by S. J. Parks
‘Come on. Tonight you meet my famous architect.’
She described him as a girl in red craned over towards the ladies’ room mirror, rubbing powder from a mother-of-pearl compact across her gums. ‘You going to Sam’s?’
Hana slipped the blusher back in her bag. Caroline from the bank, she realized. She barely recognized her transformation.
Matching red lipstick followed. ‘I’m dying to meet his guest speaker,’ Caroline said. ‘Sam’s been so excited.’
‘Do we know who it is yet?’
‘Big secret.’ Caroline winked.
Naomi held her finger to her lips and, after linking arms with Miho, the two glided out together. She assumed Josh had gone up to the reception with the investment banker. While they waited for the elevator she wondered idly whether one door might reveal the architect, stepping out like the man from a child’s humidity clock with a sheltering umbrella in his hand. It was her belief that Miho had oversold her connection with the man and that he would be unlikely to appear that night.
In the lobby, Mochizuki was running late. He drew a thin hand through lightly grizzled hair, which he wore closely cropped, and he flicked the ash from the lapel of his dark, well-cut suit. He was in no mood to be guest speaker that night. And he couldn’t work out why, Kazuko, his wife, whom he could usually entrust with his appointments diary, had sent him to a private party, in the Imperial Hotel of all venues. It was possibly, across the entire city, the building he most disliked.
This prejudice was focused on the ugly tower shaft that had replaced a remarkable icon by Frank Lloyd Wright. A beautiful landmark that was, as he remembered it, like discovering a Nirvana-like temple, once you had cut through the dense city to reach views of the emperor’s palace across the park. Though it formed part of what was a growing city back then, it had taken him by surprise when he had first seen it as a young man. He had expected exotic birds to wing in, pausing to drink at the lily pond. The treasure had, he readily admitted, fallen into some degree of decay and had not kept pace with the demands of a city whose persistent need was for regeneration that, like his workload, was a constant. What he would give just now to be at home catching up with that burden of undertakings. Kazuko had saved herself the trouble of joining him by making excuses about her own commitments. She, he observed resentfully, would not have to eat her way through plates of complicated French gravies.
Naomi let go her hold of Miho’s arm. Her backless halterneck dress fell into folds at the base of her spine and from plain yellow silk it ran into a riot of colour. This, together with Naomi’s lilac sheath, rendered them two birds of paradise that might have walked out of Mochizuki’s dreams.
‘Dance shoes?’ Naomi pointed to Miho’s platform shoes.
‘For the afterparty. Sam insists. You’ll come.’ And she drifted off, leaving Naomi to follow or find a familiar.
Voices muffled by trappings of intercontinental opulence drew Naomi along the corridor to the crowded anteroom; she watched as Miho got caught in an eddy of people and they drifted apart. Naomi felt for the small butterfly necklace she had chosen, and could make out Josh through the double doors, standing beneath the pendant chandeliers, the accumulated light playing indiscriminately over the well-dressed guests.
She knew Josh would be irritated at her for having made him wait; they lived together in a dance of reproach and rapprochement. In London when they had friends over, she was used to finding she was left with them when he had gone to bed towards the end of the evening, unannounced. One night she had encouraged everyone to creep through to their bedroom where he lay asleep and they jumped on him, only to wake his ill-temper. It had cost her days of peace.
She took a proffered tall-stemmed glass from one of the waiters and walked in. The air was brackish.
Places were set for a western dinner. A familiar crowd of guests from among the European and American expatriates were milling round a long table offering one another ready cheeks, easily drawn into the vacuum of opulence. She found it cloying.
Sam was hosting. He was tanned, and his thick, well-groomed hair was shot with lights, following his recent trip to Polynesia; a short break from the trading job that paid him more money than he knew how to spend. Tonight was out of character: a venue that was too stuffy for him. He was living on the outer reaches of an existence in which he was inevitably about to make a mistake; he might have been a happier as a person but could foresee it coming.
‘Beloved,’ he beamed as he opened his arms to catch Naomi in a welcome embrace. He had a personality to die for but he was likely to be the eventual sacrifice.
‘Looking gorgeous. How’s life?’
‘Tell me first; yours has just been reduced by another year. Happy birthday, old man.’
‘Harsh. You haven’t bought me a gift?’ He was hopeful.
‘No,’ she confirmed. ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Good.’
‘No, not yet, but I don’t promise not to. And what do you give the man who takes it all? Something alternative? Something effective.’
He found this an anti-climax. ‘Don’t make it too Bohemian,’ he warned.
‘I don’t want to have to give it back to you for Christmas. The head of Salman Rushdie is on sale for three million. How much have you got?’
She shook her head disapprovingly.
‘No Salman?’ He paused. He was fiercely intelligent and just too confident of his own abilities to find any real challenge in life, but as a result he was hungry for new experiences and it mattered to him that they were regarded novel by those around him, which was not the same as valuing their judgement.
‘Are you asking for a book or an author?’
He leaned in in confidence. ‘Perhaps I would prefer a little delicacy along the lines of the sexy reader. Is that closer to what you had in mind?’
Naomi pouted disapprovingly. His taste for women was wide-ranging and her fondness for Miho wouldn’t let her go further with it.
‘Maybe you can choose your own. We will find you something by the end of the evening,’ she promised.
They were interrupted by another guest, hailing him as if they were long-lost.
Usually at the end of the evening Sam would end up in a hostess club, with or without a tolerant girlfriend. They had been with him countless times and, no matter what woman was beside him, they had watched him papering over his loneliness. This time she had hoped it would be different for Miho.
The volume of conversation in the room rose as the need to be heard escalated and the exertion of raising their voices drew them into the spirit of the party. Miho stalked past and blew Sam a kiss; her eyes fixed less on Sam than the girl he might be talking to. She pointed to Naomi with approval and bowed smiling. Miho’s esoteric style was not what she expected for Sam who had a catalogue of trophy women behind him. Given Miho’s easy, languid manner, it might just work but she would need record-breaking levels of patience.
‘Roppongi after dinner?’ he called after her.
‘I’m on,’ Miho responded to what she knew was an invitation to find a club as she strode over to a crowd in the corner.
‘You and Josh coming?’
‘Count us in.’ Naomi hadn’t seen Josh in a while and was scanning the room.
‘He’s over talking to the derivative guys under the portrait.’
Naomi cast around and saw a group she recognised beneath the copy of a Boucher painting. She ignored the small, welling resentment that she had begun to feel at Josh’s customary insouciance when they were out. His appetite for a deal was so consuming it swallowed his passion for anything other than work. And now it was swallowing his passion for her.
‘So you’ve decided to stay in Tokyo. What’s next?’ Sam asked her.
When she had first arrived, Naomi had been very vocal about how her commitment to staying was open to review. She had given herself a couple of months to settle in and was going to take it from there. She’d been with Josh for over a year and she was conscious that her life w
as synchronized with his but not dictated by his; The discovery that the oppression of liberty was real fired her hunger for greater independence.
‘You can put your artistic talents to redesigning my apartment, if you like.’
‘Sam, your apartment is beautiful. It doesn’t need redesigning.’
His money gave him leave to be generous. The apartment was newly built and lavishly fitted with Italian marble floors and minimalist open fireplaces. It was filled with very large canvasses he had collected from a dealer, in Meguro, specialising in Russian art that was just becoming available from the Eastern bloc. His choice of venue tonight definitely ran counter to what most of the guests would have anticipated.
‘I am looking for work.’ she threw in, as a tall girl in a blue, low-cut dress caught Sam’s eye.
The girl was immediately all over him, pressing close and passing it off as merely flirtatious, which he barely acknowledged. They must have once had something, and she was still hopeful.
‘Sam, darling,’ the girl cooed, ‘we are so looking forward to the guest speaker. You’ve played your hand close. Someone special. He’s definitely coming? Surely now you can tell me who it is. Look, if he’s as well-known as you say he is, I want to sit next to him.’
‘Got you down.’
‘You’re sure?’ Sam loved to indulge people.
She turned her attentions for the first time, to Naomi. Sam introduced Fiona.
‘Yes, I’ve met Josh, right?’ she said, positioning Naomi as his accessory. ‘Has Sam told you who this mystery speaker is going to be?’ Naomi had no time to answer before the girl asked. ‘How are you finding Tokyo? Tough to be here in the rainy months. What are you doing here? Only the desperate are left here in June.’
Naomi had asked herself the same question.
Fiona seemed not to want answers.
‘Everyone’s out of town, gone home for the summer. The festering month. God, we’re all that’s left.’ She cast round the room dismissively and then looked down over her own high cheekbone. Her dress was cut too low for comfort and too tight on the waist; the chiffon was forced to lie in uncomfortable horizontal folds. Was it a dismissive glance or a safety check on the amount of cleavage presented to the room. The answer came when, as if suddenly finding herself in the wrong company, Fiona hailed a man and set off in his direction like a billiard ball looking for a pocket. Naomi thought she saw him across the room take his napkin and feed it to the garrulous girl, about to pot the red.
‘So you’ll design my lakeside cabin in Montana?’
His smile was the smile of someone who had never found life that difficult and so could invest generous amounts of goodwill in his friends, which he had found, like money, made money.
She smothered the impossibility of the task in an excuse.
‘A redwood log cabin? I don’t have any experience with wooden shacks, Sam. Wood. So medieval. We moved on. Steel and glass? Good lakeside view.’ But she was a failed student and the responsibility would eat into the reserves of confidence that had been leaching away since she arrived. ‘You need an American architect.’ She changed the subject. ‘Where’s the guest speaker?’
‘Mochizuki. We’re lucky to have him. Works with traditional principles’
‘So plagiarism some might say.’
‘You should meet him,’ Sam said conspiratorially, turning to his right and guiding her as he spoke, only to find themselves colliding with the elegant Japanese man standing behind.
‘You know my new friend Mochizuki?’ Sam asked Naomi.
Miho had described him earlier. He was thinner, almost lanky and less self-assured than she had expected. She guessed more artist than engineer. Sam shook his hand and took his arm warmly.
‘We last met at the dinner for the Guam Airport funding.’ And he turned to Naomi, ‘His work is renowned. You’ll know it.’
He had a generous face and was greying at the temples. He touched the collar of his black polo shirt.
Naomi ran quickly back and forth across the gallery of a virtual library and crashed into a trolley full of candidate books before she discovered she couldn’t raise a single piece of his work. Her face gave away not just the blank but the pain of finding nothing.
Had he heard her comment on plagiarism? His jawbone tensed. He looked as though he would rather be elsewhere.
Naomi eyed him up. He was much older but clearly took exercise. And he was marked by a self-containment brought by success and it drew her in the same way that power and money were aphrodisiacs for some. His movements were slow, measured. Attractive. She felt his dark eyes rest on her collarbone and she watched as he followed a thin black strap from her shoulders to the butterfly on her necklace. It was as if he had had touched her.
‘Butterfly.’ He bowed.
‘Naomi.’
‘So, we should build in man-made materials I think you said? I could not disagree more.’ He spoke English fluently.
He had overheard her. And she was crestfallen. Under the light as it caught her hair she turned fragile.
‘But this vogue is over, no?’ He recovered as if he had been too harsh on her.
‘Okay, Ciocio-san.’
She was aware he looked at her for too long and he noticed he had been caught.
Sam turned on his heel to face the room and lifted his arms. Like a thespian, he was so weaned on the attentions of others that he could no longer do with out them.
Mochizuki inclined his head toward her; His confidence was a force, but his humility put her at her ease.
‘Do you know much of Japanese traditional architecture?’ Mochizuki asked her. The keeness with which the architect squeezed this question into the tight interlude between Sam’s call for attention and the time lapse between seizing it gave it urgency.
‘No, I …’
‘Okay, okay, okay, everyone,’ Sam bawled to gain audience, and then announced that it was time for everyone to take their places and eat.
‘That …’ the architect said as he moved away from her, ‘that, is a great shame.’
He hadn’t yet smiled and she hoped that the reason might be cultural but feared that he was annoyed with her, as she was in turn with herself, for her comment. Josh began again.
It was best to filter off in a different direction to Mochizuki with the excuse of looking for her seat, only she discovered that she was positioned directly opposite him as they approached one another from different sides of the table. Mochizuki had an air of detachment as if an observer, whose achievement had no need of the obvious calibration that some of Josh’s friends relied on. He didn’t wear it or hold court to impress.
Josh was positioned two away from him on the same side of the table and he winked at her as they sat down to begin the meal. A large glass centrepiece of trailing white orchids and a spray of greenery screened her view of the architect across the table and she shifted on her chair to hide behind it and began the requisite opening conversations with those beside her with a rare intensity of interest.
The chef at the Imperial had a Michelin star and so they ate well, course after course, and washed it down with Puligny-Montrachet, Pétrus and listed wines on the menu that ran like a primer for French chateau. At the end of the meal Sam stood up.
‘We are gathered,’ he began.
Whoops of appreciation went up and when they had subsided he went on to applaud the French, continuing the theme of his evening, for the wisdom of their saying, ‘Show me a man’s friends and I will show you his character.’
He played to their vanity and they were then bound to listen appreciatively to anything he had to say. It was easy to see why Josh adored him. Naomi looked round the room and had to wonder how many of the company enjoying his hospitality were more than acquaintances. She and Josh knew Sam well but they had rarely seen any of these friends before. The crowd heckled.
‘I want to introduce you …’
Excited mumblings ran round the room.
‘I want to introduce
a man who proves I am not the only celebrated American in Tokyo,’ and he began to make his way to the anteroom with the intention of escorting the guest speaker to his table. His much-vaunted speaker arrived in the form of a life-size cardboard cut-out of the ex-president of the United States of America. The laughter went up and somebody leapt up to punch Sam playfully on the shoulder.
‘This man gets the Russians to believe they must buy arms that they don’t need and to ensure they have a hard time affording them he floods the Middle East with oil so they don’t have the cash to pay for them. Let us salute a great man when we see one. No, now look,’ Sam apologized, ‘I am afraid we have here a bad case of laryngitis.’ And he threw the cardboard aside ushering it out with a demand for a round of applause for ‘Ronald Regan’. And he dispensed with the joke.
‘No, I promised you a great man and you have come here to hear one.’ He conducted the applause to a diminuendo. ‘To be serious, I would like to introduce Mr Mochizuki: a man with numerous international awards to his name for work that crosses continents, gracing the skyline of so many international cities. His illustrious career speaks for itself. We are hugely privileged to have him come here to talk to us tonight.’
As the polite, gentle clapping subsided, the architect stood up .
‘Thanks – I’m gonna give you my translator. He’s more eloquent.’
He began through the interpreter standing beside him; he spoke slowly as if primarily addressing him rather than the guests in Japanese, leaning in to make his job easier. ‘I have worked on many large projects,’ his hired vocal cord said, and went on to list a few prestigious buildings in Europe and Asia.
Naomi realized she had seen colour plates of the most recent of these, though would not have attributed them.
‘But aside from these commissions, which I have been lucky enough to be asked to design, I have a private passion, very close to my heart.’
He paused to gauge their attention and Naomi’s among them, and she assumed they were about to be regaled with his recent scrapes while flying a light aircraft or his scoop on the protection of the otter on the Sanagawa River. She had underestimated that behind his professionalism lay a need to exercise those skills, to the exclusion of just about everything else.