“WHAT ARE YOU READING, Seigi?”
“A blog by a science club at a junior high school in Okayama. It’s a student-run thing.”
“A science club, you say.”
“The one Tanimoto advises.”
“Ah. I see.”
The blog post came with photos of the school and the science lab and had an upbeat, happy, childish feel. It brought an involuntary smile to my face. Richard came up behind me and put down his phone, which he’d been using up until a minute ago to send off a burst of rapid-fire texts. I’d told him I’d handle all his business correspondence, but he always brushed me off with some excuse like “This is a personal matter.” Even now that I was his private secretary, he still managed most of his own mail. Whatever floated his boat, I supposed, so long as I could offer support in other ways.
After a healthy dinner of fish and vegetables seasoned in the fashion of Singaporean Nyonya cuisine, I enjoyed a brief break relaxing in the company home.
By work, I was referring to my role as Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian’s personal secretary. The duties weren’t much different from what I was doing before, but achieving this level of comfort with my job had taken quite a journey. I wanted to thump a fist against my chest and swear, as his personal secretary, to take on anything and everything, 24/7. But Richard just gave me disappointed looks and said, “Expending all your energy at the start is not sustainable,” or “Know your limits.” This, of course, only riled me up more. I helped Richard with everything from the shop to his schedule, his appointments to reflexology massages; I even learned every kind of gourmet cooking I could.
Surprising no one, I burnt out after two weeks.
It wasn’t the work itself that was the problem. It was my inadequacy. My help—or lack thereof—never seemed to affect Richard’s performance at all. What assistance could I give a man who was perfect in every way? It wore me down to constantly feel like I was adding unnecessary lines to a beautiful drawing. Worse, and I hardly think I need to spell this out, I was only his personal secretary because I demanded he take me on. I had promoted myself hard to this flawless jeweler under the premise of being useful help. If I wasn’t useful, then what was the good in hiring me?
Just as I felt like I was losing all confidence in myself—or, as it might be more appropriate to say, losing my entire reason for being here—I got an unexpected phone call from Vincent in the US. He hadn’t said a word to me since I texted him the news of my new job.
I had a faint hope he would let me vent, but before I could say hi, he said, “How goes it? Feeling nice and depressed yet?”
I almost threw my phone at the wall. How dare he talk about depression to someone currently sliding into its depths? There was such a thing as being too topical.
When I said nothing, Vincent chuckled like a sexy anime villain and said, “I knew it,” in bone-chilling Japanese. He saw right through me. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Nakata. You aren’t the first person to go through this.”
“Sorry, what?”
“All that remains is to sell out Richard, and your transformation into my young apprentice will be complete.”
“Uh, I would never, but okay…”
“Right, because there’s no market for his secrets anymore. What a shame.”
“Vince, what are you talking about?”
It was then that I heard a kid crying in the background, and Vincent grew flustered. His son was just a bawling newborn back when I first saw a photo of him, but I would have bet he was a lot bigger now. Vincent wasn’t all that older than me, but he was already a dad. On the one hand, I admired that—on the other, how dare he.
The “how dare he” feeling won out as he left me with a final piece of constructive, if sort of dramatic, advice. “You’d better talk to someone about it. Trying to sort through these feelings on your own will kill you.”
Words of wisdom, I’m sure, I thought. But he had a point. If I wanted to talk to someone, apart from my dad, I could only really think of one suitable candidate: Richard. My boss. The übermensch who was, in some sense, the source of my woes.
I broached the subject with so much enthusiasm I almost got down on the floor and begged. “I’m so sorry to ask, but could I talk to you about something that’s bothering me?!”
My beautiful boss looked pleased, almost relieved. He made me a cup of tasty royal milk tea and served it with a side of my favorite desserts, before saying, “To be frank, I was wondering when you would come address this with me.”
Which meant what, exactly? Had Seigi Nakata just made a fatal mistake? I blanched in horror at the thought, but Richard shook his head in a reserved no. His golden blond hair swung from side to side with the movement. The most delicate and finest of chains made by a master goldsmith couldn’t have swayed with such elegance.
“You are doing a fine job, Seigi. A very fine job.”
“I’m waiting for the ‘but.’”
“Your presence alone is the greatest help of all. Managing my schedule and offering me massages are also noble tasks, but they do not constitute the chief purpose of your role.”
So, did that make me his personal secretary in name only? Was I more of a mascot cheering Richard on? And was that a job worth paying for?
When I started to look alarmed, Richard sighed, as if he’d known I’d react like that.
“Perhaps you should go away for a few days, so that I shall be working alone. That should make it quite clear, I would think, that my performance with you present versus you absent is quite different. Unfortunately, I fear Saul would never let me make a deliberate decision to lower my productivity. You are not a mascot, Seigi. You are the fuel for the engine that drives this whole operation. Chin up now. Be proud of yourself. Do not set yourself going down the wrong path.”
I looked pleadingly up at him with the eyes of an abandoned dog. So does that mean I’m helpful? Am I helping you? Richard nodded, and I pulled Jiro and Saburou into my arms for a hug.
He let me have a bit of petting therapy with them before he raised a finger and said, “With that said, I propose we further clarify the nature of your job for our mutual benefit.”
“Clarify?” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“…I mean, my goal is to be kind of a jack-of-all-trades of a secretary.”
“You are not a college student anymore. You are too old to be saying such nonsense.”
Strict-but-efficient Richard turned on his computer right then and there and made a list of all my duties. It was basically everything I’d been doing over the past two weeks, but he added a set schedule for all of them. He also specified periods of time off for me. Then, with a bit of fine-tuning—“I’d like to do this,” “I could live without that”—ta-da! We had a contract drawn up by the both of us. My eyes lit up with joy; Richard, on the other hand, sighed.
“Deplorable. As odd as this might sound coming from me, it is lucky you did not approach anyone else with your personal secretary sales pitch. I have no doubt you would be exploited and burned out long before the end of your contract.”
“I’m not that stupid,” I protested. “I wouldn’t work this hard for anyone but you.”
“I don’t know if I would call that a good thing.”
“You know, you could just say, ‘Wonderful!’ and be done with it.”
“Wonderful it is, then.”
That was how our relationship gained more definition, I began to absorb my precisely delineated duties, and work began to run smoothly. As obvious as it seems in hindsight, I realized I couldn’t give my 100 percent to everything. In fact, to achieve high performance across the board, I needed to restrict my list of duties to the bare minimum. It felt like Richard could handle everything with brisk efficiency, given his scrupulous personal schedules. I had known him for years, but I still had a lot to learn from him.
In accordance with an agreement to eat together as often as possible to save time on meetings, we ate dinner together and relaxed after work. There wasn’t anything important to discuss for work, so the rest of the evening was mine to put on pajamas, check out my favorite blog, and listen to the latest song from a guitarist friend of mine.
The Okayama Higashi Public Junior High science club’s blog was a secret oasis for my soul.
“Isn’t it great? My junior high didn’t have a science club, but I bet it would have been fun to be in one.”
“For a science club, it appears much of their activities concern geology and mineralogy.”
“They say they also do stuff like meteorology and astronomy. That’s the sky, not rocks. Besides, this is just junior high. Science isn’t that specialized yet. It said in the first blog post that Tanimoto wants everyone to have fun with science. When you were a kid, did y—oh. Never mind.”
“Why did you stop?” Richard cocked his head.
Why? Well, it went without saying, right?
“Your childhood…wasn’t anything like mine or these kids’. It’d be weird for me to ask you to share your stories. Sorry. How long have we known each other again, am I right?”
“You needn’t be so concerned. In fact, if I may offer you a word of advice, these frequent exercises in restraint you show me are completely unnecessary.”
“Yeah, but…it’s hard not to. Oh, just FYI, I wouldn’t bring this up when we’re in suits.”
“So you save it up for the times when you lounge around in long underwear. I see.”
“I mean. Yes? It’s called a sarong, though. It’s a Sri Lankan thing.”
“Who, pray tell, do you think you’re lecturing?”
He had a point. I smiled in embarrassment, but Richard didn’t notice. He was looking right through me, and I could see in his eyes that he was walking down memory lane.
“…I was much more childish in my teenage years than you imagine I was.”
I wanted to say “What?” but that felt too awkward. Richard the teenager, in my head, was Richard at junior-high age. I had only ever known Richard from the age of twenty-eight, so I ended up picturing his kid form as adult Richard, just smaller. Was he telling me that was wrong? Well, yeah, of course it was.