15
Fruit
Most evenings, Sonya sat in the den with the Chairman as he read his business periodicals and books.
In the morning, he read three newspapers, and at night, he caught up on real estate journals and business books in translation.
He had not attended college, and from reading and public lectures, he had taught himself finance, accounting, capital markets investing, and business theories.
The Chairman kept tidy notebooks, summarizing the key points of everything he studied.
Sonya was crocheting a red cardigan for Helen’s Christmas present. The torso complete, she was working on the arms. By November, she had already finished her sons’ matching blue sweaters. Now and then, the Chairman would look up from his papers, remove his reading glasses, and admire her handiwork.
After the household staff went home, and if her husband, Yong-gil, had not returned for the night, they would go to his room.
A virgin before marriage, Sonya had only been with Yong-gil.
After the birth of their second son, her husband had been less and less interested in going to her bed.
They’d always slept in separate rooms, because he came home late frequently and she was a light sleeper.
A dressing room and bath connected Sonya’s bedroom with her husband’s.
The Chairman’s bedroom was on the opposite side of Sonya’s, so when she slept in his, she’d lock the door to the dressing room and the main door to her bedroom; however, her husband never tried to open her doors.
Except for when the boys were home, visiting from their military service, the Chairman asked her to sleep in his room.
In his bed, she called him by his name, Hong-gyun. Elsewhere, she addressed him as the Chairman, no differently from when he had hired her out of college.
Hong-gyun was sixty-five years old, and she was fifty-four.
Like her, he had not had many lovers, and like her, after his wife got sick, he had been abstinent.
Neither had made love for almost two decades.
There had been numerous opportunities for him to find women to bed; however, the idea of being with someone he neither admired nor loved repulsed him.
If he could, he would have made Sonya his wife.
He liked watching her undress, and asked her to remove her clothes slowly the way she had done the first time she came to his room in her nightgown and robe. They had been lovers for a little over four months, and it was as if time had passed backward. The years seemed to fall away.
From the beginning, she had fought her unyielding infatuation with her married employer, not wanting to feel the guilt and shame.
When the Chairman asked her to marry his nephew, it had felt like a gift.
She had initially imagined falling deeply in love with Yong-gil, but he was never enamored with her; at best, he was grateful for their two sons and respected how she did not make a fuss about his affairs.
The marriage was a kind of professional relationship.
Long ago, she’d accepted that she would never be loved as a woman, and had taken consolation in the love and admiration of her sons, her friends, and the Chairman.
She knew this kind of love and esteem were far better than what most people could expect.
When Sonya prayed to God, she prayed for the well-being of her family, her friends, and even her enemies, but it had never occurred to her to petition for love.
The Chairman excited her, and she loved being with him. Although she had always been fastidious about her appearance, she took even greater care with her bathing and dress to please him. The Chairman was besotted with her.
“You make me feel like I’m thirty,” he said.
They were in bed, about to go to sleep. Sonya thought she should return to her room, but again, he didn’t want her to go.
“I’ll get up early and wake you. Before the housekeeper gets here—” he promised, kissing her neck and shoulders.
They’d made love several hours earlier and had been listening to music together in bed, but as she was about to close her eyes, his hands reached for her breasts and hips, and Sonya yielded to the growing pressure of his cock.
Sonya could not believe this part of her life. The Chairman loved her, and she him, and this interval felt like a burst of pure joy after decades of duty.
Still, she knew it was wrong. Despite the guilt, she justified this because she had raised her siblings, taken care of her husband and sons, and nursed the Chairman’s wife. This unexpected love had made her realize how little she knew herself, and how unhappy she’d been.
They did not speak directly about her marriage.
“Would you make sure that he never enters your room?” the Chairman asked her more than once. “Can you keep that closet door locked in the evening always? I cannot bear the idea of him going to your—”
“We haven’t been together since Jiman was two or three—” Sonya could hardly recall. Perhaps it was when her younger son was in preschool. Like an incubus, late at night, when she was asleep, Yong-gil had come to her room to make love to her, then vanished, never to return.
For years, she’d wondered how she’d failed to keep her husband’s sexual attention. After menopause, she reasoned that he wanted the flesh of much younger women, and there was little she could do.
Her friends had surgery, difficult procedures, and regular costly treatments, and some looked unbelievably young, fresh, and beautiful; Sonya had resisted this. She swam, did yoga and Pilates, and stayed out of the sun.
She had the ordinary vanity of an intelligent woman who had been beautiful from birth.
For now, she felt lovely enough for a woman in her fifties.
She had resolved long ago that she could never compete for her husband’s sexual attention with knowledgeable young women from hostess bars, and there had been both resignation and dignity.
Awakened by a midlife love affair, Sonya looked in the mirror more often, and she did not dislike what she saw.
Within fourteen weeks, the Chairman and Sonya had tried various positions and oral sex, which was new for her.
They had bathed together, and once they met at a hotel suite to try Viagra, a joke present from a former high school classmate of the Chairman’s that he had never thought to actually use.
The experiment had been painful for her and uncomfortable for him.
For days, they laughed at the memory of this seemingly endless erection.
After almost never having any sex, they had it so frequently that Sonya had to get antibiotics for a tract infection and learn about lubrication.
Like teenagers, they made love more than once a day, and on occasion, they would meet in the middle of the day at beautiful hotel rooms in Seoul. They became inseparable.
Often the Chairman bought her presents—a diamond pendant, a long South Sea pearl necklace, more exquisite clothing, and jewel-colored silk lingerie.
One Sunday he made a reservation at a hotel not far from their apartment and gave her a key. After church, they separated publicly, then met an hour later in the room.
He was already there waiting when she arrived.
“I don’t know if the hotel manager noticed me,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, smoothing the hair away from her brow. He felt the need to touch her, and this wasn’t possible outside of a hotel room or his bedroom. They never went to her room. “I almost don’t care anymore about getting caught.”
Neither knew what would happen if they grew more careless. They were more worried about her sons than Yong-gil.
During church service, as usual, Sonya had sat between her husband and the Chairman, and even the scent of the Chairman’s vetiver and woodsy aftershave reminded her of their intense lovemaking.
She was eager to meet him at the hotel room after church, and she felt ashamed of her weakness.
However, after services, without blinking, she lied to Yong-gil, saying that she couldn’t have lunch with him because she was meeting a friend from college.
The Chairman had left them already, giving some excuse himself.
For the first time in years, Sonya wasn’t angry at her husband.
If anything, she found him almost pleasant.
He was a hardworking executive who took good care of the Chairman’s company.
She enjoyed their polite interactions. They never fought.
If they discussed anything, it was the company or their sons.
In the room, she immediately stripped off her clothes, and he led her to the bed, where he took her from behind. With both hands, he held on to her breasts, then, when she was about to climax, he lay down, and she climbed on top of him.
“I need you,” he said, and she murmured the same.
They lay in each other’s arms, and when room service arrived, she hid in the bathroom so he could let the server in.
Naked and seated on the ledge of the cold marble bath, she saw herself in the mirrored wall. Her face was glowing, and her pink nipples were flushed and raw.
He knocked on the door to let her know that it was safe for her to come out.
“Would it be possible for me to divorce him?” she asked, standing before him, her forearms covering her small, lovely breasts. “Is there a way for us to be together as husband and wife?”
How could this be wrong when she was so in love with a man she’d known even before her husband? she wondered.
In his white terry cloth hotel robe, the Chairman was seated on the sofa by the window. He’d found her appealing the first time she entered his office, and he had told himself to be appropriate and distant. It was she who had reached for him first, coming to his room, and now she was proposing.
“Aren’t you cold?”
She shook her head no. “Do you want me to put a robe on?”
“No.”
Sonya went to bed and drew the covers over her shoulders and waited for him to come to her.