And after the Intermission II

Two weeks pass at a fast slow clip.

I have a friend come into town. I work. I drink more than I have in a long time. I buy cat food twice. Boise is eating in sorrow.

The first couple nights he waited in the living room. Now he’s happiest when we’re both asleep. He is always hungry. He is always meowing. Sometimes, when he hears her voice on the computer, he runs away. I don’t want to look and see where he goes.

I talk to her a little. She says the usual things she should say to make me feel better. This works, for a while.

I go crazy if she doesn’t call again the next night.

Here is what I do: I wake up and turn on the heat so the shower will be warm. I go to work. I sit at a computer. I come home and sit at my computer. I think about when, or if, she will call. I try not to watch tv. I bring a book to the tv and watch tv. I brush the cat until he tries to bite me. I switch brushes. I give him a snack. If she doesn’t call, I lay in bed reading. If she does call, I am okay.

This probably makes it sound too sad. The drinking is fun. I spend money she’s preapproved. I remember my old life.

Missing her is probably a good thing.

I play basketball once. Kids play at the hoop beside me and in the playground nearby and I listen to the nonsense of their small circle of friends.

The Island of Epidemics and Me

While Cathreen is away in Korea, I am working on getting published a series of tiny stories about an island of epidemics. The epidemics are: memory loss, hunger, expanding hearts, unrequited love, obsession, magic, charisma . . .

Boise claws my hands when I try to clip his nails and I think about what is plaguing him. He meows. Over and over. The first night, he slept by the door, waiting for Cathreen to come back.

I am trying to keep busy.

I went to the dentist on Friday. I worked for a couple hours with a half-numb mouth. It took a while to really get a hold of Cathreen. Today was the first day we had any time to talk. Before she hung up, she said she'd changed her mind about having a baby. Our nephew threw her hairbrush at her and she called for his mother. She said she was spending her time eating and watching tv. We were talking on the computer. I said all this was what she could be doing here, at home. I said everything she did there she could do here, at home, though that isn't true.

Before she left, she ordered some pots and pans. They came hours after I'd taken her to the airport. I cook pasta and rice and leftovers and nothing burns anymore.

I run out of Boise's food. I run out of trash bags. I spend hours online. I leave the computer on when I sleep. I send out the island of epidemics stories.

In the time between her flight and now, five have been accepted. I feel full of hope. But then I remember why I feel empty or full.

And after the Intermission

Cathreen is gone to Korea. My, this house is big.

I want to write more but it's also a little scary. How to care for the cat?

The Paris Review Interviews essays will have to wait. I have emotions on my mind. The cat sits by the door, in a suitcase. "Boy," I call him. Still, I'm the one who named him.

Five weeks.

We've done months before. But I've never been the one who couldn't get away from the other's scent. I was always the one who sadded his way over the ocean and then looked up his old life.

The Paris Review Interviews 6

James M. Cain

I had to skip some of this interview. Hollywood and writing tricks. "The old switcheroo."

Cathreen's mom is home from the hospital. In her whole-leg cast. The two babies have become attention-starved. Cathreen's grandmother is angry with her dead husband. How could he not watch out for his daughter? On the day of his death, let her slip and require knee surgery.

Maybe he was aiming at me with his grandaughter, I think after Cathreen says this. Too selfish? It was my birthday interrupted by the phone call.

Too selfish.

We move tomorrow. Nothing is packed. We've been moving for weeks. Cathreen is in bed. The cat is sleeping.

Cain says he always talked in proper English, but wrote the way a person talked.

Some other person, I guess. Obviously not himself.

The Paris Review Interviews 5

Borges says Americans have to save the English language.

Kurt Vonnegut

Cathreen lies in bed looking at online shopping sites. I try to watch tv, though there's nothing good. From time to time, she calls me in to look at something. Once, she calls me on the phone.

Vonnegut is not taking his interview seriously.

Though sometimes, he is.

The Paris Review Interviews 4

Now we are about to eat dinner with friends.

Borges was having a conversation. Borges might never have tried fiction, he says, if he hadn't almost died.

The smell coming out of the kitchen--I am in awe of my wife. I can feel her in my insides, wanting to be reconciled to hunger.

The Paris Review Interviews 3

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow took 5 weeks to complete his interview. Dedication to truth.

Boise rolls on the floor over and over. Drugged up on Japanese catnip again. He plays with a laser but can't concentrate. Cathreen talks about hairballs.

She's sore from moving all weekend. Basketball, apartment moving, shopping, exhaustion, made me take a break from this essay to lie on the couch. Exhaustion comes in many forms, from many causes.

Jorge Luis Borges

Cathreen's mother has had her surgery, Cathreen tells me in past tense. She tells me she told my mother about it. My mother is a focal point of trying to figure out my problems.

More on Borges later.

The Paris Review Interviews 2

Ernest Hemingway

By the the time of this interview, Hemingway was already bitter and angry. I kept thinking about his suicide.

T.S. Eliot

It's St. Patrick's Day in Boston, but here I am. Though, I could have chosen to go outside.

Cathreen's sisters are sending money for her to buy things here in America. This is what America is for. It's the babies birthdays soon, and we debate gifts. They're my nephews, too, I tell her. My only ones. My relationship with the cat is one of giving to the taker. "That little creature," Cathreen says. That little creature is the lucky one. This paragraph is a paragraph of desire.

Eliot thinks that common speech might disappear. Has it?

The Paris Review Interviews 1

Dorothy Parker

Cathreen is cooking in the kitchen and the smell of it is making me sick with hunger. She won't let me go in there--it messes up her rhythm or something. Two days ago, after a fight, she told me one of our nephews went to the hospital next to the hospital in which her mother lies waiting for knee surgery. The baby passed out holding its breath or having a seizure, I'm not sure which. And I tried to find out--it's a big difference, one a matter of passion.

The way they talked in the old days, I think about Dorothy Parker, won't ever be surpassed. Did they fake it that way for the movies or was everyone like that, was a common question for me in black and white.

Truman Capote

liked to talk, too. He says he was a genius and he freaked people out. He says he always knew he would be a writer.

I'm worried about when Cathreen goes back to Korea. Less than a month from now. But I'll be here with Boise. She can't be away from the cat for long. Sometimes when I come home from work, she says she wants another; when I'm alone with him, I want another, too. Why is that?

She found the Japanese cat nip today--our Asian cat shows nothing for the Western kind--and it made him so happy he bit her.

Another Spate of Bad Luck 4

Abracadabra

Cathreen says she remembers, now, a fortune teller who said her mother would be healthy except for her leg. Her sister remembers it too, first. Cathreen and I are supposed to be rich by the time she's mid-thirties. So what am I supposed to think now?

Death or Something Like It

I think I mentioned this before, but I was pronounced dead by a fortune teller? As in, "Isn't this person dead!" As in, "He shouldn't be alive at all!"

I was left out in this same world I'm living in by my birth mother. When I was just a baby. At two I was adopted, sickly, Hep-A--I think this is the one, mute? But here I am.

Okay, not exactly the same world.

That fortune teller said I was given a second life.

13

I also had my palm read once by a friend in Prague--she said I would either die young or come close to death.

So you can see what I'm up against.

But what was I talking about? I got distracted from my own words by others'. Tomorrow I should not eat meat. Saturday Cathreen will finish painting our new apartment. Sunday we will, we should, we might.

The End?

I stole this form from a book by Mary Robison--Why Did I Ever? Later I will change it. For now let it sit.

15

That's right--that's what I started out to say. Cathreen says she told her mother that her grandfather who died on my birthday, the day her mother blew out her knee, her grandfather's ghost, was just giving her an excuse/chance to relax. As they say, Get off her feet.

Another Spate of Bad Luck 3

Baby

Cathreen wants to see me take care of the cat before she can trust me with it when she's gone. I was the one who named him. Boise. Boy.

I stole the name from a Hemingway novel.

So What Do You Figure

Last night I watched a tv show that makes no sense while Cathreen watched Korean tv online in the other room. Later I tried to make sense of it for her.

I had friends over from up the street. We had to clean the house.

I should say, I had to clean the house. Which is fine, since I'm the one who invited them over. Sometimes we all watch this show together. Then it seems to make less sense, and also more.

9

We replaced the shampoo, how about that?

10

Cathreen's sisters are in a fit over who will take care of their mother. There's a lot to do.

Then there are the babies. Yesterday, one of them learned to suck his thumb. I don't mean to sound bitter.

Another Spate of Bad Luck 2

To Sleep

Today when I come home from work Cathreen is asleep. Later I will learn this is the seventeenth hour. The cat is crying for her to wake up, or for me to leave them both alone. I was told dinner would be ready, but to be upset at this would be to be the bad husband. I curl up next to her, then I take a nap of my own on the couch.

I can't keep my eyes open, as they say.

4

My birthday I called One Night in Korea. We went to a galbi restaurant, then later karaoke. Soon Cathreen will go back to Busan for over a month. I will be left in America.

In the karaoke room I sang My Girl, by The Temptations. Near the end she got up and when she came back it was a new song but I was still singing to her.

5

We missed her sister's birthday. She called two days late. She'd finally woken up and was snacking on Korean popcorn. I tried to sleep--it was getting late--but after the nap I couldn't. Maybe it was allergies. I kept thinking why was I not asleep, and then it was morning.

Robots

At work I stare at a robot and think: This is good.

There is free breakfast. I did not bring lunch. Last night I remember Cathreen coming back to bed and saying she was supposed to be lucky. Special. So said a fortune teller.

Once she was there beside me I got a few hours of rest.

Another Spate of Bad Luck

And We're Back

I went to church today.

I have been neglecting Lent. About the only thing that has anything to do with Easter, that I have done, has been to order plastic eggs for the literary journal I edit.

We're running an Easter Egg Hunt. Inside will be hidden treasures.

2

This year on my birthday my mother-in-law fell and blew out her knee. She will have to have surgery once the swelling goes down.

"They putting metal in her," Cathreen says.

A couple days earlier Cathreen's uncle died, when everyone thought her grandmother would be the one to go.

Two years ago on my birthday her grandfather lost his will to live. Last year we attended the ancestral dinner. "They putting metal in her" makes me think of robots.

The world has fewer and straighter paths than one might think.

The Chapbook!

Buy/read it at Publishing Genius Press!

Getting Old Quickly 1000

Cathreen's sister is fully recovered. Last night the baby had a fever and I didn't know this but I couldn't fall asleep until four in the morning. Maybe this was because everyone else was moving around the house, but I didn't notice their movements, truthfully. I was thinking about how to help Cathreen get all of her things to America.

We're starting a new life, but we don't want to leave behind the old.

She's found a plane ticket to Boston. I'll be there in a week. They wouldn't take her credit card, or my credit card because it's American, so she's at the bank now wiring cash. I thought it would be better to use my credit card, since the exchange rate has made the Korean won worthless. In the news today was an article about how while the dollar rises, and America prospers, the rest of the world suffers. Soon I will leave that rest of the world. But it will not leave me.

The money we have saved, almost a year of work, disappears even as it increases through the interest on it. There seems a lesson in this. Growing, fading.

What's really there and what isn't.

Two days ago we watched a movie about superheroes who weren't super, who weren't really even heroes. Cathreen said she was bored and she shouldn't have let me choose the movie. I didn't realize what I was choosing. I was led on.

Now the cat sneak-attacks the dogs and they chase him to his tower, where he looks down as if he is king and they his subjects. When I try to bring him into the baby's room, he squirms loose, afraid. Youth and wordlessness rule this household.

My back hurts and I'm sick--what timing to fly. I'm worried about a new household, and maybe some of what I feel is stress. But I'm excited to create new rules. Rules for only ourselves.

The dogs holler in the other room, but I feel no sympathy for them. I think it's best to let our cat prove himself.

Last night, Cathreen's brother-in-law took the family out for dinner because it will be the last time he sees me. An hour before we ate, Cathreen and her sister and I ate bread and filled up. My stomach hurt and I wasn't able to eat as much as usual. One baby slept. The other ate two paper cups, cried when we took the cups away from him. After dinner we ate ice cream and I stood on the street looking in on the two babies who tried to reach through the glass. Cathreen's brother-in-law shook my hand and said he probably couldn't attend the wedding, through her translation. This might be the last I see of him, then, for years. There's a finality I don't feel, but which everyone keeps reminding us of. Cathreen feels it, I guess.

For me, of course, it's going home. It's too much of a return to be an end. For Cathreen it's also very much a beginning.

In the morning, she ran her fingers through my newly cut hair and I asked what she was doing.

"Looking for white hairs," she said, as if she is the white-hair police.

"My hair's too short now for white hairs," I said, which I guess didn't make sense.

She soon found one. As she tried to pull it out, I remembered the old saying, pull one and three more appear in its place. Maybe this is what happened the last time, I said.

"But it's not the same place," Cathreen said. But it's all my head.

Now she comes home and says she successfully paid. The ticket, the move from here to there, is permanent.