Secrets of the Apple (29 page)

He went back to his hotel, went for a swim, showered, ate a solitary dinner in his room, watched half a movie and flipped channels until it was time to go out. He’d been in touch with a friend in Tokyo who frequently visited Rio for the good times and beautiful women, and obtained introductions to the best clubs and enough information to formulate his plan of attack. He emerged from the hotel well after dark, looking sharp, geared up, raring for the hunt, a slip of paper in his pocket rating clubs one to five in three separate categories—stars for atmosphere, hearts for beautiful women, and slashes for good music.

Thus armed, he entered the first club, five stars, five hearts, four slashes, his friend’s highest rating. However, it was much too dark inside for Ryoki’s taste, darker than the urban night outside, keeping the corners excessively dim, focusing all attention on the dance floor. Four stars, tops, maybe three. He liked to see the person he was talking to. But the dark can be seductively anonymous, and after about twenty minutes the heady possibilities began to swirl in his imagination. He could do anything here,
anything,
and no one would ever know. Making his way to the bar he ordered a kamikaze and lifted his glass, intending to order another right away, get a buzz started. But with the glass to his lips he remembered that he was alone, nobody in the whole city to back him up, nobody. At one time he might have reveled in that feeling, the lone wolf on the prowl, howling at the moon. He took a sip and set it down. Who needed a buzz? Buzzes were overrated.

He sauntered slowly around the edge of the dance floor where the light was a little better, and trolled for women who weren’t buried in a horde of friends, and who looked interested but not over eager. He wanted someone ready to dance. Secretly Ryoki liked to dance, had furtively enjoyed the social dance lessons his parents made him take, though he’d complained long and loud just for show. He wanted his partner to be sexy too, and at first looked only for the kind he thought might let a man lick her makeup off. But the first one he saw reminded him of Angelica, her sexuality too raw, more revolting than attractive. There needed to be some sweetness there, someone he could talk to, if she spoke his language. Twice his heart stopped, thinking he’d run into the blonde Norwegian,
“I really liked that bag, a gift from my ex,”
springing to his mind like Pavlov’s dog. He steered clear of the few Nordic blondes, just in case.

He danced with four or five Brazilian women, sexy music in the flesh, thrilling to their sinuous rhythms. This was what he came for, what he wanted to see. Beautiful, sexy, liked to dance. But by his third partner he’d begun to focus on their eyes, difficult at first, staccato images gathered between flashes of colored light. By his last partner he’d detected a pattern he’d nearly forgotten. Club rats. He’d met them all over the world, male and female, narcissistic creatures who dance strictly to be reflected in the glassy eyes of their audience, too self-absorbed to honestly enjoy themselves. Such women were generally sexy and often beautiful, but he needed a buzz to enjoy them, just enough alcohol to blur the edges and blind him to the nuances. Whole place was infested. He had to get out.

He thought about Kate as he passed into the night air. Didn’t know if she could dance. Bet she danced like she played—well, maybe not, iffy coordination and all.
Slipclick.
But he’d bet she
liked
to dance. She wouldn’t sleep with him afterwards, of course, but they could dance and talk and dance some more.

Outside the club he pulled the list from his pocket, looking at it without really seeing. Would it be so bad taking an American girlfriend, maybe someday an American wife?

He thought of the rice that sometimes slipped from Kate’s chopsticks into her lap and around her plate, and how she tried sneaking them into her napkin. Almost heard his grandmother’s monkey noises E E E E Ah Ah Ah Ah. Last night’s dinner could have been a disaster, had it not been saved by the Arimas’ panache. Not everybody would be so understanding, or so accustomed to foreigners at their table.

His father had braved it successfully, and anyone would call his parents’ marriage a triumph of affection. As a boy Ryoki himself had been taken in, groaning and rolling his eyes at his parents’ giggling hugs and kisses, but secretly believing that one day he would want exactly the same. Luckily he had his grandmother to point out the tittering stares of others, wives nudging husbands when his father put his arms around his wife, used American terms of endearment—“honey,” “sweetheart.” “Your father was taught better than that,” Ryoki’s grandmother grumbled. “All his dignity, stolen by that American.”

Kate sometimes made mistakes that embarrassed him at the office. Even answering the phone would be perilous until she mastered the fine distinctions that ranked a caller’s status. Very possibly she never would master it, not like a native. In Japan she would always set him apart as different, an outsider, and as an American she would never truly understand what that meant.

Love was hard enough. Why add sacrifice?

He studied the list in earnest and picked number four: three stars, five hearts, three slashes. Assuming his friend preferred the dark, he figured three stars meant better lighting. The hearts were all that really mattered anyway.

At this club the atmosphere felt looser, less self-conscious, fewer supermodel types. He began his rounds again, hands in pockets, strolling the edges. He danced twice, the girls seemed nice, but not all that into him. Then he ran into someone he knew from college, Ethan Somebody, used to call him Smack back when they played pick-up basketball now and then. But the guy always wore extremely short, tight shorts and talked trash the whole game, talked and talked, never stopping on or off the court. Not a great favorite.

An hour later, word of Ryoki’s bank account had spread from the D.J. booth to the bar and he gradually found himself surrounded by four good-looking women talking at once, three more flipping their lustrous hair, as five kept walking by, pouting their fine plump lips. His Portuguese hadn’t improved enough to understand all their chatter amidst the noise, but body language spoke volumes. And that’s what he came for.

An hour and a half later during a slow song, with his hand on the back of a petite brunette, he started thinking about the murder mystery he and Kate had been reading, closing the book just before the killer was revealed.

They had each fingered a different character, had bet a two-hour lunch against a batch of her cookies. He thought about it all through two songs, long-play club mixes that gave his little flame of curiosity leisure to build higher and higher, until it began to feel vitally important that he know who the killer was and prove himself right. Kate was definitely wrong; no way could it be the narrator. The narrator was your friend, the one who told the truth. If you can’t trust the narrator, who can you trust? Kate had vehemently disagreed, arguing that first-person narrators can have their own biases, a wise reader also explores the surrounding evidence
,
and he should really, really read
Till We have Faces
. Probably something she’d heard from her dad. It was stupid to stop reading; one more chapter would have settled the argument. Should have sneaked the book from the housekeeper and packed it in his suitcase. Where could he find it? No ereader in his suitcase, middle of the night in Rio, everything was closed, and there was nowhere to buy another copy now. It was hard enough to find books in English in broad daylight, maybe he could get it on his phone.

His partner bumped him and he blinked. A new song had begun, fast and hard-driving, and he knew she’d just shouted a question in his ear.

“O que?”
he shouted back.

“Vamos
(beat)
embo
(beat)
cara
,(beat)
'stou quer
(beat)
o con
(beat)
sar soz
(beat)
hos.”

She was soft-spoken and nearly drowned out by the heavy, thumping bass, but Ryoki made out the first and last words, “let’s go” and “alone.” Why not? She was a pretty girl and willing. Wouldn’t find anyone better. He looked into her pretty face, fresh and flushed, and all he could think about was that book.

“
Amanhã vem cedo para mim, eu preciso voltar
,” he said, enunciating slowly and loudly, not trusting his infant Portuguese and funny accent to get through the noise. She was a good sport about it, shrugged no big deal, her invitation refused point-blank. Still looked surprised, though, kind of twitched. He wondered if he’d misunderstood something.

Back at his hotel he lay in his bed alone, staring at the ceiling. Suffocated. Irritated. Kate’s fault. Skewed his perspective and priorities. If he hadn’t been spending so much time with her in the library he would have had someone waiting in the wings, a ready date, an easy distraction. Tired of the club scene. He needed someone steadier, a long-term girlfriend maybe. Didn’t have to be love, just entertaining. Entertaining was enough for almost any man. The club girl had been ready, willing—and young.

He put his hands behind his head as he looked up at the shadows, remembering the girl’s face. Maybe too young. Hard to tell, flashing lights, all that lipstick, and doormen didn’t always card a pretty face. So young.

Why so ready?

He knew what motivated him, what motivated all men. But what motivated a girl so young? Strange man, precarious risk. He thought of Kate stepping in front of that car.

Rio would have been more fun with Kate, he had to admit.

Infatuation, inFATuation. Fat, flabby, baby fat, childish. Didn’t account for friendship. He missed his friend, somebody he could talk to in complete sentences without alcohol or noise or flashing lights. But that put him back at square one. Hard to be friends with a woman. Thorny, convoluted.

His eyes drooped closed and he slept a few fitful hours, waking when a faint light streaked the sky. The moment he opened his eyes, he knew he had the obvious answer to all his troubles.

Kate should move out, of course she should. She was too close is all. Didn’t have to give her up, just gain a bit of distance, give them both some space.

Someplace secure, close to the office. It’s what she’d wanted from the very first day. Should have listened to her. Security would be more complicated, but could be managed. Maybe with time and distance, a word in the ears of the right gossips, the problem would be eliminated altogether, leaving her free to roam the city as she wished. Everybody’s happy, simple solution. Why hadn’t he seen it before?

Her job description wouldn’t change; she’d still run his house, his office. They could still read the same books—buy separate copies, of course—talk about them at lunch, on a plane. Stay out of the library, that was the key, maybe the kitchen too. Libraries and kitchens could be dangerous places. Excess intimacy, that was the true enemy, not Kate. Kate was his friend, the one who always told him the truth. Whatever the complications might be, he knew that for certain.

Ryoki switched to an earlier flight and sat in his room for an hour waiting for time to pass, counting wallpaper stripes and thinking. He’d give her the news as soon as he got home, but how to pitch it without offending her?

“For security purposes—” No good. She’d see right through it.

Left wall—sixty blue stripes, fifty-nine beige.
Is that beige? I think that’s called beige.

“After that photo—”

Right wall—sixty-three beige, sixty-two blue. Room not quite square… looks square.

“Cottage has termites—”

Half wall—thirty-nine blue, thirty-eight beige. Interesting, wall is longer than half, optical illusion, rectangle, not square.

“There’s been some office gossip—”

He’d counted all the stripes and came up with nothing but flimsy excuses. Couldn’t bear to see her twitch like club girl, slapped by a rejection. He let his mind drift over the last week, that stupid photograph, Morias’s visit, “
I need to breathe…
”

“I need to breathe.”

There it was, the golden key. The one explanation that could let him play the hero, pretend he’d brought her a gift.

By the time he landed in São Paulo he’d worked out a clever speech, thinking through the delivery until it played through his mind like an Academy Award-winning scene, sincere, thoughtful, working in a few jokes for style and ease of delivery. He opened his front door determined and ready. Unfortunately, Kate was not there.

H
e didn’t figure that out at first. He had decided he’d wait until they ran into each other casually, then introduce the subject nonchalantly. Didn’t want to give the conversation too much weight; it would only ruin the effect.

With that in mind, he puttered around the house—the library, the household office, anywhere he thought she might be. Finally he resorted to puttering around the garden, which was better anyway. Centrally placed, he’d be more easily noticed if she were in her cottage and looked out the window. Besides, it was a good setting for this kind of talk. Made him look sensitive—“sensitive,” there was a word for you. Too bad his wife couldn’t see him.

At lunch he sat alone in the big dining room slowly chewing his food, wishing he’d been able to make a roast beef sandwich to eat outside. But Mariko had stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a paring knife and politely informing him that lunch was nearly ready,
Keep Out
tattooed clearly across her forehead. He let his gaze drift around the green dining room walls—except Kate called it sage. Women had too many names for colors. He stared at the enormous painting titled
Three Women
that hung on the left wall. Beautiful women, but close inspection revealed them to be the Fates, subtly spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of a man’s life. A bit heavy for the dining room, but it contained a lot of sage. One night he and Kate had discussed the painting at length and decided the decorator had been enamored of the rich greens, and decided to do the room around it, without understanding the meaning. Kate said she might have it moved to the garage, to remind him to drive more slowly, until she looked it up in the household inventory and saw how much it had cost.