The Women Read Free Page B

wheels churning and the engine screeching like a mythical beast beating its wings and belching fire. Up I went, up and up—till the gravel suddenly deepened into a kind of lithic sludge and the wheels vacillated and then grabbed with a vicious spewing of rock and I thought to apply the brake just as I crested the hill and nosed up to the bumper of the car parked there. I was lit up with excitement, trembling with the exertion, the tension, the glory of it all. So what if I’d mistakenly come up the back road, used only by the tractor and the dray horses? So what if I’d come within an ace of hurtling into the rear bumper of Wrieto-San’s Cord Phaeton, the swiftest and most majestic automobile manufactured anywhere on this earth? I was here. I was home.
     
    My first impressions? Of peace, of beauty abounding, of an old-world graciousness and elegance of line. And there was something more too: a deep-dwelling spiritual presence that seemed to emanate from the earth itself, as if this were a holy place, a shrine where the autochthonous tribes had gathered to worship in a time before Wrieto-San’s ancestors, the Lloyd Joneses, had come over from Wales, a time before Columbus, a time when Edo was cut off from the world. I felt as if I’d entered one of the temples of Kyoto—Nanzenji, or better yet, Kinkakuji, its gold leaf harboring the light. All my anxiety dissolved. I felt calm, instantly calm.
     
    It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun hung above the treetops like a charm on an invisible string. I cut the engine and all the birds in the world began to sing in unison. Almost immediately the exhaust dissipated and I became aware of the lightness and purity of the air. It was scented with clover, pine, the chlorophyll of new-mown grass and the faintest trace of woodsmoke—and food, a smell of cookery that reminded me I hadn’t eaten since that ill-fated hamburger sandwich. I took a moment to breathe in deeply, considered lighting a cigarette and then thought better of it. Taliesin awaited me.
     
    I was just stepping out of the car, pulling off my (sweat-soaked) gloves preparatory to unknotting the scarf, when a figure emerged from one of the garage stalls in the courtyard just beyond the coruscating hood of the Cord. It took me a moment—my eyesight was far superior at a narrower range, the range of the drafting table, that is, than it was at a distance—before I realized, my pulse pounding all over again, that I was in the presence of the Master himself.
     
    I bowed. Deeply. As deeply as I’d ever bowed to anyone in my life, even my reverend grandfather and the regent of Tokyo Imperial University.
     
    He returned my bow with one of his own—abbreviated, a bow of the head and shoulders only, as befitted his position in respect to my own. At the same time he surprised me by offering a greeting in Japanese. “ Konnichi wa ,” he said, leveling his eyes on me.
     
    “ Hajimemashite ,” I replied, bowing a second time.
     
    Wrieto-San was then sixty-five, though he admitted to sixty-three and looked and acted like a man ten or even fifteen years younger. In his autobiography, which had been published to great acclaim that year, he claimed to be five feet eight inches tall, but he was considerably shorter than that (I stand five feet seven and over the course of the ensuing weeks had the opportunity on a number of occasions to compare height casually with him and I certainly must have had at least an inch on him, perhaps two). He was dressed like an aesthete heading to an art exhibition: beret, cape, high-collared shirt, woolen puttees and the Malacca cane he affected both for elegance and authority. His hair, a weave of thunderhead and cumulus, trailed over his collar.
     
    “Ogenki desu-ka?” he asked. (How are you?)
     
    “Genki desu,” I replied. “Anata wa?” ( I’m fine. And you?)
     
    “Watashi-mo genki desu.” (I’m fine too.)
     
    This seemed to have exhausted his Japanese, because he