Men in Black Coats

FINALLY, SOON, it will be the first day of snow in Seoul and in Seoul, the first day of snow is a day of confession: a day to confess to your one true love. And this year, unlike all the other years, it will happen. I’ll have someone to confess to. I can feel it.

Last year, I confessed to Ji-hoon which does not count because firstly he is not my type and secondly he has a million other lovers and thirdly he exists as a billboard down my street, permanently winking and holding a bottle of rice liquor. The confession happened miles away, from the leisure of my apartment window, through a stained glass that tinted him pink. The real Ji-hoon lives in Hannam-dong, according to MissyUSA, a site like Reddit but more toxic because only moms are on it. Unlike Reddit incels, these Missy moms spend most of their time in broad daylight. Actually, I think they enjoy being seen, loitering around department stores and coffee shops with days to spare. The success of any café depends on these moms. It’s easy to spot them because there will be a few dozen iced Americanos, surrounded by a few dozen women with identical puffers and tote bags and perms, zipped up and ready to talk. Talking is something these moms take very seriously. They talk about their closest friends, their daughters, their neighbors, their enemies, their idols, their sons, all with equal bits of accuracy and inaccuracy over the course of eight hours. It was Hyunwoo’s mom, after all, that posted about how she saw Ji-hoon enter his house after one of his concerts. I know this because Hyunwoo is my friend. A friend I would never confess to because he is even less my type than Ji-hoon.

“I wish my mom was normal. I wish I was normal,” Hyunwoo once said at a bar.

“You’re pretty normal,” I responded.

“I bet your mom isn’t active on internet chat rooms. I bet she lives life dimensionally, meaningfully, in a very foreign way.”

True, my mom doesn’t use any social websites but that’s because she’s de*d. I guess that is as foreign as life gets to anyone that is still alive. But how would Hyunwoo know that? We aren’t even that close.

“I heard in New York, you can pay someone to pretend to be your mom,” he continued, drawing out a silhouette of what-could-have-been with his eyes.

“You can pay someone to do that anywhere.”

“Yeah, but I’d rather do it in a city where a lack of ethics or a set of insecurities can be packaged as forms of creative expression. I want to express myself.”

“I think what you want is to live in New York.”

Hyunwoo is probably only friends with me because I used to live in New York. I used to live there when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-four and a half. The first time Hyunwoo and I met, he told me his favorite movie was American Psycho. I told him I’ve seen it once, a long time ago, and that Chloë Sevigny lived in my building when I was twenty-three and twenty-four.

“Kuh-low-ee Seb-big-nee? 헐.”

“Yeah.”

“헐.”^[1]

Yeah, well, I would have preferred Christian Bale or Willem Dafoe if I had to choose anyone to be neighbors with but sometimes you can’t be picky. I never said this to Hyunwoo because he just seemed so happy that he met someone that had met Chloë Sevigny.

“Why would you ever leave a place like that.”

I probably should have lied and told him it got dangerous. I lived alone. No safety net of a brother or a boyfriend to fall back on if a murderer broke into the building and got past the doorman, past the lobby concierge, past the elevator key scan, past ten floors and onto the eleventh, then past my own door lock. The truth felt too esoteric to reveal upfront to a stranger, nonetheless a stranger like Hyunwoo. “The truth is, my desire died one day.” And that was the truth.

“Died?” Hyunwoo laughed, as predicted.

My desire or my “Viva la Vida” or whatever you want to call a longing for life died one morning, shortly after New Year’s, on the way to the department store. I wanted to buy these fur leather gloves but something about the new millennium must have unnerved me. I was almost twenty-four which felt like a nothing age, and I was about to enter a nothing year. I couldn’t reconcile with the idea of being so nothing when, historically speaking, the year was hallmarked to be the most promising one yet. I didn’t need to buy the gloves to know they wouldn’t change my life. And I didn’t need to lose them to know I wouldn’t miss them. So what was the point? The question felt small, taking up a font size of nine, but the feeling attached was a centrifugal force of its own, strong enough to fling me back onto the block and into my apartment for days.

For days then, I worked on myself. Patrick Bateman style. I hired a maid to clean my apartment every week. I called a nutritionist to understand which vitamins to swallow. I paid a Japanese lady to strip away the apartment’s pores, anything that might have clogged the energy of the rooms. I tried changing my sheets and then changing my mattress. Started getting ten hours of sleep. Started getting a single desire back, the desire to sleep, which felt like the antithesis of all desires. “Is it boredom? Are you solving for boredom?” Only the sound of my mom’s voice at night would defibrillate me awake, at strange non-hours, with full minutes passing to realize there was no voice, no pain, no telephone cord that could connect me to the side of the dead.

When nothing was changing, I hired an assistant to fast-track my life. I found her taped to a lamppost on Greenwich Street: there was a paper printout of her face with little white flags dangling beneath. NYU student that can literally help with anything, each one read. Literally? Anything? It sounded like a challenge.

“Why do you need an assistant,” she once probed.

“Why do you need a job,” I responded. 

Matters really took a toll when my assistant found out I was twenty-four (“You look thirty”) and she believed she deserved a more inspiring client (“Julia Roberts or Toby Maguire”). Folding Julia Roberts’ laundry was different than folding my laundry, she explained. Julia’s clothes touched the clothes of other ambitious, talented women who knew how to light up a room. Her dresses rubbed against Kirsten Dunst’s dresses, Uma Thurman’s dresses, Keira Knightley’s dresses. These little rubs created their own energy that could be felt by anyone who touched these dresses. Not only did I not know how to light up a room, but I somehow dimmed it, stripped it from its original feng shui. This was different from the energy of someone dying, she made sure to clarify, because mine resembled someone who was never born.

How stupid is that?

How stupid was she? 

This is as easy as life is going to get. 

I must have said this out loud because she resigned the next day by leaving a pile of dirty clothes inside my stove. That’s it? I thought. I wish she would have lit them on fire or lit the apartment on fire, because maybe then I would have developed a burning passion to hunt her down and ruin her life, at last developed some purpose in life, leaving trails of post-it notes in her dorm (I am suing – I am suicidal – I am suicidal now, but you’ll forever be fat – Forever be guilty – And there’s black mold on your ceiling – Your mold is your karma – Your karma is also your roommate – She hates you – She told me). Maybe it wasn’t so bad that I never ended up with Patrick Bateman’s discipline. He might have lived a disciplined life, but he also killed a lot of women.

It had turned into spring before I took the clothes out of my stove. I took them out the same day I packed up the rest of my closet. The idea of breaking a lease felt more dramatic in theory, but when the landlord came by to check the state of the apartment, it didn’t feel much different than the day I moved in. Stripped of any history. My trials and errors to feel something summed up to zero. The one thing I hadn’t tried, however, in all those years, was to fall in love. So, I guess I’m making up for lost time now.

Now, it’s 12:29. That’s what it says on the restaurant’s clock. I look down at my beer. I don’t even know why I ordered it. I guess I wanted to try on a simple idea, to be one of those women who can wear a mink coat and walk into a restaurant and order a drink all before noon. In my mind, these are the women that end up falling in love. They possess the lore of tragic princesses, charming misfits, chronic dreamers. They have crinkled secrets, little to say, the attitude of a loner only child, which enchants nearby prospects to come ever closer.

I look up. 12:30. Just like the date: December 30^th. Perfectly synchronous. It takes more than luck to create these perfect synchronizations. Nobody would know, but I chose this restaurant because it is near the main corporate offices. I chose this seat because, from it, I can see handsome men in black coats come out the revolving doors every hour to smoke Raisons. I chose this time, because I can, because that’s the great thing about being unemployed. I chose these boots because they are slippery, and if I slip on the pavement, a handsome man (an attentive man) will come rescue me. And I chose this drink because, well, I already said why I chose this drink. I sip it, thinking how the most beautiful thing a man can wear besides a tuxedo is a black coat. It doesn’t matter how he looks on the inside. That would be discrimination.

I get a text message from my chocolate phone.^[2] It’s Hyunwoo, obviously.

What are you doing?

A second text shortly follows.

Never mind, you’re probably still asleep. Forgot it’s Friday.

Still asleep? I want to deny the accusation, but the first batch of handsome men have walked out the revolving door. I wait for my heart to skip a beat, but my pulse remains healthy and stagnant. Beating at a rate of seventy. Besides, it’s only 12:32 which means these are men without morning meetings or men that are lazy or men that literally cannot wait to eat. Maybe I should wait for the ones that go through the door at one or one-thirty or two or two-thirty. Plus, it hasn’t even started snowing yet.

It’s supposed to snow today. Finally the weather has gotten as cold as your moods.

Hyunwoo’s audacity is crazy. I’m sure he gets it from his mother.

In New York, the first snowfall does not mean anything beyond a foreshadow. More coldness to come, a longer winter than last. Most times, snow hardly feels like a feather anyway. Look up at the wrong time and there are a thousand Pop Rocks entering your irises. Look down and you’ll see slush tie-dying your jeans into darker shades of blue. But people in New York hardly look up or down. They hardly even look at you. And if they look at you, they usually have something to say. They don’t need a cultural tradition like the first snow to be brave or confess their love to a crush. Maybe that’s just something only Koreans need. Maybe if Koreans were brave enough to confess their love on a daily basis, and not just one day of the year, we would have more babies. We would have less suicides. We would reverse the population decline.

So, actually, what I’m doing today is something for my country. Like entering the military except instead of killing other lives, I’m creating them eventually. Procreation is easy if you love someone. Finding someone you love is the hard part.

I look near the entrance where a waiter is cleaning the glass. I wonder if he’s also thinking of time, if time feels endless, if he has someone waiting for him at the end of his shift, in which case the endlessness is worth it. Probably has one of those girlfriends with long hair and thin wrists on the verge of snapping because she types fast and all the time, sending text messages like, “Where are you,” “Can you bring me dessert,” “Are there pretty girls there,” “Why aren’t you replying,” “Where are you.” No room for ellipses or second thoughts or a roundabout way to tell a truth. A truth like, “Maybe we shouldn’t be together.”

The waiter catches me staring, rushes over, asks if I need anything else.

“Can I get another beer?”

“You’re finished with this one?”

“Yeah, I just like the foam.”

He laughs, then hides his laughter beneath his throat.

“What would your girlfriend think of that?” I ask. His eyes widen. He turns away.

As I wait for the more ambitious batch to smoke outside, I practice what I’ll say. Something straight to the point like “Hello, I think I can love you. Do you think you can love me too?” I don’t worry about rejection. I don’t worry about tone. I don’t worry whether the words will roll off my tongue smoothly or not. The point is not to be a smooth talker. Besides, being too smooth is suspicious. I am already suspicious of beautiful people—because I am one—and if everyone thought like me, the population crisis is better off unresolved. I’m okay with the world being just me and the men I get to choose from. And anyway, if the first handsome man says no, I will go to the next one and the next one until one of them says yes. Unless all the men in Yeouido are taken and married and happily in love. I find that hard to believe because why else would they smoke so many Raisons.

I check the forecast. Snow should have arrived ten minutes ago. If I can’t fall in love today, I still have my birthday. I can still wish for love. Maybe it will bring on an obsession. Maybe, then, my desire will come back for good. It doesn’t have to feel good. It just has to feel.

“Miss, here is your beer.” The waiter has regained his confidence. He places the glass softly onto the table. Then, after an ellipsis, he murmurs, “…I don’t have a girlfriend by the way.”

“Okay.” I wrap my palm against the cold cylinder glass and let the foam hit the back of my throat.

“Can I see the dessert menu?”

The waiter doesn’t try to say anything else when he comes back to give the dessert menu. Ten different slices of cake are printed across the plastic paper. The miniature cakes remind me of stickers I used to trade in elementary school, the rare ones with water and glitter inside that’d float up and down as I stuck them onto my binder. Very edible looking. The problem with Asian cakes is they are too presentable to eat. Even me, who rarely feels guilt, feels guilt when I cut through an immaculate object, through icing that’s soft and flat and freckled like a stone. Each time, I wish somebody else could do it. But no one’s ever around.

I get the sweet potato one. I get the single serving.

The men gathered outside don’t look so different from a colony of ants, walking back and forth a couple of steps, never droning too far from the premises of the glass hill. Did you know: male ants have nothing but time? They have all the time in the world? Their lives feel like forever until a brief female encounter? They die immediately after they mate? They die literally for love? Did you also know: ants love sucrose. I imagine going up to the men with a sweet potato cake, a whole one, and offering it as bait. We are a country addicted to sweet potato.

I eat my slice quickly, hurried by the image of ants on a cake, and pay the bill. When I walk out the door, the cold, beating air takes me by surprise even though it shouldn’t, but everything about the day so far has felt part of a larger soundstage, and I am on script, on cue, waiting for something extraordinary to happen. I can feel my hands tightening from the wind’s hold over my fingers and any suspicion of a theatrical production fades away. If these were all backdrops, the air would have punctured through each one, leaving behind only a stone wall that separates the imaginary world from the real world.

One of the men, out of all the men, begins walking across the street and through the stone wall. His perm is not like the mom perms, it’s more Roman and real, just like his cheeks which are chiseled like Swiss Knives. He grows taller as he comes closer until he is only a few feet in front of me. Okay, attempt one.

“Hello, I think I can—”

“No thank you.”

What the fuck?

Does he think I’m one of those street advertisers?

Following him feels borderline illegal, like the very start of a restraining order, but I do it anyway because being hellbent on love is something worth getting cuffed up for. I wait until he is through the door of the coffee shop next to the restaurant with the cakes and beer and follow suit.

Only seeing the back of his head lends the illusion that he is much more handsome. More familiar, too. His neck is slim, at least the part that’s visible, the other part cloaked by a cream collar. He smells like soft leather, like pink pepper, like a kiss in the dark. I think his cologne is Tom Ford or Acqua Di Parma or YSL. Or Cartier or Ralph Lauren or Frederic Malle. Not Diptyque or Le Labo, only guys with girlfriends wear Diptyque or Le Labo. And his coat…

“Is your coat Armani?” I hear myself asking out loud.

He doesn’t even try responding this time. Mr. Armani remains still, forward, minding only his position in line. If it wasn’t for my mission, I wouldn’t try asking again. I would keep this mental picture of him forever, someone with infinite possibilities of who I want them to be. But it’s the first day of snow so I clear my throat instead. That seems better, less hostile, than tapping his shoulder.

When he turns around, I feel discouraged because his face really does belong in a Tom Ford or Acqua Di Parma or YSL ad. Something Martin Scorsese would direct.

“Hello, I—”

“Hello.”

“I think—”

“Do you need help? Is it help you need?”

“What, no. Can you let me finish?”

“Hi sir, what would you like to order?” the cashier squeaks. She looks so cute, it’s stupid.

“Oh, could I get a hot Americano.”

I see him leave a twenty-five percent tip and wonder if he comes here often. That would explain why the cashier’s eyes lit up seeing him. It’s a monetary incentive, not an emotional one, to smile so wide and fake and—

“Hi ma’am, do you know what you want?” The cashier’s voice no longer squeaks. The bubble in her throat pops and is replaced by a sagging grunt, coming somewhere inside her stomach. The brown glitter in her eyes turn into a miniature riot. Would rather talk to Mr. Armani, they protest to my eyes.

“Can I have an iced latte with extra vanilla syrup and whip cream?”

“Are you trying to kill yourself or something?” Because he doesn’t really exist beyond my imagination, it takes me a second to realize it’s Mr. Armani. He is smiling like he told a good joke, and I think he is joking, but I have a hard time detecting sarcasm, so I don’t know. Not that it matters because he’s already moved on, looking down at his watch. “It’s twelve-forty. Too early for a sugar crash.”

“Things are behind schedule today. It hasn’t even snowed yet,” I say.

“Is it supposed to?”

“Yes!” I cry.

“Oh, okay.” His lips slump into a slight frown.

“Why can’t something be reliable for once?” I ask God.

His frown curls back up into a smile, a large one this time, raising his Swiss Knife cheekbones up against his lower eyelids. Suddenly, totally, I understand why idols have fandoms with moms on MissyUSA who religiously check comments. Picture this: Hyunwoo’s mom with a heart-shaped sign for Ji-hoon on one end of a street, and me with a heart-shaped sign for Mr. Armani on the other end. If Mr. Armani were famous, these moms would queue up to see him, love him, touch him, touching each other in line, one puffer rubbing against another, creating what would surely be a different energy from Julia Roberts’. 

“You’re really disappointed by the weather,” he says.

“Yeah, my whole day is ruined.”

“Your whole day…”

“I had this big romantic plan.”

“Plan? Were you planning to confess to a crush? Do people still do that?”

“Huh? Who told you?”

“Why don’t you call him? Do you need a phone? Here, you can use my phone.”

“I have a phone,” I say and before I know it, I take out my phone and feel Hyunwoo vibrating against my fingers.

“Okay then.”

“And I have a crush.”

“Great! Lucky you.”

“One hot Americano, one hot Americano!” squeak, squeak, squeak, goes the cashier.

I try not to be so obvious as I watch Mr. Armani grab his coffee. He sips it immediately, the way all masculine men do, because masculine men can handle extremely hot liquids. “I haven’t had a crush since I was twenty,” he says in between sips. “And I never will again.”

Pang! The piece of information punches one of my ribs, the one nearest my heart. This piece of information weighs differently than the other pieces of information. It is shaped like a metal wrench, clunking its way down into my appendix. Likely to stay there for days. The start of appendicitis.

“Good for you,” I respond.

“What?”

“You’re immune to love. Just like me.”

“No, no, I, you see my wife and I met when I was twenty so that’s why—”

Pang! Pang! Pang! More information I didn’t ask to digest. Who knows what else he is saying, my ears went deaf after “wife.”

“…and now we’re married for almost seven years so don’t be so close minded. Snow or no snow. You must lead with your heart.”

“One iced latte with vanilla syrup and whipped cream.”

If this was a normal café—a practical café—they would call out our names instead of our orders. More efficient. Less fat shaming. A chance to know Mr. Armani’s name.

“You’re married?” I ask because I like to double-check certain things.

“Yes.”

“You don’t look married.”

Mr. Armani stops sipping. He looks at the ground, as if trying to decipher whether this is a compliment or an insult or a promiscuous detour from our dialogue. I get this feeling every once in a while, that when I speak to men, they think my attempt at honesty is my attempt at seduction. If I wanted to seduce men, I would be a literal prostitute, not a literary one. It’s love I want. How else would I achieve that if not through earnesty.

“I don’t know how to do that,” I say, suddenly serious. “To lead with my heart.”

Three other men in black coats enter the café, together, squirming, laughing, stretching out the dimensions of space, collapsing the notion that it is just Mr. Armani and me, although it was never just Mr. Armani and me. I don’t need to look at them to know they aren’t like Mr. Armani. Mr. Armani has dimension, layers on layers built straight from the pipeline of my fantastical whimsies.

“Close your eyes and think about what you’re really feeling,” he says over the laughter.

I close my eyes. I think about what I’m really feeling. December weather, the smell of rain, an ant’s army, a yellow yearning, a false yearning, a choir of voices, chiming, “Is it boredom? Are you solving for boredom?” The burning of my oven stove, of clothes charcoaling against the steel rack, of fire flicking out pebbles of words that spell out, “That’s it?” And this is it, this is the apex of my emotional intensity, the most I’ll ever feel. A big pang and then splat, fizzling out like the aftermath of a paper cut.

“I think I can love you. Do you think you can love me too?” The words creep out from my consciousness, melting my metal wrenches, turning them into silver goo.

“Great,” says Mr. Armani. “Repeat that to your crush, and you will for sure succeed.”

He checks the time again, for sure a habit his wife hates. Have to head back, his brows tell me, and he tilts his head down to say goodbye. As I watch him open the door, I feel the insides of my face churning and think this must be misery in making. I feel misery centering itself onto my nose. I think I’ll cry soon. Instead, I sneeze.

My hands loosen a grip I hadn’t noticed. I think of how bare my hands are, how bare I could have been, under the right circumstances, under a different one. I think of how badly I wanted, if it was that bad at all. Already, the sharpness of Mr. Armani’s face starts to blunt, much like the bareness, both fleeting, flattening, fading away. I think of trying to contain it the only way I know how, by closing my eyes again.

Stay there, I think.

But where is there? The sheer confines of my mind? Inside a memory that will wither and whiten? 

How will this beating memory stick? 

I’d like to stick it inside a totem, inside a pair of new gloves so that every time I wear them, I can rub my fingers against today’s feeling. If I leave now and walk fast and don’t slip, I can make it to the nearest department store within ten minutes. To the gloves aisle in twelve. If I do slip, that’s okay.

I get up and gather my things. The whipped cream in my latte has given up. It has surrendered its shape fully, sogging into the brownish puddle beneath. When I go to toss it, I hear a slight thud as it hits the other cups dying in the trash bin. I touch the part of the door that Mr. Armani had touched last and press my palm against the glass. 

Outside, the air is cold and sweet like a broken poem. The wind whines out a gasp, and then a sigh, and then a slight whistle. I feel the hems of my jeans dampen, and I look up.

---

^[1] Phonetically pronounced as “hull”. Translates to OMG.

^[2] An LG slider phone titled “Chocolate” because of its resemblance to a smooth, glossy chocolate bar (released in 2006).