If I Had Your Face(56)
I’m okay. I have survived the day, again. All I need now is for these stupid fucking pills to work.
Miho
When it comes to love, I am not quite the fool that my roommate, Kyuri, believes me to be. Lately, she has been looking at me with great pity, alternating with scorn, and I know that she is contemplating my impending heartbreak. She considers it entirely my fault, for setting my heart up to be broken in the first place, with reckless disregard for the prime years of my man-attracting life.
It is her job to know men of course, and she thinks she can sum up Hanbin, my boyfriend, and how he will leave me. She believes girls should operate like Venus flytraps—opening only for prey that can actually be caught.
Of course, Kyuri cannot help thinking like this, as her own life remains deliberately stripped of love. When I ask her if she ever wants to get married, she snorts. “Not meant to be,” she says, blinking her mink-like eyelashes and wondering out loud at my rudeness for even raising the subject to her. But Kyuri is still the one out of all of us—even including the impressionable Sujin who lives in front of the TV—who cries the most when one of the characters has to leave the other for martyr-like reasons.
Kyuri also suffers from persecution mania. This is entirely my own and secret opinion. She sees herself as the victim—of men, of the room salon industry, of Korean society, of the government. She never questions her own judgment, or how she creates and wallows in these situations. But that is another story.
One day, years after we stop living together, I will embark on a Kyuri series. I know that with absolute certainty. I cannot start now, when I am in the midst of my Ruby series, nor while I am still living with Kyuri. I need time and distance between us. But this is why I relish living with Kyuri now. I am spoon-feeding the muse that lives in a well deep inside of my brain—hearing Kyuri’s stories, watching her drink to oblivion every weekend, obsessing over her face and her body and her clothes and her bags. I take photos of her and her things whenever I can. I will need them to remember her by. The other girls too, I have glimmers of them lurking in the outer regions of my mind; Sujin’s terrifying transformation, and dear, silent Ara and her antediluvian upbringing. It will take a few years, though, before I can commit them to paper or form.
* * *
—
AS FOR HANBIN, I don’t need Kyuri or Hanbin’s mother to know that he will not be my salvation.
* * *
—
SOMETIMES, WHEN HE is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both unendurable and terrifying.
* * *
—
I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time. In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.
* * *
—
WHEN I WENT to Hanbin about a month after Ruby killed herself, he told me he had been afraid. Afraid to sleep, because she lived in his dreams. Afraid to talk to anyone, in case they were judging him. When he finally ventured outside, people looked at him with a mixture of horror and blame and pity and thirst, and he had never known such combinations of expressions were possible on a human face.
He had asked if there had been a note for him, or any note at all. Her father’s people had told Hanbin that if she had stayed away from the likes of him, this wouldn’t have happened.
He looked so small then, it was as if his spine had curled inward, like a snake about to go to sleep.
His tortured face broke my heart, and for the first time I was blinded with rage at Ruby, for doing this to him—to us—with her reckless and destructive selfishness. To myself, I repeated what others had been saying about her. That anyone with her privileges had no right to be unhappy.
So I went to Hanbin and drew him down with me and lay beside him on his bed, which smelled like sweat and tears and musk and sorrow, and I comforted him with my body, and when we were entwined it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
Afterward, it was as if I had been suffocating all my life and only then was I able to breathe.
* * *
—
AT MY STUDIO, I am working on yet another Ruby sculpture when the director of the department comes barging in and interrupts me. I hate it when he does this and I have hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, but it is in English and perhaps it does not register with him.
“Everything going well?” he asks, beaming. It is clear from the self-satisfied expression on his face that he has some news, and it is likely to be good news. He circles the sculpture and me several times and clears his throat loudly. Perhaps he is disturbed by it, although it is positively demure by the standards of our department. The undergraduates’ work, especially, makes my eyes widen. It makes me want to ask about their parents. It’s part of my PR story that I have had a difficult childhood, but these undergraduates with rich parents who can send them to these schools without scholarships and have their children pursue art careers in this country—they are the ones who have apparently known unbounded depths of despair and hatred.
The director had liked the last piece I did—the installation with the boat. He had me take so many photographs in front of the sculpture that I joked I should have made room for myself on the boat, and to my horror he said that would be a brilliant new series and I should include myself in anything I do from now on. “I would be happy to take the photograph myself—it would be a collaboration!” he said, enraptured.