“I’m not sure—”
“I learned from you. You keep the money.”
I kept the money. It lasted me the rest of the year — I was stunned to find out what kind of tuition students paid at that slipshod language school, which gave airhead college kids ten bucks an hour to blather and occasionally teach the students a new word. Most of the other teachers spelled like five-year-olds and talked like hasty text messages. I prided myself on being a bit above the pack, and felt even better about quitting.
My angle here in Seattle doesn’t have anything to do with what went on with Eun Hee, and I’m sure she’d disapprove. I disapprove. I work at various schools for about a month apiece, chatting my way through six-hour days. Surveillance sessions, I call them. The male students are the toughest, because there’s no possible benefit, but I find that schools tend to assign me more girls than guys to talk to, based on my one asset: my face. Being twenty-five, handsome, and functionally intelligent is a leg up in a business filled with nascent Dahmers and aging ex-cons with a yen for young Asians. They don’t do background checks at most schools. They usually don’t check your references, either. If the reprobates who teach around me aren’t worried, I certainly have nothing to fear.
I don’t scout for the Eun Hees anymore. She was more of a girlfriend than a source of income. The money was incidental, accidental. I seek out the slightly chubby girls, the ones with a Tommy-gun spray of acne and a stencil of loneliness on their faces. And I give them what they want — which isn’t sex, no, not at all — it’s a boyfriend, a nice American boyfriend with a hand to hold and time to spend. I pick up new students, girls who’ve only taken a couple of classes. Eventually I convince them that I’ll drop out of teaching if they’ll drop out of school and claim their refund. Then it’s simple. I live for free while we’re together, and gouge the tuition refund out of them by guilt or intimidation when they leave.
I felt pretty bad the first time, standing near the entryway of a bank while Yoon Jin withdrew the last of her spending cash — earned by her father and brother during fourteen-hour workdays in some hellish Pusan office — and brought it up to me. Three thousand, five hundred and sixty-nine dollars. Small earnings for an actual criminal, probably, but to me it was enough for a few months. I paid for our cab to the airport and saw her off. Yoon Jin left too fast to realize how much she should hate me, I think.
I moved from school to school, working a total of six months out of the two years I’d lived here. Eun Hee was a distant and guiltless memory that I conjured up once in a while to cover up the more recent ones. There’d been about five since her, none of whom I’d slept with and all of whom I’d taken money from.
Grace came into my booth on one of the slow days, in the lag time when the school semester is starting up in Korea. Most of the students who’d been piling up hours of conversation in the previous weeks left on the same day, leaving me with hour-long gaps to fill in my day. That meant trial lessons — free trial lessons that I didn’t get paid for. The other teachers, such as Bruce, a cowboy-boot-wearing fellow who dyed his goatee, hated these sessions.
“It’s a jack, straight ahead, a jack,” he said, leaning over the partition between our cubicles. His breath killed the oxygen around me, replacing it with the gaseous remains of what must have been a pickle-and-cheese lunch.
“I don’t mind the trials so much,” I said to Bruce. “Less pressure to drive the conversation. What do I care if the kid signs up or not?”
“Oh, you oughta care. Maybe the school gets ninety percent of the cash, but if we don’t net that ten percent from a sign-up, we’re dead in the water. Only made my rent last month after selling half my guitar collection. How do you get by?”
Half his collection must have been one whole guitar, I thought. Probably a cheap knockoff of some vintage model that he’d seen on a few album covers. Bruce had found out I played bass. Once he stopped trying to get me to join his nonexistent band, he concentrated on forming a bond between us as rebel artists caught in a thankless real-world racket. Meeting him made me glad that I’d given up on the rock-star ticket.
“I’ve got other income here and there, Bruce. Not a good idea to anchor your life to such an irregular paycheck — you oughta know that, string-slinger.” If I wasn’t already gagging on the stink of his breath, I did as those words came out of my mouth. I had to throw him off thinking of my other income stream, and the best way was to get him talking about himself. And he did, blabbing about some alt-country band he’d started with his buddy who’d just moved to Tacoma and was living next-door to an old A&R rep from Universal who’d gotten out of the game… that was all I heard before tuning him out.
At some point, Grace sat down across from me for the first time. Six months before I ended up dragging her out into the rainy street. She moved light. Bruce hadn’t shut up. He liked to make a show of how little the presence of a student affected his real personality, but when his peripherals caught a glimpse of her his jaws snapped shut and the pickle stink gradually receded. He sat down and left us to it.
Grace smiled. She looked older than most of my students — late twenties, maybe. She wasn’t Japanese, but didn’t quite look Korean, either. She had what I’d have to call raceless beauty, a kind of pretty that was almost alien. A thin face, with an extra curve of pale flesh just above the cheekbones and just below a pair of confectionary-brown eyes. We started to talk, and I could feel the unwanted pressure of Bruce listening to us.
“Who was that other teacher?” she asked. Every second word was accentless, as is typical with students who’ve been speaking the language for a while. They start to sound like they’re doing an inconsistent impression of themselves.
“He can still hear you,” I said. “Bruce. A hell of a speaker,” I said, risking a swear in order to be able to teach her an idiom.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m Grace.” I introduced myself and noticed her glance regretfully at the cubicle wall — as though she would have preferred to have Bruce as her teacher. It was too confusing to be insulting. So I started the conversation, preparing to pile it on, finding out quickly that her English was good and that her conversation was even better — she had things to say. I gave up on her entirely as a potential source of a payout. She’d have guys wanting her company all over any country. So I just sat back and enjoyed the talk, for once. Bruce’s inaudible jealousy richly enhanced our banter.
“This is my third trial lesson today,” she said after twenty minutes, being either candid or unaware that teachers didn’t like to spend time talking to students who had no intention of transforming into a paycheck at some point.
“Three different schools?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but mindless questions were the grease these conversations rolled on. I was enjoying staring at her face, in the way that mechanics enjoy having pinups in their garages. Her prettiness made the bleakness of the job feel remote.
“Yes, three different ones. I’m looking for the right one, with the right teachers. I am always getting very young teachers.”
“Yeah?”
She crinkled a tiny eyebrow.
“‘Yeah’ as a question, I meant. You can say ‘yeah’ in that way and it means ‘Please explain more, I don’t understand.’”
“I like older teachers, they have more interesting lives. Things to talk about.” Again, Grace looked at the divider. In the next booth, Bruce’s smile was probably in danger of splitting his face open.