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Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo

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BOOK: Tongue
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“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.

My rank is below that of Manager Park, who was the youngest cook when I quit, but I don’t have to wash and prepare vegetables or devein shrimp or debone chicken. Refusing to care what the others think of me, I bake, boil, steam, sauté, fry, season, stew in the small kitchen, next to the other cooks who don’t know everything about K’s life. A gossip in the kitchen would whisper that when K first got back here she was cowed by the senior cooks, but now she commands the kitchen a little too overtly, as if to show everyone that her burning desire is to work in this kitchen. K’s appearance here for the first time in four years is the kind of thing that nobody talks about but everyone takes note of. I don’t say a word, as if I know nothing about K. You talk about your knife slicing open your finger or shoes that pinch your feet, but you don’t talk about what’s in your heart. When I spread open the well-ironed white linens to
change tables after a busy lunch service, I wonder, where did K’s life go wrong?

As I noticed when I first came back, the practice of closing the restaurant between three and five in the afternoon is still the same. During that time we prep for dinner service and one of the cooks makes a snack—a simple roll stuffed with avocado or flying-fish roe, or a tiny portion of noodles that could be finished with three swipes of chopsticks—and shares it with the others. Before, I usually made omelets with a sprinkle of sugar or fruit salad from leftover fruit, hand-squeezed orange juice, and honey. Snacks have to be either salty or sweet.

I’m leaning on the wall of the metal staircase that leads downstairs, at the end of the hall past the bathroom, when I hear someone’s footsteps approach. It doesn’t seem prudent to be caught standing around by myself yet, I think, as I dust off my hands and turn around to head back in. Chef is striding over from the far end of the hall like an angry man, with half of a thick baguette in his hand, and, without giving me the chance to refuse, shoves it quickly and forcefully into my mouth. “I don’t need a cook who doesn’t eat.”

I’m caught off guard.

“Did you forget that you have to be physically fit for this job?”

I’m quiet.

“Say you’ll eat it!”

I can’t answer because the baguette has taken over my mouth. In the kitchen, I watch what Chef is cooking, listen carefully for the words he sometimes utters, get a whiff with my nose, and, instead of asking questions, sneak a taste when he’s not there, just as I did back when I was an apprentice. So how did Chef figure out that I’m not eating anything? It’s only been three days since I started work.

After spending all that time in bed, I realized I was treating the act of eating as though it’s the art of Zen, taking in just
enough, a little at a time, slowly. Exactly the way I never did with food. Like dancing without passion, eating like that will never awaken your palate. K may have lost another crucial thing: the obsession with good food, the strong impulse to make and eat it. Chef is right. There’s no need for a cook who doesn’t eat—you don’t only cook when you’re holding a knife in the kitchen.

BOOK: Tongue
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ads

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