But Suzy knew otherwise. She had been one of Professor Tamiko’s advisees since the beginning of her junior year. Yet it was nearly impossible to get Professor Tamiko in person. Twice a semester, Suzy was supposed to meet with her to discuss her impending thesis, but so far, she had been greeted by a different TA each time, someone who seemed merely a few years older than Suzy herself, and rather flustered at having to advise anyone at all when his own dissertation lay forgotten somewhere between the hands of the university’s bureaucratic committees. She saw her in lectures, of course. Postwar Japanese Fiction was one of the few standing-room-only classes on campus, and even though Suzy had actually registered for the class whereas half the attendees seemed to be auditors, she was always stuck at the farthest distance from the podium, on which stood Professor Tamiko, whose profile seemed almost ethereal.
It was true that she was beautiful. Yuki Tamiko was stunning. At forty-nine, she had retained much of the delicate-boned, high-cheeked, ultra-slender, and immensely haughty girl whom Damian Brisco had met at Harvard when they were both freshmen. The coy-girl beauty might have long passed the woman, but there was something regal in its place, something strikingly soft and compassionate and yet impenetrable, edged by the vastness of her knowledge as she stood before the hundreds of eager minds and recited lines from Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility as though Western scholars had done the most unthinkable injustice by declaring Ulysses the ultimate fiction when the real thing lay shrouded in this Japanese tetralogy, which cast its spell over everyone in the auditorium while she, Yuki Tamiko, towered from her highest ground, suddenly demure and fiercely competent. Everyone was at her mercy. The boys looked up at her with awe and admiration—Yuki Tamiko was not the sort of woman one dared to have a crush on—and the girls marked her every word in their spiral notebooks in red ink with double exclamation points, as though everything would be different now that they knew what they had not realized merely fifty minutes ago, when their literary scope lacked the passionate breadth of that remarkable woman up on the podium. Suzy, however, remained untouched. The lecture was perfect, and Professor Tamiko’s seductive banter mesmerizing, but Suzy felt somehow left out. There was a twinge of coldness that Suzy sensed in the older woman’s face, guarded by the finest words of Japanese literature. Suzy felt claustrophobic and was struck by a distinct desire to get up and walk out. It was during one of these rash walkouts that she saw Damian for the first time.
She had slipped out the door and skipped down the steps facing Dodge Hall when she sensed that she was not alone, that another person had just taken the same steps and was walking behind her. Resisting the temptation to turn around and look, Suzy kept on walking. It must have been April. The first two weeks of April were always deadly. Finals were just on the way, the summer was around the corner, and a strange mix of excitement and panic spread through the campus as students crammed for exams. It had rained for a week straight, and the afternoon looked unnaturally bright. And it was during these nervous hours that Suzy, instead of returning to her dorm room, turned right onto Amsterdam Avenue. Now a few more people were on the street, mostly campus people still, but a bit older, because beyond the actual gates of the campus, yet still within the ten-block radius of 116th Street, most passersby were graduate students or school employees or faculty family. All seemed to be hurrying, although it was Friday afternoon, and the rain had finally ceased. Suzy ambled with not much feeling at all, or with so much feeling that she felt breathless. This extreme ennui came upon her with no warning, a dark hand moving onto her heart. Sometimes she would suddenly get up and leave, even though Professor Tamiko’s lecture was faultless and there was no reason for such an impatient exit.
Along Amsterdam Avenue there were two usual stops for wandering, restless undergraduates—St. John the Divine and the Hungarian Pastry Shop. The former was more a construction site than a cathedral, under renovation for as long as anyone could remember. Although it was one of the largest cathedrals in the world, its imperfection, Suzy thought, was really what soothed and attracted visitors. There was something oddly comforting about a cathedral whose façade was forever being repainted or repositioned. She liked sitting on a pew while listening to the usual banging of hammers and drills coming through the stained-glass windows. She hoped that the cathedral would never get done, that it would always remain half finished with steel wires sticking out. God had problems too, Suzy thought, and his cavernous sanctuary was a mess. God belonged more in the café across the street. It was the typical underground hangout often found in college neighborhoods, where goateed boys and handknit-sweatered girls sipped their refills of double Hungarian, which was a shot of espresso with a squirt of amaretto, and discussed the usual suspects—Derrida, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, even Said—although for a break they might bring up Woody Allen, whose latest film had been shot in this very café only a few weeks ago; they agreed that it sounded rather dull—a middle-aged professor falling for one of his students—so typical, so jaded, so hopelessly redundant that they all got tired of talking about it, and the conversation shifted right back to Derrida.
But Suzy entered neither that day. She was about to, and then something stopped her. She had climbed the steps to St. John the Divine when she became aware of the man next to her. He had been walking behind her; although she could not see his face, she knew he was there all along. And then, suddenly, he was on her right, almost directly parallel, facing the entrance of the cathedral. The entrance was wide enough for two people to pass without having to impose on each other, and she feared it was an aggressive gesture from a stranger who seemed to have followed her all the way from the lecture. She was cornered, and was left with no choice but to turn and face him.
His eyes are unhappy—that was her first thought. Deep, penetrating blue eyes that did not appear exactly hard, but somehow absent, even heartless. The rest of him she noticed much later: that he was considerably older, stood quite a bit taller than her five-foot-five frame, had a faint dimple on his left cheek that seemed out of place, and a face marked by permanent stubble that would graze against her thighs when finally opening her up into complete honesty. But in that initial second when she saw him standing so near that she could almost feel his fine-lined, insistent fingers on her, she thought, I must seem so terribly young.
Certainly an odd reaction to a stranger, as he was to her then, an older man, neither particularly handsome nor striking, a passerby possibly her father’s age, although her father always seemed older than those around him, whose conviction was the absolute law by which everyone must abide, because he was the sort of man no one in the family disobeyed. But when Suzy saw Damian that first time, she felt hopelessly young, almost silly, naked, as though she knew that he could see through her own flaring vulnerability as she stood there in her brown suede jacket and faded Levi’s, looking so lovely and tortured the way nineteen-year-olds can look on wet April days, staring up at this older man who seemed to have appeared from nowhere.
In fact, Suzy had never really known men. The boys around her age never showed much interest in her. It did not help that her father forbade dating. “School dances? Whatever for? Schools are not for dancing around!” In Korea, he said, girls did not frolic like these American ones. In Korea, he said again, girls stayed clean, as girls should. Under Dad’s “Korean girl” rules, nothing was allowed: no lipstick, no eye shadow, no hair dye, no perm, no perfume, no miniskirts, no cigarettes, and absolutely no boys, especially American boys. The family’s frequent moving seemed to guarantee all that. The girls never stayed in one school long enough to develop a crush. No time to get attached to sinful American habits, Dad used to say. Suzy thought he was justifying all the years of moving his family around. He might have even been trying to blame them. There never was a doubt that, when the time was right, Suzy and Grace would marry decent Korean men. Once, during a drive to a church on Sunday, they nearly hit a puppy, a curious mix of terrier and chow. It looked strange as it whimpered away, a hybrid with pointy ears and a moon face. Dad declared, laughing, “See what happens when you mix blood? Even dogs turn out a mess, stupid and ugly!”