In the Age of Love and Chocolate (17 page)

I looked into my husband’s eyes.

“What are you thinking?” he whispered.

“I can’t believe I’ve—we’ve—done this.” I was about to faint. They’d wrapped the kimono too tight, and the weight of the fabric was causing my machete to jab me in the thigh.

He chuckled and seemed less ill than he had in some time.

“Suddenly you’re looking healthier,” I said.

“Are you worried that I will live?”

“Yuji, of course not.” But it had honestly not occurred to me that he might get better.

I was beginning to feel rather unwell myself. I wanted to be back in New York. I told my “husband” that I needed to lie down. He took me to a room reserved for married couples that was near the shrine.

Kazuo trailed us. He called to Yuji in Japanese.

“Kazuo wants to know if I am sick,” Yuji translated. “For once, it is Anya,” he called merrily to Kazuo.

Yuji and I went into the marital suite. I lay down on the bed. Yuji sat nearby, watching me.

What had I been thinking? How had I convinced myself that this made sense?

I had married a man I barely knew.

I had married him!

I could not unmarry him either.

This was it. This had happened. This was my first marriage.

Natty and Theo and everyone else who’d tried to warn me off this had been right.

I was hyperventilating.

“Calm yourself,” Yuji said gently. “I will die as promised.”

I started to cry. “I don’t want you to die.”

I was still hyperventilating.

“May I loosen your obi?” he asked.

I nodded. He untied my kimono, and I began to feel better. He lay beside me. He looked at me, then he touched my face.

“Yuji, do you think I am a bad person?”

“Why?”

“Because you know I don’t love you. In a sense, I am marrying you for your money.”

“The same could be said of me. You are on the verge of being richer than I am, no? The truth is, I do not think of you in terms of good or bad.”

“How do you think of me?”

“I remember you as a child, playing in the garden with your sister. I remember you as a teenage girl, angry and reckless. I see you now, as a woman, usually so sturdy and strong. I like you best now. I like you better than I have ever liked you before. It is a shame we have had to do everything in the wrong order, but those are the lives you and I have. I would have liked, if I were young and strong, to have courted you, to have made you love me above all others, to have wooed you and won you. I would have liked to have known that when I died, Anya would be inconsolable.”

“Yuji.” I turned on my side so that I could face him. My kimono fell open and I pulled it closed.

He grabbed the obi and wrapped one end around his hand. “I wish I could make love to you.” He pulled me toward him by the belt.

My eyes widened. I was not such a fallen creature that I would make love to a man I barely knew, even if he were my husband.

“But I cannot. I am too weak. Today has been very tiring.” He looked at me. “I am pumped full of drugs and nothing works as it should.”

He was a ridiculously beautiful man, and the sickness had made him almost unbearably so. He looked like a charcoal drawing of a man. In death, he was blacks and whites.

“I think I could have loved you if we’d met when I was a few years older,” I told him.

“What a pity.”

I pulled him to me. I could feel his bones coiling and creaking around me. He must have weighed less than me, and he was terribly cold, too. We were both tired so I pulled open my kimono and then I sealed it so we were both inside.

“This life,” he said when we were eye to eye. “This life,” he repeated. “I will have more reason to miss it than once I thought.”

*   *   *

In the morning, he was gone. Kazuo explained that Yuji had needed to return to his own room on account of his health and that we were to meet him at the Ono Sweets factory later that day.

Back at the house, I changed out of my wedding kimono, which I had been wearing for almost twenty-four hours, and into my regular clothes. The servants were even more deferential than they had been before, but I almost did not know to whom they were speaking when they called me Anya Ono-san. I did not take his name, if you were wondering, but my Japanese was insufficient to explain to the servants that despite what it looked like, I was still Anya Balanchine.

*   *   *

Yuji, accompanied by an even larger entourage of businesspeople than had been at the airport, was waiting for us at the Ono Sweets factory in Osaka. For the first time since I’d arrived, Yuji wore a dark suit. I associated him with that suit and I found it comforting to see him in it again. He introduced me to his colleagues, and then we toured the plant, which was clean, well lit, and well run. There was no telltale scent to indicate that chocolate was being concocted. Their main product appeared to be
mochi
, a gummy, rice-based dessert.

“Where’s the chocolate?” I whispered to Yuji. “Or do you import it the way my family does?”

“Chocolate is illegal in Japan. You know that,” he replied. “Follow me.”

We separated from the main group and took an elevator down to a room that held a furnace. He pressed a button on the wall. The wall disappeared, and we entered a secret passage that led to a room smelling distinctly of warm chocolate. He pressed another button to close the door.

“I have spent 200 million yen building this underground factory,” Yuji told me, “but, if everything progresses as I hope, soon I will have no need for it.”

As he led me through the secret factory, I noticed that the workers, who were dressed in coveralls, sanitary masks, and gloves, were careful not to make eye contact. The factory had state-of-the-art ovens and thermometers, thick metal cauldrons and scales, and along the walls, bins of unprocessed cacao. As a result of Theo’s teachings, I knew this cacao to be subpar. The color was bad, and the odor and consistency were off.

“You can’t make cacao-based products with this,” I told him. “You can bury low-quality cacao in conventional chocolate with enough sugar or milk, but you can’t make high-percentage cacao products with this. You must change suppliers.”

Yuji nodded. I would need to call Granja Mañana to see if they could supply Ono Sweets as well.

We left the secret factory and went upstairs to meet with Yuji’s legal adviser, Sugiyama, who explained some of the challenges of opening a Dark Room–like club in Japan. “An official from the Department of Wellness will need to place a government stamp on every product, verifying the cacao content and the health benefits. This requires much money,” the adviser said.

“At first,” I said, “but then you’ll save money. You won’t have to run a secret factory, for instance. And if your business is anything like mine, you were paying off officials before. Now you’ll be paying off different officials instead.”

Sugiyama did not look at me or acknowledge that I had spoken. “Perhaps we are better off as operations stand, Ono-san,” he said.

“You must listen to Anya-san,” Yuji said. “This is what I want, Sugiyama-san. This is how it must be. We will no longer be a Pachinko operation.”

“As you wish, Ono-san.” Sugiyama nodded to me.

Yuji and I went outside to wait for a car. “These people are hopelessly conservative, Anya. They resist change. You must insist. I will insist as long as I am able.”

“Where are we going now?” I asked.

“I want to show you where the first cacao bar could be, if you approve. And then I want to introduce you to the world as my wife.”

*   *   *

Though we planned to open five locations in Japan, the location Yuji had selected for the flagship was an old, abandoned teahouse in the middle of the most urban part of Osaka. As soon as you passed through the gray stone front you were in another world. There were sakura trees and a garden with a few stalwart purple irises that had not yet resigned themselves to the despotic weeds. Everything was hopelessly overgrown. The feeling was unlike our location in New York, but it could be lovely. Romantic even.

“Do you think this will suit?” Yuji asked me.

“It is very different from New York,” I said.

“I want a place that will operate in the daylight,” he said. “I am so tired of the darkness.”

“Originally I wanted to do that, too, but my business partner talked me out of it. He said the club should be sexy.”

“I see his point. But the Japanese are different from the Americans. I think we will be better in the daylight here.”

“It can’t be called the Dark Room then.” I paused. “The Light Bar?”

He considered my suggestion. “I like this.”

About fifteen minutes later, several members of the media arrived along with Yosh, Yugi’s company’s publicist, who translated for me the parts of the press conference that were in Japanese.

“Ono-san, it’s been months since anyone has seen you,” one of the interviewers noted. “Rumor has it you are ailing, and you do look very lean.”

“I am not ailing,” Yuji said. “Nor did I summon you here today to discuss my health. I have two announcements to make. The first is that my company will undergo a dramatic reorganization in the months that follow. The second is to introduce Japan to this woman.” He pointed to me. “Her name is Anya Balanchine. She is the president of the renowned Dark Room cacao club in New York City, and she has done me the great honor of becoming my wife.”

Flashbulbs went off. I smiled at the reporters.

The story went global. In certain parts of the world, both my name and my husband’s were notorious, and it was noteworthy, I suppose, that two organized-crime families should have merged. In reality, our families had joined years before, when Leo had married the illegitimate Noriko.

*   *   *

I knew without him having to say it that Yuji wanted to see at least one of the clubs open before he died. And though I was only a bogus wife, I wanted to make him happy. For the rest of the summer, Yuji and I worked to launch the Light Bars. It wasn’t easy—the cultural and linguistic barriers could not be overstated. I worried for Yuji’s health. He was as tireless as a dying man can be.

About a week after my twentieth birthday, the first Light Bar opened. The mood of the place was more like an upscale teahouse than a nightclub. When you entered, a carpet of rose petals led you to the main room. Tiny Christmas lights hung everywhere in messy strings, and column candles in hammered silver cans lit the wrought iron tables, which were each canopied by diaphanous white fabric. Yuji and I had made it the most romantic place imaginable—the irony being that the two people who had created it had not been in love.

His heart was incredibly weak by this point and he was not able to stay at the opening long. “Are you happy?” I asked him on the ride back to his estate.

“I am,” he said. “Tomorrow, we will return to work. Maybe I will live to see Tokyo, too.”

*   *   *

That night, I went down the hall to Yuji’s room. He often couldn’t sleep through the night. I made sure his light was on before I knocked.

“Yuji,” I said, “I’m going home to help my sister move into her dorm, but I’ll return in two weeks. I’d invite you to come along with me, but in your condition…”

Yuji nodded. “Of course.”

“Please don’t die while I’m away.”

“I won’t. Do you want to know a secret?” he asked.

“Always from you.”

“Go to the window and look by the koi pond,” he said.

I obeyed. Yuji’s gray cat was sitting next to a black cat on the bench. The gray cat licked the black cat’s cheek. “Oh! They’re in love, aren’t they? How do you think they met?”

“There’s a farm not so far down the road from here. I suppose he might be from there.”

“Or maybe he’s a city cat,” I said. “Come to the country for the girl of his dreams.”

“I like your way better.” He was smiling to himself.

He patted the spot next to him in bed, and I lay down beside him.

“How do you feel?” He hated the question, but I wanted to know.

“I feel happy that I have been able to push Ono Sweets into the new era. It’s 2086, Anya. We must be ready for the twenty-second century.”

“How is your heart?” I specified.

“It beats. For now, it beats.” I lay my hand on his chest, and he flinched slightly. “Am I hurting you?”

“It’s fine.” He inhaled. “No, it’s good. The only people who touch me are doctors so I appreciate the change.”

“Tell me a story about my father,” I said.

Yuji thought for a moment before he spoke. “When I was introduced to him, it was not long after the kidnapping. I was wary of strangers. I think I have told you this before.”

“Tell me again.”

“He was an enormous man, and I was terrified of him. He got down on his knees and held his palm faceup the way you would when approaching a timid animal. ‘I hear you have an interesting battle wound, young man. Would you like to show it to me?’ he asked. I was embarrassed to be missing a finger, but I held out my hand to him anyway. He looked at it for the longest time. ‘That is a scar to be proud of,’ he said.”

Yuji held out his hand to me, and I kissed it in the broken place. Years earlier, my father’s hand had touched that hand, too.

“I am glad I will always be your first husband,” he said.

“And last,” I said. “I don’t think I am built for marriage or for love.”

“I’m not certain you are right. You’re still so young, and life is usually long.”

He fell asleep shortly after that. His breathing was labored, and beneath my hand, his heartbeat was so weak that I could barely make it out.

*   *   *

When I awoke the next day, the bed was soaking wet. So as not to embarrass Yuji, I tried to slip away without him seeing me. He awoke shivering and sat straight up.

“Sumimasen,”
he said, bowing his head. He rarely spoke in Japanese to me.

“It’s fine.” I looked him in the eye. I remembered that Nana had always hated when people didn’t look her in the eye.

On the sheets, the urine was spotted with blood.

“Anya, please go.”

“I want to help you,” I said.

“This has no dignity. Please leave.”