Suki Kim - The Interpreter

Except Michael was married, which seemed crucial. Jen, when Suzy told her about the affair, looked at her aghast. “Why?” asked Jen. “You know your parents are no longer watching, there’s no audience anymore.” Jen said nothing further and stopped introducing Suzy to those hopelessly Ivy League, defensively arrogant, devoutly bookish young men who passed through the magazine where she worked. None of them took to Suzy anyway. They would come along for a drink with Jen, which Suzy knew was all for her benefit, and ramble on about another young author on the verge of fame. Their tales of the author’s propensity for run-on sentences and waify poet girls bored her. Most of all, she could not stand the tinge of jealousy in the bookish man’s voice as he repeated, with a vengeance, the exact numbers of the six figures that the author’s first book had garnered. Suzy remained silent, trying her best to suppress a yawn, and Jen would play the moderator by cracking jokes, which was not her style. Suzy was relieved when Jen stopped her matchmaking gestures.

“Getting older, Suzy, means just getting more selfish all the time. Does my heart break anymore because you’re fucking another Damian? What if you’re hiding with another asshole? What can I do really, how does that change my life?” Jen cried one night when they had emptied half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that had been sitting on Suzy’s kitchen shelf for several months. But nothing changes my life either, nothing touches me . Suzy may have mumbled in a drunken stupor. The night was vague and easily forgotten.

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.