Drifting House Read online

  She rescued Seongwon’s work. It was a painting. It was her name. She pressed her face to its charred edges and inhaled the smoking hanji.

  Seongwon kissed her forehead, her toes. His eyes, bright with worship, sought her approval. Was he a good enough man, artist, lover?

  “You smell exactly like a woman should,” he said.

  “And you smell like you’ve been with a woman.”

  “That’s impossible. I showered.” He sniffed himself. “I smell like barley soap.”

  She maintained a careless smile to show that none of this mattered to her. “You always smell like women.”

  “They say there’s a transvestite bar in Itaewon.” He moved restlessly across the room and back as he referred to the neighborhood dominated by American soldiers. “We should visit.”

  She burrowed into his armpit and breathed in his accumulated disappointments that equaled her own. She had loved Seongwon’s risks for greater freedoms, but time had done its work and now they lived ruled by the former dictator’s cronies, and Seongwon had retreated into smaller, more manageable desires. Only then she had been shocked by her capacity to love all that was broken and flawed about him.

  “Can you imagine?” His voice was eager, searching for something else to believe in. “A bar full of transvestites in Seoul of all places.”

  “Would they be safe with you around?” She kept her voice light. She refused to act hysterical, needy. She refused to act like a woman.

  They made love; they made up. She tried to make their lovemaking, still affectionate but no longer exciting, more interesting for herself; she insisted on experimenting with different positions while on top. She looked down at the scars across his chest left by beatings in prison, his face now stripped of its confidence. How vulnerable he seemed to her in private, how boyish, so proud of his scars, his risks. His father was powerful; the government had let Seongwon live, but she was careful not to remind him of that. Soon she concentrated on herself. After a time, she forgot about the man underneath and she focused on her pleasure, until it was over.

  He sat up and kissed her buttocks.

  “I haven’t washed,” she said.

  “I love every part of you.”

  She touched his receding hairline, masked by his shaved head. With the negative ki, that energy drained from her body, she was at peace, for now. When he made speeches, his eyes sought her calm presence. He walked bullishly ahead one day, then woke up at night sweating and yanking at invisible wires pulsing across his body. When she held him, he whispered, Thank you for saving me, into her ear. She had been trained all her life to take care of men, so how could she turn away from him, a man who needed her so much?

  So this was marriage. With Seongwon, Eunkang had been allowed to be herself. She had thrown occasional chunks of cement at the riot police, she had worn obnoxious colors. While friends strategized for their children’s education and labored under weekly visits to the in–laws, she neglected dirty dishes, and painted with no pressure to sell. They had not had children, and now never would, no matter how it grieved her. Marriage, free and fluttering. She liked that image of herself, untruthful as it was.

  Seongwon was also himself. Too much himself.

  The next morning, while she cleared the breakfast table, a bell rang through the daecheong, the main hall.

  “It must be the help,” said Seongwon.

  “Help?”

  He rocked back and forth, heel to toe. An excited reaction she recognized.

  When Eunkang crossed the courtyard and opened the gate, she recognized the girl from yesterday.

  Mina Lim, as Seongwon introduced her, was a ­beauty—the artist in Eunkang could not ignore this. Her face, bright and alert, diminished the garden’s ginkgo trees and surrounding mountains into a mere landscape. And there was an uncompromising look to the defiant tilt of her hip, the way her generous chest jutted out in challenge, an independence that Eunkang occasionally glimpsed in the streets of Seoul. She was fascinated because she had never met these new generation women; most women, young and old, still played the desired types: the submissive, the unfailingly polite, the beautiful virgin. The type that Eunkang despised yet found herself imitating.

  Seongwon’s eyes roamed from Eunkang to the sky, then darted to Mina’s tanned skin with thinly veiled pleasure.

  “Hearty, isn’t she?” He gazed at her as if admiring a ­Jean-François Millet or a Park Su–geun painting. “A real village girl.”

  Hearty, Eunkang considered, did not describe Mina’s lean suppleness, like a silk streamer unfurling in the wind, or her full lips and large, fierce eyes softened by a curtain of lashes. Seongwon observed Eunkang, perhaps anticipating a scene. She would not give him that kind of power. She said, “Yes, that she is.”

  Each studied the other. Closer, she saw that Mina must be older than she’d thought, maybe ­twenty-five. Her distinctive scent of sweet rice and persimmons filled the space between them. Finally Eunkang looked away.

  In the daecheong the doors on all four sides had been raised and latched to the ceiling, so the garden merged with the house. Mina’s gaze wandered across the pond to the original sutras of Monk Wonhyo and handcrafted furniture. Her gaze was rapacious. She looked at the room the way she looked at Eunkang, stripping it naked in one glance. Her eyes seemed to take in each item, calculate its worth, see through the couple’s pretensions. Then she smiled, a sweet, surprising smile. Eunkang saw again the extravagance of their sleek hanok, and their hollow claims to freedom from attachment. How ludicrous were all attempts at defining the self! So what if they tended daily to their garden and cleaned their own house, activities that few in Seoul with their means participated in. In the village, elderly men carried forty kilos of rice on their backs. Many families still used outhouses.

  “­Seonsyaeng-nim.” Mina called him teacher. “Your house ­is—a work of art.”

  Seongwon ­quickly—too quickly for his leisurely drawl, said, “Mina paints, too. My very gifted apprentice.” He could not disguise his pleasure.

  Eunkang played hostess. “And have you lived around here all your life?” No answer.

  “And your family?”

  Mina looked away. “In Seoul somewhere,” she said. Though respectable women lived with their parents until marriage.

  “You’re starting to sound like the angibu, with all their interrogations!” said Seongwon. There was impatience in his voice, as if he expected cooperation with his latest game.

  “Just being social,” Eunkang said, meanly satisfied with the girl’s discomfort. But there was also curiosity. Her first encounter with one of her husband’s lovers, and she found herself disturbed, titillated, imagining Mina the way Seongwon might.

  The girl would understand and flee, Eunkang guessed, most would, and she was intrigued when Mina stayed. When Seongwon fretted about the mess and important Hong Kong art dealers visiting in the afternoon, Mina merely said she would start with the floors.

  So Mina scrubbed. And Eunkang dusted. Seongwon’s hands fluttered like birds’ wings as he made ­over-the-top pronouncements such as “It has to be so clean they can eat off the floors.” When Mina looked amused, Eunkang wished she could explain that Seongwon was still intact, suffering beneath his ­self-importance, and say that he was not like Eunkang’s father yet, corrupted by the respect accorded the elderly and the worship that the public lavished on him. Of course she said nothing.

  Only when the bell rang, Seongwon ran out of the house, his hands pulling up the legs of his trousers as if he were wearing a long skirt.

  Eunkang wiped sweat from her forehead; Mina scrubbed one corner of the room, radiating coolness as if her entire body was water itself. Eunkang sat and kneeled forward, her knees tucked under. She was attracted to the girl’s sexual territory, the beauty that reminded her of the old Joseon dynasty pleasure paintings: the hanbok skirt flipped up, revealing a bush of hair, the yangban’s body twisted around and into a woman like an embroidered ­knot—those erotic
paintings that made her feel more prudish than she wanted. She found her hand reaching for Mina’s shoulder. It was like marble under the rough cotton. Was this where Seongwon had touched her first, on the round curve?

  Mina stepped back, her face white with alarm. Eunkang tucked her hands behind her, holding her brazen hand.

  “The refreshments,” she cried, and fled to the kitchen.

  By the time Eunkang returned, Mina had been replaced by men in suits. She was left alone to adjust the air conditioner, to serve the finest ginseng tea. Where are the chrysanthemum rice cakes? Seongwon asked. Where is the fruit? As she served the men, they were so absorbed in their conversation they didn’t bother to look up for more than a brief nod.

  While the three men sat in lotus position on bamboo mats, Seongwon explained away his paintings as if he were teaching an art appreciation class. Quickened by his attentive audience, he laced humorous anecdotes into his careful, erudite observations. He seemed pleased, protected from the greater disappointments in his accrued knowledge and achievements. Eunkang sipped tea and marveled at how her husband had become more attractive to the foreign art world because now he was literally a tortured ­artist—he may have lost his faith and his confidence in prison, but suffering for the democratic cause had undoubtedly increased his market value! For most of the afternoon, the men, expecting a feminine public silence, did not address her. For once she was pleased to be left alone to her thoughts.

  After the guests departed with their purchases, Eunkang told Seongwon that she needed to visit Seoul for the evening. He did not have to accompany her, for it concerned family–to–family negotiations for her youngest sister’s dowry.

  And though she flinched as she lied, he only said, “Send the family my greetings. Your ­father—I miss him.” Since the elections, there was no longer a need for ­late-night organizing.

  He became quiet. When she backed the car out, it nearly hit a strolling rooster. Village boys returning to the rice fields pointed at the black sedan the size of a small ­tank—yet another ostentatious gift from Seongwon’s parents to embarrass Eunkang.

  It was dusk by the time she made inquiries and found information leading her to a traditional panjatjip, a tiny hut located just outside the town limits of ­blue-slate roofs and rough ­cement-walled houses, where a girl of Mina’s description was said to have recently moved in. It was one of those abandoned huts in the countryside that would have invited squatters who fled the city during the student movement: its wooden gate was missing its front door, its walls were made of dried-clay brick mixed with cow dung, and its roof of rotting straw was caving in. One last crow still sunning on a nearby telephone pole glanced at Eunkang. Within the gates, themadang bare of foliage was too small for a child to lie down in.

  There were holes in the white papery screen of beaten tree bark; Mina could not have lived there very long. Eunkang slid the screen door open. She had a right to this much. The smell of freshly cooked rice, persimmons, and Chinese food washed over her. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she took in the room’s permissive neglect. The room was an obstacle course of magazines. There was a sink of dirty dishes, a thin rack of ­clothes—bar-girl garments to support herself, Eunkang saw at once. She picked up a nightgown near the door and sniffed its damp sweetness, touched the clutter of sketches and tubes of paint, photographs, beads to make jewelry. A girl who liked making things. Her eyes moved to the canvases stacked against the wall. Of course, it must be the paintings she had come for.

  The door creaked.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Mina pulled a string from the ceiling, then the room flooded with light from the naked bulb that dangled between them. Her body was squared as if ready to fight. The girl’s frank beauty surprised and touched Eunkang the way beauty always did.

  “Is my house your tourist attraction?” asked Mina.

  “And my husband, yours?” Eunkang’s own honesty embarrassed her.

  There was nothing more to pretend. Still, Mina smiled that sweet, girlish smile as if determined to enjoy this.

  Eunkang filled a kettle with water and green tea leaves as if it were her own house, then set it on the portable burner. She sniffed. “Chun Mee tea from China,” she observed. “A little sweet.”

  Mina watched ­sharp-eyed but did not protest.

  “My mother calls my life a tragedy,” Eunkang said. “But she says all women’s lives are tragic. Do you think it’s so tragic?”

  Mina shrugged. “We’re just here for a little while, then we go. I don’t think about big words like tragic. It seems so melodramatic. Our country’s so melodramatic.”

  “So that’s what’s wrong with us!”

  But Eunkang agreed with her. Someone else had watched the great, important men do their dance, and laughed, knowing that the magpies would continue to fly and defecate whether people lived or died. Knowing that in a mere hundred years, all their differences would not matter.

  She poured tea and respectfully handed a teacup to Mina with two hands.

  Mina accepted it, her head slightly bowed.

  “You’re very attractive,” Eunkang said, and immediately felt mortified.

  “That’s a strange thing to say just now, but thank you.” She set the teacup down at the corner of the low floor table, pushed a sketching pad aside, and sat down on the floor. “I never imagined he’d call me while you were there, so I froze. I don’t do things like that, really. All I remember is cleaning!”

  Eunkang sat across from her. “And now you know the kind of person I am.”

  “In Seoul I take good care of myself, not like this,” Mina said, her hands busily defending herself as she made large gestures at the sagging tin roof. “I’m good at taking care of people.”

  “I wanted to know these things about you,” Eunkang said. She dipped a finger into the teacup, let it burn. “To see you the way my husband knows you.” She said this as if she had followed a plan, though she had surprised herself by coming.

  “Does he know me?” Mina said, and laughed. “Why do you let him do this to you?”

  “Why did you?”

  “When you’re gone for the weekend, the village kids use a ladder to climb into your yard and play.” Mina smiled, amused. “They say they even watch your television. They’re so afraid of you two, they put everything back exactly the way it was. Now that’s manners.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know,” Mina said. “I’m a little nervous. I wanted to learn how to paint from the best. It was something I wanted to do, just now.”

  She looked up, ­bright-eyed, though there was aggression in the smile. She added, “And I guess I wanted to know what it tasted like. Power.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  She considered this, cocked her head, and spit out, “For some people, floors have to be so clean people can eat off them.”

  This made Eunkang angry, and uncomfortable. It also delighted her. She curled up at the foot of the bed like a cat, while Mina sat on the floor ­Buddha-style. They loosened up because they had nothing to hide from each other; they would never meet again and were safe in that knowledge.

  “You won’t be surprised, but I’ve done some terrible things,” Mina said.

  “You’re so young, how terrible could they be?”

  “Terrible, and more terrible.” Her head tilted proudly. “But I don’t regret anything.”

  “I’ve never kissed anyone before marriage,” Eunkang said. “That I regret.”

  Mina drank tea and nodded and listened.

  “I wanted to be liberated, a new woman, but I lived so quietly.” Eunkang spoke honestly, the way she rarely allowed herself, like a woman hungry for speech, and she felt herself lighter with each sentence.

  “I would like a quiet life,” Mina said. “My life’s never been quiet.”

  “Would you be good at that, a quiet life?”

  “My mother wanted a quiet life somewhere, anywhere. She
wanted to be taken care of and be loved.” Mina swirled the teacup, spilling on the floor. “She grew up around here. I wanted to see it for myself.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” Eunkang said. “I’ve always wanted children.”

  She stopped there, unable to continue. Only then Mina came closer, filling Eunkang’s eyes with her long arms and breasts as large and round as a foreigner’s, a body that had been raised on milk and meat instead of vegetable roots and rice, a body that would remember peace more vividly than it did the fear of war, the body of a woman the daughter she would never have might have grown into. This beautiful woman took Eunkang by the shoulders and kissed her on the cheek, like a real daughter.

  “I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Mina said decisively, mercifully. “It’s time for me to go home.”

  “Where will you go?” Eunkang studied the way Mina carried her power. Would her daughter have been so bold, so sure of herself?

  “Back to Seoul. That’s where they are, the people who love me.”

  Only when Eunkang rose and asked to look at Mina’s paintings did the girl become shy.

  Mina said, “It’s just me, dirtying up the canvas.”

  When Eunkang turned over the first canvas, then the next, she saw that the critics would say the work was amateur. Perhaps they were right, but she also saw how playful the paintings were, and how dark. The thick oil surfaces were sculpted, scraped into an age that seemed to date itself from the beginning of time, and the amorphous figures rising from that darkness that could be about creation, survival, or destruction, she wasn’t sure. I have seen, the paintings said, and she wondered what it was that a girl of Mina’s age must have seen. She had expected to confirm that Mina could not compete, and win something ­back—her pride, her dignity. Instead she was delighted by what Mina might be capable of someday, and relieved. There was also a sense of loss, which made her feel older than she was.