Zen Attitude (32 page)

As we waited for the car to be brought to us on the busy corner of Fourteenth and K streets, Hugh folded the tiny black blindfold into my hand. “It’s never been used, if that makes you more comfortable. I saved it from my last trip to Zurich.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in regifting?” I asked lightly.

“Well, you didn’t want a ring. What else can I offer you?” The undercurrent of irritation in Hugh’s voice was clear. I’d worn his beautiful two-carat emerald for a short while, but ultimately returned it, because engagement rings scared me just as much as turning thirty did. Hugh was thirty-two; he’d been eady for the last three years. I wondered if I’d ever be.

The valet pulled up with the car and jumped out to open the passenger side for me. I got in, feeling a mixture of excitement and fear about what lay ahead. As we pulled off into traffic, I eclined my seat as far as it would go, hoping that this way, nobody would notice the woman with short black hair and a matching mask over her eyes. Anyone who caught a glimpse might think I’d just come out of plastic surgery or something like that—though most Washington women who went in for that flew to Latin America, where the plastic surgeons were good and there were no neighbors to bump into. “Are we headed for the airport?” I asked, with a sudden ush of hope.

“No chance.” Hugh sounded regretful. “It would have been fun to get away, but I can’t risk any absences when the partner-track decisions are forthcoming.”

Hugh was a lawyer at a high-pressure international firm a few blocks away. He’d been working for the last year on a class action suit that still wasn’t ready to roll. His work involved frequent travel back to Japan, the country of my heritage, where we’d met a few years earlier. I would have loved to travel with him, but I couldn’t, because I was banned from Japan. It was a complicated story that I didn’t want to revisit on a night when I was supposed to be happy.

“Don’t think about it,” I muttered to myself. It was my habit to talk to myself sometimes, to try to shut out the bad thoughts that threatened what was a perfectly pleasant life.

“What don’t you want to think about?”

“I’m getting nauseated from wearing a blindfold in a moving car,” I said. “Not to mention that my nerves are shot because you won’t tell me what’s going to happen next.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Just hang on, I’ll open the window.” Hugh pressed the control that slid down the passenger-side window next to me. “We’re just going around the corner to park. Will you survive another two minutes?”

I nodded, glad for a chance to listen to the sounds of the road. I could tell this wasn’t our neighborhood, Adams-Morgan, with its mix of pulsating salsa music, honking horns, and shouting truck drivers. All I heard was a slow, steady purr of cars caught in traffic. After a while, the car moved again and turned a corner. Then it stopped. Hugh’s window slid down.

“Paradise, sir?” A strange man’s voice asked.

“That’s right. Were staying till the wee morning hours,” Hugh said. “Will this cover it?”

Before the parking valet could answer, I had a few words of my own. “Hugh, you
know
that I have a nine-thirty meeting at the Sackler Gallery tomorrow. You can very well stay until the wee hours, but I can’t.”

“Job interviews come and go. Thirtieth birthdays are only once!” He sounded positively gleeful.

My door was opened, and I unbuckled my seat belt. Then I felt a hand on my wrist, helping me out.

“You must be the girl getting the big birthday surprise.” The valet’s voice came from somewhere to the left.

I was busy working through the situation—was this a boutique hotel, maybe?—when Hugh tugged my hand. “There’s going to be a downward flight of steps in a moment. Just take it slowly.”

“What kind of a hotel has subterranean rooms?” I demanded.

“You’ll know soon enough.” Ten steps, and then a flat surface. “I’m going to hold the door open. Just step through.”

I had no sight, but my other senses were bombarded. First, the sounds—“Japanese Girls,” an Eels song pounding ominously, and lots of voices: talking, laughing, shrieking. Then there were the smells—smoke from cigarettes and sandalwood incense.

Someone took my other hand and pressed briefly down on the area over my knuckles. I guessed that I was getting a hand-stamp, the way bouncers did at bars.

“Hugh, this is so silly,” I complained. “I want to see where I am. If this is the S and M club we read about in
City Paper
I’m not going any farther.”

Hugh sighed and said, “I’d hoped you’d stay blindfolded until the magic moment, but if you’re that anxious, you may as well take it off. Go ahead.”

Had I known of the series of events about to unfold—not this night, but in the crazy, dangerous days that rolled out, right after my birthday—I might have just kept the blindfold on. I would have remained in Hugh’s thrall, powerless to make my own choices, but secure—still twenty-nine and safe as houses.

But I’m not the kind of girl who stays in one place for long, whether it’s a city or a nightclub vestibule.

I slid off the blindfold, and opened my eyes.

photo by Jim Burger

SUJATA MASSEY
was a reporter for the
Baltimore Evening Sun
and spent several years in Japan teaching English and studying Japanese. She is the author of
The Salaryman’s Wife, Zen Attitude, The Flower Master, The Floating Girl, The Bride’s Kimono, The Samurai’s Daughter, The Pearl Diver
, and
The Typhoon Lover.
Her books have garnered numerous awards, and critics have called her stories captivating, her writing clear-eyed and unique, and her characters complex, appealing, and wryly humorous.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Anthony and Edgar Award Nominee

The Typhoon Lover

The Pearl Diver

The Samurai’s Daughter

The Bride’s Kimono

The Floating Girl

The Flower Master

Zen Attitude

The Salaryman’s Wife

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Z
EN ATTITUDE
. Copyright © 1997 by Sujata Massey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

F
IRST
H
ARPER PAPERBACK PUBLISHED
2005.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Massey, Sujata.

Zen attitude / Sujata Massey.

p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-06-089921-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-089921-9

EPub Edition © August 2013 ISBN 9780062314635

1. Shimura, Rei (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Japan—Fiction. 3. Antique dealers—Fiction. 4. Japanese Americans—Fiction. 5. Tokyo (Japan)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A79965Z34 2005

813’.54—dc22

2005052839

05 06 07 08 09
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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