Secrets of the Apple (20 page)

When the man finally packed his cameras and left, Ryoki sat outside for a long time, looking at the garden and the house as they gradually metamorphosed from a boy’s paradise to a monstrous oddity, different from the homes of his friends, maybe too different. He began to pay attention to the details of the houses he visited, noticed the simpler layouts, the precise grace of their traditional gardens. In time he began to invite friends over less and less, preferring to invent a persona less closely associated with a bizarre house and an unkempt garden.

One sunny day when he had no one to play with, his mother handed him his trusty sword, suggesting he go outside to play. But he waved her off, proclaiming himself too old for such things. He never noticed how slowly his mother turned away or the unshed tears glistening in her eyes, understanding that she had just witnessed the disappearance of her child.

B
y the time Ryoki returned home from his first day in the São Paulo office, it was nearly midnight and his back ached from a chair that didn’t quite fit. Inside the gates, the motion of the car triggered a long series of security lights, which would have been welcoming had not the house skulked at the top of the drive, its black-eyed windows bleak and glassy as a zombie stare. Once again he wished for his apartment in London where mailbox neighbor Mitzy the Noisy kept the lights in her windows blazing at all hours as she clinked glasses with her friends. Ryoki hadn’t actually known his London neighbors, and would have passed them blankly on the street. Still, the scattered lights in their punch-card windows had welcomed him home night after night as he pulled into the parking garage. This memory made his house in São Paulo appear all the more cavernous and forbidding. He keyed in the security code and began to fit his key into the manual lock when the interior light suddenly flipped on, glowing through the colorful stained glass side lights, and the door swung open from the inside. Kate stood smiling in a pool of light, barefoot, wearing jeans, her shirt rumpled, one finger holding her place in a binder containing his mother’s letters.

“I was getting worried,” she said, “and when you didn’t answer your cell, I imagined the worst.”

“I turned it off. I thought you didn’t want to be bothered once you were in for the night.” He tried to sound casual, nonchalant, but he was so glad, so happily surprised that he’d been missed, he could hardly move for fear he’d forget himself and kiss her. She moved back to let him in, friendly and efficient. As he stepped over the threshold, he “accidentally” grazed her arm with the back of his hand just to have contact, to prove to himself that she was real.

Kate shrugged. “I was reading anyway. I thought I might as well read in here as out there. Are you hungry? Mariko saved your dinner in the fridge.”

Ryoki nodded and put down his briefcase. Mariko, Mariko, why did that sound familiar—oh yes, the cook, heavyset woman, yellow teeth, sour smile. He went to wash his hands and met Kate in the kitchen. She’d laid out a napkin, a heaping plate of something that smelled delicious, a glass, a knife, and a fork.

“Don’t we have any chopsticks?”

“Somewhere, I imagine,” she said, opening a series of drawers until she found the right one.

Ryoki was almost too tired to think, but he didn’t want Kate to leave. He gestured to the chair across from him, inviting her to sit down. “Some of our executives are Brazilian with little English or Japanese. I really need you at the office. Have you gotten settled in yet?” He asked this as a courtesy, intending to take her to the office even if the house fell down.

“Let’s see, the cook and the housekeeper grew up together and have been feuding for thirty years. The gardener is furious with security and the maids are both gigglers who talk faster than they work, and everybody speaks a mixture of Japanese and Portuguese that sometimes even I don’t understand.”

“Replace them if they give you trouble,” Ryoki said shortly. After his long flight and eternal day at the office, domestic turmoil seemed a bridge too far. Kate rested her chin on the binder she’d laid on the table, looking overwhelmed.

“It’ll work out. I talked to your mom on the phone for a long time last week. She warned me about this, especially in a new household.”

“Maybe the office will be a rest, then,” he said. She smiled tiredly. “We’ll ride together in the morning,” he added offhandedly, anxious to delay the ‘I’m not letting you get behind the wheel in South America’ debate. She’d take a wrong turn for sure and come back a week later with fringe on the rearview mirror and souvenirs from Paraguay. “Driving’s crazy here,” he said, putting down his chopsticks and wiping his mouth, too tired to eat more than a few bites. “On my way home tonight I saw cars at three different stop signs honk and keep going, not even thinking about braking,”

“They do that at night to avoid getting carjacked,” she said, yawing behind her hand as they both stood. “Do you need help carrying your dishes?”

Ryoki looked blank.

“How about if you take your plate and utensils, and I take your glass and napkin,” she said with her teacher smile.

Stunned into obedience, Ryoki carried his things to the sink and watched as Kate quickly rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “It’s disheartening to find dirty dishes in the morning,” she said.

“But they feel heartened when they cash their paychecks.”

“This isn’t a business.”

“Everybody’s on the payroll,” he said flippantly, throwing out his arms to encompass the whole house, but dropped them when he looked up and realized his sweep had included Kate. She didn’t look offended but studied him thoughtfully before she spoke.

“I think it’s different in a house.” She’d screwed up her face into one of her thinking expressions and he asked her what she meant.

“One day, just a few miles from here, I came home from school in a really bad mood and started yelling at our housekeeper, thinking she was paid to take it. My mother pulled me into my room and slapped me straight across the face, the only time she ever did that—said she was ashamed I hadn’t learned any more respect. Afterwards she talked to me for a long time about the nature of homes. I’ve been thinking about that day ever since you asked me to take this job.”

Kate reached for a towel to dry her hands and knocked a porcelain canister into a free-form dive to splat head first on the stone floor, releasing a powdery brown inkblot resembling two peacocks locked in mortal combat. Suddenly the room smelled like cinnamon, nutmeg, and a witch’s spice Ryoki couldn’t identify.

Kate stood with her hand over her mouth, one eye slitted, the other scrunched closed, like a good hard blink would shove the genie back into the bottle.

“Do you need help picking up your dishes?” he said.

“If they find my dead body, it was the cook in the kitchen, with the meat cleaver,” she choked, slowly opening her eyes.

 Before either of them could so much as look for a dustpan, a series of grunting thumps alerted them that big hips were pounding down a short hall. Mariko burst through the door, a poltergeist in a tattered robe and forty yards of white nightgown, arms flailing to herd the barbarians out of her kitchen.

Kate and Ryoki beat it for the back veranda, giggling like naughty urchins. “Goodnight,” Kate said, skipping straight off to her cottage without a backward glance.

“G-Goodnight,” Ryoki faltered, automatically reaching out to snatch her back, but he was too slow. “Wait, wait, you forgot your binder,” he called, but the sound of the waterfall in the garden masked his voice. He shambled after her and stopped to lean against a column, unconsciously twisting his shirt button until he saw her lights blink on, all snug and inviting, like there might be seven dwarves and a diamond mine. Of course, that would also mean a poisoned apple, there was always a witch with a poisoned apple.

The next day dawned gray and drizzly. Ryoki chewed his breakfast slowly and watched water droplets slide down the window next to him. He was thinking about the taxing day ahead when Kate arrived, carrying her familiar burgundy briefcase and wearing a tailored navy suit that made her look like a C.E.O. from a movie set, very sharp-looking, but a little too young and glamorous to be authentic. She sat down and eyed the breakfast table suspiciously, finally settling on a piece of toast and an egg scrambled dry. “Good morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she said, sluggish and heavy-eyed, jet lag taking its toll.

“I’m sorry I kept you up so late.”

“You didn’t. I was just reading.”

It was a good natured lie and he appreciated it.

“Is that fish at 7:00 a.m.?” she asked.

Grilled fish, steamed rice, fried egg and miso soup, an ordinary breakfast. He’d just spent an hour in his dojo getting back into his normal routine and felt ravenous for the first time since January. “Want to try it?”

“Not a fish girl,” she said, picking at her toast.

“I once saw you put fried pork rinds in your mouth,” he said.

“I’m in touch with my inner redneck.”

“I’m going to outlive you,” he said, holding up a bite of fish.

“You eat things that drown in the air. What kind of life is that?”

“You’re going to have to learn to eat Japanese style. Aside from the monthly office banquets, you may have to accompany me someplace that doesn’t cater to Westerners.”

“Not part of our agreement,” she said.

“Still a fact,” he said.

“I’ve never learned how to use chopsticks and you can’t force me to eat fish.”

He watched her put a bite of egg in her mouth, holding her fork prongs down, something he’d never seen her do before. In the United States, she had practiced that bizarre American method of alternating hands for the fork. Yet this morning in Brazil, she kept her fork in her left hand and her knife in her right, crossing them on her plate in a proper continental-style X when she took a sip of her juice, to indicate she was resting rather than finished. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she dabbed the corners of her mouth and laid her napkin beside her plate in a partially folded line.

All that bluster about chopsticks and fish, yet to switch etiquette like that overnight, with no one but him to see. A manner of eating is as personal as the way an individual likes his eggs. To change so abruptly might indicate a secret self-consciousness, a need to legitimize her place in company. It would fit with the theory he’d been toying with since the Valentine’s party, that she was a shy girl masquerading as a social butterfly. He would not beg her to use chopsticks. Instead he would test his hypothesis, wait for the opportune moment to drop a hint that she might make herself unwelcome by asking for a fork, then see how it played out.

He was still thinking of this plan as they were preparing to leave the house, when she startled him with two quick tugs on his tie, pulling the tail straight and quickly running her fingers halfway down the silk to the small gold tie tack. He took a deep breath, sucking in the warm vanilla scent of her hands like a child sniffing fresh-baked cookies in the kitchen. “Your tie was crooked,” she said absently as she turned to check her lipstick. As a teenager his grandmother had warned him to keep his appearance sharp at all times. She’d also yanked his knot and pulled down on his tie, exactly as Kate had done, but her rough dry skin had crackled and snagged on the smooth silk. His grandmother’s hands were always rough because applying hand cream in the middle of the day would have doused the fire of her diamonds.

* * *

Since the previous day, the Japanese executives who had worked with Tanaka-san for the last three years in London had been scratching their heads in bemusement. They knew him to be a serious young man, sharp, demon-driven, an almost conscienceless slave driver. They were accustomed to such a person, prepared for him. However this Tanaka-san had arrived from his long flight smiling, breaking into a belly laugh three times in a single day. They eyed him suspiciously, supposing it could be alcohol or possibly some American drug. But they dismissed these possibilities as being too far out of character. When Porter-san entered with him the second day, her wide, intelligent eyes sweeping the room around her, she was an immediate object of interest to the London veterans, not for her beauty, but because she was a variable, a possible cause, though it seemed unlikely. They knew his history with round-eye women.

The newer office staff who had first met young Tanaka-san the previous day wouldn’t have used the word
jovial
when describing the lanky, rather alarming figure of their chief executive officer. They also took no note of the young woman who accompanied him on his rapid rush through the office that second morning. The two were dressed so much alike and she kept to such a quiet orbit that it wasn’t until she spoke that they noticed she wasn’t even of the same race.

By 8:10 a.m. Kate was installed in the small enclosed reception area connected to Ryoki’s office, ready to greet his first appointment. However, at 8:15 the weedy little man from the bank bypassed Kate’s office and knocked directly on Ryoki’s private outer door which, due to a construction error, looked much more substantial and impressive. “Everyone’s going to do that,” she told Ryoki. “Maybe you don’t need me.” But he pulled her into his office where the little man helped them each open a separate checking account as well as a household account so Kate could pay the staff and run the house. After the banker left, Ryoki presented Kate with a cell phone, his Visa and his black American Express, her name embossed across the bottom of each as an authorized user. She sat staring at the items on the desk.

“The phone will give you satellite directions,” he said, “and I have a code that will allow me to find you if you get lost.”

“Why not just clip a tag to my ear?”

“Do you think that would work?” Ryoki picked up the phone and began fiddling with the buttons, showing her all the nifty features that would certainly improve the quality of her life, if only she would use them. She watched with glazed eyes, finally sighing in resignation and agreeing to try to remember to turn it on. Ryoki could see the civil disobedience brewing, but he would be persistent. She frowned at the credit cards. “The Japanese give a lot of gifts,” he began.