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Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014

Page 13

by Carmen Johnson


  We buy several cans of beer, smoked dried squid, potato chips, and warm canned coffee. The cashier has the radio turned on low to keep himself awake. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is playing.

  I listen as Shin-o whistles along to the song and then ask him, “If your girlfriend works the night shift, when do you get to see each other?”

  “Oh, I’ll see her in five hours. I said I’d give her a ride home.” He checks his watch. “She likes it when I drive her home. Even though it’s only two subway stops away. We usually stop on the way for a bowl of haejangguk, or listen to music in the car, or have a smoke together.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for a girl to work at night. Didn’t you say she wants to be a model? She must complain that it’s bad for her skin.”

  “Of course she complains. She took the job thinking it was only temporary. But I don’t think she has what it takes to be a model. She’ll be lucky if she can get the occasional catalog job. Basically, she’s not that pretty. Also, she’s not the type to work hard at it.”

  “Is the Sable yours?”

  “No,” he says and frowns. “The truth is I work at a repair shop. I’m just a regular employee. My girlfriend thinks my dad’s the owner and I own several cars, but it’s not true. That car belongs to a customer. It’s not mine. What kind of grease monkey owns a Sable? That’s ridiculous.”

  “But, wait. Are you allowed to take their cars out of the shop?”

  “I have to take it right back after I drop her off. Otherwise, it’ll be reported as stolen.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell her the truth?”

  “San-gyeong set us up. He said it just slipped out when he was telling her about me. I didn’t think it would matter, so I didn’t say anything. But I’m not going to be a grease monkey forever. Absolutely not.”

  The second time I saw him, he told me, “I’m just an ordinary bank employee,” while knotting his tie. It was that hour of the morning when manual laborers began swarming the market streets in search of a drink to chase their hangovers. From between the half-open curtains, I saw the bright, wide street filled with a procession of bicycles headed for the morning shift at a factory. Was this really the same Seoul? I had marveled over it for a moment.

  “When I was in high school,” he said, “I wanted to be a rock and roll singer, but it didn’t go anywhere. I never once joined in any protests or demonstrations in college. But my mom still favors me. I have two older brothers, but she lets me do whatever I want, and she still calls me her baby.”

  I had washed my hair and was putting on eye shadow and lipstick. I still had plenty of time before I had to go to work. This man who was so interested in me even though we’d only met twice felt like a stranger to me.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said as he started the car. “Tell me what you like, what you want to do.”

  “I like having a cigarette and a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like watching the rain through a big plate-glass window.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “What about what you want to do in the future?”

  “Oh, that?” I stared resentfully at Wonhyo Bridge, which was getting backed up with the start of rush hour. “I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”

  “Are you listening to me?” Shin-o taps me lightly on the arm.

  “Huh, what did you say? The headlights are so bright, they’re distracting.”

  “I heard you like to draw. So-yeong told me. So you want to become an artist?”

  “I’m a complete amateur. I wanted to go to art school but couldn’t, so now I’m just doing it as a hobby.”

  In the parking lot, San-gyeong and Hyeong-jun are burning newspapers like a pair of hobos. So-yeong has cheered back up and is giggling with Autumn. So-yeong’s pale arms rest on Hyeong-jun’s shoulder like a phantom. Her gold bracelet sparkles in the light of the flames. I don’t think about the future. All I think about is death. Did I really say that to him?

  My cousin starts dropping by the department store to chat, claiming that she’s only there to pick up an Arpeggione Sonata CD or a pink cotton bathrobe to wear after a bath. Sometimes she comes by when I’m getting off work, and we go out for steak. So-yeong shows up, too, sometimes. After she breaks up with Hyeong-jun, she starts wearing a red suit and high heels with her hair pulled into an updo, and I almost don’t recognize her. So-yeong says my cousin is the type of woman who will plunk her baby down in front of Sesame Street as soon as it’s born. Maybe, I say. But So-yeong has also stopped wearing torn blue jeans like a back-alley hippie. What’s more, she tells me that she’s started getting regular facials.

  “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 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 talki
ng 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 flyer 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 mirrorlike 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 flyer 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.

 

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