No Jack Daniel’s tonight, nothing at all but this empty kitchen and the Evian bottle of wilting irises. Why did Grace want a boat? Did she sail out into the shallow sea to mourn their parents? Has Grace become lonely over the years? For a second, Suzy is tempted to reach for the phone and dial Grace’s New Jersey number. Over the years, Suzy tried calling Grace a few times during afternoons when she was sure Grace wouldn’t be home. Each time, she secretly hoped that Grace might have stayed home from school by some sisterly telepathy and would pick up the phone. Instead, the machine clicked on with no outgoing message whatsoever, just a plain, long beep, and Suzy would hang up immediately. Perhaps Grace never answers her phone either; perhaps the sisters have that in common.
Sleep is impossible. Not quite the night, and interminably far from the morning. But Suzy is used to this sort of wait, a meander, a break with no end in sight. The ring of smoke casts a mournful veil around the flowers. A perfect white on white, but death over life really, as if the smoke is seeping through each pore of the iris.
The sisters wore white hanbok on that day in Montauk. They gathered their hair back with white cloth pins, following the Korean tradition for immediate mourners. White is the color of sadness, the color of remembering, of home, Mom had told Suzy when she asked why she wore a white cloth pin in her hair on each anniversary of her own parents’ death. The delicate silk of their dresses appeared almost transparent against the lighthouse towering above. They must have looked hopelessly small on that day, two newly orphaned girls in white carrying the urn, their blackest hair rippling in the wind, suddenly alone amidst a vast country. Watching Grace scattering the ashes, Suzy thought that her sister seemed more Asian than she had ever remembered. Had it rained that day also? Did her parents disappear into the Atlantic, which kept calling her through that day and each day after?
To an insomniac, night crawls in secret. Suzy can hear each second tick so loudly that the anticipation of the next second makes her heart beat even louder. Sleep eludes her. It comes either all at once or not at all. During her first year in this apartment, Suzy slept all the time. She would watch TV and sleep. She had no trouble at all. She would close her eyes, and then, upon waking, she would realize that it was the next day. And then she would turn on the TV again, the continuation of programs from the previous day, and then, so naturally, a soft, smooth sleep would engulf her. Day by day, month by month, in fact, that whole year went by with a blink, as if she were not there at all, as if it were not she who slept. and ate and watched TV with such mechanical efficiency. And then, at some point, almost overnight, she found that nothing would happen when she shut her eyes. Just as she could not bear to watch TV one day, sleep also failed her. No matter how hard she tried, as now she had to make a conscious effort to will herself to sleep, nothing came. And soon sleep missed her at all hours. It would come suddenly and grip her. She would collapse onto bed, often fully dressed, as though she were under a spell, a forgetting spell that would wipe her out. Such flickering, intensely invasive sleep never lasted long, never sank into her, and here she sits at 4 a.m. wide awake at a kitchen table, making herself smoke a cigarette because there is nothing else to do.
Michael helps. Sex helps. Suzy wonders if that is why she so willingly accepted his suggestion of a date when she first met him. Even he seemed taken aback when she said yes without a glimpse of hesitation. Suzy served as the interpreter at one of his joint-venture meetings with the executives from a giant Korean corporation. The Korean side brought their own translator, but Michael’s firm had hired Suzy as a backup. It was one of Suzy’s first interpreting jobs, and she masked her nervousness with cool detachment. During the lunch break, Michael turned to her and asked, “Ms. Park, are you not allowed to smile on duty?” Suzy looked at him for the first time then and noticed that he was attractive, the way men are when they are successful, late-thirties, and obviously married. His angular, almost square face was deeply tanned, as though he had just returned from a weeklong vacation somewhere tropical, and his sandy-blond hair set off his mischievous green eyes, which made him seem younger than he actually was. He was much shorter than he had appeared sitting down, about five feet nine perhaps, which might make him feel self-conscious, because he had a very tall air about him, which Suzy could not help but find endearing as she stared back at him without an answer, still with no smile. At the end of the meeting, Michael tossed his card at Suzy with, “Call me if you wanna show me your other face,” which was not exactly romantically inspired, as he admitted later, but more like a dare, a brutish proposition, to see if this rigid, aloof girl would break rules for him, on whose fourth finger a wedding ring shone like a big fat warning sign. Instead, Suzy shot back at him with, “Forget the call, how about tonight?” She might have been waiting for someone like him, so bold, so crudely unseductive, so unlike Damian, that love never came into the question.
Michael found Suzy’s acquiescence intriguing. He took her to the “21” Club that night, not the sort of place a married man should take a girl whom he had just picked up on a job. He gazed at her over the preposterously priced salmon zapped with mint-flavored sauce and said, “You’ve got issues, but I don’t wanna know about them, not because I’m an asshole, but because you think I am.” Suzy reached over and kissed him then, a light, fleeting kiss, and remembered that it had been years since she had kissed a man. He broke into laughter as if to cover his embarrassment. “You’re a funny girl, Suzy Park; that clears it, we’re not gonna fuck tonight.” Michael was a romantic in his own way, Suzy thought. She went along with whatever he wanted, and it bothered him, she could tell. It took a few more dinners before they finally slept together. He wanted a bit of resistance, something befitting a mistress, some temper, some tears, but Suzy gave none, and he turned to her afterward and said, “That was like fucking a ghost, a very sexy one, but a ghost nonetheless.” He kept coming back, though. He liked her. He admired her, even. He was a generous lover, and Suzy slept well afterward.
Yet here she sits still, listening to the radiator tap again, as it always does at this hour, an ambulance siren, a train engine, an evenly paced knock that will not stop, which she has gotten used to through the years, which comforts her on winter nights, as though its hissing noise were the only sign familiar to her, the closest thing to a home. The heat comes on slowly, and she is no longer sure if it is Michael she craves or the kind of warmth only another body can offer, the embrace afterward as his hands curl into her arms, as his breath caresses her neck, as his thighs are wrapped into her own. It is sleep she wants, perhaps, the sleep of a spent body, sleep buried in the body of another who’s been so close, who’s entered so far, who’s moved back and forth with such insistence, emptying her of anything she might still remember.
Of course, Michael never holds her like that. He always rushes off afterward, to a meeting, to an airport, to his family. On the rare occasions when he dozes next to her, he will kiss her once with a note of finality, then turn to the wall and be fast asleep. Theirs is not that kind of intimacy. She knows that it would be false for them to cling to each other afterward. She knows that she would leave him if he ever reached out that way. She knows this because she lies next to him recalling another’s hands, which had held her afterward, which had stroked her face so precisely, as though making sure that her eyes were closed now, that her lips were smiling with the sated ripple of what had just occurred, and her fingers still following his as if reluctant to let him go, as if her body had finally found the right angle, the right corner where it might rest until she would awake again and again find him whose hands had held her no matter how often she tried to leave, how far she ran, as far as this 4 a.m. apartment where she sits alone with a dying cigarette, wanting Michael instead, wanting Michael again and again, as though dispelling the dream of another’s hands.