Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan by Frank Ahrens Read Free Book Online Page A

than later. I knew too many journalists in their fifties who were finding it difficult to make a professional life after the Post .
    What I definitely was not looking for was a wife. I was neutral, at best, on marriage. I was already forty-four and never married. If a wife dropped out of the sky into my lap, I’d consider it. But I wasn’t looking.
    Rebekah Davis fell out of the sky in early 2008 but missed my lap.
    She had been hired as the Post ’s foreign desk administrator, meaning she ran the paper’s foreign bureaus, handling the needs of the foreign correspondents, overseeing the department’s budget and generally making tough things happen. For instance, having the savvy and know-how to get cash to the paper’s fixer in Pakistan so the Post ’s reporter could do his job.
    I spotted Rebekah right away in the newsroom—who wouldn’t?—and made it a point to meet her. Over the next few weeks we went out several times. At work we sat at our desks in different parts of the Post newsroom tapping out funny and flirtatious messages back and forth, getting to know each other.
    Then, one night at a restaurant, she dropped it on me: the Friend Talk.
    I’d both given and received the Friend Talk before. At forty-four, there was something especially humiliating about getting it. Come to think of it, there was something especially humiliating about “dating” at forty-four. Maybe that was the larger issue.
    At any rate, I wasn’t having it. One benefit of being middle-aged was that you no longer have time for wasting time. I knew what I wanted, and it was not to be Rebekah’s friend.
    “Well, I’m disappointed,” I said, “but I’m not going to be your friend.”
    Silence.
    “I don’t mean I’m going to be your enemy, or that I hate you,” I explained. “What I mean is that I’m not going to continue to hang out with you and message you at work. You’re beautiful,I think you’re terrific, and I want to date you. And if you don’t want that, that’s fine. But I can’t pretend I’ll be happy just being your friend. It’ll make me miserable a thousand ways.”
    As a younger man, I had moped for months after women who were not romantically interested in me but liked me well enough to spend time with me. I hoped if I hung around long enough and was charming enough, eventually I’d win them over. Usually these efforts ended when they got boyfriends and wanted us all to hang out.
    “Oh,” she said.
    I tend to explain relationships in terms of the solar system. Call it a quirk.
    If a person is the sun, I told Rebekah, when you’re young, you have “friends” all the way out to Pluto. Roommate friends, first-job friends, bar friends. You’re certain they’ll be in your life forever, orbiting as sure and steady as the planets. In truth, they’re held to you by weak gravity. As you get older, they break free and spin off. You don’t have the time or effort to try to keep them. The friends you keep are in the tight orbits, close to the sun; think of them like Mercury and Venus, where the gravity is strong. You may have a couple in Earth orbit. Once you hit Mars, you’re outside the orbit of grown-up friends.
    Rebekah pretended to understand my strained metaphor, but mostly she respected it. I was deeply disappointed. But I knew it was better to absorb the short, sharp shock of pain now than drag it out for months.
    The next day at the Post , we didn’t message each other.
    A couple of days after that, we chanced upon each other in the hallway. We chatted amiably about nothing for a few minutes and then started to walk in opposite directions.
    She called back over her shoulder, “I miss my messages.”
    “Well,” I responded, walking off, “that’s life on Mars.”
    A few days later I got a text on my phone. It was from Rebekah. It read: “What if I’m tired of life on Mars?”
    I wish I could claim that the entire solar-system-to-life-on-Mars-line was a grand, elegant, and elaborate gambit to