34 Celeste
C eleste and Gemma are still crossing the Golden Gate Bridge when Gemma’s phone rings. She lets the call go to voicemail and puts the phone to her ear to listen to the message. Her voice pitching higher with panic, she says, “It’s Rob. He and Marge are already at the studio!”
Celeste lets out a frustrated groan as she presses on the gas. “We still have a full hour left! Why are they so early?”
She’s lightheaded from the fact that she and Gemma got barely any sleep the previous night, but thankfully, she can still drive. The only thing that’s keeping her going right now is the thought of her coffeepot patiently waiting for her at the studio.
“I’ll send him a text saying they can wait at the café next door.” Gemma taps away at her phone.
“Thanks.”
The one plus side of the morning’s chaos is that it doesn’t give her and Gemma the chance to talk about things. Their picture-perfect mini vacation to Sausalito—and this entire week, really—had been way better than Celeste expected, filled with not just a lot of good sex but a lot of heart-to-hearts, too. Celeste doesn’t know what to do with herself, nor the undeniable feelings she has for Gemma.
When they arrive at the studio, Rob is predictably grouchy, but he’s no match for Celeste. Especially not now. To distract herself from her own messy and confusing swirl of emotions, Celeste puts her charm into full gear. By the time she’s done setting up, she, Rob, and Marge are all chatting and laughing like she’s their long-lost granddaughter.
Rob is approaching eighty-five, while Marge is “young,” according to her husband, at almost eighty. As Celeste finishes her coffee, the couple says they’ve been married for sixty years, more than two times her age.
Gemma begins the interview, Celeste quietly walks around, slowly circling the space with her camera like she usually does. Rob and Marge are both white. Their faces are wrinkled, and their backs are stooped with age. Rob is bald, with thick gray eyebrows that Celeste can tell used to be black, while Marge has white, curly hair that used to be golden.
Celeste never knew her grandparents, since the ones on her dad’s side opposed her parents’ marriage and never bothered to be a part of her life, while her mom’s parents passed before she could form any real memories of them. The only thing Celeste remembers is what her mom told her when she was little.
“Your grandparents loved each other very much to their dying day,” she’d say. “It’s the reason why I’ve always believed in love.”
As Celeste takes pictures of the couple’s joined hands and the little knowing smiles that they occasionally give each other, Celeste wonders if this is what her grandparents were like, too. She grins at the thought.
Celeste usually only half listens to what Gemma and the interviewees say, since she’s too busy figuring out the best shots or checking on the cameras. So she misses the first part of the conversation, but she does catch Rob say, “When I was in my seventies, I felt like I could do anything. Past eighty though? Forget about it. Take me to the nearest crematorium.”
Celeste covers her mouth before her laughter can burst through and ruin the recording. As the interview progresses, she notices that Gemma adds a couple more questions than usual, like, “Has your opinion of each other changed from when you got married to now?”
“Of course!” Rob says. “I love her even more now than I did back then.” At the same time Marge replies, “No, not really. I always loved him a lot, then and now.”
Celeste’s favorite moment is when Gemma asks the couple about their future plans.
With a completely deadpan face, Rob says, “Die.”
Even Celeste can’t help but snicker this time. She’ll have to edit the sound out later.
Gemma wraps up like she always does, by asking, “How would you define love?”
“Love is hard work,” Rob starts to say, before Marge adds, “It’s going through decades together and somehow not hating each other. Or at least, tolerating each other enough that you can still live under the same roof.”
Both Rob and Gemma burst out laughing.
“Fifty percent of American couples don’t make it this far.” Rob makes the sign of the cross. “Lord have mercy. Did we get lucky! Whatever happened to ‘till death do us part’?”
He looks at the ceiling as if asking the question to God himself.
“It’s because women don’t have to keep being married to men they don’t like anymore, you big doofus,” Marge says. “We can make money now. And escape if we want to.”
“Well!” Rob exclaims loudly, making Celeste startle. “Then I guess I better treat you twice as good as I already do so you won’t run away from me!”
Marge smiles. “Oh, hush, you already treat me plenty well enough.”
When the final couple for “Modern Love in Focus,” Keiko and Nat, enters the studio, Celeste freezes. Her eyes remain fixed on Keiko, and in that moment, it occurs to Celeste that she’s never seen a queer Asian elder before, and definitely not one who is sapphic like her. Most of the other queer people she knows are around her age or younger, and the few older individuals she knows are not Asian. It’s a realization that sends her reeling, reminding her of a conversation she had with Min-joon while he was visiting over the holidays.
After hanging out with her friends in LA, they’d gone back to her place to have some barbecued pork belly and a bottle of soju. A few shots in, he’d randomly said, “You know, I’ve never heard anyone say they have a gay harabeoji or even a gay samchon . Have you?”
“No,” Celeste had replied. “You just never hear that sort of thing in Korea.”
Unlike her LA friends, who openly talked about their queer relatives, Min-joon and her other friends back home never mentioned having a gay grandpa or even a gay uncle, or any queer relatives at all.
“It’s the culture difference,” Min-joon had said. “It’s not like Korean queers don’t exist. We exist. But a lot of people remain closeted and live with the wife or husband they hate, more so than they do here. Let’s not do that.”
In the present, Celeste’s hands slightly tremble as she gets Keiko and Nat set up. She takes a few pictures of them before she begins the recording, making sure to capture every detail. The matching laugh lines on Keiko’s and Nat’s faces. Keiko’s wrinkly, golden hands resting on Nat’s dark brown ones.
When they begin the interview, the couple talks about how they met in the seventies while Nat was an exchange student in Tokyo.
“By the end of the program, I managed to convince her to move to America with me,” Nat says with a laugh.
“It didn’t seem so scary at the time,” Keiko adds with a laugh of her own. “Since on the map, it was ‘just’ an ocean away. How brave I was back then!”
“Mind you, San Francisco in the seventies was not the same city it is now,” Nat continues. “The civil rights movement had just happened ten years ago. But SF still seemed like a better place for us to live together at the time, especially after the Pride parades, newspapers, and rights ordinances started popping up.”
“Meanwhile in Japan,” Keiko says. “My parents were very upset when they found out about Nat. Even today, same-sex marriage is not allowed there like it is here, but I am hoping it’ll happen soon.”
Celeste tightens her grip on the camera, thinking of her own parents and how Korea has also yet to legalize same-sex marriage.
“We’d already been together for about forty years when we got legally married here, in SF,” Nat says with a laugh. “But it was nice to finally have that slip of paper. Our kids got a real kick out of it, since they got marriage certificates of their own around the same time.”
She and Keiko share a smile, and Celeste captures the moment with her camera.
When Gemma asks about their biggest challenges, Keiko answers, “Living far away from home was always the most difficult thing for me. My parents, my brothers, and my cousins… they all eventually accepted my relationship with Nat. But by then, I already had a life that I didn’t want to leave here. I don’t regret my choices, but I wish I could have spent more time with my family while they were still alive.”
Tears fall from Keiko’s eyes, and Celeste thinks about the last several years of her own life. She can somewhat relate to Keiko, since, after a childhood of constantly being told something was wrong with her, she’d thought she could just never look back after moving to the US. But she still gets a pang of homesickness whenever she leaves Korea and lands back in LAX. She misses her family and wishes she could see Min-joon and the rest of her friends in Seoul more often.
In an ideal world, she could live the life she wants and be accepted by her family back home. But of course, that world doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t for a long time.
Her eyes glistening in the light, Nat squeezes Keiko’s hand. “She gave up so much to be here with me. And I’m grateful for it, every day.”
“That’s so sweet,” Gemma says. She wipes her tears away before asking the next question. “Have there been any changes within your relationship throughout the years?”
“Our lives are definitely different now,” Nat replies. “I mean, we have grandkids . It still blows my mind whenever I think about it. But our relationship, itself? Not really.”
Keiko nods. “We’ve both changed plenty throughout the decades, and we keep experiencing new things every year. But our love has remained constant, the anchor that has gotten us through all of life’s challenges.”
Nat nods. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
Is that why Celeste has felt so unmoored all her life, going from parents who never fully accepted her to countless different lovers, some of whose faces and names she’s already forgotten? Her vision blurs, and she slowly exhales.
Finally, Gemma asks the question she’s asked every couple, the final question of this entire project. “How do you define love?”
Celeste braces herself.
“Breathing,” Keiko says, looking into Nat’s eyes.
“Living,” Nat replies. “I can’t imagine life without my wife.”
Keiko and Nat stare lovingly at each other, and Celeste can’t take it anymore. She sets her camera down on the table beside her.
Gemma shoots her a concerned look. “Celeste?” she says. “Are you okay?”
Unable to verbalize the whirlwind of thoughts and feelings inside her head, Celeste meets Gemma’s gaze and backs away.
For the first time in years, the future she wants for herself is so clear. So obvious, to the point of being right in front of her very eyes.
She wants to spend the rest of her life with Gemma. She wants to marry her and have kids with her and grow old with her, laughing and crying together for decades on end like the two women sitting on the couch. Even the slightest possibility of not being able to have that future becomes an unbearable weight.
“Sorry,” she says to no one and to everyone. “I have to go.”
Then, before anyone can stop her, Celeste bolts out of the studio.