Mr. Shimada is an impeccable compact man of about five six, carrying an amazingly thin oxblood-red briefcase and wearing a smoke-blue suit with an almost invisible pinstripe, tailored to display a dapper breadth of his gold-linked French cuffs and high white collar, on a shirt with a pale-blue body. He looks dense, like a beanbag filled to the corners with buckshot, and in good physical trim, though stocky, with a burnish of California tan on his not unfriendly face. "Is very nice meeting you," he says. "Area most nice." He speaks English easily, but with enough of an accent to cost Harry a second's response time answering him.
"Well, not around here exactly," he answers, instantly thinking that this is tactless, for why would Toyota want to locate its franchise in an ugly area? "I mean, the farm country is what we're famous for, barns with hex signs and all that." He wonders if he should explain "hex sign" and decides it's not worth it. "Would you like to look around the facility? At the setup?" In case "facility" didn't register. Talking to foreigners really makes you think about the language.
Mr. Shimada slowly, stiffly turns his head and shoulders together, one way and then the other, to take in the showroom. "I see," he smiles. "Also in Torrance I study many photos and froor pran. Oh! Rovely rady!"
Elvira has left her desk and sashays toward their visitor, sucking in her cheeks to make herself look more glamorous. "Miss Olshima, I mean Mr. Shimada" -Harry had been practicing the name, telling himself it was like Ramada with shit at the beginning, only to botch it in the crunch – "this is Miss Ollenbach, one of our best sales reps. Representatives."
Mr. Shimada first gives her an instinctive little hands-at-the-sides bow. When they shake hands, it's like both of them are trying to knock each other out with their smiles, they hold them so long. "Is good idea, to have both sexes serring," he says to Harry. "More and more common thing."
"I don't know why it took us all so long to think of it," Harry admits.
"Good idea take time," the other man says, curbing his smile a little, letting an admonitory sternness tug downward his rather full yet flat lips. Harry remembers from his boyhood in World War II how very cruel the Japanese were to their prisoners on Bataan. The first thing you heard about them, after Pearl Harbor, was that they were ridiculously small, manning tiny submarines and planes called Zeros, and then, as those early Pacific defeats rolled in, that they were fanatic in the service of their Emperor, robot-monkeys that had to be torched out of their caves with flame-throwers. What a long way we've come since then. Harry feels one of his surges of benevolence, of approval of a world that isn't asking for it. Mr. Shimada seems to be asking Elvira if she prays.
"Play tennis, you mean?" she asks back. "Yes, as a matter of fact. Whenever I can. How did you know?"
His flat face breaks into twinkling creases and, quick as a monkey, he taps her wrist, where a band of relative pallor shows on her sunbrowned skin. "Sweatband," he says, proudly.
"That's clever," Elvira says. "You must play, too, in California. Everybody does."
"All free time. Revel five, hoping revel four."
"That's fabulous," she comes back, but a sideways upward glance at Harry asks how much longer she has to be a geisha girl.
"Good fetch, no backhand," Mr. Shimada tells her, demonstrating.
"Turn your back to the net, and take the racket back low," Elvira tells him, also demonstrating. "Hit the ball out front, don't let it play you."
"Talk just as pro," Mr. Shimada tells her, beaming.
No doubt about it, Elvira is impressive. You can see how rangy and quick she would be on the court. Harry is beginning to relax. When the phantom tennis lesson is over, he takes their guest on a quick tour through the office space and through the shelved tunnel of the parts department, where Roddy, the Assistant Parts Manager, a viciously pretty youth with long lank hair he keeps flicking back from his face, his face and hands filmed with gray grease, gives them a dirty white-eyed look. Harry doesn't introduce them, for fear of besmirching Mr. Shimada with a touch of grease. He leads him to the brass-barred door of the rackety, cavernous garage, where Manny, the Service Manager Harry had inherited from Fred Springer fifteen years ago, has been replaced by Arnold, a plump young man with an advanced degree from voke school, where he was taught to wear washable coveralls that give him the figure of a Kewpie doll, or a snowman. Mr. Shimada hesitates at the verge of the echoing garage -men's curses cut through the hammering of metal on metal – and takes a step backward, asking, "Emproyee moraru good?"
This must be "morale." Harry thinks of the mechanics, their insatiable gripes and constant coffee breaks and demands for ever more costly fringe benefits, and their frequent hungover absences on Monday and suspiciously early departures on Friday, and says, "Very good. They clear twenty-two dollars an hour, with bonuses and benefits. The first job I ever took, when I was fifteen, I got thirty-five cents an hour."
Mr. Shimada is not interested. "Brack emproyees, are any? I see none."
"Yeah, well. We'd like to hire more, but it's hard to find qualified ones. We had a man a couple years ago, had good hands and got along with everybody, but we had to let him go finally because he kept showing up late or not showing up at all. When we called him on it, he said he was on Afro-American time." Harry is ashamed to tell him what the man's nickname had been – Blackie. At least we don't still sell Black Sambo dolls with nigger lips like they do in Tokyo, he saw on 60 Minutes this summer.
"Toyota strive to be fair-practices emproyer," says Mr. Shimada. "Wants to be good citizen of your pruraristic society. In prant in Georgetown, Kentucky, many bracks work. Not just assembry line, executive positions."
"We'll work on it," Rabbit promises him. "This is a kind of conservative area, but it's coming along."
"Very pretty area."
"Right."
Back in the showroom, Harry feels obliged to explain, "My son picked these colors for the walls and woodwork. My son Nelson. I would have gone for something a little less, uh, choice, but he's been the effective manager here, while I've been spending half the year in Florida. My wife loves the sun down there. She plays tennis, by the way. Loves the game."
Mr. Shimada beams. His lips seem flattened as if by pressing up against glass, and his eyeglasses, their squarish gold rims, seem set exceptionally tight against his eyes. "We know Nelson Angstrom," he says. He has trouble with the many consonants of the last name, making it "Ank-a-stom." "A most famous man at Toyota company."
A constriction in Harry's chest and a watery looseness below his belt tell him that they have arrived, after many courtesies, at the point of the visit. "Want to come into my office and sit?"
"With preasure."
"Anything one of the girls could get you? Coffee? Tea? Not like your tea, of course. Just a bag of Lipton's -"