Fiction, Liso Y. Jeon
Because it is still two o’clock. The boy who must study sits alone at a corner table, reading a treatise on scientific pluralism. Palm trees sway beyond the dusty French windows. Their fronds cast shadows in the deserted lounge, the shape of giant feathers. A lull. It is dim inside. Or maybe it is only her drooping eyelids. Vaguely, Estelle wonders if the boy, too, is secretly fighting off his drowsiness from the immoderate lunch. A heaping plate of tomato pasta with clams. Never does she think to ask him frivolous questions. Andre, who is unflinching in his movement forward.
A few tables away, Estelle herself is reading on her laptop. A halfhearted selection based on a sudden memory of the author’s name. Anaïs Nin. She is said to be famous for her diaries. When Estelle opens to a page, Nin also happens to be on vacation by the sea. But she keeps skittering to and fro various places amidst various people with whom her life is entangled. So fluent is the writing. Nin is so adroit at teasing out reality. Even her quandaries seem siphoned onto the paper with amazing lucidity, drop by drop. Although Estelle initially expects, even hopes for, a sense of intimacy through this transgressive act of reading a diary, she finds here neither thrill nor resonance. Instead she is caught in different feelings altogether. A deep suspicion towards her own impassivity and gross reverence towards the book, the fact that the diary is a book after all. Without achieving any certainty, she clicks on “x.”
“Find me upstairs.”
Against his wishes, Estelle leaves Andre a handwritten note on his table. Her cursives are brand new. The r’s are indistinguishable from the n’s. No doubt he senses her loitering. No doubt he is seething. She is compelled to irk him further by causing a minor disruption. A test on his patience, since her note is bound to extend beyond his initial notice, to drift as a meretricious specter in and out of his attention. Andre’s staunch belief in knowledge charms and revolts her, in turn.
On the fourth floor, the curtains have not been drawn. The sun of August floods the room, blanching everything. A rampant whiteness. Estelle feels that she has entered an eternity. Where every moment that could exist is being poured into her eyes at once. She thinks of the innumerable white crabs that poke frantically from their holes in the pale sand at the beach. In Estelle’s heart bubbles a kind of sick ecstasy. One too intense to be called pleasure. It is an immobilizing sensation. Her face remains placid. Before it even crosses her mind, she drops into bed and promptly sinks. How she hates lying alone in this enormous bed, which she did not ask for, but was nonetheless given, out of generosity apparently, when the lodge owner upgraded their room to a family suite. She does not complain because she hardly complains. Estelle endures her lot, her subjection to forever, her floundering in a preponderance of light.
Two more hours. Andre will have finished his reading for the day. He believes it would have been more sensible for him not to be on vacation. The vast territory of unexplored arguments takes priority over everything when he allocates his limited supply of time. Nothing is terribly novel for Andre on this ten-day trip, which he must therefore turn into “a life lived within meaningful constraints.” From twelve thirty to four each afternoon, he shall have his philosophy. The boy is a declarant of his desires.
An idea pops into Estelle’s head. That she would venture into some solitary romance while Andre chooses to busy himself with near-truths. She thinks to walk deep into the water, feel smooth pebbles under her feet, breathe, anticipate the true beginning—of what? It unsettles her, this stark opacity of her life’s, no, even her day’s trajectory. The owner’s dog is barking. It is chained to a post outdoors when the day is scorching. The matter is out of her hands. The dog will keep barking, or it will stop.
As for herself, the only consistency in the last four days has been sex after coffee in the morning. Always urgent and disloyal. Estelle moans, listening to herself closely. She does not wish to sound shrill but her voice keeps regressing to a girlish mewling. Perhaps because she is indeed a girl. Estelle is twenty-one years old. Aside from the occasional flares of hormonal acne, she has retained the rosiness of adolescence, which Andre attributes to the Korean half of her genes. Like her breasts, the impression Estelle gives is of smallness that is plump and round. But since yesterday, Estelle has been making love with a wild and deliberate abandon. She has upped her volume, gleefully imagining the five girls would be able to hear her from the corridor. She would like for them to gossip endlessly about her, the new monster in 403, the nymphomaniac. Would they believe her if she confessed to knowing truly nothing, nothing at all, about the joys of sex, the female orgasm? No. Those girls would think she is being shameless.
The five girls must be Estelle’s peers. The oldest only seems to be in her mid-twenties. In tiptoes while Andre reads, Estelle has been going around, eavesdropping. She learns that the girls work in exchange for a meager sum of pocket money, accommodation, and food for the summer. Perhaps one or two will remain later into autumn, simply if they feel like it or if nothing else beckons. Though assembled by chance, together, the girls look like sisters. In fact, they behave like one. A meek and mousy family that might inspire a folktale. The good always wins, et cetera. Their tanned faces bear no hint of makeup and they wear baggy clothes. Between four and five each day, the girls, having completed their daily chores, would be lapped in a loose embrace, vacuously fondling one another’s fingers or hair, nobody betraying a shred of self-consciousness at being touched, at touching. They make a display of their affection in the center of the lounge. The sun now enters in slanted slivers, a lazy orange. Contained in one such ray, amidst floating particles of dust, always the same girl with short home-cut hair, would be singing along to a bossa nova playing on the radio.
Silly things you told me, “I’m so lonely”
Stupid things to tell me, so unfriendly
Don’t be so cruel, it’s not funny
Love me so cruel, you can’t leave me 1
One glance at the girls and Estelle understands that her fate is to be set apart from them. No questions asked. She decides to usher destiny further. After lovemaking, she checks herself in the mirror but skips fixing her smudged mascara and blush pink lipstick like she would have normally done. With her lean but ultimately juvenile hands, she cups her breasts and lifts them slightly, thinks they have grown a little perkier through sex. She never wears a bra. This is how Estelle comes down for the complimentary breakfast prepared by the girls. Feeling decadent and certainly clever, she butters her toast and smiles before biting.
“Do you think they could be the owner’s daughters? Their mother dead?” Andre probes on the second night.
“I wouldn’t know. I have never been friends with other girls.” Estelle answers coyly as though expecting Andre to be amused. But no talk ensues. His body twitches. How dreadfully quick do boys fall asleep. It is possible, however, that this is when she loves him most. A chorus of cicadas reverberate throughout the moonlit island. And at last Andre becomes an immaculate young child who dreams dreams that Estelle might come close to entering. If she is lucky.
But Estelle did pursue a girlfriend. Once. She was visiting her mother’s country for a few months. There, she befriends Bini. A singer who also writes her own songs and performs occasionally in underground art venues. What attracts Estelle is Bini’s stoical aura. In a past life, Bini might have been a monk, with a shaved head, taking noises from nature as her sole music. Such is the serenity within which Bini hangs in the dim and crowded club striated with hypnotic green beams. Ironic. That she should profess herself a singer when she assumes more poignantly the position of a listener. Estelle cannot recall meeting anybody like Bini who listens with the whole of her body to the proprioceptive squirming of an individual world. It is a pity that they cannot be regular friends.
Bini was waiting for her blond Swiss lover. Maybe she is still waiting as he searches for a lawful reason to take up residence in Korea. After a mediterranean-style dinner, which Bini barely eats, the two of them rest beneath a pedestrian bridge where a narrow stream flows and magnificent gray herons come to fish. They share a cigarette. One full stick is too nauseating for Bini who waves merely after two puffs. Hungry mosquitoes buzz petulantly around Estelle’s outstretched legs. But she dares not make a fuss with Bini by her side, imposing her cool air of nonchalance. Estelle smokes away anxiously until the cigarette glowers just before its filter tip.
“My lover, Lucas. He considers a job at a strawberry farm. Soon it will be strawberry season.” Bini says in her learner’s English.
Oh that is ridiculous, Estelle almost blurts, almost giggles. She experiences no surge of empathy if that is the appropriate response to have. Laughable images dangle from the nervous branches of her mind. Strawberries! Of all things, strawberries! A fruity ambush. The dainty little strawberries seem to her either so profoundly adorable or so profoundly absurd. And the sheer incomprehensibility of these profundities overwhelms Estelle, tickles her madly from the inside. When Andre comes to find her in their room, she shall tell him about this forgotten story immediately. She knows that he is sure to be delirious. Her head already rings with the sound of him neighing.
Unmoved by the minor heroism of cultivating a family or securing a livelihood, Andre and Estelle have made a silent vow to live specially. This happens one year before they kiss in front of a jazz bar on Queens Street West. It is Saint Patrick’s Day and cold.
“I saw that you enjoyed the gig.”
“And how did I look?”
“Like a beautiful little fool.”
“So I am the daughter of Daisy Buchanan?”
“In a sense. You could very well be.”
“I could very well be. Because I love and hate my mother.”
Didn’t meanings used to flow effortlessly between them? Even her most oblique perceptions. Even his most deranged theories. Stupidity was then beautiful. Desire delicious. Freedom was hers. As long as she remained legible to one person. Andre.
When Estelle reconsiders the funny strawberry story, she is not sure that Andre would laugh. Perhaps he would scoff in the way she has been privately scoffing at the five girls of the lodge. But she does not recall scorn in her laughter when she heard of Bini’s lover. Lucas, was it? The Swiss man who considered becoming a foreign laborer at a Korean strawberry farm. And all for love. Estelle does not scorn love. How could she ever?
With a single blasé beep of the card reader, the door opens. Estelle jolts imperceptibly as though she is caught guilty of some indefinite crime. A dark and familiar shape quivers deep inside her body and she turns quickly to look at the clock on the nightstand. Three eleven. So he has decided to finish early, she thinks. Lacking all control over herself, Estelle becomes impossibly hopeful.
“Did you have a nice session?” she asks with a crumbly cheer.
“Why did you have to do that?” Andre shoots back but visibly withholds his anger. A thin vein has protruded on his right temple. It is writhing like a worm stuck under a shoe.
“Why what?”
“The note. I told you many times not to disturb me when I am working. Estelle, it is a matter of respect. Besides, I never asked you to wait for me. What is keeping you in?”
“You know I cannot ride the bicycle and the bus is so unreliable here. I may not be able to come back by four if I leave after lunch.”
“You might as well not have. I am not going out tonight.”
“What about dinner?”
“You were supposed to say sorry.”
Andre leaves for the bathroom without waiting for her to reply. He locks the door behind him. The sound of the shower. At first a trickle. Then a cascade. Estelle pictures him standing enclosed in a ring of water, an unbreachable wall of water. It occurs to her that there is always some place he can go to if he chooses. He is a native everywhere. She, a foreign laborer. She was Bini’s lover.
Then, what if she goes to the beach alone? What if she buys a bottle of wine to drink alone? What if she wears her floral bikini? She will not have to worry about her pubic hair jutting out. She will take photographs with her film camera, perhaps one of herself too. She will write little thoughts inside her notebook. She will not write about Andre. She will be famous for her diaries. She will have lived specially all on her own. But Estelle already feels so breathless. She is weak from thinking too hard, too straight. She is unaccustomed to thinking with words.
The dog has stopped barking. Since when? Suddenly, Estelle would like to check on it. See that it is alright. The dog is a boy Maltese with an effeminate name. Polly. Whenever she visits, the dog wags his tail and leans against her, tottering on his hind legs. Andre has a good laugh every time because the dog never fails to get an erection.
“He likes you, Estelle. He feels you.”
Estelle is rushing down the stairs, calling out the dog’s name. She trails her hand down the metal railing so as not to fall and feels that it is hot to the touch. The marble stairway echoes with the loud pattering of her flip-flops.
“Polly, Polly.”
“Polly, my sweet.”
But the chain is empty when she arrives. Estelle notices signs of a struggle. Bloody paw prints on the ground, which continue towards the main road, growing fainter. There is a movement in the center of her chest like a green vortex. She wants to cry but her tears are sucked back into that slow, swirling, carnivorous hole. She wants to scream but no sound escapes.
“But here I am, Polly.”
1 Antena, “Silly Things, Numero Group, track 3 on Camino Del Sol, March 1, 2004, Spotify.
Liso Y. Jeon is a Korean-Canadian writer born on the longest night of 1997. She lives in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke.
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