“Just stay there.” His voice booms in the dark.
I’m surprised.
“Just five minutes.”
I don’t know what to say.
“I’ll stay just five minutes and leave.”
All of my vitality drains out. I hear cloth brushing against cloth. Chef is undoing his belt and taking off his bathrobe. Should I close my eyes? Even if I do it’s not completely dark. I don’t want to be nervous right now, like a fool. It’ll be okay as long as I don’t waver. Chef lies on top of me. He grips my hands holding the blanket and pulls them up toward my ears. I can feel his weight, his warmth, his breath on the other side of the thin blanket. Only our elbows to our fingers are actually touching, and his left cheek rests on mine. But it still feels like our entire bodies are touching. Nervous relief and sighs fill my chest. If I can’t turn the clock back by five minutes, there’s only one thing I can do. Lie quietly and wait for time to pass.
“Breathe.” His voice sounds so loud.
“…Okay.”
“I’m not going to do anything.”
I know.
“So please just stay still.”
Yes, that’s what I’m doing.
“I’m going to go soon.”
I don’t want to ruin our friendship of thirteen years, formed one drop at a time. “You’re too heavy.”
He moves a leg off me. It’s easier to breathe. Chef is the kind of person who would forgo pleasure that might later bring guilt. We have to be able to eat toast comfortably at the hotel café tomorrow morning, as if nothing happened. We have to be able to complain that the coffee is too weak or that it’s flavorless. We lie there, looking at each other, not saying a thing, listening to faraway sounds. The night around me is dreamy and dizzy and too hot, like when you eat too much fermented mango.
“Every time I look at you I’m reminded of her.”
I stay silent.
“I used to be alive because of her.”
Is he talking about his ex-wife or his dead daughter? I’ve known him for a long time but I know next to nothing about his private life. But I wish he wouldn’t say that I remind him of either of them.
“I didn’t have the chance to love her fully. I didn’t have enough time.”
He’s talking about his daughter. “You can say anything you want.”
He’s surprised.
“Because we’re leaving tomorrow. We’re going home. Don’t do it there. Don’t be this close to me there.”
“…Okay.”
I want to nod but I can’t move. His face is pressing down and his shoulder is flattening and his leg is pushing down, his entire body smashed on mine.
“I wanted to remember her growing up. When I gave her baths I used to put her heel into my mouth. Babies don’t have much of a heel before they walk. It’s just a soft and squishy foot. It would move around in my mouth. A shock would go through my entire body—she was alive, and so was I. When it felt heavier in my mouth I knew—Oh, she’s grown this much. After she turned one, I couldn’t even put it in my mouth. She was too big. Then she started walking. I felt a loss but I liked to see her walking and jumping and running with her heels that were starting to harden. I was happy that I was alive.”
I’m quiet. Four days after the five-year-old was kidnapped, she was found in a manhole near their house. “What did it taste like?”
Chef doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“Her heel.”
“…Sweet. Really sweet and tender.”
“Like a green grape?”
“No, it was purer and cleaner.”
We’re quiet for a moment.
“I’ve been to Dohoku,” I say.
“Right.”
“It’s famous for its horse meat. It’s amazing, the marbling of the bloodred and white, showing through the paper-thin slices of meat. I put it in my mouth and the juices of the meat welled between the crevices of my teeth. Like a horse was slowly walking into my mouth. It filled me up. Was it like that?”
“Yeah, that’s what it was like.”
“Right.”
“…No matter where you go, you can’t find that taste.”
“You probably can’t.”
“Yeah, it’s the taste of something that doesn’t exist in this world.”
“A special taste.”
“I wanted to re-create that taste.”
We’re silent for a moment.
Are you crying? My cheek is wet, warm. It’s as if we’ve touched the deepest parts of each other, the parts that are untouchable.
“I have someone like that, too. Someone who makes me feel like I’m living.”
Chef doesn’t say a word.
“I didn’t have enough time with him either.”
“Don’t. Don’t do that to yourself anymore.”
“If it were easy it wouldn’t be love.”
Chef is quiet.
“Don’t tell me that’s not true.”
“I won’t.”
“You know how there’s a taste that can’t be substituted by anything else in the world? There are people that can’t be substituted by any other person.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“This is enough for now.”
“Yeah, this is enough.”
“Yeah.”
We stay silent again.
He unglues his face from my cheek. I watch him letting go of my hands, lifting his shoulders, slowly moving his legs away from me. I close my eyes. Because if I were to see his body, I might continue to recall this vivid sensation, which feels like a hot root pushing through me.
“But you,” Chef says, slipping into his bathrobe, about to step away. “You’re so small.” His voice brims with heartbreaking emotion and the love he couldn’t give in its entirety, as if he were talking to his daughter, frozen in youth.
I hear the door shut.
My heart hasn’t wavered, I whisper into the darkness. But somewhere, something in my being has bent, as easily as a grapevine. I turn over on my side. My body heats up, as if someone has put his mouth around my heel.
CHAPTER 19
HUMANS AND DOGS yearn for attention and love. While humans worry about what others think of them, dogs are more interested in your behavior. Dogs react differently if the other person is more dominant. But if a dog doesn’t get his way, he will gradually begin to use threats, even if he’s the most well-trained dog. Paulie, though confident and wise and graceful, has begun to think up ways to threaten me.
One day after it rains, Paulie plods into the living room from the yard. Mud is covering his beautiful golden-red fur and he smells musty. With mud caking everything but his eyes, Paulie barks once as if to tell me that he rolled in the mud on purpose, jumps onto the sofa, then leaps onto the butcher block. What are you doing, Paulie? I yell. Paulie glances at me and continues on, as if he wouldn’t even consider stopping until he gets what he wants. I don’t budge. I sit on a kitchen stool, not looking at him, pretending to read the magazine in front of me. A dog’s eyes are different from a human’s, but all eyes are sensitive to movement. I toss the magazine aside and stand up. Paulie, hesitating, lies down, his front paws placed side by side. Seok-ju doesn’t come to see Paulie anymore. Of course, he doesn’t come to see me, either. I want what you want, Paulie. But he doesn’t want what we want. You should understand that by now. I gently stroke his head to soothe him. Only the odor of the mud reverberates in the room. I push my hand deeper into Paulie’s coat. His scent’s completely evaporated now. You can’t wait obediently anymore, right, Paulie? You use your nose to understand and remember the world. Right? We’re having a conversation. A depressed dog, like a depressed person, shows physical symptoms—erratic behavior and eyes so cloudy that he wouldn’t be able to recognize his owner. We must be suffering from the same illness, and I think we communicate as best we can about it. But that turns out to be an incorrect belief.