Emergency Love

The past week has seen your wife become increasingly preoccupied with K-dramas. You suspect that this may be the root cause of the decline in your sex life. At least, you suppose, her lessening interest in you specifically. You infer this in her come-bedtime turnaways. It is implied, also, in her wordless headphoning, this occurs inevitably after you insert yourself, shivering, between the covers. You draw close for warmth; her terry cyan and white dotted pyjama pants smack cold despite the advertised cosiness. You lie there; you feign sleep; bluish light emanates from her laptop, broken sometimes by shadows, by movements of the camera. You wake hard and abut nothing; there is no wife adjacent, only empty sheets. In the mirror, you make something of yourself. Your beard breaks through brittle and brush-like; you just leave it. You reflect your interior. 

These days you breakfast and supper the selfsame meal. The almost meat shines dayglo in the orange burn of the microwave. The door is broken; you have to hold it shut. Your wife’s infatuation has coincided with the bumpy return of piles; they dot your underside, one appearing, you imagine, for each season completed, an eye for an eye. You perch awkwardly on the leatherlike couch; you suspend your rear over the cracked surface. Your wife is obsessed with K-dramas; the smart TV is plagued with them; there are no other recommendations. One hand greases the remote; the other negotiates a marsh of reheated meat. You move the cursor from left to right like a pendulum. 

In the office your work is precluded by long thoughts of women. You stand at your desk; you cannot sit down for the pain. The rain decided this week to rain continuously, and your office now stinks of wet; it mugs the room. You are sequestered in the damp corner of a particle-boarded top floor in a building in the French end. You work all the livelong day, and you come home and find your wife prostrate in the same location as where you left her, laptop aglow with low-bitrate Koreans.

You are so lonely as to find yourself making advances on the moribund receptionist, the most immediate, you suppose, woman. Her pestilent glare is usually enough to deter you; this time, however, you catch her eye-bags drooping sultrily, like two winged skin lapels, like a mopey dog's. Your navel flickers with excitement; it popcorns down into your lowlands. She is older and miserly; you imagine her ungenerous apartment, the illiberal furnishings. Later her hand, her bony fingers consort with your shoulder; the office is hours closed; there are no witnesses. 

She is a drape of a woman, a clothes hanger. You imagine her calling you young man and you shudder. You lead her grimly through streets mirrorlike with rain; you wet yourselves. There is a restaurant that imagines itself Chinese; you lead her in. The menu is speculative, the waiter monosyllabic. You are brought radials of broccoli and Halloweeny orange chicken which neither of you touch, only observe with disinterest. The two of you find union at least in your dry drink requests; you each say generally, ‘beer,’ and you are brought them. There is no sediment undrunk as dinner draws on. You mount the table in green glass. 

Later you divest the woman of her pinstripe sport coat and adjoining still-white shirt. It trails dovelike at her feet as you suspend her across the motel’s pilling daybed. She is skin bewinged and her underthings are black and laced sexy-like in the old-fashioned way. You imagine her skin-pitted lower regions gartered, but you never get there. As she retrieves your buttons from their buttonholes, as she unfastens you, she says, ‘There is nothing quite like a young man delighting in his body.’ You reach; your mouth is slicked alkaline. You start backwards as she moves to shuck you of your boxershorts. Jerkily you make your excuses, your goodbyes. You are home by an hour that allows you to slip into bed unquestioningly. ‘Hope you got paid overtime,’ is your wife’s sole remark, intoned over what you recognise as the blaring theme song to “Emergency Love.” You say nothing; you turn over on your side. Doctor Park says, in dubbed English, ‘But darling, I love you.’ I love you too, you think, strangely.