Suki Kim - The Interpreter

“You’re hiding,” Jen says after ordering a chocolate-dipped biscotti with her decaf. “This is your little revenge, to make him find you, but you know Damian’s far too decadent for that.”

Suzy pretends to not hear and blows the foam on top of her Frappuccino into a little bubble, which makes a perfect round circle for a blinking second, then pops.

“The witness today said that I looked like someone he knew,” Suzy says almost in passing.

“Another married asshole with a midlife crisis?” Jen rolls her eyes.

“No, he looked sad. He reminded me of Dad.”

“Why, was he…”

“No, not angry, just sad.”

“ Suzy …”

“I’ve gotta go,” Suzy says, sucking on the straw to get the last taste of the sugary bit at the bottom. “Michael’s calling me at three.”

“Where’s he this time?” Jen asks with a smirk, creasing her perfectly powdered face.

“London. He loves calling me from there. He says that his cell connects clearest from Heathrow. I don’t know. He might be right. Last week, he called from Lisbon and I could barely make out a word.”

“Why doesn’t the big guy just call you from a regular phone?”

“Because he thinks anything’s traceable, and at least with his cell, he’s on top of it.”

They both burst out laughing then, like two coy college girls picking on the cutest boy in the room.

THE PHONE CONTINUES for four rings and stops as Suzy reaches the fifth floor and stands at the door looking for the key. It rings again as she inserts the key into the hole, and stops at the fourth ring. Then it begins again. Whoever it is does not want to leave a message. Whoever it is does not know that she never picks up the phone, a habit that started the year she left school and moved in with Damian. He always let the machine take the call. It was from neither arrogance nor aloofness. During the first few months, it was a necessity. There were too many people hot on their trail, acquaintances with too much spare time who would call periodically to alert them to exactly what other people were saying about this “terrible situation,” which they would repeat in a conspiring whisper as though it were not they who thought it “terrible” but everyone else. “New Yorkers aren’t busy,” Damian mused. “They just don’t have enough time for themselves.” Then there was the family. Damian’s one sister lived in Lake Forest, Illinois, and had rarely been in touch over the years; Professor Tamiko would only speak to him through the lawyers. What Suzy feared was hearing her father’s silence on the other end of the line. But it soon became clear that her parents would not try to contact her. Grace left a message a few weeks after the eruption of the scandal: “Suzy, you must get out of there. God will only forgive the ones who forgive themselves.”

God had become Grace’s answer by then, although she had been the bad one all through their growing up. Grace was the one who got grounded for being found naked with that Keller boy in the back of his dad’s Toyota when she was fourteen. Grace was the one who hid her marijuana pouch inside her tampon case, which she nicknamed her “best friend, Mariana,” and then, to Suzy’s surprise, declared so boldly at the dinner table, “May I be excused? I promised my friend Mariana that we’ll do our homework together.” It had also been Grace who told Suzy that the only reason she applied to Smith College on early decision was that no decent Korean boy would want her now, because everyone knew Smith was for sluts and lesbians. But somehow, during her four years away, God found his way into Grace’s untamable spirit, and Suzy could no longer recognize her older sister, who left such an inappropriate message on her machine, as though salvation lay somewhere on the stoop of a Presbyterian church on Sunday mornings. Suzy began to dread the phone. Damian said that if he could help it he would live without the damn thing. He was distrustful of people anyway. The thought of Damian being stuck on the phone with any of her young friends—although, after a few months, Jen was the only one who called with any consistency—was almost painful.

When Suzy enters the apartment, the phone begins ringing again. She waits for the click at the fourth ring, but instead the machine takes it.

“Babe, it’s me, pick up!”

The voice is cheery and confident.

“Suzy, I know you’re there.”

She is not sure why she does not pick up immediately, but there is an unmistakable moment of hesitation. For a second, she is tempted to leave Michael at Heathrow, sliding down the moving sidewalk, shouting into his Motorola. For a second, that seems to be the most obvious thing to do, the only thing to do—to leave him there.

“Hi, I just walked in.” The hesitation is over.

“See, I knew.” Michael is all happy.

“London?”

“Yeah, it’s fab, brilliant. Those Brits just ate it up, man. They fucking love the whole crap. They’ve got it all mixed up. They think Java’s some coffee from the Caribbean, and HTML a code name for the newest hip-hop nation. They’re sure I’m their Bill Gates, and I told them, ‘Bill and me, we’re like brothers.’”

“Good,” Suzy agrees, as she always does when Michael’s had a shot of whiskey or two.

“I sent Sandy out to Harrods to get you some stuff, some slinky things here and there, for my pretty girl back home, I told her. I’m sure she thinks I’m a pig, so I told her to get some sexy stuff for herself too, although you make sure my girl gets the best of the pile, I said.”

Suzy smiles, imagining Michael’s curt, crisp, forty-something-and-single secretary lingerie-shopping for her boss’s mistress. Sandy often calls for Michael when he is stuck in a meeting or on the plane. Sandy is efficient and excessively private. Although, Michael has said, the minute she finds a man, she will quit in a flash. He is sticking with her, he has claimed, just to see that happen.

“Babe, you listening?”

“Michael, I miss you.” Suzy is surprised at this sudden confession and thinks that it must be true.

“Meet me in Frankfurt. Sandy will arrange the ticket.”

“I can’t. I don’t have a passport.” In fact, she has never been out of the country, not since she followed her parents to America as a child. At twenty-nine, Suzy has never been abroad. Partly for fear of flying, and partly because she can no longer leave New York.

“Suzy, I’m being serious.” Michael does not believe her. Why should he? He knows practically nothing about her.

“I really can’t. Family business.”

“What family? Babe, you haven’t got any…” Michael is good at dodging serious conversation. “Except for me,” he adds almost peevishly.

You’re hiding . That is what Jen said this afternoon.

“When are you boarding?” Suzy asks, trying to shake off Jen’s voice.

“Right now. Gotta go, call you tomorrow!”

Michael is gone before she can ask if it was he who kept hanging up at the fourth ring.

Suzy’s apartment on St. Marks Place is at the hub of downtown. It was the first place she saw when she moved back to the city five years ago. She had been in such a rush then that she just grabbed the first thing offered, although there had been a few more apartments to check out. Apartment hunters in Manhattan are truly desperate. At 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, they line up outside Astor Place Stationery, where the first batch of The Village Voice is delivered upon printing. That is where the apartment war begins, everyone grabbing the first issue and running to the nearest phone booth to call the handful of landlords who fill the ad space with “No broker, low rent!”

For three consecutive Tuesdays, Suzy stood in line with no luck. Although she had been worried that such a collective panic would make her so nauseous she would run straight back into Damian’s arms, she actually found it comforting to see that she was not the only one looking for a new home or new life in the streets of New York. Mostly they were college graduates fresh from Middle America who had watched too much MTV and decided to try their luck the minute they could scrape up some money to get to the city. They often appeared even hipper than the city kids. Clad in vintage velvet and leather, they looked everything they said they were. “We need a loft where me and my girlfriend can both paint; our paintings are huge, bigger than the stuff Pollock used to do,” one goateed boy declared, so loudly that everyone in line turned to him, as though he and his girlfriend were the newly crowned postmodern Abstract Expressionist royalty. Then others chimed in competitively: “New York rocks, man. I wrote like two hundred songs about it,” or “I’ll take anything on Avenue A; how could you be a poet and not follow Ginsberg?,” or “This casting agent says that I look just like Monica from Friends , and I’m, like, no way would I ever do TV!” Suzy would listen and wonder how many of them, if any, would attain their dreams, and she would realize that she, in fact, envied them all, these buoyant kids for whom life was just offering its first mysterious glimpse, while she, at twenty-five, had already given up. Then, one day, a boy who stood behind her tapped on her shoulder and asked if she needed a roommate. He was the first true redhead she had seen in a long time, and he wore a sky-blue bowling jacket that had “Vince” stitched above its right pocket. He could not afford to live alone, he said, and did not trust strangers to share an apartment, but she looked nice and he’d always wanted to live in Asia, and perhaps she was the closest thing he’d come to the continent. Then he held out his multi-ringed hand and said, “Hi, I am Caleb, I’m twenty-one, a philosopher and a performance artist.” She tried not to laugh as she shook his hand with “Suzy, twenty-five and unemployed.”