Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

by Benjamin Constable

  I don’t know why I turned to look at the library again, but I did. A youngish-looking woman had just come out. Her eyes caught mine as she rummaged in her bag. I looked down at the dead on my shoes, then back at her. She came over.

  ‘Do you have a light?’ she asked, and I passed her my lighter. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and watched me as she lit her cigarette. I thought she might say something else, but she didn’t.

  ‘Do you know where Bryant Park is?’ I asked.

  Her eyes checked around and then locked back on me. ‘Yes,’ she said. I couldn’t understand why she was staring; it wasn’t unpleasant. I smiled and she released my eyes.

  ‘It’s where I’m going now,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  I stood up and she walked down a couple of steps ahead of me, hesitating as though uncertain where to go. It wasn’t even a second.

  ‘Is it far?’ I said, and she looked back at me, smiling.

  ‘No, it’s near; it backs up onto the library.’

  We walked slowly round the side of the building and I would have liked to talk to her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Are you English?’ she asked once the silence had grown uncomfortable.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you on vacation?’

  ‘No. Yes. Well, kind of.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’ She kept a straight face, somewhere between playful and not caring.

  ‘Somebody hid something for me here and I’ve come to find it. Like a treasure hunt.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

  ‘In a way it’s nice,’ I agreed, ‘but the hiding person died, so it’s a bit sad as well.’

  She stopped and I stopped too and she looked at me hard.

  ‘They died?’

  ‘Yes. She left me a treasure hunt.’

  She looked at my face and then at my feet and I wished that I’d stopped to clean the dead off. Then I wished I’d changed my clothes. I wished I’d cleaned my teeth too. She started walking again.

  ‘So, is the thing you’re looking for in Bryant Park?’

  ‘Yes.’ I had become socially inept. How do conversations happen? ‘Why were you coming to the park?’ The words came out so uncomfortably I could have kicked myself.

  ‘To have a break. I’m working in the library.’

  ‘Are you a librarian?’

  ‘No, I’m studying.’

  We were at the top of the park.

  ‘Do you know where the statue of William Bryant is?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s over there.’ She pointed to a big stone thing on the terrace behind the library—a freestanding arch or dome sheltering a seated bronze figure.

  ‘Cool.’ I tried to keep the conversation going. ‘What are you studying?’

  But she had lost interest now. Her mind was wandering off in the other direction. ‘Oh, people and food,’ she said. I didn’t really know what that meant. It sounded interesting. She was probably interesting.

  ‘Well, thanks for your help.’

  ‘So, what exactly are you looking for?’ She wasn’t quite ready to go.

  ‘I don’t know. I just have this clue which is the writing on the base of the statue.’

  ‘What writing?’

  ‘Yet let no empty gust of passion find an utterance in thy lay, a blast that whirls the dust along the howling street and dies away; but feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, like currents journeying through the windless deep,’ I said, and she grinned at me.

  ‘That’s on the base of the statue?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never seen it.’

  She glanced over at the tables and chairs in the shade of the trees that were beckoning her, then back at me.

  ‘Maybe we should go and see,’ she said, and made a ‘come on then’ gesture with her head and started walking to where the statue was.

  ‘I think I was word-perfect,’ I said.

  ‘I think you were.’

  I ran my hand over the words carved into the plinth and looked up into the folds of Bryant’s clothes and anywhere an envelope could be hidden.

  ‘So where do you think your treasure is?’

  ‘It might not be treasure; it might just be instructions.’

  ‘How will you know when you’ve found it?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’ I looked at her. ‘I think it’s in a brown envelope with my name on it.’ I hoped she might ask me what my name was, as though perhaps she had seen such an envelope but wanted to be sure that it was mine before telling me where. She said nothing.

  Emboldened by having an audience, I climbed up a couple of steps onto the plinth, pushing my hand into the only fold of cloth that looked deep enough to hide an envelope. I lost my footing and slid back down.

  She put her head to one side like a curious dog and said, ‘Maybe you should wait until there are less people around.’

  The park was busy with summer people and lunchtime people, but no one paid any attention to me.

  ‘It’s there,’ I said. ‘I felt it.’ I climbed up again, this time adjusting my foothold so I could better support myself while I peeled away the tape holding the envelope to the unpolished metal underside. I stepped down, looking proud, then turned away for a second to examine in private what I’d found. Large blue capital letters in ballpoint; it was almost like Butterfly’s handwriting. ‘Look’—I held it up to her—‘my name.’

  ‘Very Dickensian,’ she said.

  ‘What? It’s not Dickensian at all,’ I complained, suddenly doubting her.

  She smiled as if she thought I was funny. ‘Well, good luck with the rest of your search. I’m going to find a seat now and have my lunch.’

  I felt frustrated not to be able to keep her attention.

  ‘All right. Thank you for helping me.’

  ‘It was a pleasure.’

  And she walked past me towards the shade of the trees and I watched, waiting for her to turn back and wave or something. She didn’t turn back.

  ‘Aren’t you even curious to know what’s in the envelope?’ I called after her.

  ‘Kind of.’ She stopped and looked at me and I smiled.

  ‘Can I come and join you while you have your lunch?’

  She said ‘OK,’ in a way that sounded as though she meant to say ‘Whatever,’ and shrugged her shoulders.

  We went to the north side of the park and found an empty table in the shade. She pulled a tub of salad from her bag and a metal fork brought from home. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said; ‘I’m going to eat.’

  I said I didn’t, but suddenly remembered that I too was hungry and felt jealous.

  I stuck my finger in the envelope and tore it open.

  ‘How long has it been there?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Six months at least. Maybe eight.’

  ‘Put there by a dead person?’

  ‘She wasn’t dead then.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it’s been there months.’

  I looked at the envelope and it didn’t look old or weathered, and neither did the tape that had stuck it to the statue. I frowned.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be.’ I smelt the envelope. It didn’t smell of anything other than the faint smell of envelope, but then it had been tucked up well out of the way.

  I pulled out a sheet of paper. On it was a photocopy, or scan, of a piece of lined paper torn from a notebook. I read the words while she ate her salad. I salivated but didn’t look at her.

  Leaving here and proceeding for five blocks to the east and thirty-four to the south you reach a village street. A traveler spoiled on the world’s great monuments might feel disappointment compared to the wonder felt in other cities, but the special quality of this street for the man who arrives here on an August afternoon when the shadows first start to stretch along the road and from the sidewalk in front of a café a woman smoking calls to a friend across the road, “Hey” . . . is that he feels he knows this place
already; that he’s walked this street before with an old friend and it felt like home. At a door marked 441/2 the sound of a piano draws his eyes to the top floor and he wonders what curiosity could have been left there for him.

  I pushed the paper across the table to the woman. She paused her eating to read while I looked in the envelope again and pulled out a small square of paper that also had scanned writing on it.

  Oh, Ben Constable,

  I am so excited that you have found this. I hope it wasn’t too hard. I guess you had to do some research and travel some miles. Solve the next clue. Go to the address and I recommend you take French wine or some such Franco-finery as a gift for the guardian of the treasure. Be especially charming, not that I can imagine you otherwise.

  B. X O X

  The writing was small and covered every available space, but the last part went all round the edge of the paper before squeezing the kisses in.

  ‘It’s in the style of a book called Invisible Cities by the Italian author Italo Calvino,’ said the woman matter-of-factly.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, because I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘I think you have to go to the East Village. East Sixth or Eighth Street depending on whether you start from Fortieth or Forty-Second.’

  ‘OK.’ I suddenly felt myself in the presence of a superior intelligence. ‘You may as well see the rest of it,’ I said, passing her the small square of paper.

  ‘Your treasure hunt is cute,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’ I looked down at my shoes and she followed my eyes. ‘Dead people,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘On my trainers. The dirt is from Ground Zero. I was there this morning and I stood at a gateway where the trucks go in and out, and when I left I had all this mud on my shoes with the ashes of thousands of dead people mixed in. I should clean it off really, but I’m carrying them round as a mark of respect.’

  She looked at the dead respectfully for a second and then said, ‘When did you arrive in New York?’

  ‘I got to Manhattan yesterday at about five in the morning. But I didn’t find somewhere to stay until the afternoon, then I slept until this morning, so today’s my first day really.’

  She was silent for a moment as if considering this. ‘When did your friend die?’

  ‘March the fifteenth.’

  ‘Was she your girlfriend?’

  ‘No. What makes you think she was a girl?’

  ‘She just is. Was. Sorry. I think you said “she” at some point. It’s a girl’s handwriting anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ She was very pretty—the woman I was talking to. ‘You seem old to be a student.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I mean, not old, but you’re not twenty, are you?’

  ‘I’m twenty-nine. I’m doing a doctorate, but I started late.’

  ‘It’s not really a normal time of year to be studying, August.’

  ‘You have crazy syntax,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not crazy; I’m just stupid.’

  ‘I need to present a draft of my thesis in September.’

  ‘Do you have a lot left to do?’

  ‘Yes. It looks like I’m going to spend my summer in the library. What about you? What’s next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a plan. I suppose I’ll go to East Sixth or Eighth Street and see what happens. Do you want to come?’

  ‘It’s a tempting proposition, but I really need to go back and do some work. And frankly, it would be a bit strange if I just went off treasure hunting with a stranger I met on the steps of the library.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I admitted. She put her lunch box back in her bag and I guessed she was going to get up and go back to the library.

  Oh well. ‘I think it’s time I cleaned the dead off my shoes,’ I said. ‘Is there a toilet here?’

  ‘You mean a restroom?’ She grinned.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It’s just over there.’ She pointed. We both stood up and walked to a small brick building at the edge of the park.

  ‘I’ll wait here for you,’ she said.

  Two minutes later I came out with clean shoes, expecting her to be gone, but she was waiting with her back to me, watching the park. We walked back round to the steps at the front of the library and the lions.

  ‘Well, it was very nice to meet you.’

  ‘It was nice to meet you too,’ she said with a hint of fake English accent, and then, ‘I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

  ‘Do you think you’d like to go for a coffee with me one day?’ I asked.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘So, how shall we do that? Shall I call you?’

  ‘Yeah, OK. Do you have a pen?’

  I dug in my bag, pulled out a notebook and Butterfly’s on/offable pen and handed them to the woman. She deftly scribed her number and a name, then gave it back.

  ‘Beatrice,’ I read.

  ‘If you give me a missed call, I’ll have your number too.’

  Then she shook my hand, which made me laugh. We said goodbye and she walked back up the steps into the library. I hoped she might look back at me but she didn’t.

  I put her number into my phone and then pressed the call button so she’d have my number. She answered on the first ring.

  ‘Hello—Beatrice?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Ben Constable, the English guy you were talking to less than a minute ago.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember you.’

  ‘I was just giving you a missed call so you could have my number. You weren’t supposed to answer.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Besides, you’re in a library. You can’t answer your phone in a library.’

  ‘I stepped outside as soon as it rang.’

  I turned round and she was standing by the door, looking at me. I waved and she waved back.

  ‘You know how you wouldn’t come treasure hunting with me because I’m a complete stranger you met outside a library?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why did you agree to have a coffee with me then? I’m still a complete stranger you met outside a library.’

  ‘Going for a coffee is normal. Going treasure hunting with a stranger isn’t.’

  ‘What if we went for a coffee now?’

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘You only had a break for about ten minutes. I don’t think that’s long enough.’

  ‘It’s true, it wasn’t a long break.’

  ‘Then let’s go and get coffee. That’s a perfectly normal thing to do.’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘Shall we meet in say, ten seconds at the bottom of the steps?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s good for me.’

  ‘OK. Bye.’

  * * *

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, hi. Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘That’s OK, I’ve only just arrived myself,’ she said. ‘Where do you want to get a coffee?’

  ‘I don’t know anywhere, I’m afraid.’

  She thought for a second and then said, ‘Come on,’ and I followed her up the road.

  13

  The Book in the Piano

  ‘You answered the phone quickly,’ I said.

  We stopped to wait for the lights to change.

  ‘It was an accident, I was turning my phone on; it was on silent.’

  ‘Why were you turning your phone on going into the library?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to go in. I’d only had a ten-minute break and I’ve been here since nine o’clock. I was waiting for you to leave and then I was going to go and get a coffee. I only answered my phone because in a moment of stupidity I saw a foreign number and wondered who it could be.’

  I laughed. She laughed.

  ‘Shall I let you go and get coffee by yourself and call you another time?’

  ‘No, you’ve completely put me off
my work now. I need a break.’

  We walked along Forty-Second Street and into the subway at Grand Central, then took the 6 train down to Astor Place. I followed her out into the street.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked. She’d resigned herself to her situation and suddenly everything seemed more relaxed.

  ‘I work for a bank.’

  ‘Are you a banker?’ She laughed to herself as though suspecting she had made a joke for English people.

  ‘No. I organise language lessons for bankers. I don’t take it too seriously. It pays my rent while I learn how to be a writer.’

  ‘Are you a writer?’

  ‘I’m learning.’

  ‘What do you write?’

  ‘Fiction.’

  ‘What kind of fiction?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Short fiction, long fiction. Stories that I make up, or borrow from things that happen, or from things people say.’

  ‘Have you had anything published?’

  ‘Just a couple of short stories.’

  ‘Do bankers take a lot of language lessons?’

  ‘I live in France and companies there put pressure on people to be able to work in English as well as French.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as if she knew what I was talking about. ‘There’s no forty-four and a half on this street.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I was surprised that living in France didn’t seem to provoke any interest.

  ‘This is East Sixth Street.’

  ‘I thought we were going for a coffee.’

  ‘Oh, I thought that was a pretext to get me to come with you.’

  ‘Well, it was, but I was going to convince you to come with me while we were drinking coffee.’

  ‘Well, we may just be going for coffee anyway because there’s no forty-four and a half here. Look, there’s forty-two, forty-four and that’s forty-six. Over there is forty-three and forty-five. There’s no forty-four and a half.’