Beauty Looks Down on Me

BEAUTY LOOKS DOWN ON ME

Spring Snow

I’LL NEVER FORGET the first time I saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. A late spring snow was coming down. As I followed my father into the carpeted Italian restaurant, I realized it was unlike any other place I’d ever known. Each table was set with its own dainty flower vase and candle sticks, and the air in the room was quietly stirred by the subdued conversations of affluent, refined-looking people skillfully handling Western-style silverware. My father and I were shown to a reserved table by a window. A waiter took my father’s elegant overcoat and my old, lumpy parka and hung them on a coat stand.

As soon as I sat down across from him, my eyes went to a large painting dimly lit by a spotlight on the wall behind him. I couldn’t look directly at him. The restaurant was warm and sweat soon began to pool along the folds of my neck. Now that you’re in middle school, he said, you have to start taking care of your mother. I gave him the barest nod in response. Feel free to call me anytime, he added. It sounded like a lie. When the food came out, I lowered my eyes and pretended to be busy eating. He dipped a shrimp in sauce and placed it on my plate. You have a healthy appetite, he said. But don’t worry. The fat will melt off on its own when you grow up. When I was your age, everyone called me Tubby. That sounded like a lie too.

Once we’d finished eating and the plates were cleared away, I had nothing to distract me, so I gazed up at the painting again. He turned to see what I was looking at. The corners of his mouth rose into a dignified smile. Ah, Venus, he said. Being born from the sea foam. Why did those words make me so sad? Was it her face, as smooth and beautiful as a porcelain doll’s, milky-hued with just a hint of green? Or the long, blond hair whipping in the wind and wrapping around her slender, naked body? Or those bare white feet, so vulnerable, poised on a great gaping shell? Maybe it was the mysterious sorrow lurking deep in her eyes as she gazed down into space. I’m sorry, my father said sadly, when he saw that my eyes were brimming with tears.

Looking back now, I realize that, as I followed my father around that day, I was tormented by the question of why I was born. Each time I fell behind, he had to stop and wait for me to catch up, probably thinking all the while, just as everyone else did, that I was slow because I was fat. I was already used to that kind of misunderstanding. Because I was fat, people always thought I looked unhappy or grumpy, when really I was just shy. Each time I saw my father, I went home feeling sad afterward because I was convinced I could never please him. I think he hated the fact that I was fat. If I’d been one of those clever, innocent kids, he’d have been the tragic hero, but a fat kid who looks stupid and grumpy all the time could never amount to anything more than a reminder of his past mistake, his one moment of folly.

Venus

WHEN I GOT old enough to buy things with my own money, I put a poster of Botticelli’s Venus on my wall. Since it had a naked woman in it, my high school friends figured it meant I had a different taste in porn. B said fat people were obsessed with the classics as a form of psychological compensation, a way to prove how refined and sensitive we really were. But what interested me was not the sensuous Venus welcoming her lover Mars into bed, nor the pure, innocent Venus holding Eros as he drew back his bow. Even the Venus de Milo with her elegant, almost ideal symmetry, looked like a mere model for an art class to me. The only Venus in my book was Botticelli’s.

That day, my friends and I went to B’s house to sneak drinks of some whiskey his parents had brought back from a trip to Europe. Throughout the house were bottles of ginseng wine and other kinds of liquor that we were always stealing swigs from and topping the bottles off with water afterwards so his parents wouldn’t know. But that day, we didn’t dare drink too much, as B warned us over and over that it was expensive stuff. We decided to have just a tiny bit more of the whiskey that B’s father kept in his study, and I went to get the bottle. I liked his father’s study—the dust-covered books, the secrecy and solitude, the faint, manly scent hanging in the air. Of all the things B had, it was perhaps what I liked the most. I took the bottle from the bookcase, and, on my way out, stole a glance at the book lying open on the desk. I was always curious to know what B’s father was reading. This one was a museum catalogue that looked like it had come from his latest trip.

On the page was a statuette of an immensely obese woman. A sagging roll of flesh around her middle made it look like she was carrying a baby on her back, wrapped tightly around with a thick cotton quilt. Her upper body learned forward to support breasts the size of stone mortars against a belly as round as a clay jar and short legs as thick as pillars. There was nothing that suggested arms, legs, neck, or waist, and her face as well had nothing that might be termed features. It looked like someone had stuck a pair of elephant’s legs on a hastily rolled snowman. The woman’s name was The Venus of Willendorf. The caption said it was a stone Venus made about 20,000 years ago during the Ice Age and was preserved in a museum in Vienna, Austria.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of her; I felt possessed. I set the bottle down and carefully tore the page out of the catalogue. I folded it a couple of times and tucked it into my back pocket. Even now, I don’t quite know why I stole the picture. Maybe it was my first vague sense of just how long ago twenty thousand years was. I could be a cliché and say that I felt a primal stirring somewhere deep inside, but the truth is that I was a lot more cynical about it at the time. But those feelings were immediately forgotten when my friends loudly welcomed me back into the room, bottle in hand. I forgot all about the stolen picture until I got home and took off my pants. Feeling drowsy from the alcohol, I carelessly slipped the picture between the pages of the first book I grabbed from the bookshelf and went straight to bed. As I threw myself onto it, the bed groaned as if being tortured.

I was probably at my heaviest around then. I still dream about the agony of high school gym classes sometimes. I all but forgot about the woman whose picture made me a thief for the first time in my life. But whenever I stood on the scale in the public bath on Sunday mornings when no one else was around, she’d come back to me. Each time, I’d get down from the scale, muttering, Please, Venus, enough with the blessings. I don’t need any more of your bounty or your fecundity. But I didn’t think about her so often as to want to ransack all the books in my bookcase looking for that photo. I don’t know why, but after I went to college, I bound my books together, in the same order as they’d been shelved, and sold them all to a secondhand bookstore. The faded picture of Botticelli’s Venus disappeared with them.

My father had taken me to another fancy restaurant to celebrate my starting high school, but once I was in college, I never heard from him again. My mother was always telling me that the older I got, the more I took after him. Of course, she only said that when she was mad at me. She stopped talking about him after I started college. I guess, since I was grown up, she finally came to terms with the fact that he’d left. Though she looked much freer than before, that didn’t necessarily mean she was happy. Maybe she’d taken too long getting there. Now that you’re in college, you have to start taking care of your mother. Had I seen my father then, I’m sure that’s what he would have said. Saying that was pretty much the only thing he could do for her.

Phone Call on a Sunday

MY THIRTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY fell on a Sunday. After church, my mother prepared the traditional birthday soup made with dried seaweed, which she’d soaked in water the night before. Watching television with her after she finished washing the dishes, I declared that I was going on a diet in honor of my birthday. She stared at me dubiously, as if she’d just heard those words from a bear preparing to hibernate. I’d been fat my entire life, ever since I was a baby. It wasn’t easy, of course, but in order to love yourself, you’ll adapt to any condition, no matter how bad, and find ways to rationalize it. Since Mom had spent the last thirty-something years assuming that I was okay with being obese, I understood why she looked at me like that. But she didn’t seem to pick up on why I’d suddenly decided to go on a diet.

It’ll be nice to have more room on the drying rack, she said tentatively.

She’d always complained that there wasn’t enough space on the rack to hang all the laundry, even though it was only the two of us, because my clothes were so huge. It never occurred to her that maybe she just needed to do the laundry more often.

Hmm, I wonder if the house’ll feel bigger too, she added, looking around at the room, her tired, expressionless face hardened from the passing of time.

A talk show was re-airing on a cable station. As the faces of the program guests appeared on the screen, my mother moved closer to the TV set. Two attractive young men dressed like twins in identical white clothing appeared, shaking their long, feathered hair and smiling sweetly too much. She’d never even heard their music, but they had recently become her favorite celebrities. Each time she saw them on TV, she asked without fail, Which one is Hyeonjung, and which is Hyeongjun? She had no idea whether I was giving her the right answer, but she could always tell when I wasn’t sure. Not that she really expected a sincere response from me. She had long ago gotten into the habit of talking to herself as if we were having a conversation, having realized that no amount of complaining would change my terse personality. It’d be easier to tell them apart if there were three of them, but it’s harder when there’s only two. Like telling a left turn from a right turn. That spring my mother had given up on trying to get a driver’s license after she had failed the written test for the eighth time. She must have been thinking that once she gave up on trying to tell Hyeonjung from Hyeongjun, she may as well start giving up on more and more things in her old age.

After attending a two-hour lecture to the effect that growing old was a matter of learning the composure needed to accept and resign oneself to senility, she stopped going to the Senior Citizen’s Welfare Center. Although she had been forced to give up many things in the course of her life, what she hated most was resignation and feeling pressured to resign oneself to something. In actual fact—and you can call it resignation if you like—my mother never really got to make any of her own choices. Including when she held me in her arms for the first time.

When the program ended, she sat back from the TV and asked me, How many kilograms are you going to lose? When I said I planned to lose twenty, she cocked her head and nodded again. As I went back into my room, she muttered, Are you hoping to meet someone? Though she liked to complain that I was impossible to figure out, I sometimes thought there was nothing she didn’t know about me. This was one of those times.

Of course, it’s not that I had never thought about dieting until now. You can’t ignore what’s going on in the world. Nowadays, fat people aren’t just seen as dopey and apathetic. They’re also treated like lazy good-for-nothings who lack self-control and don’t take care of themselves. I knew full well that the many blind dates I’d been set up with, and undoubtedly my own mother as well, probably thought at some point that my abilities in bed would leave a lot to be desired. My friend B joked that if I went over a hundred kilograms, I’d have to start calculating my weight in tons. ‘0.1’ looks better and sounds more aspirational than ‘100.’ To be honest, if it weren’t for your weight, you’d be far too average in every way. I don’t know if it was because I was a stubborn fat kid at heart (as B always claimed), or if after all I was anything but average, but I hated being manipulated by conformist values. The only thing that could influence me was certain people who were important to me.

That afternoon, I took the bus and went to a large bookstore in the Gwanghwamun district of Seoul. After poring through dozens of books for about two hours, I bought three diet books that I thought sounded more convincing than the others. B’s company, which closed on Saturdays and opened on Sundays instead, was ten minutes away. B answered his phone immediately. I told him I’d come out to buy some books, and he assured me he’d be there before I’d read even two pages. However, it was two hours before he showed up. A newspaper reporter is like an alcoholic husband: he always has a perfectly logical excuse for being late and never fails to add that he’s going on the wagon for real this time. While talking to me, he read the titles of the books next to me, simultaneously going over the day’s lead stories in his head.

According to B, it would be like living a new life. I’d never again suffer the indignity of having someone in a crowded elevator hit the close button as I came rushing up, gasping for air, about to set one foot inside. And I’d be freed from turning red in the face whenever I tied my shoes, worrying that I might unwittingly strain too hard and let out a fart. I’d leave behind the anguish of concealing my wounded pride whenever a waitress mistakenly delivered a meal I’d ordered to some extremely ugly, sloppily dressed fatso—since all fat people look alike—and having to call her over in a loud voice. That’s right, B said. All of us, including you, will finally get a look at the real you, the you that’s been wrapped up inside those rolls of flesh. B considered it entirely my fault that his old car had lost its muffler. Don’t you realize that the bottom of the car sinks so low when you’re in it that I can barely make it over the speed bumps? From now on, whenever you get on an airplane or boat or roller coaster, or whatever, you won’t have to worry whether the person next to you is wondering if it’s going to tip over. Ordering one last bottle of soju, B asked, Why did you decide to lose weight all of a sudden, anyway? Trying to get laid?

The question was inspired by a recent reunion of high school friends whom I hadn’t seen in years. One of the guys bragged about how he used his corporate card to hit the hottest spots in Gangnam and enjoy unlimited one-night stands. Married friends responded nonchalantly to his bragging, but the unmarried ones gradually leaned in closer. When his entertaining tales of adventures with women at the company’s expense ended, one of the guys sighed deeply. I haven’t gotten laid in eleven months, three weeks, and two days. What? No way! An exaggerated chorus of sighs arose all around, as if they were a paid audience filling the studio seats for a talk show. On the way home afterward, I confided to B that it had been two years more for me than for that friend. I only brought it up—parroting the way he had recited the months, weeks, and days—to joke that he must’ve been keeping a daily tab if he knew the number so precisely, but B misunderstood. Honestly, I don’t think diet-ing’s going to fix that for you, B said, looking all too serious. The problem is you have to be more assertive. When’s the last time you simply approached a woman and tried striking up a conversation? We’d known each other so long, but there was still so much that B didn’t know about me. I wasn’t passive about wanting things. It’s just that I’d lived my whole life having to always consider first whether it was okay for me to want something before I started wanting it. And besides, I didn’t need B to tell me that, when it came to getting laid, there were plenty of easier ways to make that happen than going on a diet. I wasn’t that stupid.

By the time we left the bar, night had already fallen and was waiting for us.

How’s your mother? B walked with me to the bus stop after he’d called for someone to drive him home. Has she been bored since selling the restaurant?

She’s taking it easy. I think she goes there sometimes to eat. She taught the new owner her recipes, so the food still tastes like hers.

Actually that was the excuse she gave. She had to be bored to death after twenty years of the same food, always in the same place, but she had nowhere else to