If I Had Your Face(27)

Nami is very intimidated by Miho, because Miho lived in America until recently and she has a real job at a university being an artist. Somehow, she gets paid to fuck around with paint and wood and clay all day. Most of the time, though, she seems to be just staring at the wall.

When Miho arrives, she sinks into a chair at our table with a big sigh and starts drumming her fingers on the table. They are truly disturbing—blisters all over with splotches of paint that has dried inside old cuts. And the state of her nails!—I don’t think she has ever had a gel manicure in her life. I shudder and Nami gapes at her.

“I’m so hungry,” says Miho. “Did you order any more food?” She twists her long ponytail around her wrist like a rope.

“When’s the last time you ate?” I ask. Miho will forget about food when she is working. I get jealous because it is so hard for me to diet but she doesn’t even spend a thought on her weight and remains impossibly slender.

“I think I ate this morning. And then I had, like, a pitcher of coffee every hour.”

I push some of the leftover fish cakes on my plate toward her and wave at the pocha owner, who comes rushing over from the counter.

“Hi, can we get an order of kimchijeon? And what else do you want?” I ask.

“Whatever you think is the best thing on the menu,” Miho tells the owner, who scratches his head. But she has already turned back to me and he hurries to the kitchen.

“Hanbin’s on his way too but it’s going to take at least an hour with the traffic. Don’t say anything about his mother, okay?” Miho’s tone prickles with warning. She is so sensitive when it comes to her boyfriend.

“Of course I won’t,” I say witheringly. “You think I’m crazy?”

“How have you been, Nami?” Miho turns to Nami and looks at her kindly. This is the third or fourth time they’ve met, and after every time, Miho tells me that Nami seems much too young to be having so much surgery. “Won’t she regret it later, when she’s older?”

For someone who grew up in an orphanage herself, Miho can be so na?ve. As if there’s a chance Nami is thinking about the future! She hasn’t seen her parents since she ran away at twelve. She lives one night at a time. Anyone with half a day of real life experience would be able to see that in a heartbeat. But Miho also thinks working in a room salon is something I do because I want to make a lot of money. She could never imagine the type of place Nami and I started in. Even though Nami has also moved out of Miari and into a third-tier room salon, she will continue to work until either she kills herself or they throw her away like a used dishrag.

It still amazes me—the na?veté of the women of this country. Especially the wives. What, exactly, do they think their men do between the hours of 8 P.M. and midnight every weeknight? Who do they think keeps these tens of thousands of room salons flush with money? And even the ones that do know—they pretend to be blind to the fact that their husbands pick out a different girl to fuck every week. They pretend so deeply that they actually forget.

I glare at Miho, who is looking so concerned. She will definitely be one of those clueless bats when she gets married.

“Miho’s boyfriend is a real chaebol,” I say to Nami.

Her eyes widen a little in alarm, and then they lapse back into glaze. She doesn’t even ask which company his family owns.

“Why do you think he likes you?” I ask Miho. I am genuinely curious. Miho is pretty but not to the level of perfection you can achieve with surgery, and she has no family or money. But for some reason this boy from one of this country’s richest families is dating her. It’s a mystery.

“Why, what do you mean by that?” she says. But she smiles to let me know that she is not actually offended.

“I don’t know, sometimes I think I know men, and then I think I can’t understand them at all,” I say.

“Oh, by the way, I told him you are my friend from middle school and that you’re a flight attendant,” says Miho, looking apologetic. “Can you just say you don’t want to talk about work? I don’t want you to have to lie too much.”

“Why a flight attendant? That’s very specific.” Although, of course, one couldn’t possibly introduce me as a room salon girl. Miho is the only person who knows, apart from the girls I work with and the men who pay for me.

“Well, you have these weird hours and you’re so pretty…” She trails off. “I couldn’t really think of anything else that entails that kind of thing. But now that I think about it, it’s kind of an elaborate lie.” Miho looks distressed. “I mean, what if he asks you about your flight routes and favorite countries?” she says, working herself up. “He’s so well-traveled.”

I shrug. “I’m okay with flight attendant,” I say. “I’ll just change the subject if I don’t know the answer to something he asks.” There was a time after I left Miari but before I joined Ajax that I briefly toyed with the idea of really becoming a flight attendant. I even enrolled in one of those flight attendant academies at Gangnam Station for two weeks, learning “how to bend the knees, not the hips” and all that crap. But then I found out how much their salaries are—even the ones who go to Middle Eastern airlines and make double the domestic salaries—and I quit immediately. Then I started working at Ajax because, well, that’s all I know how to do, really—gaze at men adoringly and drink their liquor.