by Bae Suah
“Are you dating your boss now?” I ask.
She responds by laughing cynically.
“What’s he like?” I ask.
“He’s a snob.”
“A bourgeois pig?”
“Exactly. A perfect specimen.”
She takes out her compact to check her mascara for clumps. Now that she’s wearing makeup, she looks wild and beautiful. This is not the girl who climbed into Hyeong-jun’s truck in sneakers and long skirts, who didn’t care that her hair was tangled. She sips her cola through a straw, leaving behind a clear lipstick stain.
“How’s it working out?”
“How is what working out?”
“The bank guy.”
“It’s not.”
“You broke up, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. He wasn’t right for you. He was completely unstable. Couldn’t you tell?”
My cousin puts it a little differently.
“You need to take a good look at yourself first,” she says, tapping a half-eaten piece of steak with her fork. “What I mean is that you need to figure out what you want first. Then you can move on. Actually, to tell you the truth, this is the same thing Eun-gyeong told me.”
As for whether or not my cousin is happily married, I assume that’s the case. Her “marriage” is a beautiful and successful one. Her handsome medical student still loves her, still gives her flowers and jewelry, and still takes her to see avant-garde plays on the weekends just as he did before they were married. But now, whenever she shows up at the men’s suit department where I work, carrying a department store shopping bag, it seems like something in her is missing. She still has the perky, satisfied smile of a model in an ad for Italian blue jeans, but the red-cheeked girl who ran out of the old photo studio into the shining summer street has long since vanished.
“I have to move,” So-yeong says one day while absentmindedly browsing the latest shirt designs from Guy Laroche. “I’ve stopped donating to Greenpeace, and I can’t help but think that I’m turning into your cousin. I even met with a matchmaker. I might be getting married soon.”
She walks around the store, examining each of the pastel-colored shirts on display like a woman shopping for a shirt for her fiancé.
“Really? Congratulations.” It takes me a moment to say it, as if the words just occurred to me. “What’s he like?” I add.
“He’s just a regular guy. Works for the Ministry of Home Affairs. Thirty years old, second-oldest son, has a fifty-six-square-meter apartment,” she adds impassively. “Mom’s happy about it. She hated Hyeong-jun.”
If this were a fairy tale, So-yeong’s story would end there. The beautiful princess finally marries her prince and lives happily ever after—though it’s a bit of a stretch to call an employee of the Ministry of Home Affairs a prince. But I sense that I’ll run into So-yeong again one day. I’ll see her in a park on a snowy night. She’ll be sitting on the asphalt setting fire to the Sunday sports paper with a lighter. She’ll watch the paper burn, her arm around Hyeong-jun’s shoulder, as if nothing has changed. Even after all those years, they won’t have have changed a bit.
“Are you looking for something in particular? Oh, you must be shopping for the wedding. Can I help?”
“Why are you talking about weddings already? Nothing’s been decided. But,” she says, gesturing toward the kitchen section upstairs, “I am looking for kitchen scissors.”
“Kitchen scissors?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what you came to buy?”
“I want a good pair. Something big and sturdy, and expensive. Made in Germany or Switzerland.”
I assume that’s not really what she’s there to buy. Kitchen scissors suit her about as well as a floral-print apron, a meat tenderizer, or bathroom cleaner. All I see in the department store’s full-color flier that she holds in her hand is a picture of a woman with a kerchief on her head standing in a perfect kitchen, sipping coffee and smiling like a princess. Then I see the kichen scissors propped up in a glass on the mirror-like table behind the woman. They look like a good pair, shiny and sturdy. I have no idea why they placed the scissors like that in an ad for a system kitchen. Maybe someone thought they completed the look. Like a single tulip in a vase. So-yeong was probably handed the flier at the bottom of the escalator and looked at it on the way up. Then, when I asked what she was looking for, she latched onto that as her answer.
My cousin has changed, as well. She shows up carrying several huge shopping bags. A pink cotton bathrobe peeks out from one of the packages.
“I’ve started buying steaks here because of you,” she says. “Seop is getting married. Mom tried going on a hunger strike, but it didn’t work. She refuses to meet his fiancée, and the fiancée has been acting cold in turn because of it. Things are a mess at home.”
“Why does your mother hate her so much? Is she from a poor family? Did she go to a bad school? Or is her mother a shaman?”
“No, nothing like that.”
I get off work, and we walk through the crowded downtown shopping district, browsing through several shoe stores before stopping at a café in the lounge of one of the buildings. The weather is cold and gray and threatens to snow. The whipped cream on top of the Viennese coffee is sprinkled with cinnamon, and the cup is warm.
“She’s the daughter of a college professor, and she graduated from a top women’s college. That’s not the problem. The problem is how much my brother has changed because of her.”
Whipped cream is stuck to her lip.
“Mom wanted Seop to have the kind of marriage where you get along well and love for the sake of stability. The kind of love where he loves the woman because she looks nice, wears light nail polish, and cooks for her husband on the weekends. But this girl shook him up and turned him into a totally different person. Now he’s crazy and passionate, obsessing over her every little gesture and every word she says, and then falling into despair over it. He won’t listen to anyone and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s not the kind, gentle Seop who used to be like a Harvard nerd. The changes in him have us all baffled. Mom probably feels the most betrayed.”
I tell her that the first time I heard there was an issue with the woman Seop planned to marry, I assumed she was the type of woman who’d gone to night school, had a mother who was on her third marriage, and cracked her gum all the time.
“We all love Seop. You know that. I think Mom is just jealous, in a way. But not me. I think there’s a tragic element to his passion. They’ll probably break up eventually. Not because Mom or the rest of the family disapprove. Their crazy relationship will get to them.”
Naturally, I do not go to Seop’s wedding. I don’t hear the news until much later, but, just as my cousin predicted, they divorce by mutual consent after a year of marriage. I don’t know why. Up until I quit my job and move to another department store, my cousin continues to visit several more times. As for changing jobs, the pay is better and I don’t have to work on the sales floor anymore, but also there is the matter of the scandal. All I did was go out drinking all night a few times with the young, married manager, but after his wife came to the store and made a scene, I couldn’t work there anymore. Two years go by at my new job. The working conditions aren’t bad, and they’re forgiving about minor scandals. Nothing special happens until, one day, I get a phone call.
It is a Wednesday morning full of ennui. The weather is neither rainy nor windy. The days have been continuously overcast, as if the sky is depressed. The elevator girls, who are fresh out of high school, fill their bowls with salad in the company cafeteria in the morning and complain about their sticky foundation and melting mascara. A man next to them recommends that they try Chanel. Another man eating toast and coffee chimes in to suggest waterproof mascara. Someone points out that the department store gets more crowded when the weather is gloomy. People aren’t in the mood for anything, he says, and it’s a great change of scenery. Nothing better to do than to
kill a cloudy afternoon at an indoor driving range. Little has changed in two years. The elevator girls’ pink jackets and black pleated skirts, the scent of their Lirikos perfume bought with their employee discounts, and even the low-hung gray sky look the same as ever to me. After I arrive at my job in the credit department, I flip through the Wednesday edition of the morning paper and then drink a cup of coffee and banter lightly with the people next to me.
“I lost my credit card,” the phone call begins. “My ID number is 62xxxxxxxxxx, and my name is Kim Shin-o.”
“Where did you lose it, sir?” I ask.
The monotonous rasp of file drawers opening and the tapping of keyboards fill the office. Just as they have for the past two years, everyone answers their phones in flat voices, smokers gather in the hallway to sip coffee and complain about how the office is being turned into a no-smoking zone, and women in white blouses deliberate over whether they should skip lunch to lose weight. I politely repeat the question.
“Where did you lose it, sir?”
“I lost it at a trailhead in Gugi-dong. That was two nights ago. It was a muggy, overcast night.”
Kim Shin-o’s personal information pops up on the screen. Occupation: auto mechanic. Family: wife, Yi Gyeong-rim; son, Yu-no. It’s the same Kim Shin-o from two years ago. The same Kim Shin-o who stole a Sable and waited until dawn to give his girlfriend, who worked the night shift, a ride home. His girlfriend, the aspiring model who was convinced that he was from a rich family and had fallen for her. Shin-o had read So-yeong’s tears in the dark and walked a long way with me to buy potato chips and beer. Over the phone, he tells me that So-yeong, whom I haven’t seen in a long time, is dead.
“I haven’t talked to you in ages,” he says. “So you’re still working at the department store?”
“It’s a different department store than before. But they’re pretty much the same.”
He laughs.
“Did I tell you I’m still working at a garage?”
“I already know, including the fact that you have a son.”
“Ah,” he sighs. “She’s great, my wife. We started dating last year, and she got pregnant right away, so we got married. She’s pretty and has a good heart. Yet she never thought of becoming a model!”
We laugh together over the phone. Then he tells me about So-yeong. He says that all of his middle school friends have been talking about it.
“I thought you might not have heard. It wasn’t in the papers or anything. It happened less than a month ago. It was a really hot day. The heat wave probably made the headlines.”
I can tell how badly he needs a cigarette now.
“Her wrists. She slashed her wrists. With kitchen scissors.”
“Kitchen scissors?”
“Yes. A brand-new pair of kitchen scissors that she bought at the department store that afternoon. They were probably expensive, the really sturdy kind.”
“She called me a few times. I thought she was happy. I didn’t think anything was wrong.”
“Maybe she was. Or maybe not. Anyway, all that matters now is…”
“Is that she slashed her wrists with a pair of scissors?”
“Right. The rest is meaningless. Her husband was on his way back from the airport. He’d been out of town on business.”
We hang up, and I go to lunch. In the middle of eating the cafeteria salad, which never changes, I suddenly remember what I am doing that weekend. I don’t know why, but I’d momentarily forgotten. I am planning to meet someone at the domestic terminal in the airport. It might have been what Kim Shin-o said on the phone, about someone coming back from the airport, that jogs my memory.
Someone at a table behind me is talking loudly about how she likes the color red best on gray days. It’s the woman from the retail design team; she eats a tiny bowl of rice topped with tomatoes and chrysanthemum greens. She wears a plain, dark dress without so much as a red scarf wrapped around her. The thought of having to go to the airport weighs more heavily on me than the colorless weather. A woman wearing large hoop earrings and what looks like three-inch heels brushes past me and stumbles, spilling some of her dwenjang soup on the floor. Several new male employees walking past laugh loudly.
I think about So-yeong’s wedding. The photographer, a professional whom she’d specifically hired from a photo studio downtown, wound up throwing a fit because of all the firecrackers being set off and the clumsy guests getting in his way to take their own amateur photos. Women dressed in silk hanbok kept going in and out of the buffet restaurant where the reception was held, while children in their Sunday best were running around looking for their mothers. Made up like Snow White, So-yeong was laughing loudly with her mouth wide open. It must have been this time of year—it wasn’t quite autumn yet, and the wind was blowing hard. A lot of young men in suits were there, including Kim Shin-o. His girlfriend, the aspiring model, must have been by his side. But I had only a faint memory of her face, as if it were shrouded in fog. I didn’t remember her as being particularly memorable or striking. The fact that she wanted to be a model made her seem more glamorous than she really was. But I liked watching her long hair sway around her face each time she turned her head. Shin-o was more enamored with her than anyone else. As the pianist played the wedding march, the bride and groom walked down the aisle together, covered with white streamer spray. At the reception, the groom, who was a government employee with the Ministry of Home Affairs, walked around pouring glasses of champagne for the guests. Someone sang an old song that began, I’m a gentle lamb because I love you. My heart frolics in the meadow of your bosom.
I decided to go to the airport after a lot of hesitation, and even then I barely agreed to it.
I stand in the window of my room sipping coffee. It is evening, and a soft, humid breeze is blowing. Autumn is still a ways off. I smell bread baking in a bakery in the alley below. I slowly sip my coffee and debate whether I should put on my jacket and go downstairs to buy one of the warm Danish pastries that I like, or just stay put. The phone rings. I hesitate but end up picking up the phone. Lately, my cousin has come to enjoy telling me all about one of her husband’s coworkers. She called once to tell me she thought about me while buying a wool Burberry sweater for herself last winter. She probably thinks I am lonely.
“So I decided to give you the sweater instead,” she’d said. “I’m not sure why you were on my mind. I guess I just think you should hurry up and get married.”
The evening air fills with the scent of warm bread floating in through the open second-floor window. The display designer wanted me to meet him at the airport. “You can get time off?” I’d wondered aloud. “I should be able to.” Once his business trip in the provinces was over, he would have about a week to himself.
“You’re twenty-seven,” my cousin says impatiently. “This might be your last chance. He’s a doctor. He’ll keep you in comfort. Don’t you want to take it easy?”
The designer wants to date but isn’t interested in marrying me. My cousin hates him.
“You can live without him, can’t you? You’re just lonely. You’re afraid of being alone. I get it.”
She tells me that even when she’s getting her hair done at the salon, the mere thought of him can make her upset.
“I just wanted to make sure you really exist,” the designer had said over the phone. “I haven’t been able to sleep at all since yesterday. I feel strange. My head is stuffed up. I wish you would come to the airport.” I wound up promising him I would.
I sweep the dust from the carpet and close the window. Then I put some piano music on in the CD player, clean the bathroom, and take some frozen orange juice out to dilute it with mineral water.
At work, one of the elevator girls who had just come into the cafeteria yelled that she didn’t want to become an old maid. “It’s not that I want to get married, I just don’t want to be an old maid.” She was twenty-two and had gotten engaged to one of the managers earlier that year. She had big, innocent-lookin
g eyes and long eyelashes. She pushed her boiled cabbage around her plate and asked me whether I was lonely. The other female employees sitting nearby either pretended not to listen and kept eating or exchanged sly looks with each other.
“No, I have a boyfriend. If that’s what you mean, then I’m not lonely.”
Her innocent-looking eyes widened. “Oh no, do you mean that guy from the display design team you were sitting with in the sky lounge last time? I heard he never wants to get married.” One of the long-haired women sitting next to her broke down and started tittering. A half-peeled summer tangerine fell off her tray and rolled across the floor.
I stand in the waiting room of the domestic terminal and watch cars pull in and out of the lot. It’s a Saturday, so they’re all coming from weddings and are festooned with balloons and ribbons. It’s an unusually clear day. The sunlight filling the parking lot reminds me of the flames that rose from the newspaper that dark night in the parking lot near the trailhead. So-yeong’s white arm with its gold bracelet wrapped around Hyeong-jun’s shoulders. It is almost September, but the sunlight beating down on the parking lot is mercilessly bright. A small bride in a white dress walks through the glare toward the terminal with her groom and their friends. Her white silk dress, the white stockings, and the sweltering white sunlight wash her out. Someone has playfully spelled out the words I love you in English with red tape on her white honeymoon suitcase.
“I don’t care. I am getting on that plane,” says a girl on the plastic bench next to me. She is wearing a white floral-print dress and dark sunglasses. She is talking to the guy next to her. They are each holding a can of 7-Up with straws in them. The guy’s head is turned, and I cannot see his expression, so I can’t tell if he’s angry. He hangs his head. He takes her hand. But she enunciates each word again clearly. “I am getting on that plane. Don’t try to stop me. I don’t want to leave on bad terms.” The world collapses silently around them.
