The two of them waited for me to speak.
“I’ve taken too long of a break, and in the time I’d let go of painting, my feelings and passion for it… they just naturally faded away. I’ve been living with the thought that I’d probably never paint again, so… I can’t even imagine myself picking it up.”
I had never told my teacher or him the details of my present or the journey that had led me here. In that state, this was the most honest explanation I could give. Anything more would have to be a lie or a confession, and the me of now wanted neither.
“Yes, thank you for being honest. We weren’t expecting a positive answer from you right here, today. It’s a sudden proposal, so you wouldn’t change your mind on the spot. Especially if you’ve come to terms with your feelings about painting in your own way.”
Ms. Han, who had been patting the back of my hand with her other hand, now grasped it firmly with both of hers.
“But Yeehyeon, when Representative Liu brought up the idea of you painting again… to be honest, I was grateful to him.”
A stir of emotion crossed Ms. Han’s face as she looked at me.
It wasn’t as if Ms. Han and I had kept in touch continuously since we first met, but I knew that the wavering distortion in her eyes now was not some sentimental pity for a former student’s terrible past.
In my childhood, Ms. Han and I had been sharers of a secret garden, and she had been a perfect sympathizer to the world I saw. As a child who couldn’t affirm herself on her own, it was because of my teacher that I could expand my world and be at ease within it.
There was no need to hear in detail why she felt grateful to him. As much as she was grateful to him, I simply felt sorry toward her.
I couldn’t make any more negative remarks. But it was just as difficult to express any positivity. Fearing that even the smallest reaction, like a nod, would be a rash act that gave her unintended hope, I bit my lower lip, my gaze fixed on our clasped hands.
The faint sound of rain began to mix with the hum of the air conditioner that had been the only sound in the room. As if on cue, all three of us looked out the window almost simultaneously. Against the backdrop of the now-dark late evening, raindrops drew slanted lines on the glass pane.
It was he who fractured the heavy silence.
“Seo Yeehyeon-ssi, try this.”
He pushed the plate of refreshments, which no one had touched until then, toward me. Neither my teacher nor I could keep up with his sudden change of topic.
When I didn’t react, he speared a small, bite-sized square of yakgwa with a fork and offered it to me.
“Try it. It’s a multi-layered hangwa, like a pastry, made by a master artisan. It’s a delicacy.”
“Where on earth do you even learn words like ‘master artisan’? You didn’t even grow up in Korea.”
My teacher shook her head as if giving up, and took the fork from him on my behalf, passing it to me.
“You tend to get obsessed when you live far away. You know how everyone becomes a patriot when they’re abroad.”
Spearing another piece of yakgwa on a different fork and handing it to Ms. Han, he replied cheekily with a raise of his eyebrows.
“And you’re not even a Korean citizen.”
“Citizenship is just a legal and administrative qualification. I may be a quarter-blood, but half of my blood is Korean. I only got half from my father, after all.”
As I put the yakgwa in my mouth and chewed, the honey that had seeped between the stacked layers oozed out, sweetly coating my tongue. It wasn’t an overwhelming sweetness that made you frown, but a sweetness that made your eyelids relax.
“How is it? You would’ve regretted it if you’d left without trying it, right?”
He leaned his upper body toward me, asking with a serious expression, as if my opinion of the yakgwa was now more important than painting.
It was hard to find any Eastern impression in his light, grayish-blue eyes or his distinctly defined features. Only his black hair seemed to silently, yet stubbornly, assert the half-Korean blood he spoke of.
‘You would’ve regretted it, right?’ I nodded at his question.
He gave the deepest smile I had seen from him yet. So deep that the muscles of his jaw pulled taut vertically, carving a deep groove that looked like a dimple on the side of his cheek.
○
Rainwater, trickling down the umbrella borrowed from the restaurant, dripped at my feet, splashing onto my sneakers and the hem of my jeans.
It wasn’t a downpour, but it wasn’t a drizzle you could ignore without an umbrella, either. A foreign man, wearing the hood of his windbreaker, was walking this way, led by a golden retriever.
Hi. Hi. When the man, whose chin was covered in a golden beard, got close enough for me to make out his expression, the two of them exchanged brief greetings.
“That’s a beautiful dog.”
He said.
“This one makes a fuss to go out whenever it rains, so here I am, going through all this trouble.”
He laughed at the man’s reply.
Bye. Bye. As the man brushed past me, he smiled at me too, so I gave a faint, barely-there smile in return and stepped aside to let the man and his dog pass more easily.
His SUV, which had been in the outdoor parking lot, was approaching the restaurant entrance. Ms. Han’s car had left first; she’d had another work-related appointment and had asked him to give me a ride home before leaving about three minutes ago.
“Thank you for dinner today.”
I tilted my umbrella slightly to avoid the glare of the car’s headlights as it pulled up close to the curb, and bowed to him.
“I’m going to walk for a bit to clear my head… and then take the bus, so you don’t have to worry about what my teacher said. Well then…”
My view was obstructed by the umbrella, so I couldn’t quite see his expression. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the intention of deliberately not looking, either. I turned away from his black, lace-up shoes, which suited his more casual attire for a Saturday evening, and walked past him, heading up the slope the foreign man had just come down.
“I was thinking of having a drink to clear my head, too.”
I stopped and turned around at his voice, which mimicked the exact words I had just said. Umbrella in hand, he stood watching me with one hand in his pocket. All scents grow stronger in the rain. I think I heard somewhere that you should wear less perfume on a rainy day. Like a wave that approaches gently, wets only your toes, and then recedes, his scent lingered at the tip of my nose before disappearing without entering the depths of my sense of smell.
“Will you join me?”
The inertia of my life so far told me to refuse the offer, turn around, and flee home, but a new stimulus, sweetly paralyzing that inertia, wanted to inhale the fragrance and taste it. I don’t know where I ever had such an impulse, such greed. Even if I had, it should have all died by now. His eyes, their color usually so faint as to seem on the verge of disappearing, looked exceptionally blue.
○
Perhaps he had been holding back the urge to smoke for a long time, because he lit a cigarette as soon as we took our seats at the bar. He spoke while listlessly flipping through the pages of the tall, vertical menu given to each of us.
“It’s raining. How about something strong.”
Fiddling with the bag I had set down beside me out of awkwardness in the unfamiliar place, I nodded. In truth, the awkwardness of being in a place like this with him alone was greater than that of the place itself.
The bar, a ten-minute drive from the restaurant where we had dinner, was located on a slope leading up to Namsan. The building itself wasn’t tall, but being on the mountainside of Namsan, it had a good view. He seemed to be a regular, as an employee who looked to be in charge and introduced himself to me as the manager came out personally to greet us warmly.
The seats we were led to were almost like a semi-private room. One side of the partition was open for people to come and go, but from the sofa, the main hall was not visible, and the structure was such that the inside was not visible from the hall unless one deliberately tried to look.
The cozy room was furnished with an L-shaped sofa that was not very wide but had deep seats and plush backrests, and in front of the sofa was a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the night view. It was a suitable place for two or three people to have a drink and talk in private.
It wasn’t too far from the house where Morae and Hyung lived. The view beyond the window was also similar to the one from the rooftop of that house. Though there was about as much difference between that space and this one as there was between Morae’s old house and my grandfather’s.
Rain was falling on the night view of Seoul, which had once reminded me of squid-fishing boats. The thought that I was enjoying a luxury far beyond my means suddenly made me let out a small laugh. The only bars I had ever been to in that port town were shabby raw fish joints or grilled clam shacks. I hid my face by pretending to flip through the menu I barely understood, so he wouldn’t notice.
After calling the staff and placing our order, I felt his gaze stick to the side of my face, forcing me to keep flipping through the menu even though the order was already finished.
He and I were sitting at the corner where the L-shaped sofa bent, so strictly speaking we weren’t sitting side-by-side, but we were close enough that I had to be careful our legs didn’t touch. If we had been sitting next to each other, it would have been easier to avoid his gaze, but this position forced us to face each other when we talked.
A slightly husky voice followed a deep drag of his cigarette.
“Looks like you had fun yesterday.”
He seemed to be talking about Inwoo-hyung. I lifted my gaze from the cocktail list and looked at him. As I’d thought, it was a distance with no escape from each other’s eyes.
Even if he mentioned that he’d met me, Inwoo-hyung wasn’t the type to blab about the details of our conversation. I didn’t know what this was based on, but I had at least that much faith in Hyung. He might talk about other trivial things, but I didn’t think he would know that I had asked about Alphas and Omegas in such-and-such a way.
I hadn’t shown any particular reaction, nor had he said anything funny himself, but he suddenly stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and let out a smirk.
“Gay guys, I swear.”
He muttered, as if to himself.
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