by Mark Sampson
“That’s more like it.”
So we crossed the road to her bachelor apartment on Summer St. I always loved walking into that delightfully feminine nest, so bursting with Cora’s lovely smells and competent decor. After we settled in, she cooked me dinner and we watched the news, like the good journalism students we were. Afterwards, I allowed her lead me by the arms over to her bed. How quickly my disposition changed — limpid grief transformed into ferocious lust. And what of those milestones we achieved in bed that night? For the first time, we had sex without a condom. For the first time, I told her that I loved her – weeping out those words, in cliché fashion, at the explosive peak of my excitement. But she grew distant as we ramped down together. I think I may have apologized. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said, kissing my wet face. “I’m on the Pill. Hey, hey. It’s alright.” She disentangled herself from me and toddled off the bathroom as if trying to walk while holding a bar of soap between her legs. She returned a few minutes later to find me on my stomach. Eased herself onto my back and stretched her arms out over mine. “Of course I love you, too, Michael,” she whispered into my neck. “Of course I do.” Convincing herself, I suppose.
Even after five years together, I felt like I had bore witness to only a small portion of Cora’s mysteries. Sometimes you learn things too late about a woman, about how her emotional response can be so tied to seemingly innocuous sensations. The colour of the seats on a bus, the smell of stale coffee, the feel of rough stone. They can set things off. Cause a churning.
I would love to know what sensation set off Cora’s final conclusion: I don’t love Michael. I imagine it a simple thing, happening as it does in some purple-prose short story: the texture of an undercooked pepper from some evening’s pasta sauce, or maybe the sound of the newspaper hitting the landing in just a certain way. Whatever it was, it triggered a remorseless instant of emotional truth for her: I don’t love Michael. And I’ll be ruined in a thousand little ways if I stay with him. And I would love to know what sensory experience caused her to fall so completely in love with her Quebecois coworker, Denis-never-Dennis. Again, something very basic. The way he raised his wrists while typing up his radio stories, maybe, or the gleam of the gel in his hair under the newsroom’s fluorescent lights. All I know is that she took him deeply inside her, made him the centrepiece castle in her busy emotional aquarium. He is IT, she realized one day with irrevocable certainty. And I’ve got to have him.
At least, that’s how I imagined it going down.
I mark the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death in a Jokki-Jokki bar in Daechi with Rob Cruise and Jon Hung. We sit at a wooden table with glasses of beer and little rings of puffed rice set out in bowls in front of us. Asian lanterns hang everywhere and frantic K-pop jangles from the speaker above our heads. Rob has summoned us here for a “business proposition,” though he’s being coy about what it is. He’s holding off on details until Justin arrives, as well as a new friend that he’s made at the university — a guy named Greg Carey. While we wait, I break the news to Rob that I’ve signed up for another twelve months at ABC English Planet. His reaction is predictably hysterical.
“Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m serious. I signed the contract yesterday. I’ve begun to like it, Rob. I mean Ms. Kim is still insane, but I like teaching the kids. I … I really like it.”
“Ah, fuck me, man!” He leans back against the wall, his shoulders taut with genuine disappointment. It gets to me. Even after a year of knowing Rob, of knowing what he is, I still feel that need to seek his approval. “You’re a brilliant man, Michael,” he says almost to himself. “I can’t believe you’re going to rot away in that shithole for another year.”
“I can’t believe you’re quitting your university gig,” I counter. “It’s twelve hours a week, Rob. What, you can’t handle twelve hours a week?”
He leans back in, grabs his beer glass, eyes Jon and me both. “You guys think university gigs are the bomb, but it’s a fucking lie. First of all, the pay is crap. When I’m not on campus, I’m hustling all over this city for privates. I work harder now than I ever did. Second of all, the students are shite. This country is so ass backwards: they work little kids to the bone all the way up through high school; they get to university and know they’ve made it, and don’t want to do fuck all. I’m sick of it, man.”
“You seem to get sick of a lot of things, and rather quickly,” Jon Hung points out. He himself left the hagwon a few months ago and now works for the KOSPI, doing some sort of English-based stock analysis. “Rob, you’re like a seagull looking for a rock to land on, and crapping over everything as you go.”
“Hey, shut up, I definitely need you for this. You’ve got half an MBA. You’re gonna run the business end of things.”
“Rob …” Jon sighs at him.
“Look, just hear me out. Trust me, this is an excellent idea. We’re all going to make butt-loads of money. Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit?”
Just then, the notorious Greg Carey comes through the door and joins our table when Rob waves him down. I say notorious because, though this is my first meeting with Greg, Rob has regaled us with tales about him since they met five months ago. They’ve already taken two holidays together to Puket, Thailand, and the priapic adventures that resulted are beyond anything I could imagine. This man has achieved a level of legend in my mind. He’s in his late thirties, even older than Rob, and has been Korea for seven years. He worked in a succession of shitty hagwons, survived the IMF crisis, and has now become the epitome of everything Rob wishes he could be: an expat Canadian who works very little, makes obscene amounts of money under the table, and flees to the whorehouses of Southeast Asia at every opportunity.
“Have you told them our idea?” he says as he sidles up to our table.
“ My idea,” Rob corrects him. “No, we’re still waiting for one guy to show up.”
I eye Greg up and down as he slips out of his winter coat and drops it on a hook on the wall. He has fiery red hair, a face covered by a galaxy of freckles and an unfortunate mustache.
Before we can go on, Greg begins snapping his fingers in the air to summon our Korean waiter. “Hey! Hey!” he yells.
The guy comes over in his apron and smiles politely.
“Bring-ah me-ah some a beer-uhh,” Greg chimes at him. The waiter looks confused but continues to smile. “Some beeeer-uhhh,” Greg repeats. “Bring-ah me some a beer-uhh. Some beeer-uuhhhh.” The waiter, still smiling, blinks and looks to the rest of us for help. Rob has burst into braying laughter over this — I would expect nothing less of him — but shockingly, so has Jon Hung. Perhaps he’s forgotten that he himself is half Korean.
“Jeo’ghee’yoh.” I nod gently at the waiter. “Maek’ju jusaeyoh. Cass. Oh’bec cee-cee, yo.”
He bows at me, still smiling. “Neh, meak’ju, neh.” And goes back to the bar to fetch it. Rob Cruise leers at me, oleaginous. Ahh, I see Jin has trained you well.
Greg puckers his freckled face and spits as he talks: “Bah, he knew what I meant.”
I turn to a grinning Rob. “Can we get this thing started?”
“No. Where the hell’s Justin?” He looks at his watch.
“Rob, he’s with his private tonight. He said he’d be late.”
“Fine, we’ll start without him.” He reaches down to pull his satchel off the floor, opens it and takes out glossy brochures and business cards that he and Greg have had printed up. He lays them out on the table and Jon Hung takes one up. “The Queen’s English,” he reads. “Holiday Camps for Kids.” He shrugs. “This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Look, would you give us a chance?” Rob straightens up in his chair. “We all know Korean parents force their kids to study even harder when they’re on vacation. They send them to English camps anyway. Why not one owned, organized, and run by native speakers? It only makes sense.”
“So you guys are quitting twelve hours a week at the university for
this?” I ask. “Rob, I don’t think you grasp how much work this would be.”
“It’s a summer camp. Even with all the prep, it’d only amount to about four months of work a year. We can charge millions of won per kid, and with hundreds of kids signed up we’d make a killing.”
“I think you’ve confused gross with net,” Jon says.
“Exactly.” I nod. “I mean, where are you going to hold this camp? What are the kids going to eat? Where are the books coming from?”
“Look, irregardless of the expenses, I still think —”
“ Irregardless?” I laugh at him. “Rob, dude, if you’re going to name your company The Queen’s English, you should at least learn to speak it.”
“See, this is why I need you on staff, Michael. You have a journalism degree — you’re like fucking grammar god!”
“Where’s the start-up money coming from?” Jon asks.
“Well, that’s what we need from you,” Greg pipes up, stroking his unfortunate mustache. “We’re each going to invest 2.5 million won up front.”
“Oh, you are out of your fucking mind,” I say to Rob.
“Look, we got tons of teachers around Itaewon interested in this,” Rob says. “But you are my boys. I want to get you in on the ground floor.”
I’m about to respond, but just then Justin lumbers through the door, his shoulders slouched, his head down. He pulls a chair up to our table. Looking into his face, I can immediately tell that something is wrong. He doesn’t make eye contact at us. “Yogi yo,” he calls to the waiter and orders a beer.
“You’re late,” Rob says.
He still won’t look at us.
“You had a private with Jenny?” I ask. “On a Saturday night? That seems strange.”
“I thought I had a private,” he replies.
“It wasn’t a private?”
“No. Turns out Jenny and her dad are down in Kjungju for some festival. It was her mom, Sunkyoung, who invited me over. For dinner.” He swallows very slowly. “Dinner — and a proposition.”
Rob and Jon’s eyes light up like Menorahs. “I knew it.” Rob beams. “I fucking well knew it!”
“Rob, shut up,” Justin says with a point of his finger. “I swear to God, if you say one fucking word I’m going to rip your asshole out and feed it to you.”
Rob just cackles. Cackles at the wit of it.
“What happened?” I ask.
Justin’s beer comes and he takes a pull. “I got there to find that Jenny and her dad were nowhere around. Sunkyoung had the table all set, just for the two of us. Kept plying me with red wine all night long. And then asked, in this weird matter-of-fact way, if I would consider being her boyfriend.”
“You must have an inkling that this could happen.”
“I suppose. She’s only a few years older than me, and her —”
“Is she hot?” Greg Carey asks.
Justin sighs. “Yeah she’s hot, as Korean moms go.” We all can’t help but laugh. “Look, this is serious. I’ve been tutoring Jenny for over a year. This family has practically adopted me.”
“Look, this is no big deal,” Jon Hung tries to assure him. “Tons of Korean housewives keep boyfriends on the side. You were telling us that Sunkyoung’s husband works, like, ninety hours a week. She’s probably not getting any at all. I say shag her. She’ll probably feel guilty after a few times and break things off. Sure you’ll lose the private, but there’s tons of other work out there.”
“But I like tutoring Jenny. She’s a good kid. And I like her family. It, it reminds me of …” But he trails off.
“Did anything actually happen tonight?” I ask.
“Well, we polished off two bottles of Merlot, and the next I know she was sitting in my lap.”
“What can I tell ya?” Greg chuckles. “Never underestimate what loneliness and red wine will do to a woman in her thirties.”
“I’m sorry, who the fuck are you?” Justin snaps. But Greg merely grins at him. “Anyway, I just pushed her off me and fled. I felt bad, but didn’t know what else to do.”
“Man, you’re a fucking chickenshit,” Rob finally says.
“Yeah, Rob, I’m a chickenshit.” Justin drains his beer, sets the glass down, puts five thousand won on the table and stands up.
“Hey where are you going? I didn’t tell you about my —”
Justin glances at the brochures and business cards. “Yeah, whatever it is, Rob, I’m not interested. Have fun in Itaewon, boys.” And then shambles back out the door.
I’m not sure why, but I sit there for a bit longer, chewing on what happened. I’m not even listening as Rob goes up and down his plans again. Finally, I stand up, too.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to check on him.”
“Please. He’s fine. What the hell?”
“Rob, do you even know why Justin’s in Korea in the first place?”
“Oh, fuck off, Michael.” He folds his arms. “Whatever.”
Back at the apartment, I find Justin in his room cast in the faint light of a single lamp. He’s on his bed with his shoulders against the headboard and his big feet dangling over the edge. He looks almost angry, resentful in his solitude, but when he sees me at his door he softens.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey. No Itaewon tonight?”
“No. I changed my mind.”
“Is Jin not around?” he asks, looking at the wall.
“No, she’s in Shanghai for the week. She’s back on Tuesday.” I swallow. “I kind of wish she was here tonight.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because today is the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death.”
He turns to stare absently at the photos of his son Cody, forever frozen at age six, taped to his headboard. That look of resentment comes back to his face.
“You know it’s okay to admit,” I say, “that this thing with Sunkyoung has a lot to do with Cody.”
He looks at me. “I can’t remember how much I told you, Michael.”
“A little,” I reply.
This is what I know: By age twenty-three, Justin had earned his education degree, had married his university sweetheart Kathy, and was teaching at a high school in Halifax. A year later, their son Cody was born. In the year 2000, the three of them took their first big family vacation together — a hiking trip to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. Negligent, perhaps, to take a six-year-old on such a difficult trek. Distracted by the majesty of those gorges and mountains, they allowed the little guy to get away from them for a few seconds. The seventeen-metre drop beyond a safety rail killed him instantly. Within a year, Justin and Kathy had split up, and within a year of that Justin was in Korea, teaching at the hagwon.
“Did I ever tell why Kathy and I got divorced?”
“I’ve had my hunches.”
“It’s because I had an affair.” He sits up. “It happened about four months after Cody died. It was so fucked up, what I did.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was so stupid,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. “It happened with another teacher at the school. This brief but really intense … fling. That’s all it was. But that’s all it needed to be. I look back now and can’t believe the lack of control I showed. I just dove into that opportunity, you know? I needed to do something really destructive, so I could feel like I had power over myself again. That I wasn’t just a man who let his son die. You know? I mean, I never realized how destructive sex could be. And the ironic thing is — the sex was so good. Like, ridiculously good. The kind of fucking that will cost you a damage deposit.” He laughs but his eyes have gone shiny. “I mean, that woman, the other teacher, made noises with me that Kathy never made in our eleven years together. And the whole time I’m thinking, You’re wrecking everything. This is going to destroy Kathy. And now look at me, Michael: I’m teaching in fucking Korea, and everything here is sex. Itaewon, Hooker Hill, Hongdae. It
’s all sex, sex, sex. But I don’t want to leave, because I don’t want to go back to Halifax and face my people. I don’t want to face the fact that I willfully destroyed my life.”
“So Kathy found out?”
“Of course she found out. We all taught at the same school. Shit gets around. I tried to protect her — she’d already been through so much over Cody — but she wanted me to tell her everything, every fucking fleshy detail. It was as if hearing about me fuck another woman made her grief complete, girded her for what she needed to do. And what she needed to do, she went about so clinically. The lawyer, the dividing up of our stuff, the taking back of her maiden name, all the rest. It was so amicable, only because she had closed the door to the idea of not doing it. I thought divorces took forever, but it didn’t feel like forever: it felt like one day she was my wife and the next day she wasn’t. She was just so clinical about it.” He takes a deep breath. “And that’s what I saw tonight with Sunkyoung, too. She had that same detached approach when she solicited me, as if asking if I’d help put down new tile in their bathroom or something. Her English isn’t great; I thought I’d misheard her. But, no. She was proposing that I become her, her …”
“Her gigolo.”
He laughs. Thankfully, he laughs. “Yeah, her gigolo. And I’m not gonna lie: I am attracted to Sunkyoung. She’s sexy, you know, in that Asian way. In that way that Jin is sexy. But I …”
He looks back at his headboard. In the photos, Cody looks so alive, so bursting with little-boy energy. I think he and Sunkyoung’s daughter, Jenny, would be roughly the same age.
He turns back to me. “I’m not going to break up another family. I’m not going to allow sex to break up another family.”
“Then don’t,” I say.
He nods. Looks up at me. “Michael, I’m sorry to hear you’re marking such a grim anniversary tonight.”
“It’s all right,” I reply. Lost for a moment in my thoughts, I find myself frowning. “Did I ever tell you,” I ask him, “that I showed up drunk at my mother’s funeral?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve been feeling bad about that all day.”
