Ransom (11 page)

“What kind of complaint?”

“They say you attack the Japanese family.”

“How did I do that?”

Honda consulted a piece of paper. “They say you say there is ‘double standard' in Japan.”

Now he remembered. The phrase “double standard” had come up in the lesson. Perhaps because they were accustomed to multiple standards, they couldn't really get hold of the concept.

“I must to remind you that we teach English conversation. We do not teach ethics, American or otherwise.”

“Language is shot through with values,” Ransom said.

“Say again?”

“If I want to use Japanese correctly, I have to buy into the hierarchy. Talk to my boss one way and the receptionist another.”

“I know nothing about that. I know that Mitsubishi account is very important to us. No more ethics. Ethics get you in trouble. Stick to business.”

Ransom spent what was left of the morning rewriting a brochure for an air conditioner manufactured by their largest advertising account. Honda had written the original copy, which explained and extolled the air conditioner to Australian purchasers. Now the unit was being exported to the U.S. Across the top, Honda had written, “Does this need slight revision for American market?”

The excellent thermal output machine of
MODEL K-
500
TAKYO INTERNATIONAL
as Superb
AIR CONDITIONING UNIT
for your cooling pleasure, and permitting wonderful co-existence such as: “high quality against low cost,” “energy efficient with high performance approx 55 BTUs,” “being efficient in mechanism plus operating under noises being extremely suppressed,” for cool relaxation feeling of fulfillment, “easy listening” in your beautiful home.

At the bottom he had written, “How about American theme headline: FOR YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.” Ransom edited the copy as best he could, knowing that in the end Honda—who liked to say that Carlyle was his model in English prose—would take one or two of Ransom's changes, if any, and send it back to the client, who would never know the difference. Ransom had learned that he could not hold Honda to a rigorous standard of English grammar and usage. The boss grew testy if corrected too often. After all, Honda was the author of the Honda A-OK Business English Conversation textbook series. Ransom had to teach two classes a week ostensibly based on these texts, which were not as dreadful as they might have been, the actual author being an aspiring Great American Novelist who had been Honda's first employee. Honda, however, having interfered with the manuscripts just enough to insert several howlers in each chapter, had come to believe that he wrote the books himself, and consequently to consider himself an expert. Ransom had no great desire to disabuse him. He did the best he could under the circumstances, figuring that a
misplaced modifier probably wasn't going to kill anyone. Ransom had developed a tolerance for bad English when he worked for his father as a script reader the year he graduated from college.

Desmond Caldwell looked up from his desk. “‘Ave you 'eard the Stones are in town?” Ransom nodded. Had he been in Japan too long, or did Desmond actually look like Keith Richards? Maybe it was just the snaggle teeth.

Ransom penned
Ave you eard about the Boston Strangler?
across the scratch pad, and Desmond hunched over his desk again in earnest labor.

At twelve-thirty he got a phone call from Rachel Coughlin, now a corporate something-or-other for a large American bank, and stationed in Tokyo.

“I'm in Osaka for two days. My lunch got cancelled. Have you eaten?”

“That depends,” Ransom said.

“Don't worry—it's on the company,” she said.

“I mean it depends on whether you're lunching as a friend or as my father's emissary abroad.”

“Hey, come on. I was just trying to help. But I'm through being a go-between. Promise.” She gave Ransom an address and said she would meet him there in twenty minutes. Honda wasn't around, so he left the edited air-conditioner copy on his desk and told Keiko he would be back by two-thirty.

The sidewalks were jammed with blue-suited businessmen, and Ransom was immediately caught up in the flow of the crowd. A brightly painted sound truck passed slowly, hawking a live sex show.

Rachel had befriended Ransom when he moved into her Bel Air neighborhood, and they had kept in touch after he went east to prep school. A year ago she had written to say she was working in Tokyo, and they had met for lunch several times since then. The last time he saw her, some six months ago, she was keen to know what Ransom's plans were, even insistent. She was going back to California for Christmas and she had a story about a special arrangement between the bank and an airline whereby she could bring a companion at no extra cost. It would be like the old days; he could spend Christmas at home and then join her at her family's cabin in Tahoe for skiing.

To Ransom it was clear that she'd been charged with this mission by his father. The free airfare story was made for TV. He had been getting letters from his father; impatient, fatherly letters: What was he doing with his life, what was he running from, when was he coming back to settle down, start a career? Ransom sympathized—the old man was fifty-something—but was nevertheless angry with him and Rachel alike for their manipulating. The improbably free Christmas trip was his father's idea; and, as Ransom suspected, his father planned to pay for the ticket on the sly. He had told Rachel that Ransom had clearly lost his faculties and sense to drugs in India, that he would not listen to reason.

In Yodoyobashi he passed a coffee shop with the name, written in English over the door,
Persistent Pursuit of Dainty
. Waiting for a light, he found himself beside a businessman carrying a
GROOVY CAT
shopping bag, a relative of the
FUNKY BABE:

GROOVY CAT:
Let's call a groovy guy a “Groovy Cat.” Guys tough, check out the scene, love to dancing with Funky Babes. Let's all strive to be Groovy Cats.

Surrounded by so much twisted English—in advertising, embedded in Japanese sentences, in conversation with non-native speakers like Honda and Kano—Ransom sometimes felt a kind of aphasia setting in: a student or client would present him with a crippled English sentence and he would be at a loss to fix it.

He turned into a covered alley lined with noodle and yakitori stands. A boy in a white uniform dodged through the crowd on his bicycle, three trays of noodles balanced in his left palm. He seemed headed for disaster but kept threading the openings, one-handed, between pedestrians and finally turned the corner. Farther up, in front of the tobacco stand, a man talking on the red pay telephone bowed repeatedly to his invisible confidant.

Among the plastic models in the glass case beside the door of the restaurant was a mournful, inflated
fugu
, poison blowfish, an occasionally fatal delicacy which by law could only be prepared by licensed chefs.

Ransom was shown to a table, and Rachel came in a few minutes later, breathless, trailing strands of her involvement with the world of commerce. She kissed Ransom and then dropped into her chair, her jacket flaring then subsiding around her like a parachute, attracting the attention of all of the blue-suited diners, the only woman in the restaurant and blond to boot.

“Exchange rates are going wild,” she said.

Ransom smiled. “I can hardly keep up.”

“It's exciting, now that all the currencies are floating, but life was probably a hell of a lot easier when they were fixed. Anyway, you're looking very good.”

“You too,” Ransom said.

“What are you up to tonight?”

“I teach a class. Then karate practice.”

“I have tickets for the Stones.”

“You and ten thousand Japanese teeny boppers. I met some of them the other day.”

“Join me.”

“No can do.”

“Skip your practice.”

He shook his head.

“What's so vital about one karate practice?”

“This could be the night I break somebody's nose. You wouldn't want me to miss out on that.”

“When are you going to get serious?”

“About what?”

She sighed, raised her hands as if to strangle him. “You know. I mean, about everything. About your life.”

“Going to see the Stones is serious?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I thought you'd retired as my father's agent.”

“Forget your father. You're my age, Chris. You're bright as hell but pretty soon people are going to say, Well, Mr. Ransom, what's this three-year gap in your résumé? Kung-fu and the Kyoto experience won't open many doors.”

“Karate,” Ransom said.

“What's the difference? There's a lot going on here
besides head-bashing. Listen, the business ideas of the next decade are going to come out of Japan. Why do you think I'm here? I requested this posting. The Japanese are starting to set the pace. Resource depletion, population density, miniaturization—an American who comes here with his eyes open is going to be in a position to learn. The new logos is right here. It's beyond socialism and capitalism. We are talking the Tao of Capital. Jesus, Chris, the choice isn't working in television or living like an impoverished monk in Japan. There are other options.”

“All the world lies before me, eh?”

She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I don't know why you're doing this romantic exile routine. What are you running from? Your father?”

“I'm not running, Rachel.”

“Why can't you forgive him?”

“Forgive him for what?”

“That's
my
question. What is it?”

“I hate television.”

“Very sophisticated, aren't we? You blame him for your mother, don't you?”

“I blame him for thinking that he's the director and other people are just players—Mom, me, all those promising young actresses. Other people aren't real to him.”

“No one was more devastated by your mother's death—forgive me, but I mean this—than he was.”

“The cleaning lady was more devastated.”

“He's not that bad, Chris.”

“That Christmas scheme was typical. He'd rather dream up a bad plot than just ask me to come home.”

“It was for a good cause.”

“That's what Nixon said after he got caught.”

“He loves you.”

“Did I ever tell you how he got me into Princeton? I told him I wouldn't even apply unless he promised not to get his friends and fellow alums to pull strings. My junior year I find out, accidentally, from a friend in the records office—he thinks it's a big joke, right?—that my old man donated a very considerable sum to the university the year I applied.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You got in because you were smart. Your father probably needed a tax write-off.”

“Right.”

“So he was trying to help. Sue him.”

“Well, I don't want his help, thanks. What pisses him off is that he can't help me when I'm over here. Limits to his power and all that.”

“He's not young anymore, Chris. And you're his only son.”

“How do you feel about the blowfish sashimi?” Ransom said, seeing the waiter hovering.

She sighed, looked down at the menu briefly and said, “Okay. Live dangerously.”

After they had ordered he said, “Do you like your job?”

“Sure. Why?”

“What do you like about it? I'm curious. You really seem enthusiastic. Are you in it for the money or is there something else?”

“It's challenging.” Rachel said without hesitating.

“How?” Ransom said. “The way a crossword puzzle is challenging? Maybe I just don't get it. When I got out of
school, I couldn't think of anything I really wanted to do. There were options, but there weren't any reasons.”

“What are your goals?” Rachel challenged.

Ransom thought about it. “I don't know. I think maybe I want to become a blank slate. Forgive and forget.”

The blowfish arrived, thin, salmon-colored wafers on a black lacquer tray. “I don't know,” Ransom said, “whether it is more polite to offer it to you first or to test it myself.”

Rachel snagged a piece with her chopsticks and deposited it on her tongue. Ransom followed suit. The chewy flesh slightly numbed his lips.

Rachel explained rising interest and inflation rates to him. While she was in the Ladies' Ransom paid the check, but she was so upset about it that he let her pay half.

“Can I walk you somewhere?” he said, when they were outside.

“I've got a meeting.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Why don't you ever come to Tokyo?”

“I don't like Tokyo much.”

“We'll stay indoors.”

“You could come to Kyoto. See the sights.”

“Do you have a phone yet?”

“I'll call you.”

Out on the street, he flagged a cab for her. As it moved off into the traffic Ransom felt a twinge of sadness and wondered if they might have been more than friends under different circumstances.

At five o'clock, after fruitless negotiations with Honda over the air-conditioner copy, Ransom was in a conference
room on the fourteenth floor of the Mitsubishi Shoji office, looking out over the city. A receptionist brought him a hand towel and a cup of tea. The students entered in twos and threes, and he greeted them by name. Roughly Ransom's age, they were all male, young sub-managers who might someday find themselves in New York or London on Mitsubishi business.

When everyone was seated, Ransom opened his book and called out a page number. The students looked alarmed: jumping right into the lesson was a departure from the norm. Generally he opened class with an informal discussion. A standard question was: what did you do this weekend? The bachelors drank and played mah-jong with their buddies. The married men drank and played with their children. Wives didn't rate a mention. Every once in a while, someone would visit a sick relative in Tokyo.