by Paula Hiatt
Kate drove a dark blue Mazda sedan, not new, but waxed and very clean. “It’s paid for,” she said with pride rather than apology as she beeped open the locks and slid into the driver’s seat hips first, legs second, as if it was a Bentley. She handed him a few sheets of paper listing possible attractions, each with a set of directions neatly printed to the side. The instructions seemed suspiciously detailed and landmark-heavy, lots of vague “turn left at the big blue thing,” and “2nd street (3rd?) after the Chinese market,” without a single “east” or “west” anywhere. Perhaps this was a joke of Tom’s that Kate had not yet cottoned on to, though it appeared to be written in a woman’s hand. He put the papers down between them, scanning the dash for the GPS and coming up empty.
“Where’s your map?”
She hesitated for a beat, thinking. “Oh, yes.” She reached into the pocket behind his seat and pulled out a machine-folded, absolutely pristine map fresh from the printers—“San Francisco” on one side, “Northern California” on the other. “I have another one,” she offered, producing another virgin specimen, this one titled “California Wine Country.” She smiled like a grandmother bestowing cupcakes. “Brian gave me these when I first got here, but you’re welcome to them.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking them uncertainly. “Why bother with all these directions when you have perfectly good maps?” He reached for his phone with its built-in satellite navigation.
“I don’t need them,” she said with such authority that he returned his phone to his pocket, sensing it might be taken amiss. He winced as she propped a sheet against the steering wheel, deciphering directions and driving at the same time, pausing too long at an intersection boasting two flower shops, wondering aloud whether the green striped awning or the red brick façade marked the true path. A black Volvo blasted its horn as the driver swerved past, giving her the finger. “That’s the international sign of friendship,” she said. “You should always do that when you pass.”
She made at least four unnecessary turns, continuing on unperturbed as though getting lost were a necessary prerequisite to arrival. Ryoki, who had been born with both an internal compass and a biological stopwatch, squirmed in his seat until the pain became too great and he opened a map, charting the entire route in fifty-three seconds. “Take the next left,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
He shot her a look and a few minutes later they turned north on Highway 101 and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, which Ryoki had always considered disappointingly orange.
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?” he asked.
“I turned left a number of times.”
“Read your map,” he said, waving it around.
“I have instructions.” She handed him her list.
“But you have maps.”
“You read them,” she said flatly, focusing out the windshield. He heard a guarded defiance in her voice, observed a stubborn tilt to her profile, and understood, but still couldn’t believe it.
“You’re a lawyer, but you can’t read a map?”
“Law?” She jerked to face him, her hands on the steering wheel involuntarily following suit, so that she nearly sideswiped a green VW with a windup key on the back.
“You’re certainly not a racecar driver,” he said as the closing credits of his life rolled past his eyes.
“Well, there’s a lot in between,” she said, looking genuinely puzzled. But Tom had warned him that Kate was a master of the straight-faced prank and Ryoki refused to be taken in.
“Brian brought you in especially to help me with the acquisition, licenses and distribution contracts. You reviewed the audit findings and summarized the effects for CPAs and M&A lawyers. You’ve obviously led executive meetings before.”
“You’re not a lawyer.”
“I’m the client.”
“I’m an English teacher,” she said with such careless matter-of-factness that he worried she might be telling the truth.
“Eng-lish-tea-cher?” he said slowly.
“I was supposed to start a new job at the first of the year, teaching at a little college in New York, but it fell though at the last minute. The old professor decided to push back his retirement one more year. December’s a strange time for a professor to retire, don’t you think?”
That detail sounded the grim knell of truth. Ryoki’s heart sank. The success of the meeting must have been a fluke, beginner’s luck.
“Brian must have been really desperate,” he said aloud, trying to make a joke, though it made him nauseous. She couldn’t possibly be as helpful as he’d hoped.
“That’s what I said,” she said seriously. “But Brian said you didn’t need another lawyer. He said you needed someone like me, specialized in comparing disparate texts. He and his staff have been really great about helping me get things right. I assumed you knew.” She paused, giving him a chance to answer, sneaking a glance that he caught from the corner of his eye. But he let it pass. “Anyway, I’m surprised you came alone,” she added. “It seems like your father usually traveled with a couple of assistants minimum, plus your mother.”
Ryoki looked out the window, thinking of all the times his father had called him “Fat Legs,” a mangled translation of “too big for his britches.” Maybe he was being taught a lesson.
“The legalese doesn’t bother you?” he asked, when he realized that too much time had passed for politeness.
“I spent several summers out here with Brian and Grace, and when we were younger Tom and I used to play a game called Contracts.
“Contracts?”
“Tom was always into mischief when we were kids.”
This Ryoki believed at once.
“To get us out of Grace’s hair, Brian started giving us real contracts with the names blacked out and telling us to find the loopholes,” she said. “Competition was so fierce, we voluntarily read a lot of law. Tom would do crazy things like that for his dad.”
They rode in silence for a while, Ryoki trying to work out how her revelation was going to affect the job he needed her to do. Maybe he could let it ride for a bit. So far she appeared thorough enough, and as Brian’s niece she had the unique advantage of family access to him, which meant his staff would most likely refuse her nothing.
“Let’s see,” she said, drumming her thumbs on the steering wheel, “before you became a client, I think you double-majored in International Business and English Lit at Harvard, then took an MBA at Wharton. Is that right?” She gave him an encouraging smile. “I get the business degree, but why English?”
“I like to read when I get the time,” he said in a clipped tone meant to end the discussion. Literature was a very personal matter to Ryoki, a private indulgence, and he’d learned to avoid giving personal details to women. Excessive sharing invariably led to bizarre expectations, fear of potential schemers and cursed pink undies.
English Lit had been his sole rebellion against his grandfather who grumbled that if he was going to waste time, he ought to at least waste it in his own language. Ryoki, who read widely in English and Japanese, had tried to counter with “When in America—” but that had sent his grandfather pounding off, slamming the door behind him.
Kate backed off the subject without bothering to provide another. They rode in embarrassed silence until he repented of his rudeness.
“What did you study?” he asked.
“Fashion Design undergrad, Masters in English,” she said as she glanced at her side view mirror. Because her face was turned away, Ryoki thought he’d misheard.
“I’m sorry, what? Did you say ‘fashion and English’?”
She nodded distractedly as she fiddled with the air conditioner. “It’s probably a little warm for you in here. I forget that not everyone likes it as warm as I do.” In no time Ryoki had goose bumps prickling up his arms and wished he hadn’t thrown his jacket onto the back seat. He reached for the temperature control, wondering if she knew that Japan was actually some distan
ce from the Arctic Circle. Perhaps he should make a better effort at politeness before they both froze to death.
“So, uh, why fashion?” he asked, grasping for the nearest strand of conversation.
She frowned at the windshield, not answering at first. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I guess I was stupid and eighteen, thought I wanted to be glamorous and creative. My mom was this amazing seamstress and to keep expenses down she used to take us to the fabric store and challenge us to make the clearance rack work. It was fun, so fashion design seemed like a natural fit.”
“But it didn’t fit?”
“I learned a lot, I don’t regret that, but after a while it was like wearing tight shoes and I realized I needed to change direction.”
Ryoki remembered Brian saying his brother was an English professor and a writer. “So I guess your father showed you the bookcase as soon as you got home from the clearance rack?” he asked.
“The bookcase preceded the clearance rack every day of my life, but it wasn’t flashy enough the year I graduated from high school,” she said, rolling her eyes in self-mockery. She turned on the radio, flipping stations all the way to the end of the dial before turning it off. “Was it hard for you, double majoring?” she asked.
“Literature and business are both based on critical thinking and logic,” he said, hearing the defensive chord in his voice. “One enhanced the other,” he said more firmly.
She laughed in her mouth, quiet and private. “I bet literature enhanced business for you the way fashion enhanced literature for me. It’s all about studying desire. Everybody gets what they want the most.”
Ryoki’s lip curled and he turned to look at the passing scenery. Everybody gets what they want. He’d heard that little gem from motivational speakers and jaded twenty-something pseudo-intellectuals spouting philosophy with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He stored it away along with a couple of other sound bites he’d like embroidered on pillows: Life’s not fair and that bit by Robert Burns, Man’s inhumanity to man/Makes countless… something something—maybe they were all right in a way. You can get what you want, until it’s slapped out of your hand by poverty, disease or a cheating wife.
He glanced back at Kate’s fresh, clean profile and felt used and wrinkled beneath his skin. Knowing the Porters, she had likely led a life carefully sheltered from the world’s sordid underbelly. Who was he to dispel her illusions. He held his peace and resumed counting the chances she’d had to pass the semi they’d been following for the last six miles. There, that made twenty-two. He let out a long breath and visualized her passing the truck, concentrating hard, willing her to go around. She stared straight out the windshield without saying anything else.
“Are you getting tired?” he asked after opportunity number twenty-five.
“I’m fine.”
“Let me know if you get tired. I’d be happy to drive.”
Kate turned briefly, her mouth quirked up at one corner. “It’s really not that far.” Ryoki had read the map and knew they had two miles to the Napa turn and another eighteen miles past Napa on Highway 29 and wasn’t sure how he was going to stand it. He wondered if Kate even knew which direction they were heading.
“Why don’t we stop for lunch?” he said. “I skipped breakfast.”
In Napa they stopped at a combination sandwich shop and pretentiously pricey country store that no local resident would bother with, except the owner who was making a killing.
Kate picked a sandwich from the board without really looking and gave the clerk a vague set of directions. Unable to comfortably see over the high counter, she soon wandered off to look at the specialty items. Ryoki, a Master of the Sandwich, had noted the pimply youth’s sloped forehead, beefy fingers and sagging jaw, and wondered where caveboys stored their clubs and loincloths when they were on the clock. Taking no chances, he stood his post, looming over the sneeze guard and intervening at regular intervals when the rattled clerk required instruction in the use of his opposable thumbs. Once the task was complete, Ryoki wanted to hold the sandwiches aloft like a man who has just snatched a roll of hundreds from a fire. Instead he shooed the clerk and wrapped them with his own two hands, carefully placing them in a to-go bag. The minute Ryoki turned away, the clerk heaved a sigh of relief and blotted his face with six paper towels, absorbing approximately half a pint of nervous sweat.
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 to
p.
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.