"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cavernous garage, where Manny, the Service Manager Harry had inherited from Fred Springer fifteen years ago, has been replaced by Arnold, a plump young man with an advanced degree from voke school, where he was taught to wear washable coveralls that give him the figure of a Kewpie doll,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 -"
"Is fine without." Rather unceremoniously, he enters Harry's office and sits on the vinyl customer's chair, with padded chrome arms, facing the desk. He sets his wonderfully thin briefcase on his lap and lightly folds his hands upon it, showing two dazzling breadths of white cuff. He waits for Harry to seat himself behind the desk and then begins what seems to be a prepared speech. "Arways," he says, "we in Japan admire America. As boy during Occupation, rooked way up to big GI soldiers, their happy easygo ways. Enemy soldiers, but not bad men. Powerful men. Our Emperor's advisers have red him down unfortunate ways, so General MacArthur, he seemed to us as Emperor had been, distant and first-rate. We worked hard to do what he suggest rebuild burned cities, learn democratic ways. Japanese very humble at first in regard to America. You know Toyota story. At first, very modest, then bigger, we produce a better product for the rittle man's money, yes? You ask for it, we got it, yes?"
"Good slogan," Harry tells him. "I like it better than some of the recent ones've been coming down."
But Mr. Shimada does not expect to be even slightly interrupted. His burnished, manicured hands firmly flatten on the thin oxblood briefcase and he inclines his upper body forward to make his voice clear. "Nevertheress, these years of postwar, Japanese, man and woman, have great respect for United States. Rike big brother. But in recent times big brother act rike rittle brother, always cry and comprain. Want many favors in trade, saying Japanese unfair competition. Why unfair? Make something, cheaper even with duty and transportation costs, people rike, people buy. American way in old times. But in new times America make nothing, just do mergers, do acquisitions, rower taxes, raise national debt. Nothing comes out, all goes in – foreign goods, foreign capital. America take everything, give nothing. Rike big brack hole."
Mr. Shimada is proud of this up-to-date analogy and of his unanswerable command of English. He smiles to himself and opens, with a double snap as startling as a gunshot, his briefcase. From it he takes a single sheet of stiff creamy paper, sparsely decorated with typed figures. "According to figures here, between November '88 and May '89 Springer Motors fail to report sale of nine Toyota vehicles totarring one hundred thirty-seven thousand four hundred at factory price. This sum accumurating interest come to as of this date one hundred forty-five thousand eight hundred." With one of his reflexive, half-suppressed bows, he hands the paper across the desk.
Harry covers it with his big hand and says, "Yeah, well, but it's accountants we hired reported all this to you. It's not as if Springer Motors as a company is trying to cheat anybody. It's a screwy – an unusual – situation that developed and that's being corrected. My son had a drug problem and hired a bad egg as chief accountant and together they ripped us all off. The Brewer Trust, too, in another scam – they had a dead mutual friend buying cars, would you believe it? But listen: my wife and I – technically she's the owner here – we have every intention of paying Mid-Atlantic Toyota back every penny we owe. And I'd like to see, sometime, how you're computing that interest."
Mr. Shimada leans back a bit and makes his briefest speech. "How soon?"
Harry takes a plunge. "End of August." Three weeks away. They might have to take out a bank loan, and Brewer Trust is already on their case. Well, let Janice's accountants work it out if they're so smart.
Mr. Shimada blinks, behind those lenses embedded in his flat face, and seems to nod in concord. "End of August. Interest computed at twelve per cent monthly compounded as in standard TMCC loan." He snaps shut his briefcase and balances it on its edge beside his chair. He gazes obliquely at the framed photographs on Harry's desk: Janice, when she still had bangs, in a spangly long dress three or four years ago, about to go off to the Valhalla Village New Year's Eve party, a flashlit color print Fern Drechsel took with a Nikkomat Bernie had just given her for a Hanukkah present and that came out surprisingly well, Janice's face in anticipation of the party looking younger than her years, a bit overexposed and out of focus and starry-eyed; Nelson's highschool graduation picture, in a blazer and necktie but his hair down to his shoulders, long as a girl's; and, left over from Nelson's tenure at this desk, a framed black-and-white posed school photo of Harry in his basketball uniform, holding the ball above his shining right shoulder as if to get off a shot, his hair crewcut, his eyes sleepy, his tank top stencilled MJ.