Secrets of the Apple (37 page)

“I’m lower maintenance.”

Choke/snort/liar/choke—“Sorry, swallowed wrong,” he said.

“I think Mariko made the layers for your cake a week ago and put them in a special temperature-controlled section of the freezer. She drew up a full color diagram of the finished product, four feet of blue fondant—unless you’d like five. We could invite the Arimas, their children, and their children’s children.”

“I’m sure fondant will be very good,”—whatever that was. Sounded thick and heavy, something bound to sit solid and unyielding at the bottom of his stomach.

She leaned back, silently considering him. “Was there something in particular you wanted?  A flavor or a color?”

“No, no. I’m sure it will be nice,” Ryoki said, adjusting the cells in his spreadsheet and accidentally typing pi to twelve decimal places. Aggravated, he hit delete and looked up to find her studying his face with an unnerving birdlike focus.

“You want
me
to do it, don’t you?” she said slowly.

Ryoki sucked in his lips, embarrassed by his unconscionable gluttony, begging the small when the great was already in hand. But all the birthday preparations had left him feeling neglected and petulant, nostalgic for the birthdays of his childhood when his mother shooed the chef from the kitchen and made him a special cake all by herself in a rectangular pan, covered in ordinary sprinkles and lumpy with surprising chunks of chocolate. After dinner he and his parents would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace, telling stories and eating directly from the pan until they threw down their forks and lay on their sides, unable to take another bite. The tradition had lapsed somewhere, maybe around age twelve or thirteen, and he couldn’t recall why.

“I mostly use cake mixes, but Mariko built her reputation on cakes. Her specialty—”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a cake,” he said, avoiding her eye, though he could feel her x-ray stare.

A secretary hurried in with a minor office disaster which occupied Kate’s attention for the rest of the afternoon. His evening lay wide open, with another mysterious disappearance from Kate.

The next morning he awoke and sat up in bed. Thirty-one didn’t feel any different, but then he’d never actually felt the march of time. Might find a gray hair in a year or two, maybe then things would be different.

Too old for birthday cakes. Stupid to ask, selfish.

But something inside him dreaded the big blue cake. All four feet of it roosted in the back of his mind, croaking and cawing all morning as colleagues dropped by with jokes and congratulations. It splatted dollops of frosting over his noon meeting, putting him off his lunch, and seemed somehow to blame for Kate’s mysterious three o’clock disappearance. Based on the sheer acreage of cake involved, Ryoki concluded she had gone to raise a surprise army of his most intimate executives who would gather to eat something called “blue fondant” and turn his crumb of personal birthday into a work outing. By the time he climbed into the back of the car to return home, the cake had bronzed into the flag-bearing symbol of all that is grim and miserable about growing older.
Responsibility Responsibility Responsibility,
the veins bulging in his grandfather’s bull-neck as he roared in his son’s face.

After work Ryoki entered his front hall already wearied by the great burden of official hospitality, preparing to bow and smile when he wanted nothing more than to order everybody from his house. Handing his things to the maid, he took his time changing his shoes and washed his hands with a long, martyred sigh. When he finally approached the dining room, he paused for breath before opening the double doors, preparing to be surprised. But the room was empty, except for the
four and a half
feet
of solid indigestion towering over the sideboard.

“Welcome home,” Kate said behind him, making him jump and whirl, knocking a jade lady from her niche, neatly caught by Lucas who bent the construction paper birthday card in his hands to make the save. The boy handed Ryoki both statuette and card, a crayon drawing of the house overshadowed by a huge blue cake smothered in candles. “
Otanjou-bi omedetou gozaimasu,
” he said, bashfully punctuating his birthday wishes with an awkward bow.

“That was beautifully said,” Ryoki told him as he returned the bow. Taking the boy by the shoulder, Ryoki noticed with relief that the table was only set for three.

Still, all through dinner the giant blue cake kept intruding on his peripheral vision, as a ponderous blue object will do in a green room. But he found himself continually distracted by Kate who laughed until tears stood in her eyes, remembering the fabulous pink plastic fingernails she once used to lure the neighbor boy into letting her see his toad, or the night she swiped a whole tray of cookies from her parents’ party and slipped in ham juice, knocking herself out cold. In the spirit of celebration she even agreed to put an octopus on her plate, though what with all the stories, she never got to the point of actually putting it in her mouth.

Gradually the cake began to shrink until it merely occupied the finite cubic inches above its own twenty-four inch footprint, really such a small percentage of the room, and Ryoki had almost begun to consider that perhaps it might be okay if Kate went ahead and lit the thirty-one intricate wax sculptures that passed as birthday candles.

When the plates had been cleared, Kate walked over to the cake, looking it leisurely up and down, considering one side, then the other, before finally pronouncing it
art,
far too fine for just fam—uh, for just a little party. Moments later Ryoki and Lucas found themselves herded off to the library where they found a large box tied with a red ribbon.

“Open it,” she told him.

Ryoki didn’t think there was anything he wanted that could be contained in a box, yet he pulled the ribbon tail, curiously discomfited by the tug of schoolboy exhilaration, the mysterious thrill of a wrapped present, the hopeful fear that the gift would reveal what she thought of him when she was alone in the dark.

Ryoki shook his head at his own stupidity.
Get a hold of yourself.

He carefully loosened the knot, forcing himself to delay the moment, feeling the scuffy grain of the ribbon as the ends slipped apart.

Lifting the lid, he found a plaid blanket, three forks, and an aluminum pan of yellow cake frosted with chocolate, the words “Happy Birthday Ryoki” written in squishy Japanese, dusted with sprinkles and dotted with thirty-one ordinary birthday candles. “I called your mom,” she said, taking the blanket from his hands and spreading it on the floor.

At the bottom of the box, Ryoki found a birthday card containing two movie tickets for the late showing of a new smasher crasher, and a plain manila envelope on which was scrawled “For Ryoki on his Birthday.” Inside the envelope he found a story titled “Hotel” by Kathryn Porter, five pages, single-spaced.

Ryoki was unable to speak, and put his arm around Kate’s waist, kissing her cheek, and ruffling Lucas’s hair. He watched her bend toward Lucas, helping him light the candles, thinking of the Prada briefcase he’d given her on her birthday, picked out and wrapped by Sakura Arima before he even saw it. Next year he would not be so carelessly impersonal, next year—

The thought broke off and fell at his feet with the dismaying clink of a snapped necklace. He moved closer, putting a hand on the small of her back, taking comfort in the warmth of her skin through the pale silk. “Kate, will you read it to me?” he asked. But she was still engrossed in the candles and didn’t appear to hear.

They ate too much cake, spreading crumbs all over the blanket and proclaimed themselves to be in misery. By then there were just enough minutes to hustle Lucas to bed and rush off to the movie, no time to read five pages, single-spaced. From the minute Ryoki had pulled the pages from their envelope he suspected there wouldn’t be. When it came to sharing her writing, Kate had a magician’s gift for diversion. But Ryoki had grown wise to her tricks, learning his first lesson the night he met Montgomery.

Ryoki had scored a few off Montgomery, the incident of the shoes in the foyer, for example, then there’d been the disruption of a couple of dates, like the hostile takeover that ended in a game of Scrabble and the touching of his hair. But Montgomery had unwittingly taken his revenge, spitting Kate’s hidden writing life directly into Ryoki’s eye where it could work around behind the eyeball and soak into his brain. Hours and hours in the library and she’d still never mentioned it, though he’d begun providing openings. As weeks went by, he reasoned that Montgomery was a guy raised on pop fiction, probably only read
GQ
at the hair salon while a chatty stylist painted on his blond highlights. He was therefore more easily impressed and less of a threat to a budding young author still unsure of herself. Perfectly logical, of course. Though there were those unguarded moments, nasty stingers, when
why not trust me
bounced from right ear to left and back again. But for his birthday she had granted him membership in her exclusive inner circle. He still wanted her to read it aloud, allowing him to make all the appropriate responses, to consummate the ritual.

As they were leaving for the movie, he folded the pages lengthwise and put them in his inside jacket pocket, in case they had time to read in the car. Unfortunately Kate developed a keen interest in the radio, as though a hard driving beat would speed digestion and make room for a vat of greasy popcorn. Even above the noise, Ryoki heard the paper crackle in his pocket as he moved. But as he waited for his opportunity, his thoughts began to tack left—“Hotel,” interesting title. Short, to the point. Could be about… well, about ... At that point a cold shower of shock poured over him. “Hotel”—Las Vegas and a dead guy. A hand went involuntarily to his pocket, feeling the stiffness of the paper inside. No, Kate would not give him such a story as a gift, nor did he believe she’d go the other direction and write anything pornographic. But a piece called “Hotel” could very easily describe an alluring bit of ribbon sliding from a shoulder, or a lacy silk slip peeking from under a wool skirt, or worse. What if this story was bait? The kind women leave out, like chaining a bloody wildebeest on the open savanna and jumping behind a tree to catch what came sniffing. It was possible. Maybe, terrifyingly. His heart
beat beat beat,
outstripping the thumping music. Of course, knowing Kate, a silk slip might be entirely innocuous, a necessary tool of the plot. But after all those nights by himself, thinking, imagining. If he actually heard the feminine echo of his own fantasies trailing from her own lips, no matter how watered down, what might—could he—? She couldn’t possibly understand, but he feared the consequences. Better to keep the story in his pocket, read it in private, talk about it later.

They returned home quite late, but he took the story to bed with him, determined to read it in the respectable company of his own nightstand and scholarly reading lamp, even imagining he wore glasses to complete the effect.

He read the first paragraph—
Huh, how’s she going to work sex into that?
He read the second and stopped to take a deep breath, a drink of water, and lean his head back against the headboard, his mouth curled at his own foolishness for working himself into a lather over
this,
something that could probably be shouted on the street corner of any family neighborhood. For the first time it occurred to him she might have been embarrassed by the cost of the Prada briefcase, and had only chanced the story in a desperate attempt to find a comparable gift for a spoiled friend. But as silly as he felt, three quarters of him itched to storm straight down to her cottage and demand she read it to him in her nightgown, the one with the frothy hem that she wore under that ridiculous terry cloth robe the night Lucas broke into her window. He took another breath and started over.

Kate’s narrator, an American tourist from a frozen place called Rexburg, Idaho, stands in the parking lot of a down-at-heel hotel in Richmond, Virginia, right after a freak snowstorm. A man bursts from the hotel, shoving something into his pants. He hits the ice, slipping sideways with every forward step. A pursuer shoves through the same door, screaming, “STOP, THIEF!” with arms flailing, then falls sliding around the corner, gets up, disappears in a futile slow-motion chase.

Inside the lobby the narrator finds the aftermath of an armed robbery: An unidentified woman sobbing by herself in the corner, a large black man chanting to no one in particular, “Money ain’t nothin’ but a tree, ironed flat and painted green. It ain’t nothin’.” A Latino clerk dialing a number with shaking hands, pushing the wrong button, slamming down the phone and starting over. A white man in a polyester tie talking too fast and too loud into a pay phone. An Asian couple standing near the dingy elevator, looking around the lobby in confusion and pushing the UP button so the doors would slide open and let them back inside.

In the end the police interview the victims. The criminal is never caught and an inventory of loss taken: $217, a disposable camera, a fake Rolex, and a pair of gold earrings engraved “To My Sweetheart” by a hated ex-husband. The police file their report under “S” for “Shabby.”

Once Ryoki had properly oriented his expectations, he was able to appreciate Kate’s story for what it was, a subversive comedy that made him laugh out loud at least twice, surprised that she could handle a joke so much better on paper than in real life. Turning out the light, he set the paper on his nightstand and nestled into the pillow to go to sleep, still sniggering at his own stupidity. But as he slipped into sleep, a strange undercurrent began gently tugging at his feet, gradually pulling him further and further beneath the surface and rolling him around the bottom until he stood within Kate’s story, an eyewitness to the crime. Looking slowly from face to face, all the humor fled to the door, sliding away on the ice, slowly but forever uncatchable. The sobbing woman, the big black man, the Latino clerk, polyester white man, the Asian couple—every character was connected by location, economic class, and a common trauma. They needed to talk to each other. He could almost read the words bubbling to the surface, imprinting themselves just under the skin. Ryoki began to talk, break the ice, start them off. He talked and talked, shouted even, but nobody moved. In frustration he picked the kindest face, the big black man, and tried to lead him to the crying woman. But his hand passed straight through the man’s arm. Ryoki held his hand to the light, stunned to discover himself a ghost, powerless to help. Out the window he could still see the criminal running in the distance, impossibly slow, a dark blot on a white field, an insignificant mosquito, a comic villain, a catalyst.