was steady seducing me, although I didn’t know why in the ice cream parlor. I wondered if eating ice cream for dinner could be considered one of those cravings I read about in the pregnancy book I’d perused in the bookstore, or if it was just regular for her.

  On the way out she bought colorful candy sticks and a bag of M&M’s. I was smart enough to know that for Akemi those could be snacks or hair ornaments or part of a sweet art project.

  Walking wrapped in the warm wind, once we got back to the beach, we watched a woman making a massive sand sculpture under the glare of the night lights. Akemi intently watched the artist at work, fascinated by her sand sea turtle. I thought about Akemi’s live sea turtles in her Japanese bedroom. Maybe she was thinking the same.

  Around ten minutes before eleven I eased back to Bada Ga with my wife close behind me. In Akemi’s room I removed my kicks before I put down our few bags containing her candies and other items that we had purchased. I looked at the new curtain she had hung in the motel window. Studying it, I saw that she had taken a few yards of some white linen that she had purchased just the other day, and drawn beautiful pictures inside of measured squares. On closer look, I was amazed at this curtain, where each square revealed pieces of our journey from Japan to Korea in intricate drawings. I stood stuck there for some seconds before I turned to jump back into my kicks and head to my room to make the call.

  Akemi stepped in front of her door, leaned against it, and smiled. She began to speak to me in soft-spoken Korean, which could only be to keep me spellbound by the music of her language because I couldn’t know the meaning of even one of her words.

  “Move, girl,” I told her. “I’m leaving. I’ll be back.”

  She bowed her head to me. I unwrapped her silk scarf, and her black hair fell over her shoulders. She knew how much I liked when she wrapped up and how much I enjoyed unwrapping her. She leaned up and rocked back and forth, teasing me some. I understood what was happening, and I planned to control the action with both women this time, Akemi and Chiasa.

  She unsnapped her jeans and began to remove them, first with her hands and then with her feet. It was two minutes to eleven. I turned and walked over to the phone on her desk.

  “Call Chiasa,” I told her. She stared into me before she walked over and began pressing the buttons.

  “Take,” she said, extending her arm, the phone dangling on her fingertips. I took it and sat in the rolling chair behind her desk with my back to Akemi’s seductions.

  “Ryoshi,” Chiasa answered.

  “Chiasa,” I responded. “Konbanwa,” I gave her the greeting.

  “I just walked into my house,” she said, sounding as though she may have flown up the stairs to receive my call.

  “Oh yeah, where were you?” I asked her calmly.

  “Everywhere, I had to buy some supplies for flight school. I was thinking about going to the stables in Nagano this weekend to ride Koinichi.”

  “Koinichi?” I repeated.

  “My pretty Arabian mare, remember?” she asked.

  She knew I could not forget her beautiful creature, with the mysterious eyes and long jet-black tail and white socks. I also was learning that different women have different ways of seducing. Chiasa seduced me with the adventures of her fearless and fire-filled life. As I sat, memories of her were easing out of storage and into my mind’s eyes like a slide show.

  “Yeah, of course I remember,” I said sincerely.

  “Listen …” As I said that one word, Akemi came behind me and slipped her hands through the neck of my white tee and began caressing my bare skin lightly.

  “Hai,” Chiasa said, urging me on.

  “There’s a few things we gotta take care of,” I told her. “I’ll speak on the business first because I don’t want to mix things up.”

  “Okay, I won’t …,” Chiasa said.

  “Won’t what?” Now my wife was licking my ear, her hair flowing down onto my chest.

  “I won’t mix it up,” Chiasa said softly.

  Chiasa, in real life.

  “Good. Buy a small duffel and put all of my things inside,” I told her.

  Akemi tossed her legs over the chair and was now sitting in my lap facing me. She pressed her face against my skin, the other side from where I held the phone to my ear.

  “Remember I mentioned to you about the vending machines?”

  “Hai,” Chiasa said.

  “I need you to go and get that information for me. I want to know the names of the top five vending companies, but especially the ones that are vending unusual items like sneakers. I need all the contact information. Call them up and see if they do business overseas, especially in the US or in any country in northern Africa. Also see if they have any execs that speak English.”

  “I got it,” Chiasa said. “Ryoshi, why are you breathing so hard? Are you working out while we’re on the phone?”

  “Something like that,” I said, as I eased my hand onto the outside of my wife’s panties and began to stroke back and forth over the area that I was most familiar with, her clitoris. Now Akemi was breathing hard. I eased my finger underneath the panty and into her pretty pussy. She began to bounce.

  “Chiasa, hold on a minute,” I told her. “Oh, I’ll call you back.” Now the phone was lying on the floor. I bit my wife’s left nipple to punish her. But she liked it a lot. I felt her pussy contracting and she gushed on my hand and her panties. I stood up with her in my arms and carried her to the bed. Gently I laid her down and stood over her.

  “Bad girl. You’re a bad girl,” I scolded her. She cocked her legs open so slightly and I found myself thrusting and thrashing up inside of her. Oh, Allah, what a feeling. The whole time I’m fucking her, she was speaking Korean to me, saying only Allah knows what, but driving me out of my mind. We were bit
ing each other in selected places.

  When I rolled off still holding her by her petite waist, her skin was covered with sexy sweat. I looked at her. She smiled. I grabbed her up again and hugged her tight. A feeling so good, this good, had to be a problem and could cause many men to lose their lives. Never fuck with another man’s wife. That’s my advice to all men, in every empire.

  Chapter 5

  TEST

  Sun Eun is tall and slim and quietly attractive. Her eyes are filled with vulnerability and she seemed like she should have a Fragile sticker posted somewhere on her body. Professor Dong Hwa showed up to the hospital stitched to her side as though he were there to hold her up. Dressed in pale pink linen and sling-back leather shoes, Sun Eun wore a tight, petite white sweater with small pearls on it and carried a Christian Dior purse.

  Her eyes livened up when she saw Akemi and me approaching down the hospital hallway. The closer we got to her and her husband, the more her eyes began to dance and her posture strengthened. She must’ve been filled with doubt about whether or not we’d show up, but I suspected her doubt was mainly because she couldn’t understand Akemi’s relationship to me. From all that I had learned this week in South Korea, I was sure that her own people couldn’t understand her relationship with her husband either. So I called it even.

  “Anyonghaseyo,” Akemi and I both said. Akemi bowed.

  “You came,” the professor said, smiling.

  “Of course,” I answered.

  The women spoke softly to one another as Professor Dong Hwa spoke with me. “The doctor will be out in a moment. The whole procedure takes less than three minutes.”

  “Is it a male or female?”

  “Eh?”

  “The doctor?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s a good friend of mine, my senior from undergraduate,” Dong Hwa said.

  “It would be better for my wife to have a female doctor,” I told him.

  “Don’t misunderstand. It’s a simple test. There is no undressing or internal examination. It involves a Q-tip and maybe they’ll draw blood from her arm,” he assured me.

  “How long before we get the results?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what the standard turnaround time is on this kind of thing. But I’ve already asked my sunbae to place a special rush on it for me. He will.”

  “Thank you, and that’s good. Akemi and I won’t be able to stay in Korea for long just waiting on the results. You understand that, right?”

  “I understand, but since we are planning to keep this relationship, you and Akemi will know the results as soon as we do, and we will know how to contact you, yes?”

  “That’s the agreement,” I said, smiling slightly at his need to repeat things we’d already confirmed.

  It was finished swiftly. Akemi stood in the hallway in her thin beige cotton Benetton dress and leather-heeled sandals, holding her LV Cruiser bag, which lay lightly on her shoulder because she was only carrying two days’ worth of clothing. Her hair was wrapped in a beige silk scarf and her eyes were lingering on me as I said, “Take care, I’ll call you.” She spoke something to her aunt and uncle. Dong Hwa answered her. She spoke again. I didn’t know what words they were exchanging.

  “Akemi wants to come back to you tonight. She doesn’t want to sleep over.” Dong Hwa sounded disappointed.

  I looked at Akemi. “Come here,” I told her. She came and we turned for privacy. “I’ll come to you tonight. Don’t worry,” I promised.

  “Yakusoku,” she asked, whispering in Japanese.

  “Hai.” I smiled.

  “It’s okay, she’ll stay over,” I told the professor.

  Akemi smiled and apologized to her aunt three times before they left together.

  “Akemi doesn’t know what the lab test was for, does she?” the professor asked as we were heading to his car in the parking garage of the hospital.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Do you mind if I ask you what you told her about coming to the hospital?” he said, opening his car door.

  “I told her, tomorrow, me and you, hospital, take test.’ ”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What did she say?” the professor asked.

  “Hai,” I told him.

  * * *

  “I only have one lecture today. We are making it just on time,” the professor said as his small black Hyundai powered up to pull up seven steep winding hills onto the Busan University campus. On the low, universities are always amazing to me. My own father, a PhD, graduated from three universities—the University of Khartoum in Sudan, the Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and Columbia University in Harlem, New York. On my first date with Akemi, we went to Columbia University and chilled there at night on the lit-up campus. Maybe it was the architecture, the design and layout of the place, or maybe it was because it seemed like a city of youth who were all vying to learn something powerful and do something great. Or maybe it was as simple as all of the athletic fields, gyms, and stadiums. Colleges are the opposite of public schools and high schools, I think, at least as far as New York goes. It seemed like everybody going to public school was going by force and for no other reason. College flipped the script. You had to want to go there and had to prove it by paying a heap of paper. And even if you really wanted it and were poised to pay for it, you might still get rejected. I like that, earning my way in, working to stay in, and ending up with something useful in the end, hopefully …

  “Let’s go,” Professor Dong Hwa said.

  There were about fifty-seven students in his class and they were all seated before we rolled in. He pointed to a seat up front with his head. I opted to push all the way up top to the last row. As I climbed the few wide steps, all heads turned to stare. I faced the direction I was moving in, used to it by now: Japanese ignore, Koreans stare. I sat. Notebooks and pens were out, and Professor Dong Hwa started speaking like there was not one second to waste. His deep Korean melody filled up the small lecture hall and bounced off the walls.

  I pulled out my small notebook and my mind drifted around the globe into the Ghazzalis’ basement, then out to the streets of Brooklyn, then into my sensei’s Brooklyn dojo, and out to home court for the Hustlers League. I thought of Ameer and Chris and even Marty Bookbinder. I thought Marty would be in awe of both the Japanese and Korean bookstores I had visited, and more in awe of their inventory. Over a game of chess when I got back, inshallah, and when I wasn’t stressed, I would tell him how you could buy and read books all night in Japan, and how in Korea the entire family and neighborhood, babies and all, pile up in bookstores and stay there for hours doing everything, including having a full meal in the bookstore restaurants. I would share with him how nobody had to beg the Asians to visit the bookstore, to buy books, to think and learn; it was part of their lifestyle.

  Then my mind moved to Sun Eun’s apartment, my wife, and how she was feeling and what she was eating and drinking, and what was she thinking about right then when I was thinking about her? I thought about what she was observing when she saw Sun Eun. Did she see gestures similar to what she had seen in her mother, or hear Sun Eun use similar words and phrases? Umma doesn’t have a sister. It would be bugged-out, I think, to see two Ummas seated side by side. Then I smiled and said to myself, Impossible!

  Then I thought of my Southern Sudanese grandfather, his life, thoughts, words, and criticisms. Would he think that a university was a good place? He had never been to one, never studied under any professors or professionals, yet he was the wisest man I knew. And it was his sperm that gave rise to my own father. I thought about whether my Southern Sudanese grandfather would say that a university is the exact place that changes a man’s thinking under the guise of making him strong and knowledgeable while actually making him a weak, dependent servant to a deceitful and lesser master. Yes, that’s exactly what he would say. I smiled. I appreciated the way both my father and grandfather allowed me to “visit” them these days, to g
o inside their thoughts and feelings and emerge with their expressions.

  My mind switched to the streets of Tokyo and down the narrow streets of crazy-ass Harajuku and through those blocks that led to Yoyogi Park, a forest filled with secrets. A stone path led me to the doorstep of Chiasa, the shoes lined up outside.

  Could I climb into her heart and mind and search her feelings and thoughts the way I did with my father and grandfather? What about my heart and thoughts? The truth was, Chiasa was the only person in this world who made me feel truly guilty. Before her, guilt was mostly unknown to me. Why? I asked myself. I felt guilty first for seeing Chiasa on the plane. I felt guilty for being with her, guilty for allowing her to use up all her time on me, guilty for feeling close to her too fast, guilty for loving her, guilty for not loving her, and guilty for arousing her and knowing it, and leaving her alone with a boiling heart and fire in her bones. I felt guilty for wanting her for myself and guilty for feeling like fighting to keep her from any other man, and guilty for coveting her virginity and for feeling a love that led to an urge for me to push up inside of her. Fuck it, when it came to Chiasa, I was just guilty, period. Now I’m clear. I was clear before. Then I got lost. Now I’m clear again.

  If I wanted to keep Chiasa close, I had to first speak with my wife clearly and honestly. I had to introduce them face to face. I knew I could never allow any woman to rock my first love, Akemi, who I still love sincerely, deeply, and strongly and who I would love and secure forever, as long as Allah allowed me life. My wife would have to agree. If not, I would let it burn, and let Chiasa go.

  If we two, then three were in harmony, I’d have to contact and confront Chiasa’s father. If he agreed, I’d simply marry Chiasa. She would become my second wife. I smiled. Yes, I would marry her easily, love her, work hard for her, fight for her, kill for her, cherish her, and give her babies, inshallah.