Midnight and the Meaning of Love (81 page)

In a pasta place she said and gestured that she had already eaten, but she kept pushing her fingers in my sauce and licking it, or offering her saucy finger to me instead.

In her one scoop of vanilla with the caramel drizzled on it, she spilled two tears. I called the waiter the way they do in Korea,
“Yogio!”
I paid him and grabbed her hand and left most of the ice cream and caramel melting on the dish.

In a mostly empty theater we sat a while. A film that was completely foreign to me played on the screen. We didn’t need them, the actors. We kissed softly and touched instead, seated in the last row in the corner. One hour in, she fell asleep on my arm. I held her, thought about how she must feel. Eventually my thoughts settled on whether she spilled two tears because of her emotions from meeting her grandmother. After all, today was the first day Akemi had spent with her in her entire lifetime.

Or was my wife crying because she had received a call from Chiasa at some point earlier today? I sincerely hoped it was because of the grandmother.

When I woke her up to leave the theater, she threw both her arms around my neck. Minutes later I carried her back to our suite.

Lying in one bed, with no lights, beneath the sheets, she moved her hands all over my body slowly before climbing on top of me and easing herself onto her favorite place. We had a slow, silent grind with only the sound of moisture mixing. Both my hands were gripping her hips and moving them around. She was so sleepy but still she wanted that feeling. My entire face was covered with her heavy hair and my skin was wet from her hot and continuous tears.

She slept now. I held her tight for a while listening to her breathe and feeling her heart beating against my bare chest. As I drifted
off, I thought to myself,
If Chiasa is all fire, and she is, then Akemi is pure sugar, the sweetest feeling I’ve ever known, the sweetest emotion, the sweetest taste, the sweetest woman.

Before sunrise, I eased her over onto three pillows and covered her with the bedsheets. I showered, made prayer, and afterward fell into a needed rest lying in the other bed.

When I woke she was gone. She had pasted a piece of paper to my headboard with a strip of lotion on the back to hold it up there. I pulled it down. It was written entirely in Korean hangul.

Not the type to panic, I panicked. I threw on my clothes, the ones I’d worn the night before, and took the stairs down to the front desk. The last letter that I had gotten from my wife led to her disappearance. This second letter had me shook.

“Excuse me, please tell me in English what this says,” I asked the desk attendant. She looked at the note curiously, and then she began to blush. Looking at her face, and without hearing her interpretation yet, I felt relieved.

“She says she loves you. She has gone with her grandmother to Wolgyedong and afterward they will visit a school named Yeomyung, and she will meet you back here tonight. She writes, ‘Hopefully at seven p.m.’ That’s it.” The attendant smiled partway and then snatched her smile back.

“Comsahmidah,”
I said, meaning “thank you” in Korean.

“Oh, you are in room seven-oh-seven, yes?” she asked me. “You have a message.” She turned and pulled an envelope from the mail slot.

The flap of the envelope was not glued shut. The note was written in English on Hyundai Suites stationery.

Thank you for being so good to Akemi and us. We have gone back to Busan. I have already extended your reservation until Thursday. If Akemi could please remain in Seoul visiting with her grandmother for today and tomorrow, we would really be so grateful to you. The two of you may travel back to Busan on Thursday with her. Grandmother has decided that we will have a ceremony for Akemi’s mother, Joo Eun, on Saturday in Busan. She has decided that Busan is the place that Joo Eun would’ve preferred. We will scatter her ashes over the South
Sea on an island not far from North Korea. It will bring peace to everyone and give Sun Eun and me a chance to make all of the arrangements. The elder has decided this. In Korean culture, we follow the elder’s way in these matters. Please understand us.

Professor Dong Hwa

When I told the desk clerk that I would make the payment for our room extension, she said, “It has already been taken care of.”

Back in our room, I changed into clean clothes. Afterward I made telephone calls to handle and rearrange all of my business to fit the new schedule, which was only possible because of Umma’s assurance. I didn’t mind making the changes, although I thought that Dong Hwa should’ve faced me instead of writing the letter. I knew how important the ceremony for Akemi’s mom’s ashes was to her and also for her newly discovered family. For me, this situation was, as Haki had once mentioned, “a clash of cultures.”

In Sudan men handle the business of burials and funerals. Our women do not even attend such events. Instead, they gather indoors and mourn and comfort one another, cook and share and converse. Men carry the body, which has already been washed and cleaned and prepared according to our faith and culture.

When I reached downstairs, just as I walked across the hotel lobby, the same front desk clerk approached me hurrying from behind.

“There’s a call for you,” she said. “We tried to put it through once before but your phone line was occupied.” I followed her to the front desk.

“Ryoshi, can you talk for a minute?” Chiasa asked.

“Where are you?” I asked her.

“At my hotel. I just finished speaking to my father. He’s gone out now to attend some meetings,” she said.

“Let’s meet up,” I told her, and gave her the address to the travel agency where I was headed.

* * *

Her hair wasn’t wild today, but her eyes were. She wore two thick, long cornrows and had more of a glow than before. She was wearing the love she was feeling, it seemed, and the jewels I had gifted her as well. The Seoul sun on a Ramadan day had straightened us up some, both of us. The nighttime has a sensual power that can make passions feel even more urgent. I had planned to give her those jewels after she and Akemi met and spoke specifically about our situation, but after seeing Chiasa in the mosque and then in the bookstore, I felt pushed to mark my territory, and that urgency led me to place one bangle at a time on her wrist and one diamond ring on her finger. All mosques are filled with Muslim men. They are serious men who welcome marriage, wives, and family.

“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” was the first thing she asked me. Her left hand was raised up and shielding her eyes from the sun rays. Now drops of sunlight were dancing on her diamond.

“Change of plans, I’m not leaving tomorrow,” I said calmly.

She smiled. “I’m so happy. Now you can meet daddy. I had so
many things I wanted to tell you and so many things I felt we needed to talk about before you left for the States.”

I just looked at her. I didn’t say any response. I was thinking that she must not know that I was planning to take her home with me. If Akemi agreed, it would be the three of us flying to New York. If not, Chiasa could keep the jewels. They were valuable enough. I had sold my watch to get that pear-shaped diamond. No sweat, Chiasa had given me more. She had given me Akemi.

“Let’s talk,” I told her. We walked, her messenger bag riding on her hips.

“My father can’t meet today. His schedule is so crazy. He can meet tomorrow though. I hope you won’t mind. He said if you were still in Seoul we could all meet at the Shilla because that’s where the banquet is. He can squeeze us in at seven right before the event. I’ll be dressed up, but you don’t have to. It’s just because I have to attend the banquet with Daddy.” She took a breath.

I smiled. I knew the general had selected a time to meet me when he thought I would already be in flight to New York, out of his life and Chiasa’s also. “I’ll be there, seven sharp,” I said calmly.

“Oh, good.” She threw both arms up in a touchdown pose, same as when she first came creeping into my Shinjuku hostel.

“Okay, so about the vending machines, I found a connect,” she said, shifting into her business mind. “I spoke with one who offered all kinds of options that I thought might work good for you.”

I realized right then that one reason I felt so attached to this girl was her energy. The range of her personality was wide. When she wasn’t around, I missed the way she made me feel. Her mind was so swift and she was always poised and positioned and moving rapidly toward victory in whatever she was dealing with. She was a problem solver, not a problem. She was stress-free; she was peace to me.

“So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.

“Let’s call him.”

“Right now?”

“These are business hours,” I said.

It was warm inside the phone booth with the door closed all the way so that we could hear the call properly. We were facing one another. We were standing close but not touching. She was speaking to
the connect in Japanese, and back and forth to me in English. Then her eyes switched and she said to me in English, “So give me your New York address,” while holding the phone to her ear. I gave her my Queens address. Now she was the second person to know what I normally wouldn’t allow anyone to know.

She was speaking in a soft, polite Japanese, bowing while speaking as though the caller could see her. It was a part of her, I told myself. It was automatic. It was her Japanese culture.

“It’s done. The machine will be sent to your New York address. The purchase order will be sent to me. You give me the money and I’ll pay it,” Chiasa announced. There was a pause between us.

“What?” she asked me, her eyes widened. I just smiled. I had nothing to say.

“Do you have your passport on you?” I asked Chiasa as we sat inside the travel agency.

“Yes,” she said, curious. “Why?” She swung her bag around to her lap and opened it. “It’s here.” She handed it to me.

“I want to reserve three tickets from Busan International Airport to JFK Airport in New York, leaving Busan on Sunday, May …” Chiasa’s eyebrows both lifted up. She didn’t speak or interrupt or contradict me. She remained silent. Half an hour later, outside the door of the agency, she said, “Ryoshi?”

Avoiding offering her any of the details until after her meeting with Akemi, I changed the topic. “Do you always carry a slingshot?” I asked her.

“Of course.” She smiled. “Even if I didn’t have one on me, I could make one in less than three minutes out of two pencils and rubber bands. “She was all excited again, speaking about her weapons of choice.

In Itaewon I bought her a scarf to wrap her hair in. In the back of a musical instrument shop, I watched as she showed me that she knew how to wear it. When she got it all wrong, I wrapped it for her. As my hands moved over her head, her eyelashes grazed my skin. I could feel her breathing. When I leaned in a bit more, she gasped. I looked straight into her.

“It’s not sunset,” I told her.

“I can see that,” she said so quietly.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “Why are you fasting and reading Quran and wrapping your hair?” I really wanted to listen and hear her reasoning.

“At first I was doing it out of pure admiration for Ryoshi, really. Then I started reading the Quran for myself. Certain things in there gave me a feeling,” she said.

“What kind of feeling?” I asked as we left the music store and walked through the Seoul springtime framed by all of nature blossoming.

“At first when I opened the Quran, I looked at the table of contents. I chose to read Al Nisa, the chapter on the women, before anything else. It said in there that ‘Allah created man and woman from one soul.’ I thought that was beautiful. I read the entire chapter, but that one line kept repeating in my mind. I thought that if everyone everywhere in the world believed that one line, things would be so much better between men and women and families. All of this time it seemed like everybody everywhere thought that women were less than men, lower and okay to mistreat.” She looked at me, smiling.

I thought about how each time I pushed to see if she was bullshitting me about something, she would prove that she wasn’t. Like earlier on when she gave her true reasons for following me to Kyoto. Chiasa was thoughtful, like my father raised me to be.

“What about in that same
sura
, Al Nisa, where it says on the thirty-fourth
ayat
that ‘Men are the maintainers of women’ and that ‘Good women are obedient.’ ” I smiled.

“I’d like a good man to be my maintainer.” She smiled. “And it says, ‘Good women are obedient to Allah and guard the unseen,’ ” she corrected me. “That means don’t walk around naked and uncovered.” She smiled.

We both laughed without a real joke or reason.

“About the two, or three, or four wives situation, I don’t know. I’ll admit, I wanted it to be true because I want and my heart wants and my body wants to be with you, and you are already married. But it seems like men are given permission to have up to four wives only in certain situations. And it says also ‘only if you can do justice with them.’ Do you think a man could really treat more than one wife equally and justly?” She looked at me sideways.

I was thinking and silent for some time. Then I told her what was
truest to me. “I don’t think one man can give two women the exact same things. I don’t think that a man has to give his two women the exact same things to do them justice. Each woman is different; probably they wouldn’t even want the exact same things because of those differences between them. But I could give two women the same things in general: a true love, a lifetime of loyalty, a hardworking man and provider, a passionate lover, and a man who would risk his life to protect you and give up his life so that you can keep yours, if necessary.”

Then I reminded her, “While you are bowing your head and praying to Allah, I am humbling myself and obeying and praying to Allah also.”