The Pearl Diver

by Sujata Massey

  The leak was the main problem, but there were secondary problems, too. The tansu’s surface sloped very slightly backward—the plumber had grumbled about it to me when he’d cut holes for the blue-and-white ceramic bowls to be dropped in. The wood also hadn’t been waxed. Without a protective finish like wax, water would continue to damage the wood. I eyed the paper towels, which were too rough to use to dry the wood, and used a corner of my cotton skirt instead. I slipped the kuginuki back into my skirt pocket and went out to give Marshall the bad news.

  “I think a plumber needs to look at the installation of the faucets, and then you need to have someone else come in to wax the tansu. Also, during the dinner and lunch hour, someone should come in occasionally to wipe up any water drops with a soft cloth.”

  Marshall stared at me for a moment, then made an exasperated sound. “What do you mean, someone needs to wax it? This isn’t a beauty salon.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll come tomorrow morning.”

  “With regard to your other suggestion, our cleaning people come in at ten-thirty in the morning. They don’t hang around with soft cloths during the dinner hour touching up sinks, let alone keeping the johns in decent shape.”

  I met his outraged gaze. “Like I said, I’ll wax the piece tomorrow. That may take care of the problem entirely. I’ll wipe up the surface tonight, as long as I’m here.”

  When I returned to the table, Hugh was studying the menu, but Norie wasn’t around.

  “She ran off for the kitchen tour,” Hugh said, answering my unspoken question.

  “Tonight hardly seems the time for a tour. I heard that two of the cooks never came in and the dishwasher’s in jail.” I was determined not to discuss his sleeping plans any further. I’d act as if I just didn’t care.

  “Your friend Jiro said it was petty larceny,” Hugh said. “The police caught him with a tank of lobsters that he was trying to sell on New York Avenue.”

  “Really! Maybe he’s the reason the monkfish delivery Marshall mentioned didn’t arrive. I’m surprised he didn’t think of that.”

  “It seems like quite a small thing to be booked for, but I gather this bloke had a record. Meanwhile, the kitchen’s in chaos. Your friend Andrea’s washing dishes, apparently, and Jiro says she’s too slow.”

  “Oh, no. I should go back and give her a hand—”

  “Washing dishes? Don’t let them take advantage of you. You haven’t even been paid for your labor yet, have you?”

  “Marshall needs to sort a few things out before he writes my check,” I replied. “I’m sure he’s good for it.”

  Hugh shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of that, nor do I think it’s appropriate that you clean the ladies’ cloakroom. You’re a freelance professional, not a doormat.”

  “When you work in a restaurant, it means you work as a team,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Just like you and your friends with your rugby games. You cover for people when they need help.”

  Hugh snorted. “Well, we might as well order. So what do you recommend to start, the Sashimi Flower Garden or this carpaccio thing called Red Paper? This poetic name business is so…nineties.”

  I looked at him and felt my anger building. “I don’t eat red meat, so I can’t speak for the beef carpaccio. But if you’d like to tear apart some more flesh, this is surely the dish for you.”

  “Well, I’ll try it. At least it doesn’t have carbs.” He patted his abdomen, which, to my eye, looked flatter than ever. Since coming back from Japan, he’d been spending extra time swimming and lifting weights at his gym. It was my doing, because he couldn’t hang around his apartment relaxing anymore.

  Even though Justin was supposed to be hosting, not waiting tables, he personally came to take our order. In his flirtiest manner, Justin addressed every word to Hugh, who just smiled back and asked his opinion of the carpaccio. Two beefcakes talking about more of the same. I’d had enough and decided to go locate my aunt. I left the table without a word, not that the two of them noticed.

  16

  Bento’s kitchen felt like a greasy version of a steam room. The fans were going full blast, but they were no match for the stoves. Flames leaped under pans while freestanding stockpots simmered. Everyone, it seemed, was busy cooking. The Salvadoreans who usually peeled vegetables were cooking on the line. Next to Andrea, I noticed a new dishwasher, an olive-skinned man with a long, lank ponytail and an elaborate snake tattoo on his bicep. Still, he looked old and down on his luck, the opposite of most of the young, fit-looking staff.

  Andrea was working at a second sink near him, wearing jeans and two strappy tanks that were covered up by a long apron. Her strong shoulders pulled together as she lifted a pan to rinse it. She had a tattoo on her shoulder, a small black butterfly that I hadn’t noticed before. Tattoos and piercings, my father had said, were signs of body mutilation, evidence that a person wasn’t comfortable in the skin in which they’d been born. I didn’t know about that. The tattoo looked pretty on Andrea’s muscular shoulder—but maybe, after fifty, it would look as tacky as the other dishwasher’s multi-colored snake.

  “Hi,” I said. “Need any help?”

  “Nah. They shifted Toro, the guy who torched the tuna, to dishwashing, so we’re doing fine.” Andrea angled her head to indicate her companion, who didn’t look up, just kept washing pans with a dull expression. Now I noticed that he was wearing rubber gloves. Andrea wasn’t, and her hands looked red. I asked, “Hey, shouldn’t you wear rubber gloves?”

  “Honey, the last thing on my mind is dishpan hands,” Andrea said. “Guess what? I got my dad’s service record in the mail today. What you said about calling the VA again worked.”

  “Anything interesting in it?”

  “Well, it raised a few questions in my mind. My father’s tour in Vietnam was supposed to be thirteen months, but he had a change to Japan after just eleven months. I knew he’d gone to Japan, but I didn’t know he’d gone early. I wonder why.”

  “Vietnam was pretty difficult duty,” I pointed out. “Maybe they let him transfer because of his knee injury.” I wanted to hear what Andrea had to say, but I felt distracted by my desire to find my aunt. She was supposed to be in the kitchen, but I couldn’t see her from where we were standing.

  “He had the injury much earlier in the tour, and after being treated for it, he went back to fighting,” Andrea pointed out. “I also don’t understand why anyone would do my father any favors. He had some disciplinary actions against him when he got to the U.S., to the Pentagon. He wound up with a general discharge.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to get out of the military after he got here and your mother disappeared,” I said. “Anyway, what about the box of papers we brought home from your dad’s house? Anything interesting there?”

  “I haven’t gone through it that closely because I was so surprised by the stuff from the VA, which I could read. The box my father sent is full of papers written or typed in Japanese. About the only thing I can read are the addresses on some letters she sent over there that were returned unopened.”

  “Are these letters your mother wrote to her family in Japan?”

  “I can’t tell for sure because it’s all in Japanese except for the very last part, Japan and the zip code. And, of course, the return address to Arlington.”

  “It doesn’t matter that they’re written in Japanese! My aunt and I can translate. Now we may have an address for your Japanese family. To think it was there in the box all those years!” I hugged Andrea, not caring about getting wet.

  She patted my shoulder and released me in the manner of people who don’t really like to be hugged. “I don’t need to contact those relatives, but I do want to know what the letters say. I’m a little shy about having your aunt translate, though. What if she reads something that makes her think badly of us?”

  “Whatever Sadako may have done, it is no reflection on you,” I reassured her. “By the way, I was over at the Washington-Japan Frien
dship Society and met some people who knew your mother when she lived here. They’re eager to talk to you. Did you know that she called you Akiko?”

  “Akiko,” Andrea said. “No. Yes. I’m not sure—”

  “Maybe you have a buried memory.” I was getting excited.

  “We need sauté pans!” Carlos called out, interrupting us.

  I realized now that we had talked for too long. The other kitchen workers were shooting us annoyed looks. I felt worried, all of a sudden, that we’d been talking about personal things in public. I said, “Andrea, I’m going to go back to the table. I think I saw our order go out, and I need to round up my aunt, too.”

  “I don’t think she has time to eat,” Andrea said.

  “Of course she does! She came here to eat.”

  “Look at her, over there next to Carlos. She’s cooking. She put on an apron when she heard we were short a few cooks tonight.”

  I stared at my aunt. When I’d entered the kitchen, I had walked straight past her, assuming from the back that she was a small Hispanic man. She wore her hair short, so the mistake could be made, and the heavy white apron she wore camouflaged her silk suit. The two other line cooks were working docilely next to her, leaning in to listen as she told them something.

  “She’s making some kind of stew she calls yosy-nobby,” Andrea told me.

  “Yosenabe,” I said. “Jiro let her cook?”

  “He didn’t want to, but Marshall said why not. She had a great idea when we were talking about what to do to make up for the screwed-up specials. She’s using our standard Asian-style bouillabaisse and just adding fresh vegetables, red snapper, shrimp, and cellophane noodles. Two orders have gone out already, and the customers specifically told the waiters that it was the best thing at their table.”

  “But—how can she work?” I dropped my voice. “She’s here on a tourist visa. She’s totally illegal.”

  “She told Jiro she was volunteering,” Andrea said with a smirk. “Why so shocked? You’re no stranger to bending the law.”

  I tried to talk my aunt into handing the ladle over to one of the other cooks, but she was too busy. No, she couldn’t take a break to eat. She had been sampling the yosenabe anyway, to make sure it was perfect. Normally, the dish was cooked right at the table; it was more complicated to do it ahead of time, in small quantities, undercooking the fish, then having it rushed to the table in oven-heated earthenware-lidded bowls.

  “I will try one shrimp now, just a minute.” Norie lifted a ladle, dipped it in, and tasted. “Yes, it’s a bit underdone. By the time it reaches the table, it will be perfect.” She called out to signal the runners, “Fire on twenty, I request, please!”

  I grabbed the ladle away from her just as she was about to dip it back in the pot. “You can’t eat from a ladle and put it back in! This is a professional restaurant!”

  “Sorry,” Norie said cheerfully. “Rei-chan, please go back to the dining room and relax with Hugh-san. Takeda-san said that I must work at the highest possible speed.”

  I looked around and finally spotted Jiro Takeda. He was chopping vegetables. The executive chef doing vegetable preparation? It seemed crazy, but now I realized that he had one of the vegetable prep guys—the one who’d helped with information when Kendall had vanished—working the line, and another one was gently arranging sashimi. I went over to visit Jiro and discovered that he was cutting carrots in the shape of flowers. Carrot and daikon and lotus root flowers were my aunt’s signature embellishment for dishes simmered in the nabe pot.

  “Not my style at all,” he said, surveying the sliced vegetables when I came up. “But for a nabe dish, it is traditional.”

  “You shouldn’t have to cut vegetables, should you?” I asked.

  “We are badly understaffed tonight. And, unfortunately, this dish will not even be served correctly because we are not set up with tabletop burners. Bento is not that kind of restaurant.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, sensing how upset he must be to have his authority usurped by a visiting Japanese housewife. “How can I help? You should be doing more important work than these flowers.”

  Jiro stopped chopping and looked at me. “Have you ever cut vegetable flowers?”

  “Many times.” I looked at a bundle of uncut scallions resting near the chopping board. “I know the Japanese scallion-cutting style, on the diagonal—”

  “Please, no.” Jiro raised his eyes heavenward. “On this, at least, I will make a point of having scallion curls. Let me show you.” Jiro picked up a green onion, slivering out a long section and at the same time turning it against his blade so that it curved like a miniature lily frond.

  I could do it, but we both agreed I should do the hard, less perishable vegetables first. I worked until my stomach began to growl and I realized that I’d forgotten about Hugh, in the dining room. I put away my knife and went to the rest room to wipe up the water, as I’d promised Marshall I’d do.

  In the dining room, the table where Hugh and I had been sitting had turned over to another couple. I went off to look for Justin to find out what had happened, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a note written in Hugh’s elegant loopy hand.

  Enjoyed dinner thoroughly, but tell them not so much red chile in the carpaccio dipping sauce. I’ve paid for it and have gone home to drop off your uneaten food in the fridge and to sort out my kit. I’ll be sleeping where I told you, so call if you need to talk. And remember, if you’re running late, take a taxi instead of the Metro.

  Love to your aunt,

  H.

  Something caught in my throat. Love to my aunt, but not to me.

  I went back to the kitchen, and worked like a dog until eleven-thirty. The last people were leaving. All had gone well—the nabe had been a success. I’d let Norie pour me a small bowl of it. It was fabulous—even better than what I’d eaten in her own home. Somehow, Jiro’s luscious fish stock combined to perfection with the ginger, and the seafood within was buttery and crisp at the same time. A slight bite from the scallion and shiso leaf on top gave the dish a stunning complexity, as complex as a wine, I realized, though I didn’t have a glass of Riesling to sip with it, as some of the kitchen crew were doing. All had gone well with the restaurant’s standard dishes, too—the tuna and steak supplies had been depleted. It was impossible to tell how the food critic had liked his meal, but the waiters had made sure that all the food that went to his party was as perfect as they could make it. Every plate was cleaned, and the five guests had consumed three bottles of wine. Over the dinner period, 201 covers had been served if you counted my uneaten meal that Hugh had paid for. Marshall didn’t say what the evening’s proceeds were, but he was smiling when he came in to say good night to everyone in the kitchen.

  “D’you want to go around the corner to Plum Ink for a glass of wine?” Andrea asked me. “I can tell you about the papers.”

  Plum Ink. I felt a frisson of something go down my spine. This was the restaurant that Kendall had mentioned. A take-out package from Plum Ink had been inside the trunk of the car in which she’d been kidnapped. “I’d really like to, but you know, my aunt is too tired. I should take her home.”

  “Please go and enjoy with your friend, Rei-chan,” my aunt spoke up from her position next to Andrea, where she was drying dishes. “Takeda-san is taking me home by car. If you can write down the address and give me a key, I shall let myself in.”

  “Sure.” I hesitated, thinking about how hard I’d been on Norie when I’d discovered her cooking. “Obasan, I think your dish was a great success. I’m really impressed that you had the energy to step in.”

  “It is no problemo.” Norie said, showing she had picked up some kitchen Spanish.

  “Yes, thank you very much.” Jiro had come up, and he bowed stiffly to Norie. From his face, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The dish had saved the kitchen, but it was a bit of an etiquette conundrum for a newcomer to accomplish so much.

  Norie bowed back more
deeply to him. “Thank you for letting me try. I know it wasn’t much, but anything I can do to help, I will. I would like to come back whenever you have a problem. I will stay here for a long time, so I am quite available.”

  “Ah so desu ka,” said Jiro. “But you are an esteemed lady. I insist that when you return to this place, you must be my guest. I humbly request the honor to cook your heart’s desire for you.”

  I watched the smiling back-and-forth and tried to decode it. Jiro hadn’t really wanted the help and he was actually rubbing in the fact that she was a woman, and a woman shouldn’t have a leadership role in a kitchen. A girl like Andrea or myself was okay chopping vegetables, but no female should be the chief executor of a menu dish. Norie’s face had tightened, and although she thanked him in her soft voice, she didn’t look happy.

  “Obasan, would you like to go with Andrea and me to the Chinese restaurant?” I asked again when Jiro was out of earshot.

  “I cannot reject Takeda-san’s hospitable offer. Besides, I think it will be interesting to spend more time with him. He’s a strange Japanese.”

  “This is the only key I have with me right now,” I said as I handed it over. “Can you leave it under the umbrella stand in the entryway?”

  “Is that safe?” Norie worried.

  “It always has been,” I reassured her. “I don’t think I’ll be too long. Maybe an hour or two.”

  17

  Plum Ink was upscale Chinese: glass-and-chrome tables, leather seating, and plum walls decorated with oversized calligraphy characters, a few of which I recognized. Water. Peace. Money. The important things.