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Seated at the farthest table by the window, far from the entrance, Liu was gazing out at the drizzling autumn rain. During the roughly five days he had been away, the temperature in Seoul had dropped considerably. The trees in the hotel garden below were already tinged with the full colors of autumn.
The change of seasons was always sudden. This was especially true during the transition from summer to autumn. Just the day before, the high had surpassed 30 degrees Celsius, making a mockery of the September date, but then overnight, the temperature would plummet to the point where one had to pull out a trench coat. And before one could properly enjoy the autumn leaves or the high, clear sky, winter would arrive in the blink of an eye.
And this time, he would be leaving this city before that short autumn could even deepen. He hadn’t known he would be leaving at a time like this, in a manner like this, but it didn’t matter. As long as he could escape this place safely with him, the destination didn’t even have to be New York. The next steps could be considered after that. He was prepared to endure any material or temporal loss.
Liu, who had been gazing out the window with his arms resting on the armrests of the simple, cube-shaped sofa and his hands loosely clasped over his crossed knees, was just about to reach for the on-the-rocks glass in front of him when someone approached soundlessly over the dark carpet and stopped at the table.
“Seon-woo, help me get a solo exhibition at Phantom.”
“……”
Lifting his head, he saw Shushu standing there with a hardened face. Averting his gaze, Liu took the on-the-rocks glass in his hand.
“Sit.”
After asking the waiter who came to take their order for a new on-the-rocks glass, Shushu poured himself the same whiskey Liu was drinking and downed half of it before the ice had even begun to dilute it. It was a rare sight for Shushu, who didn’t enjoy strong liquor, but Liu showed no reaction.
“While I was in Boston, did Hong Seon-woo call you and act all pathetic?”
Since the other man seemed to have no intention of dragging out the preamble, Liu, too, brought up Hong Seon-woo’s name right away.
It wasn’t an entirely unexpected development. In the hotel library in Chicago, Hong Seon-woo, who had ‘asked’ him for a solo exhibition in Seoul, had looked as if he would sell his soul to the devil. And if he was desperate enough to come to him, it wouldn’t have been difficult to figure out that the next step was to find Shushu.
Despite Liu’s aggressive remark, Shushu, his mouth set in a firm line, remained silent and lost in thought. He stared intently at the glass in his hand and opened his mouth.
“The gallery he’s with now is treating him unfairly. Not only are they continuously excluding him from exhibitions, but they’re also interfering with his work by demanding repeated revisions during the pre-production planning stage. That’s an insulting infringement on an artist’s creativity, and it’s tantamount to pressuring him to leave the gallery on his own.”
Hmph….
Liu exhaled deeply, his mouth shut. He pressed his eyelids with his palm as if performing acupressure, but it wasn’t easy to control his emotions.
Hong Seon-woo’s actions were well within the predictable range, but he hadn’t expected Shushu to react like this. He didn’t want to unleash the emotions that were beginning to boil inside his heavy head. Even without doing so, he was already emotionally at a dangerous level.
The high-ceilinged lounge bar created a classic atmosphere with several long, rectangular windows that looked to be about three stories high. Liu tried to cool his head, fiddling meaninglessly with the long satin curtains that hung from the very top of the windows where they met the ceiling.
“Do you even know how that bastard ended up getting treated like that? Are you saying this knowing that, you?”
Shushu didn’t answer. But his gaze, which met Liu’s for a moment before flitting away, was enough for him to surmise that he knew the inside story—and that he was asking him to help Hong Seon-woo despite knowing.
Liu dropped his hand from the curtain and scoffed, shaking his head.
“So you do know. What is this? Is Phantom a charity? No, even a charity wouldn’t help a bastard who sold his body to get ahead. Putting aside the fact that he ruined his own life, how… can the words ‘let’s help him’ even come out of your throat? What are you, some kind of saint?”
As if regretting the emotion he had let slip despite his resolve, Liu bit his lower lip so hard it turned white and reached for his glass.
“Weren’t you the one who said that for a work’s value to be properly recognized, the work itself isn’t enough, that management to present it attractively is essential, Liu Weikun? Not every creator is lucky enough to meet a gallerist who will diligently care for them.”
Liu, who had been looking down at the tips of his own shoes with his arm on the armrest, shifted his gaze askew toward Shushu.
“In my opinion, Hong Seon-woo has been excessively overrated until now, and he’s enjoyed more than enough luck thanks to that, don’t you think? Thanks to offering his ass to the gallery’s old owner.”
“……”
“Jeong Se-in, no matter how important a gallery’s role is in promoting a work, not everyone uses their ass to get recognized.”
Hong Seon-woo had been in an affair with the owner of his gallery. He was probably one of the rich old man’s several young lovers. Though he barely passed for being in his twenties by his American age, he was now thirty by Korean age. Liu didn’t want to know, nor did he need to know, why Hong Seon-woo had been dropped from the old man’s list of boy toys.
If his skills had been up to par, there would have been plenty of galleries willing to work with him even after being cast aside by the old man who no longer found his body attractive. But there were no galleries willing to recruit a vain artist who had been over-packaging paintings worth less than $5,000 with plausible-sounding phrases and strategic PR to sell them for $15,000.
Near the piano by the entrance, a few people bustled about for a moment, and soon a live jazz performance began. The music and performance were gentle enough not to disturb conversation, and all the other patrons seemed to be enjoying the jazz on a rainy autumn night, but the sweet melody was not reaching these two men at all.
After staring hard at Liu’s face in silence for a long while, Shushu’s lips parted and closed several times as if he were about to speak.
“The reason Seon-woo… became so pathologically obsessed with success is….”
In front of Shushu, who was cautiously revealing Hong Seon-woo’s past and family situation, completely unaware that Liu already knew the story… Liu had to endure the painful prodding of the guilt he had carried as a part of himself for the past several years.
Moreover, surprisingly, as he listened, he began to think that Shushu and Hong Seon-woo had shared more with each other than he had expected, and perhaps… had even shared a deeper connection. Liu was well aware of his father’s business failure, but the subsequent, more severely twisted pathological obsession with success was an epilogue he hadn’t known, nor cared about.
Shushu was speaking of a depth of understanding that was difficult to grasp when one party held only a one-sided interest in the other; he was speaking of the results of a psychological study of the man named Hong Seon-woo.
Shushu was speaking of the other side of a human soul, a place inaccessible unless one side opens up their own abyss, and the other listens with deep, affectionate trust and non-judgmental patience—that is, unless the relationship is as intimate as that of lovers.
Whatever the initial purpose of his approach… perhaps Hong Seon-woo hadn’t treated him with only pretense and acting during his time with Shushu. Perhaps the more than three years they had spent together hadn’t been just a show staged with a crude script that was both cruel and tragic.
Liu didn’t want to think such thoughts now. He didn’t want to come to understand Hong Seon-woo in any way.
“That… doesn’t seem like a sufficient excuse for trading his body with a gallery owner for success.”
As Shushu’s story more or less concluded, Liu, like someone wanting to ignore a certain possibility he had sensed, hastily stated his conclusion. Watching Shushu’s face harden with disappointment and resentment, Liu told himself that this was the right choice for him. And he drove the nail in.
“And it’s even more obvious that it’s no excuse for what he did to you.”
“……”
“When I think about what that bastard did to you… I just can’t understand why you’re acting like this. Jeong Se-in, in case you’ve forgotten, let me remind you: that bastard didn’t love you. For all that time, in such a filthy way, he… used you.”
Even as he watched Shushu’s face contort with hurt, he didn’t stop the provocation, thinking he had to make him face reality so that he wouldn’t be swayed by Hong Seon-woo any longer.
“Why on earth are you doing this? What does it matter to you whether Hong Seon-woo gets kicked out of his gallery or expelled from the art world? Do you have some lingering feelings for him? Don’t tell me, what, you still love him?”
“Do you think only the love between you and your genius boy is true and valuable?”
Shushu’s voice held no trace of emotional sarcasm; rather, it was a voice devoid of any force, as if the words had passed through reason, not emotion. But the content of the words alone was enough to get under Liu’s skin.
He wet his lower lip with his tongue and looked at Shushu with a gaze that had grown cold.
“……Why are you bringing that up?”
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