Secrets of the Apple (9 page)

Absolutely true,
Ryoki thought.

“We could market those cookies if you like. Probably keep you in books for years.”

“Actually, they were a bribe. All the unattached on three floors are getting together tonight to celebrate Singles Appreciation Day and I’m too chicken to go by myself.” She paused before rushing on, “It’s a great way to meet women, and it would be good for you to relax a minute.”

He really didn’t have time, and had planned to work late.

But then he looked at her wide, expectant eyes.

Of course, they were on schedule and maybe he could use a break—

Was she asking him out on a date, is that what she was doing?

His mother had insisted it was his responsibility to be a gentleman, to take the lead, ask the lady, make the arrangements. But he had studied in the United States, had learned about American women, had once written to his mother that American girls were so liberated that he was free of all responsibility. She might be asking him out.

Since Napa she’d proven they could have a quasi-social relationship and still work efficiently. It might be okay—

Hard to say no to that red suit.

“Eight-thirty?” she pressed.

“I’ll drive,” he said.

Ryoki arrived at the Porters at 8:29 p.m., guessing Kate would be ten minutes late. Brian answered the door, asked him to sit down, chatted like a father about where they were going and what they’d be doing. Kate emerged nine minutes later, clothes, hair and makeup fresh. As he opened the passenger door of his car he caught a whiff of her perfume, a bolder, spicier scent than she wore in the office. It looked like a date, smelled like a date. He shut her into the car and circled to the driver’s side. As he settled in, she handed him her directions. He programmed the address into his phone.

When they arrived at the house, Kate stopped him before he could ring the bell. “I should warn you, we know the same people at the office, so I won’t be able to introduce you to anyone. Will you be okay?” she asked with real apprehension in her face, and for the first time it dawned on him that she might turn shy in amorphous social settings, that she really might have been too chicken to come alone.

Ryoki smirked. “Little late to ask.” He had no trouble at parties, and would make sure she met people.

The door opened and the host, a mid-thirties ginger-haired bag of muscles, took charge of Kate, immediately whisking her off to the nether regions of the party. Ryoki actually felt the separation as she left his side. He’d grown accustomed to the idea of a date, and wasn’t quite ready to let her go, not just yet. Trying to hide her alarm, she’d just managed a sneaky little whisper before being dragged away: “Lots of pretties here. Good luck!” Her breath left a tickle in his ear that tingled down the back of his spine and lodged there as he found himself surrounded by red lips, pink lips, dangly earrings and clinking bracelets. He mingled, excused himself, mingled, excused himself, mingled, excused himself, casually working around the room. Eventually he caught sight of Kate, standing in an alcove and sipping a bottle of water as she talked to a slender mocha-caramel woman who swung her curtain of long, butterscotch braids and talked with her hands, endangering the champagne-colored carpet with her red wine. Though they couldn’t see him, he was close enough to touch, and his arm involuntarily jerked twice to steady the dangerously sloshing glass. Butterscotch spoke very fast. “Girl, I saw that movie star you came in with. What are you thinkin’, leaving a tasty treat like that unattended?”

Kate laughed but didn’t answer.

“Seriously, honey, if you aren’t going to stand guard, do you mind if I take a crack at him?”

“You—go—girl,” Kate said, her gentle sarcasm lost on Butterscotch, whose concentration was primarily focused on flicking her braids.

“He keeps his hair a little short though,” Butterscotch said. “I bet I could talk him into letting it out some. I like hair I can run my fingers through.”

Kate’s answer was lost in a raucous burst of laughter from the other side of the room, and the two women parted company. Annoyed, Ryoki automatically put a hand to his hair which he had trimmed religiously every three or four weeks. Butterscotch’s hair fetish put her out of the running, and he consciously avoided her for the rest of the evening, ducking out of the billiard room an hour later when she entered and committed herself by picking up a cue, which is how he found himself standing over the plush gold armchair occupied by Isabelle West.

He’d seen her around of course; who hadn’t? Blonde, blue-eyed Isabelle, with assets so magnificent Ryoki did not doubt she could supply the name of a gifted plastic surgeon. She made eye contact and held up her empty glass with complete confidence that it would be refilled. Ryoki didn’t disappoint, and after handing her another white wine he sat in the armchair to her left. She leaned toward the armrest, her long shapely legs crossed at the ankles and angled off to the side, feet flat on the floor, her long body positioned like a stretched “S.” As a teenager, he’d noticed some Western women sitting like this, and out of curiosity had tried it himself in private. Miserably uncomfortable. Now he wondered once again how a woman in pain could look so graceful. Perhaps vanity was a natural painkiller. Isabelle’s eyes met his, languid, bold, inviting.

“You must be Ryoki Tanaka. I’m Isabelle West.”

She talked about the party, the office, the traffic—all the while saying only one thing: “I’m the best thing here, choose me before you miss your chance.” Ryoki smiled like a casually interested male, throwing out just enough bait to keep her paddling. For the last three years he’d been collecting blondes. At first each addition had been amusing for a few months, though over time his interest dwindled to weeks, his attention gradually grinding down to days—well, in truth, a night. He knew the London office had whispered rumors of his conquests, though he had never spoken a word, content to know that should the true extent of his catalogue ever be published, he would be hailed as a god among men. Always careful, always discreet, he made it worth their while, a phone call, a present and most were satisfied. Tonight he hadn’t set out on a hunting party, but it seemed a shame to waste a blonde. Isabelle would require so little effort and she was certainly very pretty, reputedly smart, too. He liked smart. He considered her detachedly—well-proportioned face, stunningly beautiful body, a photogenic beauty who could, and probably would, model lacy underwear on the side of a bus, given the right contract. Instinct told him Kate would never do that.

Isabelle leaned closer, propping her wares on the arm of the chair, mounding them up. Ryoki’s breath hitched. What does Kate matter.

But the simple fact of Kate trickled unbidden through his mind, slowly diluting the plume of desire that Isabelle had coaxed from his core. Were she to know, Kate would not be impressed by his extensive collection, would probably consider his last three years tawdry and repulsive. He didn’t want her to know. Still, he sat entranced by that low-cut blouse. Something flickered in Isabelle’s eyes. She leaned closer, moving in for the kill.

A familiar laugh, cool and clear, made him blink. He drew back, turning his head to see Kate in the dining room, playing Pictionary and carrying on separate conversations with two bold drunks hunched too close on either side. He rose, Isabelle fading from his consciousness before he’d even finished excusing himself.

In a moment he was standing behind Kate’s chair, watching as she drew her loose, free-flowing cartoons, obviously sports cars in a race. The drunks guessed outrageously, every inane answer striking them as wildly hilarious. Breathing too close, they tainted her air with sour alcoholic fumes. Ryoki leaned over, speaking quietly in her ear, “Are you almost ready to go?” He put his hands on the back of her chair. She turned her head briefly, her hair brushing his arm.

“We’re nearly through,” she said, turning back to draw until the timer ran out.

Both men protested the idea of her leaving, each offering to take her home at the end of the game. Ryoki smiled pleasantly, but did not reply. As soon as she shifted to get up, he pulled out her chair and took her arm, not letting go until they had completed the customary round of goodbyes. Once back in the car, he felt an unaccountable sense of relief that they had managed to escape unscathed.

“Whew, that went better than I thought. Did you have a good time?” Kate asked.

“Yes, thank you,” he said noncommittally.

“Did you make any new friends?” she prodded with a knowing smile.

“Met a lot of people,” he said.

“Isabelle West is very pretty.”

“True,” he said.

Keeping his eyes on the road, he could sense her looking at him, silently urging him to elaborate.

“Did
you
have a good time?” he asked. For him something had scratched the paint right at the end, taking the shine off the party. A movie would have been better. They should have gone to a movie, something really uplifting with a lot of car chases and explosions.

“Some guy asked me to look at his head and see if I could spot his hair implants. He even bet me ten bucks I couldn’t,” Kate said.

“Did you win?”

“I ran—straight into a little Napoleon in a tight T-shirt who asked me the percentage of my body fat. There’s a reason these guys are single.” All the way home, she talked about the party, the office and the traffic, her conversation sharing the same skeleton as that of Isabelle West. But nothing in Kate’s voice asked him to choose her.

He took her home and wondered all the way back to his hotel whether they’d been on a date, cogitating all the way through the lobby, forgetting to dodge the help, not even recognizing the thirty-point loss. He wondered right up to the moment he unlocked his room and stepped on a message that someone had slipped under his door two hours earlier.

The message was from his father and gave cryptic reference to a new direction in São Paulo, and instructed him to check his email right away. He quickly powered up and downloaded a large file outlining a comprehensive constraint analysis that could potentially double projected market penetration via multiple channels throughout North as well as South America. Ryoki read it four times, admiring the simple elegance of the ideas and the detailed research behind it. Certainly this plan must have been in development for some time, and he couldn’t understand why he had been left out of the loop. What message he was being sent? He took a deep breath and tried not to jump to conclusions. The project would take him weeks to implement alone. The very nature of this revised vision mandated an increase in front-end planning and logistics from here in San Francisco, but the email failed to mention the makeup of the team that would have to join him right away. Perhaps they were allowing him to pick his own people, as a consolation. He looked at his watch; it was 5:00 p.m. in Tokyo. His cell was dead, so he hastily called his father on the hotel phone, anxious to recommend his own men immediately.

Unbelievably, his father said, “No.”

At the word, an angry buzzing began in Ryoki’s ear. He talked and talked, arguing his case from every angle, keeping it courteous and professional as always, but all the while hearing the pleading in his voice: “With all due respect, Father, I need my people here. I must have—”

Hiroshi’s answers came back loose and illogical, interrupted continuously, and never once answered Ryoki’s questions.
“Your excellent team is already in place in São Paulo . . . no absolute deadline for you to assume physical control . . . Brian offered total support . . .”

The conversation ended in stiff formalities.

Because he was alone, Ryoki pounded the receiver into its cradle twice and slammed back in his chair, pure fury surging in his veins, unable to comprehend such a massive lapse in judgment, even from his father. He desperately wished his grandparents hadn’t crashed into the ocean, that his grandfather was alive to call his father in and set him straight, the old man’s veins standing out on his thick neck as he roared.

This had to be his mother’s fault. He wasn’t sure how exactly, but it must have something to do with her.

That night, when exhaustion finally trumped fury and he crawled into bed, Ryoki dreamed of his twelfth birthday exactly as it happened eighteen years earlier. His mother had persuaded his father to come along with them to an amusement park. His father didn’t ride the roller coasters, but spent the day cheering mother and son as they rode and rode, until Ryoki was green and his face shone with wild excitement.

They arrived home after dark. His grandmother handed Ryoki a brightly wrapped gift and directed his father into his grandfather’s study. Ryoki hastily tore off the paper to find a radio-controlled model airplane. Holding the box aloft he pelted to the study to show his father, but stopped short at the sound of shouting coming from the half-open door. Morbidly curious, Ryoki drew closer, pressing his face at the opening. He saw the veins standing out on his grandfather’s neck, recognized his father’s erect back and understood him to be the object of punishment and derision. His grandfather’s gaze flicked to the doorway, locked on his grandson for only a split-second, and the tirade intensified. Ryoki felt his grandmother’s heavy hand on his shoulder, though whether to comfort him or hold him in place, he wasn’t sure. His father made no move, offered no defense. Ryoki knew there was nothing to be said, no defense to be made. Hiroshi had delayed important tasks to watch his wife and son ride roller coasters at an amusement park. Ryoki could not foresee that in less than a year his grandfather’s liver would force him snarling into retirement at sixty-two, the ironic result of the hard social drinking he’d done as he built his business relationships. At the time he only gazed at his grandfather’s solid bull neck and his father’s smooth, sensitive hands with their long, tapered fingers, and felt responsible for the useless waste. He was twelve, nearly a man, and he should have known better. He pulled out of his grandmother’s grasp and leaned his new plane against the wall. Running to the furthest toilet, he privately vomited up two corndogs and a Coke. When he had brushed his teeth and returned downstairs, he found his father smiling and spreading a blanket on the carpet, his mother holding a handful of forks and a lopsided cake she had risen at 5:00 a.m. to bake herself, just as she had done for every birthday he could remember. Ryoki obediently blew out his candles, then pled a stomachache and went to bed early.