From the moment he’d hit American ground, the ground had been hitting back.

Hiroshi’s command of English was as close to flawless as that of any Japanese person he’d ever known who hadn’t actually lived anywhere farther west than Fukuoka. His vocabulary was quite large. It was, he thought in English and in an atypically un-Japanese and un-Hiroshi way, something to be reckoned.

Or was that reckoned with? He made a mental note, again in English, to check the phrase in his precious, though currently un-pocketed, pocket dictionary of idioms.

Hiroshi was just as proud of his English pronunciation, of the way his tongue and palate could pick their way light-footedly through, for example, “particularly,” a word even many native English speakers had difficulty with, unconsciously substituting “especially” whenever they could.

And he was proud, as well, of the way he’d handled this crucial trip, his first ever to America, where he was, in some very small circles in Manhattan at least, well-regarded and eagerly anticipated.

His flight over had been flawless, and, once he was on the ground, his heavy backpack and duffel bag had leapt puppy-like off the carousel to greet him. Well, alright, actually he’d yanked them off with one hand, and in fact with some difficulty, having to hold on at every moment with his other hand to the old-fashioned baguette-shaped case containing his $4,000 clarinet, a father’s gift.

But at least both of the bags were there, and he’d managed with trembling arm (trembling, he’d hastened to assure himself at the time, with weight, not nerves) to maneuver them through a fluttery opening in a troupe of eleven- or twelve-year-old girls in olive-green uniforms, who’d flown with him from Narita – Girl Scouts, he was fairly sure.

But was it, in fact, a “troupe,” as one would call a group of itinerant actors, or a “troop”? That was the question that, along with the “reckoned with” issue, troubled the surface of Hiroshi’s mind as he wavered on the jute mat in front of a hardware store on Lexington Avenue, three blocks west of Central Park and two long blocks south of the Academy, in Manhattan, New York, USA.

Hiroshi wavered in a figurative sense, wanting very much to go into the store but knowing that if he lingered he might arrive at the Academy late for his first and only Master Class, and in a literal sense, because the jute mat was so stiff, with such large and distinct jutes – jutes? – that it was almost impossible to stand still without rocking from side to side.

Maybe this was due to the fact that he wasn’t heavy enough to compress the stiff fibers – Hiroshi weighed only 126 pounds – and perhaps such rugged foot mats, designed to vigorously scrub any soles that entered the store, were a good thing in a country where people strolled with their shoes still on right off streets where dogs had been walking, into not just hardware stores but homes.

Still, below the surface of his mind, where he pondered vocabulary questions and savored the memory of the incredibly delicious hot pastrami sandwich he’d had the moment he’d dropped his bags – though not his clarinet – at the hotel, even below a deeper level of his mind, where he contemplated the fact that in twenty-five minutes he was expected by a group, a troupe, of jazz prodigies and protégés barely younger than he, there dwelt a tactile awareness that something was not quite right.

This awareness had begun not with the subtle swaying he was currently experiencing, but a half hour before, as he’d walked to his current location from the delicatessen where he’d triumphantly ordered his first-ever hot pastrami sandwich. His instructions had been to take a taxi directly from his hotel in Gramercy Park to the Academy, which was on 72nd and Lex, but he’d jumped out of the cab when it reached 59th Street, fearful he wouldn’t find a real New York deli near Central Park. He was a great walker. But the whole distance from 59th to 70th, he’d scraped and scubbed the soles of his shoes on the New York sidewalks again and again, as if there were waves in the neat squares of asphalt. He’d stumbled once, and banged his sneaker-clad big toe against a sidewalk crack twice.

Could it be, he wondered at some level he wasn’t quite aware of, that the sidewalks in New York were slightly higher than those in Tokyo? But that was absurd, he sensed without thinking it through, because if the sidewalks were a bit higher, he would be higher, too.

Or could it be the first symptoms of a neurological disorder such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis (a medical term even he did not know in English, but the general idea of which he was familiar with), which would eventually render him, his recording career just beginning to pick up steam (a head of steam?), unable even to grasp his clarinet?

Of course, it was likely nothing other than jet lag – he’d had some concert dates in Europe last year, but had never flown as far as this before. So, without being truly aware that he was testing the theory, Hiroshi decided to walk the three blocks to Central Park – even though that would leave him at a bare minimum five blocks from the Academy – just to see if he would stumble on the uneven ground or display other symptoms of an acute neurological crisis.

First, though, he walked into the hardware store, where he stumbled almost immediately over a warp in the old-fashioned wooden floor. He became rather desperately worried.

But this was fascinating – not merely hardware, which he’d always loved, but American hardware, different in clever and surprising ways. The excitement, accordingly, began to crowd out the corporeal concern. It would be impossible, he reflected, to describe to a homebody like his girlfriend just how stimulating it was to be in a place like this, where everything was slightly different – it was like jumping back into his consciousness as a four-year-old, except that he had little intention, as much as he might want to, of jumping up and down excitedly.

For no reason in particular, he had an erection.

It was his first erection ever in America. It seemed to be his first of any sort in quite a while, whatever that might mean. It seemed to mean something quite important. He thought again, fleetingly, of his girlfriend and their last night together, then sent the image packing to another country.

Exceeding his initial expectations, this hardware store actually appeared to be some sort of antiquated general-purpose store, with racks of neat square packets with idealized illustrations of flowers on them – containing seeds, no doubt – and a small section for toys, and another small section with greeting cards and candies and woven baskets for Easter. It was April in New York.

Hiroshi had seen Easter paraphernalia before, of course – the Japanese celebrate, or at least sell gifts that are designed to take advantage of, virtually every Western holiday except for Groundhog Day. But much of what he saw now was fascinatingly strange. A small package, shaped like half of an egg, called “Cherry Whip.” That was interesting. It wasn’t even whip-shaped, like that detestable licorice stuff. Obviously, it was some kind of sweet, and, as the beef and mustard taste in his mouth was beginning to turn to mud, he bought the candy, intending to eat it.

But then he remembered the entire embryonic sack that was at this moment curled up in one corner of the overstuffed duffel bag he had pulled off the carousel earlier today, waiting to be filled as full as its brother for the return trip – though not, as the original bag would be, with dirty laundry and American magazines, but with souvenirs. There were a few items here that would make appropriate o-miyage, and the candy egg, he reflected, would be nice for his little half-brother, Manabu, five this month.

So he bought the egg, as well as a pretty packet of marigold seeds and a small flat plastic case containing miniature tools of various configurations, and, paper bag in one hand and clarinet case in the other, headed back into the street.

He arrived at Central Park at one o’clock, just the moment his Master Class was scheduled to begin. He cared, on one level, but on another and very unfamiliar one, did not.

The breeze was beautiful. He was aware that Central Park had a “dangerous” reputation, particularly – particularly! – in outdated Japanese guidebooks. But it was such a sparkling day, and he was a soon-to-be-somewhat-famous jazz musician, and if any miscreants – he’d known that word for a long time, though he had no reason ever to use it – bothered him, he’d pull out his clarinet and pacify them with a song.

Because it wasn’t possible, after all the distance that he’d traveled, that there would be any disasters now.

He wandered for a few minutes, looking at the pretty young women and the angry young men, and found himself in a glen, if that was the right word – a sort of meadow. It was incongruous in the middle of a city that was almost as big as Tokyo, but here was a wide expanse of green with no one at all around. He was north of the zoo, and probably pretty close to 72nd Street.

Hiroshi put down his paper bag and opened up his clarinet case. He didn’t know of another clarinetist with such an expensive instrument, a rare, silver-plated pre-war Yamaha model that used the outdated Albert fingering system. His father had more or less forced the gift on him, but he had to admit it was a nice piece of work; he’d decided the students would enjoy seeing a piece of history. And what a beautiful and fitting thing it would be to play some klezmer or a few bars of, perhaps, “Green Dolphin Street” right here in the park with no audience at all, where the only ones who could hear him would be the ghosts of all the jazz musicians he’d ever admired. Practically every one of them had played in this city at one time or another, and he himself would be playing with one of the best working bands in the business just two nights from now.

He picked up the clarinet and began to play. And then, just as quickly, stopped. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed an odd bobbing motion and looked over to see, underneath a magnificent oak-like tree, an enormous crow pecking at something.

He placed the clarinet carefully back in its case, closed it up, and leaned over to pick up the paper bag, stepping on it in the process and causing the bag to rip. The screwdrivers and awls and miniature wrenches, which had somehow come loose from their little hard plastic kit, spilled onto the patchy grass.

Hiroshi, reminded in this manner that he was having some trouble walking today, stuffed the loose tools and the plastic case, along with a few bits of unanchored grass, into the left pocket of his crisp white slacks, the one that normally held his English idiom dictionary, and the candy egg into the right. This took longer than expected; his hands were a bit numb for some reason, perhaps because of the weight of the luggage he’d carried earlier.

He left the torn bag and the packet of marigold seeds on the ground, amusing himself with the fancy that the next heavy rain would soak the packet and germinate the seeds right there.

When he straightened up to leave, he noticed that despite all his fumblings, the crow had remained unruffled. Hiroshi walked closer to see if it would frighten, but it hunched over its hidden meal, flapped its stiff, curtain-like wings, and pecked away.

By the time Hiroshi approached within a foot or so of the crow, it had backed off irritably – could one say peckishly? – but still had not flown away. Whatever the crow was eating was now partially visible and was, most notably, a brilliant violet color. Hiroshi stared at it a moment before he realized that it was an Easter egg – a real one, dyed that color, not a candy one – and the crow was lunching on the hard-boiled yolk inside.

Hiroshi looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. Suddenly filled with a familiar dread and shame – the Japanese, rather than the jazz, part of his personality – he began running out of the park and in the direction of his class. He stopped once at the park exit to get his bearings and to consult the insanely detailed, intricately folded, hand-drawn map of the Upper East Side that he’d had in his wallet for the past three weeks, and then dashed across Fifth Avenue. On the entire breathless run to 72nd and Lex, he didn’t stumble once.

. . .

By the time the Master Class was concluded, his students, as well as the faculty that had sponsored his appearance and partially subsidized his trip to America, had completely forgotten his tardiness, which in any event was easily excused by his long flight and his evident genius. For these students, and of course the instructors who had sat in, knew enough about jazz to recognize that this slight young Japanese man playing an out-of-fashion model of an out-of-fashion instrument was the real deal.

Hiroshi sat in front of the class soaking in the students’ adulation, one hand pushing back his floppy black hair with the powder-blue streak, his only outward concession to hipness – he also had a silver-gray streak, no wider than a pin, that interrupted his right eyebrow, but that was an accident of nature – and his other hand dandling his clarinet on his bent knee. He’d played “April Mist” and ”Bossa Antigua” and a couple of his own typically soft and plangent compositions, and talked a little bit about his theory of improvisation. His giddiness had almost disappeared, and his customary modesty was reasserting itself, but still he was enjoying every minute of this. He felt, much like the saying he’d once heard, like the kid in a candy store.

He was no kid. He was twenty-three, and was not only an up-and-coming jazz musician, but an accomplished amateur judo practitioner with an interest in hardware, merengue, and sports cars, and with a beautiful girlfriend back home. Why was he reminding himself of all this right now, he wondered, as the students gathered around him?

Because he wasn’t back home? Or because his girlfriend was?

He began to realize that, of all the fifteen or so students, there were only three young women, and, of the three, only one that was attractive. He wasn’t the type of guy to make a point of classifying crowds in such a manner, but he wasn’t the type of guy to play his clarinet in the park, either. Sonny Rollins had practiced on the Brooklyn Bridge, but that was New York, and he was from Tokyo. He wasn’t even really from Tokyo; until he went away to college, he’d spent his entire life in a little country town called Ichikawa.

Except that he was in New York right now, and he had two weeks of intensive exploration ahead of him.

Her name was Maureen, the pretty one, and she was a petite, burstingly energetic redhead, with an intelligent, skeptical, narrow-eyed gaze. She knew a couple of words of Japanese – “arigato,” pronounced incorrectly, and the like – and she used them playfully on Hiroshi when it became her turn to thank him for the class. She talked a bit about her instrument, the soprano saxophone, and her idol, Jane Ira Bloom. Hiroshi, in turn, complimented her again on her playing – some of the students had been given the opportunity to play a short piece to be critiqued, and Hiroshi had given her a detailed but positive evaluation then and simple praise now. During the class, she had apparently been too nervous to react with great pleasure, but now she gave him a genuine and uncomplicated smile.

A couple of other students crowded her out. They’d both decided that Hiroshi looked like Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player; he didn’t. Then, in the general after-class commotion, she was gone.

Hiroshi managed to catch a glimpse of her as she departed – her compact little form, her ponytail gathered up with a green rubber band, the slap of her sandals. She was a bundle of something or other, Hiroshi could see that. Maybe trouble. Trouble or fun. He hoped he’d find out; all of the students had been invited to his weekend gig.

When Hiroshi hit the street, he was again elated, though in a way that seemed to entail a certain degree of gravity that hadn’t been there before in the park or in the hardware store. He meandered for a while, stopped for a papaya drink at a dirty little hot dog stand, and then strolled into a very narrow and astonishingly long and well-stocked magazine store, with the delicious sense that he had nothing at all to do before his first rehearsal tomorrow night. He could see the songs from the set list whole. Indeed, the first or second time he listened to a new song, he could see the entire thing in his mind; better yet, he could see the arc of his improvisations from beginning to end, too, just at the moment he launched into them – it wasn’t in any way planned, and, if not quite the opposite of, then at a very different angle from the majority of players, who had in mind new chord changes or bits of melody they’d been practicing when they began to solo. Unlike them, Hiroshi didn’t have any plans about where he wanted to go in his solos, but there was an absolute and pleasing inevitability once he’d gotten there.

As he flipped through a copy of Car and Driver, he saw out of the corner of his eye a pretty young woman, and surreptitiously looked over at her pleasing profile. The young woman turned and smiled directly at Hiroshi, which shocked him unutterably. In much less than a second, he realized it was Maureen, and he felt a different sort of shock.

Maureen was holding in one hand, its pages flopping loosely down, a copy of Hemming’s Auto News. Hiroshi was only able to read its title by looking down at the level where she was letting it dangle and got, in the process, a quick glimpse of her sleek legs. She didn’t look, Hiroshi thought, like the sort of young woman who’d be interested in cars. But then it occurred to him that he was standing in the automotive section, and that perhaps she had picked up a title at random in order to be close to him.

It was incumbent upon him to say something. He thought about slotting his magazine back into its correct position on the rack, but decided it would take too long and, if the magazine refused to slide in neatly, bore too much potential for humiliation. So he held on to it and said, “I was very impressed by your playing. You’ve put a lot of work into your craft.”

Hiroshi immediately felt foolish – this was now the third time he had complimented her – but she flushed to the roots of her red hair, smiled, and seemed pleased. Crazily, Hiroshi stuck out his hand to shake hers, and she was forced to quickly jam her magazine back into the rack to shake his in return.

He never shook hands in Japan, it just wasn’t done, but he’d felt in that instant that he had to do something. And indeed, as she took his light grip, he felt that what he had done was alright. Their hands moved up and down together. Hiroshi, minutely relieved, moved to withdraw the grip, but Maureen held on to it, would not let go, and gave Hiroshi a smile both skeptical and, he thought, flirtatious.

At this moment, at this very moment on an early spring evening in Manhattan, holding this young woman’s soft hand, Hiroshi experienced – within the space of perhaps a second-and-a-half after the up-and-down motion stopped and before the separation of hands had commenced – so many different emotions that he felt he might once again sway or stumble in the middle of the blindingly bright store:

More than anything else, he felt surprised, for although Japanese people didn’t customarily shake hands, he knew enough about how Americans did it to know that they didn’t customarily hold on.

He also felt puzzlement: What exactly did she mean by doing this?

And he felt a thrilling sense of anticipation, as if, at this moment, he were at the edge of a long, complicated tunnel that, once entered, would hurl him downwards through the interior of a cliff, emerging, about to fall, hundreds of feet above a sparkling sea.

He felt, for precisely the same reason that he felt this anticipation, fear.

He also felt embarrassment that people would see the two of them and assume something odd was going on – an embarrassment exacerbated by his foreignness and more specifically by his Japanese predilection for feeling embarrassed.

Beyond the embarrassment, he also felt shame, shame that she had somehow “caught” him, figured out (though it wasn’t exactly true) that he’d praised her only to intrigue her, “get” her.

And beyond the shame and embarrassment, or perhaps as an instantaneous and self-protective corrective to the shame and embarrassment, he felt pique – she had no right to catch him attempting to catch her, and thereby make something unnecessarily complicated out of simple praise.

And yet, more fundamentally than embarrassment and shame and fear and pique, he also felt sexual excitement, very nearly lust, due not only to her physical proximity and to her smooth hand inside of his, but also because she was so clearly willing to be caught.

And, yet again, another layer of shame, but now of a different sort – that his sexual desires were so easily manipulated.

These were some of the emotions he experienced, without being fully aware of them, in the first second or so that their hands lay warmly but motionlessly together. There were still others, occurring perhaps a half second later, as their hands parted, and which were stationed, emotionally, at a slightly more distant remove.

He felt self-righteousness, a sense (though he knew it was insincere) that he was merely a disinterested observer, and that the handshake she had held for an extra second was merely an interesting American phenomenon along the lines of a miniature set of pliers and screwdrivers.

There was, as well, a tinge of self-pity, a sense that once again, as had happened to him so often in the past, he was being misinterpreted. What was the big deal about just shaking someone’s hand?

Then there was a sense of calculation. How, he asked himself, do I get this pretty girl out of this overlit magazine store and into my bed at the Gramercy West Hotel?

But along with this calculation came a feeling of paralysis.

Which is to say, how indeed?

And self-doubt dwelt there as well – her expression was half-skeptical for a reason. Did she suspect that her playing wasn’t as good as he thought it was? And was she in fact right? Where was his taste? Did he suspend his judgment of her musical ability because she was sexy?

And along with this, a deeper reassessment, a disturbing flicker that came and went in an instant, that maybe he didn’t have the ability to teach music at all. Or to play it.

But above it all, transcending it all, wiping out all but the barest margins of the other emotions, there was pride. She likes me. She likes me!

And finally, though he wasn’t fully conscious of more than a few of these emotions (the actual count being sixteen) at the moment, and would have confidently asserted in other circumstances that such a large number couldn’t possibly be experienced by any human being, even below the level of consciousness, in the space of a second and a half (although, to be precise, some of them lingered in the next second or two after their hands finally drew apart), nonetheless, concerning the relative handful of emotions he did register at the moment their hands were clasped, and the few others he recollected in the few seconds after their hands parted, there arose a seventeenth emotion: a sense of wonderment that he could feel so many overlapping and partially contradictory emotions at once.

He was also aware (at least until he became aware of its non-presence) that none of his emotions or thoughts concerned his beautiful girlfriend back in Japan.

Outside of Hiroshi’s mind, in the middle of a magazine store in the middle of Manhattan, his hand and Maureen’s hand, which to an outside observer hadn’t been joined for a period of time so long as to appear in the least bit odd, slid gently apart. Hiroshi finished thinking about all of the things he was capable of thinking about as he smiled at Maureen and Maureen smiled back at him.

His hands still felt numb.

And then Hiroshi realized that, at the moment he had first held out his hand to Maureen, she had been forced to jam her magazine back into the rack – which made him feel a little guilty, now that he thought about it, though that wasn’t at all the point – the point being, she had been forced to jam her magazine back into the rack because her other hand had been gripping a small canvas shopping bag.

And yet (continuing this same thought) he had maintained his hold on his own magazine before, during, and after the handshake.

In short, one of his hands had been holding her hand, while the other hand had been holding the Car and Driver magazine.

So which of his hands – he had two, not three – was holding the case containing his one-of-a-kind $4,000 clarinet?

His smile faded, and he experienced an instantaneous eruption of acid in the base of his stomach, which flooded his mouth with the taste of rancid papaya and rotten pastrami, and which washed out every one of those seventeen interesting emotions his mind had been playing with.

“Oh my God.”

Maureen looked genuinely concerned and puzzled. Somewhere behind his panic, he liked that fact.

“What is it? What’s wrong, Mr. Mori?”

“Hiroshi. I think I lost my clarinet.”

“Did you go back to your hotel?”

“No, I came straight from the class to this shop.”

“Well, then, you must of left it at the class. Don’t worry about it. We’ll just walk back and get it.”

“No, because I remember having it with me at the hot dog store.”

“What hot dog store?”

“The one where I had my fruit drink.”

“When did you have this fruit drink?”

“Right after I left the class.”

“So you didn’t come straight here from the class.”

“No.”

“So, Hiroshi,” she said very slowly and carefully, “if you had it at the hot dog store – do you mean a restaurant, or a stand? – and you don’t have it here” – she quickly scanned the narrow store to make sure the clarinet case wasn’t lying in the middle of the floor – “then I think the thing to do is to find this place where you think you had your fruit drink and go back there and see if they have it.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Hiroshi said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, do you know either the name or the location of this particular establishment?” Hiroshi observed with some irritation that a note of condescension had begun to enter her voice, but he was too worried to care.

“I’m not sure, but I think I could lead you there. I just stopped there for a papaya drink.”

“Papaya? Papaya? Then I know exactly the place you’re talking about.” She whirled around and marched out of the store, her eagerness and alacrity instantly wiping out in Hiroshi’s mind the bad feelings he’d had about her momentary lapse into condescension.

They ran down the street together, and though he was beside himself with worry and panic and nausea, he couldn’t help feeling a certain sense of excitement that he was running down the street with the likes of her. And that she was running down the street to help him.

. . .

The little counterman at the little hot dog restaurant looked suitably sympathetic. “You left your clarinet here?”

“I think I probably did,” Hiroshi said. “Yes.”

“How much was it worth?”

Hiroshi was concerned with the past tense in the question, but Maureen quickly whirled around Hiroshi, interceded herself between him and the counterman, and asked, like his attorney, “Why would you want to know how much it’s worth? To sell it?”

The little counterman laughed. “Naw, just wondering. I like clarinets.”

“Do you play?” Hiroshi asked irrelevantly.

“No, but I listen to a lot of jazz.”

Hiroshi was impatient, but interested. “Like who?”

“Oh, Boney James, guys like that.”

Hiroshi had never heard of such a name. Maureen said, “Alright, listen, could you please check in the back to see if you have it.” It wasn’t a question.

The counterman said, addressing Hiroshi, “I do remember you bringing it in here. You ordered a hot dog and a papaya drink. You put the clarinet case on the counter next to your tray, drank your drink and left the hot dog without touching it.”

“I ordered a hot dog? I don’t remember that.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you did. Because I remember wondering if it was the first hot dog you’d ever tasted.”

“They are not so uncommon in Japan.”

“Anyway, I brought the tray and the hot dog behind the counter in case you came back. I still have it.”

Maureen was close to bursting. “You saved the hot dog? The sixty-nine-cent hot dog! What about his four-thousand-dollar clarinet? Why don’t you check behind the counter for a four-thousand-dollar clarinet and forget about a fucking hot dog!”

The counterman shrugged. “I figured he took it with him. Listen, this is a small place. I know the clarinet’s not here. Probably someone else picked it up off the counter while I was busy ringing up another customer. You wanna check? Be my guest. Come on back and look around.”

Maureen and Hiroshi did just that, scouring every corner of the little restaurant, looking in every clarinet-shaped and -sized cranny in the kitchen and behind the counter.

“Probably,” the counterman said as they searched, “you just got a little distracted because you just got here from Japan.”

“How did you know that?” Maureen demanded.

“Because he told me,” the counterman said. “We talked about all kinds of things. He probably just had bad jet lag. I mean, he was acting like he had bad jet lag. How can you get right off an airplane from Japan without any sleep and not be screwed up?”

Hiroshi had had plenty of sleep on the plane. During the thirteen-hour flight, he had read nine magazines – six in Japanese and three in English. He had flipped through a Colors of Bennetton book, had read the first twenty pages or so, in English, of John Le Carre’s novel The Honourable Schoolboy, had listened, on his portable CD player and only when the flight attendant had said he was authorized to do so, to Monteverdi, Moby, Haydn, the Hollies, Lambchop, Lester Young, Count Basie, Tim Buckley, and Clifford Brown, and had eaten, in addition to the regular airline meals, a small bag of wasabi peanuts, drunk two small bottles of bourbon on the rocks, and consumed half a bottle of pickled ginger to combat airsickness, which he had never in his life actually experienced. And he had slept.

Now he felt not particularly tired at all. Depressed and elated. Panicked and relaxed. Hungry and overstuffed. But not tired. He looked at the tray containing his uneaten hot dog – which he still had no memory of ordering – and contemplated taking it with him back onto the street, since it was the only object belonging to him he was likely to find in this little place. Then he started to worry about mad cow disease, and the hot dog was again forgotten.

Hiroshi offered to accompany Maureen back to the subway and from there, perhaps, though this part of the offer was unverbalized, to her apartment in Chelsea. It felt very strange. In Japan, it was mostly the women who did the asking. Nonetheless, she assented readily, at least to the spoken, subway part of the offer, though no matter where they ended up parting, Hiroshi told himself, all he wanted was a distraction from his expensive and painful loss.

The early evening was soft and warm. They walked to the subway in silence. Hiroshi, after a moment, said, “Shall we go to the police”?

“Sure, but we might as well wait until tomorrow. You have insurance, right?”

Hiroshi, distracted for a moment by her use of the word “we,” didn’t answer, causing her, in turn, to look at him with alarm. Then he said, “yes, of course. I have insurance on everything.”

“Good. Because you’ll need a police report to file your claim. They’re not actually going to look for the clarinet itself, you know. Don’t you?”

Hiroshi didn’t answer. Maureen said, “Are you upset?”

“I guess I’m upset. Sure. I brought another clarinet with me, a regular Regent for performing, and I’ve got plenty of reeds, but this clarinet was really special, not just because of the cost, either. But at the same time, I’m happy to be in New York and happy . . .”

Maureen suddenly grabbed him around the waist and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Hey, Hiroshi. It isn’t that complicated. Okay?” She looked at him steadily.

Hiroshi felt himself getting another erection. He hoped it wouldn’t collide with one of those loose screwdrivers on the way up. At just that moment, Maureen said, “Oh my God, you really did a number on your pants!”

Hiroshi looked down at his pants in a panic and discovered a little mustard stain on his crotch, right at about the point his erection had just been, but no longer was. But it was such a small and unassuming stain it was hard to see how she could have noticed it. He laughed nervously and a bit wretchedly.

“Listen,” Maureen said, “it’s been a long day for you.”

“Can I accompany you to your apartment?”

“I wouldn’t want you falling asleep on me,” she said. They walked the last few steps to the subway and she turned, brushing her breast – accidentally? – against the side of his arm. She murmured, “good night,” smiled back at him, and disappeared.

Hiroshi wandered away in a daze. What did she mean, he wondered, by saying she wouldn’t want him to fall asleep on her? Did she mean physically on top of her, while they were making love? He would never fall asleep under such circumstances, no matter how tired he was. Or did “on,” in this case, merely mean “while in the company of, and therefore responsible for?”

Hiroshi pondered this for a while as he walked slowly back in the direction of his hotel, though he wasn’t entirely sure he was walking in the right direction. He’d have to hail a taxi eventually. Then, without resolving the question, he turned his attention to her earlier, equally enigmatic statement, “it isn’t that complicated, okay?” He was just beginning to sort out its implications when he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirrored display in the darkened window of a lingerie store.

There was a huge, irregular brown blotch staining his right pants pocket, the stain, Hiroshi realized with unendurable horror, that Maureen must have been referring to in her comment about his pants.

Gingerly, Hiroshi flexed the fingers on his right hand and slid them into the blockaded pocket, encountering something unacceptably sticky, along with a sharp corner of cardboard. He watched himself in the mirror as he performed this operation, unable as yet to look directly down at the mess. Amid the shadowy fashions, the advertising-placard image of a beautiful young woman wearing a feathery white bra observed him coolly.

He turned away from the window and looked down. He slowly extricated the lump that the paper was wrapped around and actually had to hold the mess under a street lamp to realize that it was the Cherry Whip, melted beyond recognition.

Hiroshi peeled the wrapper back and stuck one of his few as yet unchocolated fingers into the chocolate-and-cherry mess. A stray Weimaranerish dog trotted past and looked up at Hiroshi with interest; Hiroshi, looking back at the dog, accidentally let the lump of candy slip from his fingers, whereupon it fell with a silent definitive plop onto one of his white sneakers, staining it as well.

The dog moved on. Now, a solitary businessman moved past the streetlight and regarded Hiroshi with brief curiosity before also moving on. Perhaps he was following the dog home. Hiroshi stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the sidewalk, next to a traffic-signal control box. It felt like the spot where he had said good-bye to Maureen, though he was now many blocks away. There was very little traffic and no free taxis; he had no idea what the name of the street was. He couldn’t move. He really, genuinely, could not move. He considered, but instantly rejected, the possibility that his speculation earlier in the day about a neurological illness had been correct.

He really felt perfectly fine. He was just tired. And his feet, oddly, felt as numb now as his hands had earlier. The traffic signal in the middle of the intersection bathed him in a butterscotchy yellow and then, after some deliberation and a chunka-chunka noise from the signal control box, flooded him with red.

He missed his clarinet, though he felt at the same time a certain amount of guilty curiosity that he didn’t miss it more, and that he wasn’t terribly upset by its evident theft. He missed the hot dog a little bit, too. And he already missed Maureen.

A group of rowdy, tough-looking teenagers approached. Hiroshi contemplated the effectiveness, if necessary, of stabbing one of them in the thigh with a miniature screwdriver. But they passed without seeming to see him.

A powerful wave of fatigue washed over his body. He raised his right hand to his lips and slowly licked the chocolate from one finger. It was so sweet that, for a moment, he felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath. It was rather unpleasant in that regard, but also, with its overwhelming artificial cherry flavor, it represented something interesting and new to taste.

He licked the rest of his fingers clean with his warm tongue, thinking, for the moment, of nothing else.

and receive 15% discount on both