The Beginning of the End
One day, while I was rolling around on the bed, I finally got a call from my sister-in-law saying they were about to leave. I jumped up in a hurry, washed my face, and headed out of the house with my wife.
We did what we always did: ate together as usual, grabbed coffee to go, bought a dessert the women liked, and came back to our place.
“Unnie, don’t you miss Yoon-sung?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I don’t think I’d ever be able to let him go…”
“I guess I’m not much of a mother, then. Since Yoon-sung went to America, it’s been easier, in a way. I miss him, sure, but we video call often, and if I really want to see him, I can just go to the States.”
She had gotten pregnant soon after starting her first job, then returned to work after maternity leave and had met me while struggling to get back on her feet. Juggling child care and office life must have been exhausting for her.
In the end, she quit her job and devoted herself to raising our son, but for his education we decided to send him to the United States, and a little while ago we had put him in the care of my wife’s aunt there.
At first she had considered going with him, but her aunt would probably have been uncomfortable with that, and in the end, after her brother said he couldn’t just be left behind alone, we sent only the child to America.
“Are you okay, Woo-min?”
“With what?”
“So-hee stopping the IVF.”
“Ah, I’m fine. I’ve been saying I was fine for ages. So-hee was the one who wanted to do it, so we only went through with it because of her.”
“Still… men do tend to want children, you know.”
“I don’t care. Some people even choose to be DINKs on purpose. For me, it’s enough if So-hee and I can just travel around and have a good time together.”
“Hmm… that’s true now, but the problem comes later, doesn’t it?”
“No, really. If you listen to other people talking about their kids, sure, they say it’s nice, but mostly it’s just worry after worry. And when you hear older people talk, they still have to keep taking care of them even when they’re old…”
“Well, as long as the two of you are fine with it… I’ll keep hanging out with you and my brother a lot then.”
My sister-in-law hooked her arm through mine and rubbed her cheek against my shoulder, but with my brother-in-law right there, that was a little hard to ignore.
“Hey… your husband’s right here.”
“Come on, what’s the big deal? My brother doesn’t care at all, do you, honey?”
“Hahaha, it’s nice to see you two getting along.” Then, turning to me, he said, “Woo-min, do you mind if I use the computer for a bit? I’ve got some emails to check, and they’d probably be too long to read on my phone.”
“Oh, of course.”
As a writer, he must have been receiving and sending all sorts of long messages, so I figured the small screen would be inconvenient.
Without thinking much of it, I went to the computer room, turned on the computer, and told him to take his time before drifting back into conversation with the two sisters.
By the time he finally came out of the room, more than two hours had passed.
We’d been so absorbed in talking that I had no idea time had gone by so fast.
After my sister-in-law’s family left, evening had come, and I was about to just play some games when I turned on the computer and noticed there had been some video playback activity.
I remembered that the night before I’d been watching porn late and hadn’t cleared the history. A wave of anxiety hit me, wondering if my brother-in-law had seen it, but since it was him and not my wife, I didn’t care all that much.
It was a few days later, around the time I was getting off work, when he called me.
Riiing.
“Yes, Brother-in-law.”
“Hey, Woo-min. Got plans after work today?”
“Nope. Nothing. Drinks?”
“Hahaha, I knew you’d get exactly what I wanted. I’ll head over near your office by quitting time. I’m out and about for work myself, so let’s just go from there in my car. I found a good place.”
“Oh, nice. I should probably tell them I’m going out drinking with you and will be late.”
“Yeah, do that. They probably already know. I told my wife on the way out that I might be having a drink with you.”
“Okay. Call me when you get close. I’ll head down.”
“Got it.”
Aside from Jung-hoon, my boss and best friend, the person I probably met most often was my older brother-in-law, Jae-shik.
Depending on how you looked at it, it could have been the sort of relationship that felt a little distant or awkward, but he felt more like an older brother from the neighborhood, easy and comfortable to be around. And since our wives were sisters, it seemed they rather liked the fact that the two of us got along so well.
It wasn’t every time, but whenever I drank with Jae-shik, it seemed my sister-in-law and my wife would also meet up separately and chat on their own.
Once, I got drunk with him and ended up passing out at my sister-in-law’s place, and another time the two sisters had fallen asleep after chatting at our house.
Because of that, both their place and ours had a separate guest room with a bed, and each couple used one or the other.
We met somewhere nearby, and then Brother-in-law led me into an upscale bar with a nice atmosphere, saying a friend had recommended it to him.
Maybe he’d made a reservation in advance, because we were shown straight into a private room.
“Brother-in-law, this isn’t one of those expensive places, is it?”
What I really meant was, isn’t this the kind of place where women come in and you go somewhere else with them after?
I’d been with him once or twice before, but places like that always worried me a little, since my sister-in-law could have found out. Still, whenever I brought it up, he would just say it was fine and that he’d take full responsibility, and I’d end up going along to avoid making things awkward. Even so, I’d always felt a little uneasy.
“It is, but tonight I’m thinking more of just drinking quietly and talking. If you want to call women later, you can.”
“Ah… no, that’s okay.”
Soon after, people came in and the room was set up in no time. Before opening the liquor, we poured ourselves some beer to wet our throats first.
“Woo-min.”
“Yes?”
“How are things with your sister-in-law these days?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, is she okay about stopping IVF?”
It seemed my sister-in-law had sent him to test me out, worried over nothing.
“Ah, I’m really fine. Honestly, I never wanted a kid that badly to begin with. To be honest, I was pretty worried too—about whether we could raise one properly… I’d actually rather the two of us just enjoy ourselves and have fun together.”
As I spoke, I realized what I really wanted was for my wife’s sex life to become more active so the two of us could enjoy ourselves while living together, but the thought that that part would probably never happen made my disappointment show before I could hide it.
“So forget the kid for a second. You two are doing all right?”
“Huh? We don’t really have any problems.”
“Really?”
While he was drinking his beer and looking at me, our eyes met, and I felt a strange jolt.
I wondered if he had picked up on something in my tone earlier and was asking because of that.
“Yeah, well… it’s the same as always. We didn’t fight or anything just because we decided to give up on IVF.”
“Hmm… is that so?”
I couldn’t tell whether he thought there was a problem in our marriage or whether my sister-in-law had said something to him.
No matter how I thought about it, I hadn’t fought with my wife recently, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t been upset with me about anything either. So I couldn’t help wondering whether there was something I didn’t know.
“How much do you know about our marriage?”
“Huh?”
That out-of-the-blue question about how much I knew of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s relationship left me completely bewildered.
For a second I wondered if the two of them had secretly divorced or fought or something, but if anything that serious had happened, there was no way my wife wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.
“Is there some kind of problem with you two?”
“Problem? What problem? We get along great.”
“Then what do you mean…?”
“You’ve never heard how we actually live, have you?”
I was confused.
We saw each other often, and we talked a lot about our lives, but I couldn’t think of anything especially different about how they lived.
“Well, not really…”
“Yeah, I guess your sister wouldn’t know either. Jin-hee certainly wouldn’t have been the first to bring it up.”
For a moment, I wondered if the truth was that the two of them weren’t getting along at all and were just a show-window couple in front of everyone.
“You know I had a vasectomy, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
I had heard before that after Yoon-sung was born, he’d had himself tied off because he didn’t want any more children. I’d never thought much of it, figuring it was his business.
“You don’t know why, though, do you?”
“I mean… wasn’t it just family planning?”
“Family planning? Well, sure, I guess. But that wasn’t the only reason I had myself tied off. You know I got a vasectomy, but you didn’t know Jin-hee had a contraceptive procedure too, did you?”
“What?”
I was stunned.
It made sense for him, if he didn’t want any more children, to have himself tied off. But why would my sister-in-law need a procedure too? Unless they were trying to be even safer somehow.
“You’re probably wondering why I’d get a vasectomy and then have Jin-hee do that too. There’s nothing strange about it. It was exactly what it sounds like—they were trying to avoid pregnancy.”
“But if you already had the operation, why bother…”
“I told you. It was for contraception, exactly as it sounds.”
I didn’t understand. I’d heard that, in rare cases, a vasectomy could reverse itself, but the odds were tiny, and it was hard to immediately accept that they’d gone so far as to have an additional procedure just to cover that possibility.
“Now listen, and don’t be surprised. That’s why I wanted to meet you today. And for the time being, don’t tell your sister-in-law about this.”
“Y-yes…”
I waited for him, curious what it was that I wasn’t supposed to be surprised by.
“We’re free-sex advocates. Jin-hee and I both love sex. You saw porn too, didn’t you? We’ve had sex with other people brought in, and we’ve also had sex with other women brought in. The so-called threesome. We’ve enjoyed men-two-women, and women-two-men too. We’ve also tried what people call swapping, but it isn’t easy to satisfy both partners, so we don’t do that much anymore. We haven’t tried a group yet… and in Korea, it’s still hard to find enough people you can really trust.”