Chapter Text
Hee-joo was not fucking her husband. Zero seductions were happening in her bedroom except those of love stories. A great scholar of all manner of coupling, sweet, ill-fated, passionate, sad, angsty or sexy, her heart supports a steady diet of k-dramas and novels, but her winter favorite was romantic, old black and white films, especially ones from Italy in the 1960s. In her college dorm room, she hung a poster of La Fille A La Valise, an obscure film starring the young and impossibly beautiful Claudia Cardinale, found in a second-hand shop at an age when hanging a poster of a film one only pretends to have seen counts as image curation. She thinks gracefully toward that young version of herself, and eventually did find a way to stream that particular flick. When a film festival contacted her firm seeking a sign language interpreter, Hee-joo volunteered. The festival advanced a press copy of the screening of an erotic French film.
One evening Sa-eon is expected late, so she dresses in leggings and an oversized hoodie. Sitting in butterfly pose in front of the tv, she stations her remote and glass of wine near a bowl of popcorn. After adjusting subtitles, the opening credits blare an alto saxophone, it’s one part cheesy, one part sexy noir. She doesn’t hear Sa-eon’s keys unlock the door. He pads in quietly and stands unobserved in the dimmed living room.
From the edge of the room, he watches her. Hair in a high pile and cheeks already flushed from the couple of beers she had at tonight’s team dinner, it gives a youthful vitality to her looks. He is still not used to sharing his space with her. He smiles quickly to himself then adjusts his expression to neutral. “I’m home.”
Her shoulders jump at his voice. She pauses the tv and reaches her phone to type, “You scared me!!! Don’t sneak! I thought you were going to be late.”
“Sorry to scare you. My meeting was postponed.”
“Did you eat? I just started watching this movie I’m to sign at a film festival. Join me.”
“Oh. Um…
“I have popcorn! And wine! #GirlDinner”
“No wine on an empty stomach. Start your movie. I’ll make food.”
After that first week’s cold, preemptive rejection, she needed time to lick her wounds; however, maybe she needn’t feel so rejected. It’s not the first time she wondered what would motivate this beautiful man to accept an arranged marriage. Surely he would have had girls throwing themselves at his feet, rich, beautiful girls, accomplished and connected. There was no limit to his options. An arranged marriage with the spare Hong daughter? Hee-joo knows she lacks the icy beauty of her sister, In-A, but she considers herself cute. Maybe cute isn’t his type? Or maybe he’s not into girls. Maybe he’s into boys, but his political family would forbid it or worse disown him. That HAS to be it. And maybe she just needs to signal to him that she is a safe space to be authentic. If he comes out of the closet, they can be friends. She could accept a lavender marriage. It would settle her romantic feelings to know, once and for all, those feelings would not be reciprocated. Her buzzy punch drunk brain is decided. It’s time to push this issue.
What better way to press for confirmation than with a spicy film, La Piscine, with the beautiful Alain Delon. She presses play. The camera Alain Delon focuses on him, shirtless and tan next to a pool.
Sa-eon is busy making the food, but he looks up at the screen from time to time. Hee-joo is watching his reaction which is inscrutable. Finally, Sa-eon carries the pot with a trivet and an empty glass to the coffee table. She pours him some wine. Hee-joo uses the pot lid as a plate. They sit beside each other with their backs against the sofa and their legs under the coffee table. Tonight is the most approachable he’s behaved since she moved in.
Hee-joo types, “Young Alain Delon was gorgeous, don’t you agree?”
Sa-eon looks over his wine glass at her a little sideways as if he can’t make out why she is asking. “Sure,” but his inflection forms a question.
“I find him so attractive. Do you?”
“Do you mean her? She’s pretty I guess.”
“He gives good face.”
“He gives good face? What does that even mean?”
“You know. Face card never declines.”
Sa-eon is a serious man and spends almost all his time productively, he doesn’t understand this colloquialism. Hee-joo is just going to address it directly.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Maybe”
“You’re gay, right? It’s okay. I’m an ally. I can be your safe space.”
He reads her message off her phone out loud. “Pfff. Are you drunk? You think I’m gay! What makes you think I’m gay?”
She types, erases, types, erases, then looks at him with an I-Don’t-Know shrug.
“Is this…wait. Wait! Hee-joo, is this about what I said to you about not thinking of us as a couple? You think that because I said that I must not like women? That is presuming a lot, don’t you think? I like women. Ok? I don’t want you thinking we’re a couple because we’re not a couple. We never will be,” the last line drops softly.
Hee-joo doesn’t know whether she wants to cry or laugh, so instead she pours out the remaining wine and drinks it down.
“Hey! Easy, Hee-joo! You’ll make yourself sick drinking so fast.”
“In-A is NEVER coming back. I know she won’t. Sorry to break your heart,” she types.
“In-A? What’s In-A got to do with anything?”
“She left you. I know she’s beautiful and everyone loves her….”
“I don’t. I never did,” he interrupts.
“Why did you marry me?”
“Because I had to.”
“You had to?”
“Yes. Why did you marry me?”
“Because I had to.
“Because your mother told you to.”
“Sure because of my mother. And because I wanted to.”
Sa-eon quickly sucks in air before saying, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Want. Just don’t want. Don’t want me. This. This isn’t real. None of this,” he gestures at the apartment, “is real.”
“It seems real. We signed a REAL marriage contract….it could be real.”
“It can’t.”
“Why can’t it?”
“It just can’t.”
Sa-eon rises from the floor leaving his dinner and wine, goes to his room, closing the door on the conversation.
She begins to internalize what should’ve been patently obvious, that it was time to mourn her dying hope. In that moment, a seed of anger plants itself in her big, open fertile heart.