Before Narita was home to a vast international airport, it was home to a shrine and a series of low-ceilinged tourist shops. This particular restaurant is hundreds of years old. Eel is in season here. It’s rich and fragrant, almost the consistency of butter. Call it unagi.

“Yellow lace,” Haba-san says to me, scarfing up a piece of unagi. Yoshimi, his new girlfriend, nods and smiles. “You know, in Japan we have only yellow lace, really.”

“I’m surprised,” I say. “In America, we have all colors of lace. Black, red, blue.”

Haba-san coughs on his unagi. “Blue lace?!” he grunts. “I don’t think you have blue lace there. You are laughing at me.”

Outside the door, two cats growl and grumble guttural threats at one another. A delicate old lady pads up, her slippers scuffing on the hot pavement, and she utters a syllable. The cats spring and scatter like water.

I consider trying to explain the word “catcalling” to Haba-san, but decide against it.

“Actually, we mostly have the white race in the United States,” I say. “Some black, some red, though.”

“Yah, I know,” said Haba-san. I wondered what he thought I thought.

I’m attending a party at Tommy Tallarico’s mansion in San Juan Capistrano. I meet Tommy’s father, a round, stocky, grinning Italian named Tom.

“Your son has told me some stories about you,” I said. “He told me that you handle collections on game developers for him.”

“Yah, I do that,” said Tom, nodding. Somebody jumped in the pool with a splash.

“So tell me,” I said, swirling my glass of Chardonnay. “What’s the best way to handle customers who don’t pay?”

“Ah,” he said, touching me on the arm. “That case, you write ’em an invoice. Always gotta do the paperwork, you know. You send ’em the invoice. Fax it to ’em. You know?”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say they don’t pay up then. What do you do?”

“Ah. That case, you give ’em a call. Real polite. You say, I’m just calling in to check the status of the payment. And I’m calling you to understand the status of that. You give ’em thirty days. Sometimes they can make a mistake. So I give ’em every chance.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s say the customer still doesn’t pay. What now?”

“Ah well. That case, you give ’em thirty more days. And you send another copy of the invoice. Fax it to ’em. And you give ’em a call and you ask, what’s the status of this payment? Real patient, real calm, you ask ’em. You know?”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You have this reputation for being Tommy’s strong-arm.”

“Yeah, he’s a real nice boy, he can get walked all over,” said Tom. “But ya know, a polite way, that’s the best way to take the collections. Most of the people want to pay ya for services rendered. And I just keep asking ’em, real nice, ya see. And eventually, the deadbeat sons-a-bitches get the fuckin’ clue.”

The Pacific shimmers a radiant electric blue and the wind rustles our hair. Crystal has put the top down on the red Nissan 350Z roadster. The engine sings a sweet harmonic note as we trace the tight curves of the Pacific Coast Highway.

“Speed under control,” she says to me, her dark sunglasses reflecting the horizon. The bare skin on her shoulders is the color of vanilla ice cream. “You learn how fast you can push it. I had this Yamaha R6 for a time; I took it to Laguna Seca. There’s nothing like hitting a curve at seventy and feeling the bike respond underneath you.”

In the meadow to our right, stud horses stand in uffish thought, meditating upon the silver-white waters below them. We fly past them like wind.

“I did love Anthony at one time,” she said. “I was in Reykjavik, he was in Boston. We kept in touch with e-mails and Internet chat messages. I didn’t speak the language. And through the ones and zeros I found a sympathetic voice. We wrote to one another. First it was once a day… ‘how’s your day been’ and that sort of trivia. Then we started to discuss our favorite books, our philosophies, our childhood memories, and ultimately, our darkest sexual fantasies.”

“Hey, watch –” I said. A rental truck whooshed by, swerving a little. Crystal had veered into the left lane. Crystal gave me a look of subtle reproach, then continued.

“Three years after I was married to him, I met Blaine. He worked in the cubicle next to mine. With him, in person I felt something I never felt with Anthony. I knew we were going quickly, but it was my choice to do so.”

Coyote brush, sage scrub, strawberries, roses; a thousand scents pass us in a microsecond. Crystal checks her rear view mirror and gently touches the accelerator. The tachometer tweaks and the engine changes key.

“I broke up with Blaine in April. He had already decided to divorce his wife. Monday mornings, I see him at the coffee maker and nod politely. We’re civil to one another. I don’t regret anything and neither does he. The break was a clean one.”

I decided to change the subject. “Do you still ride your bike?” I asked.

“I crashed my bike a few months ago. Took a turn at Thunderhill a little too fast. A fracture in my ankle. It swelled up larger than my kneecap. I couldn’t walk for a few weeks after that. But you know something, John?”

Crystal kicked the accelerator and the little car howled like a nest of bees: ninety, one hundred. An indicator on the tachometer flashed.

Crystal dropped her sunglasses and showed me her dark eyes. “You have to push it,” she said, smiling gently at me. “You have to learn what’s possible and what’s not.”

Amanda has a supersweet languorous smile, and conversations always stall when she enters a room. She has laser-beam hazel-green eyes, full of attention and sense; whatever they focus on warms perceptibly. Her hair, long and soft, is a living part of her body, and she flicks and flows it like a filly flirts with her mane. At night, when my renegade brain ticks away, unsolving and unresolving dilemmas of money and unwork, there’s always the warm flesh of Amanda, spooning against my back and touching me, holding me. She calms me, addresses me, makes me sane.

Amanda, Mandy to friends, is far smarter than you or I. If I’ve lost something about the house, my wallet or my guitar capo or my open can of soda, I’ll ask her, and her terabit brain ticks for a picosecond and she says, “Why, on top of the mantle, sweetie,” and there my wallet or my guitar capo or my open can of soda will be. Her ability to do this, repeatedly and perfectly, gives me no end of cheap entertainment. It’s the perfect parlor trick.

Mandy sings, only for me, in a copper-plated alto. Unlike me, she remembers all the words to any song, and we’ll sometimes spend Saturday nights on the couch, with my guitar eviscerating random rock songs, and Mandy will plug into her vast mental library of throwaway-music lyrics, and we’ll joyously and raucously sing for an hour or two. Our great friendship smoothes the rumpled folds of our bed sheets, and so I consider our California king-size a place of refuge, or a nest. With a glass or two of cheap Merlot in her, she’ll forget to forget, and she can see her own sultriness reflected in my shining eyes.

She tells gentle blue jokes, twisting her tongue to the side of her ample lips in a punctuation mark of irony. I have never, in my fourteen years of association with her, known her to be spiteful or cruel to any living thing. She is a fine wife, a gentle and sweet and intelligent wife. I love my wife; more than that, I like her.