Secrets of the Apple

by Paula Hiatt

  His first impulse was to exonerate himself, subtly inform Browning that he had never engaged in such behavior with his staff. But he thought of the greedy way Browning had looked at Kate’s legs and changed his mind. It would be like serving her to a wolf. Abruptly a new thought occurred to him. What about that greedy look? Did Browning expect him to share?

  On the plane back to São Paulo, Ryoki sat in silent fury, every impression of Browning coming back to him strangely chewed, like a rich dinner vomited into the toilet. Browning the commanding general gradually deteriorated into a corrupt despot, eager to entrap the unwary. He sat leaning forward, tensed against the seat belt for thirty minutes before Kate touched his arm, her face showing concern, and asked if he felt all right. He grunted “fine” and leaned back in his seat facing the window, breathing slowly and deeply to regain his composure. It took two hours for his anger to wax and wane, but by the time they reached home, Ryoki had calmed down enough to recognize he may have overreacted, just a tad.

  Many details of his divorce had been translated into English, and were available to any curious person with a modicum of internet savvy. It was possible that Browning thought that a man once cuckolded could be so again. That’s really what set him off, the supposed personal insult. But as his anger cooled, he began to remember the atmosphere in the Porto Alegre office, the unproven but very real possibility that Browning considered office assistants fair game—a vulgar failing, certainly, but nothing that would stop him from fulfilling his contract. Men can compartmentalize; that’s what he told Kate.

  By dinnertime he’d decided to send out a sternly worded company-wide memo outlining the policy on sexual harassment, a quiet warning to Browning and a notice of rights for the women in his office, a move that assuaged his conscience and would have made his mother proud, though she would never hear of it.

  By the time he went to bed that night his anger had evaporated, leaving him perplexed by his wildly emotional reaction. Even a suspected personal affront should not have set him off that badly. Surely a man like himself, a man never particularly jealous by nature, couldn’t be capable of such obscene possessiveness, especially over a woman he wasn’t even dating.

  Laying there in the dark, mulling over the rollercoaster of a day, Ryoki began to consciously recognize how fully Kate’s influence changed the dynamic of his work life, often for the better, but sometimes for the worse. The day changed because she considered Browning some sort of threat, and to be fair, he probably was a threat to her. What was it she’d called him? A player with swiss cheese ethics. Swiss cheese, nice image. It stuck with you.

  In the darkness he rolled his eyes at his silent tantrum on the plane, sincerely hoping Kate hadn’t noticed, or worse, guessed what it was about. He needed to think with a businessman’s calm rationale, and in his mind he rehearsed all the excellent reasons Browning had been hired in the first place. But halfway through, Jake McLeary’s tortured face floated across his mind, winking and muttering to itself, like Jacob Marley haunting Scrooge. Swiss cheese ethics… stuck with you…

  This wasn’t like Las Vegas, of course. Jackson Browning, respected businessman couldn’t be compared with Angelica Ruiz, serial killer. Browning’s record and credentials had been checked and rechecked. Plenty of security in place, too. Tanaka Inc. kept track of their employees. Everything planned in advance and carefully executed. Still, Browning was brilliant and he had insulated himself with a lot of his own people. It wouldn’t hurt to place a firewall someplace he’d never suspect, just as a little insurance. Ryoki pursed his lips. Insurance— sounded like a hack gangster novel.

  The next morning he called Arima into his office and without ever using the word spy, arranged to insert a secret accountant into Browning’s inner circle, someone who would report directly back to him in São Paulo. Arima was surprised, but agreed, suggesting only that the infiltrator be in possession of a trench coat. “If it’s a female, warn her he’s a womanizer,” Ryoki said.

  Ryoki intended to tell Kate what he had done, to ease her mind. But she didn’t refer to the subject again and in the course of the day, the whole episode slid to the back of his mind. As a personal indulgence, he decided to limit Kate’s time in Browning’s presence. No point resting a burning torch on an oil drum.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Two weeks later Ryoki happened to be standing in his doorway and caught sight of Kate breezing through the full length of the office corridor, radiating that impudent American audacity all the way from the elevators.

  He’d worked out a few things since he and Kate had stood outside the Valentine’s Party. The Chopstick Experiment had exceeded his expectations. Two well-placed hints and she’d begun delicately fingering the chopsticks, blushing, exposing her self-consciousness. She’d even ordered a book on the subject, reading every word, yellow highlighter in hand.

  Intrigued, he’d sprung other little traps, tests that seemed to reveal a spindle in the great cosmic balance. He had no proof, of course, but it almost appeared as if The Amazing Kate had been born with a wagonload of talents but only a thimbleful of native confidence. He suspected that much of her bravado had probably been earned drop by painstaking drop through the tenacious honing of natural aptitudes, and a good bit of outright pretending. This intrepid stride through the office, for example. Ryoki figured he was the only person for thousands of miles who recognized what a performance it was, a studied social behavior, a sheer effort of will, a secret he would protect to his grave.

  As she made her way from the elevator, he knew the rest of the office saw nothing but her hard plastic shell. But having observed Browning’s lecherous stare, he was now alert to how the other men on his floor would note her confident stride. Watching carefully, he saw nothing but the innocent glance or the casual swivel of a head. Undeniably, they liked to look, but one and all kept a respectful distance, no doubt intimidated by her formidable, all-business demeanor, which was amplified by that severe double-breasted charcoal suit. Before leaving San Francisco, he’d felt a splinter of guilt for making her change her wardrobe, but standing in São Paulo he privately applauded his foresight at having sheltered his assistant from even the temptation of sexual harassment. American girls were very big on being protected from that.

  He smiled a slow smile, blissfully unaware that everyone from executives to gofers knew him to be watching, had previously marked the slight hardening of his jaw and the minuscule narrowing of the eyes he unwittingly awarded any man who stood too close or, heaven forbid, touched Porter-san. It was this quirk of Tanaka-san’s, combined with the two troublesome “R’s,” that made “Porter” such a tongue twister for both Japanese and Brazilians, that led the water cooler gang to raise their paper cups and dub her Senhora Tanaka. Fortunately, no one ever slipped and said it to her face.

  Guarding a woman was something most of these men understood and respected, but there had been other small changes ever since Tanaka-san’s return from the United States. Nothing they could point to exactly, no drop in standards or productivity. But they felt as though a minor earthquake had left the floor invisibly uneven, so you had to think before you took a step. For instance, all the Japanese knew that the best way to promote solidarity in the office was to go out and get drunk together. After all, how can you trust a man who never lets down his guard? In the beginning no one doubted Tanaka-san, such a fierce proponent of office unity, could be depended upon to lead the action necessary to smudge the hard line between Japanese and Brazilian executives. But by the end of the first month, it had become clear that Tanaka-san had lost some of that demonic drive that impelled him to work long weeks and hit the clubs so hard on weekends. He continued to maintain his social obligations, yet behind the aftershave and scotch lingered an antiseptic whiff of duty that confined his merrymaking to its allotted square in his appointment book. The older executives shook their heads with an indulgent smile. Perhaps their young C.E.O. had grown up, had finally run low on that boundless energy that had seemed to kee
p him at a dead run twenty-four hours a day. It would be a relief, since just watching him had made them tired. The younger executives raised their eyebrows, looked at Porter-san and waited for him to come to his senses.

  Back in San Francisco, Ryoki had been eager to get to São Paulo, eager for that pleasant homecoming feeling he always got when entering his own office. It was so nice to be among his own people that at first he didn’t consciously notice any shift in his priorities. Had anyone pointed out the small changes in his habits, he might have vaguely tapped his computer and said with a shrug, “Too much work, too little time”—a lie with all the advantages of perfect truth. He could never open his mouth and admit his dirty little secret, the thing that made him simmer as long-winded colleagues dragged late meetings into double overtime, the thing that had him scuttling for the door as soon as he responsibly could, the thing that gave him a hazy sense of disloyalty to everything his grandfather had taught him about Example and Leadership. The thing was, Ryoki just wanted to go home, though he wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.

  He’d occupied many spaces designated as “home.” His wife had used that word many times, insisting they have a home of their own, an apartment separate from his family, elegantly appointed, coordinated, and given a woman’s personal touch. He had grown up watching his mother and grandmother decorate and redecorate, each marking out her own territory in the rambling house. With their example in mind, he’d gladly complied with his wife’s wishes, given her free reign and spent a fortune. As he recalled, she’d bought a lot of orange, except she’d called it “peach,” lots of “peach” because she said peach blended in any shade. That was about all he remembered of that apartment, actually: a lot of orange. He remembered his old office though, every detail, and even now more than three years later, could have picked the stapler out of the upper right-hand drawer and pulled documents from the printer with his eyes shut.

  A man ought to remember more about the place where he lived, and the discrepancy gnawed at him until he began digging through the last few years, looking for some explanation to allay the tickling fear that he’d been living only to make money.

  Certainly he wasn’t like Browning, who shipped his treasures to his office but left his wife in another hemisphere. He’d begged Apple to come to London and she had told him to stay in Tokyo, even though to do so would sacrifice his family’s interests. He’d had to make sacrifices—yes, that was it. He’d been making sacrifices, offering hard evidence of his loyalty to his family’s company, his responsibility for the thousands of jobs in his care, proof of his fitness for his company title. It was all about sacrifice, not about making money, not really.

  The idea made him feel better, though at that point a tiny, tiny whisper in his conscience murmured that maybe he should look a little deeper. But he blinked away the inconvenient thought. He’d been noble, sacrificing for his family. Who cared about the décor of an apartment anyway? That left him back at square one. Why was he so eager to get home now?

  Once in a while, when the day had run too long, he let his mind drift to that first night when Kate had opened the door in jeans and T-shirt, welcoming him out of the dark night. She hadn’t held out her arms and folded him in, as he sometimes dreamed she had. But she had waited up for him and talked with him and smiled with a warmth that stirred a kind of primal need, something elemental that predated his sexuality, a need for a safe haven, a place of refuge and rest. That’s what he looked forward to, someplace safe and peaceful.

  In those moments, sitting tired at his desk, he occasionally wondered if Kate had cast a spell over his house, enticing him to come home quickly and rejuvenate. If he could bottle that magic, sell it to hotels, he’d be successful beyond his wildest imaginings. But Kate’s magic couldn’t be bottled, and since it couldn’t be bought for money—

  At this point in his musings, he made the effort to glance at his watch and shake his head to clear the silly romantic notions. There is no profit in daydreams. Time is money. At any rate, he concluded, the novelty would probably wear off in a few weeks and everything would return to normal, no need to dissect it—Wow, look at the time. Sushi night, better go.

  Kate considered it healthier for them to eat at home and was as stringent as his grandmother in her insistence on balanced meals, though a picky eater herself, she ate only what she liked. He particularly looked forward to Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings when they ate Japanese. Ever since Kate had embarked upon her chopstick adventure, it was hugely entertaining to watch her holding them as awkwardly as a toddler, or trying to discreetly brush stray bits of rice into her napkin because she couldn’t get over treating the rice bowl like a plate that must remain flat on the table. On those nights he made a generous effort not to mock her more than two or three times a meal, and took to sneaking bits of seafood onto her plate which she pushed suspiciously from side to side, claiming Japanese dishes were enough of a shock one at a time, let alone in groups. The night he tried slipping her an octopus, her chopsticks flashed out, eyes blazing, blocking him faster than he knew she could move, the little tentacles jiggling between them. With a smirk Ryoki popped it whole into his mouth as she watched, eyes riveted in morbid fascination, dropping rice in her lap and sighing in disbelief as he chewed and chewed.

  When Ryoki was growing up, meals in the Tanaka household had generally been quiet, ceremonial affairs dominated by his grandmother who considered dropped rice a punishable offence. She used to say his mother ate like a monkey for the first year and sometimes, on the rare occasions when she and her grandson were completely alone, she screeched and pretended to pick rice from her graying hair, just to make her point.

  In the kitchen one night, Ryoki repeated the whole act for Kate, grunting “E-E-E-E-AH-AH-AH-AH!” and beating his chest while she stood cracking eggs with one hand, plunking the gooey substance into a small stainless steel bowl and checking for eggshells, her mouth in a straight line.

  “So-o-o… your mom and grandma weren’t close?”

  Maybe his delivery was off.

  “She was only kidding,” he said.

  Kate switched on the mixer, creaming butter and sugar for chocolate chip cookies, pouring the eggs from the bowl one yellow lump at a time, and splashing in a bit of vanilla and almond extract without measuring. Owing to the cook’s bad head cold, the kitchen had been left undefended all day, and in lieu of a dinner prepared by the giggling maids, the two of them had invaded the sanctum to forage and concoct like hungry children. From memory Kate plopped a variety of white powders into a separate bowl and began chopping walnuts on a board. In a moment she was rolling balls of golden dough through white sugar and placing them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. “Be careful, cookies can be weapons,” she said when she caught him staring.

  “Only if they’re too hard. Your mother teach you that?”

  Kate looked as though she pitied his naiveté.

  “My mother cooked lettuce right onto the tacos and said ‘Don’t be mean’ when I suggested otherwise. My dad said he’d ‘choked down many a good meal,’” she said.

  “That’s years of therapy right there,” he said, borrowing a comment from an old college roommate who’d just spent Thanksgiving with his platinum-bleached mother and her latest barbeque beef boyfriend who wore a high school letterman’s jacket newer than his own.

  “Don’t you have something to do?” Kate asked, drawing her lips together one corner up in a ‘don’t be stupid’ formation.

  He did have something to do, oh yes, had been complaining about it since leaving the office. And he meant to get to it, any second now he was going to get off that stool and go to his study. But the smell of warm chocolate mingled with almond held him in the kitchen watching her roll dough with fingers, all buttery and dipped in sugar.

  After the second batch, she put a few hot cookies on a plate and shooed him off to finish his work and give her some peace from his bellyaching. Thirty minutes later, he was in his study sucking a spot of chocol
ate from his finger when he heard the muffled notes of the piano in the library. She always liked to practice after dinner.

  The first week, as they’d been settling in, Ryoki had it in his mind that she would make some offhand reference to her music, like, ‘I’m going to play now if you’d care to listen,’ or possibly ‘Do you have any requests?’ But the first night they were both at home together, Ryoki had retired to the home theater to watch a World Cup qualifier game in blaring surround-sound, emerging after the final buzzer to hear the last few notes spilling down from the second floor. He rushed up the stairs two at a time, bumping into Kate just exiting the library. “Goodnight,” she said, smiling and pattering down the hall. “Goodnight,” he said, but she was already off to her cottage and took no notice.

  Slump shouldered, he’d scuffed back to his study and turned on his computer, cheated of his Turkish Delight. He tried to shrug it off, telling himself that when she used the word practice, she didn’t really mean perform, so why would she invite him? He wouldn’t even think to invite her to the dojo at 5:00 a.m. to watch him practice his kata—oh, well, actually, he might, if he thought she’d get out of bed to watch him sweat. Obviously Kate was less of an exhibitionist. This was going to take planning.

  That night he went through the TV listings for all the matches he particularly wanted to see and set them to be recorded. The next night after dinner, he listened for her to sit down at the piano, then installed himself in the next room, slowly and silently cracking open the adjoining door, pulling up a random spreadsheet on his laptop and opening a book to give himself a double alibi, should he be detected. At the first note he leaned back and closed his eyes, eager to sit unobserved and feel the music trickle through his senses.

  Scales.

  Scales.

  Scales.

  He opened his eyes. Ten minutes of scales. He looked at his elaborate props. Idiot. Practicing does not equal performing. It is the polar opposite of performing. For all he knew, that night at the Porters’ could have been a fluke, her one good piece trotted out to impress the natives.