This was what she deserved for lying to Judith and Sabine about why she needed the weekend off. With no compunction, she’d told them that she was helping a friend move. If only she could be back in her apartment working on the leather fez assignment for her costume headwear class, bent over a sewing machine, the radio humming nearby. If only. If she hid in her hotel room until the conference was over, Kevin would be furious with her, but after this experience, she didn’t want to lie to another employer again. Casey pulled down the brim of her hat as if to shield herself from the bathing light of the Florida sun.
The first four holes passed quickly. Bizarrely, her game was brilliant. Shame could make you concentrate. Two birdies and two bogeys.
“Casey Cat is on fire!” Hugh laughed in a mixture of shock and delight after she sank another one. Both her long and short games were equally strong. Hugh was tickled by this surprise performance, not being the kind of broker who restrained his playing for the client’s sake. Besides, the two clients weren’t his anyway, and Casey was the assistant. Brett had been nearly struck dumb by her playing after the third hole, but his jingling had grown more persistent despite Unu’s curious stares. Unu, an excellent golfer, was a touch behind Casey and right there with Hugh: one bogey, two par, and his last was two over par. He’d been studying her swing.
The arc of it was just gorgeous, Unu thought. The girl’s posture when she was at rest was straighter than a club, and her profile was stiff. After he’d mentioned their prior meetings, she hadn’t said anything to him except whatever was necessary to avoid making their interaction weird. When she was quiet, he could feel the grief in her expression. Something was making her really sad, as though she were easy to hurt and would be easy to hurt again.
His ex-wife, Eunah, had been this way. Something about sad girls sort of got to him. At their first meeting arranged by a relative, shortly after he’d arrived in Seoul as an expatriate employee of Pearson Crowell, Eunah had appeared self-possessed and determined, like a young woman driving straight toward her destiny. He liked that about her; it made her seem different from the other girls, who giggled too much or were prettier but too shy. Their engagement was barely five months long, and soon after their marriage, her resolve for life dissipated quietly. Eunah did everything she was supposed to do, but there was a quality of performance about her, and he was starting to feel that nothing he could do or be would make her feel joy. She was always grateful to him, but that wasn’t necessarily happiness. She did not delight in his presence. Eunah thought he was a nice guy. Sometimes, desperate to make her laugh, he’d act the clown. He gave her expensive gifts, which she appreciated. His wife’s regret would come and go, and it infected their happiness, but Unu also had his very busy work, and he could not attend to her as much as he’d wanted to. He’d always believed there would be more time later. When he was recruited by Gingko Asset Management for a job in New York two years back, Eunah had said she couldn’t leave Korea.
“I don’t want to be an American. I don’t like bread.” She’d said this with enormous hesitation, knowing how odd it sounded considering she had married an American-born Korean who had warned her from the very first date that he fully intended to go back.
“Eunah, I’ll never ask you to give up rice,” he’d said, laughing at her comment.
Unu didn’t give up right away. He brought her guidebooks or videos of movies about New York like Annie Hall. She read them and watched the films. She tried to be enthusiastic for him and tried very hard to think about living in America. One night when they were in bed, she turned her long body away from his and told him that she still loved her college boyfriend, whom her parents had refused to meet solely because he was from Julla-do—a poor province of South Korea, where its natives were cruelly stereotyped as cheats. She had phoned him when Unu had told her about going to America, and he’d said he was still waiting for her. That he would wait for her until he died.
Unu let her go, not because he didn’t love her, but because he did. After she left, there was a peculiar sense of heartache mingled with relief, because then he understood that the sense of doom in her life wasn’t his fault. After the divorce, Eunah married that college boyfriend from Julla-do, and they had a daughter. And now Unu, the American-born Korean from Texas, lived alone in a two-bedroom Upper East Side apartment with rented furniture across the street from his cousin Ella, who invited him to brunch every Sunday after church. Unu didn’t tell Ella that on Friday nights he drove his Volvo station wagon to the Indian casino in Connecticut and played blackjack until his eyes made him quit. In March, he’d cleared eight thousand dollars, but in February, he’d lost five.