Birthday Girl Page 2

  “I have to wish for something, and it will be granted?”

  Instead of answering her question, the old man–hands still side-by-side on the desk–just smiled. He did it in the most natural and amiable way.

  “Do you have a wish, miss–or not?” he asked gently.

  “This really did happen,” she said, looking straight at me. “I’m not making it up.”

  “Of course not,” I said. She was not the sort of person to invent some goofy story out of thin air. “So … did you make a wish?”

  She went on looking at me for a while, then released a tiny sigh. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I wasn’t taking him 100 percent seriously myself. I mean, at twenty you’re not exactly living in a fairy-tale world anymore. If this was his idea of a joke, though, I had to hand it to him for coming up with it on the spot.

  He was a dapper old fellow with a twinkle in his eye, so I decided to play along with him. It was my twentieth birthday, after all: I figured I ought to have something not so ordinary happen to me that day. It wasn’t a question of believing or not believing.”

  I nodded without saying anything.

  “You can understand how I felt, I’m sure. My twentieth birthday was coming to an end with nothing special happening, nobody wishing me a happy birthday, and all I’m doing is carrying tortellini with anchovy sauce to people’s tables.”

  I nodded again. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand.”

  “So I made a wish.”

  The old man kept his gaze fixed on her, saying nothing, hands still on the desk. Also on the desk were several thick folders that might have been account books, plus writing implements, a calendar, and a lamp with a green shade. Lying among them, his small hands looked like another set of desktop furnishings.

  The rain continued to beat against the glass, the lights of Tokyo Tower filtering through the shattered drops.

  The wrinkles on the old man’s forehead deepened slightly. “That is your wish?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That is my wish.”

  “A bit unusual for a girl your age,” he said. “I was expecting something different.”

  “If it’s no good, I’ll wish for something else,” she said, clearing her throat. “I don’t mind. I’ll think of something else.”

  “No no,” the old man said, raising his hands and waving them like flags. “There’s nothing wrong with it, not at all. It’s just a little surprising, miss. Don’t you have something else? Like, say, you want to be prettier, or smarter, or rich? You’re okay with not wishing for something like that–something an ordinary girl would ask for?”

  She took some moments to search for the right words. The old man just waited, saying nothing, his hands at rest together on the desk again.

  “Of course I’d like to be prettier or smarter or rich. But I really can’t imagine what would happen to me if any of those things came true. They might be more than I could handle. I still don’t really know what life is all about. I don’t know how it works.”

  “I see,” the old man said, intertwining his fingers and separating them again. “I see.”

  “So, is my wish okay?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. It’s no trouble at all for me.”

  The old man suddenly fixed his eyes on a spot in the air. The wrinkles of his forehead deepened: they might have been the wrinkles of his brain itself as it concentrated on his thoughts. He seemed to be staring at something–perhaps all-but-invisible bits of down–floating in the air. He opened his arms wide, lifted himself slightly from his chair, and whipped his palms together with a dry smack. Settling in the chair again, he slowly ran his fingertips along the wrinkles of his brow as if to soften them, and then turned to her with a gentle smile.

  “That did it,” he said. “Your wish has been granted.”

  “Already?”

  “Yes, it was no trouble at all. Your wish has been granted, lovely miss. Happy birthday. You may go back to work now. Don’t worry, I’ll put the cart in the hall.”

  She took the elevator down to the restaurant. Empty-handed now, she felt almost disturbingly light, as though she were walking on some kind of mysterious fluff.

  “Are you okay? You look spaced out,” the younger waiter said to her.

  She gave him an ambiguous smile and shook her head. “Oh, really? No, I’m fine.”

  “Tell me about the owner. What’s he like?”

  “I dunno, I didn’t get a very good look at him,” she said, cutting the conversation short.

  An hour later she went to bring the cart down. It was out in the hall, utensils in place. She lifted the lid to find the chicken and vegetables gone. The wine bottle and coffee carafe were empty. The door to room 604 stood there closed and expressionless. She stared at it for a time, feeling as though it might open at any moment, but it did not open. She brought the cart down on the elevator and wheeled it in to the dishwasher. The chef looked at the plate, empty as always, and nodded blankly.

  “I never saw the owner again,” she said. “Not once. The manager turned out to have had just an ordinary stomachache and went back to delivering the owner’s meal again himself the next day. I quit the job after New Year’s, and I’ve never been back to the place. I don’t know, I just felt it was better not to go near there, kind of like a premonition.”

  She toyed with a paper coaster, thinking her own thoughts. “Sometimes I get the feeling that everything that happened to me on my twentieth birthday was some kind of illusion. It’s as though something happened to make me think that things happened that never really happened. But I know for sure that they did happen. I can still bring back vivid images of every piece of furniture and every knickknack in room 604. What happened to me in there really happened, and it had an important meaning for me too.”

  The two of us kept silent for a time, drinking our drinks and thinking our separate thoughts.

  “Do you mind if I ask you one thing?” I asked. “Or, more precisely, two things.”

  “Go right ahead,” she said. “I imagine you’re going to ask me what I wished for that time. That’s the first thing you’ll want to know.”

  “But it looks as though you don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Does it?”

  I nodded.

  She put the coaster down and narrowed her eyes as though staring at something off in the distance.

  “You’re not supposed to tell anybody what you wished for, you know.”

  “I’m not going to try to drag it out of you,” I said. “I would like to know whether or not it came true, though. And also–whatever the wish itself might have been–whether or not you later came to regret what it was you chose to wish for. Were you ever sorry you didn’t wish for something else?”

  “The answer to the first question is yes and also no. I still have a lot of living left to do, probably. I haven’t seen how things are going to work out to the end.”

  “So it was a wish that takes time to come true?”

  “You could say that. Time is going to play an important role.”

  “Like in cooking certain dishes?”

  She nodded.

  I thought about that for a moment, but the only thing that came to mind was the image of a gigantic pie cooking slowly in an oven at low heat.

  “And the answer to my second question?”

  “What was that again?”

  “Whether you ever regretted having chosen what you wished for.”

  A few moments of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The desiccated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, giving me a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

  “I’m married now,” she said. “To a CPA three years older than me. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi, and I play tennis with my girlfriends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

  “Even if the Audi
’s bumper has two dents?”

  “Hey, bumpers are made for denting.”

  “That could be a great bumper sticker,” she said. “‘Bumpers are for denting.'”

  I looked at her mouth when she said that.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is this,” she said more softly, scratching an earlobe. It was a beautifully shaped earlobe. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”

  “There’s another good bumper sticker,” I said. “‘No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.'”

  She laughed aloud, with a real show of pleasure, and the shadow was gone.

  She rested her elbow on the bar and looked at me. “Tell me,” she said. “What would you have wished for if you had been in my position?”

  “On the night of my twentieth birthday, you mean?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come up with a single wish.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I confessed. “I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.”

  “You really can’t think of anything?”

  I nodded.

  “Not one thing?”

  “Not one thing.”

  She looked into my eyes again–straight in–and said, “That’s because you’ve already made your wish.”

  -END-

  COPYRIGHT 2003 Harper’s Magazine Foundation in association with The Gale Group and LookSmart.

  COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group