A Woman's Nails (23 page)

She concludes her argument as she often does with a smug look and a broad sweep of her hand slicing through any disagreement.

After all I’
ve eaten and drunk, I don't have the energy to argue. Besides, people like Yoko, who love dominating conversations, tend not to listen to anything but their own sweet voice
s
.

“
I really like these
hashi oki
,” I say to myself. “
I didn't know you c
ould see fireflies around here.”

“
You know, international marriages are bound to fail because
the cultures are so different,” Shizuko says. “
You know that JA
L pilot, Barker-san
[7]
, don't you?”

“Oh, yes,”
Yoko say
s putting her wine glass down. “
I had him and his wife,
the poor girl, over last week.”
You ge
t the feeling Yoko’
s home is in a perpetual state of hospitality, inviting and feeding guests, then assuring them to come again. Once gone, however, they become the fodder for that red-lipsticked, tir
elessly booming cannon of hers.

She picks up a cherry, removes the stem with her long bony fingers then sucks it into the venomo
us red hole in her gaunt face. “
I didn't tell you, Shizuko, but while Barker-san and my husband were out getting a massage, I talked with his wife. She said she didn't know what to do
with him. ‘
He always wants to do something on his day off . . . go out, jog or hike . . . All I wa
nt to do is stay home and rest.’
And just as the poor girl was sighing, Barker-san and my husband came back. And Barker, he went right up to his wife, gave he
r a big hug and kiss and said, ‘We're so happy together!’”
Yoko fills my
choko
with more
saké
, and shakes her head. “I felt so sorry for her.”

“
So, the fireflies
. . .,” I say. “
Know any good pla
ces I can see them around here?”

“
The problem with young people tod
ay,” Shizuko says with contempt, “
is that they want to marry for
love
.”

This surprises me enough to bring me back into the conversation, and I ask Shizuko if she loves her husband. The two women laugh at me, making me feel foolish for asking. I didn’t know the question was so silly.

“
Love
,” Shizuko scoffs. “
Tell me, Peador, why do half
of all Americans get divorced?”

I could offer her a number of reasons. Many really. But, I'm really not in the mood to go head to head with these two half-drunk, half-bitter housewives.

“
It's very important to k
now the person you're marrying,” Shizuko warns. “Love confuses you.”

“
Do you
want to marry a Japanese girl?”
Yoko asks me.

“
I haven't given it much thought, to be honest. Anyways, marriage isn't the object. It's the result. If I find someone I love, who also happens to be Japanese, w
ho knows? Maybe I'll marry her.”

“
You
'll never be able to marry one,”
Yoko says refilling my
choko
. “
You have to eat
miso
and
rice and soy sauce as a child.”

Maybe I'm blind or a sentimental dolt, but, somehow, I just cannot accept the idea that what went wrong between Mie and myself was rooted in my dislike of
sashimi
.

“
Everyone wants to ma
rry someone funny and cheerful,”
Yoko continues spilling a drop of w
ine onto her linen tablecloth. “
Tsk,
tsk . . . She’s cheerful but she couldn’
t cook if her life depended upon it. She buys everything from the convenience store and puts it in the microwave.
Ching!
Boys want girls that are fun, but they don't understand that what they really need is a wife who can cook real food and take care of children.
Young people these days!
”

It was almost as if she was speaking specifically about Mie. My Mie who woke early in one morning, and walked in her pajamas to the nearest convenience store to get something for ou
r bento. She wasn’
t as hopeless as Yoko might contend; she fried the chicken herself, then packed our lunches and bags before I had even gotten out of bed. When I finally stopped knitting my nightly dream, put down my needles and woke up everything for our day at the beach had been prepared.

“
It's a shame what some of the mothers fix for their children at the International School. My daughter used to trade her
tempura
that I woke early to make because she felt sorry for her friends
. They were eating sandwic
hes!”

It was an outrage.

When I woke, Mie was gently stroking my head. I pulled her into my arms and kissed her soft lips. She laid down upon me, legs to each side of me, then punched the remote to invite Vivaldi into bed with us. As the hot morning sun began to brighten up the room, we made love, made love throughout the
Four Seasons
.

Later that morning, we drove with the top of her car open, windows down and music blaring to Umi-no-Nakamichi, a long narrow strand of sand and pines that continued for several miles until it reached a small island forming the northern edge of the Hakata Bay. Pine sand and sea lay on either side of the derelict two-lane road. We arrived at a small inlet, which had been roped off to keep the jellyfish away and paid a few hundred yen to one of the old women running one of the
umi-no-
i
e
beach houses. Passing through the makeshift hut with old
tatami
floors and low folding tables we walked out to the beach which was crowded with hundreds of others who had came to do the same.

By eleven the sun was burning down on us, burning indelible tans into the backs of children. The only refuge was either the crowded
umi-no
-
i
e
hut or the sea, so Mie and I took a
long swim, waded in each others’
arms or floated on our backs in the warm, shallow water.

Although I’
d eventually g
et such a severe sunburn that I’
d lie awake at night trembling in agony, it was one of my happiest day in Japan. On the way back to Mie’s apartment with my lobster red hand resting between her tanned thighs, I sang along to the Chagé and Aska songs playing on her stereo,
making her laugh the whole way.

“I love you,” she’
d tell me with a long kiss when we arrived.

“What men need,” Yoko repeats, “
is a woman who can cook and take care of the home. Someone like your Yu-cha
n in the office.”

I’m slapped out of my
reverie
by the absurdity of what Yoko had just said. Yu
mi
, grayest of gray, as cold and bitchy as they came, may make a suitable Eva Braun for an Al
Hitler, but suggesting that she’
d make a good w
ife for me, that was insulting.

Yoko, reading the
disagreement in my face, says, “See, Yu-chan’s gloomy and, well, she isn’
t much to look at, but she really would make a very good wife for you, Pead
or. You just don't know it yet.”

Good grief!

12

REINA

1

Reina is in one of her moods again when I get back to the office later in the afternoon. Something ha
s obviously happened, but I don’
t know what. When I try talking to her, she gives me the cold shoulder.

T
here is nothing I’
d rather do more after work than to lie down on my
futon
with the air conditioner blasting away and drift off to sleep,
but I can’
t. Earlier in the week I accepted an invitation to di
nner by Kazu, a friend of Reina’
s. A paper of his I rewrote for him has apparently been accepted by some scientific journal in the States and he is eager to s
how his appreciation. I wish he’
d show his appreciation by letting me go home and sleep.

Fortunately, this Kazu is a lot of fun. For a doctoral student in engineering at Kyûshû University, the prestigious national university in town, he is refreshingly down-to-earth, vastly different than the stuffy academic deadbeats I've met up to now. It was Kazu himself who once told me that in Japan, the better a university is, the worse the students. Kyûshû University, he said, was filled with
otaku
who were brilliant at taking tests, but didn't know
shit from Shinola.

Tall, handsome and gregarious, when Kazu enters a room, all ey
es are on him, and, if you aren’
t laughing soon, w
ell then you probably just aren’
t getting the jokes, because the guy’s a riot. Kazu, like Reina, has an infectious and enviable charisma making it difficult not to like or want to be with him. If I only I possessed a fraction of Kazu’s congeniality. It was Kazu, incidentally, that Reina was talking about when she told me a friend of hers had spent all his money at a
soapland
and felt as if he had died and gone to heaven.

Kazu picks us up in his
Mini Cooper
and the three of us cram inside, me in the back,
my
chin resting on my knees, and drive off to a pub he frequents near the university.

Some
thing about the levity in Reina’
s voice and demeanor as she speaks to Kazu reminds me of the warm spring evening when the two of us took a walk around
Ôhori Park after work. I couldn’
t have been at the company for more than a month, so it was only after we had just started
dating
or whatever it was that we'd been doing. We bought several cans of beer from a vending machine on the way, then wandered along the string of islands and arched bridges that divide the shallow black waters of the large pond in half until we had found an isolated bench to sit on. We opened one can of beer at a time and shared it, and talked and talked and talked. On the opposite shore someone was playing the
Tennessee Waltz
, badly, on a saxophone. A gentle breeze also rustled the young leaves carrying the occasional moan of young lovers screwing in the woods, making us titter like children.

Reina often told me stories of the men in her life, men like Kazu, who had come right out and confessed his love to her. When she refused, he joked that he was willing to pay her for sex. Many others, though too shy to be as bold as Kazu, went to great efforts to get the point across. It never ceased to amuse her, and she loved them all, wanted to “eat the all up”, as she liked to say.

I slept with her that night, the windows open to the sounds of cats in heat. She lay on her side with her face resting on my chest. Sweat beaded her upper lip, her shoulders and arms were flush. I thought about how so many men adored her, and yet, how she still managed to harbor a deep insecurity that could drive her from time to time to jealous apoplectic rages.

I couldn’
t deny that Reina was
a lovable person, but I couldn’
t find it in myself to love her or to fall for her the way so many others had. I found it depressing to consider that I would eventually have to choose between confessing my love to her or ending the relationship outright.

2

We sit down at the counter of the
yakitori-ya
. Aside from a few dowdy men sorely in need of haircuts and a small group of rambunctious
otaku
playing drinking games at a low table in a
tatami
room in the back, the pub is empty. Seeing our expression, Kazu tells us not to worry. He
assures us it’
s great place.

The master serves us tea in cups that are painted with irises and fireflies.

“
You know,” I say, “I've been seeing this kind of thing all day. I take it you can see
fireflies now. Any idea where?”

“Yeah,” Kazu replies. “
Along pret
ty much any river that's clean.”

“
A clean river in Japan? All the rivers I've seen in them have got rusting bicycles and
old washing machines and . . .”