“I bet you do, mate, I bet you do!” cackles Josh.
“How about you, Alfie?” Tamsin asks me pleasantly, still trying to include me in the evening, acting as though she knows it’s a meaningless question but it’s just a bit of harmless fun. How did Josh ever get a woman like her? Isn’t she much too good for him? “What’s your favorite cocktail?”
“Not much of a cocktail man,” I say lightly, as if this conversation is beneath me, draining my beer. “Not much of a drinker really.”
“Clearly,” Josh says.
I examine the empty glass in my hand as if I am secretly some kind of expert.
“But I do like a Tsingtao. Reminds me of home.”
“Home?” Jane says. “Do you mean Hong Kong?”
But India has a question of her own.
“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she says, looking at the hand that holds my Tsingtao, and everything around the table seems to get all silent.
“What?”
“Why are you wearing a wedding ring?” she asks again. “You’re not married, are you?”
I set down my glass and look at the ring around the third finger of my left hand as if I am seeing it for the first time.
“Used to be,” I say.
“And you still wear your ring? Ah. That’s sweet.”
“Lot of divorce about these days,” Dan says philosophically. “Rotten for the kids. Still, probably better than if the parents stay together and, you know, don’t get along.”
“I didn’t get divorced,” I say.
“No,” Josh says. “He didn’t get divorced. His wife died, didn’t she, Alfie? She was a beautiful girl and then she died. While scuba diving. And that means we all have to feel sorry for you, doesn’t it? Poor little Alfie and his dead wife. The rest of us are meant to apologize for going on living.”
“Josh,” says Tamsin.
“Well, I’m sick of it.”
Suddenly Josh and I are standing up. If there wasn’t a glass table and half a dozen fancy salads between us, I swear we would be exchanging punches.
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, Josh. That’s not necessary. But it would be nice if you would leave me alone.”
“Perhaps I will in the future.”
“Perhaps you should.”
I bow stiffly to Tamsin and leave the table. Josh follows me, getting more angry by the second. He’s not going to let me go that easily.
“Your wife’s dead and that’s your excuse for coming in here and acting like a complete asshole, is it? Is that your excuse, Alfie?”
But I don’t answer him as I make my way to the door. I think to myself-no, that’s not my excuse.
That’s my reason.
15
THERE IS NOTHING CASUAL ABOUT JACKIE.
Every morning she arrives for work dressed for a date with Rod Stewart. Her heels are high and her skirts are short, but there is a curious formality about her. She looks as though she has spent a long time deciding what to wear. She looks as though putting on her makeup took about as long as minor heart surgery. But her provocative clothes are like a uniform, or a shield, or a glossy shell. It’s a very self-conscious sexiness. As if she looks that way not to advertise something, but to protect it.
Even when she has changed into her cleaning kit, Jackie is still as formal as a flight attendant or a policewoman. It’s got something to do with the highlights in her hair, the mascara that is just a touch too heavy. She spends far too long trying to make herself look good. She looks good already.
Sometimes I see her in the staff room, or the corridor, or a class that is empty of students. Bumping around with her bucket, polishing something in her yellow gloves. For some reason I don’t understand, I never ask Jackie about herself. I always ask her about the young girl in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
It makes me feel good to ask Jackie about the book. It’s like a secret we share.
“How’s Mick?” I say.
“Still dreaming.” She smiles.
My students are not like Jackie. My students dress down. Depending on their personal circumstances, and their country of origin, they are either expensively scruffy or poverty stricken scruffy. Vanessa, for example, wears white or black Versace jeans every day, while Witold always wears the same pair of counterfeit Polish denims with “Levy’s” misspelled on the back. But unless they have a hot date after class, they stick with T-shirts and sneakers, combat trousers or jeans. Except for Hiroko.
Hiroko was an office lady in Tokyo and she still wears the classic OL uniform-pale, neat little matching jacket-and-skirt suits, black high heels and even those flesh-colored tights that OLs seem to favor. I have seen those flesh-colored tights on young female Japanese tourists buying their designer tea bags at Fortnum & Mason-I couldn’t help noticing-but I have never seen them on any of my students.
Apart from Hiroko.
Hiroko is not like Yumi. Hiroko is twenty-three going on fifty. With her dyed blond hair and funky fashion sense, Yumi looks like the maverick, but in fact she is far more typical of the Japanese girls at Churchill’s than Hiroko.
It’s not just Hiroko’s clothes. She is diligent in her work, deferential to her teachers, never speaking unless she is spoken to, and then only in bashful, monosyllabic sentences. She doesn’t actually bow, but when you are speaking to her she gives all these suppliant, encouraging little nods of her head that strike me as pure Japanese, far more so than the legendary bowing. Sometimes I think Hiroko has never really left that office in Tokyo.
Hiroko is having problems with her course. She is one of my Proficiency students and her written work is faultless. But she is having trouble with her spoken English. Hiroko doesn’t like talking. Hiroko hates talking. At first I thought it was because she is cripplingly shy. But it’s far more than shyness. Hiroko has that very Japanese terror of doing something imperfectly. She would much rather not do it at all.
So she sits in my Proficiency class, silent as a mute, hiding her sweet, bespectacled round face behind a long black curtain of hair. It gets so bad that I have to ask her to stay behind after class and she nods her assent, her eyes blinking nervously behind her glasses.
I start off with the good news-she is one of my best students, I can see how hard she works-and then I tell her that she has to start talking more in class or she will flunk her exam on the oral section. In her strained, faltering English-she visibly flinches at every minor mistake she makes-Hiroko asks me if she should drop down a level or two. I tell her that the problem would be exactly the same even if she was with the Advanced Beginners.
“Listen, you just have to get over your hang-up about speaking English,” I say. “Don’t let it become too important, okay? Even native speakers make mistakes. It doesn’t matter if it comes out sounding different from the textbooks. Just open your mouth and give it a go.”
Hiroko looks at me with wide, frightened eyes, furiously nodding in agreement. Where does it come from, this myth that all Asian eyes are mean little slits?
She stares at me with a kind of touching trust, waiting for something else to happen, and so very soon the pair of us are sitting in the Eamon de Valera with Hiroko nursing a spritzer and me sipping a stout. That’s where she tells me all about her broken heart.
“It’s no good if it’s too important,” I said to her on the way to the pub. “That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it too important, then it ruins everything.”
Hiroko of the broken heart.
There was a man back in Tokyo. A man from Hiroko’s office. An older man. Hiroko lived with her parents and the man lived with his wife. Their work brought Hiroko and the man together. He was friendly and charming. She was young and lonely. She liked him a lot. And so they began.
Hiroko and the man had to go to love hotels, those briefly rented rooms in buildings shaped like ocean liners and castles and space ships. She knew he wasn’t free but she also knew that they really cared for each other. He was funny and kind and he told her that she was beautiful. He made her feel good about herself, as though she could really be the person she had always wanted to be. And he told her that he loved her, he told her that he loved her so very much in one of their two-hour stays in a love hotel. Then he went home to his wife.