events. Perspectives. Entanglement is shared perspectives.”
Fan and Paul had passed through the crowded streets of Insadong proper and moved onto a broad avenue.
“Gazillions of quantum particles in the body. Who knows how many of them are entangled. Maybe that’s the reason you meet someone and you just have to see them again.”
“That’s poetry,” said Paul.
“But particles in human bodies are entangled with particles in other human bodies. We know that.”
“It’s still poetry.” Calling things poetry was not a compliment.
In bed that night Fan reached over to Paul and wedged one hand under his waist and used the other to pull his hips to her. It wasn’t like her to initiate sex so straightforwardly, but her body felt too delicious to keep to herself: as soft as the tip of a petal—she couldn’t stop feeling her own arms—the alive, blood-rushed surface.
Paul sank onto her, kissing her. She wondered if he would be too dejected about work to want to make love to her, but he became hard right away and ran his tongue through her mouth as if he’d lost something in there. He lubricated even before she touched him.
She placed his right hand on her thigh.
“It feels like embryo skin,” he said. “What did you say they scrubbed you with?”
“Salt.”
“Salt.” Paul put his tongue to her shoulder. “I don’t taste anything. Just you.”
Funny to think she had a flavor, like an herb he might recognize in a dish.
“They wash it off.”
Just the flick of his forefinger around her clit for a few minutes brought her to climax. Everything down there felt sweet and warm and full. They had intercourse with Paul on top—his choice, she was finished—and her legs wound round his shoulders. Before Paul would enter her, he asked her twice if she was sure she’d put in her diaphragm. He often did this. She wondered what had come first in Paul, the interest in cloning, or the fear of birth.
Whatever Paul might be dealing with at the lab, Fan would never agree to leave. It surprised her how much she had fallen in love with Korea, as much as it would have surprised her to fall in love with a man other than Paul. In fact, she fell in love, with Seoul in particular, the way people fall in love with other people: a visceral, even hormonal, giddy love, deep down in her body. She and Paul visited the city in the fall of the year before the move, maple leaves colored and swirling through the air like rose petals, Seoul calm and shut down for a harvest holiday.
Then the holiday ended and people thronged the streets as if they’d been poured up from the center of the earth, shopping, eating. They stayed then in Insadong. Vendors lined the streets, selling cheap clothes with delicate touches like openwork on the sleeves, dozens of kinds of foods: lollipops of scorched sugar, edible horns of soft ice cream, nuts, fruits. Yesterday’s dumpling stand became today’s pancakes bristling with scallion. She could hardly take it in. She reached an equilibrium she’d never felt before, so much to see and describe to herself her inner voice couldn’t go beyond description and have reactions beyond an open receptive joy.
Everyone smiled at her and said what they could in English, even if it were just OK or hello, and they seemed both happy to see her and unable to see the person talking made her, whom they couldn’t access. She had that feeling of teenage infatuation: as if someone has carbonated your blood.
The red of the maples was even a bit richer than a rose. She and Paul walked along a river at the edge of Insadong, a paved walkway by a channel of water. Paul saw her admiring the trees and picked up a handful of leaves, handing her a bunch by the stem. They crossed the street and he bought her a bag of walnut-shaped candy, dough molded around a nut and sweet bean paste.
“Paul! Candy and flowers!” she said, and she saw herself suddenly through his eyes: she was never so uncomplicatedly happy. He smiled, and looked nervous at the same time, rattled with wonder. She had used his name.
Fan was unsure how Paul had met In-Su (at a conference, had Paul said?), or why he’d been invited to take part in this work, given that most of his research was in agriculture. Any way of phrasing the question to him seemed to question his skills, however, and their relationship had always had that certain delicacy in regard to their work.
Paul never used the word adjunct. Rarely did anyone in her life: her father had no idea what it meant. He called his daughter “Professor” and could break down in tears talking about how far she’d gotten in life, all on her own, I couldn’t help her, he’d say. Her mother had Alzheimer’s; that stress and age had made him maudlin.
She would touch his shoulder. “You help me every day, Pop.” And she meant what she said, though not quite in the meaning he took: his strong but bent body, knobby with old breaks, his hands dark even years removed from the machine grease and black oils of his job, reminded her she could be doing worse things than what she was doing. It was more complicated than that he had been impoverished by his lack of education, while she had been near-impoverished by its access.
Grease-monkey hands, he said of himself. And she was proud of his pride. But when she saw the course of her life, she saw a Ferris wheel that had peaked when she got her BA. She perched at the top of things staring off into the educational future, seeing a vision like a tourist brochure of a beach, a paradise—a job that couldn’t be taken away from her because of tenure and that paid well, and gave her summers off. But the wheel kept turning and landed her in the same place she’d begun. She x’ed up papers instead of bathroom mirrors (with Windex; spraying in an x shape gave you the best clean); each month she paid money she didn’t have to companies she didn’t recognize that had bought her loans. Before her marriage she taught a full course load in the summer to keep up. All for the privilege of having a job for which she did not have to wear knee pads.
And she missed the society of her old job. Among the chambermaids, as the hotel where she worked called its maids, the position gave the women workers an equality; her smoke breaks with the other women, the times they stood rinsing out their mops together, seemed like some of the purest moments of communion she’d ever known. They had many religions and origins and ethnicities but ultimately, they were maids, the ones who put sponge and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to the grime left by others, those other people with no sense and no shame. They laughed about the guests: who had a quickie in the afternoon; what love affairs they’d interrupted, sometimes the chambermaids in their maid outfits surprising women—now and then a man—in their own versions of maid’s outfits.
This surprising of maid-dressers—sometimes just a glance through a door left a little open—happened often enough that they had a code for it: We got company, they said, or We got company in 432. Ultimately the maids as a group approved of guests for their lovemaking. They watched these guests in the hallways, reported back on their public demeanors, stacked against their private ones.
Once a week or so Fan and Yoon met to shop or have lunch. Yoon and In-Su had two little boys—five and seven, adorable—but like many Seoul-ites they had household help. She called Fan, saying simply You want lunch? You want to shop? either picking Fan up or telling her where to meet. For lunch Yoon nearly always insisted on a Paris Café, one of a chain of patisseries in Seoul, and Fan could never decide if this was because Yoon felt Fan would be more comfortable with European food, or if Yoon loved the chance to eat the rich pastries—chocolate tarts, Napoleons, tiramisus: she picked them up with silver tongs and heaped them on her tray. Over time Fan suspected the latter; Yoon chose her sweets while giving Fan a bright and secret
