Bicycle Days Read online

  Also by John Burnham Schwartz

  Reservation Road

  Acclaim for John Burnham Schwartz

  “Finely and carefully written, with a sweet innocence and naive sense of discovery.”

  —People

  “Graceful … absorbing … Schwartz’s writing is unpretentious and accessible. The flashbacks to Alec’s youth are smoothly integrated yet have the gritty feel of emotions honestly remembered.”

  —St. Louis Dispatch Book Review

  “A funny, painful and wonderful coming-of-age story.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Schwartz’s sentences are as elegant and effortless as we’ll find at this post-Cheever end of the century.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Has authority and refreshing charm.”

  —Time

  “John Burnham Schwartz is a wonderful stylist whose prose reveals a sheen of beauty beneath everyday life.”

  —The New York Observer

  “John Burnham Schwartz is a good writer. Bicycle Days is a good book. Get a copy and read it.”

  —Gannett News Service

  John Burnham Schwartz

  Bicycle Days

  John Burnham Schwartz is the author of Reservation Road. He lives in New York City with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1999

  Copyright © 1989 by John Burnham Schwartz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Summit Books, New York, in 1989.

  Vintage Books, Vintage Contemporaries, and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwartz, John Burnham.

  Bicycle days: a novel / John Burnham Schwartz.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78752-1

  1. Americans—Japan—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3569.C5658B5 1999]

  813’.54—dc21 98-50018

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  www.randomhouse.com/vintage

  v3.1

  For Margaret McElderry Lunt

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 TREMORS

  2 BLANK TAPE

  3 CHRISTMAS CAKE

  4 LOST AND FOUND

  5 GRAPEFRUIT JUICE

  6 BRISTLES

  7 HOSPITALIZATION

  8 ACCOUNTS

  9 HEADACHE

  10 MOTORCYCLE DREAMS

  11 FUJI-SAN

  12 MAKING SUSHI

  13 THE CLUB SCENE

  14 STRIPES

  15 PROMISE

  16 WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  17 THE FORCE OF NATURE

  18 GIFTS

  19 LOVE

  20 BLIND SPOT

  21 TAKING LEAVE

  22 GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER

  23 YAMADERA

  24 BROTHERS

  25 A HOME FOR ECHOES

  26 O-MIAI

  27 HANDS

  28 SECOND PLACE

  29 SLOW DANCING

  30 FOREIGNER

  31 TIME APART

  32 HEARTLAND

  33 TEN DAYS

  34 LOSS

  35 BICYCLE DAYS

  36 AIR

  37 TUNNEL OF HEARTS

  38 CATCH AT THE IMPERIAL PALACE

  39 MORNING

  40 MASKS

  Home is where one starts from.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Four Quartets

  East Coker; III

  TREMORS

  The noise of the silver balls was deafening. It enveloped the senses, locking Alec in no less than the Japanese men who sat transfixed, rows and rows of them, their faces inches from the pachinko machines. Every few seconds a ball would hit home, sending another stream rushing out through an opening at the bottom. Without once interrupting the motion of their thumbs as they worked the levers, the men would collect their new supply, occasionally wiping a bead of sweat from their cheeks with a twist of the shoulder. But always the noise. The vibrations would rise to a crescendo as a new jackpot was struck, only to sink again. The rhythm rose from these constant pulsations, a whirlpool of anonymous men and silver balls.

  Alec pulled his face away from the window front, erased the trace of his breath with his shirt-sleeve. The air was muggy, and he felt for a moment as if there weren’t enough oxygen in it. He stood on the wide, busy stretch of Waseda Avenue, his bags scattered around him, just a few blocks from the Japanese homestay family with whom he would be spending the summer. His watch read seven o’clock. He couldn’t remember if he had reset it when he arrived. The confusing bus ride from the airport, much more than the flight from New York, had robbed him of all sense of time.

  He had woken with the sense that something was wrong. His first thought was that he had missed his stop. Terrified, he looked around him. It was the same bus he had been on before he had fallen asleep, filled with the same people, the driver wearing the exact same pale blue hat. The bus looked like every other bus Alec had ever been on. The red vinyl seats reminded him of the Greyhound he used to ride to his aunt’s house in Vermont. He took a deep breath and rubbed his head where it had been knocking against the window. A young woman sitting across the aisle looked away when he noticed her; he was sure she had been staring at him while he slept. His head felt as though someone had been pounding on it with a rubber hammer. He traced the ache to his left ear, which was being attacked by a constant stream of freezing cold air. It surprised him that the air-conditioning could be so accurate. When he sat back, his head against the synthetic white cover, the air went directly into his ear. But he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from—there was no vent visible, no way to turn it off.

  Beyond the window, the sparse greenery of the suburbs between Narita Airport and Tokyo was merging with the outskirts of the city itself. The block forms of tall apartment complexes, gray and gold in the twilight, rolled out to greet him. Laundry flanked the balconies like children gathered for a parade. There was no longer any green, only solid, urban matter: slabs of concrete and sheets of iron; timber walls and tile roofs; the glistening bodies of Hondas and Toyotas bumper to bumper, stretching off the highway and down into the streets below. Neon signs had come on all over the city, cloaking the buildings and streets in electricity, promising an explosion of light when the sky turned dark.

  The bus eased off the exit ramp, and Alec felt Tokyo close in around him. The highway had been elevated, and he had looked out over the entire city, the distant observer. But the bus was in a maze of narrow streets now, and the city had moved close to him. Everything was concentrated; the neon brighter, garish, the buildings tall and dark above their electric signs, the people pushing, moving.

  He sat back in his seat for a moment, too tired to do anything else. It had been like this since his graduation from college, three weeks before. That afternoon his family and friends had formed a circle around him, crying and congratulating him. His father had hugged him. It was a brief, fierce, awkward hug, followed by an embarrassed silence as Alec bent down to pick up his mortarboard from the ground. His mother had hugged him, too, but then held on longer than that, stepping away with her hands tightly gripping his arms, her eyes on his, as if she had finally caught sight of him after a long absence, only to realize that he was about to disappear again. She told him to
come home soon, or whenever he wanted to. And to write or call collect anytime, because she would be there to talk to him. Anytime. And it seemed to Alec as if the day had ended with that word, because he couldn’t remember what came after.

  The bus was stopped at a light, and Alec looked down a side street. An old bicycle with a metal basket leaned against a dark one-story house. A teenage boy in a white apron and paper hat walked swiftly out of the house, carrying a tray of stacked empty dishes above his right shoulder. The light turned green, the bus jerked forward. Trying to see, Alec craned his neck against the glass. The bike was moving fast, gaining on the bus. Alec gasped as the boy came abreast of the bus, a flash of white, weaving and dipping and somehow managing not to lose the tray, which he held aloft on one hand, the one solid part of a sculpture that was all fluid motion. And then, at the next corner, he was gone.

  The driver’s voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing his stop, Takadanobaba Station. Alec quickly checked his sheet of directions, then jumped to his feet to gather his bags. The aisle seemed endless as he hurried toward the front of the bus, his luggage catching on the seats, dragging over them, hitting the silent, staring passengers on their heads.

  But the bus ride was already a memory. Alec bent down to pick up his bags and felt sweat begin to trickle down his side. A roar from across the street caught his attention. An ape was suspended from the second story of a building, its chest covered with Japanese characters spelling King Kong. At regular intervals, the ape would beat its chest with both hands and growl. Alec looked at it for a moment, then moved on.

  Up ahead was a gas station. He checked the directions and veered left down one street, then right at the next corner. He was now only about two minutes beyond the neon chaos of Waseda Avenue. People lived here—in pillbox houses of wood and tile and tin, down streets barely wide enough for a car to pass through.

  Alec walked to the end of the street, then turned left again, checking the numbers on the doors as he struggled with his luggage. He stopped in front of a four-story house with a garage taking up most of the first floor. “Hasegawa Company” was written on the glass door in adhesive Japanese characters. He put down his bags, looked once more at the sheet of directions, then back at the door. Poised, a stone lion sat just to the left. Alec repeated a couple of Japanese phrases to himself, ran a hand through his hair, and rang the doorbell.

  A teenage girl came running to the edge of a steep flight of stairs and squinted down at him. She continued to peer at him, making him even more uneasy. As he began to turn away, the girl seemed to see him for the first time. After screaming something in Japanese, she sprinted down the stairs and let him in. She wore a striped knee-length dress that looked brand-new. And black knee socks.

  “You’re Alec-san,” she said in Japanese, turning the “l” in his name into an “r.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Please excuse my lateness.”

  The girl made many rapid sounds after that, but Alec didn’t recognize any of them. He gathered his bags and followed her inside.

  On the landing, shoes were neatly lined up against the wall. He tried to untie his high-tops while still standing. The girl laughed at him but clamped her hand over her mouth as soon as he looked at her. A white miniature poodle came running down the short hallway and jumped on him. A short barrel of a woman in a puffed and pleated evening dress came after it, yelling, “Chiko! Chiko!” The dog started chewing Alec’s right foot. Alec was still trying to get his sneakers off.

  The pain started just below his knees and went shooting up into his thighs. Alec looked around the low table at his new family. They were all dressed as if they might be going out for an evening at the theater. Exhausted, far away from himself, he sensed that he was smiling and saying small things in Japanese every once in a while. He remembered the many times he had been to Japanese restaurants at home, how he had always liked the idea of sitting at a low table, liked how simple it was.

  He took a piece of sushi in his chopsticks, dipped it in soy sauce, and guided it into his mouth. Mrs. Hasegawa had ordered it especially for his arrival. He felt the eyes of the entire family on him as he chewed. Did Alec really like sushi? Yes? Laughter.

  He thought he was beginning to understand the rhythm of the conversation, if not the words. Mr. Hasegawa’s speech was unintelligible. Short and slim with a crewcut, he made constant grunting noises that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him. This was at first confusing, but Alec soon realized that each grunt was a sign of assent. Again and again, he would stop in the middle of a sentence to search for a word, only to see Mr. Hasegawa leaning forward, his hands resting on his thighs. Like a seismologist reading the tremors before a major earthquake, Alec knew then that a grunt was coming, and this knowledge gave him enough confidence to struggle through the sentence. Then the grunt would actually erupt, accompanied by an audible sigh of relief from everyone at the table, especially Alec.

  Yoshi, the eldest of the three children, was talking, mixing in a few words of English with the Japanese. Alec thought this a good sign. The summer before, when he was sixteen, Yoshi had spent a couple of weeks in the States on a group tour. He had seen Michael Jackson in concert. Yukiko, his fifteen-year-old sister, said that she preferred Bruce Springsteen. Hiroshi, twelve, was more interested in professional wrestling. Had Alec heard of Hulk Hogan?

  Alec looked at Mrs. Hasegawa sitting across the table from him, not exactly cross-legged. She had brought a plate of sliced apples from the kitchen and was eating one, chewing with a great, sweeping rotation of her jaws. When she finished, she took a toothpick from a small jar on the table and scraped her teeth. Throughout, she never stopped talking.

  Alec must eat a lot of beef, she said. And it was surprising that he wasn’t taller—most Americans are so big. She didn’t mean that he was short, but he certainly wasn’t tall. Did he have a girlfriend? What was that? No girlfriend? But he must be so smart and handsome to have graduated from a school like Yale, such a famous university. How could he not have a girlfriend?

  Alec shook his head. No one seemed to notice. He ate a slice of apple.

  I like American girls, Yoshi said. Especially California girls.

  Alec grunted, took a sip of beer.

  BLANK TAPE

  He rolled over and looked at his watch: four-thirty in the morning. He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep but knew there was no point. The room glowed from the one window, which looked directly into a neighboring house. For a moment, he didn’t think at all about where he was. It was just a room, nothing else. Alec lay in it and thought of his first summer away at camp, how empty and alone he had felt on his first night there, lying awake on the top level of a bunk bed in a bare, wooden cabin, listening to the breathing of seven other boys his own age. He had not wanted to go away then. He had cried and screamed at his parents. It hadn’t been his decision—not the way it had been later, when he went away to school, or even now, coming here. But the feeling was not so different. This room was not so different.

  Alec felt suddenly afraid then, the room seemed so small. He thought he should get some air. Rummaging through his suitcase, he pulled out a blue-and-white-patterned yukata that his mother had bought for him at Bloomingdale’s. He put it on and slid open the wood-and-paper screen of his room, and then the glass door to the balcony. The air was cool and comfortable, and he stepped into it as though into a hot bath: gingerly at first, then completely, with satisfaction. He breathed deeply. The sky was cloudless, and Tokyo lay sprawled out before him, silent and waiting, offering him his own private viewing.

  About an hour later, Alec stood in a closet-size room, his yukata hanging on a hook behind him. He was looking down at a Japanese-style toilet and felt much more naked than he normally would with no clothes on. The toilet was just a porcelain hole in the ground with a single pipe curving out of it and into the wall. There was nothing to indicate the proper mounting procedure. He supposed it was something like a bidet and did not want to be f
acing the wrong way when the time came to flush. He squatted over it but lost his balance and had to grab on to the pipe for support.

  When he had finished, he walked down the stairs, stopping on the third floor. It was still only five-thirty in the morning, and the house was quiet. The bedrooms were open, and he looked in at the black heads of the family resting against the white of their futons and comforters. He stood there for a while, hardly breathing, until the sleeping bodies blurred before his eyes. He blinked and focused on them again. But they seemed no more real or comprehensible to him than they had before, and a sudden wave of loneliness came over him. He turned and walked away from the feeling, down the stairs, and into the bathroom.

  The bathroom was damp, covered in tile. Removing his yukata, Alec squatted on a low, plastic seat in front of a faucet, which jutted out from the wall as though it had been placed there by mistake. He filled a plastic bowl with water and dumped it over his head. Next, shampoo and soap. He scrubbed himself with a cloth that felt like sandpaper against his skin. He finished by dumping another bowl of water over his head. Rinsed and clean, he stood up and rolled back the cover of the small, deep bathtub. A cloud of rising steam hit him in the face. Alec looked at the bathwater, wondering if it was really supposed to be that hot.

  He entered the tub left leg first, the heat making him feel as if the skin might peel right off his body. It went like that, one limb at a time, until five minutes later only his head was still above water. He sat back in the tub, knees up, and considered the possibility that he had come to the wrong country.

  He sat at the low table, dressed in his new pin-striped suit. Yukiko came in from the kitchen and set down a tray of dishes in front of him. She said good morning without looking at anyone and immediately disappeared. Hiroshi, the youngest, sat to Alec’s right, barely awake, slumped over his food. Alec picked up his bowl in his left hand, ate some rice with dried fish flakes on it. He looked at Hiroshi.