“Eduardo!” he said into the air.
“Yes, boss!”
“All your work done?”
“Yes, boss!”
“Let’s see it then.”
Eduardo stepped behind his desk and pulled a manila folder from a drawer. He laid it open on the conference table and he and Kwang went over it.
I said John was my height. He was actually shorter than I was, two or three inches at least. Maybe it was the kind of light that emanated from him, or the way his figure bent the light to a crucial incidence, but from any distance at all he appeared to me as though he were ascending an invisible ramp that magically preceded him. His warm-hued face was square, owing its shape to the eminence of his angular jaw, which carved out two perfect hollows on either side of his chin. He still had those shadows of youth upon him. He was clean-shaven, as always.
I think I will forever see him with that smooth face, almost aglow, almost pubescent, despite my memory of those final days of his shortened career, when his true age seemed to besiege him all over and at once.
His neatly clipped black hair, silvery about the temples with scant patches of grayness, reminded me of my father’s head ten years before, those dense shines of hair. Though it ultimately wasn’t true, my father appeared to be the most vital of men. He seemed to understand that it was his hair which lent him his attractiveness and authority, and so it became, strangely enough, the one and only vanity of his life.
He used to stand before the bathroom mirror, dabbing all sorts of conditioners and dressings on it in a time when there were only products like Vitalis and Brylcreem. Without any shame he would faithfully apply my mother’s sundry ointments each morning and each night, slowly working into his scalp the brightly tinted gobs without romance or fuss.
I suppose I always envied that brush of his, how wavy it was. I remember how proud he was of it. He used to say to me when I was young that his gohpsul muh-rhee showed the great vigor of the blood running through him. Then he’d grab at my own skull, roll the fine straight strands of my hair between his fingers, and gravely shake his head.
Look at this, he’d scoff, just like your mother’s.
How worn and weak. He was forever there to let me know every disadvantage I would have to overcome. I knew I would never enjoy his stern constitution. I have my mother’s thin blood, the kind so easily forayed by a chilly draft, an unexpected rain. She and I were always sick with something. In certain periods my mother seemed to live from her bed, rising only to clean the tub or cook dinner for my father and me, which she would do in any condition. The climate was never quite suitable for her. In truth, she could only stand up to the harshness of people and their words, a native tenacity that I can only hope someday to uncover in myself.
My self-conception was that I was frail. I would sometimes affect similar ailments to my mother’s and try to mimic her, stay in my room whole weekends with a pile of picture books or puzzles, never changing out of my pajamas. Or I would slip into her bed while she napped and fall asleep in the warm curve of her belly.
My father might come in and stand before the bed with his arms crossed and savagely complain about us. He enjoyed ranting about how she and I were living lucky in this life, resounding his personal lore of how merciless and dangerous it was in this land and that he could only do so much to protect us. Certainly it was the emptiest of his threats, for he was nothing if not a provider and a bulwark. He was the kind of man who subscribed to that old-fashioned idea of nation as personal test — and by extension, a test of family — and not only because he was an immigrant. What kept him toiling and working through his years was that he bore that small man’s folly of sometimes seeing himself in terms historical, a necessary evil, as if each apple or turnip or six-pack he was selling would be the very one to catapult him toward a renown he could only with great difficulty imagine for himself. He watched too much television. I remember how he would make fun of Joe Namath in those old cologne commercials, remark that he was too ugly a man to have so many beautiful women surrounding him.
What a nose! he’d cry in Korean at the television set. It looks like a big dried daikon.
But then there it was, invariably, the little green bottle of musky potion that Joe also used, ready for him on my mother’s dresser. My father could splash it on blithely before he went to the city for work. He could leave the house with a fresh confidence. But when he came back late at night, the magic had all but abandoned his face and his step, the aura was gone, the lilt, and I could smell the animal of him as he walked past my bedroom door in the short hall, the stink of sweat and ruined vegetables and the ashen city penetrating me like an epochal sickness.
He would have probably admired John Kwang — at least for his appearance. Though not openly, of course. That kind of admiration between men was either effeminate or disrespectful, and then a little shameful, if the object was a younger man. No, my father would likely never have approached him if he had come upon the chance. He was still alive when John Kwang first appeared on the city political scene, but the old man was at that point too ill and self-absorbed with his own decline to notice anything extramural, Korean American or not.
John Kwang dressed like a power broker. His taste for colors and fabrics was impeccable. His wife, May, didn’t dress him or buy his clothes. Later, I would note that whenever he had the opportunity he’d duck into a clothier in Manhattan and buy a French-cuffed shirt and several ties. He had every kind of shoe for his occasions, brogans, oxfords, wing tips, loafers, patent-leather pumps, deep-treaded boots. With his suits he mostly stayed to the conservative, what the people expected of him, Paul Stuart and J. Press, the American executive look, but at more internationally flavored events and certain parties you could see him working the room in something silken and double-breasted, the lines rakishly cut down to hug his youthful waist. When he took meetings around the borough, he wore a wool flannel three-piece. The jacket of the dark charcoal suit fit him perfectly, as did his trousers, which must have been retailored from their lanky western proportion to flatter his short Korean legs. I know those limbs. I remember Mitt pointing at the gnarled trunks of my father’s tanned bowlegs bared beneath his shorts and saying, “Grandpa’s a bulldog.” I laughed, thinking how right Mitt didn’t yet know he was, and figured, too, that with so much of Lelia in him, with so much of her drawnness and length, Mitt would be a greyhound when he grew up, a wispy thing, gentler and more tender of step than we who would course through him like trickling old rivers.
Kwang himself exhibited a different grace: he didn’t sport the brief choppy step of our number, but seemed instead to stride in luxurious borrowed lengths. He almost loped, not after the six-foot-three-inch bound of a Stew Boswell, but like a man who understood the true stamp and limit of his gait. As if he rode on those legs. A primed athlete among the unlimbered mass of men. And then there he was, on his way back out, holding Janice firmly by the shoulders in his customary way, as if he might lay a deep kiss upon her brow or warmly pull into his chest her solid cocksure body now offering up its last slack to his womanly hands. She was a little stunned with him. He glanced back at me once more and then moved on to the rest of the people in the room, spreading himself among them wide but never thin.
This proved what appeared to me to be his great talent: his seeming resistance to dilution. This despite the fact that everyone he met, each one of us he encountered inside and outside his office and circle, even and perhaps especially strangers, the curious citizenry of the streets, Kwang made feel as though he were bequeathing a significant part of himself. And I thought that no matter what skin you were, no matter what your opinion of him, when you met him in person you somehow felt that you understood the subtle pressure of his grip, that it said or meant that you were the faintest brother to him, perhaps distantly removed by circumstance or blood but a brother nonetheless.