Secrets of the Apple (7 page)

Kate returned carrying a bottle of sarsaparilla which Ryoki eyed suspiciously, noticing a ring of dust at the base of the neck, a telltale sign of a long stint in the backroom. “I didn’t know they made this anymore,” she said. “Maybe they don’t,” he was about to say, but she went on, “I’ve always wondered what it tasted like.” He considered explaining the difference between adventure and recklessness, but instead headed off to look for jalapeño cheese chunks, a guilty pleasure his friends in Tokyo considered disgusting.

Though a shade chilly, it was relatively warm and dry for January, and after consulting their list of landmarks, they decided to put on their jackets and have an outdoor picnic, stopping in St. Helena at a little park on the west end of Main Street. They retrieved a thick blanket from Kate’s trunk and spread it on the ground, sitting down about two feet apart, as far as the blanket would allow without scooting to the absolute outer edges. Kate opened her bottle of sarsaparilla and took a small sip. Ryoki watched from the corner of his eye as she pulled a puzzled face, then took a larger swig.

“Almost, but not quite completely nasty,” she said, looking disappointed.

He pulled a bottle of cream soda out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to her over his arm, like a waiter. “I covered your bet,” he said.

Caught off-guard, she let out a sudden snort/laugh/choke that might have been kind of gross except that it made her blush and cover her mouth, making her laugh even more genuine and unfettered. For a thoughtless instant Ryoki wanted to touch and kiss her, to take that laughter into himself, just as he’d wanted to taste her music the night before. But he drew back and looked away, as though her blouse had come unbuttoned and she hadn’t realized it yet. She composed herself, clearing her throat three times before she could swallow the rest of the funny. “You look so much like your mother,” she said with a controlled smile.

“I’m nothing like my mother.”

“No, you’re more stern and austere than either of your parents. But just when I think I’m going to sew dead fish into your coat, I see your father looking out of your eyes and I give you one more day.” She had an unnerving gift for delivering outrageous insults without giving offense, but her next comment shook him.

“Years ago your mother sent me your picture and said you’d been studying too hard at Harvard and would I like to visit and calm you down.” Ryoki choked in involuntary disgust and she put out a reassuring hand, retracting it before making contact. “She was kidding. It was a running joke with her. Your dad did offer me a job, though, about a year ago when things changed for me. He said his stupid son was killing himself in London and could use my help. He was just being nice, but I appreciated the gesture. He’s a kind man, all the way through.”

Killing himself
. That had to be an expression borrowed from his mother. Ryoki wondered how kind it would have been to send an English teacher devoid of any sense of direction into a foreign country to be a dead weight in a perfectly functional and cohesive office. Seemed to go against his father’s better business sense. Of course, here he was in San Francisco without his team—

“Brian told me you tripled sales and productivity in the European division,” she said, shifting the subject.

“I had a very good team,” Ryoki said modestly, handing over her sandwich and picking up his own.

In the ensuing conversational lull, Ryoki watched from under his lashes to see whether she appreciated her truly inspirational sandwich. Her eyes opened and closed in a long blink at her first taste. “Wow, I’ll have to remember that place,” she said, unrolling the wrapper and beginning to pry up the top.

Without thinking Ryoki grabbed her wrist. “Don’t,” he blurted, “everything will slide around and upset the balance.” She smiled, her eyes quizzical. He withdrew his hand awkwardly.

She rewrapped the sandwich, eating delicately, folding down the paper a little at a time, stopping frequently to dab at the corners of her mouth. Halfway through, Ryoki realized his fatal mistake. He had contrived an excellent sandwich by his own masculine standards. But Kate was a less aggressive biter and apparently lacked the gustatory skills necessary to manage so many slippery condiments. In the end he sighed to see half the roast beef had slid limp and slimy into the wrapper and made a mental note that her sandwiches required thinner bread and at least one quarter less meat. Not particularly useful knowledge, but a true
Artiste
always wishes to perfect his craft.

Being January, they had the whole place to themselves, and in the bright sun they felt warm and contentedly drowsy in their jackets. The park wasn’t very big or lushly wooded, just a gazebo and the occasional tree on a grassy island in the middle of a town kept self-consciously quaint so landlords could charge higher rents and tourists would spend more on oil paintings and art glass bowls. Yet, as Ryoki leaned back on his hands with the sun on his face and his stomach comfortably sated, his mind kept drifting to the story of the Garden of Eden. As a child he’d begged his mother to tell it a thousand times, the final story before he drifted off to sleep. Even as a boy he’d been intrigued by the romance of the tale, secretly playing Adam in his home’s large, wild garden, the Lord of Paradise all alone where no one could see him or make him feel different. Here in California he couldn’t guess what had triggered such a disconnected memory, unless maybe it was Kate. Maybe she looked sort of the way his childish mind had envisioned Eve—simple clothes, abundant dark hair, no particular nationality, clear, innocent expression. It felt like decades since he’d spent time alone with a woman whose innocence appeared to run deeper than her makeup.

Even after they left the park, Ryoki continued to feel curiously cheery and relaxed, not even bothered when the much-touted winery tour turned out more disjointed than informative. Their guide kept trailing off as he repeatedly stroked his comb over, his twitchy eye rolling almost against his will to a heavyset tourist with rings on all her fingers and a Guinness-worthy chest. In a quiet moment apart from the group, Kate whispered that the tourist and the guide would come to a bad end. Chest would hock all her rings to pay for a gastric bypass, hoping to impress her new boyfriend, but Twitchy would find he missed her magnificent girth and eventually go rub his bald head on somebody else. Ryoki laughed out loud, causing everyone to turn and stare. A tall Nebraskan woman with Tiffany X earrings elbowed her stubby little husband and mouthed, “Honeymooners.” He whispered back, “Five bucks, not married.” It took them four minutes to catch a glimpse of left hands—no rings. The wife handed her husband a five dollar bill, prompting Ryoki to speculate that her henpecked husband had been begging for candy or possibly a balloon.

Inventing the stories of strangers in Napa Valley furnished a bountiful source of conversation that spun on out into the parking lot and down the road. Concentrating his powers of invention, Ryoki barely registered the two dead ends and four wrong turns it took to get them to a shopping plaza highlighted in Kate’s instructions. But by late afternoon the game had grown stale and their words dried up as they wandered in and out of swanky little shops, looking at useless pretties. Ryoki tolerated the ritual because he wanted to buy her a little gift, a thank you for giving him such a pleasant day, some souvenir of Wine Country that would please her without getting too personal. Women, he knew, had a way of intimating what they desired, so he waited for the signs—the light in the eyes, the little squeal, the touching, the 360 examination. He speculated Kate would be the subtle type, but still he looked for the “tell.”

He was right, Kate was subtle, so subtle she never seemed to give any signal at all. She looked around politely, but never exclaimed, never left a fingerprint. He almost had hope over a blue glass bowl because she said it “flowed like water,” but she moved on and the afternoon started to drag. Luckily they happened across a large book store and Kate stopped in her tracks, peering through the window.

“I’ve never been in here. Do you mind if we go in? I’m out of anything to read,” she said, her eyes alight. Relieved, Ryoki opened the door.

“You can probably buy these same books anywhere,” he said.

“Different place, different things float to the top. Twenty minutes? Do you think you could amuse yourself that long?” she asked. Ryoki had barely nodded before she sped off. This seemed an odd store to choose, but whatever she wanted, he would indulge her. He shuffled around fiction for fifteen minutes, picking up books and putting them down. No point buying something he didn’t have time to read. Finally he settled into an easy chair with a magazine, guessing that twenty-minutes meant at least thirty. It turned out to be thirty-three.

As she approached him, a stack of books in her arms, he noticed two men watching her as she entered his space, knew they judged him by looking at her. All men did it. Women and cars, a man’s two most visible billboards. A woman in a very short skirt and a low-cut blouse meant the man was about to get lucky. A woman with glasses and a briefcase placed her man squarely in the professional classes. Kate was a lady, placing him in executive management. Ordinarily he didn’t begrudge other men a modest peek, but this peek was lengthening into an ogle. He rolled them an acknowledging look, their ogle duly registered and declined. The two men wandered away.

“Why do you even bother with a watch?” he asked without rancor.

“Twenty is the new thirty,” she said, transposing the numbers and making her joke a head-scratcher, something she did a couple of times a day, no point mentioning it.

“Did you find anything?” she asked.

Ryoki had gotten sucked into an article about aging politicians who make laws for increasingly technological societies. He waved his magazine and started toward the registers, reaching back for the books in her arms. She slapped his hand, giving him five. He looked at her, confused.

“Books?” he said.

“I’ll show you when we get out,” she said, leading him to the front desk and pulling out her credit card.

At the car she didn’t put her bag in the trunk as Ryoki had expected, but set it on the floor behind her seat. She retrieved a large, thickish volume from the bag, pulled a pen from the door pocket and hastily scribbled in the front pages before handing it to Ryoki:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, annotated edition. The inscription read, “To commemorate your journey, From The Porters.”

“You’ve probably read this, but it may have been a while. This is one I like to keep close by,” she said.

Ryoki sat turning the book over in his hands. He’d stabbed at
Huck Finn
as a teenager, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the written dialect with the familiar cadence of Brian Porter’s liquid speech. It had been one of the few times English had ever felt like a foreign language, frustrating him unbearably and turning him away from Southern American writers. Still, her thought touched and gratified him. “Thank you,” he said.

“It will give you something to read next time you can’t sleep,” she said as she pulled away from the curb.

He looked at her profile, trying to understand what ticked inside her brain. How could she have known he hadn’t slept? Had she figured it out first thing at the hotel? All day he’d surprised himself by feeling wide awake and alert. How had he given himself away? Why did she always seem to know more than she was telling?

“Do you have a crystal ball, Kate?”

“Yes, but it’s in the shop,” she said.

He continued to study her for another moment before reaching into the backseat for her bag. “Do you mind?” he asked, looking through the rest of the titles: three Nobel Prize-winning novels, one escapist fantasy and two textbooks on Japanese culture and business. He held up the business books. “Kiss up?” She gave him a long-suffering look, snatched the books and tossed them in the backseat. He figured he understood all about Americans, knew how to play the game. But glancing back at the books, he worried that he appeared so alien to her that she studied him like an anthropologist. Ordinarily he didn’t waste time thinking of such things, as his bank account had purchased a fairly accurate assessment of most women’s perception of him. But all week long Kate had kept him in the foreign province of uncertainty and he was still keeping a vague lookout for her Rosetta Stone. He picked up her receipt which had fluttered into his lap. “Maybe you should think about the library.”

“Librarians hate it when you write in their books.”

“These should keep you a while,” he said.

She made a throaty growl that sounded indistinctly like “Two weeks,” and turned on the radio, humming softly to herself. Lulled by the music and the gentle whine of the tires, Ryoki nodded off, sleeping peacefully all the way back to his hotel.

B
y Monday morning the glow of Friday and Saturday had caught a chill and passed away. On Sunday he had worked until he could hardly see straight, slept a short, uneasy night, and headed to the office having accomplished only half his scheduled allotment. Napa Valley had been a mistake. An excess of shared jokes and matching café lattes could slow the process. He needed her to be a machine.

At 8:07 a.m. he heard the ritual
click click click
of heels, interrupted by a
slipclick
as Kate fell off her heels hurrying down the marble hallway, as though rushing would rewind the seven minutes of her lateness. He thought she probably wrenched her ankle
again,
as she occasionally did when she lost track of her walking skills. Odd, for someone who otherwise gave every appearance of being elegant and graceful. Why wasn’t she limping all the time? And what went on in those mysterious minutes that repeatedly separated her from the appointed hour?

There was a jingle of keys and the
whump
of her laptop bag as she crossed the thick carpet in the office next door. He sat up straighter, tugged unconsciously at his tie, concentrated on his screen, steeled himself to be brisk, businesslike.

At 8:12 she entered his office. He expected a proffered pastry or two, maybe a frilly blouse or a wispy pink scarf. Instead she wore a navy suit and carried only a heavy gray binder and her laptop, her most severe appearance yet. She sat across from him, smiled an abbreviated greeting and opened her binder. He was all prepared with a good stern look, cocked and ready to blast the first flutter of the lashes or pouting of the lips, the slightest breath of sweet
kawaii
that hinted at their friendly, almost intimate weekend. This unforeseen professionalism caught him a left hook and he spoke snidely without thinking, “Long pearls today?”