1. Yun-mi / Tuesday

She paints her mouth in a heart-shaped mirror that reflects a valentine on her face. Frosted plum lipstick. Kinky black curls spiral to her waist, to her hips that move like a metronome. Yun-mi, believe me, turns your head. It's our first date, and men set their eyes on her as we lean close in a low-lit jazz bar in the neon-spun university district. The room swirls with smoke, tiny spotlights aglow in the space between us at the bar. When the third round gets served, Yun-mi whispers with her pineapple juice straw between her lips: "I would very much desire to be your girlfriend."

Like me, she teaches English grammar at a private elementary school, but she has no way of knowing that no one speaks like that. It's Pusan, South Korea, a concrete city of millions, sprawling up a maze of valleys from a harbor on the Sea of Japan. I recently finished my Masters in Education, and took the first overseas job I could get. More to the point, I'm trying hard to put some distance between me and my ex-wife back in the States. Yun-mi, I suppose, is here tonight for different reasons. She's been dropping hints in the teacher's lounge for months now. Frosted plum stains the tip of her straw and all I can think about is the sight of that. Art Blakey's hundred-mile-an-hour version of A Night in Tunisia rattles over the speakers. Trumpets and drums, flash and boom! "Let's try it for a week and see what happens," I say. Later, in the back of a taxi, we make out for fifteen minutes without pausing. In the rearview mirror I look like a murder victim with all that lipstick smeared on my face. Yun-mi is eating me alive.

*

When I was in second grade, my best friend Martin Martinez stashed a Hustler in Ms. Sawyer's desk, and I somehow got blamed for it. I got suspended, and had to go to counseling all year. That was the beginning of my mistaken identity as a sex fiend.

Last year, my wife divorced me because she was convinced that I had fooled around on her. The Other Woman under suspicion was in fact my best friend, who was a lesbian, and who wouldn't touch me with somebody else's ten-foot pole. But trying to explain that to my wife was exactly like trying to convince Ms. Sawyer that I didn't even know what a Hustler was. The thing is, by third grade, I was stealing dirty magazines from the Circle K. And these days-divorced, adrift and not-quite-thirty-I'm doing all the fooling around my skinny body can handle.

*

Yun-mi and me, back at my place. We have to be quiet because my socially stunted housemate, Nigel, is watching television downstairs. But something about Yun-mi short-circuits my desire. Stripped of lipstick, her lips are meaty and purple, too heavy for her face. She doesn't know how to use them. It's like she practiced kissing for years by smooching a pane of glass, maybe a shower door. Even worse, she becomes misty when we stop to catch our breath. "Do you believe in Destiny?" she whispers. The way she says it, you can hear the capital 'D.'

"Sometimes."

"Do you believe in Destiny this night?"

I avoid answering that by kissing her some more.

2. Betty / Wednesday

Moon-jin is serving the drinks at the Fisheye. She tends the bar on weeknights, and we've had a few dates but I can't be sure that it means anything. We're becoming more friends than lovers, which is a distressing thing to slide into. She tells me about her boyfriend in England, I tell her about Yun-mi and the others, and we end up making out until she catches a cab to get home before the sun comes up. She's sexy in a low-burn kind of way: you might not look at her twice on the street, but once you get to know her, she gets under your skin. Never a trace of make-up, always in jeans and a men's oxford which fits her like a cloud. Her body, hidden under the layers, is delicate as a bamboo shoot. She's 25, nearly an old maid in Korea. Next year, they'll start to call her "Christmas cake"-no good after the 25th. But there's always the knowledge that, if nothing else pans out at the Fisheye, she'll be needing someone to walk her out at the end of the night when she's finished washing the cocktail glasses. Tonight she sits behind the bar twirling a strand of hair around a finger and watching the room churn. With a couple dozen people at the tables, her eyes wander about and seem to skip over me without so much as a blink.

Somewhere between my second and third bourbon, Betty slides into an empty chair nearby. She's straight out of Kansas, with the dimples, blue eyes and loose perm to prove it. Like me, she ended up teaching in Korea by answering an ad in a newspaper. The Fisheye is the place where she and I, and everyone else who answered those ads, come to drink like college kids on any night of the week. White faces scatter in the smoke. Jim Beam on the rocks. Unlike any time I've ever seen her, Betty is wearing a Laura Ashley flower-print dress. Something must be up with that. Her smile is a thousand watts, and brightens with every drink she puts down. Now she leans close and says with Absolut Citron breath, "So, are you walking your bargirl home again tonight?"

"Depends," I say.

"On what." Glinty eyes, double-barreled dimples, sunday school smile.

"On whether or not I walk you home." I don't why I'm saying that. It's just a game we play, like James Bond and Miss Moneypenny. (I don't have a lot else in common with 007, so grant me this one.)

"Which home," she says, sipping her vodka, "yours or mine?"

"Anyplace will do."

You see, everything spoken between a man and a woman at the Fisheye has that quality of something Mae West would edit out of a script. Lazy innuendo. When you're a lonely ex-pat in an inscrutable country on the other side of the planet, one of the only ways to relax is to scam on other lonely ex-pats. And drink rivers. Months disappear like this. I tell Betty about Yun-mi, the strange way my desire evaporated last night, just when things were getting good.

"Tease!" she hisses. "You fucking tease!" The Kansas quotient of Betty's personality rapidly wanes with the waxing of vodka in her blood. She grins, lit up. "She should have raped you. She would have been justified, you know."

"Yes, she would have."

She leans close. "Would you like to be raped? Would you like that?"

I elect to say nothing. I watch her, my face perfectly expressionless. She throws her head back and cackles at the ceiling fans. I burst out laughing too, and then just as suddenly clamp my mouth shut and give her the expressionless face again, stone-cold as a G-man. This drives her over the edge. She's laughing so hard people turn around to see if she needs help. Is she choking? Having a seizure? "It's all right," I say, waving my arm at the crowd. "She threatened to rape me but it's all over now. Go back to your drinks."
More booze, the crowd thickens, our table fills up: Betty's roommates, some G.I.s, a handful of Korean women practicing English. I debate with one of them about the most romantic movie ever made (she says "French Kiss," I say "Star Wars"). Somewhere in there, Moon-jin passes the table and delivers me another Jim Beam on the rocks. "Hey," she says, "are we still doing the Picasso?"

"Picasso? Yes, yes." I don't remember ordering the bourbon, or anything about Picasso, but I take a sip and watch Moon-jin thread her way back to the bar, drink tray cruising over everyone else's heads. Immediately, Betty is in my face. "You're not going to back out on me, are you? Why do you think I wore this dress tonight?"

"You wore the dress for me?"

She lets her dimples do the talking. Her eyes disappear into gleeful little crescent moons and her teeth wink in the beer light.

"Well," I say, "if you really want, I'll wear the dress for you, and then we'll be even."

"Oooo," she says, wide-eyed now.

Sometimes I think I'm purposely doing all the lecherous things I could never get away with when I was married. Next thing you know, I'll be pinching women's asses on the subway, or trying to get a blowjob from the secretary at the office Christmas party. You see, I'm not that kind of man, not at all-but people change, don't they? And the way things are going, I might be changing into him.

*

Inevitably, I wear the dress for her. She's in her bra and panties on my bedmat, cackling her ass off as I strut around my bedroom with her Laura Ashley pulled up over my shoulders, my hairy legs exposed to mid-thigh, my chest a sunken mess of fabric where the bosom should be. "I didn't realize you were so stacked," I say. "Look at all this room you fill out."

"What are you, gay?" she mutters, reaching for her purse. "How could you not notice my stacks?" She pulls out a silver flask and an eel skin agenda book, sipping from the former and opening the latter across her naked thighs. She composes herself, gets all the giggles out of her system, and looks at me with the same expressionless face I used on her in the bar. "Now I'm going to read you a poem," she says.

I stand there with my hands on my hips, smirking. Did I just hear correctly? She clears her throat, touches her fingertips to her chest and intones,

"In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers,..."

I burst out laughing and don't hear another word of it, but Betty, pissy, shouts her way to the end of the verse. "What's so goddamn funny about Tennyson?" she wants to know, slamming her agenda book shut.

"There is absolutely nothing," I say, "funny about Tennyson. You, on the other hand..."

Betty gives me a smoldering look. She narrows her eyes into slits and bites off her words as she says,
"Women who are trying to be seductive while reading poetry in their underwear do not appreciate being laughed at."

I flop down next to her on the bedmat and throw my arm around her naked, freckle-spattered, white Kansas shoulders. "You were being seductive?" I say softly.

She sips again from her flask and gives me a faux-bashful look from under her eyelashes. "Sorta. Didja like it?"

I take her flask and tip it to my lips, wincing as a lick of fire crosses my tongue. It's impossible to say what the liquor might be, only that it's cheap and dangerous. It occurs to me that Betty and I are essentially naked in my bed and we still haven't kissed. Or have we? It's impossible to say. That fact that I can't remember such basic information strikes me as fascinating. "Betty, have we kissed yet?"

She grins, the old thousand-volt smile. "Is that an invitation?"

Five minutes sucking face, maybe ten. She tastes like a juniper bush-must be gin in her flask. I'm aware that any stirrings of physical desire will raise my skirt in a telltale way, but nothing in fact happens. I remain erectionless and unstirred. A mosquito, blood-bloated and sluggish, lights on the wall behind Betty's head and I stare at it as Betty's tongue slithers over my front teeth, back and forth like a dentist's finger. A thought: Has Yun-mi left any trace of her presence in this room from last night? The butts of cigarettes? A wraith of perfume? Or a few drops of blood in that mosquito on the wall?

When at last we unlock lips, a deep sleepiness weighs in my bones. Betty's eyelids are at half-staff, her eyes red and veined. She burps inside her mouth with telltale puffy cheeks, then laughs with a gust of booze breath. "You rock me," she says.

"It's Destiny."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing."

Still clasped to me, she reclines on my bedmat and pulls me down with her. "Tell me a poem," she says, misty.

"There once was a girl from Ypsilanti," I start.

"Not that one." Her voice is cobwebby with sleep.

"You know that one? I didn't think anybody knew that one."

No answer. Her mouth slowly unhinges, her lips droop. She breathes in and out, slower and slower, until she's dead to the world. Passed out in my bed half naked. Thank God: I was never going to be able to rhyme anything with 'Ypsilanti.' I scoot away a few inches, fold my arms behind my head and try to spot that mosquito again. Headlights sweep across the ceiling, turning up nothing.

3. Moon-jin / Thursday

My wife has no earthly idea where I am, and I don't think she gives a damn, either. Last she knew of me, I was teaching elementary school in Minot (North Dakota), and no one who knew me thought I'd ever get out of there. She'd have to hire a private detective to find me now, and why would she do that? Last thing she said to me was, "Adios forever, asshole." But she manages to find me regularly in dreams.

I'm at some kind of fancy party where people walk around in tuxedos and glittery gowns, sipping from champagne flutes. There are beautiful women everywhere, with perfect shoulders and golden skin, flashing their teeth as they laugh, touching their hair with long, ringless fingers. I pick out a random woman and slide up to her at the cocktail table, lifting a martini glass. "Who invited you to this party," I ask her as she turns to me. "You did," she says, "I'm your goddamn wife!" The way she screeches that word makes it sound like something you would never want to have. She storms off-in a wedding gown, it turns out-and I pick up a drink. It's not a drink. It's a rolled up Hustler magazine, stuck in a glass. Everyone has one. I'm afraid to ask: Is this my wedding?

*

My bedroom door creaks open behind me in South Korea and I open my eyes. Betty's face is inches from mine. Her cheek is crossed by a map of creases from my wrinkled pillow case. Her eyes flicker open, widen, and a near-visible thought glistens in her pupils: Danger!

Someone behind me says, "Oh!" Then I hear the door creak, and latch. Footsteps going softly back down the stairs. Betty pushes herself up onto one elbow and stares at me. "Do you have an appointment?"

"What?"

"That was Bargirl. She just walked in here, took one look, and turned around and left."

"Who?"
"Bargirl. What's-her-name."

Ah, yes, Bargirl. Moon-jin. (And what an apt name for a bartender, too.) I don't bother reminding Betty. I crawl off the bedmat, collect my clothes. She lies back down, holding one hand to her forehead and wincing her eyes shut. "Jesus," she says, "what did you pour down my throat last night?"

"A bunch of damn lies. You loved it."

She hums an answer. I get dressed and she watches. Out the window the sun is high, diffused in a polluted haze that hangs over the tile roofpeaks and septic tanks and power lines. A small figure is walking briskly down the street, away from my house. She weaves between parked cars and slow walkers, and I recognize the bounce in her step, both arms swinging, tousled hair flapping between her shoulder blades. "Why don't you stay and sleep it off," I say, stepping into the same jeans I've worn for the past three days.

Betty smiles up from the tangle of sheets. "Busy man." Yawn, stetch. She reaches for her eel skin agenda on the bedside table and instead her fingers find a pair of earrings, silver crescent moons that glitter there next to the ashtray. "Crossdressing accessories?" she says, holding them up in her palm.

I stare at them. Betty's? Or Yun-mi's? Who could possibly say? Betty is playing with me. She grins, tired-eyed and toothy, eyebrows raised and waiting for an answer. "Some girl," I say.

She drops the earrings on the table and collapses back on the pillow, yanking the sheets up to her chin and giving me a crooked smile. "You don't even know! What a hussy!" She juts an arm at the door and snaps her fingers twice, pointing the way out. "Get out of my room! Get out! And don't come back!"

With a blown kiss, I'm out the door and down the stairs. My roommate Nigel is sitting on the living room floor in front of the television watching a Korean talk show and sipping a bowl of Nescafé. "What's-her-name..." he starts, pointing at the front door.

"I know, I know, I know." Am I the only one who can keep their names straight?

*

Down the street I go, weaving in and out of the same parked cars. A scattered crossword of neon signs hangs overhead, and I can read none of it. The geometric circles and boxes and slashes of the Korean alphabet are like a static buzz at the edge of my vision, a ringing that never goes away. This is another factor of life in Korea that drives Westerners like me to drink at the Fisheye. Learning the language wouldn't be impossible, but it would take an epic exercise of will. Or a lover, someone to teach you, and with patience. Which, I suppose, is the key to living happily anywhere in the world. At the corner, on a pay phone mounted on a post, I dial her cell phone number. "Hiya!" she chirps after half a ring.

"Moon-jin," I say, and then freeze up. In the reflection of a shop window I can see my face: I'm wincing.

"Hey, Andy! Why don't you come meet me for a coffee? Are you free yet?"

That word 'yet' rings like a condemnation, like a gong. "Yes, I'm free. Totally free."

"Smashing!"

Moon-jin and I have always met for coffee at the same place, so it's not necessary to make the plans more specific. When I show up at the Café Moi ten minutes later, she's sitting at a table next to the picture windows, looking out over the jumble of city and puffing a thin cigarette. The café is on the second floor of a high-rise, with a view over a district of fashion boutiques and ice cream shops and tea houses. People move like blood cells in the street below the window. Moon-jin smiles when I sit down. Her teeth are tiny, childlike, and make her seem even smaller than she is. She's in a billowy white shirt, like every day, but today she's tied a satin ribbon around her throat. Is that supposed to mean something? Or is it only for the pure sexiness of it?

Flick! goes a glossy page in the magazine she's holding in her lap. I spy, upside-down, a collage of movie star faces, tuxedos and gowns, glittery lights. "How many times has Kevin Spacey won an Academy Award?" she wants to know. The year she spent at university in London has left traces in her accent. Academy Awode, it comes out. Smashing.

Twice, I tell her, if I'm not mistaken. We chat about movie stars and Hollywood gossip all the way through our cappuccinos, until we're both smoking her thin cigarettes and watching seagulls wheel in the haze. "If you were my boyfriend," she says out of the silence, "I would never speak to you again. Do you know that?"

Yes, I know that. "Moon-jin, let me explain, nothing happened--"

"But you're not my boyfriend. So I won't say anything."

I watch her face for twitches of sarcasm, but there's nothing there. Breath in, smoke out, smile.
"Last night," she says, "I also had a date." She peeks at me to see my reaction. I nod with my chin in my hand, averting my eyes to the street below. "He's a G.I. Not really my type, you know, but I was kind of lonely and he was really polite. That's a nice quality in a person, don't you think?"

The image that comes to mind is Betty belching inside her mouth, cheeks puffing out, then cackling laughter with booze breath. "Absolutely."

"He waited until I closed up the Fisheye, then we drove out of the city and up the mountain a little ways, to a place where you can park and look out over the valley. The only lights were the lanterns at Pomosa temple, down below. You know where I mean?"

I do. A fabled make-out spot. A piney bluff overlooking a Buddhist monastery. I've been there a handful of times, with women who drive their own cars. So this is Moon-jin's revenge. Trapped here, she's going to treat me to a blow-by-blow description of mountain-side G.I. sex. I look around for the waiter with a notion to order a mean whiskey.

"We talked for hours," she goes on, "and he was so sweet. He asked if he could kiss me, and I thought about it, and then I said no. I don't know why, exactly. I think maybe I was suspicious of him, because he was so polite. You know? Like serial killers are polite in movies. But the thing is, he just wouldn't give up. He kept insisting, and begging, and trying to convince me. It got kind of boring, and I even got a little angry, so I told him something to shut him up." She watches me dead on, as if I'm the G.I. "I told him, 'There's this American guy I kiss sometimes, and he never asks if he can kiss me, he just does it. And sometimes I just do it, too. He understands exactly when I want to kiss, and when I don't, and we never have to argue about it. He's not my boyfriend, but he understands what I need, and he gives it to me.' That's what I told him."

"And what did G.I. Joe think of that?"

She tilts her head back and laughs. Her exposed throat, with that ribbon tied around it, practically makes my mouth water. "He got angry! He said, 'What do you need! Tell me what you need!'" All across the café, heads turn at her raised voice, the foreign language, but Moon-jin doesn't give a damn. She inhales, puffs out smoke. "He was missing the clue."

"Missing the point," I correct. "Clueless."

She leans on her elbows, halfway across the table so her face is within kissing range. "You just can't ask a girl that kind of question. You just have to know."

My mind races. Should I kiss her now? Does she want me to kiss her now? Is she sending a signal, or only pretending to? That American guy who understands her perfectly-that's me, right? But maybe not. I certainly can't ask her to confirm it, because that would blow everything. So do I know when to kiss her, and when not to? Without a doubt, I too am missing the clue.

I decide not to kiss her, and watch her face for any traces of disappointment, any impatience, any hint that I've failed a test. She raises her chin and smiles, then blows a pretty streamer of smoke over my head. That's when my eye catches on something familiar moving through the street below our picture window: kinky black hair, hips that move like a metronome. Even from above, I recognize the way she moves. It's Yun-mi, strolling up the middle of the street with a girlfriend, the two of them laughing with glittery lips, shopping bags a-dangle from their elbows. I wipe my whole face with my hand like brushing sleep away, and when I look at the street again they're slipping around a corner. It could have been anyone with kinky hair and nice hips. There are millions of them.

*

We go walking through the university district, Moon-jin and I, because she has a hankering for rice and veggies wrapped in a film of seaweed: kim-bap. One after another, the streetside kim-bap stands are packed, and we circle around through the late morning crowds, passing through waves of pop music blasting from fashion boutiques, through clouds of steam from noodle joints, through a steady press of students and businessmen and old women carrying buckets, pulling carts. Around every corner, I'm certain Yun-mi will appear. Did I say I'd be her boyfriend for a week? How many days has it been now?

Once she gets her kim-bap, Moon-jin leads the way through the university gates and across the campus. All the way, she's poking the rice and seaweed medallions into her mouth with a pair of chopsticks. The buzz of the street fades away, and we slip into an oasis of calm. In a grove of spindly bamboo she climbs atop a vast boulder, fuzzy with moss, and takes a perch in the sun. Students stream past on cemented pathways nearby, but we're cocooned in the overgrowth behind the trees. Lying back on the boulder and looking straight up, the sky is blue and flecked with puffs of clouds, not hazy at all. Moon-jin lays her head on my shoulder. "I forgive you about the white girl, but you're still in trouble for the whole Picasso thing."

My eyes widen as it dawns on me. My insides shrivel. We had a date this morning, Moon-jin and I, to go to a traveling Picasso exhibition at the cultural center downtown. Everyone said we'd have to go early in the morning and stand in line for tickets, or we wouldn't get in. Now it all clicks. That was why she'd come to knock on my door this morning. She'd been waiting in the Café Moi, and when I didn't show up, she came by to scold me. I press my hand over my eyes and wince. "Fucking Picasso. Moon-jin, I'm so sorry, you have no idea,..."

"It's okay, Andy, don't worry. I heard they're not famous Picassos anyway, they're just portraits or something."

I stare up into the sky. Famous or not, who gives a damn? It would have been a hell of a date, a smashing good time. I can see us, wheeling through the galleries, cracking jokes, holding hands in front of something Blue Period, kissing in front of a Dora Marr or a Françoise. The chance to really turn this into something, whatever this thing is between Moon-jin and me. But instead, I was sleeping off a bender, sweating into the sheets with gin-drunk Betty and her ridiculous eel skin agenda, her silver flask. My ex-wife, wherever she is, would not be surprised.

Moon-jin raises a finger into the sky. "Look, it's a guitar."

She's pointing to a fluffy little cloud making its way over our boulder, way up in the big blue. It doesn't look anything like a guitar, in fact, but I can see what she's getting at. I point to another puffball and say, "That one looks like a bottle of wine on a café table."

"Hmmm, yes. With a folded newspaper and a fruit bowl."

And you know what? It sort of does look like that. This cloud: a woman's face, distorted, with pointy teeth. That one: another woman, but softer around the edges. On and on, one after another, all the way to the horizon. "Moon-jin," I say. She turns her face to me, her lips an inch from mine, but I don't kiss her, not yet. "You make me so happy I could cry."

"So cry," she says. "I've never seen a man cry before."

And, just to make her day, I do.

*

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