The Pearl Diver

by Sujata Massey

  “You received a Silver Star for heroism and a Purple Heart for being wounded in action, I believe.” Kendall made her eyes look big and awed.

  He shook his head. “I was awarded it, yes, but I never actually received it. I had left the military by the time they wanted to award it to me, but I decided I’d rather not take it. Wounded in action is nothing to be proud of, especially in my particular situation.”

  His particular situation—that sounded intriguing. I wondered whether Kendall, who had a “Support Our Troops” sticker on her Volvo bumper, would feel inclined to remove it if she participated in his campaign. But just as I was thinking about how she’d handle things, Jiro came back with another person, a tall, fortyish guy with dark curly hair just starting to turn gray. He was wearing a cashmere turtleneck under a suit that was either an Armani or an excellent runner-up.

  “You know we love you, Senator, but you’ve got to keep your hands off my girl. I need her for more than the occasional fund-raising dinner.” He put his hands on Kendall’s shoulders, and she giggled as if she didn’t mind at all.

  “Marshall, you know I’ve got to spread my energy around.” Kendall winked at him, and went on in a cheerful voice, “Rei, this is Marshall Zanger, the owner of this restaurant. Don’t believe a word he says about anything unless it’s related to food. “

  “I second that.” Senator Snowden laughed heartily.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Rei,” Marshall said, taking my hand in his. It was cooler and somewhat damper than the senator’s. “I heard from Jiro that you were interested in our next restaurant.”

  “Yes. It sounds very ambitious,” I said.

  “And what I like about your restaurant is the use of organic, local ingredients,” Harp Snowden said. “The future of American farming is tied to the kitchens of places like Bento and Mandala. As long as there are people willing to seek out and encourage small farmers, they’ll survive.”

  “So true, Senator. Because of people like you who can taste the difference, and chefs like Jiro Takeda, Bento will be the only place in Washington where a vegan can have a really upscale dinner,” Marshall said. Then he glanced at the remnants on my plate. “What about you, Rei? Are you a vegetarian?”

  “Semi.” I smiled. “I used to be a vegan, but the truth is, I can’t resist seafood. I eat anything that comes from the water except for sea urchin and raw oysters.”

  “Sea urchin I haven’t tried yet, but I think oysters are delicious,” Marshall said. “If I were a good Jewish boy, I wouldn’t eat them, but I can’t resist.”

  We all laughed, and then Jiro said, “I think this feeling about oysters is actually gender related. Male customers order them frequently, female customers hardly at all.”

  “Maybe it has to do with taste and texture,” Kendall said, turning her lazy gaze on Harp, and suddenly I had an idea of what she was thinking. I blushed to realize that this might be a thinly veiled innuendo, but Harp was smiling right back at her.

  “Interestingly enough, in Japan it’s historically been women who dive for oysters. It’s difficult work. The extra layer of fat is supposed to give women more endurance,” I said, trying to bring the conversation back to more tasteful territory.

  “And speaking of Japan,” Marshall said, “it sounded, from what Jiro said, that you know how to make contact with some sources there.”

  “I’d be happy to ask around for you,” I said.

  “Super. But before you start calling, could I steal you away to my office to talk some more?”

  “Sure. But we haven’t finished eating.” I was done, but the senator and Kendall were not. I couldn’t just walk out on them, especially when the bill hadn’t been paid.

  “Go on, Rei! Harp and I need to get back to our powwow,” Kendall said, drawing her pretty lips together. So her gentle inquisition of the candidate was going to continue.

  “I want to cover my portion,” I said.

  “Absolutely not!” Harp said. “It’s my office expenditure, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “But I want to! I really enjoyed myself!”

  “Then just relax,” the senator said. “I won’t allow a good friend’s guest to pay to eat lunch with me. When that kind of thing happens, ethics nightmares begin.”

  Kendall nodded at me and smiled. I was in, just like she was.

  “Thank you,” I said quickly, and left, hoping that my free lunch wouldn’t wind up costing me more, later on, than I was ready to pay.

  2

  “We’re very excited about Bento,” Marshall Zanger said in his office after he’d nestled me in a turmeric-colored cotton love seat across from him. Compared to the austere elegance of the restaurant, this little room was a den of pandemonium—multiple telephones, cookbooks jammed next to telephone directories, file cabinets, a computer with a waterfall of paper on the desk around it. On the wall were framed photographs of Marshall or Jiro standing next to celebrities; in the short inspection I made, I saw the last two presidents, Martha Stewart, and a young white man with a shaved head who looked curiously familiar. Was it Moby?

  “Jiro said the cuisine was going to be kaiseki. I’m trying to imagine how you’ll do something as complicated as that for American diners,” I said, dragging my gaze away from the wall of photographs.

  “There’s a small-plates trend in better restaurants,” Marshall said. “In this neighborhood alone, Zaytinya and Jaleo have made their names because of tapas-style menus. Kaiseki is just a Japanese version.”

  “So, tell me, why do you need bento boxes—which enable you to serve several courses at once—if you want to do kaiseki service?” I was confused by the different visions of the restaurant that he and Jiro were presenting.

  “Jiro’s hot to do kaiseki, but the truth is, people have no time at lunch. They want to set their tuchis down and get a plate of food in five minutes, so bento boxes make sense. They allow for better turnover of the tables, too.” Marshall studied me, as if all my questions had surprised him. “So tell me more about your source. Maybe I should speak with them directly, explain the rush.”

  I wanted to ask what a tuchi or tuchis was, but I was aware I’d been asking too many questions. “The sources I deal with don’t speak English at all, so I would have to call for you. I usually deal with antiques, but because I cook, I know all the stores in Kappabashi, the kitchen district of Tokyo.”

  “Hold on, tell me more about the antiques.”

  “Well, I have a warehouse full of goods that I brought over from Japan—”

  Marshall interrupted me. “I’d love to get some antiques in the restaurant.”

  My pulse quickened. Business was something that I badly needed. “I can take you to the warehouse. What are you looking for, exactly?”

  Marshall drummed his fingers on his desk. “Accessories to decorate the place, art, the kind of thing that makes a restaurant more of a home. I don’t want to be too Japanese-restauranty.”

  “You mean no blue cotton cushions, no pine, nothing too modern,” I guessed aloud, and he nodded happily. “Maybe you should go historic. Late Meiji Period?”

  Marshall laughed shortly. “When was that? Don’t tell me five hundred years ago. That’ll cost me more than I have.”

  I laughed, too. I was starting to like Marshall. “Don’t worry. Meiji and later is what most dealers can afford. The end of Meiji coexisted with the British Victorian period. In Japan, just as in Europe and America, there was a fabulous amount of ornamentation and a design sense that combined East and West in an opulent, yet cozy, way.”

  “Hmm,” Marshall said. “There’s a great restaurant in San Francisco that’s got the feeling I’m after. It has these fabulous oversize antique fans that flap back and forth on the ceiling—”

  “Betelnut?” I hazarded.

  “That’s right. You do know the restaurant scene.”

  The truth was, Betelnut was a few blocks from my family home, which was why I’d eaten there plenty of times. I had a hometown girl�
�s advantage, but there was no need to get into it. Instead, I said, “During the European colonial era, those fans were more in use in countries like Singapore or Malaysia. There might have been ceiling fans of that style in more tropical parts of Japan, like Okinawa, but in the old days, Okinawa wasn’t even part of Japan. I’d have to research whether that style of fan was in use—”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that.” Marshall sighed heavily. “It’s too late to make major changes. I had such hopes for this place, what it could be, and now we’re opening in thirty days without so much as tableware. Not to mention staff. I’m still trying to get line cooks. In fact, I have interviews scheduled there in about an hour. Hey, why don’t you ride over there with me? While Jiro and I are interviewing staff, you could look around and get some ideas of what I need.”

  “All right,” I said, pausing at the door. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask you something. It was a word I didn’t understand when you were talking about the lunch service.”

  “Fire away.”

  “What’s a tuchis?”

  Marshall laughed for a full minute before saying, “Tuchis is Yiddish for ‘ass.’”

  Feeling like one, I got into his Mercedes.

  Bento was housed in an old brick building on H Street, more on the edge of Chinatown although it was technically within the boundaries of Penn Quarter, the faded section of downtown that was coming back because of a number of hip new restaurants. I hadn’t been in Washington’s Chinatown since my college years, when I’d occasionally driven with a carful of other hungry Asian studies majors for dim sum. It seemed as if a lot of the Chinatown restaurants had evaporated since my day. There was no shortage of Starbucks cafes, though. Starbucks was strange. In Kendall’s suburban neighborhood of Potomac, Starbucks was full of blond power moms like herself; but in my neighborhood, it was solely inhabited by Spanish-speaking men. I would have liked to scope out the situation in the Chinatown Starbucks, but Marshall seemed impatient.

  “Chinatown doesn’t seem very—Chinese—anymore,” I said to Marshall. It seemed that all over H Street and Fifth, drugstores and Irish bars had replaced the small restaurants I remembered.

  “The rents went up,” Marshall said. “It’s going upscale. If we could only drive out the gangs, it’d be perfect.”

  Now there was something I could comment on. “In San Francisco, there were some gang wars when I was really young. There was a shoot-out in a Chinese restaurant that decimated the restaurant business in Chinatown for a few years.”

  Marshall looked at me. “I’m not anticipating a shoot-out in Bento, but there’s hostility from our neighbors. I don’t know if having a real Japanese chef is the problem—because of the grudge the Chinese still bear against Japan since the war—or if it’s just plain competition.”

  “What’s happened so far?”

  “Another restaurant owner tried to keep me from putting in a parking area out behind our kitchen. No matter that it freed up more space for street parking—he didn’t want me having anything he didn’t have.”

  I didn’t comment on that, because it seemed pretty minor league to me, but concentrated on the building’s facade. The restaurant site was typical of the early-twentieth-century Washington vernacular, a redbrick, four-story building. It was built on a corner, and it had especially charming moldings, Gothic peaks over the windows and doors. There was a boarded-up building of the same vintage next to it, made of the same brick but with a peeling white-paint overlay. A shingle flapping outside confirmed that Kendall’s husband, Win, was indeed handling its real estate transaction. You could see through the windows in this building to the peeling wallpaper and scuffed wooden floors. Marshall and Jiro’s building had its windows covered in brown paper, so nobody from the outside could peek in.

  For good reason, I discovered when I went inside. The place was in an utter shambles: drop-cloth-covered furniture intermingling with ladders, huge boxes of electrical fixtures, and other things I couldn’t identify. Half a dozen men were at work in the room, hammering and drilling.

  “The walls will be sea grass on the top half, and plum below the chair rail,” Marshall shouted over the din. “Would that work with Meiji?”

  “Perfectly. What will the floor be?”

  “Underneath the tarps, we have old Georgia pine. We’re going to sand it and stain it the color of teak.” He pulled back the plastic covering a rosewood chair, straight backed, with a cushion covered in a cinnabar-and-gold patterned fabric.

  “That looks like an old obi,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s synthetic. Totally stain resistant, which is what we need. Which reminds me of something else. Jiro’s fixated on this idea of redwood, but I’m not sure wood is durable enough for restaurant service. What’s your take?”

  I liked Jiro and his dream of the lacquered redwood bento boxes, but I knew how much effort it took to preserve the glossy finish on my own real lacquered possessions. After being used for food, lacquered wood had to be gently washed and dried. Its finish showed smeary fingerprints, too.

  “I think we could compromise and still have beauty and durability,” I said. “Bento boxes exist that are made of such high-quality plastic that they look and feel just like lacquered wood. I’ll order some samples from Japan so you can decide—”

  “I’ve already decided. That’s just what I want. But don’t tell Jiro it’s plastic, okay? It’ll be just between us.”

  I was about to tell him that it would be impossible to fool a Japanese person about such a thing when a young woman with a tawny complexion and a mop of springy, blond curls interrupted us. “Marshall, one of the cooks is already here, the guy from Nora’s—”

  “Excellent.” Marshall winked at me. “If I can steal this guy, I know I’ll be in good hands.”

  “But I thought Jiro would cook the food here.” I was confused.

  “He will be executive chef. The interviews going on are for line chefs who’ll work under him. And who knows, from the line a star may be born—the guy who’ll lead my next restaurant. Andrea will show you the existing interior-design elements, the paint chips, that kind of thing—”

  “What do you mean? I’m supposed to be checking in the cooks for interviews, and getting all those returns done on the light fixtures!” Andrea narrowed her almond-shaped eyes.

  “First you’ll show Rei around.” Marshall’s voice was firm. “She’s going to be taking over the interior-design stuff, which will make your life easier.”

  “Oh?” Andrea looked at me doubtfully.

  “I could come back another day if it’s better.” I was thinking to myself that a Japanese employee would never have spoken to a boss like that. Even Marshall seemed disturbed because his voice rose and he waved his hand to include the whole room of workers.

  “Come on, we’ve got to move! Thirty-five days from now, our doors will open. Andrea, it’ll take you five minutes to show Rei around. After that, you can go on with your regular schedule. Rei, I’ll need the proposal from you by tomorrow morning—it doesn’t have to be final, but tell me what you think I need to buy and approximately how much it’ll cost.”

  And with that, he disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen, presumably to interview the cook from Nora’s.

  “It’s a good thing he pays people as much as he does, because he’d be impossible otherwise,” Andrea muttered.

  “I’m sorry to be making more work for you,” I said. It was in my interest to get along with her, but I doubted it could happen. She was one of the gorgeous but mean girls who seemed to work exclusively in places like restaurants, fashion houses, and television stations. Andrea had slanting, catlike eyes, high cheekbones, and lips so full they must have endured a few collagen injections. She was model-quality beautiful—even in a chic, shrunken hooded sweater and low-slung yoga pants that revealed a navel pierced with a shining black stone. I sucked in my own abdomen and examined her again. Something had to be wrong with her or I wouldn’t sleep at night. Now I decided
that her short, blond, kinky hair could not possibly be natural.

  “It’s okay,” Andrea answered grumpily. “Actually, you’ll be saving me work if I don’t have to hunt for those bento boxes anymore.”

  “What is your official title within the restaurant?” I wondered if she was some kind of sous-chef—or merely the waitress from hell.

  “I used to be a hostess at Mandala, and I’m going to do the same job here. I organize people, not chairs. Did he tell you that we had an interior designer who did a lot of buying and choosing at the start of the project? No? Well, that girl quit after she got in a fight with Marshall about her fees.”

  Andrea took me down a set of creaky, dusty stairs to the restaurant’s basement, where more of the furniture lay waiting, mostly chairs and tables, all the same style as I’d seen before. There was also a folder with a blueprint of the dining room and the hallway leading to the rest rooms, and a furniture-placement diagram.

  “I don’t suppose you could show me any other accent pieces you have?”

  “Well, we’ve got forks, knives, that kind of thing. There’s the maître d’s station table up there already, and the bar—did you see it?”

  I hadn’t noticed it, so I picked up the folder and went upstairs again to look. Two more potential chefs and a dishwasher had arrived, so while Andrea took them back to the kitchen for their interviews with Marshall and Jiro, I wandered the room by myself, trying to piece it together. The things they’d chosen were all quite beautiful—hand-painted silk Roman shades for the windows, the plum wall color, and the light greeny-yellow sea grass covering for the top half of the walls. These weren’t typical colors of modern Japan, but they could fit in well with late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century design. The rest rooms were boring, I thought, after I walked into both men’s and ladies’. In my mind I was already papering the walls with the legendary arts-and-crafts textile designer Candace Wheeler’s carp-patterned wallpaper. As I did so, another idea followed: stalls made of reclaimed wood from old storehouse doors, several of which Mr. Ishida had sent to our downtown warehouse.