"Imagine that person confessing to you, Seo Ihyeon."
pasted
Against the unexpected suggestion my eyes went to the lens on their own, and even as the anxiety pressed in that everything normally hidden would be laid bare beyond that glass, I couldn’t look away.
The lens kept sliding in to the very tip of my nose to catch focus and then gliding back out, in again and out again, and it felt less like his eyes than like his lips, substituted by the lens.
He told me to imagine a confession from someone I liked, but once I actually heard the words I seemed to know it was a situation that would never happen, and a thin, flat laugh slipped out.
Strange. Why would confirming a confession I could never receive pull self-mockery and resignation out of me in this moment? It was a person who didn’t even exist, a figure I’d made up.
[whirr]
I watched the lens close and open more slowly than before. For the first time it didn’t feel uncomfortable. On a breeze that came from behind him toward me, I caught a faint trace of his scent.
"Got the best shot. Let’s stop and have some beer."
He lifted the camera away, straightened his back, and, without a backward glance, turned off.
■ ■ ■
The garden was, as advertised, completely untended, but given the season it wasn’t as desolate as you’d think. In the various deep and pale tones of green that had tangled and grown up on their own without a human hand, there was a kind of life.
With the sun lower, the garden’s shade had spread wide. We overlapped several mats at angles in that shade—stripes, ethnic, checks, even gaudy florals. We spread out the delivery hamburgers, fries, and salad on their mismatched patterns and added the beer the director had gotten comped, and it felt like we’d come to a park for a picnic.
My sister and brother didn’t speak until they’d finished their own burgers. We’d rushed to finish while there was still natural light, even skipping lunch, so it made sense that they were starving. Unlike the two of them, who kept repeating the business of taking huge bites that bulged their cheeks and chasing them with beer, the director and I picked at a few fries and mostly drank.
As he’d warned, he’d probably overdrunk at last night’s after-party. He’d looked uncharacteristically in a good mood the whole event. Maybe the lingering alcohol made him lose his appetite. Contrary to what he’d said before—“He’ll be out cold with the liquor in him, so don’t disturb his sleep”—here he was, out with us.
I stole a glance at his tilted profile that wasn’t so different from usual for someone who’d supposedly drunk too much yesterday, then swallowed a couple mouthfuls of beer whose taste I was starting to properly understand.
An early-summer breeze that had come through the tall arborvitae that anchored the garden brushed my skin softly along with the paled light of late afternoon. The Chinese junipers left untrimmed to grow any which way to nearly two meters were helping to cast the garden’s shade.
They might not hire a gardener to do any separate landscaping, but it seemed they cleaned regularly. It wasn’t a dirty garden.
"What is this? Director, did you rake Ihyeon with your lens? This is... your photos are dripping with dirty intent. A little more and it’s a sexy pictorial."
I swallowed my beer the wrong way and coughed disgracefully at Yuni’s outcry as she clutched the camera and rifled through today’s results the moment she’d filled her stomach even a little. The director flicked a look my way, dipped a fry in ketchup, took a bite, and said as if nothing were out of the ordinary,
"You need at least that much obsession with your subject to get a photo. If you don’t like it, should I delete them?"
"Who said that?"
As if he’d really snatch the camera and start deleting, my sister turned her back completely and hugged the camera to her chest. Maybe Juhan was curious after all Yuni’s spicy vocabulary, because he hauled himself over to her on his butt.
"Not just raking—he practically caressed him with the lens. Wow... we’re too pure to shoot something like this. Only depraved people can shoot this stuff."
Juhan muttered, shaking his head. To keep from reacting to those scorching words, to keep from losing my composure, the only thing I could do was read the label on the beer bottle in my hand.
"You’ve got a pretty body. I never noticed because you always wear long pants. I think this is my first time seeing you without a striped T-shirt, too."
Leaving the two of them to their heated debate over which shots to use for the update and which to delete, he turned his attention to me. Even with words like dirty intent, sexy pictorial, and caress flying around, he didn’t look the least bit ruffled.
Of course not. That wasn’t his feelings about me; he was talking about his direction toward the subject, and as always my sister and brother were just putting it impishly—while the actual photos were probably nothing more than faintly languid.
While I couldn’t answer quickly and pushed the bottle’s label up with a thumb nail, Yuni reacted first.
"Pretty body? That’s sexual harassment, isn’t it?"
"Hm. I tried to say it as mechanically as possible so it wouldn’t sound sexual... Looks like the moment ‘pretty body’ came out of my mouth there was no way not to make it sound sexual."
At his brazen self-defense, Juhan held his bottle’s mouth out to him for a toast and laughed.
"Yeah, sure. Who could resist you."
Click. Yuni pressed the shutter the moment their beers clinked. It seemed like I was the only one who noticed the sound.
While the lens swung around to take his profile as he drank, the mouth opened wide to eat a burger, the bare feet on the mat, neither of them showed any awkward self-consciousness. He even smeared ketchup on his lips on purpose and mugged at the camera.
I felt no sense at all that they were excluding me, but the essential difference between them and me was too stark for me to feel like a natural part of this group.
A well-kept beautiful two-story house and, in contrast, its messy garden; two people with unmistakable individuality and presence; and a sophisticated, wealthy Golden Alpha with overwhelming looks having an early-summer picnic.
It was as unfamiliar an experience to me as becoming Alice in Wonderland and peeking in on the March Hare and the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Judging by looks alone, Yuni suited the March Hare and Juhan the Hatter. He happened to be wearing the hunting cap we’d shot today, too. As always dressed in black from head to toe, my sister would be a rabbit with black fur, not white.
Then what role should I give him?
It was hard to find a character inside Alice in Wonderland that fit him perfectly, but if I had to pick one, maybe the waistcoat-wearing rabbit.
I wondered if he might be the arbitrary queen, the cynical caterpillar, or the smiling cat who appears and disappears—but setting aside all the other details and what role they played in the actual tale, the waistcoat-wearing rabbit was to me practically the symbol of the “Wonderland,” because he was the guide who led Alice there and the one who first provoked Alice’s curiosity.
Of course I was the visitor Alice, excited with curiosity at the experiences in a strange land and confused by things I couldn’t understand.
When I imagined myself in a blue dress with a white apron like the image everyone has of Alice, my face puckered on its own as if I’d drunk some bizarre-tasting potion.
Under the late-afternoon sunlight of early summer, they all looked free and shining. Unlike me, who’d caught the luck to be here on the back of coincidence piled on coincidence and many people’s kindness, everything they had—even down to a single smile—was something they themselves had made.
They were “people of Wonderland.”
When he struck an exaggeratedly provocative pose at the camera, my sister and brother’s laughter sharpened.
He’d looked in a good mood during the event yesterday, and today he really did seem happy. Maybe it was because all of Shushu’s works had sold at the VIP opening that doubled as a press meeting. One third of the whole had been bought by him—no, strictly speaking, by Phantom—but that was an investment to sell them at the Hong Kong art fair in July. They weren’t a headache the gallery would be stuck with, crying and swallowing mustard, if they didn’t sell.
While I hesitated, flustered by the camera suddenly turning on me, my sister came up by my side and, changing the camera angle this way and that, played at being a reporter on a scoop scene. With a “How do you feel about becoming the muse of Phantom’s Lau Weikun?” a flash popped right in front of my eyes.
"There are a lot of rumors you two aren’t just a simple photographer-and-model relationship—is it true? Looking at the photos Lau Weikun has shot, it doesn’t feel entirely baseless, you know? Seo Ihyeon, could we get a word from you!"
Smiling with her eyes full of mischief, my sister took the beer bottle I’d been fiddling with and aimed it at my mouth like a mic. Over her shoulder his gaze was also turned this way.
"Mm... no comment."
"Are you aware that ‘no comment’ is taken as no different from an admission?"
"In that case... no comment."
"......"
The mischief left my sister’s face, and in contrast he burst out laughing. Juhan whistled and drummed the mat.
I know I’m not a humorous person, but in a moment like this I wanted to meet the mood at least a little. My sister broke her surprised look into a sly grin, gave my cheek a gentle little shake, and said,
"Sometimes you’re adorable."
Then she went back to her spot, popped a fresh beer, and downed it coolly. Picking up fries, she said,
"Director, anyone else I don’t care, but Ihyeon is off-limits. Don’t even dream."
"Hm... what dream?"
"Dirty dreams unfolding in the director’s adult land."
"......"
Before he could react, Juhan, who’d taken over the camera my sister set down and was pressing the shutter here and there, stepped in.
"You don’t have to worry about that. If you stripped Ihyeon down you’d get a long, lean frame with light, fine muscle, a handsome face, and skin like it’s glazed with honey—but! Thank God he’s not the director’s style."
"Isn’t that sexual harassment? Aren’t you going to say anything? That’s way higher-level than what I said."
He easily turned the situation into a joke, appealing his own grievance to Yuni, but any yes-or-no answer to Juhan’s claim that I wasn’t his type was unnecessary.
I still remembered what he’d answered when Choi Inwoo, whom we’d run into getting out of his car in front of Phantom, pointed at me and asked if I was a new lover.
My beer suddenly tasted more bitter—it turned out it was the last mouthful. As I reached for a fresh bottle in the ice box, he, closer to it, took one out and passed it to me.
"Come to think of it, I once swung by here on a day off because I needed to rush a pickup, and I saw one of the director’s men. Surprisingly a rugged type, ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ huh?"
"What? Seriously? Director, is that true?"
At my brother’s voice, raised nearly to a shout, he scrunched his face and plugged his ears.
"What are you going to do if it’s true, and what are you going to do if it’s false? Is there some reason a rugged type can’t be my taste?"
"Wow... when someone like the artist Shushu is what you see every day, how does rugged become your taste? If you look only at beautiful things do you start wanting to live rough or something?"
"I never said rugged is my taste, did I? And even if it were, it’s not something you need to have an opinion on. And not everyone who’s been in my place is my partner. Besides, Gwon Juhan. You’re not exactly in a position to mouth off about other people’s tastes, are you?"
