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.
“Can I come in?” he asks again when he pulls up in front of the art studios on the university campus.
“Absolutely not,” I say, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before getting out of the car. “I don’t know why you keep asking.”
Scowling, he drives away.
* * *
—
IN THE STUDIO, I feel the great wash of relief I always feel when I walk in through the door. Tying my hair back, I head into the bathroom to change into my work clothes and hang Kyuri’s dress carefully on the door.
The terrible drumming in my heart subsides as I pick up my small chisels and sit down at my workstation. The scene that I have been trying to bring to form—the picture that’s so clear in my head—is that of a night sea with a girl on a boat. Her long hair covering her face, she’s leaning forward over the water, wearing a sheer nightgown and a blood-red ruby ring on her left ring finger. She is riveted by something in the water.