This Burns My Heart Page 0,99

Boston?”

“I’ve never been there, either,” Soo-Ja said, still smiling.

Jae-Hwa placed her hand on Soo-Ja’s arm; Jae-Hwa had a warm smile on her face—the kind you reserve only for people you’ve known for a long time. “When we were in high school, Soo-Ja always wanted to travel. Before any of us did. She almost went to diplomat school in Seoul. She was going to be a diplomat, and travel to every country.”

“And did you?” asked Eun-Mee.

“No, it didn’t quite work out that way,” Soo-Ja replied.

“You must not have wanted it badly enough. You probably gave up too easily,” said Eun-Mee.

“Yes, that was probably it,” Soo-Ja said, trying to end the conversation.

Jae-Hwa started patting her hand, as if apologizing for Eun-Mee.

“See, if you want something in life, you have to go after it!” Eun-Mee exclaimed to Soo-Ja enthusiastically. Soo-Ja nodded lightly and gave her a half smile. “You can’t be tentative. That’s how I got married to my husband.”

Soo-Ja turned her head toward her. She had to hold herself back, resist the temptation to say, Go on. Tell us more.

“I’m sure he proposed on the first day he met you. A woman like you wastes no time,” said Jae-Hwa.

“I knew at once when I saw him, standing with a group of men outside Pusan University Hospital,” said Eun-Mee, smiling, glad to be holding her audience’s attention like fish in a net. “He wore a Western suit and pleated pants, so incredibly handsome and confident, and I thought, I would like to be your mother!”

“Eun-Mee!” Jae-Hwa cried out, laughing.

“I want to tuck your shirt in, and feed you soup when you’re sick, and help you with your homework!” said Eun-Mee, waving her arms in front of her. “That is when a woman knows she is ready to be a wife—when she decides to mother!”

“I would strongly disagree with that, but go on,” said Jae-Hwa. Neither of them noticed Soo-Ja’s silence.

“Anyway, I invited him to come to a pageant I was in and after that we began to date a little bit, going to music rooms where we’d sit side by side on the soft velvet chairs while we listened to Bach recordings. We didn’t do much—he was as chaste as Chunhyang in that fairy tale, and I call it a fairy tale because who would wait so long for a lover who gives no sign of returning?”

“There must’ve been somebody else. Was he courting another girl at the same time?” asked Jae-Hwa, and for a second Soo-Ja turned to her nervously, wondering if she knew about her and Yul. But she couldn’t; Soo-Ja had never told her.

“No, there was nobody else. Just a memory. He’d talk about this girl he met while he was in medical school in Daegu. He talked about her like a country he had been to once and always intended on going back to. He claimed she was just an acquaintance, but I knew better. Whenever we were together, I could feel her presence between us, no matter how gay or loud I became. She was always there.” Eun-Mee stopped, her expression uncharacteristically distant. The entire room seemed to grow silent, out of sympathy.

It was strange, for Soo-Ja, to hear her story from Eun-Mee’s perspective. She sounded so powerful, when in fact she had been so helpless all along the way. Soo-Ja would have given anything to switch roles with Eun-Mee, just so she could have Yul’s body, and be able to feel his weight against her. It was nice, thought Soo-Ja, to hear that she had had Yul’s thoughts, but his thoughts alone could not warm her on a cold night, could not fit into her. Now that she knew how extravagantly Eun-Mee had had his touch—every night, for years!—Soo-Ja felt starved for it.

“Did you get him to forget this other woman?” asked Jae-Hwa. She took a sip of her coffee, but put it down immediately. It had grown cold.

“Of course! It was hard, but I did it. It was like fighting the sun—he saw her everywhere.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jae-Hwa.

“It’s hard to explain. First love leaves a deep mark. Fortunately, I know how to medicate such wounds.”

“Did you ever meet her? The woman from Daegu?” asked Jae-Hwa.

Soo-Ja turned her face away, lest her eyes confess for her.

“No, I never met her,” said Eun-Mee. “For a long time I couldn’t look at the face of beautiful women I walked by on the street because I would always think it was her. It drove me mad. Is that