I took the handle of Norie’s huge Samsonite suitcase and began pulling it quickly through the crowd. I had to get ahead of her, to get space to talk with Hugh.
“Rei, what are you doing?” Hugh caught up with me, just as I’d hoped. “Norie’s a good ten meters behind you. It’s not polite to go faster than she can—”
“Did you tell Norie we are living together?” I held my breath, waiting for the answer.
“Not exactly,” Hugh said. “I thought that was better coming from you.”
“She must not know that we live together. She’ll lose face if she is forced to be a party to it. She’ll insist on moving out, and our whole relationship will be ruined!”
“But we lived together in Japan.” Hugh’s tone was bewildered.
“That was just for a few months, before I got my own place. And she didn’t like you very much at the time, do you remember? She thought you were taking advantage of me.”
Hugh whistled softly. “What are we going to do? It’s obviously my flat, full of my gear. Not to mention, I need somewhere to sleep. Especially after this last flight, when I normally would have drifted off but she kept me up the whole time, practicing English conversation—”
“You could go to Win and Kendall,” I suggested desperately.
“No! It would be an imposition on them, not to mention that I want to be in my own bed at night, with you.” He looked at me significantly.
“Then you’ll have to go along with the plan that I suggest,” I said.
“Which is?” Hugh sounded wary.
“To start, you can drop me off with all the luggage at the building, but don’t you dare let her out of the car. You can drive her around to see the sights on the Mall. I’ll need about an hour to de-masculinize the place. You’ll join us for dinner, and then you’ll go out again. I’ll call your cell after she goes to sleep. Then you can sneak back in—oh, Obasan, I wish I had cleaned up the apartment for you!” I changed my tone as Norie caught up. “Anyway, Hugh is going to take you on a short drive while I organize a few things.”
“But I’m a little tired,” Norie started to protest.
“Don’t you know that when you arrive in a different time zone it’s important to spend time in the bright sunlight? That will help reset your body clock,” I advised. “Our car’s just across the way. Let me take another of your bags, Obasan.”
“I brought my own sheets,” Norie said. “Please don’t worry about a bed. I am used to sleeping on the floor.”
“There’s a fold-out futon in my study,” I said. It had been my bed once, in Japan.
“A study! My goodness, it sounds bigger than your last place, Rei-chan. You must be doing very well economically to have such an apartment. Of course, I will also have to see your parents’ lovely home in San Francisco. Your parents invited me to stay there for as long as I like. But I’m here to work, to help you with the wedding preparations.”
“Actually, I haven’t been thinking about the wedding much. I’ve been so caught up in the opening of this new restaurant, you see.”
“Yes, yes, Hugh said so. How is it?”
“Well, the food’s wonderful,” I said. “But there was a problem opening night that they are still trying to live down.”
“‘Live down’? What does that mean?” Norie asked.
I’d been speaking to her in English for Hugh’s benefit. I tried again. “The restaurant, it suffered an embarrassment on the first night, which they hope will be forgotten.”
“What kind of embarrassment? Some problem with the food?”
“Actually, my cousin Kendall was kidnapped from the place.” Seeing Norie’s shocked expression, I quickly added, “She was safely returned to her family the next morning. Unfortunately, the kidnapping was mentioned in the newspapers, which made the restaurant appear unsafe.”
“Newspapers can be terrible for the image. We know that from our experience, don’t we, Rei?” Norie nodded sagely. “I am not afraid to visit this restaurant. Shall we go there tomorrow?”
“Actually, tomorrow I’m driving to central Virginia. But on Tuesday we can go to Bento, if you like.”
“Sightsee in Virginia? You are making such nice plans for me from the very start!”
“Actually, don’t you want to rest tomorrow?” I asked.
“Oh, no. I am eager to, how do you say, adjust to American life. I will see the sunlight today, reset my body clock, and spend a full day of travel with you.”
I took a few deep breaths and reminded myself that I should be happy. Norie had been my surrogate mother all those years I’d spent in my early twenties in Japan. She wouldn’t stay with us forever; it was worth it to keep her approval during the time she was with me.
Hugh dropped me off with the bags, and I lugged them upstairs, then set about in a whirlwind of de-guying the apartment. Although I’d moved in plenty of antique Japanese furniture and placed a few woodblock prints on the walls, the apartment in general did not look like mine, chiefly because it had been painted and decorated by Hugh in the primary colors of blue and ochre. There was a leather sofa in the living room, which also had an elaborate stereo and high-tech-looking CD towers that housed every compact disc Hugh had collected from his college days on. No point in doing anything about the CDs, I thought; Norie wouldn’t know the difference between Grace Jones (mine) and Norah Jones (his). But I would sweep all the law journals off the coffee table and under his side of the sleigh bed. Hugh’s mahogany sleigh bed in itself could be a problem, because Norie might remember that I only owned a futon. Well, I’d just have to tell her that I bought it, and the handsome Biedermeier armoire as well. Once the living room was done, I went to the bathroom and swept all of Hugh’s shaving paraphernalia into a basket that I added to the underbelly of the bed. Then, Hugh’s coats and shoes had to move from the hall closet to our narrow bedroom closet, which was already stuffed to the rafters. His rowing machine I couldn’t hide—Norie would just have to believe that I’d taken up that form of exercise.
I was just changing the sticker on the buzzer downstairs from Glendinning to Shimura when Norie and Hugh came back.
“All set?” Hugh looked anxious as I crumpled up in my fist the old sticker bearing his name.
“Of course.” I smiled encouragingly at him. “Welcome home, Aunt Norie! And, Hugh, now that you’re back, won’t you come up and have a cup of tea?”
When Norie entered, she exclaimed happily over the size of the place, and didn’t seem fazed by anything, though she wondered aloud why Hugh had taken his own suitcase and carry-on upstairs.
“You can’t leave anything in parked cars around here, Obasan, there’s so much crime,” I said smoothly. I showed her into the study, where she’d be sleeping, and offered her the chance to have a hot bath before dinner. The fish was delicious—I’d only bought two, so I cut them up beforehand; that way it didn’t look as if someone had been counted out. I felt terrible for Hugh, who gobbled his portion promptly and then practically nodded with exhaustion over his plate.
“You’d better go home to your own place, but I’m worried about you driving. Where is it?” Norie asked kindly.
“Closer than you’d expect,” Hugh said, then swept out with a long look, but no kiss, for me.
I chatted with Norie until she made her departure to the futon in the study. Twenty minutes later, I called Hugh on his cell phone. He was at the Irish pub near Union Station with his rugby friends, who were making bets on how long the single-girl apartment ruse would work. I reminded him to tell his friends to call him only at work or on his cell phone, and he groaned.
“Frankly, if living together unmarried is such a sin, we should marry posthaste,” Hugh said. “Tomorrow I’ll apply for a license. The hell with fancy weddings.”
“But that would disappoint our parents,” I said. “Darling, just come home. She’s asleep now. We can talk about it.”
But Hugh returned too exhausted to talk. He washed up quietly in the bathroom, put on the paj
amas I’d laid out for him, and was snoring within a minute of hitting the pillow. I tossed and turned for a while, thinking about how hard the situation was going to be, but eventually fell asleep. I was still tired when Hugh kissed me awake the next morning. So he wasn’t angry with me. I was relieved.
“Here. Your present,” Hugh said. He was still damp from his shower, and was wrapped up in a terry-cloth robe.
Sleepily, I tugged the box open and saw what he’d given me: an impossibly tiny pink-and-black cell phone.
“It looks like a sex toy,” I said.
“It could be.” He grinned at me. “But really, it’s high time you got one of these things. If Kendall didn’t have one with her that night, where would she be?”
“Thank you. Do you know if it will work in the U.S.?”
“Yes, it’s an export model. The thing I like about it is that you can use it all over the world to make and receive calls, so I can get in touch with you wherever you are.”
Of course, he was the traveler, not I—though I still cherished my little dream of returning to Japan. I put the phone on the bedside table and slunk back down under the duvet.
Hugh shed his robe and crawled in after me. From the feel of him, he wasn’t after a catnap.
“We’d better not. My aunt might overhear—”
He cut me off with a long kiss, then said, “I left the shower running in the bathroom. She won’t hear a thing over that. And by the way, I’m armed!” He held a brand-new, microscopically thin Japanese condom for me to inspect.
“That’s awfully wasteful,” I sighed, as he disappeared under the covers again.
“The condom? Not really. I think we can afford them more readily than a baby, at the moment—”
“No, the water.” I could hear it pattering against the tile, just as my body was starting to tighten in anticipation.
“There’s no drought. Not in Washington, not down here either,” Hugh said suggestively.
He was right. He was too good. All the things any normal woman would have thought of during first-thing-in-the-morning sex—lack of tooth-brushing and showering—flew out of my head. Hugh didn’t care, obviously. His mouth was all over me in all the ways I loved, and he’d picked up an amazing new trick with his hands.
Sex with Hugh was perfect because it kept changing, growing, just as the feelings in myself, as I headed toward thirty, became more powerful. I was more responsive now, more daring. The days that Hugh had been gone had been full of work, but almost every night, once I’d gotten in bed, my mind had turned to what I was missing. I didn’t change his pillowcase until just before he came home because I wanted to inhale his scent.
I found myself daydreaming, after we were through, about what sex would feel like postmarriage. Would it become boring? Would there ever be a time when Hugh, like Win, came home unzipped because there was something more exciting out there?
“What is it, darling?” Hugh stroked my hair, as if he’d sensed my worry.
I didn’t want to seem too neurotic. “That new, ah, little finger trick of yours.”
“Did you like it?” Hugh practically crowed.
“Tremendously. Where did you learn it?” I said.
Hugh laughed softly. “I saw it in a pillow book I bought at Kinokuniya. They sold it to me in a plain brown wrapper! I can show you now, if you like.”
“I would love to see it.”
Hugh hopped into his underwear and started digging in his suitcase, giving a running commentary on the reaction of the young female salesclerk when he’d asked for the title. He brought the book over to me, and we were giggling over it when suddenly, the pattering of water in the bathroom ceased. There followed a light knock on the door separating the bathroom from our bedroom.
“The water is very cold. I turned it off!” Norie’s voice called out. “How can I turn on your water heater?”
Hugh’s eyes were laughing at me, silently, as he started buttoning up his Thomas Pink shirt. I had no time for fashion choices; I bundled myself into his bathrobe and went to the door, through which I loudly explained that there was no water heater in the bathroom itself, but if she waited ten minutes or so, there would be enough hot water running through the system again for her own shower.
“If she went into the bathroom while the water was running, how many more boundaries is she going to cross?” I whispered to Hugh as we finished dressing inside the bedroom.
“We might have to run away,” Hugh whispered back.
“I hear you,” I said. “But where?”
11
While driving through the Virginia countryside a few hours later, I started a few fantasies about that escape. The rolling green hills dotted by grazing sheep and decrepit old barns were almost obscenely picturesque. Not that there would be many opportunities for practicing international law or decorating houses—Hugh and I would have to shear sheep or make artisanal cheese.
Andrea was sitting silently in the backseat; I’d introduced Norie to her, after picking her up, and she’d accepted the situation without much protest—or friendliness, either. By now I knew that Andrea’s prickliness was probably a sign of how worried she was about the upcoming events. She was dressed in a manner that, for her, seemed semicasual: a long-sleeved voile blouse patterned with orchids, and fluid cream silk pants. She was wearing impossibly high heels, which she kicked off in the car.
After taking off her shoes, Andrea withdrew a package of Virginia Slims from her Coach bag. I told her to put them back.
“Shoot,” she said, “I didn’t know you were one of the anti-smoking Nazis.”
“It’s Hugh’s car,” I said. “He’d never lend it to me again if I brought it back smoky. And frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone in the food business would smoke. Doesn’t it ruin your ability to appreciate food?”
“More than half the kitchen smokes,” Andrea said. “It’s normal for restaurant people to smoke. Our palates are fine; in fact, a cigarette at the end of a meal is perfect.”
“Andrea, if Bento were a smoking restaurant, you’d hate it,” I said. “Just think of what working for six hours in a three-thousand-square-foot ashtray would do to your clothes every night.”
“And your skin would be hurt,” Aunt Norie chimed in. “Your beautiful golden skin would look old too young. As well as your eyes. Rei-chan, don’t you think your friend’s eyes look almost Japanese?”
I glanced back at Andrea through the rearview mirror. “May I tell her about you?”
“Go ahead. I can’t get any more stressed out than I already am.”
I wound up explaining Andrea’s story in Japanese, just to make certain Norie understood how important the trip was. By the end of it, Norie looked as if she could use one of Andrea’s cigarettes.
“There must be a way that I can help. I can find your Japanese relatives when I return home,” Norie said in English. I’d noticed that on foreign ground, it was much stronger than it had ever been in Japan.
“Let’s think about today, Obasan. Actually, I’m worried that your presence might bring back memories for Andrea’s father,” I replied in English, so Andrea would understand.
“Mrs. Shimura, how old are you?” Andrea asked, surprising me with her intrusiveness. But without seeming embarrassed, Norie answered that she’d been born in 1951.
“Really! I would have guessed you were younger,” Andrea said. “What I’m thinking is, you could pass for my mother’s sister, because she had a younger sister born in 1954.”
“What’s the point of passing for someone she isn’t?” My hackles rose.
“I can use your aunt,” Andrea said. “I can use you both. If you let my father believe that you are family of my mother’s, come all the way to find out the truth, he’ll have to talk to us.”
I braked suddenly, causing the car behind me to honk. I pulled myself together and drove on. When I had calmed down, I said, “Andrea, I won’t lie. And I won’t let my aunt do it either. I’ve gotten in trouble for little lies. It�
��s why I was kicked out of Japan.”
“You won’t have to say a word,” Andrea drawled. “I’ll do all the talking.”
An hour later, we were at the JL Cafe. Andrea opened a glass door plastered with signs telling us to support state troopers, American freedom, and Jesus Christ, and we all filed in. Inside there was no hostess stand, rather a cheery, hand-lettered sign that said “Seat Yourself!” with a smiley face.
It was a picture-perfect diner, just like the ones from my childhood, when we drove into the farm belt for pick-your-own fruit or to go shopping for antiques. The only difference in this diner was that everyone inside it was black. I immediately felt that every eye was on my aunt and me, and wondered if this was what it felt like for black customers at Bento—there were some, but a minority compared to whites.
More than a few people glanced at us as we took the booth that Andrea selected instead of more public spots along the long, Formica-topped counter. Behind the counter was a vast griddle, where a tall, slightly hunched man of sixty was flipping pancakes. He glanced at us, nodded, and called out, “Marie!”
Marie, a slim woman in her forties with a sprinkling of freckles across her caramel-colored skin, came to our table with a pot of coffee in hand. We all nodded that we wanted coffee even though it was already eleven in the morning, and the thought of more caffeine made me anxious for the rest room.
After Marie had left, Andrea said very quietly, “That’s my dad behind the counter.”
Norie looked blank, and I guessed she hadn’t understood what Andrea had said. I translated, and my aunt shot the cook a disapproving look. “He hasn’t greeted us. In any restaurant in Japan, we would have been greeted!”
The Pearl Diver Page 11