Charles turned to the seating chart. He called the members one by one to the front of the room. Each person was asked to sing “Happy Birthday.” Charles remained standing as he listened to the sharp tenors, the thin sounds of the baritones, the piercing shrills of the untrained sopranos. A few of the altos were passable and, thankfully, they did not shout. Some of the sopranos were altos, and some altos were really mezzos. Whatever compassion he’d felt a few moments before for Mr. Jun was fading. It was his fault that the singers didn’t know their own sounds. He called Kyung-ah Shin, the woman who’d first stood up to clap and started the collection for Mr. Jun.
She took her time to get to her spot next to the piano. Her range was not developed, but she had potential. Her ripe eyes appealed to him, and the way she looked at him privately, her back turned to the choir, was sexual, and he found this amusing. Her clothes were rich-woman flashy, big shoulder pads, cockroach killer heels, the too-dark hose. But her waist was tiny, her ass round, and he liked red lipstick on women. Lots of diamonds—likely one of these women who had husbands with cash businesses. Kyung-ah Shin’s wedding ring was hard to miss. It had been a long time since he had been with a Korean woman, certainly, a very long time since a married one. His virginity had been lost to a lonely housewife in Seoul—the shy wife of his college professor. If given the opportunity, he’d have happily fucked the married soprano who was giving him the eye. There was nothing shy about this one.
Leah was next. When she stood beside him, he was taken aback by how young she looked. From afar, because of her white hair, he’d thought she was ten or fifteen years older than what she must have been. She didn’t look more than thirty-five, and her smooth face looked as if lit from within. There was something so pure about her expression, as though she’d never had a bad thought in her head. If she dyed her hair, she would have looked twenty-eight, but it was evident that to do such a thing would have violated her submissive nature. She was a gorgeous woman, her features small and fine, but he didn’t feel aroused by her as he had with the older woman Kyung-ah Shin. Leah was slimmer than all the others, with a narrow waist and straight, boyish hips. There was a modest swell of bosom rising from her severely cut gray dress, reminding him of a German voice teacher he’d once had in England. The only exposed skin on her body was her face, neck, and hands. Then he realized that she was built like his first wife, Sara, a tiny Italian soprano, who grew very fat at the end of their relationship.
Instead of “Happy Birthday to You,” he had her sing the first verse of “A Mighty Fortress” just so he could hear her sing again. What was wrong with her? he wondered. Something about her just rankled him, despite this voice worthy of ancient cathedrals. She was too Korean. Probably dumb and quiet. In bed, she’d probably just lie there. Her downcast, overly modest expression was irritating. But as she sang, he couldn’t fight the clutch in his heart, the same as it had been at the service earlier. Her unearthly sound arrested him. So rarely had he heard such good tone and range in an amateur singer. Her breath control was astonishing. If she were younger and had funds, he’d have encouraged her to enter competitions. She’d have won them, he bet. When she finished, Charles nodded and said nothing. He called on the next person. At the end of rehearsal, he’d finished up all his notes for each singer.
“Please return on Wednesday evening at seven-thirty. I expect that we will have a two-hour rehearsal. Thank you.” Charles nodded uncomfortably. He grabbed his knapsack and jacket and fled the room.
As soon as he was gone, Peter Kim, the baritone, an insurance salesman for New York Life, gathered round the choir and told them about having once visited his house two years before. Peter knew one of Charles’s brothers from school. Charles Hong was the fourth of four boys. His great-grandfather and grandfather had had a monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of MSG—the food flavor enhancer. His older brothers were academics like their father, but all of them were tycoons. Only Charles, the grandfather’s least favorite, had gone to Europe and America to study music. If he’d stayed in Korea, he would’ve received a great deal of money annually. But he hadn’t. All his life he’d just studied music and taken little teaching jobs here and there. He used to return home regularly until his mother died several years before. He was forty-eight years old, divorced from his Italian wife of eleven years, and divorced from his Swedish wife of four years. He lived alone in Brooklyn Heights in a large limestone town house that his father had bought for him in cash. He had no children. The women gasped at this.