I bundled myself up and left the theater. Snow was falling thicker than ever, nearly obscuring my way. The entire city was as icy as a corpse, and every bit as depressing.
Back at the hotel, I rang up All Nippon Airways and booked a flight to Tokyo that evening.
“Because of the snow, there’s a good chance of delay or even cancellation,” the reservation lady informed me. I didn’t care. I’d made up my mind and the sooner I got back to Tokyo the better. Then I packed and went down to settle my bill. My friend with the glasses was on duty at the front desk. I asked to speak to her at the car-rental desk.
“Urgent business came up and I have to go back to Tokyo,” I explained.
“Thank you very much. Please come again,” she said with a professional smile. Could she have been hurt that I was giving her so little notice?
“I plan to be back soon,” I said. “When I do get back, we’ll go to dinner and talk things over. There’s a lot I want to tell you. First I have things to straighten out in Tokyo. But when I’m done, I’m coming back. I don’t know how many months it’ll take, but I’m coming back. There’s something—I don’t know how to put it—special about this place. So sooner or later I know I’ll be here again.”
“Hmm,” she said, rather dubiously.
“Hmm,” I countered, rather positively. “I’m sure what I’m saying sounds phony.”
“Not at all,” she said, expressionless. “One can’t be sure about things so many months down the road.”
“It won’t be so many months. We’ll meet again. I really feel that we share something special too,” I said, as sincerely as I meant it. “Don’t you have that feeling?”
She tapped her pen on the countertop in lieu of a response. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re taking the next flight out?”
“Well, uh, yes, I planned to. If they’re flying, that is. But with this weather, we may not get off the ground.”
“Well, if you do leave by the next plane, I have a request.”
“Of course.”
“There’s a thirteen-year-old girl who has to get back to Tokyo. Her mother had to leave suddenly on business, and the girl’s been left here in the hotel. I realize it’s a terrible imposition, but could the girl possibly accompany you down to Tokyo? She’s got a lot of luggage, and I’m afraid to send her off on a plane by herself.”
“I don’t really understand,” I said. “Isn’t it kind of off-the-wall for a mother to run off somewhere and leave her child behind?”
My friend shrugged. “I suppose, but she is off-the-wall. She’s an artist, a famous photographer, and she can be quite eccentric. An idea popped into her head, and she was off and running. She completely forgot about the child. Later on, we got this call from her, about her daughter being somewhere around the hotel, and could we please put her on a flight back to Tokyo. That was it.”
“Shouldn’t she come and get the girl herself?”
“That’s not for me to say. Besides, she’s in Kathmandu on this job, and she said she’d be busy for another week. She’s very famous and she’s a regular guest at the hotel, so who am I to contradict her? She said that if I got her daughter to the airport, she’d be fine by herself the rest of the way. Maybe so, but really, the girl’s a child, and if anything were to happen to her, it’d be our responsibility.”
“Great,” I said. Then the thought occurred to me. “It wouldn’t happen to be a kid with long hair and rock ‘n’ roll sweatshirts and a Walkman, would it?”
“The very same. How did you know?”
“Fun for the whole family.”
My friend snapped into action immediately. She phoned ANA and reserved a seat for the girl on my flight. She buzzed the girl and told her that someone—someone she knew—was going to take her back to Tokyo and that she should gather her things together right away. She called the bellboy and sent him up to the girl’s room for the bags. She summoned the hotel limousine service. I couldn’t help expressing my admiration.
“I told you I liked my job. I’m cut out for it.”
“But if someone gives you a hard time, you’d rather cut out.”
She tapped her pen. “That’s different. I don’t like being the butt of jokes.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Please believe me,” I said. “I was only trying to be funny. No offense intended, honest. I only joke around because I need to relax.”
She pursed her lips slightly and looked me in the face. With the look of someone surveying the lowlands from a hill after the floodwaters have subsided. Then she spoke in a voice that was almost a sigh, almost a snort. “By the way, could I ask you for your business card, please? As a professional measure, of course, seeing as how I’m entrusting a young girl to your care.”
“As a professional measure,” I muttered and pulled out a card for her. For what it’s worth, I do carry business cards. For what it’s worth, at least a dozen people have told me how necessary for business they are. She eyed my card as if it were a dust rag.
“And could I ask what your name is?” I had to try.
“Next time, maybe,” she said, pushing up her glasses with her middle finger. “If we meet again.”
“Of course we will,” I said.
Soft and silent as a new moon, a smile drifted across her face.
Ten minutes later the bellboy and the girl appeared in the lobby. The bellboy was lugging two huge Samsonite suitcases. Each could have held a full-grown German shepherd, standing. A bit much for a thirteen-year-old girl to haul to the airport all by herself, to be sure. She was wearing tight jeans and boots, and her sweatshirt of the day read TALKING HEADS. Over which she wore an expensive-looking fur stole. There was the same transparent sense about her as before. A beauty that was so vulnerable, so high-strung. A balance too delicate to last.
Talking Heads. Not bad, for a band name. Like something out of Kerouac.
The girl looked me over, blasé. She didn’t smile. But she did raise an eyebrow, then turned to my receptionist friend with glasses.
“Don’t worry, he’s all right,” my friend said.
“I’m not as bad as I look,” I declared.
The girl looked at me again. Then she made an oh-well-I-suppose sort of nod.
“Really, you’ll be fine,” my friend went on. “The old man tells funny jokes—”
“Old man!” I gasped.
“He throws in a nice word from time to time,” she continued, paying me no attention, “he’s a real gentleman to us ladies. Besides, he’s a friend of mine. So you’ll be just fine.”
The two of them proceeded to the limousine at the entrance of the hotel. I followed, dignity deflated, quietly behind.
The weather was terrible. The road to the airport all ice and snow. Antarctica.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.
The girl stared at me, then shook her head briefly. Gimme a break. Then she slowly looked around as if searching for something, but all there was to see was the blizzard outside. “Yuki,” she said. Snow.
“You can say that again.”
“It’s my name!” she hissed.
Then she pulled her Walkman out of her pocket and plugged in to her own private pop music microcosm. The rest of the way to the airport she never gave me so much as a glance.
Snow, eh? Such a charming character, so full of social grace. You’d think she’d at least offer me a stick of gum every time she helped herself to some. Not that I wanted any, but hadn’t she heard of polite? It would have made me feel like I was riding in the same car with her. I sank into my seat, aging by the minute, and shut my eyes.
Only later did I learn that “Yuki” actually was her name.
I thought about when I was her age. I used to collect pop records myself. Singles. Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack,” Ricky Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man,” Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I.” I owned maybe a hundred 45s. I used to listen to them day in and day out. I knew all the lyrics by heart. The things kids c
an memorize. Always the most meaningless, idiotic lines. Stuff about a China doll down in old Hong Kong, waiting for my return.…
Not quite Talking Heads. But okay, the times they are a-changin’.
I stationed Yuki in the waiting room and went to purchase our tickets. The flight was running an hour late, but the ticket agent warned that the chances were it’d be delayed even longer. “Please listen for the announcement,” she said. “At the moment, visibility is extremely bad.”
“Do you think the weather will improve?” I asked.
“That’s what the forecast says, but it may take some time,” she said grimly. She probably had to say the same thing two hundred times. Enough to depress anyone.
I returned to Yuki with the news. She glanced up at me with a hmmph sort of look, but didn’t say a word.
“Who knows when we’ll get on, so let’s not check in yet. It might be a disaster trying to get our luggage back,” I said.
A whatever-you-say look. Again, not a word.
“I guess there’s nothing we can do but wait. No fun getting stuck at an airport for hours, though.” No one could accuse me of not keeping up my end of the non-conversation. “Have you eaten?”
She nodded.
“What do you say we go to the coffee shop anyway? We could get something to drink. Whatever you want.”
An I-don’t-know-about-this look. She had a whole repertoire of expressions.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said, rising to my feet. And off we went, rolling her Samsonites along.
The coffee shop was crowded. All flights out of Sapporo were delayed, and everyone looked uniformly on edge. We waded through waves of irritability. I ordered a sandwich and coffee. Yuki asked for hot chocolate.
“How long were you staying at the hotel?” Well, somebody had to try to be civil.
After a moment’s thought, a real live answer: “Ten days.”
“And when did your mother leave?”
She looked out the window at the snow a bit, then: “Three days ago.”
I felt like we were practicing a Beginning English language drill.
“So your school’s been on vacation all this time?”
That did the trick. “No, my school hasn’t been on vacation all this time. Don’t bug me,” she snapped. She retrieved her Walkman from her pocket and plugged her ears in.
I finished my coffee and read the paper. Was every female in the world out to give me a hard time? Was it just my luck or a fundamental flaw in me?
If I had a choice, I’d rather it be just my luck, I decided, folding up my newspaper and pulling out a paperback of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner, and Philip K. Dick too. When besieged by groundless fatigue, there’s something about them you can always relate to. That’s why I always pack a novel—for times like these.
Yuki went to the restroom, came back, changed the batteries in her Walkman. Thirty minutes later the announcement came: The flight to Tokyo, Haneda Airport, was delayed four hours due to continued poor visibility. Great, just great. More agony sitting here.
Look on the bright side, I tried cheering myself up. Use the power of positive thinking. Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that little light bulb is going to click on. Maybe it will, and then again maybe it won’t. But something had to beat sitting and killing time in this noisy, smoke-filled hole.
I told Yuki to stay put while I went back into the lobby. I walked over to a car rental and the woman behind the counter quickly did the paperwork for a Toyota Corolla Sprinter, complete with stereo. A microbus gave me a lift to the lot, where I was handed the keys to a white car with brand-new snow tires. I drove ten minutes back to the airport and went to fetch Yuki in the coffee shop. “Let’s go for a three-hour ride.”
“In the middle of a blizzard? What are we going to see? And where are we going anyway?”
“Nowhere. Just around,” I said. “But the car’s got a stereo and you can play your music as loud as you want. Better for your ears than listening to that Walkman.”
A you-gotta-be-kidding shake of the head this time. All the same, as I got up to go, she stood up too.
I got her suitcases into the trunk, then pointed the car out into the snow-swept no-man’s-land. Yuki fished a cassette tape out of her bag, popped it into the stereo, and David Bowie was singing. Followed by Phil Collins, Jefferson Star-ship, Thomas Dolby, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Hall & Oates, Thompson Twins, Iggy Pop, Bananarama. Typical teenage girl’s stuff.
Then the Stones came on with “Goin’ to a Go-Go.” “I know this one,” I boasted. “The Miracles did it ages ago. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Years ago when I was fifteen or sixteen.”
“Oh,” said Yuki with not a flicker of interest.
Next it was Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson singing “Say Say Say.”
The wipers were going full force, batting away at the flakes. Few cars on the road. Almost none in fact. We were warm, riding around in the car, and the rock music pleasant. I even didn’t mind Duran Duran. Singing along, I kept our wheels on the straight roads. We did this for ninety minutes, when she noticed the cassette I’d borrowed from the car rental.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oldies,” I said.
“Put it on.”
“Can’t guarantee you’ll like it.”
“That’s okay. I can handle it. I’ve been listening to the same tapes for the last ten days.”
No sooner had I punched the PLAY button than Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” came on. Don’t know much about history … Sam the Man, killed when I was in ninth grade. Then it was “Oh Boy,” by Buddy Holly, another dead man. Airplane crash. Bobby Darin, “Beyond the Sea.” He was gone, too. Elvis “Hound Dog” Presley. A drugged stiff. Everyone dead and gone. Everyone except maybe Chuck Berry with his “Sweet Little Sixteen.” And me, singing along.
“You really remember the words, don’t you!” Yuki said, genuinely impressed.
“Who wouldn’t? I was just as crazy about rock as you are,” I said. “I used to be glued to the radio every day. I spent all my allowance on records. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was the best thing ever created.”
“And now?”
“I still listen sometimes. I like some songs. But I don’t listen so carefully, and I don’t memorize all the lyrics anymore. They don’t move me like they used to.”
“How come?”
“How come?”
“Yeah, how come? Tell me.”
“Maybe it’s because after all this time I think that really good songs—or really good anything—they’re hard to find,” I said. “Like if you listen to the radio for a whole hour, there’s maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage. But back then I never thought about it, and it was great just listening. Didn’t matter what it was. I was a kid. I was in love. And when you’re a kid you can relate to anything, even if it’s silly. Am I making sense to you?”
“Kind of.”
The Del Vikings’ “Come Go with Me” came on, and I sang along on the chorus. “Are you bored?” I asked Yuki.
“Uh-uh, not so much,” she answered.
“Not so much at all,” I threw in.
“Now that you’re not young anymore, do you still fall in love?” asked Yuki.
I had to think about that one. “Difficult question,” I said finally. “You got any boy you like?”
“No,” she said flatly. “But there sure are a lot of creeps out there.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“I’d rather just listen to music.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?” she said, surprised.
“Yeah, I really do,” I said. “Some people say that’s escapism. But that’s fine by me. I live my life, you live yours. If you’re clear about what you want, then you can live any way you please. I don’t give a damn what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care. That’s how I looked at thing
s when I was your age and I guess that’s how I look at things now. Does that mean I have arrested development? Or have I been right all these years? I’m still waiting on the answer to that one.”
Jimmy Gilmer’s “Sugar Shack.” I whistled the riff during the refrain. A huge expanse of pure white snow spread out to the left of the road. Just a little shack made out of wood. Espresso coffee tastes mighty good.… 1964.
“You know,” remarked Yuki, “anyone ever tell you you’re … different?”
“Hmmph.” My response.
“Are you married?”
“I was once.”
“So you’re not married now?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Wife walked out on me.”
“Are you telling the truth?”
“Yeah, I’m telling the truth. She went to live with someone else.”
“Oh.”
“You can say that again,” I said.
“But I think I can see how your wife must’ve felt.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged her shoulders but didn’t say anything. I made no effort to probe further.
“Want some gum?” she asked after a bit.
“No thanks.”
By now, the two of us were chiming in on the back chorus of the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ U.S.A.” All the dumb parts. Inside—outside—U.S.A. Maybe I wasn’t entirely relegated to the dustheap of “old men” after all.
The snow was starting to lighten. We headed back to the airport, turned in the keys at the car rental, checked in, and thirty minutes later were at the gate.
In the end, the plane took off five hours late. Yuki fell asleep as soon as we left the ground. She was beautiful, sleeping next to me. Finely made, exquisite, and fragile. The stewardess brought around drinks, looked over at Yuki, and smiled broadly at me. I had to smile too. I ordered a gin and tonic. And as I drank, I thought about Kiki. The scene played over and over again in my head. Kiki and Gotanda are in bed, making love. The camera pans around. And there she is. “What was that all about?” she says.
Yes, what was that all about?