No Such Thing as a Male Friend
Yoo Kang-soo could not, for the life of him, make sense of his wife Ji Hye-in's mind. It left him thoroughly, persistently confused.
Then his phone chimed with a KakaoTalk alert.
You're buying lunch.
I'm out front of the head office.
It happened to be lunchtime, so Kang-soo left the office and headed out to the front of the building. A white sedan bearing the insurance company's logo sat at the curb with its hazard lights flashing.
"It's been a while."
Kang-soo said it as he climbed into the passenger seat.
"A month isn't 'a while,' you idiot. What should we eat? Let's get something good. Buy me oxtail soup. Might as well sponge a decent meal off a guy collecting a pension."
Kang-soo laughed and shot back,
"Just pick a place."
Kim Young-pil drove them to a restaurant that specialized in oxtail soup. The two of them ordered a pair of extra-large bowls and a medium platter of boiled oxtail to go with it.
"Man, this is the kind of meal that calls for a shot of soju. But I've got work this afternoon, so I'll hold off."
Young-pil said it smacking his lips, watching the food come out. They dug into the extra-large bowls of oxtail soup, each one bubbling furiously at eighteen thousand won a piece.
Young-pil had put on the weight that came with age too — a stocky, thick-set build, and a belly that actually stuck out farther than Kang-soo's. They were the same age, classmates who'd gone through middle school and high school together. Unlike Kang-soo, who had spent long years in the military, Young-pil had started out as an insurance salesman in his youth, then switched over to roadside assistance once he passed forty. Sales got harder with age. Roadside assistance was something you could keep doing even as the years piled on. Their jobs were completely different, but they both worked for the same insurance company.
"How's your boy doing?"
Kang-soo asked first.
"He's growing up fine. Already a third-year in middle school. Doesn't study for shit, though. Takes after his mother — I think the kid's got rocks for brains. Worries me."
Young-pil said it with his face twisting into a scowl. Like Kang-soo, he had only one son. He'd gotten divorced a few years back. The reason: his wife's infidelity.
The truth was, Kang-soo had considered bringing up what had happened recently — casually, over drinks — to Young-pil. The man had already been through a wife's affair, and it had ended in divorce. But Young-pil had been raising his son on his own ever since, living his life with his head held high. And now that Kang-soo had decided to forgive her and bury the whole thing, going around talking about it felt wrong. So he hadn't said a word.
"What about you? How's the missus doing? A man ought to live with a woman like your wife — quiet, decent. Me, look at this mess. I'll be fifty before I know it. It's not that I don't think about remarrying, but it's not easy."
"Hell... living in this sorry state, drowning in loan payments, not a damn thing saved for retirement. Who the hell would marry me? And as a second wife, no less. What kind of empty-headed bitch would..."
Young-pil said it chewing noisily on the boiled oxtail.
"Hey, Young-pil. There's a junior at the office downstairs. Sounds like his wife's giving him a hard time too. She keeps going out to eat with her male acquaintances, hitting karaoke with them, that kind of thing. But if both of them work, is that just what women do these days? Apparently she even talks back about it. Says it's not like she's having an affair — if a woman has a social life, that much is only natural. What do you think?"
Kang-soo was circling around it, laying out his own situation as if it were someone else's.
"'Acquaintances,' my ass. Women like that, you ought to just rip their mouths right open. There's no such thing as 'acquaintances' between a man and a woman. You think those guys actually see it that way? Sure, if the woman's ugly as sin, maybe. But fuck... if she's even halfway decent-looking? A hundred percent of those bastards are circling, talking about 'acquaintances' this and that, just trying to get in her pants."
Young-pil was holding forth with gusto, profanity flying, not giving a damn who might be listening.
"At first it's all 'acquaintances' this and that. Then once they get a little closer, they have a drink, belt out a karaoke number... next thing you know, a hand on her shoulder, then holding her hand... and then, fuck, a little tap on her pussy... and if she doesn't make a fuss, they just fuck her. That's the playbook, man. Every guy follows the same damn steps."
Kang-soo went blank for a moment under the force of Young-pil's rant. Then the man's voice, too loud, snapped him back to attention, and he glanced around. But the lunchtime crowd at the oxtail soup place was too busy with their own conversations. Nobody seemed to be eavesdropping.
The truth was, Kang-soo's own thinking wasn't any different from his friend's. Anyone who talked about "acquaintances" between a man and a woman... in his view, those people weren't right in the head.
The company had three civil lawsuits going at once, and Kang-soo was busy enough just chasing those around. His plan, in any case, was to keep doing this work for another ten years at least. He was collecting a military pension, but after twenty-one years of service he'd started drawing it relatively young, and the actual take-home was well short of two million won. That alone wasn't quite enough to cover retirement, or to put his son Pil-jun through college. His goal was to stick with the insurance-fraud investigations — the pay was decent — for just ten more years. And so, of all the things that mattered, he had put the company's work first.
That was how, after four years of neglecting his home, his wife Ji Hye-in had ended up having an affair.
It was Friday afternoon, the weekend just ahead.
Pil-jun will be late anyway after cram school.
If you get in early, just order something for yourself.
I'll probably be late too.
Evening came. His wife's car didn't move.
Hers was the kind of workplace where she always left right around five on the dot. It wasn't a company that did overtime. The car seemed to be sitting right where it always sat, in the parking lot of her association building. She'd left it behind, it seemed. And if the GPS didn't move, he had no way of finding out where she was going.
Kang-soo thought, Well. I guess that's how it is. He was buried in work. Honestly, he couldn't spend the entire day thinking about his wife.
An insurance-fraud investigation wasn't finished until the civil lawsuit produced a verdict. Enforcement afterward mattered too, but there was a collections team that handled that separately, so Kang-soo only tracked things as far as the judgment. Recovering the money was someone else's specialty.
He wrapped up his work late and left the office after ten. By the time he got home it was nearly eleven, and right after he walked in, his son Pil-jun came through the door. Pil-jun said he was sleepy, skipped washing up properly, and collapsed straight onto the bed. Kang-soo stripped the boy's clothes off, pulled off his socks, and half-dragged him to the bathroom to wash his hands and face. Then the boy went right back to bed and passed out cold.
He had every right to be exhausted. Weekends were a little freer, but on weekdays he had to study at the cram school until ten or eleven almost every night. And it wasn't as if all that grinding put him at the top of his class. Even run through the wringer like that, he barely managed average grades. But every other family's kid was doing the same thing, so they couldn't very well not send him. They'd tried pulling him out of cram school for a while in his first year, and his grades had plummeted straight to the bottom. After that, not sending him wasn't an option.
By the time he'd gotten his son to sleep, it was past eleven-thirty.
Kang-soo was genuinely surprised. Had his wife ever stayed out this late? He turned it over in his mind, but he couldn't remember. In all the times he'd been home, it seemed to him this had never happened — not once. But over the past four years, honestly, he'd been away from home half of every year. What might have gone on during those stretches, he had no way of knowing. And Pil-jun, for his part, seemed to come home from cram school and pass out without even checking whether his mother was there or not.