Because we still made little money, Nate and I needed guarantors. The co-op required they be from the tristate area, which disqualified my parents, who, while not yet billionaires, miraculously made a very decent living now, Appa having left the oil and gas company to open an engineering consultancy. In Manhattan, lessees are required to make forty times the rent in annual income, and guarantors have to make eighty. We asked Irving and Lorraine, who handed over two years of tax returns in thick bound books. A few days later, we were approved by the co-op board and set to move just before Labor Day, in time for my second year of art school.
We drank wine with Irving and Lorraine on their porch overlooking Princeton’s main street to celebrate the lease signing. “And don’t forget, you can always stay with us if you need a late night in Princeton,” Lorraine said to Nate.
Living in Manhattan was like living in an Epcot, city-themed version of a city. While we did not have the corporate jobs of our Princeton friends or financial support from our families, we nevertheless did everything we wanted. Sometimes I couldn’t fathom what we would do with more money. As I had intended when we moved to the city, I worked harder and longer in the studio, attended art shows, met collectors, and started selling my work. Our friends traveled and took vacations, but Nate and I were happiest when we were working. Soon, I made even more money when friends asked me to tutor their children. In a matter of time, I was working the entire Upper East Side. With the extra money, we whittled down $1,000 a month in student loans, much more than our monthly minimum. My lessons began in the half hour after art school ended, and my last students were the high school juniors and seniors who preferred to meet late. I walked into the apartment after ten, and it started all over again at seven in the morning. On Saturdays, I used Nate’s commuter pass to take the train to Princeton, where I’d kept all my clients.
I lived a life that was busy and full of everything.
One Sunday afternoon when I had a tutoring cancellation, a classmate and I hired a model. Magnus was a seventy-year-old who had been quite a sip of water in his heyday, and always brought gladiator props like spears and a metal girdle. That day he wore a crown.
An hour in, the studio atmosphere tranquil and focused, Magnus fell asleep under the light.
“I like your painting of Leticia in the morning session,” I said to Brad while we painted. Handsome and capable, he was one of the few students who worked while attending our school. Occasionally, a group of us went to see him at the West Village bar where he crafted cocktails with the same precision he brought to painting.
“It’s a great pose.” He dipped a paintbrush into mineral spirits. “How’s Nate doing?”
“He’s good. Busy.”
“He’s ‘busy.’ ” Brad chuckled. “You know, none of us really believes he exists; we’ve never met him.”
I laughed. “Well, we’ll have to figure that out sometime.” It was true. Nate spent most of the week in Princeton now, staying nights at Irving and Lorraine’s. Otherwise, he got home after eight, and missed the Thursday night art openings.
“You’re busy, too,” Brad said in a way that made me realize he was an ally in the studio even though we didn’t talk much.
The alarm went off for a long break, but Magnus didn’t stir, so we kept painting.
“Can I ask you something, Brad?” The previous winter, after he had bought a television for his apartment, he and his brother rented a car and drove their old TV to their parents’ in Iowa instead of throwing it away. “You know how you have to work at the bar because you don’t get money from your parents? Do you ever get mad you have to work like that?”
His long-handled number 2 brush did not falter.
“No,” he said. “I just feel proud.”
6.
IN THE FALL OF 2008, on the way home from my last day at the art school, across Times Square, the stock tickers ran red and maniacally—Asian Markets Tumbling, Dow Plummets 1,800 Points in Largest Weekly Loss in History, Head of IMF Says US Financial Crisis to Send World into Recession—but inside my bag was a check for $13,000. Had the foreign currency been exchanged two days earlier, $13,000 would have been $20,000.
The check had arrived in the mail from an international foundation awarding grants to emerging artists, and partly on this promise, I’d left school. For months, I’d been squirreling away money, preparing to leave the classroom, which I no longer trusted to teach me about the world outside. I needed to leave school and be alone at last. I wondered whether that was an inheritance, too, whether Appa had felt the world too exciting and limitless to be constricted by anything—school rules, “common sense,” the opinions of others.
My departure from school was without cake or ceremony, since I was the one who organized cakes and ceremonies. There were hugs and high fives from classmates, and one boy said, “Don’t be a stranger,” but I exited quietly, a stranger among those with whom I’d spent fifty hours a week for three years.
When I opened my front door and dropped my box of painting supplies, the apartment was very still. Over the past couple of years, as my studio practice had grown, Nate and I had made changes to our home. The few hundred square feet that had been our living room was now overwhelmingly packed with the stuff of our lives. The queen-sized bed, futon, and kitchen table left little floor space, and in every corner was the crush of books. Last spring, in a blizzard, Nate and I had trudged to the lumber yard on the West Side Highway and bought plywood sheets. Cutting two-by-fours with a circular saw, he fashioned a model stand. We moved the bed and dressers into the living room, painted the bright walls of the back bedroom a dark charcoal to minimize reflectivity, and in the span of one weekend, we made a studio.
In the muted room, my pupils dilated in the darkness. Suddenly, I remembered I hadn’t made a portrait sketch this week. It was important, symbolic even, to paint something right then—on the last day as student, the first as professional.
I took down the hanging mirror, leaned it up against my easel, and adjusted the light. I prepared my palette with seven wells of paint: titanium white, yellow ochre, Venetian red, alizarin crimson, transparent brown oxide, raw umber, and ivory black. A while ago I’d chosen to limit the colors of my palette, to reflect metaphysically the idea that the huge variety of human experience could be made from the same small pools of matter. The white noise of life receded into the gray of the walls, along with the talking heads of the Times Square screens and the memory of the boy who’d cautioned, “Don’t be a stranger.” I looked at the blank canvas and then into the mirror. Pulling my shoulders back, I assumed the pose I thought might be me—the portrait of an artist as a young woman—and began to paint.
The first painting on the wall was mine.
Inspired by Edward Hopper’s masterpiece The Automat, I wondered what it would have looked like if the artist had zoomed in on the woman alone in the café. In the warm gold frame and under the soft lighting, my piece looked sumptuous. A red dot was stuck on the wall beside it, the red dot that meant “sold.” I entered the gallery, which was bright and festive with waiters rotating with silver trays of champagne, and kissed the owner on both cheeks. I was whisked away by a society writer to have my picture taken in front of one of my paintings. Guests held the gallery brochure. Inside, under an image of my Hopper painting, it read, “Introducing Hyeseung Song.”
I had gotten my hair done for the occasion, and when the women at the salon had heard about my debut, they clustered around me, teasing a crown so high I looked, especially with my dramatic makeup and black ensemble, like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. “Don’t worry,” they reassured me in their Eastern European accents. “It looks big, but it’s going to look perfect in the photos!” In fact, it looked big and preposterous in the photos. Abby screeched and patted the nest of hair. Nate was late.
When the opening was over, a group of us walked down to Houston Street, where we went upstairs to the dark-lit Pegu Club. Taking up a half dozen velvet booths, we drank and talked for hours. Eventually, Nate and I said goodbye and hailed a cab going west. In the car, I put my head back and sighed, snaking my hand into his.
This was how Nate and I lived full, though parallel lives in which we focused on our careers and surviving the city. These years of struggle felt like the first act of La Bohème, when hustling is still charming because tragedy has not struck. This was the time during which we achieved many things and took care of many people. It is the kind of story that is not painful to read only because the two people are young and healthy. But this was almost fifteen years ago, and now the story feels more like what it really was about: want, lack, and sacrifice.
I hummed along in my career, sending paintings to galleries, fulfilling commissions, teaching, and working eighty-hour weeks. After the first show, Nate never came to the openings. I didn’t want to pressure him to leave the office early; he worked long hours and commuted. His effort was to science and to truths about the universe. I never told myself that I was part of that universe, too.
Nate had many thoughts he did not put into words. I was always trying to guess his mind, especially when his behavior contradicted what he said. He seemed tortured, but I could not understand who had done it. What I did know, however, was that as it had been in my family, work came first and marriage second. I never questioned these priorities. Nate had done his duty when he was young—had put family first and work second—and I wanted to erase those reverberations for as long as it took to make him whole.
In the early mornings, I walked in Central Park with Eve. Then I painted in the studio until four o’clock, by which time I had to start my walk to Sutton Place or the Upper East Side for my lessons. If I got out early and the weather was fine, I met her at an ice cream shop on Ninth Avenue, and we sat on a bench and ate our cones. As I watched the passersby, I remembered how I’d learned about New York from the movies when I was young. I had both disappeared and appeared here. I never wanted to leave.
7.
NATE WENT ON THE JOB market. He had a short, fruitful search, and in the end received three offers. The first was at Harvard, the second at Columbia, and the third at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
When the Columbia offer came in, I dreamed of subsidized faculty housing on Riverside Drive and an art studio in Washington Heights. Already planning my Upper West Side life, I reached out to friends who taught at the university and had a young child, to inquire about childcare options. Cambridge felt fraught given my history there. Of the options, Baltimore would be the most like starting over. My life was in New York! But Nate said Irving and his mentors believed Baltimore was the best choice and that he should take it.
“And besides,” he said, “the labs at Columbia are way uptown and not on the main campus where my office would be. I’d need to take the train between the two.”
I reminded him that he had been commuting every day for four hours and a fifteen-minute subway ride was comparatively negligible. But he argued from the position of having spent twelve years at Princeton, where it took Irving five minutes to walk from home to lab. A five-minute commute was what Nate was trying to replicate for himself.
It was a mute, rainy day when we visited Baltimore after the offers were made. Lethargy hung in the air like dank laundry on a line. While Nate attended faculty meetings in the morning, the department, which was courting him and therefore me, had set up meetings with arts administrators at the museums. In the afternoon, we toured neighborhoods with the unofficial department realtor, a white-haired, Talbots-clad fiftysomething named Marcia, who, like most realtors, was partial to chunky gold jewelry and understated upmarket vehicles. From the air-conditioned sanctum of her Volvo, we explored the city and the suburbs.
In the city, we occasionally drove past burned-out buildings, similar to the ones Nate and I had seen upon pulling into the train station that morning. I assumed developers were working to transform them, but Marcia informed me matter-of-factly that there were few developers in the city.
The suburbs were unsurprisingly gorgeous, but like most suburbs, they were also white and evoked voluptuous stagnation and waste. In fact, they reminded me of Memorial. The picket fences, the brick perfectly pointed, the manicured lawns, more Volvos in the driveways—it should have read like success, but to me, it was suffocation. From the backseat, I whispered to Nate that I preferred the city. Marcia chimed in, “You’re from New York so maybe that’s a good fit. But you’ll see when you get here—most of the university professors live in the suburbs.”
When we exited Penn Station into the roar of Manhattan, instead of it feeling as if Baltimore was two short hours away on the Acela, it was as though we’d passed through a border from another world. I tried to keep an open mind, that is, a mind open to being persuaded. More than anything, I wanted to do what was good for Nate’s career, as he had done for me four years ago by moving to New York.
As an artist, visualization was what worked for me: identifying a compelling image and harnessing my mental energy toward developing it and making it my own. But what was the image of Baltimore? Nate said I wouldn’t have to tutor anymore and could paint all the time, perhaps even open my own art school if I wanted. The end of tutoring? I reminded myself that this was a good thing after years of service to ultrawealthy families whose children were probably guaranteed success regardless of my work but whom I cared about anyway. Nate was saying Baltimore would finally allow me to focus on myself, my career, and our family.
The underlying assumption was that I was a painter and, therefore, portable. Like a plant that can be uprooted and placed in another soil without any interruption to its growth, a painter could paint anywhere without disturbance to her artistry.
But not everyone agreed. A mother I tutored for, a Broadway star whose Al Hirschfeld drawings of her littered her town house, scrunched up her face in horror and exclaimed, “Why would anyone want to move to… Baltimore?” Those favoring the city argued that for professional artists, New York was certainly the mecca. The most neutral reaction came from a friend who asked whether I’d watched The Wire. “It’s the best show on television,” he said, hyperbolically comparing it to War and Peace. But somehow I didn’t think watching The Wire would help me visualize my life in Charm City.
It was only when I walked in Central Park with Eve that I could start to draw a picture of my future. Somehow with her, things were clearer than when I talked with Nate, and I saw that after eight years together and five of marriage, my husband and I had little experience communicating what we wanted. Our lives up until then had been based on executing oughts, and whenever the universe dispensed options, we had always chosen the best and most prestigious path. Now the decision tree splintered once more, and “best” wasn’t so clear.
In the end, I made an Excel spreadsheet of the three schools. In the columns were “Nate’s Career,” “Hyeseung’s Career,” “Location,” “Good for Children,” and “Overall.” We assigned a weight to each factor, converting each cell into a numerical score. Even though we claimed we wanted to balance our careers equally, the score weighed Nate’s more heavily than mine.
A week before we had to make our decision, Nate traveled to South Africa, so we continued our discussion via Skype. Once, a gecko crawled through an open window in his hotel room and scurried across the wall behind his head. Gecko was in the corner, and Nate was on about Baltimore. Gecko ducked behind a lamp, and Nate was back arguing for New York. I watched the screen as my husband’s two-dimensional avatar spouted arguments from Irving, whom he trusted more than anyone.
In the meantime, I was grateful for my medications, which helped me contend with Nate’s insecurity and indecision. Regarding these for the first time, I lost the sense of who my husband was. His tendency to move always and steadily toward the light and away from the darkness, his eschewing of the grays—this is what I had first admired in him, and that admiration had grown into love. But we were older now and these decisions occupied nothing but the midrange where complication peaked. Watching him eaten up by human complexity, I no longer recognized him, and my conception of Nate as the strongest person I knew collapsed. It was time to be a real partner and love in a fuller way than I ever had; and yet, I could not do it. The avatar was speaking, the gecko was scrambling. But I was no longer listening. Instead, I spoke to myself inside my three-dimensional flesh-and-blood body.
If Nate could be stronger, then I could be, too. If he showed me strength, took my hand, I would go anywhere with him and never look back.
I turned onto Eighth Avenue and entered the crush of Hell’s Kitchen after finishing my lessons for the week. The Broadway theater across the street had its gilded doors thrown open to the spring evening, and throngs of laughing theatergoers exited, holding their Playbills. A line formed behind velvet ropes around the back door, the audience clamoring for autographs and pictures with the stars.
I stopped and observed this very New York scene unfold through the film of nostalgia already in my eyes. Nate would never ask or cajole, but I knew he wanted to leave New York, which had never been a home to him.
