If I Had Your Face(21)
“We don’t have an artistic bone in our entire family, even my gallerist mother,” he said to me once when he and Ruby came over to my studio to see renderings of my final project.
I was showing him some sketches, which I was planning to turn into a series.
“I really love what you’re doing with this one,” he said reverently, holding up a rough sketch of a girl in a well, looking upward with her hands outstretched. It had been buried under a pile of other sketches and he had gone through them all. “This is quite incredible.”
“It’s all very morbid,” I mumbled, embarrassed. I’d forgotten that sketch was in the pile, and the girl’s eyes had turned out so differently from what I had envisioned in my head. It had been a class assignment on family that I had never turned in.
“But that’s why we like you,” said Ruby, from the corner where she had been studying one of my sculptures of blind children. “That’s why I like you,” she said. “I think you can see things very clearly that others can’t because they are so easily distracted.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I smiled so as not to dispel such heightened notions of me.
* * *
—
IN THE WINTER, it was a thing among the rich Korean kids to book a hotel suite for the night and drink there, even though all of them lived in beautiful apartments. One time, we drove to Boston because Ruby wanted to. “I’m so bored here,” she said, and collected her brother Mu-cheon, who went to Columbia with Hanbin and lived uptown, and a few other friends from boarding school. And off we went to stay at the Corycian Hotel on Boylston Street, with plans of shopping and clubbing.
Ruby insisted on driving herself in her red Maserati and Hanbin sat up front while Mu-cheon and I sat in the back. He was passed out because he was hungover from the night before, and I sat quietly, staring out the window at the snow-covered trees whizzing by.
I had been trying not to think about the scene I had witnessed the week before. I had been walking out of the library, wondering why Ruby had not contacted me for over a week, when I saw her and another Korean SVA girl—Jenny—getting out of a taxi with oversize shopping bags. They were laughing as they grappled with the bags and the driver had to get out of his car to help them. I could see from the logos on the bags that it had been a Fifth Avenue day. A few weeks before that, she had left me out of dinner at her house with several other study-abroad friends. I had found out about it when I overheard two girls raving about the private chef she had hired.
Only stopping twice, Ruby drove all the way to a little restaurant in Boston’s Koreatown, where we ate dinner and started drinking; the owner knew Hanbin and didn’t bother us for ID. The place got louder and louder as it became packed with drunk students. There were six of us to start with, but soon more people started coming as everyone began calling and getting calls from their friends in Boston.
Around 1 A.M. we ordered more soju for takeout, and with plastic pails in hand, we left. Ruby drove slowly and jerkily.
Back at the hotel, someone put on some music and we continued drinking. Our suite number had been given out at the restaurant and people started arriving in groups of two and three, all carrying more drinks. Some had booked rooms on our floor, so we started wandering in and out of them, drinks in hand, whispering and laughing in the hallways. I didn’t know any of the newcomers but we were all giddy and drunk. I listened to their banter and smiled and drank some more. In the corner Mu-cheon started nuzzling some Wellesley girl.
I don’t know what time it was—3 or 4 A.M.—when I went to lie down on the bed in one of the suites. My head was hurting and my body felt like it was buoyed on waves, rising and sinking. I heard murmurs and music outside but was relieved to just close my eyes.
The door opened and shut and a hand brushed against my forehead. It was Hanbin, looming over me. “My head hurts,” I said. “Do you have any Tylenol?”
He shook his head.
“Then can you just press my temples a little? Like this.” I put my fingers on my own temples where they were pulsing.
He had big hands and he clumsily tried to do what I’d shown him, but soon just started stroking my hair.
I rolled my body a little closer to his and he leaned down and somehow, suddenly, he was kissing me.
It was over so quickly but I loved it terribly, the feel of his broad, strong body against mine. His shoulders were so wide and appealing and his mouth was warm. He got up abruptly, looked down at me for a second, and then left. We have never talked about it since, but I remember everything.
* * *
—
WHEN RUBY KILLED herself two months later, I could not talk to anyone. I stopped going to classes. I could not leave my room. I did not know how to live.
I wish she could have told me more about her family, about the grief that her father caused her on a daily basis, the demons she inherited. She had alluded to these things, but I had not asked for more, and I knew that that was how I had failed her, by not asking for more details, by not telling her repeatedly about how her life was so spectacular compared to mine. I assumed she knew that, I assumed that she felt lucky compared with me, that that was why she kept me around as a friend. I should have told her more stories of my own sorrows.
I then proceeded to betray her in the worst possible way, by loving and taking Hanbin, and I know that in the next life, I will pay. But for now, I can’t help it, I cannot stop going down this path, even though I know the wreckage that it will leave of my heart. All of this—Hanbin, my job, my frenzied productivity—is very temporary, I know. All I can offer her is proof she haunts me still, every day.