Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz Page A

impossible bank shot. The dark yellow one ball hit off the edge of the corner bumper, just in front of the pocket, and bounced back out to the middle of the table. His father muttered, Shit, and took a couple of steps back from the table, so that he now stood partly under the blanket of darkness that covered the rest of the room. The red tip of his cigar glowed through it like an eye.
    “In the library at home, Dad,” Alec said, “There’s that space. It’s big, isn’t it? I mean, there’s nothing there except that rug. We could’ve put a table there, don’t you think? We really could’ve put it there. At home.”
    He waited, but his father didn’t say anything. Alec couldn’t see his face, but he wasn’t even trying to anymore. “If we’d had a table at home, you could’ve taught Mom to play.”
    “Your mother never liked the whole idea of pool. She wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
    Alec bent down quickly and took a shot. The cue ball bounced aimlessly off the bumpers, hitting nothing.
    “Your go,” he said.
    His father stepped back into the light of the table. “You’re not concentrating, Alec. Keep your head down and watch the ball. Remember what I told you.”
    “You don’t understand, Dad.”
    His father lined up for another shot. “No,” he said.
“You
don’t understand.”
    There was little conversation after that. The air had turned heavy with cigar smoke. Alec looked through it at the darkened, unused tables, standing stiff as tombstones all around. His father stood always on the other side of the table, the jacket of his soft gray suit still buttoned, his concentration focused on the game. He seemed very far away then, and Alec remembered what Mark had said about his visit to the club, how strange and quiet it had been. And he thought that what Mark must have really meant was that it had been lonely.
    The game ended. Alec wanted to go home, but once again his father was bending low over the table and breaking the rack. Sound pierced the room for an instant. The balls scattered, some careening sharply off the bumpers. Alec watched their movement and thought again of the science film he had seen, of destruction theory, of how the flower had split apart into millions of particles. The table seemed to grow brighter as he stood there looking at it, as if it too might burst apart at any second. And he felt suddenly as though it was happening all around him, this coming apart of things. As if his father standing at the end of the long table, pool cue in hand, was at that moment no different from the science teacher with his yardstick raised toward the screen, pointing and explaining while the picture in front of him was being broken down into unrecognizable pieces.

PROMISE
    A lec held the namecard in front of him with both hands. He ceremoniously studied it, first in English, then, turning it over, in Japanese. He was speaking to the supreme adviser to the Oyama Chemical and Construction Company. Bowing as smoothly as he could, he made the appropriate murmurings in Japanese about the great honor it was to meet such an exalted official from such an exalted company. That done, he waited eagerly for anything the supreme adviser might say in regard to his own lowly position of assistant manager. As usual, nothing was forthcoming. Alec thought he saw Boon hide a smile.
    It was later, somewhere around eleven o’clock. They were in the hallway of a building in Ginza. Dinner had been a feast of Kobe beef and fresh vegetables, washed down with warmed sake. Alec had sat next to another Oyama executive and talkedAmerican baseball statistics for most of the meal. He was pleased that he was finally getting a handle on doing business in Japan.
    A bare wooden door opened at the end of the corridor, and the four of them walked into a dimly lit room. Inside, there was just enough space for a short bar and a piano with stools around it. Everything was close at hand, intimate, luxurious. The carpet felt like