A Girl Like You (34 page)
“My parents married because they loved each other so much that there was no other option,” she says.
It’s not that Joseph is unattractive to her, but when she thinks of how it had been with Haru that one time, how it had completed something in her, the idea of accepting Joseph’s proposal seems ridiculous.
“I love you in my way Sati,” he says. “But if I’m honest about the reason for wanting to marry, well, the truth is that I made a promise to my father to marry. You’re the only girl I have ever met that I can imagine sharing my life with.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes.”
“The whole truth?”
“Who ever tells the whole truth?”
“Joseph!” Her face widens in surprise.
“I know, a shocking thing to say.”
“In any case, Joseph, I can’t say yes. Love is supposed to be the thing, isn’t it? The thing that goes with marriage.”
“It’s not the law, is it, Sati? And it needn’t be our rule, we can make our own. And to be blunt, that kind of marriage was never in the cards for me. You have to trust me on that.”
“Well, I don’t. Love is like luck, it comes when you least expect it.” She wishes they weren’t having this conversation. She feels put on the spot, unkind. She gulps the last of her champagne and coughs as it goes down the wrong way.
“You’re a romantic,” Joseph says, patting her back. “I didn’t have you down for one.”
“Is that so bad?”
“No, a bit unrealistic, though.”
“It’s a crazy idea, Joseph. Honestly, can you see us together for life in that way? We like each other, but …”
“Well, how many married people can say that?”
“Plenty, I guess. You’re such a cynic.”
“You can’t lose out, you know. You’ll never have to worry about money again. Never have to want for anything.”
“I don’t think money keeps you from wanting.”
“Maybe not, but I can give you the sort of life you deserve. I’ll
never be cruel to you, and I’ll be your best friend. You have had enough of struggle, surely?”
“Yes, but my struggles don’t have much to do with money.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a secret heiress.”
“Not unless you count ninety dollars or so as the definition of heiress.”
He can’t stop the pity he feels from reaching his eyes. She has ninety dollars to face the rest of her life with, small change to him. It would scare him witless to have so little, yet she seems unafraid.
“In any case, Joseph, what you see, what you think you know, is only the smallest part of who I am.”
“Who are you, then? Tell me the worst of it.”
“Well, for one thing, I’m not as nice as you think.”
“Did I ever say that I thought you were nice?”
“No, but anyway, apart from that you would find me very hard to live with. There are days when I don’t want company, when nothing much pleases me, when you would find me horrible to be with.”
“I know that already, Sati, I’m the same. We will leave each other to our own devices on those days.”
“I’m argumentative, you know? I wouldn’t give you an easy ride.”
“I know that too.”
“Oh, it doesn’t stop there.” She is irritated by his refusal to let her off the hook. “I take long showers that use up all the hot water and I refuse now to wait in line for anything. And however you might want to change me, in the way that men do, it won’t work. If my father couldn’t do it no, one can. Would you want to be saddled with such a person for a wife?”
“I would,” he says, joining her on the sofa. “There are six
bathrooms in this place and the hot water never runs out. Shower to your heart’s content. I’ll see to it that you never have to wait in line for anything. And the last thing I want to do is change you.”
“I’m not a virgin, you know.” She hopes to shock, to stop the marriage talk.
In the pause as he thinks about it, he realizes that he knew that she wasn’t. She is too complete to be a virgin. That guy Haru she told him about, he supposes. It hardly makes a difference, except that she is being honest with him, whereas he can’t find trust enough to be the same with her.
He puts his arm around her, feeling the womanly slope of her shoulder, the swell of her breast against his chest. Because it is Sati and her body is slim, pared down, it isn’t unpleasant, but it is disturbing. It’s hard for him not to shy away from the way women are made, from the heat that comes off them. They are designed to drip milk and blood, and there is something animallike at their core, something deep and murky. He has felt a faint disgust at it since infancy, since first being aware of the smothering sensation he suffered as a baby at his mother’s fulsome breasts.
He feels himself drawing away and rallies. He must marry, that’s that. He wants her, just doesn’t
want
her. They are the answer to each other’s problems, they are synchronicity.
“Well, I’m not a virgin either.” He smiles. “So we are equal, dear girl.”
“Stop, Joseph. Please let’s stop talking about it.”
“Take a chance on me, Sati. Don’t be like those dreamers waiting for fortune to shine on them. They always die disappointed, you know.”
She moves on the sofa, creating a space between them, wishing she were somewhere else. Joseph isn’t giving up.
“Just imagine for a moment all those dull little rooms in New York, filled with people growing old, hoping to win life’s lottery.
To be chosen!” he says. You know that
Only in America
thing? It works for one in a million, maybe. You could be the one.”
“They may have love, Joseph. You always dismiss love.”
“Because that’s the biggest con of all, don’t you think? Put up with all the dross and wait for the great romance, the one true love that will surely transform everything.”
“Perhaps when it comes, it does. Perhaps it’s worth waiting for.”
“I thought that you had already been burned by that fire.”
“Mmm, maybe.”
“You have to make things happen yourself, Sati. Take the opportunities when they come.”
“And you’re my opportunity, Joseph?”
“Why shouldn’t I be? Look, it can get pretty cold out there on your own, you know. You have so little to lose just now, so much to gain if you say yes.”
On her third glass of champagne, and caught up in the force of Joseph’s words, she is relaxing into the idea. Being married to Joseph would be an adventure, would be extraordinary. And what if she waits for true love, what guarantee is there that it will ever come? Maybe it has already left for good, left with Haru. Maybe its very nature is to be one-sided, to wound the one who loves most. She’s had enough of being the one who loves most.
Joseph feels the give in her, the leap to the finish line in himself. It would be too hard to lose now; he will never find anyone who fits the bill as well as Satomi Baker. She is off beat, unexpected, and off the New York society radar. She is his last chance to save himself from those uptown girls with their long teeth and above-reproach credentials.
“There is no reason, Joseph,” his mother insists, “why you shouldn’t marry a Whitney, or a Cameron. The Rodmans have earned their place in society by now, I should think.”
“God forbid it, Mother. The boredom would kill me.”
He can’t imagine ever being bored with Satomi. She is open to the world, to ideas, and surprisingly sure of herself, given her background. He likes the idea of being a teacher in their relationship even though she is not always in the mood to listen to him. It is something he can offer her that has nothing to do with money. These days the thought of being married to her seems like something he wants rather than something imposed on him.
“Say yes, Satomi. Don’t sleepwalk your life away waiting for things to happen to you. Decide that they will.”
And in the moment, in the picture he has drawn so vividly of the kind of life that he can offer her, but mostly in the terrible idea that it is possible to sleepwalk your life away, she hears herself asking for time.
“Of course, of course. Take as much time as you need.” It’s in the bag, he thinks. “Absolutely no hurry.”
A memory of the honest intimacies of love, of Aaron lightly touching Tamura’s hand as he passed her, of Tamura lighting his cigarette with sweet concentration, comes to her with a pang. She dismisses it. The thought of making things happen, of not waiting around for luck to choose her, is suddenly appealing. Luck hasn’t done such a great job for her in the past, after all.
“I should have gone down on one knee, shouldn’t I?”
He kisses her lightly on the lips, the lime-sharp cologne scent of him overpowering. She leans into him, returning the kiss, feeling his mouth close against her half-open one, feeling herself a fraud. Could she love him, make love with him? He is almost handsome, certainly glamorous. It’s not enough, she knows.
If she turns him down, will she ever get out of her dismal room, with its brick wall view, the memory of Mrs. Copeland an ever-present ghost in the hallway? There are times when that room seems to her to be the loneliest place on earth. How long had
Mrs. Copeland been fading in hers before her death? Perhaps Joseph is right. You have to seize your opportunities.
“Your family, Joseph? Can’t imagine they’d be happy about you choosing me, somehow.”
“There’s only my mother, some odd upstate cousins. They hardly matter. I never see them if I can help it.”
“How sad for you.”
“Not really. My father’s opinion is the only one I ever cared for, and he would have loved you.”
“You can’t stay in that awful place. You don’t have to decide the marriage thing now, just come and stay as a guest.” Joseph’s insistence, her own fear of stasis, had driven the decision.
“I can’t bear the thought of you in that nasty little room. Look at all the space here. Have your own rooms, as many as you want.” A nervous tick had fluttered at the corner of Joseph’s right eye. If she turned him down it would probably mean that marriage was off the table too.
“I won’t bother you. I’ll just be your landlord for the time being. Only a nicer one than you have at present.”
“But what will people think?”
“What people?”
“Oh, you know.”
“It’s nobody’s business but ours.”
“Still no pressure?”
“I told you, no hurry.”
“Well, maybe for a while.”
“Or forever, if you like.”
She is shaky about it. It feels risky, the choice a loose woman might make, certainly one Tamura would have advised against. Is this the rashness in her that Haru saw when he called her dangerous?
Her regular kind of life has collided with Joseph’s extraordinary one and she feels like a child grasping at something too big for tiny hands to hold on to. But since Mrs. Copeland died she can hardly bear to be in her building anymore. Things have changed there, and not for the better.
A woman in her early sixties has moved into Mrs. Copeland’s room. She has a tight unfriendly smile, a buttoned-up way of walking, and the smell of cheap rye and perspiration wafts from her as she passes. She hadn’t been there a week when she began banging on the wall when Satomi played the radio, although her own plays on high volume all through the night.
Satomi, glad to go, has packed up her things and moved in with Joseph. But strangely, while living with him has dispelled her loneliness, it has only added to her sense of displacement. Questions come to her mind so that she can’t settle; is she grabbing at the chance to forget the past, is she excusing herself from the promise she made to Cora? Is she letting Dr. Harper down, failing to live up to Ralph Lazo’s example?
Be honest
, she tells herself,
you wanted to be saved
. But from what? From the effort of making her own way, perhaps, from collecting dimes to feed the gas meter in her insistently cold room, or from the shower water running cold before she’s had time to rinse the soap from her hair. But it’s mostly, she thinks, from the dreadful fear she suffers of nothing changing.
I wanted to be saved from real life
, she thinks. Perhaps, after years of want, it is simply greed for a bigger slice of the cake.
Joseph finds himself completely satisfied in the waiting for her answer. He has done his part. He isn’t breaking his promise, it’s just on hold. For the moment nothing needs to change and he is at peace.
But in his splendid apartment the girl she knew has been replaced with another, less certain one. Who is this person wandering
the huge rooms, gazing at paintings worth thousands of dollars, trailing her fingers on sculptures of the kind she would normally only see in museums? Nothing in her past life had hinted at the one she lives now with Joseph. She’s in alien territory, attempting to merge. In her daydreaming moments she imagines herself becoming part of the art, alive only when looked at.
Sometimes to steady herself she has to close her eyes, to hold life at bay for a moment or two. She summons pictures of Angelina’s woods, wraps herself in its greenery, smells the wild mint that she imagines still grows around the sitting stone, and sees the fox, wild and clean. She breathes deeply, gathering herself like an actress waiting for the camera to roll so that she can play her part. It has all happened too quickly, she has hardly had time to adjust to city living, and life with Joseph may be luxurious, but it’s big and scary too.
What more could you possibly want?
she asks herself, and knows the answer.
What she wants is Tamura making tea on their little stove, dented metal mugs, a radish or two in the right season. Oh, to sit with Tamura on the barrack steps, the mountains dark as forests in the distance, the sound of Yumi arguing with Eriko, and Cora’s little arms around her neck, the sweet child smell of her. That was real life, this one the fantasy.
It’s so strange to miss Manzanar, isn’t it?
Eriko writes in her latest letter.
I can’t quite remember how to be out in the world. An alarm triggers in me at noon, shouldn’t I be going to the mess hall? My eyes still hold the ground looking for wood for the stove. Three years out of a lifetime is hardly much, yet it seems like the bigger part of it.
