by Paula Hiatt
Ryoki had visited São Paulo briefly once or twice, hurrying from the airport to his hotel to meetings and back to the airport, spending most of the trip in negotiations or bent over his work. This time, however, he would be calling the city home, and as they drove he gazed through the protective glass. People, people, people in all shades from chocolate to pale, millions seething among the endless concrete canyons that poked from the ground like his grandfather’s thick, midas fingers stretching up and up toward the hard, golden sun. After a time the glare hurt his eyes even through the tint, and he pulled a pair of polarized sunglasses from his pocket.
As they neared Morumbi, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, glinting concrete gradually gave way to tree-lined streets, the tended green gardens of fine homes and the vegetation rioting over the walls of mansions hiding from the world like a child covering her eyes. It surprised Ryoki to find that this refined neighborhood, home to the state government palace, also quartered established shanty settlers. Protected mansions shared the air with shacks cobbled together from discarded wood, corrugated metal and jerry-rigged electricity. “Looks like the lion is lying down with the lamb,” he said to Arima, who didn’t get it. Privately Ryoki wondered whether his house had enough security.
He hadn’t chosen the house himself, nor had he actually visited it. He had been emailed photos with a property history informing him it had been built by a modern industrialist who needed a place in the city, but also longed for the sweet romance of an early nineteenth-century plantation. He envisioned building a secret garden in the city, hoping to create a common refuge where he could rebuild his scattered family. Seeing a chance in Morumbi, he purchased three large houses which he had razed and replaced with a Mediterranean-style mansion in the midst of lush, extensive gardens, all hidden behind a high tiled wall. But a few years later there had been a corporate takeover and the man’s heart had failed as he watched his company sold off in bits and pieces. After the funeral, his heirs cut a deal with a room full of lawyers, letting the house go for back taxes so they could each walk off with the maximum cash. Now the government had sold the high-maintenance property to Tanaka Inc. for a very reasonable price, a perquisite for pumping so much investment capital into the country.
As the car pulled up Ryoki recognized the tiled wall from a photo, a smooth wall so high it was difficult to see the jagged bits of glass set into the top between menacing spearhead spikes, each spear gracefully scrolled at the base to keep the warning decorative. The original architect and landscape designer, who had an obvious flair for the dramatic, had planned the curve of the drive and the heights of the foliage so the house would appear all of the sudden, slightly angled, like a beautiful model contemplating the view, ostensibly unaware of the photographer, but keeping on her best side.
Many people had sighed longingly at the first sight of this house, but to Ryoki it only looked exhausting, so very, very heavy. He looked down, cringing with embarrassment, wishing he could have had a bachelor apartment closer to his office like he had in London, with a middle-aged housekeeper who left him dinner in the refrigerator, reheating instructions taped to the top. However, Tanaka Inc. was gearing up to be an important, if fairly new presence in South America, and according to the public relations department, the C.E.O.’s house would be a signal of establishment, permanence, and most importantly, of power.
Arima, who had helped prepare the house, introduced Ryoki and Kate to the housekeeper who in turn introduced them to the cook, two maids, and a gardener, mined from the Japanese neighborhood of Liberdade. The five highly trained security specialists who would chauffeur Ryoki and protect his house had all been imported from Japan.
“You must be quite a handful,” Kate said under her breath.
“It’s the house,” he whispered.
“When we lived in São Paulo, one housekeeper was enough for our whole family.”
“Your call. Feel free to fire the staff and do all the work yourself.”
The housekeeper, Cecelia Ito, talked over the whole exchange, speaking rapid-fire Japanese liberally sprinkled with heavily accented Portuguese. She took them on a tour with all the pride of motherhood—the tall, cool windows, the fabulous murals, the indoor/outdoor pool, but barely glancing into the newly converted dojo and weight rooms, though these had been Ryoki’s only personal requirements in the vast house. In the upstairs library, which overlooked the back garden, Kate ran her fingers lightly down the gleaming grand piano. The housekeeper stepped forward at once, rubbing her fingers on the surface and holding them up to Kate’s face. “See, no dust,” she said ferociously, drawing herself up to her full five feet. Kate liked the piano and Ryoki could see she wanted to try it. Instead she put her hand in her pocket and moved away.
Eventually the tour wound out to the back and the housekeeper left the three of them on a covered walkway flanked by flowers and broad-leafed foliage that extended to the front door of a picturesque stone guest cottage. “They worked around the clock to finish the modifications you requested,” Arima said to Ryoki. “The cottage has been fully wired and networked with the security system in the main house. There are motion detectors on all the doors and windows, so if anyone approaches they’ll light up, and if anyone tries to break in, the alarm will sound out here and in the main house, as well as at the security company.” He disengaged the alarm and electronic lock using the keypad next to the door and unlocked the manual bolt with Kate’s master key, staying long enough to acquaint Kate with the system before excusing himself, citing an urgent need to get back to the office.
Kate frowned at the complicated control console. “I’ve seen banks with less security.” Maybe in Utah, Ryoki thought with a frown. He’d been inside the bank on the ground floor of their building in São Paulo, noticed the grim, heavily armed guard stationed behind a bulletproof shield in the left corner where he had the clearest shot at both the door and the teller windows. Ryoki put a hand on Kate’s elbow and led her into the main room.
The cottage was just three rooms. The living room was decorated like a hotel lounge, sunny and stylishly furnished with a traditional sofa and two wingback chairs upholstered in sleek modern fabrics to compliment the black marble fireplace and coffee table. In one corner there was a wet bar, in the other stood a desk and a bookcase containing twenty or thirty titles all in English.
“Is this where you rest from the care and feeding of your house?” Kate asked blandly.
Ryoki smiled, but said nothing, leading her on to the bath where the most extensive remodeling had taken place.
The room had been expanded, taking over what used to be the cottage’s second bedroom, separating out the toilet and transforming the rest into a spacious Japanese bath of rock and wood with drains in the slate floor for open showering, and a large sunken tub surrounded by small boulders, giving it the look of a natural hot spring. He opened the french doors next to the tub, jostling a set of musical wind chimes as they stepped into a waterfall garden surrounded by a high rock privacy wall with a locked gardener’s door cunningly set in an unobtrusive corner.
He heard the catch in Kate’s breath—exactly the effect he had hoped for. Taking her elbow, he ushered her through a pocket door into the adjoining bedroom, uneasy that it wouldn’t be quite right, that the decorator hadn’t fully understood his stumbling descriptions or the ham-fisted sketches he’d emailed. He looked nervously around the bedroom.
It wasn’t exactly the same. It couldn’t be. But it was close enough to pass as an unmistakable effort. Kate halted three steps into the room, lips parted as she slowly pivoted, taking in the pale green walls, carved red mahogany furniture, cream brocade upholstery and the glossy green silk kimono hanging open-armed on the far wall.
“What do you think?” he asked, trying not to look as if he were awaiting her reaction with bated breath, which he was. She turned to look at him, but didn’t exactly meet his eye. She looked like she wanted to speak, had to say something, but lost her nerve twice before
two words finally emerged.
“My room?” She sounded squeaky, overwhelmed, the blush creeping up her neck in the same way it had when she’d talked about clothes and wrapping paper.
“I gave the decorator the details I could remember, which wasn’t actually that many, and asked my mother to send the kimono.”
“It’s—it’s so—I mean—” She looked stunned, moving mechanically through the opposite door to the more impersonal living room, where she perched uneasily on the edge of the sofa, Ryoki following worriedly.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Of course I do,” she said quickly, looking around. “This place is like a perfect cross between you and me.” The fading blush began to pink up again. “That is, it’s all just so personal. I don’t understand why. Why do all this? I’m just an assistant, right, nothing else?” Her voice trailed off and she turned away, too embarrassed to look at him.
Wrapping paper. He finally understood what she’d meant by that and what she feared. He should have anticipated this, but somehow he hadn’t. For her job she needed to be close to the house, but amid all his hurry and asexual resolution he hadn’t once considered how his surprise could be misconstrued. Stupid, stupid blunder, and he’d only wanted to say thank you. He knew she would have considered his debt lavishly repaid with a box of chocolate-dipped strawberries. But his behavior that night in Las Vegas continued to loop through his mind and he needed to give her something grand enough to expunge his crime, or at least assuage his conscience. She would never have accepted a car or a necklace—or a bracelet. “Kate, you saved my life. This is my return gift, nothing more.”
She spoke hesitantly, apologetically. “Wouldn’t it be awkward having me live here? Don’t you think good fences make good neighbors?” He anticipated she’d balk at living so close, but seeing he’d gone to such extravagant lengths, he knew she’d be far too polite to force the issue. His conscience pricked at this duplicity, his debtor’s gift tainted by his mixed motives. He did want something more from her, just not what she feared.
“Sometimes you make no sense,” she said, looking at him warily, as though she smelled deceit but couldn’t quite pinpoint its source.
“You said you wanted a secure apartment in a safe neighborhood and access to a piano. This is the best place I could think of without actually moving you into the house itself.” Which had been his first choice, though if he’d tried that, she would have run straight out the front door and caught a taxi to the airport.
“My music’s going to disturb you,” she said. “I usually practice an hour and a half after dinner and a piano can’t be turned down like a speaker.” Ryoki tried to keep his expression bland, to keep from giving away how dearly he wanted to hear her play, how tired he was of living with lonely silence.
“I can live with that,” he said.
“We need to establish up front that I won’t be on call twenty-four hours a day. Once I’m in for the night, I don’t want to be bothered unless the house is on fire.” Her blush had disappeared and she settled deeper into her seat, looking more relaxed, more in command.
“Do you like it, Kate?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking him directly in the eye for the first time since entering the cottage. “More beautiful than I could have created by myself.”
There was a rough clearing of the throat, and they turned to find Senhor Nishimura, the newly hired gardener, standing in the open doorway, hat in hand, waiting to take them on a tour and explain his plans to bring the long-neglected and overgrown garden back to its paradisiacal glory. After the long flight Ryoki would have much preferred a long walk and a leisurely meal in the weed-choked gazebo. Instead he reluctantly left Kate to discuss the trimming of the shrubbery while he showered and changed to go to the office.
As his driver pulled away from the front door, Ryoki turned in his seat to get a good look at his house. It hadn’t occurred to him when he’d only seen the digital snapshots, but now that he’d walked through its many rooms and actually bonded with the physical reality of the place, something about it reminded him of his childhood home. The two buildings themselves could not have looked more dissimilar; this house had been carefully planned by a famous architect, while his own had warted out here and there over the course of generations.
Perhaps it was the high wall that brought his Tokyo home to mind, or the sprawling feral gardens, or possibly because both houses had had their beginnings in an unfulfilled romantic dream, endowing them with the same bittersweet aura. Ryoki couldn’t tell, but it still tugged at him. The driver hit a bump at the end of the drive and Ryoki blinked, realizing he’d been waxing dime-store poetic. He turned back in his seat and hit a button, bringing his laptop to life.
* * *
When Ryoki was ten, an Oxford architecture professor came to stay and photograph his family home for a study titled “European Influences on Japanese Design.” Even as a child Ryoki had known in a passing, disinterested sort of way that his home was old, and different, and that the voluptuous garden bore scant resemblance to the precise restraint for which Japanese gardens are so famous. But all this meant nothing to an imaginative boy who only wanted a place to play.
According to family lore, a prosperous merchant ancestor in the Meiji era had stretched his purse to purchase an extravagant plot of land with the intent of keeping his nine sons around him all his life, believing that in his family lay all his true wealth. People smiled and congratulated him to his face, but privately clucked their tongues and whispered that he was tempting fate with his profligacy. Unfortunately the prosperous ancestor never saw his family’s great rise. An outbreak of cholera decimated the family, claiming his wife and all his children—except the youngest son, ironically the only child to be thin and sickly at birth. His spirit broken, the prosperous merchant all but retired from life and let his dreams slide into decay along with his house. But while the father wallowed in his sorrow, his youngest son grew strong and in time took over his father’s failing business. Again neighbors clucked their tongues as the wildly energetic young man gained a reputation as a sharp trader and clever investor, but one who traded with Europeans, entertaining and accommodating them in new additions to his father’s house especially built and furnished for their strange comforts. In time his only child, a son, followed the same pattern, each generation adding a little more to the rambling structure until the house had become something of a picturesque hodgepodge, neither Japanese nor European, but with a charming style all its own. Because the house was so utterly different, it might have become an object of ridicule had it not been for the exceptionally beautiful high surrounding wall that set it apart, gave it the air of prestige, and attracted other prosperous families, in time giving rise to a fashionable neighborhood that thrived even in the present day.
It was Ryoki’s grandfather who brought the family to true prominence. Seeing an opening at the beginning of the electronics boom, he borrowed heavily against his now valuable family home and invested big, making a fortune that eventually matured into a living, breathing entity of its own, fathering fortunes that spiraled into new manufacturing and shipping enterprises. Once his fortunes were secure, his grandfather’s first act was to pay off the house.
In his boyhood, Ryoki thought nothing of these things. He led his friends through every attic room and secret passage, spilling out into the wild garden to play fantastical games improvised from the stories his mother read to him. When he was alone, the most important place was the sacred waterfall, hidden from view in a secluded nook, where he would pretend to be Adam, busy naming all the animals. Lucifer inevitably attacked with a third of the host of heaven and Ryoki would have to chase him off with his trusty bamboo sword.
But when the Oxford professor came with his cameras and notebooks, Ryoki interrupted his games and went to stand next to the man. The professor had children of his own and explained all he saw to the bright, curious boy beside him. By the end of the day, the professor, who was a b
rilliant man but a dull teacher, had imparted all the house’s oddities and inconsistencies, without discussing a grain of its charm, as though he’d dumped out a bunch of puzzle pieces none of which had any beauty on their own. Even the garden fell under the professor’s eye as he took photos and pointed out the Japanese influences scattered among the lawless vegetation that had served Ryoki’s fancies so well. The professor couldn’t understand the huge, deep hole on the north side and asked if they’d had trouble with the sewers. Ryoki shrugged. Two years earlier he’d spent three weeks digging a bear trap, just in case. As a little boy of eight, the hole had seemed so important and digging it had been a monumental undertaking. But as a big boy of ten, looking through the professor’s lens, he came to see it was foolish, even ridiculous.
When the man finally packed his cameras and left, Ryoki sat outside for a long time, looking at the garden and the house as they gradually metamorphosed from a boy’s paradise to a monstrous oddity, different from the homes of his friends, maybe too different. He began to pay attention to the details of the houses he visited, noticed the simpler layouts, the precise grace of their traditional gardens. In time he began to invite friends over less and less, preferring to invent a persona less closely associated with a bizarre house and an unkempt garden.
One sunny day when he had no one to play with, his mother handed him his trusty sword, suggesting he go outside to play. But he waved her off, proclaiming himself too old for such things. He never noticed how slowly his mother turned away or the unshed tears glistening in her eyes, understanding that she had just witnessed the disappearance of her child.