JAE-MOON OPENED the door to me. “I am so glad to see you, Cile,” she said, taking my hands in both of hers the way she had in church. “Come in. They will be out soon; they are cleaning their rooms.”

The smell of sesame oil lingered in the air and something sweet and spicy. The parsonage had crossed the line from the potato to the rice belt. I was ravenous. I’d been such a wreck all morning, I’d had nothing but coffee, wondering what was going on at Lila Beth’s or Mary Virginia’s, what they were doing for (or to) Drew. I’d forgotten to eat, a sure sign of head-lapse.

My former home was unrecognizable. There was a long pink cloth on the dining table, pink and gray and black wall tapestries where my cows had hung, a sectional gray tweed sofa that made an angle with its back to the door, creating a cozy corner which faced a commercial-sized screen on which Korean police—recognizable by their Darth Vadar helmets—were beating rioters.

Jae-Moon seated herself and leaned forward, the pictures flashing, the sound off. She gestured that I should sit also. “It is dreadful,” she said.

I made a noise in my throat, not wanting to get into trouble here.

“Everyone thinks I am connected to this.” She gestured. She was in black trousers the color of her hair and a pale pink shirt. “They ask me how rough are the riot troopers? What are the unions striking for? What is the trouble at Hyundai? What is Roh Tae Woo’s government going to do? They think because I am from there that I have never left there. Even in the labs they ask me questions.” She turned her eyes from the violence. “Shall I turn it off?”

“That’s okay.”

She looked at me with the same all-over glow she’d had hearing in public that Eben was a free man; joy was too small and timid a word for her. “This will be better for everyone, don’t you agree?”

“I do,” I said, hoping she was talking about the passing of Eben from my life to hers and not the riots in Seoul.

“I think Eben will be happier with a woman who was raised in his church and believes in it. Don’t you agree?”

I nodded. She said his name e-BEN and not EB-en as I did. It made me think—one of those digressions the mind makes in order not to focus on what’s at hand—of a schooldays’ poem called “Abou ben Adhem.” Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)/Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace. That was all I remembered, except the end. The angel revealing that, as God-lovers went, Abou ben Adhem’s name led all the rest. Perhaps that’s what Eben was looking for, a little rest and peace.

He might have grown tired of the burden of questioning that went with living with a woman who knew that heretic meant to choose, and heathen, someone who lived on the heath, on uncultivated cow pastures. As Theo had said, I wasn’t the easiest student.

Perhaps, too, Jae-Moon had clinging to her some aura of his grandfather and father, those early upright high-collared Taits who’d gone forth across the sea. Something that Eben, old son of old men, had never possessed, one of their missionary-baptized and missionary-raised women?

“You’ll be good for him,” I told her. “You will make him happy.”

I hoped that was the right thing to say; maybe making someone happy was not the issue or even the goal. Maybe I’d been superficial, spoken in the shallow worldly way of the infidel. What was the right response?

“Ruth tells me,” she said, taking her eyes from the screen, “that when our S.S.C. is completed, in all likelihood I will be working on land that now belongs to your friend Mr. Williams.”

“Working under—”

“We do not work in the tunnel; that is what the magnets will do. Our homes and our laboratories will be aboveground. We will not be a colony of moles. Is that what you think?”

“No, I was just—”

“Making a joke? I am slow to learn.” She gazed at my face again, with the spilling-over look. “I am making the effort to find a common ground for us. Do you understand?”

I made my own effort. “The girls are really excited about having a computer here.”

“May I say I do not care for ‘the girls’? It is a sexist way of referring to them, a designation that essentially refers only to their genitals.”

Boy, this was something. This was how she’d got Eben: taking him to task, creating in him that warm-all-over glow of guilt that feels like religion. On me, it had a sort of vaccination effect. I felt a sharp edge of defensiveness nudge my solar plexus. That knowing the Scriptures and helping to wrestle with the mystery of free will didn’t count, that being a sounding board for the texts of his sermons didn’t matter, that I was still an unbeliever, I could live with. But telling me what to call my daughters?

“What do you call them?” I asked.

“By their names, Ruth and Martha.”

“How about ‘the children’?”

“Do you call us ‘the adults’? That is an age-based designation. That is what names are for, to identify.”

I thought of Martha dancing with Drew, her daddy-in-waiting. How could it be wrong to refer to what I had seen as girl?

“All right, Jae-Moon,” I said. “I’ll go with that here; this is your place now.” Deciding I’d probably stuck my foot in my mouth on that one, too. Was there something sexist about “your place”? As if the female tended the territory, especially considering that she hadn’t officially moved in. If it were a man, what would I have said? “You’re the boss, here.’ Ah ha, I had been sexist. “You’re the boss, here,” I told her.

“We do not think in those hierarchical class terms, Eben and I.” She returned her gaze to the screen.

Well, call me a tree stump. I borrowed again from the Bledsoes, helpful etymologists. “Hmmm,” I said, looking toward the hallway of what used to be called the parsonage. A term meaning the house of a parson, therefore ownership. Therefore someone who led a pastorate, therefore a leader. All sorts of evil lurking here. I still liked this house. Cleaning their rooms, my daughters? God in Heaven, they could have refinished them by now.

I stood. “Shall I see if Ruth and Martha are ready?”

“Oh, they are ready,” she said, rising also. “I asked them to wait so that we might have a talk together.”

The Korean riot controllers, the Darth Vadars, were clubbing someone on the head, while in the background another contingent was dragging a body out of the frame. I could sympathize.

Jae-Moon walked toward the hall and lightly, ever so lightly, clapped her hands, as if calling Great Danes to chow. Ruth stuck her head out of the private room, now the high-tech center I supposed. She looked interrupted, but cordial. “Okay.”

Martha, braiding her hair, peeked around the door frame. “In a minute, Momma.”

On impulse, I put a question to Dr. Song. My tongue was loose and careless because I was full of anger here and elsewhere, and some of it was leaking out. “What was Eben’s sermon today?”

Jae-Moon paused, pressed her palms quickly to the sides of her trousers. “A Paradox—” she faltered.

“ ‘The Paradox of the Judged,’ ” I supplied for her. It was the third Sunday after Easter. He had explored the question of how can you be judged if you are not free to have made a different choice? Suggested that judgment by definition must imply freedom. “John twelve,” I added.

“I would have to check the bulletin,” she said, a spot of color rising on her high cheekbones.

Score one small point for the heathen.