Meeting Luciano Read online

  MEETING LUCIANO

  a novel by

  ANNA ESAKI-SMITH

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  to Craig, my hero

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  many heartfelt thanks to:

  Henry Dunow

  Shannon Ravenel

  Lilia Ognayon

  Sun JuFang

  and most of all,

  my parents

  ONE

  There are two kinds of parents: those who bring you up with stories of their childhood, and others who act like they never had one. My mother told me everything: how her family chilled a watermelon during the summer by dropping it down a well in the morning and retrieving it at dinner, and of evenings spent in rowboats watching plankton glow in the dark. I knew she put on singing shows for her relatives, that her best friend was the daughter of the man who made her shoes, that she ate ice cream for the first time at five. Her father dropped dead from a heart attack at a train station; she loved her nurse more than her mother. My mother was filled with stories, and she’d tell them in clear, precisely chosen English, her eyes black as wet stones.

  On the day I returned home from college, my mother told me about her brother.

  “He was a very talented musician. A drummer.” She laughed. “The girls really went for that, especially on an island where most men like to fish.

  “He studied with that American, Buddy Rich,” she continued. “Isn’t he famous?”

  I nodded, vaguely remembering a name from a television show.

  My mother tapped a beat with both her index fingers on the kitchen tabletop. “But my brother’s talents were not just limited to drums. He loved all music. When I was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, he taught me this melody, which he had me sing over and over again. Even at that age I could understand the beauty of the song.”

  She broke out into her trembling soprano, the thin, silvery notes melting into one another like snowflakes on a fingertip. She watched me listen. Her voice strained, reaching for a particularly high note.

  “You get the idea,” she said, clearing her throat. “So, after I memorized the song completely, my brother sang an accompanying melody, and it became this beautiful duet. I loved being with him. We would sit outside on summer evenings and sing in the dark. Just us and our voices.”

  “You and Uncle Kahei? Or was that Uncle Goro?” I asked.

  “Neither. His name was Kazu. He died,” my mother replied.

  I had never heard of Kazu. My mother was from a large family, and there had been so many deaths (a sister who committed suicide, a brother hit by a car, a half brother killed by stomach cancer) that I was never able to keep straight who had died. I was no longer surprised at being surprised by my mother’s stories. There were always stories within her stories, small bombs set to explode at some disconcerting point.

  “Tuberculosis,” my mother added. “Everyone died of tuberculosis back then.”

  We sat in silence. My mother remained dry-eyed but her momentum had slowed. “Go on,” I prompted, and she continued:

  “Many years later, after your father and I had come to America, I went to the opera. The Metropolitan Opera Company was performing Don Giovanni. The sets were so impressive and the costumes were so complicated. At first, I thought the opera was just a busy spectacle. But then the characters Don Giovanni and Zerlina began singing and suddenly I was transported. They were singing our duet.”

  My mother began the melody again, her voice softer now. “Vieni, mio bel diletto,” she sang, her mouth carefully shaping the Italian. “Io cangierò tua sorte. Andiam, andiam, mio bene, a ristorar le pene d’un innocente amor.” This time she hit all the high notes.

  “It’s called ‘Là ci darem la mano,’” my mother informed me, after finishing. “‘There we’ll hold hands.’ Duettino. That’s Italian for little duet.”

  “I see.”

  My mother made a little sucking noise in her mouth, trying to extract something left over from lunch. “I’ve got tickets to see L’elisir d’amore tonight. It’s a preseason benefit with Pavarotti. I’m going with Mrs. Murata.”

  Mrs. Murata was a college friend of my mother’s who made a fortune opening a chain of take-out sushi shops in Manhattan called Sushi Yes! My mother had introduced her to the opera.

  “Front-row seats,” my mother continued. “So when Pavarotti spits, I’ll feel it.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll teach you my brother’s part and we can sing together.”

  I shook my head. “You know my voice stinks,” I said.

  My mother nodded. “Your voice is terrible but you have perfect pitch. A duet is still possible.”

  “I doubt it,” I replied.

  MY MOTHER LEFT for the opera in the late afternoon. Whenever she went to the opera, she made an effort to dress up, digging into her crowded closet for a pocket-book and shoes that matched, spraying old, heavy perfume in her hair. Although raised in Japan during the war, she prided herself on an appreciation of the West, to the point of distancing herself from her own culture. When visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she avoided the Asian wing. She never attended touring performances of kabuki or bunraku, and she criticized the limited repertoire of Japanese cuisine.

  She fancied herself not American but broadly European, having worked as a secretary at the British embassy in Tokyo before getting married. She followed what she believed to be a distinctly European manner, writing careful letters when a phone call would do, saying “Pardon?” instead of “What?” Whenever she ate soup, she’d scoop the spoon away from her before lifting it silently to her mouth, taking care never to slurp the way Japanese do when eating noodles. She inevitably dribbled soup down her chin. She studied Romanesque architecture in her middle age, and more recently had grown obsessed with Italian opera. It was as though she were on a quest, moving through the geography of Western civilization in search of an essence that could finally transform her. She tried to make us as European as she possibly could, too, serving us crustless cucumber sandwiches for lunch and giving us leather satchels to take to school instead of backpacks.

  Still, she fit imperfectly into this world. After dinner at a French restaurant, she’d return home and make herself a bowl of rice and miso soup. She read Japanese newspapers. The only time she seemed natural and confident was when cloaked in kimono. Tonight, as she hunted for car keys, the neckline of her dress billowed to reveal a large expanse of white skin.

  After my mother left, I looked in the refrigerator for something to eat, peeling open clumps of aluminum foil and yellowed Tupperware containers, but found nothing inspiring. Growing up, I marveled at the refrigerators of my friends, gleaming iceboxes that produced platters of cold chicken and bowls of potato salad, or frosted cakes from which precisely cut slices were missing. It seemed as if attractive leftovers, wood-paneled family rooms, and golden retrievers were written into their genetic code. Our home was never so consistent. I was once humiliated when a friend opened our refrigerator door to find an octopus tentacle curled in a stainless steel bowl.

  I ate leftover sukiyaki and a bowl of minestrone soup that evening, watching a rerun of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and went to bed feeling sluggish.

  MY LAST DAY at college had been depressing; the bars and restaurants were empty and somber. At the bagel shop, the girl behind the counter had greeted me with a yawn so big I could see clear to her tonsils. I walked slowly back to my car, hot coffee leaking out of a paper bag. Even though only a few days had passed since graduation, I felt as if I had never been there;
the town had already changed, readying itself for its new occupants. I felt vaguely betrayed.

  I drove out of town toward a stubbornly outdated vision of home life—a regular two-parent family, all the bedrooms filled, the house not yet worn down. I imagined the driveway perfectly sealed, the lawn mowed to an even green sheen, and the azalea shrubs trimmed into lush pink domes. The image persisted as I neared my hometown, even as the roads grew so familiar that it seemed I could drive by feel. It wasn’t until I walked into the house, years of disrepair and emptiness gnawing at its soul, that I fully understood how wrong the vision was.

  Late that night, as I lay under my sheet, trying with difficulty to imagine a Japanese man playing the drums, my mother’s small, round shape appeared in the doorway. “Something tremendous has happened,” she whispered hoarsely.

  I propped myself up on my elbows. She clapped her hands.

  “I met Luciano!” she exclaimed in a shrill, girlish voice.

  I blinked at her. “Luciano?”

  “Pavarotti. Luciano Pavarotti.”

  I sat up further, squinting into the light from the hallway at her silhouette. “How did you manage that?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Murata donated a great deal of money to the Westchester Arts Council. Tons of money. So we were invited backstage after the performance to meet the singers. We actually went into his dressing room.” My mother laughed loudly, her voice uneven with excitement. She walked to the side of my bed, her clothes smelling of L’Air du Temps.

  “Is he fat?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

  “He’s not fat,” my mother replied. “He’s grand.”

  I laughed and settled back into bed.

  “He was in full makeup and still dressed as Nemorino when we met him,” she said. “It was like talking to some kind of god.” She was silent for a moment. “Yes. Pavarotti is my god,” she said, and turned and walked out of the room. The hall light switched off a second later.

  GOD WAS STILL with us at breakfast the next morning. My mother kept reliving the ten minutes she had spent in his dressing room, unearthing new details about the encounter, each trip back sending her into paroxysms of happiness.

  “He gets these charming lines by the corners of his eyes when he smiles,” my mother said.

  “They’re called crow’s-feet,” I told her. “Everyone gets them at some point.”

  My mother ignored my observation. “And his complexion was lovely, the color of apricots,” she continued. “I wanted to touch it. And his pores were very large.”

  My mother had prepared a lavish breakfast in apparent celebration of the previous evening’s excitement: poached eggs with pimientos, broiled Italian sausage, sliced bread grilled with olive oil. She ate with gusto, sending particles of egg flying onto the table as she spoke.

  “We had a wonderful conversation about music and operas. I’m afraid Mrs. Murata felt quite left out.” My mother laughed with delight. “I told Luciano where I lived and he loves Westchester! So many trees, he said. I felt like we had so much in common. We made a connection.”

  She shook two spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee and drank the entire cup without stirring. When I laughed at her she giggled, rubbing her palms together while wriggling in her chair. It was as if a window had opened, flooding her with light.

  OUR HOUSE WAS a builder’s house, a split-level built in 1953: four bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining room, and den, with an acre of wooded land separating us from our neighbors. Our street cut across a hill, with a row of houses on the high side and a row on the low. We felt lucky being on the high side, looking down on the houses across the street. From our front picture window, I could see directly into the rooms of the houses below: a family arguing over dinner, a man washing dishes without a shirt on, a black dog sleeping on a white sofa. We were too high for anyone across the street to see anything but ceilings through our windows. When I was younger, I liked to think people looking up at our pink house found it mysterious.

  But, untouched for thirty years, our house had grown tired and soft. Mice ran between the walls, their feet tapping lightly as we tried to sleep. The mice never bothered my mother. She was raised in a small fishing village in Japan, a country girl accustomed to vermin and disease and death. My sister Charlotte and I, reared on a diet of television comedies and the tidy suburban homes of our friends, pleaded with her to fix the house: We were afraid of termites and flying ants; we would complain the dust was making our eyes swell and skin itch. She conceded that the house was in need of repair and that with Pappa gone she had fallen behind. Yet while her alimony checks seemed to get her comfortably through each month, nothing was ever left over. And the house remained the same, year after year.

  Then, one evening, a week after my return, my mother told me about Alex.

  She described him as Greek with a big truck. She said he would come the next day and begin tearing up the kitchen.

  “Glory hallelujah,” I said.

  “He’s quite charming, and very tall,” she said, drinking a cup of hot water. When she told me that, my heart sank. Charm was high on her list of desirable qualities, way above trustworthiness and normality.

  My mother nodded to herself. “I have a good feeling about Alex,” she said, rubbing away a faint spot on the table with her finger. “I also found a wonderful store in Darien. I’m going to pick out new cabinets, and we’re going to have new floors, windows, and stovetop. I’m switching from electric to gas. Everything is going to change.”

  We both fell silent, each contemplating the enormity of the task. The windowpanes, painted by the night, turned pitch-black and the kitchen grew thickly quiet. The refrigerator made a tinkling noise.

  My mother had told me that she would always keep the house, even after the divorce. She said it was important for people to be rooted, to feel like they had a home, not to amble through life without knowing where their hearts lie. She said the knowledge that her family house, a big, rambling wooden structure with a shiny black-tiled roof, still waited for her on a tiny Japanese island helped her get through Pappa’s departure. I never understood how a house could help. Our house was too full of clutter to be of any comfort to me.

  Sighing, my mother went to the stove and picked up a kettle full of boiled water.

  I had always thought of my mother as a tea drinker, sitting at the kitchen table with a porcelain cup, her pointed white feet perched on a nearby seat. Tins of Japanese tea—hoji-cha, mugi-cha, and ma-cha—used to line a greasy kitchen shelf on which also sat two ceramic teapots, both older than me. One, glazed black, could steep enough for five cups, and the other, small and silvery, enough for one.

  But now the tea tins were gone.

  “I only have good feelings about hot water,” she told me, pouring herself a cup. She brought the cup back to the table and crossed her arms low on her chest.

  “When I was little,” my mother said, “we would bring tin lunchboxes to school, and after we had eaten, our teacher made us pour hot water from a pot on a wood-stove into the boxes. We stirred up the rice and food stuck at the bottom with our chopsticks, and then we drank the water.”

  My mother acted this out for me as she spoke, using the flat of her palm as the lunchbox, the other hand holding an imaginary pair of chopsticks that she wiggled in the air. Then she pretended to drink from both palms.

  “It was a smart idea,” my mother said. “It kept us warm, and helped our digestion.”

  “That’s a good one,” I said.

  Her eyes darted about the kitchen, from the empty cabinets above the refrigerator (too high for her to reach), to the blue bucket (filled with raw rice) in a corner on the floor.

  “Let’s go to bed now,” she said. “We have a big day tomorrow.”

  I slept in my brother’s old room, staring at a curling poster of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My small room felt too much like a closet, filled with useless college papers and piles of dusty clothes. My mother slept in Charlotte’s room, wearing my
father’s bathrobe.

  I WOKE TO the sound of ripping. By the time I got downstairs, the kitchen floor was gone and the caramel-varnished wood cabinets were a pile in the garage. An old man was in the kitchen, removing nails from the wall with the claw of his hammer.

  “Are you Alex?” I asked.

  He extended a hand, calloused and hard as bark. “Hello there, young lady,” he said with a faint accent that sounded vaguely Transylvanian to me. “You must be Emily.”

  “Is my mother around?” I asked.

  He gestured with a jerk of his head. “She’s outside. Very nice lady, your mother. Gave me a cup of hot coffee, first thing.”

  “You work alone?”

  Alex let out a raspy laugh, revealing large white teeth. “I’m my own boss. Got the brains and I got the hands.”

  He held up his hands, perfectly still, for a remarkably long time. His square fingers looked as if the tips had been snipped off.

  “These can do anything,” he said, and winked.

  I found my mother outside, dressed in sweatpants and a lightweight red windbreaker to ward off the early June chill. She roamed the backyard wildly, each stride punctuated by a poke in the ground with a stick.

  “Good morning!” she exclaimed. I walked gingerly toward her, my thin bedslippers unable to absorb the rocks and twigs. “Don’t you think your contractor is a bit old?” I asked.

  “Oh, Alex. A charming man,” my mother said, and inhaled deeply. “He says he can finish the kitchen in a week. We won’t be able to use the stove, so I thought we would hibachi outside. Won’t that be fun? We haven’t hibachied in such a long time.”

  She peered into space, as if trying to count the pollen in the air. Her profile revealed a slight underbite. Against the many straight elms dotting the yard, she looked shrunken, like an elf who had sprung from the trunk of a tree.

  “I have to go to the steakhouse later today,” I told her. “Are you going to be O.K. by yourself?”