Em's Awful Good Fortune

by Marcie Maxfield

  All I could think was, Holy shit, he could have been electrocuted!

  It never occurred to me until that moment that Gee was sort of a construction worker. Accidents happen all the time. This became my forbidden fantasy. One day the phone would ring and it would be Gee’s boss calling. There’s been an accident, he’d say softly, breaking the bad news gently, by telephone, not even in person. Because Gee worked for a production company, not the military. Your husband has been electrocuted, his boss would say. Anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.

  I would have to pack up my things and move back the States right away. And then I’d get the insurance, plus probably more, on account of its being a work-related accident—maybe even a company settlement. I’d get the insurance money and I’d get to go home. Double Indemnity, baby! That was Gee’s favorite movie. I’d miss him, but I’d get over it; it wasn’t that I didn’t love my husband, but he wasn’t around all that much anyway.

  Meanwhile, I was more likely to die in Korea than Gee was. One day, my left arm stopped working, which was inconvenient, to say the least. Good thing I’m right-handed, I thought, or I wouldn’t have been able to get dressed in the morning. Then, a month later, my arm back to normal, I felt a lump in my right breast. And then, because I felt a lump, I couldn’t stop feeling it. And pretty soon my breast was really tender. It hurt just to touch it. Anxious thoughts were piling up in my head. Maybe because I didn’t have anyone to talk to.

  These are all the words I knew in Korean: ne, aniyo, eopseo. Yes, no, forget about it. Yeogi, chigum. Here and now. That was useful in taxis. Three ways to say hello: annyeong, annyeong-haseyo, yoboseyo. There are many ways to say goodbye. Annyeonghi gyeseyo means “goodbye, I’m leaving.” There’s another way to say goodbye if the other person is going. Or you could just say anyong, but then you risk sounding like a child, or as if you were talking to a child. At first it seemed an unnecessarily complicated linguistic distinction to make. Who’s staying? Who’s going? What does it even matter?

  I didn’t know how to say I was lonely, but here’s what I did out of desperation: I called up the Christian missionary, the one who tried to bribe me with an oven if I would just come to Bible study, and I said I might consider it if she could come up with a clothes dryer instead. And I made a playdate. On my way to her house, the sky cracked open and rain pounded the taxi in a flash downpour of biblical proportions. She fed my children Jesus and American food that she bought at the military base in Seoul. The kids were seduced by the comforts of home.

  “Grilled cheese!” they exclaimed. Like it was an ice cream sundae.

  I will never hear the end of this, I thought. Why don’t we have cheese? They will ask. Because, my darlings, they don’t sell cheese at the market, I will say. Or bread, for that matter. And then they will want to go back to the Christian missionary’s house for another playdate with her five kids, their noses running green and snotty because she doesn’t believe in antibiotics, and I will say okay because they are the only other American family I have ever seen in Daejeon.

  That night, first Rio, then Ruby puked up the processed cheese, frozen french fries, and stale Cheetos the missionary brought back from the military base. I tried to calculate how long the drive from Seoul to Daejeon was, in swamplike heat, her groceries turning rancid and her frozen food thawing. Didn’t anyone ever tell that woman you’re not supposed to refreeze? Chunks of half-digested Wonder Bread covered the floor, stuck in my hair, and soaked the sheets. The sheets could be washed, but they would never dry. Not on a clothesline. Not in monsoon season. The rain was unrelenting.

  I wiped the bedding as best I could and rotated the mattress so the wet spot would be on Gee’s side. He’ll never know, I thought. The idea that he wouldn’t know he was sleeping on puke-stained sheets made me laugh out loud. It was the first time I had laughed, really belly-laughed, in months. That’s when I decided to go home. Not home to Los Angeles—there were renters in the love shack. Home to Mommy. I’m bringing the kiddies for a visit, I told her over the telephone. Just for a couple of weeks, I said. Adding that I needed a mammogram. I figured I’d hold off on telling her I wanted to stay longer. Like forever, maybe. Or, at least until Gee’s gig in Korea was over.

  This is what I took: the kids and our passports. Nothing else mattered. Everything else could be replaced. Even Gee. Well, maybe even Gee. This is what I left: my wedding ring. It may sound spoiled to call your wedding ring cheap, but what else do you call a fourteen-karat gold band that cost less than a hundred bucks? I thought of it as a placeholder, something to be upgraded when me and Gee were flush, but flush never came and a load of crap came instead, and now I flung it on the bathroom counter. This was a temporary move, a half-move; if I had flushed it down the toilet, that would have been permanent, not just a grand gesture. That would have been a real decision. Maybe I should’ve married the Paper Bag Man, like my mama told me to do back when I was a catch, but I pooh-poohed her advice then, and now the Paper Bag Man drove a Bentley and my husband drove a Ford pickup and dragged me around the world in service of his career, if you believe building expo pavilions in Korea is a career move. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could handle, but this much I knew: I couldn’t go back in time. The Paper Bag Man was married, his wife had her claws in deep, and I had two kids and stretch marks. And healthy breasts, I reminded myself. It turns out there was nothing wrong with my boob, no suspicious bump. “Just muscle,” the doctor said.

  “Oh, honey!” My mom laughed when I asked if I could move in with her, just for a little while longer, just until I got back on my feet. Then she put on her world-weary, truth-telling, this-is-how-it-is face and said, “Divorce is for the very rich or the very poor. The rich can afford it and the poor have nothing to lose, but you, Emma, are not rich. And you have two children to think about.” We were trapped. Me and the kids. We were going to have to suck it up and go back to Korea. But not until it stopped raining.

  When monsoon season ended, I returned to Daejeon, boxed up the apartment, and moved the family to Seoul. That was the deal I struck with Gee, after the string of phone calls my mother insisted I take, handing me the phone while covering the receiver, whispering, “He’s your husband.”

  It’s your bed, missy. …

  I listened to his sorrys and promises to spend more time with us, not to work six days a week and leave me alone with the kids in a foreign country, from breakfast to bedtime, with no friends and no relatives and a day planner filled with blank pages. I knew we had to go back to Korea, but I was milking this time away for all it was worth; I went to movies and ate hamburgers with real cheese and hung out with friends. I missed my job, even the suckiest parts of my job, like impossible sales quotas and insane deadlines and the way my left eye would sometimes twitch from the pressure. Well, I didn’t miss that. Or him. I didn’t miss his touch. I didn’t miss the way he slurped noodles and sweated garlic like he was born there. And I didn’t miss how he made me feel flawed for being unhappy, as if it was my fault, as if his glass being full wasn’t the reason mine was almost empty.

  Maybe you’re thinking, Why’d she stay with this asshole if she didn’t love him? Why’d this girl quit her job and follow this guy all around the world?

  The problem was, I did love him—I just didn’t trust him after the whole Japanese thing happened and everyone said it was no big deal. After Andra said it didn’t matter, as if there was some sort of alternate DMZ, demarried zone, and it didn’t count if your man cheated on you when he was on the road. It wasn’t like her husband, she said, the one she divorced because he was sleeping with a nurse at the hospital where he worked. That was actionable. It doesn’t count if you’re not living on the same continent, she said; it just means he’s a guy. And guys have needs.

  So do I. That’s what I was thinking. I have needs too.

  But I didn’t fuck the editor of the magazine where I worked, the guy with the soft voice who liked to phone-talk me for hours about alternative bands the
whole time Gee was living in Osaka. Okay, maybe I almost did, but that was after I found out about the J-girl. And no one knows about this, not Gee, not even Andra, so it’s not making it into this memoir, that’s for sure. But maybe it should, because that’s really why I ended up staying with Gee.

  That date with the editor was so awkward, the chicken undercooked, the rice burned. Gee’s a good cook; he’s got this one dish, “marry me” pasta: aglio e olio—that’s my favorite. He’s also a good dancer. He does this full-body mosh-pit thing, even to this day. I always joke that it should have been a deal breaker, the way he jumps up and down like it’s still the ’80s, but that’s me acting like maybe I made a mistake marrying him, when in truth I dig his willingness to let loose. If someone saw the two of us dancing, they’d think we were totally mismatched—him doing this punk-rock pogo; me doing a swivel-hips, super-oozy, I’m from the D thing—but they’d be dead wrong. What makes us work is the trancelike, total abandon we each bring to the dance floor. Sure, we’ve got different styles, but we both commit to the beat 100 percent.

  Anyway, we were lying on the hardwood floor of his apartment, which wasn’t in Los Angeles (because if I learned anything from the Osaka Affair, it’s that sex in a different city doesn’t count)—no shag rug; no cozy, oversize throw pillows; not super conducive to romance—and we were listening to the Replacements. All music editors jones for the Replacements, like they’re some sort of best-kept secret. Don’t Tell a Soul. One thing led to another, and we started kissing. I can’t remember the last time me and Gee sat on the floor, listening to music and making out. Married people don’t do that shit. Andra says when the kissing goes, the relationship is over. But Andra wasn’t married very long, so she’s not exactly an authority.

  We were making out, and it felt sort of foreign, like being in Asia and you’re not sure what to do when they serve you grasshoppers squirming in oil, trying to pass it off as a delicacy. Gee would so get that reference. I think if I had been single and not pissed at my husband for cheating on me, I would have just laughed and said, “Let’s be friends.” And then it would have been a perfect night hanging out and listening to records, not CDs, because editors still collect vinyl. But I was on a mission to get laid by someone other than my husband, and I’d put a lot of effort into this flirtation—hours on the phone talking hip-hop versus hard rock—and I was determined to see it through. Even the score. So I kept at it a bit. How to describe this particular version of bad sex? The whole time we were fooling around, fumbling around was more like it, cottonmouth, dry skin, and elbows jabbing, lacking heat like the undercooked chicken he made for dinner, I was thinking, This is not my guy. It made me feel so alone, weepy-hearted. How could Gee get it up for that girl in Japan and I couldn’t go through with this, couldn’t even screw this one guy I kinda-sorta liked? But kind of liking is not the same thing as belonging to each other, not at all. And we didn’t fit, me and the editor who liked the Replacements but wasn’t one. We didn’t have rhythm.

  “It’ll get better,” he said. “Next time.”

  “No next time for us,” I said, kissing him sweetly on the cheek. After all, it wasn’t his fault; he just got caught in the crossfire of our marriage.

  I left him there wanting what Gee didn’t have the good sense to hold precious, went back to my hotel room and wept for the love of Gee, and how broken he had made us. My flesh was bound to him, but I was unable to trust him anymore. I filed this incident away and never told anyone on account of this one little detail: I might have been pregnant at the time. So that’s why this story is really not making it into the book. But maybe it should. Because that’s when I decided to go all in and stay with Gee. I wanted that second baby so bad. Only children are always fucked-up little emperors, and my daughter was gonna have a sibling, come hell or whatever, a sister or brother, and not be spoiled or have broken-home syndrome. Gee and I were gonna make it work. And that’s really why I followed him to Korea.

  Things went better in Seoul. For one thing, it’s a big city with an international community. I put Ruby in daycare, and Gee’s company found us a babysitter for Rio so I could go to the market without dragging him along. Mi Chung was a lifesaver. She had this childlike spirit; I could tell she loved being on the merry-go-round as much as the kids did. And the way I knew this was that I often accompanied her to the park. I didn’t need a babysitter so much as a friend, and Mi Chung, a college student, spoke pretty good English. For her part, she probably would have taken care of the kids for free, just to perfect her language skills—she was hoping to move to America—but we paid her anyway. For his part, Gee made good on his promise not to work all the time. On weekends, our family went on picnics or shopping in Itaewon, where we bought an antique Korean wedding chest for good luck, then ducked into Nashville, an expat club that served the military base. “This Is America”: the Far East version. It was a portal, a Hollywood set where they played Motown, screened classic movies, served burgers in baskets with ketchup and fries. It even had an English-language lending library. It was almost like being home. And—another improvement—Gee’s company loaned me Mr. Kim, a Korean surfer with a beat-up van, to drive the kids and me around town.

  Most of my pictures from Korea are of my helpers: Mi Chung playing dolls with Ruby; Mr. Kim carrying Rio up a flight of steps to a temple; Mr. Kim and me on a ferry crossing the Han River, my hair windswept, he in his driver’s uniform, a thin burgundy-and-black cotton vest. I hung out with Mi Chung when she “babysat” the kids, and insisted that Mr. Kim act as my tour guide when he drove me to museums or the hardware store. Not just because I was uncomfortable leaving Mr. Kim sitting in the car while I ran errands and explored the city, but because it made me feel less isolated to have another adult around. Especially one who spoke Korean. It’s good practice for learning English, I told him, as if I were doing it for him and not me. In Asia, this is called “saving face.” I was becoming culturally acclimated.

  Most days, Mr. Kim took Ruby to preschool in the mornings, dropped me off at the gym, and waited in the van, reading Playboy magazine for the articles.

  “For to learn English,” he said.

  “What’d you learn today, Mr. Kim?” I asked, climbing into the back of the van after a workout, sweaty, too lazy to put my street clothes back on, wearing only leggings and a tank top, cluelessly underdressed.

  When he saw me, he blushed. “Where you go now?” he wanted to know.

  That’s when I blushed. It was embarrassing that I didn’t have anywhere pressing to go. Maybe Gee was right: I lacked the adventure gene. While having a driver was a huge convenience, it was also a straight-up reminder of how little I had to do all day.

  So I joined the American Women’s Club, mostly because I wanted to have somewhere to tell Mr. Kim to take me while Ruby was in school and Rio was with Mi Chung. And that’s where I was introduced to the tagalong scene. I thought it would be easy to make friends, but the tagalong ladies didn’t invite me into their expat homes, because I wasn’t going to be in Seoul long enough to be worth the friendship investment. I call this tagalong math. Later, I would come to understand this algorithm; in Paris, I would be on the other side of this survival strategy, not wanting to extend myself to women who wouldn’t be around long enough to reciprocate. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to waste time getting to know other moms who would be gone before I could memorize their kids’ names; it was also because I didn’t want to lose people I’d come to rely on as friends. Good friends. Women with whom I shared the day-to-day experience, the ups and downs, the frustration over not knowing how to get things done; women in whom I confided, with whom I commiserated; women who made me laugh. And laughing while tagging along is nothing to sneeze at. So tagalongs get picky. The first question out of their mouth, almost before “What’s your name?” or “Where are you from?” is “How long will you be here?”

  “Welcome to Seoul.” The woman sitting next to me at the American Women’s Club monthly coffee meet-up said,
“How long will you be here?” I was wearing jeans and a Newcomer Crack-N-Peel label. She was dressed in head-to-toe fake designer goods: Chanel tweed jacket and quilted purse with chain-link strap, Ferragamo flats in black patent leather. She looked like a throwback to a committee lady. She looked like my mother.

  “Less than a year,” I told her. She smiled, nodded politely, and never said another word to me. These are not your people, I told myself, to lighten the sting of rejection. Still, it hurt that they didn’t extend themselves to me. Being a tagalong is a lot like being in high school: There are cliques, new girls, and own-the-school girls. But, to be fair, I was a short-termer. I wouldn’t even be in Seoul long enough to attend the fundraiser they were all planning.

  However, I was there long enough to take a vacation. A real vacation. Not just an overnight on Jeju Island—the Hawaii of South Korea—on a photo shoot for a high-end kids’ clothing catalog. (I joked that Ruby and Rio made more money than I did that year.) Or a weekend in Busan, where someone fell into a bucket of halibut at the fish market and picked up a nickname they hated. Fish Butt! No, this was the kind of vacation travel magazines feature. We flew to Bali, with a layover in Singapore. Ate satay in the Night Market, had cocktails at the Raffles Hotel, where the Singapore Sling was created, visited the world-famous zoo, and took a family photo with an orangutan on our laps. Then we were off to Ubud, where a sacred monkey perched on Gee’s shoulders and groomed his hair like they were long-lost siblings. We slept deep in a rice paddy at a luxury hotel with walls that were paper-thin and slid open to a lush expanse of nature, iridescent green and undulating. There was a sleek modern infinity pool, the water appearing almost black and falling off toward the horizon; fresh flower petals were strewn on the bedspread. At night we heard frogs mating.

  Before returning to Korea, we stayed at one of those family-friendly resorts with a kids’ club and babysitting. Gee and I sat at the bar, him in a batik shirt, me wearing a sarong. We ordered drinks that we paid for with beads from a necklace they gave us when we checked in, so that we wouldn’t know how much money we were spending on alcohol. Ruby had her hair braided on the beach. A jellyfish stung Rio. Gee relaxed, and the two of us got our groove on. This vacation was the big payoff for our stint in Korea. It was meant to be a blowout, one-time-only Far East adventure. At least, that’s how I saw it. Afterward, I was ready to go home and get back to reality.