—I should be the one crying.
There I was, staring at Gyu-ho as he cried. He was really ugly when he cried. Ugly but cute. Cute but pitiful. Funny that I was thinking he was the one who was pitiful. Gyu-ho swallowed his sobs as he spoke.
—You know, I like cats a lot. But I can’t adopt one. I have allergies.
—Why are you talking about this?
—You look like a fat and mean cat. I’m going to call you Fatty Catty from now on.
Like “Kylie,” kind of a weird nickname. But I still liked it.
?
After a long time had gone by, on a night when we were lying in bed together, I asked Gyu-ho a question. Why, despite Kylie, did he decide to go out with me?
—Because, whatever it was or wasn’t, you were you.
Because, whatever it was or wasn’t—not because of it or despite it—I was me. I liked what he said so much I kept savoring it under my breath.
—Whatever it was or wasn’t.
?
When I announced that Gyu-ho and I were exclusive, the ones most overjoyed about it were the T-aras.
—Wow!
—Congratulations.
—Does this mean we enter the club for free?
—And do we get free drinks?
Can you believe those bitches?
2.
The first person between the two of us to get a proper job was Gyu-ho. Once he finished his clinical training, he immediately got several job offers at plastic surgery franchises and even at a urologist’s clinic specializing in penis enlargement in the fancy Sinsa-dong neighborhood. A feat, considering how difficult it was to find work these days. Gyu-ho did have a reputation for being hardworking and resilient, but he was a little bit of a dunce in terms of planning out his life or making important decisions. Following my advice, he took the penis enlargement clinic job. And I turned out to be correct because he found out the work was easy and the pay high compared to the jobs taken by other people in his nursing school cohort.
The whole time we were together, Gyu-ho would ask me:
—Fatty Catty, what doing? Playing?
I surmised it was some form of Jeju dialect, cutting off the conjugations, which made me sigh and present him with the options most appropriate to his and our circumstances, like I was a mother bird digesting his food for him. I wasn’t great at the daily stuff like cleaning the apartment or recycling, but I was pretty good at thinking through the big decisions. Of course, a monk can’t shave his own head, as the saying goes, and my own pathfinding in life was a mess, getting rejected from a hundred companies I’d applied to and feeling like the whole world had turned its back on me. But all the same, I didn’t really feel disappointed, let alone despairing, having experienced the universal truth that even if I’d managed to beat the odds and land somewhere, my life wouldn’t improve that much anyway. And it went the same for relationships as well, giving me no swelling of the heart or great expectations when it came to our future together. And maybe that was the secret to our longevity.
Despite the drama of our beginnings, our actual relationship was perfectly mundane to the point of being yawn-inducing. But we didn’t care. Because whatever it was or wasn’t, we were in a relationship.
It became a habit of Gyu-ho’s to come sleep at my place after his weekend shift at the club. He treaded softly because he knew I was a light sleeper and washed only his face before creeping under the covers and falling asleep in ten seconds. I woke, despite the faintness of the sounds he made, and nestled my nose up to the back of his head, where I could smell the tobacco in his hair or on his forehead as I tried to get back to sleep.
We’d get up late in the afternoon, boil ourselves some bean sprout or kimchi stew, and go out. I never would have ventured from the bed (especially not to go anywhere with crowds) unless someone told me to, while Gyu-ho felt caged in when he was in one place for too long. I couldn’t understand how he had changed me, but thanks to him, I was now seeing the world.
The course of our dates followed the flow of Seoul’s gentrification. The galleries of Samcheong-dong and Bukchon, Serosugil, near where Gyu-ho worked, and past Bogwang-dong, Mangwon-dong, Haebangchon, and Seongsu-dong . . . We each gained over ten pounds while we were together. Gyu-ho mostly picked up the check, for the sake of his minimum-wage, dirt-poor boyfriend. And whenever he told me to get famous soon and pay him back, I’d always answer with a boisterous “Of course!” But we both knew that was never going to happen.
?
Gyu-ho came home one day with a piece of Australian beef to celebrate his promotion to Head of Consultations. What kind of two-bit operation must this clinic be to have given him a promotion already, I mused out loud as I cooked the beef. Hearing him talk about it, Head of Consultations didn’t seem like it was that big a job, but the chief at the clinic did seem to have taken a liking to Gyu-ho. According to him, he was fond of Gyu-ho for not being like kids these days.
—What does he mean by me not being like kids these days?
—It means you’re country as fuck.
I could tell what that doctor was thinking. Gyu-ho’s frugality with words, his steadfast personality, combined with the looks of a juvenile delinquent—a combination that, oddly enough, inspired trust in his character. I should know, since that was exactly what attracted me to him as well.
Around the end of Grease’s run, I happened to stumble into a job at a medium-size shipping company. A company willing to pay me more than I was worth, to be honest, but there was one problem: the physical, the last formality in the hiring process. This being a relatively large corporation, they had subcontracted their physical exam to a hospital that could run full blood work panels. The university hospital doctor from whom I got my prescriptions assured me that it was illegal for them to test for the virus without my consent. But I couldn’t quite take to heart what he was saying or shake off my sense of dread. Lo and behold, according to my Internet searches, someone had had his forthcoming employment contract at a major chaebol company canceled because of precisely what I was fearing. Seeing me worrying, Gyu-ho came up with a plan.
—I’ll go instead. We have the same blood type.
In the beginning of our relationship he had asked for all sorts of stupid info like my blood type and astrological signs, saying he wanted to see if we were compatible—who knew that stuff would come in handy now? Not only did we have similar height and weight, but we were both type AB. Not to mention that people who didn’t know us often had a hard time telling us apart (although I couldn’t for the life of me understand why). A situation that was exacerbated when we both put on weight. Anyway, good for us, it was worth a shot. We decided to send him out instead of me. On the day of the exam, for which he took my citizens’ registration ID with him, I was on pins and needles all day, worried that he’d do something stupid to blow his cover.
Easy as pie.