Secrets of the Apple (24 page)

Ryoki resumed his seat, disappointed but curious. If it was too horrible he could sneak out and watch his match. He’d give her five minutes to impress him. That ought to be fair.

She began to sing an aria in a language he couldn’t readily identify, probably Italian. He caught only one word,
amore
. A love song then, one he couldn’t understand. Again he closed his eyes, settling back to listen. Five minutes, that would be enough.

She lacked the sliding style of pop singers, so he guessed she had been classically trained. But her voice had a round, chocolate quality he found both soothing and modern, and he decided he’d listen to the song all the way through, just to give her a chance.

Leaning back and closing his eyes, he began filling in the hidden story, developing the plot from the rise and fall of Kate’s voice.

At first the notes bubbled and bloomed like two carefree lovers, one chasing the other through a meadow, innocent and childish, exhilarated by nothing more than the bright sun and green grass. Ryoki thought Kate had chosen a charming escape to follow her lighthearted mood, a cheerful snapshot with all the depth of a romance novel. But gradually the tempo slowed and her voice turned a dark chocolate, finally grinding down to a pure bitter cocoa, an expression of heaviness and mourning—maybe death or betrayal. After a time the imagined story began to feel too real and Ryoki felt fear prickling down his arms and across his chest until he was ready to plead for mercy, begging to return to the lovely green meadow where all lovers belonged. But the music pressed heedlessly forward as Kate’s voice trailed off and she began to play, frantic and frightening, sharp dissonances choking and twisting through the chords until Ryoki wanted to run. At the very moment he could take no more, a soft gray dawn began to ease through the sound and he slowly awoke to the ache in his hands, realizing with a shock that he’d been gripping his knees so tightly that the veins stood out on his arms. Bit by bit he opened his fingers, relaxed his muscles, grateful that the terrible storm had begun to break. He steeled himself for the end he expected, a bittersweet proclamation that each human being must ultimately fail or triumph alone, a common theme among serious modern artists. But as the piano made its
diminuendo
and Kate once again began to sing, she surprised him by repeating the two themes that had first put the idea of lovers in his head, the notes still twining around each other as they had at the beginning, as though they had both survived the cataclysm, the childish trilling interspersed between deeper, richer notes mined from the lower octaves, transforming their transitory happiness into a quiet and intimate joy.

The piece had been a long one, and at the end Kate closed the piano and padded off down the stairs. Ryoki slouched in his chair, tattered and quivering. It was a piece of music, nothing more, black ink on a white page, the musician effect all over again, like that corny old song “Killing Me Softly.” He repeated this several times in different variations, convincing himself she hadn’t dredged up that stupid kid playing in his make-believe Garden of Eden, the lack-wit who secretly believed in True Love. He was a jaded and sophisticated man of the world now, and he knew better. Yet, for those moments, Kate’s chocolate voice made the old possibilities tingle in the air, gathering atoms to take corporeal form. He felt a drop splash from his chin and was mortified to recognize that it came from his own eye. He brushed it rudely from his face, but another drop took its place, then another. Fearing discovery, he hurried to his room where he locked the door and sat on his bed taking deep, ragged breaths, determined to calm himself. Soon the first sob escaped, a strangled, animal-like sound that shamed him. There was another, and another until sobs came too thick and Ryoki gave in, laying on his side, crying for the first time in twenty years, finally allowing himself to grieve for the failure of his marriage.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but at 4:21 a.m. his eyes snapped open and he found himself fully awake, still wearing yesterday’s crumpled clothes. Getting off the bed, Ryoki unbuttoned and unzipped, leaving his clothes in a trail as he went to shower and take a good long soak. He should have been exhausted, but instead he felt curiously refreshed and free. What happened the previous night made no sense to him and he saw little point in analyzing it. Maybe one day he’d end up on some shrink’s couch and the whole bizarre incident would come pouring out to be gift-wrapped and labeled as somebody else’s fault. But for now he only wanted to feel good and amazed and to take a bath.

For a week, Ryoki continued to secretly listen in the adjoining room, though he never cried again. In his mind he filed that episode under A & I for Absurd and Illogical and just spent his eavesdropping moments appreciating the music and wondering what could possibly have prompted Kate’s ex to part with her. But he knew nothing of the Blond Pirate, other than his penchant for girly boy costumes. She never mentioned him, not even his name.

Eventually Ryoki tired of the deadening effect of the intervening walls and decided to graduate to the library itself. Once she’d begun to play he silently ventured to a seat just inside the door, thinking to sneak out before she finished. Five minutes later she caught him.

“I’m sorry, are you reading in here?” she asked, gesturing to the book he held loosely in his hand.

“It
is
the library,” he said.

“I could move the piano, not sure how far I’ll get.”

“I like to read to music,” he said, a barefaced lie.

“Really? When I read to music, I just end up reading the same line over and over.”

“Then you’re obviously not as talented as I am,” he said.

Ryoki opened his book about a third of the way through, as if picking up from where he’d stopped, and Kate turned back to the piano. “The sofa’s much softer and there’s a lamp. That’s where I’d read,” she said as she placed her hands on the keys.

When she finished her last piece and started out of the library, he touched her elbow as she brushed past. “You could stay in here to read, if you want. Your book and your computer bag are still in the house anyway.” He trained his eyes back on his page, going for unconcerned, not needy, definitely not needy. She tugged the book from his grasp, turned it right-side-up and handed it back. “Too much house for one person?” she asked, studying his face.

“The sofa’s soft and there’s another lamp at the other end,” he said, picking up the house phone to ask that Kate’s things be brought from the front hall.

They were both too busy to spend every evening together in the library, but it became the place they most often sought. Gradually their personal belongings accumulated in storage ottomans or end table drawers within handy reach of the sofa—hers on the right side, his on the left, where the remote most often ended up squished between the cushion and the arm.

The library itself, more than any other room in the house, had been designed around the two sides of the romantic industrialist who commissioned it. It appeared to be centuries old with dark paneled walls, a great muscular fireplace with a stone surround spirited from the ruins of a European castle, and an elegant coffered ceiling laid out like a chessboard, the black knight boldly out front, as if white had lost its nerve. The decorator had run with the bones, piling money among the books in the form of medieval artifacts: statuary, kings and queens, Arthurian and quixotic. But all that antique romance concealed state-of-the-art technology crowded behind moveable panels, everything cleverly designed to be easily upgradeable. With the touch of the remote, the aesthetically ancient library transformed into an advanced entertainment room, not as sophisticated as the home theater downstairs, but the place Ryoki preferred to watch sports while Kate sketched fanciful dresses, blackening her fingers and smudging her face with charcoal. But the room could not seem to contain restless Kate as it did Ryoki. Sometimes he looked up from a particularly exciting play to find her drawings abandoned in a careless heap, only to discover her hours later in another room, hunched over her laptop or her old leather binder, probably writing letters or emailing her enormous family. He never came near enough see, even from the doorway, he could clearly read her need for space.

The library was also stocked with games, and on sushi nights they liked to play a German board game or Scrabble,
lots
of Scrabble. But far and away her great obsession was books, a passion he shared, but couldn’t indulge as often as he would have liked. Preferring printed copies to ebooks, she was always tearing into small parcels shipped from England or the U.S., spending every
centavo
of her book allowance as she rapidly plowed through a wide range of novels from heavy and serious to escapist young adult series that served as her version of television. Sometimes he peeked over his reports to watch a book claim her, gradually melting her reserve until she curled and stretched like a cat, wiggling her toes between the sofa cushions, no longer aware of his existence. It was in the library that he discovered the nerd girl who coexisted inside her polished persona, one who spoke a little Elvish and sometimes snorted when she laughed. One night he leaned toward her and flipped up the cover of the book she was reading so he could see the title. “
Huckleberry Finn,
” she said. “Huck and Jim are looking for the other wooden leg. Do you remember that part?” A sticky moment: should he chuckle and say, “Oh, yeah,” leaving an opening for further questions, or admit he’d never finished the great American novel, thereby admitting himself a cultural philistine?

“No,” he said dismissively, returning to his reports as if Mark Twain wasn’t fit to share shelf space with such giants as the “Quarterly P and L” and “Statement of Cash Flows.” Anyone else would have been put off by his hauteur, but Kate couldn’t let it go.

“Don’t you like Twain?”

“Isn’t that book considered racist?” he said, parroting something he’d heard in a class, belatedly remembering she had given him a copy as a gift. Kate looked at him for five full seconds before rolling her eyes in disgust.

“Are we supposed to forget the past, pretend slavery never happened? Are you one of those unreasonable readers who believe books from all historical periods must conform to the current social construct?”

“I don’t know what you just said, but it sounded kind of rude.” He hah-hah’ed his remark, hoping to save himself, but she’d already climbed her soapbox.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of these people and we have the gall to act all self-righteous and superior.” Kate humphed and set her eyes back on her book, though he’d be willing to bet she was reading words without processing their meaning. He knew he’d hit a landmine and for the sake of peace, he put down his reports.

“Maybe we could take turns reading it aloud together and argue it out fair and square,” he said equitably, thinking she’d be gung-ho for a few pages, but lose interest as soon as her irritation cooled. Kate looked at him for a long moment, as if seriously considering his proposal, before turning to the beginning and reading two chapters aloud before closing the cover on her thumb.

“We don’t have to do this. You’re welcome to think whatever you want. It’s just one of my sacred cows,” she said. But Ryoki was intrigued. In Kate’s mouth the characters’ impenetrable dialect had seemed clear as a summer day. He took the book from her hand, determined to try it himself, and read three more chapters, slaughtering the dialect until Kate nearly died laughing. By the time they got to the wooden leg in chapter nine they were both hooked and a new pastime had been born, though by the third evening they’d been forced to make a rule against reading ahead and had to give the book to the housekeeper to keep them both honest.

One evening as Ryoki took up their mystery thriller for his turn to read, Kate pulled her cashmere throw from the storage ottoman to ward off the damp chill that had gradually begun to replace summer’s sweltering damp. With a flick of her wrist she shook it out and let it settle around her, a corner coming to rest on Ryoki’s leg. He wrapped the soft gray fringe around his fingers. “Don’t worry, if I die of frostbite you’ll rest easy knowing you did all you could.”

“Get your own.”

“I don’t have a blankie.”

“Throw.”

“Blankie.”

“It’s a
throw,
” she said, resignedly flipping up the edge and offering him a space. “Now read, I know that guy with the knife is right around the corner.” Under the blanket, his leg just brushed hers and she flinched away, drawing her feet under her and leaning off to the right, maintaining the pretense of personal space, but he could still smell her coconut shampoo.

He particularly loved those evenings when circumstances brought them close enough for casual contact, though there was never a single moment that would have looked exciting in a movie, no touch that could be backlit and set to skin-tingling violins. Even Kate appeared oblivious of their proximity. But for Ryoki the occasional graze of her hand or brush of her knee carried the emotional charge of a guilty caress. He took great pains to keep his expression impassive, the touches brief and convincingly accidental, a secret in plain sight.

He could never let on how much he craved female contact. His wife had despised this weakness and retreated to the other side of their huge bed, forbidding him from crossing the imaginary center line once she was asleep. Wishing he’d ordered a smaller bed, he rolled over and reverted to his habit of falling asleep with his arms hugging a wad of blankets. He had naturally assumed marriage would cure him of this ridiculous need. Instead, his wife had driven it underground to fester and pus.

For Ryoki the time he spent in the library with Kate represented a closed universe, temporary and finite where he allowed himself twenty minutes each night to imagine his most secret, most extravagant fantasy. Variations abounded, but in its skeleton Kate always loved him, the children were in bed and nothing mattered outside.

It was at the end of one such twenty-minute reverie on a Friday night when Kate stopped as she was leaving for her cottage and turned to look at him. “Your schedule’s clear tomorrow. What would you think of letting me give you a tour of the city as I knew it?” He hesitated, thinking of the stack of work in his study, already procrastinated to keep their Friday evening open. Perhaps he’d been too indulgent with Kate, allowing her to distract him too much, not a wise trait in a leader. He opened his mouth to refuse, but her eyes were so very green and shining that he heard himself say yes, as though he were powerless to do otherwise.