The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories

a flat box of a building, undecorated and anonymous. Inside, they had tried to make it look like someone’s home, with donated couches and mismatched lamps and a TV broadcasting a daytime drama. We gave our names to a smiling young woman, who led my wife away. Just as they reached a closed door, my wife turned, then returned to me. Hold this, she said, giving me her handbag. I reached a hand out to touch her but failed in midair. I nodded. She gave me an unreadable stare and then turned her back on me. I sat on a striped couch, gone so soft with wear I feared I would never escape it. There were several other women and two men. We did not look at each other, our eyes riveted to the TV screen. After several minutes, the young man with longish hair cleared his throat and asked aloud if it would be okay to change the channel. Nobody said a word. In a jerky movement, he rose and turned the knob until he found an afternoon baseball game. The Red Sox were winning.

The afternoon is approaching but still my wife and daughter and son-in-law do not come home. My stomach is empty but I have nothing to eat. I was surprised at how rarely my daughter eats Korean food. She can cook the simple dishes, bulgogiand kalbi, but nothing else. When they want anything more complicated, even kimbap, they go out to Korean restaurants. My son-in-law likes Korean food very much but only desires it about twice a month. I am thinking of fish chigae and battered shrimp, steamed rice with peas, and banchan—spinach, bean sprouts, bean curd, and several different kinds of kimchi—when the telephone rings.

It is my wife. I sense at once that something is wrong.

We are at the hospital, my wife says. The baby may come sooner than we expected.

What happened?

She thought it was indigestion but the pain only grew worse. There was some bleeding, but now the doctor says everything is fine. David has already left to pick you up.

Is that normal? I ask.

What is normal when one is having a baby? she says.

I am already thinking about riding in the car with David. We have never been alone before. What will we talk about?

God willing, we will have a granddaughter before the evening is through, my wife says before hanging up.

As I walk through the dining room, I stop to tell Picasso that my daughter is giving birth. He stares back at me as if to say, And so?

Twenty minutes later, my son-in-law returns home. He is understandably preoccupied. I can hear him moving with great urgency upstairs, where he has gone to pack a small suitcase for my daughter. In the kitchen, where I am waiting with my overcoat and camera at the table, he stops to drink a glass of water in great gulps like a man who has been in the desert for some time. Also like a man in the desert, there is a faraway look in his eyes. I know this feeling of anticipation, the longing and fear of what is about to take place. Sometimes I think it is easier for women who for the past nine months have undergone a physical transformation. Their bodies have told them ofwhat is to come as they have lived with the new life inside them. For men, it can be a sudden, violent change, and though you think you are prepared, you are not.

It will be all right, I tell him.

He nods vigorously. She started bleeding, he says, while we were in the store. Not much, but enough to worry us.

He says that they will have to cut into my daughter in order to deliver the baby.

American doctors are very smart, I tell him.

I forgot her lotion, he says to me suddenly, and runs upstairs.

The highway is crowded even though it is a Sunday evening, and my son-in-law explains to me that people are returning to the city. Even though we will not be going into the city ourselves, we must travel on this same stretch of highway. My son-in-law moves in and out of the different traffic lanes so quickly that at every moment I expect the suddenness of an accident. He inserts a tiny piece of green plastic into his ear that is connected by wire to his cell phone and calls my daughter.

The traffic is terrible, he tells her.

Yes, he’s here. He’s fine.

Yes, yes, I’ve got everything—the magazines, the lotions, your nightgown. Yes, yes. Does it hurt?

Has the bleeding stopped? You’re sure?

And afterward?

We’ll be there as soon as we can. I love you.

He hangs up. He swings into another lane of traffic.

I am a little embarrassed. The life between a husband and wife is an intimate thing. It should not be exposed to outsiders. But, of course, Americans find it easy to declare their love for each other. I love you, I love you, they all say but then manage to divorce each other several years later. I have never told my wife that I love her and I have never heard it from her. It is unnecessary. It would be like saying I breathe or I think or I live.

But my daughter is lucky to have found a good man, a man who vacuums and cooks and rubs her feet at the end of the day. I have seen this for myself. Their marriage is of a different generation. Sometimes I think my wife wishes she were of a different generation herself. But when I try to do the dishes or wipe the table after a spill, she laughs at me or scowls and says that I am not doing it correctly. How can one wipe a table incorrectly? I ask her.

I don’t know, she says, but you are inventing it.

What was it like when your first child was born? my son-in-law asks me.

Truly, I hardly remember. I was at the