11
Disgrace
John hadn’t visited this part of Myeong-dong in years, not since college when he’d worked weekends at a record shop on the corner of a narrow street, next to a clothing store owned by a sharp-tongued widow who disliked almost everyone.
In the evenings, John would put the outdoor sale bins back into the record shop, then help close up her store.
At the end of the season, she gave him nice sweaters and trousers she’d set aside in his size that she claimed hadn’t sold.
Both places had vanished long ago. Pretty much the only familiar things were the street signs and sewer covers.
Lately he’d had more time, and whenever he walked through parts of Seoul where he’d been before, he found that even the width of the roads had changed, and if it weren’t for a significant landmark that had been preserved, he would’ve gotten lost, no different from a tourist.
With some luck, he located the brick structure behind the cathedral, whose tall spire cast a blurry shadow over the low-slung buildings on the street.
John stepped off the elevator on the sixth floor and paused at the tax preparer’s office, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
There was no one else in the whitewashed hallway.
Standing in front of the blue-painted metal door, John stared at the company name on the brass sign screwed into the wall.
Judging by the size of the suite, he estimated maybe five or six employees.
He tucked in his shirt and straightened his tie and jacket.
He’d dressed as he always did for work, in a tropical-weight wool suit with a French silk necktie.
Only a month ago, he had managed a team of twenty-one people for HRI, which he’d joined right after leaving Endo K.K.
In Sydney, he’d managed ten employees. He had worked at two global conglomerates.
At SNU, he had been third in his class in his major.
At forty-six, he was starting again, and looking for a temporary job.
The internal investigation had been fruitless.
HRI still wanted him to resign, refusing to pay him.
Not knowing what to do, John had done nothing.
Only Helen knew. They could not tell the children.
John did not want to use the money Shin had left; he’d asked Helen to store the duffel bag somewhere safe in the apartment.
John knocked on the door, and a woman’s high-pitched voice answered, “Yes?”
The office was warm and smelled like food.
It was lunchtime, and it seemed strange to him that the employees were eating at their desks while working.
No one did that at HRI, where there was a well-run cafeteria for everyone, and often, he and his peers went out to one of a number of local restaurants for a proper midday meal.
Here men wearing white shirts and rayon neckties occupied the eight large desks piled high with documents. Two desks remained empty. The employees looked up briefly, then returned to work. The lone young woman, who functioned as the receptionist, sat behind the desk closest to the door.
Tiny and pale with a pointy chin, the receptionist wore her short hair parted on the side with the longer piece pinned back with a rhinestone-encrusted barrette, like a schoolgirl.
She wore a frilly white blouse, and a brown cardigan hung over her bony shoulders.
She was nibbling on a large fried pastry; seeing John, she put it down by her tea mug and patted her mouth with a tissue.
“Hello?” she said, more a question than a greeting.
“Excuse me. I didn’t realize it was lunchtime,” John said, embarrassed.
“Is anyone expecting you?” She checked to see if the owner had noticed. Seated in the back, the boss was still on a phone call. The side of his desk faced the only window in the office.
“My name is Koh Yohan,” John said. “I saw the advertisement for the tax preparer position. I thought I’d drop off the résumé myself.”
Puzzled, the woman tried to smile. He was nearly her father’s age. The position was for a trainee.
“I had an appointment in the area,” John volunteered, seeing her confusion. He handed her his résumé in a folder. “Is there an application that I could fill out?”
It had been over twenty years since he’d last looked for work. His mouth felt papery.
Unsure, the woman touched her sparkling barrette with her left index finger.
“Wait, please. I’ll go ask the owner.”
When she got up, she was even smaller than she had appeared behind the desk.
Her standing height matched the height of the seated man in the back.
The owner was now off the call, and he looked up from his uneaten lunch and shrugged.
For a moment, he studied John. It took him no time to figure out that the poor bastard with the fancy suit had been sacked from a big company that had no use for him.
There were legions of men like this. The owner had no use for leftovers, so he whispered to the receptionist, and she returned to the front of the office.
“The position has already been filled, sir. Thank you for stopping by.”
John walked toward the cathedral and did not enter it. Rather, he went to the courtyard, where people were gathered in clusters. He found an empty bench.
Not long after his brother died, John had converted.
His college friends were Presbyterian, so he had gone to Protestant services with them.
It was all he knew. Helen had grown up Roman Catholic.
When her parents would abandon her and her siblings on their gambling sprees, the children had received help from neighborhood churches.
An American priest had even given her the name of a saint, and she preferred it over Hejin.
Saint Helen was supposed to be Greek, and John had long planned to take her to Greece one day, after the children finished school and were married.
He wondered if that would ever be possible now.
John decided to walk for a while. There was little else for him to do that day. At home, he could tidy the house, though it wasn’t dirty. When she returned, Helen would cook dinner, and Bo wouldn’t get back from the hagwon till late.
The wide shopping streets bustled with people rushing, haggling, selling—and it occurred to him that everyone was occupied and needed to be somewhere.
The small woman in the tax preparer’s office had pitied him.
He saw it in her face. That gentle smile, which she had meant as a kindness, had affected him.
He had given that same look to others. Pity and sympathy had to be doled out with greater consideration, he realized.
John walked a little faster, wanting to leave that moment behind him.
Lately he had come to understand that he had done it all wrong.
He had not saved enough. He had not built other relationships besides the ones at HRI.
He didn’t have any interests except for work and his family.
There had never been enough time for hobbies.
Had he known that something like this could happen, he might have lived differently, but could he have imagined such a thing?
That a woman could be so cruel and his friend so thoughtless and out of control?
Why had he listened to Shin? John had trusted him with his family’s well-being.
Two weeks before, Shin had come by the apartment again and said that he was still trying to fix things.
If John told the company everything, then they would both lose their jobs, because the company would argue that John should have reported Shin’s scheme to fire Danbi from the start.
To blame Danbi alone would require evidence, and John had none.
It was his word against hers. Shin had not yet left her.
John was not a violent man, but he had wanted to hit Shin, so instead he’d asked him to leave.
When John was a boy, he had read a manhwa about “hubris,” a word from Greece, like Helen’s name. Icarus, Achilles, Odysseus—all of them had hubris, and the gods had to punish them for it.
Because John had done everything as well and as honorably as he could, he had believed that he did not need to develop other skills, and that he would be protected by his education and achievements.
He had only worked for two important companies, and he knew no one personally who had been fired without cause.
Two classmates had lost positions at big companies. Neither found work in an equivalent place; however, both were okay because they had come from prosperous families, and there was enough money to wait things out until something at least halfway decent could appear. They each got another turn.
His own parents and brother were long gone, and if they had lived to see this, they would likely not have had any advice or help to give. For John, the man who knew how to survive best and whom he had leaned on was the very man who had brought him disgrace.
After dinner, Helen asked John to go to the mart to get eggs. As soon as he left, she phoned Australia.
Lily picked up, and she and Kenny took the call in their bedroom, closing the door behind them.
Kenny held the receiver between them, and Lily sat at the edge of the bed, half expecting one of the children to interrupt at any moment.
Lily tucked loose threads from the fraying bedspread into the seam of the ribbon binding and smoothed the fabric with both hands.
Lily leaned toward her husband’s ear, and she could hear her sister-in-law’s quavering voice. Helen spoke in English.
“It’s been almost a month, and he’s been looking.
Just in case things don’t work out at HRI.
We’re thinking of leaving Seoul.” Helen was embarrassed to be talking about her husband’s situation.
“He doesn’t get interviews. His old friends from school hardly remember him.
The school connections have dried up. We were away for too long.
” She didn’t mention the part about his age and seniority, which was obvious to them.