Bicycle Days (8 page)

It had been an easy dinner, Alec thought. A good dinner. And he had contributed to it, had kept the conversation flowing just the way he thought it should. Only to have Boon ruin it now with his determined silence. Alec waited, but still no one said a word. Finally he cleared his throat loudly and looked at Imamura.

“Do you follow American baseball, Imamura-san?”

Startled, Imamura mumbled, No, and glanced questioningly at Boon. Alec was about to ask him another question when he saw Boon staring at him. He closed his mouth, looked hard at the menu, and decided not to speak for the rest of the evening.
In the pachinko world of his head, a jackpot had been struck. Little silver balls of pain were bouncing everywhere.

“I think this is my favorite view of Tokyo,” Boon said. “There’s always a mist, or cloud cover, or something. And with those great skyscrapers poking through. It hardly looks real.”

It was just the two of them now, and it was late. They sat sprawled in deep lounge chairs on the top floor of the Akasaka Prince Hotel. Alec took a sip of beer and followed Boon’s gaze through the huge picture window. Above its blanket of mist, the city seemed to shoot off in every direction; to snake and sprawl, to rise skyward, lifting him with it. He felt his exhaustion turn to awe at the play of shadow and light. To the left, Boon pointed out the dark outlines of the grounds of the Imperial Palace, a vast expanse of land in a city where so little was available that a golf club membership could cost a million dollars.

Boon pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Tonight was the first time Alec had seen him when he wasn’t bursting with energy. He felt closer to him because of it, as though he had been let in on a secret.

“You look kind of tired.” He said it timidly, not sure that it was the right thing to do. He waited.

Boon stopped rubbing his eyes, his glasses fell back into place. The corners of his mouth turned up a little. “Yeah, I guess I am. Sometimes it just catches up with me.”

“Please don’t stay up for my sake, Mr. Boon. I can just finish my drink and head home. It’s really no problem.”

“Not at all, Alec,” Boon said. “You’ll find you get used to being tired over here, the hours are so much longer. Also, I guess I’m getting a little older—forty’s not so young anymore. Though it doesn’t always feel like forty. There’s so much to do.” He paused. “And please, call me Joe. Japan’s so formal I almost never hear my first name anymore. I kind of miss it. Okay?”
Alec nodded his head. “Good,” Boon said, then slapped his thigh. “Anyway, I didn’t bring you up here to subject you to my ramblings. I want to know what you thought of the dinner, what kinds of things you picked up from it.”

“Maybe you could tell from my behavior at the table that I wasn’t really sure what was going on,” Alec said.

“Yes, actually, I could.” Boon smiled suddenly. “But that’s okay. Just tell me what you thought.”

“Well, I thought the dinner was going fine until everyone stopped talking. Then, suddenly, it all felt very awkward. That’s when I made the mistake of asking Imamura about baseball. Then you gave me that look and I shut up for good. How’s that?”

“Fair enough,” Boon said. “I decided about halfway through that it wasn’t the time to talk business. It was clear that they were expecting some serious discussion of the proposal—Imamura is the highest man they’ve sent over so far—and I sensed that it might be in our best interest to keep them a little off balance. So, the dinner was really just another chance to feel them out, to get a better understanding of who we’re doing business with.” He took a sip of his drink. “I wanted you there for a couple of reasons, the most obvious of which was to give you the chance to see firsthand how people do business over here—or, in this case, how they choose not to do business. But you were also a very active participant in the dinner. Your being there made them uncomfortable at first, because they weren’t expecting you. In general, bringing surprise guests is not something to be recommended. But I thought they would like you, and they did. That’s what allowed me to run the dinner that way. I didn’t realize your Japanese was good enough to really talk to people.”

“Neither did I,” Alec said. “After a few drinks, though, I just seemed to pick up speed. I probably won’t be able to speak a word tomorrow.”

“Knowing the language can be a great asset. Maybe I should’ve put more time into it when I was younger.”

“Maybe so,” Alec said, “but I got the feeling at dinner that you understood a lot more of the Japanese conversation than you let on. What there was of it, anyway.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. Remember: when you don’t understand much, you have to be very shrewd.” He gave a quiet laugh, as though it were a joke he had heard many times.

Alec had been looking away, out the window, but there was something in Boon’s laugh—in the softness of it—that made him turn back to Boon for just a second, almost to make sure it was still really him. He remembered hearing his father laugh that same way once before. It was a laugh of modesty and warmth, so unlike his usual laugh, which had always sounded harsh to Alec, something thrown at people across the dinner table. This was a laugh of unconscious moments, and Alec looked more closely at Boon, feeling that he had somehow been let in on another secret, this one less clear and more important.

“Joe?”

Boon looked surprised for a moment at hearing his own name.

“I was just wondering about your family. If you have one, I mean.”

“Sometimes I wonder about my family, too,” Boon said. Then he smiled. “Don’t look so serious, Alec.”

“Sorry.”

“And don’t apologize. Okay? My wife and I split up a long time ago. Diane was never really happy here. She tried to make it work for a couple of years. Then, one morning, she said she thought she had to leave, to go back. Things were just starting to work for me at the company, and I felt I had to stay on. For my career. So that was pretty much it. Of course, there were other problems, too.”

“Do you have any kids?”

Boon held up his index finger. “One. A daughter. She’s at school in Connecticut, where her mother lives. She’ll enter tenth grade this fall. I haven’t seen her in a year.”

“You miss her.”

“Yes. Sure.”

“Do you get lonely sometimes?”

“Lonely? Not really,” Boon said, looking out the window. “Not anymore. There’s too much to do. But life’s not all one way or another, Alec—not all loneliness or happiness. I guess I don’t believe people can separate the parts of their lives like that. And if you spend your life thinking you can, or even trying to, I think you always end up a little disappointed.”

They were both quiet then. Alec found himself caught in the strange, bittersweet mood of the nearly empty bar. Waiters in red jackets emptied ashtrays and wiped the tables clean. Chairs were put up, lights were turned off; the room became a patchwork of shadows. The bartender glanced nervously at the two foreigners, not wanting to speak to them, hoping they would realize on their own that it was time to leave. Looking out from the darkened interior, the glowing, mist-covered sky appeared otherworldly, an apparition.

T
he steam rose from the water of the wooden bathtub, fast and then slow. Suspended, swirling, it cloaked the walls and ceiling of the small room in layers of billowed white gauze. And with it came the heat, wet and sensual, all energy in the confined space.

Alec reached up and pushed the window open a crack. Steam poured out the opening, briefly painting the darkness a cloudy white before disappearing. He rested the back of his head against the rim of the small, deep tub. Eyes closed, he listened to his breathing as it became more and more relaxed. He crossed his arms underwater, hugging himself.

His mind filled with pictures. Some of them were real, some imagined. His mother appeared in every one of them. In one she was playing Chopin on the piano, a half smile on her face as her fingers danced and hopped across the keyboard. In another she was reading aloud to him as he sat next to her on the sofa, her finger following the words so he would know where she was in
the
story.
But the most frequent picture was of the kitchen table. It was old and unvarnished, thick and bare like a chopping block, with burns, nicks, and gauges on its surface. Its length fit snugly against one wall of the large kitchen, so that there was just enough room for a wooden stool at each end and two folding chairs along one side. In the mornings, Alec liked to sit on his stool across from Mark, watching his mother make breakfast.

Mark had already begun playing team sports after school, leaving Alec to come home alone after classes were done. His mother was almost always in the kitchen, preparing dinner. In between trips to the stove she sat at the table, on Mark’s stool, with a couple of magazines open in front of her. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled up, and there were light streaks of flour on her dark green apron. Her blond hair was tied back from her face. She drank lukewarm coffee with milk in it from a gray pottery mug.

Alec learned that there were no rules in the afternoons. She would look up from her magazines or from the counter where she had her hands in a large cooking bowl and ask him questions. She wanted to know if he was scared when he went to school on the first day of classes every year or what he remembered of the books she used to read to him when he had been small. Some of the questions were hard in that way, and he had to think for a minute before answering.

She encouraged him to ask her questions. She said once that there was nothing he could ask her that she wouldn’t answer. Nothing. Alec felt older when she said that; he took it seriously. Once he asked her why he sometimes heard her and his father yelling at each other at night through the closed door of their bedroom, when they thought he and Mark would be asleep. Her face tightened then, he knew it did, and she told him that all parents fight once in a while, even when they love each other very much.

* * *

It was hard to know exactly when the look and feel of the pictures in his mind changed permanently. But whenever it was, it seemed to Alec that suddenly the pictures were too sharp and clear to belong to anyone, least of all himself. There were no fingerprints on them, nothing to show that they had ever been touched.

Things might have changed when he was eleven, on the afternoon when his mother left the apartment to begin her job. It was a good job, she said, teaching piano a few afternoons a week at a nearby music school. He heard her voice through the closed door of his room, where he had taken his glass of milk. She said that sometimes she needed to get out of the house, too. Alec didn’t tell her what he was feeling, even though she asked him twice. He drank his milk and stared at the wall of his room. He didn’t tell her anything.

After that, he came home to the empty apartment three times a week and began to make tours. He would drop his knapsack on the floor, walk into the high-ceilinged living room, and sit on the formal chairs. He would lie down on the long sofa, imagining people sitting around him at his own dinner party. He would light cigarettes and set them in the ashtray to burn.

Then he would go into the library, where the upright piano stood against one wall. He would lift the lid of the keyboard and lay out sheets of music as though he were going to practice. Only he would get up then and turn on the television and the stereo. He would sit down at his father’s antique rolltop desk, uncap the lacquered fountain pen, and fill one sheet of notepaper after another with the signatures of his family. He would sign imaginary letters and contracts and school forms, working at it every afternoon until he could write four different signatures, all of them perfect, his own included.

He always saved his parents’ bedroom for last. He went through their closets. The hanging clothes brushed against his face. He breathed in the smells of mothballs and flannel and leather, and traces of his mother’s perfume. He looked into their bureau drawers, felt the gold weight of a pocketwatch that had
belonged to his grandfather. And then he walked out of their bedroom, closing the door behind him. He stood a few feet away from it, his body pressed tight against the wall, and imagined that he and Mark were listening to another one of their parents’ fights, adding their own mental pictures to the words they heard. He thought of his mother teaching the piano to strange children, of his father running a business that his family didn’t really understand, of Mark playing football with the older boys because he was as big as they were. He remembered how much he had liked sitting at the kitchen table after school. And he felt fear come to him as he stood in the short, dark corridor that connected his parents’ room to the rest of the apartment. It held him and pressed him harder against the wall until his shoulders and back began to hurt, until he slid down and sat on the carpet.

He didn’t often go into his parents’ room after that; the apartment began to seem dangerous. He stayed in his own end of the house. His was the smallest room—he always assumed it was because he was the smallest person—but during those afternoons he rarely left it. There was a black-and-white TV he could watch if he felt like it. But mostly he just sat by the window, looking out over the reservoir and Central Park.