Secrets of the Apple (28 page)

“The day I forget that is the day I’m sleeping on the couch.”

Ryoki chuckled as he was meant to, but Arima kept his eyes fixed on the ice in his glass, speaking almost to himself. “It takes courage to keep doing laundry day after day. That’s the part that’s hard to remember.” There was a natural lull in the conversation as the two men settled deeper into their chairs, allowing Miles Davis to fill the silence. Ryoki leaned his head back, letting the music serve as a velvet cushion on which he turned over and examined what Arima had said. He thought it may have been important, but he doubted Kate did her own laundry, let alone his, so he wasn’t sure how it applied.

“Sakura keeps wishing you’d find a nice girl and settle down so she wouldn’t have to worry so much about you,” Arima said, looking up.

Ryoki took a real pull of his drink, feeling the burn down his throat. “Maybe I should have a matchmaker send me a nice Japanese girl, maybe one of the ten virgins left in the free world.”

“Your mother could help you look.”

“She tried that once, before I married Miu. Some American friend of hers, if you can believe that. Some feminist pain in the—”

“Some American like Porter-san?”

Ryoki blinked in the middle of an emphatic no. Surely it couldn’t have been Kate. No, she’d have been too young, twenty-one or twenty-two when he married.

“You touch her a lot,” Arima said.

It was a nothing comment, Ryoki knew that, banter between old friends. Except it struck him hard, hearing it said aloud by a co-worker. Touching Kate was only supposed to be a thought between his ears. But now Arima had brought it out in the open, endowed it with flesh and credibility. He shifted in his seat, feeling his shirt to be itchy and the room disturbingly warm. What incident could have prompted Arima to say such a thing? The tricky newspaper photo. Had to be it. Arima had seen the front-page photo—everyone had. What were they saying in the office? Probably nothing. Arima was more observant than most. What if they were talking in the office? Would Kate be listening to gossip? No. But she couldn’t help overhearing gossip. Maybe she’d taken another look at the photo, maybe rethought their wrestling match, cast it in a romantic light. Here his reasoning broke down. The wrestling just irritated her. But there had been moments in the library, private times that might look romantic in retrospect, if someone suggested the possibility. Maybe she’d ordered some bridal magazines herself, kept them hidden under her bed in a closed box labeled PRIVATE in English, Japanese and Portuguese.

No, that was foolish. She wouldn’t do that. Too sensible and businesslike.

But the maybes began wiggling around his mind, past Miles Davis, all the way through dessert, and into the music room where Ryoki sat with the labored ease of a man trying to conceal a bullet wound.

Kate and Sakura, having overcome their initial awkwardness, sang silly songs and played duets for forty-five minutes, laughing, almost giggling in their delight at discovering a shared passion. For a moment Ryoki thought their ebullience resembled Kate and her sister. But that was probably just the music creating a false atmosphere of easy friendship, hadn’t it happened to him in his own house? Arima had been too generous in his estimation of Kate. The two women were nothing alike. At heart, Sakura was a traditional Japanese woman and Kate remained hopelessly American, could barely use chopsticks. He stopped short of thinking monkey noises, but only just.

At the door Kate and Sakura made plans for a girls’ night out while Ryoki and Arima shifted from foot to foot waiting for the women to say their final goodbyes, hopes rising and falling whenever anyone shuffled in any direction. Wasn’t happening, ever. No good. Their words poured like a dam break. Finally Ryoki put his hand on the small of Kate’s back to speed the process. Arima’s eyes flicked to the spot and Ryoki pulled his hand away too quickly, slowing down to casually slide it into his pocket. Kate turned, a question in her face. Maybe he did touch her too much. He saw she almost expected it, its absence now the anomaly. Innocent touch, deceptive newspaper photo, office gossip. The perfect storm.

“Is everything okay?” she asked once they were in the car.

“Of course.”

“You seemed very quiet after dinner, and a little flushed.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Actually—I think I need a break from São Paulo. I’ve been thinking about going to Rio for a couple of days, maybe tomorrow—early.” He finished in a rush: “It’s not work-related, so I won’t need you. You should take some time off.”

“That would be nice.” She smiled, but held herself stiff, uncertain. Obviously he needed to widen the space. Give them both room to breathe. Why had he not seen sooner? Too much time in the library, a warped reality for sure, let them get too close. It was his fault, had maybe given Kate false hope. Though maybe not. Hard to tell, but no sense taking chances. Probably did touch her too much. Maybe a tad infatuated. Infatuated, that was a good word, made him feel less lecherous, the word that came to mind when he replayed the wrestling match in his mind. It was a simple case of infatuation. Easy to see how, single man, attractive girl. Happened all the time. Infatuation—inFATuation. The word itself sounded flabby, fat, baby fat, childish. He could get rid of it the way he’d lose a few pounds, strict discipline and a careful diet.

S
unday morning Ryoki sat in his hotel room counting stripes on the wallpaper, killing time before his flight. Twenty-four hours earlier he’d stepped out of the airport into the bright morning sunshine, every muscle buzzing to get at the women. Like he used to in London. No worries, no conscience. He’d approached his cab inhaling deeply, taking in the smells of Rio, relishing this nearly forgotten freedom—until he choked on a cloud of exhaust and had to shallow his breathing.

He’d been too rushed to bother with security or even a private car, but the taxi was clean, the driver a better class of cabbie—pressed slacks, starched shirt—who handed Ryoki a business card before turning on a samba, thoughtfully played low, softly thumping the steering wheel with his thumbs and singing to himself. It felt good to be out among the people and Ryoki asked him to turn up the music, eager to feel the beat, internalize the rhythm. No tongue-clucking, classical Kate here, no one to slow down the party. His time. Man time. Down and dirty time.

Ryoki had never before visited Rio, but he’d heard plenty of spring break stories from his friends, always in broad strokes. “Gotta tell ya, she was hot. Beach volleyball in a thong and a top that could have been an eye patch. You gotta check it out.” Everybody knew Rio’s beaches were thick with such women.

After checking in at the hotel he walked over to Ipanema Beach, having somehow forgotten that on this side of the equator July is the dead of winter, and the day, while bright, was too chilly for hot-weather natives in thongs and eye patches. Doggedly he continued walking until he came to Copacabana Beach, where he ran across an American couple pinking in the sun, their fast-food thighs porking out of their bathing suits like a velociraptor’s lunch. They raised their glasses in salute as he walked by, hands in his pockets, pretending to enjoy the postcard surf crashing onto the white sand. The umbrella fell out of the woman’s drink and she giggled to her husband who pinched her, rubbing his shoulder in her pillowy cleavage. Ryoki looked quickly away, both disgusted and mildly jealous.

He paused to watch a game of footvolley, marveling at the players’ control as they kicked and headed the ball over the net like they’d been doing it since birth. One of the muscular young men deliberately shot Ryoki the ball, motioning him to join. But he shyly declined, knowing he’d only hold them back. Hands still in his pockets, he wandered off to observe some street dancers flipping red skirts high over shapely brown legs, willing tourists to deposit money in their donation boxes.

Better to wait for the night life, he reasoned; easier to meet women at night. May as well do the tourist thing.

He rode the cable car to the top of the Pão de Açùcar, wishing he’d brought climbing gear. That would have been something, feeling the rough rock under his hands, searching for toe holds with his feet. His stomach did a pleasant little flip when the suspended cable car rocked in a sudden gust of wind, prompting two girls to screech, but the wind died and that was it. He imagined parachuting to the top from a plane, then careening to the ground on an improvised zip line to escape armed thugs. He’d settle for the zip line, just him and the harness.

He waited to get to the top, not expecting much other than a tourist trap. It was just a brown hill sticking out of a blue bay, not the tallest, not the widest, not the -est of anything, a landmark that had appeared in so many movies he felt like he’d seen it already. He’d take a photo to prove he’d been there, and move on.

He snapped two pictures right off, then walked around, hands again stuffed in his pockets, time to kill. He found a bench and sat down, his interest caught by the vivid green of a bush against the startling blue of the ocean, two blocks of color ramming head on. Modern art in nature. Having nothing else to do, he bent to examine the bush more closely, running his fingers along the silky texture of the leaves. It had been a long time since he’d voluntarily stopped to look at a leaf, not since he was a small boy, discovering the world one fascinating insect at a time. The leaf felt pleasantly cool to his touch and he moved closer, bringing his face to it, tilting it this way and that to catch the light, revealing tender gradations of green, brown, yellow and blue weaving through its surface. Not a block of color at all, not modern art. He looked and looked until the word
miracle
sat quietly on his mind, a miracle of both art and engineering, infinite, ancient and disposable at once. What a thing to hide its magnificence in plain sight, fantastic genius masked by overabundance and easy access. He’d taken a number of science classes in his life, must have learned the basic workings of a plant in grade school, but had somehow failed to be astonished, until this moment. Science does not teach about miracles, it parcels out numbers and chemicals, glossing over the inexplicable with an arrogant sniff. But separate facts artfully sifted and arranged could sometimes obscure a greater truth; he’d learned that during his divorce. That reporter won an award.

The leaf came off in his hand and he held it up to the light, examining the clever arrangement of veins carrying water and nutrients to every corner—complex, but simple. Science had not discovered everything about this leaf. There would be revelation yet; he felt it in his heart.

A wandering tourist bent to look at the bush, his eyes sweeping for a plaque explaining its significance. Finding none, he snapped a picture and moved away.

Ryoki took a close-up photo of his leaf, carefully focusing his camera to pick up as much detail as possible, all the time knowing that the resulting photographic artifact would go in a box or album only to be thrown away after his death, or perhaps when his own memory failed to grasp its significance. Who knows? Impossible as it seemed now, he could lose this newfound sense of wonder in a week or an hour—or a minute—if he wasn’t careful. He stood, slowly looking around, concentrating on color as he had concentrated on the leaf. A toddler teetered toward him full-speed, squealing as she snatched the bright red hat from her head, flung it to the ground, then yanked a leaf from his bush and crammed it in her chocolate mouth before Ryoki could even move. Her mother, yellow shirt, blue pants running forward, tan hand reaching for green leaf, bright, shocking against the blues, purples, and greens frothing in the ocean, dotted here and there with clumps of seaweed spewed from its floor. He looked at the camera dangling from his hands. He would take a few more photos, but none of them would provide true evidence of this experience. A picture is worth a thousand words, he thought, but not a single I.

That sounded good, he thought. Pithy, maybe even deep.

The idea of having an original thought gave him a minor thrill, and sensing the young woman at his elbow, he hastened to tell Kate all about it, intending to expound on all the greater implications that began pouring into his mind, his enthusiasm burning away the veneer of jaded cool that separates the sophisticate from the yokel. “It’s breathtaking. I’ve seen photos, but this is different, more than I expected. I had to see it for myself to understand. Photos are just visual hearsay, all about the photographer’s perspective. I didn’t have enough information—”

He turned and found a Norwegian blonde staring into a pair of field glasses she kept trained on the sandy shoreline. Abashed, he smiled and tried to move away, but he had given her an opening and she rushed to tell her tale. “Right down there, one of those beach bums started to talk to me, flexing his big bronze pecks and everything—really nice pecs, big—and when I turned my back his friend took my bag. Didn’t get a look at the other guy. All they got was a towel and a little money. But the bag was nice.” Pause for doleful effect. “They didn’t get much. My sunscreen, a book. The police said that’s how they work, in pairs. They didn’t get much. I really liked that bag.”

Ryoki made a number of sympathetic noises, stepping away at what he was sure must be the end. But she stepped too, the story looping on and on. “The bag was nice.” Pause, purse lips. “A gift from my boyfriend. well, ex-boyfriend. They didn’t get much. He was—ha ha—
is
a filmmaker. Not dead. Indy scene. My boyfriend—ex, that is—”

Two hours later he made it to the giant
Cristo Redentor,
where he took exactly two pictures of the massive art deco Christ, considered by many to be one of the wonders of the modern world. The photos would prove he’d been there.

It was still light when he left the Cristo, much too early for any nightlife, and on the way back to the hotel he asked the cabbie to go the long way around, take him to see some of the sights. A Rio native, the driver proudly pointed out the famous Maracanã Football Stadium, the largest in the world, claiming it once held nearly two hundred thousand fans. Later he flung out a dismissive arm toward the harbor, grunting “Brazilian Navy” as he sped past a tiny collection of ships and subs, shrugging his shoulders, making no comment. He liked to drive fast, but Ryoki made him slow down as they passed the
favelas
that blanketed the hillsides, snaking between the skyscrapers, rich and poor living like puzzle pieces hemmed in by the surrounding cliffs that kept the city from spreading—a bit like his neighborhood in São Paulo, but on a much grander scale. He wanted to ask Kate what she thought. Luckily he remembered she wasn’t there.