The Year Of Uh

by Jud Widing

  Deirdre, happy to have a costume that took some explaining, fashioned a little hat for herself out of tin foil and went as An American Conspiracy Theorist. Her costume would prove significantly more popular throughout the evening, leading Nur to wonder if America wasn’t more heavily populated with the tin foil hat types than she’d realized. Perhaps they had some kind of cabal or society at which they met under cover of night.

  Thusly attired, the two sisters bid their Aunt and Uncle a good night and stepped outside. Deirdre assumed the lead, and Nur followed, legs shaking less from the cold and more from nerves.

  Tonight was the night.

  They meandered around the neighborhood for a while, collecting candy in the canvas Trader Joe’s bags they cadged from the cupboard, nodding and smiling to the other trick-or-treaters who hadn’t gotten the holiday out of their system over the weekend. Most of the Monday night crowd appeared to have significant crossover with the juicebox crowd, Nur was slightly embarrassed to note. But she and Deirdre perhaps represented the median age, if only one took into account the parents and chaperones trailing the giggling throngs of prepubescents.

  On second thought, that made her feel worse.

  Once they’d taken on enough candy to start engaging the forearm muscles in more direct ways, Deirdre ushered Nur onto the inbound green line. This they rode in silence, sat between Sexy Yellow Nattering Tic Tac Monster From That One Children’s Movie and what Nur first took to be Sexy Indira Gandhi, India’s First And Only Female Prime Minister, but upon further inspection was probably meant to be Sexy Bride Of Frankenstein (vertical hair and a little white streak, anybody could have made that mistake).

  So baffling were the costumes, Nur completely failed to notice that Deirdre had sat down next to her, for the first time in the nearly three months they had been here.

  A quarter of a year, one fourth of our time here gone, Nur realized with a concussive jolt. Already nervy at the prospective turn she meant the evening to take, this realization hit her especially hard.

  Fortunately, the T pulled in to Park Street, and Deirdre shot up with a smile. “We change here!” she called over her shoulder as she leapt down the two steps to the platform.

  Nur buried the temporal anxiety and followed her sister. After alighting, she paused. “Wait…we’re changing?” She couldn’t imagine why she would give up this costume, so perfectly balanced between sensuality and insulation.

  “To the red line!” Deirdre once again called over her shoulder, weaving through the colorful crowd of Sexy Sitcom Characters and Sexy Patio Furniture. Nur processed this for a moment, before remembering that the T had its own array of colors; she had merely been limiting herself to the green one.

  For the first time, she was going to get on a different line. Wherever Hyun-Woo lived, it was off the red one. And didn’t the red one lead to Cambridge? And wasn’t Cambridge where the brainiacs and rich kids lived? Hadn’t she heard that somewhere?

  Her anxiety redoubled. Perhaps her fantasy hadn’t been far off the mark – perhaps Hyun-Woo did live in a penthouse. Not that it would matter if he didn’t, but, well, she wouldn’t turn her nose up at him if he did. She’d certainly never been in one, other than the one atop the De Dernberg Towers. But she only went in there to clean it after some rich asshole had wrecked it. Would she finally get to participate in the wrecking? Oh, to see how the other half lived…

  Nur pursued her sister around the stairs to the street, and down a stairwell that led to the deep, rushing warmth of the red line platform. Her costume was doing her all sorts of favors aboveground, but down here, with a volcanic breeze unique to subway tunnels tossling the fur of the long-dead coyote or marmot or whatever she had draped over her shoulders, she was starting to sweat. And her candy was starting to melt.

  “Say,” she said, “why did we spend so long around Uncle Bernard’s place, if Hyun-Woo lives off the red line?”

  Deirdre smiled and answered by way of shaking her bag of free treats gone runny in the heat, which caught the perpetual sigh of the tunnels and made an unpleasant, whooshing squooshing noise like somebody with a cold trying to breath through their mouth while eating macaroni and cheese.

  Nur frowned, and Deirdre couldn’t blame her, because that was a sound so far from appetizing it made a mockery of the petty deception that netted such an unhappy chocolate slop. “Free candy,” Deirdre reiterated without conviction.

  “Uh huh,” Nur granted as the baseline sigh became a thunderous yawn, portending an incoming choo-choo. “Well let’s maybe minimize the amount of time we waste getting more free candy, please? I think we have enough.”

  Deirdre grinned. “Biological clock is ticking, eh?”

  “I think you know perfectly well that’s not how I’d phrase it.”

  “I do.”

  The train came, they got on, and off they went.

  Much to Nur’s chagrin, they did waste about a half hour wandering around Cambridge, which was charming in theory but frustrating in practice. It was indeed where the rich folks lived, and the rich folks always bought the big-ass Hershey bars. As Deirdre was running the show, Nur had to endure the onslaught of sugar. It was such a mindless exercise that she actually had forgotten why they came out in the first place. So when they knocked on a door and Hyun-Woo opened it, she didn’t have to feign surprise in the least.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Oh!” Nur shouted. She managed to stop short of “WWWHHHAAAA?!”, but only just.

  Instead, she looked up at Hyun-Woo on the porch, dressed as…himself…and asked “why are you here?” in English, because it was all she could think to say without recourse to translation (thank heavens they had that class on dealing with doorstep missionaries).

  It was, in hindsight, a dumb question. It was a mark in favor of Hyun-Woo’s natural tact that he answered it as though it weren’t.

  “This is where I live,” he returned gently. Nur was struggling enough to understand the English, so the fact that she understood that led her to believe that Hyun-Woo was managing to speak with a normal American accent. Whatever that meant.

  There he stood, clutching a plastic jack-o-lantern full of sweeties, in a solid blue T shirt and plaid, unbuttoned overshirt, over deep blue jeans…and there she stood, Sexy Bear from The Revenant. He had stayed in to hand out candy to children. And she knocked on his door.

  From go, this scenario had been erotically charged for her. So it wasn’t until now that she realized precisely how unsexy the entire situation was. Ascension to the penthouse was far from a foregone conclusion, to say nothing of a collision of naughty bits.

  As sneakily as possible, Nur tried to strike a sexier pose. Nur wasn’t well accustomed to being sneaky or sexy, so the pose she struck was instead both uncomfortable and unattractive.

  Hyun-Woo hardly noticed, though. He just kept staring her straight in the eye. That was gratifying. Maybe salvaging this moment wouldn’t be so difficult after all…

  He nodded to her bag. “Lots of candy?”

  Was that innuendo? Seemed like it might have been, but Hyun-Woo had never struck her as the overly flirtatious type. Or maybe he was, and flirting was wildly different in Korea than it was in Seychelles than it was in America. Screw it, tonight is about making the first move.

  “Not enough,” she replied with a saucy roll of the right eyebrow. She was so immensely proud of that, she could hardly be bothered to worry about it being too much.

  Or, go figure, not enough; Hyun-Woo just nodded, pulled a handful of candy from his plastic basket and deposited it into her bag. “How’s that?” he inquired with a lack of irony that was equal parts charming and, in the current situation, frustrating.

  From Nur’s right, an evil witch cackled and tin foil crackled. She turned and showed Deirdre her eyebrows, nary an echo of the saucy roll on them. Her sister got the message and sat on the
cackle. Nothing to be done about the tin foil, however.

  Deirdre then loosed a stream of babble in which Nur could find little to nothing comprehensible. She aimed the spray directly at Hyun-Woo, and his face betraying understanding on his part.

  Nur clutched her sister’s arm as sneakily (but not sexily) as she could. “What are you saying to him?”

  The younger De Dernberg shook Nur off and kept rattling on. A smile dawned on Hyun-Woo’s face, and that’s when Nur started to get really worried. Did Deirdre still fancy herself a little pimp? This was not working out at all.

  Finally, Deirdre stopped, and now it was Hyun-Woo’s turn to talk. He said some stuff, then Deirdre said some more stuff, then Hyun-Woo said some more stuff.

  “What are you guys saying?” was all Nur contributed.

  After a few back-and-forths, Deirdre turned to her sister. “I told him we’ve been out for hours and you’re exhausted and have a blister on your foot.”

  “That’s all you told him, is it? Took you that long?”

  “Well, I may have said some other stuff. But the upshot is he wants to invite you in.”

  She nodded to Hyun-Woo, who nodded to Nur.

  Mixed feelings, instantly. She was going in, private time with Hyun-Woo. At long last! That was the one hand. On the other hand, she was going in on the pretense of having an imaginary blister what needed treating. So the invite wasn’t so much sexy as it was humanitarian. Not to mention, she didn’t actually have a blister. So unless she could slap on a bandage large enough to convincingly cover a blister, she’d have to see to her purpose this evening with her socks on.

  Far from ideal, but it’d do in a pinch.

  And a pinch would certainly do, she mulled privately, as she wasn’t about to embarrass herself with more public attempts at innuendo this evening.

  Hyun-Woo turned and opened the varnished wood door wider. And he gave her one of those smiles, with a little something extra. He knew what was up, surely. Right?

  Nur patted Deirdre on the back and leaned in for a whisper. “Harvard T station at 11:30, right?”

  “Yeah. Go get…get that…fuck his…go have sex.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “I appreciate your help on all of this but I’m really not comfortable with you talking t-“

  “I’m not either. I just wanted to see where the boundary on our relationship was.”

  “You found it.”

  “I know that now.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “See you later.”

  “Yep.”

  Nur went upstairs with Hyun-Woo, and Deirdre went back to explore Cambridge, and they never spoke about that, or like that, to each other ever again. Their relationship was so much the better for it.

  Hyun-Woo’s apartment building was three stories tall, with an exterior of brick and moss that almost demanded all tenants have two sets of hand towels, because one set is antique and for display only so please use the cheaper ones that also look like antiques but are not.

  His apartment was up a curved marble staircase on the second floor, behind a big black door that could well have been painted yesterday, and almost certainly looked that way every day. As Hyun-Woo opened it, it creaked precisely as much as one would want it too; it wasn’t an ear-splitting whine, but nor was it a tedious silence. It was a door with character, and Nur felt reasonably confident that the hinges had been seen to and were maintained by specialists in the field of aperture acoustics.

  Before even stepping inside, in other words, Nur was assaulted by such a display of wealth as to be ever so slightly repulsed. She’d always imagined it would be fun, falling into the stiffening lap of luxury, but in practice it was making her feel slightly…icky. It might well have helped if Hyun-Woo had shouted “ta-da!” every few seconds; at least that way she would have known that he felt like it was all a bit much as well. But he kept his head down as he held the doors for her and led her into his not-so-humble abode, like this was all the most ordinary and unremarkable thing in the world.

  Which meant to him, it probably was.

  She wondered, not so idly, just whose apartment this was. His parents were both diplomats, so was this an apartment allotted for foreigners on political business? One might expect it to be in, say, Washington D.C. then, right? Or were they renting it for the duration of Hyun-Woo’s study at the Crabshoe School For The Language Of English? Or did they own it? How wealthy were they, exactly? Did they make all of their money on diplomatic business, or did they have thumbs in other pies?

  The question of love came circling back. If Hyun-Woo were just a hook-up to her, she wouldn’t give two hoots about the answers to those questions. She’d done the ‘no strings’ thing before, and while it wasn’t her favorite, she’d done a good job at snipping those strings. For a little while, she saw a guy who giggled every time he reached climax. And a proper giggle it was, tee-hee-hee like he was being tickled. It was harmless but unnerving, especially when Nur flipped the causal chain and wondered if maybe he could only reach climax by giggling himself up to it. Still, the guy was great, and often brought her to a similar conclusion (though she never marked the occasion with a giggle, you can be sure about that), so she bundled that unfortunate characteristic up with all the others (for reasons all his own he insisted on calling her “Bee-Baw”; he had a grandmother’s grasp on texting etiquette; his hair always felt sort of greasy) and partitioned them. They had both agreed it was a purely physical relationship up front, and so the rest didn’t matter.

  Now here was Nur, forming questions about ‘the rest’ as pertained to Hyun-Woo, and finding that she cared deeply about the answers. How disappointing it would be, to find out that he was not only unambitious (oh, she’d managed to make herself forget that assessment of him, but now it came roaring back) but entitled as well. He seemed so kind and well-adjusted…and if he weren’t, well, it wouldn’t matter if this were purely physical. But it did matter.

  So was this love? She had no way of knowing. Maybe. It hardly seemed worth wondering, at this stage.

  But it was most definitely something.

  Hyun-Woo swung open the door to his/his parent’s/the US government’s/somebody’s apartment. Where Nur expected buttoned leather and odorous mahogany, she saw modernity. Sharp angles and glass tabletops and space-age curvy chairs and minimalism minimalism minimalism, so much minimalism it bore repeating even if that did sort of defeat the purpose. The place was so sleek and shiny, it seemed an almost perverse refutation of the building’s exterior.

  Not that any of this implied a lesser degree of wealth or privilege than antique stained oak armoires and cuckoo clocks with golden pendulums would have, of course. This whole classed up Sharper Image look may well have cost more, when all the electronic doodads and gewgaws were factored in. It was just, to Nur’s slightly biased mind, a less ostentatious form of wealth. It was progressive wealth, wealth aimed toward the future, as opposed to wealth turned toward the past.

  This was a largely arbitrary position to hold, she knew perfectly well. But that did little to minimize the intensity with which she felt it.

  Or perhaps it was just a convenient stance to take, given her ulterior motives.

  Recalling the motives, she dropped her bag of candy, hoping to get Hyun-Woo’s attention. The bag went thwack, and Hyun-Woo turned, and then they stood silently for a moment as the contents of the bag went krskrkskrskrskr for what felt like a billion years, until they finally settled.

  Hyun-Woo favored her with his resplendent grin. “Do you-“

  Krskrskrskr said a rogue bar of chocolate.

  “…do you need to dress your _____?”

  Ah, right. She had nearly forgotten that she was flying solo here. What was the last word he had just said? He was talking about ‘dressing’, whi
ch was certainly on topic, though she was more concerned with undressing at this point. What would she have to dress? Does he think I’m cold because of this costume? He maybe thinks I need to dress in more clothes?

  “No,” she gambled, “I am, maybe, too warm.” She shrugged the animal skin blanket off onto the floor. It fell with a refreshingly soft and brief wshhhh. Underneath, she was wearing a dark tank top. All the ‘flesh colored’ garments she could find were apparently for wan cave monsters with the complexion of a snake’s egg, so she’d had to bust out her tie-dying skills and tint a top to match her own skin tone. Judging by Hyun-Woo’s face, the illusion of nudity was effectively attained, at least for a moment.

  “Haaah,” Hyun-Woo exhaled. He nodded for a moment, then pointed to her ankles. He started to repeat himself, but he didn’t need to.

  Damnit.

  Do you need to see to your wound. Dress meant applying a bandage in that context.

  Nur cocked her jaw to the side, and reset it with a little pop. “Oh, yeah.” She picked up the fur coat and tossed it on the nearby Christ-like sectional, which instead of sins had taken on all of the fluffiness and cushionitude of the rest of the apartment. That’d be a prime spot to start, she noted as Hyun-Woo showed her to the bathroom, which was surely the opposite end of that spectrum. She thanked him, closed the door, and pondered her next move as she wasted a perfectly good bandage on a decidedly healthy portion of her left heel.

  She was exceedingly surprised to find that she wished she could have talked to Deirdre just then.

  CHAPTER 21

  Seychelles was hardly a matriarchy, but it did skew that way. So Nur was well-accustomed to being the carnal Prime Mover Unmoved, and it had never felt unusual to her. The fact that Hyun-Woo was retaining such passivity led her to speculate that South Korea may have had a similar social-sexual setup.