2 comments/ 37978 views/ 0 favorites One Kind of Revenge By: mirandola One dark afternoon in the beginning with Song Hee, an afternoon whose heaviness he yearned to lighten, Gary surprised himself by proposing that they have children right away. She stood at the window watching the rain descend with the evening on Mangwon-dong, the proletarian neighborhood in Seoul where they lived. "I will be bad mother," she said. He asked how she could be so sure and then half-heartedly repeated his proposal. But she was adamantly against the idea. Truth was, he was not entirely convinced he wanted a family with her, so he let the matter drop and never brought it up again. Nonetheless, Song Hee did not question the form their marriage should take, as prescribed by a small coterie of female friends. She quit her job and continued with her homemaking tasks as well as she could, although her heart seemed to go out of it as time went on. Gary busted his butt making a living, and they still had sex every night whether they wanted to or not. Unless he asked for something different, she would simply lie there like a dead dog at the butcher's, her arms and legs spread wide, waiting for him to put it to her. In time, she learned to flex her legs at the hip so that he could enter from the bottom between her thighs, using their undersides as a brace as he thrusted -- a position he'd once heard a black G.I. call "the hucklebuck." It hurt her at first, but it became their method of choice for a time until it also became routine. Much sooner than in his first marriage, the nightly tryst became a stale ritual, one without meaning, emotion, or physical excitement. She would groan or grunt as she thought women did when having orgasms (in movies? in books? in the lies of her friends?), but it was never convincing, and she often made him want to laugh. Without ever saying so, she clearly depended on him to instruct her in the ways of love, but he was inhibited as much by her suspicion of him and her resentment of his first marriage as by her general ineptitude. He suspected that, for her, fucking was little more than a symbolic gesture. By this means, he was supposed to show how good a husband he was, and her performance was intended to sum up her role as a loyal and acquiescent wife. There was something elemental about it, almost primitive, but in modern terms as wholly pointless as the virginity she had brought to the marriage as her “gift.” He interpreted the signs as meaning that, although she didn't like the sex part, the partner thing was tolerable enough. All of that was fine. But, if she felt that way, why did the forms have to be so scrupulously observed? He felt locked into another absurd commitment, as he'd been a number of times in the past (his onetime progress toward the priesthood being the prime example), where the symbols were primary and the represented "reality" given little credence at all. This had been one factor motivating him to quit the seminary. And now neither he nor Song Hee was enjoying their nightly charade much either. She seemed as glad as he was when they finally toweled off and rolled over for the night. Apparently, another part of the marital agenda was that, after about a year or so in which the husband was allowed to think he’d established himself as head of the household, the wife threw off her diffidence and revealed herself as the actual boss. In any case, this is what Song Hee tried to do in urging him to turn over their finances to her. He refused on the ground that he had always managed his own business affairs and that, since he earned all their income now, he should also be the one to control it. This was only fair, he thought, yet he had to admit (to himself) that it would have been more convenient if she handled the money, at least while they were living in Korea. Above all, he was afraid that if she ever got hold of his small but cherished grubstake, it would evaporate like a smear of gasoline. Every now and then, Song Hee would express her suspicion that he was hiding something from her. Was he spending his money in some "wrong" way? No, he would answer. But, if she couldn't find the lie in the faintness of his disclaimer, she would find it in the clearing of his throat. It was true that, before they met, he sometimes paid for sex with the hostess-whores who came on to him in bars and coffee shops. And, every month or so, he would drop the equivalent of fifty or sixty bucks at the barber's. His ten-minute haircut, done by a male barber, would be followed by a shave from a comely young female attendant. After that would come the massage. The girl would apply a mud pack to his face, and while waiting for it to dry she would begin kneading his arms up and down. As he learned to trust the barbershop girl, he would gradually relax as her strong, careful hands took charge of his body. He would lie back in the leather chair as the drapes were drawn, the lights dimmed, and a mist of light fragrance sweetened the air. Faint music wafted in from somewhere, together with occasional sounds from other curtained chairs in the dark, cavernous basement shop. Some customers slept and snored, others whispered to their girls, and still others could be heard emitting muted barks of pleasure. By the time the attendant had thoroughly tenderized every muscle of his arms and hands and cracked every finger with an expert yank, she would bend him forward to thump his back. Then she would lay him down and tiptoe around to his legs. After loosening his belt and unzipping his fly, she would work on individual muscle groups from his ticklish feet up to his calves and thighs, sporadically reaching up to check on his crotch. Her hands would creep first to his chest and belly, then to his groin proper, where she would work the region of the hips, studiously avoiding the genitals. She would turn him over for a couple of minutes on each side and dig her fingers gently but deeply into the flesh of his buttocks. These moves would loosen up his entrails and make them rumble comfortably. If he farted, he was not afraid she would laugh or think the less of him for it. It was all part of the rhythm of nature, and he was accepted here as an earthly mortal whose body did the things everybody else's did. All this time, his face masked by the hardening, anonymizing mud, he had a distinct sense he had lost his anchorage in geographical space, perhaps even in reality itself. The girl could have hurt him seriously, even killed him if she'd wanted. His defenses had been skillfully disabled. Like a balloon he floated, at the mercy of hands that seldom left him, feigning the tenderness of genuine affection. When she finally cupped the bulge of his genitals in her palm, he would be fully erect and straining for release. At that point she'd reach through the flap and ease out the rigid phallus. As she massaged the freestanding shaft, beads of semen would appear at the tip, and she would lick them off. She would start kissing it then, moving her tongue up and down the vein on the underside and intermittently lowering her mouth around the head. She'd twiddle it with her tongue, dipping down and up until, afraid he couldn't take any more without gushing into her hand, he'd push her away, and she'd leave, swishing the drapes. For a little while he relaxed, his naked penis subsiding onto the V of his fly. Since she'd not yet removed the mud from his face, he'd wonder where she’d gone and what she was up to. But she was never gone long enough for him to worry. On her return, she'd manually check the hardness of the mud, place a hand on his chest, and bend over his ear to whisper in English, "You want Special?" "Special? Yes! I want Special!" he'd croak as from a windowless cell, all the while nodding his plaster-bound face. Then he'd hear the rustling of clothes, the faint metal-fabric sounds of snaps and hooks and elastic. In her bare feet, she could be heard padding the tile floor -- then her hand, on his erection, would stiffen it for a condom. Naked, she would climb onto the barber's chair, plant her feet on each side of his waist, and lower herself slowly onto him. Oooooooh! The sublime act of coitus, when engaged in for physical pleasure alone, was best done with a total stranger. In the barber's chair he would have orgasms such as he'd never had in nice beds with the women he loved. Often, he would have two because the squatting girl would keep going at him as long as he was hard or she could get him that way. Once, after a short rest, she had even made him come a third time, but usually after the first or second he was worn out and had to sleep for a time. On leaving the barbershop, after paying his tab and liberally tipping the attendant, he'd be bidden adieu by everyone on the staff who was free (the others, for the moment, indisposed), and they would all bow Japanese-style, a habit they'd acquired to please their foreign clientele. Gary would feel totally rejuvenated in body and mind. He'd look into the mirror and see how happy he looked. Those two and a half hours had lifted, for an afternoon, the lassitude of a friendless American scrabbling for a living in a strange land. Shucks! -- he’d even gotten a shave and a haircut! But when he married Song Hee, he swore to himself he would have no more of such stuff. He would not be able to face her honestly if he was unfaithful to her, even with a barbershop girl. Here is what caused him to forget his oath: One Saturday afternoon, two or three months into the marriage, he was trying to get a stack of grading done when, without warning, he was confronted with the first in a series of eruptions that would rattle both their lives for years to come. Song Hee had discovered some letters. He had been stuffing them into an open cubbyhole in his desk at home because he naively assumed she would never go through his private things. He was sitting at the desk when she entered from the second of their two rooms, the one where they ate, watched TV, made love, and slept. With a sigh, she settled herself quietly into a chair behind him. Feeling the portentousness of her mood, he tensed up immediately. It was easy to read her. Tacitly she was saying, "Let's get serious, Chum." Hers was the air of a boss about to chew out an inept employee, or of a mother about to scold her teenaged boy for a pornographic picture found in his pocket. "Hi," he said. "What's up?" Silence. "How are you, Sweetheart? What's for dinner?" Nothing. "Anything on your mind?" "Well . . ." she said finally. "What?" He swiveled to face her. "I saw something." "You saw something?" "Yes." She sat like a child in her blue and white printed one-piece housedress, the one betraying no part of her anatomy that was not strictly vertical. Inside it, her slender body was like the clapper of an old blue and white china monastery bell. "So what is this 'something'?" Gary grew uneasy. Maybe she'd been following him and had seen him talking to a female student. He knew he hadn't consciously done anything to offend or betray her, but he was beginning to fear that this was one of those baseless, absurd emergencies over which he had no control whatsoever. "I saw retter," she said. "A letter? Which letter?" "Her retter. You fat wife." Her teeth were clenched now, and the color was rising to further darken her tawny face. "You saw a letter from Donna? How?" "It is there," she pointed to the wad in the cubbyhole. "Many, many retters." "You mean to say you have read my private correspondence?” “Yes.” “I can't believe this! You have taken letters out of my desk and read them? How sneaky! Are you spying on me? Is that what you're doing? Don't you trust me?" "No." "Well, you should. I made a vow to be faithful to you, and that's what I have been, completely faithful. And another thing is that I am an American, and we Americans don't believe in reading other people's letters. How dare you!" "You my husband?" she asked with a mannered steadiness. She was showing how well she could keep her wounded feelings under wraps. "Of course I'm your husband!" "Why you write retter you fat wife? Why, Gary? It wrong!" "Well, if you must know, Donna and I have agreed to keep in touch for the sake of Moira. I miss Moira painfully, and as her father I need to hear from her and have her hear from me. I'm afraid she'll forget me." "That okay she forget you." "What do you mean? Let my daughter forget me?" "You fat wife." "I wasn't referring to her. I was referring to my daughter, okay?" "I understand. You love fat wife. You want puck her! You dream you puck her all the time! You bad man, son of beesh! You dog! Smell like old dirty dog!" "I don't want to fuck her. I don't love her. I never did love her, really. It's you I love. But I love my daughter too." "I you wife. You ruv daughter, you not ruv me." "Don't do that! Don't make an issue of who I love more. It is not a matter of choosing between one or the other. I have a daughter, and I have a wife. I love you both. You have to trust me on this. I love you both. My daughter lives with Donna, and Donna can tell me things that Moira would never tell me in her letters. That way, I get a more complete picture, you see? Maybe you don't. You don't know what it's like to be a parent." This was not a lie, but it was not the complete truth either. Donna and Gary had separated five years earlier and had stayed in touch regularly afterwards, while he was in graduate school. This was largely for the sake of Moira, but they felt a certain sentimental attachment to each other too. The marriage had come to an end because of a decade-long malaise they had tried to deny but finally acknowledged with some rather dramatic infidelities on both sides. On the day they got the divorce, they went out for a drink after the court hearing. They had a few beers and then adjourned to a favorite shady hollow near the house. There they tried to make love one last time, as a kind of memorial to what had just ended. But it didn't work. Their frayed ties had already come undone, and Gary couldn't get it up to save his soul -- even to indulge a last loveless lust ignited by alcohol. They continued to write after the divorce and even to exchange gifts at birthdays and Christmas. In his letters, Gary would be fairly forthright about women he met and how he felt about them, but Donna, always pretending that his doings were of sincere interest to her, wouldn't say anything about her own affairs except to leak the name of a guy here and there. This went on for years, Gary doing his best to paint word portraits of the women in his life and Donna responding patiently as if she were really interested. He knew he didn't love her anymore, if he ever did; and maybe this was his way of making that clear to her without saying so. Besides, she was advancing well into her thirties, to that anteroom of middle age where the characteristics of one's parents begin to overtake the originality of youth. Gary didn't see much of her father in Donna, but in personality she was becoming very similar to her cornball mother, an old, perpetually jolly woman who had always given Gary the creeps. "You tell to you fat wife my Engrish not good! I so shame!" Song Hee screeched. Ah-hah! At last they'd come to the nub, or rather the nub of the nub of the nub -- the nucleus of the atom of the molecule of Song Hee's disgust with his previous wife. Not only, she discovered, had he continued to correspond with his first wife after marrying Song Hee, but he had actually mentioned her imperfect English! Gary did not deny this, but he knew it had been only to describe, not to criticize. In fact, under his tutelage but mostly because of her own hard work, Song Hee had come along quite well in her English skills. He was fond of calling her "my masterpiece," and in this she took a certain pride. But she thought he had been lying when he so lavishly complimented her progress and that he would just turn around and laugh at her behind her back. To a former wife, no less. How humiliating! "Oh, honey. I didn’t mean to blame you. I merely wanted to give Donna an idea of you. Your English is a thousand times better than my Korean, and I told her that too." "She say nothing about that." She carefully made her tongue peek between her teeth to make the English "th." "Well, then, she just forgot to mention it. But, believe me, I told her how poor a student I've been with my Korean." "Yes, you right. You very poor. Very poor man. Very poor husband." The lesson here was that for Song Hee, and probably for most Asians, their consciousness of themselves in the eyes of others was a wholly different matter from what we in the West call "reputation." To be spoken ill, even to people they hated -- maybe especially to people they hated -- was a source of intolerable shame. This is what it meant to lose face. Things settled down that evening when Gary agreed to throw out all the letters, which pained him, and promised not to write Donna again. They did not have sex that night, and he regarded this as a very bad sign. As to the promise not to write, he knew he'd be breaking it almost immediately because not writing Donna would mean not having reliable information about fifteen-year-old Moira, who, alas, was not writing more than a few times a year. Gary was worried about the usual things fathers worry about with daughters -- ratty boyfriends, reckless driving, drugs, alcohol, studies neglected, pregnancies, abortions. And so, while he deemed it reasonable to observe the spirit of his promise to Song Hee, in his mind he was crossing his fingers. He would not drop all contact with Donna when it meant he might not hear of his daughter's possibly dangerous adolescent adventures. But the real blow-out occurred a month or so later, just after the American Thanksgiving. The issue of the letters seemed to have faded somewhat, although Song Hee seemed to be keeping a wary eye on him, and her habitual coldness was more palpable than ever. She knew he might be writing and reading secret letters at the university, and it was true that he was. Of course, to Gary this was nothing she should have been worrying about, but she continued to imagine the worst. When he suggested doing some Christmas shopping for his Stateside relatives, Song Hee volunteered to come along and help. They spent hours in Namdaemun Market, a swarming warren of narrow streets near the fourteenth-century South Gate to Seoul. They finally wound up in a multi-storied "department store," more an unheated permanent indoor street market. It was so packed with every conceivable kind of merchandise that the aisles afforded only the narrowest passage between individual shops -- or booths, as they would have been called in the U.S. When they found one specializing in art supplies, Gary spotted a beautiful calligraphy set -- brushes, paper, ink powder, and inkstone, all arrayed attractively in a beautiful laquered paulownia box. It was the perfect gift for Donna, who for years had dabbled in calligraphy but seemed never to have the right tools for it. Of course, he could not tell Song Hee it would be a gift for his ex-wife. He would say instead it was for his daughter. "It too espensive," Song Hee said when he suggested they buy it. "Oh, it's not that bad. We can afford it, and it would mean that we could finish up our shopping right now, then go home and get warmed up. Why don't you take a break from cooking tonight. We could order out for Chinese." Always he hoped that domestic chatter would mollify her, as it sometimes did an American woman. But she was just not made that way. She could not put out of her mind the expense of the gift, whose price he judged to be quite reasonable for what it was. So they bought it, despite Song Hee's continued grumbling. In the taxi home, she lapsed into manikin mode, clenching her teeth and refusing to say a word even when spoken to. Lately, though, this had not been unusual behavior for her, so he tried to take it in stride. One Kind of Revenge When they got home, she refused to order out for dinner and insisted on scraping something together out of leftover kimchi soup and rice because, she said, they were too poor to live better. She asked how much more money he had if he could spend so much on a gift for his daughter, and he replied that she could see their savings book any time she wanted. She asked to see it right then and there, and he pulled it out of the desk for her to examine. After the incident with the letters, he was fairly certain she had not been satisfied with his verbal updates on the amount of their savings but had already gone hunting in his desk and verified the numbers for herself. Yet they both acted as though this was the first time she was seeing these records. "We very poor," she said as she scanned the columns of the bankbook. "What are you talking about? We're not poor. We live well enough, and I'm able to save at least twenty percent of my salary each month. We already have almost ten thousand dollars. "You sink that lotta money?" she asked rhetorically. "Ha!" "Yes, I do. In fact, I've never had that much money in my life. It's already enough for a downpayment on a house when we choose to go back to the States." "That not enough to buy house." "I said downpayment. Oh, never mind." "You very poor man. Old man with nothing," she said with increasing excitement. "Except fat wife and fat daughter," she added. "Jesus Christ! Can't you speak with a little kindness about people you don't know? I told you once that Donna was overweight, and you see that as some sort of mortal sin. You're a Catholic. You do know what a mortal sin is, don't you?" She glared. "A mortal sin is the most serious kind of sin. If you don't go to confession and get forgiveness from God the All-Merciful, He will send you to hell for it. Now, you claim to be Catholic, and you don't even know that?" She scowled. "Being heavy is not a mortal sin, and Donna's metabolism is such that I don't think she can control her weight easily." "So slowww!" Song Hee drew out the word to convey the essence of a fat woman‘s sluggishness. "But I'll tell you what is a mortal sin. Cruelty in word and deed." This seemed to bubble up from some buried memory of fourth grade catechism class. "When you are as cruel to people as you are, your words will send you to hell. You'd better go to confession and tell the priest how damnably cruel you have been. And you call yourself a Catholic? Can a Catholic be so unkind? Did Jesus teach you that?" "You protect wife. You shit!" "I am not protecting my wife. You're my wife. I mean . . ." "You not protect me! You puck fat wife." "I'm simply reminding you how to regard a person you have never met whom I know to be perfectly intelligent, pleasant, and talented, a fine mother and a good friend. I just didn't love her, that's all. It was not her fault." As he said this, he was thinking that, as surely as Donna had receded from his life, at that moment he loved her a hundred times more than he ever loved Song Hee. "You buy stuff for fat wife! This. . . ." She picked up the calligraphy set with both hands. "This for fat wife. I know!" And with that the pawlonia box dropped hard onto the linoleum floor. The wooden lid flew open and cracked into three pieces. All the contents except the inkstone bounced out, scattering in a mess at his feet. The ink powder puffed out like a lick of shotgun fire and made a sooty cloud that settled onto the furniture, the floor, his pants, and his shoes. The brushes were strewn about, contaminated like the rice paper with the inky black filth. He was aghast, shaken, speechless. He hadn’t realized she could be so senselessly spiteful and destructive, nor could he have guessed she could see through him as clearly as that. What else did she know that she wasn't admitting? What else was there to learn? Whatever there was, she probably knew. "You clean it up, you bitch!" he shouted as he got his coat and dashed downstairs. On the street, he felt free -- free of her, free of everything, for a while. He considered going to a restaurant or a movie, but that would not have satisfied his instinct for revenge. He pictured himself crawling back, not exactly begging for forgiveness but not fortified either with the satisfaction of having committed a secret act of retribution, something that would comfort him when she got on his case again. Yes, he said to himself, he would get laid. He would find a whore and get laid. This would be his vigilante justice, and he didn't care if he did go to hell for it. He checked into a cheap inn no more than ten minutes from home, ordered out for fried chicken and beer, and invited the older woman owner to join him in his repast. They ate and kidded around a while, mostly with sign language. When he told her he wanted a woman, she introduced him to Mrs. Yoon, the somewhat, but not much, younger woman who had gone out for the food. She was comparatively tall, stringy, and haggard-looking, not ancient but definitely past her prime. She wore a conventional, and very unattractive, workingman's windbreaker, and she didn't take it off inside. This was the kind of woman forty-year-old Gary would wonder about when he saw one in public, "Could I get it up for her?" But he was too timid to refuse her. The owner had said that the night with Mrs. Yoon would cost only twenty dollars, so he said what the hell. As it turned out, the decision was not a mistake. Gary didn't wear a condom, but in these days before H.I.V. was much in the news, he was not worried about catching a deadly disease or getting her pregnant. She looked a little too old to be getting much regular loving. Maybe he was wrong about that, and maybe he was being very reckless; but, at the moment, clear-headed practicality took a back seat to hurting Song Hee. He liked the idea that, if he ever made love to her again, he would be doing it with equipment that had pleasured not only Donna and twenty or so other women in his past but also this decidedly plain-looking mature lady he had never met before. For Mrs.Yoon was capable of pleasure -- yes indeed! Gary wondered about the "Mrs.," supposing that maybe she was divorced or widowed or abandoned. Or maybe she was the owner's poor friend, who would tell her husband she was going out on a few errands and then, with or without his approval, would score an occasional trick to help pay the bills. Gary speculated that her husband may even have been an invalid who could no longer give her what she needed but whose medical bills ate up most of their income. One thing was certain, though. She was a wonderful lover. She was all the things Song Hee was not -- gentle, affectionate, practiced, yielding, considerate, and athletic. They made love for hours in that tacky room, and she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. As with the barbershop girls (had she been a barbershop girl herself?), she preferred to do it in a squat, but one difference was that she could bring herself off that way. What he liked most about her was that she attended to her own pleasure, and in the wee hours Gary took satisfaction in realizing that she was using him exactly as he was using her. Once, for about thirty minutes, she became manically absorbed in masturbating on him. He was her dildo, and at the end of that grueling session, hard work for him but many times harder for her, she came four or five times, each time lying back on his angled legs, where she had providently placed a pillow, playing with her clitoris as she slid sweatily up and down his engorged self. In the morning after some fitful sleep, again she aroused him playfully as they lay in their cozy bedroll, and so it happened that they were able to accomplish one more squishy screw. It brought tears to their eyes, it was so amiable, so splendid a farewell. He got up to shower, and when he returned from the bathroom she was gone, the bedroll neatly stowed away. He put on his coat and reluctantly headed home.