‘I’m serious,’ you say. ‘I should have worn one long ago.’
‘Is it too late?’
‘It depends.’
He looks at your face again, then asks, ‘Did I already tell you that you look beautiful?’
Husein’s fingers touch yours. You pull your hand away. Husein looks surprised.
‘If you pull any crap, I’m taking off the wig,’ you growl through your smile.
‘But you’ll still be beautiful.’
That night you drink two glasses of wine. You don’t feel drunk, but you say more than you intended to. You don’t know how it starts, but you tell him about your comfortable marriage with Bob. Comfortable, because you don’t love him, but he gives you space. Husein replies that you’ve never loved anyone like he has.
‘But you’ve never loved someone real.’
‘You’re real,’ he says.
He’s trying to be seductive, but you wonder who he’s flirting with: you or Karina? Your shoulders feel heavy. You hope you’re not being possessed by Karina’s ghost. You have to stop drinking wine.
After dessert, Husein invites you to another spot. Where? you ask. He doesn’t want to tell you. It’s a secret, he says.
As you leave the restaurant, you glance again at your watch. 11 p.m. There’s no harm in going for a stroll. But in the car, you grow nervous and think of Bob. The place Husein has in mind seems to be far away. You’ve left the San Francisco city limits. In front of you there is only dark, deserted road. You feel sleepy. Maybe you shouldn’t have drunk so much. When you open your eyes, you catch a dazzling yellow light moving towards you. You scream. Everything goes black.
A car travelling in the opposite direction has collided with you.
In the final seconds you sense Husein swerving the steering wheel towards the other car. An accident? Or something else? You’re too weary for assumptions. A series of images flickers in your head: flashing neon in front of a hotel, a silhouette of a man in a hat, a geometric floor pattern that resembles a labyrinth. Everything is so much like a slow-motion film that you wonder who could possibly be stretching time.
Do you have regrets?
Who’d have thought you’d come to such a useless end, trapped by a deus ex machina? But you’ve had many stories. You have chosen your own red-shoes adventure.
Hopefully, when the police find you in the morning, you’ll make a beautiful corpse in your grey dress and red shoes. Is that asking for too much? You want to assure yourself that your head, hands and feet remain intact. But you can’t feel your fingers. Let’s just fantasise about tomorrow morning. Noel the receptionist might read about the accident in the newspaper, trembling. His perfect eyebrows won’t move, but his face will grow ashen and he’ll swear an oath never to utter the word fiesta again.
Oh, and how is Husein? Why is he silent? You wonder if he’s still dapper or now unrecognisable, body crushed and torn, eyes agog, staring upward. You conclude that he wanted to take you to Mission San Juan Bautista. That’s where his search for Karina comes to an end. In bringing his fiction to life, at least, he has been unswerving. Sadly, though, the woman in the wig, as the curtain descends, is not Karina.
Images continue to appear randomly, one after another, until finally you see nothing more than whiteness, a void. Will an angel come? You sense a familiar figure coming into view. Devil? Where are we going?
FINIS
The Solidarity Club of Lost Husbands
Dressed in black, everyone, yourself included, sits in a circle. You commit a few of the others’ names to memory: Carmencita from Mexico, Soonyi of South Korea, and Andy, born in Boston. Doña Manuela, a tall, sturdy Argentinian woman of sixty-five, is the society’s founder. She listens throughout as she wipes photo frames, a music box and her collection of miniature houses. Everyone in the club except you lives in Los Angeles. In Doña Manuela’s living room, however, you must cross borders on the way to the past. The Solidarity Club of Lost Husbands is an international body that traces memories from Tijuana to the Yellow Sea.
You never imagined that a city with such an awful transport system could have led you there. It’s not Los Angeles that you’re indebted to, though, but the police station toilets.
A policewoman had recorded details about your husband’s disappearance, knitting her eyebrows when you mentioned several traits (sixty-two years old, white, fat, asthmatic). She scanned the front page of your passport, as if trying to convince herself that you’d yet to turn thirty, and occasionally stole a glance at your beautiful scarf. Upstanding public servant that she was, though, she finished her report and said warmly, ‘We’ll do our best.’
In the toilets, you ran into an elderly woman of perhaps eighty, with grey, bobbed hair. She flashed a friendly smile, then greeted you somewhat clumsily, ‘Dari Indonesia, ya?’ She goes on to say that she herself left Malang in the 1960s and has never returned home. For years she lived in The Hague before moving to California.
You answered that yes, you’re from Indonesia, and then admitted that you’d just filed a report about the disappearance of your husband. You and he had been planning a honeymoon from New York. You flew first to Los Angeles because he had to attend a conference in Europe, but now, three days after he was scheduled to arrive, he has yet to catch up with you. All communication has been cut off.
The old woman nodded, looking more attentive than sympathetic. She rummaged in her bag and offered you a card. As she washed her hands, you took note of an odd name printed there.
‘This is a club I used to be active in. You might find it helpful. Just say that you heard about it from Yunita.’
‘You’re here because your husband is missing too?’
‘Oh, no! I lost my wallet.’ She turned off the tap. ‘My husband died over forty years ago.’
Yunita rotated her wrinkled hands under the dryer. Your condolences were swallowed in the machine’s roar. She looked in the mirror and smoothed her short hair.
‘Well, I’ll be on my way. I hope you find your husband.’
The Solidarity Club of Lost Husbands doesn’t aim to find those who are lost, but to bring life to loss. Nevertheless, Doña Manuela is always ready to share her contacts – police, private detectives, activist networks – as well as tips on dealing with the state apparatus. Her principle: let’s not become victims twice over. She belonged to several groups demanding justice for victims of Argentina’s Dirty War, and her mother-in-law was a member of the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
‘I have some pictures I haven’t shown you yet.’
Carmencita’s voice is husky. She opens a tiny Dell laptop in a purple case to share the photos.
Carmencita and her husband had visited Paris three years ago, in spring 2005, to shoot some pictures before their wedding. They attached a padlock reading ‘Carmencita & Pablo’ to the bridge of love, the Pont des Arts. A photographer friend immortalised Carmencita in Pablo’s embrace. She wore a white dress, cropped in front, trailing behind. She looked like the star of a telenovela.
But after their wedding in Los Angeles, Pablo went off to a Walmart late one afternoon and never returned. Even now, his clothes remain stored neatly in the closet.
‘The lock will be there forever, like our love.’
At Carmencita’s side, Andy Horowitz rolls his eyes.
‘Oh, how romantic! I hope some lunatic doesn’t go wild and set the bridge on fire.’
‘You’re so cruel!’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Andy says sweetly, ‘only morons attach love locks.’
‘I know a couple from Guadalajara who did it, and they’re both authors!’ Carmencita retorts.
Andy didn’t believe in many things, including marriage, until he had a nasty accident that required surgery. Greg, his partner of a decade, wasn’t legally considered a family member, so Andy’s mother flew out from Boston to sign the consent forms. After Andy recovered, he thought a lot about the legal issues. If he were ever in a coma for months, he wanted
to be euthanised, and he wanted Greg to be able to make the final medical decisions for him. But before euthanasia could separate them, Greg disappeared. The last time he called Andy, he was about to sail across the Hecate Strait in Canada, which was prone to storms and bad weather.
Members of the Solidarity Club of Lost Husbands remember those who are absent by repeating their stories. They can start from any point, in linear fashion from the beginning until the loss of their husband, or via flashbacks. Some choose to plunge in medias res.
Thoughts of old age triggered Andy’s decision to marry in Toronto (in 2006 same-sex marriage was not yet possible in California). Andy’s story then moves further back in time, to the art gallery where he and Greg met. He’s a film editor and works in enclosed spaces; Greg was a photographer and loved nature.
When it’s your turn to speak, you retell the timeline of your loss as if you’re back in the police station. Carmencita, looking sadder than you, asks, ‘What do you remember most about your husband?’
You look around as you clutch at memories. A little nervously, you say, ‘Can I tell you another time?’
Your companions nod, though they appear confused. Then comes Soonyi’s voice, slow and frail, just like her movements. Her face is sweet, though she is certainly older than Doña Manuela.
‘It’s OK. I don’t remember a lot about my husband either.’
All sorts of things were scattered about after the Korean War and the US withdrew most of its troops. Grand events like wars often leave scraps of debris in their wake, useless and dirty, like syphilis and babies.
At age seventeen, Soonyi gave birth to a black-skinned child from a soldier she called husband even though they never wed.
‘He never contacted me. Even his address was fake,’ Soonyi said, her voice still soft. ‘But there was no reminder more real than Jihoon, my son. Because of Jihoon I was treated as a whore. Because he had no father and because his skin was black.’
The participants fall silent. You intuit that this happens every time. Some stories never dull through repetition – in fact they always stab.
Doña Manuela breaks the hush. ‘Next?’
You begin to understand how the members have come to cherish their loss. Memory becomes a shrine that must be polished to a sparkle, like each corner of the photo frames that Doña Manuela burnishes with painstaking care. Some other women knit. Carmencita paints her nails. Soonyi always prepares bibimbap (which seems to you like a combination of rice and gado-gado) for the members to share. Only Andy, the editor, feels that he doesn’t need a handicraft of some sort, because such is his daily routine: cutting, rearranging and splicing stories.
Some days, the knitting is rent asunder and nail polish stains the skin.
It is on one of those days that you arrive early and bump into Soonyi at the door. Looking unwell, she rushes home. Shortly afterwards you come across something on the bathroom floor. Someone has hawked up a lungful of phlegm.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that.’ Doña Manuela approaches you. ‘Sorry. It must have been Soonyi.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘Her heart is weak, yes. But the spitting – she stopped a long time ago,’ says Doña Manuela. ‘It used to be an addiction. She’d do it in places that are guarded, like government offices and city libraries.’
You can’t imagine how it must have felt to have an illegitimate black child in post-war Korea.
Soonyi was determined to escape. A brief marriage allowed her to finally set foot in America in 1975. Since then she had often been struck by an intense desire to spit in public facilities. She was apprehended by a security guard once, then released because she was assumed to be ill. After all, her sweet face harboured no malice.
You remember her bibimbap. A foul sensation develops in your mouth upon seeing Soonyi’s phlegm.
While helping to clean the bathroom, you hear more about not only Soonyi but also Doña Manuela and the loss of her husband during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s.
‘Obviously he’s dead. But how he died, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It probably wasn’t very different from what happened to Yunita’s husband.’
The roar of the hand dryer in the police station toilet comes back to you.
Yunita, says Doña Manuela, never knew whether her husband was shot or butchered.
‘She’s not even sure whether he died in Java or Bali.’
There’s no dryer here, but your throat feels parched.
‘In my country, people were disappeared in different ways,’ she continues. ‘Some were stripped naked and thrown into a freezing river, or forced out of a helicopter. Every day we choose our own nightmare.’
In the bathroom, you hope for the roar of a hand dryer. But all you find is a roll of toilet tissue, clean and mute, which can’t rescue you.
‘You must love your husband very much, Doña.’
‘Does that matter?’
She asks if you love your husband. You don’t answer.
‘It’s obvious that the state oppressed me,’ she intones. Now her voice is slow and strange. ‘The Bible says: Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’
Doña Manuela, sturdy and calm, seems to you like a volcano, keeping her fury in check through painstaking, trivial acts. You dare not imagine when and how she will erupt.
You’ve already stopped visiting the club by the time Soonyi dies. An event has forced you back to New York. We’ll come to it shortly, but, to be brief, you’re at Bob’s apartment when you hear about Soonyi’s death. In the name of solidarity, you fly to Los Angeles to attend her funeral. You see her for the last time in church, her corpse done up for the casket as beautifully as a pixie’s. Carmencita has applied her make-up.
You remember your disgust over the bibimbap, and the day at the club that changed everything. From then on, everyone finished Soonyi’s bibimbap, and when her health deteriorated, Doña Manuela would visit her home simply to help cook.
That day Carmencita and Andy had bickered. The term ‘Lost Husband’ needed to be redefined, Andy argued, because it didn’t apply to Carmencita. Evidently, her husband wasn’t lost, he was an escapee.
‘Oh, wake up and smell the coffee, Carmencita. We all know what happened. Your husband is here in LA, living with his new girlfriend!’
Andy’s cynical barb made Carmencita burst into hysterical tears. Doña Manuela shot him a glare.
‘Sorry.’ Andy looked mildly apologetic. ‘I think all of us could use a little slap from reality.’
‘People aren’t here to be slapped,’ Doña Manuela declared.
Soonyi, who had been silent, spoke up.
‘Andy’s right. We need a slap,’ she said. ‘My husband – I found him. We met again in 1980.’
All eyes turned towards the diminutive woman. Doña Manuela’s jaw clamped shut. Her broad shoulders rose and fell. The abrupt appearance of new information, a year after Soonyi had joined the club, left her feeling betrayed.
‘That’s quite interesting, Soonyi.’ Doña Manuela’s tone was icy cold. ‘So now, after all these months, we learn that your husband wasn’t missing after all.’
Soonyi bowed her head for a long time. Then you heard her voice, so calm. ‘He wasn’t missing. I made him go missing.’
A storyteller must also erase.
In 1953, the father of Soonyi’s baby left Korea and married a woman in America. By the time Soonyi finally located him, he had been widowed. He swore he didn’t know he had a child in Korea, and asked Soonyi to marry him and forget all her past suffering.
Two days after their wedding, Soonyi put a suitcase into the trunk of her car and drove far, far away.
‘I miss him. Sometimes, even now, after decades, I feel he’s still lying next to me.’
Soonyi wiped her teary eyes.
‘Maybe that’s what I kept in the suitcase.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Not him.’ And then: silence.
At that point Doña Manuela stood up and served
the bibimbap.
Now, dressed in black, you and your compatriots go to a Korean restaurant after the funeral. Your husband still hasn’t been found. Maybe you don’t love him, but that doesn’t matter. Losing someone and a sense of loss – each brings a different emptiness, slippery and enigmatic. Sometimes they intersect in miraculous ways, as you learned from Doña Manuela, Soonyi and the Solidarity Club of Lost Husbands.
Turn to page 329.
You place the shoes carefully in an empty shoebox, which you found in Anna’s closet, and set them on the dining table. You leave the key to the apartment and a note: Thank you for your kindness. Please accept these shoes as a memento. Happy adventuring!
You button your coat and pull on boots. Without looking back, you open the door and walk down the stairs. A sharp gust of wind strikes your cheeks as you exit the building. You close your eyes and take a deep breath, as if freed from a cage. In your mind, the cage resembles a shop display window. You imagine Maria traipsing about elsewhere in red shoes. Not in Bulgaria – she doesn’t want to go back there. Maybe as a teacher in Botswana, or as a social activist in Baltimore. Sounds like fun.
Continue on to page 341.
Noel chauffeurs you to the hotel lobby. He helps take your bags out from the trunk and hugs you warmly as he says goodbye.
‘If you need anything, just give me a call.’
You smile and nod. You don’t envision calling him any time soon.
Once in your room, you immediately open your laptop to check for email from Bob. No news. Maybe he’s on his way. You’ve given him the hotel’s address, naturally, and he can take a cab from the airport. Meanwhile, you kill time visiting tourist sights in Los Angeles. Getting around LA without your own vehicle turns out to be a real pain. You can hardly wait for Bob’s arrival on Saturday, so you can rent a car to travel around.
But Saturday comes and there’s still no sign of Bob. Maybe his plane has been delayed, you think. Maybe he had to postpone his trip. You can’t reach him. On Sunday, you wake up without any news. Anxiety sets in. You call LAX information and ask if a plane from Frankfurt has arrived.
The Wandering Page 28