4.
THE NEXT SUMMER, FOUR YEARS after I graduated from college, Nate and I married.
My parents wanted us to have the wedding in Houston so Umma could help plan. But Houston and a two-hundred-person wedding of mostly Koreans meant nothing to Nate. “Irving and Lorraine got married at city hall in the morning. They had lunch and went to the movies. By dinnertime, he was back at lab.” Nate quietly alluded to his advisor and his wife as I selected menus and signed food-and-beverage contracts. I suppose this is how he thinks you become successful in life, by engaging in zero unnecessary hoopla and putting your time into work and not people. But then I immediately chastened myself. Nate, of course, had put time into people. I tried to accept his participation would be limited to his appearance on the wedding day, but whenever I heard him joke to his friends that he was going to be a guest at his own wedding, I got mad. As for me, as the day approached, I was tying more bows and counting more RSVP cards than I was painting or drawing.
Someone besides Umma who took an interest in the wedding was my cousin Tae Hyun. Despite his divorce, he still believed in the promise of marriage and offered to have my wedding hanboks made.
“Tae Hyun says he hopes Nate will like his! The pastels are very on-trend right now!” Umma yelled from the other room, where she was on the phone with Seoul. In a giddy voice, she admonished her nephew for spending too much. It was the toys and food at Lotte World all over again.
One searingly bright and cloudless summer afternoon, Nate and I changed: I out of my dupioni gown, he out of his tux, on the lapel of which was pinned a single gardenia. I dressed in my bright magenta chima and Nate in his peach pants and cobalt-blue jeogori, in preparation for the Korean bowing ceremony. We were changing, from man and woman into man and wife, from a Western couple into an Eastern one. An hour before, Father Ko from years past officiated the English, Korean, and Latin wedding mass.
During the hour-long service, I tried to breathe. I was stressed from arriving late at the church and wondered whether my aggressively hair-sprayed bangs would look crunchy in the photos. As Father Ko intoned above, I clenched my hands together, but I wasn’t praying.
If I had the chance to relive that moment, I would pray though. I would give thanks that God had used the Stew to short-circuit the path I had barreled down. Two years at Harvard—just two years of the wrong life, and my life would not be a compromise. In that time of sickness, Nate had stepped into the void to give me the kind of love I understood: warm in intention, dutiful in practice. This was the love I’d learned from my parents.
This was all I knew.
5.
JON PETER LENT ME ARTBOOKS and introduced me to the work of living artists. I studied him as well: an artist at work on his own life. He helped me find a small painting school in Manhattan I could afford. The Monday after Nate and I returned from the wedding, I knocked on a door on the Upper East Side. It opened, a portal to another existence. I stepped in, and began my life as an artist.
During that first year of working and commuting from Princeton, art was my world, a world that my marriage made possible. While painting, I could hold many things at bay—the noonday demon, the clawing of my mother.
The following summer, Nate graduated with his PhD. He completed the degree on time, despite the year in Bozeman with his parents. At his defense, his mentor, Irving, and the other professors drilled him. His tall, slim form strode over to the front of the room. With a faint smile on his face, Nate worked. Neat lines of numbers and symbols trickled down the chalkboard. When he finished, we all clapped.
We celebrated with pizza and champagne in the department. Among the crowd was Nate’s classmate Gerald. A prodigy and teen graduate of MIT, Gerald had also completed his PhD and was returning to MIT for a professorship. The sight of him made me wonder whether, if it hadn’t been for Nate’s choice to care for loved ones, his genius might have catapulted him to similar heights. Nate was staying on at Princeton for a postdoctoral fellowship, a coveted position he was happy about—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that meeting me hadn’t been very good for his dreams.
At the beginning of August, school let out for vacation. August in New York could be miserable, which was why everyone tried to leave the city. But I took the first day of the month to walk the neighborhoods closest to Penn Station.
A broker took me past Tenth Avenue on the extreme western edge of the island. In a dingy walk-up, the shower stall abutted the kitchen sink, taking advantage of the same water line. Doorless, the toilet sat on a raised throne in the corner of the living room.
“Am I supposed to do dishes in the shower?” I exclaimed. From my bag I pulled a tennis ball I used as the end of a mahl stick to keep my hand steady when painting small details, and placed it on the scuffed floor. The broker and I watched as it rolled with growing speed from one end of the room to the other.
After a few places like that, I was thoroughly dejected and bid goodbye to the sweat-drenched broker who was glad to loosen his tie. The sidewalks emanated the heat of hell, and from the sewer grates hot air blew up my blousy shorts. Around Ninth Avenue in the mid-Forties, I came across a prewar building with a covered awning advertising itself as “the Whitby.” Some of the unsavory elements in Giuliani’s Times Square cleanup had been thrown to this patch of Hell’s Kitchen, littered with gentlemen’s clubs and sex shops. Women loitered in front of the nearby Aladdin Hotel. Across the street, an establishment calling itself “Private Eyes” had rolled out the red carpet. Here goes nothing, I sighed, and passed under the Whitby’s wide green canopy.
It was cool and dark inside the lobby. I inquired about vacancies, and the office manager and I rode the elevator to a surprisingly serene one-bedroom on a high floor. I walked to the back of the apartment where the windows looked out toward Central Park. Everywhere was light.
I turned toward her. “I’m interested,” I said.
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.
