The Nightingale Floor
(Hermes, the trickster god)
In a large loft on Great Jones Street the writer Hidecki Hiro was awaiting his dinner guests.
He looked out over his clean bare space with its uguisubari floors that squeaked like a nightingale at the tread of human feet, even his own.
At great expense, he’d had the nightingale floor—dried planks with upside-down V shaped joints—installed so that no one might sneak up on him without the floor chirping its warning. This was an old samurai trick that Hiro, born in southern New Jersey, had borrowed.
Hiro lived all the time with a nervous fear that had risen to a crescendo this night because of his guest of honor, the writer Jan Cremerski.
Ava Bernstein was bringing him and she had already warned Hiro about his food preferences (“Cooked and very cooked!”) and his habit of pranks, disguises, and the telling of stories of dubious intent.
“You know he is a famous liar,” Ava told him and Hiro did, indeed, for he had read and appreciated all Jan Cremerski’s work, his books already prominent on Hiro’s shelves without having to be moved.
Chorinne Wu, his chef for the night, whacked her cleaver in the open kitchen and Hiro jumped a bit. They were having shabu shabu, bubbling beef hot pot, and two electric woks with kelp water were set up on the long table.
Hiro was expecting the kind of international downtown crowd usually disliked and resented by everyone who is not in it. Hiro existed on its fringes because of his talent, his money and because he forced himself to have these dinners for eighteen mostly attractive people every two or three months.
“Here we are!” said Ava Bernstein, shielding the great writer with her velvet bulk as she came squeaking across the floor. Somehow, Jan Cremerski made no sound at all as he walked forward, his eyes already rising to the shelves to find his books.
The man was a bird, with a long saturnine beak, a small pointed beard, dark feathered brows that rose in wings at the end over black terrifying eyes. He looped his cane which was twined with two inlaid ivory snakes over a chair. He pressed Hiro’s hand and his eyes found Chorinne slicing the scallions and shiitake.
And then they were all upon him at once, blown in from the cold, already alit with drink, the Germans, the Italians, Hiro’s Romanian friend who had swum the English Channel, two models from Estonia, a French photographer. Many different accents, which was just how Hiro liked things at his table.
Yukio slid out from the kitchen with one tray, then another. The floors groaned and cheeped with the sound of little birds.
After the soba with three mushrooms that they ate with china spoons, the guests picked up their chopsticks and began dipping strands of kobe beef into the simmering broth.
“Last time I was in New York, I had dinner on Central Park South with Albert Singer,” Jan Cremerski said. Everyone grew quiet for he had said almost nothing until now.
“He had a girlfriend from the American South, a stunning girl a foot taller than Albert. Too young, much too beautiful. She was wearing tan leather clothes with those dripping strings all over…
“Fringe,” said one of the models.
“Long pale blond hair up in a horsetail swishing around, back and forth, up and down, back and forth…” he said slowly and fondly. “Riding boots.”
“Albert, who you know was a famous scholar and classics professor, now had bows and quivers of steel -tipped arrows here and there in the living room. He had an ashtray filled with bullets. A crossbow and a gun case were propped against the dining room wall…We were eating quail. ‘I shot the whole dinner,’ the girl said, and I believed this because I had been picking shot from my mouth on the sly. We had venison next, tough and bloody and some woodland berries, poorly rinsed. She was walking all around the table, so restless like stalking, standing over Albert’s chair pressing down on his shoulders with very big hands…very big hands…”
The table was so hushed that all one could hear was the bubbling broth and the squeak of the floor as Yukio refreshed the sake cups and brought out more dipping sauces.
“Later that night, she shot Albert in the leg and left. He never pressed charges. You must know he died a year later from a heart attack on an airplane over the ocean…Poor Albert, dying all alone up in the air.” Jan Cremerski leaned out over the table, a bird of prey studying the ground for small scurryings, and chuckled.
Now the guests raised their chopsticks and, again hungry, began dunking the vegetables and the tofu cubes. Their chopsticks clicked against the pot, the steam rose in twists as they waited for Jan Cremerski to tell them another story.
Over the anise crème brulee, everyone began to discuss what had happened to them on various flights here and there. Jan Cremerski, having dropped his twig into the nest, slid further down in his seat. Hiro, was watching him and about to start a topic when everyone rose and began milling about the loft.
Chorinne came over and handed Hiro a note that said “I am hiding. Come and find me.”
“Where’s Jan?” Ava said.
Suddenly the party revived as Hiro announced the game and encouraged everyone to go searching for Jan Cremerski.
The models, by far the youngest there, went off at once, pushing at the cabinets, crawling to look under the beds and up on tiptoe to inspect the top shelves of the closets. In the kitchen, they looked to see if they might find the famous writer among the woks and pans or in the closet with Hiro’s one red broom. There were only so many places to look in the large loft. Hiro had devoted many hours that he might have been writing to eliminating and stripping himself of things that did not give him joy. Hiro now was down to things that did not inspire further fear.
Finally, they gave up and sank onto the long twin sofas that faced each other on one side of the room where a large seated Kamakura Buddha regarded them under a cabinet of netsuke of pure white jade. The models perched on each other, the Germans paraded around, the last to give up.
“What if something has happened to him?” Ada said and sat down heavily.
The hour was late even for these children of the night and none were enough engaged by Jan Cremerski to keep playing his game. They were restless and getting ready to leave, except for Ava who kept saying she didn’t know what to do and looking around, going over to the long windows to see if her friend was fool enough to stand out on the sill in the cold air. She sat down again with a thump and up from under her in the sofa rose the thin dusty form of Jan Cremerski.
Somehow he had not been crushed or suffocated.
Everyone applauded. Ava had turned an unusual color, with prickles of sweat popping from her makeup. The models were all over Jan Cremerski asking how he had done it.
“The magician, he never tells,” he said and asked the one of them for her phone number.
Hiro stood a bit apart, looking down at his nightingale floor which had not sung when the writer snuck away. Would this strange man come creeping back over the floors to steal the netsukes? He had seen Jan Cremerski studying the cabinet when he arrived. Would he then get hurt?
After they left, somewhat harried, but thanking Hiro all the same, Chorrine brought Hiro a cup of white tea and they sat in front of the Buddha for a long quiet time before they heard the first sounds trilling from the shifting floor.