If I Had Your Face(50)
“It has recently come to my attention—actually, yesterday, when one of the women who work with your mother had her hair permed—that my inquiring about you and how you are doing in Seoul has been misconstrued as something resembling romantic attention, especially since, well, as I am sure you know, the situation with my wife,” he says quietly, looking at the floor. “It has made me quite miserable to think that people were thinking that about me, but I did not know how to set things right. This is why I was so astonished to find you and your friends looking straight at me through the window just now, because I had been pondering how to rectify matters.”
His phone rings and he fishes it out of his pocket. “Lawyer Ko” lights up the screen and he silences it, grimacing, before his eyes return to me. He takes a deep breath.
“No matter how dark things get for me, the memory that I saved a life—that my life has mattered—has been something I can cling to,” he says with a catch in his voice. “It is, perhaps, the only lifeline that I possess. And I am so grateful that I can tell you this. What your life means to your parents—you will realize it one day, when you have your own children.”
* * *
—
LATER, WHEN SUJIN and Miho finally emerge from the bakery carrying paper bags of free bread and cakes that Hyehwa has clearly piled upon them, I am sitting on the curb looking up at the cloudless wintry sky and wondering if I am a happier person than I was twenty minutes ago, when I did not know what I know now.
“Hey! So did he propose?” asks Sujin, as she breaks off a piece of choux cream pie and feeds it to me. It is cold and sweet and I immediately hold out my hand for more.
“I can’t believe someone our age is getting married,” says Miho, looking back at the bakery, where I see a trim Hyehwa organizing cake slices through the cloudy glass window. “Do you want to go in there and say hello?” she asks. I shake my head.
“I’m sorry, but getting married in your twenties is just ridiculous,” says Sujin in an exaggerated hushed voice. “What a fool.”
They quarrel over whether we will all head to the Loring Center now together, or if Sujin will just return to the Big House by herself.
“You think Ara wants to be here? Now we’re doing what you don’t want to do, and you better just suck it up,” says Miho, reaching out and giving Sujin a little poke. Loading the bags full of bread onto the handlebars, Sujin exhales a sigh of resignation and says the bread and cakes better be going to the children and not a loaf to the teachers. And with that, the three of us hop on our creaking, frozen bicycles and start off toward the Loring Center, each of us grasping at our own shifting versions of the past.
Kyuri
Bruce has not been to the room salon for almost three weeks now. And the last two times he was here he sat me alongside fat, foreign investors, clearly to punish me. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from finding out about his engagement, but Madam has been commenting on his absence and I need her to shut her face. I have tried texting him, but he doesn’t even respond. The bastard.
I don’t know what possesses me, but when the last Sunday of the month rolls around, I tell Sujin that I am going to treat her to dinner at Seul-kuk, at the Reign Hotel, to celebrate the holiday. Independence Movement Day has been looming for weeks—I have been staring at the calendar, waiting for the days to pass.
It takes a few attempts to convince her to go, because you can still see the stitches on her puffy eyelids and the lower half of her face looks blown up, like a sad, old balloon. I say she looks pretty and no one will even notice.
“I still can’t chew that well,” she says slowly, shaking her head. “My teeth are not aligned. And I still feel so self-conscious on the street even with a mask.”
“They have the best jajangmyeon—the noodles are going to be so soft,” I say instead. “And there’s soup. So many different kinds of soup. Shark fin soup. Have you ever had real shark fin soup?”
“They don’t sell that anymore. And I would never eat the fin of a poor shark,” says Sujin. “And isn’t Seul-kuk the most expensive Chinese restaurant in the entire country? One of my clients from the nail salon was talking about that place—a bowl of jajangmyeon is almost forty thousand won there! Kyuri, you can’t be serious. You’re usually so careful with money!” Her eyes are round in her swollen face.
“Look, I want to see if it’s as good as they say on TV, okay? Are you coming or not?”
When we show up at the Reign Hotel a little before seven and take the elevator to the second floor—Sujin having taken an hour to get dressed, even with my help and my accessories—the restaurant is full and the host asks us to wait in the hall. And so we do, settling ourselves in the red silk chairs by the entrance, my head whipping around whenever I hear the ping of an elevator.
“What’s wrong with you?” hisses Sujin, but then I see a group arriving that must be them. A family of four, very dressed up, faces taut. The mother, fussy-looking in a lime green knit two-piece with a parrot-shaped sparkling brooch on the lapel, is clucking like a hen and picking lint off the father’s suit as he brushes her away. The brother looks pleasant and tall, the girl is wearing a conservative blush-colored long-sleeved dress and carrying a matching tweed Chanel bag from two seasons ago. She’s pretty, in a washed-out way, but completely flat-chested—and looks much younger than I would have guessed. Bruce constantly tells me how much he adores my breasts. “I fantasize about them at the office,” he says. “I get delirious thinking about tickling your nipples until they get hard.”