by Jud Widing
But they didn’t have any music. And so the mood seeped away, and as Nur’s laughter stepped up to fill the void, it encountered a chilly resistance from Hyun-Woo. He didn’t find this funny, and so the void remained unfilled for him.
This qualified as “a problem”, and the fact that “a problem” arose because of a fart noise made the entire situation even funnier to Nur. She tried to stop laughing, therefore she laughed even harder. She couldn’t stop. This was “a problem”, and her giggles, now rushing headlong into gasping hysterics, were only making it worse. Her heart was shouting cut that shit out! But her head, always at a step’s remove, couldn’t get over how funny this all was. Hyun-Woo was tensing up, rolling off of her and slapping a palm over his eyes. She’d never seen him like this before. Was he taking the laughter personally? Did he truly not understand why she was laughing? The tender moment they had been sharing not fifteen seconds ago had vanished – it hadn’t popped, or evaporated, or disintegrated, it vanished, all at once and in an instant – and her heart was crying out, seeing the looming danger but finding itself unable to outrun it, because the head just wanted to sit back and watch. This was an objectively funny situation. There was a thickness in the atmosphere that demanded discharge. Things were about to be said, she intuited, and all because their naked bodies had clapped together and made a fart noise.
“Sorry,” she sputtered through the relentless tides of merriment. “It’s not you…it’s just funny.”
He didn’t say anything to that, just lay there with his hand over his eyes. Was he crying? Was this even worse than she’d expected? HOW? What the hell was happening?
And how can I make it stop happening?
The worse the situation grew for her heart, the funnier it became to her head. She felt their relationship to be further out on the rocks than it had ever been…because of pplbt. Not having the slightest clue why pplbt had set Hyun-Woo off if this way, she was left to imagine scenarios. All of them involved traumatic fart incidents for a young Hyun-Woo, and consequently all of them were funny, because farts are always funny, even when they’re doing inexplicable damage to your relationships.
Had Hyun-Woo always been this humorless? She’d just seen him laugh, really truly laugh, and it was beautiful! Granted, it was also noteworthy for having been one of the first times she’d ever seen it…
Uh oh. Does Hyun-Woo not have a sense of humor? That couldn’t be right. Hyun-Woo had said that working out humor in another language was his mark of fluency. It was simply that they didn’t understand each other’s sense of humor, due to the language barrier. That was it.
Except that wasn’t quite it. That wasn’t what Hyun-Woo had said. Wordplay was his mark of fluency. And as anyone who’s had to listen to a group of would-be wits trying to out-pun each other at a party can attest, wordplay and comedy have a casual relationship.
The laughter grew so forceful that it started to hurt. She coughed and wheezed through it, though, because this was so rich. Hyun-Woo didn’t have a sense of humor. It had just taken until this moment to realize it, with something as simple and ludicrous and insignificant as pplbt.
When she finally felt up to speaking, it wasn’t that the laughter had stopped. It had simply tapered off enough for her to shape the formless outbursts into recognizable words. “What’s wrong?” she inquired.
Without removing his hand from his eyes, Hyun-Woo replied “everything”. And Nur wanted desperately to laugh again, because wasn’t that such a dramatic thing to say after a little tummy-fuck-fart, but she didn’t. Her heart had finally caught up to her head, and said you fucking idiot, and her head hung itself and replied you may have a point there. And they consulted one another on how best to figure out what the fuck just happened, and why Hyun-Woo was so upset. But that would be a separate thing.
The pplbt, that was the second thing that happened in rapid succession.
CHAPTER 33
For somebody who spoke eighteen thousand languages, Hyun-Woo was doing a very poor job of expressing himself. He lay on the bed, hand draped over his eyes, making periodic whimpering sounds, for what felt like hours. Nur just watched him, her laughter finally subsiding, and occasionally attempting to prime a conversation with things like “what’s wrong?” or “what are you thinking?”
A handful of times, Hyun-Woo would take a deep breath and lift his arms skyward, like a baby reaching out to be picked up by its mother (and perhaps the mother is shouting wait let me take my baby). “It’s just,” he would begin, or once it was “I just,” but what was just remained the primary concern, and the terminus, of these abortive preambles.
To begin with, Nur was concerned. Hyun-Woo seemed genuinely anguished over something, and it couldn’t have been the fart noise by itself. Was it because she was laughing? Could he have misinterpreted that? Surely not – they’d had a great deal of sex unsullied by laughter. She quickly downgraded that to probably not, because dudes could be quite touchy about their sexual prowess.
And then time, as is its wont, passed. And contrary to their wont, things stayed the same. Hyun-Woo laying on his back, hand reposed on his brow like a dizzy socialite whose corset was too tight. Nur laying next to him, propped up on one elbow, waiting for him to say something, and periodically saying something herself. She couldn’t help what came next – concern cracked and hatched impatience.
The words didn’t change, but the tone did. The smooth, honeyed “what’s wrong?” turned bitter and went pointy at the edges. “What’s wrong?”
Hyun-Woo said something in Korean. Later, it would occur to Nur that he probably didn’t realize he was saying said something out loud.
In the moment, this only exacerbated her impatience. “I can’t understand.” Were she standing, she’d have starting tapping her foot just then.
He slid his hand down his face, as though trying to wipe it off. His eyes were squeezed shut, a thin layer of dew caught in his lashes. “I wanted this to work,” he blubbered.
Neither of them said anything for several minutes. Nur hadn’t even begun trying to formulate a reply; she was busy parsing that sentence, attempting to sort out alternative meanings to what she thought it meant. Did he seriously just say this isn’t working? Because of a fucking FART NOISE? This was coming from absolutely nowhere, as far(t) as she could tell. And the backhanded nature of it was galling. He hadn’t even said something like ‘I don’t think this is working’. He phrased it in the past tense, as though it were a foregone conclusion that it hadn’t worked!
She should have been devastated just then, but the impatience evolved into anger, so devastation would have to wait its goddamned turn. Her words failed her, save the one that was burning a hole in her heart, demanding to be loosed. “Explain!” she snapped.
And he did.
And she understood maybe thirty percent of it.
Is this an actual reason, or is he just using words he knows I won’t understand in order to make it seem like a reason? There was a troublingly paranoid thought, followed up by a troublingly vindictive one: I don’t know that he’s smart enough to pull that off.
That was all the hurt doing the talking, but she hadn’t allowed herself to feel that hurt yet.
“Speak more easily,” she demanded. At this point, she was fairly certain she didn’t want to hear whatever it was he had to say. Who cared what he thought? Dude didn’t have a sense of humor.
Gulping cartoonishly, brow knit in concentration, Hyun-Woo silently rehearsed his words, moving his mouth without speaking. Without the words they were shaping, his lips made nearly imperceptible slurping and smacking sounds. But Nur was feeling quite perceptive just then, so they registered as moist reports from a Cronenberg cannon.
When the swamp noises finally summoned up some words from the gassy depths, they sounded as though they belonged to a strange, ancient language. The meaning came only after he’d finish
ed talking.
“We both knew there was no future in this,” he had said.
Oh, God. She had a million and one things to say, but how could she say them? Even in Seychellois Creole, she’d have struggled. In English? This was going be nearly impossible, and she wasn’t about the put Deirdre in the middle just to make it easier. “We both knew?” was where she ultimately landed.
“We’re from different countries.”
Well, that was a fair point. She couldn’t really argue with that. But people had overcome worse for love, hadn’t they?
But those people had usually told each other that they were in love, hadn’t they? They had.
She replied to Hyun-Woo’s geographical concerns by saying “I love you” for the first time. Whoops was her follow-up thought, as well as the next thing she said out loud. But hey, the night had been going strangely enough as it was. Why not add some emotional intensity to it, right? Idiot.
Hyun-Woo grimaced and nodded. “I love you too,” he croaked through a tightened throat, “I wanted this to work.”
The past tense again. She wanted to slap him. “So why not?”
“Why not what?”
If he was going to start critiquing her grammar, maybe she would slap him. “Why’s not working?”
“We’re friends.”
“Yes.”
“We’re from different cou-“
“Yes?”
“We knew this was, um ‘friends with benefits’.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Hyun-Woo explained. Nur did not slap him, because that would have been too obvious. Instead she got dressed and left without saying another word. Not because she didn’t want to, she just didn’t know the words she wanted to say.
We knew this was friends with benefits. How could he say that immediately after telling her that he loved her?
And why had things come to a head tonight? Had this been on his mind, and the shattering of the mood back there finally brought these issues up to the surface? She had so many questions she wanted to ask him, but suspected she’d never get the chance.
He knew he was leaving. They both did. Neither was staying in America when their time at Crabshoe was up, and Nur had thought about this from practically the first day she had felt something for Hyun-Woo. But she had ignored it, in favor of savoring each moment with him as it came. His approach, she was now discovering, was keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon. The distance she felt between them tonight – had that always been there? Had she conveniently ignored it, for as long as it had failed to be an obstacle? Or was he lying, to both of them, by insisting that it had always been there, that they had always been just ‘friends with benefits’, palling around for the sex and nothing more, to make himself feel better?
It hadn’t been that to her. It had never been that to her. And that he should insist they had both always known it was the most hurtful part of this whole thing. Being demoted to fuck-buddy made her feel devalued. Being told that she had actually never held a higher position in his heart from which to be demoted, and being told that she should have known that from the beginning, made her feel stupid.
She got back to Uncle Bernard’s and slipped into a dreamless, tear-streaked sleep. In the morning she awoke with an operating theory as to what catalyzed the previous night’s crisis. The pplbt shattered the illusion they’d built for themselves, but what lay behind that fragile veneer was something else entirely.
Recently, very recently, Nur had introduced Hyun-Woo to her Aunt and Uncle. “I’m seeing him,” she’d said. Had she told Hyun-Woo ahead of time that he’d be meeting her relatives? No, come to think of it. Would he have been less freaked out if he’d known ahead of time? Or would he not have come at all?
Meeting her Uncle Bernard as ‘the guy your niece is seeing’ must have freaked Hyun-Woo out. Bernard’s firm handshake made things formal. Aunt Amy’s capacious hug felt like a welcome to the family. If it was true that this had all been a relationship – not even a relationship, an exchange – without a future to him, then that day must have been something close to traumatizing. Maybe he was hesitant to get overly involved with Nur for ‘guy reasons’, whatever the hell reasons guys had for being distant. But that wouldn’t explain his red-rimmed eyes that night, would it?
Hyun-Woo was probably hesitant to get involved because he did love her. And he knew that the closer he got to her, the more it would hurt to leave her.
Because, ultimately, that’s what was going to happen. They would leave each other, and return to the normal trajectory of their lives.
She’d entertained fantasies from the beginning, fantasies in which one or the other (or both of them) would be willing to abandon their plans, or at least restructure them, so as to allow the two of them to stay together. But that was always pure imagination, in which she could indulge herself when departure was one year away. Now it was just over four months away.
It was late in the day for such fantasies.
If these were his actual reasons for behaving as he had (and who knew), why hadn’t they discussed this earlier? They were both reasonable, rational adults. Why allow themselves to be hurt, why hurt each other, why let things go as far as they had? He could try to retcon their relationship to have included the “we’re just friends with benefits” conversation if he wanted, but that didn’t change the fact that it never happened.
Unless it did, and Nur just hadn’t been able to understand it yet.
Because for a long while, she’d fancied that getting the gist of what he was saying was the same as understanding what he was saying.
Well, if she forgot everything else she’d learned at the Crabshoe School For The Language Of English, there’s one lesson she would never forget. ‘Getting’ somebody isn’t the same as ‘understanding’ them. And, if she was being honest with herself (and why not be, this late in the game, not that it was a game), she suspected neither was actually possible at all, on account of certain things not making any goddamned sense.
If only the world made sense. Then she could ask him questions, and he could give her answers, and nobody would be confused or hurt and all would be sensible, comprehensible love throughout all ages, world without end, amen.
But it was late in the day for such fantasies.
CHAPTER 34
After she had stopped crying, she was mostly angry.
At Hyun-Woo, obviously. And at herself. At the fact that humanity still hadn’t quit flirting with globalization and just gotten a universal language sorted out already. At this country for being such a dumbass melting pot. At the dog she saw tied to a NO PARKING ANYTIME sign on the curb, because what the hell did that dog know about parking or about anything. At the NO PARKING ANYTIME sign, because what gave one human the right to tell another human where they could not park and when. At people walking too slowly down the street, obstructing her path and making her weave around them. At people walking too quickly down the street, weaving around her and making her stagger to one side or the other. At a tree. No reason there. Just, you know, fuck that tree.
She was angry, and anger didn’t need a ‘why’. Just a ‘what’, as in the fuck.
Had her anger needed a ‘why’, it might well have listened to her ‘why not’. Because she had a good reason why she shouldn’t be angry, didn’t she? Hadn’t she already drummed up a plausible psychological portrait of Hyun-Woo and his defensive fear of emotional entanglement so near to his time of departure?
Another ‘what’, as in so fucking. That was no excuse for the way he had treated her last night. And that was no excuse for not communicating his feelings to her. Granted, the lack of a common language was a more convincing excuse, but there were workarounds. Deirdre being the most obvious, but the more delicate particulars could be delivered via semaphore and charade.
No, she had a righ
t to be angry. Anger was justified here. Anger was fine and good and very nice.
She had so much anger, in fact, she could bottle most of it up and save it for later without losing a step in the moment.
What steps was she not losing? Why, the steps away from Hyun-Woo, of course. They began avoiding each other, which wasn’t especially difficult given their different classes. At least, Nur began avoiding Hyun-Woo. Part of that avoidance meant not seeing him, to know whether or not he was avoiding her. Like she cared. Let him do what he wanted. Wasn’t that what he’d been doing already? Oh, indeed it was.
Deirdre picked up on Nur’s studied disdain, though ‘picked up on’ makes it sound as though this was some great feat of sisterly intuition. This was how Nur read it, of course, because she had a very poor concept of how she was presenting herself. To Deirdre, her elder sibling might as well have clipped a button to her lapel that said ASK ME ABOUT MY HEARTBREAK.
So Deirdre did just that, and Nur refused to answer.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she huffed.
Deirdre sighed. “You might be able to fool everyone else,” she said carefully and without conviction, “but I can see through your, um…” she had nowhere else to go with that, and so waited for Nur to pick up the slack.
Which she eventually did, through more sullen puffing. “Everything’s great.”
Another sigh from Deirdre, but this time no words followed the exhalation. Instead the sisters just sat around, sighing and huffing and puffing and heaving and making a serious go at increasing the room’s carbon dioxide quotient to fatal extremes.
In time, as is always the case, the reason for the initial spate of anger shrank in importance, until it was downright insignificant. But much like a space shuttle only needs its boosters to break orbit, and happily tosses them back down to Earth once they’ve served their purpose, so anger only needs propulsion for so long before it can keep on flying by inertia.
