Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  “You and your sister used to pick on me,” he said, breaking into a smile. His teeth were still bad.

  I laughed dryly, trying to avoid his gaze.

  “Just don’t call me Takenoko anymore. That really does wonders for a boy’s ego.”

  Mrs. Kobayashi nudged her son’s elbow. “Takeshi, say hello to Mrs. Shimoda. You remember her, don’t you? And of course, this is her friend, Alex.”

  “Hi.” Takeshi extended a tanned hand to Alex, who shook it firmly. “Good to see you again, Mrs. Shimoda,” he said, turning to my mother. “You’re looking well.”

  My mother, pleased, reached to touch her hair. Feeling her scarf, she removed it, evidently having forgotten she’d left it on for so long.

  “Congratulations on Caltech. What will you be studying?” she asked.

  Takeshi grinned. “Biochemistry. I’m a bit of a nerd, unlike your daughter.”

  I felt myself flush, and my ears began to tingle.

  “So, what are you up to these days, Emily?” he asked. I checked his face for some sign of sarcasm, but found only goodwill.

  “I just got out of school. I’m waiting tables for now,” I replied.

  “I thought you’d be doing something creative. You used to draw pictures of me. They were really good. You got everything down, my glasses, my braces—”

  “Your short shorts,” I added.

  Takeshi laughed.

  “Our family does have artistic inclinations,” my mother said loudly.

  “Oh, there are the Hondas. You must meet the Hondas,” Mrs. Kobayashi told Alex, pointing to a couple in their late forties, both dressed in matching white sweaters.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting all of Hanako’s friends,” Alex replied.

  “They’re renovating their garage. They want to convert it into a billiards room.”

  Alex blinked. “Is that right?” he asked.

  “I’m sure if you work for Hanako, they’ll want to hire you right away.” She turned to Takeshi. “Why don’t you entertain Emily for a while? She tells us she’s unattached!”

  I watched Mrs. Kobayashi weave her way through her garden of guests, leading my mother and an uncertain Alex by the arm, his blazer now hanging neatly over his shoulder.

  • • •

  I THOUGHT OF the last time I saw Ben. We were standing on the football field, a few minutes after our graduating class had thrown caps in the air with forced (at least for me) cheer. Ben was in complete disarray, his cheeks and nose ruddy from champagne, his gown unzipped to reveal a dingy undershirt, gym shorts, and pale, hairy legs.

  “Well, good-bye,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s cold, Emily. Even for you.”

  I wasn’t purposefully trying to be distant. I just didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’m going to study in Beijing in the fall,” he said. “But first I’m going to Vietnam! I’m really excited.”

  “That’s great, Ben.”

  We stood in silence. Although there was a storm of activity around us, the space between Ben and me was strangely quiet. The broad blue sky seemed to infuse the football field with its clarity. I felt as if I could count all the golden hairs on Ben’s head, each strand radiantly defined by the sun.

  We remained motionless until he scratched one of several mosquito bites on his legs.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  I had a couple of practiced answers ready. But when I looked at Ben, I couldn’t form the words in my throat.

  “I’m going home,” I replied.

  Ben started to reach for my arm but stopped when his fingers touched me. I felt a flutter, as if a butterfly had brushed against my skin.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “YOU SEEM EXCITED about Caltech,” I said to Takeshi, who was staring at the pool.

  He shrugged. “Well, yeah. I’ve always been good at math and science, ever since I was a kid. I wish I could do something to shock everyone, though, like become a toll-booth collector. Wow, would that freak my parents out.”

  “I don’t think that would make your mother too happy.”

  “What did you study in school?”

  “Architecture. Well, at least until my junior year. Then, for a lot of reasons, I switched majors.”

  “To what?”

  “Accounting.”

  We watched Mrs. Kobayashi emerge from the house carrying half a gigantic watermelon, scraped clean, and filled with red, green, and orange melon balls. She teetered uncertainly at the top step, adjusted the watermelon in her hands, and started her descent.

  “Because of your parents?” Takeshi asked.

  “Actually, it was because of my mother that I got interested in architecture—Romanesque architecture really—but my parents split up, and I got a little nervous about my future, so I caved in and switched.”

  “That’s too bad. You seem more the artistic type than a bean counter.” Takeshi bent over to firmly adjust a Velcro strap on an ugly black sandal. “You always seemed so sure about yourself back then. I was so impressed.”

  “Thanks, though it’s been a long time since I’ve drawn anything.”

  We sat in silence for a while, watching the people around us talk and eat, and for the first time that afternoon, I began to relax.

  ALEX EMERGED FROM one of the green-curtained cabanas wearing a large white T-shirt and knee-length electric-orange trunks with a green stripe around each thigh. Both the trunks and the shirt looked brand-new. He stood at one end of the pool and dipped his foot into the iridescent blue water.

  “It’s awfully cold,” he called out to me.

  “Where’s my mother?” I asked.

  “Changing,” he replied. The sun had drifted lower in the late-afternoon sky, and most of the guests were gone. Alex jumped up and down beside the pool.

  “You know, they say the way people enter pools says a lot about the way they make love,” Takeshi said conspiratorially. He had come from the kitchen, carrying two iced teas. Sweat glimmered through his black hair.

  A faint fragrance of soap reached me as he sat on the wood deck next to my chair, wrapping his arms around his knees.

  “People who are shy and cautious in bed take forever to get in the water,” Takeshi said. “Bolder types jump right in.”

  Alex cupped his hands and directed his voice in the direction of the cabanas. “Hanako!” he called out.

  “Yes, yes,” my mother replied, irritation tinging her muffled voice. The curtain of her cabana fluttered. A few moments later, she emerged.

  My mother had always been a modest woman. When she took us to public pools as kids, she’d hardly ever change out of her clothes, only donning a suit on the hottest days. I hadn’t seen her in a swimsuit for over fifteen years. Still, I immediately recognized the one she had on. It was flowered diagonally across the front, a pleated skirt covering the tops of her thighs. Her body filled the suit to near-bursting, the elastic fabric compressing folds of flesh at her breasts and stomach. She looked very white in the sunlight, except for several small bruises on her legs.

  “You look lovely, Hanako,” Alex called out as my mother passed quickly by. She walked toward the shallow end, stone-faced, and seated herself at the pool’s edge with her feet in the water. After studying the water’s surface, she glanced up at me, her face tight with strain.

  “She’s that way because she can’t swim well,” I told Takeshi, trying to hide my embarrassment. Alex suddenly pulled the T-shirt up over his head to reveal a surprisingly muscular chest, filled with fluffy white hair. He was deeply tanned from the elbows to his hands, and from his neck to the tips of his ears. But the rest of his body was a porcelain white, as if belonging to another person. He swung his arms in the air, much as my father did before swimming, and I wondered if that was something all men of a certain age did around pools.

  “Proper warm-up is important,” Alex said to no one in particular, his words barely audible under his heavy breathing. “You don’t wa
nt to get cramps.”

  He performed a series of deep knee bends, eyes straight ahead, focused on the back door of the Kobayashi house. My mother watched him warily.

  Mr. Takitani swam toward the shallow end, eyeglasses still perched on his nose, his silver hair combed smoothly over his scalp. He stared at Alex and then at my mother before eventually bumping into the wall.

  “Is that you, Hanako-san?” Mr. Takitani stood up and removed his glasses. He shook water from the lenses before returning them to his nose.

  “Takitani-san, so good to see you,” my mother called out, bowing her head slightly.

  Mr. Takitani glanced at Alex again before speaking.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Very fine, thank you.”

  “You’re looking well. Very sporty.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He looked cautiously at Alex, who offered a quick wave before embarking on a series of jumping jacks. “I’m Alex,” he called out, “a friend of Hanako’s.”

  My mother lowered her eyes and gazed at the water, the ends of her mouth turned up slightly in a smile.

  “I see,” Mr. Takitani said. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Mr. Ozaki, floating on his back, bobbed upright as Alex jogged lightly in a small circle, his arms jiggling at his sides.

  “Now, quick, tell me how you think Alex will get in the pool,” Takeshi said excitedly. “Quick, quick.”

  “I say he’s going to dive in, all at once, and get the cold over with,” I said.

  Takeshi shook his head, a thin gold chain glimmering at his neck. “No, he doesn’t look that aggressive. He’s got a few inhibitions. No, I think he’ll sit at the side of the pool, and kind of lower himself in.”

  A breeze rippled the water, and Alex stopped, facing the pool, his toes kneading the soft ground. Then he broke into a run, arms pumping at his sides, until he reached the tiled edge. Leaping in the air, he squeezed his body into a tight ball, suspended for a moment like a planet, before cracking the water’s surface with an enormous splash.

  SEVEN

  My mother lit a candle and placed it on the kitchen table, the quivering light warming her otherwise pale face. We sat in silence, the slow evening uninterrupted by any other noise in the house, the air so still and quiet that I thought I might hear the melting wax drip.

  “Fire is an amazing, beautiful thing,” she said, leaning back in her chair, the details of her features receding into the darkness.

  “Yeah, well so is electricity,” I replied.

  Our power had been turned off sometime the night before. The refrigerator abruptly stopped, leaving its contents to wilt. When I touched the bottles and containers inside that morning, they were all coated with condensation and retained only a faint chill.

  “Sort of romantic, isn’t it?” my mother remarked, crossing her arms over her chest. “Candlelight. Silence. Night. It’s inspiring.”

  She sang a high tune, in a minor key. I knew the melody well: “Okesa,” a folk song about the first people to arrive on Sado Island. In Japan, men and women danced to the music, wearing taut kimonos, straw hats tipped to cover their faces. My mother barely moved her mouth as she sang; the music was as natural to her as breathing. “Sado eh to kusa ki mo nabi-ku yo,” she sang, until the point at which others are cued to chime, “Ah-ryo, ah-ryo, ah-ryo-san.” But, in our kitchen, there was only silence.

  “I miss Sado,” my mother said.

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s full of old people, with nothing to do but eat fish and drink beer.”

  My mother only sang Japanese songs when she felt sad and only talked about the island when unhappy with her life here. Sado was actually a wonderful place. Snow remained on the mountaintops until mid-June and ravens hovered in the pine trees over garden ponds, cawing at the carp. The air was clear and smelled of the sea.

  “When I was in primary school, a servant from my house would deliver my box lunch to school every day at noon,” she said, smiling. “I don’t remember this exactly, but my friends have told me this is the way it was. I guess that’s why the food always tasted so fresh.”

  “When was the last time you paid the electricity bill?” I asked. “And aren’t you having the singing group over tomorrow?”

  “This isn’t such a big problem, you know. For the time being, try and enjoy the evening.” We fell silent, both staring at the candle’s silent flame.

  I ONLY KNEW my father within the context of family rituals—a quiet presence behind a morning newspaper as my mother scrambled eggs, an impatient man behind the wheel of his Chevrolet taking us shopping for new rakes. My mother was eternally accessible, her constant, solitary vigil in the kitchen exposing her to all of us. But the whirl of the family provided a veil through which my father’s true self was shaded. After he left, I felt as though he had been enclosed in an unconnected room in our house, living a separate, parallel life all along.

  If I moved with my father to France, we would both be freed from all that we were before. My mother’s chaotic house, Ben’s disapproval, the steakhouse would all disappear. I would wear perfume and smoke clove cigarettes. People would judge me on my mysterious appearance rather than any actual knowledge, and I imagined comfort in that kind of superficiality. My parents must have felt that way when they moved to America: my mother leaving behind a privileged childhood drained of its wealth by the war, my father a trying past that would have drained others of hope. Moving to a new place allowed them to reinvent themselves.

  It occurred to me that my brother, Pierre, had wanted to be liberated as well when he left us for Milan. I had always thought him a happy boy, although he was difficult to read. His large forehead, sharp cheekbones, heavy eyebrows, and strong chin lacked the soft elasticity needed for emotional expression and, as a result, his face revealed little. But I always sensed that he was impatient with us. I pictured him at an outdoor café in Milan, eating gelatos with his painter friends, smiling faintly.

  Then I imagined my father in his pajamas, sitting at the head of a long banquet table in our château. I’d be seated at the other end, two large candelabras between us. Did it seem strange to him to have six empty bedrooms and a fireplace big enough to roast a deer on a spit? I wanted to believe that the majestic past of the home’s previous occupants would more than compensate for the fact that none of what Pappa and I had was really ours.

  MY MOTHER LIT a second candle for me and got up, holding hers on a saucer as she headed upstairs. I watched as she paused momentarily in front of Charlotte’s clean, orderly room before going into her own. When she was gone, I noticed a postcard for me on the kitchen table. The card, from Happy Life Serviced Apartments in Tokyo, showed a tall, tiled building on a busy city street and two views of a typical room’s interior: a single bed, writing desk, desk lamp, dresser, love seat, tiny refrigerator, microwave, and two-burner stove. “My new home!” my father’s neat handwriting read on the other side. “The entire bathroom—bathtub, sink, and floor—was molded from a single piece of plastic. Very near many subway stations. Please come visit. Love, Father.”

  As I carried the postcard and the candle upstairs, I noticed a glow through the half-open door of my mother’s bedroom. She was kneeling on the floor by the side of her bed, going through mail piled up near her pillow. She methodically opened envelopes and unfolded bills, and sorted them into separate stacks. Her candle had burned down to an inch of white wax, but she continued at her slow pace, as if she had all night to devote to the task.

  After changing into a nightgown, I got into bed and looked at the card again. I pictured my father lying beneath his single bed’s clean white sheets, the soft ticking of the apartment’s alarm clock lulling him to sleep, his beloved subway cars rumbling somewhere deep beneath the floor of his new home.

  For my mother, a home was a way of creating her own world within a world of uncertainty. My father’s home, I realized, would never be the physical environment around him
, but a feeling he carried with him, no matter where he was.

  Perhaps if my home was with my mother, in her builder’s house on Hunting Ridge Hollow, or with my father in a French château, my own life couldn’t really begin. That’s what Ben probably meant about being afraid to find my own place in the world, I thought.

  THE NEXT MORNING I came downstairs for breakfast. My mother stood distracted and listless by the kitchen sink, her fingers toying with a button on her blouse.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “Did I ever tell you about when my mother died?” she asked, looking out the window.

  I shook my head.

  “She was in the hospital with cancer, and was allowed only one visitor to remain with her until late. One night, we all sensed it would be her last. And she still had to pick only one person.”

  My mother brushed a strand of hair from her face and laughed quietly. “She chose my sister-in-law. She was the one who had been there on the island, seeing her through her illness. I suppose it was natural that she would pick her over me.”

  My mother didn’t act particularly disturbed by the memory, although I couldn’t imagine her opting for someone who wasn’t her own child.

  “So my sister-in-law stayed that night,” my mother continued, putting on a pair of rubber gloves. “And she was the one with my mother when she died.”

  I handed her a stack of cups and saucers, which she placed gently in the sink. We stood silently by each other, not moving.

  “The Sado house is gone,” she told me.

  “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  “My brother sold it to a developer. He told me in a letter I read last night. He couldn’t keep it up.”