The Pearl Diver Read Online Free PDF Page B

She was model-quality beautiful—even in a chic, shrunken hooded sweater and low-slung yoga pants that revealed a navel pierced with a shining black stone. I sucked in my own abdomen and examined her again. Something had to be wrong with her or I wouldn’t sleep at night. Now I decided that her short, blond, kinky hair could not possibly be natural.
    “It’s okay,” Andrea answered grumpily. “Actually, you’ll be saving me work if I don’t have to hunt for those bento boxes anymore.”
    “What is your official title within the restaurant?” I wondered if she was some kind of sous-chef—or merely the waitress from hell.
    “I used to be a hostess at Mandala, and I’m going to do the same job here. I organize people, not chairs. Did he tell you that we had an interior designer who did a lot of buying and choosing at the start of the project? No? Well, that girl quit after she got in a fight with Marshall about her fees.”
    Andrea took me down a set of creaky, dusty stairs to the restaurant’s basement, where more of the furniture lay waiting, mostly chairs and tables, all the same style as I’d seen before. There was also a folder with a blueprint of the dining room and the hallway leading to the rest rooms, and a furniture-placement diagram.
    “I don’t suppose you could show me any other accent pieces you have?”
    “Well, we’ve got forks, knives, that kind of thing. There’s the maître d’s station table up there already, and the bar—did you see it?”
    I hadn’t noticed it, so I picked up the folder and went upstairs again to look. Two more potential chefs and a dishwasher had arrived, so while Andrea took them back to the kitchen for theirinterviews with Marshall and Jiro, I wandered the room by myself, trying to piece it together. The things they’d chosen were all quite beautiful—hand-painted silk Roman shades for the windows, the plum wall color, and the light greeny-yellow sea grass covering for the top half of the walls. These weren’t typical colors of modern Japan, but they could fit in well with late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century design. The rest rooms were boring, I thought, after I walked into both men’s and ladies’. In my mind I was already papering the walls with the legendary arts-and-crafts textile designer Candace Wheeler’s carp-patterned wallpaper. As I did so, another idea followed: stalls made of reclaimed wood from old storehouse doors, several of which Mr. Ishida had sent to our downtown warehouse.
    The toilets were roughed in, I could see, as were the plumbing lines for the sinks. The fixtures hadn’t been installed yet, which made me think of some slightly flawed, but handsome, tansu chests that could be transformed into vanities. Blue-and-white porcelain Imari bowls dropped in their centers would serve as sinks. I also had several antique blue-and-white china urinals that could come into play as planters, or toiletry holders. The rest rooms could be amazing.
    I emerged from the lavatories to consult with Andrea, who was grumbling into a cell phone to somebody.
    “What now?” she asked after she’d finally hung up.
    What a sourpuss, I thought to myself, and asked how much of the bathroom furnishings had been purchased.
    “Just what you see. The interior designer didn’t get around to sinks, and Marshall was supposed to order them but I’m sure he forgot.”
    Great, I thought to myself.
    I spent three hours in Bento, wandering around and dreaming. The job wouldn’t be insurmountable. Spending thirty-five days polishing up the restaurant was something I thought I could do. This would be a good way to get me out of the apartment and the sense that everything in my life was standing still.
    At five, I peered into the kitchen, where Marshall was chatting, rapid-fire, in Spanish with one of the cooks, and told him I was leaving.
    “I’ll see you tomorrow, nineish,” Marshall said.
    “Uh, afternoon would be better. I’ll probably have to work through