Suki Kim - The Interpreter

She liked Caleb. He was honest and surprisingly shy. He also brought her luck, because on that very night they found the apartment on St. Marks Place. She was amazed that it had been so easy, considering that she was unemployed, and as far as she could tell, his day job of working at a vegan restaurant on the Lower East Side did not quite fulfill the criterion of a desirable tenant. Then Caleb told her that his doctor parents who lived in Scarsdale co-signed the lease. When she asked if they knew that the beneficiary of their generosity was an unemployed stranger their son had met outside Astor Place Stationery, Caleb winked. “Darling, I told them that I had a mad crush on you. They would’ve bought the apartment for us if they thought we were actually doing it.”

The apartment was a typical East Village walk-up railroad, an elongated stretch of three connecting rooms. Suzy had to pass through Caleb’s bedroom to get to the kitchen, which led to the bathroom that was missing a sink. Neither noticed the missing sink until they finally moved in, when Caleb walked out into the kitchen with a seriously distraught look on his face and exclaimed, “There’s no place to put a toothbrush!” Suzy thought it could have been worse. Better a sink than a tub. She could not imagine surviving New York winters without the relief of a hot bath.

Caleb often brought home leftover tofu pancakes and nondairy crème brûlée from the restaurant. The only edible things there, he explained. The rest tasted so depressingly dull that it was simply cruel to put his taste buds through such an uninspiring challenge. A cleverly concocted diet plan, he claimed. Imagine working at a restaurant where the food is actually good! The philosopher-and-performance-artist bit was hard to figure out, though. Caleb never read books and was certainly too cynical to perform in front of a crowd. When Suzy finally approached the subject without wanting to sound either dismissive or disrespectful, he burst out laughing. “Oh, it’s a private joke with myself. My dad once said that homosexuality is for philosophers or performance artists. How could you grow up in Westchester and end up fucking boys? He wept when I came out at my high-school graduation, really. Imagine this Jewish optometrist in his fifties with tears streaming down his face. He didn’t use the f-word, of course.”

Suzy found it almost comforting to hear about Caleb’s unending drama with his parents, who phoned every Sunday and yet always managed to avoid addressing her directly. Soon they stopped calling. Caleb’s therapist, whom his parents hired and paid for, thought it was unwise for them to keep up with this weekly communication, which only encouraged resentment in both parties. “Once the homosexual issue is ‘solved,’ Dr. Siegel told them, then they can call!” Caleb exclaimed with the cheeky smile of a kid who has just pushed the bully off the merry-go-round.

“What about your parents? Do they know that you never get laid?” Caleb asked one night after three months of living together. It must have been Thursday, the crème brûlée night, which they often celebrated with an Australian Chardonnay from the “Deal of the Week” shelf at First Avenue Liquor.

“They’re both dead. But, no, I guess they never knew, or never wanted to know at least,” Suzy answered in the most matter-of-fact tone she could muster, which she hoped would make him feel less sorry about asking.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Suz, I didn’t know…”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s been a while. Besides, we never talked much when they were alive anyway.”

With that, Suzy polished off the last scoop. Caleb sat still, waiting for her to say more. But she didn’t. It was the first time she had said aloud that they were dead. It came out just like that, almost naturally. She had not talked to anyone she knew since the funeral. She had not seen anyone, except for Jen. She certainly did not plan on finding herself in an East Village walkthrough kitchen with a twenty-one-year-old boy whom she’d met three months ago and casually saying, while picking at a bowl of crème brûlée, that her parents were dead.

Suzy never mentioned her parents again, and Caleb never asked. Instead, she asked him about his. She inquired after his progress with Dr. Siegel, and if his father still occasionally cried, if his mother was curious at all about the supposed girlfriend who lived with her son. Suzy asked to see their photograph, which Caleb then stuck on the refrigerator door with a magnet that said “From Here to Eternity.” They looked almost exactly as Suzy had imagined, with Caleb’s red hair and extra-long eyelashes, posing before their unmistakable Stanford White house and the nougat-colored Mercedes Benz. Caleb would tell her all about his father’s glass-walled office in the center of Scarsdale, and his mother’s book club, which included other doctors’ wives from the better part of Westchester County. “Whatever’s on the Times best-seller list they’d read, especially the lewd ones, you know, books like Hollywood Madam , which I’m sure they took home to pore over only the dirty parts.” Caleb would steal a glance at Suzy as if he knew that she kept prodding him with questions so that she would not have to talk.

Then, three months later, Caleb started dating an older man who one day walked into the restaurant and fell in love with him, and three weeks later, he packed his bag and moved into the man’s spacious one-bedroom apartment in the West Village. “He has a real sink, with gold faucets and everything. I feel like I’m back in Scarsdale,” Caleb said, chuckling into the phone on his first night away.

Suzy did not bother looking for a new roommate. There was still some money left over in the savings account that Damian had set up for her during the later stage of their escapade. It occurred to her that she should send it back to him, but she knew that he also expected her to. It was Damian’s way. It was his hook, his excuse to keep her in his tow, and she knew that he waited patiently for a day when she would throw the money back at him with a letter, a memo, a phone call, so Suzy would not do it. She kept it instead, and paid her landlord $966 each month with Damian’s money. She thought this ensured her as his kept woman, as everyone had believed, including Professor Tamiko and their mutual colleagues, including her parents and Grace, including Damian himself, although Suzy was the last one to find out.

Suzy spent the first year back in New York doing nothing. She lay around the apartment all day and called no one. Caleb dropped by once in a while, after his day shift at the restaurant. They would walk around the neighborhood on sticky evenings and sit on a bench at Tompkins Square Park munching on crème brûlée wrapped in tinfoil. Caleb would buy her a Starbucks Frappuccino, which he said was her Jappiest habit and that if she ever met a decent boy, she should keep it a secret from him until he was well hooked on her Asian charm, and she would laugh, realizing that her own laughter sounded almost foreign to her. Caleb would tell her all about his new boyfriend and the incredible sex they were having: “Three courses a night, darling. I tell you, you ain’t seen nothing yet until you fucked someone your dad’s age.”

But everything comes with a price, Suzy thought. She was twenty-five then, unemployed, goal-less, an orphan.

At the funeral, Grace avoided Suzy. They sat next to each other and did not exchange a word. No one spoke to Suzy, not her parents’ acquaintances, not the man with gold-rimmed glasses who had helped Grace out of a car, not Mr. and Mrs. Lim, whom Suzy grew up next door to when they lived in Flushing years ago. It was as if they considered her also dead, as if respecting the wishes of her parents, who had disowned her the minute she ran off with Damian in her senior year. Quite a crowd had gathered at the Korean church in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Grace now lived. There were no relatives, because they did not have any except for a few aunts back in Korea whom neither Suzy nor Grace had ever met. Her parents barely had any friends, never liked people much, but their death had been shocking, scandalous, tragic, and people, especially churchgoing immigrants, loved tragedies. The only thing Grace said when Suzy went up to her to say goodbye was, Don’t bother showing up for the ashes, they are with God now. Do me a favor, Suzy; leave us alone.