Secrets of the Apple

by Paula Hiatt

  Even after they left the park, Ryoki continued to feel curiously cheery and relaxed, not even bothered when the much-touted winery tour turned out more disjointed than informative. Their guide kept trailing off as he repeatedly stroked his comb over, his twitchy eye rolling almost against his will to a heavyset tourist with rings on all her fingers and a Guinness-worthy chest. In a quiet moment apart from the group, Kate whispered that the tourist and the guide would come to a bad end. Chest would hock all her rings to pay for a gastric bypass, hoping to impress her new boyfriend, but Twitchy would find he missed her magnificent girth and eventually go rub his bald head on somebody else. Ryoki laughed out loud, causing everyone to turn and stare. A tall Nebraskan woman with Tiffany X earrings elbowed her stubby little husband and mouthed, “Honeymooners.” He whispered back, “Five bucks, not married.” It took them four minutes to catch a glimpse of left hands—no rings. The wife handed her husband a five dollar bill, prompting Ryoki to speculate that her henpecked husband had been begging for candy or possibly a balloon.

  Inventing the stories of strangers in Napa Valley furnished a bountiful source of conversation that spun on out into the parking lot and down the road. Concentrating his powers of invention, Ryoki barely registered the two dead ends and four wrong turns it took to get them to a shopping plaza highlighted in Kate’s instructions. But by late afternoon the game had grown stale and their words dried up as they wandered in and out of swanky little shops, looking at useless pretties. Ryoki tolerated the ritual because he wanted to buy her a little gift, a thank you for giving him such a pleasant day, some souvenir of Wine Country that would please her without getting too personal. Women, he knew, had a way of intimating what they desired, so he waited for the signs—the light in the eyes, the little squeal, the touching, the 360 examination. He speculated Kate would be the subtle type, but still he looked for the “tell.”

  He was right, Kate was subtle, so subtle she never seemed to give any signal at all. She looked around politely, but never exclaimed, never left a fingerprint. He almost had hope over a blue glass bowl because she said it “flowed like water,” but she moved on and the afternoon started to drag. Luckily they happened across a large book store and Kate stopped in her tracks, peering through the window.

  “I’ve never been in here. Do you mind if we go in? I’m out of anything to read,” she said, her eyes alight. Relieved, Ryoki opened the door.

  “You can probably buy these same books anywhere,” he said.

  “Different place, different things float to the top. Twenty minutes? Do you think you could amuse yourself that long?” she asked. Ryoki had barely nodded before she sped off. This seemed an odd store to choose, but whatever she wanted, he would indulge her. He shuffled around fiction for fifteen minutes, picking up books and putting them down. No point buying something he didn’t have time to read. Finally he settled into an easy chair with a magazine, guessing that twenty-minutes meant at least thirty. It turned out to be thirty-three.

  As she approached him, a stack of books in her arms, he noticed two men watching her as she entered his space, knew they judged him by looking at her. All men did it. Women and cars, a man’s two most visible billboards. A woman in a very short skirt and a low-cut blouse meant the man was about to get lucky. A woman with glasses and a briefcase placed her man squarely in the professional classes. Kate was a lady, placing him in executive management. Ordinarily he didn’t begrudge other men a modest peek, but this peek was lengthening into an ogle. He rolled them an acknowledging look, their ogle duly registered and declined. The two men wandered away.

  “Why do you even bother with a watch?” he asked without rancor.

  “Twenty is the new thirty,” she said, transposing the numbers and making her joke a head-scratcher, something she did a couple of times a day, no point mentioning it.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked.

  Ryoki had gotten sucked into an article about aging politicians who make laws for increasingly technological societies. He waved his magazine and started toward the registers, reaching back for the books in her arms. She slapped his hand, giving him five. He looked at her, confused.

  “Books?” he said.

  “I’ll show you when we get out,” she said, leading him to the front desk and pulling out her credit card.

  At the car she didn’t put her bag in the trunk as Ryoki had expected, but set it on the floor behind her seat. She retrieved a large, thickish volume from the bag, pulled a pen from the door pocket and hastily scribbled in the front pages before handing it to Ryoki: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, annotated edition. The inscription read, “To commemorate your journey, From The Porters.”

  “You’ve probably read this, but it may have been a while. This is one I like to keep close by,” she said.

  Ryoki sat turning the book over in his hands. He’d stabbed at Huck Finn as a teenager, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the written dialect with the familiar cadence of Brian Porter’s liquid speech. It had been one of the few times English had ever felt like a foreign language, frustrating him unbearably and turning him away from Southern American writers. Still, her thought touched and gratified him. “Thank you,” he said.

  “It will give you something to read next time you can’t sleep,” she said as she pulled away from the curb.

  He looked at her profile, trying to understand what ticked inside her brain. How could she have known he hadn’t slept? Had she figured it out first thing at the hotel? All day he’d surprised himself by feeling wide awake and alert. How had he given himself away? Why did she always seem to know more than she was telling?

  “Do you have a crystal ball, Kate?”

  “Yes, but it’s in the shop,” she said.

  He continued to study her for another moment before reaching into the backseat for her bag. “Do you mind?” he asked, looking through the rest of the titles: three Nobel Prize-winning novels, one escapist fantasy and two textbooks on Japanese culture and business. He held up the business books. “Kiss up?” She gave him a long-suffering look, snatched the books and tossed them in the backseat. He figured he understood all about Americans, knew how to play the game. But glancing back at the books, he worried that he appeared so alien to her that she studied him like an anthropologist. Ordinarily he didn’t waste time thinking of such things, as his bank account had purchased a fairly accurate assessment of most women’s perception of him. But all week long Kate had kept him in the foreign province of uncertainty and he was still keeping a vague lookout for her Rosetta Stone. He picked up her receipt which had fluttered into his lap. “Maybe you should think about the library.”

  “Librarians hate it when you write in their books.”

  “These should keep you a while,” he said.

  She made a throaty growl that sounded indistinctly like “Two weeks,” and turned on the radio, humming softly to herself. Lulled by the music and the gentle whine of the tires, Ryoki nodded off, sleeping peacefully all the way back to his hotel.

  Chapter Five

  By Monday morning the glow of Friday and Saturday had caught a chill and passed away. On Sunday he had worked until he could hardly see straight, slept a short, uneasy night, and headed to the office having accomplished only half his scheduled allotment. Napa Valley had been a mistake. An excess of shared jokes and matching café lattes could slow the process. He needed her to be a machine.

  At 8:07 a.m. he heard the ritual click click click of heels, interrupted by a slipclick as Kate fell off her heels hurrying down the marble hallway, as though rushing would rewind the seven minutes of her lateness. He thought she probably wrenched her ankle again, as she occasionally did when she lost track of her walking skills. Odd, for someone who otherwise gave every appearance of being elegant and graceful. Why wasn’t she limping all the time? And what went on in those mysterious minutes that repeatedly separated her from the appointed hour?

  There was a jingle of keys and the whump of her laptop bag as she crossed
the thick carpet in the office next door. He sat up straighter, tugged unconsciously at his tie, concentrated on his screen, steeled himself to be brisk, businesslike.

  At 8:12 she entered his office. He expected a proffered pastry or two, maybe a frilly blouse or a wispy pink scarf. Instead she wore a navy suit and carried only a heavy gray binder and her laptop, her most severe appearance yet. She sat across from him, smiled an abbreviated greeting and opened her binder. He was all prepared with a good stern look, cocked and ready to blast the first flutter of the lashes or pouting of the lips, the slightest breath of sweet kawaii that hinted at their friendly, almost intimate weekend. This unforeseen professionalism caught him a left hook and he spoke snidely without thinking, “Long pearls today?”

  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.