“Look at this,” she added, showing me her phone; she’d taken photos of his student ID and driver’s license. His address was in Gaepo-dong, near Gangnam. Another detail caught my eye.
—Damn. He lied to me about his age.
The ID said he was also part of the entering class of ’06.
—If he comes back here, we can pay him a return visit in Gaepo-dong.
I hugged Jaehee tight. My devil, my savior, my Jaehee.
In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question:
—Why were we born this way?
—Who knows?
?
Throughout this drama, a rumor went around our department about how while we were living together, Jaehee had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. All technically true, which made Jaehee and me marvel at the omniscient wonders of collective intelligence. We were all seniors now anyway, too busy looking for a way to make a living, and such rumors hardly affected the author or the subject of the rumor.
Jaehee overcame her characteristic lack of common sense and maintained good grades while reducing the number of times she got drunk in a week from eight to three, and thus returned to the land of the living. I sat in French literature classes nodding off to geriatric professors blabbering on about love, looked every night for someone to have sex with, and if that didn’t work out, sat at home waiting for Jaehee like one of Jeju Island’s petrified-rock fishermen’s wives of myth, pouring myself a bowl of frozen blueberries. If I ate them with my fingers, my fingers turned purple. For some reason, I found this hilarious.
In the first semester of her senior year, Jaehee defied her job-market handicap of being a female humanities major and scored a job at a large electronics company. During the month she left home to spend at the company training center, I was so bored I almost died. Without Jaehee, there was no one to drink with, have stupid conversations with, or just kill time with. The nights became too long, which got me doing what was so unlike me: poring over the list of men I’d dumped. The engineering student had just got a job at an automobile company and had bought a Kia K3 and (this part is important) wanted any excuse whatsoever to take it out for a drive on the weekends, which suited me fine as well. I hadn’t been trying to get back together with him after the whole shouting-from-the-street fiasco, but riding around in that K3 to N Tower and Sanjeong Lake made it seem like we were doing something that resembled coupledom. We’d already had sex enough times for my body to feel like his and his mine, really nothing new there, but we both had low self-esteem, regularly felt suicidal compulsions, were bullied as kids, and pretentiously enjoyed arty films and books while hating basic crap like Haruki Murakami, Hong Sangsoo, French literature, and Audis, all of which made us end up thinking we were something special as a pair.
Jaehee was also not one to waste time, and she managed to find a boyfriend in her corporate cohort who was three years older than her. I thought she would play around with him for a while and dump him, but I realized she was serious about him when, around the three-month mark, she officially invited me to have dinner with them.
—Since it would be weird if you were a third wheel at the dinner, bring your boyfriend.
—He’s not my boyfriend.
—Fine. The K3 guy.
—No. That’s even weirder. What am I going to introduce him to your boyfriend as?
—Would you quit snapping back at me for a second and just come? It’ll be my treat.
—What’s the treat?
The first part of the evening was at a fancy Korean restaurant in Hannam-dong. Jaehee’s boyfriend was told that we were friends who had met at a board game club. Her boyfriend was different from the previous ones. He did not style himself an artist or regularly slap on a bunch of new tattoos (that he would only be embarrassed about in a year), nor did he have a cunning look in his eye, nor, according to my sixth sense, did he seem to have a big dick. But he had a kind of stability that Jaehee and I didn’t have, a fundamental optimism toward life. When I heard he had graduated from Seoul National University Engineering and was working as a researcher in semiconductors, my thumbs tapped out a text to Jaehee from under the table.
I thought you said you were never dealing with shits from SNU.
Do you think our lives would look like this if our plans always worked out?
She was so right that I kept saying things to her boyfriend like “Damn, hyungnim,” “You are so right,” “You are so amazingly clever”—inane compliments like that. K3, being an engineer, had lots in common with this semiconductor specialist, and they seemed to get along, going on and on about the different cultures of their companies and technical jargon about their research. Bored with their conversation, I regaled them with tales of Jaehee’s life in college, bowdlerized for this mainstream audience, of course. The dinner remains in my mind a memory of perfect propriety and respectability.
3.
Then last summer, Jaehee’s boyfriend began thinking something was funny about Jieun.
—Hey Jaehee, is your roommate Jieun a cat?
—What? What are you talking about, oppa?
—She seems a little strange. Why is she always at home? Why haven’t you ever introduced us? Why have I never heard her voice? And there are no photos of you together. Even a cat meows on occasion. Why haven’t I ever heard her make a sound?
Thank God the relationships Jaehee had in the past were short-lived, because anyone with half a brain would’ve had the same suspicion. He had suggested inviting Jieun to dinner many times, but Jaehee kept saying she was shy or making up some other excuse, so of course, at some point, he would realize it was strange.
If only Jaehee could lie a bit more convincingly, then all of our lives would’ve been easier. Instead, the two had their first big fight ever in the year they’d been together. Bad at lying, Jaehee struggled to make up different excuses before being cornered into confessing that her “roommate Jieun” was actually a man her age. And that the roommate in question liked men.
—So, oppa, he’s basically a girl. It’s just like I’m living with Jieun.
—That’s not the same thing! He’s a man, a man is living with a woman.
Jaehee came home that evening and told me about it, her head bowed low.
—I’m really sorry. I wasn’t trying to let things get this way. But they have.