Midnight and the Meaning of Love (82 page)

Akemi was seated on the stairs outside Hyundai Suites. Chiasa saw her first, all the way from the bottom of the block.

“Should I walk up there alone? Would that be better?” she asked me.

“No, we are already walking together so we shouldn’t pretend that we are not,” I said.

Akemi had her face lying on her knee tops. Her hair was uncovered and hanging down almost to the floor. She was watching as we approached. Her eyes were soft as they always were—soft, mysterious, and a little bit vulnerable. She was wearing a white
yukata
with a long stemmed black rose stitched on it in a wicked design. She wore wooden-heeled flip-flops. All of her fingernails had the kanji for Mayonaka. On her toenails were drawn half moons. She was so subtle in her extreme elegance.

“Akemi.” I came in close and reached my hand out to help her up. As she stood up, Chiasa bowed down, then came up speaking in Japanese. Akemi placed her hand in my hand and kept it there. We were now three standing still on the stairs, staring. I saw Akemi’s eyes seeing Chiasa’s diamond ring and bangles.

Akemi said something to Chiasa. Chiasa turned to me and said, “Akemi is asking me if I am your translator. I told her I was.”

“I’ll head upstairs so you two can talk,” I said to Chiasa and gestured to Akemi at the same time. Akemi wouldn’t loosen her hand from mine. She tightened it to halt me.

“Akemi said to me, if I am your translator, then I should translate.” Chiasa informed me.

I looked at Akemi. Her eyes told me she wanted the three of us to remain together.

“Then let’s all go upstairs,” I said. “For privacy,” I added.

In the elevator, I stood in the middle. They were on opposite sides, leaning on the wall as though it was the only thing holding them up.

Upstairs in our suite, we all removed our shoes. I sat on the bed and leaned against the headboard. Chiasa sat at the small wooden eating table. Akemi moved around in the tiny kitchenette, preparing tea and rice and soup.

She spoke some Japanese to Chiasa. Chiasa translated to me that Akemi said:

“For the first time, I feel so frustrated at myself for failing to learn to speak the English language. This was never a problem between Mayonaka and me before.”

Akemi was looking at me to let me feel and know that her words were for me. Then she said, “Now I feel myself splitting slowly like a glacier that has a tiny crack that threatens to break it into two pieces and send both sides drifting over icy water.”

Chiasa looked at me. “You see, this is why I love her words. They are like poetry,” Chiasa said softly in English without a trace of humor.

Akemi then turned to Chiasa and expressed the following feelings to her in Japanese, which Chiasa put into English so that I would also hear and understand.

AKEMI’S VOICE

I know why you love my husband. You love him for the same reasons that I love him. Any woman who comes to know Mayonaka will love him just the same. I am not angry that you love him. I have seen many women with either lust or love for my husband in their eyes.

I am angry because
he loves you
. He is loving you while he is loving me. I am also angry at myself, because you would never have come to know him if I had been in his life fully and at his side where I belong.

I am angry because his love is strong, and his love adds, but it never subtracts. So I know that no matter what I do or say, you have become an addition to me and him, a
permanent
part of us.

I am so angry at my father because he caused all of this. He divided a great love, mine and Mayonaka’s, and for shallow and stupid reasons. He has kept me away from so many people, family members who love me or who would have loved me and I might have also loved. If I had only known them.

The love between Mayonaka and me is so intense, but now our love will never be as it was, just he and I. Now it is he and I and you and all of our children to come. I feel many children will come, because I know him.

I’m not going to be mean to you, because I already know that would be useless. It would cause distance between me and my man, and I want to hold him close, so close, so close. I know that you will never leave him, because I would never leave him for the same reasons. So here we are, wedded together somehow.

Chiasa, I saw you at Hokkaido. You were impossible for my eyes to miss. I am an artist who appreciates so deeply each beautiful thing in deep detail. I see it. I appreciate it. I remember it. I saw you on the plane, a very beautiful, quiet girl, pretty even while sleeping. I did not know that the girl who I often spoke to over the phone, was the one who rode on the plane beside me and Mayonaka.

I am crying now because even when my husband was coming for me, he was with you. What exactly happened between the two of you? I will never know. Whatever it was, it has created a powerful energy, and a strong bond and a deep feeling between you two. These facts can never be denied. I saw the passion in your writing on the study cards that you made for him. I saw the love in his eyes as he spoke to you over the phone. I feel his body jerk at the mention of your name.

Mayonaka has already told me that he loves me, he tells me that I am number one in his heart, his first love, and that he will love me forever. Mayonaka has already told me that he will never leave me, no matter what. Mayonaka has already told me that if he has gone away from me, he will always return to me. He is my husband. I am his wife.

I cannot ever separate from his words, from his love, from his body.

So if it is okay for you to be number two, then I accept you. Between you and me, woman to woman, and wife to wife, we should never have as our goal to destroy one another. It is impossible for me to destroy you without destroying him. It is impossible for you to destroy me without destroying him. We’ll share.

Honestly though, and hopefully
only
in the beginning, while he is loving you, I’ll be burning. I’ll be burning because I know how good it feels. While he is loving you, I’ll be burning because I know how good it feels to him and at that time it will be
you
making him feel that good, not me. But when he returns to me and holds me, I will heal each time. For that healing from him, I would do anything.

Chiasa, if knowing all of this, my true feelings, the lives I carry from him in my womb, you still want to join us, and I know you will, I accept you. We should become great friends. You and I should become close, but we will never become as close as each of us is to him.

CHIASA’S VOICE

I love your husband. You are right in almost everything that you’ve said. True, I can only love him because of you, but
not
because you were separated from him. During the time that he was looking for you and I was helping him to find you, our tongues never touched.

He was true to you, more perfect than you could imagine and more perfect than I ever wanted or expected any man to be. I am embarrassed to say that even though I was a virgin then, and I am still a virgin even tonight, if he would’ve attempted in one of those nights that he was searching for you, I would’ve allowed him. But he did not.

We used your diary to locate you. Only I could read your kanji, and I was his translator. It was you, then, who brought my heart to him. It was your words, your feelings, your impressions, descriptions, and experiences with him. I fell in love with you first. Then I fell in love with him. It all happened in that order. So yes, that makes me second, when I am used to winning first place and being number one.

But what will I have if I pretend to be what I am not? In this love, I am number two. I love and admire you, Akemi, as a woman. I don’t hate women, although I know that many women hate every other woman automatically. I also love and admire him as a woman loves a man, in the deepest and most intimate of ways.

Number two is not less. You are right, it is addition, not subtraction. One is first and two is the next number over, but two is more than one. It makes one stronger. So here we are with no shame and no sin committed. I am so grateful you have accepted me.
Inshallah
over time, you will enjoy me genuinely.

MIDNIGHT’S VOICE

I know that if Akemi and Chiasa were American girls, they would’ve attacked each other. They would have tried to rip each other’s hearts out and bloodied as many body parts as possible. They would’ve burnt down houses and slashed tires and raised up girl armies. They might have even tried to castrate.

They would have labeled me a motherfucker, a dog, an animal, a nigga, or worse. They would’ve said that I was crazy or full of myself
or full of shit. Both of them would’ve told me to go to hell. The illest thing, however, that I know for sure from seven years in America—if they were American girls, they would’ve both made a scene, fought, and talked a bunch of shit and refused to marry me and refused to share. Still they both would’ve continued to allow me to fuck them repeatedly, impregnate them, and abandon them while swearing they were both right and both hadn’t done anything wrong. I was proud of Akemi and Chiasa. Them being able to stay cool, talk it out, and be reasonable made me love them even more.

* * *

“Call me in the morning,” I said, after walking Chiasa downstairs in front of the hotel. I hailed a cab. It pulled over.

“I want to spend time alone with Akemi, to make friends,” Chiasa said as I opened the back door for her. “Maybe I can come by early tomorrow,” she said, leaning her face out the window.

I knew from experiencing Chiasa during our search for my wife that she was great at making friends and winning over hearts. Chiasa has a purity in her smile and a gentleness in her talk that soothes and brings out the best in people despite her soul of fire and brave heart.

“Akemi won’t be here tomorrow. She has to go with her grandmother. How about you?” I asked her.

“I’m good until about four. Then I’ll have to get ready for the banquet. And will you still come at seven to meet Daddy?” she asked, as though something in me might’ve changed.

“Definitely, seven sharp,” I said. She smiled.

“Meet me at the mosque tomorrow at ten a.m.,” I told her as she was looking up at me with those long lashes and pretty eyes.

She seemed unsure. But she said, “Okay, ten a.m. the mosque, and seven p.m. the Shilla.”

I tapped the top of the cab and said, “The Shilla.” His meter was already running. He pulled off.

Umma told me to take my Armani suit with me. I should’ve listened to her, as usual. But I was fresh dressed and more than chilling for the thriller at the Shilla. I was feeling good, extremely calm and peaceful. Meeting the general at his five-star hotel, squeezed in between his last pressing appointment and his banquet of dignitaries, was just a formality for me. I had already married his daughter Chiasa, the sixteen-year-old pretty puma of the legal marrying age. I had affixed Umma’s signature on my documents, with her permission, of course.

Chiasa was swirling with emotions, her entire body pulsating like a heartbeat as she eagerly became my second wife. We wed at the mosque in Itaewon under the supervision of Imam Jabril Park and the witnesses he organized on short notice. As far as I was concerned, the general had already given his permission when he and I shook hands at the military property where he had abducted and held me, in Busan.

“Word is bond.” That’s what I believe and that’s what my father and grandfather believe as well. The documents were for the authorities. The ceremony was for the faith. The spiritual permission was all I was truly concerned about. If it was right in Allah’s eyes, then it was right for me, period.

Chiasa and my heart were probably married before all of that or perhaps before any words were exchanged between us. Maybe it was when I first saw her sleeping on the plane, or maybe it was much later when it came to me, a thought deposited into my mind:
Chiasa, a gift from Allah.

I had not gone into her. I would. When our feelings were at their
highest height and we were free to express them, just she and I, I would go in. I was excited to give her the deepest feeling that could be given to a woman probably other than childbirth, which I am sure is completely different. I was honored to be the first and only man to break through the skin that separated her from everyone else and brought her closest to me.

“We’ll tell Daddy together, but wait for me to wink,” she said, speaking of our marriage. “Please promise.”

She probably didn’t know that I felt so high from having her and Akemi as my own that I would’ve agreed to almost anything inside of those seconds when she made the request.

There was a long line of limos gliding up the long path to the Shilla, and Benzes and Lexuses and of course Hyundais. The trees were crowded on both sides, like a huge audience gathered for a holiday parade. Slowly my driver eased past the traditional Korean buildings and beneath the arches that lined the winding road. Each arch was made from intricately designed and painted wood. Turquoise was the dominant color. The tops were curled on the edges, the wicked way old-style Asian roofs were uniquely crafted.

When we reached the Hermès shop, I paid the driver and got out. The ride for the next seventy feet to reach the hotel door could take a half hour or more with all the vehicles waiting. I could walk up in less than a minute.

Through the revolving door and into an elegant lobby that was a festival of lights, my eyes were moving rapidly, taking it all in. The Korean designers had the eyes for the fine lighting. Everywhere I had gone in Korea so far was expertly lit, not with typical lamps or bulky bulbs.

At the Shilla the lights were a series of crystals carefully draped and dangling on an eighteen-foot wire slimmer than kite string. Each delicate crystal glistened from the high ceilings down. Each string hung at different lengths and on different angles.