“Been here since last night?” I asked, kettle in hand.
An ever so slight nod of her head.
“You’ve been waiting all this time?”
No answer.
The room had steamed up from the boiling water and strong sun. I shut the window and switched on the air conditioner, then set the two mugs of coffee on the table.
“Drink,” I said, reclaiming my own voice.
Silence.
“Be better if you drank something.”
It was thirty seconds before she raised her head slowly, evenly, and gazed absently at the potted plant. A few fine strands of hair lay plastered against her dampened cheeks, an aura of wetness about her.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cry.”
I held out a box of tissues to her. She quietly blew her nose, then brushed the hair from her cheek.
“Actually, I planned on being gone by the time you returned. I didn’t want to see you.”
“But you changed your mind, I see.”
“Not at all. I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to go. But I’m going now, don’t worry.”
“Well, have some coffee anyway.”
I tuned in to the radio traffic report as I sipped my coffee and slit open the two pieces of mail. One was an announcement from a furniture store where everything was twenty percent off. The second was a letter from someone I didn’t want to think about, much less read a letter from. I crumpled them up and tossed them into the wastebasket, then nibbled on leftover cheese crackers. She cupped her hands around the coffee cup as if to warm herself and fixed her eyes on me, her lip lightly riding the rim of the mug.
“There’s salad in the fridge,” she said.
“Salad?”
“Tomatoes and string beans. There wasn’t anything else. The cucumbers had gone bad, so I threw them out.”
“Oh.”
I went to the refrigerator and took out the blue Okinawa glass salad bowl and sprinkled on the last drops from the bottle of dressing. The tomatoes and string beans were but chilled shadows. Tasteless shadows. Nor was there any taste to the coffee or crackers. Maybe because of the morning sun? The light of morning decomposes everything. I gave up on the coffee midway, dug a bent cigarette out of my pocket, and lit up with matches that I’d never seen before. The tip of the cigarette crackled dryly as its lavender smoke formed a tracery in the morning light.
“I went to a funeral. When it was over, I went to Shinjuku, by myself.”
The cat appeared out of nowhere, yawned at length, then sprang into her lap. She scratched him behind the ears.
“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” she said. “I’m out of the picture already.”
“I’m not explaining. I’m just making conversation.”
She shrugged and pushed her brassiere strap back inside her dress. Her face had no expression, like a photograph of a sunken city on the ocean floor.
“An acquaintance of sorts from years back. No one you knew.”
“Oh really?”
The cat gave his legs a good stretch, topped it off with a puff of a breath.
I glanced at the burning tip of the cigarette in my mouth.
“How did this acquaintance die?”
“Hit by a truck. Thirteen bones fractured.”
“Female?”
“Uh-huh.”
The seven o’clock news and traffic report came to an end, and light rock returned to the airwaves. She set her coffee back down and looked me in the face.
“Tell me, if I died, would you go out drinking like that?”
“The funeral had nothing to do with my drinking. Only the first one or two rounds, if that.”
A new day was beginning. Another hot one. A cluster of skyscrapers glared through the window.
“How about something cool to drink?”
She shook her head.
I got a can of cola out of the refrigerator and downed it in one go.
“She was the kind of girl who’d sleep with anyone.” What an obituary: the deceased was the kind of girl who would sleep with anyone.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Why indeed? I had no idea.
“Very well,” she picked up where I trailed off, “she was the kind of girl who’d sleep with anyone, right?”
“Right.”
“But not with you, right?”
There was an edge to her voice. I glanced up from the salad bowl.
“You think not?”
“Somehow, no,” she said quietly. “You, you’re not the type.”
“What type?”
“I don’t know, there’s something about you. Say there’s an hourglass: the sand’s about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”
“That so?”
She pursed her lips, then relaxed.
“I came to get the rest of my things. My winter coat, hats, things I left behind. I packed them up in boxes. When you have time, could you take them to the parcel service?”
“I can drop them by.”
She shook her head. “That’s all right. I don’t want you to come. You understand, don’t you?”
Of course I did. I talk too much, without thinking.
“You have the address?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all that’s left to do. Sorry for staying so long.”
“And the paperwork, was that it?”
“Uh-huh. All done.”
“I can’t believe it’s that easy. I thought there’d be a lot more to it.”
“People who don’t know anything about it all think so, but it really is simple. Once it’s over and done with.” Saying that, she went back to scratching the cat’s head. “Get divorced twice, and you’re a veteran.”
The cat did a back stretch, eyes closed, then quickly nestled his head into the crook of her arm. I tossed the coffee mugs and salad bowl into the sink, then swept up the cracker crumbs with a bill. My eyes were throbbing from the glare of the sun.
“I made out a list of details. Where papers are filed, trash days, things like that. Anything you can’t figure out, give me a call.”
“Thanks.”
“Had you wanted children?” she suddenly asked.
“Nah, can’t say I ever wanted kids.”
“I wondered about that for a while there. But seeing how it ended up like this, I guess it was just as well. Or maybe if we’d had a child it wouldn’t have come to this, what do you think?”
“There’re lots of couples with kids who get divorced.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, toying with my lighter. “I still love you. But I guess that’s not the point now, is it? I know that well enough myself.”
The Slip
Once she was gone, I downed another cola, then took a hot shower and shaved. I was down to the bottom on just about everything—soap, shampoo, shaving cream.
I stepped out of the shower and dried my hair, rubbed on body lotion, cleaned my ears. Then to the kitchen to heat up the last of the coffee. Only to discover: no one sitting at the opposite side of the table. Staring at that chair where no one sat, I felt like a tiny child in a De Chirico painting, left behind all alone in a foreign country. Of course, a tiny child I was not. I decided I wouldn’t think about it and took my time with my coffee and cigarette.
For not having slept in twenty-four hours, I felt surprisingly awake. My body was hazed to the core, but my mind kept swimming swiftly around through the convoluted waterways of my consciousness, like a restless aquatic organism.
The vacant chair in front of me made me think of an American novel I’d read a while back. After the wife walks out, the husband keeps her slip draped over the chair. It made sense, now that I thought about it. True, it wouldn’t really help things, but it beat having that dying geranium staring at me. Besides, probably even the cat would feel more comfortable having her things around.
I checked the bedroom, opening all of
her drawers, all empty. Only a moth-eaten scarf, three coat hangers, and a packet of mothballs. Her cosmetics, toiletries, and curlers, her toothbrush, hair dryer, assortment of pills, boots, sandals, slippers, hat boxes, accessories, handbags, shoulder bags, suitcases, purses, her ever-tidy stock of underwear, stockings, and socks, letters, everything with the least womanly scent was gone. She probably even wiped off her fingerprints. A third of the books and records was gone too—anything she’d bought herself or I’d given her.
From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I’d been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.
A slip! She could have at least left a slip!
It was her choice, and her choice was to leave not a single trace. I could either accept it or, as I imagined was her intention, I could talk myself into believing that she never existed all along. If she never existed, then neither did her slip.
I doused the ashtray, thought more about her slip, then gave up and hit the sack.
A month had passed since I agreed to the divorce and she moved out. A non-month. Unfocused and unfelt, a lukewarm protoplasm of a month.
Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theaters. Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the one.
In one sense, her disappearance was due to circumstances beyond my control. What’s done is done, that sort of thing. How we got on the last four years was of no consequence. Any more than the photos peeled out of the albums.
Nor did it matter that she’d been sleeping with a friend of mine for a long time and one day upped and moved in with him. All this was within the realm of possibility. Such things happened often enough, so how could I think her leaving me was anything out of the ordinary? The long and the short of it was, it was up to her.
“The long and short of it is, it’s up to you,” I said.
It was a Sunday afternoon, as I dawdled with a pull-ring from a beer can, that she came out with it. Said she wanted a divorce.
“Either way is fine with you then?” she asked, releasing her words slowly.
“No, either way is not fine with me,” I said. “I’m only saying it’s up to you.”
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t want to leave you,” she said after a moment.
“All right, then don’t leave me,” I said.
“But I’m going nowhere staying with you.”
She wouldn’t say any more, but I knew what she meant. I would be thirty in a few months; she would be twenty-six. And if you considered the vastness of the rest of our lives, the foundations we’d laid barely scraped zero. All we’d done our four years together was to eat through our savings.
Mostly my fault, I guess. Probably I never should have gotten married. At least never to her.
In the beginning, she thought she was the one unfit for society and made me out to be the socially functioning one. In our respective roles, we got along relatively well. Yet no sooner had we thought we’d reached a lasting arrangement than something crumbled. The tiniest hint of something, but it was never to be recovered. We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end.
To her, I was already lost. Even if she still loved me, it didn’t matter. We’d gotten too used to each other’s role. She understood it instinctively; I knew it from experience. There was no hope.
So it was that she and her slip vanished forever. Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy.
July 24, 8:25 A.M.
I checked the numerals of the digital clock, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.
Part Three
September, Two Months Later
The Whale’s Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations
To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there’s sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there’s sex as pastime.
There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life—how shall I put it?—differs fundamentally from the sex life of the whale.
We are not whales—and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.
When I was a kid, there was an aquarium thirty minutes by bicycle from where I lived. A chill aquarium-like silence always pervaded the place, with only an occasional splash to be heard. I could almost feel the Creature from the Black Lagoon breathing in some dim corner.
Schools of tuna circled ’round and ’round the enormous pool. Sturgeon plied their own narrow watercourse, piranha set their razor-sharp teeth into chunks of meat, and electric eels sputtered and sparked like shorted-out lightbulbs.
The aquarium was filled with countless other fish as well, all with different names and scales and fins. I couldn’t figure out why on earth there had to be so many kinds of fish.
There were, of course, no whales in the aquarium. One whale would have been too big, even if you knocked out all the walls and made the entire aquarium into one tank. Instead, the aquarium kept a whale penis on display. As a token, if you will.
So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale but a whale’s penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I’d steal off to my place on the bench in the hushed, high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale’s penis.
At times it would remind me of a tiny shriveled palm tree; at other times, a giant ear of corn. In fact, if not for the plaque—WHALE GENITAL: MALE—no one would have taken it to be a whale’s penis. More likely an artifact unearthed from the Central Asian desert than a product of the Antarctic Ocean. It bore no resemblance to my penis, nor to any penis I’d ever seen. What was worse, the severed penis exuded a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness.
It came back to me, that giant whale’s penis, after having intercourse with a girl for the very first time. What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it. I felt as if I didn’t have a hope in the world. But I was only seventeen and clearly too young to give up on everything. It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since.
Which is, that I am not a whale.
In bed now with my new girlfriend, running my fingers through her hair, I thought about whales for the longest time.
In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn. The glass of the tanks is cold. I’m wearing a heavy sweater. Through the large picture window of the exhibition room, the sea is dark as lead, the countless whitecaps reminiscent of lace collars on girls’ dresses.
“What’re you thinking about?” she asked.
“Something long ago,” I said.
She was twenty-one, with an attractive slender body and a pair of the most bewitching, perfectly formed ears. She was a part-time proofreader for a small publishing house, a commercial model specializing in ear shots, and a call girl in a discreet intimate-friends-only club. Which of the three she considered her main occupation, I had no idea. Neither did she.
Nonetheless, sizing up her essential attributes, I would have to say her natural gifts ran
to ear modeling. She agreed. Which was well and good until you considered how extremely limited are the opportunities for a commercial ear model, how abysmal the status and pay. To your typical P.R. man or makeup artist or cameraman, she was just an “earholder,” someone with ears. Her mind and body, apart from the ears, were completely out of the picture, disregarded, nonexistent.
“But you know, that’s not the real me,” she’d say. “I am my ears, my ears are me.”
Neither her proofreader self nor her call girl self ever, not for one second, showed her ears to others.
“That’s because they’re not really me,” she explained.
The office of her call girl club, registered as a “talent club” for appearances, was located in Akasaka and run by a gray-haired Englishwoman whom everyone called Mrs. X. She’d been living in Japan for thirty years, spoke fluent Japanese, and read most of the basic Chinese characters.
Mrs. X had opened an English-language tutorial school for women not five hundred yards from the call girl office and used the place to scout promising faces for the latter. Conversely, several of the call girls were also going to her English school. At reduced tuition, of course.
Mrs. X called all her call girls “dear.” Soft as a spring afternoon, her “dears.”
“Make sure to wear frilly undies, dear. And no pantyhose.” Or “You take your tea with cream, don’t you, dear?” She had a firm understanding of her market. Her clientele were wealthy businessmen in their forties and fifties. Two-thirds foreigners, the rest Japanese. Mrs. X expressed a dislike for politicians, old men, perverts, and the poor.
A dozen long-stemmed beauties she kept on call, but out of the whole bouquet my new girlfriend was the least attractive bloom. As a call girl, she seemed no more than ordinary. In fact, with her ears hidden, she was plain. I couldn’t figure out how Mrs. X had singled her out. Maybe she’d detected in her plainness some special glimmer, or maybe she thought one plain girl would be an asset. Either way, Mrs. X’s sights had been right on target, and my girlfriend quickly had a number of regular customers. She wore ordinary clothes, ordinary makeup, ordinary underwear, and an ordinary scent as she’d head out to the Hilton or Okura or Prince to sleep with one or two men a week, thereby making enough to live on for a month.