Secrets of the Apple (35 page)

Two days later Ryoki sat at a very early breakfast, reading some last-minute reports and preparing to leave for his longest stint without Kate since January. He had assured her that all was ready and that there was no reason for her to get up so early. Yet his heart expected her, skipped a beat when he finally heard her bare feet padding quickly toward the dining room. He rose to meet her, and in a few moments she stood before him in shorts and a T-shirt, no makeup, her hair held back in a black headband.

“Just making sure you didn’t think of anything else,” she said.

“Don’t forget your—”

“Phone,” she finished, rolling her eyes. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait,” he said, unconsciously moving forward, entering her personal space. She took a step back. “Say goodbye to Lucas for me.” He leaned toward her. She took another step, backing herself against the wall. He realized he was looming like a big panting dog and took half a step back.

“Lucas has been going to the dojo with Sano every morning. He may be able to take you down when you get home.” She looked intently at the doorframe and began running her finger across the molding as though checking for dust. “Call me when you land, so I know you made it,” she said without looking up.

She walked him out to the car and he leaned over, kissing each of her soft cheeks, as he had seen many Brazilians do—though he’d privately noted that men’s lips generally brushed the air next to sagging or mottled skin. He was prepared to defend the kisses, explain that he was going native, but if Kate was surprised, she gave no sign.

As the driver pulled away, Ryoki looked back and saw Kate lean against a pillar, her hand raised in a wave, her right foot up on her left leg, the quirky stork stance he’d seen a hundred times in the last nine months. Nine months. Felt so short—long enough for a woman to give birth. He settled in his seat, letting out a breath. Only three months left.

Ryoki felt an eerie prickling on his arms and clutched at his briefcase, suddenly agitated by the time, a sense of rush. He tapped lightly on the headrest of the bodyguard who would accompany him. “Did you check traffic? Are you sure we’ll get there in time?” The driver dipped his head politely, though Ryoki could see by the set of his head that he was merely humoring a petulant employer.

Ryoki extracted the reports he’d been going over before Kate interrupted him, reminding himself how liberating it was to travel without a woman, and how unwise to become dependent on a temporary assistant like Kate—an affirmation he would have to repeat often in the ensuing weeks as he found himself irritated half to death by Miss Blatislav who frequently stood scratching her head at his instructions, unable to interpret the tri-lingual shorthand he unconsciously spoke with Kate.

As the weeks passed, Ryoki felt increasingly isolated among Browning’s people who’d been hired and trained for a lone-wolf-style leader, and lacked the cohesiveness he took for granted in São Paulo. It didn’t take long to see that Browning had constructed his team to enable and protect his crime. Placing his own considerable brilliance at the epicenter, he had hired a pack of yes men, paid them well above the usual scale to ensure their reluctance to quit, and cemented their personal loyalty with random surprise gifts quietly messengered to their homes with little personal notes: “Keep this to yourself”… “Thank you for all your hard work” … “Well done” … “In appreciation”—all purchased out of petty cash, some even brazenly classified as fixed assets, as though Waterman pens could be depreciated over the useful life of a factory. Some of this Ryoki discovered on his own. The rest he learned from the men themselves when he asked what kind of boss Browning had been. Everyone still standing after the initial purge was eager to testify, to prove their company loyalty and keep their jobs. It would take time to unravel who knew how much. Either way, there would likely be more firings. Looking at these men, Ryoki knew Browning would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t opened his fly and exposed himself. Too bad he didn’t have Kate to teach him to sew on a button.

Ryoki had to speak with Kate at frequent odd intervals, and his third evening away he happened to call as she was giving Lucas a piano lesson, their conversation punctuated by slow depressions of the keys, C D E F G A B C, spoken slowly and clearly in English because Lucas had said he wanted to play music and talk American like Dona Kate.

After hanging up, Ryoki sat looking at the walls, his hotel room seeming to shrink as the silence pressed in around him, stuffy and thick. He opened the window and put on some music, plugging in his headphones. Mozart’s 12 Variations, performed by a world-class pianist. But he couldn’t get the childish piano lesson out of his head—C D E F G A B C.

He unplugged his headphones, turned the music up, attempting to drown the silence, create a concert. His neighbor banged on the wall. He turned it off.

On his fourth evening Kate answered his call during a date with Montgomery, and in the background Ryoki heard a string of muffled expletives he would be ashamed to use in front of a lady. She walked away for privacy and Ryoki apologized, though he secretly took a perverse pleasure in causing the interruption, like dropping a surprise trump. Unfortunately she kept the conversation short and to the point, as though taking bullet-point notes on the back of a business card, drawing the Maginot Line between business and pleasure.

Two hours later Ryoki went to bed exhausted and unreasonably irritated by the hardness of his mattress and the arrhythmic splatter of rain, like handfuls of tiny glass beads randomly blown against his window. He couldn’t sleep, his mind revolving on what Kate and Montgomery might have been talking about. Did she tell him that Lucas was subtly changing the house, that Sano the Serious sometimes laughed and galloped around the garden with the boy on his back, that Mariko now kept cookies in the pantry all the time? Did she say that she worried about Lucas, that he was being too careful, too anxious to please?

Two days earlier the boy had been caught in the wee hours, staring at the phone, the new access code crumpled in his fist, tears running down his face, whispering “can’t do it can’t do it.” Ryoki did not want her discussing such intimate household details with Montgomery, though he never said so. Last he’d heard, the subject of Lucas had been banned between them, enacting a truce, agree-to-disagree. He hoped that had not changed.

What if he’d interrupted a kiss?

That was the thought he tried to consciously avoid, but the taboo image slithered under the door like a transgressive ghost, surfer-blond hair tickling into red-mahogany curls as lips sought lips and hands—

Ryoki shuddered violently and got out of bed to turn on his computer, intending to submerge beneath a sea of numbers until the phantasm gasped and drowned. The next evening he agreed to go out with some of Browning’s men—the best of the lot, possible “keepers” for the company, eager to ingratiate themselves. Needed to get to know them better. Should have done it earlier, social responsibilities sorely neglected. Sterile dark hotel room. Long, long night.

As he expected the men took him to a local strip bar, the nicest in town. His mother had always disapproved of the kind of bonding Japanese men did after work, and in his youth she had often admonished him to stay away from such places. “It degrades those poor women,” she said, “even if they don’t know it. And it will degrade you too.”

The first time his co-workers invited him to one of those clubs, his mother’s warning rang clearly in his ears. But the other men laughed at his hesitation, teasing that he must be a virgin, the unspoken sneer that he was different, not part of the group. What did mother know? She ate like a monkey. Slap on the back. Let me get my coat.

Now, sitting between two of Browning’s men he looked around at various scantily clad Brazilian beauties, aping their sisters in Japan, Europe and the United States, glitter rubbed around their eyes for sparkle, their faces contorted in mock passion.
Greasepaint love,
thought Ryoki. The man on his left tossed back his third drink, his eyes glazed, enthralled by the long legs and high heels dancing a fantasy come-hither before him. The man on his right surreptitiously checked his watch, looking tired, uncomfortable.

From the corner of his eye Ryoki saw a bleach-blonde Brazilian woman strutting toward their VIP section where the seats had thicker padding and the tips were bigger. She wore a military hat and a man’s long black overcoat that swung and gapped, presenting peeks of shiny black thigh-high boots, spiky five-inch heels striking the floor to the beat of the music. When she was within eight feet she flung off her hat and dropped her coat in one liquid movement, exposing a black patent mini and bustier two sizes too small. She danced closer, kicking her legs, spinning, twisting, bumping her hips, touching her lips, her movements manic, thrilled, the promise of a wild ride. She came so close that even the muted light and heavy makeup couldn’t conceal the large open sores that dotted her face and body. Meth, most likely. Ryoki had seen a number of addicts among the club rats of Europe, seduced by the chemical sycophant that told them they were beautiful even as it turned them ugly.

The manager and a bouncer rushed forward, catching at the girl’s arms, her gyrations morphing into a feral struggle for survival. “I worked here,” she screeched. “I paid for your car. Everybody came to see me dance! Everybody!”

“Forgive us, gentlemen,” the manager said. “We’re not sure how she keeps getting in.”

Ryoki’s phone rang. Gratefully he hurried to the lobby to answer it.

Lucas had torn a big hole in the Fates. New football, forgot the no-ball-in-the-house rule. Shaking, scared to death. Cecelia caught him trying to run away and snatched him up in her arms, letting him cry and beg for mercy until he had nothing left. Kate was quiet when she’d told her tale, waiting for him to pass judgment.

“Did his ball survive?” Ryoki asked.

Kate hesitated. “The painting might be ruined.” He could hear her apprehension in the silence.

Ryoki remembered his father’s mercy the night he broke a Fabergé egg with a basketball, punishing him for breaking the rule without trying to take the egg out of his hide. “Have Lucas pull some weeds for breaking the rules and we’ll say no more about it,” he said.

As Ryoki clicked off he took one step back into the smoky club, the half-dressed girls, their arms beckoning, lips pouting, teasing him back to his seat. He thought again of the first time he made love: the bored girl, the great lie exposed. At twenty-two he’d gone to his first strip club, sitting wretchedly uncomfortable, checking his watch. At what point had he glazed over, willingly deceived by marsh lights and glitter? He looked at the phone in his hand, the connection broken. Needing a breath, he stepped outside the windowless club and felt the heralding drops on his face and hands, the flash of lightning—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—and the crack of thunder. He stood face up as the heavens began to pour to earth, heedless of the wet, deluged by the fluid homesickness that had been lapping around him for days, testing the cracks, looking for a way in.

Ten minutes later the rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun, but by then he had ordered his reluctant bodyguard to wait for the others while he walked two miles back to his hotel. He needed to be alone, to try and understand what had happened at the club, to think about Kate. Her fault he couldn’t stand being in the club. Given him a taste for authenticity.

Maybe it was time to change his strategy there. Somehow he had turned Kate into forbidden fruit. That was no good; only added to her allure, built her up in his mind. Needed to know the truth, see her as she is.

He’d once read that in a forest, firefighters let certain fires burn naturally, to clear out the surplus dry tinder and avoid the lunatic infernos that invariably resulted from excessively efficient fire suppression. Perhaps if he acknowledged the possibility that he might feel more than a simple attraction, pled to infantile jealousy before his own personal judge, let a small fire burn until it burned out, he could avoid the disaster of falling in love with an unsuitable woman.

By the time he reached his room the idea seemed superb, inspiring. Should have thought of it before. He showered, brushed his teeth and lay back on his pillow, giving himself carte blanche to fantasize without a time limit, falling asleep with her name breathing silently from his lips.

The next morning he awoke in such dreadful loneliness he unconsciously reached for the phone. It was much too early to call, but he was hungry to hear her voice. Halfway through punching in her number he stopped. Maybe this wasn’t such a great strategy; maybe he was digging himself deeper. The phone rang in his hand.

“Hello, sorry,” Kate said, “I know it’s early, but I just got off the phone with your dad and I wanted to catch you in private, before you left for your meetings.”

“What’s going on?” he said, almost worried she could read the passion of his dreams through the crackly connection.

“Your father pointed out that your birthday is in about five weeks and it roughly coincides with Tanaka, Brazil’s one-year anniversary.”

“Not really.”

“Well, if you count the day they started remodeling the offices. Anyway, he wants to combine the parties,” she said. “He can’t be here, but he really wants to make it a birthday you won’t forget. I think it’s really important to him.”

Ryoki groaned. “A huge corporate birthday party will make me look like an egomaniac.”

“People already think that. It wouldn’t hurt for them to see you socializing like a regular guy. You haven’t had much time for that, especially lately. With everything that’s happened, it would be a good chance to promote solidarity in the office, let everybody know things are okay.”

“I’d rather have a cake at home. We could invite Lucas. I bet he likes cake.”

“Your birthday actually falls on a Thursday, and I was thinking we could celebrate your real birthday at home and have the corporate party on Friday, with a minor mention of your birthday. What do you think, good compromise?”