I didn’t used to be skin drag. In San Diego as a kid, I was uniform motion. A pool in the backyard. Dad, Mom, Kim, me. Five years old when we moved from Korea. My sister and me, as soon as we could swim, we were always in the pool, on the bottom, crossed legs, talking bubbles. One hand on the ladder to keep us down, one hand moving quick left, quick right, to make bubble-talk like real tea parties. We throw back our heads, laugh loud. Bubbles fly out our throats. Lots of air through open throats. Appropriate force through appropriate opening. We swim to the surface and gulp up air, then head back down to the bottom, hold ourselves down on the ladder. Cross-legged on the bottom, talking through bubbles, I could say anything to Kim. Our bubble-talk was animated and loud, more bubbles, or intimate and soft, few bubbles. Wish I could bubble-talk with her still.
At six years old, there were no more bubble parties. Dad said no more. Dad was bigger than Newton. Bigger than Mao. About as big as Lech Wałęsa. “No more pool until English perfect,” except he said it with Rs for Ls. Smart guy. Chemist.
So, every day that pool, that kidney shape taking up the yard. I sat in the living room with the tutor, Mr. Chan, Chinese, yelling over the oscillating fans. The day we met I thought he’d have a long, skinny beard and slippers. He was younger than my dad. Raced bicycles. Smooth legs. Smelled like sprinklers.
“Golf,” he said. Some weird sound came from way back in his throat.
“Guff,” I said.
“Guh,” he said. And he opened his mouth with his bottom jaw first. My sister’s face at the bottom of the pool behind bubbles and gibberish. I about laughed.
“Gruh,” I said. I talked bubbles, a language Mr. Chan couldn’t speak.
After Mr. Chan left, I told my dad, “It’s too hard,” and my dad said too hard equaled staying in North Korea, Communists, and praying in secret. He said hard was moving whole family to United States. What did I know about too hard?
Each night late my mom and dad came home, put Elvis on, opened cans of Bud. Mom and Dad sat on the front porch of our adobe, and they picked paint off their arms and legs. All year long, seven days a week, one house after another. Paint in their hair, on their eyelashes, on their teeth. Dad was no chemist any more. They spoke Korean to each other, laughed so loud their heads knocked the wall behind them. I tried to listen, but by seven years old, I lost Korean. If they heard me coming, they switched to English. And their cheeks caved in, their mouths didn’t open so much, and their throats didn’t hold low notes. English words pushed through their mouths, but their mouths resisted. Wave drag was English in their mouths.
For months from the living room window I watched Kim splash in the pool. “No more pool until English good,” my dad didn’t say any more. Didn’t need to. Mr. Chan’s wiry legs stuck out of his shorts. We sat at the card table practicing. My English still bad. Sometimes I gave him my homework folded in a rose, sometimes an elephant.
“Thank you, Mr. Song,” Mr. Chan said. “Now say, letter.”
Always the Ls: letter, last, too late.
When Carla slips through the door, when she puts her lips on mine, I lock the door behind us. Off duty, 10 p.m., the Kings of the Dorm put themselves to bed. The jocks back early showed the babies, the Second Formers, the routine. The summer didn’t drain every ounce of order from their jock brains. For three months of summer I tried to exert force and block the energy moving through me. Twenty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t fall for a girl, a student, no matter how smart or self-assured. The greater the distance the less the attraction. But no distance right now means great attraction.
Lips and mouths hook together, hands grabbing backs and clothes, we shuffle to the couch, fall on it. I’m on top, and there is no me. One light by the rocking chair lights up half her face, her curls falling to the side. Her eyes, big and dark, and she looks at me as if I am the world, and she barely has a hold on the world, and she presses up, meeting equal and opposite force pressing down.
I slide off. One loafer drops, then the other. At her middle, my fingers on her zipper; at her feet, my hands tug at the end of her jeans. She puts her hands behind her head and lifts her hips off the couch. She says, “Don’t you want to talk about, like, inertia, maybe centripetal force?”
“You’re funny,” I say, and her jeans come off.
And she gets still. And when my hands feel how soft her thighs are, when my hands cup her hips and draw her down the couch, I forget time and age and dorm rooms. I spread her legs, like paper I will fold. And I kiss her, kiss down her thighs. And she arches up, and we are objects in motion with the same speed acting in a balanced force. We are Newton’s first law.
But then her breath gets shallow, and these sounds out of her mouth are like a baby, and she makes sounds like she’s hurt, like I’m hurting her. The sounds are high and rapid, too much air through too little space. And I stop, stop kissing her, stop before anything else.
Then she turns animal, wild, kicking, and I’m already not touching her, and she says, “No, no, no,” and I land on my butt. Tears shoot out of her eyes; she gets sweaty and curls up, puts her fists between her legs. She rolls away from me and turns her face into my stinky cushions. She keeps panting.
What have I done? is all I can think. What I haven’t done is this before. Talk was all we did, ever, and the force between us of negative and positive charges, the electricity in our walks around campus. What I’ve done tonight, the undressing, the kissing, is too much. So I say, “Carla, Carla” to her back, really quietly, but she doesn’t move. She rocks a little. Her hair is soft; her curls straighten when I put my fingers through them.
When I see her shake, I tuck a blanket around her. Out of my mouth comes the song my mother sang to Kim and me when we were new to San Diego, little, fresh off the boat. I don’t even know what it means. It’s the only Korean I have. My mother sang it to us to go to sleep, sang it to Kim in the hospital when she was weak.
Back in my rocking chair by the one light on in the room, I rock forward, backward. This young woman who holds on to the world through me, who opens before me like something raw and faultless, some equal force, is a girl. An eighteen-year-old girl.
Mr. Chan taught me to say Ls: lewd, loser, lecherous.