Secrets of the Apple (27 page)

She nodded, breathing a “yes” almost beneath hearing. He stood in one graceful motion, putting out a hand to help her up. Neither spoke as they moved to the sofa. She sat at the far end, keeping a chilly distance.

“I could sue you for sexual harassment.”

“Attackers are terrified of lawsuits.”

Kate shot him a spiky look and turned away again.

“You agreed to wrestle a Japanese man in the middle of South America. Sue away. You would be a lone feminist voice in a sexist wilderness. You might even win and get on the news.”

“What’s your point, Ryoki?”

“Biology. I’m bigger, stronger, and faster than you.”

“And?” Annoyed, she finally faced him.

“At a certain basic level, your independence depends on my being civilized, Kate. But there’s an uncivilized man out there who could snatch you up for ransom and once he had you in one of those
favelas
—” He swallowed before going on. “It wouldn’t take long to do a lot of damage, Kate. Men like that, you’d be nothing but property.”

He considered the issue settled by combat, but her mouth had that twisty, thinking look, like she was still trying to get past him.

“That’s a very old argument, Ryoki. Controlling women for fear of what other men might do. I’m just not convinced the threat is real.”

“Maybe at some historical moments, when the world was less civilized, it was necessary and the practice became corrupted,” he suggested.

She opened her mouth to retort, but stopped and looked at him, or maybe through him, as though his comment had sparked a synaptic connection to some other thought and she needed a moment to file it all away.

“I’m calling it in, Kate. I listened to you in Las Vegas—”

“You sulked in the bathroom.”

“—I listened to you in Las Vegas, and if I hadn’t, I’d be dead. Now I’m asking you to listen to me. I’ll follow you around myself if I have to.”

That last bit may have gone too far because her mouth curved in disbelief. He meant it, though; follow her around or send her home. He could see no way around it.

“Why do you feel so strongly about this?” she asked, blowing out a breath and slumping her shoulders, her first signs of weakening.

“Why did you make a fool of yourself in Las Vegas? I mean, storming into my suite and ordering Ruiz out, then parking yourself at the door so I wouldn’t go after her. At the time it made you look crazy. I thought you were crazy.”

“I felt responsible,” she said slowly, “to your parents and Brian, and Grace and Tom and—”

“It was my choice.”

Kate said nothing, just chewed her lip as she thought.

“Come on Kate, I’ve known your family my whole life. What would I say to them if anything happened to you? My father is in business with Brian. How would he face him?”

“It wouldn’t be your fault.”

“Grief doesn’t know about fault, it knows about biology. I’m bigger and stronger and faster. I brought you here, I put you at risk. So why didn’t I protect you?”

She studied her hands, examining her pale nail polish. “Isn’t it enough that I practically live on your doorstep and wear your clothes and eat your food? I need room to breathe.”

“Uh,” he stammered, brought up short. That expression had never made sense to him. Everybody breathes all the time—in out in out—until they’re dead.

“I understand that my life is maybe a little overwhelming,” he faltered.

“
Do
you understand?” she asked. “I’m not sure you really do, because of ‘biology.’”

“You have the option to quit. I’ll still give you a good recommendation.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees to ease the returning queasiness. They sat in silence, both keeping their faces blank.

“This makes you look paranoid, and kind of crazy,” she said. “Not just to me, to anybody who finds out. It might cause gossip. You understand that?”

“Don’t care.” It surprised him to realize he truly didn’t.

She gave him a hard look, the one that made him wonder if she could see through to the other side.  Finally she nodded and stood to leave the room. “All right, you win. I give my permission.”

She left his office looking an inch shorter, and he would have felt guilty if the worry hadn’t weighed so much. Kate said no more about it, so technically that should have been the end. But over the next few days her comments continued to roll around his mind, especially the part about not being able to breathe. Why couldn’t she breathe? Did he smother women until they would rather run off with penniless lovers or take chances with gangsters, than live under his umbrella?  The following night he caught her checking her watch as they read aloud together. Abruptly he closed the book in the middle of a suspenseful scene and forced a yawn, though he didn’t feel the least tired. Maybe she felt she had to humor the big baby, at least until December. What if she was miserable and stayed solely out of honor, because she had made a commitment? Honor and commitment, those were excellent qualities in an employee, he reminded himself. Much sought after. That was enough, should be enough—mostly—maybe.

On Friday evening Kate and Ryoki went to dinner at the penthouse apartment of Mokoto Arima and his wife Sakura. Sakura Arima sorely missed her London friends and, having heard so much about Tanaka-san’s unusual assistant, threatened to come to the office and discover for herself whether Porter-san was actually friend material. In mock horror her husband threw up his hands and invited them both on short notice. Ryoki, hoping to make up for the bodyguard business, accepted at once, not remembering Kate’s aversion to seafood, one of Sakura’s specialties.

At first the dinner did not appear to be a success. Kate, self-conscious of her chopsticks, ate barely twenty grains of rice and bit into a tempura shrimp with the rigidity of a woman consuming dirt at a state dinner. The two women were so intensely polite that Ryoki and Arima watched them warily, wondering when the real Kate and Sakura were going to leap out and flatten everybody. The evening might have ended early and stiff, except Arima, gesturing expansively to make a point, upended the centerpiece, flooding the table and ruining the main course. For half a second everyone looked stunned, until Sakura erupted in a ripe and rich belly laugh that startled Kate. “Peanut butter and jam?” Sakura asked, looking around the table for any takers. The men declined, but Kate confessed to loving peanut butter. “Good,” Sakura said, pulling Kate to her feet. “You help me.”

“You did that on purpose,” Ryoki said, once the women were gone. Arima busied himself blotting the worst of the spill with his napkin before declaring the table a total loss and leaving it for the skittery young maid who had most certainly sneaked off to watch her favorite
telenovela.
Not willing to prod the maid from her hole, he ushered Tanaka to the den and went off by himself in search of scotch. On the way he heard the closing credits of his daughters’ movie and glimpsed two ruffled nightgowns streaking toward the kitchen for snacks. If Porter-san passed muster in the kitchen, very likely Sakura would press her into service helping to read stories and put the girls to bed. She set great store on how her friends interacted with children. She and Porter-san would be good for each other, Arima was sure of this.

Left by himself in the den, Ryoki took in the room’s decor, a professional job meant as a gift to Sakura, for allowing her husband to accept this transfer. Arima could have taken a job anywhere and Ryoki knew she didn’t want to leave London. The room looked very nice, magazine nice, but it lacked the warmth of their place in Mayfair, nothing he could point to exactly, just a feeling. Of course, they’d lived in London for several years and Sakura had had sovereign control of their home.

He had believed he was being thoughtful in hiring a decorator, creating an insta-home to ease their transition. Now he wasn’t so sure. This place reminded him of his grandmother’s apartments in their rambling old house in Tokyo, always a little too perfect, like there should be gold ropes across the chairs.

When he was nine he remembered sitting by his grandmother as she met with a man wearing a pink silk shirt and a glittery gold pocket watch, who kept repeating that a woman’s rooms should reflect the woman. Later Ryoki had watched at the door as workmen and artisans flashed thrilling drills, hammers and screwdrivers, adding moldings, painting murals, and hanging chandeliers until it felt like Versailles. He’d been dragged there a year earlier and considered it the last word gaudy and exhausting. Months later he’d stood in the same doorway looking at his grandmother seated in a chair as she read, her sleek modern dress and glossy novel curiously out of sync with so much swirling gilt. She’d glanced up, closing her book, but keeping it in her lap, as though unwilling to let stray props spoil the set, even for a moment.

Five years later a man with a single diamond earring designed his grandmother a Mediterranean hideaway. Five years after that, a woman clad in black produced a Queen Anne retreat. So on and so on. When he was twenty-nine, his grandmother brought in a new designer who insisted they strip all the bumpy, hand-painted wallpaper, and all the layers underneath, and create a clean, fresh, Japanese style, someplace where she could breathe. But the workmen had discovered old water damage that was slowly eating through the walls, leaving them weakened and pitted behind their layers of paint and fabulous wallpapers. Those walls too damaged to salvage had been torn away and partially replaced, but then his grandparents’ plane had crashed and the work stopped. In December during his last quick visit at home, Ryoki had walked through her rooms, torn bits of wallpaper fluttering as he opened the doors, wires hanging like spilled guts where fixtures had been removed.

“It’s a very nice apartment,” Arima said, making Ryoki jump. “We were grateful to find we had so much space in such a nice area. The girls particularly like the terrace.”

“I did nothing,” Ryoki said. In truth, he had taken special pains, harassing the agent to make sure the Arimas had excellent accommodations—more trouble than he’d thought to take for himself. “But I think I liked your old place better.”

Arima chuckled. “Give Sakura time, she’ll make this place hers as well.” He fixed Ryoki a drink, two fingers of single malt scotch on the rocks. He watched Tanaka take a small sip and set it down, like he used to do, before his divorce. After the divorce, Arima had watched his friend in London, getting drunk with the office after hours, promoting solidarity, hilarity, and a pretense of superior trust. Then he’d go home with some trashy blonde he would never have taken to bed sober. With some men, Arima might have winked at such behavior, boys will be boys. But he knew Tanaka was eating himself from the inside, trying to numb his heart. Sakura understood it better. After watching him with their little girls, she decided Tanaka-san had a great capacity for love, a true gift. But he kept it to himself for fear the hyenas would get him.

“Porter-san reminds me of my Sakura,” Arima said.

“That’s high praise for Kate,” Ryoki said. He’d always admired Arima’s wife and considered him tremendously fortunate. At one time he had assumed that given time, he and his wife would grow into the same kind of harmonious existence.

Arima pulled a remote from a hidden compartment and began flipping through the music on tap to choose a soundtrack for the evening. He finally settled on Miles Davis—smooth jazz turned low, a good atmosphere for talking.

Ryoki thought about Arima’s brilliantly talented wife who stayed home performing the duties of a traditional Japanese wife. He wondered how she’d take to a bodyguard trailing her around. Kate said she couldn’t breathe. He still wasn’t sure what that meant, really

“Is it difficult for your wife to stay home?” Ryoki asked.

Arima paused mid-sip. He never thought he’d hear anything like that out of Tanaka’s mouth. Must have something to do with Porter-san. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” Ryoki said, picking up his glass and clinking the ice.

“Something changed in San Francisco,” Arima said, expecting his friend to grin, maybe crack a joke about love or crushes, a tacit confession that it might be true. Sakura had already declared it a fact, based on the observations he brought home. But that was secondhand information and could be biased.

For a split-second Tanaka appeared on the verge of opening up, but his expression flattened and he shrugged.

“Does she like staying home, or does she have trouble breathing?”

Tanaka’s tone sounded casual, off-hand, his eyes averted like he was only half engaged in the topic, but Arima picked up the honest questioning underneath. Funny the subject never came up when he was married. Of course, Tanaka and his wife never really occupied the same space.

“Trouble breathing, huh?” Arima said. He’d been married long enough to know many incarnations of that phrase and knew his friend was in for complex long-term negotiations. He wished he had an easy answer, something catchy he could put on T-shirts that would save marriages and make him wildly rich. In a way he had been puzzling over the question since he was a boy, since the day he had stepped back from a fierce hug around his mother’s waist and looked up, noticing for the first time her frayed collar and stained sleeve, side by side with his father’s immaculate new suit. He told her she needed a new dress. She smiled, but there was something about the slant of her mouth or the set of her eyes and he knew right away she wouldn’t buy one. The incident had sprouted in his memory, eventually taking firm root and spreading to characterize the natural order between mothers and fathers. Until he met Sakura and his world changed forever.

“When I was twelve, Sakura moved in next door and we ended up close friends in the same class at school. As you can imagine, she was always in the top ten percent at school and always surrounded by kids who wanted to be her friend. It took me fifteen years to convince her to marry me. Even then she made me give my solemn promise that I would never, ever forget that she was my equal, and then some.”

“Your wife could be playing her violin with some of the foremost orchestras in the world,” Ryoki said.