If I Had Your Face(14)
As a child, I could not have imagined that I would one day live in the busiest part of Seoul, with its shimmering skyline and whimsical sculptures that stand guard outside each skyscraper. It is still amazing to me how comfortable people my age look as they walk in and out of marbled lobbies with disposable coffee cups in hand and employee passes dangling from their necks.
My life before I went to New York was a small restaurant in a field of flowers and then an orphanage in the middle of a forest. A provincial arts school in the mountains.
When Sujin wrote to me to come live with her after my New York fellowship ended, I leapt at the suggestion. She had left the Loring Center shortly before I had and we’d corresponded avidly over the years, swapping stories of Seoul and New York. We did not talk about the past much.
Sujin had told me that as office-tels go, hers was very small—usually they are dense high-rises with hundreds of units—and I told her to keep an eye out for a room opening up, so that I could book my plane ticket as soon as she gave the word.
She had been worried that I would be let down after my New York experience, but I told her I love the building, and it’s true. It was built for the unfettered.
It’s mostly girls who live here—apart from a married couple who live in the apartment below us. All day long girls go in and out in clean, pretty outfits. I think I’m the only girl in the entire office-tel who doesn’t wear full makeup or have dyed or permed hair. The first time Ara saw my hair she gasped and she hasn’t been able to stop touching it whenever she sees me. I took it for flattery (usually people in the States would exclaim how much they envied my hair) until I saw her shaking her head sorrowfully at Sujin as she ran her fingers through it. So raw, she wrote in her small notepad.
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BECAUSE MY BEDROOM is next to the front door, which is next to the stairs, which echo loudly, each morning I hear the conversation of the married couple downstairs when they leave for the day. They are older, in their thirties, and the husband is desperately affectionate to the wife, who always sounds like she is somewhere far away.
“Wonna, do you want me to pick anything up from the store today?” he asks eagerly. “Are you craving anything in particular?” Three seconds later the wife responds, “What? Oh, whatever,” before they clickety-clack down the loudest stairs in the world.
Sometimes, I see the wife sitting on the steps when I come back late at night from the studio. She never raises her head as I walk past. It’s all very rude but I am used to her.
I listen to the rain a little while longer, trying to remember why I feel more agitated than normal this morning. Then it washes over me—today I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend, Hanbin, for lunch. At his parents’ house.
It is a momentous occasion of epic implications.
His mother will be there, and perhaps—and I can’t spend too long thinking about it as it makes me so anxious—his father too, who is usually busy playing golf or meeting famous people from other countries.
“I want to show you the Ishii, it finally came last week,” Hanbin said last night, when he came to pick me up from my studio at school. It seems indecent, somehow, that someone can just own an Ishii fish sculpture to put in their house, to touch if they want, whenever they want. The only times I have ever seen one were at the Gagosian in New York, from a distance, and at the National Gallery in D.C. after waiting two torturous hours in line with a full bladder because Ruby wanted to see it.
“And don’t worry, Mr. Choi will be there too,” he said when he saw my face. He was referring to his mother’s driver, who has picked us up several times before and has always been very polite to me. I looked at him in utter exasperation, my handsome, confident, clueless boy, who thinks that his family’s elderly driver pottering about his national treasure of a house would be the source of any comfort.
I stood up. “I need to go back to my work,” I said. We were in the empty café downstairs because I don’t allow him in my actual studio. He hasn’t seen anything I’ve been working on in the year that I have been back in Korea.
“Can I come see?” he said. “It’s so ridiculous that you won’t show me.”
I shook my head and frowned.
“No, not now,” I said. “Besides, my studio mate is there working too and she will get so upset if anyone else comes in.”
This was a lie, as the girl who shared my studio left months ago for a new fellowship at another university. And even if she had still been here, she would have loved nothing more than a chance to gossip with a good-looking older guy with lots of questions. She had been so chatty while she was working—she usually worked on fluorescent reproductions of Silla Dynasty crowns and belts that required no thinking, apparently—that I had been on the verge of complaining to the department head when she told me she’d been offered the fellowship, which awarded ten million won more than what we got at our current university. She had bragged with intent to sting, but when I understood she’d be leaving immediately, I enveloped her in such a heartfelt hug that she was visibly discomfited.
“I will see you tomorrow,” I said to Hanbin firmly.
“I’ll pick you up at your apartment?” he asked. He knew I didn’t like him coming to the office-tel either. I don’t want him around the other girls, especially my roommate.