Montauk, I told her.
Kim Yong Su’s last words, circling in her head. What could it mean? A few months before their death… did her parents send Grace there?,
Montauk.
Where her parents’ ashes are scattered.
Where Kim Yong Su’s wife is buried.
Where Suzy two days ago walked to its lighthouse, where a strange man had stood watching, a man resembling Mr. Lim, the next-door neighbor from her childhood.
Where Grace had shown up last Friday to rent a boat. Kelly’s boat, over at the dock. A tiny sloop. Two-person, max. And Grace can’t even swim. And the secret wedding. Somehow Suzy is not convinced. Just a gut feeling. No evidence to the contrary, no reason to disbelieve…
“Sorry, have you been waiting long? What a dreary day!”
Jen stands before Suzy, carrying a brown paper bag in her arms. She’s gotten older, Suzy notices for the first time, but in just the right way. Her blond hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail; the light-mauve lipstick complements her creamy glow. Looking at Jen bundled in a knee-length camel coat, Suzy can see a woman reaching her prime in her thirties. Jen has never looked more radiant, Suzy thinks. So confident, so knowing, so perfectly compassionate. The same does not apply to Suzy herself, of course. Linear age eludes her. With her parents’ sudden death, Suzy skipped her youth entirely.
“Thank God, I was worried you might’ve gotten us coffee too.” Jen slides by Suzy’s side and takes out two large cups from the bag. “Decaf. I didn’t think you’d want the caffeine kick so late in the day.”
Suzy recalls how they had both been such fervent coffeedrinkers in college. They spent most of their junior year huddled in the dark corner of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, sipping double espresso while writing their Eighteenth-Century Novel papers. They were both literature majors. Back then, they would have sniffed at the mention of decaf, as though caffeine were the sign of a true soul. And now nothing is that absolute, nothing evokes such a conviction. Must be the years. Comforting to know that they are gaining in years together.
“Soooo nice to be outside!” Jen takes a deep breath, handing Suzy one of the paper cups. “I didn’t know that I’d end up wasting all of my twenties in a cubicle.”
Earlier, when Suzy called from the subway station, Jen sounded flustered, even slightly panicked. Meet you at the park in twenty minutes; any excuse to leave the office for a bit, Jen groaned. The writer for the cover story was a total control freak, which explained the painful late hours this week. But that could not be the reason for her panic, Suzy thought, detecting a slight tremor in Jen’s voice, which suggested trouble.
“You love it. You’ll say the same thing when you turn forty,” predicts Suzy, taking the hot cup with both hands. The heat is nice. Half the fun of hot coffee is holding the mug.
“Maybe not…” Jen looks away at the pair of musty pigeons tottering along the green patch nearby. “So how was your day?”
Suzy can tell that something is wrong. Jen always defers the subject to another when something is bothering her.
“I went to see Grace today.” Suzy does not elaborate. It is obvious that Jen has a load on her mind.
“And did you see her?” Jen looks surprised, and intrigued. She has never met Grace, but she has never approved of Grace’s hostility toward Suzy.
“She wasn’t there. She’s gone off to get married, supposedly.”
“And you don’t believe that anyone would want to marry her?” Jen is being cynical. It is a sign that something is definitely wrong.
“I don’t know what I believe. I haven’t seen her in five years. More like ten, if you count those years she was at Smith and I… took off. Ten years, then—I guess people must change a lot, no?” Opening the lid, Suzy blows on the coffee once before taking a sip. The hot liquid trickles down her throat, warming the inside. The park is a good place at this time of the day. The late-autumn sun is setting.
“Have we changed in ten years? Am I different now than I was in college?” Jen asks without taking her eyes off the pigeons.
“No, I guess not, because you still can’t hide anything. What’s the matter?”
“Is it that obvious?” Jen gives up pretending. “Nothing too serious. Just a job thing.” Jen smiles, trying to appear nonchalant. Suzy remains quiet. This job means a lot to Jen. Suzy knows from having worked there herself, although for just a few months.
“There have been reports about me. The insider report, because only the insider could know the stuff, even though they’re a bunch of silly lies really. How I purposefully leaked the Baryshinikov feature to the Sunday Times. How I’ve been assigning articles to one particular writer since his wild book party last April. How I’ve been ripping off the story ideas from freelancers. They all sound just absurd enough to get me weird looks. I don’t know who’s making these up, but I don’t like it. It makes me feel… trapped.” Jen pauses, taking a sip of her coffee. “I mean, the magazine world isn’t innocent. Editors fuck writers, and writers fuck their subjects. That’s the way mass journalism works. But these rumors about me, I’m not sure. Actual e-mails were sent to the editor-in-chief’s private address, although no one knows from whom. At least that’s what I was told by my assistant, who’s up on office gossip. Who knows, maybe everyone knows who it is and is not telling me. Maybe no one’s telling me the truth. Sure, someone could be jealous, someone could want me out.” Jen turns to Suzy with a tight smile. “But I’m no longer sure who’s on my side.”
Whose side is she on?
When Mr. Lee testified that her parents’ death was not random, that someone must have had a reason to plan and execute the killing, she did not doubt him. When he claimed that half the Korean community didn’t mourn their deaths, it did not surprise her. When he swore that her father had had it coming to him, she did not defend her father. Instead, she sought out Kim Yong Su, as if to confirm her suspicion.
“Funny how life turned out much simpler than it promised to be in college,” says Jen, smoothing the wrinkled end of the white silk scarf which wraps around her neck a few times to drape down to her lap. It is a dramatic sort of look, not quite Jen’s style. Suzy wonders if that is why she suddenly noticed Jen’s beauty, not because of the scarf itself, but because of such a subtle change, which seems no longer so subtle. “It was never about Faulkner or Joyce or even Derrida or whatever they jammed into our brains for four years. What a superb con job, feeding us a fantasy for our hundred thousand dollars’ tuition! Literature and semantics don’t make us cry. It all comes down to such basic fights, like holding on to a job despite an infantile enemy, sucking up to the editor-in-chief for a higher profile. The survival has nothing to do with your brain. It’s about who has the thicker skin. It’s about shedding all the ethics and righteousness that we learned in college. It’s about the resilience of your needs and fulfilling them even if it costs all your moral conviction.