Masao worked for a large Japanese corporation and was currently stationed in the New York headquarters - a situation that every day filled his heart with joy and expectation - where he would remain for five years before returning to Japan and a greater position within the company. Although Masao was prone to dreaming, a trait not especially favored in the Japanese corporate world, he was an ace golfer, the star of the company's baseball team and proficient in English.
Two years into his occupation of one of ten desks in a large room on the 24th floor of a mid-Manhattan skyscraper facing southeast, at a desk exactly like all the others in the the large room, a tall blond American woman of about 30 years old came to occupy the desk to his left, directly, and Masao without so much as a flickering eyelid nor a change in his vibrational frequency - his heart skipping only one beat - sat for the rest of the day contemplating this fantastic creature brought to his side, his dream girl, a temp, here for a three-month assignment as his assistant.
It was early spring and day after day they sat at their desks, close enough for Masao to exchange a word from time to time without attracting undue attention from his colleagues; there he and his assistant sat with the barest of communication, she reading her book on interior design and he driven numb by his job, his telephone, his future, with only an occasional furtive glance at her breasts, encased like monuments in her summer blouses so reassuringly in evidence while Masao, unable to wholly concentrate these days, felt no longer a Japanese businessman, one of thousands, millions, but the man he was in his dreams, Elvis Presley, able to approach a woman such as the one at the desk to his left with abandon and the assurance of reciprocation though he was shy and did nothing to forward himself.
The alluring assistant was with Masao's company for three months in her temporary status when she announced she would be leaving, she had been offered a job in a design firm though this confused the other men in the office; the pay was low by their standards and she could stay on with them if she wanted to but American women were unfathomable, they thought, so aggressive and willful, unlike the women in Japan.
On his assistant's last day Masao worked up the courage to ask her out for a drink, secretively by the teletype machine in a small separate room where she was busy sending a message to Japan, and to his great relief she accepted, his heart missing no more than two beats, a slight clip in his step as he walked back into the large office overlooking all of Manhattan to the southeast.
They met for drinks in a midtown hotel bar where they drank from the company bottle of Dewars after which he invited her to have dinner in a Japanese restaurant on 48th Street where he could also provision the company bottle of scotch and revel in being the only man in the place with a beautiful American woman who smiled at him with blushing eyes before the order of sushi he was encouraging her to try, while he continued drinking more than he should from the bottle of scotch.
Bucked up by her friendly spirit and plenty to drink, Masao invited her to a love hotel for something he said to her, he wanted.
The former assistant, a little drunk possibly after all that Dewars on the rocks, needed no cajoling, she went and once there, let herself be undressed, let herself be touched wherever Masao cared to touch and eventually touched back, but the ardor was more about a need to feel someone completely there, and then to look at that someone without separation...in this way they formed a childlike bond though Masao did not understand any of it at the time.
Masao that night was hoping to fulfill a fantasy that had something to do with Marilyn Monroe, with America, it had to do with escape and wide opportunity which he knew would always be a fantasy for a Japanese businessman, everything jumbled in his mind from popular culture mingled with his own desires and in a little hotel room in midtown, Masao fell in love with the temp and later bought her a small gold ring for her birthday though they could never marry.
With his former assistant, for six months, every Friday night, before she left New York, Masao found the key to his American dream: he found an open heart in this open country. He brooded less, played better ball, improved his English and bought a 1966 Pontiac Bonneville as big as the side of his house in New Jersey, too big for the city but he would drive around in the suburbs, to the golf course, the ball field, maneuvering cautiously at first, and then with a little more verve, laughed at by almost everyone he knew until he returned to Japan several years later where he would work at the same desk for several decades although his business travel was frequent enough to prevent lassitude.
A year before Masao was to retire, many years after this story began, occupying a desk in a room full of many desks in perfect symmetry in downtown Tokyo, he pulled a card out of the lining of his wallet for the restaurant on 48th Street in New York and noticed that her phone number was, in her handwriting, on the back. He smiled returning it to his wallet and opened his newspaper for coffee break only to find to his great astonishment, her name with a small picture of a middle-aged woman: she was an expert on design and would be giving a lecture on Japanese decorative techniques in the art of James McNeill Whistler and other nineteenth-century artists at the Imperial Design Center, for which Masao, having no real interest in design, immediately phoned in a reservation and then began calling every hotel in Tokyo catering to Americans.
Dedicated to film director Yasujirō Ozu.
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