The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, putting her bags down and reaching across to kiss me. I grunted. I was in a bad mood. Internal politics at the newspaper were beginning to irritate me. The editor had begun to suggest that I was no longer a naïf in Paris and so my columns were becoming a little redundant. In recent times I had begun to spread my wings anyway and was interviewing celebrities for profile pieces but the syndication of the travel column netted me a substantial amount and I hadn’t wanted to let it go, even though I knew he was right.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I said sarcastically. ‘It’s not like I couldn’t have stayed in the office for another hour and got some work done if I’d known.’

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ she snapped back. ‘I said I’m sorry. I got delayed.’

  I shrugged. We rarely had an argument but on some occasions, such as this one, I felt an overwhelming urge to start one. I had sometimes felt that our relationship was too happy and that it would be healthier if there were some points of conflict between us. Hitomi thought I was mad whenever I suggested this and refused to play along but nevertheless, at times I longed for a little drama. Our neighbours, Annette and Luc, fought like cats and dogs and yet remained about the most secure couple I had ever known. We could hear them throwing plates at each other sometimes, or screaming for hours on end at each other using obscene French words which always made me smile, before a silence would descend and we would know that they had found some way to make up with each other.

  Our beers arrived and we sat there silently for a time. I looked across the plaza where we were seated and watched as a tall young woman in a short dress and dark glasses strolled across towards the fountain while a father and son seated outside a restaurant on the opposite side watched her every movement in silence.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Hitomi after a while. ‘What are you angry about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s just been a long day, that’s all. Dupré wants to cancel the travel column for one thing. Wants me to concentrate on the interviews and profiles.’

  ‘Well you enjoy them more, don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess,’ I muttered, not much wanting to discuss it. ‘I don’t know. I’m a bit fed up, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe you need a change,’ she said and I glanced across at her, aware that there was something more in her voice than just making conversation. She was trying hard not to burst into a wide grin and I narrowed my eyes to stare at her.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ve been offered a job,’ she said. ‘A new job.’

  ‘In Paris?’

  ‘In America.’

  I opened my eyes wide and exhaled heavily, unsure what to think of this potential move. ‘America,’ I said. ‘What is it? How did it come about?’

  ‘I applied for it, of course,’ she said. ‘How do you think? It’s part of an exchange programme between Japanese professors. It would only be for one year but what an opportunity!’

  I nodded. Although even at this early stage of information, I knew I quite liked the idea, I didn’t want to appear too enthusiastic too soon and decided to play irritated instead. ‘You applied for a job in America and you never bothered to tell me?’ I said. ‘Thanks for that. That says a lot about us.’

  ‘I never expected to get it,’ she said. ‘Honestly, William, I sent in the application on a whim. Leila had applied and she was expected to get it but then she had to drop out of course.’ Leila was a colleague of Hitomi’s who I had met several times and liked; she was one step more senior than my wife but had recently become pregnant and this was presumably why she had declined any offer made to her. ‘With her not going, I was next in line,’ she continued. ‘I just heard today. It really is a terrific opportunity for me. For us.’

  I nodded and sighed. ‘You said. And what about me?’ I asked. ‘Am I supposed to just down tools and come along too?’

  ‘To do what?’ she asked, unfamiliar with the idiom. ‘To down tools? What do you mean?’

  ‘Am I supposed to just quit my job?’ I asked in a more aggressive voice. ‘Is that what you want me to do?’

  ‘William, it’s only for a year. You’ve managed to bounce between countries before and find a newspaper willing to take you on. You did all right here, didn’t you? And in Japan?’

  I shrugged, unwilling to concede the point. ‘That was different,’ I said. ‘This is Paris. We’re talking about America here. The competition will be stronger. Everyone wants to be Woodward and Bernstein over there. I’ll be a small fish in a big pond. It’ll be harder for me to find work.’

  ‘But you said you wanted to travel more,’ she protested. ‘You said so only last week. You said that we should try to—’

  ‘I know what I said,’ I interrupted, unsure why I was putting up such an opposition to this plan. ‘Jesus, don’t tell me what I said, okay?’ Neither of us spoke for a moment and I could see that Hitomi was becoming upset. ‘All right,’ I said eventually in a calmer voice, trying to reconcile us without backing down. ‘Tell me more about it at least. Where is it anyway?’

  ‘It would start in September in New York University,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Then after Christmas we would be in the University of Colorado for nine months. We could leave again in August if we didn’t like it.’

  I nodded. It was tempting. ‘I might have more luck in Colorado than I would in New York,’ I said. ‘Although, does anything actually happen in Colorado? Isn’t it all just oil rigs and Stetsons?’

  ‘Of course things happen there,’ she said irritably. ‘Don’t be so parochial. I mean it is an entire state after all, people live there. Anyway, you could write another book if you wanted to. Do more television work. Something like that.’

  ‘Let’s think about it,’ I said. ‘How soon do they need to know?’

  ‘This week,’ she replied. ‘By Thursday in fact or they offer it to someone else.’

  ‘Thursday! That’s a bit quick, isn’t it?’

  ‘They need to know,’ she said with a shrug. ‘They have to make plans for the semesters.’

  ‘Then there’s Isaac …’ I muttered, not entirely sure what I even meant by this.

  ‘What about him?’ she asked. ‘What, do you want to bring him with us?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said irritably. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just mean he’s not getting any younger, that’s all. He doesn’t have much time left, right? Maybe I shouldn’t just troop off to the other side of the world when he might need me.’

  Hitomi sat back in her chair and now it was her turn to look angry. She shook her head and looked away, speaking to me through gritted teeth, refusing to even look at me. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t use him as an excuse please. This is my life and my career that I want to follow. You’ve seen your father only a couple of times in the last few years. Don’t pretend you’re the dutiful son now just to spite me.’

  That stung and I felt myself grow even more angry with her. ‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘I may not see him much but that doesn’t mean I don’t … that I don’t …’ I couldn’t even get the words out and she saw her opportunity to jump in.

  ‘Don’t tell me you love him,’ she said. ‘You can’t even be in the same country as him, for heaven’s sake, let alone the same room. You’re the one who always tells me that you have no relationship with him, that he isn’t interested in you, that he just wants you to be some sort of reincarnation of a mythical figure.’

  ‘He’s not mythical!’ I shouted. ‘A myth is something that—’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, leaning forward so our argument would not be heard by all around us. ‘And don’t correct my grammar, all right? We’ve been in Paris for two years now and you’ve only visited him once and even that was a disaster so don’t say no to this opportunity because of him. If you don’t want to go, then that’s fine. Just say so. And tell me why. But don’t make this Isaac’s fault. Don’t give y
ourself another reason to be angry with him.’

  ‘And if I do say no?’ I asked, unsure whether I should ask such a potentially dangerous question or not. (I’d watched enough courtroom dramas to know that you should never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to.) ‘What then? What will you do?’

  She thought about it. I knew what I expected her to say, because she was angry with me and would want to assert herself. However, as always she surprised me. ‘If you say no, I’ll decline the offer,’ she said. ‘If you think I could live without you, you’re crazy. Because I couldn’t. So I’d say no, all right? Is that what you want to hear?’

  I felt a rush of love for her and reached across the table to take her hand, which she whipped away from me in fury. One thing I never fully appreciated about Hitomi was her ability to tell the truth, regardless of the implications for herself. Anyone else in that situation would have said that she would have gone anyway, even if that were not so, and waited to see what my reaction would have been. But even in anger she said she wouldn’t go without me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m being stupid. Of course it’s a good opportunity. Of course you should go. We should go.’

  She perked up and smiled faintly. There was a tear in the corner of her eye which she was blinking back but she failed and it suddenly cascaded down her cheek in a quick dart. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, annoyed with herself showing emotion now. ‘So I can tell them yes?’ she asked. ‘I’ll tell them we’re going?’

  I sighed and nodded. ‘Tell them yes,’ I said. ‘But in a year’s time, if we don’t like it there, we can come back here, yes?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. She looked delighted as we continued to talk about our plans for the rest of the evening, and even though I was sure that I was right in agreeing to go, there was something nagging at the back of my mind which didn’t augur well. Unlike when I had first gone to Japan from London, or when I had left Tokyo for Paris in search of Hitomi, I was not convinced that we were doing the right thing. Somewhere I felt that this was not going to be as good a move as the others had been. I had little choice but to dismiss these thoughts as ridiculous and soon entered into her enthusiastic planning.

  We spent the winter in New York, staying in an apartment on East 16th Street, near Union Square. The university rented it to us at a cheap price. It was convenient for Hitomi’s work but I didn’t like it much. It was quite small for one thing and I couldn’t sleep with the sounds of cars and sirens going off relentlessly below. It was much smaller than our Parisian apartment had been and I found myself going a little stir crazy with the lack of space. We had placed most of our belongings in storage for our year away but had planned on shipping some of them to Colorado after Christmas, since we would be there for the best part of a year. Although I didn’t tell my wife, I spent most of our twelve weeks in the Big Apple, counting down the days in my head until we could leave the big city behind and head westwards.

  Hitomi, on the other hand, took to New York like a fish to water. She made friends quickly at the university; the teacher-exchange programme had apparently seen the department where she was working sending one of their most unpopular members across the world to the Sorbonne and her new colleagues had welcomed her with open arms. I was at something of a loss, however, for I was effectively unemployable due to the short-term status of my stay in the city. I found myself spending a lot of time in the cinemas and riding the subways. I saw every exhibition, painting and artefact in the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. I was seeing less and less of Hitomi as her work took up most of her time and began to feel homesick for Paris. I phoned Annette and Luc from time to time and the sound of their voices always made we want to return there. I began to realise that that was my true home, more than London, more than Japan and definitely more than New York. Despite the fact that I had been a near constant traveller my whole adult life, for the first time I felt displaced.

  Although twelve weeks can pass quickly when one is settled, those twelve went by slowly for me, and as Christmas approached I found myself in a hotel bar near Central Park at three in the afternoon on Fifth Avenue and 88th Street with nothing to do. I was feeling lonely and depressed; over the previous three days I’d seen Hitomi for a total of one hour, having been asleep on two consecutive nights when she’d returned home. We seemed to be communicating through notes left by the side of the bed. We hadn’t made love in a week and I could feel her enthusiasm for her new friends and challenges momentarily taking her away from me. It was stupid, but I was jealous. I’d spent an hour or so that afternoon in the International Center of Photography on 94th Street where there was an exhibition of Japanese photography from the war which I had read a good review of and which I’d wanted to see. There’d been some sort of accident that morning, however, and the main exhibition room upstairs was closed; instead I spent some time looking at the photographs on display in the ground-floor room and even considered buying some prints from the small shop in the lobby but decided against it and was walking back down Fifth Avenue considering a stroll through Central Park on my right when I saw the hotel and decided to step in out of the cold. It had started snowing and the air was as frosty as anything I had ever felt. I could feel my ears and cheeks begin to burn with the cold and resolved to buy a hat with earflaps later on, even though I hate hats.

  I saw the bar on the left-hand side as I entered the hotel and stepped inside. It was quite small and most of the tables were empty. I chose a booth at the end by the window and took my coat off, rubbing my hands together quickly to bring the blood back. The bartender – over six feet tall and perfectly sculpted, obviously either a struggling actor, model or hyphenate – came over with a bowl of cashew nuts and I ordered a beer, which he brought presently in a tall, unusual glass which I liked drinking from. I felt an unnatural urge to steal it.

  I was about to reach for the inside pocket of my coat to retrieve the book I was reading at the time when I noticed a woman enter the bar. It wasn’t her beauty that made me notice her – although she was extremely attractive – but the fact that she wore a pair of the blackest glasses I had ever seen and a scarlet coat. Looking like a heroine out of an old Joan Crawford movie, or maybe Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she walked straight to the bar and muttered something quickly to the bartender before taking the booth a few seats down from me and pulling out a cigarette. I glanced at her as she took her glasses off and when she caught me staring she gave me a bug-eyed look of irritation and I turned away quickly. What looked like an Irish coffee arrived for her and she paid immediately, which suggested that she wasn’t going to be there very long. No tab.

  I started to read my book but something about the woman had captured my attention and I found myself unable to concentrate. When I dared to look back again, some ten minutes later, I noticed that she was reading too and to my surprise, she was reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, the same novel I had been reading on the evening in Paris when Hitomi had decided that we should go to London to visit Isaac. I thought about this coincidence and felt an urge to speak to the woman, as if it had been pre-ordained that I should. She was engrossed in the novel now and didn’t notice as I stole furtive looks in her direction but the jacket of the book – which was dominated by the large brown spying eye of a Japanese boy – seemed to be winking at me and before I could talk myself out of it, I stood up and walked towards her table, leaving my drink behind me to prove I wasn’t going to bother her for long, and waited there for a moment, wishing I had decided on my opening gambit earlier, before she looked up at me casually.

  ‘Yes?’ she said in a dry voice. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘I was just … sitting over there,’ I muttered, indicating the other seat. ‘I noticed what you were reading and felt like I should speak to you. I read it myself recently. I liked it very much.’

  She thought about this for a moment, obviously
deciding whether she should dismiss me out of hand or humour me a little. ‘I read it when I was a girl,’ she said eventually. ‘I wanted to read it again.’ There was an awkward silence as we tried to decide what was the best thing for us to do now. Happily, she solved it. Her sudden friendliness surprised me; she had sized me up in a moment and decided I wasn’t a threat. (I wasn’t sure whether to take this as a compliment or an insult.) ‘Would you like to join me?’ she asked, nodding towards the seat opposite her. ‘Mr …?’

  ‘Cody,’ I said. ‘William Cody.’

  She frowned, as if considering this name. ‘Buffalo Bill, right?’ she asked as I retrieved my drink, sat down and, unwilling to go into the details, laughed.

  ‘Coincidence,’ I said. ‘I get that a lot.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked suddenly, which surprised me. I shook my head and she seemed surprised. ‘You don’t? You’re not just saying that?’

  I laughed nervously. I’m sorry,’ I said, staring at her face, wondering whether she was a movie star perhaps, or a chat-show host. ‘Should I?’

  She shook her head quickly as if she didn’t know why she had asked the question in the first place and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘Why should you indeed? We’ve only just met.’

  There was a pause and I waited for her to tell me, but no name was forthcoming. ‘So who are you then?’ I asked her finally. ‘Or am I supposed to guess?’

  ‘No, you don’t have to guess,’ she said. ‘My name is Eleanor Nightingale.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, reaching across to shake her hand. She was a little older than me, perhaps in her early thirties, and very beautiful. She kept her head turned away from the bar and the other couples so that only I could really see her. Her name meant nothing to me. ‘I only came over because I thought it was a coincidence, you see,’ I explained. ‘I lived in Japan for a couple of years, you see.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I’ve never been there. I’d love to go. What part did you live in?’