Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  “Not true,” he said.

  “So she’s lying to me?”

  Pappa rubbed his eyes. His legs were crossed, and a beaten leather slipper hung from the toes of his left foot.

  “She’s turned you against me, Emily. My reasons are very complicated.”

  He spoke with a conviction equal to my mother’s, although his words were measured and drained. My mother was more dramatic, gesturing with her white arms. Her comforting coolness changed into a confined kind of resentment, like an alert, active animal kept in a closed box. She snipped photos of my father into sharp pieces and sprinkled them on top of the garbage.

  Pappa left one night while I was sleeping. When I awoke, I didn’t know anything had happened until I noticed that his shoes, which my mother kept lined up by the hall closet, were gone. The rest of the house seemed normal. The dishwasher was on. My mother was sitting in the kitchen in her bathrobe, with a cup of tea cooling on the table. She had taken her slippers off, and her feet were propped up on my father’s chair. I walked into the room gingerly, afraid of making noise.

  “Is he gone?” I asked.

  My mother nodded. “Breakfast?” she said.

  NOW, I NO longer understood the dynamics of the house; the television seemed too far away from the sofa, the doorbell sounded too loud, my mattress felt too hard. Yet, after four years away, I couldn’t accurately remember what it was like before. My father, sister, and brother had left behind most of their belongings, as if they had fled during some emergency. Perhaps it was the absence of their bodies that skewed the dimensions and the acoustics of the house I had known.

  Charlotte called in the early afternoon, a food processor grinding over the phone.

  “I’m making a cold soup,” she said, her voice close to my ear, as if her lips were pressed against the receiver. She paused a second after something clattered to the ground. “Gazpacho,” she added.

  The food processor began whirring in fits and starts. “I’m ‘pulsing,’” Charlotte informed me. “So how’s the house?”

  “You know about the renovation?”

  “Sure. Mom called me early this morning. Really early. I haven’t heard her so excited about anything in a long time.”

  “She has been acting a little strangely.”

  “How so?”

  “I haven’t figured it out yet exactly.” I watched her from my brother’s bedroom window, chatting up Alex in the driveway. “She’s got this contractor here tearing things up left and right, and she strolls around the mess like a monk. This morning there were a few rocks in a pile in the backyard, and she told me they suggested a crane.”

  Charlotte laughed. “She’ll probably start throwing salt around the kitchen in some kind of purification rite.”

  We often joked about our family and the odd inner logic our parents had developed, like eating lasagna at Thanksgiving or taking our shoes off at the front door even though the floors left our socks blackened. But we never questioned our private customs and followed the rituals with the same matter-of-factness as other families on our street, who roasted turkeys for holidays and went to church on Sundays.

  I asked how she was doing.

  “Chicago’s great, my apartment’s great, the kitchen’s got all this counter space,” she said. “When are you coming to visit?”

  I fingered one of Pierre’s high school soccer trophies. “Soon, when Mom gets the house business straightened out,” I replied.

  “Hey, she told me about meeting Pavarotti, too. That’s pretty amazing.”

  “I think she wants to bear his children.”

  Charlotte pulsed her gazpacho some more and talked about her job at the bank before we hung up. I always used my sister as a gauge for what was normal and abnormal in this world. For as long as I could remember, our family had lived a ramshackle life. My parents tended to details that gradually knit together into something bigger rather than dividing life into a series of categories, like work, hobbies, and health. They created a thriving chaos that in the end, to them, made sense.

  But something was always left hanging, a loose end flying in the air. My mother’s insistence on keeping everything, whether it be ratty rubber bands, used pieces of plastic wrap, or empty mayonnaise jars, maddened my sister.

  “We’re not poor!” Charlotte would say.

  Harmless activities became quests. At one point, my father transformed an interest in bowling into a full-blown lifestyle. He wore bowling shirts at home and watched somber tournaments on TV. We bowled every Thursday and Saturday evening for five straight months (with none of us quite able to understand the scoring). My mother complained the entire time that bowling was a crude American version of bocci ball. And it ended when she bought a bocci set that is still in our garage. We never used it because our yard was too sloped.

  But my sister was the most well-adjusted person I knew, exercising regularly, flossing her teeth, taking her red Toyota in for oil changes every three months. It was as if having triumphed over overwhelming idiosyncrasy she reveled in routine, in being like everyone else and nothing like our parents.

  My mother knocked at the door. “Charlotte is fine?” she asked, leaning her head into the room. She was looking very good, a healthy pink tinting her cheeks. Her hair had been combed into a smooth cap.

  “Seems that way,” I replied.

  “Has she found a boyfriend?” she asked, coming in.

  “Not that I know of.”

  My mother sighed. “She should get a boyfriend. She’s getting old, already twenty-nine. You should get one, too.”

  “Get one yourself,” I said, irritated.

  My brother’s room felt small with both of us there, me sitting at his desk by the window, my mother standing by the bed. A boy-smell lingered in the air: baseball mitts, worn shoes, loose change.

  My mother blinked rapidly and took a step toward me. “You have an extremely bad attitude.”

  “Me?” I replied, my voice tightening, bracing myself for the inevitable onslaught. “Getting a boyfriend isn’t like shopping for a steak. Maybe that’s the way it is in Japan, but I think Charlotte and I want something better.”

  “Better?”

  My mother paused, then hit her thigh. When emotional, she made noises with her hands, clapping them at good news, softly slapping the side of her face when dismayed.

  “Can’t you see how alone we are? Pappa’s gone, Charlotte in Chicago, Pierre in Milan. We’re all like islands now.” She crossed her arms tightly over her stomach. “A boyfriend can give us family and relatives, make us part of something. So for heaven’s sake, don’t be stupid.”

  THAT FIRST EVENING with Ben was a typical Saturday night in town. Bars were packed, cigarette smoke filling the spaces bodies did not. The sidewalks were soured by beer, and the streets echoed with the occasional howl of a drunken student or the sudden booming bass of a dance tune as a bar door swung open in the distant darkness.

  Ben walked quickly, his trench coat flapping around him like a flag. At one point, he stopped in front of an old maple and exclaimed, “What a beautiful tree!” Though embarrassed by his undisguised effort to impress me, I stepped back a few paces and took in the tree I had passed dozens of times before. I saw that it was perfect in its symmetry, as if someone had cut its silhouette from a folded piece of paper. Its green leaves were as glossy as glass, each one quivering in the breeze like a butterfly’s wing.

  He led me to the front of a tiny coffee shop, opened the door, and let himself in first. “This is the best café in town,” he said.

  The room was small and bare, with a few posters of Ho Chi Minh City on the walls and white candles flickering on the tiny tables. Ben removed his coat with a flourish before sliding into a seat, his dramatic movements nearly blowing out the candle in front of him.

  My knees bumped his as I sat down across from him. I couldn’t decide which of his eyes to focus on, so I shifted from one to the other, hoping my wavering would fuse into a steady gaze.

&nb
sp; “Something wrong with your contacts?” he asked.

  “No, no,” I replied, rubbing my eyes. “I’m just tired.”

  “Yeah, I have friends who are architecture students. For them, sleeping is just a hobby.”

  He leaned back in his chair and called to a waitress. “Two coffees?” He turned to me and smiled conspiratorially. “Do you know where the Vietnamese find really good coffee?”

  “Where?”

  “In fox shit.”

  “In what?”

  “Vietnamese foxes eat coffee beans and expel them whole. People retrieve their shit because the foxes know how to pick the best beans. Something in their digestive system adds flavor. Coffee farmers keep their own fox coffee stash.”

  I laughed. “That can’t be true.”

  “It’s true. I’ve had it, it’s great. The guy who owns this place has some. God, I’d love to go to Vietnam.”

  He paused for a moment, gazing at the candle that was now a pool of clear wax in a small tin base. “I’d start at Ho Chi Minh City, and stay at the Continental Hotel, where Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American. Then, I’d go north by train, stopping at Hue, Vietnam’s Kyoto. I’d end up at Halong Bay, where the water is emerald green.”

  He sounded enthusiastic, but practiced. I wondered how many women had occupied my chair while he wheeled out this exotic itinerary.

  “Of course, I’d go to Hanoi.”

  “Now’s a good time to go. You’ll still be able to see the city’s Old Quarter before it’s torn down,” I said, breaking his monologue. “The buildings are French colonial—high ceilings, deep verandahs, buttressed eaves.”

  “Is that right? Of course, you’d know.”

  He laughed as the waitress set down two coffee cups between us. On top of each was a tin drip filter loaded with dark grounds.

  “It’s not from a fox, is it?” I asked, smiling.

  Ben removed his filter and stirred up the sweet, condensed milk from the bottom of his cup with a spoon. “Unfortunately, no,” he replied, and nodded toward my cup for me to do the same.

  TWO

  The steakhouse was a wooden farmhouse originally set near a rice field in Hokkaido. Sometime in the early 1970s, it had been transported piece by piece to a grassy spot overlooking the Saw Mill River Parkway thirty minutes north of New York City, then meticulously reconstructed, using hemp cords and strategic grooves. There wasn’t a nail in the place. The menus solemnly apprised guests of the building’s features, drawing their attention to the steeply slanted roof, meant to deflect snow like an Alpine chalet. The design was supposedly modeled after two hands in prayer. The joke among the chefs was that the roof was praying the farmhouse wouldn’t fall down.

  I had worked at the steakhouse every summer since I was fifteen, waiting tables and serving drinks festooned with pineapple slices and paper umbrellas. Within the subdued Westchester countryside, the steakhouse was known as a family restaurant, or a good dark place for high school kids to take a first date. On Friday and Saturday nights, the chefs made supreme efforts to outdo one another: tossing zucchinis in the air and catching them on their knives or spinning ceramic plates on the table like a stunt from The Ed Sullivan Show. Yet, despite the theatrics, there was a melancholy feeling to the steakhouse, as if, like members of a traveling circus, we had all ended up there after failing to fit in elsewhere.

  During the week, when only a few diners trickled in, the slow pace sapped everyone. On those nights, the dim lighting barely hid the restaurant’s shabby details: the patina of grease coating the walls, our faded cotton kimonos, the chefs’ tired faces.

  “Yo,” Hiro called out as I walked into the kitchen. He wore a tall yellow chef’s cap, slightly stained around the rim, and his mustache drooped to the corners of his mouth. He was a short, compact man with large forearms developed from years of theatrical cooking. Hiro and the other chefs were clustered around a large metal table, picking through piles of bean sprouts and cleaning vegetables.

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  “Business is good,” Hiro said, peeling an onion with quick jerks of his knife.

  “Anybody famous come by recently?”

  Hiro paused, staring at the greenish-white ball in his hand as if peering into the past. “Simon, but without Garfunkel,” he said. “Sam Donaldson, who was wearing a thick toupee. And Peter Frampton. But he only ordered vegetables. I asked him, ‘If you want vegetables, why did you come to a steakhouse?’ Stupid.”

  Hiro was friendly, and, for a Japanese, unusually cynical. From the first day I met him, he treated me like an equal, while the other chefs viewed the waitresses as useful but mostly decorative.

  A busboy burst in the swinging kitchen door, bringing with him the smell of grease from the dining room. I breathed it in and felt deeply depressed. During my summer stints, I liked knowing I would be there only for a few months, that by the end of August I could leave my kimono behind. Now I didn’t know how long I’d have to wear the thing.

  “We’re offering crab legs now,” Hiro added. “You should watch us crack those legs.”

  He unsheathed a knife from the holster on his belt and, holding the handle with both hands, lifted it in the air, samurai-style.

  “We get good tips,” he added, bringing the knife down in slow motion, then sliding it back into his belt.

  I examined the cartons of ice cream packed into the freezer. “Cherry pistachio’s new too,” I said.

  “Yes. Disgusting, but popular,” Hiro replied. The other chefs mumbled in agreement.

  “How’s Mariko?” I asked.

  “Mariko is Mariko,” he said, stripping another onion of its brittle brown skin.

  I went downstairs to the ladies’ locker room. My two-piece kimono was where I had left it the year before, the cotton top and bottom neatly folded in a cubbyhole, the heavy embroidered sash curled on top like a sleeping cat. I held the kimono to my nose, breathing in the scent of laundry soap still laced with the smell of grilled meat. The oily smoke from the open grills never washed out. Mariko had set aside a fresh pair of tabi for me, ironed and rolled like a wad of dollar bills. I loved the velvety tabi, fitting my feet like snug white gloves, separating my big toe from the rest.

  PUTTING ON THE steakhouse kimono involved none of the silk cords and hidden ties of a real one. There was no ritualistic order to the undergarments; in fact, no undergarments were needed at all other than my own Hanes underwear. The kimono had been reduced to its barest essence. The stiff back bow of my obi sash snapped on like a little boy’s necktie. My zori slippers were plastic. Changing was as simple as getting into gym clothes.

  But when I looked in the full-length mirror, the illusion was startling. With my hair neatly tied back in a bun, and my hands clasped primly in front, I could be a girl dressed for a street festival in Tokyo. I walked around the locker room with tiny, abbreviated steps, like I had seen my mother do when dressed in her formal kimono, slightly pigeon-toed to accentuate her demureness, and smiled at how unnatural it felt.

  As I sat down to adjust my top, I felt as if I had never left the restaurant. College was already beginning to feel like a hazy dream. I had started with a major in architecture, inspired by my mother’s interests at that time and encouraged by fine arts teachers starved for students interested in something other than business or law. But the summer after my father left, I became compulsive about saving money. My mother grew quiet and withdrawn, so I compensated by busying myself with economy, turning off lights whenever they weren’t needed, snipping coupons from newspapers, and cutting my own hair.

  Although our life before was never extravagant, I was obsessed with trimming whatever excess I could, as if every cent I saved was helping us inch back to the way we were before.

  As my father cut off our credit cards and froze my mother’s bank accounts, all my mother could do was rant about how his friends had betrayed her, how his company should fire him. And I felt, for the first time, that my mother couldn’t protect me. Sh
e seemed out of reach, adrift on her own.

  “Hey, Emily! Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Tomoe, a half-Japanese woman in her late twenties, hauled a heavy backpack onto the bench. She smiled, her golden-brown eyes narrowing slightly.

  “Well, for better or worse, I’m back,” I said, sighing.

  “This year’s my seventh here. Can you believe it?” Tomoe slipped her clogs off and wriggled out of tight jeans. “I keep telling myself, I’m going to do something new, I’m going to try something different, but I keep coming back. I could just shoot myself.”

  Tomoe was beautiful, smart, and could speak smoothly fluent Japanese; it seemed it would be easy for her to do whatever she wanted. But as we dressed quietly in the locker room, it occurred to me that her reasons for being here were likely as personal and complicated as my own. She could never guess that I came back because the gaping hole my father left in my mother’s life was one I had tried frantically to fill. When I returned to campus the fall after Pappa left, I switched my major to accounting, and spent the remainder of my college years in quiet agony, calculator in hand. By the time I graduated, the last thing I wanted to become was an accountant.

  In the hallway, the time clock ticked like a bomb. I found my card lined up with those of the other waitresses: Mariko from Kyushu, Sachiko from Osaka, Futaba from Kobe. They were all good, hardworking people who laughed about the oppressive social rules of Japan yet hadn’t found a place abroad where they wanted to stay. They had come to America, but still seemed to be searching, wandering further and further from their homes. The steakhouse, with its tropical drinks and green-tea ice cream, seemed to be only a stop on so many individual journeys.

  I punched in: 4:58 P.M., two minutes early. Before heading upstairs, I paused in the empty hallway and listened to the distant clatter from the kitchen, breathing in the odor of hot soy sauce and fried meat. All those miles I had logged walking from class to class on a wide, grassy campus, the books I had bought and read, the facts and equations I had memorized in numbingly quiet libraries—all seemed to dissolve into that smell lingering in the air. I felt that no matter where I fled—to places scented with curry or basil or lemongrass—I’d still wind up here, smelling that smell.