—So what are you going to do about it?
I couldn’t control the anger in my voice. As if she hadn’t expected my reaction, Jaehee stood motionless with her head still bowed and her mouth slightly open. I wondered why my voice was shaking so much and realized: I really was angry. Even though we’d done worse things to each other. I’d dragged her drunk ass home kicking and screaming more than once, and another time she had peed on the bathroom floor by mistake, after which I had to toss her ruined stockings and scrub the floor with bleach. Then she’d wake up rubbing her eyes and say she was sorry, to which my only answer would be to give her a slap on the back and laugh out loud. But this time, I was incensed.
Betrayal.
That was something I wasn’t used to feeling, given how little I expected of others.
It was funny if I thought about it. All Jaehee had done was tell the truth. Before that moment, I didn’t have many hang-ups about being outed. For someone who would get drunk and immediately start kissing men in the middle of the street, it would be ridiculous to think there would be no rumors about my sexuality. But thinking of how my secret had been used as a shield in Jaehee’s relationship with her boyfriend was hard to accept. I didn’t care if people went around gossiping about me, but the thought of Jaehee being one of those people was intolerable. Everyone else could say whatever they wanted about me, but Jaehee should’ve kept her mouth shut.
Because she was Jaehee.
The things she and I shared, stories that belonged to just the two of us—I didn’t want other people to know them. I believed our relationship was solely our own. Forever. So I said what I had to say.
—Don’t call me.
I packed up and moved right back into my mother’s apartment in the Jamsil-dong without even understanding why I’d had such an extreme reaction.
Jaehee called me a few times after, but I didn’t pick up. I sent K3 a message saying I needed to think about our relationship more. He replied that he couldn’t comprehend why I was always running away from him, that it was truly over between us, but every morning as the sun rose he’d drunkenly text me lines about love (plagiarized from somewhere, no doubt), misspellings and all. Jaehee on occasion sent messages saying she understood how I felt, but I had no idea what she was claiming to understand. My thoughts grew more and more poisonous in my brain, but those thoughts themselves also felt absurd to me, so I lay grinning in my childhood bed in the dark.
?
While living in my parents’ apartment, I wrote short stories. It was there that I became a writer.
Me, Jaehee, the men we met, the stories about our relationship, I mixed everything together willy-nilly, churning out my stories. I hadn’t written them to show anyone. It just so happened that I was having trouble falling asleep and needed something to do, and now that I had no one to talk to all night, the thing I wanted more than anything else was to ramble on about nothing to someone. When I wrote short stories about slutty gays and lost dogs, I didn’t exactly feel any satisfaction or sense of achievement. It’s just that the stories I wrote and the nights I spent talking to Jaehee felt similar. I submitted a couple of the stories to a writing contest without thinking too much about what I was doing. I ended up winning.
I called Jaehee to tell her the news. Three months had passed since I’d last talked to her. Jaehee said hi as if I’d called her just three hours before, and as soon as she heard I’d won, she burst into tears. How very you, I thought, as I let her cry for about three minutes then read her the judges’ comments. An elder novelist talked about how worried he was that my work veered into “tabloid territory.” When Jaehee heard that line, she couldn’t stop laughing. I used part of the prize money to buy Jaehee a Chanel lambskin bag.
I was notified of K3’s death around that time. Car accident. The K3 he’d loved so much ended up becoming his coffin. Only when I heard the news did I realize I’d imagined a long stretch of time ahead where we were an us. This was the last line he sent me:
If obsession isn’t love, I have never loved.
?
After the funeral, I moved back into Jaehee’s apartment and things seemed to return to the way they were. Jaehee stocked the freezer with blueberries just like she used to. I bought some Marlboro Reds, but she told me not to bother anymore—after cigarette prices went up, she and her boyfriend both decided to quit. Of course they did. The cigarettes I bought remained frozen and untouched.
Just like old times, we talked about our days before we went to sleep. I went on meeting the Man of the Day, and Jaehee and her boyfriend continued to avoid the Roommate/Jieun issue like it was a flagged landmine. They seemed to have decided it was like living with an embarrassing family member. But whenever he was drunk, Jaehee’s boyfriend would say something along these lines:
—You do know that this situation would be unacceptable to anyone else.
Who cared? I expected them to break up one day, but the boyfriend had more stamina than I thought. Jaehee said he was more down-to-earth than anyone else she had met, and it was lovely that he always listened to what she had to say.
—He does everything I suggest, like a pet dog.
He had no weird habits, and unlike her other men, he didn’t find her drinking tiresome, going so far as to joke that it was like meeting a new woman every night. (Sure it was.)
Jaehee would always fall asleep before midnight. Her work must’ve been draining, because she came home after ten every night and lay around the apartment like a deflated balloon, but if I messaged her saying I was close to scoring and was staying out, she’d reply like a mother waiting up for her child:
Try not to pick one who’ll die before you this time.
I’ll do my best.
?
Right around then, Jaehee’s boyfriend proposed to her, and she said yes. They had been going out for three years. When I heard the news, I remarked that the hyung seemed like a nice guy and all but had no eye for women. Jaehee replied, “I know, right?” And added:
—He said he loved how I would make him laugh for the rest of his life.
I hoped he didn’t end up getting slapped in the back of his head for laughing so much.
But his words did make me realize that he was seeing in her the same qualities I loved. Jaehee wasn’t pretty or kind, but she was definitely funny.
Still, it wasn’t as if that hyung was that old—why was he in such a hurry to marry? Because he was such a congenitally down-to-earth person? From what I knew, he had an older sister who hadn’t married yet . . . It did cross my mind that Jaehee’s biologically male roommate may have had something to do with his decision to marry, but I decided not to think too much along those lines. Or really to think about anything that had to do with me. An excess of self-awareness being a disease in itself . . .
4.