Free Food for Millionaires (40 page)

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.

“When I went to his house for the appointment that his brother had set up for me, he’d forgotten all about it. He was home alone, eating boiled rice and frankfurters with hot sauce off of a card table. In that huge expensive house, he had no furniture except for a gigantic piano and a sofa. He said he didn’t need any life insurance. ‘Who would lose if I dropped off?’ Anyway, he gave me a beer and a CD of
Tristan and Isolde.
” Peter shrugged. “He’s a nice enough man. I don’t even think he remembered us ever meeting when I sang today.”

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 hour, 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.