To those bold young doctors at Mercy Hospital who would inquire as to her status-was she married, or did she have a boyfriend? they wanted to know-Yi-Yiing always said, to their surprise, “I live with the writer Danny Angel.” She must have liked saying this, for reasons beyond it being a conversation-stopper, because it was only to her closer friends and acquaintances that Yi-Yiing would bother to add: “Well, actually, I’m dating Danny’s father. He’s a cook at Mao’s-not the Chinese one.” But the cook understood that it was complicated for Yi-Yiing-a woman in her thirties with an unsettled life, living so far away from her native land, and with a daughter she knew only from photographs.

Once, at a party, someone who worked at Mercy Hospital said to Danny, “Oh, I know your girlfriend.”

“What girlfriend?” Danny had asked; this was before Youn came into his fiction workshop, and (before long) had moved into the second house on Court Street.

“Yi-Yiing-she’s Chinese, a nurse at-”

“She’s my dad’s girlfriend,” the writer quickly said.

“Oh-”

“What’s going on with Yi-Yiing?” Danny had later asked his father. “Some people think she’s living with me.”

“I don’t question Yi-Yiing, Daniel. She doesn’t question me,” the cook pointed out. “And isn’t she terrific with Joe?” his dad asked him. Both of them knew very well that this was the same point Danny had made to his father about his former Windham College student Franky, back in Vermont-yet it was strange, nonetheless, Danny thought. Was the cook, who was turning fifty, more of a bohemian than his writer son (at least until Youn moved into that second Court Street house)?

And what was it that was wrong about that house? It had been big enough for them all; that wasn’t it. There were enough bedrooms so that everyone could have slept separately; Youn used one of the extra bedrooms as a place to write, and for all her things. For a woman over thirty who’d had no children and endured an incomprehensible Korean divorce-at least it was “incomprehensible” in her novel-in-progress, or so Danny thought-Youn had remarkably few things. Had she left everything behind in Seoul, not just her truly terrifying-sounding former husband?

“I’m a student,” she’d said to Danny. “That is what is so liberating about being a student again-I don’t have any things.” It was a smart answer, the writer thought, but Danny didn’t know if he believed her.

IN THE FALL OF ’73, when Joe was starting third grade, the cook kept a crate of apples on the back porch of their Iowa City house. The porch overlooked a narrow, paved alley; it ran the length of the long row of houses that fronted Court Street. The alley didn’t appear to be used for anything, except for picking up garbage. Only an occasional slow-moving car passed, and-more often, even constantly-kids on bicycles. There was some loose sand or gravel on the little-used pavement, which meant the kids could practice skids on their bikes. Joe had fallen off his bike in that back alley. Yi-Yiing had cleaned the scrape on the boy’s knee.

A porch, off the kitchen, faced the alley, and something was eating the apples that the cook left out on the porch-a raccoon, Danny at first suspected, but it was a possum, actually, and one early evening when young Joe went out on the porch to fetch an apple for himself, he put his hand in the crate and the possum scared him. It growled or hissed or snarled; the boy was so scared that he couldn’t even say for sure if the primitive-looking animal had bitten him.

All Danny kept asking was, “Did it bite you?” (He couldn’t stop examining Joe’s arms and hands for bite marks.)

“I don’t know!” the boy wailed. “It was white and pink-it looked awful! What was it?”

“A possum,” Danny kept repeating; he’d seen it slink away. Possums were ugly-looking creatures.

That night, when Joe fell asleep, Danny went into the boy’s bedroom and examined him all over. He wished Yi-Yiing was home, but she was working in the ER. She would know if possums were occasionally rabid-in Vermont, raccoons often were-and the good nurse would know what to do if Joe had been bitten, but Danny couldn’t find a bite mark anywhere on his son’s perfect body.

Youn had stood in the open doorway of the boy’s bedroom; she’d watched Danny looking for any indication of an animal bite. “Wouldn’t Joe know if he was bitten?” she asked.

“He was too startled and too scared to know,” Danny answered her. Youn was staring at the sleeping boy as if he were a wild or unknown animal to her, and Danny realized that she often looked at Joe with this puzzled, from-another-world fascination. If Yi-Yiing doted on Joe because she longed to be with her daughter of that same age, Youn looked at Joe with what appeared to be incomprehension; it was as if she’d never been around children of any age before.

Then again, if one could believe her story (or her novel), her success in obtaining a divorce from her husband-most important, in getting him to initiate the allegedly complicated procedure-was due to her failure to get pregnant and have a child. That was her novel’s tortuous plot: how her husband presumed she was trying to get pregnant, when all along she’d been taking birth-control pills and using a diaphragm-she was doing all she could not to get pregnant, and to never have a child.

Youn was writing her novel in English, not Korean, and her English was excellent, Danny thought; her writing was good, though certain Korean elements remained mystifying. (What was Korean divorce law, anyway? Why was the charade of pretending to try to get pregnant necessary? And, according to Youn, she’d hated taking birth-control pills.)

The husband-ultimately, Danny assumed, the ex-husband-in Youn’s novel was a kind of gangster businessman. Perhaps he was a well-paid assassin, or he hired lesser hit men to do his dirty work; in Danny’s reading of Youn’s novel-in-progress, this wasn’t clear. That the husband was dangerous-in both Youn’s real life and her novel-seemed obvious. Danny could only wonder about the sexual detail. There was something sympathetic about the husband, despite Youn’s efforts to demonize him; the poor man imagined it was his fault that his scheming wife couldn’t get pregnant.

It didn’t help that, in bed at night, Youn told Danny the worst details of her miserable marriage-her husband’s tireless need for sex included. (But he was trying to get you pregnant, wasn’t he? Danny wanted to ask, though he didn’t. Maybe sex had felt like a duty to Youn’s unfortunate husband and to Youn. The things she told Danny in the dark and the details of her novels were becoming blurred-or were they interchangeable?)

Shouldn’t the fictional husband, the cold-blooded-killer executive in her novel, have a different name from her actual ex-husband? Danny had asked Youn. What if her former husband ever read her novel? (Assuming she could get it published.) Wouldn’t he then know how she’d deceived him-by deliberately trying not to get pregnant when they were married?

“My previous life is over,” Youn answered him darkly. She did not seem to associate sex with duty now, though Danny couldn’t help but wonder about that, too.

Youn was extraordinarily neat with her few belongings. She even kept her toilet articles in the small bathroom attached to the unused bedroom where she wrote. Her clothes were in the closet of that bedroom, or in the lone chest of drawers that was there. Once, when Youn was out, Danny had looked in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom she used. He saw her birth-control pills-it was an Iowa City prescription.

Danny always used a condom. It was an old habit-and, given his history of occasionally having more than one sexual partner, not a bad one. But Youn had said to him one time, almost casually, “Thank you for using a condom. I’ve taken a lifetime of birth-control pills. I don’t ever want to take them again.”