Secondhand World

  “Good-bye, Myung Hee,” he said. “Don't drive too fast.”

  “I won't, Dad,” I said.

  The evening of my mother's next poetry class, I got into my father's car and drove to the North way, got on and then off again, and ended up cruising by the unimpressive group of brick and concrete buildings that constituted the campus of Battrick Community College. I parked my car in the visitor's lot behind the admissions building. The buildings were conveniently marked with large white signs printed in orange letters, the signs more impressive and imposing than the buildings themselves.

  It was a warm night, in the high seventies, and I strolled along, past the cement-block structure proudly marked LANGE LIBRARY,past the career services building that looked like a double-wide, past the sprawling brick hydra that was the Hutner Student Union. I tagged along at the end of a prospective student tour, listening to the backward-walking student guide describe the joys of foosball and air hockey, the convenience of the on-campus snack bar, and the thoughtful addition of a weight and exercise room.

  I found the drab brick building that housed the English department at the edge of campus, at the point where BCC seemed to end and the town began. There was a pizza parlor across the street, and two doors down was a laundromat. At this point I knew what I was there for. I simply wanted to observe for myself, live and in the flesh, the esteemed Professor William R. Moul-ten, author of Unspeakable Acts. His chapbook did not include a photograph, nor any biographical information, and I was curious what this man looked like, how he moved in the world. I imagined some aging hippie with a William Kunstler hairstyle, in jeans and a handwoven shirt from Guatemala, sandals with white socks.

  I walked into the building and found his name on the board in the front hall—WILLIAM R. MOULTEN RM.24. There was a secretary in a glassed-in office on the left, but she didn't look up when I came in. I knew Moulten wouldn't be there because he was in class with my mother for another five minutes, so I mounted the narrow staircase, holding on to the handrail on the left. The stairs seemed warped and uneven, and my feet had trouble negotiating their crooked lie.

  The door to his office was open, and no one else seemed to be around, so I popped in and took a look. It was a small room with a dormer window and a slanted ceiling, packed with books on shelves and in stacks on the floor. The metal desk was piled high with papers and books, and the only personal touches I could discern were a series of postcards of black-and-white portraits thumbtacked along the side of a bookcase. One I recognized as Dylan Thomas, curiously wrapped around some sort of sticklike tree, looking like a particularly woeful Saint Sebastian. Another I knew was T. S. Eliot, with his owl eyes and banker's uniform. Walt Whitman was there, of course, with his madman's hair and beard, containing multitudes.

  I heard voices and footsteps coming up the stairs, so I quickly slid out of Moulten's office and around the hall, which doglegged to the right, and, standing outside Sally Baldwin's office, pretended to be searching for my paper in a pile on a chair marked WILDERNESS LIT.

  “Of course, it's not quite so straightforward, Helen,” I heard a man's voice say. It was a deep voice with a trace of a Southern accent, and it sounded so pompous I had to believe it was Moulten's.

  To my surprise, I heard my mother's answering giggle. “It never is, Bill,” she said. “I've learned that much.”

  Helen? I'd never heard my mother called that. Hae Kyoung. I suppose it was close enough. But it made me cringe. Helen. As though he couldn't pronounce her real name. As though he had decided to rechristen her; the poet with the power of naming. Helen, after Helen of Troy, destroyer of men and cities.

  “The thing about Stevens …” I heard him say, and the door closed.

  I waited for five minutes, ten, fifteen. I wore no watch, so I had no way of knowing exactly how long I waited there, standing frozen with Lisa Flanagan's paper, “Thoreau's Views of Nature in Waiden’ in my hand.

  Finally I crept back down the stairs. The door to Moulten's office was solid wood, its public face barren except for a color cartoon from Doonesbury that I did not take the time to read.

  I left the English building and went across the street to sit in the pizza parlor, at a table by the window. I ordered a slice and a Coke and kept careful vigil as I ripped the pizza to shreds with a plastic fork and swirled the ice in my cup. The incurious proprietor wiped tables around me, looking up at frequent intervals at a ball game blinking from a television anchored in the wall.

  Several people went in and out. At one point I saw the secretary leave the building and walk slowly down the street to the parking lot. I had no idea what time it was at this point, but I believed my mother and her professor to have been in his office for easily two hours by now.

  I was just about to give up and go home, my stonelike anger having given way to a kind of disgust at myself, at them, at the whole sordid stakeout I had poisoned myself with, when I saw them leave the building together, my mother and her professor. Helen and Bill. He was a tall man with hair the color and texture of an ocean sponge—not at all what I'd expected. From where I sat I couldn't tell how old he was, though he seemed younger and squarer than I'd imagined, in a plain white shirt and chinos, with ordinary brown shoes that looked like Hush Puppies.

  They stood outside for a few moments, laughing about something, and then they began to walk, slowly, in the same direction the secretary had earlier. At the corner of the street they stopped. He leaned forward and kissed my mother, briefly but unmistakably, on the lips, and my mother put her hand up to his cheek. Then he crossed the street and kept walking, and my mother entered the parking lot, found her car, got in, and drove away.

  Accusation

  Iraced home from BCC at eighty miles an hour to make sure I was back before my mother, who was a notoriously slow driver. I didn't know what I would say to her, how I could admit I knew what I did without forfeiting a large portion of the moral high ground. I felt such a tremendous rage, it was like a tumor blooming inside my heart. Even so, I wasn't sure why. Was it that my mother was cheating on my father? That she was infatuated with a bad poet? What was the source of this gruesome passion that shook me, bodily, like a hurricane force, so that even as I drove down the highway, I had to hunch over the steering wheel with both arms, hugging it for ballast?

  • • •

  My mother got in a few minutes behind me, bright-eyed and breathless. “Oh, Isa, hi,” she said, closing the door to the basement behind her. She stepped out of her shoes, put on her slippers, and hurried upstairs to put away her books.

  I followed her into her bedroom. She'd taken her wig off and was placing it on its Styrofoam head. She scratched at her scalp, in back where her scar was, and began to brush her real hair, which was dulling to gray beneath the black. She looked up at me. I was standing in the doorway.

  “Isa, what is it?”

  “I saw you,” I said.

  My mother gave me an uncomprehending look.

  “I went to Battrick I got back just before you did. I saw you with him.”

  My mother sat down on the bed, the brush in her fist still poised toward her head. She said nothing.

  “I saw him kiss you,” I went on. “I heard him call you Helen. He was talking to you like you were a second grader, something about Wallace Stevens.” Something compelled me to keep speaking, as though to prove to her I had been there, that I'd compiled hard evidence against her. Still she said nothing. She began to brush her hair again, slowly, looking not at me but toward the sliding closet doors.

  “He's a lousy poet,” I said. “That book of his is the most pathetic bunch of crap I've ever read. No wonder he teaches at a community college, so people like you will look up to him and treat him like this great man, when he knows he couldn't write a good poem if his life depended on it. I bet he preys on women like you every semester, picks out the most adoring in the group, gives her his book, tells her what great stuff she writes—”

  My mother raised the hand with the brush, �
�josim-hae” she said in a low voice that did not sound at all like her. Be careful.

  The pitch of our breathing heightened. I was aware of the white of my mother's knuckles as she gripped the hairbrush above her head, the red flange of her nostrils. Her eyes flickered and then narrowed.

  “Go ahead,” I said, my voice steady.

  My mother said nothing, but brought her hand down, and I walked out of the room.

  Note

  Idrove back to Battrick. This time I parked in the lot beside the laundromat, next door to the English building. The doors were locked and the place was dark. I went across the street to the pizza parlor and borrowed a pen and a blank paper place mat from the fat proprietor. There were more customers now, college kids in booths watching the game on television, chattering among themselves, pouring pitchers of beer and hoisting pizza slices from the soggy rounds of cardboard in the middle of their tables.

  The pen the man had given me didn't work at first, its ballpoint stopping and starting like a bad transmission. I had to scribble along the top to get the ink to flow.

  Professor Moulten (I wrote):

  I know all about your affair with your student “Helen” Hae Kyoung Sohn. If it does not end immediately, I will be forced to take the matter to the Dean and to Helen's husband, Dr. Tae Mun Sohn, who has a black belt in tae kwon do and no reverence whatsoever for poetry.

  A concerned party

  I folded the note several times and wrote WILLIAM MOULTENacross the blank part. I walked back over to the English department and hesitated. I wondered if the secretary was the kind of person who would unfold and read a note addressed to a professor before putting it neatly in his box. Or maybe one of the other members of the faculty would come in early in the morning. Would they pick it up? They probably all knew already. It was a small college; it was probably the gossip of the campus.

  “Look who Moulten's doing now. That pretty Oriental in his poetry class.”

  “God, he didn't give her a copy of his chapbook, did he?”

  “Of course. He always does.”

  My face burned at the indignity of it, the public humiliation. I felt it on behalf of my father, and my mother, and on my own behalf, the single living child of their failing union. I stood there, poised to slip the note under the front door of the office, where it would lie in the foyer until someone bent to pick it up. I wished I'd thought to bring an envelope, but all the stores were closed by now, and it occurred to me that Bill Moulten, being the kind of person I knew him to be, would probably find a note like this amusing. I couldn't stomach the thought of becoming a joke at his expense. In the end, I crumpled the note and threw it in the trash can on the corner of the street where I'd seen a strange man kiss my mother.

  Ultimatum

  My mother came into my room the night I returned from BCC for the second time, having failed to deliver a note to her lover. She knocked and I unlocked the door. She was standing in her robe, holding a piece of dental floss in both hands.

  “Isa,” she said, “don't do this. I will give him up. It's wrong, I know. I just needed …” She started to cry. She sat down on my bed and bowed her head; she wasn't wearing her wig, and a sober vein of gray opened at her part. I felt the thrill of my righteousness, but I felt pity for her also. I thought of the months of grief after Stephen died. The way she had looked then was the way she looked now, like misery itself feeding from its own subterranean source.

  “Are you in love with him?” I said. “You can't be in love with him! I mean, God, Mom.”

  “You don't understand, Isa,” my mother said quietly.

  “Obviously not.”

  She patted the bed next to her for me to sit down. I remained standing. “You remember you asked me,” she said, “if love lasts? And I said it changed.”

  I glared at her.

  “I love your father. He is difficult man; you know that, Myung Hee-ya. He does not show his feelings, he has bad temper sometimes, but he is a good man and he loves me, I know.” My mother stopped, readjusted her position on the bed by shifting her hips slightly. “People change, Myung Hee,” she said. “You will learn. Marriage is a hard thing, because what you want when you are young is maybe not what you need when you are older.”

  I considered this. It was strange that she was calling me Myung Hee.

  “So what do you need now that you aren't getting?” I said derisively.

  My mother blushed and looked down at her lap. “You know, Myung Hee, before the war came, I was young girl, and I had been in this bad fire, and everyone said no one would marry me. And there was this boy, the brother of a friend of mine, and he would watch me when I was walking to school, and one day my friend gave me a note he had written. He wanted to know me, he said. He thought I was pretty. I did not write him back. But the next time I saw him I smiled, and when I went to my friend's house we talked and once we held hands for a few moments, and I thought he was the most splendid boy I had ever seen.”

  “And?” I said.

  “He was killed by Communists,” she said. “In the first days of the war. He was a poet, too sensitive to fight.”

  “A poet?”

  My mother smiled. “I know what you think, Isa. Yes, he wrote poems, but that's not what I mean. He was a poet by his nature. He could not survive war.” She looked down at the piece of dental floss in her hand. “I think sometimes that he was my great love,” she said. “By the time I met your father, I did not think so much about those things.”

  “So you never loved Dad?”

  My mother made a face, her expression equivocal, unconvinced. “I loved him,” she conceded. “Only it was different feeling. With your father I felt safe. He was so sure, and he loved me so much. And he was very hurt, your father, underneath his pride. I think I knew … I knew about your father, that there were things we didn't understand about each other and that he would not try to understand, and that was good for me.”

  “What about Bill?” I said.

  My mother pulled the dental floss taut between her fingers. She spoke slowly, deliberately. “You say Bill is bad poet,” she said. “I don't know. I cannot judge. But he talks poetry to me. He tells me I am beautiful. He makes me feel beautiful.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “One day you will know what this means.”

  Of course I felt I knew what it meant already, and this rekindled my anger. I thought of Hero and tried to banish the feel of his hands on my body, the light that radiated from his skin. I banished also the fleeting image of my mother lying under William Moulten, his white hands engulfing the brown swell of her breasts. I thought of my mother's fascination with those dancing caryatids, despite the fact that they had ruptured into flame and almost taken her life. I thought of the way, the morning I'd had the premonition of my brother's death, I had accidentally smooshed a moth against the back of my hand, how its pale body had rubbed across my skin, adding an unlikely sheen, an opalescent light. I shook my head.

  “Look,” I said now, “you are beautiful. You know that. Dad certainly thinks you are. The thing is, what you're doing is wrong. What if Dad found out? Don't you realize what you're doing?”

  My mother looked at me with a level gaze. “He won't find out,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I am careful. And because he is busy with work.”

  “What if I told him?” I said.

  “You won't,” she said.

  “Why wouldn't I?” I said.

  My mother smiled. “Because we are women, Isa, and we know how to keep secrets.”

  “It's not my secret!” I shouted. “They're never my secrets! ‘Don't tell your Dad,’ whenever you buy a dress or a new pair of shoes. ‘Don't tell your Dad,’ when you dent the car. ‘Don't tell your Dad,’ about the money you have stashed in your jewelry box! I'm tired of keeping all your fucking secrets!”

  “Isa!” My mother looked at me in shock, but it was as though I could see her only from a great distance, and instead of feeling pit
y or sympathy or love, or any of the emotions you'd think I might feel—the daughter who had looked to her mother all her life with adoration—I felt only disgust. She started to cry then, harder, her tears turning to sobs, a great keening grief, and I saw the flaw that extended throughout the world open upon her face.

  Graduation Dress

  Afew days before my father came back from California, my mother took me shopping for a graduation dress. She was, as usual, quite insistent about what she felt would be most flattering on me—something white, she thought, tea length, with a flared skirt and some lace on the sleeves. I kept mumbling that I was going to be wearing a long robe on top anyway, so what did it matter what I wore underneath?

  “Oh, Isa,” my mother said with a trace of her old cajoling, “every girl wants beautiful dress for her graduation day!”

  “Not every girl,” I said. “Not me.”

  My mother looked at me. She started to say something but stopped. She hugged the few dresses she'd chosen to her waist as she zipped through another rack, her fingers flying as though across an abacus.

  I loitered in the large, fluorescent-lit space, glancing at price tags, running my fingers across fabrics. I watched other women, with my mother's same frantic pace, hoisting garments over their shoulders in a fireman's carry.

  We had spoken no more about William Moulten since the night of my discovery, and I wasn't sure whether my mother had broken it off yet or not, but she was acting hyper-normal, a souped-up version of her former self. As I tried on the dresses she handed me, I looked in the mirror and saw me in a white dress with beige stripes, me in a white dress with doily-like lace, me in a pale pink dress with white flowers. I trooped out of the dressing room for my mother's inspection, dutifully turning this way and that at the wave of her hand while she nodded or frowned or shook her head.