Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

“You installed that yourself?” I asked. “That’s pretty difficult, isn’t it?”

  Alex nodded. “I was hoping you’d be impressed,” he said, smiling.

  A soprano launched into “Ah, fuggi il traditor.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I tried to fit the small metal strainer filled with finely powdered coffee into the socket on the espresso machine, holding the contraption down with one hand as it skittered on the counter. What happened to the old reliable percolator, I wondered. My mother had also purchased an electric pasta maker and a gelato machine. The filter finally snapped into place, sending a spray of coffee over my arm. I turned on the machine, half-expecting it to explode, and went to retrieve the paper from the front stoop. It was early, the blue sky still streaked with the watery pink tones of dawn. I always enjoyed the fragile light at this particular time, precariously balanced between dawn’s rosy gray and the clarity of day.

  The living room’s new, pale oak floor illuminated the room, opening up the space that had earlier been confined by blue carpeting. The floor had been a near disaster. At first, Alex pulled up the carpet to inspect the old floor and declared it fit enough to refinish. After scrubbing it for a few hours, he hopped into his truck and returned with a sander, a contraption that looked like a cross between a lawn mower and a giant vacuum cleaner.

  By early afternoon, he was standing behind the roaring machine as it skimmed across the boards, leaving alarming semicircular scratches in its path. Next, the sander spewed copious clouds of wood dust into the air when Alex didn’t realize its collecting bag was full. Before I could complain, he turned the machine off and smoothed his hair back tightly with both his hands as if trying to glue the strands to his head. Then he went into the kitchen to make a phone call.

  An hour or so later, a few silent young men, bearded and wearing T-shirts and jeans, trudged in through our front door, each mumbling a quiet but polite hello to my mother. The subcontractors went to work quickly and efficiently, moving with the businesslike energy of an emergency medical team. Alex stood next to me, watching them, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Getting old, I guess,” he said lightly but a bit sadly, relief loosening the lines of his face.

  I sipped the beige froth (my mother insisted on calling it crema) from the top of my espresso. The coffee was good, but for all the effort, the machine had only dribbled out three-quarters of a cup. I opened the newspaper and skimmed some of the less important foreign headlines.

  A Japanese rock star hanged himself from a lamppost with a towel, prompting several young girls in Japan to do the same. The Chinese were drinking French wine, but mixing it with Sprite. Due to cold weather and a diet of dull open-faced sandwiches, Scandinavians were chronically, desperately depressed.

  I stopped reading and looked around the room. As much as I disliked it at times, there was an integrity to my mother’s house, an appropriateness to its structure, size, shape, and floor plan. Homes that have been lived in for a while have an intangible character that goes beyond aesthetics, a somehow organic quality that reflects the personality of their occupants. My mother was right about not wanting to rid her house completely of its history. Sitting on her sofa, in the freshly finished living room, I felt as settled as I did sitting in her quiet presence.

  But there was still something wrong. My mother’s house, situated beautifully atop a hill facing west, was bathed each day with light: the kitchen and dining room illuminated in the morning, the living room in the afternoon. Yet, the living room remained dark late into the day, and the light that did enter in the morning came through the opening in the wall separating the living room from the dining room. I had always thought the claustrophobic feel of the living room was due to the carpeting and many books and magazines crowding the tables. But now I could see the problem was with the wall. Alex had installed a row of French doors in the dining room overlooking the backyard, but the dividing wall separating the dining room from the living room cropped the view. I got up and tapped the wall, which sounded light and hollow. It was probably just some gypsum board and studs.

  “You’re up early,” my mother said, coming down the stairs. She was dressed in a blazingly bright sunflower-yellow sweatsuit.

  “I went to bed early,” I replied.

  “It looks to be a beautiful day,” my mother remarked, glancing out the window.

  “Mom, how would you feel about tearing down the wall between the living room and the dining room?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “We never use the dining room—everyone eats in the kitchen. So it’s sort of silly to have two relatively small rooms when we could have one large space.”

  The dining room table was piled high with junk mail, old Christmas cards, and unused dishes. After years of neglect, the room had slowly turned into a dusty storage space.

  After a long silence, my mother smiled. “I always knew you had a good eye, Emily,” she said, patting me on the arm.

  “NOW, WE CAN’T go around knocking down whatever we want,” Alex said, laughing later that afternoon. “We don’t want ceilings collapsing.”

  “I’m sure the wall isn’t load-bearing. It’s just a partition, a divider,” I said.

  “Even partitions can be load-bearing, Emily.”

  “Maybe there’s an I-beam running the length of the ceiling for support. Or we could extend the lintel,” I said. “Why don’t you drill into the ceiling and check?”

  “Well, all right,” Alex said reluctantly. He looked up at me. “How do you know so much about this stuff, anyway?” he asked.

  Alex climbed a ladder, holding his drill, and much to his surprise, and my satisfaction, he quickly hit steel. Soon afterward, he whacked at the wall with a sledgehammer and crowbarred up the studs until all that remained was a mound of rubble. Even before he was finished, I could see my instincts were right, as if the wall had been blocking a current. Light now flowed through the rooms, traveling freely from the front window straight to the French doors that overlooked the backyard. In this new environment, the Danish Modern dining room table and chairs looked like sculpture.

  THE DAY OF Pavarotti’s concert arrived, but my mother didn’t seem at all worried that there was no formal plan to meet the famous tenor. Aside from the call regarding her complimentary ticket, no one had contacted her. Yet, with each passing minute my mother’s happiness, and her singing, became increasingly frenetic. The bathroom and living room, although still sparsely furnished, were completed, glistening with confidence.

  “Ah! chi mi dice mai, quel barbaro dov’è, che per mio scorno amai, che mi mancò di fé?” she sang as we descended the stairs into the damp, cool basement.

  “So how is this going to work?” I asked.

  “Ah se ritrovo l’empio, e a me non torna ancor,” she continued, her arms full of sheets. She opened the washer and stuffed the laundry inside, pausing for a moment as I added my towels to the load.

  “Donna Elvira’s aria, Don Giovanni, act one, scene five,” she told me, closing the lid and meticulously turning the dials on the washer as if opening a bank vault. “Poor woman.”

  “Mom, did you hear me?”

  “How is what going to work?” she asked, swatting at a loose cobweb that hung from the ceiling.

  “Meeting Luciano. Aren’t you worried that nothing’s been set up?”

  “I have my ticket.”

  “But how are you going to meet him, how do you think you’re going to get him here?”

  “Sometimes things just happen. You have to have faith.” My mother bent over and opened the dryer, picking out a large wad of lint from the filter. “In La traviata, Alfredo returns to Violetta before she dies, realizing he had made a mistake, thinking she had cheated on him. And in L’elisir d’amore, Nemorino does get the woman he wants in the end, even without the elixir, which is fake anyway. Everything always turns out all right.”

  My mother believed that good always balanced bad, that life was never overly weighted with one or the other. She’d cite
examples of people we knew—my father’s painful childhood banished by professional success, Mrs. Murata’s infertility mitigated by her wealth. Virtue was always rewarded, she reasoned; her difficult years were bound to fetch her some form of happiness.

  But I had seen enough opera to know that lots of sopranos end badly for all their pain: Lucia di Lammermoor forced to marry a man she doesn’t love and driven mad by the man she does; Aida doomed to die in a sealed tomb; and Gilda, whose death is an unfortunate side effect of vengeance gone awry. I saw no moral to be learned from these tales. Some people just had bad luck.

  “Life isn’t an opera, Mom,” I said.

  My mother closed the dryer, put the lint in her pocket, and, avoiding my gaze, scanned the rest of the basement behind me. “I decided that this will be my music room,” she said quickly. “I’ll put a piano down here. The acoustics are excellent.”

  The basement’s cinder-block walls were covered with clumpy dust. The little light that seeped in through the dirt-encrusted windows made the room feel small and made me feel claustrophobic.

  “I’m worried about the foundation,” I said, looking at the concrete floor, softened and stained with the water that appeared after heavy rains.

  “Oh, Alex says he can fix that—he’s going to dig out around the outside and seal the walls. He says we can put in a raised floor. Dehumidifiers will take care of the rest. But, first of all, I’m going to get rid of all these old things,” my mother said.

  A miniature train track wove through the room atop a series of wooden tables built by my father. The tables were painted green, and tiny, frosted trees, toy buildings, and plastic people still dotted their surfaces. There was a boy raking invisible leaves, a man carrying a briefcase, a woman walking a tiny brown dog. There were no trains, however. Pappa left behind nearly all his belongings—his clothes, his books, his photos, even his academic awards—but he had come back for his trains.

  “I never understood his fascination with these things,” my mother said. But it occurred to me that these tiny trains, humming through a picture-perfect neighborhood, were my father’s version of the stately homes and manicured lawns that so fascinated my mother.

  I looked at her. “So, what time’s the concert?” I asked.

  “Eight o’clock,” my mother said firmly. “Will you be home around eleven? I want you to meet him.”

  I smiled. “Sure.”

  “It will happen,” she said. “The house is ready. I am ready. It will happen.”

  AS I DROVE to work, the young, gray evening settling behind the trees, I felt a deep sense of dread.

  I imagined how my mother envisioned her life: The stage is set with a dreamy backdrop of green hills against a darkening pink sky. A young girl sits on a bench with her older brother. They are both singing, their untrained voices accompanied only by the distant sound of waves lapping the shore.

  Scene Two: The girl, now a beautiful young woman, is wooed by a stranger. They sing a tender love duet and he whisks her off to the United States. The backdrop changes to rolling suburban neighborhoods, huge, cavernous supermarkets, and, finally, to the interior of a Western home, dominated by the blue carpet of our living room. For the scene in which the woman discovers her husband’s infidelity, a starkly barren bedroom. The curtain comes down as the woman sits at the kitchen table, alone, her head in her hands, the backdrop painted with the big yellow flowers of our kitchen wallpaper.

  Act Two: The character of the contractor enters, his gravelly baritone filling the house as he sings and works. The backdrops change, showing a series of renovated rooms. The act closes with a triumphant duet between the woman and contractor, sung in front of the fountain at Lincoln Center.

  The third act begins with an aria, sung by the woman in the parking lot of a university. She expresses dismay at love lost, but sings thanks to her contractor for helping rebuild her life. She goes into the theater and finds her seat, front row center. Pavarotti comes on stage and begins to sing. When he pauses, the woman sings back from her seat, the superior quality of her voice shocking the tenor on stage. He sings again while extending a hand toward the mysterious woman, who joins him on stage. The opera ends with the conclusion of the duet, the two singers enjoying thunderous applause.

  I sighed, swerving to avoid hitting a dead squirrel. At least my mother could legitimately sing the praises of Alex. After all my misgivings about him, the renovation was completed on time. And besides treating us to the opera, he had agreed to extend her credit on some of the work and had renovated the bathroom for free. “Wasn’t that kind?” she said to me. “Wasn’t I right?”

  THE CASHIER TWIRLED her long hair around her fingers and picked at the split ends. Across the room, chef caps bobbed and dipped like the beaks of exotic birds. I watched Hiro throw a green pepper from behind his back so that it sailed over his shoulder, but he missed catching it. He tried the same thing twice more, missing both times. His tableful of guests gasped when he grabbed a knife from his holster, and tossed it in the same manner. But he caught it, as he did each time. The diners burst into relieved applause.

  The room hummed with conversation, punctuated by the sound of metal scraping against metal and occasional bursts of staccato chopping. Waitresses in taut kimonos cut through the air thick with cigarette smoke and smoke from the grills. I retrieved my tray from the wait station near the bar and went to table eight, one of three tables assigned to me for the evening. Seated around the dull steely surface of the grill were six thuggish men, all sporting versions of the same cruel haircut: shaved at the sides, long in the back, and the tops seemingly permed. Their leader, tight and sinewy as a wrung towel, jerked his head from left to right like a boxer while his knees bobbed with restless energy.

  Each man ordered two entrees, and Hiro worked furiously at the grill. Back in the kitchen, Tetsu was in a dismal mood, having cut himself early in the shift. He walked around with his arms at his sides, occasionally stopping to inspect a thick gauze bandage wrapped around his index finger.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked, pulling bowls of salad from the refrigerator. I ladled dressing out of a stainless steel cauldron, slopping a little over each bowl.

  Tetsu shook his head. “No pain. I just feel bad for the rest of the chefs. Especially Hiro. He’ll end up doing all my work.”

  Hiro banged his cart through the swinging door, accompanied by a burst of laughter from the dining room. Stacks of empty metal platters teetered in front of him, his chef’s cap slightly askew. He left the empty cart and switched to Tetsu’s fully loaded one, heading back to the dining room without even looking up at us. I followed him out and went to the bar. Roberto, the Filipino bartender, announced that we were out of melon liqueur.

  “No Green Buddhas, no Balmy Sea Breezes, no Far East Fruit Fantasies,” he said.

  “Got it,” I replied. As I watched him speak, I realized I had never seen Roberto’s legs.

  “Push Blue Skies over Fuji. We’ve got plenty of curaçao.”

  I walked to the dining area and saw Hiro bow to his new guests. At the adjoining table, the boxer and his friends were shoveling forkfuls of food into their mouths, their chopsticks stuck like TV antennae into the bowls of rice.

  Hiro turned and caught my eye while pouring a stream of oil from a decanter onto the grill.

  “Shrimp,” he mouthed with raised eyebrows. I hesitated and he tipped his head toward the kitchen.

  I nodded, but as I was heading out, the boxer motioned to me. “I want a Geisha Kiss,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  As I turned again toward the kitchen Mariko came through the swinging doors. She smiled wanly. “Table six is getting restless.”

  I glanced back at the table. Seated were plump twin boys dressed in similarly floppy dungarees, a tanned, well-to-do couple wearing identical white golf shirts, and an elderly man drumming his fingers on the tabletop beside his nurse. I picked up menus and hurried to them. “This is a fun place,” the old guy said.


  They ordered drinks and I headed back toward the bar. As I passed Hiro, he shot me a concerned look while digging metal spatulas into the sliced onion and zucchini cooking on the grill. “Shrimp,” he hissed, tossing the vegetables high in the air.

  The bar area was already congested with fresh drinks and empty, dirty glasses. Roberto sighed dramatically as I searched for a spot to put my order slips, resorting to the wet side of a cold bottle of beer. I rushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen and opened the walk-in refrigerator.

  “What are you doing?” Mariko asked, pouring boiling water into a tea kettle.

  “Hiro forgot the shrimp,” I replied.

  “Oh, no, he’s made a mistake. One of his customers is allergic to shrimp. I removed it from his cart.”

  “Really? He’s asked me a few times to get it.”

  “Remind him. He’s made a mistake.”

  I swung back to the bar to pick up the boxer’s order. Gin and tonics, beer, and Cokes crowded the counter. I spotted the drinks for table six, but nothing resembling a Geisha Kiss.

  “Roberto, did you get my other order?” I asked, loading my tray with drinks.

  “For what?”

  “A Geisha Kiss.”

  “A what?”

  “A Geisha Kiss.”

  “We don’t have anything like that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Roberto laughed, popping a maraschino cherry into his mouth.

  I tucked the order pad into my obi and met the gaze of the boxer from across the room. He smiled, his body still twitching.

  “Where is the shrimp?” Hiro asked, his voice directly behind my neck. When I turned, he looked up my nose.

  “I’ve already done the steak. Everything is going backwards.”

  “Oh, Hiro. Mariko told me someone at your table is allergic to shrimp, so you’re not supposed to cook it.”

  Hiro snorted. “Mariko!” He paused for a moment, his eyes distracted, and then hurried back to his grill. The obese twins were getting restless, strain showing on the tanned parents’ faces. The boxer continued to grin at me, and I could see a large family being seated at my third table. I patted my obi and pulled out my order pad with table six’s dinner orders still on it.