After Eduardo left for other work at the office, Janice and I drove around Queens. She had me at the wheel. The clouds were clearing, and it was getting warm in her old Datsun. The vinyl seats smelled stale and moldering and were littered with bits of caramel popcorn and skeins of hair and dried-up splatters of soda. The backseat was crammed with cardboard file boxes full of papers and documents and photographs. This was her rolling, touring office. We were taking a local route through the neighborhoods of south Queens so that she could scout appearance locations for John Kwang. She was drink-ing from a plastic liter bottle of mineral water.
“You never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in,” she said.
“Staying out of trouble,” I said.
“I can see that,” she replied. She penciled some notes on the next day’s schedule. “John’s been fantastic at that. Everyone seems to love him. He can draw hordes, you know. He has that gift. Not all politicians do. Most have to learn how to do it. Anyway, I want you to expect a lot of media. Another grocer boycott started in the Bronx.”
“That must make about six so far this year,” I said.
Janice nodded. “It’s not so awful, actually. They’ve been making all his meetings with black groups newsworthy. I’m not being cynical. John’s a genuine peacemaker. He does good work and influential people trust him. I think the electorate is really beginning to understand that about him.”
“Eduardo admires him,” I said. “Maybe loves him.”
“I love him,” answered Janice. “We all love him. He’s genuinely kind. You know he’s sexy.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Definitely,” said Janice. “It’s his skin.”
I asked, “His skin where?”
“Just his skin,” she said, smirking at me. “Anyway, there’s such a beautiful glow to it. It looks soft. Like a woman’s skin.”
“So that’s it?” I asked.
“I think so. He has a nice color.”
“Pale yellow like silk or pale green like jade?” I said to her.
She smiled with surprise. “Henry, are you giving me shit?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she answered. “You wouldn’t have the right. There were so many Asians at Berkeley. In fact all of my friends were Asian. There wasn’t anyone else. All my three boyfriends in college. Actually, they were, in a row, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.”
“What were their names?”
“God! Wait, there was Bobby Feng. Ken Nakajima. And John Kim.”
“So which one did you like best?”
“How come every Asian man I mention this to has to ask that?”
“We’re competitive.”
She beamed anyway. “I guess I liked them all. I liked John a hell of a lot. He was the last one. He was an art student. He made collages from magazine pictures and then painted over them. He had long coarse hair.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said. “We broke up just before graduation. My parents wanted me back in Chicago before starting law school. They have a pastry shop and bakery. They even said he could come back with me. John didn’t want to live in our house and decided to go back to Los Angeles. We had a huge fight. Actually, I mostly yelled at him. He wouldn’t say anything back. I called him later from Chicago but he wasn’t home and his mother answered. She had no idea who I was. She never knew I existed. He never told them.”
“Maybe it only seemed like she didn’t recognize your name. Korean parents don’t say too much.”
“Oh, she did. I told her I was his girlfriend for the last year and a half. She said very politely that I shouldn’t call back. Then I told her I was white and Polish. She started shrieking for her husband, I think.”
“Probably just shrieking,” I said.
Janice frowned. “So I hung up,” she said. “I haven’t spoken to him since before that. I never understood how he could just drop me like that. Is it a Korean thing? I mean, what kind of person does that? Except for the very end, everything was great between us. We had great sex, too, and that doesn’t happen a lot in college. But now I have to think none of it was very good. It was like he’d done his time with me, with a white girl, and then it was over. I almost still hate him. Asshole.”
We drove for the next two hours in stops and starts through tight car-jammed streets lined with old row houses. Archie Bunkers. Janice stopped us every now and then and got out and surveyed a corner or a building with her arms crossed tight. We were at an elementary school. She wasn’t talking much anymore. I didn’t mention to her that I had known at least six John Kims in my life. Kim is a prevalent Korean surname, and the name John is still popular among immigrant parents because they think it’s very American, although of course it was more popular twenty-five or thirty years ago, after the wars. I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. And Janice’s John Kim, exquisitely silent, was like some fault-ridden patch of ground that shakes and threatens a violence but then just falls in upon itself, cascading softly and evenly down its own private fissure until tightly filled up again.
I watched Janice head away from the car to talk to some people loitering outside the school building. I remembered a day when I visited a Korean friend’s house in New Jersey. It was during a winter break from college. We entered Albert’s house from the garage and the sweet scents of broiled beef short ribs and spicy codfish soup and sesame-fried zucchini made me think of my own house before my mother died. Then Albert’s mother called happily to him in Korean, “Now you’ve come home!” and although her accent was different, too breathy, nearly Japanese, the inflection of the words was just that of my mother’s, so much so that I nearly dropped my duffel and went to the strange-faced woman standing there in the busy kitchen in her soy-sauce-and-oil-splattered apron. And while sitting at dinner listening to her and Albert’s father asking their son questions about school, his health, worrying as they were in the very words, in the very tone and gesture of my own growing up, a familiarity arose that should have been impossible but wasn’t and made me feel a little sick inside. It wasn’t that Albert and I were similar; we weren’t, our parents weren’t. It was something else. That night, lying in the short bunk bed above snoring Albert, I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement. If I-as-Albert in the bottom bunk were listening to Albert-snoring-as-Henry, would I know the huge wrong that had passed upon our lives?
Janice pranced back to the car all smiles. She pulled in her door with a slam.
“Drive, man, drive,” she told me. I accelerated. She’d come upon some information about Mayor De Roos. She said that apparently the tabloid rumors of his extramarital affair with a young black woman were true. The woman worked for the Transit Authority. De Roos was supposed to have seen her at a news conference last year on subway crime, held down inside the station where she sold tokens. Her name was Kiki and she had grown up and still lived in the neighborhood. The people hanging out in front of the school knew her and said she was flashing new clothes and jewelry around the neighborhood, and that a call car could be seen at all hours of the night in front of her apartment building.