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“Tell me about him. The ex in the big house.” I want to hear this story and I think Jules needs to share it. Plans to storm the Kwon castle can be cooked up later. She’s not going anywhere and neither am I.
Jules heaves herself away from the table. “I’m gonna need some ice cream before I talk about this.”
“We had it for lunch.”
“I didn’t realize there was a daily limit.”
When she disappears inside the store, I pull out my phone and check my messages. Still nothing from Boyoung, but there are two from Yujun.
YUJUN: Dinner doesn’t taste as good when it’s not with you.
YUJUN: Have a meeting in the morning but plan to take off early. Will meet you at the metro stop since you love it so much.
“Why are you smiling? I haven’t even given you your cone.”
I look up from my phone to see Jules handing me a paper-wrapped ice cream treat. “Nothing much.” It’d be like rubbing salt in her open sore.
“Okay, keep your boyfriend secrets to yourself.” She slumps in her plastic chair across from me.
“He says he’s working tomorrow morning.”
“That’s probably accurate. Koreans are workaholics.”
“You were going to tell me about the ex,” I remind her. The ice cream treat is one of those chocolate-dipped cones with a nut topping. I guess some desserts are universal. I mean, who doesn’t love ice cream and chocolate?
“Lee Bowon teaches math at a private boys’ school. Teaching is considered a very honorable profession here. It’s not like back home where no one gives a shit about a teacher. Here they’re like revered. Seonsaengnim is one of the most respectful titles you can call a person, and it literally means ‘teacher.’ So, anyway, he’s considered good husband material and his mom was always sending him blind date candidates. This girl is a med student at SNU—that’s Seoul National University. This other girl is studying law at Yonsei. This one is getting an engineering degree at Korea University. They call it SKY. He graduated from Seoul, of course.” Jules chomps down on her cone and chews the ice cream angrily. “He ignored all of the summons, or so I thought. I mean, we were like you and Choi Yujun. We were together every night. We went to Seokcho and kissed on the beach, held hands by the lake in Ilsan, did other stuff in other places.”
She picks up her beer and takes a deep gulp. “And then one day he announces that he can’t see me anymore because he is getting engaged.”
Geez, he could have stuck a knife in her heart and it would’ve been kinder. “Was it the Korea Uni girl?”
Jules’s brows furrow together. “How’d you know?”
“Math and engineering. Sounded like they went together, unlike this ice cream and beer.”
“You just haven’t had enough,” Jules declares, her mouth full of ice cream again. “What’s your boyfriend do anyway?”
I stop denying that Yujun and I are dating because we sort of are, but he’s not really my boyfriend. He’s a . . . vacation romance. A voyfriend? A vayfriend? Is there a word for this? I toy with the paper wrapping around the base of the cone. “Logistics—although I don’t know what all that means. He has meetings. He wears dress pants to work.” I recall his evening plans. “He takes employees out to dinner.”
“And has a driver and a big-ass black car, so I’d bet my salary he’s in one of the chaebols.”
“Chaebol means what again?”
“Chaebols are those superconglomerates that basically own everything from the ice cream you’re eating to the cooler that it’s kept in to the land that the store sits on.” Jules drinks more of her beer before returning to the ice cream cone. She screws up her face. “You’re right. This is a foul concoction—beer and ice cream. Maybe you can never drink enough to make this taste good.”
“I don’t know about that.” I’m on my third can and the buzz is feeling good. My feet aren’t aching and I no longer smell like dirt and sweat—or maybe I do but the beer buzz is covering it up. I also don’t know how rich Yujun is, and does it matter? It’s not like I’m going to be affected by his social position. We’re enjoying each other’s company. A voyfriend’s social status is irrelevant because it doesn’t affect you in real life. I finish my cone and break open another beer.
“I thought my story was tragic,” Jules says, reaching for the last of the beer. “Foreign girl falls in love with local boy only to be replaced by a local, but yours trumps mine. You come here and find out your real old man has kicked the bucket but he’s also a turd, spreading his sperm around like he’s some kind of farmer during the planting season.” She tips her beer can in my direction. “Congrats.”
