3.

Activities: that was the new watchword. Over lunch in the dining-hall annex, Matt narrowed down the list (Brazilian Capoeira? the Ayn Rand Group?) to two possibilities. First, Parliamentary Debate. Here at least he would find a footing easily: after all, in high school he had placed quite decently in a couple of Bergen County–wide tournaments. Perverse, not to mention tragic too: though lost at leisurely chitchat with his so-called peers, nonetheless before a judge and armed with a topic, he could whip his words expertly into utterance, there where the wheels of logic were all that mattered.

Yet when he opened the door to Meyer Hall 504 at five-fifteen on October 9, saw a splenetic red-faced guy finish declaiming about biodiesel at the podium and a girl in loafers preparatorily smirking before rows of hawkeyed notetakers…Well. This again? All that vacant rhetoric left a sour taste. Patiently, Matt sat through the charade—“And he expects us to believe,” the girl might say, with a derisive jerk of her head, dragging giant piles of xeroxes to her aid, from which she read strings of numbers and words, and once even, “If you believe that, I have a couple of bridges to sell you”—feeling his fingers tingle with shame for the red-faced guy busily scribbling notes, until finally the professor warbled, “Time!” Then Matt bolted from the room. No, debate was not the best spot for finding friends; just a bunch of sharks swimming round in an auditorium.

Rather, his other choice was perfect: nothing competitive, something calm and celebratory, common-cause: the Asian Cultural Union. To promote the understanding and appreciation of the cultures and histories of Asians and Asian-Americans, the register said. Doesn’t that sound nice? Summer afternoons after Mrs. Nakamura paid him for cutting her grass and buying groceries, while he took green tea in her lemon-yellow silk-covered living room shaded by scarlet maples, she’d explain about the prints framed on her walls and show him the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige.¹² Dazed with those serious, ethereal things, in the heady first week of class he had flirted with a beautifully sibilant but alas too work-intensive and difficult section of Beginning Japanese. Yes, the ACU. Wouldn’t they have screenings, symposia, fascinating trips to museums? Just imagine: a room filled with paintings, with pleasant conversation, and you’re in a corner speaking of brushstroke to a little group interested in that stuff too!

So Wednesday afternoon Matt shook off a leaden gray day passing through a glass double door in the Asian Pacific American Institute and walked down a bland institutional hallway to stand in an acid-green sweater and trim navy Dickies—Outfit (Casual) #5—before the receptionist, a tiny Japanese girl dwarfed by an enormous steel desk. On the wall above her was a glossy picture of Mount Fuji, rich and grassy, where impossible fluffed clouds hovered in a serene blue sky.

He cleared his throat, put hands to his sides, and bowed from the waist in the neat style Mrs. Nakamura had taught. “Konichiwa,” trilling the wa so it hung pleasantly in the air, work it, let’s work it out baby, “watashi no namae wa Matt Acciaccatura-san desu.” Or—maybe she wasn’t Japanese; her mouth had popped ajar into puzzled-look. “Ah, good evening. My name is Matt Acciaccatura, and I’m interested in joining—”

“Ssssh!”

Through two pinned-open doors to the right of the girl’s desk, Matt saw a long auditorium aisle at the end of which a speaker on a stage was gripping the podium, seeking out the noisemaker beyond the lights, while mere feet away rows of kids twisted in their seats, shooting angry glares directly at him.

“Oh!” he squeaked, jerking toward the doors—and knocking over a cupful of pens with his courier bag, swinging wide. The pens clinked on the floor and began to roll, the blasted cheap Bics! “Oh! Oh, I’m so horribly sorry. Wait, I’ll…” He was on his knees now, scrabbling on the floor under the giant desk.

Scurrying down from her side of it, the receptionist giggled. But nice. She had sparks in her black eyes and was astoundingly thin, a scaffolding of bones over which a gold tarpaulin of skin was tautly, glisteningly stretched. Two rudderlike collarbones peeked out from the neckhole of her pink sweater, which widened as she propped herself up and brushed her fountaining sprays of silver earrings. “Hei,” she whispered breathily, “Matt Acciaccatura-san.” Giggled again; what a pretty tinkle. “I think you can see, the meeting’s already started. Anyway, go take a seat. I’ll get this.” She reached for the pens in his hand and warmly smiled. The left earring stretched as she reached; now Matt could see one of its strands had hooked inside the loose weave of the sweater’s high neck.

“Hold it! May I touch you for a moment?”

“What?!” Her jaw fell, more surprised-pleased than aghast.

“Just…” Deftly he managed to unhook the silver link. “There. You don’t want to, you know—pull on the lobe, disastrous, happened to my mother once, went all the way through…”

“Oh.” Craning down at the sweater. “Thanks.” She flashed back to him and winked. “Now give me the pens. I’ve got this.”

“Righto.” He released them into her nimble grasp, accidentally touching the slender fingers. Now he slunk off to secret his offending body inside the auditorium—but moments after he slid his butt into the empty back row, the audience erupted in applause, started speeding toward the doors. Had he mixed up the time? Out in the hall, while some groups were heading down the walkway to the outside, others appeared to be staying, or rather turning left into another, smaller room: behind their bodies Matt spotted folding tables laden with refreshments. Why, a little reception! Excellent, he was ready.

He strode to a table and filled a plastic cup with soda water.

“Oof!” A short, stumpy Korean girl had accidentally collapsed her broad heft into him; holding up her hands as if to keep him at bay, she crept backward away. “Doh!”

“Jesus, Katherine, you’re such a klutz.” Two other Korean girls materialized.

“It’s okay,” he declared, generous. He slouched toward them.

The tallest one, likely the leader, scrutinized his sweater. “Are you in the ACU?”

“Yeah,” he snapped, in the vocal style Aloof. “Well, this is my first meeting.”

“Oh, you’re a freshman,” the first girl said, manically scooping chips in dip.

“What’d you think of the speaker?” whined the middle girl, sing-songy.

“Um.” He could frame this as badass. “Whatever.” He shrugged. “I missed most of it…” Then crown it with a snicker, for the truly arch and cool effect.

“Oh, wait, wait.” Holding up her red paws, the evil dwarf revealed a mouthful of dip and broken chips. “You’re not that guy who—” She cackled ecstatically. “You totally are! That guy who like came in the back and started all—Konichiwaaaa!”

“No.” The eyes of the tall girl filled with disbelief.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. Was that loserish? His accent was actually pretty good back there.

“Hey, is that Issey?” The middle girl tipped her head across the room.

“Issey!” Tall Girl waved to a kid with an expert shag. “Bye,” she murmured to Matt.

“Konichiwaaa…” sang the dwarf under her breath, brushing crumbs from her shirt.

So. A boy shows up a little late. A boy talks a little too loudly, okay, in Japanese—they probably hadn’t even noticed the pens thing. Brilliant! Konichiwa—sayonara! Already the crowd was thinning; scanty groups clung to columns in the center like filings around magnets. Couples were shaking on their coats, shouldering bags, and bobbing along like merry rowboats toward the door. Wait a second, was he the only white person here? Ah, jeez. How had he missed that? Certainly white faces had passed by in the auditorium, but this event was evidently a private party. How crazily must he stand out: what’s the white boy doing here? God. If he moved too quickly now, he would cry, it would just come out, water from a crushed sponge. He gazed off into space, feigning to read the signs on the wall opposite.

“Hold it,” said a pert voice, “you have broccoli on your cheek.” Then a small hand had brushed his cheek with one deft gesture. “Gone,” a tiny girl before him asserted definitely, “Matt-san.” It was the girl from the receptionist desk, standing a whole half foot below him in a pink sweater dress and knee-high black leather boots. Her hair was cut asymmetrically, nearly to the shoulder on the right while the left side bounced at the length of the silver earrings’ sprays. A mischievous smile crimped her lips, moistly covered now in some kind of gloss. “I forgot to ask for permission! But maybe you don’t mind. It’s Sophie,” she added.¹³

Quite all right, he said, or thought he said. He was smiling and the room was filled with blurring volumes of water. She was complimenting his Japanese accent. With a curled finger she was calling him over to a wall with something, a rectangle something, a piece of paper, a train timetable, a calendar, God-knows-what-it-was, a schedule of ACU events, he was blowing bubbles through his mouth, Uh-huh, thank you, grinning, inane, and, just because there was nothing else to say, he wagged a finger toward the Isamu Noguchi Sculpture Garden poster and noted how that museum was hard to get to but really lovely. She narrowed her eyes at him. I love him, she claimed accusingly. And for the whole long instant while she stood staring, barely a foot away, before she tossed her hair and asked, When did you go?, breaking the spell—her sentence had dissolved to reform as what it was not: fine wires of her love for him snapping tight through his veins.

         

Why should a girl by the name of Sophie Yamamoto come brush the broccoli from his cheek? And why, further, should she ask him back to her place for something to eat? These and all other questions Matt put into the hands of fate, as he trailed by her side through the just-rained, gleaming streets. It was too much to keep up with her speedy boots to worry about his own body moving aptly, too much to take in all her swerving banter to worry much what he was saying back. By his side crossing between taxis before traffic lights went green, darting across the wide double river of Houston Street—where she turned back at the median to check for him with an open, crooked smile—she was lovely and as perfectly unbelievable as the Tooth Fairy, and as they talked tiny explosions of her mirth twirled through the conversation like fireflies, and as they walked he could almost see her bones churning like gears, she was nearly translucent and he was in love.

Sophie, a sophomore, second floor on Sullivan Street, next to a Japanese restaurant whose owners gave her leftovers because they liked her. This much he received, tossed back and forth in his mind while sitting at her kitchen table, nibbling on a seaweed snack unwrapped from its cellophane. Graceful, she slid around the room with plastic containers of gyoza and soba, heating things. Sophie’s whole studio was a tender spot of bright light, something radiant and overfilled in his chest. Every detail was perfect—the furniture: two antique lamps with fringed turquoise shades glowed white and warm here on the sill above the kitchenette’s studded vintage table; a set of nesting tables in gentle burnished gold, too fragile-looking to bear any weight, delicately balanced on their long arched legs before the open threshold to a bedroom made up in white and brilliant green; on the walls were small framed prints of color gradations like Josef Albers or Klee, on the refrigerator two pinned pastel postcard paintings of the Annunciation. There Mary, infinitely calm, her narrow hands pressed together, her body, washed in pinks and light blue, sat slack in a purity of patience—while he sat just as slack, watching Sophie glide in the kitchen, her body reedlike, swaying, an animation in the fingers and lips that reminded him of mice, some unreachably intelligent, trembling creature.

“Beautiful.” Oh God! Backpedal, backpedal, sir. You can’t just say that out loud to a girl. “I mean, ah,” he coughed, scanning for what to mean instead of you, oh, you. “The Filippo Lippi painting.” He gestured defiantly past her toward the postcards on the fridge, as if sheer confidence would lead her astray. “You know how they got that glimmery gold effect? They put an underlayer of gilt and took a sharp tool—”

“Punching.” She unveiled her lopsided smile. “I know. Poked through the paint. My class took a trip to the Met last year. It’s so gorgeous in person. Glimmery gold,” she repeated. “I like that.” From the sink, she glanced back at him, leaning one skinny arm on the silver rim and cocking her head, hair flopping. “Hmm. I’m surprised you know that technique. I just heard about it here in my major intro course.”

“Yeah.” He grinned, sheepish. “I guess I just like all that stuff. Vasari, you know, all those guys.” Matt stuffed more seaweed snack into his mouth. He had just mentioned a book, for heaven’s sake, broken one of the fundamental Rules. But, “Vasari,” she murmured, setting down two red lacquered bowls and turning back to the sink, “I love Vasari.” Maybe all bets were off here? “Punching,” he went on. “Such a crazy concept.”

She traipsed to the table and for one horribly painful hot instant poked his shoulder with a chopstick, then winked. “Consider yourself punched.” She handed him the pair. “Here you are.”

Here he was indeed. Ah, how he managed to sit here without screaming he’d never know, spilling out of himself some chit and chat on this and that; it was a hop-step from Lippi’s cropping to perspective in Hiroshige, the views of Edo and his very, very favorite with the ghostly courtesan behind a screen—hers too! (No. Yes. That’s so amazing!) How he managed to nod and laugh and at the same time twist noodles round the chopsticks, ease these properly to his mouth—impossible, hurrah, it was eye-hand coordination and singular, God-given luck. And she was eating it up! She suddenly ughed and threw her head back so he could see inside the dark country of her nostrils.

“I know,” she sat up to say, her eyes rolling, “it’s not fair that all those Japanese kids take Beginning. They’re fluent to begin with and just do it for the easy A.” The slim sandbar of her brow sped into angry rills: how would they feel if you touched them? Soft and warm or smooth and cool or papery light? “It’s just so stupid.”

“Yeah,” sighed he, his lungs too furred up with something to speak. “Yeah.” His body was lightning-rod-oscillant, beyond control. Soon he might visibly shake. “Um, do you mind if I use the, um…”

“Right in there.” She pointed into shadows past the bedroom’s threshold. “Just take a left.”

Wobbly, he pressed himself up from the table and managed to make it into the dim white and rich-green bedroom area without event. There were plastic circles attached to the large wall at the bed’s head, large pastel blue and white circles, harmonious, serene. There was a calm white couch along the right wall beneath three windows, where pastel blue pillows sewn with abstract patterns of silver glinted in the streetlights’ orange glow. This place was a paradise, so strange, operating parallel to the real world, to NYU, as if suddenly and without warning he had stumbled into a cave or enchanted cove, peaceful and filled with jewels. He turned left into the bathroom, switched on the light, and stared at his face in the mirror, gripping and ungripping his hands on the counter edge for steadiness. Did he look cute? He twisted his head around, trying to find a decent angle. His cheekbones looked nice, actually: jutting. His eyes…a little toadish. But perhaps she liked that. Big and blue; perhaps the eyes were a plus. He checked his teeth: nothing. He flushed, ran water in the sink, and slicked down stray hair, trying to work the longest ends over the tops of his big ears.

Exiting the bathroom, he shrieked. There to the right of the couch, shadowed in that opposite corner he hadn’t looked into before was a—a—“Oh my God,” he said. “It’s just one of those, those…”

“Ha!” he heard her yelp. “So you met Susie. My dressmaker’s dummy.”

The bulb of a head gazed at him from atop a rigid body.

“Sorry.” He slipped back into his seat and stared down at the table.

“Don’t worry about it. It even happens to me sometimes.” She put a hand over his—electric, oh my sweet Jesus—and when he looked up she was grinning. “Anyway, isn’t it nice to be frightened sometimes?”

“Ha, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t? I love it. Not all the time, of course, but a little, you know, jolt.” She retrieved her palm; Matt felt it go away like a magnet, still drawing on him. “What’s your biggest fear?”

His brain was washed. Simply: slate-clean. Staring at the curve of her hands on the table—little soft live seahorses—it was impossible that outside the black windowpanes a world existed…. Think, sir. He had to give her something, not sound like an idiot. He closed his eyes. And, instantly, a vision—screaming, scores of kids racing toward him lying on his back in the grass—everyone ten years old, irrational and tiny, coming to leap on him as if he were a quarterback tackled to earth, their soft bodies falling and, all light pushed out, continuing to fall…He shuddered, opened his eyes.

She was staring, her lips pursed to the side. “You looked like you were wishing. You were breathing so deeply. Like you were about to blow out birthday candles or something. So.” She leaned back, her foot tapping air. “What you got for me?”

“Oh, we don’t need to get into that. Truly.”

“What? After all you made me wait? You’ve got a good one, I can tell.”

He smiled; his heart beat obedient as the wings of some naive bird nestled in her palm. Their eyes caught, and stayed, the golden air fly-papering their gaze—then her eyes sparked impish, and she let out one of her tinkling iridescent laughs.

         

Somehow he didn’t get lost going back home, though he wasn’t even trying to find his way. Pulled into the circuit of the moon, the path seemed to tug gently, towing him by invisible cords through the washed streets—it must have rained again; no, it was still raining, just misting, seeding his face with mites of wet. At this hour on a weeknight, the streets were cool and vacant. Only now and again a taxi passed, skimming along the surface of the rainwater, the four white digits of its license number glowing through the moist dark air.

Dizzy, he lunged up the stairwell to slowly creak open his bedroom door: where the Imperturbable One wheezed with tranquil regularity. That settled it; Matt could hardly still himself down to sleep now, anyway. He slipped into the common room and turned the futon chair to face out the window into the courtyard. From the soft hushed room with all its lights off, all Dwightness and Joshness smoothed out into ineffectualness by the benevolent fingers of Lady Night, he stared out into the window’s square, which somehow contained everything in the world, pulsing. Green-finned shrubs and bare wooden benches drifted in the salmon-pink clouds of sodium lanterns. Still too far, that fresh dark—he threw open the window and sniffed up huge nosefuls of wet breeze. She had shown him a picture book of a ruined city and paintings by some Russian, all squares of black or white on white till he felt a little bell at his center ringing a silver excitement. She had spoken of near-death events and déjà vu, had even gotten him to swap earliest childhood memories: the aqua ruffled carpet where at age two he thrilled to see for the first time that he could read; she, at three, back in Kyoto, the city she called home till seven years ago, had placed a stone in her grandfather’s rock garden—somehow just right for her, practical yet graceful at once. Sophie. Can you possibly—like—like—like—me? She was an apricot in a white bowl and the bowl too, she was water, rain and the rare emptied chill of something all blissfully spent. Delirious, my God! Yes, You’re behind this, aren’t You? Mm, don’t think we don’t know.

A shout boiled up from the courtyard. Two incomprehensible syllables, yelled by a few male voices. Then a scratch, bump from the other side of the wall—“What?” came a pouty shout. Carly Hale, so unnervingly near to him! He held his breath.

Outside, the guys drowned in guffaws. Then, “Carly—Carly—!” belted out.

“What?!” she shrieked. The petulant ice queen.

“Car-ly!” Someone struggled into the radius of lantern light. Dwight’s friend Taylor. “Come out here, Carly!” He fell again in toward the building: drunk, from the sound of it.

“Carly!” they all called, clapping. “Carly—Carly, we love you!” someone shouted, then another and another.

“Shut—up!” Carly cheerfully screeched. A happy smack of metal; probably shut her window. The syncopated echoes dropped to murmurs, then silence. Gone inside.

He closed his window, quietly so Carly couldn’t hear. Then he crept around the futon and the desk chairs and the rough folds in the natty carpet. Why, of course. As if they could spy from some watchtower when someone floated free above their domineering: they came, crushed out your spot of contentment. Just like that. Like snapping their fingers. The sound of those voices—horn notes from the king’s hunting crew, aristocratic laughter as they plow through the brush, flushing you and your small heart out, in a hurried frightened flight like a horde of ungainly fowl. What other person not of Them would have liberty to barge around, so publicly shout—to flirt in the open, unashamed, and so late, at nearly midnight for Chrissakes, waking everyone and damn-it-all who hears?

A feeling of doom roosted on his heart, like a black bird, pressing, forceful, down. And yet, as he slid into his bed, tossing in the waves of Josh’s snores, the bird raised its sleek jet head: it was she. Sophie.