Re Jane (24 page)

That moment marked something new for me. It was the moment I bundled up the very last of Sang and Hannah's words on all matters Korean and tossed them in the wastebasket. They had taught me a lifetime of misinformation. It was all, to put it in Sang's own words,
nothing but the wrong.

We were supposed to meet Changhoon and Monica at a place called Irish Pub, which was said to have the best burgers in all of Seoul. Round two would take us to Pose, a cocktail bar where the bartenders made an elaborate show of tossing bottles in the air and setting drinks on fire. Round three: a luxury karaoke bar. Round four: a
minsokjujeom—
a folk-themed bar that served scallion pancakes and milky
makgeolli
rice wine in hollowed-out gourd shells. And finally we'd cap off the night at JJ's, a club.

After a few wrong turns, we arrived at Irish Pub. Monica texted to say she was already there. She showed up ten minutes early to everything. Changhoon was held up at work but would be there shortly. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. The bar was crowded with young Western faces, mostly men. Their eyes went straight for us. “Who are all these white guys?” Nina whispered to me. “Army?”

“No idea,” I whispered back.

The walk to the back of Irish Pub felt endless. There were dozens of men staring at us or beckoning us over to their tables. “I could maybe get used to this,” Nina said.

Monica waved at me from a table in the back. To my disappointment, she'd brought Rachel along. Before I could introduce Nina to them, she was already doing the honors. “I'm Nina. Good to meet you,” she said, sticking her hand out at them with her usual assertiveness.

Right away something felt off between us. In general, Rachel and Monica tended toward the hyperfeminine, and they seemed a little taken aback by how easily—and perhaps presumptuously—Nina had inserted herself into the group. Where I always hemmed and hawed, never quite assured in social settings, Nina assumed familiarity with everyone. But that was what I loved most about her.

The girls offered limp hands in return.

Just as we settled into our seats and poured drinks from the pitcher of beer that Monica and Rachel had already ordered, we were surrounded by three men. They draped their torsos over the empty chairs. “Hel-
lo,
ladies!” they said. “Mind if we join you?”

Nina sized them up. They were tall, lanky, and fair, probably about our age. “Hello yourself,” Nina said before turning back to me. She was not into skinny blond guys; she preferred her men dark and muscled. But Rachel and Monica tucked in their shoulders and giggled—actually
giggled—
and nodded demurely at the empty seats.
The men sat down and introduced themselves. They were English teachers from the middle of America. Since Nina wasn't interested in the guys and I had a boyfriend, there wasn't much point in talking with them. While they focused their attention on Rachel and Monica, Nina filled me in on all that I'd missed out on in New York.

“I swear,” she was saying, “all of a sudden every guy on the F train's wearing these dumb-looking trucker hats.”

“Trucker hats,” I repeated back. “What's that even mean?”

Monica's high-pitched trill cut through the air; she was laughing—it sounded forced—at something one of the guys was saying. She always tried too hard. Nina glanced over at Monica and shook her head before turning back to me.

“You know, like they're driving a John Deere tractor or something, wearing it all like”—Nina demonstrated. “What, do they think they're farming for corn in the middle of Brook—”

“Hey,
ladies,
” one of the guys interrupted. “What's so funny over there?”

Nina ignored him and continued with her story.

But the guy persisted. He had the boyish air and dress of someone in his mid-twenties, combined with the hard-worn, bloated face of a forty-year-old man. “No, come on. Tell us,” he said, his arm grazing mine.

“We were in the middle of a joke,” I said, pulling my arm closer to me. I didn't want to encourage him.

But the guy did a double take, regarding me in a new light. “Wow, you speak English real good!” He proceeded patronizingly slowly. “How many years you been studying—”

“She's
American,
” Nina interrupted, rolling her eyes. “And she obviously speaks it better than you.”

The men, realizing they had overstayed their welcome, stood up and left the table. Rachel and Monica exchanged another look.

It was going to be a long night.

An hour and a half later, Changhoon finally arrived. He smelled of his usual cigarettes and sweet cologne, but as I stood up to greet him, he also reeked of barbecued-meat fumes, and alcohol coated his breath. I was furious; he was late to the very evening he had planned himself.
“Where you were? Why so late?”
I demanded. I was like Sang, my already tenuous grasp of the language deteriorating with my rising emotion.

“Ay, I told you I was running behind,”
Changhoon said, patting me to sit down.

“But only ten minutes!”
He'd texted, in ten-minute increments, each time to say he'd be ten minutes late.
“Why you not right away say you one hour late?”

Monica and Rachel exchanged another look; I was being unseemly.
“Hwesik,”
Changhoon told them. Company dinner
.
They knew—and I should have known—that these things were sprung suddenly, and attendance was not optional. They nodded understandingly.

Evening out my tone, I introduced him to Nina. He shook her hand enthusiastically and apologized for his lateness. “Nice to meet Jane's best American friend!”

I was immediately embarrassed. She
was
my best friend from America, but I wasn't hers. She had a whole crew waiting for her back home. Though Nina took it in good stride.

Monica jumped in. “Changhoon Oppa—I mean, Chandler is hungry? Thirsty? What I can get for you?” She began fussing about—frantically flagging down the waiter for a menu and another glass.

Changhoon glanced about the table and said, in a loud voice, “Tonight style is all-American! We take American friend to American Irish Pub.” It was the same line he'd once used on me.

Nina didn't hear him, didn't understand him, or didn't think it was funny, because she did not laugh. Changhoon's comment hung in the air and was falling fast, so to keep it buoyant I let out a long string of laughter.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha!”
I said.
Nunchi.

Nina shot me a look.

“So who is superior English speaker: Jane or Jane friend?” Monica asked Nina.

“I'm sorry, I don't understand your question.” Nina looked at me in confusion.

“I think she wants to know which one of us speaks English better.”

“Yeah, I got that, but her question still doesn't make sense.”

Changhoon, perhaps out of
nunchi
-ful obligation to Monica, jumped in. “Only because Jane is like Korean and you are real
American.”

Real American.
Like “real Chinese.”
As opposed to fake.

Nina said, “I've got a New York accent, but Jane doesn't. Jane talks like people from the news. I talk like people from
Goodfellas.
”

They countered with blank faces.

Nina puffed out air. “Forget about it.” She took a swig of beer, and Rachel and Monica exchanged another look I didn't understand. When Nina put down her drink, she said, “Actually, Jane's also got a much bigger vocabulary than me. She picked up a lot of new words working for her last boss.” Nina caught my eye, and we both laughed.

“What does it mean?” Monica said.

Nina explained. How Beth would foist her academic, feminist readings on me. As she talked, I was brought right back to the Mazer-Farleys'—to that dusty top-floor office. Beth's smell worked its way through the stale beer and cigarette smoke.

“‘Nor can we discourse on the feminist movement—in all its wrought history—without first discoursing on the problematic tradition of desire and the male gaze,'” Nina said.

“I can't believe you remember that!”

Nina was a fucking genius.

She turned to the group. “This Jane you see before you now? A year ago she was
nothing
like this. No makeup, no heels, no nothing. T-shirt and sneakers every single day. Beth would never recognize you now!”

Nina also had no fucking
nunchi.

“Really!” Changhoon said. “I cannot picture.”

I'd hoped his reaction would be different, that
he
would
be able to picture it—or at least accept it.

“It is because she lives with crazy feminine boss?” Monica asked. “Jane told us stories of her. She is with too much . . .” Monica fluttered her fingers under her armpits.

Rachel said, “And Jane tells us her husband is whip.”

“Ed
was
whipped.” Nina turned to me. “I guess he got so tired of it that he ran away to upstate New York.”

“What!” I couldn't help the gasp that escaped from my lips.

“I thought I told you. Ed's left Brooklyn. He took a job at one of the SUNYs up there.”

“Ed's . . . gone?”

A thousand questions swirled. Did Beth follow him? Were they still together, or did that mean they were now separated? And what about Devon?

“What he looks like?” Rachel asked Nina.

“Blond, blue-eyed, pretty built. Personally, Ed's a little too fair for my taste, but compared to his wife he was way hotter. She looked like a troll. Jane didn't tell you?”

I was turning red, redder by the minute. I looked down at my beer glass, feeling Rachel's eyes on me. “Hotter than Chandler?” she said.

How could I answer that? My face would give me away. But Nina was slapping Changhoon on the arm. “He couldn't hold a candle to you, Chandler.”

Changhoon laughed. But based on the confused tone to his laughter, I knew he had no idea what the expression meant.

* * *

And so the evening proceeded, on to the next round and the round after that. But just as we were leaving Irish Pub, the plumes of fresh smoke gave way to a staler stench, of decades' worth of cigarettes and spilled whiskey and something else: a heavy, downtrodden spirit hanging in the air. I hadn't noticed them before, but a huddle of middle-aged Western patrons sat propped on stools at the bar. Something about their faces gave me pause. Their features sagged toward the pilled carpet on the floor, as though defeated by gravity. I stared into their dull, disillusioned eyes—all yearning and hope had long ago been extinguished from them. Had their eyes ever shone with youthful luster? Had one of these men, in his younger incarnation, once gazed at my mother with desire?

Hurry up, hurry up . . .
I heard Changhoon and Rachel and Monica chanting behind me. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. I studied each face, dreading a connection linking someone's features to my own. But I found none. I told myself I was never coming back to Itaewon.

At the end of round three in the luxury karaoke bar where we mouthed along the words to English and Korean songs, Nina let out a not-so-subtle yawn. “Jane, come with me to the bathroom?”

At the sink she stared into the mirror, prodding the bags under her eyes. “I'm completely wiped out. Mind if we cut the night short?”

“But we only have two more rounds to go.” I thought of all the effort Changhoon had put into planning the night. “You sure you can't rally?”

“Honestly, Jane? Your friends are kind of wearing me out. Your boy Chandler's way too hyper. So's that girl Monica. I just can't deal right now.”

“Yeah, no, fine.”

“Jane.” Nina's tone was pleading. “I just flew in this morning. I haven't slept in thirty-six hours. I'll have more energy tomorrow.”

Nina was right. I relented. “I'll explain to Changhoon.” I fluffed my hair in the mirror, then stared back at our reflections. Nina did look exhausted. We both were. “Let's head home.”

We rejoined the others outside. The streets were teeming with groups of young Seoulites in various rounds of revelry. Middle-aged women worked food carts selling rice cakes smothered in red-pepper sauce and deep-fried battered vegetables. The air smelled of cooking oil and wisps of girls' perfume and car exhaust.

“So sorry, but I think we should go home now,”
I told Changhoon.

“But we still have two rounds left. . . .”
Changhoon trailed off when he saw Nina looking at us.

“Sorry,” she said. “I'm the one being lame.”

“What it means?” Changhoon asked.

Nina shook her head. “It doesn't matter.”

Changhoon insisted on escorting us home, while Monica and Rachel went ahead to round four.

When our taxi pulled up to Sinnara Apartments, Nina and I got out. Changhoon was waiting in the cab, to make sure we made it safely inside.

“I owe you one,” she said. “Well, technically two: that time I dragged you from Twine when you were making out with what's-his-face.”

“Still holding a grudge. I might've married what's-his-face,” I said. “Forget Seoul. You'd be visiting us in the suburbs instead. Two-point-five kids, Labradoodle, white picket fence.”

“As long as it wasn't in
Jersey.
”
She let out a comical shudder. Then, “Look, I'm sorry I dragged you away from your friends.”

“No biggie,” I said, shrugging. But I knew that Changhoon was disappointed. He'd just been too polite to show it.

Nina studied me. “You know you can go. You don't have to come in with me.”

You are responsible for everything for your friend.
“I should.”

“You should do what you want.” She nodded at the cab. “So go.”

“He
did
pull in a favor to get us on the list at JJ's. . . .” I started.