Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  “Sometimes I hate this work,” I said to Mariko when she appeared at my side.

  “Work is work,” she replied.

  “My rhythm’s all messed up. I haven’t cleared my first table, and the second one hasn’t got soup, and I haven’t given their dinner orders to any chef yet. And now I’ve got a new table.”

  Mariko smiled, looking as serene as a lily pond. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  And she did. I watched her take drink orders and food orders at the same time, and then bring out bowls of salad balanced along her arms. She distributed the drinks carefully, holding back her kimono sleeve so as not to drag it across the grill. And with rubber bands and paper, she even transformed chopsticks into wooden tweezers for the twins.

  I POURED MYSELF a glass of water and stood in the kitchen, thinking of the concert. Maybe it would all work out; somehow, my mother would be able to slip backstage to see the star. He would pass up postconcert celebrations to follow an overly excited Japanese woman into a beat-up Volvo and drive deep into the suburban night until they reached her house, clean and tranquil atop a hill: a renovated temple.

  Or maybe if he doesn’t show up, the things that irritated me the most about my mother—her disorganized life, her astonishing, sometimes baseless faith, her bottomless passion for opera—would sustain her.

  “Your table is seated,” Mariko called to me as she entered the kitchen. I tucked an order pad into my obi and headed slowly out. “Europeans,” she added.

  Hiro sighed and began tying a clean yellow kerchief around his neck, while Tetsu prepared his next cart. “Europeans always want to change the flavor of the food,” he said. “‘Oh, that is too much soy sauce. Please, do you have more ginger? More oil? More green onion?’ So picky.” He yanked the ends into a tight knot. “Makes me mad.”

  There were ten people waiting, two more than the table was designed to hold, meaning two more bowls of rice and salad than the trays could accommodate. Even from across the room, I could see the table was particularly noisy, a well-dressed bevy of joking, jovial friends. As I approached, I penetrated an aura of cologne. A large man sat in the middle, the center of attention.

  I patted my obi, feeling for a pen, but looked up when I heard the voice. It rose above the din and clatter of the grills, past the mournful plucking of taped koto music, filling the high, empty space to the ceiling.

  “Una furtiva lagrima negl’occhi suoi spuntò,” the voice sang, “quelle festose giovani invidiar sembrò: che più cercando io vo?”

  The steakhouse became eerily still. Twenty feet away, Mariko’s hand froze in midair, a salad bowl cradled in her fingers; the only sound was meat sizzling on a grill. I had heard the voice a million times on our old record player. I had heard the voice just last month. It was Pavarotti.

  “Bravo!” someone yelled. Tables broke out in applause. Pavarotti half-stood and bowed, sending the flowing end of a white silk scarf over his shoulder with a dramatic swat. The mouth I had known as a big black O on record covers was in front of me, smirking, coughing, laughing. His heavy beard and mustache covered his cheeks and chin like a rough wool overcoat. “I am in terrible voice tonight,” he said with a frown to no one in particular.

  “Oh no, on the contrary,” said a woman sitting across from him. She shook her head emphatically, her long, sparkly earrings batting the sides of her face. “You’re magnificent,” she cooed.

  “Oh, please,” Pavarotti murmured, lowering his eyes. He exaggerated his expressions, as if trying to convey his feelings to the back of the room. Modesty meant pulling out his lower lip and gazing at his hands.

  Then he smiled, his heavily lidded eyes half open, and continued the conversation momentarily interrupted. “Nemorino knows that Adina finally loves him when he spots ‘una furtiva lagrima’ in her eye. A furtive tear. And Adina, despite having turned him away earlier because she felt fidelity was impossible, wants Nemorino’s love and wins him back. Not with any magical elixir, but with her smile and eyes.” He snickered. “I wonder how long that relationship would have lasted.”

  “Oooo,” the woman with the earrings murmured.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. He looked up at me, his eyes shimmering and clear like coffee, his mouth gigantic. “You’re supposed to be performing at Purchase,” I told him.

  “Are you my waitress?” he asked. I nodded.

  “You sound more like my dear mother, but she’s not as pretty as you,” he said, giving me a sly smile. The table tittered and followed his lead when he opened the menu. A thick gold ring with a red stone twinkled on his pinky.

  “I saw you last month at the Met,” I said, clicking my pen uncontrollably, my eyes struggling to focus on Pavarotti’s considerable face. “My mother thought you sang ‘Parigi, o cara’ really well.”

  Pavarotti raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  “But why aren’t you performing?” I asked. “At Purchase? Tonight?” I had difficulty getting enough air into my lungs to complete my sentences with one breath; as Pavarotti’s table grew quiet I felt my obi tighten so that I soon wouldn’t be able to speak.

  Pavarotti’s forehead wrinkled into three horizontal lines. He turned to his tablemates to shrug and lift his hands in bafflement. He then burst out laughing, and his entourage joined in on the joke, a chortling mass of purple and blue cashmere, gold watches, and expensively styled hair.

  One of the men at the table spoke for him: “His doctor tells him he has bronchial allergies. Singing under these conditions would be irresponsible.” Pavarotti sniffed. “Irresponsible,” his friend repeated, looking at me meaningfully. “Everyone always makes such a fuss.”

  “He was supposed to be coming to my mother’s house,” I continued, my voice ringing high and unreal in my ears.

  Pavarotti folded his arms on the wooden bit of table that framed the grill and smiled gently. “Darling,” he said, his tongue rolling, then releasing the r. “I have fans everywhere. From Tulsa to Thailand, even Tibet.” The other man took over. “It would be impossible for him to visit all of them in their homes.”

  “But he told my mother he would. At the Met…

  Pavarotti shook his head and threw his hands in the air.

  My eyes searched for some kind of recognition in his face, some sign that he recalled my mother’s happiness for those ten minutes in his dressing room. His face remained blank, crossed by a ripple of irritation. But then he took my hand. “Is your mother Asian, about five feet tall?” he asked.

  “You remember her?” I said.

  He looked at me, his lips pursed with concern, his fingers closing warmly around mine, and I started to believe him. He remembered.

  Then a man screamed. I looked up toward a flash of light and saw a tower of flame disappear in the air. The old man at table six flailed his arms, and I could see Hiro’s yellow hat standing still above a crowd of craning diners. Mariko dashed from the kitchen with a wet towel in her hand and held it to the old man’s head. When she removed it, the man’s white hair was singed black in front, his eyebrows nearly gone. Burnt shrimp sputtered on the grill.

  The guests sat back down uneasily in their chairs, leaving Hiro standing, alone. He bowed deeply and then walked quickly toward the front door. “Baka yaro,” he mumbled, tossing his yellow chef’s cap onto the floor.

  The corners of Pavarotti’s mouth twitched, as if in spasm, and he released my hand. The surrounding air hit my fingers with a distant coolness.

  “Hiro!” Mariko called out, running after him through the front door. I ran after him as well. His head looked small and vulnerable, unprotected by his chef’s cap, and I noticed he was balding.

  “It’s not a disaster,” Mariko said as we reached the parking lot behind him.

  He hurried toward his Pinto with an uneven gait, untying his apron and kerchief and flinging them behind him. Opening the creaky door, he slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door so hard the entire car shook. He started the engine
with a full-throttle whine and took off, his tires screaming and burning black onto the pavement. Mariko and I were left behind in a blast of blue exhaust.

  Mariko, hands on her hips, shook her head. We watched his yellow car pause at the bottom of the restaurant’s driveway, turn south, then zoom away.

  “Where is he going?” I asked.

  “Florida,” she replied.

  “Florida?”

  Mariko nodded. “He’s always had a fantasy about Florida, driving along Daytona Beach, learning to surf, eating oranges off the tree. There’s a steakhouse down there somewhere, too.”

  “What makes you think he’s decided to go now?” I asked.

  “Gil,” she said. “And the Harley-Davidson Gil never rode. Hiro doesn’t want to be dead before he lives his life.”

  We stood in the parking lot for a few moments, moths batting against the lights high above us. Then the front door swung open, and Pavarotti and his entourage streamed out onto the front steps. We watched in silence as the group headed for two Mercedes-Benzes parked at the far end of the lot.

  The car doors closed with muffled thumps and the sedans filed past Mariko and me, as solemnly as a funeral motorcade. I spotted Pavarotti sitting in the backseat of the second Mercedes, his hands gesturing wildly.

  THE CROWDS USUALLY began to thin at around nine-thirty, but tonight they continued to pour in, filling up the bar and blocking the hallway that the waitresses used. “On your right! On your right!” Mariko called out as she burst out of the pantry, carrying two trays. The cigarette smoke from the bar floated toward the dining room, mingling with the heavy smoke from the grills. As I headed down the hallway toward the pantry, my tray loaded with empty dishes, the smoke stung my eyes, the waiting customers looking like laughing, talking blurs.

  Mariko had picked up Hiro’s yellow cap from the floor and put it on the front counter in the pantry. I looked closely at it, a sheath of cotton crisply starched and ironed. Hiro had spent so many hours wearing this thing, working in front of hot grills and entertaining guests, that I almost expected it to have absorbed some of his ebullience, some of his personality. But without him, it was just part of a discarded uniform.

  At ten-thirty, I scraped the last of the ginger-carrot dressing onto a bowl of salad. The five other bowls remained undressed. I stared at the empty stainless steel cauldron, its inside coated with orange-tinted oil. I had never seen it empty.

  “What should we do?” I asked Tetsu, who peeked into the cauldron from over my shoulder.

  “Hiro’s the only one who knows the recipe,” he said. “He kept it a secret for ten years.”

  Customers often asked me how the dressing was made, or if the ingredients were available in the U.S. When I’d repeated these questions to Hiro, he had replied with a shrug that company policy was to ignore the requests. But I suspected that he planted stories in the minds of the customers. As a result, the dressing grew shrouded in culinary mystery: The orange color was rumored to come from a rare ginger grown only in southern Japan; there was talk that the recipe had been uttered from the lips of a dying chef, the last of a line of chefs to cook for the Emperor. One night, a diner told me that he had heard that the dressing could cure his arthritis.

  I’d had no idea that Hiro had created the dressing. Despite his callousness, his complaints about the drudgery of his job, he cared enough to leave his imprint, to help shape the steakhouse, to create a bit of his own history.

  I examined the many decanters lined up on a shelf and poured all of the oil from one into the cauldron. My mother could improvise fiercely and with confidence, reaching into a cupboard for jars of dried herbs, bending over the stove to taste from the pots in front of her, adding a pinch of this or a drop of that, moving like a conductor at the podium, directing an orchestra.

  “Get all the lemons you can find,” I told Tetsu.

  “Lemonade dressing?” Tetsu asked.

  While he rummaged around the refrigerator, I rushed to the bar, took all the lemons, and returned to the kitchen. We cut the lemons in half and squeezed the juice into the oil in the cauldron, the pungent tang scenting the air. I added chopped garlic, salt and pepper, and a few spoonfuls of sugar.

  “Taste it,” I told Tetsu.

  He dipped a finger into the dressing and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Sour,” he said, lips puckered, “but tastes good. It’ll cut through the grease.”

  I stirred the dressing with a ladle and spooned it over the rest of the salads and returned the cauldron to the refrigerator.

  Just as I was leaving, Mariko flew into the pantry, her normally cool complexion glistening.

  “You’ve got a phone call, Emily,” she said, yanking open the refrigerator and lugging out the dressing. “He’s on hold, line eight.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I bolted out the door, and the smoke and din of the crowd hit me like a blast of exhaust from the back of a bus. I pushed through the throng to the bar, picked up the phone, and pressed line eight.

  “Hello?”

  I heard a man’s voice, but couldn’t make out any words through the din of people talking at the bar and the connection’s crackly static.

  “Hello?” I repeated. Suddenly, I thought it might be Pavarotti, calling to apologize. The man spoke again.

  “Mr. Pavarotti?” I said, pressing my hand over my free ear.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?” the man said faintly. The voice was too deep to be Pavarotti’s.

  “Alex?” I asked.

  “Emily? It’s Ben. Sounds like I’m catching you at a bad time.”

  “Ben?”

  “I got your work number from your mother. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Vietnam?”

  “I just got back.”

  “You sound like you’re calling from a tunnel,” I shouted above a woman’s laughter. Someone stepped on my foot and I stifled a cry.

  “I’m on a cell phone. I’m driving to New York. Right now I’m on Interstate 80. I figure I’ll be in Tarrytown in under an hour.”

  “You’re coming here?”

  “I was wondering if you’re free for a drink tonight.”

  “Tonight?” The area around the bar started to clear. “You want to see me?’

  “Yeah. I can pick you up, if you like.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had.”

  “A rough crowd?”

  “Sort of.” I paused for a moment, and was suddenly flooded with thoughts of our last days together. “But what about Beijing University?” I asked.

  “I’m still going to Beijing, but not as a student. I’ve got a job. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Oh.”

  A frisson of static rippled across the line.

  “Listen, I’ve got something I’ve got to do tonight. But can we go out later this week? I’m glad you called.” I watched the doors swing open and yet another noisy party of ten walk in. “I’m not working this Saturday,” I added.

  “Saturday, sure. I’ll call you.”

  “O.K.”

  “I brought you back something from Vietnam. A pound of very special coffee. See you.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to meet Roberto’s interested gaze. “You look like you’ve just been crowned Miss America,” he said, working a toothpick through his lower teeth.

  I returned to the pantry to retrieve my tray, but my elation deflated as soon as I entered the dining room. The chefs were frenzied, some tending two tables at a time, cooking with a trancelike concentration. A layer of smoke hovered above the diners’ heads. From the sound of the voices and laughter, some of them were obviously drunk.

  It wasn’t until one-thirty in the morning that Mariko lugged the large wooden tip box to the kitchen table. Though each waitress stuffed their tips into a different slot, the money was distributed evenly to all the staff. She lifted the lid. The box was overflowing with cash. She look
ed at the money for a moment before pulling out and smoothing open a few crumpled bills.

  “God, I’m exhausted,” I said, looking over Mariko’s shoulder.

  “You worked very well tonight,” Mariko told me. “Look at the tips.”

  I yawned.

  We counted the money in silence for a while, Mariko going through the smaller bills while I fished through the tip box for quarters and stacked them in groups of four.

  “You know, there are a lot of things that Hiro used to do besides just cooking,” Mariko said.

  “Really? Like what?”

  “He had managerial responsibilities. Ordering the food, hiring staff, planning work schedules, promotion and advertising. You should think about whether you’re interested in taking his place.”

  “Me?” I looked at Mariko. “You want me to do that?”

  She laughed. “Don’t act so shocked. You work hard, you get along with people, you have energy. And didn’t you study accounting in college? Why wouldn’t we want you?”

  I thought about Hiro hurtling down the highway toward Florida, or wherever he was going, his white shirt finally unbuttoned at the neck, free from the tight grip of his yellow kerchief.

  After changing into my clothes, I sat for a while in the empty locker room. The other waitresses were already upstairs, collecting their share of the tips. Soon, the chefs would return from a cigarette break by the rock garden and make dinner for the staff in the kitchen. Even with the nightly intrusion of outsiders, there was a comfortable predictability to the steakhouse, a routine that varied little from day to day, down to this after-hours meal: drinks, soup, salad, meat, rice, ice cream, tea. Each ritual slid precisely into the next, like the many planks of wood that made up the steakhouse.

  I carefully folded my two-piece kimono and rolled up the tabi as Mariko always did for me. I lay them in my cubbyhole, lined up my plastic zori next to them, and curled my obi around everything. My flowered uniform still looked surprisingly fresh, even after all those summers, the pinks and reds girlishly bright.