Audrey Hepburns Neck

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter One:

According to its brochure, the Very Romantic English Academy occupies the third and fourth floors of the Hysteric Glamour Building, upstairs from My Charming Home interior furnishings, a Häagen-Dazs ice cream parlor, and the Cherry Blossom Discount Camera Center, and is only a seven-minute walk up Dogenzaka Hill from Tokyo's Shibuya Station, where the Ginza, Hanzamon, Inokashira, Toyoko, Shin-Tamagawa, and Yamanote train lines all converge on top of a Tokyu Department Store, two soba stands, the Love Bun German bakery and coffee bar, and a branch of Williams-Sonoma.

Twice each week, Toshi hurries up Dogenzaka Hill, checks his Swatch watch in the lobby: six minutes. He never misses Jane Borden's Intermediate English Conversation class. He raises his hand and asks and answers more questions, and in better English, than anyone else except for the Ishikawa sisters, who lived for three years in Hawaii where their father owns a papaya plantation.

"Jane Borden. Borden, like the ice cream, like the cow, like Lizzie who chopped up her father with an ax," she tells her bewildered students on the first day of class. She throws open all the windows, as if she is freeing caged birds, and they can hear ten thousand angry rice farmers chanting at a rally in front of Shibuya Station: "No American rice. No American rice. Keep the market closed. No American rice."

"I want you to forget that you're in school when you're in this room with me," she says, rearranging their chairs so that they circle her like planets around the sun. She perches on the edge of her desk and she beams. She drinks coffee from a huge white mug with her own initials painted on it. She writes her name on the blackboard in English and then again in phonetic Japanese.

"Jane Borden. I'm thirty years old. I come from New York City in New York State in the United States of America," she tells them proudly, as if these are things she has achieved rather than accidents of fate. "No, I'm not married. You can call me Jane. We don't have to be formal in here. I want you to think of me as someone you can talk to about anything. I'm always available. I'm here for you."

Toshi is sure she is looking at him when she writes her home phone number on the blackboard, each successive numeral larger and loopier than the one before.

She is as slender as a Japanese girl, but she moves constantly and talks too quickly. She wears red tights and red cowboy boots and antique silk sarongs from Thailand, she tells them, which she drapes around her neck like voluminous scarves. Jewelry: Hoops and pendulums, sharp daggers, pots and pans, and cloisonné tigers dangle from her salmon-colored ears; bead and bone and silver necklaces from Sri Lanka hang down between her breasts. Jade and feather fetishes flutter in the breeze that always seems to accompany her even when the windows are closed.

"Language is communication, it is social intercourse," she says, prancing around the classroom.

"You're standing in front of Courbet's Woman with a Parrot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and you see a beautiful woman all alone." She pauses in front of Toshi's desk and stares at him. "Your eyes meet. Your heart beats fast. Your palms sweat. She waits for you to speak. What do you say to her?"

The class is silent, waiting. Toshi's heart beats fast. New York. Courbet. His palms sweat. Jane brushes her dark hair out of her seaweed green eyes. She reaches out her hand to him, and her bracelets spin, rings from Bali and Katmandu on every finger.

"It is nice to meet you," Toshi says, but the words come out stilted, badly inflected. Someone giggles. Is this American-style education? He is confused and seduced. The next week he wears his tightest jeans to class. When the weather turns warm, he wears his gym shorts. He smiles and nods his head constantly when Jane speaks.

Toshi is fascinated by American women.

Two days before his twenty-third birthday, she stops him in the hallway. Classroom doors open and shut, flutter like eyelids.

"I was impressed with the talk you gave today about your job. You expressed some very deep feelings."

"Thank you," Toshi says, backing away slightly. Jane always encourages them to express "deep feelings," but no one in the class, except for the Ishikawa sisters, seems to know what they are or how to express them.

"Comic books are such an important art form in Japan. You must be a very talented artist."

"Yes," he says, then, too late, realizes his mistake. He should have said no. He is mesmerized by Jane, she makes him thirsty when she smiles.

He recovers. "I work for another manga artist. I only draw what he tells me."

"Still, it's special. I'd love to see some of your drawings." She moves in closer. In her boots, she's as tall as he is. "You know, I'm not just an English teacher. I'm an artist, too. An actress."

"Really? In movies?"

She laughs, and her red lips part to reveal small, even, white teeth, then beyond, wonderful darkness. "No. On the stage. The theater. You know?"

He nods, too nervous to speak. Is she famous in America?

"I have this script, in Japanese, that a director gave me, and I need help translating it. If you're interested, I'd pay you. It could be fun."

"Yes. Fun," he says, but he isn't sure in response to what. Her words dart past him like startled birds. Around them, the buzz and whirl subside as students move on to their next classes and the hall empties. Then they are alone. Can she see that he is shaking? American women still do this to him.

"So, do you have plans for your birthday?" she asks, and he is so astonished to see her turn red with embarrassment that he feels himself blush too.

"No plans." He scrambles for something else to say, but all that comes to mind are learned phrases: America is a wide country. Japan has four seasons. Do you take traveler's checks? He wants desperately to impress her, but she isn't giving him time to put his words in order.

"Well, why don't I take you out to dinner and we can talk about the script?"

Now he thinks of something to say. "How did you know it was my birthday?"

"I looked up your records in the office. You were born in the Year of the Monkey, right?"

"Yes! The monkey! Yes." He relaxes. At last, something he knows. Monkey. He once saw monkeys at a hot spring resort in the snowy mountains of Hokkaido. The monkeys came down and bathed in the pools.

DON'T LOOK IN THEIR EYES OR THEY WILL ATTACK YOU the posted signs warned.

"I was born in the Year of the Tiger," Jane says. "We should work well together. You know: the monkey riding on the tiger's back."

Before he can reply, she turns and walks into the classroom, and shuts the door behind her.

Toshi is out of breath. He staggers like a drunken salary man on a midnight commuter train out of Tokyo Station. This is what he likes best yet dreads most about American women: You can never tell, even with the ones you think you know, what they're going to do next.

Copyright © 1996 by Alan Brown