How Could I Show My Face?
Shameful, really. He had no face to show.
“Director, have you heard anything about Jae-hee lately?”
“Jae-hee? Didn't a drama of his air a while back?”
Lee Young-chang had watched Everything About First Love, which aired just before the Cannes Film Festival. It was a short run, but Yoon Jae-hee had been flawless — exactly as befitting the genius he'd discovered.
Word had it that even during filming, the director and the writer had doted on the boy.
How could a child that young devour his adult co-star Park Shin-woo's mannerisms and speech patterns like that, delivering a perfect child performance? He'd heard himself promising to cast the boy in his very next film.
“Not that. There's some ugly talk going around these days.”
“······Such as?”
“I think the award hit the kid hard. They say he's not what he used to be······.”
Truthfully, Lee Young-chang had expected as much. The youngest-ever, the first-ever, a genius — the kind of thing that made people lose their minds. With that much attention came an equally deep shadow.
“It'd still be presumptuous of me to step in, wouldn't it?”
He thought that a man who wasn't even the boy's parent overstepping would only invite accusations of meddling. Worse, he worried that one strange rumor would only breed another.
And besides, Lee Young-chang was busy. Greedy to make something better than The Child, he was pouring himself into his next film.
Once this project wrapped — once he had the time, then······ then he would keep the boy at his side, shield him from hurt. If Yoon Jae-hee wanted it, he would become a patron the boy could lean on.
“What's Yoon Jae-hee been up to these days?”
But Yoon Jae-hee, they said, had vanished.
Unable to trust mere rumor, Lee Young-chang set out to find him himself.
“Now, where was it... the business card I got back then······.”
After asking his way around, he tracked down Yoon Jae-hee's home and pounded on the door — which stayed unmoved no matter how many times he pressed the bell.
“Are you in there? Mr. Yoon Su-heon!”
“It's Lee Young-chang! Just a word, please!”
And then the door flew open. The man who would proudly introduce his son with a confident smile was nowhere to be found.
There was only a man unkempt with an unshaven beard, reeking of alcohol hard enough to make one's brow furrow.
“······Come in.”
“My, this is······.”
Taking in the wreck of a house with empty bottles rolling across the floor, and the divorce papers left abandoned on the table, Lee Young-chang spoke carefully.
“Where, uh... where is Jae-hee?”
“He's gone.”
“I'm sorry?”
Surely nothing had happened to the boy? Lee Young-chang waited for the man to speak first. When he did, tears came dripping down Yoon Su-heon's face.
“Director, I ruined everything. I... I was too greedy.”
He couldn't simply walk past a man so broken. Yoon Jae-hee had already been hurt and left — but if he ever came back someday, wouldn't there need to be a nest intact for him to return to?
Of course, the boy had grown far too much by now to come looking for any nest. Lee Young-chang stole a glance at Yoon Jay, eating his meal with impeccable manners across the table.
He's grown up fine.
He'd seen him several times now, yet it struck him anew every time. His eyes had deepened in ways he couldn't begin to guess at.
“You must have a lot of questions for me.”
“I do. I've been waiting for you to tell me.”
Yoon Jay inclined his upper body slightly toward Lee Young-chang, who was leaning in with obvious interest.
According to Park Hyun-ah, he had done his utmost for his birth father. Thanks to that, he'd met Park Hyun-ah at all, and been able to build a new family.
Probably because of me, though.
There must have been plenty of questions even at the funeral, yet the man had waited for him to speak first. Having come this far, it seemed time to open up.
“After you disappeared like that, I heard the rumors too late. I blamed myself — wondered if it wasn't somehow my fault.”
“You have no need for guilt, Director. I was glad to act in The Child.”
“I see. How have you lived, all this time?”
“The rumors are probably more than half true.”
Yoon Jay recounted what had happened in those days, calmly and in compressed form.
His speech, stiff at first, had softened a little. Had he opened his heart? Lee Young-chang let out a sorrowful murmur at how much worse the boy's circumstances had been than he'd imagined.
“The truth is, when I told you at the funeral that I had no thoughts of acting — that was because of my fear of the camera.”
“Then you're better now?”
“Thanks to my father.”
The video of his birth father admitting his own fault had played its part, but what had made him who he was now was the influence of his present father, who had worked so hard to help him overcome his phobia.
Saying this, he also briefly laid bare the story of his family in America.
“They sound like wonderful people. I'd like to meet them someday.”
“If the chance comes, I'll introduce you. What did you think of my acting?”
“It was good. Twenty-odd years of absence, and I couldn't feel a single trace of it.”
Good, was it······. Not an answer Yoon Jay could be satisfied with.
“That's hardly the highest praise you're capable of, Director.”
“That's······ not to say your acting was lacking.”
“I know what you're saying.”
In The Garden of Evil, he had acted with someone as a reference. In Along Along, he had draped Lord Muhwi over himself, more or less — but looking back, neither had satisfied him.
“I feel the same way.”
Back in The Child, there had been something more······. A blazing, electric sensation of being not Yoon Jae-hee, nor even Yoon Jae-hee playing Park Dong-hwa, but Park Dong-hwa himself.
And he'd only managed to feel that in the latter half of filming. He wanted to bring that sensation back to life.
No doubt that was exactly what Director Lee Young-chang meant as well.
“So then, your acting going forward······.”
“I intend to continue. I'm curious how far Yoon Jay — not Yoon Jae-hee — can go.”
“Then I suppose I must keep your secret.”
“I've decided I want to be famous. Otherwise, I feel like those lost years will never be repaid to me.”
He had run away because he couldn't endure it — but what if he had held on? Some people, like recently, would no doubt slam and drag him down without reason. But if just as many people loved him for it, he thought he could bear it.
It had been a wandering life — but the first place he'd returned to had turned out to be his final destination.
“That's why······ someday, I want to walk the red carpet with you, Director.”
Back in his Yoon Jae-hee days he'd been too young, and back then he'd only wanted to be home with his family. But if he ever got the chance again······.
At the steadiness of Yoon Jay's gaze, Lee Young-chang felt his heart beat with a pleasant thrill. He had been languishing in burnout for a while, yet suddenly his passion seemed to rekindle.
“In that case, then I······.”
I must make a work for you and you alone.
After The Child, once he'd recovered his touch, Lee Young-chang had walked the floors of any number of international award ceremonies. Missing out on the trophies was one thing, but returning to those places was hardly novel anymore.
But if it was with the young man before him — something he hadn't managed back then, but once more, this time together. Lee Young-chang curled the corners of his mouth upward.
“I'd like that very much myself.”
Astra's marketing team had defended him with everything they had, but public opinion, once it caught the scent, would not let go.
And it had been the actor himself who quelled the controversy. Even the investment firm that had suddenly pumped a fortune into Along Along······. Lee Seo-won furrowed his brow.
I really have no face to show Jay.
Lee Seo-won irritably turned off his phone screen and pocketed it.
The car Yoon Jay had spotted was indeed his. The two of them were in a place quite close by, and Lee Seo-won, entering a certain bar, stepped into the private room. The people inside were startled to see him — but welcomed him warmly all the same.
“Well, if it isn't CEO Lee!”
“The man who never shows his face in a place like this finally graces us!”
“Aigoo, my deepest regards, gentlemen.”
Lee Seo-won smiled with easy charm as the other industry men greeted him.
“Raising a rookie these days, I hear? It's been noisy out there lately.”
“Oh please, what did I even do. The man simply worked hard to get where he is, that's all.”
And as he said it, he made sure to glare at a certain someone. The recipient of that stare — Oh Seung-han, CEO of an entertainment agency — deftly averted his eyes.
“Word is you sold off a company and made a tidy sum?”
“Well. Yes, something like that.”
“Y'know, I've got a kid I'm pushing these days too······. CEO Lee, could you put in a good word? What productions are you looking at lately?”
A request, technically — but the posture of the one making it was wretched. The man wouldn't drop his pride, throwing his weight around as the industry's great senior.
Lee Seo-won oozed past the remark with a slippery smile. That man's flagship actor would be joining his company soon enough anyway.
“Aw, come on. Just help me out a little.”
“So, CEO Lee. What genre's caught your eye these days?”
They all ran agencies playing the same game, yet the relationships among them were strange. Lee Seo-won's career in entertainment was shorter than theirs — but he wielded influence to match any of them.
“Shall I pour you a round?”
“You're not drinking, CEO Lee? I'll step out for a moment.”
“Of course. Go right ahead.”
Lee Seo-won waved them along with his hand, hurrying them out the door. Then he grabbed hold of someone who was leaving with them.
“A moment, CEO Oh.”
Oh Seung-han tensed slightly at the sudden change in Lee Seo-won's expression. The man's eyes alone seemed capable of killing.
“Don't touch my kid.”
“Excuse me?”
“You thought I wouldn't find out?”
“Heh. CEO Lee. Bit informal, aren't we?”
What — did dropping his honorifics offend him that much? Lee Seo-won twisted his mouth into a sneer and laughed openly.
“CEO Oh, have you ever stopped to wonder how a man like me — no director background, no investor background — climbed to this position so suddenly, in so little time?”
“······.”
Oh Seung-han swallowed hard.
Lee Seo-won was a man whose origins invited questions. A production company that appeared out of nowhere, where its investment capital came from, bottomless financial resources — and the uncanny knack for selecting, as if he already knew the future, only the projects destined to be hits······.
“You're not curious how I knew about the dirty tricks you pulled, CEO Oh?”
And how had he known that, too? Yes — Oh Seung-han had tried to slip his own agency's actor into the role of Lord Muhwi, the part Yoon Jay had taken.
But there was no shortage of companies gunning for the role, and poisoning the well — running reverse virals so that rival agencies' actors or the other side would get dragged through the mud — was hardly difficult. So he had filtered through multiple firms and worked carefully, one by one.
“And you're not curious what I happen to know about you, CEO Oh — or about your company?”
“Th-that's······.”
He'd been so certain it would never come to light. How on earth had he traced it back?
And if he could find it out this easily, then what he'd dug up about me, about my company······. Oh Seung-han broke out in a cold sweat.
“If you keep this up, we'll have a problem, won't we? Let's play fair, you and I.”
“Ah-hm, ahem.”
“We settle this with the work and the acting. Deal?”
I'm not worried. Lee Seo-won smiled, cold and vicious.
“So, Jay. What would you like to do next?”
“I'd like to experience a variety of things. That special appearance you mentioned before sounds fine too.”
“Ah······ well, you won't need that anymore.”
The special appearance had been meant to put his face out there — something today's Yoon Jay had no need for. In television, ratings are everything, and he had proven himself with the highest numbers in recent memory and the acting to match.
“But it's still acting.”
“Hmm. Okay, fair. Then what else?”
“I'd like to do another drama.”
He could stand before the camera relatively quickly, and see reactions faster than with film. He wanted to train himself to become the character itself, in a short span of time.
“I'd like to try variety shows too, if the chance comes. I want to raise my name recognition a bit more.”
Help from Lee Seo-won or the mysterious investment firm was all well and good, but he wanted to become someone who could draw ticket power on his own name alone.
But Lee Seo-won understood it differently. So that's it — after taking beatings from every direction lately, he's decided he'd better get famous.
I really should have buried CEO Oh completely.
Time to make up for my mistake. Lee Seo-won pressed firmly at his temples.
“All right, I'll draft up a plan. You fly out today, right? Have a safe trip.”
“Thank you. I'll be off, then.”
Once his packed schedule had eased somewhat, Yoon Jay headed to the airport — the reward vacation for Along Along.
Still, was it common for a CEO to come find you in person and fuss over you like this? A faint question flickered through his mind, but it was a good thing, so he let it pass.