Sung J. Woo

Artwork by Dina Brodsky

"With its star-crossed lovers and fickle downtown art scene, Lines is a sweet, sharp-eyed New York fairytale bound to appeal to fans of smart romantic comedies. While Sung J. Woo’s deft use of his fugue structure will remind readers of Sliding Doors, his feel for Josh and Abby as they navigate their many missed connections recalls the pure, exalted yearning of Haruki Murakami."

—Stewart O’Nan, author of Ocean State and Last Night at the Lobster

"A thoughtful exploration of the choices we make, and how one chance meeting (or lack thereof) can change your life in complicated and unexpected ways. Smart and meticulously crafted, Lines is a story that will stay with me long after finishing the last page."

—Brenda Janowitz, author of The Liz Taylor Ring and The Grace Kelly Dress

A witty, observant, exhilarating pleasure, with much to teach us about the complexities of loving and the complexities of living a life devoted to art.

—Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon

––––––––

Also by Sung J. Woo

Deep Roots

Skin Deep

Love Love

Everything Asian

LINES

Copyright © 2024 Sung J. Woo

All Rights Reserved.

Published by Unsolicited Press.

Printed in the United States of America.

First Edition.

Paintings in the book are the property of Dina Brodsky. Non-exclusive, irrevocable, and royalty-free permissions granted for the sole production in this book.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. People, places, and notions in these stories are from the author’s imagination; any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.

The flash fiction stories that accompany the paintings throughout the novel were previously published in Juked, Columbia Journal, and Slice, in slightly different form.

Attention schools and businesses: for discounted copies on large orders, please contact the publisher directly.

For information contact:

Unsolicited Press

Portland, Oregon

www.unsolicitedpress.com

orders@unsolicitedpress.com

619-354-8005

Cover Design: Jun Cen

Inner Cover Design: Shahbaz Qamar

Editor: S. Stewart

ISBN: 978-1-956692-50-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945448

For

Dawn

and

Dina

I don't want to hurt you

I just want to be your friend

Even though we draw our lines with very different ends

Do you believe me

Have I even earned your trust

To ask you for it now, would it ever be enough

With all the words to say

Surely we can find

A place to leave our past behind

Oh our worlds collide

When they can't survive

On their own precious lies

Oh we make mistakes

Find what it takes

And make an honest try

—Katie Herzig, Lines

Prologue

OUR STORY BEGINS five years ago, on a cool and damp Saturday morning in the city of New York. The street is Fifth Avenue, downtown. Parked cars line both sides of the road, their windshields dotted with dew. We’re a block away from Washington Square Park, the imposing arch squaring up its shoulders. The first sentence of the inscription engraved into the stone at the top of the monument reads:

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair.

The second sentence is shrouded in fog along with the rest of this famed structure. In fact, the mist is so thick and pervasive that the few natives who are out at this early hour of seven o’clock walk at a tourist’s pace. The rising sun is burning off this white cloak that has descended upon the city, which will remain for another three minutes and twenty-six seconds. That’s not much time, but enough for what is and isn’t about to transpire.

If we keep walking on Fifth, we’ll pass right through the arch. But we won’t do that. Instead, we’re going to watch two people approach one another.

The man who enters our view from the left is Joshua Kozlov. Five-ten, clean-shaven, of Belarusian origin but by name only, i.e., his favorite dessert is apple pie and he wouldn’t know a babushka from a balaclava. He turned forty yesterday. He wasn’t happy about it then, and he isn’t happy about it now. He hates his birthday. He hates all birthdays, but that’s a rude thing to say to people who like their birthdays, so he keeps this opinion to himself. Not that he cares about what others think. (Actually, he does, more than he cares to admit.) What’s important is that there’s no birthday he hates more than his own, and a milestone one like this makes it a hundred times worse. The big four-oh! Where’s your cane? Don’t forget your Depends! Friends and family have been gushing, prodding, joking all week. At least it’s over. He wants to start the new decade of his life with purpose and meaning, which is why he’s now marching down Washington Square North with grim-grave determination.

The woman who enters from the right is Abby Kim. Five-three, long-haired, a methodical long-distance cycler, of South Korean origin. Twenty-nine, her family immigrated when she was twelve, so she remembers the old country, but far less than one might imagine. Like she’s unable to recall a single student in fifth grade, her last class before she departed for America. Not one, and not even the teacher. She must’ve had friends, right? Maybe not. Maybe she ate lunches by herself, at her desk, staring at the blackboard. Except she can’t remember what she ate, the desk where this alleged consumption took place, or the vaguest notion of a blackboard.

Instead, what has been indelibly etched on her brain is a walking bridge she used to cross with a tin container in hand, about the size of a cigar box. On the other side of the river was an old woman who squatted against a crumbling brick wall and sautéed slivers of rice cake in hot pepper sauce. Abby gave her five hundred won (about fifty cents) and the empty container and watched the woman, who was toothless and always humming some unfamiliar song, ladle up steaming scoops of the tteokbokki. The woman filled the container to the brim, too much, as when she closed the lid, some of the red goop squeezed out, but that was just fine with Abby. She didn’t even wait until she got home to eat, just used her fingers to extricate one red medallion at a time, tangy, spicy, gooey goodness. Abby isn’t hungry, but as she nears the midpoint of Washington Square North, her mouth waters and she’s delighted by this Pavlovian response. Her mind, telling her body what to do. She walks a little faster.

Fourteen seconds from now, enough of the fog will have lifted that the island of Manhattan will come back into focus. The second sentence of the arch’s inscription, shorn of the haze, now proclaims:

The event is in the hand of God.

Is it God? Or are we in the realm of brain-cramping quantum mechanics? Doesn’t matter. Let us observe the events as they unfold, two of them, occurring simultaneously.

We know. This is not what we witness in our daily, quotidian lives. But take our word for it, both lines are happening right now. If this were a movie, the screen would split in half.

Joshua and Abby run into each other.

And:

Abby and Josh miss each other.

In the first line, upon impact, they fall to the ground in an instinctually protective hug. The fog dissipates, and they stare into each other’s eyes in disbelief, at the physicality of their bodily collision and their subsequent, spontaneous coupling. They laugh. They rise and dust each other off. Joshua invites Abby for coffee and they end up talking until lunch. They date. They fall in love, hard. They marry just two months later.

And:

In the second line, they pass through the fog, oblivious of each other’s existence. Until five years later, when Josh, in his suburban home in New Jersey, finds himself in front of his computer to peer at an oval-shaped locket no bigger than his thumbnail, at the impossibly tiny white dress painted within the boundary of its golden border.

The Garden State

THE DRESS IS beautiful, but the dress is sad. Lacy and white and wispy, it’s something a young girl might wear...in her coffin. Sometimes white can be blue, like the glacier he saw two years ago when he and Marlene took a cruise around Alaska. Those grand and funereal icy floats felt like the end of the world, and now here is that same feeling inside this locket, a silent sort of death. Against the black background, the tiny painting of this dress has a wealth of miraculous details, like the frayed ends of the frill on the bottom where each thread is thinner than a strand of hair. Even the wire hanger that the dress hangs on is comprised of multiple hues, only noticeable after Josh clicks on the high-resolution version of the picture and blows it way up.

Item 37, titled Sometimes I Forget. Next to the photo on the gallery’s website is a name, Abby Kim. He’s about to click on the hyperlink on her name when he hears:

Honey? How’s it going?

Josh’s mouse pointer jumps to the top-right corner of his screen and closes his browser.

All done! he shouts from his basement office. Shutting down now.

His face flushes as he waits for his computer to wind itself down, then he chuckles. It wasn’t like he’d been looking at porn, but it felt something like it. As he switches off the power strip, he considers the chain of human links that got him to the locket a few minutes before bedtime. His wife’s birthday was two weeks away and he’d been trying to find her a gift, and he’d gotten an email from his sister, which consisted of a Facebook message she’d received from a friend of hers, who knew a gallery owner who knew the publicist through Twitter. God bless the internet.

As he makes his way up the stairs to their bedroom, the miniscule dress follows him like a ghost. Marlene is in her pink nightgown, leaning over the sink as she washes her face. He imagines giving her the locket at the restaurant after dinner. He’d stand behind her, unclasp the gold chain. As she holds up her strawberry-blonde hair to expose her throat, he’d lay the locket against the soft dip of her collarbone, the part he treasures to touch with the tip of his index finger. Even though they’ve known each other for eleven years and have been married for five, there’s still a mystery to her naked body, hidden curves he has yet to discover.

He sneaks behind her for a hug as she pats dry her face with a hand towel. He places his head next to hers, and they stare at each other in the mirror. His hands slide up from her waist to cup her breasts. Underneath the silky fabric, they strike the most feminine balance between soft and firm.

Hello, beautiful, he says.

Marlene smirks. Somebody’s happy, she says, then presses herself against his erection.

The following morning, sitting in his cube, a bit groggy after the previous late-night extracurricular activities, he sips his coffee and waits for his computer to boot up. He’s read somewhere that men think about sex once every fifteen minutes, which seems patently ridiculous, but then again, during his half-hour commute, the walk from the car to the front door of PayRight in Jersey City, and the walk from the lobby up to his cubicle, his brain plays out last night like snippets of video: Marlene’s curls splayed out against her pillow, her breasts bobbing with each thrust, her right hand bunching the bedsheet when she comes.

Hey, get me for our 9:30, all right?

Absolutely, Josh says. As he watches his boss Harold walk down to his office, he imagines delivering the following version of his status report during the morning standup meeting: Client was very satisfied with the speed and force of the live presentation; we achieved full market penetration late last night; repeat business is a certainty.

He has twenty minutes to kill before the meeting, so he fires up his browser and types in abbykim.art and sees an image of a circular painting that depicts a room inside an abandoned building. The window is broken, the wallpaper is peeling, and shards of glass and pieces of plaster are scattered across the well-worn wooden boards. Everything here should be ugly, but it couldn’t be more opposite. Abby finds beauty in decrepitude, in places and things discarded and forgotten. In the bottom corner of the painting, there’s a haphazard pile of fabric that has got to be the same white dress from the locket. Josh leans closer to the monitor, his nose almost touching the screen. The same lace, the same delicate fringes, yes! It’s like he’s discovered a secret, a furtive bond between the locket and this painting, and in a way, between himself and Abby.

Her website is no-nonsense, with a menu up top that features her C.V. and links to her previous projects, from her most recent works to landscapes from her college days. Trees are her latest obsession, a hundred and one of them drawn with a ballpoint pen. Funny thing is, they all look like they’re on the brink of death, shorn of leaves, their branches skeletal, and yet there’s an undeniable strength in these bare trunks, too. Together, these drawings are like an arboreal army standing together as a testament to time. This is her specialty, her focus: small-scale works about decomposition and ruin that defy their innate negativity and reach a kind of quiet majesty.

Josh? Let’s not keep the team waiting.

It’s Harold again, holding up a manila folder.

Sorry, Harold, he says, and bolts up from his chair. He follows his boss to the conference room, his mind trapped inside that painting on her home page, circumscribed within that poignant circle of decay.

*

Outside Abby’s window, snow falls in temperamental whorls, tiny white flakes reflected by the street light below. Sometimes it looks like they’re falling up, because here on the third floor, the wind is wilder, taking the ice crystals for an extra ride. A sharp blast of an arctic chill whistles the sill, as the bottom frame has never sat even. There’s a brown water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida, a crack in the plaster wall that runs from one corner to another, and the outlet near the closet has never worked. Still, it’s her place, her little Manhattan apartment, one she’s been able to make rent every month for seven years through pure scrappiness: teaching classes at the 92nd Y, giving one-on-one lessons with mostly spoiled brats of one-percenter parents, and selling her paintings. She sells them through the SoHo gallery that represents her, but sometimes customers find her website and contact her directly.

Which was the case earlier today, when she received an email from a Josh Kozlov. She’s not fond of email because it makes her feel dumb. English has never come easy for her, even though she’s now lived in America for more than twenty years. Still, she finds the language confounding, with its many exceptions and nonsensical rules. Like why should there be subject-verb agreement? Why add an s at the end of a verb when it’s a he or a she? Korean is way simpler; even the alphabet itself is self-explanatory, the letters shaped to resemble the position of the human tongue. So when she receives an email like the one from Josh Kozlov, she’s immediately put on the defensive.

What a pleasure it is to be ensconced within your private world, Ms. Kim. How exquisite your lines, how vibrant your colors. Your work is simply disarming, and I would like nothing more than to possess your locket that was on display at the Peregrine Gallery last month. As you can surmise from my introduction to your work, my path to you has been a zigzag of fortuitous connections that only the convoluted internet can provide.

And that was just one paragraph of six! After reading that email, it took her an hour to compose a reply that she hoped would mask her lack of linguistic grace.

Email, the bane of her existence. Her inbox is a mess, with messages that date back to the beginning of the Obama Administration. When she first got her Gmail account, she promised herself this wouldn’t happen, that she’d be better with her correspondence than her Yahoo! Email (there are unanswered messages from her college days in that vast ether), but alas, organization has never been her forte. It’s especially difficult right now because she’s putting together a gallery show with her fellow Schoolers, her inbox dinging almost continuously.

Speak of the devil — Ding!

Abby, Franny’s Big Bird with Roadkill 1 is still stuck in Customs. Fuck we do now?

Ding!

Need a rough headcount. Don’t wanna run out of white wine like last time. What’s with the mass hate for red? Anyway, ASAP, yo!

There’s only one way to quell her exhausted brain, and that is to work. Abby zips up her hoodie, sits down in her wooden chair over her desk, and picks up her 2/0 pointed round brush. It’s seven thirty. Half an hour to lose herself into her latest painting, a two-inch Plexiglas disc that’s beginning to finally look like the scene in her mind, a narrow asphalt bike path snaking through a sun-dappled forest. It was just last summer that she went on her month-long European cycling trip, but it feels like a lifetime ago, someone else’s life.

Josh said he’d ring her at eight, but her iPhone rings now. Ted.

I know you’re working, so I’ll keep this short. Good luck and call me as soon as you’re done? Please, my dear future wife?

Of course, my dear future husband.

He keeps his promise of brevity and hangs up without saying goodbye, and she loves him for it. He called because he wanted to express his concern, which is sweet but unnecessary. In all the many times she has met a prospective buyer in her apartment, not once has she ever felt like she was in any kind of danger.

Still, Ted has asked her to keep the front door ajar, so even though she disagrees with him, she’ll make good on her part of their agreement. Before Ted, she never would’ve done something she didn’t believe in, but things are different now. Is it because she’s months away from becoming a bride? Possibly. At thirty-four, she’s at the midpoint of her fourth decade, a time when one is supposed to make mature decisions about the life ahead and not just do things on a whim...such as stuffing a trio of shorts, underwear, and t-shirt plus a giant bag of trail mix into the backpack, her only check-in luggage her disassembled bicycle. With her windbreaker on and her rolled sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of her backpack, she would leave JFK Airport as a civilized human being and return four weeks later from the European countryside as a vagabond gypsy drifter.

Goodness, was she ever filthy when she came back! How thoroughly thorough was dirt, embedding its granular blackness into the very pores of her skin. Even though she took the occasional camp shower, stepping into the warm bath in her apartment, watching the water slowly turn gray, scrubbing her fingernails with a toothbrush because there was no other way to remove the grime — that feeling of cleanliness she achieved after her multi-country sojourn...it must be what the butterfly feels as it breaks free of its cocoon. And it went well beyond the physical, this refreshing, resetting, renewing. A month of sleeping and waking and riding, sketching into her journal with her Zebra pen of the places and people she’d observed, this was how she restocked her creative stockpile that fed her for the rest of the year.

Every journey was transformative in its own way, but on her last trip, for the first time, she felt like she was riding toward something instead of riding away, headlong into a future instead of dodging the past. It had felt like the beginning, which is why she now feels so bereft because it was actually the ending. Yes, she could still go. That’s what she used to do — just up and leave, decide in the middle of the night, take the LIRR to JFK next morning and get on a standby flight to Frankfurt.

Why not now? She could do it. She could.

But she won’t.

Stop, Abby thinks. Stop thinking about the past or the future. Your painting awaits you. If you aren’t going to do this, who will?

Dip the brush into the green paint. Touch the brush to the surface.

Dip the brush into the white paint. Touch the brush to the surface.

This is her mantra. When she loses herself in her work, she feels beautifully numb. She blends into the background of the universe, becomes a vague splotch of color, a nameless blob. This is her peace, more serene than any drug.

She hears her phone’s notification chirp but ignores it. She wants to stay here, in the tight space between her brush and the surface. When she meets people for the first time and they find out she’s a painter, they all assume it’s the creativity of the profession that attracts her. That is not a falsity, but it isn’t the truth. More than anything, what she loves is this mechanical repetition, the accrual of a thousand strokes onto a single canvas. If this were fifty years ago and she and art never got together, Abby could easily imagine spending her days at a factory, nailing a bolt onto a metal plate, hour after hour, and loving it.

This time the phone rings, and then she remembers that she’s supposed to meet someone tonight.

Hi, she answers.

Miss Kim?

It’s weird to be called that, but she’s been called worse.

Josh?

I’m outside your apartment building.

I’ll come down and let you in.

He descends downstairs to his computer, thinking about a girl in New York City getting ready for her wedding, which might be happening right now. He did gush in his email about her locket, so he’s probably excited about meeting her. She needs to perk up here, play the part of a grateful artist. Not that she has to play it hard, as she is absolutely, totally grateful. The number of people who support art — and let’s face it, the only way to support art is to buy it — is so infinitesimally small that she still finds it a minor miracle when she does sell something.

She opens the door to the vestibule and there he stands. She sees him before he sees her. Unlike 99% of the people who wait, he’s not staring at his phone. Instead, he leans against the door and takes in her view, which isn’t much, just 28th Street downtown, a boring red square of a building across the pavement, the fluorescent glow from the windows of a D’Agostino Supermarket a block away that reflects the falling snow. Standing in profile, Abby sees the smile on his face. It is such an unguarded, genuine smile, and she almost feels embarrassed that she’s bearing witness to it.

And now it is her, standing inside, knocking on the window of her outer door, as if to ask him to let her in. Maybe in a way she is asking just that, to be let into his preoccupied, exhilarated mind. He turns. Through the clear glass, she meets his pale blue eyes, the color of an arctic iceberg.

The Big Apple

THERE WAS A time when Joshua’s cool blue eyes calmed her, but now, all she sees is his disappointment.

No. Stop. She will not be distracted, not again.

The baby portrait Abby should be working on, an eight-foot by six-foot canvas of stretched linen hung on the