My Wife's Outing, Part 1
"By the way, honey. I'm not joking — are you really okay with me seeing other men?"
"Yeah. You had a good time tonight, didn't you? My wife should get to enjoy herself too. Go to the clubs like you used to. Hit up a host bar now and then, like tonight, and blow off some steam."
"Hmmm~ You mean that, right? If you change your tune later, you're a real bastard. You know that?"
"Heh heh~ Got it. I won't take it back."
My wife shot me one last prim little glare, then buried her face in the pillow. Drenched in sweat and spent past the point of speech, the two of us dropped into sleep as if someone had switched us off.
The next day, our little transgression might as well have been a dream. My wife and I slipped back into our ordinary routine as if nothing had happened, and before long both of us were swallowed by work again, tearing through a stretch of days so hectic we barely had time to think. I buried myself in wrapping up the current project and mapping out the next one. She finished closing the sales on the old contract and pounded the pavement hunting down a new one.
The children's safety-simulation training system had been a success, so we pointed the next project in the same direction and started laying the groundwork. The conglomerate liaison who'd handled us on the previous job passed along a useful scrap of information: there was fresh investment money moving into VR education, and a professor — supposedly the foremost authority in the country on disaster-safety training — was looking for a company to build the system he had in mind.
That liaison was Assistant Manager Jang Hyeoncheol. He was three years younger than me, but rumors had a way of circulating that he belonged to the conglomerate's owning family, and the rumors were hard to dismiss. For a man whose title was only assistant manager, his word in the marketing-planning division was all but law, and he had enough pull to drop a major-corporation contract into the lap of a little outfit like ours, over the heads of any number of bigger firms.
I'd entertained him once at a hostess bar, and after that we grew close in a hurry. The small gap in our ages made it easy to find common ground, but watching him play, I could tell he was the type who chased women with real appetite. And no matter how well a conglomerate salary might pay, a man who tipped the girls with bank checks was not living on a paycheck. That was when I became sure the owning-family rumor was true.
For the sake of what came next, I made a point of keeping Jang happy. Then our project closed out successfully, and he offered to put in a word with the professor. I bit without a second's hesitation.
The man Jang introduced was Ahn Mansu. Professor Ahn, Jang hinted, had deep connections in the government and the state-owned enterprises; if we pulled this off and earned his approval, our standing would jump overnight. It was too good a chance to pass up.
My wife and I went to see him at once and sat through a meeting, but we did not walk out with the project. According to Professor Ahn, he was the one driving it, yes — but the money belonged to the university, which meant the thing had to go through an open bid. That was the principle.
A little rattled, I called Jang and laid out what had happened.
After that I sent my wife and Hiyeon to Professor Ahn whenever I could, folding a few of his private tastes in with the publicly available project specs, and we built the prototype around what they brought back. This job was bigger than the last one. If we landed it, the cash it would put in our hands would be serious money — enough that my wife called him every single morning just to stay in his good graces, working him with a diligence that bordered on devotion.
In the end we turned out a prototype that fit Professor Ahn like a glove. Jang arranged the entertainment, I treated the man to a night out, and the project was ours.
I handed my wife my card again and told her to go have some fun, a small thank-you for all the work. She took it, looked up at me, and smiled.
That night she hit the club first with Hiyeon, Hyejeong, and Minhee, shaking herself happily across the floor, then moved on to a host bar for a second round with the men. And once again, through Minhee, the photographs of my wife in the middle of all that found their way to my phone.
In the pictures Minhee sent this time, Yeonju was the same bright, laughing thing she'd been before, body moving to the music with real joy — but she hadn't paired off with anyone. That wasn't because my wife and her friends had suddenly discovered virtue. They already had a reservation at the host bar, and they were saving themselves for it.
Sure enough, the host-bar shots told a different story. Just like last time, each of them had a partner on her arm, and they all looked like they were having a wonderful time.
I looked closer — and stopped. Yeonju's partner looked like the same man from before. Had they seriously gone back to the same place?
Curiosity got the better of me. I sent Minhee a message.
They locked eyes...?
I set the phone down and lay back on the bed, picturing my wife out there enjoying herself with those men. What time would she come home tonight? Midnight was already well behind us; dawn was not far off, which meant the clubs would be closing soon. Even if she and her friends stayed at the host bar until the lights came up, two hours was a generous window — she ought to be walking through the door before then. If she ran later than that, I would have to start wondering whether she had left with her host for a room.
Which would she choose? The question left me interested and restless in equal measure. My chest would not settle.
Some time later I was still lying there, imagining my wife in the thick of it, when the keypad at the front door started beeping. She was back — much earlier than I had expected.
I pulled the blanket up and pretended to be asleep, making a point of it, listening to her punch in the code and come inside.
The bedroom door clicked. She turned on the light and began rustling around, doing something I couldn't see. Taking off her jewelry, I guessed, and changing out of her clothes. The moment she stepped into the room, a thick wave of perfume pushed into my nose.
My wife never wore perfume. The scent blooming so suddenly, so sharply, felt strange in a way I could not quite name.
She stripped down to nothing, then slipped into a thin little nightgown and carried the clothes she'd taken off into the bathroom. A moment later she came back and slid under the covers beside me. With her that close, the perfume was even heavier — and underneath it, I caught the clean, bright smell of soap.
It was the kind of soap they put out in motels. Which meant there was a real chance she had showered somewhere else before coming home. If I lined that up against the time I'd been texting Minhee, then somewhere in the space of a single hour my wife had found a reason to need a shower.
A married woman comes home from a night out and she has already washed. There was nothing else to think. I wanted to sit up and ask her everything, question after question — but another part of me knew that pretending I had noticed nothing would leave her free to keep going, with no hand on the reins. So I held my tongue, and I let myself fall asleep.
The next morning she was up before me. She made the usual simple toast, then came to wake me.
"Honey, get up. You need to wash."
"Mm......"
I got up the way I always did, bleary-eyed, washed quickly, changed, and sat down with her over the toast.
"Babe. You've got some dark circles under your eyes. Did you run yourself pretty hard last night?"
"Oh my god, really? No way~~"
She bolted for the bedroom the instant I said it, fixed her makeup, and came back out.
"Well? Do I look all right now?"
Whether she was doing it on purpose or not, there she was at the breakfast table, chin in both hands, batting those big eyes at me with the cute little pout of a girl-group idol.
"Pfft~ What's this all of a sudden? Aegyo first thing in the morning? Did something good happen?"
"Something good? Please. I just had a blast, that's all. Guess it worked some of the stress out."
She was unusually bright this morning, and my mouth itched with questions I was dying to ask. But I had already decided to watch and wait for a while, so I swallowed them and let it go.
Once she got to the office she put together a full-staff presentation wrapping up Professor Ahn's project, and just like that we were into the second job in earnest. Development went smoothly. My wife, who handled the business and the sales, managed the professor with practiced ease — a phone call here, a visit to his university there, the occasional meal to keep him warm.
A little over a month in, something in her began to change.
She started coming home later and later. More and more often she walked through the door wearing a heavy perfume that had not been on her when she left for work. If she had been out with her friends, the late hours would have made sense — but she had begun using outside business trips as an excuse to come in past midnight once or twice even during the week. On weekends she would say she was going to a hobby gathering, and sometimes she would vanish for the entire day.
When I asked what kind of gathering, she told me it was a workshop where housewives got together to make their own interior décor. And it was true that on the days she stayed out from morning to night, she always came back with something in her hands and found a place in the house to put it.
Still, it was not without its shadows. She used to leave for business in a neat, proper suit. Lately the hemlines had been creeping up. And the outfit she wore to this so-called hobby workshop was, on more than one occasion, an open-shoulder dress.
I am a man, but even I know that a craft circle of married housewives is not a place you dress like that.
I was certain by then that my wife was hiding something from me. I tried to get it out of Minhee, but Minhee said she had no idea what Yeonju had been doing with her days. Hiyeon, who was glued to her side, almost certainly knew — but if I asked Hiyeon a question like that, it would be a matter of hours before my wife heard that I had been digging into her.
I turned it over carefully. And at last I reached a conclusion. If I wanted the truth of my wife's private life, there was only one way left — the same method I had used before.