Lord of All Things (15 page)

Hiroshi looked up, too. It was a clear night. He shivered. “I need another beer,” he said to nobody in particular.

He went inside and headed downstairs, carrying his empty glass. The atmosphere had already changed since he’d come up to the roof; it was more febrile, more excited, full of expectation, as though anything might happen at any moment. Though he couldn’t have said what he might have wanted to happen, the excitement took hold of him as well.

“Bar’s moved,” he learned from a guy with a scrubby little beard and striking gray eyes. He waved his hand. “Back there in the gallery. Last room.”

Hiroshi wandered off in that direction, shoving his way past kissing couples and groups of people laughing uproariously. He hadn’t been in this part of the house before, or at least he didn’t think he had. In the hallway through to the bar the crowd got thicker until it was almost like being in the metro again. Everyone here, however, had a drink in their hand.

He’d almost reached it. Between him and the bar were just two more guys—broad shoulders, leather jackets—blocking his way. He tapped them both on the shoulder and asked, “Can I get by?”

He would remember what happened next as though it had taken place in slow motion. The two men stepped aside. Somebody laughed loudly. A white curtain gusted in the wind.

And there was Charlotte standing in front of him.

2

Dorothy liked to sleep in on Sundays. Not only because she was sometimes out late on Saturday night, but for its own sake. It was her way of marking that it was Sunday, so to speak, and if she opened her eyes before ten o’clock, then that counted as early in her book.

And now here she was, awake, even though it was practically still dark. It was little more than twilight outside; she could see outlines and shadows, but no colors. It was early for anyone, not just her.

Her first thought was of Hiroshi and how good it would be to have him lying next to her so that she could snuggle up to him and put ideas in his head. Sex on a Sunday morning, warm and relaxed, then drowsing off to sleep again and finally untangling themselves long enough to have breakfast: it would be the best way to start a Sunday she could imagine.

The doorbell rang. In the same moment, Dorothy realized it was not the first time, that the first ring was what had woken her up. It was horribly loud, especially at that hour, and the dorm had terribly thin walls, as she sometimes had cause to remember. Now, for instance. She jumped out of bed and hurried over to the intercom.

It was Hiroshi. “I have something important to tell you,” she heard him say, his voice crackling and buzzing on the line.

“On Sunday morning?” she asked in astonishment, then turned to look at the clock radio on her bedside table. “At twelve minutes past five?”

She was surprised to hear herself say that. Why wasn’t she happy that he was here, that he had turned up as if by magic just as she was thinking of him? But she wasn’t. Something was wrong.

“It’s urgent,” Hiroshi said insistently. Once he was in that mood, there was no dissuading him anyway.

“Okay,” said Dorothy, pressing the button to let him in.

It was chilly. She looked around. Should she put something on, her robe perhaps—if she could find it? On the other hand, she looked good right now in just her thin nightshirt. Who knew, it might turn into a lovely Sunday morning after all? Outside her door she could hear footsteps echoing on the stairs, and Hiroshi’s words echoed in her thoughts: “I have something important to tell you.” What could it be? Those three little words, perhaps? She hardly dared think. Suddenly Hiroshi was standing in her doorway. His clothes were awry, he smelled of beer and smoke, his eyes were red, and he looked like he hadn’t slept all night.

Dorothy closed the door behind him. “Hey. Um…were you at the Phi Beta Kappa party?”

“Yes,” Hiroshi answered, his voice rough.

“Without me?”

It hurt, for sure. Why had he gone all of a sudden? She had talked till she was blue in the face about how Hiroshi should go to this or that party with her, as well as all her other invitations. Hiroshi didn’t even try to defend himself. He took her hands and drew her over toward the bed. Dorothy hesitated. Sex with a man who stank of beer and smoke was not part of her ideal Sunday. She would send him off to have a shower before she even let him kiss her.

But he didn’t even try to kiss her. He just sat down and said, “Something happened to me.”

Dorothy felt the hairs stand up on the back of her head. He spoke in the same tone he might use if he had said, “I killed someone.”

He began to talk, but he seemed to be speaking some foreign language. Or was there something wrong with her ears? She could barely understand what he was saying—didn’t want to understand—as he told her about some woman he had known when he was a child and how he had met her again. He was telling her about a fence he had had to climb, about a doll he had repaired, about taking a flight to see his sick aunt. And he was saying he had to think things through. He said that several times. That something important had happened, that fate had stepped in, that he had to think things through.

And then he uttered the words that pierced her to the heart like a red-hot nail. “I’ve realized that I don’t love you.”

Dorothy thought she would fall apart.

“I thought I did,” Hiroshi told her earnestly, looking at her with his dark Japanese eyes, which seemed to glow in the half-light of dawn, “but I don’t. I realized that tonight. I’m meant to be with Charlotte. Not with you.”

“I understand,” Dorothy heard herself say. Something inside her took control of the situation—some kind of autopilot, a simple but robust little mechanism that was ready for all emergencies. The rest of her collapsed in uncomprehending misery.

It was one of those moments when she wished everything was just a bad dream but she knew it was no such thing. The worst of it was that, for the very first time since she had met Hiroshi, she felt he was being completely honest with her, opening himself up to her—only to say he didn’t love her and never really had.

“Which is why it would be best for us to stop seeing each other.”

“Yes,” said autopilot Dorothy.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

“You don’t deserve this,” he went on. “You deserve someone who really loves you.”

“Yes.”

She could never remember afterward whether they had said anything more after that. All she remembered was she had somehow managed to see him out without falling to pieces, and then she had crept into bed, pulled the covers over her head, and screamed—screamed and howled—until she was hoarse.

“You did what?” Rodney stared at him incredulously. The wooden spoon in his hand hung motionless.

Hiroshi pointed to the saucepan. “Hey! That’s burning.” Rodney was cooking up a batch of his special hangover cure, a combination of all that was sharp and fierce in Mexican cookery. The whole corridor smelled of tomato, garlic, chili, and chocolate. “It wasn’t as bad as all that. She took it surprisingly calmly.”

“Calmly?” Rodney echoed as the onions turned black in the oil. “You don’t really believe that, do you? If I were in your shoes, I would worry sh
e
’
d do something to herself.”

Hiroshi looked at him. He didn’t feel well, his eyes were burning, and though he had snatched a couple of hours of restless sleep, it had done nothing to fix the daze he was in. “Don’t get such wild ideas,” he muttered uncomfortably.

Rodney pushed the pan off the heat, stormed out of the kitchen, and came back with his cell phone. “What’s her number?”

Hiroshi took out his own phone and passed it over. “It’s on speed dial. Number nine.”

“Do you really think she’s going to answer if she sees your number?”

Hiroshi told him the number. He dialed it, then went out into the corridor.

“Hi, Dorothy, it’s me, Rodney,” Hiroshi heard him saying. “My lame-brained roommate has just told me everything, and I wanted to see if you’re okay…yeah…yeah, sure, I understand…”

There was a long pause. Hiroshi sighed. He suddenly felt relieved she was all right.

“Yes, quite,” he heard Rodney say. “An idiot. I think so, too. A complete idiot. Absolutely. A total, complete and utter
…n
o question.”

It went on that way for quite some time, until Rodney managed to wrap up the call. When he came back into the kitchen, a dark cloud seemed to be hanging over him. Without a word he went to the stove, put the pan back on the hot plate, and added spices and tomato to the oil. He began to stir like crazy.

“Okay,” said Hiroshi. “So she didn’t take it quite as calmly as I thought. Maybe I just got that idea because it was so early in the morning. Dorothy’s not so great at getting up early, especially not on Sundays.”

Rodney carried on stirring. He was clearly furious. “You really are completely crazy, you know that?” he suddenly burst out. “You don’t just hang a girl like Dorothy out to dry! On a whim when you’re half-drunk.”

“It wasn’t a whim. It was fate.”

“You’re talking crap.”

“It wouldn’t have been honest to carry on the relationship. Simple as that. There was no alternative.”

“Now you’re talking like an inscrutable Japanese.”

“And you’re talking like a hot-blooded Chicano.”

Rodney slammed the lid onto the pan, turned the heat down, and clattered around, putting the deep-frozen tortillas into the oven. Hiroshi kept quiet. His job was to make strong coffee, and that was already taken care of.

Rodney had vanished with the girl with the tousled hair at some point the night before. Rodney claimed he had gone looking for Hiroshi but hadn’t found him, which would have been strange, since he and Charlotte had simply sat on the back terrace and talked until finally someone came to throw them out. Then they had gone to her place to talk some more. In the end, Hiroshi had taken a taxi home, and Rodney had gotten a lift back with the tousled-haired girl, which meant his own car was still at Harvard.

Rodney, skeptical as always, said she had kissed him good-bye. Rodney was strange about women. He had an enviable gift for talking to them and winning them over, but he was very, very careful with his feelings. Any woman who wanted to go to bed with him straightaway had ruled herself right out. But they were planning to go on another date. Last night’s girl obviously still had a chance.

“Dorothy really loved you,” Rodney grumbled, breaking the silence. “She would have done anything for you. Anything, man!”

“I know,” Hiroshi said. “But I didn’t love her. I just didn’t know it. Until today.”

“So who is she, this woman you were meant for?”

Hiroshi cleared his throat. “Her name’s Charlotte Malroux—”

“Say what?” Rodney broke in, astonished.

“Charlotte Malroux,” Hiroshi repeated. “She’s French. Her father is an ambassador, and—”

“Tell me it ain’t true!” Rodney collapsed onto the nearest kitchen chair. The look on his face spoke of new heights of surprise and bewilderment, even after everything else he’d heard this morning.

“Why?” Hiroshi asked, perplexed. “Do you know her?”

Rodney squeezed his eyes tight and rubbed his temples. “Oh boy oh boy oh boy! You’re even crazier than I thought.” He looked up and laughed mirthlessly. “Okay, to be absolutely honest I have no idea how to put this, but have you ever, at any point between last night and this morning, actually given any thought to what your chances might be? Listen, we’re talking about Charlotte Malroux here. She’s widely recognized to be the hottest ticket Harvard has seen this decade. We’re talking about a woman who scores an easy twelve on the scale of one to ten. Charlotte Malroux could be a supermodel without even opening her makeup box. I mean, have you even considered how many men in Boston have the hots for her? All of them, I would say. And that’s a conservative estimate.”

Hiroshi blinked in astonishment. He hadn’t even noticed. Okay, yes, she looked good, but as good as all that? Well, it had been at night, and it was dark.

“On top of which,” Rodney went on ruthlessly, “Charlotte Malroux, as everyone but you seems to know, is dating a certain James Michael Bennett III, who, as the name may tell you, is from the very upper crust of Boston society. Do you know the name Bennett Industries? Well, yes, he’s the heir. And as if it weren’t enough that he’s stinking rich, he also looks like a Greek god and is a hotshot at half a dozen different sports. Among other things, he’s quarterback for the Harvard football team, he’s won the Harvard golf cup several times over, he rides for the polo team, and I don’t know what else.” Rodney heaved a deep sigh. “I’m really sorry to have to say this, but even with all the luck in the world, I don’t see how you can compete.”

“I don’t think in those terms,” Hiroshi declared.

“But those are the terms women think in.”

“Not all of them, I hope.”

Rodney groaned with despair. “You’re a dreamer.”

Hiroshi nodded. “I am indeed. And? All great things begin with a dream. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“Kiddo, the woman’s got herself a billionaire-to-be for a boyfriend. Maybe a senator-to-be, governor-to-be, could be even a president. And don’t you go thinking he’s not as good in the sack as mere mortals like us. From what I hear, he’s had a lot of practice. Do you think any woman in the world is going to kiss a chance like that good-bye just because she ran into an old flame from her grade-school days?” He shook his head. “No, I gotta tell you you’re going to regret what you did to Dorothy.”

Hiroshi had been listening with growing resentment. He felt the old rage from his childhood building inside him again as though it had never gone away—his rage at the way the world was.

He snarled, “Ever since I was a kid, people have been telling me I’ll regret this or that, that I’ll see where it gets me. I’m telling you, I’m fed up with hearing it.”

“Let’s eat,” Rodney said amicably. “What’s with the coffee?”


After she woke up, Charlotte lay in bed for a while staring at the ceiling, waiting to be sure she could tell dreaming from waking. Seeing Hiroshi again had not been a dream after all. It hadn’t been a dream that they had spent the whole night talking, sometimes even in Japanese, a language she hadn’t spoken for half a lifetime. She ran her fingers through her hair. It felt tangled and matted. She had taken a quick shower before she went to bed this morning, but she hadn’t dried her hair, not completely; she had been too worn-out.

For a moment she wondered where James was. Then she remembered he had said he’d be visiting his parents today. He hadn’t wanted to come to the party last night, claiming that “one of us might get jealous.” He had made other plans, and she had instead gone with a couple of her girlfriends but lost sight of them over the course of the evening. Strange to think that if it had happened any other way, she and Hiroshi would never have run into each other. Strange to think, too, that they had both been living in Boston for years and never crossed paths. But strangest of all was how they had recognized one another straightaway even though they had been children back in Tokyo.

Charlotte rolled over in bed and looked at the three dolls lined up on the shelf by her headboard. Hiroshi had been touched when she told him she still had that doll he had fished out of the rubbish and repaired. Valérie. It wasn’t here in the States with her, though; these three were from an artists’ market in South Boston. Valérie was safely back in Paris in her parents’ apartment, where her parents in fact never lived. Her father had recently gotten the Moscow posting he’d long been hoping for and was even trying to learn Russian, to the astonishment and embarrassment of all around him.