The Bride's Kimono (27 page)

“I
love him. He’s handsome, cultured, and obviously wild for you, my dear,” my mother said as I drove her and my father out of the hotel driveway and south on Connecticut Avenue. Since I’d said to Takeo that I was going to be the designated driver, I’d felt the need to honor my word. The only problem was, driving on the right felt so foreign to me—I’d veered to the left by accident at the beginning of our journey and was finding it hard to live it down.

“Not only did he pay for the meal, he did it on a gold card,” my mother continued. “He’s financially comfortable, even though he’s just your age. I can hardly believe it.”

“He’s using his father’s money,” I said. How different Takeo was from Hugh, who had gone to a public university on a scholarship and had spent a significant portion of his salary as a new lawyer paying for his younger brother’s education.

“Catherine, I think we should leave her to make her own decision,” my father was saying.

“What are you saying, Toshiro? Didn’t you think he was wonderful? The two of them together just
belong
. Their skin color, their hair, the way they walk across a room.”

I’d forgotten how my mother could get spun up with
a little wine. It obviously ran in the family. As for Takeo and me looking attractive together—it was true, to a limited degree, but that was so meaningless. His father would never approve, because I didn’t come from the fabulously wealthy stratosphere that the Kayamas inhabited. I’d come from America, which was not good enough.

“It’s not the old days, Catherine, when parents made decisions about love,” my father said, breaking into my thoughts. “I offended Rei earlier because of my interference. I’m not going to trouble her again.”

“Please don’t talk about that. I have to concentrate on where I’m going,” I said. I had meant to make a left earlier, but the turn would have been illegal, so now there was nowhere to go but into the traffic maelstrom of Dupont Circle—the traffic circle I’d had to cross when I met Hugh inside its center. It seemed as dangerous for drivers as it had been for pedestrians. There were traffic lights, and signs showing access to the streets that radiated out of the circle, but if you weren’t in the correct lane a hundred feet ahead of each sign, it was impossible to find the way out.

I swore under my breath as I missed the lane that would have allowed me to continue on New Hampshire Avenue. Well, I’d just have to go around the circle again.

“Rei, sweetie, you should have allowed me to drive,” my mother said. “I grew up here, practically.”

“No, I needed to drive because I’ve got to make a brief stop somewhere before we go back.”

“If it’s that time of the month, there’s a mini-drugstore in the hotel,” my mother said.

“No, no, nothing of the sort. I want to stop by Jamie’s place tonight for a quick visit.” I exhaled with relief as I made the correct exit out of the circle and onto New Hampshire Avenue, heading northeast.

“A third man?” There was horror in my father’s voice. “Rei, I know I just promised not to interfere in your life, but I’m worried there may be a biological reason for your change in sexual behavior. A more thorough psychiatric evaluation could be a help. We could just keep driving straight to either Sheppard Pratt or Johns Hopkins in Baltimore—”

“Why is it that whenever it comes to my sexuality, the Shimuras think I’m a depraved, mentally ill freak? Jamie is the museum’s conservator, and she’s female,” I explained, trying to keep my voice from rising. “She’s been missing for two days, and I’ve finally found her address and am going to check if she’s all right.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re just seeing a girl. I wouldn’t want anything to shake up the situation with Takeo,” my mother said. “We’d be happy to visit your friend Jamie, as late as the evening is.”

“It would be very nice if you could look for U Street,” I said, though I was churning inside. The situation with Takeo was a disaster. I’d do anything to shake loose from it.

My mother located U Street but clucked her tongue as we drove east. “I don’t like the look of this, Rei. There are hardly any cars around, and look at those poor people loitering on the streets.”

I glanced in the driver’s-side mirror to check out the people she was talking about. In the process, I noticed a dark blue compact car right on our tail. It looked like the one that had followed me the night before.

“Um, Mom, can you get the license number on the car behind us? I think it’s the same crew that followed me yesterday.”

My mother and father both twisted around to look.

“I can’t make out the number, because there’s mud on it, but it looks as if it has Virginia plates.” My mother
sounded more cheerful, all of a sudden. “The driver must be just like us: a tourist from Virginia who’s taken a turn for the worse!”

Or, I thought, it might be my good friends from the police, following me in the hope of catching me with criminal associates. I continued on U Street, feeling just as scared as before. Jamie’s address was only a few blocks farther east. I didn’t want the driver behind me to see me go in—but I didn’t want to give up, either. I had to know if Jamie was alive.

“I think we should go to a police station.” My father’s voice broke into my thoughts.

It was a reasonable idea—even though I distrusted the police—but there were no police stations marked on the Gray Line tourist map of Washington, just McDonald’s restaurants. However, my mother remembered something about a police station on New York Avenue, fairly near the entrance to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. My parents consulted and told me to make a right on Florida Avenue. From there, it was a straight shot through an increasingly dismal area of boarded-up houses, liquor stores, and pawnshops. At one red light, a woman wearing a tiny skirt and a short fake-fur jacket approached our car. When she saw our faces, she stepped back.

“I don’t care if there’s a police station up ahead: this is
not
where I want to go,” I said, making a right turn on P Street. I’d been shaken by the glazed, sad expression on the woman’s face.

“You should never have let her drive!” my mother grumbled to my father.

“She’s got a license,” my father shot back. “And I have to agree with her, Catherine, this neighborhood is not worth continuing to explore. We need to get back to an area with decent people, and shops and lights.”

The blue car was still tailing us. I wished I had the gumption to shoot around the city the way Hugh had, but I wasn’t behind the wheel of a Lexus with a powerful V-8 engine—I was in a Toyota Corolla. Furthermore, I didn’t know my way around Washington. I’d never experienced a city like it—so many streets shooting out at sharp angles, so many circles, so many one-ways and left-turn prohibitions. It was a driver’s nightmare. No wonder people kept recommending I take the Metro.

I saw a traffic circle ahead of me. Great. Another chance to go round and round and lose my bearings. I’d thought the roundabout would turn out to be Dupont Circle, but it turned out that it was a smaller circle that I hadn’t been around before. Not many cars were in the circle, which gave me a bit of inspiration. I went around, switching lanes the way Hugh had done the night before, finally shooting off on P Street, the way I’d originally come.

“Where’s the car?” I asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“It went onto Rhode Island Avenue, westbound. It was quite strange—the driver seemed to lose interest,” my father said. “Maybe he wanted to find that circle all along.”

“I bet the driver thinks we decided to retreat back to Northern Virginia. They’re probably waiting for us at the Washington Suites parking lot. Well, they’ll spend a boring hour there,” I said, feeling my spirits rise.

Despite my parents’ protests, I made a few more turns to get going toward the right part of U Street. I parked on Thirteenth Street, just around the corner from Jamie’s apartment.

“Do you want to come with me, or stay in the—” I began to ask, but my parents were out the door and hurrying up the steps to Jamie’s building. It was a dull
gray town house with metal grates on all the first-floor windows.

“A quick hello, Rei, just to see if she’s all right,” my mother reminded me.

I didn’t answer, because I had no intention of doing that.

The vestibule had a battered steel entry system with a long line of doorbells and an intercom. I pressed the button that said
JAMES STEVENSON
because that was the closest thing to Jamie’s name. I checked my watch. It was ten.

There was no response, so I buzzed again. I heard a woman’s voice say, “Go away.”

“Jamie?” I asked.

“Who is it?” The tone of her voice changed from angry to curious.

“Rei Shimura. I just wanted to make sure you were okay—”

“I am.”

“Could I—come up to talk to you about something?”

She paused, then said, “Okay. I’m on the third floor.”

There was a buzzing sound, and I pushed the door open. I looked at my parents and said, “She wants me to go up.”

“Then we’ll go, too,” my father said. “You can’t expect your mother and me to stay outdoors in this city.”

We trooped upstairs to Jamie’s apartment, which had a big sticker on the door with an alarm company name. When she opened the door to us, I heard the telltale electronic chirp of a door sensor. This neighborhood, a half mile from where the prostitute had approached our car, must not be safe at all. I thought again about the blue car that had been tailing us. If its occupants really had been undercover police, it might have been a good idea to lure them to wait for us outside Jamie’s building. But I hadn’t thought of that—my instinct had been to shake them.

Jamie stood in an open doorway wearing a tank top and leggings that accentuated her fantastically lean shape. Her eyes widened when she saw my parents.

“We were all out together, Jamie,” I said, and introduced them.

She nodded and gave a faint smile. “Please come in. The place is kind of a mess, I have to warn you. I wasn’t expecting company tonight.”

Jamie’s apartment wasn’t bad at all. There was a slight aroma from a cat litter box, and a chubby white cat sprinted into another room when it saw us. Overall, the apartment was a very pleasant one. I saw the remains of Chinese takeout on the dining table, and what a dining table it was—a round walnut one with ball-and-claw feet. The chairs surrounding it had antique needlepoint seats, and there was a magnificent Japanese triptych representing a procession of samurai hanging over the fireplace.

My mother murmured a few words of appreciation and went straight to the wall where a tapestry showing foxes and hounds was hanging. My father asked to use the bathroom.

“I hope he’s not allergic to cats, there’s a litter box in there—” Jamie said, after he’d left.

“Oh, no, don’t worry. Can we talk privately in another room?” I asked her in a low voice. “My parents won’t mind.”

“You’re sure?” Jamie asked as she led me into her bedroom—a small room dominated by a huge nineteenth-century four-poster bed. The canopy and matching coverlet were red silk. My gaze followed her as she went to the bed to straighten the coverlet, at the same time smoothly turning over a framed photograph on the bedside table so I couldn’t see it.

“Have you been in bed the last few days?” In my ef
forts to see the overturned photo, I noticed a stack of books next to her bed. Right on top was Liza Dalby’s book on the anthropology of kimono that I’d read in graduate school. Underneath that was a copy of the
Kama Sutra,
and below it, a small, old leather-bound volume that looked familiar.

“I was exhausted after the reception, so I stayed home for a bit,” Jamie said, jerking me away from my snooping.

“I thought you might have been waiting for me at the Spanish Steps that evening. Were you?”

Jamie looked at me. “Yes, I was. But then your boyfriend came along, so I thought I better get going quickly. I know how these things are.”

“What makes you think Hugh Glendinning is my boyfriend?” I asked, trying not reveal my panic.

“I sensed something strange in the restaurant. I mean, he was the one who had given your name to the committee, so he should have been friendlier, or more excited. So I hung around him during the reception, and it became clear. I watched him write the message about the meeting place. I wanted to speak to you before you got out there—to warn you. You told me that you didn’t make much money, so I thought you were at risk for getting into the same horrible situation that I’m in.”

Now I felt really sick. Was Hugh known around Washington as someone who preyed on penniless but pretty women? “Has Hugh ever come on to you?”

“No, no! I don’t think I’m his type. I mean, he hardly notices me at all. That’s why I was able to see him writing that note on the napkin.”

“So tell me,” I said, relief washing over me for an instant—only to be replaced with the worries I still had. “I noticed you’ve got a private security system, which is
unusual for an apartment, and the apartment is listed under a man’s name. Have you had—a problem with someone stalking you?”

“No. All that’s because I don’t want any break-ins. You’ve seen what the neighborhood’s like, and my furniture’s worth a lot. The security system and the guy’s name on the mailbox is an ounce of prevention.”

I nodded. “So, if you’re not scared of a particular person, why were you so upset at the reception?”

“It’s just—stressful working right now. Allison is demanding, and she also gets angry at the slightest thing. It’s been that way since her husband left her for an intern.”

“I heard about that. It must be hard for her—”

“Not just her,” Jamie snapped. “Ever since the intern-president thing, it’s been very embarrassing to be a junior employee. Especially if you’re a woman. The way Allison’s treating you reminds me of how she was with Sarah, our former intern.”

“She was ticked off at me that evening, and it got even worse the next day, when I did the noon lecture. She used up most of my allotted time telling the audience things that had been in the outline I showed her. And she wouldn’t let me show my slides. The lecture was a bust.”