Gwyneth Paltrow: An Introduction
Part II of the Copenhagen series
The last time I saw Gwyneth Paltrow was in January on a short weekend trip to Paris when she came to visit, not out of luxury but out of necessity, wanting to, in her words, “end it all,” but refusing to end it all, not out of some respect for the sanctity of life, but because she didn’t want her on-and-off again lover, who was the cause of the gloom that darkened all of our interactions on that cold, wet end-of-January trip, to “win.”
For Miss Paltrow, relationships have winners and losers— and through some silly miscalculations, she had found herself on the losing side. All things end, from the trivial to the significant, and any attempt to keep or safeguard or hold in stasis is doomed from the get-go. There’s no two ways about it. The losing side is the side that clings.
She had clung just twice before. First, see little Gwyn, backpacked and pig-tailed, refusing to take off her father’s prescription eyeglasses for weeks after his funeral. Second, there’s teenage Gwyn, Mohawk’d and clad in leather and denim, repeatedly calling up her first girlfriend of sorts, a much older, and much more married, woman, trying to fill the space growing between them with snotty-wet promises left on her answering machine. But being the clinger with Ji-soo — the South Korean, still-in-the-closet-to-her-friends-and-family lesbian, who made her want to end it all — hurt much more, in part because her neediness had caught her by surprise.
Ji-soo was supposed to have been a one-night stand, like several of the other one-night stands Gwyn had on one of her month-long, bi-annual excursions to Seoul. Gwyn took to Korea, its culture, and its women, the way other aging, childless millennials take to running clubs, bike-packing trips, chalked-up bouldering walls, ethical non-monogamous relationships, half-hearted bi-sexuality, bird-watching through second-hand binoculars, and pickleball. Though technically, she was not immune to the allure of birdcall. Sorting and tracking the birds of North Wales, along seaside hikes through coastal towns, soothed her anxious mind. She filled two college-ruled spiral notebooks with journal entries, detailing her encounters with yellow-eyed peregrine falcons, red kites, and oystercatchers. That tuxedo’d bird was her favorite, with its cat-like squeaks; a flock of them created an arrhythmic chorus of bickering along the ocean front. With birds, she had sketches to keep, uneven illustrations done messily with heavy ink pushed out of cheap BiC pens. With Koreans, she had to rely on screenshots of their Tinder profiles, and then, if she got lucky with one of them, candid photos — usually blurred, sometimes taken incognito — of their night together or the morning after. The photos (always live) were rarely pornographic if that’s what you’re thinking. One is of a lover brushing her teeth, wearing one of Gwyn’s baggy bedtime shirts, her face grimacing as bristles scrub against her sensitive gums. Another: Skinny, pale Busanic legs shift under the hotel bed sheets, a single foot sticking out, flat and wide from a childhood spent barefoot. Gwyn took these photos because — like when she spotted a black-velvet chough near South Stack — she couldn’t believe this was her life, that her life had evolved in such a way, and — like when she said she spotted the chough — people back home often didn’t believe her. Cheap masculine behavior, for sure; a high school football player pointing out the cheerleader who gave him a blowjob, but she didn’t care. She showed everyone she could. Progress isn’t progress if not viewed within the landscape of those you’ve left behind. A plane in the sky looks slow, stationary even, until it passes clouds.
After her first trip to Seoul, she enrolled in language lessons. Twice a week, she hunched over her monitor, listening to her tutor make animal sounds while she recited the corresponding Korean words for pig, cow, sheep, and so on. She filled up notebooks with “the easiest alphabet to learn.” So easy, the pitch goes, that it was made for peasant farmers to learn in a day. Well, not as bright as a Korean peasant, then. On Sunday nights, she practiced listening comprehension by watching Korean movies and dramas with her mother. There’s her mom now scooping popcorn into her mouth, cooing when the well-manicured, but clearly cuntish, leading actor comes on, while Gwyn sits criss-crossed, a college-ruled notebook in her lap, writing down phrases she can catch, which aren’t many, but you’ve never heard a more fluent Welsh whistle out: Hello! Goodbye! Where are the toilets? More Kimchi, please.
There was a drawback to learning the language. The more words and phrases she could decipher, the less attracted she was to the women she took to her place or to the club bathroom stall or in between bushes along Gyeongui Line Forest Park. When you don’t speak each other’s language, you fill up gaps of comprehension with the benefit of the doubt. Fluency reveals the canyons that exist between you. She was starting to get tired of it all, the one-night stands, the dumb conversations, the routines of a hook-up. She could turn off her brain and navigate the night, from bar to her hotel room and back down again, relying on muscle memory alone.
That was until Ji-soo. To be clear, there’s nothing special about Ji-soo, so I won’t try to make her out to be as such. She is, from all angles, an average woman, likely a sub-par person in the grand scheme of things, with a boring job, little to no savings, and some genuinely alarming habits (habitual lying and the ability to produce, before the clap of a snap, fake tears). She is neither funny nor clever, endearing nor memorable. In an ideal world, Ji-soo and Gwyn would have never gone on more than two or three dates before they realized their coupling would end in disaster. But in the world they occupied — where so many other people had let them down and where the people they had actually loved did not love them back — they saw their average chemistry, combined with the romance of meeting in foreign places, as life-affirming. Here is someone who doesn’t bore me; how many more chances will I get?
We can simplify it further: the reason Ji-soo stuck around longer than the other girls is that she stuck around. Gwyn was clear about this in the telling and the retelling: she never asked her to stay, she just did. And disrupted Gwyn’s routine in the process.
The morning after their first night together — which Gwyn would normally have spent looking over the photos of the night prior, choosing which ones to keep — Ji-soo ordered breakfast. She showered in the hotel’s shower, using Gwyn’s damp towel to dry herself, and then pulled some clothes out of Gwyn’s half-unpacked Samsonite suitcase. (“She looked better in my clothes than I did. That almost hurt me to be honest.”) They had coffee, then lunch, then dinner, and the whole cycle repeated itself. On the second day Gwyn had called down to reception for extra towels, Ji-soo whispering the Korean phrases into Gwyn’s ear, Gwyn’s lips fumbling with the nuances between ta’s and da’s and cha’s and ja’s which I can’t capture for you here phonetically, there is no counterpart, there is no extended family in the far reaches of our etymology. On the third day, Ji-soo went back to her place to get some clothes. Two weeks after Gwyn flew back to Wales — weeks spent glued to her phone texting Ji-soo, of arranging FaceTime dates, of becoming less of a presence in her hometown, the birds would have to spot themselves — she bought her new lover a ticket to come see her.
Gwyn’s mother had thrown a surprise welcome party, much to Gwyn’s embarrassment. Completely unoriented about that side of the world, her mother decorated their home with stuffed panda bears and dragon streamers and had even gone to the one Chinese shop in town and convinced them to let her take just a handful of chopsticks without buying anything to eat.
“She loved Wales, if you can believe it. All the green. She was wide-eyed. She said she could see being a mother here, raising a child. Korea is so depressing to locals; they don’t see it how we see it.”
Together, they walked the seaside hikes and spoke carefully of the future. Bit by bit, Ji-soo saw more of Gwyn: her messiness (a room covered in unfinished beers, open crisps, and hills of laundry), her mechanical, self-centered mind (cold, blunt answers, the inability to pretend to care, a lack of listening, a lack of awareness), and how she hid under faux masculinity. They shared Gwyn’s small childhood bed. Ji-soo had never seen a childhood bedroom without any posters, art, or pictures on the walls. Gwyn was taller, at least two and a half heads taller, but in bed, when they weren’t making love, she hunched down, putting her forehead up against Ji-soo’s chest. On the third day of their visit, Gwyn paid for a hotel room in the city centre, and the two of them had two nights together, always returning to Gwyn’s home to go to sleep.
Accounts will differ, but as Gwyn tells it, Ji-soo was the one to pull back first after she returned to Seoul. The time difference was difficult. Gwyn’s early mornings were Ji-soo’s late nights; when one was winding up, the other was winding down. They met in different moods, and these moods colored how they viewed each other’s behavior. Text messages became shorter, spread out over longer and longer delays. When they did text, Ji-soo quickly turned the conversation sexual, like she had reached out just for help in getting off.
Gwyn had turned into the kind of person she hates: checking her phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a message, adjusting her sleep schedule so she could be awake when Ji-soo was awake, but then refusing to make the first move. “She ought to want to text me as much as I want to text her, no, actually, she should want to text me more. She was making me the woman.”
There she was, taking an extra break in her shift to check her phone yet again. There she was, trying to piece together a night out on the other side of the world, spying through her alt account what Ji-soo’s friends were up to and if she could spot her lover in stories posted by the club they frequented together when she was in town.
And that’s not Gwyn. Gwyn is the one who demands and orders, not one who waits. The one who wears the strap on (always packing an assortment with her). The one who holds down. Out of all of her lovers, she had only let one Korean girl, whose name she can’t recall, who didn’t make it into her photo album, go down on her. The whole experience was uncomfortable, pushing her deeper into herself, not pulling her out. She wouldn’t even let Ji-soo go down on her after that, instead insisting that she just suck on her prosthetic phallus, a symbolic act which she found sexier.
So she did what she had to do. She deleted all their messages, their photos, and cancelled their future plans for visits. She changed the dates for her next trip to Korea and switched hotels. When Ji-soo texted and then called, confused and hurt, Gwyn didn’t respond. She was winning now, but the move had cost her her stability. Tears followed, but she didn’t show Ji-soo, just me. She took sad little photos of herself crying and sent them over. She wrote childish poetry that reminded me of the Tumblr era. She said she wanted to document everything, as who knew if she’d ever feel like this again, like how she drew and re-drew that pitch black, red-beaked chough she had spotted without even expecting to. She wanted to preserve every moment; she wanted to end things. In long WhatsApp messages, she told me that she had never felt worse, but she couldn’t take the chance of waking up in the afterlife with the clarity that her deceased body, clumped into the corner of her bathroom floor, would be laid out on the losing side. Ji-soo would think horribly untrue thoughts, such as “my dear Gwyn couldn’t bear to live without me,” when really what Gwyneth Paltrow, my dear troubled friend, couldn’t live with was that her ex would think such a thing at all.
Since she couldn’t kill herself, she went to Paris instead.
On that gloomy trip to the City of Lights, we stood long-faced in slow-moving queues to see paintings of random women and men, who, I’ll give them this, seemed happier than us. We shuffled together with hundreds of other tourists, in and out of metro stations, up and down piss-stained, spit-stained, stain-stained stairs, past beggars and hustlers, tourists who walk on the left side, tourists who walk on the right, locals who stop suddenly, smeared spots of dog shit from the spoiled and untrained COVID dogs. Only in Paris can shit on the street be a sign of a city healing.
We drank long-faced at short, crowded bars, gulping down ten euro pints in the touristy parts of an already touristy city. I had spent so much money on stupid things: a side car tour of Paris, with Gwyn riding bitch while wearing a black beret, an old-timey photo of us taken in front of the Sacré-Cœur, a second black beret for Gwyn after she lost the first one, a macaron cooking session, a treat for her gluten free heart, which was pointless as we spent most mornings with her hunched over, inflamed and achy due to non-gluten-free shots we had ordered the night before.
And then there was the problem of the Asians. Busloads of them, seemingly following us from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame to Moulin Rouge to the Sacré-Cœur. They walked around in their berets, in their long, heavy black coats, holding up cameras, snapping photos, moving like schools of fish.
“Christ,” she had said, on our trip through Montmartre. “There are so many Koreans here. They all remind me of her.”
For the rest of her short visit, I pointed out Asian women, but only the ones that looked nothing like her ex: short, stocky, sun-beaten, wide-nosed. “Is that her?” The offenses we make against others to make a friend smile a bit.
But all of that is in the past. Things have changed, we assured each other leading up to the Copenhagen trip, our third, and though we didn’t know it at the time, final reunion.
I was the one who chose Copenhagen. I’m drawn to the northern, chilly (socially and climatically) countries of Europe the way others are drawn to the sun-warmed beaches of Bali. I feel most myself with a coat buttoned up to the collar. She had no opinion one way or the other. She simply wanted to meet, for me to see the new and improved her, to show me the new additions to her photo album of progress, to explain her five year plan of finally getting the life she wants, the one she deserves, a life that no one would abandon, for us to get drunk and crazy as we did back in those first days in Seoul, before all those life-changing things that could have happened to us happened.