junk mail. A few calls would come in every day, some from abroad. Sumire would take down the person’s name, number, and message and relay these to Miu on her cellphone. Miu usually showed up around one or two in the afternoon. She’d stay an hour or so, give Sumire various instructions, drink coffee, make a few calls. Letters that required a reply she’d dictate to Sumire, who’d type them up on the word processor and either post or fax them. These were usually quite brief business letters. Sumire also made reservations for Miu at the hairdresser, restaurants, and the squash court. Business out of the way, Miu and Sumire would chat for a while, and then Miu would leave.
So Sumire was often alone in the office, talking to no one for hours, but she never felt bored or lonely. She’d review her twice-a-week Italian lessons, memorizing the irregular verbs, checking her pronunciation with a tape recorder. She took some computer classes and got to where she could handle most simple glitches. She opened up the information in the hard drive and learned the general outlines of the projects Miu had going.
Miu’s main work was exactly as she had described it at the wedding reception. She contracted with small wine producers, mostly in France, and wholesaled their wine to restaurants and speciality shops in Tokyo. On occasion she arranged concert trips by musicians to Japan. Agents from large firms handled the complex business angles, with Miu taking care of the overall plan and some of the groundwork. Miu’s speciality was searching out unknown, promising young performers and bringing them to Japan.
Sumire had no way of knowing how much profit Miu made from her private business. Accounting records were kept on
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separate disks and couldn’t be accessed without a password. At any rate, Sumire was ecstatic, her heart aflutter, just to be able to meet Miu and talk to her. That’s the desk where Miu sits, she thought. That’s the ballpoint pen she uses; the mug she drinks coffee from. No matter how trivial the task, Sumire did her best.
*
Every so often Miu would invite Sumire out for dinner. Since her business involved wine, Miu found it necessary to regularly make the rounds of the better-known restaurants to stay in touch with the latest news. Miu always ordered a light fish dish or, on occasion, chicken, though she’d leave half, and would pass on dessert. She’d pore over every detail of the wine list before deciding on a bottle, but would never drink more than a glass. “Go ahead and have as much as you like,” she told Sumire, but there was no way Sumire could finish that much. So they always ended up with half a very expensive bottle of wine left, but Miu didn’t mind.
“It’s such a waste to order a whole bottle of wine for just the two of us,” Sumire said to Miu one time. “We can barely finish half.”
“Don’t worry.” Miu laughed. “The more we leave behind, the more people in the restaurant will be able to try it. The sommelier, the headwaiter, all the way down to the waiter who fills the water glasses. That way a lot of people will start to acquire a taste for good wine. Which is why leaving expensive wine is never a waste.”
Miu examined the colour of the 1986 Médoc and then, as if savouring some nicely turned out prose, carefully tasted it.
“It is the same with anything—you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it
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from a book.”
Taking a cue from Miu, Sumire picked up her glass and very attentively took a sip, held it in her mouth, and then swallowed it. For a moment an agreeable aftertaste remained, but after a few seconds this disappeared, like morning dew on a summer leaf. All of which prepared the palate for the next bite of food. Every time she ate and talked with Miu, Sumire learned something new. Sumire was amazed by the overwhelming number of things she had yet to learn.
“You know I’ve never thought I wanted to be somebody else,” Sumire blurted out once, perhaps urged on by the morethan-usual amount of wine she’d drunk. “But sometimes I think how nice it would be to be like you.”
Miu held her breath for a moment. Then she picked up her wineglass and took a sip. For a second, the light dyed her eyes the crimson of the wine. Her face was drained of its usual subtle expression.
“I’m sure you don’t know this,” she said calmly, returning her glass to the table. “The person here now isn’t the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole—that would have been wonderful. But it’s pointless to think about that now.”
