Werewolf


It was Halloween, and Amanda walked into a party in a small apartment in Michigan State’s student housing complex. At first she didn’t see anyone in costume. Then she saw a guy with a werewolf mask on the couch next to her friend Kathy. It was the big rubber kind of mask you pull entirely over your head. It must have been hard to breathe with the mask on, but he kept it till the end of the evening; he seemed happy and laughed a lot. When he took the mask off, Jae was revealed; a small wiry Korean with a pug nose and skin as smooth as a dolphin.

Kathy said he was a student in one of her classes. Everyone at the party was either a student or a teacher at the English Language Center, where international students at the university improved their English enough to progress to regular academic classes. The teachers were working at assistantships to support their own graduate studies.

Amanda walked back to her apartment alone after the party. She stayed up for a while grading papers and trying to do practice exercises for her Articulatory Phonetics class.

The second time Amanda saw Jae was when a group of them went out dancing. They were all sitting around a big table in a nightclub. Kathy was sitting beside Amanda to her left and Jae was the other side of Kathy.

Kathy took out her wallet and showed them a picture of her husband, who was big and blond like her and looked like he could have been her twin.
“I didn’t know you were married,” said Jae.
Kathy smiled. She had left her husband in Detroit because she was bored with him, and decided to come and do graduate school on her own. He was still waiting for her to come back. Meanwhile she had a boyfriend here; a PhD student from Africa who she said was a genius. The boyfriend wasn’t out with them tonight though.

The bartender brought drinks. Kathy took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” said Jae.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” said Kathy. “The later it gets the more bad things we do.” She winked at him.

There was a man from Saudi Arabia sitting on Amanda’s right side and he started telling her a long story about a TV show in his country in which a housewife takes to alcohol and goes out drinking and sleeps with someone she doesn’t even know. Then she goes back home and the man she slept with keeps calling her house, and one time when he calls the husband answers and then the housewife gets into big trouble. Amanda looked down into her beer bottle. The moral of the story was obvious. She looked up again and Jae was there; he asked her to dance. “I’d love to,” she said.

After the nightclub they went out to breakfast at a restaurant a few blocks away. The air outside was very cold, but the restaurant was warm. Over coffee, Jae and Amanda and an Indonesian man had a conversation about fortune-telling. Jae claimed that he could tell fortunes by looking at a person’s earlobes.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.
“You’re about to fall in love”, he said.

They started spending time together. Amanda learned more about him. He was twenty-two, like she was. He was a Biology major, but he wanted to be an artist, or a politician. He talked about things the United States had and his country didn’t, that he would implement if he could, like programs to protect the rights of disabled people. He was born and raised in Seoul, had one sister and one brother, and his father was paying for his education. Every time his mother talked to him on the phone, she told him, “Remember, I’m looking for a bride for you.” Jae always laughed about this, as if it wasn’t serious. He said that 30% of Koreans married Americans.

Snow was falling on the campus and Christmas vacation was approaching. She didn’t know what to do about Jae. He kept telling her he was in love, and she never trusted people who said that.

One evening they went out with friends and Amanda had too much to drink. In the morning she and Jae were in her apartment in student housing and she told him how horrible she felt.
“I know a hangover cure”, he said. She looked at him doubtfully, but she was too sick to have a closed mind.
“Do you have any string?” he asked. They found some string in a kitchen drawer, and he took the string and tied it around both her thumbs, very tightly. For a moment all she could feel was that string tightening. Then she went into the bathroom and threw up. When she came back out, she paused for a moment and looked at him.
“I’m not sick anymore.”
“See. You need to trust me,” Jae said.

After Amanda went back home for Christmas, Jae bought a car and followed her there. On his trip north, the roads were icy and the visibility poor. He got into one accident by St. Ignace, brought the car to a shop, stayed overnight at a motel, and was on his way again the next afternoon when he slid off the road a second time. When he finally walked in the door of her mother’s house, she thought, “Maybe he does love me.”

After they returned to campus, they were inseparable. They walked around the campus hand in hand, over the snowy walks where the squirrels bounded along, looking as big as groundhogs. They walked by the Cedar River through crowds of ducks, who by contrast with the squirrels seemed winter-starved and would dive ferociously after any possible food source like birds from a Hitchcock movie.

Amanda had become entranced not only with Jae but with his country. She imagined that by researching his country she was exploring his soul. She ate kim chee, kalbi, and mandu, and drank ginseng tea. She tried to learn how to speak and write Korean. She went to the appropriate section of the library and pulled rows of books out, reading about the Japanese occupation, the split between North and South, the life of Kim Il-sung, and poetry in translation. She started to think about traveling and teaching there.

She had a dream one night that she and Jae were walking down a little forest path. In the branches of the trees shading the path were birds in wicker cages, singing sweetly to them as if they were Adam and Eve. She interpreted this dream as a green light.

In the month of March they had a week’s vacation and they decided to meet in New York City. She had an aunt and uncle there and Jae had grandparents, who were deported from Korea years ago for political reasons. He also had old school friends living in the city.

On that Sunday, she was at her aunt and uncle’s one bedroom apartment. Her aunt made coffee in the tiny kitchen. Jae was supposed to arrive in the city that day and call her. But she waited all day and didn’t hear the phone ring. On Monday, she was still waiting. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and she tried to convince herself to go to the parade, but she was too unhappy.

On Tuesday, her aunt was at her job doing research at Albert Einstein Medical Center, and her uncle had gone to his studio to paint. Jae finally called, with no excuse for his lateness except for a party with his old friends at which he drank a lot of whiskey and played cards all night. He told her about the game, the Korean equivalent of poker, which used a special deck patterned with flowers. She was trying to listen to him and recapture the way that she used to feel, but she felt as though something had begun to break down and fall apart.

Jae came by the apartment. He had borrowed an old car from one of his friends. He said he wanted to go visit his aunt, who was married to a Jewish guy who owned an optical shop. They lived in Queens, but the shop was in Harlem. She helped her husband run the shop and sell glasses. Jae said she was pregnant and that he felt sorry for her. She had gotten into trouble in Korea (an inappropriate affair) and the family had fixed her up with the optometrist in a sort of mail order deal, and sent her off to New York City. She was very lonely, Jae said.

“How do you know how to get there?” Amanda asked him.
“She gave me directions,” said Jae. She looked at him. They were driving already, and they passed a young girl on the corner who was wearing a miniskirt, fishnet stockings and high heels.
“Sad,” said Amanda.
Jae nodded, and said, “Another victim of society.”

They drove through Harlem for what seemed like the longest time; in a slow, surreal motion she saw faces keep turning toward the car and staring at them, and she was thinking about what they would do if the car broke down or they got lost, and how strange they must look, a white woman and a small Asian man, driving in a big old Cadillac through these streets.

It seemed like an absolute miracle that Jae found the shop. There were no customers inside. His aunt was happy to see him. She smiled at Amanda, shyly. Then she and Jae started talking really fast in Korean. Her husband came out from a back room and shook their hands. He told them that his wife would not work after she had the baby.
“She’ll have plenty to do,” he said. But he didn’t say it in a nice way, like he wanted to take care of her; he said it like he was trying to prove that he was the one in charge. His wife did not say anything. She looked at the floor.

Jae and Amanda drove back out of Harlem and visited a few museums. The next day they had a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant and drank a bottle of wine. She thought that she should have been happy, as they had been looking forward to this trip for weeks. But she wasn’t. They went to the Metropolitan Opera and sat in the front row and watched Carmen. At the finale, when Carmen was stabbed, Amanda felt a sharp pain.

Though Jae was supposed to meet her aunt and uncle, he never did; though Amanda was supposed to be invited to dinner at his grandparents’ place, they were called out of town, and canceled; though she had taken many photographs during the week, of she and Jae pretending to have a good time, she accidentally left the film in a suitcase that went through X rays at the airport and it was ruined.

The evidence of their trip had been erased. The emotion that had been between them was replaced by something else, something cold.

Nightmares began replacing Amanda’s dreams. In one, she and Jae were on top of a mountain. She pushed him off, but he caught on to a tree branch extending from the side of the rock. She pushed him again and he fell. In another, he had been run over by a car on a highway. She stood and looked down at him. She didn’t call an ambulance. In the third, they were in a swimming pool. She turned and placed her hands on the side. Jae stabbed her in the back with a silver knife and the pool filled up with blood.

For the whole summer, they didn’t see each other at all. Then, in fall, they met. He had gained some weight. He said he had been trying to eat four meals a day so he could get bigger and look older. She had lost weight herself. They used to be the same size. Jae was still unsure about many things, whether to stay here or go back to Seoul, whether to be a politician or an artist. But he had decided that he could not risk his parents’ reaction if he were to marry an American woman. After all, he would probably be disowned, and then how could he pay for school?

Halloween came again. Amanda was all in black. She had borrowed a long black vampire cape with a high collar. She was already so pale she didn’t need makeup. She walked to another party with Jae; it was not a date, they told each other. They were just going as friends.

At the party, they danced and danced. Amanda remembered the werewolf mask from the year before and thought that Jae had put on an American personality just like that mask. Everything in the United States was new and exciting. In this persona, he met her, and it seemed natural to want an American woman. Then one day he looked in the mirror and realized that it wasn’t him.

They were still dancing. When she closed her eyes, she could feel a temporary return of the belief that they were perfectly matched, that they were one being spinning around the room. But she knew that when she opened her eyes, it would be time to face the real world again.