If I Had Your Face(17)
I could have looked hurt or angry, I know, but I settled on chirpy as my default state a while ago, because I remembered something Ruby said to me once back in New York.
“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”
* * *
—
I STOP BY Joye department store to buy miniature orchids from the flower shop on the first floor. It costs ten times more than the flower market near my apartment, but the pot bears the Joye logo and name. When I meet Hanbin outside the subway station nearest to his house, he sees the shopping bag and says there was no need to buy a gift, but I can tell he approves.
Hanbin’s house is modern and astonishing—all gray slate and glass and slanted roofs—atop a hill in Sungbukdong behind a tall brick wall. When the gate opens for us, my heart drops in an incredulous lurch that takes my breath. He has only told me about the inconveniences, of how cold it can get in the winters, how tourists and journalists tramp about the neighborhood to catch a glimpse beyond the gate, how friends of the house’s famous Dutch architect show up for impromptu calls to examine his first commission in Asia. The architecture reminds me of Japanese museums that I studied in school, all stark lines and muted beauty.
But it’s not until I am standing on the lawn—and what house in Seoul, let alone one in the most coveted arts neighborhood, has a lawn of real grass?—that I realize I almost despise Hanbin right now. Certainly his mother.
The inside of the house seems to be bursting with even more white flowers than the gardens. Heaps of orchids and peonies in unusual arrangements are everywhere and I look at my little pot sadly.
“I will go tell your mother that you are here,” says the man who opened the front door for us. He bows, takes my coat, and hands me a pair of leather slippers from the marble shoe closet. Despite his formal speech to Hanbin, he is dressed casually—just a long-sleeved (striped!) T-shirt and wrinkled khakis, not the suit or uniform I realize I’d been expecting.
“That’s all right—I’ll go up and tell her myself,” says Hanbin. He asks me to wait in the living room to the left of the foyer, then bounds down the hallway to the right.
The living room is cavernous—about the height and size of a basketball court, with groupings of chairs and coffee tables in each corner. In the center is the Ishii fish, the size and color of a baby elephant—a beautiful thing that glistens as I draw near. The art on the walls is also modern Japanese, a mix of Tsunoda, Ohira, and Sakurai. I sit down in the far corner, next to another tiny Ishii the color of an angry cloud.
The man who opened the door brings me some tea on a tray. The tea is a small mauve flower that opens in the water as it steeps. He adjusts the flowers on the coffee table without saying a word, and I realize that Hanbin was right, Mr. Choi the driver would have been a comfort to me if he’d been here, which he’s not.
“Mother’s actually not feeling well so it’ll just be us today,” says Hanbin, coming toward me. “She has a terrible headache and she’s lying down.”
He’s looking at me a little too earnestly as he is saying this, as if he’s forcing himself not to look away. Either he’s lying or he thinks she’s lying and my heart begins pounding loudly. Acid starts to trickle through my veins. He does not say she apologizes for not coming down.
“That’s terrible. I hope she feels better soon.” What else is there to say, really? We stare into our cooling teas, then he clears his throat.
“I’ll show you the gardens while they’re getting lunch ready. Unless you want cake or ddeok? Are you hungry?”
I shake my head and he takes my hand and leads me back outside through the foyer. On the way out, I see two uniformed women peeping at me from a doorway and I jerk my head so that they are not in my line of vision. When we reach the door, the man who opened it for us earlier materializes with our coats.
The gardens stretch around the house, unfolding into a series of miniature landscapes. My favorite is the pine grove in the back, a maze of carefully designed and pruned pine trees. The scent has a calming effect on my nerves.
Through the trees, the view floats up toward us. I can see other massive houses scattered on the hill and the rest of the city sprawled out beneath them.
As Hanbin walks in front of me, stooping beneath low-hanging branches, my heart burns. It is too much, this house, his mother, the art. What was he thinking, bringing me here?
“That’s my grandmother’s house,” Hanbin says, pointing to a white two-story house in the distance. It’s a Western-style house surrounded by rosebushes and more pine trees. His paternal grandmother is on the brink of dementia, and has lately taken to accusing the servants of stealing her money.
“And over there, that’s Ruby’s father’s house,” he says. My head snaps toward where he is pointing, to the right of his grandmother’s house. Even from a distance it looms like a fortress, morose and dark, the gardens a sinister moat. But perhaps it’s because I am seeing it with Ruby’s voice whispering in my head.
We stand there, saying nothing, until he’s the one who starts walking back first.
After lunch—a painfully awkward affair served in a spectacular sunlit dining room by two silent men—I ask Hanbin to drop me off at my studio. He doesn’t protest, although I know he wanted to see a movie, and in the car we are both quiet.