by Frances Cha
Now that I’m in the hallway, it becomes clear that the screams—they are intermittent—are coming from downstairs. The married couple is right beneath us, and I think there is a girl who lives by herself in the other apartment. I walk softly down the stairs and listen right outside the front door of apartment 302.
It’s this one. And I can hear more moaning now. Mumblings. Something about a baby? I press my ear closer and I hear only a woman’s voice and at first I think she is addressing someone but then it occurs to me that she is just talking to herself. And then she screams in pain so loudly that I jump in fright and almost drop the kettle.
“Who’s there?” a woman’s voice calls out suddenly, her voice full of fear. I tap on the door, hoping that the taps sound gentle and innocuous.
“Who is it?” she calls again, right before she moans again. There is some shuffling and groaning, and I hear a scraping at the door right in front of me. She is probably looking through the peephole so I back up a little so she can see me more clearly and smile and wave with my free hand.
The door unlocks and opens slowly and she pokes her head out.
“Who is it?” she says. It’s the married lady. She looks frightful—her eyes are bloodshot, and her pale face contorted and streaked with tears. She opens the door a bit more and sees that I am holding a water kettle.
“What is it?” she says. “Don’t you live upstairs?”
I nod and then I point to my throat and shake my head.
“Huh?” She looks more confused, then she doubles over and lets out a tortured moan.
Setting the kettle down on the floor outside her door, I take her by the shoulders and we go inside her apartment. She is in too much pain and she barely makes it to the living room, where she keels over onto a sofa.
I pat her on the arm and then run out and open the front door again and bring in the hot water. Then I go to her kitchen and look for a mug and pour some for her.
She is writhing on the sofa, clutching her stomach. Tears course down her cheeks. Kneeling in front of her, I run my hands up and down her arms. Then I fish out my phone from my pocket.
“I heard some strange sounds so I came to see if there was something wrong. Do you need me to call an ambulance?” I type into my phone, and then I show her.
Wiping her tears, she takes the phone and reads it. “You can’t speak?” she asks, her brows furrowing in surprise. She is exaggerating her words the way most people do when they first find out.
I nod.
She sits up then and grabs my wrist, surprising me.
“Were you born that way?” she asks, with strange desperation. People often ask me this, but she sounds as if there is more to her query than just fleeting curiosity. I blink rapidly and shake my head after a moment.
She sighs and lies back down on the sofa. I wait for a follow-up question about how it happened but it does not come.
“Do you need to go to the emergency room?” I type out again.
She reads it and closes her eyes in pain.
“I don’t know,” she says, rocking back and forth. “I guess I should but I don’t know.” She starts crying again. “This doesn’t make any sense but I want to wait a little. It’s still so early that if there is something wrong I’m sure they’ll just kill her to take her out of me.”
I gather that she is pregnant and she is talking about her baby.
“I heard that if something is wrong then they will save the mother over the baby and I don’t want that to happen. If my baby is going to die then I’ll just die with her.”
I look down at her and I understand. I nod and bring her some tissues from a box on her kitchen table and she blows her nose. I kneel next to her and start stroking her hair, which is wet from sweat. Even the tensest of my clients tend to relax when I do this, so I hope it helps if only just a little.
I glance around the apartment curiously. It is only slightly bigger than ours and it does not look at all like an apartment for a married couple. Not that I have ever been to a young married person’s house, now that I think about it, but the ones I have seen on TV have frilly lace curtains on the windows and blown-up wedding photographs and matching blue and pink mugs and slippers and stuff.
But this apartment, there are no photographs or paintings or frills—it is as stark and muted and neutral as a hospital waiting room. No books or plants either. The only thing that is personal at all is a small bookshelf of CDs in the corner. What a curious woman she must be, not to have a single decoration in her house. Even at the salon, where we each have the little acreage of one chair in front of a mirror, everyone is trying to decorate the hell out of the thirty centimeters of shelf space in front of the mirrors. And she’s having a baby! Not a single baby thing anywhere, although I did hear that people do not like buying things early for fear of bad luck…Tempting the gods with assumptions of happiness.
My phone starts buzzing, making us both jump. It’s Miho calling. She must be very frazzled, to be calling me. “Ara, it’s me. Check your texts!! Text me back!!” she says when I pick up, then she hangs up.
I open the texts and see that she has texted me a bunch. “Where are you??? Are you ok???? I just knocked on your door and you are not here!!”
I text her back. “Downstairs in 302. Lady in a lot of pain. I’m fine!”
Perhaps ten seconds later, I hear a knock on the door.
“Who’s that?” says the woman weakly, and I run to the door and open it.
Miho looks relieved when she sees me. Her long hair is in two flowing braids and she has paint on her hands and arms as usual.
“You scared me!” Miho says in a chiding voice. “You can’t do that! Just text and go silent!”
I crinkle my face in apology.
“I called the police,” says Miho. I shake my head. “Call them back? Tell them not to come?” she asks, and I nod.
“Who is it?” calls the woman from the living room, and Miho walks in with me.
“Hello, are you okay?” Miho asks gently when she sees the woman lying down. “My friend Ara here texted that she heard screaming and then she didn’t text back so I got nervous.”
The woman sits up slowly, gingerly touching her stomach.
“I was in a lot of pain,” she says. “My husband…is not here.” She says this hesitantly, then rubs her stomach in a circular motion. “I actually think I am feeling better. It still hurts but less now. I’m pregnant.” She says the last part a bit defiantly.
“Do you need to call your doctor?” Miho asks. The woman shakes her head and looks at me. I touch Miho on the arm and shake my head.
“Well, at least you are feeling better,” says Miho. “That’s good! I’m Miho, by the way. This is Ara. We live upstairs.”
“Yes, I am sorry,” the woman says. “It’s very late and I disturbed you. I am surprised the whole office-tel is not pounding on my door.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” says Miho. “Ara is just special. She hears things more acutely than most people. I’m sure everyone else is asleep.”
“When is your husband coming back?” I type.
She looks at my text and shakes her head once. And then Miho jabs me in the back to tell me to stop asking.
I go to the kitchen table to check on the hot water I have poured into the mug. It’s a drinkable temperature now, so I bring it to the woman and she sips.
“Thank you so much for bringing hot water. It’s very thoughtful.” She holds the mug with both hands and then places it on her belly.
I smile weakly. It’s just as well that she doesn’t know I thought she was being raped and I was going to fling the boiling water in her rapist’s face.
“It’s so late. I feel quite terrible for keeping you up. Please return home and go to sleep. I feel so much better, really.” To illustrate her point, she stands up and smiles tremulousl
y.
Miho and I look at the clock, which now reads 4:05 A.M. We both shrug. Miho keeps her own hours and can sleep in as late as she likes.
I have to be at work by 9:30. I haven’t had a dedicated assistant since Cherry never came back after that night; I’ve been laying low and haven’t asked for another one yet.
I take the woman’s hands in mine and squeeze them. They are bony and soft at the same time.
“Thank you,” she says, her eyes cast down to the floor in embarrassment. Miho murmurs good night to her and we leave together, closing the door softly behind us.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY at work, I am thinking about the lady. I can’t stop thinking about her desperate eyes—how, even despite her pain, she was unwilling to go to the emergency room because they might take the baby out of her.
I cannot imagine feeling that way. I cannot imagine having a child and you have to watch out for him or her and every moment of every day will be devoted to the child with no life of your own. I wonder how that transition happens and what it feels like when that instinct kicks in.
One of my customers said to me once that the problem with a lot of my generation in this country is that we do not live for tomorrow. He was a professor of sociology and had been quizzing the assistants about their life choices, which obviously made them uncomfortable. They would not be working at a salon if they could answer such questions positively, I wanted to say. But of course he and everyone else knew that already, and he was simply being cruel by bringing it up. “You have to grow up with parents whose lives become better as time goes by, so you learn that you must invest effort for life to improve. But if you grow up around people whose situations become worse as time goes on, then you think that you have to just live for today. And when I ask young people, What about the future? What will you do when tomorrow comes and you have spent everything already? they say they will just die. And that is why Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world.”
He said this in a lecturing way, as if to chide everyone who worked in the salon.
I wanted to ask if his own children were brilliant and filial and successful, because no one is actually like that.
Sometimes, it is a good thing that I cannot speak.
* * *
—
KYURI TEXTS ME around dinnertime.
“Our manager says there’s a chance Taein will come to Ajax tonight! Madam is not going to be here because she’s getting her annual health checkup tomorrow so she has to fast and not drink starting 5 P.M. today. This is perfect. Any chance you can get off work and come here by 9 or so? His manager is definitely coming with someone from Taein’s company and I am betting that it’s really him. And even if it isn’t, you can meet his manager at least.”
I stare and stare at this text and I can’t breathe and I have to sit down and the assistants scatter like roaches when they see my face. Perhaps Cherry told them things about me after all.
It is finally here. The time that I get to meet Taein. I have fantasized about this a thousand times, and each time, he is taken with me and wants to talk to me alone and he takes me to his apartment, where we listen to music all night lying on the floor of his room, like he did in that reality show My Lonely Room. I bolt up from my chair and stare at the mirror. I have to go. I know that Kyuri would never have texted me if this was not a real opportunity.
I must transform myself, that is immediately clear. I will have to borrow something to wear from one of the girls. I run through all of their dresses in my head. I once saw Miho wearing some kind of dark green dress that I loved. I will have to ask her about it right now.
I hurry to the front desk and ask how many clients I have left today, and fortunately they tell me it is only two. Mrs. Park Mi-soon and Mr. Lim Myung-sang. I type on my phone that I have an emergency and have to go home, and ask Miss Kim if she can call and ask if they would prefer to reschedule or to just go with whoever is available. Mrs. Park is scheduled for her perm, which she gets only once every three months, but this cannot be helped. And Mr. Lim is just his regular monthly haircut. Miss Kim nods and asks what’s wrong, but I shake my head and fly to the locker room, where I change into my regular clothes. As I leave, I catch Miss Kim’s eye and motion for her to text me, and she nods and waves me off.
* * *
—
WHEN I GET back to the office-tel, nobody is home and Miho is not answering my text about the dress. I punch in the numbers for the lock to Miho and Kyuri’s apartment, and once I’m in I rifle through their closets.
I find the green dress not in Miho’s closet but in Kyuri’s, and I write in to the group chat. “Borrowing dark green dress from Kyuri’s closet, whoever’s it is!! Thanks!! Makeup and shoes too!!”
Kyuri’s tools do not make Kyuri’s face, however, and I emerge from her room looking a bit too pale and wide-eyed for my liking. Eyeliner was never my strong point. At least my hair will look perfect. After putting on the dress, which is a bit tight on me, I curl my hair into waves. Unfortunately, Kyuri’s shoes are all too big for me so I have to wear my own, and the only remotely passable ones are some nude heels I bought a few summers ago that hurt my toes. The forecasts all say that there is a chance of showers in the evening, and I take an umbrella because I don’t want to ruin the dress.
By the time I catch a cab, it is already past 9 P.M., and I am almost crying with anxiety as we sit in traffic for nearly ten minutes. Kyuri texts me to say that Taein just arrived. She says she’ll come up to get me when I arrive.
My heart is bursting as the cab finally pulls up and I see Kyuri waving at me by an entrance where several men in suits are loitering.
“You came!” she squeals, and I can smell the alcohol on her breath. She’s drunk already and giggling as she squeezes my hand. We teeter down the stairs together. “So, he’s here with his two friends and his manager and then the CEO of his agency is coming later too. And Sujin! Sujin is in another room right now but she’ll be coming in soon!”
We walk down a dark hallway where girls and waiters are going in and out of rooms. As doors open and close we hear snippets of laughter or low voices or singing. Finally Kyuri stops and opens the door and pushes me in gently.
Inside, it is dark, with a long rectangular marble table in the middle of the room and a bathroom in the corner. Four men are sitting around the table drinking, and on the far right, it’s really Taein.
It seems strange that there are not more people here, that everyone isn’t staring at him rapturously. I am not hallucinating—his skin is glowing, his face is smaller than I expected—his perfect face, which I stare at every night on the screen, is so close to mine I could reach out and cup it with my hands.
“Come on, Ara,” says Kyuri, and she pushes me in until we reach the table and then plops me down next to Taein.
I bow and blush bright red up to my roots.
“You left so fast I was going to get offended, Kyuri,” says one of the guys, who is wearing a striped T-shirt and looks around Taein’s age.
A guy on the other side says, “Yeah, I didn’t realize you were that popular, that you can’t sit here for ten minutes straight.” He has a round face and bad skin and his expression is unkind. “This place is getting too cocky.”
“I went to get my friend, who is a huge Taein fan!” says Kyuri merrily. “Not to another room, silly.”
“Ugh, seriously, a fan?” says the guy in the striped shirt. “He hates fans.”
“No I don’t,” says Taein quickly, reaching over and mock-punching him on the shoulder. He turns and gives me a wide smile, but I can tell he is on his guard now.
“So what’s your name?” says Taein’s giant hulk of a manager, turning toward me. His wide face is marked by splotchy acne, and I recognize him too, from all the reality TV shows. He’s been with Crown since before their debut. All the st
ories that have ever been told about him—usually on radio rather than TV—come immediately to mind. He used to hoard food in his room and pretend he didn’t have any when the kids were going hungry after practicing all day and had used up the ten-thousand-won food budget for the day. And one time, he forgot to pick them up from the airport because he was too drunk and they actually had to take a taxi home with their own money (when they were not making any money yet).
I wonder how they can stand to be around him now, after all that heart suffering he put them through when they were struggling and poor.
“Her name is Ara,” says Kyuri. “She is mute.”
“What?” There are yelps from around the table and I flush more.
“I’ve never met a mute!” says one of the friends. “Wow, this room salon gets more and more interesting every time I come here. How is she supposed to talk to me when she’s mute?”
“Body language, you idiot,” says the tall one, cracking himself up. “She must be fluent in several dialects.”
For all the times I imagined meeting Taein, I wonder at myself, why I didn’t prepare more for this. Hot tears are building up in my eyes when the door opens and Sujin walks in.
“They told me you were in here!” she says gaily to Kyuri. “Hello, everyone!”
The men cast a glance over her and ignore her. Then she sees me and Taein.
“Ara?” Sujin says when she sees me. “Oh my God!” Instantly, she understands what is happening and hurries to sit down next to me. She pinches me and starts squealing.
“What the fuck,” I hear the tall guy mutter. Then he presses the buzzer on the table and a waiter pops in. “Call the madam,” he says. Everyone is quiet suddenly, and Kyuri seems agitated.
It only takes a minute for the manager, dressed in all black, to open the door and slide in quietly. “Hello,” he says, bowing deeply. “Is something the matter? How can I fix it?”
The tall guy motions to him. “I said, call the madam. Not you. I don’t know you.”
