Page 64 of Love in Focus

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 forsixtyyears, 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 arealization 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 gayharabeojior even a gaysamchon. 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.Weexist. But a lot of people remain closeted and live with the wife or husband they hate, more so than they do here. Let’snotdo 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.”

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