Читать книгу Sad Peninsula - Mark Sampson - Страница 8

The pound and rush of alien traffic, long shiny streams of Hyundai Hyundai Hyundai racing through the blink and blare of this February Friday, and it took coming to Korea for me to realize that enduring friendships are built on a foundation of mutual envy. I am friends with Rob Cruise because part of me wants to be him. Let’s get that straight, right off the bat. He and Justin Ford, my roommate, have been in this country for two years. Their existence here in Seoul seems like a neverending epilogue to tales already climaxed, lives back in Canada full of shut doors and embarrassing tragedies. I can relate to that.

The three of us stand upon the two words that will ensure I find my way home tonight — Daechi Sa Guh Rhee. “Commit to memory,” they’ve told me, “in case we get separated. It means Daechi Intersection. Say it to a cabbie just like that — Daechi Sa Guh Rhee — and he’ll take you right back here.” This first week in, I’ve been thinking these men have adopted me, looking out for my safety in this city of 11 million people, but now I’m wondering if they’re having fun at my expense. It’s clear they’ve misled me about tonight’s activities. They said “bar” and I heard “pub” ( hof they call them here, just like in Germany) but these guys are obviously dolled up for something else and I’m dressed like a frump by comparison. We’re not going to a pub, I’ve now learned. We’re going to a club, a dance club. Thumping techno and bright spinning lights and boys with boners in their cargo pants — some of my least favourite things. Rob Cruise, who is wearing cargo pants below his winter jacket, has begun dancing already, standing at the Sa Guh Rhee with knees pumping like he needs to pee, cigarette making hurried trips to his lips. We’ll hop in a cab as soon as Jon Hung shows up. Oh wait, there he is, descending the grimy stairs of a PC Room on the other side of the street.

“Look at the white boys standing on the corner!” he shouts as he crosses the intersection.

“Whatever you say, chink!” Rob smiles as he flicks his cigarette to the gutter.

Jon Hung is not a chink. He is a kyopo — dad’s Korean, mom’s American — and he possesses the Hawaiian good looks and designer clothes that scream to the world I have half an MBA and will go get the other half just as soon as I’m done with this ridiculous antisabbatical. Despite his heritage, he speaks less Korean than I do, and I’ve been in this country exactly eight days.

“You’re going to have fun, so relax,” he says to me, spotting my body language. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Rob Cruise tells me. “The club we’re going to, most girls won’t care what you’re wearing.”

Justin, who says nothing, steps off the curb to hail us a taxi. One pulls up within seconds, winking out its dome light. The four of us pile in, Rob Cruise presuming shotgun, and then we’re off, joining the long, shiny streams of Hyundai Hyundai Hyundai.

You don’t so much see Seoul’s neon as you taste it, like bright hard Christmas candy, reds and greens sprayed out across the city as if fired from a cannon. As our cab races northward toward the lugubrious Han River, I figure I’ll never get used to this nonstop showcase of luminance. A landscape choked with discos and Starbucks outlets and soju tents on the sidewalks, with street-side barbecues and 7-Elevens that will let you drink beer on plastic furniture set up out front. As we settle in for the ride, Rob Cruise begins his complaining. He’s been a flame thrower at the urinal for several weeks now. The nurses at the clinic near our school have started recognizing him when he walks in; the pharmacist doesn’t even need to see the slip anymore to fetch him the right antibiotics.

“Dude, why don’t you wear a fucking condom?” Jon Hung asks.

Rob laughs at this. “A lot of Korean girls don’t like them. They got the whole rhythm method going on.” Voguing his hands to show rhythm.

When I find it funny that he finds it funny, I don’t recognize myself. I should be ashamed that his insouciance ignites a profound ache in me. Deflated, I lean back and try to look out the cab’s window, but Justin’s head blocks my view as he stares into the night.

Rob Cruise catches my sinking mood in the cabbie’s mirror and twists around to face the backseat. This is where the envy is supposed to kick in, where he imbues the air of the cab with his raunchy wisdom. Is he really thirty-three years old? The guys have heard all this stuff before, but it doesn’t matter because I’m the target. Rob begins telling me about life as a successful player, about how the best moments come when the serial seducer becomes the seduced. On those special nights, the girl he’s with will seize the lead with needs that nearly scare him. He loses control of the situation, and that’s his favourite part. Rob makes even the worries afterward, the insipient burn at the urinal that comes later, sound like an adventure unto itself. He details the inner rawness, the unwelcome discharge, the swelling that weighs on him like guilt.

“It sounds like the clap,” I sniff.

“It’s more than the clap,” he replies, adjusting his groin. “It’s like a fucking standing ovation!”

And we roar, loud enough to startle the Korean cabbie. Even Justin joins in, forsaking his stare out the window, laughing his deep bell-like laugh, perhaps forgetting for an instant that he once had a kid in Nova Scotia who died.

Our cab flies over a bridge crossing the Han, makes the turnoff, and then grinds to a near halt as we join the constipated line of other cabs oozing into Itaewon. Finally we make it to the strip, pay the cabbie, and get out. The street is an open-air party, a festival of boozy expat teachers, of Korean beauties, of U.S. army guys on the hunt for love and war. This is Itaewon, the foreign quarter, adjacent to Yongsan Garrison, the largest U.S. army base in the country. I will come to know this place as a hive of sexual hysteria with a neon glint of violence.

“It’s this way,” Rob says.

On the hike up the hill and through bewildering side streets I spot at least three hofs and nearly beg us to stop. But these men are on a mission — even Justin seems keen. We finally land in a lineup outside a two-storey club called Jokers Red, its sign a splay of cards and an evil clown face. The Korean girls lined up to get in are not dressed for February. They are shivering sticks in miniskirts and tube tops, more concerned with looking hot than being warm. Rob is nearly bursting. At the door, I’m burglarized for a cover charge, follow the men inside, and then get smacked with the thumpthumpthump and the epilepsy of strobe lights. It’s then that I realize how far I have fallen: to be nearly thirty and spending Friday night in the sort of club I had zero interest in when I was nineteen. I need to be drunk.

So off we go to the bar. We take drinks up some stairs to a booth with expansive benches that overlook the rail surrounding the dance floor like a cattle pen. Despite the crowd and its accumulated body heat, this club is as chilly as a meat locker: drafts waft in from poorly insulated walls and windows. Rob and Jon rendezvous with some familiar faces just coming off the dance floor. A shivering stick hugs Jon Hung as he slinks out of his coat and tosses it into the booth. She must be one of his girlfriends. She’s wearing knee-high bitch boots and a miniskirt that barely reaches her groin.

Soon Rob Cruise leads a migration to the dance floor; everyone but me. I tell them I’ll “hold down the booth.” I watch as they all congregate under the throbbing lights. Jon Hung moves like liquid, scoops into his miniskirted girlfriend as if she were a ball grounded deep into left field, leads her where he wants her, and then they grind into each other like turbines. Justin is a good dancer, too; his creepy stoicism complements rather than detracts from his moves. Of course, the star is Rob Cruise: the wind-chime swing of his hips defies his age, and, seemingly, gravity itself. Each sway proves he’s got a profound sense of rhythm flowing through him. He’s attracting moons to his orbit, girls curious and scantily clad. When he looks up to see me watching him, he begins shuffling over to the beat of the music with a wolf-like grin, dances his way up the stairs, grabs my arms, and attempts to drag me into participation. I refuse. I know that down there I would be like the decrepit grandfather attempting the Macarena at a wedding. When he gives up, I scoot off to the bar to see if they sell Scotch.

Soon they’re done dancing and return to the table. More people the guys know come in from the cold to join us — a few more girls wearing virtually nothing, and one of our coworkers, a kid fresh off a B.A., his baseball cap turned around backwards. Rob has brought a raven-haired stranger with him, a heavily made-up girl with bare shoulders peppered with gooseflesh and gleaming a cold sweat. In fact, it’s obvious that all the girls are freezing. Their tight, inscrutable faces try to hide it, but their hands keep rubbing absently at their exposed triceps. The absurdity of it makes me wish I had thick duvet to throw over everyone.

Funny how even under the walloping techno we’re still able to conduct halfway decent conversations. It’s like our ears have adjusted to the noise in the same way that eyes adjust to darkness. Listening to Rob with the bare-shouldered girl, I’m once again awash in envy. His flirting is flawless; he’s working over her defences and guiding her through convoluted hallways, all of which lead to his bed. He even incorporates my presence into his act. I’ll come to learn that this is one of the chief ways Rob gets a girl to trust him, by lobbing huge, exaggerated compliments at his male friends. “See this guy?” he points at me, grinning. “He’s amazing. Been in Korea — eight days. Already speaks lotsa lotsa Korean.” He nods at me. “Go ahead, show her your Korean.” I sip my Scotch without smiling, then rhyme off the handful of phrases I’ve picked up since the flight over — hello/goodbye, do you speak English, I would like a beer, may I make some change please?, etc. etc. I expect the girl to applaud with a frantic little clap of her hands. Instead, she nods once and turns back to Rob. In fact, none of the shivering sticks are paying me any attention, and frankly I don’t blame them. I come off like what I am: a dumpy, balding, bearded orphan who has crash-landed on this peninsula. I might as well be part of the furniture.

Justin, who had bowed out briefly from a conversation, is suddenly laughing, a heavy drum beat, seemingly to himself. He has spotted something over the lip of the booth.

“Hey Rob, check out who’s here,” he says.

Rob twists to look and I look with him. Another Korean girl they know has just cleared the door and stepped into the club. She looks around briefly as if lost, as if she’s not entirely sure she wants to be there. I notice that she’s wearing a heavy winter coat that goes all the way to her knees.

“Ho-leee fuck!” Rob yells and begins waving madly in the air. “Hey, Jin! Jin! Come over here, would you?”

She turns to see our group in the booth, but then hesitates as if trying to gauge whether she wants to join us. She sighs, rolls her eyes, comes marching up the stairway, and arrives at our table, her face flushed from the cold.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Jon Hung clichés.

“Well, if it isn’t my waegookin friends,” she replies, using the Korean word for foreigner. “Friday night and you’re drinking, surprise surprise.”

“What are you doing here?” Rob asks, tucking an arm around the bare-shouldered girl.

“I came to hear the DJ. He played the Armada in Hongdae last weekend, but I missed him.”

“Are you going to join us?”

“I suppose.”

We all scrunch in to give her room to sit. Before she does, she opens her coat, but does not take it off. Underneath, she’s wearing a white cashmere sweater and blue jeans.

“So I hardly recognized you without a cigarette in your mouth.” Rob grins at her. “What, did you quit?” The other girls guffaw, as if what Rob has said tells them everything they need to know about this Jin character. Despite Korea’s rapid assent into modernity, smoking among women is still considered verboten. Jin simply stares at him. “And you grew your hair long again, thank God,” Rob goes on. “That bob you had was a disaster.” She tilts her head and stares even deeper into him. He realizes that he’s probably jeopardizing her presence at the table, and he softens his tone. “So where you been, girl?”

“Working,” she replies. “I see you’re still cruising, Mr. Cruise.” She turns then to the bare-shouldered girl and says with a sort of cheery, deadpan cattiness: “You know, he slept with nearly a hundred women last year — some of them prostitutes.” The girl laughs loudly but uneasily. Within a minute she gets up to go to the bathroom, or so she says, but then disappears into the crowd’s pulsating throngs. Rob keeps looking for her over the rail as our small talk chirps around his head, and when it becomes clear he’s lost her, he turns back to the table to seethe at Jin.

“Why don’t you take off your coat,” he snipes at her.

“Because I’m fucking cold,” she yells over the music. “You guys can ogle me later.” I laugh at this, I can’t help it, but nobody looks at me. “So who’s going to buy me a drink?” she asks. As if by reflex, Jon, Justin, and the kid in the baseball cap all make intimations toward their wallets before stopping themselves as if they’ve been tricked. She just shakes her head. “Ugh. You waegookins are all the same.” And scoots up fast, faster than I can make an offer to get her a drink, and heads to the bar on her own, her lengthy winter coat ballooning like a cape around her.

Aptly enough, the other Korean girls have yielded their place in the conversation to this Jin person: while they possess varying degrees of fluency, Jin’s English is nearly flawless. It amazes me how even in a large group, it’s always one or two people who become the focal point. Here it is Rob and Jin, riffing off each other with so much affectionate vitriol. He is a master of viciousness, of well-placed quips, but she is his equal — made more impressive by the fact that they aren’t sparring in her native tongue. I drink silently; I have lost track of how many silent drinks I’ve had.

Because there are far more women at our table than men, we soon attract some unwanted guests: a handful of GIs, toting large mugs of beer, have suddenly invaded our space. These young guys are gruffly sociable in their crewcuts and muscles, but their intentions are obvious. “Do you mind if we join you?” the leader of the pack hollers. Without waiting for an answer, they pull up chairs seemingly out of nowhere and surround our booth. Conversations recalibrate yet again. The shivering sticks ask where the boys are from. The soldiers mention American-sounding towns in American states. Rob, Justin, and I — all from the Maritimes in Canada — grow uneasy. One of us will need to pick a minor fight.

“So tell me something,” Justin wades in, “is it true what they say about American soldiers in Korea?”

“What’s that?” asks one of the marines.

“That the only reason you’re here is because you’ve had disciplinary problems in other postings? That it’s a punishment to be here.”

The leader just beams. “Hey man, we love Korea. We love the women.” The miniskirted girls cover their mouths as they laugh. I catch Jin rolling her eyes and I feel a tingle beneath my skin.

Jon Hung pipes up next, mentioning that he’s the only American in our group — born in Hawaii, raised in Seattle. “So tell me,” he asks, “are we really going to war or what?”

The marines laugh again. It’s true — their subliterate commander-in-chief will be launching an unprovoked invasion in another month or so. These boys contradict themselves by saying they’d love to get reassigned off this peninsula that hasn’t seen real conflict in fifty years. The war would be their ticket to adventure.

“But it’ll only be a three-month gig, man,” one of them says. “Get rid of Saddam, root out al-Qaeda, then back home by summer.”

“There’s no al-Qaeda in Iraq,” I point out, but assume my mumbles are smothered under the dance music.

“Yeah, man,” another marine goes on, “we’ll get in there and finish the job we started.”

Rob Cruise, conspicuously quiet for several minutes, takes a long pull on his drink and says: “I served in the first Gulf War.”

The table turns to face him. He takes another drink.

“Did you really?” Jon Hung asks.

“I did. Company C of the RCR, 1991. I took a break from university the year before and signed up. I was barely twenty.” He says this directly at the lead marine, who looks like he would’ve still been in elementary school in 1991.

Jin tilts her head at Rob. “You never told me that.” The way she says it — the gentle, almost caring tone, the slight hurt that he would keep such a thing from her — floods me with a knowledge that should’ve been obvious from the start. Oh my God, I think, she was one of the one hundred.

“So you’ve been over there?” the lead marine asks.

“Yep.”

“So what do you think? We up for a good fight?”

Rob spits laughter at him. “What do I think? I think your D.O.D. has lost its fucking mind. First of all, Michael over here is right — al-Qaeda doesn’t have any connections to Iraq. Second of all, you guys have no idea what kind of hornets’ nest you’re about to stir up.”

The marine shrugs. “That’s all part of the job, man. Army life’s full of excitement and danger — you’d know that.” He sips his own drink. “Of course, teaching ABCs to Korean kids must have its challenges, too.”

Jin’s laughter bounces off the table. Rob and the other guys need to say something to keep the balance in check, but they’re struggling. I search for words that would get Jin’s attention back, to return the ball to our court, or at least relieve this sudden tension.

I give up hope once the conversation becomes blatantly about sex. How could it not, with this kind of dynamic? The youngest-looking marine — maybe eighteen — kicks things off by lobbing a stereotype about Korean girls in bed, something about their aversion to oral sex. He meant for it to sound flirty and hilarious, but his joke sinks like a stone. It does, however, lead us to discuss other stereotypes — French lovers, American lovers, Canadian lovers. Jin, still in her coat, takes up the charge when we start imagining what kind of lovers certain people around the table would be. She deliberately skips over Rob as she does the rounds, but has a blast taking the piss out of Jon Hung (“You’d be such a businessman — you probably use a spreadsheet to keep track of your conquests”) and Justin (“You would have silent orgasms”) and one of the beefier marines (“Selfish brute — you have ‘closet rapist’ written all over you!”) Then her gaze, for the first time, falls on me.

“And you?” she says, eyeing me up. It’s only then that I become painfully aware that I had put on a cardigan before leaving the apartment. “You’d probably make love like an intellectual.”

I catch the reference right away but allow the boys their laugh — after all, I do look like someone who’d make love like an intellectual.

“Kundera,” I say as she attempts to move on.

She snaps back to look at me, her face sharp with surprise. “Excuse me?”

“Milan Kundera,” I yell over the music. “That line about making love like an intellectual — you stole it from his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.”

She blinks at me. “You’ve read Kundera?” It doesn’t come out as a question so much as a statement of intrigue.

“What the hell are they talking about?” asks one of the marines.

“Milan Kundera,” I say simply.

“Who is she?” Rob Cruise asks.

“It’s a he, idiot,” Jin snips without looking at him. “He’s only one of my favourite writers.” She holds my gaze as if goading me to go on.

“I haven’t read everything of his,” I continue with a sigh. “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Oh, and his new one, Ignorance, was one of the books I read on the flight over here. I didn’t like it.”

For the first time tonight, she stammers. “Well — well I’ve read Kundera in English, French, Chinese, and Korean.”

Deliberately, I shrug with indifference. I turn to the lead marine and say: “Kundera knows a thing or two about unprovoked invasions. You should read him.”

Rob Cruise is glowing at me; this is where I hold up my end of the mutual envy. It’s as if he’s passing me a torch, giving me permission to fan the flames of my sudden stardom. He also seems mildly stunned that I’ve trumped him and the other men at the table, that I’ve touched Jin in a way that they couldn’t. “This is all too heady for me,” he yells at everyone, giving me a wink. “What do you say we dance?” He gets up from the bench, anxious to lead us like Moses down to the dance floor. The soldiers don’t hesitate; in the spirit of sexual rivalry, they rise en masse in time with Rob’s movements, each trying to claim one of the shivering sticks as they too stand, adjusting miniskirts and straightening tube tops. Jin gets up, as well, trying very hard not to look at me. She finally, finally takes off her coat and tosses it onto the bench.

Oh my God.

She notices that I’m staring but haven’t moved. “Are you coming?” she asks.

“I don’t dance.”

Her face flattens with disbelief. What, you think this is about dancing? The others can’t quite believe that I’m holding my ground, that I’m about to squander what I’ve earned. Jin waits, maybe thinking that if she stares at me long enough with that face, I’ll change my mind.

Rob Cruise stands watching at the top of the stairwell, growing impatient. “Jin, baby, let’s go!”

She’s waffling now — to leave and dance, or stay and talk? I refuse to give her an inch, and so she clucks her teeth at the air and races lithely to the stairs, her legs a rush of tendons and confidence. Rob has already begun descending, certain now that she’ll follow him. Meanwhile, Jon Hung’s girlfriend is pulling him to his feet. “Go on, baby, I’ll be right there,” he orders her. When she’s gone, he comes over to me.

“What are you, lost?”

“I don’t dance,” I repeat.

He drains his drink and sets it noisily on the table. “Milan Kundera,” he shakes his head in mock disgust. “You are in the wrong fucking place, my friend.” He then motions to Justin, who is also still sitting. “Are you coming down?”

“No, I’ll stay behind. Keep Captain Hopeless over here company.”

Jon shakes his head at me again and then is gone. I slide over to the rail to watch them all on the dance floor. I find Jin right away. She stands out in the crowd not because of her cashmere and jeans but because her body in dance is an alluring twist and spiral to the mindless thump of music. GIs comes on to her, but she makes shoving them away look like just another of her moves. She looks up at me over the rail and holds my stare for a moment. At the end of a song, she hurries off the floor, trots up the stairs, and returns to the table to search for something in her coat. When she doesn’t find it, she races back down again, without so much as a glance at me, to join Rob and Jon under the spinning lights. I look at Justin, who is also watching them, also drinking his drink, also keeping his sad mysteries below the surface. On the dance floor, Rob Cruise has abandoned Jin like a crossword puzzle he will never solve and has begun grinding into another girl. For an instant, we make eye contact. It’s as if he holds my conscience in the same grip that he holds the girl. A stare that wants to liberate me from my principles. On a night other than this, he promises to seize my reticence and toss it with delight into Seoul’s great fevered flow. He will teach me to take what I want here. And we will better friends for it, sharing the sort of bond that two men can have only after they’ve been intimate with the same woman.