His hands behind his back, Charles bowed his head and said nothing.
The choir whispered among themselves. The bass with the double chin said to the tenor, “Young guy.” Kyung-ah Shin, the attractive soprano seated next to Leah Han, smiled in his direction. “Look, honey, no wedding ring.” Leah didn’t want to get caught talking. Mr. Jun hated it when the choir members talked during rehearsals. She checked his hands. There was no wedding ring, but on his right hand, Dr. Hong wore a gold signet ring with an oval lapis lazuli. He wore no other jewelry. Kyung-ah elbowed Leah. “Do you think he is gay?” She pronounced the word gay in two syllables: geh-ee. Kyung-ah touched her earrings—black Tahitian pearls with paper white diamonds framing them. On her pale throat, she wore a matching choker necklace with a diamond clasp. Kyung-ah and her younger sister, Joanne, owned three wholesale sneaker stores in Manhattan that had grossed over 1.7 million dollars in business last year. She’d bought the jewelry for herself last Christmas, believing that she should get herself whatever she deserved.
Charles smiled politely, unaffected by the puffed-up introduction. In his own mind, he was the forty-eight-year-old son of a rich man with no money of his own. He’d failed marriage twice, received a worthless doctorate of music and obscure prizes for organ competitions. The church was paying him eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, a laughable amount of money to live on in New York, but Charles didn’t need much in terms of daily maintenance. Also, his voice lessons earned him at least three hundred dollars a week. With both jobs, he wouldn’t need his father’s monthly allowance anymore. After his second divorce, his older brothers’ persistent remarks about how their elderly father still supported the supposed “artist” in the family had become impossible to bear.
Charles had never directed a choir before, but he was a good voice coach. Mr. Jun had boasted that the woman singing the solo today, Deaconess Cho, had a finer voice than Kiri Te Kanawa and Jessye Norman. Charles looked over the seating chart on the lectern and spotted Leah in the soprano section. Deaconess Cho was a petite woman with slight shoulders, a pale face, and smooth white hair. She wore almost no makeup, in contrast with the pretty, dark-haired soprano seated next to her, whose eyes were painted like a tropical bird. Leah felt his hard stare, and she turned away, taking in a desperate gulp of breath.
Kyung-ah, who missed little, saw him observing Leah. The new director was interesting to her. A sexy woman, Kyung-ah fully expected him to notice her. She touched her black hair and checked for stray crimson lipstick in the corners of her mouth with her pinkie. She wished the acetate choir robe she was wearing didn’t hide her favorite Claude Montana suit, which cinched in her small waist beautifully, flattering her hips and shapely legs. She wasn’t looking for herself so much; Kyung-ah was long married to a pleasant, hardworking man who was a little dull. But her sister was still single. She always scanned for prospects for Joanne, who was an excellent cook and good with children.
Charles went over the seating chart, matching names with faces as Mr. Jun droned on about what the purpose of a choir was. The choir was a predictable collection of fish-eyed men with jowly faces and exhausted mothers with dyed black hair, their eyebrows drawn in too darkly in brown pencil, wearing lipstick shades that no longer complimented them. They watched him like careful students, and he felt no kindred attachment to them. How could he possibly direct this ragtag bunch of immigrants who wanted to sing to their Jesus?
The week before, at his job interview, the Reverend Lim had asked Charles if he believed in Jesus Christ. Charles had replied, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The nearly dwarf-size minister, oblivious to sarcasm, couldn’t have been more pleased; to him, there could be no more perfect answer than this. Charles had recited a fragment of the first verse of Psalm 23, written by David, a brave warrior king and, of course, the Bible’s most famous musician.
When the sermon ended, the choir rose to sing the offertory. Leah began the first verse of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” When she opened her mouth to sing, Mr. Jun closed his eyes for a moment in relief. The others joined at the refrain, but the shadow of Leah’s voice continued to track the piece. Charles, who was seated in the first pew, felt compelled to examine Leah’s face closely, unable to believe the high register of her vocal instrument. She had a rounded voice with a complicated range of feeling. It did in fact remind him of some of the sopranos that Mr. Jun had mentioned, but her exquisite sound wasn’t cultivated in any traditional sense, and he could hear a raw sorrow in it. In a way, it recalled the lament of pansori music with its inexplicable anguish. When she stopped singing, Charles felt profoundly alone and yearned to hear her sing again. Her voice had lifted him from his stray thoughts, and he collected himself.