Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo
Tongue (11 page)
The thousands of taste buds on my tongue wake up one after the other. Taste is the most pleasurable of all human senses. The happiness you get from eating can fill the absence of other pleasures. There’s a time when all you can do is eat. When eating is the only way you can prove that you’re still alive. Large raindrops splatter onto the table, signaling the imminent arrival of a squall.
To eat or not to eat. To love or not to love. That is the question for the five senses.
MEMORIES ARE LIKE A WINDMILL with sharp points, spinning in your heart, stabbing it. The more you dwell on them the more they spin, quicker and quicker. Will the edges eventually dull? Will such a day come? Am I actually longing for that day to come, or are the sharp points keeping me alive? My past stays with me no matter how much time flows by. It’ll be good not to think about it, if only for three days. I bite my lip. Is there something I wouldn’t be able to do unless I did it right now? I feel that something will change for me when I go home. I feel more trepidation than excitement. Here, all I do is eat at three different restaurants a day. My nervousness might be a sign that my subconscious is vibrantly alive. With that faint hope, I eat breakfast at Killiney Kopitiam near the Somerset MRT station—French toast with jam of kaya, made of coconut milk, eggs, and sugar. I sense saltiness before sweetness.
In the afternoon I’m supposed to attend the wine workshop at the Conrad. I buy two jars of homemade kaya jam and hop into a cab to Chinatown. It’s hot and humid and it might rain again.
From a fruit stand I buy a green-tinged mango and a bright yellow Hawaiian papaya. I bypass exotic fruit like mangosteen, juicy and tart enough to be called the queen of fruit, little orange-colored bananas, and champedak, which is too smelly to bring into the hotel. I can make a sweet and light dessert by slicing the orange mango into thin slivers and shaving Gouda over it. Or these fruits would be perfect garnishes to honey-baked pumpkin. Mangosteen or champedak would be delicious with green-tea ice cream. Fruit is good on its own, but you can absorb more of its nutrients if you pair it with something else. Something is missing. I go into a Chinese bakery and buy a box of tarts. I don’t know if he still likes these cookielike pies, made with plenty of pineapple sauce thickened for a long time on the stove. We’ve seen each other a few times since he left but we haven’t eaten or drunk together. I don’t want to believe his tastes have changed. One’s sense of taste and smell do not change easily. I want to bake myself like a cake for him, or bake flour-salt dough into hard, salty, bracelet-shaped pretzels and cuff them to his wrists.
Chef was to join me at the wine workshop conducted by the wine expert Michel Rolland in the Conrad Hotel garden, but I don’t see him. Kim and Choi would be on the sought-after gourmet safari, which takes you to three restaurants along the river. Rolland talks about Château Lebon Pasteur, which has notes of overripe plum and dried fig; it’s made in Pomerol, his hometown. This wine might be ordinary for others but is special to him. According to Rolland, you eat from the lightest to the most intensely flavored dishes, but for wine you should drink from the heaviest to the lightest, the most flavorful to the most subtle. But that’s not always true. Individual likes and dislikes are important in choosing wine, and the same is true for food. Rolland pours about half an inch of wine into glasses lined in a row on the table. Now it’s time to taste. He raises his glass and says, This is the purest liquid in the world!
Ruby-red liquid dances in the glass, the color of condensed sunlight and wind, sophisticated and transparent. A question pops into my head. Pure water doesn’t contain any molecules that draw out taste. So you can’t taste something that is completely pure unless another element is added, whether it’s a grain of salt or a few droplets of vinegar. Is the wine in my hand pure liquid or not?
On our last night in Singapore, our group decides to have dinner together at Seafood Center on the eastern shore. I stay back at the hotel alone. Just as a meal ends with coffee or ice cream, trips to Singapore always finish with seafood. This time I didn’t feel like it, partly because of the wine I’d been drinking since the afternoon and the humidity sticking to my body like a wet cloth. My head hurts. It’s not even eight o’clock when I return to my room after having a bowl of wonton soup at the third-floor Chinese restaurant. I sit in the tub with the water running, then emerge and lie down in the middle of the floor, water dripping off my body. Whatever energy I have drains out, as if someone were sprinkling kosher salt over my naked body. Three days is too long. To think of only one person, or to try as hard as I could not to think of him.
If you’re sad just let yourself be sad
. I can’t tell whether it’s sadness or wistfulness or resignation pressing down on me. I want to sleep now. I want to enter into a deep and lengthy sleep, one I wouldn’t wake from in the morning. Choi will be back soon. I don’t have the energy to get in bed. I’m wilted, like hand-torn spinach. I manage to stretch my arm out and pull down the camel-colored blanket from my bed to cover myself. I feel warmth from my armpits, from the insides of my elbows, between my knees. Did I overindulge in eating and drinking?
Seok-ju, I’m freezing all of a sudden
.
I rub my eyes. A huge white horse stands in the middle of the room. I close my eyes, open them. A man wearing a white
bathrobe stares down at me … Who is it? Like I’m looking through heavy fog dispersing slowly, I realize it’s Chef. I’m about to raise myself up, but remember that I’m not wearing anything and that I’m not in a kitchen but a hotel room. I tug the blanket up to my chin. What time is it? Are they back from the seafood restaurant? Where’s Choi and why is Chef here? Even though I’m lying down and Chef is just standing there, it’s not awkward—it’s as if we’ve done this before. All we’ve done was stand next to each other in a narrow kitchen, bumping into each other. I raise my neck with effort, to get up.
“Just stay there.” His voice booms in the dark.
I’m surprised.
“Just five minutes.”
I don’t know what to say.
“I’ll stay just five minutes and leave.”
All of my vitality drains out. I hear cloth brushing against cloth. Chef is undoing his belt and taking off his bathrobe. Should I close my eyes? Even if I do it’s not completely dark. I don’t want to be nervous right now, like a fool. It’ll be okay as long as I don’t waver. Chef lies on top of me. He grips my hands holding the blanket and pulls them up toward my ears. I can feel his weight, his warmth, his breath on the other side of the thin blanket. Only our elbows to our fingers are actually touching, and his left cheek rests on mine. But it still feels like our entire bodies are touching. Nervous relief and sighs fill my chest. If I can’t turn the clock back by five minutes, there’s only one thing I can do. Lie quietly and wait for time to pass.
“Breathe.” His voice sounds so loud.
“… Okay.”
“I’m not going to do anything.”
I know
.
“So please just stay still.”
Yes, that’s what I’m doing
.
“I’m going to go soon.”
I don’t want to ruin our friendship of thirteen years, formed one drop at a time
. “You’re too heavy.”
He moves a leg off me. It’s easier to breathe. Chef is the kind of person who would forgo pleasure that might later bring guilt. We have to be able to eat toast comfortably at the hotel café tomorrow morning, as if nothing happened. We have to be able to complain that the coffee is too weak or that it’s flavorless. We lie there, looking at each other, not saying a thing, listening to faraway sounds. The night around me is dreamy and dizzy and too hot, like when you eat too much fermented mango.
“Every time I look at you I’m reminded of her.”
I stay silent.
“I used to be alive because of her.”
Is he talking about his ex-wife or his dead daughter? I’ve known him for a long time but I know next to nothing about his private life. But I wish he wouldn’t say that I remind him of either of them.
“I didn’t have the chance to love her fully. I didn’t have enough time.”
He’s talking about his daughter. “You can say anything you want.”
He’s surprised.
“Because we’re leaving tomorrow. We’re going home. Don’t do it there. Don’t be this close to me there.”
“… Okay.”
I want to nod but I can’t move. His face is pressing down and his shoulder is flattening and his leg is pushing down, his entire body smashed on mine.
“I wanted to remember her growing up. When I gave her baths I used to put her heel into my mouth. Babies don’t have much of a heel before they walk. It’s just a soft and squishy foot. It would move around in my mouth. A shock would go through
my entire body—she was alive, and so was I. When it felt heavier in my mouth I knew—Oh, she’s grown this much. After she turned one, I couldn’t even put it in my mouth. She was too big. Then she started walking. I felt a loss but I liked to see her walking and jumping and running with her heels that were starting to harden. I was happy that I was alive.”
I’m quiet. Four days after the five-year-old was kidnapped, she was found in a manhole near their house. “What did it taste like?”
Chef doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“Her heel.”
“… Sweet. Really sweet and tender.”
“Like a green grape?”
“No, it was purer and cleaner.”
We’re quiet for a moment.
“I’ve been to Dohoku,” I say.
“Right.”
“It’s famous for its horse meat. It’s amazing, the marbling of the bloodred and white, showing through the paper-thin slices of meat. I put it in my mouth and the juices of the meat welled between the crevices of my teeth. Like a horse was slowly walking into my mouth. It filled me up. Was it like that?”
“Yeah, that’s what it was like.”
“Right.”
“… No matter where you go, you can’t find that taste.”
“You probably can’t.”
“Yeah, it’s the taste of something that doesn’t exist in this world.”
“A special taste.”
“I wanted to re-create that taste.”
We’re silent for a moment.
Are you crying?
My cheek is wet, warm. It’s as if we’ve touched the deepest parts of each other, the parts that are untouchable.
“I have someone like that, too. Someone who makes me feel like I’m living.”
Chef doesn’t say a word.
“I didn’t have enough time with him either.”
“Don’t. Don’t do that to yourself anymore.”
“If it were easy it wouldn’t be love.”
Chef is quiet.
“Don’t tell me that’s not true.”
“I won’t.”
“You know how there’s a taste that can’t be substituted by anything else in the world? There are people that can’t be substituted by any other person.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“This is enough for now.”
“Yeah, this is enough.”
“Yeah.”
We stay silent again.
He unglues his face from my cheek. I watch him letting go of my hands, lifting his shoulders, slowly moving his legs away from me. I close my eyes. Because if I were to see his body, I might continue to recall this vivid sensation, which feels like a hot root pushing through me.
“But you,” Chef says, slipping into his bathrobe, about to step away. “You’re so small.” His voice brims with heartbreaking emotion and the love he couldn’t give in its entirety, as if he were talking to his daughter, frozen in youth.
I hear the door shut.
My heart hasn’t wavered, I whisper into the darkness. But somewhere, something in my being has bent, as easily as a grapevine. I turn over on my side. My body heats up, as if someone has put his mouth around my heel.
HUMANS AND DOGS yearn for attention and love. While humans worry about what others think of them, dogs are more interested in your behavior. Dogs react differently if the other person is more dominant. But if a dog doesn’t get his way, he will gradually begin to use threats, even if he’s the most well-trained dog. Paulie, though confident and wise and graceful, has begun to think up ways to threaten me.
One day after it rains, Paulie plods into the living room from the yard. Mud is covering his beautiful golden-red fur and he smells musty. With mud caking everything but his eyes, Paulie barks once as if to tell me that he rolled in the mud on purpose, jumps onto the sofa, then leaps onto the butcher block. What are you doing, Paulie? I yell. Paulie glances at me and continues on, as if he wouldn’t even consider stopping until he gets what he wants. I don’t budge. I sit on a kitchen stool, not looking at him, pretending to read the magazine in front of me. A dog’s eyes are different from a human’s, but all eyes are sensitive to movement. I toss the magazine aside and stand up.
Paulie, hesitating, lies down, his front paws placed side by side. Seok-ju doesn’t come to see Paulie anymore. Of course, he doesn’t come to see me, either.
I want what you want, Paulie. But he doesn’t want what we want. You should understand that by now
. I gently stroke his head to soothe him. Only the odor of the mud reverberates in the room. I push my hand deeper into Paulie’s coat. His scent’s completely evaporated now.
You can’t wait obediently anymore, right, Paulie? You use your nose to understand and remember the world. Right?
We’re having a conversation. A depressed dog, like a depressed person, shows physical symptoms—erratic behavior and eyes so cloudy that he wouldn’t be able to recognize his owner. We must be suffering from the same illness, and I think we communicate as best we can about it. But that turns out to be an incorrect belief.
A few days later, when I come home from work, Paulie is rolling a dead cat around like a ball, and when he sees me staring at him, a hand to my mouth, he plops down on top of it. As if to say, I’ve always liked smelly, squishy things. When I manage to pull Paulie away and stick him in the tub, he latches onto my neck. It’s not really a bite—he puts pressure on my neck with his muzzle the way he does when he pushes my knee, but we aren’t playing catch or wrestling like the other times. I feel a sudden terror. Dogs show their unhappiness with their mouths. If they’re pushed into a corner, they bite, even if it happens to be their owner. Paulie is agitated. I need to be calm. I have to be more attentive to his needs. Even though I’ve already turned on the water, I put the showerhead down on the floor as if to show him that I mean no harm. Whether you’re a dog or a human, if your needs are unfulfilled, you will feel like attacking. Is this what I’m really afraid of?