by EQM
I moved from school to school, working a total of six months out of the two years I’d lived here. Eun Hee was a distant and guiltless memory that I conjured up once in a while to cover up the more recent ones. There’d been about five since her, none of whom I’d slept with and all of whom I’d taken money from.
Grace came into my booth on one of the slow days, in the lag time when the school semester is starting up in Korea. Most of the students who’d been piling up hours of conversation in the previous weeks left on the same day, leaving me with hour-long gaps to fill in my day. That meant trial lessons—free trial lessons that I didn’t get paid for. The other teachers, such as Bruce, a cowboy-boot-wearing fellow who dyed his goatee, hated these sessions.
“It’s a jack, straight ahead, a jack,” he said, leaning over the partition between our cubicles. His breath killed the oxygen around me, replacing it with the gaseous remains of what must have been a pickle-and-cheese lunch.
“I don’t mind the trials so much,” I said to Bruce. “Less pressure to drive the conversation. What do I care if the kid signs up or not?”
“Oh, you oughta care. Maybe the school gets ninety percent of the cash, but if we don’t net that ten percent from a sign-up, we’re dead in the water. Only made my rent last month after selling half my guitar collection. How do you get by?”
Half his collection must have been one whole guitar, I thought. Probably a cheap knockoff of some vintage model that he’d seen on a few album covers. Bruce had found out I played bass. Once he stopped trying to get me to join his nonexistent band, he concentrated on forming a bond between us as rebel artists caught in a thankless real-world racket. Meeting him made me glad that I’d given up on the rock-star ticket.
“I’ve got other income here and there, Bruce. Not a good idea to anchor your life to such an irregular paycheck—you oughta know that, string-slinger.” If I wasn’t already gagging on the stink of his breath, I did as those words came out of my mouth. I had to throw him off thinking of my other income stream, and the best way was to get him talking about himself. And he did, blabbing about some alt-country band he’d started with his buddy who’d just moved to Tacoma and was living next-door to an old A&R rep from Universal who’d gotten out of the game ... that was all I heard before tuning him out.
At some point, Grace sat down across from me for the first time. Six months before I ended up dragging her out into the rainy street. She moved light. Bruce hadn’t shut up. He liked to make a show of how little the presence of a student affected his real personality, but when his peripherals caught a glimpse of her his jaws snapped shut and the pickle stink gradually receded. He sat down and left us to it.
Grace smiled. She looked older than most of my students—late twenties, maybe. She wasn’t Japanese, but didn’t quite look Korean, either. She had what I’d have to call raceless beauty, a kind of pretty that was almost alien. A thin face, with an extra curve of pale flesh just above the cheekbones and just below a pair of confectionary-brown eyes. We started to talk, and I could feel the unwanted pressure of Bruce listening to us.
“Who was that other teacher?” she asked. Every second word was accentless, as is typical with students who’ve been speaking the language for a while. They start to sound like they’re doing an inconsistent impression of themselves.
“He can still hear you,” I said. “Bruce. A hell of a speaker,” I said, risking a swear in order to be able to teach her an idiom.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m Grace.” I introduced myself and noticed her glance regretfully at the cubicle wall—as though she would have preferred to have Bruce as her teacher. It was too confusing to be insulting. So I started the conversation, preparing to pile it on, finding out quickly that her English was good and that her conversation was even better—she had things to say. I gave up on her entirely as a potential source of a payout. She’d have guys wanting her company all over any country. So I just sat back and enjoyed the talk, for once. Bruce’s inaudible jealousy richly enhanced our banter.
“This is my third trial lesson today,” she said after twenty minutes, being either candid or unaware that teachers didn’t like to spend time talking to students who had no intention of transforming into a paycheck at some point.
“Three different schools?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but mindless questions were the grease these conversations rolled on. I was enjoying staring at her face, in the way that mechanics enjoy having pinups in their garages. Her prettiness made the bleakness of the job feel remote.
“Yes, three different ones. I’m looking for the right one, with the right teachers. I am always getting very young teachers.”
“Yeah?”
She crinkled a tiny eyebrow.
“‘Yeah’ as a question, I meant. You can say ‘yeah’ in that way and it means ‘Please explain more, I don’t understand.’”
“I like older teachers, they have more interesting lives. Things to talk about.” Again, Grace looked at the divider. In the next booth, Bruce’s smile was probably in danger of splitting his face open.
“Oh. Well, they assign students randomly for the trials—”
“Randomly?” She said it deeply, enunciating it like I did, but with a question-mark tail.
“By chance. Luck. Not planned.” I wrote the hasty definition out for her. “You can choose another teacher if you want.”
“Yeah, okay. I think I will take the other teacher. You say he’s a good speaker?”
“Yeah.” Grace got up, picked up her combined purse/bookbag, and started to back out of the booth. She threw a small card onto the desk as she took the paper with the “random” definition from my hand, then went over to Bruce’s booth. The card had a phone number, presumably hers, on the back.
I found out for sure when I dialed it a couple of hours later. I’d just eaten a fish sandwich at a diner, trying not to be bothered by Grace’s abandonment. The boss had let me off early with a disappointed look, as though I’d let down the entire educational system by losing a student to Bruce. The waitress looked disgusted with me, too, but that was probably because I’d been ordering the same fish sandwich from her for six months. She’d been waitressing in a cheap diner for six months. We could take turns being disgusted.
“Hello?” The word was muffled and coy, the accent uncertain.
“Grace?”
“Oh, yes. You’re the teacher!”
“Not much of one, apparently.” I could tell that she was outside, walking around downtown, from the sounds of the automobile and sidewalk traffic.
“What?”
“Nothing, just a joke. Did you want to meet with me, or something? You certainly didn’t seem too interested in the school.”
She must have dodged into a building, because the noise on her end of the line receded suddenly. “I was interested, but wanted the other teacher. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s a little mysterious. So are we going to meet up or what?”
“You like Starbucks?”
“No.”
She laughed. The friendliness of teaching was one of the first things that I liked to cast off on the street, although I did have to keep some of it around when I was with one of my recruited companion-students. I didn’t feel like being friendly with Grace.
“You pick,” she said. I named a bar. She said it was near her place. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I was ringing the buzzer at her apartment building a half-hour later.
Her place was near-palatial, in a building known to be infested by rich software developers, fathers of the boom that had come and faded in Seattle, just like the music scene that I’d loved. She met me at the door after my elevator ride. The door was a long walk away from the kitchen, which had delicious smells steaming out of it.
“That outfit is too nice to be cooking in.” It was. She was wearing a green linen dress that was supernaturally unwrinkled, with black stockings below.
“This dress is thin,” she replied. “Good for cooking.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah. I just ate.”
“I wasn’t cooking for you, just me. I thought you just wanted to drink?”
“Yes, that would be good. What do you have?”
“Could you get some? I like Kronenbourg.” She separated the three syllables.
“Well, yeah, okay. Give me some keys so I don’t have to buzz up.” She tossed me a key with an electronic fob chained to it and I went on my way. There was a store at the corner, only a few minutes away, but it was raining hard enough by then for me to be soaked when I got back to the lobby. A few of the other residents looked at me, and I made a display of waggling my fob in front of the elevator’s scanner. I was wearing black jeans and a Meat Puppets T-shirt under my open windbreaker. At least I smelled okay.
She’d eaten and washed the dishes by the time I got back. The kitchen must have been well ventilated, because I couldn’t smell any spices. Grace’s clothes gave off fabric softener and perfume, which combined into a soft, synthetic blooming odor from her side of the room. The first six Kronenbourgs went down fast, and I asked the obvious question. We were both extended on separate parts of her red sectional couch, most of the light coming in from the city outside her massive glass walls.
“I told you there,” she said, “I only like older teachers. So much more to talk about.”
“But you should know that’s not true. Most of them are sad, broken men with very boring lives behind them. I guess if you asked them to list their disappointments you’d have an entertaining hour or six, but beyond that, what is there?”
“There is enough.”
“Why did you get me to call you?”
“I liked your hair.”
“Really? I guess it’s grown quite attached to me.” I grinned, knowing what I’d said would be beyond her English. But she laughed. She leaned back, shut her eyes, and laughed. Then she spoke again.
“That was bad. I hope you reserve those lines for people who won’t be able to understand them.” Her accent had disappeared. Actually, her voice had become Southern Californian, lacking any trace of overseas.
“What’s your deal?” I asked.
“My deal? No deal. I’m a student, just not an ESL student. Part-time theater at the university.”
“So what, you do this little act at downtown schools as a performance piece?” I was disturbed and would have gotten out of there if she didn’t look the way she did, and wasn’t looking at me the way she was. I opened another beer instead, using my thumb and her fob.
“No, it’s not that. I guess the acting practice is good, too. But no, I do it for money, really.”
I froze up and understood immediately. She got herself assigned to the worst sad sack in the office, convinced him somehow that she was his girlfriend, extracted what little cash he had on a day-to-day basis, and then maybe a little more. Grace confirmed all of it.
“And you’d be surprised at the kind of savings those guys have. What they’re willing to give up. Your pal Bruce has two properties, you know that? His dead mother’s house in Bellingham and his own apartment down here. Just works that talking job because he’s lonely.”
“How do you know that’s true? It makes perfect sense to me that Bruce would lie.”
“He carries around folded-up photocopies of the deeds in his wallet.”
This detail was too perfect to be fake. We both laughed and started to drink more. Her scheme was really perfect—she called it a “grift,” feeling that this term classed things up a bit. She did the same thing that I did—offered companionship, pretended to be shy about sex, complained of having money troubles from home, needing a loan to extend her stay in the city, and so on. She never let them come to her apartment, obviously. That would disrupt the whole game. After the rest of the twelve-pack, I felt comfortable telling Grace about my own game. She pretended to be disturbed for a moment, then folded over in giggles. She really was an excellent actress. Then we made our way toward the bedroom and I forgot all about her acting skills.
It was a lot like dating Eun Hee again, only better. We had more to share. Work was a delight, as I got to experience Bruce swaggering around smugly and dropping sledgehammer-subtle hints about the new girl in his life. He spent the early evenings with Grace, and I got all night with her. I managed to pick up a daytime girl for myself in the next week, a pasty unfortunate named Yu Na. Twenty-seven and never been kissed. I could do that much for her. She was out of the city in four days and I had enough spending cash to have an excellent month with Grace. We met at her place and spent lots of money at local bars and restaurants.
“Are you ever going to let me see your apartment?” she asked one night after we were walking home from an all-night Italian restaurant on Boren.
“Sure, tonight, if you want. We’ll need to cab it there. And it’s a rathole compared to your place.”
“You should get better at your job if you want a nicer apartment.”
“Oh, my grift, as you say? It’s part of my grift. I’m just a poor student on his way up, right? They’d get suspicious if their ten-buck-an-hour teacher was living in Silicon Heights or whatever.”
We got back to my place and Grace looked around. Half-full laundry basket on the floor, packs of guitar strings with dust-mouse colonies forming on them. Exactly what she’d expected.
“Sorry,” I said anyway.
“It’s no problem. We can do all the same things here.” We did.
I woke up alone. That was fine with me, and it fit our regular schedule. She had to be off every Wednesday, early, to have breakfast and a walk in the park with Bruce. She really did deserve a reward for tolerating that guy. According to tradition, my fridge was empty of everything except for half a glass of orange juice. I drank that and had waffles with maple walnut ice cream at the overpriced chain restaurant down the street. After my lean college years, it always felt good to be able to lay down a twenty without grimacing at the bill. I killed time at record stores and then got to work at about three.
Bruce was slumped in his booth in his customary nap-taking position. When I passed him he came to life, looking at me sadly.
“She cut me out, man,” Bruce said.
“Beg pardon?”
“That girl I was talking about. She said she needed to get back home to take care of some family trouble. She’ll e-mail me in a few days. I’m just broken up about it.”
“But she’ll get back to you.”
“Of course. Man, we really had something. I loaned her plane fare and everything. It was actually that girl who came in—”
“Grace.”
“How did you guess?”
“Prettiest girl in here in weeks, Bruce. I knew you’d be on that like I know you’re you.” This cheered him immensely and he forced me to high-five him. I taught with a grin for the rest of the day. Grace called when I was at dinner and told me that she’d come to my place after class.
She moved in a special way indoors, a type of walk that would look good on stage. It wasn’t theatrical, just very naked. Maybe that’s why she liked thin fabrics. She walked as though she was nude in her own place and no one was around. We joked about Bruce for a while and she showed me the manila envelope of bills in her purse. On the outside of it, he’d written “For trips there and back again.—Bruce.”
“That has real levels of pathos to it,” I said. Grace agreed. Soon, she was naked for real, and so was I. We spent most of the night that way, and the rest sleeping. I was woken by a sharp pain in my back at about four.
“Jesus! Did you bite me?” Grace didn’t answer. I assumed it was a spider and swept my hand around on the mattress. I didn’t find anything, and soon I fell asleep without realizing it.
I was alone again in the morning, but something was wrong. I felt bad. The sum of a dozen hangovers had added up in my skull and body, and I knew right away that I’d been drugged. Only drugs made you feel this bad the next day, and this was one I’d never tried. My fingers were working so poorly that the bedside lamp only came on after twe
lve tries. Another ten minutes got me to the bathroom, and what I saw made me glad that I still had some of those numbing narcotics in my system.
“Mlurn,” was the first sound to come out of me. My face was the color of polluted sea foam, and my eyes were nearly puffed shut. That explained why it still seemed so dark. I must have had an allergic reaction to whatever she’d injected me with.
I went to the kitchen and swallowed as many codeine pills as I could fit down, cupping handfuls of water from the tap to help their voyage down. Then I went back to sleep with a cold towel over my face. It was all I could manage.
In the afternoon, I was a little better. My face was still swollen but the rest of me felt okay. I took a closer look at my apartment and saw that it had been tossed in an organized, considerate way. She might have nearly killed me with whatever was in that needle, but she didn’t want to leave the place a mess. I went straight for the kitchen cupboard and found a half-full box of raisin bran, but no economy-sized corn flakes box. It was gone. Eight thousand and change in savings, the responsible put-aside part of what I’d taken off the girls. Grace had rightly assumed I was too lazy to get a safety-deposit box. With her plane fare from Bruce, she’d made a little more than ten thousand dollars yesterday.
I went to a dingy Chinese restaurant for some food, a place where the lighting was red and the service hasty. There was no point in looking for Grace at the school, or in asking to see her records there. They’d be fake. Mine always were. I checked my watch for the date: It was the first of the month. I didn’t have any doubt that Grace had moved house the day before when she was supposedly at acting class. She didn’t need classes.
I waited until my eyes looked almost normal and walked down to the school. I was an hour late, but I ignored the upset staff and went straight for Bruce’s booth.
