I threw away the address Jisoo had given Manager Kim and went on a date. Insook was soft, with thick wrists, and curves that looked warm and giving beneath her flimsy cotton dress. She held on to my arm as we watched a film, her painted nails pressing into my shirtsleeve. I didn’t know her well, but her boldness was a good sign. When I asked her to my room after the movie, she laughed. “Sunmi said you were forward.”
“I only want to pick up a restaurant discount. Then we’ll get dinner.” I raised my arms like an innocent cowboy. “I promise.”
She gave me an appraising look. “All right.”
When we reached the Songs’ hanok, Insook hesitated. “I rent a room,” I said. “No one’s home.”
“I’ll wait.” She sat on a bench in the inner courtyard. As I walked around the porch, she gestured at the motorcycle. “This is yours?”
“I made it myself.” I patted its leather seat. “It’d get stolen if I parked it outside.”
Insook considered this with a tilt of her head. “Can I ride it?”
“You don’t want to see what a renter’s life looks like?”
“Oh, fine.” She picked up the hem of her skirt like a girl wading through water. Her heels slipped off easily.
She entered my room, touched the few items I had on display. “I know this.” She held up a drawing of Jeju Island. “Sunmi told me you two weren’t ever serious.”
I shuffled through my papers, looking for the discounts. “Sunmi’s sister set us up a couple of years ago, but we were better as friends. She’s a good artist.”
Insook set down the drawing. “I hardly know you, anyway.”
“Let’s go to dinner and get to know each other, then.”
“Mr. Yun?” Grandmother Song’s thin voice rose as she called my name. “Mr. Yun?”
“Oh, no,” Insook said.
“It’s all right.” I opened the door to my room.
Grandmother Song cradled a glossy brown handbag in the middle of the courtyard. She nodded at Insook’s shoes. “We’ve talked about this. It’s unacceptable. The neighbors see you. They come to me and I have to handle their complaints.”
“We were only picking up a few papers.” Insook bowed low with a deferential gaze. “I wouldn’t normally come inside like this.”
“You’re not the one to blame. It’s him.” She pointed. “I have grandchildren here.”
“They’re adults now,” I said.
“You don’t talk to me however you want, Mr. Yun.” She walked away.
“Wow,” Insook whispered. “Let’s go.”
Outside the hanok gates, Insook leaned on my elbow and adjusted her right heel. “That’s why my brother refuses to rent from hanoks. No family telling him what to do.” She nodded at a figure walking up the path. “Is that one of the kids?”
“The granddaughter,” I said. “She’s in high school.”
“I want to meet her.” Insook smiled and fiddled with her shoe until Aejung reached us.
Hugging her backpack, Aejung bowed. “Going somewhere?”
“This is Lee Insook,” I said. “We’re getting dinner.” Aejung wore her school uniform, but her lips were painted red. “Your makeup.” I pointed. “Better wash that off before you go inside.”
“Damn.” She touched her mouth and turned to Insook. “Do you have a mirror?”
“You should always carry one around.” Insook held one up as Aejung rubbed a tissue over her lips. “Especially if you have a grandmother like that.”
“She’s in a bad mood,” I warned.
“You really should stop bringing women over.” Aejung looked at Insook. “He’s a dirty bachelor. Three matchmakers gave up on him.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to imply.” Insook wrapped her mirror in a stretch of cloth and tucked it inside her bag. “We’re colleagues.”
“You work at the beauty products company?”
“And you’re in middle school?” Insook gestured at the backpack. “Too young to wear makeup, clearly.”
“What are we doing here?” I motioned. “Let’s go. These only work before seven.”
Aejung sniffed. “Restaurant discounts? I guess it isn’t a date after all.”
Insook straightened a small pin in her hair that I hadn’t noticed earlier. “I’m not very hungry, actually. Kyunghwan, I’m leaving.”
“She’s just a sassy kid,” I said.
Insook turned to Aejung. “You know, that color isn’t flattering on you. It brings out the yellow in your teeth.”
At the end of the path, Insook slid into a taxi with the ease of a woman who would have let me kiss her after dinner. I was almost angry. “Look what you’ve done.”
“I’m just a sassy kid.” Aejung smiled. “What’ll you do now?”
I laughed at her eager, obvious face. “I guess I’ll have to eat alone like the sad, old bachelor I am.” I pretended to turn toward the road.
“I’ll come.” She hitched up her backpack. “Wait here. I want to change.”
“Don’t tell your grandmother.”
She thrust out her chin. “I’m not dumb.”
Aejung was harmless, an easy distraction. She was eighteen and captivated by the political rantings of her older brother. As we ate, she complained about her parents, who’d voted for Park. She praised the recent hunger strikes. These students all said the same things with the same indignant looks, the same shaking fists. They had been children when the country was divided, and now they wanted to be the leaders of the people.
My instinct for preservation took on a different form. Aejung and her brother floated through their lives, padded by their parents’ money, shouting their principled indignities. I had only my work, my ability to pass unnoticed.
“I know all about Japan.” I cracked open the tab of my beer can. “If they give us a heap of money, so what? Doesn’t that help us?”
Aejung twirled a red plastic bracelet around her wrist and complained. “You don’t care at all.”
“I do, but hunger strikers only hurt themselves.”
She sank her chopsticks into the milky-white broth. When she found an ox bone, she didn’t wrest off the meat but sucked on it whole. “You wouldn’t care if Japan came back and ruled over us one by one, as long as the economy gets better,” she said with her mouth full.
“Hey,” I said, my voice veering sharp. “You were born after Independence. You don’t know what it was like under Japanese rule. It was just as bad as the war.”
She raised her nose and sniffed. “Then you should be more upset.” She pointed to the open newspaper between us. “I know a lot, anyway. My friends are part of the movement. Things are going to happen, like the demo tomorrow.”
I sighed and set down my can. “There have been protests for months.”
She glanced behind her shoulder at the other diners. “Not like this one. Park won’t be able to ignore us anymore.”
I prodded the newspaper. “Why don’t you save this talk for your brother and let me enjoy my meal?”
Aejung pretended to pout but set the paper aside. She pulled out a shiny tube and swiped bright red over her lips. “Oppa still thinks I’m ten years old. You don’t.”
Her clever mouth. I watched her smile and almost wanted to kiss her. She was close enough. A bit more vain and prim, but she had the same willfulness, the same desire to assert herself in the world as Haemi had when she was young. I tugged Aejung’s red plastic bracelet, its simple shininess. “How do I think of you, then?”
But as Aejung leaned toward me, I saw only a wide, pale face drenched with rain. Her dark, upturned eyes. The scent of her, a heady mix of rice, salt, grass. The way she had turned to Jisoo in that makeshift bar, years ago, and asked him to take her away.
* * *
I wanted to erase Haemi, but it wasn’t so easy. The night I finally kissed her, when we fell into each other with all the hunger of twelve years, I thought—At last. At last, I wasn’t alone. At last, the night had untangled itself the
way I’d always wanted. Not just the night, but all my years. My life shifted into clarity.
I told Haemi about the strange boredom of the stalemate, and the pulsing rush of fear we felt when the night attacks robbed us of sight, smell, understanding. I told her of the shack along Namsan, Father’s death, the failed exam. Memories I thought I’d discarded long ago. How I’d quit my position in the paper factory to return to her, to see her as a woman. That I had a new job selling beauty products waiting for me back in Seoul. That she should come, too.
Haemi unfurled herself beside me. I touched the skin that had always been mine in my mind. Her smooth neck, its paleness rivered by blue veins. The slopes of her tender breasts, the slight slack to their shape from mothering. The dark nipples I held in my mouth, circling with my tongue until they budded for me. I loved the stretch of her stomach, the scars running along the backs of her legs, the cuts on her fingers from careless housekeeping, how the flesh of her inner arm gave way to my grip. My fingers wove with hers, the gasp of us together, and the taste of her, everywhere. I loved her. I had loved her from the beginning. “Tonight. We’ll go,” she said. It was dark and I could smell her more than see her. The dirt underneath her fingernails, between the creases of her summered neck. The taste of her mouth, full of pond water.
“Tomorrow.” I reached for her. “Stay here with me.”
“Tonight. We’ll come back for the girls.” She held my face between her hands. “Do you want me?”
“You know I do.”
“Then tonight. I’ll lose the courage if we don’t. I promise you.”
I raised myself up and searched for my shirt. “What about Jisoo?”
She closed her eyes. “He’s sick of me.”
* * *
How much had been true that night? How much had she meant? Why didn’t I leave with her right then? I didn’t know the answers even now.
Words circled around us, but we wanted to feel each other more than anything. I held her by the throat, the dip where she vibrated with each sound, her collarbone. From outside, we heard the cry of a bird, nothing else. No Jisoo, no children, no world without us together. I lit a candle even though we were burning. I wanted the look of her, how she moved in darkness stained with light. I realized I’d always known this body. Before we even undressed, I had known.
As the hours passed, she trapped herself in the practicalities of our escape, how we would survive. “There’s too much in our way.” Her hand hovered over the candle’s flame. “Jisoo could have us jailed.” I tried to convince her that the law against adultery was meant to punish cheating husbands, not wives. She slapped my arm, her palm hot against me. “It doesn’t matter. It’s me that would suffer. You’d be fine.”
She slowly built a pillar of reasons—the law, the impossibility of divorce, the shunning of her daughters, the ruin of poverty. “Even if he let me go, I can’t live like we used to.” She cupped her hands and held them to her mouth like an animal lapping water. “Remember when we were so hungry we’d eat the lees from the distillery? How tipsy we would be when we got to school? We were seven, eight.”
I remembered the thick gray mush that stank of alcohol. Everyone had done it. Red, sleepy faces arriving with loose books and easy smiles. The teachers had smelled our breaths, hit our heads and palms. But we were hungry and they couldn’t help us.
I showed Haemi the money I’d brought with me.
“Are you trying to pay me or show me how we’ll live?”
“There’ll be more. We’ll be fine,” I said.
She laughed in the way I hated and stood with her dress in her hands.
“Don’t leave,” I said.
“You already did.”
* * *
The world paled when I thought of her. I couldn’t explain her hold on me all these years. I walked Aejung home after dinner and when she looped her arm with mine, I let her. I tried to feel the swing of her weight, this girl who was here and wanted me. She tipped her head against my shoulder. I smelled the clean, common scent of her shampoo. I listened to her hum and felt something release inside me. A desire for a normal life, maybe. No, a determination. For a wife, some children, an end to my aimless flirtations. Haemi had chosen Jisoo. What did that make me?
Aejung slowed our pace at the street that led to our shared hanok. “We’re here already?” I smiled down at her, distracted again. “You should go in before your grandmother starts to worry.”
“I don’t want to yet. Maybe we could go somewhere?” She twisted the toe of her sneaker into the pavement. “To a hotel?”
“Aejung.” I dropped her arm. “I can’t do that.”
She touched her lips, smearing the red. “I’m eighteen.”
“Don’t do this.” I glanced up the road. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
She pushed out her chest and tilted her head, like a doll cast into a seductive pose. “You watch me.” Her lips twitched into a smile. “I see you.”
I sighed. I watched her and saw what Haemi could have been. If born a few years later, in a different city, and into a different sort of life. “It’s not like that,” I said.
“What’s wrong with me, then?” Aejung wound her shirt around her finger and I caught a glimpse of pale, soft stomach. “Aren’t I as good as the women you bring home?”
A hot wind blew against us. She pulled down the edge of her skirt with a quick, childlike tug. I laughed at the image, not trying to be unkind.
“I’m a terrible person and too old.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She’d painted her lids a shimmering pink. Her eyes were hot with recognition and maybe a little resignation. “You’ll find your own person one day, but tonight, you should get far away from me.”
She leaned against my chest and blew out a long, slow breath. Her lashes thick, almost wet. “I’ll go.”
Her desire to be seen still heated her face as she walked away. At the hanok entrance, she bowed.
I roamed the downtown streets, where flickering neon signs advertised bars and coffee shops. A happy flush of noise burst from an open window of a beer hall, but I didn’t want a bar girl to pour my drinks and I didn’t want to be alone. A group of college boys passed me in a tense roar. “I hope it’s a big demo,” one of them said. The thought of protests dragged Jisoo’s request to the surface of my mind. If Hyunki had been arrested, he would have contacted them. Haemi only wanted to prove that she could still control me. Jisoo wouldn’t have called otherwise. I knew it. He did, too. We were alike in this way—beholden to a ruthless, capricious woman.
I passed a row of trees, their branches heavy with shiny green walnut husks. I turned down different paths and tried to convince myself that I wandered aimlessly. Still, I knew where I’d end up.
I entered a neighborhood of apartment buildings and stopped in front of Hyunki’s two-story boardinghouse. I’d memorized the address with one read. Haemi. She didn’t need me. And with one call, I was reminded of how much I needed her.
I left a note with the landlady and waited at a pojangmacha around the corner. I ordered soju, fish cakes, and broiled sparrows splayed on sticks. I wasn’t hungry but gorged myself anyway. I scanned the crowds outside the street bar’s clear plastic curtains. Hyunki would come or he wouldn’t; at least I had taken care of my end. I wondered if he would recognize me. I glanced at my reflection in the carbide lamp’s metal glare. Not yet thirty and I felt ripe with age, pitiful, and alone.
Most of the customers idled at the standing bar—college boys with short hair and clean buttoned shirts; older uncles, already drunk; and grandfathers with long wooden pipes. When Hyunki finally entered, I was surprised at how easily I identified him. Tall and thin, he ducked under the tarp opening and I recognized the serious stare, the strong nose. That same peaked hairline. The small sickly boy I’d once known now stretched into a gangly adult.
I raised an arm. “Here, Hyunki.”
“Kyunghwan-hyung.” He bowed.
He walked with the unear
ned swagger of all the college students. These boys who believed they alone were responsible for our country’s future. Resentment surged in me, like the vomit that crawled up my throat after downing a shot of soju too quickly.
He bowed again and sat down. “Is everything all right? Is something wrong?” His voice, deep and scratchy, cleared away my bitterness. It was late and I’d scared him with my sudden visit.
“Your nuna and Jisoo wanted me to check on you,” I said. “Spare an hour to drink and eat with an old cousin?”
“Thank God.” Hyunki coughed into his arm. “It’s great to see you.”
I examined him. “Are you sick again?”
“It’s only a cold.” He held the glass I’d given him with both hands as I poured. “Thank you.”
“You sure?” Before he could answer, I noticed the green tinge to his face. Across his nose and cheek, his skin was swollen. “Are you sick or beaten up? Let me see.”
He turned so I could inspect him and smiled. “It’s nothing. Don’t tell Nuna. She’ll only get mad.”
His simplicity reminded me of when I’d first arrived in Seoul—those eager months before I’d failed the entrance exam. “There have always been protests, new republics,” I said. “You shouldn’t put yourself in danger.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You sound like Jisoo-hyung. You don’t believe that, do you?”
I didn’t know. I had never been able to make up my mind about my political leanings, Haemi, myself.
“You’ve seen what Park’s censorship has done.” He quartered an oily fish cake with his chopsticks. “Living in Seoul, you must know.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m not some farmer in the fields. You think I was gullible enough to vote for Park Chung-hee?”
He chuckled and raised his glass in celebration.
The soju greased our thoughts and made them easier to share. I couldn’t help but like Hyunki. He spoke with an intensity I’d never felt for any ideology. As we ripped into fried fish cakes, he tried to recruit me into joining his college protest meetings.
If You Leave Me Page 24