8
Teachers
After a tasteless church dinner without any alcohol, Shin arrived home exhausted from the boring conversation punctuated by self-righteous prayers. He shut the front door and rested his head against it in relief.
Danbi rushed to him, fresh and clean, wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before, a white strapless sundress. He breathed in her new scent—orange blossoms and mint—and admired her ivory shoulders. He held her tightly, not wanting to talk.
“Oppa,” she said, her voice throaty and low. “We were in the same building all day and I barely saw you. Did you miss me?” She touched his face, then withdrew her cool hand at the feel of his day’s growth of beard.
The housekeeper’s car was gone for the night. Their intense lovemaking schedule varied, but without fail, they had rough sex on Sunday evenings. He imagined she had some sort of surprise for him.
He smiled and tousled her hair and headed to the shower.
Shin did his best to anticipate Danbi and to please her because he didn’t know how to control her.
He had never been afraid of Mary—a beautiful and well-educated woman.
She had loved him and given him three sons, and to this day, he felt guilty for having ruined her life.
His sole consolation was knowing that Mary was better off without him. They were still married.
There were times when Shin thought of getting on a plane and flying across the country to remain in Englewood, pretending Danbi and their daughter Anna were hazy figures in a dream, but he could not. Already he had harmed his original family, and he thought he should be decent to the new one.
In his military service, Shin had never been the fearful sort. He had not been afraid of his superiors, and they’d admired his cool competence. Shin was astute about men and what they wanted; however, Danbi was not a man, and she was not like most women.
She was unpredictable and far too canny for her own good.
If she’d been born a man, Shin believed that Danbi would have been a self-made tycoon or a national leader.
He’d never witnessed such determination and ambition.
Shin would not cross her, and the wisest thing Mary had done was recognize the terms of their engagement.
Mary was too smart to tangle with the likes of a crazy woman, so she kept her distance, yet held her ground.
Danbi was a petite woman: 160 centimeters and forty-nine kilograms. If she weren’t so physically striking with exquisite proportions, she might have been overlooked because of her slight stature.
Built more like an adolescent girl’s with high, full breasts and narrow hips, her tiny girlish body appealed to men who wanted to feel powerful.
In her first year in college, male students dared each other to physically pick her up like a parcel.
Every man she’d ever slept with had enjoyed being able to carry her in his arms to a bed, desk, counter, dresser; piggyback; or by straddling her against a wall, so Danbi had forced herself to weigh less so they could feel stronger.
Even after having a child, she had starved herself to keep her power.
In the beginning of their affair, Shin had wanted to protect her; however, over the years, she had protected him through her sheer ability to survive.
Shin had come to understand that he was merely the figurehead and totem of power.
The outside world saw him as the head of the family and their business; however, they were always executing her plans.
After his shower, Shin put on a clean navy polo shirt and khakis and went to the kitchen, where Danbi opened a bottle of beer and poured it into a tall glass.
“Your friend is now on the Nominating Committee.”
He took a long swallow of his beer and raised a questioning eyebrow.
“John Koh. Elder Sobin, George Hong’s wife, insisted that he was such an admirable person. You’ll never believe this, but she wanted him in particular because he works as a manager of a nail salon. Apparently we have too many important people, so we need blue-collar workers.”
Shin sighed. He knew John was a decent man who loathed gossip, and although there had been numerous opportunities for John to tell others at church about him and Danbi, John and his late wife had not.
He trusted John, and especially after Helen’s death, he wished Danbi would leave him be.
She was paranoid about John, and no matter what Shin said, Danbi wouldn’t let it go.
“Why do you care?” Shin said. “I told you. He’s not going to hurt us.”
“People like him. Now that he’s a widower, women are falling over themselves. Thank God he’s poor—they’d lose their minds if he had money.”
“You don’t have a very high opinion of women.”
“Women don’t have a high opinion of me.”
This was something Shin had witnessed countless times. Danbi had to work much harder to get women to trust her. Able to sense the danger she posed in a way that men could not, women were wary of her. She was envious of anyone who could be accepted without having to try.
“More?” she asked, noticing his empty glass. Danbi liked it when he was a little drunk at night. Alcohol made him talkative.
“I shouldn’t. It’s affecting my sleep.”
Shin placed the glass in the sink.
“You sure?”
Standing in front of the refrigerator, he considered a second beer.
He felt good enough and didn’t want to feel sleepier.
He got down on the floor and did twenty push-ups, a thing he did often.
Over the course of a day, he did a hundred push-ups in five sets of twenty.
As he was about to do his set of squats, Danbi moved toward him and put her dress over his head, exposing her pale navel and bare hips. She had not worn anything underneath.
He uncovered his head and, lifting her body, he seated her on the counter. She kept talking as he pulled her dress down to her waist, exposing her.
“He can tell someone about us. It was such a long time ago. I was younger and afraid of losing you. I apologized to them. You saw me. But he and his wife refused to greet me. Once I went to the store where she worked, and she wouldn’t even look at me.
She was a saleswoman and wouldn’t try to serve me. Unbelievable.”
She leaned back on the counter and pulled his head toward her left breast.
“He can ruin our company.”
Shin stopped what he was doing and stroked her hair with his hands as if she were a child. Sometimes this would calm her.
“John Koh doesn’t like to talk about people. He doesn’t like to talk, period.”
“You are my naive oppa. Here, come to me.” She sat up on the counter and reached for him. Her nude-polished fingernail traced a straight line from the center of his clavicle down to his belt buckle. Her manicured hand covered his erection, and she held him with both hands. Shin closed his eyes.
He inhaled the scent of her, barely moving, and focused on her light breathing.
She kissed his closed eyelids.
“Today I was very bad,” she said, wide-eyed and unblinking in her gaze.
“You fought against John getting nominated?”
“Yes.”
“You were afraid,” he said, and he pulled her to him.
“I was bad.”
“Every day you are bad,” he said, smiling. “Every day, every day.”
Shin opened his eyes and smiled at her extraordinary open face, upturned pink lips, black pools for eyes, framed by her dark shining hair.
Amused by this game they played, Shin pushed up her skirt over her bone-white thighs, scrunching up the muslin dress on her waist like a thick gauze Band-Aid, covering nothing really. Without any tenderness, he turned his woman around and leaned her over the kitchen counter.
As they’d agreed, on Saturday morning, Elder George waited for her at a parking lot near Hoag Hospital. When he spotted her silver Porsche, he waved at her and pointed to his phone, so she checked hers.
Follow my car, he had texted.
Where are we going?
Near Anaheim.
I have to be back in four hours, she typed, and followed him.
He brought his gym bag to the four-star hotel near Disneyland. The reserved room was expensive, but Danbi said nothing and followed him. She wanted to order room service, and a motel wouldn’t have that.
“I could not stop thinking about you,” George said, once inside the room. He was embracing her.
“Good morning, Elder Hong,” she whispered, taking care not to leave any makeup on his jacket.
“I could leave my marriage,” he said.
Danbi pulled back and covered her mouth, peals of laughter escaping her apricot-colored lips. She removed her yellow cardigan, exposing her wide-strapped butter-yellow sundress. Looking up at him, she smiled like an ingenue and pouted. She took his left hand and put it on her belly.
“I haven’t had breakfast yet. Can we get eggs and bacon?” She dropped the cardigan on the desk and looked around for a menu.
“I’m serious,” he said. “My wife and I haven’t had sex in years. Everyone thinks that Sobin and I are an ideal couple, but she never wants me to see her naked or touch her.”
“That’s a shame. No more talk like this, or be assured that I can never ever see you again, Elder Hong.
” Danbi opened the curtains wide but left the sheer panels closed.
She walked around the room and turned on every lamp and stripped off her clothes slowly, making sure that his eyes never left her hands as they moved across zippers, buckles, and straps.
“Did you want to keep the lights on? I don’t mind.
” She placed her hands on her breasts and moved them toward her abdomen.
Bent over the bed, she removed the coverlet and lay across the white sheets, burying her face in the pillow, so he could see her from behind.
She raised her bottom a little to tease him.
“Your husband is the luckiest man.”
“He is. Let’s make rules. Don’t talk about him, and we will not talk about her.”
“So you don’t want to leave him?”
She shot him a warning glance.
“Never.”
“Then why? Why are we here?”
“I wanted to own you,” she said, laughing again invitingly.
George looked hurt and surprised, and she was charmed.