started to stumble immediately. “The class. It was your first, wasn’t it?”
“Here, yes, but I’ve taught before.”
“How did you find them?”
“Who?”
“The students. Our students.”
“They’re like students,” she said, with a quarter of a smile.
“Sorry. I’m just making conversation.” In a minute, though, I would get irritated. I was just making conversation, just to be agreeable, so why was she doing the inscrutable bit?
But now she increased the smile to half-size. “I thought you might be going to offer me some advice,” she said. “Everyone else has, except Ginger. Everyone else wants to explain why Hambleton students are unique. I’d rather find out for myself.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Who?”
“The students. The class you just taught.”
“I just taught them.”
“What?”
“Poetry.”
“What am I doing wrong now?”
Now the smile was up to three-quarters. It was slowly filling her face like the blue bit at the bottom of the screen that tells you the computer is loading. I waited, and the blue bit reached the end and the face appeared, smiling on the imaginary desktop I was watching. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m waiting to find out what you are up to.”
Now I had her. “In what way?” I asked.
“In all the usual ways.”
“I’m a happily unmarried man, if that’s one of the things we are talking about,” I said. It was still only eleven in the morning.
“That’s one of the things we’re talking about. Not the most important.”
“Tell me some of the others.” This was weird but engrossing. I had known her, after all, for a total of fifteen minutes, and here we were talking as if after an evening of exploration.
“I’ll be simple,” she said. “Our conversation has consisted entirely of you trying to take me over.”
“Me? You? I told you, I’m a happily unmarried man.”
“Indeed you are, almost an epigram, aren’t you, so I must have meant something else, mustn’t I? Think about what you have asked me since you came back to the office.”
“I’ve just been making conversation, making you feel at home. I don’t remember all the words I used.”
“You’ve been patronizing me. Would you have asked a forty-year-old male the same questions?’
Just what Ginger had said. Had they been talking?
“Let me think,” I began.
To give her credit, she waited while I did.
“First,” I said “I’m thirty-five, though I’ve had a hard life. Second, I think you jumped the gun. As a matter of fact I might have asked an exact male contemporary the same questions out of a spirit of collegiality, a desire to be agreeable to the new man, and a curiosity about how his past experiences had prepared him for his first class at Hambleton, and how our students differed if at all from these experiences. So you might have been totally and utterly wrong.
“However,” I held up my hand to stem protest although she hadn’t said a word or moved a face muscle to dislodge the set of her smile, “Although you might have been wrong, in fact, you weren’t. What I first saw in you this morning was a tyro, someone who might not have taught anywhere before, so my questions certainly flowed out of a patronizing desire to offer warmth and comfort to my new little young female colleague in case the rough engineering students had bruised her.
“Second I saw a Japanese person who I was surprised to hear speak my language so well and I was curious to know if her exotic foreign looks juxtaposed with her obvious command of idiom created a special dynamic in the classroom. Thus on top of patronizing, chauvinistic paternalism, we have to add ethnic stereotyping, and even racism, which, though benevolent—many of my acquaintances are Japanese—is certainly not neutral.”
She opened her lips for the first time since I had started my speech. “And third?” she asked. She wasn’t being hostile; she was intrigued to see where this was leading.”Third,” I said, “is the fact that you’re not only young and Japanese, but pretty, so the matter of your being a girl, sorry, a woman, also lay behind my questions. So, yes, I was probably relaxing into my roots and patting the pretty little geisha on the head, wondering, as one does with geishas, when sex would get into the act. I won’t do it again.”
She got up now and came over to me. I braced for an assault, verbal or one-handed or even a spit in the eye. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “No pats,” she said. “Not on the head, or on the bum.” She smiled and left the office, moving around Ginger who was standing in the doorway.
“You do something right?” he asked
“I nearly said something wrong. What you saw was her agreeing she might have been over-reacting, and taking the opportunity anyway to let me know where she stood.”
“We’ll have to be careful, won’t we?”
Yes, I thought, we would. Because in spite of Masaka’s demonstration that she felt competent to look after herself, I could not believe that her previous experience had included someone like Ginger, and I still felt very protective.
chapter eight
I had no classes until three o’clock so I called Atkinson, my boss at the agency, to log the hours I was spending watching Tyler, then drove into the downtown area and found a place to park near the bookstore.
Across the street, a coffee shop with a ledge under the window and a row of stools gave me a chance to do a bit of surveillance in daylight. I’d never had a good look at Tyler, and I was keen to see inside his store, too. I’d made a few fake enquiries by telephone and established that if I wanted him to look over some books I wanted to sell, I would find him at the store anytime except between twelve and two.
This particular coffee shop makes good sandwiches, and I bought a salmon salad on whole wheat and a coffee, and got myself settled on a stool. Over the top of my newspaper I could watch the door of the bookshop across the street, as well as Tyler’s car, which was parked outside.
First, I had to deal with the salmon sandwich, because I had that morning put on a pair of pants just back from the dry cleaners. I took out the lettuce and tomato to eat separately. Then I put a napkin over each half of the sandwich, pressed down firmly, squeezing the surplus salmon mixture out and on to the plate, where I could eat it with my coffee spoon. Now I had a sandwich that was only mouth-thick and wouldn’t ooze its filling all over my pants when I tried to eat it.
A headline about a new step in the quest for
