Tongue Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  WHEN I SEE a house whose living room is brightly lit in the middle of the night, I think of two possibilities. Two people sitting across from each other, swirling glasses of wine, lit by subtly scented candles. Or two people fighting, arguing like it will never end. People don’t have spats in the dark. In the dark people make love or talk. The far superior option is to eat as you talk. Anyway, it’s not a good sign that the lights are on in our house late into the night. The thing I want to do most right now isn’t make love or talk or cook. I want to walk around the whole house, barefoot, and slowly switch off all the lights. Usually at this time, I’m in the bedroom or in the kitchen with the lights dimmed, making a simple late-night snack. But right now I’m not doing either. I can’t believe all the lights are on at one in the morning, like at a hatchery. I watch him as he walks around the house, unrushed, packing his things.

  He used to say, At night, I sit on the sofa like this and think about the happiest moment of my day. Then I get up slowly, turn out every light in the house, and go into the bedroom calm and relaxed. I close the door gently. I pull back the sheets and lie in bed, and I can smell the dried lavender from my pillow. The most important thing is that you’re always lying there next to me.

  Once a friend said that falling in love is like carving a word on the back of your hand. Even if you rub it out as hard as you can, a faint residue is left behind. So you have to be certain that you really want it. Make sure you think about it.

  Even though she’d never met him, my friend talked about him a lot. No, I talked about him a lot and she must have been listening. And she remembered everything I said. You’re right. I need to be certain about it right now, certain that this isn’t the end—it can’t be over like this.

  “Come here, Paulie!” he calls.

  Paulie, who was hunched by my feet, glances up at me, gets up slowly, and pads over to him. By now Paulie and I both know what this means. It means that he has something to say to me. I’m not sure when it started, but he calls Paulie’s name instead of mine. I caress the cutting board with one hand and walk into the living room.

  “I’m going to have people come and pack up that painting. I’ll tell them to call to make sure you’re home. I took care of all of our accounts at the bank, too. There shouldn’t be anything that you have to manage by yourself. I’ll call if I’ve forgotten something … I don’t really know how we’re supposed to deal with something like this. I’m going to Dubai for work in a week. I’ll be there for about two weeks. I don’t think I can leave the key, though, because I have to come see Paulie.” He clamps his mouth suddenly, as if he’s uncomfortable. If we’d had a child, would he have said he’d come by to see the kid like that? I don’t know what the end of a relationship is supposed to be like either—do I hurry up and say what I need to say as if I’m being chased, just as he’s doing, or do I cry and buy some time?

  “Do you want something to eat?” I ask, studying his sallow face.

  “Huh. You’re so unemotional.” He leaks a smile.

  It’s not the most adequate thing to say to someone who’s walking out on you, but I can’t think of anything better. I wouldn’t know of anything better to say anyway. Gogol wrote extensively about food, and was undoubtedly obsessed with it. The couples in his stories always express their love by feeding each other smoked sturgeon, fruit jelly, sausage, pancakes, mushrooms, melons. One couple eats eleven-course meals daily. One day, the husband suggests to his dying wife, “Perhaps you would eat a little something.” After she dies, he sheds tears at the sight of her favorite dishes. The man ends up starving himself to death. I wish someone would suggest the same thing to me right now: Perhaps you would eat a little something. I would probably say that to him when he’s on his deathbed, urging, It’s not too late, just ask for it and I’ll make it for you. What about a slab of rare steak like that first time?

  I remember the day he came into the restaurant to look for me. Cooks rarely come out of the kitchen. Even Chef never goes into the dining room during service unless someone he knows comes to the restaurant. Chef doesn’t trust cooks who meddle in the affairs of the dining room and sternly prohibited me from doing so. That evening was the first time I went onto the floor during dinner service. Manager Park, clad in a stylish white shirt and black vest, called me in—Ji-won, a customer came in with your business card. He wants you to make him this dish. Do you know him? Oh, okay, I replied, but I wondered who it was. I glimpsed the person’s face, the one who’d come in with my business card and ordered steak. I stared at him like I had the first time I saw him.

  Yes. It was him. I had met him at a pizzeria in Napoli, where I had worked for ten days for no pay to learn how to make pizza. My face flushed. It had been one month since I’d returned to Seoul. And here he was, thirty days after our first meeting.

  I went back to the grill station to sear the herb-marinated beef and cut a cross into the top of a potato to stick it in the oven. Sweat rolled off my face. The tiramisu I’d made in the morning had come out exceptionally well, and I’d taken a thirty-minute nap in the afternoon. And he had come here in the evening. When I go to bed later, I may be in an even better mood, I thought, as if chanting a spell. It wouldn’t do if I thought about something sad or if I were stressed, because those emotions could seep into my cooking. I laughed out loud. I turned over the steak. It’s going to be fantastic, I said, loud enough for the potato to hear me. I filled the opening of the potato with crème fraîche. I slid my knife under the beef and moved it from the grill, plating it in the center of the platter. I added some mustard sauce as well as some roasted asparagus, which usually wasn’t part of the dish. It was done. I placed the platter on the pass. Which wine did he order? I asked Manager Park. Barolo Zonchera, he replied. A solid choice. Manager Park lifted the platter easily and headed toward his table. I supported myself on the pass with both arms, my upper body sticking out. I could see him unfold the napkin onto his lap and slowly pick up his fork and knife.

  It looked as if he was poking at the middle of the steak with his knife. I tensed. A satisfied smile bloomed on his lips. The meat was perfectly cooked, offering just the right amount of resistance before giving way to the knife. Go ahead, take a bite, I said quietly from behind the pass. He cut off a piece and put it into his mouth and chewed. He nodded once, as if to say, Not bad at all, and cut another piece. I stood there until he was done, not missing a single moment, even seeing his lips plump with pleasure. When you eat, all the blood rushes to your lips, which become red and puffy. Like the penis when making love. Lips and penises and tongues are all special erogenous zones, crowded with nerve endings. The most sensitive moment for the tongue is the exact instant it’s touched by food.

  He drank some water, then took a sip of wine. He cut into his steak and chewed, savoring it. He had a good appetite. As Uncle had told me bitterly, you can’t continue a relationship with people who don’t want to eat anything, no matter how much you love them. If someone has a good appetite, there will be room for you to be included. He cut another piece and ate it with gusto. I didn’t miss a single second of it. I stared at him so intently that I was eating that steak myself. He was cutting into me, putting me into his mouth, chewing me. I felt my lips swell like well-ripened plum tomatoes, red and taut. Next time I’ll make you a dish with truffles, I said, gently wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Truffles and asparagus are some of my favorites, both sprouting from the depths of the earth. I believed that’s how love grew as well.

  “It’s too late to eat.” His voice is no longer conciliatory or contrite. I nod lightly. Eating and loving—impossible for us right now, as they require us to have warmth in our bodies.

  He’s gripping the handle of the front door. “See you,” he says, his eyes on Paulie. Paulie comes up behind me slowly and pushes his head lightly against the back of my knees. Just smile at me once, even if it’s awkward, just like the first time you saw me. I watch him take a step outside and turn my back on
him. If we had been a single line before, one line neatly on top of the other, now we are two separate lines going different ways. Two slanting lines are bound to meet somewhere. This feels like an obvious truth, like the way liquid always flows downward. That’s why I can send him off like this. It will just take time for us.

  I’ll feel better if I eat something sweet, Paulie, I say. If there’s no cake, alcohol isn’t a bad substitute. I’m going to pour liquor to the rim of the glass, until it overflows, aggressively lick the edge of the glass, then down it. I’ll gulp it in a split second, practically leaving an imprint of my teeth on the glass. Paulie barks. I hear the door close. Don’t bark, Paulie! I throw open the refrigerator doors as if I am yanking drapes apart. Chilly air assaults me.

  CHAPTER 4

  IF LONELINESS OR SADNESS or happiness could be expressed through food, loneliness would be basil. It’s not good for your stomach, dims your eyes, and turns your mind murky. If you pound basil and place a stone over it, scorpions swarm toward it. Happiness is saffron, from the crocus that blooms in the spring. Even if you add just a pinch to a dish, it adds an intense taste and a lingering scent. You can find it anywhere but you can’t get it at any time of the year. It’s good for your heart, and if you drop a little bit in your wine, you instantly become drunk from its heady perfume. The best saffron crumbles at the touch and instantaneously emits its fragrance. Sadness is a knobby cucumber, whose aroma you can detect from far away. It’s tough and hard to digest and makes you fall ill with a high fever. It’s porous, excellent at absorption, and sponges up spices, guaranteeing a lengthy period of preservation. Pickles are the best food you can make from cucumbers. You boil vinegar and pour it over the cucumbers, then season with salt and pepper. You enclose them in a sterilized glass jar, seal it, and store it in a dark and dry place.

  WON’S KITCHEN. I take off the sign hanging by the first-floor entryway. He designed it by hand and silk-screened it onto a metal plate. Early in the morning on the day of the opening party for the cooking school, he had me hang the sign myself. I was meaning to give it a really special name, he said, grinning, flashing his white teeth, but I thought Jeong Ji-won was the most special name in the world. He called my name again: Hey, Ji-won.

  He walked around the house calling my name over and over, mischievously—as if he were an Eskimo who believed that the soul became imprinted in the name when it was called—while I fried an egg, cautiously sprinkling grated Emmentaler, salt, pepper, taking care not to pop the yolk. I spread the white sun-dried tablecloth on the coffee table and set it with the fried egg, un-salted butter, blueberry jam, and a baguette I’d toasted in the oven. It was our favorite breakfast: simple, warm, sweet. As was his habit, he spread a thick layer of butter and jam on his baguette and dunked it into his coffee, and I plunked into my cup the teaspoon laced with jam, waiting for the sticky sweetness to melt into the hot, dark coffee.

  I still remember the sugary jam infusing the last drop of coffee and the moist crumbs of the baguette lingering at the roof of my mouth. And also his words, informing me that he wanted to design a new house that would contain the cooking school, his office, and our bedroom. Instead of replying, I picked up a firm red radish, sparkling with droplets of water, dabbed a little butter on it, dipped it in salt, and stuck it into my mouth. A crunch resonated from my mouth. Hoping the crunch sounded like, Yes, someday, I continued to eat it. Was that the reason I equated a fresh red radish with sprouting green tops, as small as a miniature apple, with the taste of love? But if I cut into it crosswise like an apple, I wouldn’t find the constellation of seeds.

  Once I take down the sign I’m unmoored, as though I have nothing else to do, as if my name were forever erased from the world.

  After he’s gone I curl up on the couch in the living room, immobile. I lie there quietly, sensing the wind blowing outside, the setting sun, the arrival of morning, the descent of cold, my throat starting to hurt. I don’t fry an egg or toast bread. I heave myself from the couch once in a while to take a sip of water, and when it feels like the long, sharp end of a dried-up, hard-as-rock baguette is jabbing into my forehead, I make a face and manage to pour hot water into the coffee press for a cup. Right now, in this house, the only things I can keep down seem to be water, coffee, air. I quit counting the days after the third day. I’m gradually being split into pieces—my shoulders and arms, my head and neck. When I realize it’s night again, I feel faint, as if my tired body is laid in a large, hot copper pan. Am I slowly disappearing without attracting any attention, like a small dot? I want to stir, to move and feel my fingers and toes that seem to be evaporating, but I can’t. Help, help me up, I whisper into the deep, dark green of night. You have to snap out of this, Uncle says. You can’t allow yourself to wallow in a pool of sorrow. Get up!

  Something large and hot and wet sweeps across my cheek.

  I open my eyes.

  Paulie is licking my face. His wide, black pupils are staring at me quietly.

  Did … someone come by? I ask, raising my upper body.

  Paulie barks once, in a low tone. He lies down quietly, twice shaking his head so that his ears, drooping and folded backward, swing to the front of his head. It’s his way of saying he’s hungry. I slide my hand under Paulie’s belly and pet his soft, silky coat. English setters—famous for being an elegant, powerful, expressive breed, lying quietly at their owners’ feet, pointing at prey without barking—are no longer valued for their hunting prowess. Instead they are prized for the long, silky, beautiful light-brown fur draping their bodies and their aristocratic beauty, which reveals itself when they prance around slowly, shaking their hair, taking a viewer’s breath away. Paulie nudges my knee with his nose. He seems to be saying, You’ll take care of me, right? Instead of agreeing, I rub his head with my palms—Paulie, such a loving, independent dog, with a weak homing instinct. He emits another low bark. Do you want to leave too? I ask him. Paulie flattens his stomach on the ground and puts his head on his front paws as if to say, I have to rest here a little.

  Paulie is his dog. He trained him, saying, He reacts when I call his name, so maybe it’s possible to teach Paulie actual words. With Paulie, he disliked using orders like sit, stand, go back, go forward, go away, don’t bark, lie down, no, wait. Instead he wanted to teach words he could listen and react to, like Are you hungry? Do you want to go for a walk? Do you know that person? We discovered that, depending on the pitch, length, and frequency of Paulie’s noises, there was an imperfect but workable sphere of communication between us. But just as dogs saw the world in grays, dark browns, and greens, there was a limit to the language we could converse in. This is good enough, he’d said, pleased. Now he’s gone and left, giving me the dog he’d trained, the dog he’d raised for fifteen years, the dog he’d had even before he met me. Once the decision was made that we were to separate, we divided up our belongings as if we were playing jacks, but the problem of who would keep the dog was surprisingly easy. She didn’t like dogs.

  We were rejected, you and me. I want to kneel on the ground and lightly nudge Paulie with my nose, ask him, You’re going to take care of me now, right? Something hot surges up from deep down within me. I swipe the back of my hand against my face, and then, because it feels as if I’m stuck in a tight corner, I touch my fingers, feet, and nose, carefully and seriously. The body parts that protrude, like noses and fingers, show the most wear and tear. Even though it isn’t perfect, my body is still held together in the right places and my fingers and toes still move freely. If I go limp now, if I give in to the heavy weight of sorrow, my body would quiver anew from the fresh sensation of pain—just like a sudden drip of candle wax on skin—and from the thrill of pleasure, all the more irresistible once I’d discovered it.

  I’ve never even dreamed of what rejection would feel like, and I know that I need to sense pain and understand the reason behind it and force my way out of it. My eyes are sparkling, reflected in the living-room window, and my skin tightens and my muscles tense the
same as when I make a sumptuous dish. Like a cork bobbing on water, I resurface lightly. And to push away the fear that is poised to grip me at any moment, I address Paulie in an unnecessarily loud voice: Paulie, want to go for a walk?

  FEBRUARY

  In the quest for gold a man may be lukewarm; but salt every one desires to find, and deservedly so, since to it every kind of meat owes its savor.

  —Cassiodorus, A.D. 523

  CHAPTER 5

  IT’S SO COLD on the last day of the Lunar New Year holiday that I buy a light-green down jacket on my way home from a walk. Every time I move, my body seems to rattle like bones encased in a tin. I go to work wearing that jacket. I run up the two flights to the restaurant, hurrying up the wooden steps whose edges are crusted with frozen snow. I took these stairs every day from the age of twenty to twenty-nine, when I quit to open the cooking school. Now, at thirty-three, I wish I could say that I’d briefly gone to a place nobody knows about before returning home. Just like the big and small scars on my arms, from flipping hot pans or splattering oil, ugly spots have invaded some part of my body under this heavy jacket. I grab the cold, frozen handle of the glass door with both hands. My palms stick to the surface. Now I’m one of seven cooks here. The door glides open after a screech of resistance, forbidding. I draw in a deep breath. Bread is already baking in the kitchen.

  The other cooks talk about me when I’m not around, just enough for me to detect the hush when I get back to my station. In the bustling morning kitchen, as we marinate meat, bake bread and pastries, wash arugula, I try to think of myself as someone else in that kitchen, let’s say someone named K. K, a disciple of the head chef, graduated from Appennino, the culinary school specializing in Italian cuisine, and was immediately hired by Nove. For six years she was Chef’s trusted right hand and oversaw the kitchen with him. Within a year of becoming sous chef, she left to open a private cooking school, and some of Nove’s regulars took their business to Won’s Kitchen. The popularity of K’s cooking classes spread through word of mouth in the trendy Gangnam area, but by that time K had split up with the young architect she’d lived with for seven years. The woman he’d fallen in love with was O, the famous model. K, left behind with a dog, shuttered her cooking school and returned to Nove—K’s life can be summed up in only a few sentences. Now that I think of it, I would talk about K behind her back, too, and that makes me feel better. At least K doesn’t have the kind of life that nobody would care to talk about.