South of the Border, West of the Sun

  “When they say ‘star-crossed,’ what do they mean?”

  “You know—lovers born under an unlucky star. Unlucky lovers. Here it’s referring to Romeo and Juliet. Ellington and Strayhorn wrote it for a performance at the Ontario Shakespeare Festival. In the original recording, Johnny Hodges’ alto sax was Juliet, and Paul Gonsalves played the Romeo part on tenor sax.”

  “Lovers born under an unlucky star,” she said. “Sounds like it was written for the two of us.”

  “You mean we’re lovers?”

  “You think we’re not?”

  I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling anymore. I could make out a faint glimmer deep within her eyes.

  “Shimamoto-san, I don’t know anything about you,” I said. “Every time I look in your eyes, I feel that. The most I can say about you is how you were at age twelve. The Shimamoto-san who lived in the neighborhood and was in my class. But that was twenty-five years ago. The Twist was in, and people still rode in streetcars. No cassette tapes, no tampons, no bullet train, no diet food. I’m talking long ago. Other than what I know about you then, I’m in the dark.”

  “Is that what you see in my eyes? That you know nothing about me?”

  “Nothing’s written in your eyes,” I replied. “It’s written in my eyes. I just see the reflection in yours.”

  “Hajime,” she said, “I know I should be telling you more. I do. There’s nothing I can do about it. So please don’t say anything further.”

  “Like I said, I’m just mouthing off to myself. Don’t give it a second thought.”

  She raised a hand to her collar and fingered the fish brooch. And quietly listened to the piano trio. When their performance ended, she clapped and took a sip of her cocktail. Finally she let out a long sigh and turned to me. “Six months is a long time,” she said. “But most likely, probably, I’ll be able to come here for a while.”

  “The old magic words,” I said.

  “Magic words?”

  “Probably and for a while.”

  She smiled and looked at me. She took a cigarette out of her small bag and lit it with a lighter.

  “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,” I said. “It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

  Shimamoto said nothing.

  “You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?”

  “Possibly. For the time being,” she answered.

  “I see I’m not the only one with a strange sense of humor,” I said. And smiled.

  She smiled too. The rain has stopped, without a sound there’s a break in the clouds, and the very first rays of sunlight shine through—that kind of smile. Small, warm lines at the corners of her eyes, holding out the promise of something wonderful.

  “Hajime,” she said, “I brought you a present.”

  She passed me a beautifully wrapped package with a red bow.

  “Looks like a record,” I said, gauging its size and shape.

  “It’s a Nat King Cole record. The one we used to listen to together. Remember? I’m giving it to you.”

  “Thanks. But don’t you want it? As a keepsake from your father?”

  “I have more. This one’s for you.”

  I gazed at the record, wrapped and beribboned. Before long, all the sounds around me—the clamor of the people at the bar, the piano trio’s music—all faded in the distance, as if the tide had gone out. Only she and I remained. Everything else was an illusion, papier-mâché props on a stage. What existed, what was real, was the two of us.

  “Shimamoto-san,” I said, “what do you say we go somewhere and listen to this together?”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said.

  “I have a small cottage in Hakone. It’s empty now, and there’s a stereo there. This time of night, we could drive there in an hour and a half.”

  She looked at her watch. And then at me. “You want to go there now?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “But it’s already past ten. If we went to Hakone now, it would be very late when we came back. Don’t you mind?”

  “No. Do you?”

  Once more she looked at her watch. And closed her eyes for a good ten seconds. When she reopened them, her face was filled with an entirely new expression, as if she’d gone far away, left something there, and returned. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  I called to the acting manager and asked him to take care of things in my absence—lock up the register, organize the receipts, and deposit the profits in the bank’s night deposit box. I walked over to my condo and drove the BMW out of the underground garage. And called my wife from a nearby telephone booth, telling her I was off to Hakone.

  “At this hour?” she said, surprised. “Why do you have to go all the way to Hakone at this hour?”

  “There’s something I need to think over,” I said.

  “So you won’t be back tonight?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Honey, I’ve been thinking over what happened, and I’m really sorry. You were right I got rid of all the stock. So why don’t you come on home?”

  “Yukiko, I’m not angry at you. Not at all. Forget about that I just want some time to think. Give me one night, okay?”

  She said nothing for a while. Then: “All right.” She sounded exhausted. “Go ahead to Hakone. But be careful driving. It’s raining.”

  “I will.”

  “There’s so much I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Tell me one thing: am I in your way?”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “It has nothing to do with you. If anything, the problem’s with me. So don’t worry about it, okay? I just want some time to think.”

  I hung up and drove to the bar. I could tell from Yukiko’s voice that she’d been mulling over our lunchtime conversation. She was tired, confused. It saddened me. The rain was still falling hard. I let Shimamoto into the car.

  “Isn’t there someplace you need to call before we go?” I asked.

  Silently she shook her head. And, as she did on the way back from Haneda Airport, she pressed her face against the glass and stared at the scenery.

  There was little traffic on the way to Hakone. I got off the Tomei Highway at Atsugi and headed straight to Odawara on the expressway. I kept our speed between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The rain came down in sheets from time to time, but I knew every curve and hill along the way. After we got on the highway, Shimamoto and I said hardly a word. I played a Mozart quartet quietly and kept my eyes on the road. Shimamoto was lost in thought as she looked out the window. Occasionally she’d glance over at me. Whenever she did, my throat went dry. Forcing myself to relax, I swallowed a couple of times.

  “Hajime,” she said. We were near Kouzu. “You don’t listen to jazz much outside the bar?”

  “No, I don’t. Mostly classical music.”

  “How come?”

  “I guess because jazz is part of my job. Outside the club, I like to listen to something different. Sometimes rock too, but hardly ever jazz.”

  “What type of music does your wife listen to?”

  “Usually whatever I’m listening to. She hardly ever plays any records on her own. I’m not even sure if she knows how to use the turntable.”

  Shimamoto reached over to the cassette case and pulled out a couple of tapes. One of them contained the children’s songs my daughters and I sang together in the car. “The Doggy Policeman,” “Tulip”—the Japanese equivalent of Barney’s Greatest Hits. From her expression as she gazed at the cassette and its picture of Snoopy on the cover, you’d think she??
?d discovered a relic from outer space.

  Again she turned to gaze at me. “Hajime,” she said after a while. “When I look at you driving, sometimes I want to grab the steering wheel and give it a yank. It’d kill us, wouldn’t it.”

  “We’d die, all right. We’re going eighty miles an hour.”

  “You’d rather not die with me?”

  “I can think of more pleasant ways to go.” I laughed. “And besides, we haven’t listened to the record yet. That’s the reason we’re here, right?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t do anything like that. The thought just crosses my mind from time to time.”

  It was only the beginning of October, but nights in Hakone were chilly. We arrived at the cottage, and I turned on the lights and lit the gas stove in the living room. And took down a bottle of brandy and two snifters from the shelf. We sat next to each other on the sofa, as we used to do so many years before, and I put the Nat King Cole record on the turntable. The red glow from the stove was reflected in our brandy glasses. Shimamoto sat with her legs folded underneath her. She rested one arm on the back of the sofa, the other in her lap. The same as in the old days. Back then she probably wanted to hide her leg, and the habit remained even now. Nat King Cole was singing “South of the Border.” How many years had it been since I heard that tune?

  “When I was a kid and listened to this record, I used to wonder what it was that lay south of the border,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said. “When I grew up and could read the English lyrics, I was disappointed. It was just a song about Mexico. I’d always thought something great lay south of the border.”

  “Like what?”

  Shimamoto brushed her hair back and lightly gathered it behind. “I’m not sure. Something beautiful, big, and soft.”

  “Something beautiful, big, and soft,” I repeated. “Was it edible?”

  She laughed. Her white teeth showed faintly. “I doubt it.”

  “Something you can touch?”

  “Probably.”

  “Again with the probablys.”

  “A world full of probablys,” she said.

  I stretched out my hand and laid it on top of her fingers on the back of the sofa. I hadn’t touched her body for so very long, not since the plane ride back from Ishikawa. As my fingers grazed hers, she looked up at me briefly, then down again.

  “South of the border, west of the sun,” she said.

  “West of the sun?”

  “Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana?”

  “No.”

  “I read this somewhere a long time ago. Might have been in junior high. I can’t for the life of me recall what book I read it in. Anyway, it affects farmers living in Siberia. Try to imagine this. You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep.”

  “Not exactly the lifestyle of an Aoyama bar owner.”

  “Hardly.” She smiled and inclined her head ever so slightly. “Anyway, that cycle continues, year after year.”

  “But in Siberia they don’t work in the fields in winter.”

  “They rest in the winter,” she said. “In the winter they stay home and do indoor work. When spring comes, they head out to the fields again. You’re that farmer. Imagine it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And then one day, something inside you dies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”

  I tried to conjure up the picture of a Siberian farmer lying dead on the ground.

  “But what is there, west of the sun?” I asked.

  She again shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. At any rate, it’s different from south of the border.”

  When Nat King Cole began singing “Pretend,” Shimamoto, as she had done so very long before, sang along in a small voice.

  Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue

  It isn’t very hard to do

  “Shimamoto-san,” I said, “after you left, I thought about you for a long time. Every day for six months, from morning to night I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. And I came to this conclusion. I can’t make it without you. I don’t ever want to lose you again. I don’t want to hear the words for a while anymore. Or probably. You’ll say we can’t see each other for a while, and then you’ll disappear. And no one can say when you’ll be back. You might never be back, and I might spend the rest of my life never seeing you again. And I couldn’t stand that. Life would be meaningless.”

  Shimamoto looked at me silently, still faintly smiling. A quiet smile that nothing could ever touch, revealing nothing to me of what lay beyond. Confronted with that smile, I felt as if my own emotions were about to be lost to me. For an instant I lost my bearings, my sense of who and where I was. After a while, though, words returned.

  “I love you,” I told her. “Nothing can change it. Special feelings like that should never, ever be taken away. I’ve lost you many times. But I should never have let you go. These last several months have taught me that I love you, and I don’t want you ever to leave me.”

  After I finished, she closed her eyes. The fire from the stove burned, and Nat King Cole kept on singing his old songs. I should say something more, I thought, but I could think of nothing.

  “Hajime,” she began, “this is very important, so listen carefully. As I told you before, there is no middle ground with me. You take either all of me or nothing. That’s the way it works. If you don’t mind continuing the way we are now, I don’t see why we can’t do that. I don’t know how long we’d be able to, but I’ll do everything in my power to see that it happens. When I’m able to come see you, I will. But when I can’t, I can’t. I can’t just come to see you whenever I feel like it. You may not be satisfied with that arrangement, but if you don’t want me to go away again, you have to take all of me. Everything. All the baggage I carry, everything that clings to me. And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you still want to be with me?”

  “I’ve already decided, Shimamoto-san,” I said. “I thought about it when you were gone, and I made my decision.”

  “But, Hajime, you have a wife and two children. And you love them. You want to do what’s right for them.”

  “Of course I love them. Very much. And I want to take care of them. But something’s missing. I have a family, a job, and no complaints about either. You could say I’m happy. Yet I’ve known ever since I met you again that something is missing. The important question is what is missing. Something’s lacking. In me and my life. And that part of me is always hungry, always thirsting. Neither my wife nor my children can fill that gap. In the whole world, there’s only one person who can do that. You. Only now, when that thirst is satisfied, do I realize how empty I was. And how I’ve been hungering, thirsting, for so many years. I can’t go back to that kind of world.”

  Shimamoto wrapped both her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel the softness of her body. It pushed against me warmly, insistently.

  “I love you too, Hajime. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. I don’t think you realize how very much I love you. I’ve loved you ever since I was tw
elve. Whenever anyone else held me, I thought of you. And that’s the reason why I didn’t want to see you again. If I saw you once, I knew I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I couldn’t keep myself away. At first I thought I’d just make sure it was really you, then head home. But once I saw you, I had to talk to you.” She kept her head on my shoulder. “Ever since I was twelve, I wanted you to hold me. You never knew that, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I admitted.

  “Since I was twelve, I wanted to hold you, naked. You had no idea, I suppose.”

  I held her close and kissed her. She closed her eyes, not moving. Our tongues wound round each other, and I could feel her heartbeat just below her breasts. A passionate, warm heartbeat. I closed my eyes and thought of the red blood coursing through her veins. I stroked her soft hair and drank in its fragrance. Her hands wandered over my back. The record finished, and the arm moved back to its base. Once again we were wrapped only in the sound of the rain. After a while, she opened her eyes. “Hajime,” she whispered, “are you sure this is all right? Are you sure you want to throw away everything for my sake?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I’ve already made up my mind.”

  “But if you’d never met me, you could have had a peaceful life. With no doubts or dissatisfactions. Don’t you think so?”

  “Maybe. But I did meet you. And we can’t undo that,” I said. “Just as you told me once, there are certain things you can’t undo. You can only go forward. Shimamoto-san, I don’t care where we end up; I just know I want to go there with you. And begin again.”

  “Hajime,” she said, “would you take off your clothes and let me see your body?”

  “You want just me to take off my clothes?”

  “Yes. First you take all your clothes off. I want to look at your body. You don’t want to?”

  “I don’t mind. If you want me to,” I said. I undressed in front of the stove. I took off my yacht parka, polo shirt, blue jeans, socks, T-shirt, underpants. Shimamoto had me get down on both knees on the floor. My penis was already hard, which embarrassed me a little. She moved back slightly to take in the whole scene. She still wore her jacket.