A Personal Matter (7 page)

“It was good of you to come over.” The professor showed no sign of getting out of his rocking chair. Bird, feeling lucky not to have been asked to stay longer, stood up. “There’s a bottle of whisky in that desk,” the professor said. “Take it along.”

Bird stiffened, and he could feel the three assistants tense. They must have known as well as his father-in-law about that long, disastrous drunk; now he sensed their eyes beginning to track the development of the incident. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily:
Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?

Nevertheless, Bird bent forward, opened the top of the professor’s desk, and lifted out the bottle of Johnnie Walker with both hands. He was crimson even to his eyeballs, yet he felt a twisted, feverish joy. Ask a man to trample a crucifix and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.

“Thank you,” Bird said. The three assistants relaxed. The professor was working his chair slowly around to its original position, his head erect, his face still slack and scarlet. Bird glanced at the younger men, swiftly bowed, and left the room.

Down the stairs and into the stone courtyard, Bird kept a prudent grip on the whisky bottle, as though it were a hand grenade. The rest of the day was his to spend as he liked by himself—the thought merged in his mind with an image of the Johnnie Walker and foamed into a promise of ecstasy and peril.

Tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe after a week’s reprieve, when my wife has learned about the wretched baby’s death, the two of us are going to be locked up in a dungeon of cruel neurosis. Accordingly—Bird argued with the bubbly voice of apprehension inside himself—I have a perfect right to today’s bottle of whisky and liberating time. Quietly the bubble collapsed. Fine! Let’s get down to drinking. First Bird thought of going back to his apartment and drinking in his study, but clearly that was a bad idea. If he returned, the old landlady and his friends might besiege him, by telephone if not in person, with detailed questions about the birth; besides, whenever he looked into the
bedroom, the baby’s white enamel bassinet would tear his nerves like a gnashing shark. Shaking his head roughly, Bird drove the notion from his mind. Why not hole up in a cheap hotel where only strangers stayed? But Bird pictured himself getting drunk in a locked hotel room and he felt afraid. Bird gazed enviously at the jolly Scotsman in the red cutaway striding across the Johnnie Walker label. Where was he going in such a hurry? All of a sudden, Bird remembered an old girlfriend. Winter and summer alike, during the day she was always sprawled in her darkened bedroom, pondering something extremely metaphysical while she chain-smoked Players until an artificial fog hung over her bed. She never left the house until after dusk.

Bird stopped to wait for a cab just outside the college gates. Through the large window in the coffee shop across the street he could see his former student sitting at a table with some friends. The student noticed Bird at once and began like an affectionate puppy to send sincere, ungainly signals. His friends, too, regarded Bird with vague, blunted curiosity. How would he explain Bird to his friends! As an English instructor who had drunk himself out of graduate school, a man in the grip of an unexplainable passion, or maybe a crazy fear?

The student smiled at him tenaciously until he was in the taxicab. Bird realized as he drove away that he felt as if he had just received charity. And from a boy who in all his time at the cram-school had never learned to distinguish English gerunds from present participles, a former student with a brain no bigger than a cat’s!

Bird’s friend lived on one of the city’s many hills, in a quarter ringed by temples and cemeteries. The girl lived alone in a tiny house at the end of an alley. Bird had met her at a class mixer in October of his freshman year. When it was her turn to stand and introduce herself, she had challenged the class to guess the source of her unusual name: Himiko—fire-sighting-child. Bird had answered, correctly, that the name was taken from the Chronicles of the ancient province of Higo—
The Emperor commanded his oarsmen, saying: There in the distance a signal fire burns; make for it straightaway.
After that, Bird and the girl Himiko from the island of Kyushu had become friends.

There were very few girls at Bird’s university, only a handful in the liberal arts who had come to Tokyo from the provinces; and all of those, as far as Bird knew, had undergone a transmutation into peculiar and unclassifiable monsters shortly after they had graduated. A certain
percentage of their body cells slowly overdeveloped, clustered and knotted until the girls were moving sluggishly and looking dull and melancholic. In the end, they became fatally unfit for everyday, postgraduate life. If they got married, they were divorced; if they went to work, they were fired; and those who did nothing but travel met with ludicrous and gruesome auto accidents. Himiko, shortly after graduation, had married a graduate student, and she hadn’t been divorced. Worse, a year after the marriage, her husband had committed suicide. Himiko’s father-in-law had made her a present of the house the couple had been living in, and he still provided her every month with money for living expenses. He hoped that Himiko would remarry, but at present she devoted her days to contemplation and cruised the city in a sports car every night.

Bird had heard open rumors that Himiko was a sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit. Even rumors that related her husband’s suicide to her deviate tastes. Bird had slept with the girl just once, but both of them had been terribly drunk and he wasn’t even certain coitus had been achieved. That was long before Himiko’s unfortunate marriage, and though she had been driven by keen desire and had pursued her pleasure actively, Himiko had been nothing more in those days than an inexperienced college girl.

Bird got out of the cab at the entrance to the alley where Himiko lived. Quickly, he calculated the money remaining in his wallet; he shouldn’t have any trouble getting an advance on this month’s salary after class tomorrow.

Bird twisted the bottle of Johnnie Walker into his jacket pocket and hurried down the alley, covering the neck of the bottle with his hand. Since the neighborhood knew all about Himiko’s eccentric life, it was impossible not to suspect that visitors were observed discreetly from windows here and there.

Bird pushed the buzzer in the vestibule. There was no response. He rattled the door a few times and softly called Himiko’s name. This was just a formality. Bird walked around toward the back of the house and saw that a dusty, secondhand MG was parked beneath Himiko’s bedroom window. With its empty seats exposed, the scarlet MG seemed to have been abandoned here for a long time. But it was proof that Himiko was at home. Bird propped a muddy shoe on the badly dented bumper and brought his weight to bear. The MG rocked gently, like a
boat. Bird called Himiko’s name again, looking up at the curtained bedroom window. Inside the room, the curtains were lifted slightly where they met and a single eye looked down at Bird through the narrow peephole. Bird stopped rocking the MG and smiled: he could always behave freely and naturally in front of this girl.

“Hey! Bird—” Her voice impeded by the curtain and by the window glass, sounded like a feeble, silly sigh.

Bird knew he had discovered the ideal spot for beginning a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the middle of the day. Feeling as though he had entered just one more plus on the psychological balance sheet for the day, he walked back to the front of the house.

I
HOPE
you weren’t asleep,” Bird said as Himiko opened the door for him.

“Asleep? At this hour?” the girl teased. Himiko held up one hand against the midday sun but it didn’t help; the light at Bird’s back descended roughly on her neck and shoulders, bare where her violet terrycloth bathrobe fell away. Himiko’s grandfather was a Kyushu fisherman who had taken as a wife, abducted really, a Russian girl from Vladivostok. That explained the whiteness of Himiko’s skin; you could see the web of capillary vessels just beneath the surface. In the way she moved, too, was something to suggest the confusion of the immigrant who is never quite at ease in his new country.

Wincing in the rush of light, Himiko stepped back into the shadow of the open door with the ruffled haste of a mother hen. She was in that meager stage of womanhood between the vulnerable beauty of a young girl, which she had lost, and the mature woman’s fullness still to come. Himiko was probably the type of woman who would have to spend a particularly long time in this tenuous state.

Quickly, in order to protect his friend from the revealing light, Bird stepped inside and closed the door. For an instant the cramped space of the vestibule felt like the inside of a hooded cage. Bird blinked rapidly while he took off his shoes, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness. Himiko hovered in the darkness behind him, watching.

“I hate to disturb people when they’re sleeping,” Bird offered.

“You’re so timid today, Bird. Anyway, I wasn’t asleep; if I nap during the day I can never get to sleep at night. I was thinking about the pluralistic universe.”

Pluralistic universe? Good enough, Bird thought, we can discuss it over whisky. Glancing around him like a hunting dog nosing for a
spoor, Bird followed Himiko inside. In the living room it might have been evening, and the gloom was dark and stagnant like a bed of straw for sick livestock. Bird squinted down at the old but sturdy rattan chair he always sat in and carefully lowered himself into it after removing some magazines. Until Himiko had showered and dressed and put on some make-up, she wouldn’t turn on the lights, much less open the curtains. Company had to wait patiently in the dark. During his last visit here a year ago, Bird had stepped on a glass and had cut the base of his big toe. Recalling the pain and the panic, he shivered.

It was hard to decide where to put the bottle of whisky: an elaborate confusion of books and magazines, empty boxes and bottles, shells, knives, scissors, withered flowers collected in winter woods, insect specimens, and old and new letters covered not only the entire floor and the table, but even the low bookcase along the window, the record player, and the television set. Bird hesitated, then shuffled a small space on the floor with his feet and wedged the bottle of Johnnie Walker between his ankles. Watching from the door, Himiko said as though in greeting, “I still haven’t learned to be neat. Bird, was it like this the last time you were here?”

“Damn right it was; I cut my big toe!”

“Of course, the floor around the chair there was all bloody, wasn’t it,” Himiko reminisced. “It’s been ages, Bird. But everything’s the same around here. How about you?”

“As matter of fact, I had a kind of accident.”

“Accident?”

Bird hesitated; he hadn’t planned to start right in with all his troubles. “We had a child but it died right away,” he simplified.

“No! Really? The same thing happened to friends of mine—two friends! That makes three people I know. Don’t you think fallout in the rain has something to do with it?”

Bird tried comparing his child who seemed to have two heads with pictures he had seen of mutations caused by radioactivity. But he had only to think to himself about the baby’s abnormality and a sense of extremely personal shame hotly rose into his throat. How could he discuss the misfortune with other people; it was inherent in himself! He had the feeling this would never be a problem he could share with the rest of mankind.

“In my son’s case, it was apparently just an accident.”

“What an awful experience for you, Bird,” Himiko said, and she looked at him quietly with an expression in her eyes that seemed to cloud her lids with ink.

Bird didn’t trouble himself with the message in Himiko’s eyes; instead, he lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker. “I wanted somewhere to drink and I knew you wouldn’t mind even if it was the middle of the day. Have a drink with me?”

Bird sensed himself wheedling the girl, like any brazen young gigolo. But that was the way men whom Himiko knew generally behaved toward her. The man she had married, more openly than Bird or any of her other friends, had played up to her as though he were a younger brother. And suddenly one morning he had hanged himself.

“I can see the baby’s death is still close to you, Bird. You haven’t recovered yet. Well, I’m not going to ask you anything more about it.”

“That would probably be best. There’s almost nothing to tell anyway.”

“Shall we have a drink?”

“Good.”

“I want to take a shower, but you start. Bird! There are glasses and a pitcher in the kitchen.”

Himiko disappeared into the bedroom and Bird stood up. The kitchen and the bathroom shared the twisted space at the end of the hall that amounted to the tail of the little house. Bird jumped over a cat crouching on the floor, the bathrobe and underclothes Himiko had just thrown off, and went into the kitchen. On his way back with a pitcher of water, glasses and cups he had washed himself, two in each pocket, he happened to glance past the open glass door and saw Himiko showering at the back of the bathroom, where it was even darker than the hall. With her left hand upheld as if to check the black water pouring out of the darkness above her head and her right hand resting on her belly, Himiko was looking down over her right shoulder at her buttocks and slightly arched right calf. Bird saw back and buttocks and legs, and the sight filled him with a disgust he couldn’t repress; his flesh turned to goosepimples. Bird rose on his toes as if to flee a darkness alive with ghosts: and then he was running, trembling, past the bedroom and back to the familiar rattan chair. He had conquered it once, he couldn’t say when, and now it had reawakened in him: the juvenile’s disgust, anxiety ridden, for the naked body. Bird sensed that the
octopus of disgust would extend its tentacles even when he turned to his wife, who now lay in a hospital bed thinking about the baby
who had gone with its father to another hospital because of a defective heart.
But would the feeling last for a long time? Would it grow acute?