Denture

Written by Choi Jeong-hwa

The following is an excerpt from the translation by Stella Kim

He opened his mouth and grabbed his top front teeth. As he began to rock his hand slowly back and forth, she noticed a sign of misfortune that would soon befall her. She immediately regretted what she’d said to him seconds ago. If she could, she would have taken her words back. Now she had no choice but to keep her wits about her and make sure her face didn’t betray her emotions.

Finally, he took out his denture. Slumping slightly forward, he exhaled deeply. In his right hand was a partial set of false teeth attached to a semicircular frame. He smiled at her. Was he expecting me to compliment him? She hesitated, not knowing where to place her gaze. Disgusting. He seemed like a messenger of death. She wanted to scream and run away. But she was well aware that she shouldn’t even look away. She couldn’t embarrass him. She had to reassure him first, so she took a deep breath and curled the ends of her lips into a smile.

Her husband started wearing a denture five years ago. He had been hospitalized after an accident involving a drunk driver. Even after three major operations, he had to stay in the hospital for four more months. Most injuries from the accident had healed, but reattaching six upper front teeth that had been knocked out was out of question. The doctor explained that dental implants were impossible because of the structure of the roots of the broken teeth. As her husband had only been in his late 30s, he was heartbroken over the loss of his teeth. He didn’t say a word for several days and refused to eat the porridge she tried to feed him. Every day, she returned home with a full container of porridge she’d made for him. Days passed by with her bringing porridge to the hospital, struggling to coax her husband to take a spoonful, and returning home with a full container upon failing to feed him.

An old man who was sharing the hospital room with her husband spoke highly of her to his own son. One day, as she stood up to leave the room, the old man’s son approached her and asked, “Would you be able to care for my father when you’re done with your patient?”

She shook her head and quickly walked out of the room. As she was closing the door, she saw her husband turning over with his back toward her. She thought that perhaps he was smiling.

There was a reason the old man and his son thought she was just a caregiver. She and her husband were stark opposites, starting with their looks. He was tall, standing five-foot-nine, and worked out at least three times a week at the gym to stay in shape. She was small, both in frame and in height, that it was easy to mistake her for a middle school student from afar. He was extraverted and had a lot of friends and also a lot of hobbies, but she was content with simply taking care of house chores. Heading to a public bathhouse for a bath once a week was all the outing she needed, and she even avoided visiting her own parents if it wasn’t a holiday. He was concerned about his looks to the point that he washed his hair everyday even in the hospital, but she was too plain and rather old-fashioned in terms of appearance. He had the look of a man from a wealthy family while she gave off a scent of poverty.

In any case, he had to wear the denture since the accident, and it was his Achilles’ heel that only she knew of. When he first started wearing the denture, he refused to go out with people to eat because he was afraid that his denture would fall out while eating. Once a gregarious talker, he no longer spoke much or smiled.

But after about six months, he finally started to believe what she’d been telling him: no one would know that he was wearing a denture. Slowly, he was able to return to his lively and cheerful self. Even she sometimes forgot that he was wearing a denture. Except for him, the whole world seemed to have forgotten that he wore a denture.

He said the denture was rather uncomfortable. He hated anything touching him. He couldn’t fall asleep when her arm or leg was touching him. He only fell asleep with his arms by his side and his legs neatly stretched out in a straight line. His sight wasn’t great, but he never wore glasses except when he read books. He said he found it rather irritating to have the temples touching his ears, and above all, the nose pads made his nose itchy. As for the denture, however, he had no choice but to wear it. If he took them out, his upper lip caved into his mouth, giving his whole face an unsightly appearance. There was no way he’d show such a gruesome sight to anyone—including his wife. He bought a small container made out of stainless steel. After filling it up with cold denture cleaner, he waited for her to turn off the light. Only when it was dark, he took out the denture from his mouth and put it in the container. Then he got into bed and fell asleep with his arms by his side and legs stretched out in a straight line. When he finally began to snore, she reached out and held his hand. She felt a sense of loneliness every time she saw him take out his denture with his back toward her. She thought a husband and wife should understand and embrace each other’s scars and flaws.

To her, he was perfect. He made good money, and he was even good looking. On top of that, he was an outgoing person. Born as the eldest son into a happy family, he had always been at the top of his class, and he’d gone on volunteer trips on every vacation. Now, he was a skilled worker at his company, and all his colleagues loved him. He was also a great dad to their three children. When their children were young, they called him “captain,” and these beautiful angels knocked on their father’s study whenever they needed someone to talk to. The letters they wrote in school were always addressed to “Dad and Mom” instead of “Mom and Dad.” And although the letters mentioned both dad and mom on the first line, the messages were for their dad only. Occasionally, she questioned the meaning of her existence but immediately shook off such thoughts, thinking it was a luxury for her to complain about such a matter. She thought she should be grateful to her husband. She wrote him a letter every Tuesday. She never received a reply, but it didn’t matter.

Since the accident, she felt sorry for him at night. Every time she saw his silhouette, taking out the denture in the dark after midnight, she wanted to stroke his hair to console him and tell him that he didn’t need to do that, that he would never seem repulsive to her. And finally she had suggested,

“Why not take them out when you’re home?”

For a while, she gawked at his grotesque face without the denture. Then coming back to her senses, she turned away from him, saying that she needed to go set the table for dinner. She headed to the kitchen. First, she opened the refrigerator to see what ingredients she had. She had to make a steamed dish because she needed as much time as possible to be away from him. She put a whole frozen chicken in the microwave to defrost and started to de-shell chestnuts. Usually, he was the one in charge of peeling chestnuts. But now, she wanted to do everything herself. She didn’t have the courage to face him even for a little while. She’d thought that she’d been preparing herself and waiting to see him without the denture for a long time. But when it actually happened, she was disturbed. Her mind went blank—she didn’t know what to say or what to do in front of him.

Unaware of what was going on in her head, he sat on the sofa in the living room and started reading the newspaper. She didn’t even turn her head toward the living room. When he mentioned that today was the coldest day this year, she replied in a high-pitched voice, “That’s why my ankles were cold even indoors.”

As soon as the last word slipped out of her lips, her heart began to throb. Her fingertips started to tremble. He seemed like a complete stranger to her.

She tried to take as much time as possible, but the frozen chicken thawed too quickly. She was in such a daze that she mistook the beep from the microwave for the doorbell and headed to the front door. Chestnut shells were too easy to peel, and vegetables she’d put into a pot of boiling water were cooked almost immediately and rose to the surface.

“You didn’t use to be like this before, though. You weren’t like this twenty years ago. You definitely need a change.”

“My gosh, I’m only in my forties!”

He raised his voice, unable to hold back his irritation against her for confusing the number of years again.

“We didn’t even know each other twenty years ago!”

He was 43 years old. He’d only graduated from college 15 years ago, and it’d only been three months since they celebrated the tenth anniversary of their marriage. He seemed afraid that she was confusing the years. Perhaps it was because he felt as if he’d really aged so much from hearing her say so.

It was true that he seldom went out of the apartment this winter. On the second Thursday of December, he didn’t go to a seminar he was supposed to attend because he felt like he was coming down with a cold; on the third Saturday, he declined a neighbor’s invitation to go hiking. And just this week, he could’ve gone to a hot spring with his colleagues if he wanted to, on the company’s dime. But for some reason, he didn’t have the will to do anything.

“I’m sorry, honey. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days. We were going to invite your friends, right? Let’s set a date and start inviting people.”

She scheduled the get-together for the weekend after next and started on a quest to remove even a speck of dust from their apartment. As she was cleaning, she found tiny black bugs, smaller than a grain of rice, throughout the apartment. She was surprised to find dozens of these dead bugs in places. She’d lived in the apartment for over seven years, but it was the first time she saw these bugs. Shaped like shrimps, the dead black bugs were plump and rigid. She picked up their corpses with a tissue and threw them into the trashcan. As if that wasn’t good enough, she took the trashcan outside and emptied it right away. Feeling disgusted, she now wanted to cancel the party. But she couldn’t go back on her promise again. She had to rescue her husband from his lethargy.

She was curious. A personality test based on your lipstick shape? She didn’t know who came up with the idea but thought that it was rather cute and imaginative. And she was excited to see her husband showing interest in such an adorable test. The lethargic and depressed person that he used to be was nowhere in sight. Instead, here he was, full of boyish curiosity. He flipped to the next page knowingly, as if he was holding the secrets of the world at his fingertips, and she turned around in her seat to face him with a smile on her face. For the first time in a long time, warmth enveloped the two of them. She almost felt tears come to her eyes. Slowly, she walked toward the bed and sat up against him as closely as possible. Then she started reading the results with him.

“If you use a brush to make the top of your lipstick flat and concave,” he swallowed and continued. “You might seem gentle and mild, but you’re full of passion underneath. You tend to keep everything to yourself instead of opening up to even your closest friends or family, and people often think you’re mysterious. You’re a great listener and adviser. Your energy grows when you’re around a lot of people. Your lucky place is department store, and the best job for your personality is entertainer.”

“Entertainer?”

She laughed, leaning backwards. He put his arm around her shoulders to keep her from falling back. At that moment, they were truly happy. She had a great feeling about this reunion party even before it began. It seemed that her plan was a complete success.

The moment she pulled her face close to his cheek to give him a kiss, the bell rang. They got up at once.

“I’ll get the door,” he said. “Finish up.”

She nodded. As he headed to the door, she sat back at the dressing table. Casually, she looked down, and, at that moment, she saw it. The grotesque thing in the rectangular container on her dressing table. His denture.

“Honey!”

She urgently called after him. He turned around. He even smiled at her. But when she saw him standing there with a smile on his face, she became oddly infuriated. And a kind of malice she’d never felt before surged through her.

“The food,” she said as she relaxed her shoulders. “I was going to say, don’t eat the sweet and sour pork. You developed an allergy to pork, remember?”

“I lost my front teeth from an accident five years ago. Since then, I’ve been wearing a denture.”

His friends nodded.

“You don’t need look so depressed,” one of his friends said with a compassionate gaze. “Think about them like glasses. I already have what they call age- related farsightedness, you know. Everyone starts to get old at some point.”

Then the dinner began. Only after he put some noodles into his mouth, he seemed to have realized that something was wrong. He moved his mouth a couple of times to chew. Then he got up abruptly, rushed into the bedroom, and returned after a moment. Now, although he was putting food in his mouth, he seemed to be having trouble swallowing. He picked through a few dishes with a sigh and slowly began to speak.

After dinner, all of them gathered in the living room for some tea. She brought out different varieties of black tea and added sufficient amount of sugar to each cup. Everyone praised the taste of the tea. It seemed that the fragrance of the tea wiped away all the unpleasantness of the dinner. They decided to play poker once they finished their tea. Yet when the time came, everyone returned home for one reason or another.

He seemed unconcerned about the reason his friends left in such a hurry. Drinking beer, he concentrated on the TV screen. A comedy show was on. Comedians in absurd getup were engaged in a ridiculous dialogue. Laugh tracks were played at random intervals. He didn’t laugh out loud, but, looking rather relieved to hear the laughter he wasn’t making himself, he sank deep into the sofa. An ugly female comedian with a small build, who was dressed like a preteen, was performing a backflip on the TV. She had more haters than fans, almost to the point that her fame seemed to be based on people’s dislike of her.

The next day, he was lying asleep on the floor, having rolled off the sofa. Empty beer bottles were strewn about the floor, and the vase on the table had fallen on its side. She woke him up. He got up, rubbed his hair down a few times, set the vase upright, and put all the empty beer bottles out on the balcony. When he opened the window to air the room, gooseflesh broke out all over her body. He said his wrists and knees were sore. She told him it was probably because of uric acid accumulation from drinking alcohol. He consoled himself saying that it was just once in a long time. He closed the window, hopped in place a few times, and fell over. Was he still drunk? Now he was sitting on the sofa again, blankly staring at the wall on the opposite side of the living room.

“I can’t remember the first law of thermodynamics.”

He’d told her that the first law of thermodynamics was an equation his college professor made his students memorize and recite even on field trips, saying that all students of physics must know it by heart. Even after graduation, he’d recited the equation every morning upon waking up. To him, it was a prayer, just like the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles’ Creed. But now he was saying that he could not remember the equation he’d recited by heart every morning. He paced the living room with a concerned look on his face.

Then he seemed to have reached the conclusion that drinking alcohol would bring him peace. He asked her to hand him a glass. When she gave him one, he proceeded to take out a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. She was preparing the ingredients to make bean sprout soup, but when she saw him reach for a beer, she threw the green onions down on the floor and wrestled the glass full of beer out of his hand.

“What are you doing? It’s way too early in the morning!”

“Can’t you see I’m trying to drink?”

He said as he took the glass back from her. He drained the glass as if to spite her and poured himself another, which he downed again. Then he staggered to the refrigerator and took out another bottle. After pouring the beer into the glass and guzzling it down, he glared at her.

The next day, he woke up as usual, recited the first law of thermodynamics, and left for work. Feeling agitated for no particular reason, she called him five times throughout the day. But every time, he sounded like his usual self. She felt relieved.

He didn’t come home even after his normal work hours ended. The doorbell rang after midnight. Some guy was helping her husband up. He was a driver for hire who’d driven her husband home. She sent him away with the payment and a tip.

Her husband was completely wasted. He couldn’t even walk without leaning on her. He barely took two steps before collapsing onto the floor, and he lay sprawled at the doorway. Then he began to sing. It was a popular Korean trot song. He’d never sung it before. But he sang it tonight with all his heart and fell asleep after finishing the song.

She took off her husband’s shoes and grabbed his arms. Like a criminal trying to move a corpse, she dragged him by the arms to the bedroom. Twice she had to stop for a breath. Dragging him into the bedroom was the easy part. She barely managed to hold him up in an embrace and heave his torso onto the bed. Only after repeating this process ten more times, she succeeded in getting him on the bed.

Putting his legs up on the bed was nothing compared to that. She removed his jacket and pants, took off his tie, and unbuttoned a few buttons of his shirt. Then she covered him with a comforter. She thought she’d be mad at him, but, instead, she was sad. She felt sorry for her husband. And she felt guilty. If I’d told him to wear the denture the day his friends came to visit, would he have ended up this way? She walked out into the living room and fell asleep watching TV.

The next morning, she made bean sprout soup as a hangover cure for her husband. She poured the steaming soup into a bowl and placed it on the table along with a bowl of tart, ripe kkadugi. Then she went to wake him up. He was lying spread- eagle on the bed, just as she’d left him covered with a comforter the night before. He still seemed to be asleep, perhaps because he didn’t hear her calling him. She shook him by his shoulders. He didn’t move at all. She shook him more forcibly. His head fell sideways, and his mouth hung open. That was when she remembered that she hadn’t taken out his denture the night before. Quietly, she put her ear to his chest. And she screamed.

Stella Kim

Stella Kim developed her interest in literary translation during her MA program in Korean Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. She completed the Regular Course at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in 2012. Kim is the winner of the 13th Korean Literature Translation Award for New Career Translators, and her works have been published in Asia Literary Review and ASIA. She graduated from the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in 2015 and is currently working as a freelance interpreter/translator.

“I am delighted and honored to receive the Commendation Award in fiction from the 47th Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards. Korea has always held a special place in my heart, as I was born in Korea but raised in the U.S. It’s been a few years since I started learning about and reading Korean literature, and I find it amazingly difficult yet rewarding to tell a story that would not have otherwise been told in English. Umberto Eco once said, “Translation is the art of failure.” The more I make attempt at translation, the more I feel ill-equipped to translate. And that feeling makes me read more and learn more. This was a great experience, and I hope to work harder to help people who can’t read Korean to enjoy the stories that I love. Thank you.”