One Kind of Revenge

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 -- maybeespeciallyto 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.