Read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Online
Authors: Jamie Ford
"This is incredible! Look at these books," Marty said from across the dusty basement. "Pops, come look at these things."
Henry and his makeshift crew had been mining the luggage for old disk records for two hours. In that time Henry had been called over to ooh and aah over piles of costume jewelry, a Japanese sword that had miraculously avoided confiscation, and a case of old brass surgical instruments. He was growing weary of the novelty of the hour.
"Is it a record?" he mumbled.
"Sort of, it's a record
of something
--it's a sketchbook. A whole box of sketchbooks in fact. Come check 'em out."
Henry dropped the bamboo steamer he had been taking out of an old shipping trunk and shuffled over boxes and suitcases as quickly as he could.
"Let me see, let me see ..."
"Easy now, there's plenty to share," Marty said.
Henry held the tiny sketchbook in his hand--the dusty black cover was old and brittle. Inside were sketches of Chinatown and Japantown. Of the piers jutting out to Elliott Bay. And of cannery workers, ferryboats, and flowers in the marketplace.
The sketches looked rough and imperfect, occasionally dotted with little notations of time or place. No name was written in them, none that he could find anyway.
Marty and Samantha sat on suitcases beneath the spotlight of a single hanging bulb, paging through the sketchbooks. Henry couldn't sit. He couldn't stand still either.
"Where did you find these? Which pile?"
Marty pointed, and Henry began digging through a crate of old maps, half-painted canvases, and jars of ancient art supplies.
"Pops?"
Henry turned around and saw a bewildered look in his son's eyes. He looked to the page in front of him, then up at his father and back again. Samantha just looked confused.
"Dad?" Marty stared at his father in the dim light.
"Is this you?"
Marty held out an open, dog-eared page. It was a pencil drawing of a young boy sitting on the steps of a building. Looking somewhat sad and alone.
Henry felt like he was looking at a ghost. He stood staring at the image.
Marty turned the page. There were two more drawings, less detailed but obviously
of the same boy. The last one was a close-up of a young, handsome face. Beneath it was the word "Henry."
"It's you, isn't it? I recognize it from pictures and photos of you as a kid growing up."
Henry swallowed hard and caught his breath, no longer aware of the dust from the basement tickling his nose or making him want to scratch his eyes. He didn't feel the dryness anymore. He touched the lines on the page, feeling the pencil marks, the texture of the graphite smoothed out to define shadow and light. He took the small sketchbook from his son and turned the page. Pressed in it were cherry blossoms, old and dried, brown and brittle. Pieces of something that had once been so completely alive.
The years had been unkind.
Henry closed the sketchbook and looked at his son, nodding.
"I found something!" Samantha had gone back to work in the boxes where the sketchbooks had been found. "It's a record!" She pulled out a dingy white record sleeve; its size was odd by contemporary standards. It was an old 78. Samantha handed it to him.
It was twice as heavy as today's records; still, he felt it give. He didn't even have to take the old record out to know it was broken in half Henry opened the sleeve and saw the two halves bend, held together by the record label. A few splintered pieces settled in the bottom of the sleeve. He carefully slipped out the record, which otherwise looked shiny and brand-new. No scratches on the surface, and the thick grooves were free from dust.
He rested it, slightly bent, in his palm. As it reflected in the light, he could make out fingerprints at the edges of the vinyl. Small fingerprints. Henry placed his fingers over them, sizing them up; then his hand drifted across the label, which read "Oscar Holden & the Midnight Blue, The Alley Cat Strut."
Henry breathed a sigh of quiet relief and sat down on an old milk crate. Like so many things Henry had wanted in life--like his father, his marriage, his life--it had arrived a little damaged. Imperfect. But he didn't care, this was all he'd wanted. Something to hope for, and he'd found it. It didn't matter what condition it was in.
Uwajimaya
(1986)
Henry and Marty leaned against the hood of his son's Honda in the parking lot of the Uwajimaya grocery store. Samantha had gone inside to pick up a few things--she insisted on making dinner for all of them, a Chinese dinner. Why, or what she might be trying to prove, Henry couldn't ascertain, and honestly, he didn't care. She could have made huevos rancheros or coq au vin and he'd have been fine with it. He had been so anxious about what might be found in the basement of the Panama Hotel that he'd skipped lunch completely. Now it was nearing dinnertime and he was excited, emotionally exhausted ... and famished.
"I'm sorry you found your Holy Grail and it was all damaged like that." Marty tried his best to console his father, who was actually in terrific spirits, despite his son's perceptions of the day.
"I found it, that was all that mattered. I don't care what condition--"
"Yeah, but you can't play it," Marty interrupted. "And in that condition it's not worth anything, the collectible value is nil."
Henry thought about it for a moment, casually looking at his watch as they waited for Samantha to return. "Worth is determined only by the market, and the market will never determine that--because I would
never
sell it, even if it were in mint condition. This is something I've wanted to find off and on for years. Decades. Now I have it. I'd rather have found something broken than have it lost to me forever."
Marty screwed a smile on his face. "Sort of like, 'Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved--' "
" 'At all,' " Henry finished. "Something like that. Not quite as much of a Hallmark moment as how you put it, but you're in the same zip code."
He and Marty had searched through the rest of the trunks and boxes near where they had found the sketchbooks and the old record, but none were clearly marked. He did find several loose name tags, including one that read "Okabe," but it had settled atop a pile of magazines. A mouse or rat had probably confiscated the twine from the hangtags long ago. Most of the nearby cases contained art supplies. Most likely Keiko's or her mother's. When he had more time, Henry planned to go back and see what else he could find. But for now, he had found exactly what he wanted.
"So are you going to explain that box in the backseat then?" Marty asked, pointing to the small wooden crate of sketchbooks in the back of his Honda Accord.
Ms. Pettison had let Henry take the collection of Keiko's sketchbooks and drawings, temporarily, after he showed her the illustrations with his name inside. She asked only that he bring them back later to be cataloged with the rest of the belongings and allow a historian to photograph them. Oscar Holden's old vinyl 78 managed to find its way into the box as well, somewhat unnoticed. But the old jazz record was broken and not worth anything anyway, right? Henry felt guilty nonetheless, though Marty convinced him that some rules were worth bending.
Henry leaned on the hood of the car, making sure it wouldn't dent or buckle, then got comfortable. "Those books belonged to my best friend--when I was just a boy during
the war years.
"
"A Japanese friend, I take it?" Marty asked, but his question was more of a declarative.
Henry raised his eyebrows and nodded, noticing the knowing look on his son's face. Marty's eyes glimmered with a hint of sadness and regret. Henry was unsure why that was.
"Yay Yay must have flipped his lid when he found out," Marty said.
Henry always marveled at how his son stood with his feet planted firmly in two worlds. One, traditional Chinese; the other, contemporary American. Modern even.
Running a computer bulletin board for the chemistry program at Seattle University but still calling his grandfather by the traditional Chinese honorific Yay Yay (and Yin Yin for his grandmother). Then again, his grandmother had always sent Marty letters in college addressed to "Master Martin Lee;" the formalities seemed to work both ways.
"Oh, your grandfather was busy at the time, fighting the war on two fronts, in America and back in China."
But yes, you don't know the half of it.
"What was he like--your friend? How did you meet?"
"She."
"Who?"
"He was a
she.
Her name was Keiko. We met as the only two Asian children sent to an all-white prep school--this was during the height of the war, you know. Each of our parents wanting us to grow up
American
, and as quickly as possible."
Henry smiled, on the inside anyway, as his son popped up off the hood, turned around, tried to speak--then turned around again. "Let me get this straight. Your
best
friend
was a Japanese girl while you were living under Yay Yay's one-man Cultural Revolution at home? I mean--" Henry watched his son grasping for the words, stunned, gape-mouthed at his father's revelation. "Was she like ... a girlfriend? I mean, this is not the most comforting discussion to have with one's own father, but I have to know. I mean, weren't you practically in an arranged marriage? That's how you made it sound whenever you mentioned how you and mom met."
Henry looked up and down South King. There were people of every walk of life strolling the boulevard--all kinds of races. Chinese and Japanese, but also Vietnamese, Laotian, Korean, and of course, plenty of Caucasian. As well as a mix of
hapa
, as they say in the Pacific Islands, meaning "half" People who were a little bit of everything. "We were very young," he said. "Dating was not like it is today."
"So she was ... someone
special ...
"
Henry didn't answer. So much time had passed, and he didn't know how to explain it in a way his son would understand. Especially now that he had met Samantha.
In Henry's day, it was common to meet a girl's parents before you started dating her, rather than the other way around. And dating was more like courting, and courting leads to ...
"Did Mom know about all this?"
Henry felt the Ethel-shaped hole in his heart grow a little emptier, a little colder.
He missed her terribly. "A little. But when I married your mother, I never looked back."
"Pops, you've been full of surprises lately. I mean, big, perception-altering surprises. I'm stunned. I mean, this whole time--us looking for the record. Was it really about the record, or were you looking for memories of Keiko, of your long-lost
friend
?"
Henry felt a little awkward as his son said the
word friend
in a way that insinuated more. But she
was
more than a friend, wasn't she?
"It started with the record, the one I always wanted to find again," Henry said, not sure if that was entirely true. "I wanted it for someone. Sort of a dying wish for a long-lost brother. I vaguely remembered her stuff had been put there, but I'd just assumed it had been recovered or claimed decades earlier. I never dreamed it would
still
be there, right under my nose. I walked by that hotel off and on for years and years, never knowing. Then they start bringing up all that stuff--that bamboo parasol. All those things left behind. I had no idea what I'd find. But I'm grateful for the sketchbooks. The memories."
"Wait a minute," Marty stopped him. "One, you're an only child, and two, you just said you'd never sell that record, no matter what shape it was in."
"I didn't say I wouldn't
give
it away--especially to an old friend--"
"I'm ba-ack" Samantha appeared, heavy plastic shopping bags dangling from each arm. Henry took a few, and Marty took the others. "You're in for a treat this evening. I'm making my special black-bean crab." She reached in and pulled out a wrapped bundle that looked from the size of it like fresh Dungeness crab. "I'm also making
choy sum
with spiced oyster sauce."
Two of Henry's favorites. He was famished--now he was famished
and
impressed.