"Are you enjoying yourself so far?"
"Fuck no. I'm jittery as hell," I answered Tom, who was leaning into me with a tray of something I couldn't identify and wasn't sure even was cooked. All of this foreign crap was just too much for me. I was out of place and I'm afraid I had just fucked up. "There are Japs to the left of me and Japs to the right, and they all came in their robes."
Thomas laughed. "I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to be referring to them as Japs anymore. I think they're interesting, Jack. Like that young one over there. He's been looking at you and giving a little shy smile since they got here. Dipping his head. You know what dipping his head means, don't you, Jack?"
"Yes, I know what it meansâat least I know what is means here and in our circles. I'm not so sure what it means in Tokyo. I'm not interested. He's different and Japanese. Just too different in a robe like that. I think I'd laugh through it all. It would be like unwrapping a Christmas present. And too young anyway. But, what? You're jealous?"
"No, should I be?" Thomas answered. The way he said it told Jack that he was, in fact, a little concerned.
"I didn't ask to be here," I said. "Frank wanted me to be here because he's trying to sell us to the Japsâexcuse me, Japaneseâhe's entertaining. But it backfired that he made me come. That one he had me talk toâHayashi something or otherâwanted to talk theory, and I just make the glass, I don't pray to it. I came across as a country bumpkin."
"No, you didn't mess that up," Tom countered. "He was very attentive to you. You came across as someone who knew exactly how to get it done. He's got a hotel to put back together, not a theory to run after. If anything, I think you helped show that what Frank has to offer is grounded, not just pie in the sky. And you know how too many critics see Frank's designsâas pie in the sky."
"Are you trying to make me?" I asked with a smile, "what with the flattery and all."
"I'm always trying that, Jack. You know you only have to look my way."
"Are you stuck serving the crap on this tray all evening?"
"I can get away for a while, if you want me to."
* * * *
"We're being watched."
I turned Tom a bit to where I could see up the dimly lit corridor leading from the drafting studio at Taliesin back to the main house, where Frank Lloyd Wright was entertaining Aisaku Hayashi, manager of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo; his wife; and Japanese architect Tori Yoshitake. It was unseasonably warm that February of 1916 and it was the first entertaining Frank was doing at his reconstructed complex in southern Wisconsin, near Madison, since the fire there two years earlier during which his mistress, Mamah Borthwick, and her children had been murdered by a disgruntled employee, who then burned the main house down. Frank said he had to entertain the Japanese because he'd been trying to get the commission to renovate and add to Tokyo's premier Imperial Hotel since 1911.
I'd been among those Frank said had to come to the party, not because I was presentable in fancy society, which I wasn't, but because I was his chief stained-glass artist, and Frank wanted the key artisans who would be working on the Tokyo project to be there to convince the Japanese to hire us. Frank was nearly out of moneyâhe always was nearly out of moneyâand said he needed this job. I wasn't one of his pansy artistsâI thought of myself more as the guy who made reality out of someone else's design. I'd come to the stained-glass specialty the rough wayâas a welder and glass blowerâbut Frank and his assistants did the designs themselves, so I only had to do the hot-lead part of the work. I could design as well, but I wasn't up to Frank's standards on that.
What I did design and render in glass beyond what Frank paid me to was glass dildos. I made special ones and was known for doing so. It helped me in getting the men I wanted. Of course, Frank and his designers didn't have an inkling that I made those.
Frank had said to be nice to the visitors. I'd been more interested in being nice to Thomas Aikens, one of the new brick-layer hires, who was serving refreshments at the party.
There was a young Japanese guy among the visitors I'd been exchanging looks with. I don't know why I kept looking at him. I'd told Tom I wasn't interested in the young Jap, but that was a lie. I was attracted to him despite not wanting to be. I told myself I wasn't attracted to the Japanese visitors at all; that they put me off. They were too foreign, too different looking, too stiff. Just too different. I was just a regular guy. An American. I wasn't all that interested in Frank's Japanese project. But I needed the job and I needed to be working on Frank's designs. I couldn't get that feeling of being part of something important and long-lasting from anyone but Frank.
But as much as I was put off by the Japanese visitors, I kept looking back at that young one and wondering. Maybe if he didn't give those signals of submission and I wasn't so horny tonight. But I was on shaky ground hereâwere those really signals of interest for a Jap? I had no trouble figuring out interest from my own kind. I didn't need this shit.
I usually kept my business away from the main house and stuck with guys closer to my age. Thomas was twenty-six to my thirty-one, but the Japanese guy couldn't be more than twenty-two. I didn't need this confusing shit. But he looked so exotic and sexy in that kimono or whatever Japanese robe he was wearingâall of the Japanese visitors had come dressed that wayâthat I was turned on. That didn't set well with me, though. I didn't have any interest in anything exotic like a young Japanese guy in a robeâor so I told myself.
At the same time, though, I was thinking about unwrapping the guy's robe. I needed to stop thinking of what he was like under that robeâwhat he wore under the robe and how easy it would be to take off. Would his body be small and slender, as berry-brown as he appeared to be, exotic? Would his cock be small or long? Would he sigh for me when I fingered his hole? Would his hole take me? Would he screech in some guttural language or moan as I fucked him?
I had plenty of guys around me who were just rough workmen, like me, and could take a good fuck. I didn't need to go chasing any different tail. He probably wasn't even intentionally signaling to me.
His name was Yukio Takamoto and he apparently was some royal Japanese something or other and had spent the fall studying architecture at the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison. Hayashi had brought him along to meet Frank because Takamoto could help in getting the royals to support the hotel redesign. But he'd done as much looking at me as I'd done at him, and, unless signals were different in Japan from here, I could tell that he wanted itâand from me. I wasn't all that sure that that was what Frank meant about being nice to the visitors, though. And who the hell knew if signals were the same on both sides of the ocean? Maybe the signaling was flip-flopped over on the wrong side of the world.