The Wrong Kind of Money (36 page)

He finds that, pine needles adrift like golden snow.

“…
And very slippery. I know, because I tried to climb those hills
.… And now the shot of you landing on your fanny in the pine needles.…”

He finds it, and she laughs and claps her hands. “Pause for laughter. I like it, don't you?”

“I love it!” he says.

“And now a close-up of Mr. Kelso's whiskey in the glass.
But it was when I tasted Mr. Kelso's whiskey
…”

“Melody, we've got to get all this down on paper.”

“All I need is a typewriter.”

“I'll have one sent up.”

“And paper, of course. Or do you want it on cue cards?”

“Cue cards maybe?”

“That could be risky. You'll be standing at a lectern. If you drop one, or get one out of place, then you'll be all fouled up. I think a triple-spaced script would be better.”

“You're right. Melody, you're certainly going to be earning your credit for your winter work period.” He studies her. She is wearing a slim blue skirt, to the knee, a matching cashmere sweater, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, a gold circle pin, and her dark hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail. “You know, it's funny,” he says.

“What's funny?”

“You don't look like a Bennington girl.”

She laughs. “What's a Bennington girl look like?”

“From the ones I've seen on campus, it's jeans, battle jackets, knapsacks, boots and Reeboks. It's either grunge or long, flowing Mother Hubbards. And little felt hats.”

She laughs again. “Those're for the
heavier
girls,” she says. “It's the heavier girls who go in for muumuus. Remember, I'm an actress. You dress for the part. You dress for the casting call. If the part calls for a slut, I dress like one of those girls hanging around your hospitality suite. But for this assignment I decided I'd dress like someone's executive secretary. Anyway, I'll have your script typed up for you by the time you get back from this morning's meeting.”

He frowns. “Following this meeting there's a lunch.”

“After the lunch, then. Whatever.”

“And after the lunch I've got two more meetings, back to back. I told you I wouldn't have much time to spend with you this week, Mellie.”

“That's all right. Whenever you get back here, I'll have a draft of the script ready for you to look over.”

“And, at six o'clock, I've invited some people up here for drinks.”

“Don't worry. By six o'clock you won't find hide nor hair of me. Not even the typewriter. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless when I finish, you'd rather I just hopped on a bus back to New York,” she says. “The way you said last night.”

He hesitates, looking at the square of carpet between his feet. “No, I don't want you to do that,” he says. “By about nine o'clock I should be free.”

“All right. I'll phone the room at nine o'clock.”

“And then we—”

“Can have a bite to eat.”

“Chicken sandwiches.” He sits down again.

“Our chicken sandwiches. Have you ever seen the movie
Brief Encounter,
Noah?”

“No.”

“Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard. David Lean directed. It's about two people, neither of them free, who meet and have a—well, that's the title of the film.”

“Brief encounter. Mellie, I—”

She holds up her hand. “Don't say it. I think I know what you're going to say, but I don't want to hear you say it.” She glances at her watch. “You'd better hurry and finish dressing, Noah, or you'll be late for your meeting.”

He rises and looks down at her as she sits, very still, on the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her slim blue skirt.

Without returning his look, she carefully picks up her coffee cup again and takes a small sip. “And do something about
that,”
she says. “You can't go to your meeting in that condition.”

Now she is saying to him in the darkened bedroom:

Me? You mean you want to hear about my childhood, and all that? It really wasn't all that interesting, at least it wasn't up to a point. At one point it did get interesting, but by then I wasn't exactly a child anymore.

As you know, my father works for the State Department. I used to think my father was some kind of god. After all, he worked for the United States
government,
and in Japan anybody who works for the government is considered
very important.
A businessman may make more money, but to work for the government is supposed to be this great honor. As a kid it seemed to me we had all sorts of special privileges. The government gave us a car, for instance. We didn't even have to pay for gas. We could park our car in places that said “No Parking” because our car had diplomatic plates. We could shop at the military post exchange and get lower prices. If my father had to travel for his job, he could fly for free on a navy plane, at least if the navy plane happened to be going where he had to go. If not, the government paid for the travel. There were other little things, discounts and so on, that you get if you work for the U.S. government. It was also considered good that my father was paid in U.S. dollars, not in yen, though for the past few years that hasn't meant so much. Anyway, I grew up thinking that my parents were the greatest thing since sliced bread. All my Japanese friends were envious of me, and I liked that. I must have been a horrid little snot.

Later, I found out that my father wasn't any kind of god at all, and wasn't even very important. My Japanese school friends were so impressed because we had an autographed photograph of the president of the United States in our living room. Later, I found out that everybody at my father's level got one of those.

But the trouble is, my father
looks
like a god—tall, and blond, and handsome, with the body of a Greek warrior. He has those long, smooth swimmer's muscles, and he always has a golden year-round tan. The Japanese think he looks like Errol Flynn, and that's what they call him—
Ellor Frynn.
My father knows he's good-looking. He's very vain.

What my father
is
is a translator and interpreter. Well, it's a little better than that. He's assistant to the head of that department at the embassy in Tokyo. He spends his days translating documents back and forth between English and Japanese, which sounds kind of boring, translating all those boring, official documents. My father taught himself to speak and write fluent Japanese at the Fort Ord language school in Monterrey, and when I was growing up, I was led to believe that this was a great accomplishment. Maybe it was. Japanese is a difficult language, with all sorts of different vowel sounds that can completely change the meaning of a word. The word for
wander,
for instance, is very close to the word for
shit.
If you wanted to say, “I think I'll go out and wander in the garden,” it could come out as “I think I'll go out and shit in the garden” if you use the wrong vowel sound. I speak some Japanese. But I've never learned to read or write it.

It was my father's mastery of the Japanese language, I was always told, that led to his being posted to Tokyo. But later I became not so sure whether this was the whole reason. My mother is a very bitter woman. She was always very bitter about the State Department, and when she and my father quarreled, which they often did—though not so much anymore—she used to imply that my father had been sent to the other side of the world as a punishment for something. Punishment for what? I really don't know, but sometimes I think I can guess. My mother has always hated Japan. She hates Tokyo. She hates the Japanese and has never learned to speak a word of the language, not even hello on the telephone. She absolutely loathes Japanese women, and she has no Japanese friends. Her only friends are the other American wives, who are just as boring and bitter as Mother is about how they hate living in Japan. Tokyo is an important post, but not to hear my mother talk about it. She'd much rather be in one of the more glamorous cities—London, Paris, Rome, or even Vienna or Budapest. If there's one thing Tokyo isn't, it's glamorous. But the place she'd most like to be is Washington, D.C., right at the heart of things. She's from Virginia, and has family there. She's bitter because it doesn't look as though my father will ever be assigned to Washington, and she blames my father for the fact that she's stuck for the rest of her life on the other side of the world. It's not a very happy household, my parents'.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I wanted to start to date. All the other girls my age were dating boys by then—at least all the American girls. But my father was very opposed to this. He said he preferred the Japanese system, where girls—girls of good family, that is—are very much sheltered and protected until they're ready to get married, and by that time most of the marriages have been arranged for them. In Japan teenage girls are expected to stay home and help their mothers, and learn the tea ceremony and all that, and to do their fathers' wishes. It's still very much a male-dominated society in Japan, and it's terribly strict and confining for women, particularly young women. As Japan gets more Westernized, it's beginning to change, and women are starting to rebel, but my father was in favor of the old-fashioned ways. He wanted me—literally—to fetch him his pipe and slippers when he came home from the office at the end of the day, and to fix him a drink. Then he liked to have me sit on a footstool beside his chair, while he smoked, and sipped his drink, and stroked my hair while he read the evening papers. And I—well, I liked these quiet evenings with my father, up to a point, because I still thought my father was some sort of god. But I wanted more out of my life than that.

There was one boy I began seeing secretly. His name was David, he was a few years older than me, and we—well, we were convinced that we were very much in love. He was my first sexual experience, and I—well, I liked it very much! He was very sweet, very gentle, a lot like you in many ways. My mother had told me nothing about the facts of life—absolutely nothing at all. She hadn't even warned me about getting the curse. But fortunately I have an older sister, Cassie, who'd told me pretty much everything I needed to know. Cassie's married now and lives in Australia. There must have been some romance between my parents, back in the days when Cassie and I were being born. They gave us these romantic names. Cassandra. Melody.

David was the first person who ever told me I was pretty. He told me I was beautiful. He told me I was beautiful enough to be a movie star, and it was he who said I ought to study to be an actress. But when my father found out I was seeing David—he saw me getting out of David's car one Saturday afternoon—he was furious. There was a terrible scene. He said David was too old for me. He said David wasn't good enough for me. He said David's family was trash. He said David's father was a war profiteer. This was because David's father, who'd been too young to be in the war, had come to Japan after the war and bought up a lot of military equipment, and sold it, and made a fortune in what I guess is called the scrap metal business. David was in business with his father at the time.

My father told me I was never to see David again, but of course I did. David and I began making plans to run away together. I guess I've always been a runaway at heart. I ran away to be with you here, didn't I? David's family owned a cabin in the mountains north of Kyoto, which they never used, and that was where we planned to run away to. I'm sure it wouldn't have worked. That cabin would have been the first place our families would have looked for us. Still, we made all these elaborate, secret plans.

Meanwhile, my father began taking me on outings on the weekends, just the two of us, far outside the city. These outings were so David and I would have no chance to meet. Because David worked and I was in school, the weekends were the only times we were able to get together. My father would get me into the car on a Saturday morning, and we'd drive—I'd never know where we were going till we got there. “Surprise,” he'd say. “Surprise, surprise.” One afternoon that summer our destination turned out to be a tiny island in Toyana Bay, on the west coast, where he'd rented a speedboat and scuba-diving equipment for us both. My father knew I loved scuba diving, and he did, too. He was in a good mood. He'd had a meeting at the Imperial Palace the day before.

Once or twice a year he'd have to attend a meeting at the Imperial Palace, and after each of these meetings he'd bring home a little souvenir. They were just trinkets, really—a whalebone letter opener, a silver pen, a crystal paperweight, things like that. He used to tell us these were gifts from the emperor himself. I don't believe that. I don't believe he ever met the emperor. The emperor and empress of Japan lead very secluded lives, and hardly ever meet with people outside their family and members of the imperial household. They don't give audiences, like the pope, or hold press conferences, or make speeches. I think his meetings at the Palace were just with minor functionaries of the household. And the trinkets? I believe he stole them—just picked these things up when no one was looking and dropped them in his pocket. Members of the imperial household don't give out little souvenir gifts to visitors. No way.

The Japanese are funny about crime. They like to say that theirs is a crime-free society. They talk of America as the land of the criminals. There's plenty of crime in Japan, of course, but it's not considered polite to talk about it. And so, if a member of the Japanese imperial household noticed some small object missing after one of my father's visits, it would be beneath his dignity to mention it to anyone, much less the American embassy. This was how my father was able to get away with pinching little things from the palace. At least this was David's theory, and he understood the Japanese mentality and customs much better than I did. And I think David was right.