His dry tone, devoid of any excessive emotion, seemed to waver slightly, but he soon regained his composure, or rather, his balance of insensibility.
“People would simply describe them as an ‘ideal couple,’ but as their only child, what I felt from the closest vantage point was something more than that. No arguments, a long marriage yet they still looked at each other as sweetly as lovers, enjoying dates just the two of them… It went beyond that kind of relationship….”
He struggled to choose the right words to convey an unconventional meaning, and I suddenly cut in.
“I think I know.”
He, who had been hesitating, scraping his lower lip with his upper teeth, turned to look at me. The cigarette between his fingers had already grown short.
What do you know? How could you know? He didn’t lash out at me. Instead, his tense face, which had been looking at me in surprise, slackened into a faint smile. It was a smile of tolerance, accepting that the other person was receiving and understanding his story in ‘their own way.’
Considering that most people show an objective and rational attitude toward the pain of others, yet resent even a wound as small as a thorn under their own fingernail being taken lightly, the gentle, slightly lonely, and resigned smile he showed suggested that he wasn’t just a prince who had reigned over the world and achieved everything with ease simply by the power of his given environment.
But on my part, it was by no means a feigned gesture of empathy thrown out lightly.
Although I couldn’t be perfectly certain if my understanding matched his story exactly, I too knew a couple who shared a relationship that was more than just the commonly understood meaning of an ideal couple.
“My father was an admirer of and an artistic comrade to my mother’s world of work and all the spirit that composed it, and my mother regarded my father, the perfect connoisseur of herself and her work, as literally her soulmate. Many people think that a perfectly balanced relationship, not leaning even slightly to one side, doesn’t exist… and they especially think the relationship between an artist and their supporter is an unequal one where the weight is on the artist’s side, but they were different.”
He stubbed out the cigarette, which had burned right down to the filter, in the ashtray.
“It wasn’t a relationship that relied merely on romantic feelings for a person of the opposite sex or the affection that builds over time. In order to instill a meaning in life beyond the basic sustenance of food, clothing, and shelter, in order to exist as themselves… they absolutely needed each other, and those two… because of me… were forced to be torn apart.”
There was almost no aspect of him demanding my empathy for his emotions. Pausing for a moment and staring into the air as if recalling a point in the past, he was making sure to bear his emotions entirely on his own. He was just telling it to me as a story, as a piece of information.
I had it this hard, I was in this much pain. He might think it ugly to get drunk on emotion and turn the other person into an audience for himself.
Even as I agreed that this was maturity in the ‘general sense,’ and even as I myself was a person who felt uncomfortable revealing my own vulnerabilities, a selfish desire suddenly surged within me—a desire to see him expose his most vulnerable parts, to see him boil over and force his emotions onto me, and in doing so, to possess the him that must be hidden in the deepest place. It was, literally, a selfish desire.
After being deep in thought for a while, he stood up, grabbed the cigarette pack and lighter from the table, and returned to his seat. After lighting a new cigarette, he exhaled smoke with a practiced motion and opened his mouth.
“I had to ask myself countless times while growing up. Whether I… was worth all that.”
I felt the urge to answer for him. But of course, I had no right to speak on that answer. And I was not the one he was seeking the answer from.
“It’s strange, isn’t it? They sacrificed even their most precious relationship for me, so why couldn’t I become a person filled with deep love, and instead came to doubt my own existence? Even though I knew they didn’t make that decision to make me feel guilty… as time went on, what settled inside me was more apology than gratitude… and knowing that their project was becoming a failure the more I became that kind of person, the guilt just piled on. Well, I spent my formative years in that kind of vicious cycle.”
He deliberately delivered the last sentence in a light tone and shrugged. Placing the cigarette on the ashtray, he rested his arms on his knees, loosely clasped his hands, and cracked the joints of his fingers one by one—pop, pop. He then glanced my way and smiled faintly.
“So the moment I saw that painting, I was suspicious. What is this? Have I ever painted something like this?”
But I couldn’t even smile back, let alone stir. He was talking about one of the cells that made him up, about a secret that was, at least to me right now, the most curious in the world, and that cell was now about to connect with me.
The alienation he had to bear for an unconventional reason.
Ideally loving parents, and the sacrifice those parents decided on out of love for him. A child who ‘must’ be happy within that fence.
It wasn’t a perfect match, but even if I thought it was considerably similar to my own story, it wouldn’t be a delusion stemming from my impatience to create a commonality with him.
I felt my body starting to get a little cold again.
“That’s how much I related to it. The words I wanted to scream at my father and mother, or at the world… they were right there in it. I could just tell, right away, what the artist was trying to say.”
He looked at me as if seeking confirmation, to see if he had seen the painting correctly, but until then, I had never thought about how I would accept others’ interpretations of my paintings.
I could only vaguely guess that if he felt that way, and if it was a very strong conviction, then for him, it becomes that kind of painting. And isn’t that enough?
“Everyone said that since I was born to wonderfully talented parents who loved each other so much and was raised with sacrificial love, I should naturally be happy. But why couldn’t I be? Was I the strange one for not being happy? Later, I started getting angry at the people who forced happiness on me.”
The pressure to be happy. And not just any happiness, but a picture-perfect one, like the ending of a fairy tale or a Hollywood family movie. I, too, knew a certain amount about the suffocation of that.
But from what I had observed, a friend with laissez-faire parents would envy a friend who received devoted attention from their parents, and a friend with attentive parents would, in turn, yearn for freedom. That was real human life.
I loved my parents, and I was happy. It was just that it wasn’t a flawless, complete happiness, as some people had forced on me for the purely relative reason that I had what they themselves did not.
To me, who was already grateful and already happy, they had said with sullen faces, You should be more grateful, and more happy.
The reason goosebumps rose on my arms, wrapped in the soft-textured pajamas, was not because the air in this room, where the heat we had poured out had not yet cooled, was cold.
Taking another drag of smoke, he swept his hair back with the hand holding the cigarette and turned to look at me, his face tilted at an angle.
“But that painting was telling a different story. —You’re not the only weird one. I’m weird too.”
At his exaggerated jest, whose voice he was imitating I couldn’t tell, I, who had been so rigid I couldn’t even swallow my spit, had no choice but to relax my shoulders and laugh.
And amidst the fading laughter, I recalled what Suki Kim had said.
That ‘Isolation’ had been a comfort to him. That despite the many wonderful works he owned and possessed, the one that had shaken him the most would be ‘Isolation’—that too had been an unbelievable story.
That ‘Isolation’ was hanging in his living room not just because he highly valued my talent as a collector or a dealer… but because he himself had felt a deep personal empathy from my painting. Only now was I hearing it clearly from his own mouth.
The fact that at least a part of the alienation he had to live with had been shared with my painting… stirred a special kind of emotion I had never felt before. You might not believe me, but it was a sentiment more captivating than the sex I had shared with him just a moment ago. I wanted to know more about him.
“That’s why I want you to paint again, Mr. Seo Yeehyeon. I want to see that artist’s next work.”
His eyes speak to me. I want to see the paintings you draw.
Even if he had said he wanted to see my naked body, my soul could not have trembled more than this.
“Your question was brief, Mr. Seo Yeehyeon, but my answer was a bit… very long, wasn’t it?”
As if belatedly embarrassed by the long story he had laid out, he smiled a little bitterly and rubbed his eyes. I thought he might finally be a little tired. And why wouldn’t he be? For hours like that… he had held me, a person of no small size, and poured out his energy.
“Could I… have one too?”
“……”
He looked at me wordlessly, and after a moment of silence, he handed me a cigarette without any particular reaction. He only gave me the cigarette and not the lighter, so when I looked at him, he gestured with his chin as if to tell me to put it in my mouth. I awkwardly put the filter between my lips, and he brought the flame of the lighter to the tip of the cigarette.
Flinching, I pulled back for a moment, then met his eyes over the flame and slowly tilted my head. He, too, did not take his eyes off mine.
It didn’t provoke as much of a rejection from my body as the cigarette I had smoked while staying in his room at the Hong Kong hotel. I didn’t cough, and the sharp sensation of my throat and lungs tightening wasn’t severe. In fact, it felt like this degree of pain might be what I needed right now.
But I couldn’t even swallow half of the smoke. The other half spread slowly into the air. Funnily enough, I was thinking that it resembled the spreading of the bodily fluids that had flowed from my body a while ago, clouding the water in the bathtub.
I was the one who looked away first.
“Suki Kim is… your mother, isn’t she, Director?”
It was a question thrown out for confirmation, as he no longer seemed to have any intention of hiding that fact.
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