Chef plays with a crystal water glass sitting on the desk, his face expressionless. I watch his large, darkened left hand holding the glass. A hand that has been broken and sewn and cut. The hand I’ve been looking up to since I was twenty, the hand that moved efficiently and effectively in the kitchen. Chef picks up a teaspoon and stirs the water in the glass. Even water moves if you stir it, he says. When I stop, the water’s going to continue swirling like a little hurricane for a while. I mean, what would happen if everything stopped? He swallows hard. I wonder if it’s hard for him to vocalize a simple thought, just as it’s hard to make a simple dish. You know the foods that make you feel better when you eat them? The kind of food that gives you pure joy? I want to make a list of happiness. Chef stops talking. As if to say, I’m doing this, whether you help me or not. I stay there a little longer, then leave the office and go up the stairs.
A list of happiness.
Is that even possible? I look out the picture window as people come into Nove, study the menu, look toward the kitchen in anticipation of the food, stare into each other’s eyes across a vase with a single violet in it. Nobody is silent in a restaurant. Everyone is smiling or talking or eating. Maybe the table was the birthplace of language. A repetitive gathering place for meals and routine activities is conducive to talking, to conversations. Food goes into a mouth and words come out of it, just like a door. Talking and tasting, expressions of desire, happen in the mouth, on the tongue, and the mouth is the entrance to our bodies, revealing who we are.
The restaurant is filled with upbeat, happy chatter. Red lips, swollen in expectation of warm food and words, float, cloudlike. People move closer, whispering secrets and eating and feeding one another food. When you whisper and eat, the tip of your tongue, glistening with saliva, peeks out, sparkling like a red jewel. If you touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue and sing, lalalala, your bones vibrate with the sound. This gleeful clamor erupts when you eat something delicious.
Now I remember the cookbook I wanted to write—food that brings positive change, the vivid sensations and tastes and textures of my youth, the scents of memories and the stories behind them. Once I wanted to write a book similar to Chef’s. Back then, I whispered and talked and ate and drank and laughed like all the others. I sat close to friends in small circles, like winter bees trying to survive the cold. Am I certain we loved each other? Happiness comes through the mouth, but the mouth is also the doorway through which it walks out. If you lock the door to your body from the inside, the inner darkness traps you. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t keep promises, the mouth is merely a dark, lightless cave.
CHAPTER 27
I OPEN MY FRONT DOOR and Mun-ju pokes her head out from behind the pocket door. I pause, taken by surprise. It’s been a long time since someone greeted me when I got home. In January, when I was in bed for ten days, Mun-ju wrote down the contact information for the hospital Uncle was in and made a copy of my keys, saying, So this won’t happen again. I’m not bedridden anymore but something in me is shattered. Even if something disappears it isn’t completely gone. After Paulie’s death I’ve become more attuned to sound. I’m not scared by big noises, like the sound of thunder or lightning or fireworks. But the sound of rain coasting down the windows, the door closing, the fridge whirring, a few grains of rice falling to the floor, my own breathing—I feel those more immediately than the pounding of a drum. And the sounds I hear—Paulie’s slow footsteps, his sniffing, his breathing. One night, when Paulie’s death finally sank in, his sounds wounding me, I had to stifle my moans. Paulie used to give a single bark when the wind rustled the leaves, when he sauntered into the yard, when I brushed my teeth, when the blender was whirring, when I was grinding coffee beans. I keep brushing my teeth even after they’re clean, in the darkness, to feel Paulie coming up to me and pressing his wet nose on the back of my knees. Yeah, I remember. We shared something deep, something fundamental. Right, Paulie?
Now I run alone on the track at night.
Everything in this world, including those long dead, makes noise. But I can’t tell even Mun-ju that Paulie runs next to me, his teeth suppressing his panting.
“Exercise is fine and good, but not right before you sleep.”
“It was always at this time.”
“What?”
I stay quiet.
“Oh, right. That’s true.” Mun-ju nods.
I get up and boil water and steep some lavender. We sit on the sofa, side by side. Mun-ju has just returned from a week in Venegono Superiore, a small town about an hour from Milan, for a special feature about slow food. If you take the train from there and travel south for two hours, you arrive in Tuscany. The last time I went to Italy through Nove’s program, I learned how to butcher pigs and cattle, observing butchers for three weeks. It was a unique chance, but when the most renowned butcher in the region pulled out the backbone of a pig lying on its side, with a flourish, I let out a surprised shriek, so I lost the opportunity to learn more. The butcher’s glare was cold and jagged, reproachful. The way Chef looked at me if I made a mistake at the chopping block as a novice.
“Are you already done with the article?”
“The issue’s already out. But it’s not that interesting.”
“What isn’t?”
“This slow-food movement.”
“Didn’t it come from the desire to live at a slower pace?”
“Yeah. You ride a bike instead of driving a car, you take naps in the afternoon, and you cook the fruit and vegetables from your garden.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You have too much time to think.”
“You don’t like that?”
“A happy person doesn’t have that much to think about.”
We laugh. A bitter laugh, as if to acknowledge that we are far from being happy.
“How are things?” Mun-ju asks.
“Fine, I guess.”
“I stopped by Nove yesterday afternoon for a cup of tea but you weren’t there. Where were you?”
Yesterday afternoon I met Mr. Choe at the Shilla Hotel café. “He asked if I wanted to move to a different kitchen.”
Mun-ju doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“He’s going to open a restaurant.”
“Chef is opening another one?”
“No, Mr. Choe.”
“Mr. Choe from Mido?”
“Yeah.”
“So is he scouting you?”
I don’t answer. Was that what he meant? Mr. Choe said that he was going to renovate a two-story wine bar into an Italian restaurant. The location is great and so is the salary he mentioned, much more than what I make at Nove. He said that I would be sent overseas to learn about food for one month every year. Every cook who starts the day peeling hundreds of potatoes wants this, and, unless your dream is to run your own restaurant, this is the best—and rarest—opportunity. I smiled at Mr. Choe. He said, We should keep this quiet from Chef for the time being. He wetted his lips and added, When you get to my age, you start wanting a cook. Your own cook.