by Min Jin Lee
Peter and about a dozen of the men left to eat kalbi. Several others were looking for a house to play ha-toh—invariably, someone would have brought a deck of red cards to church in the hopes of getting in a game.
Leah had been paying attention to every word Peter Kim said. Dr. Hong seemed tragically sad to her from his description—to be so alone in the world. Yet she wondered what it would be like to study music all your life. That must have been like heaven.
“You want to go with the geh girls to eat jajangmyun?” Kyung-ah asked, breaking up Leah’s thoughts of him.
“Oh no, sister, I have to go home and make dinner,” she said.
“Oh, you’re such a good wife. You put us all to shame,” said Kyung-ah, who had no intention of going home so early. Her son and daughter were in college, and her husband was perfectly content to fix himself ramen on Sunday nights. She let him go to his men’s Bible study twice a week, and she did what she wanted.
The members scattered and would return again to the same room in three days.
On Wednesday, Leah blew through her work rapidly. She finished most of the mending that needed to be done for the week and was able to help the girls sort clothes in the back room. She hummed the whole day. For dinner, she’d bought some broccoli and a piece of fish from the market near the store to prepare for Joseph’s meal. He ate so little these days. She’d have a bowl of rice with bori-cha because her stomach had been feeling nervous all day. Their drive home was quiet, with hardly a word between them. Leah’s mind was full of music and thoughts of the old choir director and the new one. As soon as they got home, she rushed to the kitchen to cook, and when it was done, she called out to Joseph, who was watching his favorite terebi program.
“Yobo,” she called out to him from the kitchen, but there was no answer. “Yobo,” she said again.
In the living room, Joseph had fallen asleep in front of the television set. He’d suffered from nightmares since the war and all through their marriage, but inexplicably, they seemed to occur more frequently since the building fire. Joseph tried to go to bed earlier, but he never felt rested.
“Yobo,” she said quietly, trying to wake him. She didn’t want him to go to bed without having his dinner. Joseph didn’t stir, having fallen into a deep sleep. Leah dragged the ottoman from the other side of the chair to prop up his feet. She covered her husband with a quilt she’d made from her sewing scraps. She set the kitchen table with his dinner in case he got up, and moments later, she drove to choir rehearsal.
Leah was hardly the first to arrive. Kyung-ah was already sitting in her chair, wearing a red belted dress and high heels. She crossed and uncrossed her pretty legs to adjust herself in her chair. Between giggles, she teased the nearby baritones, who stared at her as if she were a wedding feast.
Most of the choir members wore street clothes to practice, nothing close to their Sunday best, since many of them had come from their jobs—groceries in Spanish Harlem, midtown Manhattan nail salons, hair product wholesale shops in the Bronx, and dry-cleaning shops, like Leah. A few came from office jobs, but most of them owned or worked in stores. The Kim brothers, forty-year-old twins, both bachelor tenors, owned a brake repair shop in Flushing, but prior to Wednesday night choir rehearsals, they scrubbed themselves with Irish Spring soap and wore Aramis aftershave. They wore white shirts pressed and starched by their mother, whom they lived with and supported, and pleated trousers from Italy. Like the Kim twins, Mrs. Koh, a widow who worked twelve hours a day as a cashier at a fish market in Queens Village, made a deliberate attempt to erase her vocation through water and heavily perfumed soap. She was renowned at church for having sent all three of her sons to Harvard—the oldest awarded second place in the Westinghouse competition when he was a junior at the Bronx High School of Science.
Once everyone had taken a seat, Charles tapped his white baton against the black metal music stand. Today, he wore a black V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath and blue jeans. His expression was again serious, no curve or softening of his lips. With his baton, he pointed to Mrs. Noh, the secretary for the choir, a tall, elderly woman wearing beige foundation from the base of her neck to the tip of her brow hairline. He gestured for her to come forward. For over two decades, she’d been in charge of attendance, choir robe cleanings, folder clearing, and photocopying of all choir business. He handed over a pile of scores for the song “O Divine Redeemer” for her to distribute.
At the sight of the familiar sheet music, the Kim brothers were delighted. Then they noticed that this arrangement was for a soprano. For the second week in a row, a woman got a solo.
Charles fiddled with the CD player. There had never been a CD player in the choir room. Without an introduction, he played the song. Mr. Jun used to talk so much that the choir expected a forty-minute rehearsal and an hour and twenty minutes of lecturing as well as his own vocal demonstration of the different parts.
The recording began with a cello playing solemnly, then the soprano sang the first line in English: “Ah, turn me not away.” The singer’s incantatory sound mesmerized them. When she hit an impossibly high note at the refrain, “I pray Thee, grant me pardon,” many of them stopped breathing, feeling the soprano’s infinite reach. They could hear the hymn’s potence. Its sanctuary. When Charles turned off the recording, a bass sitting way back shouted in approval, “Ah-men!” Others thundered in agreement. None of the men were in the least bit intimidated by the new director’s silent governing.
In a soft voice, Charles asked the accompanist to play the refrain. He pointed to the altos, and they sang their parts. It went this way for some time, with him saying little, the different sections being led by the point of his baton, and their singing voices moving about the room like a freight train. Under his focused direction, the singers sat up straighter, becoming more thoughtful of the quality of their sound. The choir felt proud of their voices, but Charles’s disdain grew. They would take a great deal of work, far more work than he wished to do for eight hundred and fifty dollars a month.
Charles tapped his baton against the music stand.
“This would be a good time to bring in the solo. Deaconess Cho, please begin with the first line. It should begin andante—” He read his score, not bothering to look at Leah or at anyone else in the choir. He missed the confused glances.
Leah shook her head slightly. He had to mean her. Didn’t he? Deaconess Cho was her church title, and the only other Deaconess Cho was an alto. But how could he mean her? She’d sung a solo the week before. She’d never had more than four solos per year, and that was the most anyone ever had. Kyung-ah had had three. Mr. Jun rotated the solo schedules from male to female—from tenor to soprano and back again, with an occasional minor part sung by a solo bass or alto. Mr. Jun was also fond of duets.
The accompanist played, but no one sang.
Charles looked up. “Andante—” Leah appeared lost.
“Sloooo-wly,” he said, then turned to the accompanist, who started from the top.
Leah did not sing.
Charles tapped his baton again, his irritation unhidden.
“Are you ready?” He looked straight at Leah. “Is something wrong?”
Leah was terrified but had no idea how to protest. With his baton, Charles motioned for her to rise.
“Please come here,” he said quietly, and Leah took a quick breath before getting up.
When she stood next to the accompanist, Charles said, “Shi-jak.”
Leah wouldn’t start.
“Shi-jak,” he said again, this time in a much louder voice.
Leah began to sing, keeping in mind what she’d just heard on the recording, repeating the first two lines with greater feeling. She concentrated on her friend Kyung-ah, who’d bitten her upper lip and smudged her scarlet lipstick on her lower set of teeth.
For the next hour or so, Leah sang weakly. At nine o’clock, one of the mothers with younger children raised her hand to say she had to leave. In the following half h
our, the others seemed itchy to leave. Charles tried to understand these pedestrian concerns. At nine-thirty, he let them go after saying, “On Sunday, please arrive precisely at seven-thirty a.m.”
Mr. Jun normally dismissed the choir by acknowledging their efforts, saying, “You worked very hard today,” or some equivalent, but Charles said nothing of the kind.
The choir trickled out, and Leah thought it might be safe to go. She was still fixed to the same spot near the piano.
“You can stay for half an hour to work,” Charles said to her with only the mildest inflection of a question.
Leah stood there, watching the accompanist put on her jacket. She also had small children.
Kyung-ah marched to the front of the room and smiled at Charles, who nodded coolly at her. She was wrapped in a black cashmere shawl fastened by a large jade-and-gold stickpin.
“Do you want to go out with us?” Kyung-ah asked Leah, pretending Charles couldn’t hear her.
“She has to practice some more,” Charles answered for her.
Kyung-ah jerked her head back slightly. She stared hard at him, but Charles didn’t notice.
Leah’s left hand fluttered up to touch her collarbone. She felt panic at being left alone with this man. Charles went to the piano. Another soprano in their geh, Deaconess Chun, came up to get Kyung-ah.
“Good night,” Kyung-ah said to her, slipping her arm into the crook of Deaconess Chun’s arm.
They were alone, and unconsciously, Leah paced around the small perimeter of space she’d allowed herself.
“You can sit down,” Charles said.
Leah tucked herself into the seat in the first row where Mrs. Noh, the choir secretary, sat. It made her feel safer to sit in her spot.
“This is where you’re having trouble. . .” He talked to her more kindly, as if she were one of his voice students. He sat up straight on his piano bench, inhaled deeply, then sang, “Hear my cry, hear my cry, save me Lord, in Thy mercy.” Without taking a pause to breathe, he sang the line again.
The words calmed her. His tenor voice was cool, like a cup of well water. For the first time that night, she felt the anxiety of the sinner’s plea—the sinner would understand in his heart that he is undeserving of God’s protection.
“Now, if you. . .” Charles turned his face from the sheet music. Leah was in tears, her face wrapped in her hands, and at that moment, he found her inexplicably beautiful. This wasn’t unusual to witness a soprano crying; both his singer wives wept at the slightest provocation. If he was late coming home, his second wife, crying out of control, would throw the dinner on the floor. His first wife cried when she saw the color periwinkle or smelled lavender. But Charles was surprised to see Leah cry. In the brief time he’d observed her, her stoicism was thoroughly marked in her manner, expression, clothing, and posture.
Charles swallowed. “Are you all right?” he asked. He smiled at her. “You don’t like the way I sing or play Gounod?” This was his first smile since he’d been in the practice room.
Leah didn’t understand his meaning.
“The composer, Charles Gounod,” he said in his respectable French accent. “He was going to be a priest, and he, too, was a choirmaster for over four years. I doubt I will last half that long.” He laughed.
“I’m so sorry.” Leah looked at him, sniffling. She was embarrassed by her emotions. She didn’t know what brought it on exactly.
Charles was right—Leah didn’t cry often, but somehow, when he’d sung just that verse, she had been impossibly moved. But this wasn’t something she could say. Throughout her life, many had praised her singing, appearing startled by the sound that came from her mouth, and in her lifetime, she too had heard a number of voices that had affected her deeply. Yet she herself was unable to put into words the sentiments racing through her heart. Sometimes she wished she could sing back to them. But that would have been insane. Life was not an opera. When she heard a voice like Charles’s or the one on the recording, what she wanted to say was, I can hear God when you sing.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t sing the solo. I sang last week, and it’s not fair to the others in the choir—”
Charles cocked his head. Singers did not turn down solos. This woman was ridiculous, her selflessness implausible.
“You must understand something: I’m not interested in fairness. And your God doesn’t seem interested in fairness when He gives out talent. I see mediocrity or ambition most of the time. You have talent, but no ambition. That’s why you’re stuck here.”
Leah furrowed her brow, not grasping his meaning.
“Mr. Jun has already explained to me his system of solo schedules. Everyone is pissed. I didn’t miss that today. I will figure out an alternative, but next Sunday is Easter—a big-deal holiday for Christians, as you and I know. And it should have the finest music, don’t you think? And your Mr. Jun is leaving. Shouldn’t we send him off with a nice song? For this Sunday, I expect you to sing because you’re the only voice I can bear right now.” He resented like hell the way singers needed stroking—their bottomless need for confirmation of their gifts. Was he begging a singer to do another solo? Impossible.
“But—”
“Do you object to the song?”
“No, no. It couldn’t be more beautiful. . . but, but—”
“Do you really care that your little soprano buddies are angry with you? The best is always shunned. Do you really care more about approval than about praising your God? Don’t you care at all about Mr. Jun’s last service? I saw you sobbing up there last Sunday when he announced the news.”
“I. . . I—” Leah, who preferred silence over talking, and singing over everything, wished she could say something, but she had no words.
Charles was angry now, because he could tell she still didn’t agree.
“You can’t care about what people say or what people think, dammit.”
“It’s not just that I care what—”
“Don’t be a sheep. You’ve already lost so much. If you’d only fought for your own—”
Leah stared at this man who didn’t know her at all. Why was he saying these horrible things about her life? There was nothing wrong with her life. She was grateful for her hardworking husband who loved her, for her smart daughters, her good health. Her singing was this extra beautiful gift that she’d never expected. And she cared about her friends. Everyone should have a turn. She stared at the red tiles beneath her feet.
“This is why I never work with Koreans. They are so goddamn stuck. You must choose yourself over the group.” Charles said these things, not caring if Leah even understood his meaning. He was angry with his family, with the immigrant communities in New York, even the artists he knew who weren’t Korean who kept on wanting to compromise. An artist, a real artist, couldn’t do that. An artist could not necessarily have the things other people had—a happy marriage, children, a quiet home life, a retirement account, even mental health. These were things that following convention might give you, but most great artists had been denied much of them. Both of his wives had wanted children, but he had told them no, for these very reasons. Charles had no intention of giving up his art to make room for a steady job or crying babies, because to him, a life without music was insupportable. Without it, he would have certainly put the gun in his mouth.
Charles put his head down on the piano. His life of music had been reduced to this basement practice room smelling of kimchi chi-geh, where a white-haired housewife who had true talent was reminding him to be fair.
Leah didn’t know what to do. The new director was very upset with her.
“I’ll sing it,” Leah said. “I’ll sing it for Mr. Jun’s retirement on Sunday. And I’ll practice at home,” she continued, hoping the new director would raise his head from the piano and look at her. Perhaps smile again. “It’s just that I didn’t think it was right for me to sing for two Sundays in a row.”
Charles lifted his head a
nd shouted, “Goddamn you! Did you hear anything I said?”
Leah pulled back, her eyes blinking in terror. Joseph had never said anything so awful.
Charles took another breath. “Take the recording from the player and listen to it at home. Listen to her feeling. Think about the words, feel the music. Feel more than you want to. If you want to sing about redemption, you have to recognize the sin.” He didn’t know if she understood him.
Leah got up from her seat. Her hand trembled as she removed the compact disc from the player, and she restored it to its jewel case. She walked quietly to the coat closet to get her things. She opened the door, then turned around to bow. Charles wiped tears from his face with both hands. Leah pretended not to see, wanting to protect his pride. In the church parking lot, the only car was hers, and Leah drove home slowly, wondering where he lived exactly and how far he’d have to travel tonight.
14 HOSPITALITY
CASEY FINISHED THE BREAKFAST DISHES and got dressed for work. She had an hour and a half before she had to be at Sabine’s, but she couldn’t stay home.
Unu didn’t ask why she was leaving early, but Casey told him anyway that she had promised to meet Sabine before work. That wasn’t true, and as she walked toward Madison Avenue, she couldn’t figure out why she had lied to him.
She hated it when she felt sorry for herself and hoped a long walk down Madison might help her lousy mood. The first year of business school was almost over, but she still didn’t have a summer internship with an investment bank, and it was making her feel horrible. Hugh Underhill had said to give him a call if she needed anything, but she hated the idea of asking for help. Most of her friends at school had summer job offers with Internet start-ups, and though Casey had interviewed with a few, nothing was even remotely interesting to her. She couldn’t understand what happened when you stuck a “.com” behind a word or what these companies did. But everyone said that’s where the action was. Also, a lot of the interviewers looked twelve. But she reminded herself that girls with five-figure debts couldn’t be picky, so she had not turned down a summer internship offer from Sklar.com, a market research company. For the past three months, ever since Unu lost his job, her credit card debts had only gotten worse. The debts she’d been paying off steadily had crept up again. As she walked and walked, dressed in one of her Sabine’s getups—hat, dress, and fancy shoes—Casey felt like escaping, but where would she go?