I sighed when I read his text message.
In the end, with two more performances to go before the curtains came down on Grease, I was able to enter the shipping company’s training center. That Grease production, which had started with a triple-casting and shrunk to the two main principals with the narrowest vocal ranges, ended with over two hundred programs still unsold.
?
Even after he got a nursing job, Gyu-ho did not quit bartending. His brother’s vile personality was getting worse by the minute as he prepared for his licensing exams, and Gyu-ho was determined to move out as soon as he had saved enough for a rental deposit. Not only did he work five days a week at his day job, he did two nights at the club and even took a Saturday-morning shift at the clinic every other week. Our dates, which used to happen once or twice a week, shrank to once or twice a month. But at least he came to sleep at my place more often, collapsing into bed like he would never get up again. Now that we both had incomes, we could have meals at nicer places, and when we wanted to feel fancy we would book a room at a Seoul hotel. We’d drop a bath bomb into the tub, sit in the bubbles sipping champagne, never missing the opportunity to take selfies to upload on Instagram or Facebook, and then put on the hotel bathrobes and stare out at the city at night—all the usual things other people did. Of course, we didn’t do the one most important thing. Or should I say, we couldn’t? Gyu-ho would invariably, every single time, go limp as soon as he put on a condom, and if I became the one to put it on, he would bleed, and so we tried Viagra, but it gave us indigestion and blocked our noses. The panoply of medicine I had to take in the morning was already more than enough, including the digestive aids and liver protection pills. Moments like these were when Kylie, who was usually such a faint presence I could barely sense her, would suddenly appear and interfere with my life. But despite this, I decided to think of us as a completely ordinary couple of three years and not get all maudlin over it. Sometimes, I found Viagra generics or ejaculation delay medication in Gyu-ho’s pockets. He said they were samples sent from pharmaceutical companies. They’re swimming in this kind of stuff. Of course they were. But why was he carrying these things in his pocket? And I would think of the time Gyu-ho went to Japan alone. “Have lots of affairs, I’m fine.” I was the one to say that. I had Kylie, and knew all too well that Gyu-ho didn’t get to do everything he wanted to do because of her. I didn’t want to be naive about it. I could keep Gyu-ho with me by not believing in anything. I could protect myself that way. It was all right. You can’t have everything in life.
Kylie was my burden and mine alone.
?
Gyu-ho, who’d said he had a rare day off during the week and was going to take a nap at home, showed up at my door completely incensed.
—What happened?
—I can’t live with that bastard anymore.
That bastard who was his hyung, who only existed at that point to eat up the food Gyu-ho prepared, had begun to complain that Gyu-ho wasn’t cooking enough because of his new job at the clinic. When Gyu-ho shot back at him, the bastard apparently opened the fridge and got out eggs to throw at him. I could feel my own face growing red with rage just hearing about it. There was still some yellow egg yolk on Gyu-ho’s neck.
—Hey, let’s call a truck.
And there went Gyu-ho and I, straight to Incheon together. It took two hours to get there by subway. To think he took this route both ways every day, for work and to come to my house. Thinking how we’d been together for seven hundred days but I’d never visited him at his place made me feel somewhat guilty. When we got out of the station and onto a bus, I heard an oddly familiar jingle playing on the radio: “Let’s go together to You Sulhee, You Sulhee Nursing Academy, then it’s off to nursing college, for you and me.” Our eyes met and I tried not to laugh.
His bastard hyung was not home, he was probably off somewhere stuffing his face, and he hadn’t cleaned up the smashed eggs in front of the fridge. I told Gyu-ho to pack his bag fast. He grabbed his clothes, two pairs of shoes, and a laptop. Everything fit into a large wheeled trunk.
—Is that it?
—Yeah. Plus the mattress I bought with my own money.
That was the extent of his share in that house. The moving truck that we had rented arrived just then, and Gyu-ho and I with our not-great backs managed to haul the super-single mattress onto the truck, groaning all the way.
Cold stars appeared in the skies that evening, and we crammed into the narrow passenger seat together in the truck, exchanging body heat through our thighs as we sped down the highway toward home. To a place that was no longer my apartment, but our apartment. The orange road lit up by streetlamps was making me tear up, and the city felt as if it were beginning anew.
Of course, that feeling did not last long. Try as we might, we couldn’t figure out how to make Gyu-ho’s mattress fit in my studio apartment. We ended up putting it in an awkward position by the sliding balcony doors, stepping on the mattress and pillows whenever we wanted to go out to the balcony. After four days of sleeping with me in my bed, Gyu-ho declared that my snoring was too loud and went to go to sleep on his own old mattress. Cold air seeped through the doors. Gyu-ho said that with the electric blanket on, his body would be warm but his nose cold, which he seemed to find hilarious.
Not long after he moved in, Gyu-ho quit bartending. He said he was feeling too tired to keep doing it, but I had a feeling it was because he no longer felt the need to work so hard for a rental deposit anymore. On his last night at work, the club owner gave him two bottles of Mo?t & Chandon. Gyu-ho’s friends and mine gathered at a table to drink it up and celebrate.
3.
Once we started living together, we began to argue often. Not over anything big—just the usual stuff that comes from differences in lifestyles.
I considered drying laundry a life-or-death situation, which meant not only did I shake each piece of laundry several times before hanging it on the drying rack to prevent wrinkles, I also maintained a bit of space between each item, opened all the windows of the house, and even had a fan blowing on the clothes. As for Gyu-ho, he would randomly—I truly felt that “randomly” was the only word for it—toss the laundry on the rack and keep the windows shut so the house would end up like a sauna. These slow-drying clothes inevitably developed a sour smell. No matter how many times I nagged him, he never hung them properly, which is what compelled me to throw one of my T-shirts at his face after I got home from work.
—Look! Our clothes smell like rags!
—You’re just smelling your own dirty face.