“I made a mistake. It is my fault. Please pardon my offense. I made a terrible mistake . .” Leah began to sob.
“Are you coming next week?” he asked. “Leah?”
“I don’t know.” She stopped coughing. Tears trickled down her long face. Her nose was runny.
Charles exhaled. He had to return to the choir room. He’d left the choir alone. If he hadn’t called now, then her husband might’ve been there. He was calling from the empty church office. On the wall, there hung a free calendar with tear-away pages from some Bible dealer. The month of June had a quotation from Psalm 23 in Korean. Where is my comfort? Charles wondered. How had he landed up in a church basement reeking of kimchi asking a white-haired woman to leave her husband?
“Please forgive me.” She couldn’t bear the thought of him being angry with her.
“Maybe it was a mistake,” Charles muttered.
Her heart lurched. He had wanted her to come live with him. That was what he had said that night, and he had called to come get her today. Now it was a mistake. Uh-muh. A man like this could change his mind so fast. They could never be together—that much she had always understood, and she deserved to die for her sin of wanting him—but a part of her had thought that maybe this was what all the soh-sul books and terebi programs were about, a kind of pure, impossible love, and she had thought this had been her experience of it. But, no, it couldn’t be that if his heart could reverse itself. Was he a jeh bi—a smart girl was supposed to guard her soul against a man who’d appear swiftly like the fork-tailed swallow, full of charming songs. A man like that swept into your life, stole the jewels of your faith, then flew away, leaving you blinded and empty.
Leah held the phone close to her ear as she stared at the front door in case her husband walked in. With their lunch. He had been so considerate while she was sick. What would she do if her daughters rang the bell? Did the girls still have their keys? Leah wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her jersey housedress.
“I better go,” Charles said. He felt absurd for having called. This past month, he had been preparing himself for her to come to him. He had imagined that she would knock on his door and ask to stay. And of course, he would let her come in. He would marry her. Maybe even take her to Korea. His father would have liked her. He had not liked his two previous wives. The notion seemed childish to him now, no different from his boyhood wish for his dead grandmother to come back to life or how he had yearned for months when he was eight years old for his nanny, who had married a farmer, to return to him—tell him that she’d gone to her village for only a short trip to bring back his favorite yut candy. Charles missed his home suddenly, the home of his youth that didn’t exist anymore, where his mother was still alive and young, his grandmother was in the drawing room reading her novels, and his favorite nanny, who’d slept at the foot of his bed and brought him yogurt drinks when he did his homework, still lived with them and when his piano playing had pleased these women.
But courtship was a mutual delusion, and once love was captured, things tended to go awry. The divas he had married could never be pleased. It was a mean curse to be married to a woman who refused to be happy. He’d had affairs and stayed away from the house. A wife’s pernicious anger gradually amounted to a killing. Extricating himself legally from the divas had been such an enormous waste of time. It was better to be alone. He would never have children.
Leah was still on the phone. “I thought you cared for me,” she heard herself saying quietly. “That you wanted me to come and live with you.”
Now it was Charles’s turn to be silent. He recognized that voice—it was the voice of a hurt woman. Somehow it made him less merciful.
“You have a beautiful voice, Leah. The most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.” He said this and believed it was true. He had heard Callas, Price, Te Kanawa, and Battle. But this white-haired, middle-aged tailor outshone the divas. If there was a God, Charles thought, his distribution of gifts made no sense. Or was it that God kept the greatest for Himself, for His private pleasure? Just a few moments ago, he had thought of giving her everything he had.
Leah began to cough and couldn’t stop.
“You should rest. Your husband was here this morning—”
“He spoke to you?” It felt like a slap to have him mention her husband.
“Yes. He was worried about you.”
And you? she wanted to ask but didn’t. He did not love her. It was not the love that lasted. There was worry in love, there was sacrifice. There was constancy. In four weeks, he had never tried to contact her. He was someone who could not be counted on, and it embarrassed her that she had even considered Charles as someone to love.