I put off phoning Antonio as long as I could bear to:  a whole week.  At first, I feared that he might not remember me, but he did.

‘Maria. The American girl whose skirt was open in front of the Join Us Building.’

‘Well – yes.’  Jesus, of all the things for him to remember.

He suggested that we get together a few days later, on Friday night. Would I mind coming up to Tokyo?

As it happened, I’d already made arrangements to go out to with Carol and Mark on Friday night, so I told Antonio I’d call him back.  When I told Carol about Antonio, she insisted that I invite him along:  ‘We’ll check him out for you, Mary – see if we think he’s worthy of you.’

But on Friday evening, the closer it got to our actual meeting time of 7:00, the more nervous I began to feel. What if he wasn’t as nice as I remembered him? What if Carol and Mark really didn’t like him?  Or if he didn’t like them? What if he decided he didn’t really like me? 

Over dinner at an Indian restaurant, I told Carol and Mark how anxious I felt about meeting Antonio again. They had already noticed that I was nervous: I had just finished shredding all of our paper napkins into a neat little pile.

Carol reassured me. ‘Come on, Mary, it’ll be fine. You’ve been on dates before, after all.’

So I had. But my last date seemed like eons ago.

Mark agreed.  ‘And it’s a great opportunity for us to meet him and have a little talk with him to find out what his intentions are.’

‘Oh Mark!’ said Carol.

He held up his hands. ‘Just kidding! But seriously, I’ll try and sneak a look at his passport to see if there’s any mention of a wife in it.’

‘Mark!’ said Carol again.

‘Or how many kids he has – that’d be useful to know! They list them on your passport, you know.  I’ll distract him, Carol, and you just slip his passport out of his pocket and check.’

‘Mark!’ Carol and I both yelled together. But his teasing made me forget just how nervous I was – a little.

We were going to a nightclub in Akasakamitsuke, not far from Roppongi. Carol and Mark weren’t nightclub people any more than I was, but they had a good friend who had told them about this one, and they wanted to see what it was like. Tonight there was to be some sort of singing competition, so there was a special deal: three people could enter for the price of two. Carol said that they didn’t really go out much, so this was a good excuse for them to do so. I privately thought that however little they went out, it was bound to be more than I did with my almost monastic existence. But perhaps that was all about to change; I hoped it was.

Antonio and I had arranged to meet in front of the Almond Plaza Coffee shop in Roppongi, not far from the Indian restaurant where we’d had dinner that evening. The Almond Plaza was a traditional meeting place, a trendy little coffee shop with pink and white awning, one of those places that everybody in Tokyo knew.  When we got there it was only five minutes till seven, but there were dozens of people waiting there,  taking anxious peeks at their watches, scanning the crowds for that one face they were hoping to see.

My eyes flickered anxiously from face to face. Antonio wasn’t there yet.  Of course, it wasn’t quite 7:00 and yet I was still panicking that he wouldn’t show up. How awful if he really didn’t: my disappointment and humiliation at being stood up would be all the greater in front of my two friends.

I smoothed my freshly washed hair and adjusted my bra straps under the shoulders of my short-sleeved cotton dress for perhaps the fifteenth time in the past hour. If he didn’t show up, I would be furious:  I’d even worn high heels!

‘Do I look okay in this dress, Carol?  Do you think the flowers on it are too big?’ Even as I asked this, I realized it was a stupid question. It wasn’t as though I could change it now.

‘You look as good in it as you did twenty minutes ago when you last asked me that question.’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry!’

‘Don’t worry, Mary – he’ll be here!’

Mark agreed. ‘If he doesn’t show, we’ll go find him and punch his lights out.’

Carol continued to reassure me and Mark continued to tease me, and then all of a sudden I heard my name called – Maria!  – and I  spun around.

Antonio.

He actually looked even better than I remembered: darker, more handsome. He was not tall, but I didn’t particularly care about that; it was his incredible smile and the look of intelligence in his eyes that made me weak in the knees.

He turned his smile on full blast. ‘So!  You are here. I am glad; for a minute I thought that you might not come.’

My sentiments exactly.  I introduced him to Carol and Mark and we all went into the nightclub.

The noise level did not make conversation impossible, but it was easier to listen to the music than it was to chat, so conversation was generally restricted to breaks between songs. They were having a singing competition, it appeared. The emcee would ask the audience for volunteers to come up and sing on the stage and, blushing and cringing in embarrassment, a steady stream of remarkably brave souls would make their way to the microphone and blast out a song to the accompaniment of a karaoke machine. I had never seen a karaoke machine or realized that such a thing existed, and I was fascinated.

The songs people chose were mainly popular rubbish and oldies that we weren’t familiar with. Beatles’ songs were great favorites, too, especially ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Hey Jude.’ And enka. Many of the older people participating in the competition requested enka. Whenever someone asked for an enka, I generally  found myself humming along to the song:  I was happy to realize that I knew quite a few of them.

‘Hey,’ said Mark incredulously. ‘You actually know these songs?’

I smiled modestly. ‘A few of them, yes.’

‘I’m really impressed!’ said Carol. ‘How did you learn to sing Japanese songs?’

I smiled and ducked my head.  It was so embarrassing. How could I tell them that I was such a pathetic loner I was reduced to singing along to the radio every night?  Carol had heard my tale of woe about the Yokohama school and Marjorie, but I hadn’t liked to bend her ear about it too often.

‘I like to listen to the radio,’ I said simply.

‘You must have a photographic memory!’ said Antonio, who seemed as impressed as Mark and Carol.

I shrugged. ‘I like those songs.’  I saw no need to mention that I’d heard some of them about a hundred times.

‘Can you sing one?’ asked Mark.  ‘I mean from start to finish – actually sing one on your own with the proper words and everything?’

You bet I could; I frequently did – just about every night, as a matter of fact, in the privacy of my own bathroom. I’d memorized whole songs that I’d recorded and, pathetically, even double-checked the lyrics in the song books I bought. But no way was I going to give tell anybody that. I nodded. ‘Yes, I could probably sing one.’

‘Join the competition, Mary.’

‘What?’

Mark repeated himself. ‘Seriously. Go on – put your hand up. Get up there on the stage and sing one. The winner gets something good – I don’t know what, but it’s a good prize of some kind.’

‘No way.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because!’

‘No really,’ said Mark, leaning forward and warming to the theme. ‘Go for it. Why not? You can sing the songs, after all – and you’ve got to be better than half of the people who’ve gone up there tonight.’

This was cruel, but it was absolutely true. And I’m hardly Edith Piaf.

‘Go on, Maria, go up there and do it!  So far, no gaijin  have gone up there. You will be very popular. You might even win!’

‘No way.’ My heart was thundering in my chest. I was surprised nobody could hear it.

‘You really should, Mary,’ Carol enjoined. ‘I would if I could.’

‘No way in the world.’ 

‘Please!’ said Antonio in a low voice. ‘Sing for me, Maria!’ We were sitting next to each other opposite Carol and Mark, virtually shoe-horned into a seat that was far too small for the two of us, thank God. I could feel his thigh pressing against mine, the warmth, the strength of it.

Goddamn it. I had to do it. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t.

So I did it. They had to buy me a couple more drinks first – tequila sunrises – but with two of those under my belt, I told myself it was now or never. I put up my hand and the spotlight swerved over to our table.  As the other customers saw that we were foreigners, a low murmuring started up. I could hear the word gaijin from various points in the room.

‘What song?’ boomed out the emcee, first in heavily-accented English, then in pidgin-Japanese.

My mouth had gone dry, but I announced the song I wanted to sing in a quavering voice:  ‘Aishuu ressha.’   Train of sorrow. 

The crowd gasped appreciatively:  Aishuu ressha is not an easy song to sing – God knows why I chose it.  I marched up to stand under the spotlight and fumbled about with the microphone for a few awful moments until someone stepped onto the stage and put me out of my misery, showing me how to turn it on and indicating that I should not hold it too close to my mouth.  I clutched the microphone in my sweaty hand and cleared my throat. The opening chords of Aishuu ressha came blasting out of the karaoke machine. I felt like throwing up all over the stage.

I’d like to say that I put Edith Piaf to shame. I’d like to say that I charmed and dazzled everyone in the audience with my golden voice and fantastic range – but of course I’d like a lot of things to be true that really aren’t. The one thing I can will say for myself is that I actually went through with it without fainting or otherwise disgracing myself. I got through all three verses and only screwed up in one place, and I managed to correct myself when that happened. And I walked back to my seat afterwards without tripping or catching my skirt on anything. To thunderous and stunned applause.  My rendition of Aishuu ressha might not have been great art, but it was pretty damned unusual.

Carol and Mark were grinning away, clapping along with the rest of the people in the club.

‘Way to go, Mary – you did it!’ enthused Carol.  It was hard to tell if the grin on her face was from admiration or amusement.

Mark gave me a thumbs up. ‘Well done – especially not getting too flummoxed over that spot in the middle.’

Antonio, too, was gazing at me admiringly, wearing his broadest, most knee-buckling smile.

‘You were wonderful,’ he murmured, still clapping his hands.  ‘Bravo, Maria.'

It was worth doing for that alone.