by Frances Cha
I start composing a new text message.
“Hi, it’s me,” I type. It is to Bruce.
I know I probably won’t have a chance to say this to you in person because you don’t want to talk to me.
I know I made a huge mistake, going to the restaurant the way I did. I understand that now.
I missed you. And I wanted to see what kind of girl you would spend the rest of your life with. I wanted to see your family too. It was just pure curiosity on my part. I had no ill intentions toward you, I swear.
I know this will be hard for you to believe, but that is really all I wanted to do. I just wanted to see you having dinner with the girl you are going to marry.
I wasn’t going to talk to you there. It was just the closest I could come to something like that—to being somewhere like that with you. And I didn’t make a scene, did I? If I wanted to, I could have.
You were so good to me that it hurt me to hear you were getting married. And you didn’t even tell me directly because you didn’t think it was necessary. Perhaps I should have continued to act as if nothing was different. But I have feelings. You should know that.
Everyone is so angry with me, and I’m going to take on a suicidal amount of debt at the shop because of what happened. I had some idea of what the consequences would be but I still went to see you and her. That is how much I was in love with you. You do know that, right?
I just want to say that I am sorry. I know I will never see you again. I hope you can forgive me.
* * *
—
MY HEADACHE HAS arrived with a vengeance and it is unfurling throughout my body. I am shaking as I finish composing the text and press send. I am kneading my temples as hard as I can, but it does not make a dent in the pain. People walking by look at me in alarm because I am lurching back and forth in this chair. I stand up and look around for a pharmacy, even though I know that five, six painkillers will not be enough to help and the doctor warned me about taking any more than three at a time. “That kind of dosage is for people who have just given birth,” he warned. What about people who will never be able to give birth? I wanted to ask.
I find a pharmacy and I stumble in and ask for the strongest dose of painkillers they can give me. As I reach into the suit pocket for the cash, I feel my phone buzzing and I draw it out.
It is a text from Bruce.
All right, it says. Now fuck off.
* * *
—
ALMOST WEEPING with relief, I hand over cash and walk out of the pharmacy without waiting for the change.
As the door closes behind me, I hear the pharmacist call, “Are you sure you are okay, miss?” His gentle voice falls like a patter of rain. I raise my hand and nod as I pry the pills from the thick packaging.
I’m okay. I have survived the day, again. All I need now is for these stupid fucking pills to work.
Miho
When it comes to love, I am not quite the fool that my roommate, Kyuri, believes me to be. Lately, she has been looking at me with great pity, alternating with scorn, and I know that she is contemplating my impending heartbreak. She considers it entirely my fault, for setting my heart up to be broken in the first place, with reckless disregard for the prime years of my man-attracting life.
It is her job to know men of course, and she thinks she can sum up Hanbin, my boyfriend, and how he will leave me. She believes girls should operate like Venus flytraps—opening only for prey that can actually be caught.
Of course, Kyuri cannot help thinking like this, as her own life remains deliberately stripped of love. When I ask her if she ever wants to get married, she snorts. “Not meant to be,” she says, blinking her mink-like eyelashes and wondering out loud at my rudeness for even raising the subject to her. But Kyuri is still the one out of all of us—even including the impressionable Sujin who lives in front of the TV—who cries the most when one of the characters has to leave the other for martyr-like reasons.
Kyuri also suffers from persecution mania. This is entirely my own and secret opinion. She sees herself as the victim—of men, of the room salon industry, of Korean society, of the government. She never questions her own judgment, or how she creates and wallows in these situations. But that is another story.
One day, years after we stop living together, I will embark on a Kyuri series. I know that with absolute certainty. I cannot start now, when I am in the midst of my Ruby series, nor while I am still living with Kyuri. I need time and distance between us. But this is why I relish living with Kyuri now. I am spoon-feeding the muse that lives in a well deep inside of my brain—hearing Kyuri’s stories, watching her drink to oblivion every weekend, obsessing over her face and her body and her clothes and her bags. I take photos of her and her things whenever I can. I will need them to remember her by. The other girls too, I have glimmers of them lurking in the outer regions of my mind; Sujin’s terrifying transformation, and dear, silent Ara and her antediluvian upbringing. It will take a few years, though, before I can commit them to paper or form.
* * *
—
AS FOR HANBIN, I don’t need Kyuri or Hanbin’s mother to know that he will not be my salvation.
* * *
—
SOMETIMES, WHEN HE is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both unendurable and terrifying.
* * *
—
I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time. In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.
* * *
—
WHEN I WENT to Hanbin about a month after Ruby killed herself, he told me he had been afraid. Afraid to sleep, because she lived in his dreams. Afraid to talk to anyone, in case they were judging him. When he finally ventured outside, people looked at him with a mixture of horror and blame and pity and thirst, and he had never known such combinations of expressions were possible on a human face.
He had asked if there had been a note for him, or any note at all. Her father’s people had told Hanbin that if she had stayed away from the likes of him, this wouldn’t have happened.
He looked so small then, it was as if his spine had curled inward, like a snake about to go to sleep.
His tortured face broke my heart, and for the first time I was blinded with rage at Ruby, for doing this to him—to us—with her reckless and destructive selfishness. To myself, I repeated what others had been saying about her. That anyone with her privileges had no right to be unhappy.
So I went to Hanbin and drew him down with me and lay beside him on his bed, which smelled like sweat and tears and musk and sorrow, and I comforted him with my body, and when we were entwined it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
Afterward, it was as if I had been suffocating all my life and only then was I able to breathe.
* * *
—
AT MY STUDIO, I am working on yet another Ruby sculpture when the director of the department comes barging in and interrupts me. I hate it when he does this and I have hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, but it is in English and perhaps it does not register with him.
“Everything going well?” he asks, beaming. It is clear from the self-satisfied expression on his face that he has some news, and it is likely to be good news. He circles the sculpture and me several times and clears his throat loudly. Perhaps he is disturbed by it, although it is positively demure by the standards of our department. The undergraduates’ work, especially, makes my eyes widen. It makes me want to ask about their parents. It’s part of my PR story that I have had a difficult childhood, but these undergraduates with rich pare
nts who can send them to these schools without scholarships and have their children pursue art careers in this country—they are the ones who have apparently known unbounded depths of despair and hatred.
The director had liked the last piece I did—the installation with the boat. He had me take so many photographs in front of the sculpture that I joked I should have made room for myself on the boat, and to my horror he said that would be a brilliant new series and I should include myself in anything I do from now on. “I would be happy to take the photograph myself—it would be a collaboration!” he said, enraptured.
This latest sculpture is a departure for me, because I am using acrylic on wood, and also incorporating fabric. In this one, Ruby is a kumiho in human form, a terrifying girl carrying a basket of jewels, her bead of powers hidden among them, her shoulders covered with a hooded cape made of out of fox fur, which melds into her body and turns into a fox’s hind legs. Her nine tails spread thickly out on the ground behind her. She has been feasting on meat—human flesh—and blood drips down her chin. I am working on her mouth, how to get her pointed white teeth to show while the rest of her mouth is filled with blood. When I fall into daydreaming, I dream wistfully about having enough money to fill her wicker basket with actual jewels. Practically speaking, I could probably sell the sculpture faster that way, if the jewels were priced in. To the Middle East perhaps. Ruby would have had contacts there. China for sure, but Ruby detested the fuerdai.
The director clears his throat. Reluctantly, I step away from my sculpture and walk over to my paint-splattered sink to wash my hands. As I am drying them on my apron, I ask how the preparations are coming along for the upcoming anniversary exhibition. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the university this year, and they have started landscaping the campus for the festivities. The construction has been driving me to the brink of lunacy.
“Guess what! There is some amazing news!” he says. “Congressman Yang is coming.” He cannot contain his glee and his body gives a little spasm of delight. He looks just like a character in a comic book. Which has possibilities. I start thinking of a tableau with a little man with a clock face. To torture him I could have him drown in a tank of water.
“Do you understand what that means?” He looks at me with an injured expression when I do not respond with joy and incredulity.
“Is he going to speak at graduation?” I ask faintly, glancing back at my work.
He looks at me.
“Look, Miss Miho,” he says after a drawn-out pause. “I know you think this conversation is irrelevant to you, but I assure you that this could not be further from the truth.”
I have annoyed him. I am repentant—he has made it possible for me to have a space and a position and money—scant as the amount may be. I walk over to my stylish little fifties-style fridge, which Hanbin bought me as a congratulations-for-getting-a-studio present, and pull out two orange fiber drinks and hand one to the director. I love these drinks because of their color. Orange is a shade that is so often ridiculed in the world. But I love these glass bottles filled with sunrise-colored liquids in my beautiful Italian fridge with vintage lettering, which is undoubtedly the most expensive thing I own.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It takes a minute to pull myself out of my work. I’m all yours. Please enlighten me.”
I sit down on a stool and face him, trying to mimic the expression Kyuri has taught me for lulling a man into thinking he has your full attention. It is all about opening the eyes wide and pulling your ears back, with only the hint of a smile lurking in the corners of your mouth.
He clears his throat.
“The reason why these politicians are important is because they can channel funds, or they can influence chaebol to set funds aside, and you get to keep creating work that can make our school famous. Understand?”
I nod. This is, indeed, important.
“Anyway, I am hard at work trying to organize this luncheon for potential patrons and politicians, and I came here to tell you that you will attend. I have made a booking at the Hotel of the Artists for next Monday at noon. So make sure…” He stops. I am waiting expectantly.
“Well, you know. Just be a good representative for this entire school,” he finishes lamely. He wants to drive home the crushing responsibility that rests on my shoulders.
“Is Miss Mari coming?” I ask. She is the other recipient of the fellowship. She creates digital installations depicting brain waves or something like that.
“No,” says the director. “Miss Mari is not…Let’s just say her work represents her better than she herself can.”
I smile sweetly and say I am honored. Mari, who is a good ten years older than me, is a bit of a wild card. She is near forty, divorced and overweight, which renders her entirely invisible in the eyes of Korean men of every generation. While I have been greatly entertained by her company the few times I have spoken with her at these mandatory events, she chooses her words according to shock value, and the director is clearly balking at the thought of placing her in the vicinity of a potential donor.
“You are the department’s mascot, don’t forget,” says the director, beaming once more now that I have said the right things in the right way. “We are featuring you on the poster for the exhibition! The photographer will be coming around in the next week or so. She will coordinate beforehand about what to wear, and hair and makeup.” I bow deeply and he stalks out, appeased.
It is an easy thing, keeping elders happy. All you have to do is smile wide and say hello and thank you and goodbye with deep earnestness.
This is something many of my generation—and my chosen vocation—do not understand.
* * *
—
IN THE EVENING, I meet Hanbin for dinner and I tell him about my upcoming parade in front of a line of donors.
“That’s amazing!” he says with delight, his tanned, handsome face breaking into a smile. Happiness, like a warm blanket, settles around my shoulders. We are eating grilled eel in the foodie street in front of school, because he says we both need energy recharging.
He is doubly happy for me because, in the past year, he has offered several times to introduce me to gallerists that he knows through his mother, and I have constantly refused. These offers do not come lightly from him, I know, because my accepting a favor like that would mean his family would then owe these people a favor, and his mother would hear of it and she would be, at the very least, wild with fury. I am trying to do this all on my own, and I know that is the way to actually keep him. He could buy all the art of all the graduate students in my department combined for half of what he paid for his car last year. It goes without saying that he could buy out all of my art in my upcoming solo show in May at the university’s gallery.
He is expertly grilling the pieces of eel and keeps placing them on my plate. I have not been able to tell him until now that I do not like eel because he already thinks I’m too picky.
Hoe, for instance. When I was growing up, we never had hoe, and every time he takes me to an expensive hoe restaurant, his eyes light up when the server brings us a beautifully arranged plate of paper-thin slices of raw white fish, topped off with sea cucumber or sea urchin. It takes singular effort to keep the queasiness from printing itself on my face. “The chef saved the best mackerel for us—I called the restaurant last week to tell them we were coming today,” he says to me, piling the translucent slivers high on my plate. “And guess what, he has set aside really high-quality pufferfish sashimi too, that he’ll be bringing out himself!”
Ruby, I think, suspected this about me. One of the wonderful things she did—without ever acknowledging it—was to stop trying to coax me to eat raw seafood. Or foie gras. Or lamb. Or rabbit. Or any sort of food I had never experienced growing up.
But oddly, even after years of dining alongside these refined palates, my aversions are only getting worse. Give me
ramen and tteokbokki and soondae any day. Or no food at all. I am happy with no food.
Usually Hanbin would have gotten angry if I started saying I was full this early, but he does not seem to care today. He is either excited or restless, and I ask him what’s going on.
“Not a thing,” he says, shaking his head. “Work is crazy. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s fucking depressing.”
Hanbin is working as the bellboy in his family’s hotel. It’s been a recent trend for hotel families to put their heirs to work in the trenches of their empires. He began as a parking attendant the summer after he graduated from Columbia, and after a few months was reassigned to washing dishes in the kitchen.
His mother pretends to be horrified that her husband is relegating her son to such menial labor, but according to Hanbin she’s actually quite tickled. It gives her a fresh new way of bragging about the hotel and her son and how farsighted her husband is to dream up such a grueling CEO-training program.
One would think that the management wouldn’t actually make him do any work, but recent chaebol scandals have changed a lot of people’s thinking. There are still the sycophants that grovel and fawn, but many are also contemptuously watchful—waiting for the owner families to make a mistake so they can pounce and report it to the police or the press. “Unions!” Hanbin tends to say explosively out of nowhere from time to time.
“At least you don’t have to pluck used condoms off the floor and sponge dirty toilet bowls on your knees,” I said to him the other week when he was complaining about how terrible his day had been. I was thinking about the stories that Sujin told me about working as a maid in a love motel the first few months she was in Seoul while she was attending a hair and beauty academy. The hotel she worked at charged by the hour, and the turnover was so fast that she lost six kilograms in two weeks because she had no time to eat, and also just because she had no appetite after cleaning all the condoms and multicolored stains every hour. She heartily recommended it as a weight-loss program.