9781529949353

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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Originally published in Korean in 2015 as 트렁크 by Changbi Publishers, Inc., Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.

First published as The Trunk in the United States in 2024 by Hanover Square Press

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Kim Ryeo-ryeong 2024

Kim Ryeo-ryeong 2024 has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

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isbn 9781529949353

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It was our last night together. The husband had been just the right amount of nice and had kept an appropriate distance. Work would be so much easier if all the husbands were like him. Earlier that day, I had filled the fridge with that Belgian beer he likes. He had one of those kimchi refrigerators and, as it turned out, the drawer was just the right size for beer bottles. The husband had it set to the optimal temperature for ‘Kimchi taste preservation’ and would pull out beers as though he was plucking out radishes from the ground. When I first came to the house, my heart dropped at the sight of the fridge and kitchen shelves stocked full of booze. There were bottles of alcohol everywhere, as though the kitchen had been filled by an alcoholic compulsively storing liquor.

I asked myself why I had even made it to his spouse list in the first place. Did anything in my profile or sample video indicate that I liked to drink a lot? I had mentally prepared myself to ask for an early divorce, even if that meant being punished by the company. It looked like I had stepped in some real shit –  just some terrible luck, really. At first, I kept my phone attached to

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me at all times, so that I could call the rescue team in case the husband got sloshed and started messing around in any way.

Letting first-timers into yearlong marriages without any kind of trial was bad company policy. A colleague of mine once lived with a first-time spouse who hadn’t been properly vetted. She was beaten within an inch of her life and had to be rescued. Since the husband was obviously to blame, he received no refund, but my abused colleague was still penalized with a three-month pay cut for the early termination of marriage.

Anyway, fortunately, I never saw any horrible drunken behavior from the husband. He liked to drink, but he didn’t overdo it, and his only unusual drinking habit was to impulsively buy more alcohol. At home, the husband usually just had a few of his Belgian beers. Apart from the initial shock of his strange liquor collection, our marriage was smooth sailing.

I had packed all my possessions earlier during the day. My luggage now wasn’t very different from what I’d first brought with me when I arrived at the husband’s house. I had a few more clothes now, but I’d be throwing out almost everything else. I usually felt a sense of relief throwing things out at the end of a marriage. The only thing I kept as a memento was the wedding ring, which the company gave to couples when they exchanged their wedding vows. All the other little things I used –  slippers, a toothbrush, etc. –  all went in the trash. If I could, I’d get rid of every little scrap of this marriage.

I looked at the fourteen-karat gold thread ring on my finger. Tomorrow, it would go back into its ring box, along with all memories of the husband. The husband got me as his first wife after he signed up as a member. Han Jeong-won. Forty years old. A music producer who works under a pseudonym. Never makes media

appearances. One-time divorcé. That was all the information I received. But I was confident it was accurate because the company I worked for, Wedding & Life (or W&L for short), did strict checks before accepting new members.

W&L was an exclusive matchmaking company with a huge reputation – some even said that most singles in Korea felt compelled to sign up. I was a member of New Marriage (NM), W&L’s dedicated VIP department. We were given the entire third level of the W&L office. For security reasons, regular employees were unable to access our floor.

While NM was disguised as a department of W&L, it was in fact a secret subsidiary. The vice president of W&L, who happened to be the wife of the CEO, was also the president of NM Our company had two main pillars around which its operations were centered: the wife team and the husband team. I was a deputy manager in the wife team and worked as a field wife, or FW. Unlike its parent company, NM was not a matchmaking service for single men and women. Instead, NM directly provided clients with a FW or a FH (field husband). As a FW or FH selected to be a client’s spouse, we were given the chance to say either yes or no to the assignment. If we replied with no more than three times without justification, we were given the nudge to resign.

Regular W&L employees were quite curious about the identities of these special VIPs that NM catered to separately. While they assumed that we arranged secret marriages for highranking officials, überwealthy heirs to large conglomerates, or even princes and princesses from foreign lands, our real business was quite different. But our VIP client list did, in fact, include high-ranking officials, business heirs, and the members

of certain elite families, if not royalty. I didn’t know how these VIPs found their way to NM. All I knew was that they were definitely unmarried, because the company made sure to verify that, but I was pretty sure they didn’t look into who the client was as a person. I was once dropped from consideration for a promotion because I used two of my no’s consecutively after an awful marriage with a horrible old man. I only had one no left.

In his bedroom that night, the husband from my current, nearly finished marriage grabbed my hand. I wondered why he had chosen me. How had he even come across NM? But we couldn’t just share NM-related information like it were pillow talk; it was strictly prohibited. The company diligently monitored newly inducted members when they entered their first marriage. It was, after all, their first impression of NM, and played an important role in determining future patronage. For that reason, NM assigned neither field wife rookies nor sly, foxlike veterans for first-time clients. Instead, it chose to dispatch experienced, yet not entirely jaded, field wives. If a husband was happy with his experience being my spouse, he would go on to take another field wife.

But if he withdrew from NM after our marriage ended, I would have to write up a report. I made a subtle attempt to probe this husband’s intentions.

‘Was the marriage okay?’

‘Better than expected. You?’

‘Same.’

So that was that. We both thought it had been a good marriage, so what more was there to say? The awkward silence that followed pushed me to try and continue the conversation.

‘By the way, what is that podcast you’re doing about? Do your friends even know about it?’

‘Well, you know, it’s nice to have some things just for myself.’

It seemed like the podcast was like a hidden stack of cash for him. He was probably quite happy knowing that it was safely stowed away, so I decided not to push him about it. I didn’t want to be the kind of wife who peered under mattresses and felt a sense of triumphant glee when she found the hidden money. Only in such instances did I put the trust between us above all. I didn’t want to expose all of the husband’s secrets, even if they were just little things. I didn’t want to rain on his parade when he was enjoying the thrill and relief of not having been caught yet. I appreciated that he even let me in on the fact that he had such a secret.

The husband climbed on top of me. I could sense that he was eager, but was having trouble getting things started. If he couldn’t get it up while sober, maybe he should put some of the alcohol filling the kitchen cupboards to good use, instead of just . . . mucking around like a limp fish. Anyway, it didn’t matter, I could say goodbye now. Goodbye, have a nice life.

Icarefully dragged my suitcase, treading as quietly I could. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with Granny, my neighbor from next door. I put it down in front of the door and gently raised the electric key cover to enter the code into the keypad. But before I could even press the remaining digits, Granny stuck her head out.

‘You’re back?’

‘Yes. How have you been?’

‘Same as always. You look fairly relaxed, looks like your work trip wasn’t too stressful.’

I entered the rest of the code and opened the door to step in, Granny in tow. Upon entering, she immediately poured herself a coffee from the commercial coffee dispenser in my kitchen. That darn contraption! But more on that later.

Usually, with most other old ladies in the neighborhood, even little nods hello were awkward, but this granny was unique. When I was in high school, she moved into the neighborhood with her son, and I had been like family to them since. The son and my older brother were the same age, and they soon became

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friends. Her son spent his college years enjoying passionate romance, and graduated at the same time as his girlfriend, the outline of a baby-bump clear under her gown. Granny always fantasized about the day her son would graduate and bring home paychecks. But just three months after graduating, he brought home a pudgy baby boy instead.

Granny immediately mortgaged out her house and got her son and his wife an apartment opposite hers. Together, the newlywed couple set up a small home office for a business that had nothing to do with either of their degrees. They used their house as storage to sell anything and everything that could be sold online. So, it was only natural that their son was basically left to be raised by his grandmother.

Not much had changed since then. Granny was still busy looking after her grandson. And I had been busy taking care of Granny’s coffee needs whenever she came over. She hadn’t been visiting as often since about two years ago, when my brother was assigned to work in the countryside and my parents went along with him. But now, thanks to that darn coffee dispenser, she came over so frequently it was like she owned the place.

‘Mmm, delicious. Now that’s coffee,’ Granny said, looking approvingly at the coffee dispenser. It never failed to meet her expectations. By virtue of her double-eyelid surgery, her eyes looked like they were wide-open in shock, but she was in fact looking at the coffee dispenser with a gentle gaze. I did wonder what had possessed the plastic surgeon to perform their art so boldly. The result looked as though red semicircles had been etched below Granny’s brow in permanent marker. If you looked a little closer, you could also see some additional work hidden at the hairline, the skin pulled taut.

Granny’s transformation began ever since the arrival of the young singer. One day she suddenly started coming home with eggs, tissues, piles of onions or burdock root. She got all that kind of stuff for free, but then would pay exorbitantly for ginseng extract, because she believed it was organic.

The young singer oppa was the one selling her these beliefs and products. He would give her discount coupons every time she went to see him. With the coupons, Granny had bought a basic electric rice cooker for the price of a multifunction one, a faulty minifridge at the price of one that could make and dispense ice, and an LCD TV for the price of a QLED. Are these discount coupons, or coupons to pay a premium? I would wonder. Her son had smashed quite a few such items in fits of rage. If you asked me, he would be better off reselling them online.

Granny liked the young singer oppa. He sang well, danced well, and gave her shoulder rubs. But Granny’s son didn’t understand why she wasted her time with men like that when she could spend her time with her son instead. What an idiot – what mother would feel her heart race at the sight of her son?

‘To him, only his wife is a woman. I’m just a mom until I die,’ Granny lamented.

The young oppa once gave her an autographed CD, which she proudly showed off. The autograph was so showy and convoluted that I would bet my salary that he himself wouldn’t be able to replicate it. Granny and the young oppa had even had dinner together, just the two of them. By a quick estimate, she must have spent a small fortune in goods because of him, with no end in sight. At dinner, the son of a bitch inhaled his expensive eel dish, and then had the audacity to push the bill back toward her. And yet being on that date with him, this man in his

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forties, made Granny’s heart flutter; she loved it. She said it got her blood flowing, without having to take her medication. And so, she continued to see him, and the piles of useless products kept growing on her verandah.

Maybe I should just get her to join NM. That way, she could get a ‘spouse’ without actually remarrying, which her son was dreadfully opposed to. After all, there was always a younger and more attractive field husband ready and waiting to take the young singer oppa’s place. NM’s fees would be an issue, though. Maybe I should tell her to sell her house. Prices went up when an area was redeveloped, so perhaps I needed to go start a campaign and rally in front of city hall: ‘The elderly are single and horny! Take responsibility!’

Granny was dreaming about having sex with the young oppa now, but she honestly believed that it would become a reality soon. That’s how well he had played his cards; he was a real bastard. Granny had even resorted to borrowing money from my mother to give to him. How could he then pay her back with just lip service?

If I were Granny, I wouldn’t have given him a dime until he slept with me. If he wanted the money, he should be the one to get naked and take me to bed. After we were done, I’d just hand him a couple of bills and that would be that. But the problem was that Granny was a romantic at heart. Maybe NM needed to reduce its rates and help make contract marriages more commonplace.

‘You were pretty popular back in the day, weren’t you?’ I asked Granny.

‘I was.’

‘What would you do on dates back then?’

‘We’d do what people do now –  there isn’t much else for grown-ups to do for fun. We’d have a drink, then get into bed with each other.’

People gossiped about Granny, calling her a pitiful widow when she was single and, when she wasn’t, talking about her like she were the kind of person to try and fish for any man who caught her eye. They had something to say about every outfit she wore, and would criticize her makeup too. ‘Who are you trying to impress by looking like that?’

People were going to chatter no matter what, so Granny decided to give them something to really talk about. She led a life so full of steamy romance, she made those busybodies regret not being widows themselves. Love and affection between two people may not be easy to spot when they’re married, but it’s hard to miss when they’re dating. When people saw flowers being delivered to her place, or Granny getting all dolled up for a date after work, they realized that she went through different dates like she was going through the seasons.

Granny’s colleague had once grumbled to her, ‘When I get home from work, I’m so done with everything, I don’t even feel like getting it on. Props to you, honestly.’

Granny set her colleague’s nether regions on fire by responding, ‘You feel like that because when you get home from work, all you have waiting for you is your old ball and chain. It’s different when you have a lover.’

While a fun anecdote, I was suddenly confused about whether she was talking about the past or the present. Could it be that the ‘lover’ she mentioned was the young oppa? Maybe he was actually in love with this senior femme fatale. He had eel

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on their date, maybe because he knew it was an aphrodisiac. What a thoughtful, hardworking little piece of shit.

‘You’re at your prime. Meet plenty of guys now so that you don’t have any regrets later,’ Granny told me. ‘I’ve gotta go now. Jun-soo will be back soon.’

Granny poured two hot drinks from the dispenser –  coffee with milk and Yulmu millet tea. Her grandson, Jun-soo, really liked tea, so Granny took a cup for him whenever he came home. The coffee would be for the bus driver, who dropped Jun-soo off. When Granny finally left, I came to a decision. I was going to throw away that damn coffee dispenser once it ran out of stock, no matter what. The reason I even had it in the first place was my friend Shi-jeong.

Last year, Shi-jeong had decided that she was going to become a webtoon creator, and had started taking classes from a manhwa artist.  Shi-jeong could not do her creative work at home, because her parents were opposed to her becoming an artist. And so, she came up with a plan. She would first focus on getting her own studio space. After that, she would participate in and win some webtoon contests. Then, she would use that success to convince her parents that being a manhwa artist was a viable career. For the time being, however, she still needed a studio to work in.

When Shi-jeong showed me some of her work, I thought she had real potential. I also thought that aspiring to start afresh so close to thirty was quite brave. So, I lent her the generous, but not too generous, sum of five hundred thousand won. At the time, we were twenty-eight and the anxiety and anticipation around turning thirty was huge. The money was my way of sending support to the thirty-year-old Shi-jeong of the future.

What I had forgotten, however, was that Shi- jeong often got caught up in some deep, inexplicable sentimentality and developed new passions with worrying frequency. She went back and forth between interests like some crazy bitch on a seesaw. Damn thirty was right in front of us, so it made sense.

To no one’s surprise, the studio did not last long. Shi-jeong watered the plant I gifted her on opening day a couple of times, and that was it.

The space she had rented was in a building near the subway station in Seoul’s corporate hub, Yeoksam-dong. Such spaces were usually prime real estate, but Shi-jeong had paid a ridiculously low deposit for her studio. The trade-off was a high monthly rent, which she couldn’t afford, so she was out in six months. Shi-jeong hadn’t even arranged for a place to store her stuff: she had just left the studio, maintenance charges unpaid, like a criminal fleeing a crime scene. She had been generous with her money when it came to things like buying a big coffee dispenser, so it was ridiculous to me that she was being so defiant when it came to maintenance charges. News flash –  Shi-jeong herself couldn’t even drink coffee. If she had any, she spent the rest of the day in the bathroom. In any case, what use would a novice artist have for all that coffee in a studio that rarely saw any clients?

Anyway, Shi-jeong closed her studio and brought the coffee dispenser to my house. She told me that she’d definitely pay me back the money I had lent her, and I should think of the coffee dispenser as collateral. She talked about the machine like it was some kind of revolutionary innovation. It’s super easy to clean, and there’s no need to bother with boiling water – one simple press of

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a button and the machine gives you coffee! You would think she’d brought over a coffee robot or something.

I had never asked for collateral in the first place, and the whole idea of giving someone an industrial-sized coffee dispenser to put in their home seemed like a very manhwa-esque way of thinking. The machine had three buttons: milk coffee, black coffee, and tea. The webtoon dream suited her, and I thought that she should keep it going. I tried to tell her as much.

‘You can use the machine later when you have a studio again.’

‘Oh, I’m only going to draw as a hobby now,’ was her response.

So that was how I ended up with a coffee dispenser in my home. Shi-jeong was a warm and decisive person, but her problem was that she was simple, just like a three-buttoned coffee dispenser.

Iwished I had a small house somewhere in a tranquil forest. It would be nice to live alone, with minimal housekeeping and tableware, spending my time leisurely painting the walls and floors. I wondered out loud if I could find a quaint little house like that somewhere, but my earnest dream was apparently uninspiring to Shi-jeong.

‘There are a lot of abandoned houses in the mountains if you look for them. If you’re lucky, you might just find someone willing to rent one out to you. Finding a house isn’t your biggest problem, though. A woman living alone in the forest draws attention. If someone were to visit you, and you welcomed them in, then they’d probably come to bother you all the time. It’s just something bad waiting to happen.’

Couldn’t you just call the cops? I thought. Although, come to think of it, NM rescue teams called to help FWs rarely made it before serious harm had already been inflicted. It looked like my dream of living in a small forest house, where I hung laundry in the yard and took long naps on the deck, would have to

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remain just a dream. Here I was, only twenty-nine, but already so worn out.

‘Hey, Inji,’ Shi-jeong said, ‘if a man doesn’t call, what does it mean?’

‘He’s not interested.’

‘What if he’s just shy?’

Men could be in the middle of getting brain surgery, but if they liked you, they would still call. Shy? Yeah, right. Love let you overcome that sort of thing. It seemed like the guy she was talking about was someone she used to draw webtoons with. They apparently stopped talking when she gave up on that dream. If that was the case, then he was just a friendly colleague, at most.

I told her that if she had any lingering feelings for him, she should make the call and coax him into bed, but that just made her all flustered. She took the joke too seriously. I didn’t get why Shi-jeong was like that about sex. It was as if she’d been whacked over the head while doing the deed or something, making her feel weird and embarrassed about the act itself. Thinking of love and sex as so directly connected seemed so outdated to me. Only some country bumpkin would think like that. It was natural to want to be intimate and physical with someone when you loved them. Things just became awkward otherwise.

‘I’m not like that. Are you only dating to get laid?’ fumed Shi-jeong.

‘It’s more like I go on dates with people, and we just end up sleeping together. You always go to the movies on dates, right? It’s not because you’re in love with popcorn, is it? If that was the case, then you should’ve bought a popcorn maker instead of

that lousy coffee dispenser! Look, if you wanna be a nun, so be it.’

‘Are you incapable of seeing relationships as something more than that?’

‘Look at the guy next door. He slept with his wife a few times, and now they even have a kid together.’

‘I can’t talk to you if you’re gonna be like this.’

‘Girl, just take your coffee dispenser and go.’

Shi-jeong did not take the coffee dispenser. Instead, she sent me another unwanted gift – a thin, pasty man named Om Tae-seong. While he wouldn’t be my first choice, he wasn’t too bad. I was told he was a ‘breath of fresh air’, who was supposedly going to reeducate me on relationships and show me that men and women could do more than just have sex with each other.

Usually, when a marriage contract came to a close, I had to fill out a marriage report and then I got a week off to relax. However, thanks to Granny and Shi-jeong, I didn’t get a moment’s rest. Last time it was her webtoon-writing colleague, and now this guy . . . Why was I being roped into all this?

‘I heard you work at W&L,’ Tae-seong said on our date. ‘Yup.’

‘So even W&L employees go on blind dates.’

‘Yeah, I guess. Anyway, how do you know Shi-jeong?’

‘We met at a workshop on home-made tteok.’

Tteok? She was making rice cakes now? She changed hobbies again ?

‘Did you know you can even make injeolmi using a rice cooker? You just need to pound the rice after cooking it.’

He seemed pretty serious about his tteok hobby. He said that

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he had a variety of handmade tteok at home. I had never, in my entire life, heard anyone brag about their tteok collection. What was I supposed to make of this strange thirty-three-year-old guy and his love for tteok? He even wore a rainbow-colored tteok-patterned tie to the pasta place we were meeting at.

I’m sorry, is this some sort of prank? I wanted to ask him. Such a pure and virtuous love for tteok –  to think that it wasn’t sex but rice cakes that brought a man and woman together. He seemed like he would be a good match for Shi-jeong, so I couldn’t understand why he was here, sitting in front of me. I really couldn’t care less about him.

Tae-seong wanted to show me some tteok cake, which he insisted was in no way inferior to regular cake, so he ended up dragging me to a tteok café in the charming neighborhood of Insa-dong. It was right across from an art gallery that I always made sure to avoid. In fact, I had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the moment we got into the taxi, and Tae-seong told the driver to take us to Insa-dong. Today was really not my day.

Insa-dong was where it all started with NM. I was still in college but graduation was fast approaching, and I had secured a job interview with a publisher in Anguk-dong. The manager asked a series of questions, none of which seemed even remotely related to the actual job.

‘Do you like to drink?’

‘Occasionally,’ I replied. Occasionally was unlikely to be enough. There were several breweries nearby, and I was well aware that most of their alcohol ended up at the publisher’s.

‘What do you like to drink, Ms Noh?’ inquired the manager.

‘I like beer.’