When I reached downstairs, just as I walked across the hotel lobby, the same front desk clerk approached me hurrying from behind.
“There’s a call for you,” she said. “We tried to put it through once before but your phone line was occupied.” I followed her to the front desk.
Chapter 19
ONE SOUL
“Ryoshi, can you talk for a minute?” Chiasa asked.
“Where are you?” I asked her.
“At my hotel. I just finished speaking to my father. He’s gone out now to attend some meetings,” she said.
“Let’s meet up,” I told her, and gave her the address to the travel agency where I was headed.
* * *
Her hair wasn’t wild today, but her eyes were. She wore two thick, long cornrows and had more of a glow than before. She was wearing the love she was feeling, it seemed, and the jewels I had gifted her as well. The Seoul sun on a Ramadan day had straightened us up some, both of us. The nighttime has a sensual power that can make passions feel even more urgent. I had planned to give her those jewels after she and Akemi met and spoke specifically about our situation, but after seeing Chiasa in the mosque and then in the bookstore, I felt pushed to mark my territory, and that urgency led me to place one bangle at a time on her wrist and one diamond ring on her finger. All mosques are filled with Muslim men. They are serious men who welcome marriage, wives, and family.
“What time are you leaving tomorrow?” was the first thing she asked me. Her left hand was raised up and shielding her eyes from the sun rays. Now drops of sunlight were dancing on her diamond.
“Change of plans, I’m not leaving tomorrow,” I said calmly.
She smiled. “I’m so happy. Now you can meet daddy. I had somany things I wanted to tell you and so many things I felt we needed to talk about before you left for the States.”
I just looked at her. I didn’t say any response. I was thinking that she must not know that I was planning to take her home with me. If Akemi agreed, it would be the three of us flying to New York. If not, Chiasa could keep the jewels. They were valuable enough. I had sold my watch to get that pear-shaped diamond. No sweat, Chiasa had given me more. She had given me Akemi.
“Let’s talk,” I told her. We walked, her messenger bag riding on her hips.
“My father can’t meet today. His schedule is so crazy. He can meet tomorrow though. I hope you won’t mind. He said if you were still in Seoul we could all meet at the Shilla because that’s where the banquet is. He can squeeze us in at seven right before the event. I’ll be dressed up, but you don’t have to. It’s just because I have to attend the banquet with Daddy.” She took a breath.
I smiled. I knew the general had selected a time to meet me when he thought I would already be in flight to New York, out of his life and Chiasa’s also. “I’ll be there, seven sharp,” I said calmly.
“Oh, good.” She threw both arms up in a touchdown pose, same as when she first came creeping into my Shinjuku hostel.
“Okay, so about the vending machines, I found a connect,” she said, shifting into her business mind. “I spoke with one who offered all kinds of options that I thought might work good for you.”
I realized right then that one reason I felt so attached to this girl was her energy. The range of her personality was wide. When she wasn’t around, I missed the way she made me feel. Her mind was so swift and she was always poised and positioned and moving rapidly toward victory in whatever she was dealing with. She was a problem solver, not a problem. She was stress-free; she was peace to me.
“So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.
“Let’s call him.”
“Right now?”
“These are business hours,” I said.
It was warm inside the phone booth with the door closed all the way so that we could hear the call properly. We were facing one another. We were standing close but not touching. She was speaking to the connect in Japanese, and back and forth to me in English. Then her eyes switched and she said to me in English, “So give me your New York address,” while holding the phone to her ear. I gave her my Queens address. Now she was the second person to know what I normally wouldn’t allow anyone to know.
She was speaking in a soft, polite Japanese, bowing while speaking as though the caller could see her. It was a part of her, I told myself. It was automatic. It was her Japanese culture.
“It’s done. The machine will be sent to your New York address. The purchase order will be sent to me. You give me the money and I’ll pay it,” Chiasa announced. There was a pause between us.
“What?” she asked me, her eyes widened. I just smiled. I had nothing to say.
“Do you have your passport on you?” I asked Chiasa as we sat inside the travel agency.
“Yes,” she said, curious. “Why?” She swung her bag around to her lap and opened it. “It’s here.” She handed it to me.
“I want to reserve three tickets from Busan International Airport to JFK Airport in New York, leaving Busan on Sunday, May …” Chiasa’s eyebrows both lifted up. She didn’t speak or interrupt or contradict me. She remained silent. Half an hour later, outside the door of the agency, she said, “Ryoshi?”
Avoiding offering her any of the details until after her meeting with Akemi, I changed the topic. “Do you always carry a slingshot?” I asked her.
“Of course.” She smiled. “Even if I didn’t have one on me, I could make one in less than three minutes out of two pencils and rubber bands. “She was all excited again, speaking about her weapons of choice.
In Itaewon I bought her a scarf to wrap her hair in. In the back of a musical instrument shop, I watched as she showed me that she knew how to wear it. When she got it all wrong, I wrapped it for her. As my hands moved over her head, her eyelashes grazed my skin. I could feel her breathing. When I leaned in a bit more, she gasped. I looked straight into her.
“It’s not sunset,” I told her.
“I can see that,” she said so quietly.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “Why are you fasting and reading Quran and wrapping your hair?” I really wanted to listen and hear her reasoning.
“At first I was doing it out of pure admiration for Ryoshi, really. Then I started reading the Quran for myself. Certain things in there gave me a feeling,” she said.
“What kind of feeling?” I asked as we left the music store and walked through the Seoul springtime framed by all of nature blossoming.
“At first when I opened the Quran, I looked at the table of contents. I chose to read Al Nisa, the chapter on the women, before anything else. It said in there that ‘Allah created man and woman from one soul.’ I thought that was beautiful. I read the entire chapter, but that one line kept repeating in my mind. I thought that if everyone everywhere in the world believed that one line, things would be so much better between men and women and families. All of this time it seemed like everybody everywhere thought that women were less than men, lower and okay to mistreat.” She looked at me, smiling.
I thought about how each time I pushed to see if she was bullshitting me about something, she would prove that she wasn’t. Like earlier on when she gave her true reasons for following me to Kyoto. Chiasa was thoughtful, like my father raised me to be.
“What about in that same sura, Al Nisa, where it says on the thirty-fourth ayat that ‘Men are the maintainers of women’ and that ‘Good women are obedient.’ ” I smiled.
“I’d like a good man to be my maintainer.” She smiled. “And it says, ‘Good women are obedient to Allah and guard the unseen,’ ” she corrected me. “That means don’t walk around naked and uncovered.” She smiled.
We both laughed without a real joke or reason.
“About the two, or three, or four wives situation, I don’t know. I’ll admit, I wanted it to be true because I want and my heart wants and my body wants to be with you, and you are already married. But it seems like men are given permission to have up to four wives on
ly in certain situations. And it says also ‘only if you can do justice with them.’ Do you think a man could really treat more than one wife equally and justly?” She looked at me sideways.
I was thinking and silent for some time. Then I told her what was truest to me. “I don’t think one man can give two women the exact same things. I don’t think that a man has to give his two women the exact same things to do them justice. Each woman is different; probably they wouldn’t even want the exact same things because of those differences between them. But I could give two women the same things in general: a true love, a lifetime of loyalty, a hardworking man and provider, a passionate lover, and a man who would risk his life to protect you and give up his life so that you can keep yours, if necessary.”
Then I reminded her, “While you are bowing your head and praying to Allah, I am humbling myself and obeying and praying to Allah also.”
Chapter 20
INSHALLAH
Akemi was seated on the stairs outside Hyundai Suites. Chiasa saw her first, all the way from the bottom of the block.
“Should I walk up there alone? Would that be better?” she asked me.
“No, we are already walking together so we shouldn’t pretend that we are not,” I said.
Akemi had her face lying on her knee tops. Her hair was uncovered and hanging down almost to the floor. She was watching as we approached. Her eyes were soft as they always were—soft, mysterious, and a little bit vulnerable. She was wearing a white yukata with a long stemmed black rose stitched on it in a wicked design. She wore wooden-heeled flip-flops. All of her fingernails had the kanji for Mayonaka. On her toenails were drawn half moons. She was so subtle in her extreme elegance.
“Akemi.” I came in close and reached my hand out to help her up. As she stood up, Chiasa bowed down, then came up speaking in Japanese. Akemi placed her hand in my hand and kept it there. We were now three standing still on the stairs, staring. I saw Akemi’s eyes seeing Chiasa’s diamond ring and bangles.
Akemi said something to Chiasa. Chiasa turned to me and said, “Akemi is asking me if I am your translator. I told her I was.”
“I’ll head upstairs so you two can talk,” I said to Chiasa and gestured to Akemi at the same time. Akemi wouldn’t loosen her hand from mine. She tightened it to halt me.
“Akemi said to me, if I am your translator, then I should translate.” Chiasa informed me.
I looked at Akemi. Her eyes told me she wanted the three of us to remain together.
“Then let’s all go upstairs,” I said. “For privacy,” I added.
In the elevator, I stood in the middle. They were on opposite sides, leaning on the wall as though it was the only thing holding them up.
Upstairs in our suite, we all removed our shoes. I sat on the bed and leaned against the headboard. Chiasa sat at the small wooden eating table. Akemi moved around in the tiny kitchenette, preparing tea and rice and soup.
She spoke some Japanese to Chiasa. Chiasa translated to me that Akemi said:
“For the first time, I feel so frustrated at myself for failing to learn to speak the English language. This was never a problem between Mayonaka and me before.”
Akemi was looking at me to let me feel and know that her words were for me. Then she said, “Now I feel myself splitting slowly like a glacier that has a tiny crack that threatens to break it into two pieces and send both sides drifting over icy water.”
Chiasa looked at me. “You see, this is why I love her words. They are like poetry,” Chiasa said softly in English without a trace of humor.
Akemi then turned to Chiasa and expressed the following feelings to her in Japanese, which Chiasa put into English so that I would also hear and understand.
Chapter 21
WHOLE WOMEN
AKEMI’S VOICE
I know why you love my husband. You love him for the same reasons that I love him. Any woman who comes to know Mayonaka will love him just the same. I am not angry that you love him. I have seen many women with either lust or love for my husband in their eyes.
I am angry because he loves you. He is loving you while he is loving me. I am also angry at myself, because you would never have come to know him if I had been in his life fully and at his side where I belong.
I am angry because his love is strong, and his love adds, but it never subtracts. So I know that no matter what I do or say, you have become an addition to me and him, a permanent part of us.
I am so angry at my father because he caused all of this. He divided a great love, mine and Mayonaka’s, and for shallow and stupid reasons. He has kept me away from so many people, family members who love me or who would have loved me and I might have also loved. If I had only known them.
The love between Mayonaka and me is so intense, but now our love will never be as it was, just he and I. Now it is he and I and you and all of our children to come. I feel many children will come, because I know him.
I’m not going to be mean to you, because I already know that would be useless. It would cause distance between me and my man, and I want to hold him close, so close, so close. I know that you will never leave him, because I would never leave him for the same reasons. So here we are, wedded together somehow.
Chiasa, I saw you at Hokkaido. You were impossible for my eyes to miss. I am an artist who appreciates so deeply each beautiful thing in deep detail. I see it. I appreciate it. I remember it. I saw you on the plane, a very beautiful, quiet girl, pretty even while sleeping. I did not know that the girl who I often spoke to over the phone, was the one who rode on the plane beside me and Mayonaka.
I am crying now because even when my husband was coming for me, he was with you. What exactly happened between the two of you? I will never know. Whatever it was, it has created a powerful energy, and a strong bond and a deep feeling between you two. These facts can never be denied. I saw the passion in your writing on the study cards that you made for him. I saw the love in his eyes as he spoke to you over the phone. I feel his body jerk at the mention of your name.
Mayonaka has already told me that he loves me, he tells me that I am number one in his heart, his first love, and that he will love me forever. Mayonaka has already told me that he will never leave me, no matter what. Mayonaka has already told me that if he has gone away from me, he will always return to me. He is my husband. I am his wife.
I cannot ever separate from his words, from his love, from his body.
So if it is okay for you to be number two, then I accept you. Between you and me, woman to woman, and wife to wife, we should never have as our goal to destroy one another. It is impossible for me to destroy you without destroying him. It is impossible for you to destroy me without destroying him. We’ll share.
Honestly though, and hopefully only in the beginning, while he is loving you, I’ll be burning. I’ll be burning because I know how good it feels. While he is loving you, I’ll be burning because I know how good it feels to him and at that time it will be you making him feel that good, not me. But when he returns to me and holds me, I will heal each time. For that healing from him, I would do anything.
Chiasa, if knowing all of this, my true feelings, the lives I carry from him in my womb, you still want to join us, and I know you will, I accept you. We should become great friends. You and I should become close, but we will never become as close as each of us is to him.
CHIASA’S VOICE
I love your husband. You are right in almost everything that you’ve said. True, I can only love him because of you, but not because you were separated from him. During the time that he was looking for you and I was helping him to find you, our tongues never touched.
He was true to you, more perfect than you could imagine and more perfect than I ever wanted or expected any man to be. I am embarrassed to say that even though I was a virgin then, and I am still a virgin even tonight, if he would’ve attempted in one of those nights that he was searching for you, I would’ve allowed him. But he did not.
We u
sed your diary to locate you. Only I could read your kanji, and I was his translator. It was you, then, who brought my heart to him. It was your words, your feelings, your impressions, descriptions, and experiences with him. I fell in love with you first. Then I fell in love with him. It all happened in that order. So yes, that makes me second, when I am used to winning first place and being number one.
But what will I have if I pretend to be what I am not? In this love, I am number two. I love and admire you, Akemi, as a woman. I don’t hate women, although I know that many women hate every other woman automatically. I also love and admire him as a woman loves a man, in the deepest and most intimate of ways.
Number two is not less. You are right, it is addition, not subtraction. One is first and two is the next number over, but two is more than one. It makes one stronger. So here we are with no shame and no sin committed. I am so grateful you have accepted me. Inshallah over time, you will enjoy me genuinely.
MIDNIGHT’S VOICE
I know that if Akemi and Chiasa were American girls, they would’ve attacked each other. They would have tried to rip each other’s hearts out and bloodied as many body parts as possible. They would’ve burnt down houses and slashed tires and raised up girl armies. They might have even tried to castrate.
They would have labeled me a motherfucker, a dog, an animal, a nigga, or worse. They would’ve said that I was crazy or full of myself or full of shit. Both of them would’ve told me to go to hell. The illest thing, however, that I know for sure from seven years in America—if they were American girls, they would’ve both made a scene, fought, and talked a bunch of shit and refused to marry me and refused to share. Still they both would’ve continued to allow me to fuck them repeatedly, impregnate them, and abandon them while swearing they were both right and both hadn’t done anything wrong. I was proud of Akemi and Chiasa. Them being able to stay cool, talk it out, and be reasonable made me love them even more.