Page 34 of The Comeback
I make a tally mark next to my name in my notebook and try not to look at him. He’s standing close, closer than he needs to be, and watching me with those big brown eyes. An orchestral song should be playing in the background as a montage of us laughing slides in over our faces.
Think first.
I step back. “Ready for the next place?”
“Lead the way.”
Gregor drives us to Graffiti Alley, a dingy, stinky back laneway that runs parallel to Queen Street West. Puddles of rainbow-flecked water fill in the cracks of the broken asphalt and reflect the magical murals that cover walls, doors, and garages. I hand Jihoon a special mobile phone and the new earbuds that Yuko left in the car for me. I owe her big. “Audio tour.”
He takes my hand and presses one of the buds into my palm. “We’ll experience it together.”
We linger in that dirty, fantastical lane listening to a woman narrate the stories behind the graffiti: the tags, the motifs, the artists. Some have already disappeared, painted over by new ideas. Beside me, pressed close because of the earbuds, Jihoon has a blissful expression, and he occasionally hums to himself and types notes into his phone. He’s utterly lost in the experience, and I have that sweet feeling of getting it perfectly right. My work at Yesterly and Havings is intellectually satisfying, but that’s about as good as it gets. None of my colleagues ever seem contented by what they do because it’s more about winning for the win’s sake. This is about—and I mentally squint at this—being happy. I get a little of what Jihoon was trying to say the other day about art and meaning.
“Ready for the final point in the game?” I ask when the tour ends. “It’s an easy one.”
“I am.” He takes out his earbud and waits.
“Find the painting that best represents your life. Two minutes on the timer.”
He looks around. “There are so many.”
“If you’d like to forfeit, I’ll take the final point for the win.” I pull my hair around to the front of my shoulder.
He stiffens. “Hana, dul, set, let’s go.”
After thirty seconds, I’m cursing myself. This is too revealing, too vulnerable. I see a school of fish with one going the opposite direction, but that’s Phoebe, not me. I move on to a cubist landscape of a tree on a hill and consider it before deciding that, although I don’t know what it means, it’s not me. When the timer goes off, I’m standing in front of a purple silhouette of two little girls in short dresses holding hands and looking at a high wall. If Phoebe and I had been closer in age, would our relationship be different? Would we have been able to confide in each other to build something that could have evolved past our shared DNA?
“Ready?” Jihoon calls.
I turn quickly away from the image. There’s no point wondering about what-ifs when we have the relationship we have.
“Yes.” I look around and point at the tree I saw earlier. “That’s mine. I’m the tree, and I like overseeing everything.” That’s a safe response.
He looks at me as if he knows I’m hiding something, then steps aside. Behind him is a door, a real one, and it’s been painted with two doors, each of which open to two more, and so on until the doors are the size of dimes. It’s hypnotic.
“Why?” I ask.
Jihoon stands in front of the image, tracing the thin red outline of one door with his fingers. “Every time we go through one door in life, there’s two more closed ones to choose from.”
“What if you choose the wrong door? Do you go back?”
He doesn’t look away. “No. You keep going and hope the next one is the right one.”
The air is raw in a way that makes me jumpy. When my last boyfriend broke up with me, he said I had the emotional intelligence of an eggplant—I paraphrase but also couldn’t argue with the sentiment. I’m out of my depth here, like there’s something I don’t understand and saying the wrong thing will tarnish whatever it is.
I clear my throat and decide to leave it rather than risk going deeper. “You win,” I say. It’s not even a question.
He gives me a deep bow. “You were a worthy adversary, but I humbly accept my triumph.”
At least he’s an amusing winner. “Dessert?” I ask.
He gives the alley a final look and nods. We get back in the car, and I keep up a running commentary as we drive. We pass a restaurant with an old-school diner sign. “Hana had a crush on one of the servers at that place.”
“Did anything happen?”
“Hana spilled a drink on him and then knocked a plate of fries on the floor because she was nervous. She never even got his name, and we didn’t go back.”
He looks out the rear window at the restaurant. “Why did she like him?”
