Bicycle Days (7 page)

Alec was laughing. “Come on. Hospitalized? That’s the worst line I’ve ever heard.”

Nobi was trying to look indignant. “Of course. But there is sympathy for anyone who would take rejection so hard. Yes?”

“This must be a purely Japanese phenomenon,” Alec said. “From my experience, not even the threat of suicide works in New York.”

Nobi laughed loudly. A group of MITI officials at a nearby table looked over, their expressions severe. Alec saw them and cleared his throat. Nobi looked up, quickly pulled himself together, and signaled for the check.

On the way out, Nobi invited Alec to a party at his apartment that weekend. He wrote out the address and phone number and told him that there would be many beautiful women there, and many opportunities for hospitalization.

A
lec wavered a little outside the door, steadied himself by placing his hand on the head of the stone lion. As usual, the glass door was unlocked, and he pushed through it hard, catching it just before it slammed into the wall. The stairs were almost too steep for him. He took his time, leaning forward, grabbing the handrail with his left hand. Midway up there was a small landing where he stopped to regain his strength and sense of balance. A wire bird cage stood against the wall, almost even with his own height. Within the cage, two lovebirds sat together on a perch, their beaks touching. He thought they looked very pretty. Tentatively, afraid of being bitten, he stuck his forefinger between the wires and touched one of the birds on the wing. The bird didn’t move. He touched it harder; both birds fell off the perch, landing with a thud at the bottom of the cage. He desperately wanted to put the birds back on the perch but couldn’t figure out how to get his whole hand in the cage to do it. The birds looked funny with their feet sticking up in the
air and little tufts of stuffing sticking out from under their wings. Realizing that it might be easier in the morning, he started climbing the stairs again.

At the second-floor landing, he kicked off his loafers, then glided in his socks along the short hallway toward the next set of stairs. A light was on in the eating room, its edge brightening the wood floor ahead of him. Mrs. Hasegawa was still awake. He could hear her harsh, openmouthed breathing, could picture her sitting at the low table, the house account books spread out before her. Often in the early morning when Alec went downstairs for a bath, he would walk into the eating room to find her asleep on the tatami, the account books still open on the table. He knew that she only slept a few hours a night and would try not to disturb her. But she would somehow sense his presence and awake on her own, like a bear emerging from a period of hibernation. She always stood up and moved slowly, as though her legs caused her considerable pain. They looked heavy and unused, her legs, and Alec worried that her circulation was not good. But he had once seen her riding a bicycle.

She always wanted to talk in the morning. And she would want to talk now, too. She would ask him questions about everything he had said and done since he had left for work. She would try to feed him. Alec took the stairs guiltily, one at a time, trying not to make a sound. He held his breath: two more and he would be up and around the corner, home free.

“Alec!” The voice made him jump.

“Hai,”
he responded automatically, walked back down the stairs to the eating room. The scene was just as he had imagined it: Mrs. Hasegawa sat, beaming, on the tatami floor, the account books open on the table. She stood up when she saw him.

“Come. Sit down.” She pointed to a spot at the table. He sat as close to it as he could manage. She peered at him, began laughing, her breasts shaking. “Alec! Have you been drinking beer again?” Then her mouth stopped smiling; she looked suddenly very wise.
“Mugi-cha,”
she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Alec tried to remain seated but no longer felt strong enough to support his upper body. He lay back on the tatami. The white plaster ceiling and plain wooden crossbeams seemed unusually bright. Resting comfortably, he pulled at his tie to loosen it, began unfastening the buttons on his shirt.

Mrs. Hasegawa came back into the room carrying a glass of dark brown liquid. Alec was lying on his back, half-undressed, scratching his stomach. She started laughing again, almost spilling the drink as she handed it to him. Propping himself up on one elbow, he took a sip. The cold, bitter tea felt alive in his dry mouth. He drank off the rest of the glass. Mrs. Hasegawa returned from the kitchen with a liter bottle of the tea, refilled his glass. Looking very pleased, she sat down at her place again.

“Where did you go tonight?” she asked.

Alec looked at her, sideways and up, from the floor. A response in Japanese wasn’t forthcoming, so he smiled at her until he could put together an answer. “I went to a party at the house of my friend from MITI.”

Her eyes widened. “Is that so? A party? What sort of party? Were there girls?”

“It was a party to watch the summer fireworks,” he said slowly, piecing the backward grammatical constructions together in his head. “There were a lot of girls. Japanese girls.”

Mrs. Hasegawa looked shocked. “Eh? Japanese girls? Do you like them? What did you talk about?”

Alec felt inadequate in the face of her hunger for information. “I told them that they were beautiful and that I liked their clothes. One girl in a red dress, I asked her to dance, but her husband said that she couldn’t. His face was the same color as her dress.”

“You should not ask a married woman to dance,” she said severely. “Japanese women are different from American women, you know.”

“I have heard that, Hasegawa-san.”

“Call me Mother.”

“Mother,” Alec said softly.

“That is very funny. What else did you say?”

“Mother,” Alec repeated.

She shook her head patiently. “No. At the party.”

If he just lay on his back and closed his eyes, Alec found that the talking itself didn’t require a great deal of effort. “I told every girl I met that if I did not see her again, I would become very sick. I do not think they understood.” He opened his eyes, rolling his head to the side in order to see her expression.

Mrs. Hasegawa looked severe again. She was making her favorite noise of disapproval: a loud clucking. Alec thought she sounded like a chicken. He almost laughed but stopped himself by turning over on his stomach, cradling his face in his arms.

“There is a very important thing about Japan that you do not yet know, so I will tell you,” she said to his back. “Even though you are not very tall, you are handsome. You are not fat. Your family must be very important—it is a good family. So, you cannot have just any girl for a girlfriend; she must also be of good family, eh? Do you understand?”

He heard the pouring sounds as she refilled his glass. “Yes, thank you. You are right,” he said, his voice muffled by his arms. “You are right.”

There was a break in the conversation. Alec wondered if she had gone back to working on the account books. Mr. Hasegawa had inherited the family business of wholesaling fruits and vegetables to restaurants and supermarkets throughout the Tokyo area. It appeared that the business was thriving. An indigo Mercedes was parked in the garage of their narrow, four-story house. They had an extra bedroom. They ate mango and kiwi. Yet it seemed to Alec that, outside of these material rewards, all Mrs. Hasegawa really had to herself were the account books, which she spent at least an hour every night updating. They were her responsibility, not her husband’s. She chose to work on them late at night, when everyone else in her family had gone to bed. Alec wondered whether there was a kind of freedom in that routine—in the chance to have, for just an hour or two, a job and place of her own, free of her children and household chores.
In that sense, the account books were more real to her than was her husband. Aside from meals, Alec had yet to see the two of them together. Mr. Hasegawa’s office was on the third floor of the house, and he could be found there at all hours of the day, unless he was at the low table, watching the baseball game on TV, his wife and daughter wordlessly serving him dinner.

“Do you like Scotch?” Mrs. Hasegawa asked.

Alec looked up. “What? Yes.”

Slowly she stood up, walked into the kitchen. When she returned, she set a bottle of Scotch and two glasses with ice down on the low table. She mixed two drinks with a little water, handed one to him.

“Kampai,”
she said.

“Kampai.”
He took a sip of the strong drink.

She sat down on the tatami again. “Sometimes I get very tired.”

“You are always working, Mother.”

“Working? No, I am not working. I am only taking care of the house.”

“But taking care of the house takes a lot of time. Perhaps more time than your husband spends working.” He said it without thinking.

Something in her eyes seemed to light up, focus on him more intently. “My husband?” She laughed, but he didn’t hear any humor in it. “In the house, my husband only does work. But he leaves the house often; I almost never leave. And when he comes back, he starts to work again. He does not tell me what he does when he leaves. He does not talk to me.”

Alec took a sip of Scotch and felt something open up around him, between them, as if they had crossed some sort of line together by talking. Then he turned away and lay down on his stomach, afraid that if he looked at her too long, she might stop coming into focus.

“What about your children? Do you talk to them?”

She shook her head slowly. “My husband and I, we are not from Tokyo. Eh? We are from Tohoku, in the north—from a
very small village. But our children, they are from Tokyo. And so, sometimes it is difficult to talk. Sometimes I think they are children of Tokyo, not of me.”

They were quiet after that, Alec knowing that she expected him to speak but not quite sure what to say. Finally she picked up her pen, went back to working on the account books.

But he knew something about her now, and he felt in her silence the truth of what she had told him. Watching her, he saw the tedium of her daily life; saw, too, the intensity of her excitement at his return and the chance for conversation. Dizzy, he rolled over and sat up. Mrs. Hasegawa stared up at him with curious, almost hesitant eyes. He smiled at her, took another sip of Scotch.

“I want to tell you a little about my friend Nobi,” he said.

T
he restaurant was distinctly European. Crystal chandeliers shed soft light throughout the dining room. Earthen-colored Tuscan floor tiles blended with chairs of mahogany and leather, giving the room a sense of opulence and comfort. Crisp and white, the tables stood at attention, uncrowded, inviting. Japanese waiters floated from place to place, attentive and discreet, cutting sharp figures in their starched black-and-white uniforms.

It was a business dinner, Alec’s first, and Boon was being no help at all. He sat as though in a trance, his fingertips touching in front of his half-closed eyes. A dessert menu lay open before him, but there was no motion in his face, not even a hint that anything was taking place within his head.

Alec was getting a headache. He imagined himself as an inverted pachinko machine, his shoulders and neck producing little silver balls of muscular tension, which, one by one, were
bouncing their way up into his head. Noise reverberating in his brain. Levers clicking. Balls clattering. A cacophony of sound and pain. He looked around the table in the hope that someone else might be sharing his experience. It seemed unlikely. The two men from the Japanese electronics firm mirrored Boon’s neutral countenance. Imamura, the senior executive, sat like a schoolboy in church, his hands in his lap, his eyes cast downward. Occasionally he would glance furtively at his partner, Ayada, who was acting as both translator and
atendo,
caretaker and protector of the higher-ranking man.

Silence had overtaken the table as if by consensus. Heads had bent down to study the dessert menus and had not been raised again. Alec could not understand what had happened. The meal had gone smoothly up until then, formalities mixing easily with talk about baseball, women, and drinking. With each glass of wine, the faces of both Japanese men had evolved into deeper shades of red, while Alec soon believed himself to be a native speaker. His tongue felt loose, athletic. He was talking to Imamura about the benefits of bachelorhood. He was laughing with Ayada as they discussed the dangers of drinking too much sake before telling the bar hostess that her pert breasts were the only true national treasures of Japan. And he was aware that Boon was taking it in, not necessarily understanding all the Japanese, but knowing what was behind it, watching him.