The Heat of the Sun

seen him he was over forty, but even then he remained in essence a callow boy.
    Now, at last, Ben Pinkerton was a man.
    I wondered if he regretted anything and was not sure he did. Life had been difficult for him during the years of the occupation. At all costs he could not be identified as Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton II. Lying low, he had kept out of sight of the Americans. He had changed his name and carried forged papers; to this day he was known in Nagasaki as Mr Glover.
    ‘Hey, Sharpless, remember this?’ Trouble said suddenly, leaping up like a man much younger. In a corner of the room stood an old-fashioned phonograph with a frilly, yawning horn,
like the one the fellows at Blaze had smashed years before. He wound it up, let the needle drop – and the years fell away; it was 1914, and there I was, hearing that intemperate bellowing
voice, rising startled from my dorm-room bed, moving down a line of curtained cubicles to meet a boy with the most extraordinary eyes I had ever seen.
    A lifetime later, I looked into those eyes and wondered if I would weep – cast myself down and weep helplessly, abandoned to all dignity and shame. Some of these days – oh,
you’ll miss me, honey , sang Sophie Tucker. Good old Sophie Tucker! She had been right about everything.
    When tea was over Isamu retired to rest, and Trouble and I took a turn about the garden. He praised Isamu’s gardening skills, and I was keen in my admiration; I kept my voice light, but
something was slipping inside me, ready to fall. Was there a lesson I must learn, too late? Trouble asked me about my books. One of them had won the Pulitzer and he said he had better read it; I
doubted that he would. I told him about the PEN delegation and he murmured interest politely. We talked about Aunt Toolie, and the theatre company she still ran in Carmel – though by now she
was well over ninety; we talked about Le Vol and his recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Trouble urged me to give them his best wishes. I said I would, and, of course, I would not. I
would never tell them he was still alive. He would be my secret, locked inside my heart.
    Sorrow filled me and I gazed at Trouble. I felt as if a wall had descended between us. Then I knew: Trouble was Trouble, and I was Woodley Sharpless. Hemispheres divided us and always had.
    We stood at the foot of the garden, looking down to the harbour where the Abraham Lincoln had docked so long ago. A lifetime later, the ships still came, drawn as if by strange
enchantments from the many corners of the world. I raised my eyes to the blue, distant hills that hovered above the city and its busy waterfront. I said to Trouble, ‘Do you think Nirvana
might be a place like this – the perfect lookout?’
    He said, ‘I think Nirvana’s got no lookout at all.’
    ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said, and turned away.
    We were walking back up the garden when Trouble asked me, ‘You were there when the senator died, weren’t you?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘And Mama,’ he said. ‘Poor Mama. I didn’t let her see me in San Diego. I’ve regretted that. I believed we’d meet again. I thought she’d always be
there.’
    ‘She loved you,’ I said. ‘They both loved you.’
    Trouble ran a hand through a spray of blossoms. ‘I remembered too much. That was my problem all along, wasn’t it? For years I had an image of a face that loomed in front of me, eyes
wide and tearful. More has come back since. Even now. This house. This garden.’ He gestured around him, as if a frail Japanese woman might linger nearby, a ghost among the trees. ‘The
wind blows, and she whispers in my ear. Sometimes she plays the samisen or we peer together through holes in a shoji screen. I remember once, perhaps the night before she died, she made me stay by
her all night until dawn, waiting for my father to come. We waited and waited. And then he came. In the end, he came.’
    Lightly, I touched Trouble’s sleeve; it was the first time I had touched him that afternoon. I smiled and said it was time I was going. My cab was waiting.
    He said, ‘There’s an expression here in Japan: Shikata ga nai .’
    ‘I’ve heard it,’ I said. ‘It can’t be helped. Too bad.’
    ‘It was all bound to happen. Somehow or other, it was all bound to happen.’
    ‘You’ll thank Isamu for me, won’t you?’ I said.
    ‘He’d rather be thanking you. He’s always been grateful to you, Sharpless. If there’s a hero of this