The autumn rains were ending. We had just made love and were lying in bed, catching our breath, listening to the rain thin out. Raindrops fell on the outdoor unit of the air conditioner.
“Whenever I hear that sound, I think of kalguksu,” my wife said.
“Why?” I asked.
“When raindrops fell on the tin roof, my mother boiled noodles. Then we sat around on the wooden porch and ate kalguksu. When she put shredded zucchini into clam broth, it was unbelievably good.”
“My mother made pajeon. When she heard rain, she washed scallions, mixed flour with water, and made batter. Sometimes she told my older sister to go to the market and buy clam meat. My sister hated errands. So in the end I was the one who went to buy it. That really is an old story.”
My wife made a gesture asking for my arm as a pillow. I stretched out my left arm. She rested her face on it and stroked my chest. I love this soft touch of my wife’s hand.
“Shall we go out and eat kalguksu?” I asked.
“Yes. But let’s lie here a little longer.”
I looked quietly at the ceiling. I tried to think of other sounds that bring food to mind. But I could not quite come up with any. Maybe it was because of the hangover. My wife and I do not usually drink much, but yesterday we drank too much. Half a bottle of tequila and two bottles of wine, so we were both quite drunk.
Yesterday was not any special anniversary. A few days earlier, my wife had told me about her first love. She said the man’s name was Maeng Yo-cheol. I teased her, saying his father must have been an amusing man to put the characters for concave and convex into his son’s name. My wife gave me a look and said she did not know what character the “yo” was, but the “cheol” was the character for brightness, or wisdom. Holding back my laughter, I said that if we did it right, we could probably find him even now. My wife did not answer. Then she told me the story of her first love, from the third year of middle school, that old time more than twenty years ago.
The setting of her first love was, naturally, Sokcho, my wife’s hometown. Her house was near Sokcho Jungang Market. At the time, my wife’s family was neither especially well-off nor poor, but they had a couple of spare rooms and rented them out. I suppose it was probably a way for my mother-in-law to make some spending money. Usually men who worked on boats used the rooms for fifteen days or a month, but that summer a university student from Seoul rented one of the rooms for two months. He was my wife’s first love, Mr. Maeng Yo-cheol.
Of course, she said, it wasn’t love at first sight or anything like that. Still, since a student was staying in the rented room, my mother-in-law must have paid some attention to him. So if she boiled noodles at lunchtime, she would have put some in a bowl and told my wife to take it to the low wooden veranda of the room where the university student was staying. Or in the evening, she would have told her to call him in for dinner. In those days, that sort of thing was natural, so there was nothing very strange about it.
My wife did not call the university student oppa. She called him Yo-cheol ajusshi. If it had been me, I would have been rather disappointed, but Yo-cheol ajusshi did not seem to mind. In any case, once Yo-cheol ajusshi took my wife to the beach in Sokcho and bought her sea cucumber and sea squirt, and she says she still cannot forget the taste.
Is that true? I thought perhaps sea cucumber and sea squirt were all wild then, so they must have been clearly different from the farmed ones we eat now. Besides, when it comes to taste, everyone has one memory or another they cannot forget.
During the day, Yo-cheol ajusshi spent time by the sea with a fishing rod. At night, he read until late or played the harmonica. According to my wife, the sound of the harmonica was so mournful that my father-in-law would say, “Play one more tune.”
I almost forgot the watermelon story. One evening, Yo-cheol ajusshi came home and gave my mother-in-law a whole watermelon. Maybe he felt bad about eating dinner there all the time, so he had bought a large watermelon. They sat around the wooden platform in the yard and ate watermelon, and when my father-in-law asked why he had come down to Sokcho, he only answered that he had come to rest.
That night, my wife imagined that Yo-cheol ajusshi had been heartbroken in Seoul and had come down to Sokcho to get over the sorrow. And she was swept up in a strange feeling, both hating and being grateful to the woman who had hurt Yo-cheol ajusshi’s heart. Wasn’t that exactly the sort of feeling a girl in the third year of middle school might have? At that part of the story, I loved my wife very much.
Toward the end of summer vacation, a big typhoon came. The wind blew fiercely, and the rain fell so hard that an umbrella was no use. Worried about Yo-cheol ajusshi, who had gone fishing, my wife took an umbrella and went out looking for him. She was badly scolded by my mother-in-law later, but what was a typhoon to a sixteen-year-old girl in love?
When my wife reached the place where Yo-cheol ajusshi fished, he was already gone, and entry had been blocked. My wife came home in the rain, sniffling and crying. She was sick with worry over Yo-cheol ajusshi, but toward sunset he returned as if nothing had happened, wearing a white raincoat. She said he felt so cruel to her that tears welled up in her eyes. When my wife told me this part, I could not help saying one thing.
“Now I’m jealous.”
My wife said that because Yo-cheol ajusshi had come back safely, she forgave everything. But then he quietly called her over and handed her a yellow raincoat. A small, cute yellow raincoat with a hood. Imagine it. How happy must she have been? Enough to make me jealous.
Anyway, the adolescent girl cherished that raincoat and wore it whenever it rained. On the last day of the typhoon, Yo-cheol ajusshi hurried back to Seoul. He did not say what the reason was. He packed his things, said a simple goodbye, and left in a hurry.
The yellow raincoat was torn during the next typhoon. My wife’s younger sister secretly wore it out and came back with it ripped here and there. Only then did I understand what the story of the yellow raincoat was, the one my wife and her sister sometimes talked about. My sister-in-law was scolded badly by my wife. She had been in the fifth grade of elementary school then, so she could not have known what story was attached to that yellow raincoat. But the girl in the third year of middle school held the torn yellow raincoat and wet it with tears all night.
Yo-cheol ajusshi never contacted her after that.
When I had heard the whole story of my wife’s first love, like a brief summer shower, I asked again.
“Shall I find Yo-cheol ajusshi for you?”
My wife quietly nodded.
Finding Mr. Maeng Yo-cheol was not difficult. I went on the internet and in thirty minutes found his phone number and even his address. How many people in the Republic of Korea could have the surname Maeng and the given name Yo-cheol? This sort of thing is nothing to me.
When I handed my wife Mr. Maeng Yo-cheol’s phone number, she asked me to call him for her. I called him. And when he answered, I briefly introduced myself and passed the receiver to my wife.
In a trembling voice, my wife said into the receiver, “Hello. This is Park Jeong-hwa, the girl from the seaside in Sokcho. I wonder if you remember me.”
Park Jeong-hwa, the girl from the seaside. Holding back the laughter that was about to burst out, I quietly went into the small room.
My wife spoke with Yo-cheol ajusshi for about ten minutes. Then she hung up and came to me and said this.
“He’s married. He has children. He lives in Seosan.”
I held my wife. Surely, if Mr. Yo-cheol had been unmarried, she wouldn’t have left me for him, would she? I patted my wife on the back. That evening we drank tequila and wine and talked a lot about old memories. My memory is hazy because I was drunk, but I think my wife said that when blue crab season came, we should go to Seosan once.
“Shall we go eat kalguksu now?” my wife says.
“Yes. And pajeon,” I answer quietly.
My wife gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom to shower. The sound of cool water reaches the bed. I think. Where might Hee-jeong be now, and what might she be doing?
Sunday afternoon sunlight comes into the bedroom. I get up and go into the bathroom.