Chapter 15

Akemi’s husband Mitchell had taken time off from work, trying for a different career but finding nothing he was good at, came back, now disoriented in the place he knew so well. Old friends greeted him like statues in a museum come to life, one in the hallway he’d entered to get something he needed for a class he was preparing, his first since his return.

“Do you recognize me?” Broad-faced with freckles, strong bones, from the Midwest, roughing it in New York, trying a new life. Eileen faced him directly, her face flat, appealing in the cool light. He liked her directness, frankness., the way she frowned.

“Of course,” he said. “You haven’t changed. We’ve known each other, what, ten years?”

Eileen frowned on cue. “What bothers me is this ‘Giving Tuesday’ they’re insisting on.” The administration had encouraged faculty to join the spirit of the nationwide celebration of generosity and donate to a fund. Eileen resented the intrusion.

“I’m not Christian,” she explained to Mitchell.

“Well, maybe think of it as just giving, irrespective of religion.”

Mitchell tried to be constructive but saw that Eileen wasn’t going to budge, that as usual people at work had something to gripe; the place would never change.

He said, “What I have to do is figure out how to get class materials to students’ phones directly, to make it a paperless class. That’ll also spare me the trouble of making copies of handouts, class sets for everyone- a real nuisance waiting for the copy machine.” Which trouble alone, that and the overwhelming entrenched negativism of the workplace atmosphere, had driven Mitchell to look for employment elsewhere. The effort having failed, he was now back. Thank god, he thought to himself, he had Akemi at home to make life fresh. He never felt empty outside the job.

He didn’t share this thought with his coworker Eileen, instead talked more about his class preparation plans. He’d decided to open up the question of phone use for discussion, get the students’ input on the best way to get his files to them, include the class in the planning. They’d like that. It was part of the ju-jitsu of his profession, a phrase he had learned from Akemi.

He knew other men hankered for her and laughed off their interest. He knew Akemi was strong-willed and savvy enough to bypass overtures. He hadn’t known one of the men would be an immigration cop operating outside the law, intent on using his authority to bypass her will and impose his own.