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.
