At 2 a.m., while Ju-hyeon sleeps, the front-door key turns with a stealthy click. On the concrete floor of the living room, foot-odor mingles with stale liquor, cigarette smoke, and the after-taste of a stranger’s perfume. In the mirror I loosen my tie and open my mouth. “Even while you lie beside me, her breath still circles the edges of my body.”
Before the Warmth Cools
When Ju-hyeon’s hand brushes me, it is not my heart that leaps but my memory.
I love my wife. Of that I am certain. Yet in the 0.3 seconds before subway doors close, the graze of an unfamiliar forearm; the mingled breath in a lift; the shadowy smile of the new tenant across the hall—all slide through my veins like blood.
“Is it not my wife I need, but simply ‘new skin’?”
Every day I witness love and desire laughing at each other. My wife looks at me with trusting eyes, but before her gaze reaches me I have already traced another woman’s waist in my mind.
Memory betrays.
The ring I slipped onto Ju-hyeon’s finger on our wedding day is still there, yet the joints of my hand have forgotten its heat.
The Basement Where We Deceive Each Other
Case 1. Min-seok, 38
Min-seok loves meat. After work, dodging the designated-driver stand, he slips down an alley and always ends up at the same sushi bar—a members-only place called Yuki. For six months he has been going there without his wife, Su-jin, knowing.
“Back again,” Yuki says, rolling up the sleeve of her white shirt and settling opposite him. Each time she slices fish, a scar like an ancient inscription appears on her forearm. Whenever Min-seok sees it he thinks of the cellulite on Su-jin’s arm.
My wife’s body is too familiar.
So when the tip of Yuki’s finger brushes his ear, Min-seok bows his head.
“Are you all right today?” Instead of answering, he whispers into her ear, “The wasabi you dabbed on me with your fingertip is hotter than my wife’s soup.”
Yuki laughs. The smile is so effortless that Min-seok cannot stop imagining she may be deceiving another man as well. Two cunning servants standing between bride and groom—that is Min-seok and Yuki.
Case 2. Jae-hyeon, 31
Jae-hyeon has been married three years; his wife Ji-a is seven months pregnant. After being called “her little king” at the obstetrician’s, he meets Anna in the lounge of a Busan hotel while on a business trip.
Anna is a shoe designer and makes no effort to hide the tattoo near her heel.
“How many months is your wife?”
“Seven.”
Anna tugs at Jae-hyeon’s tie. “As the baby grows, she gets short of breath. But can you feel it too?”
Jae-hyeon does not lay his hand on his pregnant wife’s belly; he strokes the arch of Anna’s foot.
Ji-a waits for the fetal heartbeat. I trace a pulse in a sole.
In the same hotel bed on the same night, two different hearts beat.
The Optic Nerve of Desire
When humans see a taboo, one part of the brain cries out in a flash, “I must not do this.” Yet another part murmurs at the same instant, “That is exactly why I want to.”
Dopamine always chases novelty. Marriage is repetition; repetition is predictable, and the predictable shuts down the reward circuit.
“Love, in the end, does not ask how long you stay, but how often you leave.”
We trust our wives, while simultaneously carrying the emotion of stealing glances at her like a waning moon. The farewell kiss and the duty kiss meet at the same angle but at different speeds. That microscopic gap is desire’s fissure.
The instant another’s skin flashes across the mind, the wife becomes not a distant past but a present ghost. She is so close that, finally, the fingertips cannot reach her.
A Question That Rises
At 3 a.m. I lay a hand on my wife’s shoulder. Beneath her sleeping eyelids she dreams. The fear that I may not exist in her dream is smaller than the unease that another woman always exists in mine.
Tomorrow morning, when Ju-hyeon again says “I love you,” what will I hide inside those words—or fail to hide?
“Darling, are you holding me even now without having quite shaken off someone else’s skin?”