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 saiddownpayment. 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 whatisa 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'remy 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 elsewasthere 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.Yoonwascapable 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.