Secrets of the Apple (8 page)

She leaned forward to arrange her things and the necklace swung against the binder, rebounded and clicked against the buttons on her suit jacket. He heard a funny noise like escaping air, only afterwards recognizing it came from his own lips.

“I’ve been talking to Brian and looking over some company records for the European division,” she said. “I see you tripled sales through a series of joint venture agreements with existing firms in several emerging Eastern European countries. Pretty slick to end-run the severe trade restrictions and beat your competition to the market. Are you intending to use a similar technique to speed up market penetration in South America?”

That sounded like her uncle.

“To some extent,” he said, clearing his throat. “But with more established competition across the whole continent and the complicated bureaucracy, we won’t see those kinds of results for a long time, at least not in Brazil.” He paused. “I thought you weren’t a businesswoman.”

“I can read reports, and if I understand your method, I can be better prepared. And yesterday I started to worry that you weren’t going to get out of here on time.” It gratified Ryoki to see her take his deadline seriously, a sign that she might be a team player.

She was a right-hander who wore her watch on her right wrist, though she always pulled it off before they started working in earnest, setting it on the desk before opening her laptop. She pressed the power button and immediately began fiddling with the keys “to loosen up the board,” she said. She should have used a company computer and he couldn’t understand why she insisted on using her own with its finicky keyboard, which tended to skip letters, highlight or stick on all caps for no apparent reason. But they’d already had that discussion and she’d remained immoveable on the grounds that she wanted hers close by and didn’t care to drag two. Her argument made no sense, but he stopped forcing the issue once he recognized her to be a technophobe. When the project concluded he intended to give her a fountain pen as a parting shot, or better yet, a quill and a bottle of ink.

She bumped her watch and it slid to the floor.

“Eventually you’re going to lose that,” he warned her.

“I can’t stand the way it rubs on the keyboard. I don’t really like things on my wrists,” she said, bending to pick it up.

“Not even bracelets?” He had yet to meet a woman who didn’t enjoy a pretty bracelet, especially if it sparkled.

“Inconvenient,” she said, tapping at her keys.

Ryoki was about to ask how convenient it was to wear a yard of pearls to the office, but then he remembered he was supposed to be brisk and said nothing. They worked at his desk for the better part of the morning, including a discussion of the specifics of his strategy. She frankly explained her strengths and weaknesses, and together they refined her role. By the end of the day he started to feel, not relief exactly, but the possibility of survival. It was the first ray of hope he’d felt since arriving in San Francisco.

By the end of the second week, he privately considered Kate a godsend. They worked together with a natural ease and efficiency that, had they known it, echoed the pleasant and profitable working relationship between Hiroshi Tanaka and Brian Porter. She spent so much time working on the other side of his desk that when she finally moved into her hidden cubicle in the corner of his office, he actually saw her less.

For the first four hours he remembered she was there, despite the high dividers, because she had just clattered her things into her new desk and apparently every paperclip had to be moved at least twice. For the next three hours he was aware of her presence because her red trench coat had swung around the coat rack and caught on the paneling, snagging the corner of his eye like red paint splashed on dark wood. But in the early evening he strode in from the outer office engrossed in the report in his hands and failed to lean to the right as required before dropping into his temperamental chair. Arms and legs flailing, papers sailing in every direction, he swore with the profound length and creativity of a Shakespeare.

“Are you all right?” she called cheerily.

He froze.

“No. Yes, I’m fine, thank you, just getting comfortable.” His voice sounded squeaky and uneven, like a choirboy about to lose the soprano solo.

“It must be hard to sit on that stick all day.” She spoke so impassively he had actually retrieved all his papers before realizing she was not referring to his chair.

“Wait, what—”

There was a small thump and a stack of binders slid off Kate’s desk, a suspiciously fortuitous interruption. He could hear her scrabbling around to pick them up when her phone rang. She answered it sounding perfectly sweet and innocent. No defense against her.

She stuck her head around the partition. “Will you need anything else tonight?”

“No, thank you. See you tomorrow.”

She spoke into the phone, “Meet you at the theater in forty-five minutes.” She hung up and he heard the papery whoosh and rustle of a desk being tidied, the buckle of a laptop bag and the final grainy swish as she pulled her trench coat from the stand and slid it up her arms. “Goodnight,” she said, her hand on the doorknob.

Ryoki found he wasn’t quite ready for her to leave. “Forty-five minutes to the theater?”

“I don’t think it’s too far, but there are those one-way streets and parking’s a bit iffy,” Kate trailed off, rolling her eyes. He’d forgotten to factor in the indispensable “time to get lost.”

“You better hurry,” he said.

When the door shut behind her, some invisible detail changed in the room, maybe something to do with the air pressure, or possibly the temperature. Gradually minor noises took on a strange magnification, like the grinding
tikka tikka
of the antique clock on the credenza and the splatter of raindrops against the windows as the long drizzle finally turned ardent. He felt a chill in his arms and rose to put the clock in a drawer, wondering how he could have occupied this room for two weeks without consciously noting such an irritating sound. Back at his desk, he picked up a pen, reminding himself how rejuvenating it was to work in solitude, free to swear all he wanted. He put the pen down, remembering he didn’t need it. He sat back in his chair. The office felt dead.

He ground forward, eyes on his screen, occasionally checking his watch, jealous of Kate’s escape. Was her friend a man or a woman? What movie were they going to see? Comedy? Action? Romance? Popcorn? Dinner? Such invasive curiosity made him feel like a stalker and he struggled to focus, fidgeting like a schoolboy until he gave up at 10:15.

By the third week Ryoki had mastered the intricacies of his chair, leaning and dropping without a thought. But Kate was still a puzzle. It had become his habit to observe her at odd moments, through lowered lids or from the corner of his eye. Every morning she arrived five to seven minutes late, heels clicking, heels slipping, chirping a “Good Morning” or a “Hey, you,” to everyone from partners to clerical staff, calling many by name—except him, of course. It had taken a week and a half to realize she never called him anything, not Mr. Tanaka or Sir or Ryoki. He didn’t let on he’d noticed, but it was more than bothersome; it was faintly insulting. He tried nearly every day to trick her into giving him some kind of appellation. No luck so far.

He observed that a few of the men in the outer office had little crushes on her, even tried to detain her as she swept past their desks. What’s-His-Name from legal research always spoke to Ryoki with the crisp authority of a pompous master of his craft, until Kate appeared and he began blushing and choking on his tongue. Ryoki thought she must have noticed, but he wasn’t sure. After so much close contact he’d begun to sense in her a certain insulating self-containment that made it hard to say what she did or did not see. Sometimes he found her lunching at her desk, an uninspired peanut butter and jam sandwich with a half-moon bite pushed to the side as she scribbled barely legible notes in a schoolgirl’s wide-ruled notebook—or typing furiously on a Word file, or writing slowly in a scuffed and stained leather binder that bore no company logo. A few times he caught her standing like a stork, one shoeless foot bent up to rest above the opposite knee, intently gazing into some inner universe. Her toes fascinated him, especially the bright rose-red nail polish with a single flower on the right big toe, so utterly different from her pale, nearly colorless fingernails. He knew about the toes because she generally slipped off her shoes when they worked alone in the office. Maybe her shoes were uncomfortable, or maybe she hoped to conceal the rather obvious coordination deficiencies that made high heels a perilous vanity. These idiosyncrasies he found tolerable, even charming, but the clairvoyance was one drink too many.

On Monday afternoon of his fourth week, Ryoki had rifled every drawer, the wastebasket, his briefcase, and emptied all his pockets in search of his keys—again, as he’d been doing intermittently for a solid year, wondering if some mischievous departed ancestor occasionally decided to drop his harp and torment the living. Eventually the keys always turned up, but in a place he would never have left them himself. At last he heard Kate’s heels clicking back from lunch. Click click slip click. Ryoki composed his face, trying for Mildly Concerned.

“Kate, have you seen my keys?”

She approached his desk without putting down her bag. He looked away for an instant, double-checking one more drawer just in case, and heard the keys clank as she magicked them from thin air and dropped them next to his computer. This was the third time she’d done it. He needed to remember not to look away.

“Do you hide my keys so you can pretend to perform a miracle?” he asked, his annoyance breaking through the jokey pretense.

“Did you skip lunch looking for your keys? I bet you haven’t eaten all day.” She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe I should order you some sesame chicken before I put you through a wall.” Ryoki apologized shamefaced and put the keys back in his pocket.

“There, did you see that, pull those out,” Kate said. Mystified, Ryoki took out his keys and laid them on the desk. “You’re right-handed, but when you wear that suit you put your keys in your left pants pocket, and when you sit you drop them on the left side of your desk where they get buried between stacks of paper.”

He’d owned that suit for a year.

“Is there something wrong with your right pocket?”

“The tailor forgot to sew it in,” he admitted. “I meant to have it fixed, but I never got around to it.”

“The pocket’s not there, in a suit like that? It
looks
like it’s there. I assume these are lined,” she said, coming closer and briefly rubbing the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, careful to hold it away from his body. She opened her bag, retrieved a pair of miniature scissors from a small sewing kit and began deftly snipping.

Taken aback, Ryoki kept absolutely still, desperately concentrating on baseball, the windup of the pitcher, the crisp crack of the bat, the ball sailing high, far out between first and second, going, going—

“Finished,” she announced, plucking the last tiny dark threads from the pocket and letting them flutter into the trash. “Haven’t you ever unpicked the basting from the pockets of a new suit?”

“Basting?” He’d been patronizing the same London tailor for as long as he’d been buying his own suits, but the sacred ritual of “basting” had never come up. “What would possess a person to make a pocket and then sew it closed?”

Kate didn’t answer, just reassembled her sewing kit and dropped it into her bag as she walked to her cubicle. Behind the dividers he could hear her unscrew the lid to her hand cream. The jar was tan, a flat round disk a little bigger than a hockey puck. He knew she would return with the faint scent of warm sweet vanilla on her hands and his mouth would water for cookies. These things he noticed, but not a deep pocket in his own pants. Ryoki picked up his keys in disgust and dropped them in his right pocket.

It was over a week before he could bring himself to wear that suit again, Valentine’s Day, not that he’d noticed. He arrived in his office as usual, pulling his keys from his right pocket and dropping them on top of a square box wrapped in plain red paper with a large hand-tied white bow. A surprise. He picked up the accompanying handwritten note which opened with no greeting, which meant it could only be from Kate.

Apparently on Japanese Valentine’s Day women present chocolates to the men with whom they work/date/love or consider friends. This smells like a marketing strategy. Some shrewd candy company probably figured women are more apt to remember and therefore spend money. Personally, I believe Japanese women should revolt against the commercial pressure and make men spoil them. However, I did not want you to feel homesick.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Kate

He opened the box and bit into a chocolate chip cookie. Excellent chocolate, delectable chewy texture with just a hint of crunch, the work of a real A
rtiste.
He sat at his desk with the box at his elbow, musing that if he were going to be around on March 21, he would have to prepare an equally delightful return gift, perhaps an original sandwich hand-crafted to fit her mouth, though he had scant hope that she would genuinely understand or appreciate it. But he wouldn’t be around, so he was off the hook. When he looked down again, half the cookies had vanished, apparently stolen by trolls. He put the box in his lower desk drawer, determined not to open it again for at least a day, knowing that about 3:30 his resolve would crack. At 9:10 Kate entered his office wearing a striking red suit and her long pearls.

“That’s a—bright choice,” he said. Red, too alluring for the office. How could she not know? That red suit probably hung in the closet between the pink plaid and the green floral he’d dubbed her “Georgia O’Keefe.”

“Red is my favorite color. Besides, it’s Valentine’s Day.”

“I like green, but I’d never wear a green suit.”

“Because you’d look like a leprechau—” Ryoki shot her a look. “Red on a woman is a power color,” she amended.