I file the word away. “You watch dramas. You said you watched a couple of them.” We climb the stairs to the second floor and turn to the right. Choi Yusuk is installed in a large room directly above mine.
“I didn’t say I agreed with the stereotype. Some dramas are great and some are terrible.” He shrugs. “Eomma likes the very terrible, very melodramatic ones, but that’s between you and me and my father.” He pushes the door to his father’s room open.
The nurse aide who watches Choi Yusuk during the day rises to her feet and gives a low bow, which I know is for Yujun because I usually only get a nod.
“Thank you, ganhosa-nim. We will call you when we are finished.” Yujun dismisses the nurse aide easily.
Park Sooyoung bows again and disappears out the double doors without another word. Choi Yusuk rests in a king-size bed with a headboard that is big and grand enough to decorate a presidential suite. It’s made of mahogany, and the lion’s head, tree branches, and pine cones were all carved by hand by an artisan in Germany. It was a gift, Wansu told me, from a famous German furniture maker to Choi Yusuk’s father for a favor done. What favor, Wansu isn’t sure, or she’s not sharing with me. When Choi Yusuk passes on, this massive wooden piece will become Yujun’s. I cannot envision Yujun propped against the dark wood with his dimples bracketed by wooden pine cones. Choi Yusuk’s bed is from two generations ago, while Yujun, from his slacks, which are precisely hemmed at his anklebone, to his well-groomed eyebrows, is thoroughly modern.
“Is your bed a platform style?” I blurt out, wanting to believe I know him.
Yujun cocks his head, wondering where this question suddenly came from. “Yes?”
Mentally, I pump my fist at my accuracy. “I thought so.”
A wicked grin spreads across his face, his left dimple deepening past the puddle stage into the bottomless well. I want to poke it, kiss it, swim in his happy look forever.
“Spent a lot of time thinking about me in my bed, have you?”
I could play coy, but why? “I have.”
He runs his tongue along his lower teeth and arches an eyebrow high. “I have yellow pillows.”
Why does that sound erotic? His hand snakes out to wrap around my waist, but I scoot out of reach. “Not in your dad’s room,” I whisper in a half-joking, half-serious tone.
He gusts out a small sigh but joins me at the bedside, dragging a chair over. I wince at the sound of the wood scraping against the marble. Yujun’s casual familiarity with his home speaks of his comfort level with this kind of wealth. I’m still adjusting.
“What are we reading?” he asks.
“Korean folktales. In English, though.”
He sits down and waits for me to begin. I hesitate. It’s wonderful having Yujun back and I do want to spend every waking minute with him, but maybe not for the next hour or so. Reading aloud is much like acting out a story, and I don’t know that I can do it in front of him. I might as well sit at the dining room table naked. That’s how uncomfortable I would feel. “I can’t read with you in here, Yujun. I will be too self-conscious.”
“Really?” He’s surprised.
“Yes, really. My tongue already feels thick and my throat’s closing so—” I make a shooing gesture. “Off you go.”
“I was gone for six weeks, Hara. I want to spend time with you.”
“I want the same thing, but I can’t.” I’m whispering now, as if Choi Yusuk can hear me. I mean, I think he can hear me, which is why I read to him in the mornings and Wansu spends every evening in here, but I don’t know what he comprehends. Maybe he understands it all and is now internally frowning as he pieces together what my little argument with his son means.
“Pretend I’m not here.” Yujun crosses his arms and stretches out his long legs, looking like he doesn’t plan to leave for the next five days.
“Because it’s so easy to ignore a six-foot man. Please, Yujun,” I plead.
Reluctantly and slowly, he rises from the chair, giving me plenty of opportunity to stop him. I don’t and he finally caves. “I’ll wait outside.”
“Sorry about that, Sae Appa,” I whisper after Yujun closes the door, using the Korean words that Wansu taught me. They mean “stepfather,” she said, and that’s how she wanted me to address him. I straighten the covers and pull the blanket under his chin. I always worry about him being cold.
Yujun once told me that he put his father in this bed after they’d argued about the direction of IF Group. Choi Yusuk did not support the changes Yujun and Choi Wansu wanted to make. They argued and Choi Yusuk had a stroke. His condition deteriorated until he slipped into unconsciousness three years ago. He’s a traditionalist, Wansu said, and a traditional Korean man had a certain way of thinking. If he were awake, I don’t think I’d be in this house, and so even after these two weeks, I’m still on edge when I’m at Choi Yusuk’s bedside.
“Is it okay that I’m here? Would you give Yujun and me your blessing if you were awake? Would you allow me space at your dinner table? Would you eat food I cooked during Chuseok? Would you permit Yujun to love me?”
CHAPTER NINE
Sae Appa has no answers for me. There’s nothing but the sound of his breathing machine, the click, click, click of the heart monitor, and the quiet hum of the heater. I rub my cold hands together and open the book I’ve been reading. It’s a collection of Korean fairy tales. I’m on the story of “Sim Cheong.” “Sim Cheong” is a traditional Korean folktale, one of the five pansori, a Korean opera, that have survived through the centuries. So much of the pansori is steeped in mysticism that it is hard to know where the human ends and the dragon begins. This particular pansori is about filial piety.
“Sim Cheong” is sad—emo, black-eyeliner, long-bangs sad. Sim Bongsa, Sim the Blind, loses his wife upon his daughter’s birth and gradually begins to lose his eyesight. When his daughter is thirteen, Sim Bongsa is begging in the street, crying about his blindness. A monk passing by overhears these complaints, which Sim Bongsa has made many times before. Tired, the monk makes an offer. For a grand price of three hundred bags of rice, the temple will offer up prayers to Buddha for Sim Bongsa’s sight to be returned. Sim is so poor that even one bag of rice would be a luxury, but he foolishly agrees to this insane bargain. When Sim Cheong hears of the deal that her father has struck with the monks, she weeps, for she knows that the temple bargain cannot be met.
The following day she learns that sailors have landed in search of a virgin to sacrifice to the King of the Sea, who is tormenting the ships with storms. For three hundred bags of rice, Sim Cheong agrees to be that sacrifice. She is thrown into the sea, and the prayers of the monks, if they were actually made, result in no change to her father. He remains blind and now childless.