If I Had Your Face(18)

“Can I come in?” he asks again when he pulls up in front of the art studios on the university campus.

“Absolutely not,” I say, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before getting out of the car. “I don’t know why you keep asking.”

Scowling, he drives away.



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IN THE STUDIO, I feel the great wash of relief I always feel when I walk in through the door. Tying my hair back, I head into the bathroom to change into my work clothes and hang Kyuri’s dress carefully on the door.

The terrible drumming in my heart subsides as I pick up my small chisels and sit down at my workstation. The scene that I have been trying to bring to form—the picture that’s so clear in my head—is that of a night sea with a girl on a boat. Her long hair covering her face, she’s leaning forward over the water, wearing a sheer nightgown and a blood-red ruby ring on her left ring finger. She is riveted by something in the water.

Last week, I started to carve her out of plaster. Her face was the easiest part—it’s the hair that will take the longest. I think I will make the sea out of ostrich feathers and the boat will be a real boat—a wooden rowboat, I am thinking, with faded red paint.

After a few hours of carving, I have to set the chisels aside to start working on a watercolor of the same scene. I just want a rendering of what I had in my head before I forget anything, although such loss is hard to imagine. This is going to be the sixth in my latest Ruby series. The other five pieces—paintings and sculptures—are sitting in the back of my studio, in the shadows. They were pathetic manifestations of what I had in my head, of course, but they are as finished as they can be for now.



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IN A SHOE BOX somewhere under my bed is a stack of black-and-white photographs—my first Ruby series, if I choose to think about it that way. My favorite shows Ruby in a white fur coat, a preposterous thing of shorn mink with cream silk lining and a matching hat. She is standing on our school library steps (how I miss winter in New York!), snow piled up on either side of her, lights glowing in the windows. Underneath the coat, she is wearing a knee-length ink black dress, stockings, and precarious high heels. She looks happy, her eyes crinkled in a rare, crooked smile.

We were on our way to a gallery opening that evening and we had stopped by the library to see if they had any books on the featured artist—a German painter who specialized in neon-tinted birch trees. “All we need to read is the introduction,” she said authoritatively as she ran a finger along the spine of the book we found in the European wing. “That’s all you need,” she said. When she found the book, she skimmed the introduction twice and made me memorize the titles of three of the artist’s most noted works.

Hanbin picked us up that night in front of the library. Or did we meet him at the gallery? He picked us up most nights, anyway, and he was certainly there for that particular exhibition. He bought a painting for Ruby and surprised her with it for her birthday a month later. It was the cheapest one at the exhibition, he whispered to me at her party. She loved that painting so much—a fluorescent forest of birches, streaked with shocking pink and yellow, in a thick gold frame inscribed with her name. RUBY SO-WON LEE.

I wonder where the painting is now, maybe up on a wall at her father’s house, or in some closet crowded with skeletons.



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THERE WAS a short article about Ruby’s younger brother in the news the other day—the American news, not Korean news. His exotic car rental start-up had just received funding from the second-biggest venture capital firm in San Francisco. I found this puzzling for many reasons—why would Mu-cheon need funding at all, why was he trying to work on something as insignificant as a car rental company in America, in English no less, and what happened to law school?

But when I asked Hanbin about it, he just shrugged and said, “Why not?” which effectively stopped any further line of conjecturing. Hanbin did say that he thought the funding thing was more about publicity than about actual need, and that the Silicon Valley investors probably needed Mu-cheon’s connections more than Mu-cheon needed them. An illegitimate son is still an heir, potent and wary, a prize to be carefully wooed over long periods of time.



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WHEN I THINK about Ruby, I remember her best just lounging on her white sofa in her Tribeca apartment, caressing a piece of jewelry she had bought that day, surrounded by impossibly beautiful things. She was a born collector with a devastating eye, who could make harmony out of the myriad pieces she purchased. We would walk into an antiques store and she would home in on seemingly incongruous, heart-poundingly extravagant knickknacks—a century-old ebony jewelry box encrusted with uncut gemstones, gold-edged teacups from Russia, a woebegone nineteenth-century doll with ash blond curls and a wardrobe of miniature, exquisite dresses—but when they came home to her apartment they looked as if they had been grown there, sown from other seeds of beauty. Her apartment nourished a part of me I didn’t know I had—a desolate craving to touch and see and luxuriate in objects.

The thing about her was that she knew I was entranced by her things, but she didn’t mind. I was already firmly categorized in her mind as an artist, a creator and lover of beauty. My worshipping of her taste fed her vanity as a collector.